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Something seems to be stirring out there. I’m too cautious and cynical to proclaim a renaissance in formalist poetry but the prognosis is promising. Clarence Caddell, an Australian, has published the second issue of The Borough: A Journal of Poetry. I wrote about the first issue in September. Just last week I wrote about the third issue of New Verse Review.   Especially gratifying is seeing five poems by R.L. Barth in The Borough. Bob is a Marine Corps veteran of Vietnam who served as a patrol leader in the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion. He is the finest American poet to have served in that war – not that there’s a lot of competition for the title. His work is composed in the plain style, practiced by writers from Ben Jonson to Yvor Winters and J.V. Cunningham. Here is Bob’s anti-sentimental “Letters from Home”:   “I never understood Why others couldn’t wait For letters when what good Came from news three-weeks late?   “Came from an alien world Of proms and family meals? Took mind from war, unfurled No memory that heals   “But carelessness that kills? The truth is that you’re here On mountains or foothills Where life, not home, is dear.”   And here is “Flying Home,” subtitled March 1969, also from The Borough:   “Weapons surrendered to the armory, My separation papers well in hand, I look at the dark porthole, where I see Myself in civvies, ill-prepared to land.”   Another good poet collected in The Borough is Vivian Smith, a retired teacher in Australia who turns eighty-two this year. As with Barth, note the emotional realism, the pared-down though conversational style, and the anti-sentimental tone. Here is Smith’s “Birthday”:   “Born in the year that Hitler came to power, I don’t do face book, blog or tweet, I’ve never owned a mobile phone, kind of old-school, dressed to disappear,   “and yet surprise, surprise, I’m still alive with poems waiting to be written down like sign writing scribbled on the sky, half-erased, already vanishing.   “I like my life, the humdrum tasks. I never hungered for the hippie trail. Indifferent to fashion, I survive. Poems can be true in different ways.   “I write them down, I do not hold my breath. I don’t just sit around, waiting for my death.”   On Friday, Bob sent me a new poem not published in The Borough. Of it he writes: “Here's a poem about a subject I've been thinking about for fifty-five years. Like [J.V. Cunningham], I am a renegade Catholic; but, as JVC certainly knew, being a renegade doesn't mean you leave the training behind.” Here is “A Soldier-Poet Courts Controversy”:   “‘Your unchecked rages and so forth are clearly Manifestations of PTSD.’ An all-encompassing excuse, for sure, To which I give a blunt response: bull shit. Agnostically, call them . . . character flaws; But Catholics know the Seven Deadly Sins Down in the depths of their iniquity, And strictly hold themselves accountable.”

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The teens living in the garden in the YA romantasy The Story of the Stone spend a lot of time reading forbidden books, much older YA romantasys.  These books are all famous classical Chinese plays.  Cao Xueqin gives a couple of chapters early on to their reading, including a list of titles.  I figured I’d better try one of them. How about The Peony Pavilion by Tang Xianzu, written in 1598, an exciting time in English and Spanish drama, too.  The play is really an opera, partly sung and partly spoken, a monster, eighteen hours long in a complete performance, a wild mix of stories and tones. An attempt at the story: beautiful young Bridal Du begins her education with a tutor.  The explication of four lines of 2,500 year-old Chinese poetry, the limit of her education, are enough to make her curious about the outside world.  She goes for a walk in an artificial garden where, in the title’s Peony Pavilion, she falls into a dream where she meets and has sex with a stranger, an experience so powerful that after waking she soon dies.  This is one-third of the way in. Luckily the lover is real and stumbles across the garden.  After an idyllic period of ghost sex, he figures out how to resurrect Bridal Du, launching the final third of the play which is full of bandits, severed heads, mistaken identities, and heroic test-taking.  There is a scene I have never encountered in dramatic form before, Scene 41, where the test examiners grades essays: Every kind of error: what a bunch of blockheads grinding their ink for nothing, not one brush “bursts into flower.” (230) What could be more dramatic than watching a teacher grade papers? The Peony Pavilion also has comic scenes in Hell, songs about manure, comics scenes with a couple of slapstick servants, and a comic scene with a pompous government inspector.  I thought this scene must be one of the most cut – the entire opera has been performed rarely, or perhaps never before 1999 (!) – but no, it is one of the most performed, historically, often performed on its own at village festivals. The text is full of quotations and lines and entire poems from two thousand years of Chinese poetry, all identified, as above, by quotation marks and occasionally by footnote identification, but there is so much quotation that the editor gives up on identifying the authors by page 5.  The quotations are sometimes turned into dirty jokes or elaborate poetry games much like the kids play in The Story of the Stone. It is all the most amazing thing, is what I am saying, one piece of craziness after another.  Someday I will have to read more of these things, and maybe a book or two about how to read them.  Cao Xueqin clearly learned more about writing his novel from these plays than from earlier Chinese novels.  “It’s very pretty in the garden” but “[t]hat garden is a vast and lonely place” (Sc. 11, 54). Oh, why are classical plays forbidden to the 18th century youth?  One, kids are not supposed to be wasting their time with romantasys but instead reading the Five Classics and practicing calligraphy; second, the plays will give young ladies corrupting ideas about falling in love and marrying who they want rather than the dud or monster chosen by their parents. Cyril Birch is the translator.  Page references are to the Indiana University Press 2nd edition. The image is from the 1998 Peter Sellars production of The Peony Pavilion.  How I wish I had seen it. Tan Dun’s music for that production (the album is titled Bitter Love) is worth hearing.

The year the young Charles Darwin (February 12, 1809–April 19, 1882) boarded The Beagle, Mary Shelley contemplated the nature of the imagination in her preface to the most famous edition of Frankenstein, concluding that creativity “does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos” — the chaos, she meant, of ideas and impressions and memories seething in the cauldron of the mind, out of which we half-consciously select and combine fragments to have the thoughts and ideas we call our own. The chaos of ideas Darwin was about to absorb on the Galapagos would lead him to… read article