A Couple of Literature Notes

The Guardian has an interview with Robert Pirsig, author of the infamous Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Pirsig has had a challenging life, which has been compounded by the fame he achieved with the success of his books. He claims this will be his last interview (not that he has given many since the publication of Zen).

Here is a bit of the article:

One day in the car with his six-year-old son Chris, his mind buzzing, Pirsig stopped at a junction and literally did not know which way to turn. He had to ask his son to guide him home. What followed was the point where he either found enlightenment, or went insane, depending on how you look at it (really the root of all the questions in his first book).

'I could not sleep and I could not stay awake,' he recalls. 'I just sat there cross-legged in the room for three days. All sorts of volitions started to go away. My wife started getting upset at me sitting there, got a little insulting. Pain disappeared, cigarettes burned down in my fingers ...'

It was like a monastic experience?

'Yes, but then a kind of chaos set in. Suddenly I realised that the person who had come this far was about to expire. I was terrified, and curious as to what was coming. I felt so sorry for this guy I was leaving behind. It was a separation. This is described in the psychiatric canon as catatonic schizophrenia. It is cited in the Zen Buddhist canon as hard enlightenment. I have never insisted on either - in fact I switch back and forth depending on who I am talking to.'

I had really never read much about Pirsig, and having done so now, I am all the more intrigued by his work. I read the Zen book back in college but never picked up Lila: An Inquiry into Morals. Maybe I'll give his work another chance sometime.

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Reuters ran a story a couple of days ago about Josephine Hart, the Irish author of Damage and a bunch of other novels, having rounded up a few big names to read poetry to children.

For no fee, she got actor Ralph Fiennes to read W.H. Auden at one of her British Library poetry hours that sell out months in advance.

Former James Bond star Roger Moore picked Rudyard Kipling, Geldof declaimed W.B. Yeats and Nobel prize-winning playwright Harold Pinter read Philip Larkin.

But that was not enough for Hart.

She collected the recordings and wrote "Catching Life by The Throat: How To Read Poetry and Why". She has sent copies of the book and CD to 6,000 schools in Britain.

"Poetry deals with all the great experiences of life and obviously children respond to it," Hart told Reuters in an interview to mark the publication.

"The rhythms of language that make great poetry are very primitive. I have every confidence children will fall in love with it once they hear it."

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Hart bemoans the loss of oral traditions at British schools.

"Poetry should not be a distant thing. It should be the closest of art forms," she said.

I wish some big name would make the same effort in American schools. I grew up hating poetry because it was taught so badly, and made to feel so remote from my experience. Most adults admit that they don't how to read poetry. Maybe if we taught with poetry as a major part of the curriculum, and taught our children how to think in symbolic terms and to understand metaphor, we'd appreciate poetry a little more. And we might be better people, too.

Tags: Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Josephine Hart, poetry, children, poetry in the schools