There’s a tidy part of me that wants things resolved, whether a lawsuit or a differential equation. No sloppy inconsistencies, no denouements hanging by a thread. I used to love IRS Form 1040EZ: subtract one number from another, sign your name and wait for the refund. I had a logic professor who told us, “Don’t confuse philosophy with real life.” Adam Zagajewski concludes his poem “An Ode to Plurality” with these words: “a poem grows / on contradiction but it can’t cover it.” That may be true for poems, but humans are infinitely more complicated. Some of us can thrive on the tension; others are paralyzed or broken.  A reader asks for my thoughts on Keats’ notion of “negativity capability.” I’ve often thought his renowned letter to his brothers on December 21, 1817 expresses less a literary theory than a reflection on his sensibility and perhaps ours:   “[I]t struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously — I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”   The passage is customarily read as embracing poetic openness and rejecting closed systems of thought. The writer, in a sense, is all potential, at least while writing. He projects himself into the sensibilities of others. His imagination is sympathetic. He is not theory-driven. Not for him the “egotistic sublime.”   Keats suggests we keep our minds elastic and limber. Don’t assume the first thought or the twenty-seventh is best, though it may be. In his 1978 essay “Spare Time,” V.S. Pritchett refers in passing to negative capability. For a writer, any thought or experience, any book read, may come in handy, even those we’ve forgotten. “A writer,” says Pritchett, “must have the capacity to become passive and lost in doubt in order to be open to new suggestions. He must alternate between clocking in and clocking out.” In his final paragraph, Pritchett writes:   “I find that reading Russian novelists, mainly of the nineteenth century, is good for my ‘negative capability’ – a state, incidentally, that means a state of vagary, doubt and indecision as well as self-annulment.”   I think of Louise MacNeice’s “Snow,” its reminder that “World is crazier and more of it than we think, / Incorrigibly plural.” The poem suggests we accept “The drunkenness of things being various.”

Despite the repellant spectacle of Allen Ginsburg, poetry as a career is not a guarantee of fame and fortune. One of our finest recent poets, Herbert Morris, is forgotten and was hardly remembered even during his life. He published six collections between 1978 and 2000 and died at age seventy-three in 2001. Only now have I stumbled on a review by J.P. White of Morris’ fourth book, Dream Palace, published in the December 1986 issue of Poetry. I wouldn’t discover Morris for another fourteen years when his final book, What Was Lost, was published. He favored dramatic or interior monologues. White begins his review by suggesting an interesting possible lineage for Morris’ blank verse:  “Lawrence Sterne's Tristam Shandy took its motto from Epictetus: ‘It is not action, but opinions about actions, which disturb men’; and so began the first novel to interpret the invisible life of the mind. Herbert Morris -- an unusually gifted master of the inner monologue -- works in a tradition created more by novelists like Sterne, James, Proust, Joyce, and Herman Broch.”   The distinctive quality of Morris’ poetry is difficult to convey in brief quotations. He’s not an aphorist, not conventionally “quotable” because most of his poems are densely woven monologues. As White writes, “The long, talky lines capture the shifting, disjointed flow of the free-associating mind as it works over memory.” This is from “House of Words” (What Was Lost) in which the speaker is an aging Henry James,  delivering a nineteen-page, 657-line monologue:   “I, finder of refuge, maker of refuge, in words. Whose life, indeed, was spun of words, spun and respun, spun once more, then respun, a life which has itself become a refuge (words, in a world bordered by blood, on one side, by the tumult of passion on the other); the thinness, yes, the thinness of one’s life: what has one built if not a house of words?”   White refers to Morris’ “memory narratives of the finest order keenly imagined and confidently played out.” His recurrent theme is memory, whether of the historical or personal past. He often writes about old photographs and their power to evoke memories. Morris imaginatively reanimates them, probing their meaning. White writes:   “Morris’s illumination of the past acquires the accent of prophecy, and his fluid style, which often takes twenty to thirty lines to complete a thought, is especially drawn to moments frozen in time through photographs. These static frames permit him to inhabit the inner imaginative life of outward appearance.”   Memories are frequently heartbreaking. In his eleven-page “Boardwalk” (Dream Palace), Morris searches an old photograph of his family, focusing on his doomed brother’s shoes, looking for clues: “. . . the way he holds himself may have to do / with having come to learn—how can I say this?-- / what it will be to die, and to die young.” White writes: “Memory connects split moments and the accretion of nuances, and it’s the only tool that provides insight into the spiritual reality waiting to be transformed within us.”   Morris' poems recall Dr. Johnson writing in the February 17, 1759 edition of The Idler:   “He remembers many calamities incurred by folly, many opportunities lost by negligence. The shades of the dead rise up before him; and he laments the companions of his youth, the partners of his amusements, the assistants of his labours, whom the hand of death has snatched away.”

I have encountered the neologism “egowriting” used to describe -- with approval -- such genres as memoirs, diaries, journals, letters, blog posts, commonplace books, notebooks and essays--almost anything. In other words, a broad collection of forms in which the author and his self are often the focus. It’s a cloyingly repellant name and a complicated literary category that might even be stretched to include some forms of fiction and poetry.  I have an ambiguous relationship with the first-person singular. When I started Anecdotal Evidence nineteen years ago, I intended it to be more like literary criticism but soon discovered I’m not a critic nor does most criticism interest me. Thus, the motto: “A blog about the intersection of books and life.” My model more closely resembled the classic English essay, à la Hazlitt, Lamb and Beerbohm, a mingling of the bookish and the familiar. Books are life for a dedicated reader, or at least a big chunk of it, not a segregated category. I have no interest in John Berryman-like confession, the minutia of self-display. Often, I still feel a tingle of uncertainty when I deploy an “I,” and sometimes while revising prune them away.       Lately, I have come to look forward to the essays of Peter Hitchens in The Lamp magazine. He does what I strive to do. His latest is “All Shall Wax Old,” subtitled “On the Past.” He begins with a Chestertonian premise: sorting old clothes. He recalls an anecdote from his schoolboy days and then the task of sorting his father’s possessions after his death:   “There is still so much I do not know, which is why I urge everyone to get to know their parents while they can, and to ask, without restraint, about their lives. As it is, I came out of a mystery, and in this life I will never solve it.”   One memory unfolds into another. None is lingered over self-regardingly. He reflects on his relationships with his own children. Hitchens’ touch is serious but light. There’s no self-flagellation or self-aggrandizement, no wallowing in guilt or self-congratulation:   “How do you recover when you have failed to set a good example, or set a bad one? How much attention was I paying during those crucial times? Who wants power over others? Not I. The only power worth having in the world is the power to stop those others from interfering too much in your life.”   Hear, hear. In the U.S., the most important of rights is not included in our precious Bill of Rights. It is, of course, the right to be left alone, not to be controlled or manipulated. Hitchens cites a novel by Michael Frayn I have not read and concludes his essay – which began with sorting old clothes – like this: “Heavens, how sad it is to contemplate all those days of mighty trivia. If I think about it too much, I can hardly breathe.”   Starting with the mundane, Hitchens finishes gracefully with the profound.

Erica Light takes after her mother, the late poet Helen Pinkerton, in her thoughtfulness and generosity. She has sent me a box of books, including four collections of poems by R.L. Barth: Looking for Peace (1981), Simonides in Vietnam (1990), Small Arms Fire (1994) and Reading The Iliad (1995). None of these had I seen before, though many of the poems are familiar from other editions. Some of the non-Vietnam-related verse in the first volume is surprising. I could hear J.V. Cunningham talking in the next room, especially in the epigrams. Here is “A Brief History of Reason,” subtitled “Aquinas to the Moderns”:  “Evil is nothing. Then, by their finesse, Nothing is evil, and men errorless.”   And this is “The Jeweler,” “for the memory of Yvor Winters”:   “Each facet, sharp and bright, Despite the turning hand Immersed in the pure light, Divides light, band from band.”   What treasure Erica has given me. Along with the Barth came the Melville House reissue of Chekhov’s novella My Life in the Constance Garnett translation, a brief monograph on Paul Klee by Joseph-Émile Muller, and a mint-condition first edition of Joseph Epstein's 1991 essay collection A Line Out for a Walk (a title he takes from Klee). Erica left a slip of paper in the Epstein collection at Page 268, in the middle of “Waiter, There’s a Paragraph in My Soup!” Here he writes:   “Anyone reading an interesting passage in a book asks, if often only subconsciously, Is what I have just read formally correct? Is it beautiful? What does it mean? Do I believe it? Along with these questions, a writer asks two others: How technically, did the author bring it off? and Is there anything here I can appropriate (why bring in a word like steal when it isn’t absolutely required) for my own writing?”   Erica’s gift reminds me of her mother's poem “The Gift”:   “I had a gift once that I then refused. Now, when I take it, though I be accused Of softness, cant, self-weariness at best, Of failure, fear, neurosis, and the rest. Still, I am here and I shall not remove. I know my need. And this reluctant love, This little that I have, is something true, Sign of the unrevealed that lies in you. Grace is the gift. To take it my concern— Itself the only possible return.”   Helen’s poem can be found in Taken in Faith, (Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 2002) and A Journey of the Mind: Collected Poems of Helen Pinkerton 1945-2016 (Wiseblood Books, 2016).

You know what you’re in for just by reading the title and acknowledging the author: “A Love Song in the Modern Taste” (1733) by Jonathan Swift. For once, the excremental stuff is absent. The poem amounts to a catalog of clichés about love, a sort of anti-Valentine’s Day card. Here is the first of its eight stanzas:  “Fluttering spread thy purple pinions, Gentle Cupid o’er my heart; I a slave in thy dominions; Nature must give way to art.”   No scatology. Just the beau of Vanessa and Stella mocking the conventional romantic sentiments of the day. Pat Rogers, editor of Swift’s Complete Poems (1983), likens the poem to one of his prose works, Polite Conversation (1738), in which he mocks the banality and garble of so much talk, as in “I won’t quarrel with my bread and butter” and “I hate nobody: I am in charity with the world.” Rogers notes of the poem: “The joke lies in slotting together so many familiar ideas in a more or less coherent sequence.”     Swift’s most notorious exercise in scatology, “The Lady’s Dressing Room,” written in 1732, was his most popular poem with the public during his lifetime, reproduced as a pamphlet and reprinted in newspapers in both England and Ireland. Readers familiar with Swift’s “cloacal obsession” (a phrase once applied by critics to another Irishman, James Joyce) will know what to expect. Strephon is investigating the dressing room of his “goddess,” Celia, after she has spent five hours at her toilette: “And first a dirty Smock appear’d, / Beneath the Arm-pits well besmear’d . . .”  . Swift devotes 144 octosyllabic lines to Strephon’s inventory. His growing sense of disgust mirrors the reader’s. When he spies a “reeking chest,” he lifts the lid and the contents    “Send up an excremental Smell To taint the Parts from whence they fell. The Pettycoats and Gown perfume, Which waft a Stink round every Room.”   Some poets might conclude the poem with those lines, but not Swift. He continues:   “Disgusted Strephon stole away Repeating in his amorous Fits, Oh! Celia, Celia, Celia shits!”   Swift the lover, writer and man is the subject of J.V. Cunningham’s “With a Copy of Swift’s Works” (written in 1944; published in The Judge is Fury, 1947; collected in The Poems of J.V. Cunningham, edited by Timothy Steele, 1997):   “Underneath this pretty cover Lies Vanessa’s, Stella’s lover. You that undertake this story For his life nor death be sorry Who the Absolute so loved Motion to its zero moved, Till, immobile in that chill, Fury hardened in the will, And the trivial, bestial flesh In its jacket ceased to thresh, And the soul none dare forgive Quiet lay, and ceased to live.”   “The soul none dare forgive” complements Swift’s self-penned epitaph: “Ubi saeva indignatio ulterius cor lacerare nequit” (“Where savage indignation no more can lacerate his heart”). In his gloss on the poem Steele writes: “Because of the rebarbative nature of his satire, Swift was reviled as no other major English author had been or has been since.” Nor was Cunningham a writer of conventional love lyrics. Here’s an epigram Swift might have signed his name to:   “Here lies my wife. Eternal peace Be to us both with her decease.”   And this:   “I married in my youth a wife. She was my own, my very first. She gave the best years of her life. I hope nobody gets the worst.”