Several years ago I was going to meet the poet Sterling Plumpp at Blue Chicago on Clark St.  We had already known each other a long while, and I had interviewed him at great length (an excerpt of this interview appeared in a special section devoted to Plumpp’s work in the December 2005 issue of The Arkansas Review, along with appreciations by Duriel E. Harris, Jeffrey Renard Allen, and Michael Antonucci).  When I arrived at Blue Chicago the music was already at something close to excruciating volume–Willie Kent and his band.  They were at the other end of the narrow club, and as I made my way forward along the bar I looked for Sterling.  Only when I got to the front did I see him–sitting at the table that was closest to the band, and as they were rolling with raucous energy and high spirits, the speakers blasting on each side of them, there Sterling was, bent over some paper and writing, as if somewhere else entirely–somewhere quiet, sheltered from interruption and distraction.  I sat down next to him and shouted into his ear:  I understand now!  This is your Paris café!  He grinned broadly and nodded his head.

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See the video “Jimmie Lee Robinson and Sterling Plumpp on Maxwell Street”:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZVyOiUypQs

And the video of Plumpp speaking at the Center for the Writing Arts conference in fall 2007, on the CWA home page (click on “VIDEOS”)

Sometime soon I hope to post the transcript of my complete interview with Plumpp on this site.  In it he recounts his early experience, his sense of poetry, music, greatness in both arts, and his purposes and interests as a teacher.

Another response to something in the news:

In today’s New York Times Stanley Fish takes up the subject of whether college and university courses that teach expository writing should–as they mostly do–bring that instruction to students under the banners of the sorts of topics that interest students already, and use the students’ interest in particular subjects as the pretext for instructing them on grammar, syntax, rhetoric, argument, evidence. Fish wonders justifiably whether most graduate students, who teach the great majority of such courses in the USA, are themselves good enough writers to be teaching writing to others.

Mostly, Fish is quarreling with the political biases of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, but he is also agreeing with their insistence that when writing is to be taught, it should be the sole focus of a writing course.  This point is evidently contained in a new report from the ACTE, “What Will They Learn? A Report on General Education Requirements at 100 of the Nation’s Leading Colleges and Universities. ”

These controversies are not going to be resolved any time soon.  I am pondering what they might say, indirectly, about creative writing courses, too, both undergraduate and graduate workshops.  The intense desire to write, or at least to be a writer, surpasses the capabilities of most students at both levels to write clearly, strongly, and eloquently.  I sometimes sense in my own classes that when I am taking apart a technical matter, demonstrating what it is and how it works, and doing so in a way that makes it learnable, some of my students may be only tolerating my curious arguments, and waiting for me to finish making my points so that our discussion can go back to elements of fiction or poetry or nonfiction prose that are fuzzier–the gender politics of a piece, the setting, the emotional trajectory of it.  All of which are too important for us not to ponder, too.  Yet I can’t help thinking that the ways in which it is hard to think through such fuzzier matters are for most of us based on what we already feel, and not on learning how to think or feel differently.  Whereas my experience is that going further and further, in each draft, toward handling with greatest deliberate effect the verb tenses, the word choice, the images, the syntax (especially), really is at the heart of what we become able to think and feel anew, or even for the first time, when we are writing.

Mt. Kitheronas, late August 2009 (Petros Giannakouris-AP)

I was startled to see on the front page of the Washington Post web site yesterday, among photos of the wildfires burning near Athens, one that shows a nighttime silhouette of fire along the ridgeline of Mount Kithairon, as it was called in ancient Greek.  Here’s the caption:

“A fire burns on the mount of Kitheronas about 70 kilometers, (45 miles) west of Athens on Sunday, Aug. 23, 2009. More than 90 wildfires have ignited since Saturday across Greece, and six major fires were burning late Sunday. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris) (Petros Giannakouris – AP”

Greek poetry thought with many methods, devices, artistic strategies, most of which poetry still uses, but one of them that we can’t access in the same way was thinking with a landscape in which many different values had already been inscribed by both myths and history.

Among the villages that have burned in these recent fires is Marathon, site of the famous battle between Athenians and invading Persians in the year 490 BCE–from which, according to legend, a runner was dispatched all the way to Athens to announce the improbable victory of the Greeks over a much larger force of their enemies.  Another village that has burned is Plataea–also the site of a decisive military victory, after the Persians, about a decade later, invaded once again.

While the surviving poetry of the ancient Greeks makes much less of such events than does the work of ancient historians, Persians, by Aeschylus, the oldest surviving Athenian tragedy, made dramatic-poetic use of the relatively recent Greek victories over the hated and dangerous Persians by reversing perspectives and portraying not noble Athenian warriors and commanders but instead defeated and pitiable Persian royalty.  This got Aeschylus into some trouble in Athens.

The battle sites were names so saturated with historical significance that not only the name (like Shiloh, Bull Run) but also, in a comparatively compact cultural region, the landscape itself kept signifying, for a very long while.  On the other hand, Kithairon, like some other natural sites, signified ideas that had been collectively created and elaborated within Greek mythology that associated mountain heights with the divine, with the sheer and gigantic force of nature–the antithesis of culture, thus of cities, laws, art, and armies.  So in Euripides’ Bakkhai (Bacchae) the place and name of Mt. Kithairon are used poetically to suggest a powerful pole of human experience that associates human violence (such as catching wild animals with bare hands and tearing them apart and eating their flesh raw) with natural force that can overwhelm everyday human force; that revives within civilized, settled human beings seemingly mythical, pre-civilized values and behavior (such as women roaming together in wilderness and wearing loose clothes held together at the shoulder not by little cords but by little live snakes) and mythical plenty (such as an easy, natural abundance, requiring no work, of water and honey and milk).

All that, too, is burning on Mt. Kithairon.  But it will not be consumed by fires.

By an interesting train of cultural thought–produced, it would seem, by a suspicion of poetry or even a resentment of it, which at the same time allows for its power to intoxicate (that is, overwhelm other kinds of thinking)–three things are associated with each other in the definitions of a single word: (1) verbal word games based on poetry, (2) rhyming as in itself an act to be contemned as low and dimwitted–perhaps partly because it has the power to seduce–, (3) and drinking.

From the OED:

1. a. A game in which one player gives a word or line of verse to which each of the others has to find a rime.

1660 PEPYS Diary 20 May, From thence to the Hague again playing at Crambo in the waggon. 1711 ADDISON Spect. No. 63 6 A Cluster of Men and Women..diverting themselves at a Game of Crambo. 1712 STEELE Ibid. No. 504 1 Those who can play at Crambo, or cap Verses. 1721 BAILEY, Crambo, a Play in Rhiming, in which he that repeats a Word that was said before, forfeits something. 1837 Blackw. Mag. XLI. 289 A sort of Hellenic cramboHesiod singing one verse, and Homer filling up the meaning with another.

b. dumb crambo: a game in which one set of players have to guess a word agreed upon by the other set, after being told what word it rimes with, by acting in dumb show one word after another till they find it. (Sometimes transf. = dumb show.)

2. transf. Rime, riming: said in contempt.

3. A fashion in drinking. Obs. (Cf. CRAMBE 3, quot. 1630.)

4. = CRAMBE, repetition. Also attrib. Obs.

5. attrib. and Comb., as crambo-rime, -song; crambo-clink, -jingle = sense 2.

1762 LLOYD Odes, Oblivion ii. 9 Sacred to thee the crambo rhyme. 1785 BURNS Ep. to Lapraik viii, Amaist as soon as I could spell, I to the crambo-jingle fell. 1786 On Scotch Bard i, A’ ye wha live by crambo-clink. 1789 F. BURNEY Diary 19 Feb., A crambo song, on his own name. 1876 CLERK in D. Macleod Life N. Macleod I. iii. 33 He would improvise crambo rhymes.