A Prof Sounds Off
If Doctor BOP is the Burnt-Out Prof, what’s the source of the burning? At least partly, it’s the friction between past and present. In the long poem that starts E.M. Schorb’s book and provides its title, the Prof mentions geniuses whose names speak volumes to his generation but who today are the kind of dead white men that excite few students: Donne, Hogarth, Thomas Wolfe. And a dead language too, Yiddish. In fact, as if growling to scare off any frivolous youngsters among the readership, Schorb starts that first poem with a Yiddish expression — actually one of a very few that the book contains: “My old man was a Moishe Kapoyr if you ever saw one.” I had to look it up on the web. It turns out that Moishe was a cartoon figure in The Jewish Daily Forward who did everything backwards and understood everything in the opposite way. A real Moishe Kapoyr would start reading the book from the end and might, I think, start off with a better grasp of it that way. The book has three parts. After “Life and Opinions of Doctor Bop” come several “Related Poems” and then “Other Poems.” The last of the “other” poems, though, very much describes the book in general. It says, “The buoys of memory have faint bells, noticed in the night. / I have left these chiming seamarks for the time of my return.” That metaphor is good for all the poems, which seem to set memories and remarks afloat on the page to be recaptured later, or not, for better or worse, by the protagonist or the reader or the hand of time. The opening poem presents strong contrarian thoughts from the Burnt-Out Prof, whom academic fashion has left behind. Called upon to show concern for others all over the world, “We are asked to stretch fraternity’s blood / until we become anemic, pale pretenders / to emotion, vampires of passion.” Another poet might have chosen to give such aphorisms great prominence, but Schorb here leaves them for the reader to find in the context of lengthy rambles. The Prof remarks that “lateral thinking impinged” as he thought of the college where he works (“an historic college that no longer / recognizes history as a legitimate subject”), and the opening poem is indeed a long, winding train of thought although it starts neatly in his childhood and ends neatly in his present. And while he complains that scholarship is in decline, the Prof also has his own doubts about how important a factor it is in the immediacy of life. Poetry may be a more promising game: “an actual little stab / and, poets hope, rip in the black sheet / that covers the deserted, haunted mansion.” The “Related Poems” of the second part are observations that certainly echo the Burnt-Out Prof thematically. The Prof himself wrote in the first part that “Living with the bomb has made tragedy impossible. / ‘Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Live with the Bomb,’ / is a comedy. No deliberate war was possible.” (Yes, Schorb gets the movie’s title a bit wrong.) One of the “Related Poems” rings a variation: “Arthur Miller says tragedy is impossible in our time. / Only drama. It’s dramatic to lose your breath. / When you get it back, you laugh because you were so silly, / and life returns to comedy.” In another, the Prof meets the gods of Rome. In a third, he uses rhyme as he contemplates old age. Others are not in the name of the Prof but could be the apocrypha to his canon. In the “Other Poems” of the book’s third part, E.M. Schorb discards the persona of the Burnt-Out Prof in order to write somewhat less waspishly, a bit more lyrically, and apparently even more autobiographically about his youth, the people he values, and his inner life. So the Burnt-Out Prof isn’t exactly a doppelganger of Schorb himself, even though there are similarities. Even though Schorb also drops the names of writers that many of us couldn’t pass a simple quiz on. Even though Schorb is so old-fashioned that he has actually published a book of his letters (called Carbons). The big difference is that far from burning out, E.M. Schorb still burns bright. Like the Burnt-Out Prof of the book, reviewer Mark L. Levinson remembers better times; but he thinks back on Harvard Yard rather than Washington Square. Today he lives a few miles north of Tel Aviv, works as a translator, and occasionally writes poetry, op-eds, and miscellanea. Note: The views and opinions expressed in this review are not necessarily the views and opinions held by Blue as an Orange or any of its staff.
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11/19/2023 10:55:26 pm
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