Jeff Nunokawa
I’ve written two books in my life – my dissertation (which was carved up and published as four articles) in 1967, and Shakespeare’s Dilemmas, which was published in 1988 and got me promoted to full professor at Brooklyn College. Both were worthwhile projects; both were endless torture. I’m not suited to the format; I can’t hold the whole thing in my mind at one time. My late friend Richard Uviller was exasperated by my failure to write more books; he thought I had much to say, he admired my writing, he told me I was denying my destiny. Not so, I kept telling him. My destiny, in literary terms at least, takes a short-format form: I write articles.
He refused to accept that explanation: articles, even scholarly ones, are ephemera, he claimed – they exist only for a moment, and are then buried under an avalanche of more articles. Did Shakespeare write articles, he would ask?
Well, no, but Shakespeare wrote sonnets, and if I were a serious poet, so would I. I think the greatest poem written in English is Paradise Lost, which is ten thousand lines long, but of course the epic form is not for me. Fourteen lines seeems about right. Wordsworth wrote a sonnet that defended sonnets from the charge that they were too slight to matter; it begins,
Scorn not the sonnet: Critic, you have frown’d,
Mindless of its just honours; with this key
Shakespeare unlock’d his heart; the melody
Of this small lute gave ease to Petrarch’s wound. . . .
The image of unlocking the heart points to the private, confessional nature of the sonnet; sonnets were sometimes writ small and folded into lockets, shown at the writer’s whim to whoever was deemed worthy. No less a personage than Elizabeth I indulged in this practice. I’m not a poet, though I write occasional verse, for birthday, wedding and anniversary toasts (see my birthday toast to Roger Sherman in the previous blog), but I can’t resist reprinting a poem I wrote while stuck in a subway tunnel one day years ago:
They have no need of poetry,
Those who should be moving shortly in the sooty tubes
Beneath the river that surfaces at Times Square.
No need of Strand's or Clampitt’s airy overviews
That fresco the walls of buses,
Short-haul limos awash in the city’s changing lights.
No, those with tunnel vision
Have more pressing concerns
Than thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird.
They need to know
Where to get their torn earlobes stitched
How to avoid AIDS and its evil twin SIDA
And most of all
What steps to take
When they can’t move
And the lights go out.
But I’ve never followed up with more verse. If I did, it would probably be haiku; for me, as for Shakespeare and Wordsworth, the thrill of the short poem is the tension between getting something said despite the formal obstacles – in the latter case, 17 syllables, arranged in a 5-7-5 three-line pattern. Haiku can be sensuous and lyrical, or funny:
Left the door open
For the prophet Elijah –
Now our cat is gone. (from Haiku for Jews)
Technology is on my side, of course. Twitter mandates a limit of 140 words; most internet writing is stripped bare of grammar, punctuation and prolixity. (Not mine; I write in standard English and proofread every e-mail I send.)
But I just read a Talk of the Town piece in the July 4th New Yorker that opened a door for me. There’s a professor at Princeton named Jeff Nunowaka who writes a Facebook note every day – the count now exceeds 3000. Typically they begin with a short citation from one of his favorite authors – George Eliot, Oscar Wilde, Gerard Manley Hopkins -- followed by scholarly “meditations – half literary-critical, half confessional.”
Nunowaka has respectable conventional credentials; he’s published two books, one on Dickens and Eliot and the other on Wilde. But he now prefers the sociability of Facebook, and the fact that he can more easily connect with undergraduates there. When I read about his approach, I felt instantly empowered. I’ll never write another book or journal article, and the book and play reviews that have occupied me for the past few years do feel insubstantial; when I fritter an afternoon away on the golf course, I feel guilty. I’m very bad about contributing to this blog, because very few people read it (though it’s an endless loop: I don’t write because they don’t read, and they don’t read because I don’t write). But Facebook as a viable medium for actual writing! Nunowaka and I are already “friends”; I’m going to ask him if it’s all right to start contributing notes to my own page.
He refused to accept that explanation: articles, even scholarly ones, are ephemera, he claimed – they exist only for a moment, and are then buried under an avalanche of more articles. Did Shakespeare write articles, he would ask?
Well, no, but Shakespeare wrote sonnets, and if I were a serious poet, so would I. I think the greatest poem written in English is Paradise Lost, which is ten thousand lines long, but of course the epic form is not for me. Fourteen lines seeems about right. Wordsworth wrote a sonnet that defended sonnets from the charge that they were too slight to matter; it begins,
Scorn not the sonnet: Critic, you have frown’d,
Mindless of its just honours; with this key
Shakespeare unlock’d his heart; the melody
Of this small lute gave ease to Petrarch’s wound. . . .
The image of unlocking the heart points to the private, confessional nature of the sonnet; sonnets were sometimes writ small and folded into lockets, shown at the writer’s whim to whoever was deemed worthy. No less a personage than Elizabeth I indulged in this practice. I’m not a poet, though I write occasional verse, for birthday, wedding and anniversary toasts (see my birthday toast to Roger Sherman in the previous blog), but I can’t resist reprinting a poem I wrote while stuck in a subway tunnel one day years ago:
They have no need of poetry,
Those who should be moving shortly in the sooty tubes
Beneath the river that surfaces at Times Square.
No need of Strand's or Clampitt’s airy overviews
That fresco the walls of buses,
Short-haul limos awash in the city’s changing lights.
No, those with tunnel vision
Have more pressing concerns
Than thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird.
They need to know
Where to get their torn earlobes stitched
How to avoid AIDS and its evil twin SIDA
And most of all
What steps to take
When they can’t move
And the lights go out.
But I’ve never followed up with more verse. If I did, it would probably be haiku; for me, as for Shakespeare and Wordsworth, the thrill of the short poem is the tension between getting something said despite the formal obstacles – in the latter case, 17 syllables, arranged in a 5-7-5 three-line pattern. Haiku can be sensuous and lyrical, or funny:
Left the door open
For the prophet Elijah –
Now our cat is gone. (from Haiku for Jews)
Technology is on my side, of course. Twitter mandates a limit of 140 words; most internet writing is stripped bare of grammar, punctuation and prolixity. (Not mine; I write in standard English and proofread every e-mail I send.)
But I just read a Talk of the Town piece in the July 4th New Yorker that opened a door for me. There’s a professor at Princeton named Jeff Nunowaka who writes a Facebook note every day – the count now exceeds 3000. Typically they begin with a short citation from one of his favorite authors – George Eliot, Oscar Wilde, Gerard Manley Hopkins -- followed by scholarly “meditations – half literary-critical, half confessional.”
Nunowaka has respectable conventional credentials; he’s published two books, one on Dickens and Eliot and the other on Wilde. But he now prefers the sociability of Facebook, and the fact that he can more easily connect with undergraduates there. When I read about his approach, I felt instantly empowered. I’ll never write another book or journal article, and the book and play reviews that have occupied me for the past few years do feel insubstantial; when I fritter an afternoon away on the golf course, I feel guilty. I’m very bad about contributing to this blog, because very few people read it (though it’s an endless loop: I don’t write because they don’t read, and they don’t read because I don’t write). But Facebook as a viable medium for actual writing! Nunowaka and I are already “friends”; I’m going to ask him if it’s all right to start contributing notes to my own page.
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