I am at home with a broken arm for a couple of weeks so I have the opportunity to do a bit more exploring than usual. There are a lot of interesting things and people in the world, that’s for sure.
Every now and then I go look at the faculty listings from my alma mater. I’m not sure why; I guess sometimes I can’t quite believe I was 17 or 22 or one of the ages in between and going to university. Lately it’s mostly a reminder that I’m getting older, as nearly all of the professors I knew are retired. Today I remembered a couple of the best ones and went looking among the new faculty for someone who might resemble them.
I did find something interesting: Michael Ullyot’s podcast Open Book. The description says:
Each episode covers a different text, or part of a longer text, and asks: How do literary critics read differently from everyone else? How do we interpret literature?
Reading like a literary critic does not have automatic appeal, as I long ago stopped giving literary critics, in general at least, any particular moral or intellectual authority. But Prof Ullyot features an intriguing list of writers: Shakespeare, John Milton, Jane Austen, John Donne, among others. The podcasts were a reasonable length, and I did have a very large pile of laundry to fold (one handed). So I gave two of them a try:
and
I took a class on Metaphysical Poetry in my third undergraduate year, and it was one of my favourite courses. It was the first time I was taught close reading (which Prof Ullyot has helpfully written a page on too) and to explore the worldview of the writer with curiosity and delight. My professor back then excelled at sharing his joy and fascination with the poetry, in a humble, gentle manner. I remember him on one occasion talking about a very rare manuscript he would love to see. “What would I give,” he speculated. “Certainly not my wife. But my house. I’d give my house to see it.” I remember that class in parallel with the springtime when I took it: beauty and surprise blooming in the poetry and in nature outside.
Metaphysical poetry is superbly fun. Among other things, it’s the art of the extended metaphor. Most of us can compare one thing to another, but what if you kept playing with the comparison, taking it into the absurd and beyond, teasing out and then resolving each contradiction? What if you set aside obvious comparisons and used odd and surprising ones? And whatever their flaws, and the flaws of their time and place, I don’t see how you can escape the conclusion that the metaphysical poets knew how to love: their lovers, husbands, wives, friends, children, God, earth, universe. They were the opposite of nihilists: they looked for and found meaning and transcendence everywhere.
The metaphysical love poems podcast featured exclusively women, which I did not expect but which was interesting and enjoyable. Ullyot reads each poem in full then talks about what the references mean and how they connect to some bigger themes. It’s delightful to hear the poems read out loud, and it inspires me to listen to more poetry podcasts (if such things exist).
Ullyot frames some of the women as responding to the well-known male writers of the day, such as John Donne. So then I backtracked and listened to the John Donne podcast. Now I can’t say I read some John Donne every day (it would be better for me if I did) but I have loved his work since that memorable class many years ago. Prof Ullyot starts the podcast with
a seduction poem which is seriously hot. He tries to create some distance by commenting on what we might call Donne’s male gaze, but whatever professor, Mr Donne had the moves, and he still has them a few centuries later. This 21st century woman doesn’t mind at-all. Many more poems and commentary follow, and finally, toward the end Prof Ullyot talks about his favourite poem, A Valediction Forbidding Mourning. He also finally uses the B-word: Beauty. I warmed up to Prof Ullyot at this point. Before that he seemed clever, and well-intentioned, but perhaps a little too self-conscious. There may be good reasons for that. It’s interesting that the first few seconds of both these podcasts feature Prof Ullyot saying something overtly feminist. The statements are quotations from inside the podcast, which make sense in context but sound rather odd at the beginning. I don’t know why they are there, but I wonder if he put them first so that people who are too lazy to listen to the whole podcast will conclude that he believes the “right things” and leave him alone. Back in my day, it was fashionable according to some English majors to snark about “dead white males” and the presumably necrophiliac students and professors who studied them. (I was on both sides of this “culture war” at one point or another. Luckily though I mostly found better things to do.) Since then, of course, things have gotten much, much worse.
But thank you Prof Ullyot, for bringing beauty into my day. When I look back at my life, I think I can truthfully say it has been beauty that most influenced the choices I made and it’s good to be reminded, as often as possible.
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