Two for Tuesday: Ginsberg and Cavafy

This week is the annual UND Writers Conference. It should be a good show and is headlined by George Saunders. I hope to be able to make it to a few sessions.

The writers conference week always nudges me to read more fiction, more literature, and more criticism. It is all too easy for me to race around reading stuff that doesn’t matter: academic ephemera, low-stakes assignments, routine emails, box scores. I spend too little time reading writing of thought and of substance.

It’s not that I don’t try.

This week, I’ve been enjoying Allen Ginsberg in two registers. First, I’ve been reading a newly published collection of Ginsberg’s lectures at the Naropa Institute’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics titled AH!MERICA. The lectures were edited Sebastian Clark and published by Isolarii in their remarkable little book series. The lectures center loosely on Ginsberg’s reading of Blake. As someone who is less familiar with Blake than the average Naropa student, much of what he says, I have to take at face value.

More important (and familiar to me) is Ginsberg’s comments on reading poetry. “This is why when I read a page of someone’s poems, I look for minutiae… So I find myself reading vast reams of poetry with my eye running down the page” (36-37). He then goes on to discuss William Carlos Williams’s poetry of the ordinary. Williams’s effort to understand his entire house a poetics of domesticity. Ginsberg notes details in “The Young Housewife” and exclaims “And the imaginary…is all contained in the fish-man!” (46-47).

I’m reading Ginsberg’s The Fall of America (1973). And letting “my eye run down the page.” The poems, among other things, offers vivid and detailed travelogue as Ginsberg drives across the US reading roadside signs, hitch hikers, fragments of the radio, truck stops, warehouses, the Vietnam War, and details…

I’ve been taking my cameras with me on walks. Most of the time I feel silly. I’m looking at the same stuff over and over again thinking that maybe the light will change or I’ll notice a new angle. I take the same photos over and over. Maybe I need to go back to Williams and spend more time with Ginsberg when I worry that I’m seeing the same things and convince myself that beauty is in the minutiae.

Yesterday morning, very early, I read Langdon Hammer’s reflection on biographies of Cavafy in the Yale Review. He seems to be thinking about Gregory Jusdanis and Peter Jeffreys recent work, Constantine Cavafy: A New Biography. The essay took me back to my first Greek class which was taught by Avi Sharon’s who published an award winning translation of Cavafy. I had Modern Greek with Gregory Jusdanis at Ohio State. Reading Sharon’s translation of Cavafy’s “Caesarion” I recognized something:

When I managed to find the date in question, I’d have put the book aside had a brief mention of King Caesarion, an insignificant note really, not suddenly caught my eye…

The insignificant notes, the minutiae, or, in an anecdote from Hammer’s review:

Once, when a protégé grew impatient with his discussion of the fine points of metrical analysis and said, “Certainly, maître, all of these are details,” Cavafy snapped: “What else is art but details?”

Maybe that’s what I’m after somehow with my work in the Bakken, with my preoccupation with fragments, and with my endless photographing of the same things. It’s not art, I concede that very quickly, and it certainly isn’t poetry, but the minutiae matter on their own. 

Postscript: As usual Noah Kaye seems to be ahead of me, sometime yesterday he posted on Takis Kayalis’s recent book Cavafy’s Hellenistic Antiquities: History, Archaeology, Empire (2024) which includes a chapter on Cavafy’s “Caesarion.” I’m reading that chapter this morning with my coffee.