It's Spin Win Sunday!

Hubert and Gumby are crowded round for the results:

It's number 9, which means Virginia Woolf's The Years. An excellent choice. The spin gods have a certain liking for Virginia--this is the second time they've landed on her; the first was A Room of One's Own. 

Do you know this one? Do I have a treat in front of me? 

Did you spin and did you get something good? 

The Ars Poetica of Paul Verlaine

 

Ars Poetica

Music first and foremost! In your verse

Choose those meters odd of syllable,

Supple in the air, vague, flexible,

Free of pounding beat, heavy or terse.

 

Choose the words you use--now right, now wrong--

With abandon: when the poet's vision

Couples the Precise with Imprecision,

Best the giddy shadows of his song:

 

Eyes veiled, dark with mystery,

Sunshine trembling in the noonday glare,

Starlight, in the tepid autumn air,

Shimmering in the night-blue filigree!

 

For nuance, not Color absolute,

Is your goal; subtle and shaded hue!

Nuance! It alone is what lets you

Marry dream to dream, and horn to flute!

 

Shun all cruel and ruthless Railleries;

Hurtful Quip, lewd Laughter, that appall

Heaven, Azure-eyed, to tears; and all

Garlic-stench scullery recipes!

 

Take vain Eloquence and wring its neck!

Best you keep your Rhyme sober and sound,

Lest it wander, reinless and unbound--

How far? Who can say?--if not in check!

 

Rhyme! Who will its infamies revile?

What deaf child, what Black of little wit

Forged with the worthless bauble, fashioned it

False and hollow-sounding to the file?

 

Music first and foremost, and forever!

Let your verse be what goes soaring, sighing,

Set free, fleeing from the soul gone flying

Off to other skies and loves, wherever.

 

Let your verse be aimless chance, delighting

In good-omened fortune, sprinkled over

Dawn's wind, bristling scents of mint, thyme, clover...

All the rest is nothing more than writing.

 

-Paul Verlaine (tr. Norman R. Shapiro)

 

 

I've been reading Richard Hell's novel Godlike, which retells the romance of Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud, but setting the story in New York City in the 1970s instead of Paris of the 1870s. Pick your drug of choice: absinthe or something more modern. The novel is told from the point of view of the Verlaine character after the death of Rimbaud, with flashbacks to when the affair was at its hottest.

I didn't really know the poetry of Paul Verlaine at all, so I looked up some poems on-line to see what they were like. 

Richard Hell is coming to the main Toronto library to discuss the book. Will he sing a few bars from Blank Generation? Probably not, alas, he's supposed to be retired from performing music.

 

 

Classics Club Spin #44

 

Mr. Dickens ponders the possibilities of chance.

Yes! It's time for a Classics Club spin. You know the rules, but what are the books I'm ready to read based on the dictates of chance? Well, it's actually a pretty quiet time for me over the next month and a half, so I'm allowing a few of the longer choices on this list. I also prioritized ones that weren't on my last list. So here we go...

1.) Willa Cather/Lucy Gayheart

2.) Elizabeth Gaskell/Wives and Daughters

3.) Sinclair Lewis/Elmer Gantry

4.) Jack London/The Iron Heel

5.) Edgar Wallace/The Four Just Men

6.) Simone de Beauvoir/The Mandarins

7.) Joachim Machado de Assis/Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas

8.) Walter Pater/Imaginary Portraits

9.) Virginia Woolf/The Years

10.) Virginia Woolf/Between the Acts

11.) Andrei Bely/Petersburg

12.) Knut Hamsun/Hunger

13.) Halldor Laxness/Salka Valka

14.) Diogenes Laertius/Lives of the Eminent Philosophers

15.) W. E. B. Du Bois/The Autobiography

16.) Apollonius Rhodius/The Argonautica

17.) Nazami Ganjavi/Layli and Majnun

18.) Lucan/The Civil War

19.) Nikos Kazantzakis/Odyssey: A Modern Sequel

20.) John Ruskin/Unto This Last

 

I'm guessing the Kazantzakis and the Diogenes Laertius are the difficult ones on that list, but that's OK, I should have time. Which look good to you?

 

Sunday, May 17th, will reveal all.