Intellectual Generosity

I shall meander.

It's raining, I'm procrastinating. My horse, Seeker, seems to have a bad case of either mites or mange. This is distressing. I want the rain to come harder so he'll just come in the barn and I can work on him. If not, I shall coax with treats. Poor enormous baby. There has been Much Rain here, and I have been lax in my springtime attention to him. Not good karma.

Several conversations have arisen in the last months about intellectual generosity, collegeiality, and the like. MC and I have shuttled poems and essays back and forth for review, commenting at length, as acadanerd friends do. She's lamented the dearth of such generosity in her department even in conversation. This is the department where she hopes I am hired by the way. I suspect this is just SOP for most places. She says of this aspect of collegeiality that she holds it above most others. I wonder, hard and often, what it is with colleagues that they take their differences of literary period, or critical school, or philosophical position, or favorite color to lead as if by force of logic to intellectual stinginess. I am not the first to wonder this, I know. Common Knowledge's response to this is one that I intuitively dig: irenic scholarship --> peaceful and peace-making. Do you, really, have to agree with me aforehand in order to read my work attentively, or even responsibly, or listen and speak together? It helps, that makes it easier, but we didn't get in this biz to do easy. I maunder on. Writing of substance on this would be fun to do.

My grandfather's dementia (Greek for mind-away, isn't that, well, poetic?) deepens. It's just regular old wear and tear on the brain (plus decades of highly functional but impressive acoholism). He's cheerful enough and all, and physically healthy for an 87 year old, but the other night he asked my mom why her mom wasn't at dinner with them. Well, grandma's been dead and in an urn on top of her piano for six years. Fleur said, "Well, she's gone, Daddy." Grandpa asks, "Fine, but when will she be back?" Dementia does not do metaphor of any kind, not in his head (in some it's all metaphor all the time). But, what does one tell him? Truth? That might be devastating, given that he sort of cracked in half when she died. She's out playing bridge? No, because he's very good at obsessing about anticipated events: a visit from one or all of us, his wife coming home, a trip to the grocery store. He would just get stuck on, "She's coming back soon," and never go to sleep wondering where she is. What's fair and kind?

I sent a recent suite of poems to friends for comment. They're all entitled "conge" (should have an accent aigue on that last e: Konzhay), which is a no longer practiced French genre of farewell poem, usually written shortly before death/exile/etc. I'll bet they were all the rage during the Terror. This is my new toy, my Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms which has tons of terms and concepts in it that don't get much play anymore (see: ghostword -- tempting isn't it?). I've been pulling things about and writing from/around them. Very fun. ---- Anyway, I found this word for this genre and four poems came out. They're farewells of sorts, to situations or states of being, not people or this life. Very "post-lyric" and whatnot. Straight ripped a couple moves from J. Graham because I'm writing about her work these days (plus she mimics freaking Everybody at one point or another, love it!). Well, L over in Holland is forwarding the suite on to a friend who works for (or edits??) Yang. L hear's Pound in these poems (which, wha??, but OK). So, Yang's former editor translated and published, for instance, Michael Palmer, Luis Zukofsky, bunches of Objectivists and Language poets. DUDE! Thanks L! Now that, people, that's intellectual generosity. You return some karma to me, you get some karma for you. Whether they take it or not. But do let's observe that so far I have a Much higher acceptance for my poetry in, ahem, Europe than in the US. And just what the ? is up with that?