By Marc Stengel and Michael Sims

Well Versed

There is no mistaking the informality of Mark Jarman’s manner. Without a trace of pretense or diffidence, he glides gently from an introductory handshake over morning coffee into an engaging discussion about career and creativity. But as a leading proponent of the New Formalism movement in American poetry, Jarman is dedicated to the idea that meaning derives from structure.

Rhythm and meter matter to Jarman, both in his activities as a nationally lauded poet and as a professor of English at Vanderbilt University. Nevertheless, as displayed in his most recent book of poetry, Questions for Ecclesiastes, rules of prosody needn’t crystallize verse into cold, stilted formulas of expression. As manipulated by Jarman’s imagination, the “old forms”—the sonnets and quatrains, iambs and dactyls—become building blocks for supple, elastic polymers of meaning. The poems that result are as accessible as they are spellbinding.

“I felt about these poems that the only way I would be able to fix them to the page is if I returned to a traditional idea of verse. You see, I began writing at a time when traditional verse—measured speech—was very much out. You just didn’t do that. And it took me a long time to realize that form is the only way you can get these things down on the page. There must be some form; there must be some shape, or it’s chaos.”

In part, it seems, the chaos derives from a cacophony of voices clamoring for the poet’s attention. But the poet is only an intermediary—a servant of the voices that the reader (or listener) also craves to hear and understand.

“If you’re raised with a sense of conscience, then you are given a voice—a voice that comments. And I think we do desire to hear a voice from some transcendent reality speak to us and tell us something. What I think happens in poetry—perhaps it’s happening in these poems from my latest collection—is that we associate a kind of divine inspiration with those voices. People still want to know, ‘Where’d you get your inspiration? Who breathed that breath into you? There must have been something out there.’

“And so I’m interested in how many different voices might be speaking in a poem. Where are these voices coming from? At one time we might have thought they were coming from some divine source.”

If Jarman no longer fully trusts the idea of divine inspiration as a source, there is still the matter of poetry’s—and the poet’s—intended outcome. What is the role of poetry within literature and among its audiences? Is it merely a static display of the poet’s proprietary beliefs and feelings? Or must it also influence and engage? Perhaps it is a formality of an older, more traditional, magnanimous sort that shapes Jarman’s opinion of the poetic transaction:

“Though there’s such a variety of poetry being written in this country today—and some of it I have absolutely no use for—all of it is trying to reach that reader and cause a kind of change in his state of consciousness. All of it. I would say even the poem that was written merely to be performed and not to have any life on the page—all of it is meant to affect the auditor or the reader personally and create a change in him or her. And I think it’s often a physical change—one that gives pleasure or at least creates a kind of thoughtfulness, a musing effect, that is regarded as pleasant.”—Marc Stengel

Signs and Events

♦ Jon Krakauer signs Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disasters, 7:30 p.m. May 15 at Davis-Kidd Booksellers. One of the high points of the spring literary season promises to be Krakauer’s personal account—cum slide show—of his assault upon and by Mt. Everest in May 1996. Anyone who has heard the author’s NPR account of the disaster that claimed nine lives already knows about the strange brew of fate, hubris, weather, and pluck that comprise his instructive tale of adventure and survival.

♦ Jimmy Bowen signs Rough Mix: An Unapologetic Look at the Music Business and How It Got That Way, 5:30 p.m. May 16 at Davis-Kidd Booksellers. Even if you think Garth Brooks is another new subdivision in Brentwood and that Shania is Samuel Clemens’ great-great-granddaughter, this may well be the country-music tell-all that’s got enough juice for everyone in Nashville to take a sip. Bowen has an enviable—and rare—rep for telling it like it is and for making things happen on Music Row.

♦ J.J. Stein signs Gentlemen of Decision, 6 p.m. May 19 at Davis-Kidd Booksellers. In this, his first novel, Jeff Stein knits together a thinking-man’s thriller, replete with conspiracies, cover-ups, and current events. Citing the influences of Joseph Campbell and M. Scott Peck, Stein pits father against son and idealist against cynic with a storytelling flair he honed as a screenwriter in Hollywood. Originally from New York, Stein now makes Nashville his home.

♦ Madison Jones signs Nashville 1864: The Dying of the Light, 6 p.m. May 22 at Davis-Kidd Booksellers. Nashville native Madison Jones returns to the center of the national literary stage with this powerful historical novel about the city’s wartime occupation. Jones will read passages from his fictional account of a young Tennessee boy and his slave companion who are caught in the clutches of opposing forces and changing times.

♦ Also of note:

Robert H. Allen signs Simple Annals: Two Centuries of an American Family, 7:30 p.m. May 20 at Bookstar.

Melissa Fay Greene signs The Temple Bombing, 6 p.m. May 21 at Davis-Kidd Booksellers.

Don Keith signs Wizard of the Wind, 1 p.m. May 24 at Bookstar.—Marc Stengel

An irresistible song

The Odyssey by Homer, translated by Robert Fagles (Viking, $35; audiocassette version, $45.95)

When Alexander Pope translated the Iliad into rhyming couplets in the early 18th century, Richard Bentley responded with a line that could serve as a cautionary reminder for all translators: “It is a pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you must not call it Homer.” I am not qualified to judge the extent to which Robert Fagles’ new translation of the Odyssey is truly Homer. On that question I refer you to the critics who have been applauding Fagles since Viking published its handsome edition last November. But I can say that this new Odyssey (which is decidedly not in rhymed couplets) is more than a pretty poem. It is an accessible and hugely entertaining tale of adventure and identity.

As practically everyone knows, the Odyssey recounts Odysseus’ journey homeward from the Trojan War and the efforts of his son Telemachus to find him. In his Poetics, Aristotle famously summarizes the plot of the Odyssey in a few sentences, then adds, “The rest is episode.” It is those wonderful episodes that make the Odyssey the most glorious adventure story ever written. The poem is filled with scenes as memorable as any in literature—the escape from the one-eyed giant, Polyphemus; the delightful seven-year captivity on the island with Calypso; Poseidon rising from the sea; Odysseus’ triumphant, if gory, return. Perhaps most entertainingly of all, there is the constant bickering of gods and goddesses clearly made in our own image. (Polytheism, come to think of it, reconciles many of the problems troubling those who claim a lone god rules this crazy universe.)

Robert Fagles teaches literature at Princeton. He has translated Sophocles and the Iliad, and he is a poet in his own right. It shows. His language is precise, majestic, and yet colloquial. Consider Zeus responding to Athena’s defense of her favorite mortal:

“My child,” Zeus who marshals the thunderheads replied,

“what nonsense you let slip through your teeth.

Now, how on earth could I forget Odysseus?”

Although not as swaddled in exegesis as some classics, this edition doesn’t arrive naked. Harvard classicist Bernard Knox analyzes the poem’s background in his 65-page introduction. The text is mercifully free of footnotes, but there is commentary in the back, followed by suggestions for further reading. Most helpful to the casual reader (meaning, for example, myself) is the pronouncing glossary of characters and settings.

This edition boasts other distinctions as well. Ian McKellen, the well-known British actor, reads the unabridged translation on a set of 12 cassettes, for a total of more than 13 hours of story. McKellen’s performance is passionate and masterful.

At the king’s word the herald sprang to his feet

and ran to fetch the ringing lyre from the house....

A rippling prelude—

now the bard struck up an irresistible song....

To hear McKellen recite such lines is a strong reminder that these stories were not written for people who wanted to kill time on an airplane. They were recited by and for people who respected the ability of narrative to lend meaning to experience. The works attributed to Homer may have been created by several authors, or a single Homer may have reworked prevailing themes in an established medium, as most artists do. For most of us, however, these questions are beside the point. The point is the story.—Michael Sims

The dog-eared page

♦ “As Yeats said, ‘The correcting of prose is endless, because it has no fixed laws; a poem comes right with a click, like a box.’ ”—Jacques Barzun, Simple and Direct: A Rhetoric for Writers (Harper & Row, 1975)

♦ “Production/Production, the wheels/ Whistled. Among the forests/Of metal the one human/Sound was the lament of/The poets for deciduous language.”—R.S. Thomas, excerpted from “Postscript,” Poems of R.S. Thomas (U. of Arkansas Press, 1985)

♦ “An old tale tells of the Chinese gentleman who, watching a pair of Englishmen sweating away at a game of tennis, inquired why they did not hire coolies to play it for them.”—Jan Morris, Hong Kong (Vintage Departures, 1997)

♦ “I believed that if the world could be informed of the truths of combat, future generations might be deterred from it. Experience has disabused me. Telling does not deter and knowing does not inoculate. War will always find men to fight it.”—John Keegan, reviewing The Soldier’s Tale by Samuel Hynes in the Wall Street Journal, March 27, 1997

♦ “I believed that if the world could be informed of the truths of combat, future generations might be deterred from it. Experience has disabused me. Telling does not deter and knowing does not inoculate. War will always find men to fight it.”—John Keegan, reviewing The Soldier’s Tale by Samuel Hynes in the Wall Street Journal, March 27, 1997