Broken Things on Drunken Boat

How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome has been named a finalist in the Drunken Boat PanLiterary Awards - Web Art Section. The final results of the competition will be announced later this fall. Broken Things will appear in the next issue regardless. DrunkenBoat.com is an international online journal for the arts featuring poetry, prose, photography, video, web art, and sound.

How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome was created between 2002 and 2005 in Rome and Montréal with the generous financial support of the Oboro New Media Lab artist in residency programme and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec.

Milli gazie again to Barbara Catalini in Rome and Stéphane Vermette in Montréal.
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Francis Bacon, meet Anne Carson

Francis Bacon, Essays, Of Travel (1625)

“He that travelleth into a country, before he hath some entrance into the language, goeth to school, and not to travel. That young men travel under some tutor, or grave servant, I allow well; so that he be such a one that hath the language, and hath been in the country before; whereby he may be able to tell them what things are worthy to be seen, in the country where they go; what acquaintances they are to seek; what exercises, or discipline, the place yieldeth. For else, young men shall go hooded, and look abroad little.”

Anne Carson, The Fall of Rome: A Traveller’s Guide, 199?

[Excerpts]

I.
By this time tomorrow I will be a man of Rome.

VII.
Who I am doesn’t matter.
As you see me

fighting to survive,

fighting to be esteemed and honoured
(so that my past vanishes),
you will dismiss me as nothing terrific.

Fair enough,
but there is one thing about me:
I can take you to Anna Xenia.

VIII.
She is a citizen of the ancient republic,
historian of its wars

and ravishing

in
her
armour.

IX.
Now although I hate to travel
I go a lot of places

and have noted

certain recurrent phenomena.
A journey, for example,
begins with a voice

calling your name out
behind you.
This seems a convenient arrangement.

How else would you know it’s time to go?

[…]

Anna Xenia has studied at Oxford.

Maybe
she can explain
some of this to me.

XI.
What is the holiness of the citizen?
It is to open

a day

to a stranger,
who has no day
of his own.

XIV.
There is a wonderful lot of talk in Anna Xenia.
She cocks her head like Cicero
and pretends

I am someone talking back.
Good afternoon.
I am well thanks how are you?

XV.
From deep within
my traveller’s clothes

I watch these conversations take place.

XXII.
What is the holiness of the stranger?
He has none.

XXIV.
A stranger is poor, voracious, and turbulent.
He comes

from nowhere in particular

and pushes prices up.
His method of knowing something
is to eat it.

XXXIII.
Rome collapsed when Alaric ran out the dawn side.

XXXIV.
A stranger is someone who comes on the wrong day.

XL.
A stranger is someone desperate for conversation.

Then why is it I never have anything to say?
We perch in our armour
at the kitchen table.

XLIV.
A stranger is someone
who sits

very still at the kitchen table,

looks down at his knuckles,
thinks someday we will laugh about this,
doesn’t believe it.

LIII.
What is the holiness of conversation?

It is
to master death.

Anne Carson, The Fall of Rome: A Traveller's Guide
excerpted from Pequod.
. . . . .

Bacon, meet Goethe

Francis Bacon, Essays, Of Travel (1625)

“It is a strange thing, that in sea voyages, where there is nothing to be seen but sky and sea, men should make diaries; but in land-travel, wherein so much is to be observed, for the most part they omit it; as if chance were fitter to be registered than observation.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Italian Journey, Sea Voyage from Naples to Sicily (1787)

At Sea, March 29. Throughout the night the ship made its quiet progress. The cabins below deck are pleasant and furnished with single berths. Our fellow passengers, opera singers and dancers with engagements in Palermo, are gay and well behaved.

At Sea, March 30. The sun sank into the sea accompanied by clouds and a streak of purple light a mile long… I was not to enjoy this gorgeous sight for long before I was overcome by seasickness. I retired to my cabin, assumed a horizontal position … and soon felt quite snug. Isolated from the outside world, I let my thoughts run freely on the inner one, and … set myself forthwith a serious task … the first two acts of Tasso. These, though roughly similar in plot and action to the ones I have now done, were written ten years ago in a poetic prose. I found them too weak and nebulous, but these defects vanished when, in accordance with my present ideas, I introduced a metre and let the form dominate.

At Sea, March 31. I remained in my horizontal position, revolving and reviving my play in my mind.

At Sea, April 1. By three in the morning, it was blowing a gale. Half awake, half asleep, I kept thinking about my drama… By noon we could make out the promontories and bays of the Sicilian coast, but the ship had fallen considerably to leeward. Now and then we tacked… Once in a while I ventured on deck but kept my poetic project always in mind – by now I had almost mastered the whole play.

At Sea, April 2. By eight in the morning we stood directly opposite Palermo. I was in high spirits. During these last days in the belly of the whale, I have made considerable progress in planning my play. I felt so well that I was able to stand on the foredeck and devote my attention to the coast of Sicily.

Palermo, April 2. Instead of hurrying impatiently ashore, we remained on deck until we were driven off. It might be long before we could again enjoy such a treat for the eyes from such a vantage point… For an artist, there was an inexhaustible wealth of vistas to me seen, and we studied them one by one with an eye to pointing them all.

Palermo, April 3. Here are a few more notes, hastily thrown together: If anything was ever a decisive event for me, it is this trip. No one who has never seen himself surrounded on all sides by nothing but the sea can have a true conception of the world and of his own relation to it… Forgive my scribbling with a blunt pen dipped in the sepia which my friend uses when he retraces his drawings. It will come to you like a whisper while I am preparing another memorial to these happy hours. I shan’t tell you what it is, and I can’t tell you when you will receive it.

. . . . .

Reading Francis Bacon, Essays

OF TRUTH

“Truth may perhaps come to the price of a pearl, that showeth best by day; but it will not rise to the price of a diamond or carbuncle, that showeth best in varied lights. A mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure… But it is not the lie that passeth through the mind, but the lie that sinketh in and settleth in it, that doth the hurt.”

OF SIMULATION AND DISSIMULATION

“The best composition and temperature is to have openness in fame and opinion; secrecy in habit; dissimulation in seasonable use; and a power to feign, if there be no remedy.”

OF MARRIAGE AND SINGLE LIFE

“It is often seen that bad husbands have very good wives; whether it be that it raiseth the price of their husband’s kindness when it comes; or that the wives take a pride in their patience. But this never fails, if the bad husbands were of their own choosing against their friends’ consent; for then they will be sure to make good their own folly.”

OF LOVE

“There is in man’s nature a secret inclination and motion towards love of others, which if it be not spent upon some one or a few, doth naturally spread itself towards many, and maketh men become humane and charitable; as it is seen sometime in friars. Nuptial love maketh mankind; friendly love perfecteth it.”

OF SEDITIONS AND TROUBLES

“Above all things, good policy is to be used that the treasure and monies in a state be not gathered into few hands. For otherwise a state may have a great stock, and yet starve. And money is like muck, not good except it be spread.”

OF TRAVEL

“It is a strange thing, that in sea voyages, where there is nothing to be seen but sky and sea, men should make diaries; but in land-travel, wherein so much is to be observed, for the most part they omit it; as if chance were fitter to be registered than observation.”

OF EMPIRE

“It is a miserable state of mind to have few things to desire, and many things to fear: and yet that commonly is the case of kings… We see also that kings that have been fortunate conquerors in their first years … turn in their latter years to be superstitious and melancholy… For he that is used to go forward, and findeth a stop, falleth out of his own favour, and is not the thing he was… And certain it is that nothing destroyeth authority so much as the unequal and untimely interchange of power pressed too far, and relaxed too much.”

OF THE TRUE GREATNESS OF KINGDOMS AND ESTATES

“There is not anything amongst civil affairs more subject to error, than the right valuation and true judgement concerning the power and forces of an estate… Let states that aim at greatness, take heed how their nobility and gentlemen do multiply too fast… For to think that an handful of people can, with the greatest courage and policy in the world, embrace too large extent of dominion, it may hold for a time, but it will fail suddenly… It was not the Romans that spread upon the world, but it was the world that spread upon the Romans; and that was the sure way of greatness.”

OF PLANTATIONS [COLONIES]

“I like a plantation in a pure soil; that is, where people are not displanted to the end to plant in others. For else it is rather an extirpation than a plantation.”

OF MASQUES AND TRIUMPHS

“Since princes will have such things, it is better they should be graced with elegancy than daubed with cost.”

OF STUDIES

“Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested… Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man. And therefore, if a man write little, he had need have a great memory; if he confer little, he had need have a present wit: and if he read little, he had need have much cunning, to seem to know that he doth not.”

. . . . .

History Through Poetry

March 3, 2003 marked launch of the anthology 100 Poets Against The War (edited by Todd Swift, Salt Publishing: Cambridge, UK & Applecross, Australia).

The project began with a call for submissions, on January 20, 2003, for poets to contribute to a downloadable electronic chapbook, which was published online on January 27, 2003 to coincide with Hans Blix’s report to the UN on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. I immediately wrote and contributed a poem called "A Verse to War". I felt compelled to participate for a few reasons: My father was a Vietnam War draft evader, so I was lucky enough to be born in Canada. My grandfather witnessed the levelling of Manila as a Technical Sergeant in the Pacific Theatre during World War II. Meanwhile, on the other side of the planet, the Nazis made short work of what little of our family was left in Hungary. Both my grandparents watched the World Trade Center collapse from their bedroom window. The smoke stank up their apartment for days.

I can’t remember the exact date that the 100 Poets anthology launched in Montréal, but I do remember that I had been in New York for the two weeks previous attending to my grandmother’s funeral and the distribution of her last effects, mostly books. When she was a child, my grandmother had some of her poems published in the Yiddish newspapers of New York’s Lower East Side. She graduated with a Master’s Degree in English Literature from Hunter College, but wound up teaching junior high school science in Queens for thirty years. She never wanted me to be a writer. Or rather, she never believed that I would become a writer. Which is to say, she never thought I’d make it as a writer. In the last face-to-face conversation I had with her before she died she said: "If it doesn’t work out, I won’t say ‘I told you so’. But if it does work out – well, then I’ll say, ‘My granddaughter, the novelist!’"

I witnessed both pro and anti war protests in progress in many of the small towns that the Greyhound passed through as I traveled home from New York to Montréal the day before reading at the 100 Poets book launch. Two of the more popular placard slogans still stand out in my head: "America is worth fighting for," and "Another Veteran Against the War." I couldn’t help thinking: My grandmother would have hated this.

I can’t remember if I ever sent my grandmother a copy of one of the three free downloadable and printable 100 Poets Against the War PDF chapbooks that Todd Swift and Val Stevenson assembled and published on Nthposition.com. If I did it wouldn’t have impressed her much. Her own mother had never bought a single paper that published her Yiddish poems and until I was anthologized in the Rinehart Reader my grandmother wasn’t likely to make a fuss.

Today, approximately two and a half years after the 100 Poets anthology launched in cities around the world, I stumbled across an online article that would have made my grandmother the schoolteacher sit up and take notice.

On a web site called: "Rethinking Schools Online" I found that in their Spring 2003 edition they had published a special collection of resources for teachers called: "Teaching About the War". In her lesson plan, "Entering History Through Poetry", Linda Christensen suggested using 100 Poets Against the War as a teaching aide. She wrote: "Opening a topic as volatile as war by getting students to talk about their fears and questions can help teachers understand the extent of student knowledge as well as their positions. … Students should feel comfortable entering a classroom conversation; otherwise, we're not wrestling with issues; we're pinning them down and force-feeding them. J. R. Carpenter's poem "A verse to war" provides an opening for discussion.

Carpenter uses the repeating line "I am afraid," then lists her fears. I asked students to look at the structure of the poem — the repeating line followed by a list. Then we generated potential lines and students wrote poems using this structure. Abigail, a sophomore in Anderson's class, wrote about her brother: "I am afraid/of my brother leaving/to serve this country./I am afraid/I will never get the chance/to hug him again…/I am afraid of war." Ashley, Abigail's classmate, invented her own line and tied the war to the budget cuts: "I do not know/of war/of suffering/of fear./I do not know how my life will be altered…/I do not know/of destruction/of cold-blooded murder…/I do not know my future/of dreams unbroken/of non-potential/ of miseducation…."

Even though worse than my worst fears have come true for Iraq – and for America, for the two are now inextricably linked – and even though the above article was published over two years ago and I only found out about it today, it moves me immensely to hear that a poem that I wrote "provided an opening for discussion," and that the 100 Poets project was put to use in this way. This, my grandmother would have loved.

A Verse to War

I am afraid
(of what will happen
of the rhetoric
of the silence
of not knowing).
I am afraid I don’t know what to contribute.

I am afraid
(of destruction
of waiting
of doing nothing
of adding fuel to the flames).
I am afraid I don’t have any answers.

I am afraid
(of trivializing
of propagandizing
of margins
of error).
I am afraid it is but a meagre thing to add –
a verse adverse to war.


Thank you to Todd Swift, Val Stevenson, Salt Publishing and to Vince Tinguely who first sent me the call for submissions. 100 Poets Against the War is still available for download or for purchase online. FOr more information please visit: Nthposition.com/100poets.php
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Reading Robert Burton - Part IV

From The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621 – 1651)

Apparent rari nantes in gurgite vasto.
[Here and there, in the vast abyss, a swimmer is seen.]

There are amongst you, I do ingeniously confess, many well deserving patrons, and true patriots, of my knowledge, besides many hundreds which I never saw, no doubt, or heard of, pillars of our commonwealth, whose worth, bounty, learning, forwardness, true seal in religion, and good esteem of all scholars, ought to be consecrated to all posterity: but of your rank there are a debauched, corrupt, covetous, illiterate crew again, no better than stocks, mere cattle… There is no hope, no good to be done without money. If after long expectation, much expense, travel, earnest suit of ourselves and friends, we obtain a small benefice at last: our misery begins afresh, we are suddenly encountered with the flesh, world, and devil, with a new onset, we change a quiet life for an ocean of troubles… Honest men make the best of it, as often it falls out, from a polite and terse academic, he must turn rustic, rude, melancholize alone, learn to forget, or else, as many do become maltsters, graziers, chapmen, &c. (now banished from the academy, all commerce of the Muses, and confined to a county village, as Ovid was from Rome to Pontus), and daily converse with a company of idiots and clowns.

Ovid writes, from exile on the Black Sea:

ipse mihi-quid enim faciam? -
scriboque legoque, tutaque ivdicio
littera nostra suo est

[I write for myself -
What else can I do? -
and I read to myself,
and my writing is
secure in its own criticism]

OVID, Tristia IV
. . . . .

Reading Robert Buton - Part III

From The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621 – 1651)

Burton, a most Ciceronian of stylists, tries to convince us otherwise: I am aqua potor [a water drinker], drink no wine at all, which so much improved our modern wits, a loose, plain rude wri-ter, ficum voco ficum, & ligonem ligonem [I call a spade a spade]… As a river runs sometimes precipitate and swift, then dull and slow; now direct, then per ambages [windingly]; now deep, then shallow; now muddy, then clear; now broad, then narrow; doth my style flow: now serious, then light; now comical, then satirical; now more elaborate, then remiss, as the present subject required.

There be many other subjects, I do easily grant… I was fatally driven upon this rock of melancholy, and carried away by this by-stream, which as a rillet, is deducted from the main channel of my studies, in which I have pleased and busied myself at idle hours.

‘Tis the common tenet of the world, that learning dulls and diminisheth the spirits, and so produceth melancholy… [Students] live a sedentary, solitary life, subbi & musis [to themselves and letters], free from bodily exercise… Only scholars neglect that instrument, their brain and spirits (I mean) which they daily use, and by which they range over all the world, which by much study is consumed… [Contemplation] dries the brain, and extinguisheth natural heat; for whilst the spirits are intent to meditation above in the head, the stomach and liver are left destitute… Students are commonly troubled with gouts, catarrhs, rheums, cachexia, bradiopepsia, bad eyes, stone and colic, crudities, oppilations, vertigo, winds, cramps, consumptions, and all such diseases as come by overmuch sitting; they are most part lean, dry, ill coloured, spend their fortunes, lose their wits, and many times their lives and all through immoderate pains, and extraordinary studies… How many poor scholars have lost their wits, or become dizards, neglecting all worldly affairs, and their own health, wealth, esse and benne esse, to gain knowledge? for which, after all their pains in the world’s esteem they are accounted ridiculous and silly fools, idiots, asses, and (as oft they are) rejected, contemned, derided, dotting, and mad… Go to Bedlam and ask.

No labour in the world like unto study… To say truth, ‘tis the common fortune of most scholars, to be servile and poor, to complain pitifully, and lay open their wants to their respectless patrons… Poverty is the Muses’ patrimony, and as that poetical divinity teacheth us, when Jupiter’s daughters were each of them married to the Gods, the muses alone were left solitary… Ever since all their followers are poor, forsaken and left unto themselves… Let us give over our books, and betake ourselves to some other course of life. To what end should we study? … I say, let’s turn soldiers, sell our books, and buy swords, guns, and pikes… leave all, and rather betake ourselves to any other course of life, than to continue longer in this misery. It would be better to make toothpicks, than by literary labours to try and get the favour of the great.

. . . . .

Reading Robert Burton - Part II

From The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621 – 1651)

We can say nothing but what hath been said, the composition and method is ours only, and shows a scholar… And for those other faults of barbarism, Doric dialect, extemporanean style, tautologies, apish imitation, a rhapsody of rags gathered together from several dung-hills, excrements of authors, toys and fopperies, confusedly tumbled out, without art, invention, judgement, wit, learning, harsh, raw, rude, fantastical, absurd, insolent, indiscreet, ill-composed, indigested, vain, scurrile, idle, dull and dry; I confess all (‘tis partly affected) thou canst not think worse of me than I do of myself… I am afraid I have over-shot myself, Laudare se vani, vituperare sulti [the vain praise themselves, the foolish blame themselves]… Our style betrays us… Our writings are as so many dishes, our readers guests; our books like beauty, that which one admires another rejects; so are we approved and men’s fancies are inclined.

Pro captu lectoris habent sua fata libelli [The reader’s fancy makes the fate of books]… He respects matter, thou are wholly for words, he loves a loose and free style, thou are all for neat composition, strong lines, hyperboles, allegories; he desires a fine frontispiece, enticing pictures… how shall I hope to express myself to each man’s humour and conceit, our to give satisfaction to all? … I resolve, if you like not my writing, go read something else. I do not much esteem thy censure.
. . . . .

Reading Robert Burton - Part I

From The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621 – 1651)

I have lived a silent, sedentary, solitary, private life, mihi & musis [to myself and letters]… I had a great desire (not able to attain to a superficial skill in any) to have some smattering in all, to be aliquis in omnibus, nullus in singulis [something in everything, no authority in anything]… I have followed all, saving that which I should, and may justly complain, and truly, qui ubique est, nusquam est [he who is everywhere is nowhere]… I have read many books, but to little purpose, for want of art, order, memory, judgement. I never travelled but in map… I hear and see what is done abroad, how others run, ride, turmoil… I hear news every day, and those ordinary rumours of war, plagues, fires, inundations, thefts, murders, massacres, meteors, comets, spectrums, prodigies, apparitions, of towns taken, cities besieged… A vast confusion of vows, wishes, actions, edicts, petitions, lawsuits, please, laws, proclamations, complaints, grievances, are daily brought to our ears. New books every day, pamphlets, currantoes, stories, whole catalogues of volumes of all sorts… Thus I daily hear, and suchlike, both private, and public news, amidst the gallantry and misery of the world.

I did for my recreation now and then walk abroad, look into the world, and could not choose but make some little observation… I write of melancholy, by being busy to avoid melancholy. There is no greater cause of melancholy than idleness… This I aimed at; vel ut lenirem animum scribendo, to ease my mind by writing… Besides I might not well refrain, for ubi dolor, ibi digitus, one must needs scratch where it itcheth… ‘Tis most true, many are possessed by an incurable itch to write, and “there is no end of writing of books.” [Ecclesiastes 12:12] Bewitched with this desire of frame, etiam mediis in morbis, to the disparagement of their health, and scarce able to hold a pen, they must say something, have it out… They turn authors lest peradventure the printers should have a holiday, or they must write something to prove they have lived… Quis tam avidus librorum helluo [what a glut of books!], Who can read them? As already, we shall have a vast chaos and confusion of books, we are oppressed with them, our eyes ache with reading, our fingers with turning.
. . . . .

spoken word night

We sat at the back and
talked amongst ourselves
quietly, hard for me since
my voice carries,
while someone on stage
read written spoken word
and someone in the audience
laughed at all the sad parts
so loudly that soon everyone
joined in except us, caught
up in the rhythm of switching
from whisperer to listener
the bill of your hat whacking
my forehead each time
we traded lip for ear.
J. R. Carpenter
. . . . .