The Be-Loving Imaginer

Was Shakespeare Bisexual? The Truth Hidden in 154 Sonnets - "Shakespair: Sonnet Replies to the 154 Sonnets of William Shakespeare" by Martin BidneyIn Shakespeare's 1609 book of 154 sonnets (14-liners), you'll notice the welcoming, inclusive, bisexual sensibility of thepoems' narrator. He gets involved in three love triangles: first a woman and two men, next again a woman and two men, and finally a triangle of three men. The book's 39 opening sonnets are love poems to his boyfriend. In poem 40 a woman appears, and when the Shakespeare narrator falls in love with her, he immediately learns that the boyfriend has been romancing her for several years already! The book, viewed as a whole, resembles a TV series filled with dramatic episodes. The narrator's bipolar mood-switches are themselves psychologically fascinating. A beloved, male or female, can suddenly turn into a frenemy. The emotional range is vast, the implications unending. My contribution? I write an original sonnet reply to every one the Bard offers. He becomes my sociable companion, teacher, mentor, also a joke-telling pal, suffering victim, and rapid imaginer it's exciting to be friends with. There's no book you can read that has more vital and empathetic LGBTQ+ interests and observations. I'm inexpressibly grateful for the chanceto dialogue with "Will" (that's what he calls himself) in his favorite verse form.Martin Bidney, Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at Binghamton University in upstate New York,taught there for 35 years, publishing Blake and Goethe and Patterns of Epiphany. In the first 23 years of his "rewirement" he has published 61 books of original and translated poetry, often including both in what he calls "verse translation interviews" with poets he has read in Polish, Russian, German, and French.

The Be-loving Imaginer Episode 63: Con-verse-ing with Stefan GeorgeThe best response to a poem you value will be a poem you write in reply. The superbly crafted lyrics of German poet Stefan George (1868-1923) embody a range of moods that not only charm the hearer by their verbal music but make the responder want to continue the melody and to elaborate or amplify suggested implications. George’s contemporary, Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926). offers context in my replies, as do kindred spirits from Russia.From “The Book of the Hanging Gardens” the George lyric “Voices of the River” initiates a series of dramatic monologues embodying expressive psychological portraits, and Nikolai Gumilyov’s “Drunken Dervish” provides a comparable study of dramatic ambivalence and lyric exuberance.From “A Year of the Soul” I select a melancholy meditation relating to the tradition of 19th century poet Heinrich Heine, who liked to give his own folksong-like laments a humorous twist comparable in ambivalence to the “merry dread” of George.From “Mournful Dances” I choose a mentality-portrait that brought to mind another troubled bard from the Romantic period, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.From “The Tapestry of Life” I offer a hymn-like journal entry by George that brings to mind a closely comparable religiously oriented prayer-like masterwork I translate from the German of Rilke, showing the abiding legacy of early Catholic spirituality in the two bards’ writing.To a poem “The Word” from the brief sequence “Song” I respond with a presentation of Tyutchev’s Russian lyric “Silence” in a discussion of the dramatic strengths and hazards of incorporating maxims or adages in lyrical monologues. While George says, “No thing is, where the word has failed,” Tyutchev writes, “The thought, once uttered, is a lie.” With deep gratitude,Martin

Impulse of the Lyric MomentThe Be-Loving Imaginer Episode 62 Any lyric moment, or hour, or day can be the source of pure joy in poetry writing, as the best poets have known. Here’s how I start my book: opening paragraph with “Ode on the Moment.” Ancient Roman poet Horace in Book 1, Ode 11 wrote 8 lines on “seizing the day” that have resounded through the centuries (p. xvii). Turn the page and you’ll hear two German poets in more modern times debating on this theme. Poems 26 and 27 show the moment unfolding for Picasso and J. S. Bach. Poem 28 lets you watch it play out in a memory of junior high school string orchestra. Paintings on the net offer other priceless moments: Edward Hopper (44). A friend writes me an e-mail and the reply tries to make the moment timeless (51). Poem (56) shows me taking pleasure in learning how to do this. Poem (79) show how a birdsong collaborates. Poem (87) “Polygnostic” shows how openness to the moment can lead to a wider spiritual openness. A polygnostic is one who learns from many sources. (92)Psalmer” show awareness of the Judaeo-Christo-Islamic tradition. A poet from any background whatever can initiate the writing of a poetic scripture, a scripture of beauty (96). Poems 111, 112 and 113 show how to do lyrical “fortune telling.” Multiethnic memories arise in (116) from Poland, and (121) from Italy.In poem (158) Islamic and Christian memories combine. (160) “A Quiet Morning” commemorates a moment that extends to unite 3 generations.

The Be-loving Imaginer Episode 61: Dialogues with Rilke’s Book of HoursRainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) wrote a “Book of Hours.” The phrase usually means a prayer schedule for the religious (breviary). Raised a Catholic, the poet in this book is not a believer in any religion but nonetheless seems to talk to God on every page, for the book is the journal of a search for the Transcendent. I translate the collection and reply to every poem, usually with verses of my own, or sometimes by a Rilke contemporary, usually from Russia, a country the poet visited with his friend Lou Andreas-Salomé. The book begins with the activities of a traditional Russian icon painter, as we see from Dialogue 18.By the time we reach conversation 28 Rilke is no longer content to play this fictive character role. Instead he stresses the need to communicate for a while with a feeling of Darkness without and within.Dialogue 55 conveys a focus on Immanence, Spirit in the World, in something like the introspective manner of the Jewish Kabbalists or the Sufi mystic writers central to Islamic poetry in Persia.Dialogue 84 offers the portrayal of a pilgrimage, physical and spiritual.Dialogue 118 focuses on a famous one-liner lyric by Rilke, which is also depicted visually on the book’s calligraphic cover, where the lyric is translated into Arabic. Rilke’s final poem in the collection, found in Dialogue 134, sums up not only the breadth and inclusive mentality of the poet but his relation to the Romantic movement as an episode in our developing understanding of convergent mythologies.

Episode 60 Goethe on Love and TravelIn episode 59 I told about Goethe’s thinking on breathing as the metaphor ofa lifegiving style of mental health attained in dialogue. Now it’s time to sample some dialogues I wrote with him when we con-versed in my dialogic translation of the German poet’s “Roman Elegies” and “Venetian Epigrams.” My verse replies to Goethe’s short poems copy his rhythms, which are easy-going and pleasant. I call them each a “blogatelle,” meaning a blog which is light and musical, as “bagatelle” is a term for entertaining light music.

“First Elegy”: yes, the monuments are impressive, but where’s the Romanwoman he had hoped to meet again today? My two-part “blogatelle” offersthoughts about Venus and Mars, Love and War, and the difficulties we have inkeeping them apart.

“Sixteenth” and “Seventeenth” elegies offer a bit of comedy, and I enjoytalking about it in my blogatelles.

Moving to Venice, in Epigram 41 we’re sampling a museum with Goethe,and of course I have a conversational verse reply interpreting and elaborating his mood.

Lastly, in conversation on Epigram 48 Goethe and I discuss “separating thesheep from the goats.”

Episode 59 Selving, Unselving, BreathingMy latest book, A Memoir-Essay on Literary Dialogue and Two VerseDialogues with Goethe’s Newly Translated Lyrics of Love and Travel, “RomanElegies” and “Venetian Epigrams,” has two parts.My translation of two verse-collections by Germany’s greatest poet will bePart Two. But first, in Part One, I want to show you how I used Goethe’s lifelong outlook to “coach” me in the theory and practice of dialogue. In what the German poet calls his own personal religion, he invented a story filled with meaning for me. So my “memoir-essay” will present this new symbolic narrative, where we learn about the needed alternation of “selving” and “unselving” to stimulate a life of dialogue.Then, I will go on to offer a 6-line poem by Goethe which I find elaboratesthis myth, Goethe’s “own” religion, into a moral psychology of breathing as key to a happy, healthy mental life. The combination of the new-made religion or myth and the illuminating practical lyric on breathing work together so perfectly that they’ve stimulated me to devote more than two decades trying out literary dialogues that will apply and actualize the twofold key I found.

The Be-loving Imaginer Episode 58:Revitalizing Melody I’m an experimenter in lyric verse, traveling through space and time to find poetic stanza patterns that start memorizing themselves in me. My attitude is playful: you don’t know what you will find. In this book, I use a form that Victorian poet Swinburne called a “ballad” stanza. I accompany each experimental “ballad” poem with a commentary that I call a “blogatelle,” a blog that’s more like a piece of music since it contains, usually, a supplementary wordsong in verse. “27. A Ballad of Play” creates a mood for considering poetry writing as playful, and my blogatelle compares “A child, a cat, an otter, and a bard” in this light. “28. A Ballad of Brief Lines” focuses on the refreshingly supple flexibility of the Swinburne stanza, and the blogatelle offers a sketch of a “shaman” as creator of a religious and therapeutic solo-poem, healing the reciter and the hearer. “29. A Ballad of Equality” quotes a passage from the Qur’an that I especially love. The blogatelle develops the equality idea by bringing in a related Qur’an verse: “There is no compulsion in religion.” “30. A Ballad of Camouflage” presents a moth I saw on the internet, whose wing-art design depicts a predator bird devouring and excreting its prey. The blogatelle develops the idea that Nature includes much, it is filled with life-and-death as a unified package, so “being one with Nature” means also a willingness to die when it is time.

In stanzas 2 to 6 of my memoir in Byronic-style verse I introduce you to the poem by way of the topic “humor.” In the 336 stanzas of this journal I shift moods often, as Lord Byron did when writing about himself in “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.” Then I launch into a sample episode in the mood of comedy.

The Be-Loving Imaginer: Episode 56

The Be-Loving Imaginer Episode 55 Reimagining Medieval Persian Pub Life