Jane Hirshfield, Beings in the Holes

Golden Crowned Kinglet, a new life bird for me

 Do you remember Theodore Roethke’s villanelle, and hymn, “The Waking” in which he offers, “I hear my being dance from ear to ear”?  Jane Hirshfield’s “Like the Small Hole by the Path-Side Something Lives,” finds something similar, a somewhere within us, other than our conscious awareness, where there are small holes housing unknown critters. They live and die and  go extinct, but we can know they do live and have lived within us.

I wonder if someone will accuse the poem of being Buddhism 101, but I don’t care; I  find its imagery and its mind’s work very appealing. Click here:

Like the Small Hole by the Path-Side Something Lives in by Jane Hirshfield : Poetry Magazine

I like the quirky, homey, perhaps awkward phrasing of the important first and last lines, where I hear a lack of pretension, a kind of honesty, something like an inelegant elegance. Maybe Hirshfield had to work hard for that phrasing, but she’s made it convincing as a humble, likable, trustworthy statement.

Even the music in this realm is heard by something other than ears. Music as we know can be pretty good, but it would be too tangible, too logical and conventional for Hirshfield's realm. The music that matters is going down some stairs, to a place beyond understanding, maybe even beyond hearing—beyond science and knowing. Yet it’s music, and it’s there.

Kinglet, bowing, reveals his golden crown

The self is a “low field” with apples. If you’re not a politician or CEO, full of greedy ambition, that might be a pleasant and reasonable view of yourself. You’d rather be a quiet field than a king, or a gun, or other kinds of machines that are “like loud ideas with tungsten bits that grind the day.”

I routinely get carried away with this or that idea, but how can anyone not love Hirshfield’s comparison of nasty ideas to cold, hard machines—metallic systems that make noise and break things up? Much better to be a field with apples.

But Hirshfield does not abandon or deny what we might call realism or rationality, if those are the words to describe ways of being that include matter and reason, but are not limited to them.

Nor are Hirshfield’s ways and perceptions a pie-in-the-sky, teddy-bear wonderfulness in our souls.  And they feel less bombastic, but no less important, than Wordsworth’s “one soul within us and abroad.”

No, Hirshfield includes predation and extinction, and her landscape is a “low field,” not a snow-capped mountain or a sunset ocean. Her field’s apples are “small and blemished.” Hirshfield is not sloppily sentimental about whatever’s out there, down there, around there, inside all those holes.

If you were a small, blemished apple in a low field, however, you’d see that “a few escape” predation and other bad outcomes. That’s what passes for “a mercy.” It’s a qualified, limited, realistic mercy; therefore, we might dare to hope for it.  

Are Hirshfield’s “self-map,” “self-clock,” and “self-scale” merely new, and New Age, takes on the familiar notion of a mysterious essence beyond physical forms? I don’t think so, but even if they are, the fact remains that she’s making us re-examine all that mystery, giving us new peeks at The Something, the whole possibility that there’s more to us, and everything, than we can understand or explain.

We can’t know if this approach is more valid than the old, hackneyed ways of labeling the streets that run within us, for we are only small holes by the roadside, small animals and blemished apples in a field. But why isn’t that enough?


Like the Small Hole by the Path-Side Something Lives in by Jane Hirshfield : Poetry Magazine

We also talked about such matters here in January 2011:

http://banjo52.blogspot.com/2011/01/wordsworth-world-is-too-much-with-us.html

Roethke's "The Meadow Mouse" Part 3, Conclusion

Part 3

Before I quit, let me discuss two of the poem’s gifts.
The Meadow Mouse by Theodore Roethke at Old Poetry
First, there's the daring opening, “sleeps the baby mouse” instead of “the mouse sleeps,” or some other less charming phrasing.

The inverted, perhaps archaic syntax in “sleeps the baby mouse” instantly creates the tone of a children’s tale, which the rest of the poem pretty much sustains, effectively forcing us to revive our childlike sensibilities. That diction might even offer the argument that compassion and sensitivity are inherently childlike responses, what Wordsworth called the “primal sympathies, which having been must ever be.”

Although I still fault Roethke’s poetic excesses in this direction, they might create an interesting position about human psychology. What if every instance of human sympathy or empathy is, and must be, the resurrection of a child’s heart and mind? What if that’s the only way we can even begin to understand compassion? What if adulthood without that inner child is limited to sterile, desiccated, egocentric, often mean thoughts and behavior?

Why would this be so? Because adults have learned to expect “adult” behavior from others—cunning, aggression, intrusion. Defensively, that requires of each adult constant vigilance, suspicion, strategizing, guile. Without those stone walls and nimble maneuvers we are children, spontaneous and empathic but vulnerable.

Maybe we are especially susceptible to feeling stupid






for not having foreseen and thwarted the trickery of our peers. “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.” The adage that W. made extra famous is probably more relevant to the adult’s world than the child’s, though it’s impossible to know when and how barriers begin to rise and thicken. And, lest we over-romanticize puerile innocence, let’s remember that most of these defenses are necessary to psychic or even physical survival.

Secondly, part of my resistance to Roethke’s final line grows from what I imagine without that line. It’s considered heresy in critiquing a friend’s poem to rewrite images or lines for him, but I’m going to do just that—to an icon, no less. I’d have encouraged Roethke to consider this ending:

I think of the nestling fallen into the deep grass,
The turtle gasping in the dusty rubble
of the highway, the paralytic stunned
in the tub, the water rising.

The End. If we omit Roethke’s final line, we have a turn from vulnerable mouse toward vulnerable human, the paralytic. And stop. Although it’s a sudden, even shocking turn, it’s been implied all along. The poem is about all things vulnerable, not just baby mice.

The Meadow Mouse by Theodore Roethke at Old Poetry

In my suggestion there are risks of causing the poem to seem disjointed or herky-jerky at the end—and making the poem more anthropocentric. Maybe I’m suggesting, “You thought it was about the mouse? It was always about the human, always will be, if a human’s telling the story.”

But that would not glorify humans; it would simply pin down the nature of human sympathy, confessing that we care about the mouse primarily because that sympathy clarifies the way we care about our own, our collective Me. To say otherwise is at least a little dishonest.

Let me repeat that I have no axe to grind with Theodore Roethke, whose poem “The Waking” I admire as much as any poem I know. “My Papa’s Waltz,” “I Knew a Woman,” and “The Geranium” are not far behind.

The Meadow Mouse by Theodore Roethke at Old Poetry

I also love the parental instincts here, the compassion, the heart, the . . . reverence? . . . for everything fragile in “The Meadow Mouse.” However, I think those feelings might have more power if they’d been forced to struggle for existence, struggle to be expressed, if there were a sense that Roethke had tried to hold back more of his flood of sensitivity, if the poem were a little tougher about its emotionality. In the old, good bromide, “Show, don’t tell,” I wish the poem had told a little less and been satisfied with what it showed.

So I'm outta here on this. You think you're sick of the subject? Imagine how I feel. Happy February.

Roethke's "The Meadow Mouse" Part 2, Specific Complaints

Tricolored Heron (please correct me any time I mis-identify), a purty bird intended to balance the criticism (and drudgery?) below.


The Meadow Mouse by Theodore Roethke at Old Poetry

Here are a few of my reservations about “The Meadow Mouse,” which offers so many gifts when it’s not flawed by excesses of repetition and sentimentality.

First things first: the last line has got to go. The opening lines strongly imply that the speaker’s compassion has been far-reaching and is more than a childlike kindness toward baby animals. To be sure of that, he's included the paralytic human. So tacking on “all things innocent, hapless, forsaken” is an overdose of sugar—especially after baby birds, turtles, and a drowining human have just been introduced to the list of the wounded and vulnerable.

That final line is only the most salient example of Roethke’s loosened grip on the poem’s emotionality; he’s already pushed the limit. At first, the mouse “trembled and shook.” Does the poem require him to do both? After all, he’ll be trembling twice more to close out Part 1.

Along these lines, must the animal be pet-named “little quaker?” It’s a bit of a smile, I guess, but in what way is humor relevant to the poem as a whole? The diminutive “little quaker” adds even more emphasis to a quivering that’s already trembling under its own weight.

And what an odd thing it is to hear in “little quaker” a thinly veiled allusion to the brave and peaceful Society of Friends. Some might instinctively consider them victims because of their pacifism and earnest lives of self-denial outside the frivolous mainstream, but shall we therefore compare them to mice? Shy as a mouse, quiet as a church mouse?

As if that’s not enough, the mouse—the whole body of him—once again is explicitly “trembling.” Yes, Mr. Speaker, we get it—he’s small, young, vulnerable, and afraid. And by the way, he’s trembling. Are you afraid we won’t see that if you don’t repeat it several, several, several times?

Must the mouse’s feet be like small leaves as well as “little” lizard feet? Why not “His feet like leaves or lizard-feet”? The comparison to non-mammalian forms is a good way to make us see the mouse in a different, unexpected light. But those other items are small too, so why saturate the lines with the tininess of everything?

If the mouse must be compared to another young, vulnerable creature, namely, a puppy, why the gawky, hyperbolic, and unnecessary word, “miniscule.” Although others might not hear, as I do, a rhythmically awkward and scientific quality in “miniscule”—maybe words like “microscopic” or “particulate"—surely “miniscule” is not an urgent or even accurate modifier for a puppy. Instead, it’s one more instance of piling on children’s images of smallness and vulnerability.

The second stanza of Part 1 is better controlled and paints an appealing picture. It’s still plenty sweet and tender, and it offers a companion image to lizard-feet in the un-cuddly “bat-like ears.” Both images work well against our natural tendency toward anthropomorphism; humanizing the mouse is a tendency to which we’re all probably susceptible, never mind the risks of sentimentality and inaccuracy. So, to keep us from making the mouse even more of a teddy bear than necessary, the poem skillfully offers similarities to Mr. Lizard and Mr. Bat, with whom very few of us are likely to feel a kinship.

Then, as if he’d let too much brain into his heartfelt story, Roethke backslides into a heartfelt repetition of trembling, not once, but twice. I suppose the counter-argument is that the mouse’s trembling is, physically, the dominant descriptive element; it is what the speaker notices again and again, so he must make us notice it the same way. But given the connotations of the image itself—its shout of Victim, Pain and Suffering, Injustice—one “trembling” after another is excessive.

In Part 2 of the poem, the problems continue. The animal is not “the” meadow mouse, but “my” meadow mouse. I love you, Mr. Roethke, but that's pretty cloying. Had he been simply “the” meadow mouse, I would still have been concerned for the nuzzling “thumb of a child” as he escaped into the larger world of predation. So the callow possessive of “my” mouse distances me, an adult, from this cooing speaker. Cooing is a private matter, between me and my pooch or me and my infant; a poem-full of cooing is hard to take seriously. I’m not sure “poem-full” is what we have here, but we’re close enough for me to find it excessive and distracting.

Before I quit, let me discuss two of the poem’s greatest gifts . . . .

The Meadow Mouse by Theodore Roethke at Old Poetry

Part 3, Conclusion, coming soon . . .

Roethke's "The Meadow Mouse" and the Problem of Sentimentality

Left, a juvenile heron (Black-crowned Night Heron??) catches a crab but isn't sure what to do next. Although it took awhile, the heron gets the crab down, one piece at a time. Was the crab young too? Who knows?

The Meadow Mouse by Theodore Roethke at Old Poetry

Though probably not as well known or esteemed as "The Waking" or “My Papa’s Waltz,” Theodore Roethke’s “The Meadow Mouse” seems to be a favorite among his readers, and I can see why. There’s no reason to argue against the poem's content as raw ideas—essentially, sympathy for the vulnerable, the wounded, the doomed.

Also, most of the individual images are effective in conveying a sensibility that might fit both children and adults, which is an accomplishment. The inverted, archaic syntax in “sleeps the mouse” (2) is charming, and it immediately sets up a tone that could inform either a children’s tale or adult literature. But sometimes in “The Meadow Mouse,” Roethke’s language and thinking (if there’s a difference) fall too far into a youthful level of understanding and way of talking about experience.

Presumptuous as it must seem, I’d have urged Roethke to think again in a few places, most of which amount to a tendency toward sentimentality—which is, remember, not just the emotional content in a work, but an excess of emotion, feelings that have not been earned by the poem’s presentation of an experience, feelings that exceed any known cause for them, or emotionality that has not been controlled and balanced by an intellectual presence in the poem.

This is a tightrope that every poet must walk; T.S. Eliot said the right balance between heart and mind could be called “Felt Thought.” I don’t mean that we should follow Eliot because he’s Eliot, but that particular concept is a keeper. (Of course, we should feel free to reverse the words to Thought Feeling).

Well. That’s something to chew on and respond to for now. TGIF: what’s a Friday for if not poetry analysis? I’ve gone windy on the poem, so here’s TGIF-2: I’ll wait a day or two before adding some examples and additional ideas, maybe lots of them.

The Meadow Mouse by Theodore Roethke at Old Poetry


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Theodore Roethke, "I Knew a Woman": The Gift of a Poem

I Knew a Woman by Theodore Roethke : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

A couple of times recently (see, for example, Banjo52, December 8, 2010), I’ve agreed with others in saying that art, including poetry, should be a gift—and bear smaller gifts along the way of its journey. As an example, Theodore Roethke’s “I Knew a Woman” is almost a cheat, the poem is so full of pleasures. It’s more playful than serious, but it illustrates my point. Male readers should appreciate the poem’s gifts without need for explanation. But female readers, even militant feminists, might smile too as they hear Roethke proclaim—and exaggerate, perhaps—women’s powers and their dominance over men.

These are not new gambits about gender, but consider a few of the new images or phrases. First, the woman sighs back at birds. Birds don’t sigh, as far as I know, but what a charming, though improbable image. If a man insists upon going dopey over a woman, what better defense for his insanity than her ability to sigh with the birds? Who could resist such a woman, gentle, at home in orchards, cousin to the finch? It's the end of the paradigm of Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll.

So, by the end of Line 2, Roethke has made clear that there will be some frippery here; if you want King Lear wailing over Cordelia’s corpse, you’ll have to go read the bard. Or Dostoevsky, or dozens of other somber works. This poem is primarily playful, though it might gently raise the serious issue of dominance, who’s running the show, and how much inequality of power is healthy in a relationship. There's also a bit of philosophy, mystery, even witchcraft:

What’s freedom for? To know eternity.
I swear she cast a shadow white as stone.

Is this is enough of a non-erotic basis for worship, enough adoration for attributes other than the physical? I suspect various readers will answer that differently. But the primacy of the female in Roethke's overall scheme is beyond doubt, and that primacy resides in a sublimity that's much more than lust.

Roethke died in 1963, so he missed the most recent decades of feminism as well as the latest news from evolutionists: in mating, the female of the species does the choosing. She's The Decider. (Sorry, couldn't resist). So, knowingly or unwittingly, Roethke's playful poem might be touching on some scientific concepts, proven or otherwise.

Much of the gift in art is offering the unexpected and making it seem appropriate and be appropriate--natural and convincing, both rational and supra-rational. In this vein, Roethke’s next surprise is his adoration of his love as a “bright container.” As a pick-up line, I’ve never considered, “Hey, baby, you’re one bright container.” I wonder if it would work. It should; a suitor should get points for originality.

Whatever else she is, a woman is surely a container, a bright one; she should be honored to be called a container, though it took Roethke to show me this truth. (I suppose men are containers too, but maybe we’re not all that bright . . . maybe we're milk cartons).

I’ve contemplated a hip or two passing by, but I don't recall any hips with noses. Still, Roethke-think has persuaded me to play along, just in time for a somewhat menacing image: this fine woman of circles is also a sickle—a tool! a blade! And Walmart is fresh out of codpieces! But she and he are both happy with the male as rake, following along, cleaning up after her. Only a few weeds have been amputated; all his . . . digits are intact.

There might also be a play here on that other meaning of “rake,” the rough and ready playboy, as in the song verse, “I am a rake and rambling boy.” Maybe that’s Roethke’s effort at a shred of dignity for his gender—romanticizing, idolizing tin-cup beggars that we are. But that's a stretch, and even if it has merit, it yields to the primary image of “rake” as clean-up device.

A truer test of my assertion about gifts in art would be a darker poem that we’re nevertheless glad we’ve read. Its thinking and language are so incisive, fresh, surprising, and significant that they are unquestionably worth the new light of day (or night) the poet has given them. But there have been and will be grim poems aplenty; maybe it’s all right to begin with “I Knew a Woman”—light but ingenious—so that we might all be on the same page about what I mean by gifts in a poem.

Do you find any gifts in "I Knew a Woman"? Elsewhere?

I Knew a Woman by Theodore Roethke : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry

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Back Roads, Campus, Waking, Roethke

The weekend’s not over yet. You can still hit the two-lanes for a few hours, or take a new back road home from Shangri-La.

Hit some small towns, wander by some farms. How much can you generalize about them? Or roam around a college campus, which can feel something like a gathering of cathedrals if you plan well—or just get lucky. What is life like for those kids and profs? If the devil's in the details, how much can you, should you generalize?

If this weekend is a flop, remember, a couple of autumn months have just begun, and they won’t last long. So hit the road and remember your Roethke:

I wake to sleep and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.


The Waking by Theodore Roethke : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

Women in Art and Poetry

I’m not ready to abandon that nineteenth century American gallery after last week’s attempts to relate the work there to Hawthorne. I’m not sure why the idea took hold so firmly, except for my feeling that here were two contemporaries presenting rather similar portraits of similar parts of the U.S. I think I felt that each might have validated the other, and therefore I was illuminated (nothing more dangerous than an illuminated banjo—it’ll never shut up—it’s like some Jurassic Park cricket.).

So before leaving that gallery indefinitely, I want to look at a few portraits of women of that era, painted by men of that era, plus some modern poems that seem related. Then, tomorrow or very soon, I want to look at some contemporary American women poets on the subject of women. (Does the fact that they’re contemporary fatally skew the comparison?).

“Piazza DiSpagna, Early Morning” by Richard Wilbur (this is the cleanest online version I found. I’m sorry about the small print; the poem is at the bottom left of the page).

http://members.fortunecity.co.uk/kagaya_rinoa/aa/Piazza.di.Spagna,.Early.Morning.htm

“I Knew a Woman” by Theodore Roethke http://gawow.com/roethke/poems/122.html

“Nude Descending a Staircase” by X.J. Kennedy, in response to the Duchamps painting by the same title

http://www.poemtree.com/poems/NudeDescendingAStaircase.htm

By the way, I've deliberately opted against an e.e. cummings poem--he fits in all too easily. For whatever reason, these three poems popped into my mind concerning this subject--I rarely think about the Kennedy poem, but there it was, more for the title and its comparison to the Wilbur than for any other reason. What Duchamps was up to in his painting is a whole other bucket of worms, isn't it?

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Beauty as Utility

Which perspective is the right one?




Among the words I've loved, here’s a thought from Professor Ralph Williams at the University of Michigan. I don't have the statement in print, so I’m paraphrasing, but this is close:

“We talk about setting virtue against evil; maybe it’s time to set beauty against evil.”

Maybe one implication is that humans are more likely to agree upon what is beautiful—and its sanctity—than what is good, moral, ethical, legal, and such.






“The Waking” by Theodore Roethke

http://gawow.com/roethke/poems/104.html

I’m a little worn out after the last couple of posts, and I’m busy with readying myself to return to teaching any day now, depending on strike negotiations. Therefore, I’m going to try something I’ve been meaning to do here from time to time—post links to poems that I've found valuable. (I wish I could simply paste the poems into Banjo52, but I’m too wary of copyright issues for that).

In these rancorous times, I’ll try to keep the selections somewhat upbeat, or soothing, or at least interesting enough in language or thought to act as counterpoints to the blaring of hate-mongers out there. No promises, however; I am not a robot.

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GOTHPUNKUNCLE AND THE NEW CRITICISM, Part 2

Sunshine Musings


From Yesterday:
GPK: Value is dynamic rather than static. Whose stock is worth more now? Does T.S. Eliot mean as much to readers as he did 40 years ago?

Bjo52: “Value”? I hope the marketplace is not the primary determinant of value. If so, all poetry is virtually worthless . . .

Today:

Now, about your example of the local coffee house composer-singer, the value of his work beside Dylan, the Beatles, and other icons, you say . . .

GPK: Even if it was the greatest song ever (a song by the local coffee house guy), isn't it a text subject to the demands of context? The rigors of genre and cultural expectation?

Bjo52: The rigors of genre, yes. But I question how much the text is subject to the demands of context, if you mean culture, history, and so forth. However, I love the hugeness of the question, so here are some thoughts.

Are you saying one cannot appreciate or understand, for example, Shakespeare’s Henry plays without knowing the historical background of the Lancaster and York unpleasantness, or Shakespeare’s own vulnerability because of his queen’s sensitivity about her ancestors? If so, I can't agree. Although understanding context probably enriches those events and characters for a modern reader, there’s plenty of meat in the plays independent of Elizabethan history or the actual history of Richard II, Henry IV and Henry V. In fact, that very universality is a major criterion in judging what’s good, isn’t it?

Coming at it from another important perspective, if a reader chooses not to examine the actual lines of the text, if he’s using the literature only as a way of understanding more about history, he’s a pretty limited reader. Should I trust a critic who's skimming in his study of character and poetry, a scholar who uses a play primarily as an illustration of some point about the Wars of the Roses or the aftermath in Elizabethan England--or 21st century America?

I don't mean that the two disciplines should never cross paths, and of course intellectual history and art history are legitimate, important fields of study--as long as they announce that their purpose is to look at the literature, philosophy, religion, art, history and so forth as disciplines in relation to each other. But too often I've heard teachers of English talk openly or even proudly of using literature to teach history, and through history, politics, and from there to the teacher's own biases. What happened to the text? I do not accept that the text is a mere prop for the study of other fields; it may be that too, but it must first be its own entity, worthy of and demanding of study for its own sake--its intellectual and aesthetic properties.

Students and other careful, well-intentioned readers must first approach the literature carefully, line by line, word by word, and comma by comma; from there it's a natural and legitimate step to challenging each other and teachers about meaning and technique. If that analysis does not occur, points about cultural, political, religious, or other contexts will amount to little more than sloganeering.

In turn, that is part of the reason there's so much animosity about political correctness, which should simply mean treating each other and our groups with respect. Instead, it seems to mean, "I had some communist professor who made me say and write things I didn't think or believe. That's why liberals suck." The logic is incomplete, to put it mildly, yet I can see where it comes from: the classroom as professorial throne, the professor as dictator, T.S. Eliot not just frowned upon, but banned.

Bring this into the current, so-called national conversation. It's become a shouting match, an amassing of cheap shots and lies. That has become the culture or context for our talk with each other. I'd rather read Roethke's "The Waking" one more time than listen to the hyenas.

A New Critical perspective, as I conceive of it, would say, "Wait. Where's the evidence? Where are the facts? Let's look at them carefully, thoroughly, dispassionately. To the extent that's humanly possible, let's leave self-interest, vulnerabilty, rage and bullying at the door and see if we can agree on what actually has happened and is happening in this text, which may be this poem alone or this nation and the world." Quite possibly, that kind of careful examination of text might even create a different context, a culture of analysis rather than rhetorical flap and hatred.

That's a lot to ask, and it will never completely happen because we are at least as emotional as we are rational. Shall we therefore not try it? Shall we accept our status quo: Loudest wins?

Shakespeare's Henry plays are very much about Hal’s development as a human, a man, and a leader, and the nature of—the heartlessness required of?—leaders. There's the simultaneous appeal and repugnance we’re likely to feel toward a wit and buffoon, a self-interested pragmatist like Falstaff, the ersatz survivor, who ironically does not survive (as Hal's pal, as citizen).

How in the world is all that confined to the context or culture of young Henry's or Shakespeare’s England? What could be more timely than the bellicose rhetoric of Hotspur, or Glendower's exotic claims of a direct connection to the gods, the question of whom we can believe, and when, why, how?

We don't need to study aged history to appreciate the meaning and relevance of this; we may if we wish--out of curiosity or idleness. But what we must do is listen carefully to the characters' words and look at his actions and see how they're alive today. We don't need to know the particulars of the cultures that produced these characters; every culture produces these characters, admires these characters, divides loyalties among these characters, fears these characters, obeys and is victim of these characters.

Shall we compare Hal to George W. Bush, two overgrown children born into the lap of everything? Hal made it work, while even most conservatives now say, less than a year after the facts, that W. never did. How many history books about the Wars of the Roses must I read to acknowledge the plausibility of that comparison? Or the rigors to which a successful politician must submit, even if he’s a king, supposedly ruling by divine right? My answer is zero history, zero understanding of other cultures to get the gist of these plays that might seem so rooted in and confined to their specific eras.

Maybe it’s true that Leonard Cohen could not have written what he has written at other times or within other cultural norms. Maybe his culture has helped to produce him--surely it isn't either/or, is it? On the other hand, many or most great artists were aliens, or rebels, in their own times and places. I don’t know if that describes Cohen, but neither do I think we must have those answers in order to understand and love the beauty or wisdom this or that song. If we have some knowledge of Cohen's personal or cultural history, it might be useful or it might be dangerous; our first job and pleasure is to hear the song, not researching the intellectual climate in which it was written.

Ditto the unknown player at the coffee house. He may be singing about personal issues in early 21st century America, but if he isn’t at the same time singing about universal human concerns, he won’t be much remembered or honored beyond his few decades on the planet. And if he makes a zillion dollars, it won’t matter in the way that Dickinson and Whitman matter--they should matter first for their poems, secondly at most for the ways they do or do not reflect their culture.

GPK, is that too pompous for the sly humor in your commentary? It won’t be the first time I’ve been accused of bombast. I very much appreciate the sly humor, provocation, and enlarging of issues that you bring to the table.