Tom Bombadil - the Embodied

 A short note on Tom Bombadil, whom I have mentioned once or twice before, since I have been rereading Fellowship of the Ring to help jump-start my stalled book progress:

Last summer, I wrote quite a lot about the Valar. In the course of writing about them, I engaged in rather a serious way with the idea of their spiritual nature--their wholly spiritual nature, which meant fluidity of form but not of gender, and a reversal of Tolkien's original plan that there should be children of the Valar.

Rereading Ch. 6: "The Old Forest," I did not have any epiphany concerning what type of being he is. Truthfully, I think the deciphering of all the mysteries to be a boring and fruitless endeavor. But it did occur to me how blissfully, exuberantly embodied he is, "dancing along the path," coming into sight "[w]ith another hop and a bound," if not quite tall enough to be a man, at least "too big and heavy to be a hobbit," "stumping along with great yellow boots on his thick legs, and charging through grass and rushes like a cow going down to drink." He is heavily made, heavily clothed, bearded, wrinkled, and utterly, completely, a physical being, reveling in moving about on the created earth almost as if he has chosen, quite deliberately, to exist in this form.

A Concurrent Project, perhaps Commonplace

 Recently, I began rereading The Lord of the Rings. I'm supposed to be writing a book about how Tolkien presents marriage in his works, but I'm getting very bogged down in the Histories and the mythology. So I decided that the best way to remember why it was I wanted to write about Tolkien was to reread the thing I love most by him: The Lord of the Rings.

Meanwhile, I received some lovely things for Christmas: a fine Tomoe River notebook, and a bottle of Diamine Mystique ink (purple with gold shimmer), which I supplemented with a TWSBI Eco pen with a broad nib, which shows off the shimmer:

I am not a person who feels very comfortable with blank books and fine notebooks. I feel like I will mess them up--with mistake or the shoddiness of the thoughts that I have recorded. I have torn pages out of more journals and blank books than I remember because looking back, I just find them embarrassing. I have taken down a few blog posts, for that matter--or whole blogs with years' worth of posts. So the only thing I realize I feel comfortable recording in my book are quotes from what I am reading--a record of whatever strikes me at the time. This is how I began:

But you notice, something different has started to happen:

Instead of simply recording what I am reading, I have decided that I want to record, also, when something I am reading brings to mind something else. It may not be something very similar, but to my mind, there is an association, and I think that is worth recalling. It started with Frodo:

"I feel that as long as the Shire lies behind, safe and comfortable, I shall find wandering more bearable: I shall know that somewhere there is a firm foothold, even if my feet cannot stand there again."

And continued with Puddleglum:

"I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia."

And then this:

Tomorrow we may come this way

And take the hidden paths that run

Towards the Moon or to the Sun.

Apple, thorn, and nut and sloe,

Let them go! Let them go!

happened to recall this:

Though I am old with wandering

Through hollow lands and hilly lands,

I will find out where she has gone,

And kiss her lips and take her hands;

And walk along long dappled grass,

And pluck till time and times are done,

The silver apples of the moon,

The golden apples of the sun.

As I believe it always has.

It is, if you will, a Commonplace Book, but also, because it is a book of connections, it reminds me, again, of what things I know. And it strikes me that one of the valuable things in my education was always--and still is--the planting of beautiful words in my head.

With shimmer and shine,

Literacy-chic

P.S. - I am not at all happy with breaking a quote between pages, with my choice to single space the poetry, with my few mistakes, or even my variation in handwriting. And I need to work on wheedling my husband's gold-ink-filled pen on a longer-term basis (that is the color ink that I bought for him!). But I am resolved not to tear out any pages because of perfectionism. New Year's Resolution? We shall see!

How would I teach... Adrienne Rich?

 It had to be poetry. There was never a doubt that, wherever else I went with this, I would start with poetry. One of the biggest mistakes I ever made was not pursuing either poetry or children's literature in my graduate work. This was because 1) I was advised that children's literature wasn't taken seriously as a specialization, or it would limit me too much, or some such... and 2) there wasn't much focus on poetry at the school where I did my graduate work, which was not my first choice. Or my second. Or third. More because of circumstance and finance than because I couldn't get in anywhere else. I would up working on British Modernism because I was able to write a dissertation on British Modernism, and it seemed like a promising field. Except somehow, I didn't write about the cool British Modernists, or the cool issues in British Modernism, so...

I started out intending to work on ecopoetics. I had one of my mentors say that he would "love to work on ecopoetics" with me, as my advisor. He wound up being my advisor, but only because the Modernist I wanted to work on was too rigid. And she got pregnant, got divorced, and left, so there's that. Kids, take it from me: don't choose your Ph.D. program on the strength of a smile and a handshake, no matter how flattered you are by someone's regard. And don't continue into a Ph.D. program because you might as well, since your husband is finishing his second M.A. It is better to wait, teach a few classes or get a different job, and come back to it if you want to. Otherwise, in the immortal words of Admiral Akbar, "It's a trap!"

***

Having decided that I would start this series (?) with poetry, the poems started to flood my brain. Mostly, as promised, poems once considered as part of the canon--if, actually, on the late end of the canon. For example, Tolkien wouldn't have recognized them as canonical. Tennyson was verging on too late for his liking, Yeats was right out, and some of the others I would choose (will choose?) were, in fact, his contemporaries. But the poem that settled into my brain was, in fact, by Adrienne Rich. One of her later poems, that I encountered on my own rather than in a class, because I liked what I did read by Rich in class and, having aspirations to poetry myself, sought out contemporary poets. It is, in fact, "An Atlas of the Difficult World." 

Right now, I am hamstrung by the fact that my poetry books are packed up from my exodus from my final (only?) (contingent) faculty position, by the fact that the poem is very copyright protected, and by the fact that it is, therefore, unavailable in its entirety on the web. But the most evocative section is available online, probably not legally:

Now, the first question with a poet like Adrienne Rich is in what context I would be teaching this poem. A contemporary poetry course, which is likely where I originally encountered her? In an Introduction to Poetry course, if your university has such a thing? In an Introduction to Literature course, if the course included poetry as one of its genres, and if the survey nature of the course allowed for the inclusion of what is a long and surprisingly challenging poem? In an American Poetry course? I wouldn't likely be teaching American Literature, even in an ideal world. Not my cup of tea. How about a Women in Poetry or a Women's Literature course, or Feminism in Literature? Again, probably not subjects I would be teaching, each of which would lend itself to a particular approach involving theory and context. For argument's sake, let's imagine an Introduction to Literature. I would prefer the class that I took as an undergrad against the objection of the advisor, who said that English majors usually took Intro to Lit instead of the two-course sequence of Intro to Short Story/Novel and Intro to Poetry/Drama. I imagine  this being a good poem to teach to nontraditional students in an introductory literature course--to students with life experience, who might have different motivations for returning to school. I believe that Rich would have approved.

How would I begin?

Ideally, the class would already have a pretty firm basis in poetry by this time. Meaning, we would have had a survey of poetic form and covered certain influential figures who preceded Rich. It is a bit of a crime to read Rich without having read Whitman and Ginsburg because of how each one of them uses the poetic line--stretching it to its breaking point and using it to its fullest capacity at the same time. It is, however, possible to do so.

Would I give background on Rich? Students do like a short biography. I personally love the fact that she was chosen by none other than W. H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Award in 1951, who commented memorably that her poems were "neatly and modestly dressed, speak quietly but do not mumble, respect their elders but are not cowed by them." Oh, to be condescended to by the likes of W. H. Auden! This, however, would only register with a class already familiar with W. H. Auden, and I have never taught a class--even of senior English majors--in which even one was familiar with Auden, more's the pity. There are certainly some who would be interested and find value in the story of her young marriage and subsequent divorce, her lesbian identity and her feminism. Being brought up as an undergraduate by a flock of professors who were schooled in the original New Criticism, biography tends to be less important to me, though I suppose I would include a slide with her life and career high points. This is why I am not an "expert." My expertise shows itself in the process of reading and discovering, not in the collecting and disseminating of information.

So how would I really begin?

In this poem, I would focus on persona. The usual first question that my professors (or one notable one) taught me to ask--"What is the dramatic situation?"--is not relevant here. Unless it is... The dramatic situation is that the Poet is speaking. And this is why biography does not strike me as helpful in all cases, though again, students like to have something to latch onto, and some "information" that might plausibly be on a quiz. Who, after all, is "the Poet"? Well, it is not Adrienne Rich. And it is quite deliberately not Adrienne Rich. She is speaking here not as "the poet," but as "The Poet." It might be helpful to know a little bit about rhetoric and oratory, here, and to be able to talk about Voice.

Now, Voice is something that I have taught in quite a different context. Specifically, in an upper-division course titled "The Rhetoric of Style," which was designed by a mentor of mine, now retired Emeritus or something, to take writing to the next level. It's great for analysis, as well--for really getting down into the nitty gritty of why writers make the choices they do, or, if they don't know why they make the choices they do, to explain why what they have done instinctively is effective. The foundational text for the course is Performing Prose: The Study and Practice of Style in Composition. The reason I loved this course and its text is because it reminded me of analyzing poetry. And one of the key points is a discussion of Voice, which the authors recast as "Footing"--the author's self-positioning in relation to the subject. After all, Voice is not very helpful, evoking as it does something that you hear when you speak to a person, but that has much less meaning when it comes to describing a written text. "Well, she sounds like..." But if you're talking about what she sounds like, are you talking about Voice, or Tone? Shifting the discourse away from standard (or stale) literary terms can only yield more productive discussion, not less. So... footing. How is The Poet (not Adrienne Rich, but some more formal persona created by Adrienne Rich, a mask, if you will) positioning herself in relation to the subject? Granting, of course, that we have not yet determined the subject. That discovery will come.

So how do we know what we know about The Poet?

Unpacking the persona is really the point of a discussion of this poem, as far as I'm concerned. To discuss this teaches us something about how language positions us in relation to our subject, which can be really valuable to carry back to one's own writing, poetic or not. 

Strikingly, this is a poem written in second person. Which means that it is constructing not only The Poet, the poet's persona, but also the reader (by virtue of the second person pronoun):

I know you are reading this poem

late, before leaving your office

of the one intense yellowing lamp-spot and the darkening window

in the lassitude of a building faded to quiet

long after rush hour. I know you are reading this poem....

Where is the reader positioned in this poem? The first line we read is "I know you are reading this poem." We have been discovered--potentially in a compromising position. Were we not supposed to be reading? Is the Poet sympathetic? Is the Poet a voyeur? These questions evolve with each line. Are we uncomfortable with the position we are placed in? Or for that matter, are we placed in the position of reader? After all, it is with the Poet's voice that we read the poem, not the reader's. Perhaps we are, sometimes, the Poet, and other times, the reader--the subject--the one being regarded. If this is a class that uses theory, we might consider "the Gaze." Does the Poet's regard objectify the subject/reader? If not, why not?

And look! This is a poem about reading. My preoccupation with depictions of reading stretches back before this blog, before my dissertation, before, even, my first paper on the topic, which was probably for a course on Dante and Medieval English Literature, a graduate course that I took at my undergraduate institution. So if I were teaching a course that had a literacy theme, I would, of course, ask what this poem tells us about literacy and what it does for us.

Formally, we might look at the line breaks and consider that "I know you/ are reading this poem late" creates different meaning from "I know you are reading this poem/ late...." I believe I would want to read the poem aloud, which would call for classroom seating that facilitated such a thing. I love arranging certain of my classes in a circle. I would ask what their favorite lines might be, because this is a poem that reaches into the soul of the reader, and I might read some of my favorites:

I know you are reading this poem by fluorescent light

in the boredom and fatigue of the young who are counted out,

count themselves out, at too early an age. I know

you are reading this poem through your failing sight, the thick

lens enlarging these letters beyond all meaning yet you read on

because even the alphabet is precious.

I know you are reading this poem as you pace beside the stove

warming milk, a crying child on your shoulder, a book in your hand

because life is short and you too are thirsty.

This does not answer any questions. I have my ideas about the answers, but I tend not to give them. If this seems a haphazard way of teaching, well, I guess it drives students nuts sometimes. Except the ones who really crave this kind of thing. And sometimes, a whole class would play along, and it was magic.

The value in a poem like this comes from being able to read it, not from knowing what it says. And that's what I love about teaching poetry. Reading together. Discovering. Because life is short and you too are thirsty.

Still searching thirsting,

Literacy-chic

Let's play a game!

 It's a new year, and I admit that I am feeling... well, imposter syndrome. Let's cut to the chase and not mince words. The odd thing is that I don't feel the imposter syndrome of a scholar at a conference, or of a new faculty member in the classroom or a faculty meeting. Nope. I feel imposter syndrome in the comfort of my own home.

You see, while I have this Ph.D., it means absolutely nothing. I am not working in a job in which it matters in the least. I am not likely to do so ever again. There are not many occasions when having a Ph.D. in English means that you can contribute something to a conversation. If I know things, they are so far removed from my daily life, recent experience, and even my most recent teaching experiences (which were largely tech writing), that I wonder if, in fact, I still know them. When I do know something, or feel like maybe I used to know something, I am eclipsed by someone who knows every bit as much as I do in some areas, and more in many others. Not in English literature, but as I say, this rarely comes up in conversation and when it does, it is only tangential to the real substantive knowledge--which he knows. It's the curse of being married to someone with a job that actually makes him an expert in new and interesting things while I work a mostly-clerical job for a publisher of, realistically speaking, nothing I would read.

This is a hard situation for someone who used to be smart. And, I mean, I guess I'm still smart. But who would know it? Isn't that Ph.D. supposed to put some kind of a lid on that "smart" so that it exists for perpetuity? And of course, the answer is no. It doesn't, and no one ever said it did. That's what tenure does. It means that you're already at the top, and it doesn't matter whether you're "current in your field" any more; the field is free to leave you behind. Or is that "Emeritus"? I get confused.

At any rate, the field is leaving me behind--had already left me behind long ago. And that's fine, because I don't want what it has become. So here we come to my game.

I'm not very good at sticking with things, but I need something to do that will make me remember things that I know--or once knew. So I'm going to play a game called, "How would I teach that?" This is purely for my own benefit. I don't claim to be an expert--on anything, really. It's one of the things that was a problem for me as a teacher. That imposter syndrome--it runs deep. But the truth is that I didn't learn more about anything when I was getting my Ph.D. I learned how to write the ideas I had and make them sound scholarly, and I learned about the theories that were supposed to help me to do that and to fit my ideas in with what other people were talking about. I was already pretty good at the "sounding scholarly" part. The "fitting in" never worked.

I am also not claiming to be an expert teacher. I don't teach the way that anyone learns. What I might manage to convey, if I'm lucky, is a model of reading that my teachers imparted on me. And I mean my undergraduate professors, to whom I owe more of a debt for imparting their knowledge and inspiring me than anyone I have encountered since. I have had mentors since then, but not teachers. 

The best part of being in the classroom is discussion, and it, truly, is where I am at my best. I have come up with my best ideas about works of literature while in the middle of explaining something... and sometimes, I've never been able to recapture the brilliance of the moment. But I also love writing (I think), so maybe some sparks can happen anyway.

I don't expect to enlighten anyone. If you had the high school or undergraduate curriculum that I did--a basically canonical kind of thing--you probably won't learn anything new. This is just an exercise. Do I protest too much? I don't want to disappoint anyone--including myself. But if you enjoy reading along, let me know. And feel free to offer suggestions. I might not feel qualified to take them, but maybe I'll challenge myself.

Anyway, with this ambitious plan, I will end, and hopefully think of something worth posting next--some nearly forgotten gem resting in the corner of my memory or my Norton Anthology.

In search of a good closing phrase,

Literacy-chic