Don't enjoy the Faerie Queene as a story

But I do like it as poetry

Hello friends. I’ve been listening to The Faerie Queene lately. Can’t say I recommend it. It’s very, very long, and as I wrote earlier, I find its world to be curiously empty, even for a romance. Like in Gawain and the Green Knight, the action starts off at a big feast—there’s no big feasts in The Faerie Queene. There are no children, few families, little home life. It reminds me of Le Morte D’Arthur, honestly, which had a similar empty, depressing quality. There are so many knights wandering around with their ladies, setting up pavilions, having combat in the middle of the forest. Makes you wonder what it’s all for.

But I’m still happy I’m listening to it. I just get curious about things. I was telling

Gnocchic Apocryphon

that I’m thinking about reading Patrick Deneen next—he’s the most prominent of the Catholics political philosophers who think theocracy is the best way forward for the United States. I want to read him, want to know what his arguments are.

I can’t say it’s a good use of time, reading books just out of curiosity, but in a way the whole Great Books project is built on that! If you know anything about the Great Books it’s that they’re likely to be weirder and more difficult than anything you’re likely to read for fun. For instance, I’m reading Aristotle’s Politics now, and I forgot how dreary and scattered his writing is, how he has this magpie-like tendency towards categorizing and collecting, but then he often doesn’t provide much analysis, or provides only superficial analysis. But it’s just interesting to know what’s in there. For instance, when he writes about how a city should be ruled according to the common good, he means the common good of its citizens—of those who participate in the political process. He does not believe that a tyrant or a set of oligarchs will rule according to the good of the mass of residents. That’s explicitly why Aristotle wants democratic features in his government. The whole idea of The Politics is “how do we get the best men to rule according to the common good of all men.” To this end, he wants features that promote participation in government by all people (like paying people to serve on juries) and features that require participation by the best people (by fining people who refuse to serve on juries).

If there’s anything enjoyable about Aristotle it is his lack of systematization. You get the sense that he just wants to put down as much information as possible, which gives his work a very lucid, humane quality (like the best of the Anglo-American philosophers), because he is always willing to jettison the ideal in favor of the practical. For instance, he tries to set out the best constitution (which will form a mean between oligarchy and democracy), but then is like…in most places and times this will prove impractical, either because the rich are too powerful or because the poor are too powerful.

Anyway, not everyone has the time to read a long book just because they’re curious. Most people can’t, I think. And that includes most academics and most writers, whose reading is too heavily implicated in their various projects. I was listening to an interview for instance with Robin, who’s been running my favorite podcast, The History of Byzantium, for the last decade, and he said all of his reading is podcast related. He only reads about Byzantium, that’s it. And this is a man who makes a living as a freelance writer and intellectual—a person whose curiosity ultimately paid off big! It’s just a truism of intellectual work—you grow through curiosity, but the more you grow, the more difficult it becomes to be curious.

I’m coming out of a bit of a depression—my books are coming out next year, and I don’t have a project to work on right now. I keep looking back and wondering, “Am I any good? Why do I do this?” I look at my current work and think “Do I still want to writing this kind of thing in five or ten years?” Sometimes I lay back and just wonder and muse about things and that feels very productive, but it’s so difficult to sustain. I pull a book off the shelf and start reading it, and the hour I get of reading that book is the best hour of the day, and yet I still spend the rest of the day playing Binding of Isaac on my Switch.

So it’s weird to think that I’ve now spent ten hours listening to a book that I don’t love. I’ve been trying to identify exactly what draws me back, over and over, to The Faerie Queene, and I think it comes down to precisely that gap I discussed recently, between discussing poetry as a fiction and discussing it as poetry. As a fiction, The Faerie Queene isn’t very good. It’s repetitive and can feel underimagined and simplistic. As poetry, it has a manic, profuse beauty. The poem is most famous for its elaborate, extended metaphors, and I think the emptiness of the world is a function of the lushness of the writing. If there was more in the foreground of the poem, it would get lost amongst all the metaphors and symbols. I’m listening, so it’s hard to take notes, but here is one stanza that I rather randomly marked out as especially pretty. This is from a very, very long description of Belphoebe, one of the virgin huntresses that peoples the book. The camera lingers over her lips, her eyes, and finally gets to her hair:

From Book II
Her yellow lockes crisped, like golden wyre,
  About her shoulders weren loosely shed,
  And when the winde emongst them did inspyre,
  They waued like a penon wide dispred,
  And low behinde her backe were scattered:
  And whether art it were, or heedlesse hap,
  As through the flouring forrest rash she fled,
  In her rude haires sweet flowres themselues did lap,
And flourishing fresh leaues and blossomes did enwrap.

I was surprised, hunting down the written version of the words, at how plain they were, how unremarkable. It’s different, I think, when read aloud. There’s something very fresh, very beautiful about the words. They do somehow transport you to a purer and finer age. I decided to break copyright (a tiny bit) and record the stanza off my phone, just so you could hear it aloud.

It’s nice, I think, to read a long poem, and especially to hear it read. The language, the diction, the rhythm, they all work their way into your bones. I think sometimes I like to listen to long poetry just to remind myself what meter sounds like. It’s almost a form of training. I find myself, in my prose writing, becoming more rhythmic and inserting subtle alliterations and assonances (though whether this is good or bad is something I find impossible to tell).

I’m simultaneously reading that book from Sublunary Editions that recently blew up online: Indeterminate Inflorescence by Lee Seong-bok, a South Korean poet. It’s a list of aphorisms drawn from his teaching, all about how to write poetry quickly, unconsciously, and automatically, and above all to be guided by language itself. (E.g., his 12th aphorism: “To write poetry is to dig a waterway for words. Poetry allows words to flow through you. The poet must not force the flow of words but must wait and watch.”)

Usually when I write poetry or short pieces, I try and think of an image or feeling and translate it into words. But reading this book, I’ve been wondering, why not just start with words? Why not use words first and see where they lead. Well, it’s a hard thing, because I am prone, when I do automatic writing, to descend into nonsense of the “the blue dog jumped over the moon sleazily, boxing his knickers into a punchcard dress” sort of thing that doesn’t make any sort of sense. So there’s a register somewhere north of that—within the realm of ordinary spoken language—that I need to stay, even in my automatic writing, but it’s been fruitful, I’ve been doing some writing today. I think maybe this thinking of language as a thing in itself, rather than something that points to something else, might be a way forward for me.

But who knows what’ll happen? I always think that I want to be one of those writers who idealizes LANGUAGE itself and pays attention more to sound than to sense. I think all that language first rhetoric is a bit absurd, but I do think it offers a pathway inside, to something more intense and intuitive. So, yes, I think listening to this very long old poem is somehow a part of that search.

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Addenda:

• As part of the efforts to market my YA, my publicists are trying to place some of my pieces in various publications, so I am now running all my blog posts by them before they go public. This means that today I wrote TWO posts—one for next week and one for today. I’ll do the same thing for Thursday, and then hopefully I’ll be one week ahead of my schedule.

• Am feeling less depressed bc my wonderful wife is spending some time with me this week.

• Got a good review in Kirkus for my next YA novel (Just Happy To Be Here, releasing Jan 2, 2024). They absolutely savaged my last book, so I am pleased to not be savaged again.