Last night, I read an amazing Richard Powers' essay in the new Pushcart volume about how computers will affect books and the narrative in general--some lab has created a program that can produce quite effective and genuine and even autonomous characters and plots. I don't quite know what to make of it all--both the essay and the cyber-world. Am I turning my back on the real one? Or the book one? By wasting time with the blog.



But I must say there is a serendipity that comes with all this information overload. In regards to my brain's limited storage capacity, for example, I have always tried to hold there Elizabeth Bishop's poem Casabianca, which I think I know by heart, and as I don't have her book at hand I'll type it out as well as I can remember:



Love's the boy stood on the deck trying to recite

"The boy stood on the burning deck."

Love's the boy stood on the deck while the whole

proud ship in flames went down.



Love's the boy, the burning ship and even the swimming sailors who

would love to have a schoolroom platform too

or any excuse to stay on deck.

And love's the burning boy.



Since I typed that from memory, the line breaks are probably all wrong, as well as other glitches. But I always loved that poem and never knew what it meant, until the other day when Garrison Keillor e-mailed me his chosen poem for the day. It's long, but here's the beginning of it, by Felicia Dorothea Hemans.



Casabianca



The boy stood on the burning deck

Whence all but he had fled;

The flame that lit the battle's wreck

Shone round him o'er the dead.



Yet beautiful and bright he stood,

As born to rule the storm;

A creature of heroic blood,

A proud, though childlike form.





FDH lived 1793-1835: don't know if I'll research her more than that. But at last the mystery is solved.



Also the other day I found out who Gaspara Stampa was (a 16th century Italian writer of sonnets.) Her name figured into a contemporary poem I used to like, and use in class, but I can't remember much more about it than that it included a line about having "hands like eggbeaters." If anyone knows where that line comes from, let me know.