A first?

 Alice Notley notes that when she was writing poems about being pregnant and then a young mother and taking care of kids, etc... that that kind of poetry, based on that experience, had never been written before. I'm not going to dispute that because what matters is her perception of this. She is probably right, and any counter example would be the exception that proves the rule.  

I mentioned that Cummings poem about Buffalo Bill is the first poem ever about the death of a pop culture celebrity.  I can't prove that either, and if someone has an earlier example I would stand corrected.  

Another first might be Keats' "This living hand, now capable of earnest grasping...."  This is the first poem I know that has that quality of emotional rawness to it. It's not even in other Keats poems. 

Of course, once you see that, you can go back and find precursors to any thing that seems to be a "first," like Borges's precursors of Kafka. Kafka is a first: there is not that particular feeling in literature before that.  

That would seem to be the important thing, because all the archetypes have always existed, the narrative structures of quest or homecoming, the particular rhythms of plots with up and down movements, problems being posed and resolved. You can't be original with that, but new kinds of feeling can come into being.  You can have the -esque of Kafkaesque.  (And I don't mean the Kafka cliché, but the feeling one gets from it.).  

What are some other firsts?  I associate this with writers who "cut through" and identify new forms of feeling, make them recognizable.  

What's wrong with this?

I was looking at this report:  

https://worldhumanitiesreport.org/report/

The humanities are a resource of critical analysis and interpretation. At the same time, this report reveals a tension between the humanities understood as core practices of national identity formation, imperialism, and dominance, and the humanities understood as the critical global humanities: resources through which nationalism, imperialism, and dominance have been questioned, analyzed, dissected, and displaced."

What's wrong with this?  

Monk Project

 I have a Monk project. consisting of learning as many tunes as possible. I know Bemsha Swing very well, and have learned Friday the 13th as well.  I purchased the Monk fake book and am working from there but listening to records as well.  My next tune is North of the Sunset, a blues in Bb.  A lot of the tunes are not in difficult keys.  

I will learn a ballad, Ruby my Dear, always one of my favorites.  

The nice thing about Friday the 13th is that is seems almost impossible to play wrong notes when improvising over it.  Yes, I can play "wrong notes," but I almost have to try to play things that won't fit. I tried the method of soloing over it with one note, using all twelve possible notes.  Some notes are more difficult to use, some easier, but it is a spectrum, not an absolute dichotomy.  

I use different methods of improvisation.  For example, a chorus of only very short phrases. Another of long phrases, then one mixing long and short.  Play only quarter notes, only quarter note triplets, only half notes, etc... Solo using only two notes, only three notes.  Use only the notes of the chord. Use mostly scalar movement, use mostly arpeggios.  Start every phrase on the and of 1.  

The goal of this project?  This will be revealed to me later.  Aside from the obvious purpose: to spend time with Monk and make friends and influence people. 

Buffalo Bill's

 My friend came back from Cody, Wyoming and we were talking about Buffalo Bill in the car. Her flight came in near midnight.  I thought of the poem, "Buffalo Bill's / defunct."  I have it memorized, not surprisingly.  I remember explaining the poem to my father when I was a teenager. He wanted to know why Cummings wrote out the word "Mister" rather than using "Mr." I explained this to him.  Now BB died in 1917. Tulips & Chimneys, where the Cummings poem appeared, came out in 1923. In 1917 EEC had published some poems in a volume called 8 Harvard Poets, with a mixture of late Victorian style poems and some modernist ones. He might have written the first draft of the poem in 1917, after Buffalo Bill's death.  I don't know the exact date of the poem, but it feels occasional.  Clearly he had begun the modernist style already, as evidenced by the Harvard poems. He was about 23 years old,  a bit younger than Williams, Pound, H.D, Marianne Moore, Eliot.  (The other modernist American poets.)  

I don't know poems that early that talk about the death of a pop culture celebrity in colloquial, even profane language (Jesus / he was a handsome man).  It's almost like a Frank O'Hara poem. Buffalo Bill was a showman, using his status as Western hero to put on spectacles for the public, "breaking onetwothreefourfive pigeons just like that." The poem is an homage, but with an ironic edge too.  

Cummings never became a better poet than he was with his first book. It is all there from the beginning, the humor and sentimentality, the typography. This poem is among his best.  

I get email

 Someone sent me their poems from Spain in an email, with a very flowery email message asking me to do something, I'm not sure what, exactly. There was some talk of my "magisterio" which made me laugh a bit. It was an odd combination of a very pretentious explanation of what the poet was trying to do (think the "dreaded artist statement") and poems that did not line up at all with what the dreaded artist statement would lead one to expect. I begged off as politely as I could, and put it in an email response that will be sent a bit later today. 

Everyone that know me knows I hate that kind of pretentiousness. Mediocre poetry bolstered by pretentious explanations is even worse, because it isn't allowed to be what it actually is, a modest display of one's own literary persona.  

A paradox

 I've referred to this paradox before, where a religious believer might have serious ambivalence about God existing at all, but be quite certain of more minute points of doctrine.  

We are all subject to that paradox, in that we need to argue the finer points and be right about them, without understanding what the big picture is. How could we? Yet we need something to argue about. 

Advantages of (almost) literal translation

 By literal translation I don't mean word by word, but translation that essentially follows the most obvious path, with most elements of the text except those that would sound too unnatural or stiff. You would say dream about not "dream with" to translate "soñar con..."  

1. It is easy to follow in a bilingual face-to-face edition, where the verso is the original and the recto of the next is the translation. Easy for both the monolingual reader and the reader with some knowledge of the source language. 

2. It is non-objectionable.  It is hard to formulate objections to it, because it seem like the most correct and natural version possible. 

3. It usually avoids amplification, or introducing more words that the original had. It won't be padded or over explanatory.  

4. It will often convey literary qualities of the original text because it won't rewrite in a way that eliminates the tropes. 

Disadvantages:

It won't be particular meta, calling attention to itself as a translation. (But this could be an advantage.)

It may not be musical or have a satisfactory prosody. (But the literary and free version might also not have a satisfactory prosody.).