[A] Damn my awkwardness on encountering your beauty, always too much To bear. Dear, to hear what I wanted to say tonight, listen to the nightly rain.

You keep vanishing, yet return as dark memory occasionally returns when I see a face framed in the window of a train, barreling down into heavy rain.

Your eyes always open within mine, as certain dark Lilies slowly push their heads out into this spring rain.

[B] To caress your hair with these crude hands, to cradle your body of stars In a language, which is only spoken between a field of grass and the rain!

When will my body hum with music, that slap of water against stone? Only when I can hear your quick laughter, always flaming in the rain!

Who has played Holi in your alley today? Who is she who has colored you today? And whose handprints cover your eyes, Sashi? Surely these are not that of rain!

Last evening was spent in the company of poets, before and after one of those almost uniquely American spectacles: a poetry reading. While such experiences in the past year have been more frequent that what is, perhaps, required by the human organism – for really gossip, even when done by ‘professional’ poets, is, or soon gets to be, numbingly dull. How many conversations revolve around the yet to be ‘professional’ poets, i.e., M.F.A students sucking up to the full-time pros, or the full-time pros reminiscing about literary conferences from a distant time, taking about who got which grant, award, or fellowship (as Tom Disch in ‘The House of Indolence”, a book of essays on poetry, more trenchantly calls it, ‘institutional welfare’), or in unguarded moments, which range into sexual proclivities, expeditions and so forth of the muse-anointed-few.

While this begs the question: why do I go, which I won’t attempt to answer, après self-analysis, last evening proved to be somewhat superior than the others, because one of the poets involved (Robert Bly) was gracious enough to climb down for Mount Olympia (or which ever mountain pro-poets sit in conversation with the muses), and make conversation with the hangers on, like yours truly.

So I got my few words edgeways about my discoveries of some fantastic poets, notably Tomas Transtromer, via his (in Transtromer's case good) translations, which like his own poetry are pretty uneven; a few of Kabir and Meera Bai are, really, terribly bad, and those of Ghalib merely insufficient.

But then I may be prejudiced, having a reasonable access to (and understanding of) these poems in original. And maybe because my critical awareness was heightened after reading, recently, Dan Gioia’s ‘demolition’ job of Bly’s work:

"By propagating this sort of minimalist translation Bly has done immense damage to American poetry. Translating quickly and superficially, he not only misrepresented the work of many great poets, but also distorted some of the basic standards of poetic excellence. His slapdash method ignored both the obvious formal qualities of the originals (like rhyme and meter) and, more crucially, those subtler organizing principles such as diction, tone, rhythm, and texture that frequently gave the poems their intensity. Concentrating almost entirely on syntax and imagery, Bly reduced the complex originals into abstract visual blueprints. In his hands, dramatically different poets like Lorca and Rilke, Montale y Machado, not only sounded alike, they all sounded like Robert Bly, and even then not like Bly at his best. But as if that weren’t bad enough, Bly consistently held up these diminished versions as models of poetic excellence worthy of emulation. In promoting his new poetics (based on his specially chosen foreign models), he set standards so low that he helped create a school of mediocrities largely ignorant of the premodern poetry in English and familiar with foreign poetry only through oversimplified translations."

And some of the above points are valid, and very well made by Gioia.

Bly also told us that Transtromer had recently suffered from a stroke, which took away his mental functions for using words (I thought of Beethoven going deaf in his latter years), and for forming sentences. What a fate for a poet!

Subsequently we also gossiped about his methods of translating Ghalib, with help from his PhD-cop-Indian son-in-law, and other personal matters regarding how he wrote, lived, what his children did etc. This was followed by the reading, which was compared to a few other affairs I had subjected myself to, fairly enjoyable, if not because of the poetry read then for the literary asides and anecdotes told, especially by Heather McHugh (the other poet on the bill of fare). These ones were especially witty (I don’t recall to whom these quotes were attributed to):

Dear Sir, the distance between the covers of your book is too great. I shall waste no time reading your wonderful book. The writing in this book is both original and ugly; where it copies from others’ work, it is original, and where it does not, it is ugly.

Following this Robert Bly took to stage, and read from some of his recent work, most of which he claims to have written in the ghazal form. If he did use this form, they didn’t sound like ghazals to me, and even if they were ghazals, they lacked the intensity the best of ghazals (here I am thinking of Faiz Ahmed Faiz in Urdu) possess when viewing the world. But then, perhaps, if one is as famous as Bly is, stuff like this can be passed off as the real ghazal. However to end, (and stop playing the amateur cirtic), on a nice note: Mr. Bly also gave me two of his books gratis, and also asked me to write to him in his Minneapolis ‘hermitage’.

Hidden Within Technology's Kingdom, a Republic of Letters

When I was a boy "discovering literature," I used to think how wonderful it would be if every other person on the street were familiar with Proust and Joyce or T. E. Lawrence or Pasternak and Kafka. Later I learned how refractory to high culture the democratic masses were. Lincoln as a young frontiersman read Plutarch, Shakespeare and the Bible. But then he was Lincoln.

Later when I was traveling in the Midwest by car, bus and train, I regularly visited small-town libraries and found that readers in Keokuk, Iowa, or Benton Harbor, Mich., were checking out Proust and Joyce and even Svevo and Andrei Biely. D. H. Lawrence was also a favorite. And sometimes I remembered that God was willing to spare Sodom for the sake of 10 of the righteous. Not that Keokuk was anything like wicked Sodom, or that Proust's Charlus would have been tempted to settle in Benton Harbor. I seem to have had a persistent democratic desire to find evidences of high culture in the most unlikely places.

For many decades now I have been a fiction writer, and from the first I was aware that mine was a questionable occupation. In the 1930s an elderly neighbor in Chicago told me that he wrote fiction for the pulps. "The people on the block wonder why I don't go to a job, and I'm seen puttering around, trimming the bushes or painting a fence instead of working in a factory. But I'm a writer. I sell to Argosy and Doc Savage," he said with a certain gloom. "They wouldn't call that a trade." Probably he noticed that I was a bookish boy, likely to sympathize with him, and perhaps he was trying to warn me to avoid being unlike others. But it was too late for that.

From the first, too, I had been warned that the novel was at the point of death, that like the walled city or the crossbow, it was a thing of the past. And no one likes to be at odds with history. Oswald Spengler, one of the most widely read authors of the early '30s, taught that our tired old civilization was very nearly finished. His advice to the young was to avoid literature and the arts and to embrace mechanization and become engineers.

In refusing to be obsolete, you challenged and defied the evolutionist historians. I had great respect for Spengler in my youth, but even then I couldn't accept his conclusions, and (with respect and admiration) I mentally told him to get lost.

Sixty years later, in a recent issue of The Wall Street Journal, I come upon the old Spenglerian argument in a contemporary form. Terry Teachout, unlike Spengler, does not dump paralyzing mountains of historical theory upon us, but there are signs that he has weighed, sifted and pondered the evidence.

He speaks of our "atomized culture," and his is a responsible, up-to-date and carefully considered opinion. He speaks of "art forms as technologies." He tells us that movies will soon be "downloadable" -- that is, transferable from one computer to the memory of another device -- and predicts that films will soon be marketed like books. He predicts that the near-magical powers of technology are bringing us to the threshold of a new age and concludes: "Once this happens, my guess is that the independent movie will replace the novel as the principal vehicle for serious storytelling in the 21st century."

In support of this argument, Teachout cites the ominous drop in the volume of book sales and the great increase in movie attendance: "For Americans under the age of 30, film has replaced the novel as the dominant mode of artistic expression." To this Teachout adds that popular novelists like Tom Clancy and Stephen King "top out at around a million copies per book," and notes, "The final episode of NBC's 'Cheers,' by contrast, was seen by 42 million people."

On majoritarian grounds, the movies win. "The power of novels to shape the national conversation has declined," says Teachout. But I am not at all certain that in their day "Moby-Dick" or "The Scarlet Letter" had any considerable influence on "the national conversation." In the mid-19th century it was "Uncle Tom's Cabin" that impressed the great public. "Moby-Dick" was a small-public novel.

The literary masterpieces of the 20th century were for the most part the work of novelists who had no large public in mind. The novels of Proust and Joyce were written in a cultural twilight and were not intended to be read under the blaze and dazzle of popularity.

Teachout's article in the Journal follows the path generally taken by observers whose aim is to discover a trend. "According to one recent study 55 percent of Americans spend less than 30 minutes reading anything at all. ... It may even be that movies have superseded novels not because Americans have grown dumber but because the novel is an obsolete artistic technology."

"We are not accustomed to thinking of art forms as technologies," he says, "but that is what they are, which means they have been rendered moribund by new technical developments."

Together with this emphasis on technics that attracts the scientific-minded young, there are other preferences discernible: It is better to do as a majority of your contemporaries are doing, better to be one of millions viewing a film than one of mere thousands reading a book. Moreover, the reader reads in solitude, whereas the viewer belongs to a great majority; he has powers of numerosity as well as the powers of mechanization. Add to this the importance of avoiding technological obsolescence and the attraction of feeling that technics will decide questions for us more dependably than the thinking of an individual, no matter how distinctive he may be.

John Cheever told me long ago that it was his readers who kept him going, people from every part of the country who had written to him. When he was at work, he was aware of these readers and correspondents in the woods beyond the lawn. "If I couldn't picture them, I'd be sunk," he said. And the novelist Wright Morris, urging me to get an electric typewriter, said that he seldom turned his machine off. "When I'm not writing, I listen to the electricity," he said. "It keeps me company. We have conversations."

I wonder how Teachout might square such idiosyncrasies with his "art forms as technologies." Perhaps he would argue that these two writers had somehow isolated themselves from "broad-based cultural influence." Teachout has at least one laudable purpose: He thinks that he sees a way to bring together the Great Public of the movies with the Small Public of the highbrows. He is, however, interested in millions: millions of dollars, millions of readers, millions of viewers.

The one thing "everybody" does is go to the movies, Teachout says. How right he is.

Back in the '20s children between the ages of 8 and 12 lined up on Saturdays to buy their nickel tickets to see the crisis of last Saturday resolved. The heroine was untied in a matter of seconds just before the locomotive would have crushed her. Then came a new episode; and after that the newsreel and "Our Gang." Finally there was a western with Tom Mix, or a Janet Gaynor picture about a young bride and her husband blissful in the attic, or Gloria Swanson and Theda Bara or Wallace Beery or Adolphe Menjou or Marie Dressler. And of course there was Charlie Chaplin in "The Gold Rush," and from "The Gold Rush" it was only one step to the stories of Jack London.

There was no rivalry then between the viewer and the reader. Nobody supervised our reading. We were on our own. We civilized ourselves. We found or made a mental and imaginative life. Because we could read, we learned also to write. It did not confuse me to see "Treasure Island" in the movies and then read the book. There was no competition for our attention.

One of the more attractive oddities of the United States is that our minorities are so numerous, so huge. A minority of millions is not at all unusual. But there are in fact millions of literate Americans in a state of separation from others of their kind. They are, if you like, the readers of Cheever, a crowd of them too large to be hidden in the woods. Departments of literature across the country have not succeeded in alienating them from books, works old and new. My friend Keith Botsford and I felt strongly that if the woods were filled with readers gone astray, among those readers there were probably writers as well.

To learn in detail of their existence you have only to publish a magazine like The Republic of Letters. Given encouragement, unknown writers, formerly without hope, materialize. One early reader wrote that our paper, "with its contents so fresh, person-to-person," was "real, non-synthetic, undistracting." Noting that there were no ads, she asked, "Is it possible, can it last?" and called it "an antidote to the shrinking of the human being in every one of us." And toward the end of her letter our correspondent added, "It behooves the elder generation to come up with reminders of who we used to be and need to be."

This is what Keith Botsford and I had hoped that our "tabloid for literates" would be. And for two years it has been just that. We are a pair of utopian codgers who feel we have a duty to literature. I hope we are not like those humane do-gooders who, when the horse was vanishing, still donated troughs in City Hall Square for thirsty nags.

We have no way of guessing how many independent, self-initiated connoisseurs and lovers of literature have survived in remote corners of the country. The little evidence we have suggests that they are glad to find us, they are grateful. They want more than they are getting. Ingenious technology has failed to give them what they so badly need.