In the museum, attention shifted from painting to painting, the eye forced around, so that it was impossible to focus on any single work. The nightmare was of a giant bluebottle fly which buzzed, “I’m all there is.” Where cars don’t go are shortcuts. My grandfather was forced to recognize his age when another, younger, man offered his seat on the bus. When one travels, one might “hit” a storm. The shoe must be tied to the ankle. As for we who “love to be astonished,” McDonald’s is the world’s largest purchaser of beef eyeballs. They went out with bows and armbands to shoot at the hay. It’s as easy as waves, slopping water. Traverse, watch, and cease.

My Life is book of poetry by Lyn Hejinian. First published in 1980, the work originally consisted of 37 paragraphs, each with 37 lines, composed when the poet was 37 years old. A revised edition came out a few years later, which increased all those numbers to 45. This was continued in an addendum of sorts, My Life in the Nineties. But these poems are not simple autobiography. Instead, they weave together sentences, sounds, and images into a collage that often feels just at the edge of understandability.

Chris and Suzanne use this book to begin reflecting on this cluster of episodes on Essays, Essaying, Stories, Storying. How does this poetry approach form and openness (of what might get included, of how this writing might be understood), and how does Hejinian’s poeming reflect upon certain kinds of essaying and storying?

Show Notes.

Lyn Hejinian: My Life (includes My Life in the Nineties).

An overview of Lyn Hejinain’s life and work, including a longer excerpt or two from My Life.

Douglas Messerli’s introduction to an anthology of “Language“ Poetries might explain things that these poets were trying to do.

William Carlos Williams: Paterson.

Brian Dillon: Essayism: On Form, Feeling, and Nonfiction.

Virginia Woolf: Selected Essays. (The collected essays have been published over many volumes.)

George Orwell: A Collection of Essays. (His collected runs across four volumes.)

Kim TallBear‘s Critical Poly 100s appear in Shapes of Native Nonfiction.

Jackson Mac Low: Pieces o’ Six. (The book is very out of print, but the pdf is reasonably priced.)

Support The Spouter-Inn on Patreon and hang out with us in a friendly discord.

Next: J.R.R. Tolkien: The Return of the King. (Probably.)

We conceive of the essay as an exquisite vessel, one that evidences the delicate balance of beauty and pain. The ‘exquisite’ character of this vessel invokes simultaneously an exquisite work of art and the exquisite ache of an intense sensation. By bringing to the fore a focus on form, in both the structure and the concept of the collection, we use the term exquisite vessel not just to name the work done herein but to draw attention to form as a creative and literary practice of reverence for the exquisite in its most literal sense of something carefully sought out. To essay is to try, test, and practice. The form of the essay, then, is a fitting site for the experiential and sometimes painful work of seeking answers.

Shapes of Native Nonfiction is a collection of contemporary essays by Indigenous writers, edited by Elisha Washuta and Theresa Warburton, and published in 2019. But in addition to providing a sampler of Indigenous voices and perspectives, the collection also offers a provocation about essaying itself, by thinking deeply about the art of basket weaving. What goes into a well-crafted basket? How is that reflected in each of these essays, and in the gathering and arrangement of these essays? Chris and Suzanne look at a few key essays in the collection, and think about how books like this fit into our reckoning of “literature”.

Show Notes.

Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers (Elissa Washuta and Theresa Warburton, eds.)

The essays from this collection that we focus on:

• Elissa Washuta and Theresa Warburton: “Introduction: Exquisite Vessels”
• Ernestine Hayes: “Contemporary Creative Writing and Ancient Oral Tradition”
• Deborah A. Miranda: “Tuolumne”
• Eden Robinson: “Real Romantic”
• Laura Da’: “Pain Scale Peace Treaties”
• Elissa Washuta: “Apocalypse Logic”

Two essay collections that Suzanne edited and Chris designed:

• How We Write: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blank Page (Suzanne Conklin Akbari, ed.)
• How We Read: Tales, Fury, Nothing, Sound (Suzanne Conklin Akbari and Kaitlin Heller, eds.)

Suzanne’s essay on LitHub about the essay and this collection.

Our episode on Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach.

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Next: Lyn Hejinian: My Life.

Storytelling is an emergent practice, and meaning for each individual listener will necessarily be different. The relationships between the storyteller and the listeners become the nest that cradles the meaning. The storyteller creates both the context and the content and collectively a plurality of meanings are generated through the experiences of the audience. The “analysis” and the “critical examination” are done with the utmost care and respect. Nishnaabeg storytellers, when telling in English, will use phrases such as “maybe it happened this way,” “some people say that’s what happened, I don’t know, I wasn’t there” or “I heard it happened that way, but I don’t know.” Revealing that one can only speak about what they know to be true from direct experience.

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s nonfiction book Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-Creation, Resurgence and a New Emergence (2011) considers what “resurgence” might mean for Indigenous people and communities. Her ways of thinking about resurgence are intimately connected to her thinking about story, especially the many forms of creation story. Suzanne and Chris reflect on and respond to Simpson's conceptions of what story is, how it relates to the essay, and what it makes possible.

Show Notes.

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson:Dancing On Our Turtle's Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-Creation, Resurgence, and a New Emergence.

Leanne Simpson’s website.

Other books by Simpson include A Short History of the Blockade, Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies, and Rehearsals for Living (with Robyn Maynard).

Our episodes on Lee Maracle’s Memory Serves, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and Augustine’s Confessions

Next: Elissa Washuta and Theresa Warburton, eds. Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers.

When lately I retired to my house resolved that, in so far as I could, I would cease to concern myself with anything except the passing in rest and retirement of the little time I still have to live, I could do my mind no better service than to leave it in complete idleness to commune with itself, to come to rest, and to grow settled; which I hoped it would thenceforth be able to do more easily, since it had become graver and more mature with time. But I find (variam semper dant otia mentem), that, on the contrary, like a runaway horse, it is a hundred times more active on its own behalf than ever it was for others. It presents me with so many chimeras and imaginary monsters, one after another, without order or plan, that in order to contemplate their oddness and absurdity at leisure, I have begun to record them in writing, hoping in time to make my mind ashamed of them.

The Spouter-Inn returns with an experiment. We recorded four episodes over a busy weekend, and our cluster topic was "Essays, Essaying, Stories, Storying". We decided, this time, to put a “classic” text in conversation with some much more recent works. Let’s see where this path takes us?

Michel de Montaigne’s Essays are often described as the origin of the genre. But his writings are almost nothing like the kinds of essays we read in magazines or write for academic assignments. Montaigne’s pieces are meandering and personal, and often only tangentially related to the topics they are nominally “about”. Chris and Suzanne read a few of these essays and follow them wherever they might go.

Show Notes.

Michel de Montaigne: Essays (trans. M.A. Screech). Also available on Project Gutenberg (trans. Charles Cotton) and on the HyperEssays website.

The essays we look at:

• On Idleness (1.8)
• On Liars (1.9)
• On the Power of the Imagination (1.20)
• On Friendship (1.27)
• On the Education of Children (1.25)

Our episodes on Leaves of Grass and the Symposium.

Étienne de La Boétie.

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Next: Leanne Betasamosake Simpson:Dancing On Our Turtle's Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-Creation, Resurgence, and a New Emergence.

Allas, of me, unto the worldes ende,
Shal neither been ywriten nor ysonge
No good word, for thise bokes wol me shende.
O, rolled shal I been on many a tonge;
Thurghout the world my belle shal be ronge;
And wommen most wol hate me of alle.
Allas, that swich a cas me sholde falle!

(Alas! Until the end of the world, no good word will be written or sung about me, because these books will utterly shame me. Oh, I will be rolled on many a tongue, throughout the world my bell will be rung — and women will hate me most of all. Alas, that such a thing should happen to me!)

Geoffrey Chaucer’s narrative poem Troilus and Criseyde tells a love story — if by “love” you mean romantic obsession, coercion, and worse — all set during the Trojan War. Chris and Suzanne talk about how this book explores the interiority of its characters, how it depicts independence and politics, and how it explores the way narratives unfold within systems of tropes and traditions.

Show Notes.

Geoffrey Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde (in the original and in a modernization).

Other works by Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales; The Riverside Chaucer (i.e., his complete works).

Our episode on the Iliad.

(The Spouter-Inn will in fact turn five years old in January.)

Boccaccio: Il Filostrato.

Our episodes on Paradiso, Consolation of Philosophy, and the Metamorphoses.

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There’s a feeling, I think, in English poetry that you have to be original. That feeling isn’t really there in Persian poetry until the very modern period. Then it is. But before then, there’s a kind of sense that there’s this vast treasury of possibilities in poetry which everybody has used—and you can use them too.

Dick Davis is an award-winning poet and translator, famous for his translations of medieval Persian poetry. He has translated Attar’s The Conference of the Birds and Nezami’s Layli and Majnun (both covered on The Spouter-Inn), as well as Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, and his most recent translation is The Mirror of My Heart: A Thousand Years of Persian Poetry by Women.

He joins Chris and Suzanne to talk about reading and translating Persian poetry, how his work in translation has influenced his own poetry, and the specific challenges in translating Layli and Majnun.

Show Notes.

Dick Davis’s translations include Layli and Majnun, The Conference of the Birds, and others listed below.

Our episodes on Layli and Majnun and Conference of the Birds.

Fakhraddin Gorgani: Vis and Ramin (trans. Dick Davis).

The Mirror of My Heart: A Thousand Years of Persian Poetry by Women (trans. Dick Davis): hardcover bilingual edition by Mage and English-only paperback by Penguin

Jahan Khatun.

Hafez.

Faces of Love: Hafez and the Poets of Shiraz (trans. Dick Davis): originally published by Mage, paperback reprint by Penguin, bilingual edition by Mage.

Mughal empire.

Our bonus episodes with Emily Wilson and Sassan Tabatabai.

Nezami: Khosrow and Shirin.

“Seek a Poet who your way do's bend, / And chuse an Author as you chuse a Friend” (Wentworth Dillon, Earl of Roscomon, in An Essay on Translated Verse).

Chapman’s Homer.

John Keats: On First Looking into Chapman's Homer.

Nizami’s Khamsa.

On Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh.

Ferdowsi: Shahnameh (trans. Dick Davis): magnificent hardcover in three volumes, illustrated, published by Mage, paperback single volume by Penguin.

Support The Spouter-Inn on Patreon to help us research and record the show, and you can hang out with us on a friendly little Discord.

Her voice was sweet and liquid, like a stream
That lulls all other streams to sleep and dream;
Her eyes like doe’s eyes, whose dark gaze would make
A lion lie down dazed, and half awake.
She seemed an alphabet of loveliness,
Curved letters were the curling of each tress,
Straight letters were her stature, and her lips
Were like a letter formed as an ellipse,
And all the letters made her like that bowl
That shows the world as an enchanted whole.

The story of Layli and Majnun — sometimes written as Layla and Majnun — was most famously recorded in a book-length poem by the twelfth-century Persian poet Nezami Ganjavi. Chris and Suzanne consider what the poem has to say about love, mental illness, and fan culture.

Show Notes.

Nezami Ganjavi: Layla and Majnun, trans. Dick Davis. [Bookshop.]

Our episode on Conference of the Birds.

Maria Rosa Menocal: Shards of Love: Exile and the Origin of the Lyric.

Our episode on Enkidu from The Epic of Gilgamesh.

Raymond Roussel: Locus Solus.

Manuscript images of Layli and Majnun at the Metropolitan Museum of Art: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

And images of Majnun at the Ka’aba with a door knocker: 1, 2.

Our episode on Blind Owl.

The Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, 1892–1910.

J.R.R. Tolkien: The Hobbit.

Next: Geoffrey Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde. (Bookshop. Also a helpful online modernized and annotated version.)

You can support us through our network, Megaphonic, on Patreon.

Language is so personal and internal. It exists in your head. You can close your eyes and plug your ears and not engage with the outside world at all, and yet you still have language going on. So I think one of the things that attracts people to [etymology] is, it’s discussing something that they feel they have a part in.

Mark Sundaram is a medievalist and linguist who specializes in the history of the English language. He’s the co-host of the podcast The Endless Knot and the main force behind the Alliterative YouTube channel. Mark has a PhD in Medieval Studies from the University of Toronto and teaches at Laurentian University.

Aven McMaster is a Classicist who studies Latin poetry and Roman social history. She is the co-host of the podcast The Endless Knot Podcast and does production work on the Alliterative channel videos. Aven has a PhD in Classics from the University of Toronto and taught at Thorneloe University at Laurentian.

They join Chris and Suzanne to talk all about etymologies, dictionaries, and etymological dictionaries. What pleasures are found in reading the dictionary? Why are some people so compelled by etymologies? How do etymologies and puns inform classical poetry?

Show Notes.

The Endless Knot on Twitter.

John Ayto: Dictionary of Word Origins.

The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology.

Paul Anthony Jones (Haggard Hawks on Twitter): Why Is This A Question?

On Webster’s Third New International Dictionary.

Ernest Weekley: The Romance of Words.

Alliterative’s video on nation.

The etymology of feisty.

Ernest Klein: A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language.

Anatoly Liberman: Word Origins and How We Know Them.

The Oxford Etymologist.

Calvert Watkins: The American Dictionary of Indo-European Roots.

Support The Spouter-Inn and our network, Megaphonic, if you can. Thanks!

The word “amicus” — meaning “friend” — comes from a derivation, as if it were “animi custos”, or “guardian of the soul”. And this is well put! The term for someone tormented by carnal desire is “amator turpitudinis”, a lover of wickedness. But “friend”, “amicus”, is from the word “hamus”, a hook — in other words, the chain of charity, since hooks hold on.

The Etymologies , by the seventh-century polymath and theologian Isidore of Seville, is a massive medieval encyclopedia, with sections devoted to topics from grammar to farming, mathematics to war. And throughout the book, Isidore attempts to understand the world through etymology—that is, by poking and prodding at words until they reveal their histories and the other words that they’re made of. Chris and Suzanne revel in Isidore’s ear for the materiality of language, as well as his encyclopedic impulse to gather and organize everything.

Show Notes.

Isidore of Seville: The Etymologies. [Bookshop.] [The text in Latin.]

The only other book by Isidore available in English translation seems to be On the Nature of Things.

Our episodes on the Hereford Mappa Mundi, The Aeneid, Beyond a Boundary, Gertrude Stein, and Georges Perec.

Petrus Riga’s Aurora does not seem to be available in English translation.

The Latin text of the opening quote:

> Amicus, per derivationem, quasi animi custos. Dictus autem proprie: amator turpitudinis, quia amore torquetur libidinis: amicus ab hamo, id est, a catena caritatis; unde et hami quod teneant.

Suzanne wrote about encyclopedism (and Moby-Dick, naturally) for LitHub.

The Glossa Ordinaria.

The First Grammatical Treatise.

Virgilius Maro Grammaticus.

Next: Nezami Ganjavi: Layla and Majnun. [Bookshop.]

Support The Spouter-Inn through our network, Megaphonic if you can. Thank you!

“Now I know,” she said, “that other, more serious cause of your sickness: you have forgotten what you are. So I really understand why you are ill and how to cure you. For because you are wandering, forgetful of your true self, you grieve that you are an exile and stripped of your goods; since indeed you do not know the goal and end of all things, you think that evil and wicked men are fortunate and powerful; since indeed you have forgotten what sort of governance the world is guided by, you think these fluctuations of fortune uncontrolled. All these are quite enough to cause not merely sickness but even death. But I thank the author of all health that you have not yet wholly lost your true nature.”

The Consolation of Philosophy by the sixth-century Roman author Boethius has a little of everything: poetry and prose, autobiography and philosophy; bright and lively writing and… maybe some boring bits, especially in the last two sections. But it was written by a man who found himself thrown in jail and condemned to death; who can blame him for trying to use philosophy—or, a dialogue with the personification of Philosophy herself—to make sense of his life? Chris and Suzanne discuss how this complex poem intersects with a lot of other literary works, and argue about the uneasy marriage of philosophy and poetry.

Show Notes.

Boethius: The Consolation of Philosophy. [Bookshop.]

Our episodes on The Symposium, Augustine’s Confessions, The Book of the City of Ladies, Paradiso, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

The Wikipedia page for The Consolation of Philosophy has a nice medieval depiction of Fortune’s wheel.

Rainer Maria Rilke: Archaic Torso of Apollo. (The original German text. See also Mark Doty talking about this poem.)

Next: Isidore of Seville: The Etymologies. [Bookshop.]

Support The Spouter-Inn and our network on Patreon — it helps us make the show, and it gives you access to our friendly Discord!

I come to my garden, my sister, my bride;
I gather my myrrh with my spice,
I eat my honeycomb with my honey,
I drink my wine with my milk.

Eat, friends, drink,
And be drunk with love.

The Song of Songs is a work of lyric poetry which is notably and undeniably erotic in focus. And yet it has also been a key religious text within both Judaism and Christianity, and has been read and commented upon for thousands of years within those contexts. Chris and Suzanne read this poetry both within and without these traditions of interpretations — and also luxuriate in its intensity (and spiciness).

Show Notes.

The Song of Songs is part of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Bible, and is available in many translations. Chris was primarily looking at the Jewish Publication Society translation; Suzanne at the Revised Standard Version.

Our episodes on Walt Whitman, the allegorical Conference of the Birds, and Times Square Red, Times Square Blue.

Bernard of Clairvaux: Commentary on the Song of Songs.

Alain of Lille’s commentary, Elucidatio in Cantica Canticorum, doesn’t seem to be easily available in English, but here’s the Latin.

Rupert of Deutz’s Commentaria in Cantica Canticorum also doesn’t seem to have been translated into English.

Next: Boethius: The Consolation of Philosophy.