So here we go again – D.A. Powell’s poem.
My first post about this poem is directly below this entry.
Click on the link over Powell’s name – or look at the post below – for the poem unhampered by UD’s commentary.
**********************************
coal of this unquickened world
[We've already talked about the source of this title in Philip Larkin's poem, Night-Music. But while Larkin's focus is mainly on the natural world, with subtly gathering implications for humanity, Powell's will turn out to be very personal. The coal is himself, his mind, his spirit, a dead, dull, blackened substance unable to lend itself the least bit of brightness. This is a poem about depression.]
midnight slips obsidian: an arrowhead in my hand
[Midnight gradually establishes itself as total blackness. The poet, let us say, sadly holds his head in his hand as one would hold an obsidian arrowhead. His bleak thoughts - painful, sharp glass is what an obsidian arrowhead amounts to - wound him.]
pointed roofs against the backdrop, black and blacker
three kinds of ink, each more india than the last
[Notice how the word india is almost embedded in the word obsidian - the poet plays with words, with near rhymes.]
must be going blind: eyes two pitted olives on a cracker
a draft of bitter ale, a kind of saturated past
poppy seeds: black holes large as my head. my head
[The poet tries this and that metaphor to convey his reduction to a burned-out deadhead; his olive eyes are empty (pitted) and share the shiny inexpressive blackness of the obsidian arrowheads. His past is pitted - saturated - with black holes. These holes designate the memory hole of bitter recollections.]
dirty as a dishrag, crudely drawn imp, a charcoaled dove
disappearing down alleys with a pail from the chimney
[The self-hatred of the depressive. My worthless mind, once innocent as a dove and now filthy with bad thoughts and motives, blackens itself.]
this carbon: no graphite or diamond it’s ordinary soot
[I'm nothing. Nothing special. No diamond in the rough. I'm plain old soot, animated dirt. Carbon of the lowest form.]
dress it up: say “buckminsterfullerene” or carbon 60
but it’s just common, the color of a boot
["A fullerene is any molecule composed entirely of carbon, in the form of a hollow sphere, ellipsoid, or tube. ... The first fullerene to be discovered, and the family's namesake, was buckminsterfullerene C60 ... The name was an homage to Richard Buckminster Fuller, whose geodesic domes it resembles."]
a slate on the ground. a petroleum bubble above
smothering in the walrus suit,
[He describes himself as a bubble of crude covered in a walrus suit -- a ridiculous, but also catastrophic image, since - I suppose - once the bubble bursts, the oil spill will destroy the walrus. This is a very endangered, on the edge, person.]
the cloud of smoke
the shroud and the deathmask. blitzkrieg black sun choke
[Well, there you go. The bubble bursts in a cloud of smoke, and the black liquid chokes the poet to death. He's blitzed.]
Notice a couple of fascinating things about Powell’s style here. Though you don’t really register it, this is an exceedingly formal poem, a fourteen-line sort of sonnet complete with end rhymes and a final couplet. You don’t register this formality because of the very loose graphic style of the poem, which plays against the tightness of its rhyme scheme. There’s no capitalization, little punctuation, and sometimes there’s just guttering unrelated words: blitzkrieg black sun choke.
These final words suggest a concluding explosive chaos, everything blown to bits; yet the hyper-controlled structure of the poem works against total disintegration…. In other words, there’s an exciting tension in a poem like this one between a content which conveys flat-out clinical melancholia, and a form which shows the creative mind working at full capacity.
… is the author of
Tea, D.A. Powell.
From the New York Times Arts, Briefly blog:
In its continuing unofficial mission to prove that a poetry career need not condemn an author to a life of destitution, Claremont Graduate University has announced the winners of its highly lucrative Kingsley and Kate Tufts poetry awards. The Kingsley Tufts Award, which comes with a prize of $100,000, will go to D. A. Powell for his [latest] collection “Chronic” (Graywolf Press), the university said in a news release. Mr. Powell, a poet from the San Francisco Bay Area, is a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s poetry award, also for “Chronic”; his previous collection “Cocktails,” was also a finalist for that honor….
Let’s look up close at one of Powell’s poems from Chronic, coal of this unquickened world.
Powell got his title from Philip Larkin.
In 1944, early in his writing life, Larkin wrote this poem.
Night-Music
At one the wind rose,
And with it the noise
Of the black poplars.
Long since had the living
By a thin twine
Been led into their dreams
Where lanterns shine
Under a still veil
Of falling streams;
Long since had the dead
Become untroubled
In the light soil.
There were no mouths
To drink of the wind,
Nor any eyes
To sharpen on the stars’
Wide heaven-holding,
Only the sound
Long sibilant-muscled trees
Were lifting up, the black poplars.
And in their blazing solitude
The stars sang in their sockets through the night:
`Blow bright, blow bright
The coal of this unquickened world.’
*******************************
Powell will hyper-literalize Larkin’s coal and turn out, as we’ll see in a moment, quite an amazing poem – a poem without the sad formal measure Larkin gets with his TS Eliotish short, short lines (Wallace Stevens gets an effect like Larkin’s here, in Domination of Black.)
Larkin’s pulled back lines let him express the pulled back midnight world, very silent except for the sound the sibilant poplars make in the wind. The poplars are green of course when it’s day; at night, they become, like everything but the stars, black.
It’s a wiped-out world. No one’s awake, except the poet recording the silent world with its bit of song from the trees. Everyone’s asleep, ushered out of consciousness into the weakly-lit theater of dreams. The world of the dead too is meager, thin. They lie “untroubled / in the light soil.” No eyes are open to “sharpen on the stars’ / Wide heaven-holding.” (In After Greece, James Merrill’s ancestors are “anxious to know / What holds up heaven nowadays.”)
Larkin in many of his poems loves to record the ghostly insinuating life of the world that goes on without us, while we’re sleeping or while we’re dead. His most famous rendition of this weird activity appears in An Arundel Tomb. “Pre-baroque” lovers are buried beneath a stone sculpture of the two them lying side by side, hand in hand. The poet imagines the long centuries during which the world’s life has revolved around their motionlessness:
Snow fell, undated. Light
Each summer thronged the glass. A bright
Litter of birdcalls strewed the same
Bone-littered ground
Thronged is wonderful.
*************************************
Back to Night-Music, and the way Larkin conveys with all of his images the perilous delicacy, the fragile contingency, of earthly existence.
We have no eyes, but the stars have eyes; the song they sing “in their sockets through the night” is a magical invocation to the wind to wake us and our world up again:
`Blow bright, blow bright
The coal of this unquickened world.’
This black cinder globe with yet a bit of fire in its ash — blow on it, bring it back to life, quicken it. Our time here is brief and perilous, but, pray, make our cheeks ruddy…
Those three hard k sounds are gorgeous – coal, unquickened – but it’s more than this that drew Powell to the line. Here’s his poem.
*****************************************
D.A. Powell
coal of this unquickened world
midnight slips obsidian: an arrowhead in my hand
pointed roofs against the backdrop, black and blacker
three kinds of ink, each more india than the last
must be going blind: eyes two pitted olives on a cracker
a draft of bitter ale, a kind of saturated past
poppy seeds: black holes large as my head. my head
dirty as a dishrag, crudely drawn imp, a charcoaled dove
disappearing down alleys with a pail from the chimney
this carbon: no graphite or diamond it’s ordinary soot
dress it up: say “buckminsterfullerene” or carbon 60
but it’s just common, the color of a boot
a slate on the ground. a petroleum bubble above
smothering in the walrus suit, the cloud of smoke
the shroud and the deathmask. blitzkrieg black sun choke
***************************
Let me take a break from this post and then return to talk about Powell’s poem.
… for a longer, more existential view.
Don DeLillo, in the New York Times.
****************
DeLillo’s getting sketchy: The NYT review of Point Omega.
At 5.38pm on 29 January, the German social theorist and philosopher Jürgen Habermas apparently tweeted the following: “It’s true that the internet has reactivated the grass-roots of an egalitarian public sphere of writers and readers.” At 5.40, he tweeted again: “It also counterbalances the deficits from the impersonal and asymmetrical character of broadcasting insofar as . . .” At 5.41: “. . . it reintroduces deliberative elements in communication. Besides that, it can undermine the censorship of authoritarian regimes . . .” At 5.44: “But the rise of millions of fragmented discussions across the world tend instead to lead to fragmentation of audiences into isolated publics.”
Had the 80-year-old doyen of the Frankfurt School for social research joined the twitterati?’
… [O]n 1 February, the blogger Jonathan Stray (jonathanstray.com) revealed that he had contacted the real Habermas at his home, and asked him if he was on Twitter. “No, no, no,” he was told. “This is somebody else. This is a misuse of my name.” …
Plus there’s about four inches of it on the ground.
But George Washington University’s open, so UD’s currently attempting to get to campus in order to teach her class on James Joyce.
Later.
A university registrar who offered forged degrees to two women in return for spanking sessions has been given a suspended jail sentence.
Bristol Crown Court heard that Karl Woodgett filmed himself caning the women at a Bristol hotel.
The 37-year-old, of Ewell Minnis, Kent, worked at the University of Bath at the time of the offences.
He was given a nine-month sentence suspended for a year after admitting conspiracy to make fake degrees…
Born this date, February 2, 1882.
UD’s fellow DC Joycean, Bob Kolodney, emails her this Writer’s Almanac summary:
It’s the birthday of James Joyce, born in Dublin (1882), who said, “The only demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole life to reading my works.” Joyce wrote Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939);an autobiographical novel, Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man (1916); and a short-story collection, Dubliners (1914), among other works.
He was educated by Jesuits, first visited a prostitute at the age of 14, dropped out of medical school and aspired to be an opera star. He met and fell in love with a Galway hotel maid named Nora Barnacle when he was 22 years old, and he set the action of Ulysses on the day he had his first date with Nora, June 16, 1904. It’s now commemorated all over the world each year as Bloomsday, after the novel’s protagonist, Leopold Bloom.
Shortly after meeting Nora, he convinced her to leave Ireland with him and elope to continental Europe. He thought he’d lined up a teaching job as a language instructor, but that fell through, and he ended up working at a bank in Rome for a while. They were forever impoverished and constantly relying on Joyce’s brother Stanislaus for money.
They had a son, Giorgio, and after that James and Nora slept head to foot, an attempt at birth control. It didn’t seem to be an effective form, though, and Nora became pregnant with Lucia about a year after giving birth to Giorgio. Joyce was a doting father, liked to spoil his kids, never punished either one and once told an interviewer, “Children must be educated by love, not punishment.”
Nora was famously apathetic toward her husband’s writing. Joyce worked at night and laughed so loudly at his own words that Nora would get up and tell him to stop writing and stop laughing so that she could get a bit of sleep. Shortly after Ulysses (Joyce pronounced it “Oolissays”) was published, she remarked to a fan of his: “I’ve always told him he should give up writing and take up singing.” Ulysses took seven years of unbroken labor, which translated into 20,000 hours of work.
Joyce was afraid of thunder and lightning — during electrical storms, he would hide under bedcovers — and he was also afraid of dogs, and walked around town with rocks in his pockets in case he encountered any roaming mutts. He didn’t care for the arts other than music and literature, and he especially had no patience for art like painting. Over his desk he kept a photograph of a statue of Penelope (from Greek mythology, the wife of Odysseus/Ulysses) and a photograph of a man from Trieste, whom Joyce wouldn’t name but said was the model for Leopold Bloom. On his desk he had a tiny bronze statue of a woman lying back in a chair with a cat draped over her shoulders. All of his friends told him it was ugly, but he kept it on his desk anyway. One of his Parisian friends remarked, “He had no taste, only genius.”
Joyce liked to drink and he liked to dance; his daughter-in-law said that “liquor went to his feet, not head. “Joyce usually sat with his legs crossed with the toe of one crossed again under the calf of the other. He was kind and generous to strangers, and he was known to invite waiters to join him at his table for food and drink. Sylvia Beach, proprietor of Shakespeare and Co., said that Joyce “treated people invariably as his equals, whether they were writers, children, waiters, princesses, or charladies. What anybody had to say interested him; he told me that he had never met a bore. … If he arrived in a taxi, he wouldn’t get out until the driver had finished what he was saying. Joyce himself fascinated everybody; no one could resist his charm.”
James Joyce said, “The artist, like the God of the Creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.”
In a landmark legal ruling, IT services firm EDS has lost its ongoing case with broadcaster BSkyB after the British High Court ruled that the HP-owned company had lied about its expertise.
The court ruled that EDS has misled BSkyB over its skills and that the contract and a clause limiting EDS’ potential damages to US$30 million were invalid. The ruling would leave EDS liable to at least £200m (AU$357 million) in damages.
… The saga began in 2000 when EDS won a £48m (AU$85m) contract to build a CRM system for BSkyB’s operations in Scotland. The project was beset with problems and cost overruns and in the end BSkyB sacked EDS and finished the project themselves, at a cost of £265m (AU473m).
BSkyB said that EDS had misrepresented its skills and if it had known this it would have gone with an alternative bid from PricewaterhouseCoopers.
***********************************
That’s the background. But what really lost the case for EDS?
Jeffrey, a reader, links UD to a related article:
EDS’s key witness during the firm’s court case against BSkyB was shown to have bought his degree online – but still managed to get a worse mark than a dog.
The witness – Joe Galloway, former Managing Director for CRM Solutions at EDS – was responsible for providing BSkyB with the time period he thought it would take to install a CRM IT system. The delivery then took much longer than he had claimed.
… The judge’s ruling said: “That representation was false…it was made dishonestly by Joe Galloway who knew it to be false.”
Of the five accusations of misrepresentation brought by BSkyB in the case, this was the only one that was upheld by the judge and effectively led to EDS losing the case.
One of the reasons the accusation was upheld was that Joe Galloway made another representation that was proven false by BSkyB’s lawyers – that he had a degree from Concordia College in the US Virgin Islands.
Galloway gave detailed evidence on how he took plane journeys between the islands and attended a college there.
But while questioning Galloway in court, Mark Howard QC managed to obtain exactly the same degree as Galloway from Concordia College for his dog “Lulu” with one key difference – the dog got a higher mark.
Both Galloway and the dog received a letter from the vice-chancellor of Concordia College saying:
“Mr Galloway / Lulu demonstrated that he/she is prepared and fully equipped to add valuable apprenticeship to our institution’s activities by means of talented and profoundly investigated subject treatment.”
Galloway’s credibility as a witness was shredded, according to one lawyer who witnessed proceedings.
“He gave his evidence [on going to the college] in the same confident, secure manner as he gave his evidence about the EDS representations. Make no mistake, this was a key factor in EDS losing this case,” said the lawyer.
UD thanks Jeffrey.
A resident physician at a Long Island, N.Y., hospital apologized to faculty members over the weekend for posting a photograph of a former classmate giving two thumbs up next to a cadaver as state health officials said they would be looking into the matter.
In three separate e-mails, Erica Katz, who works in the emergency medicine unit at Stony Brook University Medical Center, told faculty members that posting the photo on her Facebook page was a mistake.
… Dean Richard Fine on Monday met with faculty members, who referred the matter to the committee on academic standards. That panel will make recommendations to Fine on what, if any, disciplinary action will be taken against Katz.
… The photo, which features [the classmate] wearing purple gloves and smiling over a cadaver with both of [the classmate's] thumbs up, was taken during an anatomy class.
… Dr. Todd R. Olson, professor of anatomy at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and president of the American Association of Clinical Anatomists… [asked:] “Don’t you think … one has every reasonable expectation that you’re not going to show up with somebody holding two thumbs up over Uncle Dick on Facebook?” …
… but very much worth making.
… If you stay in an American hotel, you are more or less guaranteed not to be able to get a good cup of tea. I know that this is a major accusation to make against a whole culture, but it is, regrettably, quite true. Certainly you will find tea (in the form of tea bags) in your room, but how do you make it? The answer is that they expect you to make it in the coffee maker.
Now the problem with that is that if there are two flavours in this world that cannot – in any circumstances – be combined, it is tea and coffee. To make tea in a container that has been tainted with coffee is to ensure that the resultant tea is undrinkable. The flavour of coffee lingers in a vessel long after the last cup was brewed, and it is impossible to use that vessel for tea-making no matter how much it is washed. Try it. Put coffee in a vacuum flask and then, after washing it out thoroughly, try to use it for tea…
Alexander McCall, the novelist, says very clearly and forcefully something I’ve felt in a vague and submerged way for years… Something I’ve tried to explain to Mr UD as we enter hotel rooms and he points out to me, among other wonderful and elegant features, bags of good tea and a coffee maker. How can I explain that, as McCall says, tea brewed in such tainted circumstances is not merely undrinkable, but unthinkable?
Tea, for me, is one of the great subjects. It is a romantic trade, it does not pollute excessively, it has all sorts of health benefits, it calms and wakes you up at the same time. It promotes conversation.
UD’s poetry and prose in praise of tea can be found here.
McCall with his tea and his cat.
Doesn’t hold office hours, often travels and misses classes. Does not give priority to students in Michigan because he’s got other jobs in India, like Dean of a school there. Avoid.
Always distracted, talking on phone, won’t return emails or phone calls, too busy with other projects at other schools.
He bring a lot of consultancy exprience to class, so may be that’s why you can never find him in his office and he cancels so many classes. He is good when he shows up, but he is hardly ever on campus.
Online class. He did not respond to questions via email and often confused the class by putting unread material on exams. Required a lot of discussion board, but never made comments about the subjects or students input on the board. Does not give feedback.
These comments from students of Madhukar Angur, at the University of Michigan – Flint, on Rate My Professors (there are positive comments as well) begin to paint the picture. Teaches a lot of online courses; isn’t physically around much.
Currently, according to a Michigan Times article about him, Angur “holds two class sessions on campus between 4-9:45 p.m. on Tuesdays … Angur is one of the highest paid professors on campus with an annual full-time equivalent salary of $120,000 per year… ”
*****************************
So let’s see what the taxpayers of Michigan are getting for their money.
They’re getting a guy who teaches one day a week. If he’s around. Sounds as though some semesters he’s got everything online.
But that’s not all. Michiganders are paying for something more.
An award-winning University of Michigan-Flint professor is being investigated for possible conflict of interest. The investigation began after School of Management (SOM) faculty complained about Professor Madhukar Angur holding a second job in India.
… Faculty members complained about the “disappearance” of Angur for two weeks in October, forcing him to cancel one week of classes to attend to administrative duties in India.
The controversy has created a crisis within SOM where morale is described as being at an “all-time low.” It is being blamed for faculty members leaving UM-Flint.
Do you have any idea how expensive it is to fly back and forth to India all the time?
A medical faculty is a dicey thing. Among this cohort of professors at your university, you’ve always got lurking a few ghosted writers, courtesy authors, research fakers, plagiarists, etc.
But your biggest problem these days, what with the money to be made from selling drugs for pharmaceutical companies, comes from corporate shills using their university affiliation to look respectable.
Take Leslie Baumann, pride of the University of Miami. Leslie’s in trouble with the FDA.
… [T]he Food and Drug Administration has cracked down on one of the most widely quoted cosmetic doctors, sending shudders through the ranks of opinion leaders in fashion publishing and vanity medicine.
The F.D.A. recently sent a warning letter to Dr. Leslie Baumann, a well-known dermatologist and clinical researcher in Miami Beach, citing the doctor for expressing premature enthusiasm in the media about Dysport, an injectable antiwrinkle drug the agency had not yet approved.
Dr. Baumann’s comments in the media in 2007 violated restrictions on drug promotion, according to the letter; the agency asked Dr. Baumann to explain how she intended to prevent similar violations in the future.
Under the Obama administration, the F.D.A. has stepped up scrutiny of drug advertising, dispatching many warning letters about misleading commercials and online marketing efforts. But this is believed to be the first time the agency has warned an individual investigator — a medical researcher who oversees a clinical trial — for apparently promoting an unapproved drug.
… Federal rules bar drug makers and investigators on their clinical trials from promoting a drug before the agency has approved the product. Dr. Baumann violated the restrictions, the F.D.A. letter said, because she was an investigator on a clinical trial for Dysport and promoted it well before the drug’s approval in April.
“Early data shows it may last longer and kick in faster than Botox,” Dr. Baumann told the fashion magazine Allure in 2007. She made similar comments that same year to Elle magazine and during an appearance on the “Today” show on NBC in January 2009.
… Dr. Baumann, a former professor of dermatology at the University of Miami medical school …
Former? Why is she still listed as a faculty member? And don’t you think she should update her Amazon.com bibliography?
