Dana Crum - Poet and Writer
  • News
  • Bio
  • Publications
  • Events
  • Videos
  • For Hire
    • Writing Coach
    • Tutoring
    • Editing
  • Blog
  • Contact

A Brief Introduction to the Work of Our New U.S. Poet Laureate

8/16/2010

25 Comments

 
Picture
Most Americans have heard by now that W.S. Merwin is our new U.S. Poet Laureate; but given the relatively small readership poetry commands in this country, many may know little or nothing about his work and accomplishments. Merwin, 82 now, has written over 30 books of poetry, translation and prose and has won countless awards, including two Pulitzer Prizes, the National Book Award, the Bollingen Prize and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.

Now that I’ve said something about his awards and prolificacy, I thought I would post some of his poetry. Even if you’ve already read the below poems, they're worth revisiting. Great poems always warrant and reward rereading.

Here’s a haunting poem of his that condemns the Vietnam War:

The Asians Dying

When the forests have been destroyed their darkness remains   
The ash the great walker follows the possessors
Forever
Nothing they will come to is real
Nor for long
Over the watercourses
Like ducks in the time of the ducks
The ghosts of the villages trail in the sky
Making a new twilight

Rain falls into the open eyes of the dead   
Again again with its pointless sound
When the moon finds them they are the color of everything

The nights disappear like bruises but nothing is healed   
The dead go away like bruises
The blood vanishes into the poisoned farmlands   
Pain the horizon
Remains
Overhead the seasons rock
They are paper bells
Calling to nothing living

The possessors move everywhere under Death their star   
Like columns of smoke they advance into the shadows   
Like thin flames with no light
They with no past
And fire their only future


Over the centuries many poets have written about death—Dickinson, Keats, Milton, Thomas Gray and Yeats, to name a few. In the below poem, Merwin finds an ingenious way to talk about his own future death:

For the Anniversary of My Death

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day   
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveler
Like the beam of a lightless star

Then I will no longer
Find myself in life as in a strange garment
Surprised at the earth
And the love of one woman
And the shamelessness of men
As today writing after three days of rain
Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease
And bowing not knowing to what


Picture
As for analyzing and summing up Merwin’s entire body of work, I won’t attempt to say much here. So much has already been written—and will continue to be written—on that subject. What I will say is that Merwin’s poetry, initially formal, soon evolved into an impersonal free verse that dispensed with punctuation. J.D. McClatchy adds, “Merwin’s early work absorbed the major traditions of English Romantic poetry; it is mythic or emblematic and richly rhetorical. By 1963, however, he had evolved a new style—austere, impersonal, disjunctive, often surrealistic.” While Merwin’s style has changed over the years, a major consistency in his work is the theme of humanity’s alienation from nature, an alienation he sees as catastrophic not only for the environment but for humanity itself.


Links to Merwin’s poems and basic info on him:
  • "W. S. Merwin to Be Named Poet Laureate" (NYT)
  • The Poetry Foundation — Merwin’s poetry and a short bio on him
  • The Academy of American Poets — Merwin’s poetry and a short bio on him

Link to an archive of literary criticism on Merwin’s poetry:
  • LiteraryHistory.com

25 Comments

Haiti, Child Slavery and Worldwide Human Trafficking

8/4/2010

14 Comments

 
Picture
In Haiti slavery is alive and thriving. This is ironic because Haiti is the one country in the Western Hemisphere where African slaves successfully revolted against their white masters. Today the Caribbean nation’s slaves are mainly children, though some adults are forced into prostitution.

Destitution, and the desperation it breeds, drives many parents to give their children to other families. The abandoned child is supposed to do minor household chores for the new family in exchange for lodging, food and schooling, but too often the child becomes a domestic slave subject to physical and sexual abuse. In Haiti these children are called restaveks.

Haiti’s child-slavery problem was exacerbated by the earthquake in January, a catastrophe that killed more than 300,000 and left countless children homeless, orphaned and even more vulnerable to absorption into domestic slavery.

According to UNICEF, before the quake 300,000 children in Haiti were slaves. Jean-Robert Cadet, author of Restavek and a former restavek himself, believes that number will double unless the international community intervenes -- for instance, by driving Haiti toward universal education, which, he believes, will ensure that every child is in school and not in servitude.

Haiti’s child slavery is a form of human trafficking (even though the children usually remain in Haiti), and human trafficking is a worldwide problem. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) defines human trafficking as “an act of recruiting, transporting, transferring, harboring or receiving a person through a use of force, coercion or other means, for the purpose of exploiting them. Every year, thousands of men, women and children fall into the hands of traffickers, in their own countries and abroad. Every country in the world is affected by trafficking, whether as a country of origin, transit or destination for victims.”

Every country plays a role in this detestable crime. Even the United States, “the land of the free.”

Human trafficking is modern-day slavery. The UNODC estimates that there are 2.5 million slaves in the world today, but that's a conservative figure. Kevin Bales, author of Disposable People, and the International Justice Mission (IJM) place the number at over 27 million. The IJM states, “More children, women and men are held in slavery right now than over the course of the entire trans-Atlantic slave trade.”

According to the UNODC, 79% of slaves are forced into prostitution while 18% are forced to work as laborers. The organization admits, however, that this last statistic may be skewed by bias. That may be the case. But what’s clear and undeniable is that with more than 27 million humans in bondage at this very moment, slavery is thriving in the 21st century.

How much progress have we truly made?

Sources:
  • "Child slavery a growing problem in Haiti, advocate says" (CNN)
  • The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime
  • The International Justice Mission
  • Disposable People by Kevin Bales

14 Comments

Falling Down the Rabbit Hole of Some T.S. Eliot Criticism

8/1/2010

10 Comments

 
Picture
I recently fell down the rabbit hole of some T.S. Eliot criticism. I’ve read and reread a lot of Eliot’s poetry over the years, but as amazing as he is, he’s one of the most difficult poets ever to write in English. So perusing good criticism of him is essential. The Eliot criticism I slogged through in the past wasn’t as helpful as the book I recently read. But the recent book, though insightful, was almost as difficult as Eliot’s poems.

And what makes Eliot's poetry, and literary interpretation of his poetry, so difficult? His work’s mind-blowing preponderance of allusions, not just to literature but also to religion, mythology, anthropology, philosophy, history and science. Here I’m thinking of The Waste Land, arguably his masterpiece, as well as poems like The Hollow Men and Four Quartets. Eliot read everything and virtually all of it made its way into his poetry, usually in the form of allusions but sometimes in the form of quotations and partial rephrasings. (Incidentally, early in his career, the quotations, often without quotation marks, and partial rephrasings led to his being accused of plagiarism. Eliot — the über-modernist, writing in the early to mid 20th century — was sampling decades before hip-hop artists, the quintessential postmodernists, made sampling widespread within pop culture. But I digress...) To quote poet and Harvard professor Stephen Burt, before John Ashbery “the last figure whom half the English-language poets alive thought a great model, and the other half thought incomprehensible was probably T. S. Eliot.” Probably? No, definitely.

Picture
The book of Eliot criticism that I recently read, and found insightful but difficult, is B.C. Southam's A Guide to the Selected Poems of T.S. Eliot. Don't let the lightweight-sounding title fool you. The book is anything but lightweight. It's a compendium of the galaxies of criticism from preceding Eliot critics and goes through "all" the layers of allusions that undergird Eliot's work. If you want to grasp every single allusion Southam unearths, no matter how esoteric or complicated, and fully understand how and why Eliot is manipulating the texts he references, then reading Southam’s book is hard work, especially since you’ll need to flip back and forth between Southam’s book and Eliot’s poems, rereading the relevant passage from Eliot’s oeuvre each time Southam explains an allusion.

As difficult as Southam’s book can be (and will be if used correctly), you should read it first and then move on to other books of Eliot criticism. Just my advice as someone who unfortunately reversed the order. The Eliot criticism I read before Southam’s book — Denis Donoghue's Words Alone will do as an example — wasn’t all that helpful, but that was only because I should have read Southam’s book first. Southam is a good (and incredibly thorough) starting place. Donoghue, after all, cites the book repeatedly.

Some of you may be wondering, “Why even bother reading a poet as difficult as Eliot, especially since fully understanding him requires that you read scholarly books?” My answer? Eliot is worth the trouble. He’s one of the greatest English-language poets of the twentieth century and has had a deeper influence on my poetry than I care to admit. For me, gaining a greater understanding of his work is a tremendous boon. As Ezra Pound put it, “The more we know of Eliot, the better.”

10 Comments

    Dana's Blog

    Thanks for stopping by. I'm glad you could make it.

     

    RSS Feed

     

    Categories

    All
    9/11
    Adam Gopnik
    Agnosticism
    Alabama
    Alumni Matters
    Anti-Semitism
    Blank Verse
    Business World
    Childhood
    Christianity
    College
    D.C.
    Difficult Poets
    Digital Media
    Editing
    Egyptian Protests
    Ekphrasis
    Existentialism
    Fragmentary Writing
    Friendship
    Good Friday 2000
    Hip-hop
    Human Trafficking
    Humor
    Jk Rowling
    John Keats
    Justice
    Langston Hughes
    Life Of The Writer
    Linguistics
    M.I.A.
    M.L.K.
    My Published Fiction
    My Published Nonfiction
    Natasha Trethewey
    Outkast
    Poetry
    Princeton
    Professional Development
    Publishing Industry
    Racism
    Republicans
    Shakespeare
    T.S. Eliot
    Tutoring
    Unions & Black Labor
    U.S. Politics
    Violence
    Visual Art
    W.B. Yeats
    W.E.B. Du Bois
    Whorfianism
    Winslow Homer
    World Politics
    Writing
    W.S. Merwin


    Archives

    May 2016
    March 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    May 2014
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2012
    February 2012
    September 2011
    March 2011
    February 2011
    January 2011
    December 2010
    November 2010
    October 2010
    September 2010
    August 2010

     

    Favorite Blogs

    Prose Wizard
    Bino A. Realuyo
    Fatback and Foie Gras
    Guy's Library