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AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

Poetry Off the Shelf: The Waste Land, the App

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Curtis Fox: This is Poetry Off the Shelf from the Poetry Foundation, October 21st, 2011. I'm Curtis Fox. This week, “‘The Waste Land,' the App.”

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Last June, Faber and Faber, T.S. Eliot's old publishing house, released an iPad app of “The Waste Land.” The price of the app was high. It's a great poem and all, but $13.99? But I was curious to see what the latest in technology could do with a classic Modernist poem that railed against the modern world. So, I went for it. I opened it up and there's the poem itself, of course, in print. But the first thing I went to were the readings.

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T.S. Eliot: Unreal City, / Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, / A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many.

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Curtis Fox: That's T.S. Eliot himself, from 1933. Then Eliot again from 1947…

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T.S. Eliot: Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled, / And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.

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Curtis Fox: Then there's Alec Guinness, Sir Alec Guinness.

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Alec Guinness: Flowed up the hill and down King William Street.

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Curtis Fox: Ted Hughes.

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Ted Hughes: To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours / With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.

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Curtis Fox: And then Viggo Mortensen. But he reads so lethargically, let's skip right over him to the video of the great Fiona Shaw.

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Fiona Shaw: There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: ‘Stetson! / ‘You who were with me in the ships at Mylae! / ‘That corpse you planted last year in your garden, / ‘Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year? / ‘Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed? / ‘Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men, / ‘Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again! / ‘You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!”

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Curtis Fox: Talk about chewing on the line breaks. No wonder a lot of poets fear actors, even very good ones like Fiona Shaw, getting hold of their poems. But there is more: a gallery of a few images associated with the poem; a facsimile of Eliot's original manuscript, with edits by Ezra Pound. But the beating heart of the app, to me, at least, were the video commentaries.

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Seamus Heaney: I knew that Eliot was the modern poet par excellence. I had overheard that at school.

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Curtis Fox: That's Seamus Heaney, who is probably worth the price of the app itself.

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Seamus Heaney: So I asked and an aunt of mine promised me to, she would get me books, and I asked for T.S. Eliot's Collected Poems, and I got them, and they simply scared me off. I had no way of getting into them.

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Curtis Fox: There are also commentaries by the poetry editor at Faber and Faber, Paul Keegan.

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Paul Keegan:: And I think if you'd asked most of the younger poets today what they're getting from Eliot, it would have to do with acoustic things.

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Curtis Fox: A history of “The Waste Land” publication by Jim McCue.

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Jim McCue: Eliot takes this manuscript that he's written in Margate and Lausanne to Pound in Paris.

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Curtis Fox: Eliot's scholar, Craig Raine.

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Craig Raine: But I think the really important thing about Eliot coming to England and being an American is that he had to change his voice.

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Curtis Fox: And there's more video commentary by Fiona Shaw herself, Frank Turner, and the novelist Jeanette Winterson. So, there's a lot of stuff in there. And here to talk about “The Waste Land” and what the app does to, or for, “The Waste Land” is poet Tess Taylor. She's been on the program before to talk about Amy Clampitt while she was doing a residency a while back in Amy Clampitt's old house. Welcome back, Tess.

Tess Taylor: Hi, Curtis. It's great to be here.

Curtis Fox: So most people usually encounter “The Waste Land” for the first time, at least, in school. And I wanted to ask you, when did you first read the poem? Do you remember?

Tess Taylor: I was a ambitious kid, an ambitious reader, and I bought a copy, used, of some of Eliot's poems at Moe's Books, a famous bookstore on Berkeley's Telegraph Avenue. Went there late some Friday night because it was probably the only thing that I could do. You know, you can't drink when you're a teenager and...

Curtis Fox: Sure you can.

Tess Taylor: Not legally. (LAUGHS) And I remember sitting on the floor of Moe's Books reading this battered edition of T.S. Eliot's poems and coming across “The Waste Land” and feeling like it was very important.

Curtis Fox: Mm-hm. Yeah, it's a poem whose stature is kind of hard to overestimate, but it is a poem that almost seems to require somebody from the English department to help you out a little bit with what's going on in it. Did that annoy you? That it seems to be a poem that not only requires footnotes, but has footnotes in it?

Tess Taylor: The epigraph is in Greek and that sort of forbidding sense of, I am a poem, but I'm not gonna give myself away to you. It was present in Eliot and Pound, and it's playing with obscurity. It's got this collage of multiple voices. It's perfectly happy to lose you in the dust. And then...

Curtis Fox: Yeah. (LAUGHS)

Tess Taylor: ..it seems to demand annotation.

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T.S. Eliot: I sat upon the shore / Fishing, with the arid plain behind me / Shall I at least set my lands in order? / London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down / Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina / Quando fiam uti chelidon—O swallow swallow / Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie / These fragments I have shored against my ruins

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Tess Taylor: On the other hand, it's so sonically rich and beautiful that the experience of being mystified by it is itself kind of a rich experience. I mean, it's kind of a great mystery.

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T.S. Eliot: Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo's mad againe. / Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata. / Shantih shantih shantih

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Curtis Fox: So, let's get to the app. We are both armed with iPads, and you have spent a good deal of time in your “Waste Land” app. Tell me about your general impressions, especially when you first opened it.

Tess Taylor: Well, the thing that I noticed first about the app was that somehow because it was a gift, it was really hard to open, and we had to go to iTunes and get a lot of flarfy emails that went back and forth, and it ended up being one of those kind of really banal errands that takes up a lot of your time.

Curtis Fox: Yeah, I spend my life in those errands, right.

Tess Taylor: I mention that only because I was really hungry to actually read the poem. And I came to it with a sense of sort of technological irritation that I think a lot of us carry around a lot of the time.

Curtis Fox: Yeah.

Tess Taylor: Then I opened it, and I think my second impression was also being a little bit baffled by the way that my face was sort of hovering in the screen of the iPad. iPads have really shiny screens. And I mention this, I don't wanna be, you know, incredibly cosmetic, but, again, I was thinking about what is it like to try to experience this reading in a new medium? And I...

Curtis Fox: When you're worried about your haircut, right?

Tess Taylor: Well, I was thinking, I began to think about, right, you know, how do I look? Which is, of course, not—it's the exact opposite experience that you wanna have…

Curtis Fox: Yeah.

Tess Taylor: …when you read a book. And in some ways that became kind of a metaphor for some of the experience that I had as I pursued the app. It was as if my own face was too much in the way, or there were a lot of things that seemed to be in the way of getting quite to this ideal reading experience. That said, once I got into it, I found a lot to enjoy.

Curtis Fox: What was your favorite part of it? What worked best in the app?

Tess Taylor: To its credit, the presentation, once you get beyond the shininess of the screen, is very clean. If you hold the iPad in the vertical direction, it's just this clean, long scroll that kind of unfolds the poem for you. And then if you turn it in the horizontal direction, these notes pop up on the side. So, you sort of get to control how much you wanna have your experience of reading mediated. And that's kind of an interesting thing that you can choose a certain amount of commentary that you're willing to take in, and kind of first read the poem, then allow some of the notes in, then begin to explore the various voices that are reading the poem, which you mentioned…Ted Hughes, Fiona Shaw.

Curtis Fox: You know, I have to confess that I opened the app and I ignored the poem completely (LAUGHS), and I went right for the bells and whistles because I wanted to find out.

Tess Taylor: Oh, really?

Curtis Fox: Yeah, I have not reread the poem. I have listened to several of the readings of it, and I watched the entire Fiona Shaw video of her dramatically reading the poem, but I skipped the poem.

Tess Taylor: Interesting. Well, I know that Paul Keegan, who's the Faber editor, wanted to make sure that the poem felt front and center in the app. And it's possible that you can put it that way, but I do think that there are, you know, there's a lot of ways to use the app to avoid reading.

Curtis Fox: Yeah.

Tess Taylor: I think that Fiona Shaw's kind of...

Curtis Fox: Yeah, what'd you think of the Fiona Shaw reading?

Tess Taylor: Oh. 

Curtis Fox: Yeah (LAUGHS)

Tess Taylor: First of all, I love Fiona Shaw.

Curtis Fox: Yeah.

Tess Taylor: I was distracted. I felt, well, OK, so here she is in this shabby-chic kind of house in Dublin that is surrounded by these dusty busts of ancient Greek statues, and she's kind of got a weird piano forte in the background, and she's wearing these really mousey-looking Keds and kind of a bad scarf. And I kept thinking, why is Fiona Shaw wearing those shoes? And so instead of thinking about T.S. Eliot, I was thinking about Fiona Shaw's shoes.

Curtis Fox: Right, but her performance itself I thought was incredibly over the top. I mean, I don't know what you thought of it.

Tess Taylor: Well, this is a poem that's made up of a lot of voices. I mean, to its credit, the app makes this enormous collage, right? And the poem is itself a collage of all these kinds of voices. So, Fiona Shaw's sort of dramatic, multi-voiced, one-woman show was one kind of way of thinking about what the poem was. I mean, she dramatized all those voices, and she put on all these accents and kind of changed postures. And I could see how maybe that let me into an aspect of the poem, its kind of multi-vocality, and in fact, the app did that in a larger way.

Curtis Fox: Yeah, I think it's an incredibly well-put-together app and really well-designed and thought-out. And in fact, this app gave me the notion that I think this is probably the future of a lot of publishing, because I think poets, in particular, instead of publishing books, might just, not very far into the future, if not already, start just publishing apps along with a book. So they have all the poems there. They have their readings of all the poems. They have any ancillary video that they wanna put with it. They could throw, if there's a turnkey application to put one of these apps together very easily, it's a great publishing device.

Tess Taylor: Well, and I was talking with Robert Polito, who's the director of Writing Programs at the New School, and he was saying that, you know, maybe for us it's a kind of a 1914 moment, that maybe what will happen is that people begin to write in new forms that fit these new technologies. Now, I happen to feel like the technologies are still moving and changing so fast that you can't reliably create forms that necessarily fit them, that are then durable.

Curtis Fox: Right. 

Tess Taylor: It could be that we jump on this app bandwagon and, you know, in 10 years it's one of those Blu-ray Discs or one of those intermediate technologies. It's really hard to know where this is all gonna settle.

Curtis Fox: Mm-hm.

Tess Taylor: In the meantime, yeah, I think that's a cool thing. I have no problem with making a cool app product and people could do that and circulate themselves that way. But I also think that there will be, to the extent that books persist, the reason that they'll persist is because people wanna get back to them, away from some of that screen time, that they will persist because they offer a kind of a unique sort of ecosystem of satisfaction. I felt that way even with the notes reading this, that although the commentary was a wonderful thing to have, and it was wonderful to have it so accessible that I could, you know, have a translation about the Sibyl at Cumae and then a commentary about who the Sibyl at Cumae was, I kind of wished and longed for some time when I wasn't being bombarded with that information and that I could figure out who the Sibyl at Cumae was later, if I knew, or I could just rely on my own knowledge of it, and I could just read those pages without having to, you know, have things kind of popping up into my peripheral vision. So, I'm, sort of, of both minds.

Curtis Fox: Thank you so much, Tess.

Tess Taylor: Thanks, Curtis. And, you know, thanks, T.S. Eliot and thanks, Faber, honestly. I think it's a really important exploration.

Curtis Fox: Tess Taylor's most recent collection is The Misremembered World, published by the Poetry Society of America. You can find “The Waste Land” app in the iTunes Store, or you could do it the old-fashioned way and read the poem online at poetryfoundation.org. Let us…

Tess Taylor: Or you could buy one.

Curtis Fox: Or you could just buy the book. Let us know what you think of this program, where our motto is...

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T.S. Eliot: One must be so careful these days.

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Curtis Fox: Email us at podcastpoetryfoundation.org. The theme music for this program comes from the Claudia Quintet. For Poetry Off the Shelf, I'm Curtis Fox. Thanks for listening.

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