Bending the Bow

Bending the Bow is a new anthology of African love poetry, edited by the Malawian poet Frank Chipasula and published by Southern Illinois University Press. Here’s an excerpt from my blog post at Words Without Borders:

The earliest poems are among the best, and do much to undermine the idea that ancient Egypt was a gloomy place oppressed by pharaohs and preoccupied by death. “My love is back, let me shout out the news!” begins the first. “My arms swing to embrace her, / And heart pirouettes in its dark chamber / glad as a fish when night shades the pool.”

Naturally enough, many of the poems collected here are addressed from a young man to a young woman, or vice versa. These African lovers sometimes focus on different details from those a Western lover might. “My dark-brown girl is like a cow,” begins a traditional poem in the Aandonga language. Liyongo Fumo of Kenya praises a woman in these words: “Her matching eyebrows / are perfectly parallel / and neatly join at the root / as if they are knotted together.”

Raw Silk by Meena Alexander

After meeting the poet Meena Alexander at this year’s PEN World Voices Festival, I read her memoir Fault Lines, which includes her memories of a childhood divided between India and Sudan. I followed that up with Raw Silk, a collection of poems largely written in the aftermath of 9/11. Alexander combines glancing references to the attack in New York with allusions to outbreaks of ethnic violence in India. The joining of gorgeous, tactile language with scenes of violence—as well as the South Asian settings—reminds me of Michael Ondaatje’s novel Anil’s Ghost, about a forensic scientist in Sri Lanka.

Here’s the first section of “Blue Lotus” from Raw Silk. The Pamba River runs through the state of Kerala in India. The image of a severed hand recurs in Alexander’s work.

Twilight, I stroll through stubble fields
clouds lift, the hope of a mountain.
What was distinct turns to mist,

what was fitful burns the heart.
When I dream of the tribe gathering
by the red soil of the Pamba River

I feel my writing hand split at the wrist.
Dark tribute or punishment, who can tell?
You kiss the stump and where the wrist

bone was, you set the stalk of a lotus.
There is a blue lotus in my grandmother’s garden,
its petals whirl in moonlight like this mountain.

Enough. by John C. Bogle

The latest book by the indomitable Jack Bogle, founder of the Vanguard Group, takes its inspiration from a poem by Kurt Vonnegut in which he recounted a conversation with his friend Joseph Heller. Both men were guests at a lavish party thrown by a hedge fund manager, whom Vonnegut said made more money in one day than Heller’s Catch-22 (a bestseller) had made since it was published.

“Yes,” said Heller, “but I have something he will never have ... enough.”

Bogle’s book Enough. (the period is part of the title) doesn’t say a great deal more than Bogle’s earlier books and speeches—but given the ongoing financial crisis, it seems more timely than ever. Bogle reiterates his message that the financial industry adds no value to the economy, and that the fees it extracts from investors make the stock market a worse-than-zero-sum game. For everyone who beats the market over a certain length of time (and this is usually due to chance, he argues) someone else must lose. Bogle repeats his case that the rational response is to invest through low-cost broad-based index funds that will capture the overall returns of the market while costing the investor less than the average.

In Enough., Bogle combines the index-fund case with a more general plea for ethics in business and life. The chapter titles tell the story: “Too Much Counting, Not Enough Trust,” “Too Much Management, Not Enough Leadership,” “Too Much ‘Success,’ Not Enough Character.” Despite this emphasis, Bogle still doesn’t seem to have discovered the existence of socially responsible investing. But apart from this notable omission, Enough. is a solid, concise introduction to Bogle’s views on money and life.

Thoreau and the toads

As a sort of follow-up to my post on Camus and the toads, today we have Thoreau and the Toads: a poem by David Wagoner that’s featured on Garrison Keillor’s site The Writer’s Almanac.

The poem ends with Thoreau tying his rawhide shoelaces into a square knot. From this we can conclude that Thoreau was at least 36 years old at the time the poem takes place, as it took him that long to learn the difference between a granny knot and a square knot. On July 25, 1853, he wrote a lengthy entry on the troubles he has had with shoelaces coming untied.

I thought of strings with recurved prickles and various other remedies myself. At last the other day it occurred to me that I would try an experiment, and, instead of tying two simple knots over the other the same way, putting the end which fell to the right over each time, that I would reverse the process, and put it under the other. Greatly to my satisfaction, the experiment was perfectly successful, and from that time my shoe-strings have given me no trouble, except sometimes in untying them at night.

On telling this to others I learned that I had been all the while tying what is called a granny’s knot, for I had never been taught to tie any other, as sailors’ children are; but now I had blundered into a square knot, I think they called it, or two running slip-nooses. Should not all children be taught this accomplishment, and an hour, perchance, of their childhood be devoted to instruction in tying knots?

William Maxwell

I went last night to “The Wisest, Kindest Voice,” a panel discussion on the life and work of William Maxwell that was held alfresco in Madison Square Park. The moderator was my old friend Chris Carduff, editor of Library of America’s two volumes of Maxwell. As he predicted in his introduction, the event took on the quality of a front -porch conversation on a summer evening, as the shadows gathered around the statue of Admiral Farragut, the reflecting pool, and the canopies of the old trees. (Photos are available, Media Bistro covered the event, and the National Book Foundation will soon have a complete video.)

Maxwell was the fiction editor of The New Yorker for forty years, where he edited Updike, Salinger, Cheever, Nabokov, and many others. (Nabokov, of course, never admitted any need for an editor.) He worked three days a week, leaving time for his own fiction, and according to Daniel Menaker, who took over the job from him, he got an astonishing amount of work done in those three days.

On his own time, he wrote essays, short stories, family memoir, and six novels, of which everyone on the panel seemed to agree that the last and shortest of them, So Long, See You Tomorrow, was his masterpiece.

Despite the title of the event, the participants made it clear that Maxwell was not unfailingly wise and kind. Commenting on the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, he wrote in a letter, “There are more hypocrites in this country than there are Purdue chickens.” When Menaker presented him with a batch of poems previously rejected by The New Yorker’s Howard Moss, Maxwell returned them the next day with some advice: “Stick to prose.” Although, or perhaps in part because, he was an editor by profession, he was exceptionally resistant to being edited. “He was a stubborn son of a bitch,” said Menaker. “He regretted every change he’d ever made,” said the poet Edward Hirsch.

The result of that stubbornness, though, was tough, understated prose that was beautiful in its faithfulness to experience. When Maxwell took an interest in you, Hirsch said, it could be almost unnerving. “You felt that you weren’t quite worthy of his attention.”