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[...] I, too, can almost imagine a dialogue, an ongoing symposium latently emerging among the drone operating personnel, the way blossoms from a tree planted in a sheltered courtyard, with sun coming only from the west, bloom late, only as afternoon light lengthens.
unexpectedly pretty
Peter! I see you. Through the thin walls of my ground-floor studio, through glazed windows covered on the outside with steel lattice to keep out burglars and birds, I see you emerging onto the front lawn on a fresh spring morning in Massachusetts, as a robin pecks for worms and a squirrel scampers out of an open garbage bin. I watch you descend the steps of an eggshell-painted porch, blue-trimmed, a sturdy two-and-a-half-story wood-frame house behind you, in a city once known as the cradle of American industrial ingenuity. I hear things, too, the accompanying drone — the persistent aural kind — of a nearby handheld power drill — although this might be coming from the room next to mine. You’ve left your wife inside amid the green-striped Ikea sheets. In unbuttoned, breast milk–stained plaid flannels, she nurses the baby. A moment ago, you brought her a bowl of Great Grains cereal with soy milk and a mug of coffee, caught her gratitude in a softening of her cornflower-blue eyes and a sudden renewed attention to her appearance as she brushed away hay-colored bangs and covered an exposed, engorged breast, which gesture you took for an apology: “It won’t always be like this.” And now you are thinking, as you often do upon climbing into your leased, blue, bird-dropping bespattered Kia, of Kant of Königsberg and his daily walk around the city’s square, rain or shine, always at the same time. The phrase “Call of Duty” comes to mind and you wonder how it is that a popular computer game in which you shoot Nazis could be named in a way to resemble a Kantian first principle. As you mechanically ease the car out of the driveway, looking both ways down your one-way street, and set out toward your morning class, you think, “What is philosophy if not the ‘Call of Duty.’” It might be funny to title a chapter of your book with that phrase.
kinda weird but he's a hell of a writer
I should say that, at the time and for many years after, I received almost nothing from this class. I remembered almost nothing, consciously, that Bloom said about all the poems we’d read. My marginalia is incomprehensible and almost worthless; the notebook long since lost in an attic. Only when I’d completely freed myself from academia and abandoned all hope of an academic career, even an academic life, did I return to those poems, again not even consciously, and find not just pleasure in them but meaning, which is also too earnest and defined a word to say what I discovered. And then in those moments I don’t hear Bloom’s voice at all, but I’m aware that the — pleasure is too soft a word — insight I receive from, say, Wallace Stevens’s “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” or John Ashbery’s “Soonest Mended” takes place in a Bloomian universe: gnostic, agonistic, a beauty with terror in it, clashing structures and strange cohabitations, a poem as a play in as many acts as the poet needs.
If you got the Bloom experience at the right time of your life, as a poet or a person who loves poetry, then he could be perfect. At a crisis moment for such a person, he might also be terrible. There is something to be said for teaching that has no “deliverables,” for which the only answer to the evaluator’s question about what was learned is: “Ask me in five years, then again in ten, then in twenty.” In 1998, I had vague feelings for poetry that I didn’t know were at odds with the academic persona I was trying to cultivate. I put poems into meaning machines linked to my ambition and ground them into dust. Years later, once I’d relinquished the need to definitively interpret anything in such a way that it could be professionally recognized and circulated, in ways that credited the originality and rigor of my interpretations, the poems came back to me as poetry and I could hear them: sometimes as poems that did not transcend themselves; sometimes as individuals marked, as we are, by others living and dead.