Poetry discussion by contemporary poets

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2009/05/a-short-highly-personal-observation-completely-lacking-in-examples-which-i-could-have-never-have-made-thirty-years-ago-when-i-was-a-young-poet-still-living-in-new-york-because-i-didn’t-know/

1.A

A SHORT, HIGHLY PERSONAL OBSERVATION COMPLETELY LACKING IN EXAMPLES WHICH I COULD HAVE NEVER HAVE MADE THIRTY YEARS AGO WHEN I WAS A YOUNG POET STILL LIVING IN NEW YORK, BECAUSE I DIDN’T KNOW ENOUGH TO KNOW IT WAS TRUE. BUT I DO NOW.
BY MARTIN EARL

W.H. Auden once said that he always felt that he was the youngest person in the room, even at an older age, when this was certainly not the case. I’ve felt similarly while blogging, especially when being reprimanded by commentators half my age. This could have all sorts of explanations. But for the moment let’s file them under “Monkey Glands”, aka W.B. Yeats. Today, I have a more pressing issue at hand, a comment on the younger generations of scriveners; or to reverse Auden’s impression, all of those younger than myself and involved, in one way or another, in the palimpsestic quest of poetry. I mean poets in their twenties, thirties and forties – fifty being the cut-off date.

Of course, there are exceptions but for the moment I am intent on generalizing. In the field of poetry, women make better bloggers than do their male counterparts, also better commentators, better critics and, increasingly, better poets. Of the younger generation of poets I am discovering through my involvement with Harriet, the women are clearly superior. Not only is their poetry more ambitious and achieved but their criticism is more daring, their originality of thought deeper and their wit more honed.
Why should this be? One reason perhaps (and this is undoubtedly one of those clichés for which I will be run out of town) is that women have an ontological connection that men don’t have to making and creating, to nurturing form out of raw materials: out of themselves, out of language and out of the ground, in the sense of both lettuce patches and the Heidegerrean notion of fundamentum absolutum, or der grund. Heidegger posits a reversal of the Cartesian first principle and says “I am therefore I think.” This stands in well for the difference between male and female sensibilities.
Traditionally discouraged or prevented from taking part in social paradigms of creative expression (with the exception, of course, of motherhood) women have learned patience, the art of autonomy and a capacity for restraint. Related to these qualities is the fact that they are more open to difference, generally more tolerant, and less threatened by the mechanisms of authority: those mechanisms that are found in traditional knowledge structures, traditional language structures and traditional institutional structures. Since historically women have had to defend themselves against the power emanating from these structures, their mastery and insight into the workings of power is deeper. Likewise, women’s competitive instincts are more subtly attuned to the task at hand, the medium they are dealing with, the objectives of a given project than they are with the impression they would like to make upon the world. This comes from ease with self-effacement, which in artistic endeavors results in a more thoroughgoing capacity for immersion in the project at hand. They are more apt to experiment in ways that produce organic forms for expressive purposes rather than try, as men so often do, to trick language into duplicating the will. Because women are generally more sensitive to others, they are more sensitive to the needs of the poem. Because they are more coherent, grounded and possess a higher degree of self-knowledge at a younger age, they are better prepared to resist the influences of their teachers, their education and even the expectations of the medium they are working in. Hence they are more original.
Decades of work by women to open new formats, create equalities, to encourage creative and intellectual work, to valorize the special experiences of women (both material and intellectual), and to formulate a critical framework for understanding the various forms of oppression woman have born, and continue to bear, is, in my opinion, and in my special field of concern (poetry and literary criticism) also responsible for the health, innovation and continuing wonder of the medium. But it is not the whole story, and it is time to move on, away from theory and back to practice. On a practical level, that of making and reading poems, male poets now have more to learn from how women work, and from what they are saying and creating than vice versa.
And yet in spite of what I say above (characterizing women’s experience, perhaps inaccurately, and seeing their poetry as having benefited from that experience) I have never been comfortable with the designation “women’s poetry”, or with any of the other normative appellations that marked 20th century discussions on the subject and that led to misleading typologies and atomizations. In fact, I follow Berryman’s cue in not distinguishing between British and American poetry – and I carry that further to all poets writing in English: Irish, South African, Indian and West Indian, Australian etc. (two of my favorite poets, John Kinsella and Less Murray, are from down under).
I’m even uncomfortable (since I live and work in a polyglot setting) with classifying poets or their poems by language. To pit French poets against German poets seems hardly useful when we finally arrive at the poem itself. My Portuguese colleagues, some of whom I’ve translated, are essentially doing the same thing that I do when I write a poem. The fact that they are writing in Portuguese doesn’t matter in the end. Of course different situations produce different poems, but this is a question of topicality and character and follows no scientifically consistent pattern. When I have to use categories I prefer them to be as large as possible and related to historical conditions, which effect poets in an aleatory fashion. I recently argued that postwar Central European poetry was stronger than that produced in Western Europe over the same period, but these are supranational categories and have more to do with how two different political systems effected creativity in a variable and highly unorganized fashion. Just as women, over the last three centuries, have had more hurdles to overcome than men when it came to legitimizing their status as artists and poets, Central Europeans had far more difficulties creating poetry and publishing freely in the postwar period. Perhaps a degree of resistance helps in the creation of art. Be it as it may, it is the art that we must finally look at, independent of even the most sweeping categories.
(cf. http://www.ou.edu/worldlit/onlinemagazine/2007May/20quintais-earl.pdf )

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

This is not to say that poets should not use (if such were possible) their special experience, experience that can derive from many things: location, language, race, gender, poverty, wealth, temperament, what they read and what they don’t read, or whatever. But for the reader or the critic to use these experiences taxonomically corrupts our capacity to evaluate poetry at the level of the poem.
By looking at poetry qua poetry we are more apt to read more sensitively, praise more accurately and winnow more decisively. But just in case you’ve missed my point, I think we’d all be the better for paying serious attention to the poems now being made by poets who happen to be women, and trying to figure out why they’re so good.
COMMENTS (111)

1.B
On May 19, 2009 at 10:20 am Michael J. wrote:
I find that the moment one says “there are exceptions”, the act of generalization becomes a fallacy. It is impossible to generalize unless you are willing to deal in stereotypes and false structures.
I grew up in a family of women, a house of women. And when I say this, I don’t mean we were outnumbered by a small margin… I mean we equaled 3 or 4 other men in the range of 50 women. If that. And if I were to remove those other men, I was usually alone with upwards of 15 women at a time.
But I agree female creatives are way more fascinating to me than my male counterparts. I recently bought Sandra Beasley’s “Theories of Falling” and Olena K. Davis’ first book “And her soul out of nothing”. They should arrive this week. But they aren’t the only ones tickling my poetics.
Anyway… I really don’t think it comes down to simply male and female, though we have our differences… but those differences, I am realizing, are less inherent.
You could view me as the exception, meaning, I am very in touch with my feminine side — what does that mean? Nearly all the personality qualities you may associate with the feminine, you could see in me. Same with the masculine. Which then tend to cancel each other out and simply allow one to be themselves, without the need to tag certain qualities with “masculine” or “feminine”.
And if I am then viewed as an exception, I am not special enough to believe I am *the* exception. This means there is another, and if this is two, there is likely three, and so on and so on… which then possibly leads us back to the phrase: there are exceptions, but I will deal in generalizations…
It is possible then that when people say this, they are saying (obviously, I guess) generalizations outweigh the exceptions… of course, this is impossible to account for. As generalizations exist in this outer realm of opinions and wants and other things…
You did mention personal experience coloring ones self and in turn ones work… which I agree with…
And I haven’t attempted to answer your original question — why are women creatives so enticing (read: popular?) these days when put parallel with the male creatives…
Maybe it is the swing of times that we, males that is, are truly and finally noticing such things? Maybe there are more women on the position to give notice to other women who may go unnoticed? (this I want to doubt, because I’d hope art is the only space where such prejudices and sexism do not exist… but this is only a wish, as I have seen mass amounts of ego and childish antics involved in poetry when I used to perform with a poetry group).
I feel I am contradicting myself here.
It is very likely we are all exceptions…
I dunno…
On May 19, 2009 at 12:14 pm Zachary Bos wrote:
The will to debunk this post point-by-point has been leached right out of me by the solar intensity of the poor reasoning on display. Among the topics misunderstood are ontology, gender, Heidegger, instinct, creativity, and logic. Pious affirmations of generally agreeable statements do not give shoddy thinking a pass. To self: is my hyper-critical response a masculine trope?
On May 19, 2009 at 12:20 pm Joseph Hutchison wrote:
Michael J.—I take exception to your statement about generalities and exceptions. We can all agree that there are mammals, and that mammals are distinguished by the possession of hair or fur, the secretion of milk by females for the nourishment of their young, and by giving birth to live young. The platypus and the spiny ant-eater are exceptions: mammals that lay eggs, i.e., monotremes. The problem is not with the generalities; the problem is that our systems are not completely congruent with the world.
This is part of Martin’s point, I think: in a world where gender equality is assumed, we still find women writing stronger poems. By “we,” of course, I mean Martin and me; I share his feeling but know as well as he does that it’s highly personal and subjective.
Nevertheless, I think what Martin says is true about the superiority of women poets, especially in certain “camps.” I’ve especially felt this when criticizing so-called Language poets for their many weaknesses. I always have to insert the caveat that I admire several poets in that camp, and that for some reason they are all women. (Not that I admire all female Language poets!) I too wonder why this should be so. But I’m a poet and a reader, not a critic and certainly not a theorist. So I’ll have to wait for someone with talents in that direction to suggest an answer….
On May 19, 2009 at 1:27 pm Daniel E. Pritchard wrote:
I’m interested to know who the women are to which you refer. (Also, I think it’s accepted generally that anyone over 40 isn’t young anymore, by any standard except comparison.) Also, though my memory may not serve me, I recall that in the late 19th and early 20th century, most of the most popular and well-respected authors, essayists, and poets were women, though few have persisted — how would this be a substantially different phenomenon?
On May 19, 2009 at 2:02 pm thomas brady wrote:
Who is this mysterious gunslinger leaning quietly against the wall?
Be still, my heart!
On May 19, 2009 at 2:51 pm Desmond Swords wrote:
I think this measuring the contemporary quality of one’s writing based on gender, contains elements of both truth and fantasy, but is ultimately a defective and redundant position to put forward.
Consider the following statement, which is the exact same as Jason makes, but with the genders reversed:
“Men make better bloggers than do their female counterparts, also better commentators, better critics and, increasingly, better poets. Of the younger generation of poets I am discovering through my involvement with Harriet, the men are clearly superior.”
The comedian in me calls to mind a (good looking and cunning) pal i knew when i was in my mid twenties, who donned a right-on cloak of ultra PC Femminism when in his university years.
any (often totally innocuous) comment which he construed as sexist and/or insulting to women, even when the (inevitably) student-men making what he considered to be such, did so in innocence and even if though most others would not see the anti-woman slant — my pal would stand up for the sisterhood and generally sing to the skies of his battle for the gals.
But in reality, it was all an act he engaged in purely to ingratiate himself with the women, in order to pursue a thoroughly male agenda of bedding as many women as he could. And it worked. he got a name as the metro-sexual all caring fella, amongst early twenties women and when this three year period of his life finished, went back to being the sexists git i always knew.
My own background is, i was reared with four sisters, three older, one younger and myself and my father, the only men.
Currently i have seven neices and three nephews, all seven necies arriving on the scene before the nephews. Growing up, i was effectively a token girl in the sense of having no brothers.
~
I think the Amergin text i have been banging on about, which explains what Poetry is, the fundamental of it, that 50% of all humanity will be born with the poetic gift, can be appropriated to this debate.
Rather than reversing it and elevating Woman to the position Man previously held in the delsion that He was God, my learning has brought me to making Jason’s statement this:
“wo/men make better bloggers, also better commentators, better critics and, increasingly, better poets. Of the younger generation of poets I am discovering through my involvement with Harriet, the wo/men are clearly superior.”
This is true 50/50 gender neutrality.
Our mind is neither male or female, but a s/he and once we transcend gender, come to understand it in these plain terms. The bnest writing is gender neutral, a third person eye speaking for all pronouns.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

2A

On May 19, 2009 at 3:12 pm Colin Ward wrote:
Martin,
There may be another perspective to this. In the print world, among living poets we tend to see men dominating the scene: Cohen, Ondaatje, Heaney, Hill, Walcott, Collins, etc. By contrast, a poll of internet poets had all four top spots taken by women: Grinnell, Griffith, Carter, Copeland, plus Lindley (6th) and Kelleher (10th)–and this was before Kristalo arrived on the scene!
Others will judge which media or process can serve as the better meritocracy, now or in the future.
Best regards,
Colin
“If you don’t think your work is competing against the works of others you’re probably right!”
– Elizabeth Zuk
“Even a burning flag has to be waved, if only to put out the flames…”
– Dale M. Houstman
-o-
On May 19, 2009 at 7:23 pm Pris Campbell wrote:
I’m a female blogger/poet over 50 and I don’t feel any gender superiority at all. It’s true. Reverse the gender in this post and we women would be screaming ‘chauvinistic!’.
On May 19, 2009 at 9:40 pm Steve wrote:
Dear Colin Ward: who are these Internet poets described in your poll? they’re not the poets I know from the Internet. Can you post a link?
Dear Martin: Provocative, certainly; but I wish you would name some of your favorite younger, or “younger,” poets. Do they all write about experience that has historically, or biologically (e.g. parturition) been the province of women? Some women poets write about things like parturition, which men can’t do (Elizabeth Alexander has a whole sequence); some women poets seem to be undertaking ecriture feminine (Larissa Szporluk, sometimes); some women poets write about topics traditionally considered feminine– sex, beauty, the beauty myth, raising young children, managing a household (Laura Kasischke! Laura Kasischke!); and some women poets, most of the time, don’t do any of those things (Kay Ryan, Lucia Perillo, many many others). Does your claim apply equally to all four categories? If so, why? If not, isn’t it just a claim that we seek out, and should seek out, contemporary poets whose topics and approaches are under-represented in the literature of the past? (As we should.)
On May 19, 2009 at 10:04 pm Reb Livingston wrote:
Well I feel all kinds of superiority and not just because of my gender, but that’s a start. Heh.
I concur with much of what Martin Earl has written, of course he can get away with writing it and not being labeled as bitter or a ball snipper.
What I mean is that as an editor, I too have noticed a trend in the submission pile. On *average* I find the work of contemporary female poets to be more daring, original and interesting. My magazine receives more submissions from men (about 10-15% more), but it publishes more women. Years ago when I first noticed this, I was surprised. All along I thought I preferred male poets. I owned more books by them, was definitely more familiar with their work from major literary magazines and from my education. Turns out I was incredibly ignorant.
So when certain editors talk about the “number troubles” I don’t understand why this is even an issue. Are these editors living in a cave?
One can chalk up my observations to my taste and bias, which I most certainly have, like every other editor and poet.
Reb
On May 19, 2009 at 11:21 pm michael j wrote:
Reb, and other Editors out there,
If you were to remove the names from submissions (unless this is done already), do you feel you’d naturally gravitate towards female writers? Very curious to know.
___
All this talk of child raising and such, is, to me, a stereotype which frustrates me. Men can raise child just as women do. The pregnancy aspect is agreeable. No man (except the fictional character Arnold played in that one movie where he got pregnant) can ever experience pregnancy. The genetic/instinctual chain-link which rises from the bottoms of the stardust which binds us will eventually explode from the creative mind. It is inevitable. And this does, possibly, provide a different slant to ones work.
Though the specific experience of being a woman can’t be recreated, meaning — shoot, you know what I mean — but the oppression can be. That type of experience can be. On many various levels, no?
If I am reading the article correct, Martin is wondering if this is why the work is more daring. Or, rather, one of the reasons. Good question. The natural instincts instilled in us seep into our work, most definitely. Creativity is one of those deeper, ancient things.
But I dunno, I think the better way to approach this is where you almost went but stopped, “On a practical level, that of making and reading poems, male poets now have more to learn from how women work, and from what they are saying and creating than vice versa.”
Approach it from why male’s aren’t doing the daring work to figure out why females are. I think I’m gonna attempt that. Thanks Martin!
And did anyone else find that portrait genius? How the hands are held, with the head cocked, she is purely an adult woman. But with the foot soles touching, her legs slanted like that, she is purely a young girl.
The juxtaposition makes me keep staring at it.
On May 19, 2009 at 11:59 pm Reb Livingston wrote:
“If you were to remove the names from submissions (unless this is done already), do you feel you’d naturally gravitate towards female writers? Very curious to know.”
Yep. Like I said, I began the magazine believing I preferred male poets. It wasn’t until after a year of publishing different poets each week that I “looked at the numbers” and realized my preference leaned otherwise.
Not sure why this is such an unbelievable or questionable concept. I’m trying to be honest and open here regarding my editorial leanings as I best understand them. If certain poetry magazines dropped the malarky of “we only publish the BEST regardless of . . .” and were more open/aware of their own leanings, whether it be style, subject matter, etc., I’d have much less of an issue with them. If the editors came clean and said something like “Well, we’ve been publishing for 20 years and 75% of the poems are by white men and 65% are narrative, so we must at least have some unconscious editorial leanings in those directions.” But no, instead they blame it on women having babies or being too shy to submit or lacking a certain kind of ambition. Because as editors of course they have no control what appears on their pages!

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

2B

On May 20, 2009 at 9:31 pm Desmond Swords wrote:
Actually Marty my arl ramblin mahn,
you are right.
At least, going on the poems in an edition of a British e zine i recently read, edited by a woman, with around 80% of the poems by men, and with a preponderance of authoratitive philisophical all seeing all knowing narrator ‘I’s going for the majestrial note and not pulling it off.
The few women that were in there, by contrast, there stuff was much more creative.
The blokes tended to try to hard to be God, and in British poetry, the legacy of Larkin (a misanthropic man with racists leanings obsessed with swearing and with a massive complex about women) who introduced or at least made the the eff word acceptable as a poetic one – is the wrapping of mundane events (catching a bus, having a dump on the crapper) in a conversational prosaic style and then a stab at high blown lingo, evinced in the Larkin’s sun-comprending glass and nothingness schtick.
Unfortunatley, it just comes across as posey twaddle by straight faced blokey bores.
The gals gear though, was less ambitious – didn’t want to tell us the deepest fundamental secrets of the universal knowledge in a poem about a fridge- but instead seemed to spiral about in and around the concept of poetic expression in general, per se, vis a vis, a bit more jiggle, phwaor ‘n oomph Marty me arl god-like knower.
On May 20, 2009 at 10:02 pm Colin Ward wrote:
I tried posting a version of this yesterday but it didn’t show up. If it does so belatedly, I apologize for the double post.
Martin:
No, I don’t think you’re prejudging at all.
Incidentally and for what it’s worth, those interested in gender differences in writing who haven’t seen this site might be amused:
Gender Genie:
http://bookblog.net/gender/genie.php
Steve:
Dear Colin Ward: who are these Internet poets described in your poll? they’re not the poets I know from the Internet. Can you post a link?
The “Caught on the Net” poll was taken a few years back. The site is defunct now but, fortunately, I kept a copy of it, which I can email you if you’d like. The question posed was: “Suppose there were an anthology of poems by the best online English language poets. Whose work (other than your own) would you like to see included?” The respondents were members of the more serious, expert internet venues: Poetry Free-For-All, Gazebo, Eratosphere, and Usenet (the web’s evil twin). Here are the URL’s for these moderated critical venues:
The Poetry Free-For-All:
http://www.everypoet.org/pffa/
Gazebo in Exile (this URL is about to change):
http://thegazeboinexile.iforums.us/
Eratosphere:
http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/Ultimate.cgi
QED:
http://www.qedpoetry.com/
All of these sites have thriving discussion and theory forums within them. Members are often called “workshoppers”, but that is something of a misnomer; many members spend more of their time discussing poetry–much as we see here, but with the ability of all members to initiate threads and edit their posts–than posting or critiquing individual poems. One caveat regarding PFFA in particular: behave yourself and bring your best game.
To access Usenet you need to install a newsreader program (e.g. Free Agent); the two most active newsgroups are rec.arts.poems and alt.arts.poetry.comments. One has to wade through a lot of trolls to get to the good stuff, though. N.B.: webbers (among whom workshoppers and bloggers are subsets) and Usenetters form two very different communities, often oblivious to each other.
As for the poets I mentioned, I’m not really qualified to write their bio or CV but here are some impressions and what few facts I know:
Professor Claudia Grinnell is perhaps better known as a fine critiquer. I believe she was one of the founders and administrators on QED–one of the smaller advanced online workshops. Claudia hasn’t been very active lately.
Britisher Margaret A. Griffith, aka “Maz”, is the author of “Studying Savonarola”, a poem that might be trotted out when onliners speak of the best poems of the 21st century, whenever anyone says that free verse “isn’t poetry” or that stunning romantic poems aren’t still being written. When Carol Ann Duffy was named as Poet Laureate more than a few internetters wondered if selection committee members shouldn’t be subjected to mandatory drug testing. Maz is a member of PFFA, Gazebo and Eratosphere.
Julie Carter is “the sonnet lady”, active on Usenet, Gazebo and Eratosphere. She’s also a huge baseball fan.
Kim “K.R.” Copeland is arguably the most consistent, quirky and interesting performer. She seems to post mostly to Gazebo.
Rachel Lindley is a very good theorist, along with the likes of Howard Miller (PFFA), Robert MacKenzie (PFFA, Usenet), Harry Rutherford (PFFA), and, of course, Peter John Ross (Usenet). Her articles on PFFA’s “Blurbs of Wisdom”, especially those on the topic of sonics, are a must read for any serious student of the art form.
http://www.everypoet.org/pffa/forumdisplay.php?s=&daysprune=&f=34
Rose Kelleher is a solid performer whose stock, like Ms. Copeland’s, may have risen in recent years.
D.P. Kristalo (Poets.org, Gazebo) wrote both “Beans” and “Joie de Mourir”. Need I say more?
Francesca Sweeney-Androulaki (Gazebo), Jennifer Reeser (Eratosphere), and Sarah Sloat (Desert Moon Review) are others well worth Googling on a rainy afternoon.
If anyone is curious, humourist Sam Home (Gazebo & Eratosphere) topped the male poets. Robert J. Maughan (Usenet), Frank Matagrano (Gazebo), Andrew Kei Miller (Usenet, Gazebo), Oswald LeWinter (Gazebo, Zoetrope), Jerry H. Jenkins (Usenet) and Dale Houstman (Usenet) are other familiar names to those internetters outside the blogosphere, at least.
I hope this albeit sketchy overview helps, Steve.
-o-
On May 21, 2009 at 10:34 am gmc wrote:
“..as man won’t be male
and woman won’t be female..” (gospel of thomas)
what kind of poet are you, dear martin, whose memory is like a hole full of kaleidoscopic souvenirs?
what you call man and woman are simply male and female, anything else, and your text is like an hallucination of yours, not less, not more.
(sorry for my bad english, but i’m not english-speaking born)

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

Comments anybody?
As can be readily seen, the field of writing classed as Poetry is massively broad and deep!
With as much controversy as is life in general and the world at large!
I found the admission about the better contemporary poets being female quite enlightening and one I must delve further into to verify if made as a sound judgment. I do not negate that as a possibility but have not enough knowledge of contemporary poetry as I do of the classic poetry of the giants known and praised the world over..
Be it readily admitted that I do not attempt to mimic other poets be they famous or even talented unknowns.
I stubbornly follow my own path and measure in my writings be it for good or ill. . Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

Comments anybody?
As can be readily seen, the field of writing classed as Poetry is massively broad and deep!
With as much controversy as is life in general and the world at large!
I found the admission about the better contemporary poets being female quite enlightening and one I must delve further into to verify if made as a sound judgment. I do not negate that as a possibility but have not enough knowledge of contemporary poetry as I do of the classic poetry of the giants known and praised the world over..
Be it readily admitted that I do not attempt to mimic other poets be they famous or even talented unknowns.
I stubbornly follow my own path and measure in my writings be it for good or ill. . Tyr
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continued from previous stopping point......

3A. On May 24, 2009 at 12:21 am Terreson wrote:
Man, this thread is so rich it makes me want to go out to a local Mexican restaurant, a favorite watering hole among local professionals, and order two top shelf margueritas. Initial blog entry is juicy. The ensuing conversation with its ideological lines drawn fascinating. And, rather to be expected, there is Thomas Brady championing the poetry of Millay like some good feminist. Elsewhere on this forum he has expressed perfect dismissiveness of such women poets as H.D., Mina Loy, Marianne Moore, and Laura Riding. But that is all silly stuff, perfectly inconsequential.
Martin Earl, here is what I get from your blog entry. Mind you, I am having to dig a little here. Your entry relies a bit much on short-hand for its thinking. You are not saying, categorically, women are better poets than are men. But you are saying there is a certain capacity for poetry, and for poetry comprehension, women poets have a main line to that men poets do not constitutionally have. And I agree. (It would have been beneficial, by the way, had you made the effort and given the examples you said you wouldn’t. That you don’t amounts to a laziness.)
From your comments I am figuring you are over fifty. So am I. I read your post and I think: is he just now coming to the tidal turn in poetry women have always, always made? Your discovery, while it may be new to you, is really not all that new. Speaking for myself, I say flat out the big discoveries I’ve made in poetry, and in writing in general, have always come at the hands of women writers. H.D., Colette, Riding, Dickinson, Sexton, Heloise, Madame de Sevigne, Lady Murasaki, Italian folk poets of the strege tradition. These are the poets and writers who’ve taught me the essential things. They happen to be women. The exceptions to the rule have tended to prove the rule: both Rilke and Goethe.
There is a story Robert Graves tells. He is speaking of Sappho whom he considered about the greatest poet who has ever lived. He felt she gave perfect voice to The Lady of the Wild Things.
“Sappho undertook this responsibility: one should not believe the malevolent lies of the Attic comedians who caricature her as an insatiable Lesbian. The quality of her poems proves her to have been a true Cerridwen. I once asked my so-called Moral Tutor at Oxford, a Classical scholar and Apollonian: ‘Tell me, sir, do you think that Sappho was a good poet?’ He looked up and down the street, as if to see whether anyone was listening and then confided to me: ‘Yes, Graves, that’s the trouble, she was very, very good!’ I gathered that he considered it fortunate that so little of her work had survived.”
I am glad for you you’ve come to what you’ve come to. Maybe it is important to put it out yet again. On the other hand I got to say this. One Sappho, one Dickinson, one Millay, one Sexton, one Pattie Smith no more makes a poet than one Eliot, one Crane, one Lorca, or one Neruda.
Anyway, your picture amounts to an idealization of women I am not sure Jane Austen, George Eliot, Colette, or Simone de Beauvoir would cotton to. While I note the biggest lessons I’ve learned have come at the hands of women poets I also note the majority of women poets are no less or more mediocre than their male counterparts.
Terreson

On May 24, 2009 at 9:39 am Gary B. Fitzgerald wrote:
The only champion a good poet needs is Father Time.
Ask Emily and John.

On May 24, 2009 at 11:20 am thomas brady wrote:
Terreson,
So I’ve been hoisted by my own petard?
“there is Thomas Brady championing the poetry of Millay like some good feminist. Elsewhere on this forum he has expressed perfect dismissiveness of such women poets as H.D., Mina Loy, Marianne Moore, and Laura Riding.”
Your strategy is insidious, Tere, this damning with faint praise all women poets, dooming every last one.
If one ignores the light-years of talent separating
Edna St. Vincent Millay, author of half of the 10 best sonnets ever written in English
and
H.D., Pound’s GF,
Marianne Moore, Dial Clique editor and supporter,
Laura Riding, Fugitive club member and Robert Graves’ GF,
then one is merely damning with faint praise ALL WOMEN POETS. This is a TRICK by the male status quo: include a few women (a GF, why not?) whose poetry is laced with FAILURE, and by doing so blur all distinctions so that it is assumed critical rigor is not even necessary when it comes to women.
As I said before, if Millay is thrown under the bus, no woman is safe.
There is plenty of documentary proof for what I am saying. Millay actually felt a kinship with Poe, who was abused by the same envious, low readership, fragile, ambitious, Modernist clique, and there’s a plethora of evidence to back up these facts.
Tere, you like to believe, with Mr. Fitzgerald, that poets are superheroes who don’t need critics and that criticism is mostly an annoyance and a sign of impotent envy, but I’m afraid this is a childish belief; a few well-placed notices can destroy a poet’s reputation, especially if she is a woman.
Thomas

On May 24, 2009 at 1:16 pm Gary B. Fitzgerald wrote:
Hey…don’t drag me into this sordid affair.
I’m just a simple, didactic, philosophical Nature poet, remember, Thomas?

On May 24, 2009 at 2:16 pm thomas brady wrote:
You can’t wriggle out of this one… Mr. Wordsworth!

On May 24, 2009 at 4:50 pm Gary B. Fitzgerald wrote:
Actually, Thomas, I’m a lot closer to your hero, Eddie Al, than I am to all these others.
Especially in the drinking department. :-)
I’d be happy to declare my own heroes here but the only ones I can come up with are William Blake, Dylan Thomas, Lao tzu and E.E. Cummings. Oh, and Bob Dylan. Oh, yeah, and Charles Darwin, Galileo, Newton, Einstein and Copernicus and oh, that’s right, Shakespeare and Keats and Whitman. And did I mention Dickinson, Lindsay, Snyder, Frost, Plath, Wright, Roethke, Merwin, Yeats, Millay, Stevens, Eliot, Williams, Pound, Bishop, Lowell, Crane, Patchen, Rexroth, Moore, Ashbery, Creeley, Bly, Sexton, and everybody else who ever taught me how to think?

On May 24, 2009 at 7:08 pm Terreson wrote:
Thomas Brady says:
“Edna St. Vincent Millay, author of half of the 10 best sonnets ever written in English.”
On whose authority, please. The sonnet in English has been pursued for a good 500 years. 5 out of 10 best sonnets in English might be a bit of a claim even for the most ardent of Millay’s enthusiasts.
Thomas Brady says:
“There is plenty of documentary proof for what I am saying. Millay actually felt a kinship with Poe, who was abused by the same envious, low readership, fragile, ambitious, Modernist clique, and there’s a plethora of evidence to back up these facts.”
I look forward to reviewing the documentation.
Thomas Brady says:
“Tere, you like to believe, with Mr. Fitzgerald, that poets are superheroes who don’t need critics and that criticism is mostly an annoyance and a sign of impotent envy,…”
Actually, I view the case of critics in a much less flattering light. They put me in mind of cowbirds (species: molthrus), whose parasititic habits have become a seriously impacting disruption in the natural history of other bird species, what with their learned behavior of laying their eggs in the nests of other birds. Now there is an objective correlative for you.
Terreson

On May 24, 2009 at 10:56 pm Gary B. Fitzgerald wrote:
I forgot Shelley, Tennyson, Byron, Pope and Poe. And that’s the thing, Thomas. It’s like a smorgasbord, a cornucopia of flavor and styles, ideas and thought. No one selection is any better or more delicious than the other, just…different. Different people have different tastes.
You don’t like the fish, try the beef. Don’t like the crab, try the steamed peas and lamb.
It’s an unending buffet for the mind, the whole world in a sauteed kipper. It’s poetry!

On May 24, 2009 at 11:16 pm thomas brady wrote:
Nice list.
Yea…Einstein’s great.
Your point?

On May 25, 2009 at 1:06 am Terreson wrote:
Because the interest is vital to me, I keep trying to make sense of this blog entry and subsequent exchange. It would help this reader tremendously if ya’ll blog starters would learn the Montaigne lesson, learn the art of the essay, and compose your thoughts before composing your words. But so it goes.
I am thinking this is what the thread is about, how Martin Earl caps his comments:
“By looking at poetry qua poetry we are more apt to read more sensitively, praise more accurately and winnow more decisively. But just in case you’ve missed my point, I think we’d all be the better for paying serious attention to the poems now being made by poets who happen to be women, and trying to figure out why they’re so good.”
This is the substance of the post, right? Or that serious attention should be given to women poets writing today because they are so good. If this is the proposition I can go with it. I regularly meet in online venues (women) poets who rock me, knock my socks off clean into the washer, who show me something new in rhythm, syntax, and sense. And so I must wonder just how familiar the blog’s author is with the scene, which has pretty much shifted from print to screen.
And I must wonder about something else too. At least in America, women poets have been shifting the scene for a long, long time, or for a good hundred years. The proof is in the popular anthologies of poetry. (You got to love the dialogue we guys and girls got going.) So again I am wondering. Am I allowed to reach back to Lola Ridge, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Angelina Grimke, Sara Teasdale, Elinor Wylie, Hazell Hall, Georgia Johnson, or do I have to put my sights on young women poets working today?

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

FROM POETRY MAGAZINE
The Occasion of Poetry
BY REBECCA GAYLE HOWELL

Note: Each month we feature a guest post from a contributor to Poetry’s current issue. Rebecca Gayle Howell’s poems “Every Job Has a First Day” and “Something’s Coming but Never Does” appear in the June 2015 issue. Previous posts in this series can be found on the Editors’ Blog.]


In my twenties I had the good fortune of living in my homeplace, Lexington, Kentucky, a town that hums with the company of neighbors, many of whom are makers. In those days we were all in it together—literature, I mean. It never mattered who was accomplished and who wasn’t. On any given week at any given reading at the local bookstore, a wanderer-in might sit unawares next to Nikky Finney or Maurice Manning; when a big country laugh rolled out the back room, only some of us would know it was Wendell Berry, at it again with his buddies. If it was a warm night the doors and windows would be open, and as you walked up the block toward the door you’d hear against the noise of cars and katydids all the talk and remembering. If winter was with us, you’d open to the quiet an instant racket I only know to call community, and you’d heat yourself by it alongside the rest of us slap happy souls until some tired someone turned out the lights.
I helped edit a local literary magazine during this time, and when I wrote Wendell to ask him if I could publish a poem of his, I didn’t give it much thought. I mean I knew Wendell, but I didn’t understand who Wendell was (I had to leave Kentucky to find that out). What I wanted was to publish a poem worth reading, and I knew where to look for it. Whether you know Wendell or know of him, it doesn’t matter: he’ll write you back. On the long sheets torn from his yellow legal pad, he’ll return his thoughts to yours the morning following your letter’s arrival, and he’ll sign his, Your friend. In response to what, under more worldly circumstances, would have been a garish request on my part, I received a sheaf of twenty or thirty poems from which I was encouraged to choose as many or as few I saw fit. He wrote that he wouldn’t be surprised if there was nothing for us in the pile, that it was all occasional verse, that he was, more or less now, an occasional poet, a poet who wrote occasionally.
Occasional poetry has a long convention of pageantry—poems hired out, commissioned to celebrate, mourn, or in some way put a pin in a particular instant of history. I think of Mr. Frost’s “The Gift Outright,” our nation’s first inaugural poem which commemorated Kennedy’s election by declaring imperialism our native triumph. Or, come some thirty years later, Ms. Angelou’s inaugural correction, “On the Pulse of Morning,” which gave our land a god’s voice and spoke the chilling lines: “Come, you may stand upon my / Back and face your distant destiny, / But seek no haven in my shadow. I will give you no hiding place down here.” Of course there are those other poems that would not be paid for but censored by such commissioners (Amiri Baraka’s “Somebody Blew Up America” or Ezra Pound’s The Pisan Cantos), but I also think of Gwendolyn Brooks’s A Street in Bronzeville or Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems, poetry that speaks into the forgetting air what should not be forgotten. In his letter to me, Wendell didn’t mean he was being paid to write high, public verse. I think, in fact, he meant something like its opposite. To be occasional means to be willing to be of your time and place, to be of the mortal moment.
Almost twenty years gone from those late Kentucky nights of literary friendship, and I find myself in community with relative strangers, other transient emerging voices tweeting memorials to what is likely America’s greatest generation of poets. Carolyn Kizer. Ai. Amiri Baraka. Adrienne Rich. Lucille Clifton. Galway Kinnell, Maxine Kumin. Phillip Levine. Maya Angelou. Ruth Stone. Gil Scott-Heron. Grace Paley. Claudia Emerson. Lou Reed. Giants of sanity’s work, all gone in a small pile of years. If we can still believe in a human democracy, it is in no small way thanks to these cantankerous, righteous souls. I wish I could hold each in their passing, put my forehead to their foreheads, kiss them goodbye. I cannot. Though I’ve spent my adult life reading, memorizing their poems, charting their words like compass guides, they lived across time from me, and, now, make their neighborhood on history’s other shore. All I know to do is read. And write. And by that I mean, I want to learn their courage of the here and now.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2015/06/the-occasion-of-poetry/

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

ESSAY
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” Turns 100
The famous poem was nearly not published.

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” Turns 100
This month marks the 100th anniversary of T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” published when Eliot was just 26 years old. Had it not been for the intervention of Ezra Pound and Harriet Monroe, the seminal poem that helped usher in American Modernism might not have been published at all.

Eliot originally wrote parts of the monologue of a troubled, middle-aged man in 1910 and soon combined these pieces to form the long, complicated poem readers know now. Then he put it in a drawer for four years and focused on his graduate study in philosophy.

In the spring of 1914, Conrad Aiken, Eliot’s college friend, passed “Prufrock” along to Harold Monro, editor of Poetry and Drama. He reportedly remarked that the poem is “absolutely insane” and turned it down.

In September 1914, Eliot first met Pound in London, who was then the acting foreign correspondent of Poetry. Eliot showed him “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” and Pound was elated. “Prufrock,” wrote Pound to Poetry editor Harriet Monroe, is “the best poem I have yet had or seen from an American,” adding exuberantly in all caps, “PRAY GOD IT BE NOT BE A SINGLE AND UNIQUE SUCCESS.”

The following slideshow features three of Pound’s letters to Monroe, proclaiming Eliot’s talent and urging her to publish “Prufrock.” (“I hope you’ll get it in soon,” he wrote.) She found room in the June 1915 issue. Though Monroe’s responses to Pound are not available, his letters hint at her apprehension. “In being the first American magazine to print Eliot you have scored again, though you may not yet think so,” Pound wrote shortly after “Prufrock” appeared in print, still compelled to convince her of its value.


View slideshow of letters from Pound to Monroe

For more background, watch Eliot scholar and editor Christopher Ricks the Prufrock centenary at Harvard University.

Letters by Ezra Pound, from New Directions Publishing Company acting as agent, copyright 2015 by Mary de Rachewiltz and the Estate of Omar S. Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Company. Photos courtesy of the Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.


Originally Published: June 8, 2015



http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/250664

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

POETRY NEWS
‘Every Era is Replete with Bad Poetry': Donald Hall at New Hampshire Union Leader
BY HARRIET STAFF

Although he quit writing poetry two years ago, citing a connection between poetry’s sensuality and his octogenarian age, Donald Hall did manage to speak rather candidly with the New Hampshire Union Leader about his observations after decades writing poetry. (Although we know little about aging, we agree that poetry is a truly sexy craft.) From New Hampshire Union Leader:
WILMOT – This century appears to be a promising one so far for poetry.
Cities from Manchester to Pasadena host poetry slams. Hip-hop has entrenched its rhythmical brand of poetry into popular culture. And even small-town bookstores feature readings from poets.
Despite the groundswell, New Hampshire’s most famous living poet announced two years ago that he was done with the craft.
“I’m too old,” said Donald Hall, 86, this country’s 14th poet laureate. “I think that poetry’s very sexual, and I think it’s a lack of testosterone or low testosterone. In the early 50s, I said that poetry was ‘rich with sensuality.'”
Hall spoke recently in the book-lined living room of the Wilmot farmhouse that has been in his family for four generations. His right knee is shot, making the front couple of porch steps as daunting a challenge as a granite cliff on his beloved Mount Kearsarge.
He sits in an upholstered chair that is on a 6-inch riser; easier for him to get up and down. He looks out antique glass windows, the kind that warp outside objects like a funhouse mirror. Closest to his view are the peonies and other perennials that his deceased wife – acclaimed poet Jane Kenyon – planted decades ago.
Hall’s best poetry, he said, was written in his 40s and 50s. Over time, his poetic abilities waned. So he just put an end to it (although he does revise previously written poems).
Hall still writes. Like a baseball player who trades his mitt for a golf club, he’s turned to less vibrant endeavors. He answers nearly all letters that come his way. And in 2014, he published “Essays after Eighty,” a wry look at being old. The book landed on the New York Times Bestseller list (for a week, he notes).
“Certainly, he has been a big name of his generation, partly because he so dedicated his life to writing,” said Acworth resident Alice Fogel, the current New Hampshire poet laureate.
In the mid-70s, many writers found his career move inspirational, Fogel said. Encouraged by Kenyon, Hall gave up a tenured job at University of Michigan and moved to the Wilmot farm to make a living writing.
From there, Hall earned his place among New Hampshire’s literary greats. Robert Frost, Maxine Kumin, Charles Simic. All are national poets laureate; each lived in the Granite State. Frost, Hall and Kumin wrote vividly about New England.[…]
Continue at New Hampshire Union Leader.
Tags: Donald Hall, New Hampshire Leader
Posted in Poetry News on Monday, June 22nd, 2015 by Harriet Staff

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2015/06/every-era-is-replete-with-bad-poetry-donald-hall-at-new-hampshire-union-leader/

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2015/05/a-lance-to-pierce-the-possible-reading-n-h-pritchard/


‘a lance to pierce the possible': Reading N. H. Pritchard
BY LILLIAN-YVONNE BERTRAM

I would like to shift away from discussing the deployment of whiteness in conceptual, avant-garde, or experimental writing. In my previous post, “Canvases Pale,” I included a definition of conceptual poetics that links it specifically to the 21st century. Similarly, the definition in the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetics emphasizes the mechanistic mode of reproduction in these poetics, aided largely by the Internet and various means of digital production. But such technologies of writing in the formulation of poetics and aesthetics are not 21st century developments. I’d like to not be so hasty or short-sighted on the matter, and look at some work by N.H. Pritchard. As Kenneth Goldsmith has so keenly shown, various ways of manipulating text objects (words, sentences, sentence placement) do affect the reading and meaning-making of a particular text. I would like to glance at sections of the poem “Metagnomy” from Pritchard’s 1971 collection The Matrix: Poems, 1960-1970.
One striking feature of the poem is the deployment of kerning, the typographic process of “adjusting the space between characters in a proportional font, usually to achieve a visually pleasing result” (Wikipedia). In his era, however, texts would have required physical typesetting in order to print and so I feel that an acknowledgement of the physical process and labor of his designs is required. This likely required more than a keystroke commitment.

In “Metagnomy,” Pritchard draws on themes of nature in the images of birds and wind (“s ee m in g ly/as if a bird in f light” and “in t he w in d s w o n t”). However the poem is preoccupied not as much with the place or location of these images (the place of the poem isn’t exactly a physical one, rather it is “A mid the non com mit t e d/com pound s of t he m in d”) as it is with how, in emphasizing the constructedness of language, our attention is drawn to the ways that these constructions themselves build the image of pastoral beauty. That is, nature has no beauty-qua-beauty independent of how language describes it. The deliberately higher-pitched poetic register of the line “unto the sylvan down of wombs” (“un to t sylvan d own of w om b s”) concretizes the way language, already at least one remove from experience, combines with the expressive desire to abstract the self away from the more-than-human world in the process of trying to approach it more concretely. Language systems, Pritchard seems to suggest, much less traditional modes of writing and presenting text, are just not adequate to the task of developing a subjectivity that can understand the more-than-human elements of the world.
Instead, the poem proposes that by peering through the holes in language we can see the subconscious at work. It is through the activities of the mind that metagnomy, in the power of divination, can approach the mysterious. In this way the prospects of mental divination and access to aspects of the more-than-human world through extrasensory mental perception are assessed through the peeling apart of the words, revealing that the changed course of “a bird in f light” (line 9) is indeed “s ee m in g l y” (line 8). That is, what we perceive as a change in the course of a bird in flight might simply be the course the bird was always on. Similarly, the “w or d/f or got ten/in t he w in d ’ s w on t,” recalls the idea of a voice or words lost in the wind and suggests that words are not lost or forgotten as they are being carried on a different stream.
The poem does not negotiate between the more-than-human world and the world of the human, but is a negotiation with the mental self. The human subject must negotiate the openness and discomfort with the very openness supplied by the linguistic ambiguity the unclosed words suggest. As in many aspects of divination practices, one must first be open to the messages of the more-than-human world in order to access the fact that the mysteries of the mind and the natural world are the same and that there is no opposition. This is different from healing a rift or recapturing innocence, a la the poetics of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and to a lesser extent, Blake and Clare, but a statement as to the artificiality of the rift in the first place. For Pritchard, neither the mind or the text are screens against which the scenes of memory are played and replayed, allowing for a return to a pre-lapsarian childlike pastoral innocence; but the mind is a hem, a mist (both “hem” and “mist” come ghosting through the line “thru a c he mist r y of ought”—and how easy it is to read that as “chemistry of thought”!), an “age-less” (or “age less”?) gleaming. Or is it an “image less gleaming” or “imageless gleaming”:
LB2
Operating rhizomatically with its multiple entry points and replete with traces, there is no way to “tell” a definitive reading and the form-as-content actively resists such closure. The potential meanings are increased by the typographical maneuverings. In Pritchard’s poetics, the signifier is always at play in an unstable hovering. The mind is reasserted as a sensory organ that, with the attention required by “man if est s t a s i s” (a very difficult image to picture) to “r ide on ly up on t h at move ment t he ear t h pro vide s” (or is it “t he ear th” provides?) can lead to the profoundly natural and intrinsic sixth sense of seeing through the word tracings to the workings of the world that inspire them. Pritchard’s formal choices reflect the avant-garde aesthetic in the ways we might know the avant-garde as avant-garde (in its more traditional sense), as radical breaks with conventional forms and the conscious disruption of the status quo of what it means to “read” a text. He is perhaps doubly othered (and written out of literary history) not just by his avant-garde techniques, but also the way these techniques are deployed in an investigation of place and the natural world. What to make of such a poet who, at the time, was “out there” formally and stylistically in the service of exploring the more-than-human world? For those tempted to read Pritchard’s supposedly racially unmarked poetics as post-racial (or prefiguring the pleasant fiction of the post-racial) or as transcending race, such claims are hard to justify. While his choice of poetics acknowledge the way earlier African-American writers opened spaces for a greater variety of poetic forms and choices for content, poems like “Self” (“What does the cracker/when in a barrel/bare/with dark/and alone/and/beside it/self/with fear/of being/uneaten”) use the tropes of darkness and the slang meanings of “cracker” to direct attention, if obliquely, to constructions of race and particularly those constructions of whiteness.
I would be remiss if I did not point out the extent to which, in a first draft, my transcription of the lines (without the spaces) were an unnecessary violence occasioned by my efforts to “make legible” or “naturalize” the lines for the benefit (and detriment) of those who might not have the text on hand. Perhaps because they reveal one of the more readily accessible images in Pritchard’s work, the lines
LB3
not only suggest potential motives behind Pritchard’s psychovisual form, but the “pier” in “pierce,” a pier as a lance (the long line itself a piercing lance) piercing the landscape of a lake or an ocean, becomes extremely hard to ignore. What’s more, we are asked to consider the way the constructedness of the pier, a piece of built environment, seeks to pierce and enter (with deliberate phallic undertones) the more-than-human world. The textual kerning unlocks an image and its associated web of connotations that were previously hidden in the closed graphemes. A pier is an incursion, yes, but it can also be read as a radical (if misguided) attempt at clos...................

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Trust me, poets pick and choose how much we care to embrace from this topics/discussions.
Would be foolhardy to take each as gospel IMHO. Yet is much one can learn. --Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2015/06/speculative-thinking-with-srikanth-reddy-lucy-ives/

Speculative Thinking With Srikanth Reddy & Lucy Ives
BY HARRIET STAFF


In “The Technocrat’s Guide to the Galaxy,” poet Srikanth Reddy talks with Lucy Ives “about the possible plurality of worlds, poets as ‘feeling machines,’ and how to make an aesthetic object out of bureaucratic relics of the space race,” referencing a talk Reddy gave at Triple Canopy’s 2013 show at MoMA/PS1, Speculations (“The future is ______”), which comprised 50 days of lectures, discussions, and debates about the future with leading leaders and thinking thinkers of now. “You seemed so comfortable in this speculative mode of thinking!” says Ives. “I’m curious what role speculative thinking might play in your work.” “…If you don’t think about the distant future of our contemporary historical moment—the longue durée, as it were—then it’s very easy for one’s political or aesthetic practice to be too circumscribed in the ‘now.’ Or even in one’s domestic practice, for that matter,” replies Reddy. More from this excellent conversation:
Ives In your second collection of poetry, Voyager (2011), there is certainly some interest in speculative thinking, since the book speaks to the possibility of a plurality of worlds. Interestingly, this happens through the erasure, appropriation, and rewriting of a memoir by Kurt Waldheim, former secretary-general of the United Nations and, as was revealed during his (successful) run for the Austrian presidency in 1985, intelligence officer in Hitler’s Wehrmacht.
Reddy In a way, as I worked on Voyager I was interested in some cosmological questions—“How many worlds are there?” or “How many objects are there in the world?” or “Is the world a single object?”—that real philosophers might find somewhat boring. But in the book I’m trying to deal with these problems not so much speculatively as concretely, through a reading of Waldheim’s hopelessly partial and duplicitous account of the world, trying to retrieve other imaginative cosmologies from inside of that falsely totalizing technocratic text. So the cosmological project of Voyager is more about investigative reading than about speculation to a certain extent.
[…]
Ives …I’d like to know…how you think about the role of the poet or the “creative writer” within the academy. Is poetry ever a kind of knowledge, in an academic sense?
Reddy I hear a lot of colleagues in the humanities self-describe as knowledge workers. I don’t think that’s a helpful way of describing what a poet is doing, even within an institutional context. This is an old-fashioned, probably romantic distinction, but I think of the poet more as a “feeling worker,” or an “affective worker.” Not that I’m hoping for a return to sentimentalism in the art. It’s just that I’m skeptical of any knowledge claim people make for poetry. I’ve never seen the art form as one that is epistemological in that sense. I find that it’s more of a technology of feeling than anything else, or at least, I feel that poetry helps me to orient myself affectively in the world—that this is the work it does for me in my experience, though naturally others will invariably find that it does other forms of work for them. It’s a hopelessly rough-hewn way of overstating the case, the way I’m making these distinctions, of course!
Ives And yet there are what one might call philosophic tendencies within your work—an interest in contemplation, for example.
Reddy In the first book of Voyager there is a series of propositions about the world that very loosely echoes Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. I wasn’t really trying to do philosophy here; I was trying to feel my way toward a kind of philosophical music that was more “flattened out” than the lyric, tonally speaking. The philosophical premise of Book One of Voyager was just that: a kind of a premise for the construction of poetic language. I’m very drawn to conceptual work, since it has a kind of philosophical inflection. (I’m thinking of writers like Tan Lin or Lisa Robertson here, though they may not self-identify as “conceptualists” in a strict sense). But I think it would be a dangerous mistake to make the claim that my own poem—or, in a sense, any poem—is actually doing philosophy! Rather, one could say that the poem—my own poem, that is—is adopting the rhetorical and tonal, and even narratological, strategies of philosophy in order to achieve aesthetic effects. That’s what I like about conceptual work: how it makes me feel. Not that it gives me a new set of political or epistemological tools to make my way in the world. Rather, it allows me to feel my way to a proper stance toward these tools.
Read more at Triple Canopy. A recording of Reddy’s Speculations talk is here. And if you want to check out a few poems from Voyager, we have a sampling here.
Tags: Lucy Ives, Srikanth Reddy, Triple Canopy
Posted in Poetry News on Tuesday, June 23rd, 2015 by Harriet Staff.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

BY WIN BASSETT

How are you? Pity soaks the moment like wet bread. Do I spit it out, or must I gum this unguent down?


I learned in my first week as a hospital chaplain never to ask, “How are you?” or any variation of the question. Before my chaplaincy program, I went to law school and served as a criminal prosecutor in North Carolina; I never felt compelled to utter this small-talk inquiry to any party during that time. But instead of the harsh overhead lighting inside a dilapidated courthouse, I now find myself underneath the sterile bulbs of a university hospital in Virginia for the next three months. Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE), a standardized chaplaincy program housed in most large hospitals in the United States, is a popular summer option for students in seminaries. I gave up the moral distress of putting kids in jail for nonviolent crimes to study literature in a divinity school, a move I hope will serve as an adequate bridge from law to secondary education and advocacy for the poetry world that lent me the courage to head down this road. “To make injustice the only / measure of our attention is to praise the Devil,” Jack Gilbert writes in the providentially named poem “A Brief for the Defense.”

Back in the hospital, my fellow interns and I watched the film Wit, along with most other summer chaplaincy programs in the country, to understand why we shouldn’t ask how someone is doing. The movie depicts an angry John Donne scholar (played by Emma Thompson) during her various stages of cancer:

I've been asked, "How are you feeling?" while throwing up into a plastic basin.

I have been asked as I was emerging from a four-hour operation with a tube in every orifice: "How are you feeling today?"

I'm waiting for the moment when I'm asked this question and I'm dead.

I'm a little sorry I'll miss that.

I asked the question all summer. What else was I supposed to say when I cold-knocked and walked into a room of a vulnerable person I’d never spoken to nor seen in my life?

Wiman goes on to write, “prevarications, extenuations, tomorrow’s tease of being: / we are what we are only in our last bastions.” This notion of “our last bastions” troubles me. The most common definition of his last word: “an institution, a place, or a person strongly defending or upholding particular principles, attitudes, or activities.” When a grown man who is half-naked in a hospital bed cries because he can’t move his bowels, is this all that he is if he dies tomorrow?

I visited this man almost every day for two months last summer. In the mornings, we had didactics (such as “Caring for the Buddhist Patient”) or verbatims (in which we workshopped, word for word, how a patient visit had unfolded), so I visited this guy after lunch each day. He was about my father’s age—mid-50s—and he was cleaning brush behind some of his property near the West Virginia–Virginia line when he was shot with an AK-47. It was an accident—some kid was dry-firing it a few houses down, messed up, and shot my patient in the back of his right shoulder. The shell bounced around and traveled down his bowels. I prayed for shit with him all summer.

I’ll call him Joe. On our second visit, Joe had me weeping. After telling me more details about how someone shot him with an assault rifle, how his hospitalization hurt the business at his auto shop, and how the traveling back and forth from home exhausts his wife, I said to him, “You don’t seem like you’re angry at all.” Joe told me he’s not. “The first thing I did was to forgive that boy.” Behind wet eyes, I told Joe that it’s rare to encounter someone who actually does what Jesus told us to do. And I rethought Wiman’s line about last bastions.

•

My first overnight stint, one that spans morning to morning, came four weeks into my summer program at the hospital. During the normal workday hours, no fewer than four chaplain interns, five chaplain residents, two staff chaplains, and two chaplain supervisors roam the main building’s eight floors, which hold 601 beds. I cover only the pediatric and orthopedic units in my afternoons. But once the on-call shift hits, from five in the evening until eight the next morning, I cover the entire hospital. I love this, I told my supervisor, because I like holding down the fort. He told me this feeling might be telling of something else. This standardized chaplaincy program, after all, was designed for participants to learn more about themselves than anything else all summer.

An in-between feeling, like the time on Cadillac Mountain I saw the sun blaring its new brightness, hit me each time I emerged from the on-call suite (a basement room with a twin bed) at the end of my overnight shifts. I write in-between in a similar sense to Seamus Heaney’s notion: between the present and something greater to which I’m not privy. After living for 24 hours inside the building, I open the door from the basement to the three-story wall of windows in the lobby that try to serve as a gate to a beaming sun—the motions and resultant visuals make me feel as though a day never passed. It seems this way because the civilization inside never stops, never rests. The citizens might change shifts, but it’s noticeable only if I try—there are so many of them, and they are so busy. Days separate, it seems, not because of a new sun’s rising but because a rest period has begun and ended.

When does a new day come into being after one of my overnight shifts? Not until I step outside. “As the doors glide shut behind me, / the world flares back into being— / I exist again, recover myself,” writes Anya Silver in “Leaving the Hospital.” As her poem’s speaker emerges from the building, she comments on a fellow patient who doesn’t fare well at night: “the nighttime cries of a man withered / child-size by cancer, and the bells / of emptied IVs tolling through hallways.”

The nurses inevitably page the on-call chaplain when they hear “the nighttime cries of a man withered” because they usually have more pressing medical concerns that need their attention. I find early on in my summer that hymns work better than other forms of language or media to console these souls. Forget small talk, television, and off-the-cuff prayers—these folks know their hymns. After a few weeks of confidence-boosting patient encounters, I realize poetry might also be helpful in these instances of distress. The patients don’t know the poems I carry in my pocket the way they know their hymns, but they quiet nonetheless. I chalk up these powers to poetry’s economy of words. When you know you don’t have much longer in this life, why not make every word you speak and hear pack as much meaning as possible? “Poetry is an orphan of silence,” Charles Simic said.

•

“Ceremoniously, gravely, and weakly, / Dozens of pale hands are waving / Back, from inside their flames,” James Dickey writes in “The Hospital Window.” Like the speaker, I take images of hospital residents with me after sleepless nights. They remain vivid, and the images still live and move after I leave the hospital on my bike as people drive and walk to work in the morning.
I helped a man—if helping means being the last person to pray with him—die during the weeks in July when the Virginia heat blurred my vision outside. He told me he was ready. I didn’t take him seriously, and I tried to convince him that it wasn’t time. “That the dying may float without fear / In the bold blue gaze of my father,” Dickey writes. Drained and on my ride home, I think about when I asked him when last he saw his children. “Before I went blind over a decade ago,” he laughed.

•

Those mornings I traveled north on I91,
passing below the basalt cliff of East Rock
where the elms discussed their genealogies.
I was a chaplain at Hartford Hospital,
took the Myers-Briggs with Sister Margaret,
learned I was an I drawn to Es.
In small group I said, “I do not like it—
the way so many young black men die here-- ............................................
.........................

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

All Mod Cons – or a Reflective Analysis on Whitman and American Institutional Technophilia
BY PHILP JENKS


Walt-Whitman

I’ve been too cruel to Walt Whitman’s works. Perhaps because I relate too much to the criticisms I have that it strikes fear in me. His work seems to uncover another honesty. The speaker appears often as a loving and encompassing man. He includes “everything” from classes, races, sexualities and into ecosystems in a vast democratic celebration of being. No small feat. Yet, this is much like many of the progressive oppressors I know. I’ve been groomed by Whitman too many times. Can I forgive the works? Leaves of Grass, Specimen Days, and Democratic Vistas all deploy a masculinist voyeurism. Moreover, the “I,” the speaking subject is the “neutral” and abstract. Put differently, this gets down to the institutionalized sexisms, racisms, classisms and all other isms that are inculcated within me. And I don’t always work to get them out and destroy them. Whitman’s voyeuristic vision watches over each and every, delighting in it. This includes even the most horrifying scenes, darkest spaces I’ve encountered. Too often I will denounce. Despite gestures to the contrary, including a book on an overly judgmental society (My First Painting Will Be the Accuser on Zephyr Press), I’m judgmental of his inclusivity. Or efforts therein. Yet, without his work I’d be no writer, understand much less, and yes there have been times when it saved my life. Whitman incorporates a hinge into the world, suturing a rift in reason, providing some repair that is desperately needed in these times.
Sometimes I’m so scared of the Civil War patent-office hospital he depicts in Specimen Days. Rarely even can I think about it. They stored dead soldiers in these patent cases.
A few weeks ago the vast area of the second story of that noblest of Washington buildings was crowded close with rows of sick, badly wounded and dying soldiers. They were placed in three very large apartments. I went there many times. It was a strange, solemn, and, with all its features of suffering and death, a sort of fascinating sight. I go sometimes to sooth and relieve particular cases. Two of the immense apartments are fill’d high and ponderous glass cases, crowded with models of every kind of utensil, machine or invention, it ever enter’d into the mind of man to conceive….Between these cases are lateral openings, perhaps eight feet wide and quite deep, and in these were placed the sick….It was, indeed, a curious scene, especially at night when lit up. (Whitman: Poetry and Prose, Library of America Edition 741)
While too much has been made of American innovation and technology, still the immense transformation of such a place and space (for place has a home within it) into its very opposite illuminates an eeriness, an ability to convey that beyond most capabilities. Or…was it the opposite? Here, the site of invention, “shades of makers of the world” (Wolf) haunts the groaning, dying boys and men. Machines, utensils, inventions, and “a poor fellow dying, with emaciated face and glassy eye, the nurse by his side, the doctor also there, but no friend, no relative” (Whitman 742). A piercing loneliness and alienation could not be more aptly scripted for one’s life. The Civil War was the first “technological” war in so many senses. The other side of making, but not thinking—the other side of thinking that new creation inevitably is “progress” in a sort of fascistic Hegelian spirit is that eventually a nation’s embodiment of technological advance will inherit the scores of dead bodies that thoughtless technophilia produces. For Whitman, institutionalism itself kills off the source of any liberated verse.
And in libraries I lie as one dumb, a gawk, or unborn, or
dead
But just possibly with you on a high hill, first watching lest
any person for miles around approach unawares,
Or possibly with you sailing at sea, or on the beach of the
sea or some quiet island,
(“Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand” 271)
This hinge of the world may appear bucolic or naïve even. However, consider the alternative. It would seem within the sheer volume of Whitman’s work, much of the twenty-first century in the Global North is far closer to a Patent-Office Hospital, a making without thinking (Arendt, Essays in Understanding).



http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2015/04/all-mod-cons-or-a-reflective-analysis-on-whitman-and-american-institutional-technophilia/

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/250426

INTERVIEW
Talk to the Dead
Ruth Lilly Prize winner Alice Notley on the voice and spirits of her poetry.

BY ADAM PLUNKETT

Any honest introduction of Alice Notley should acknowledge that you can’t quite introduce her. She has written too much, for too long, in too many different ways, and if any principle explains her work, it’s what she calls “disobedience,” a refusal to comply with any movement or style or idea or identity. In her nearly 30 books from the last 45 years, she has been a New York School poet (second generation) and a feminist poet, an epic and a lyric and a novelistic poet, a playwright and a memoirist, an essayist and an accomplished visual artist: funny, poignant, erudite, and fearless. “Over the years,” she wrote in 2005, “I’ve been variously … formal, experimental, elliptical, polysyllabic, exceedingly plain, personal, and narrative; also speedy and slowed-down; all, it seems to me, in the same general voice.”

True to noncompliant form, she told me recently that she hears less a voice in her poetry now than a number of voices. It was late April, and she was on a trip to New York City, where she learned that she had been awarded the 2015 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. We discussed the voices in a series of e-mails, which touched on her ambition to give voice to the dead and the silenced, her two forthcoming books, and why she thinks academia is dulling poetry. Our interview has been edited and condensed.

******

What brings you back to New York City? And how does it feel to be back after having lived abroad, in Paris, for—correct me if I’m wrong—22 years now?

I come back to New York a couple times a year to visit my sons and their families. But this visit I also read at The Poetry Project, something I have done every few years since 1971. It’s familiar to come back—it’s family and friends, it’s the sound of a significant part of my poetry—that New York speed and humor in the street, it’s an important part of my background. I’ve lived in Paris now for 23 years and it’s become home, but I need New York, too


Are you aware at all when you’re here of discontinuity, too?


Sometimes I think and say aloud that it’s changed—but I’m not really sure it’s that different. The energy’s the same. There are still people who live their lives primarily out on the sidewalk, for example. There are large numbers of immigrants, though of different backgrounds from before; the subway’s still interesting to ride in; there’s a lot of overt artistic activity.


You wrote in your 1995 essay “The ‘Feminine’ Epic” that part of what drew you to write The Descent of Alette, an epic in which the protagonist finds herself on “a subway, endlessly,” was your noticing more and more homeless people in New York in the late 1980s. How, if at all, do you see oppression manifesting itself differently now that the city has so many rich inhabitants? How is it different in Paris?


I’m told that there are homeless people everywhere in New York; I think I would have to stay here longer to know exactly where they are. I’m not aware of people clustered together, as they were in the ’80s, in places like Tompkins Square Park and beneath Grand Central Station. I suppose that means that overt displays of homelessness are discouraged. Paris had a rather large homeless population when I first moved there, and there seem to be a lot of people sleeping over heating grates at the moment. But there’s more dialogue in Europe in general about housing. There are a lot more people in the world than there used to be, and taking care of everyone’s needs seems formidable. I actually don’t think about the rich very much. I’m not interested in them. I suppose I think everyone should exclude them.

Could you speak to your decision not to spend your career in academia, and to why, as you’ve said elsewhere, “Poetry should feel hugely uncomfortable in the academy”?


I’ve never seen any connection between poetry and the academy or poetry and the university—or between fiction writing and the university. When I first went to Iowa as a fiction writer, I was appalled to discover I was supposed to learn how to teach. I somehow hadn’t noticed the MFA was a teaching degree. I gradually began writing poetry and got my degree eventually in fiction and poetry both, but I refused to do the student teaching and was given the job of being the dittograph person. I ran off everybody’s handouts for classes. Poetry is itself an ancient art older than any academy or institution. Why should a poet teach poetry or anything else?


Could you talk about specific problems in the poetry world that stem at least in part from the fact that so many practicing poets spend their lives in academia? One issue that occurred to me was the shift in emphasis from musicality to form that you discuss in your essay “American Poetic Music at the Moment.” Perhaps part of the reason poets are more comfortable talking about form than sound is that it’s easier to study.


Oh, everyone’s so boring! They have students! We had these really difficult lives in the midst of which we talked to each other and fought with each other about all of our thoughts about poetry. Everyone thinks they’re a poet because they get degrees. They are taught by boring teachers who validate the fact that they have a certain interest in poetry and then—presto—they get to validate more like themselves. I am using the pronoun “they” in the normal American vernacular way that is born of necessity. So. There are still old-fashioned, silly ways to discuss musicality in the mainstream academy (you say vague things about consonants and vowels), and my work has been subjected to them as well as to the lack of discussion in the avant-garde part of the academy. With musicality no one knows what to say, because it’s practically metaphysical, the essence of the poetry talent—don’t ever mention the poetry talent, either. I am totally musical, and I hear all the words I say in daily life. I have allergies at the moment that are blocking up my normal sounds and making other ones. My speaking voice is echoing about in my brain-bones, and I can’t catch my breath properly.

------------------------------------------------ ****

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2015/06/rhetorics-as-raw-material-on-the-complex-work-of-daniel-borzutzky/

Rhetorics as Raw Material: On the Complex Work of Daniel Borzutzky
BY HARRIET STAFF



At Jacket2, Kristin Dykstra writes about both the translation and creative work of Daniel Borzutzky, and how the two
modes interrelate as she reads across his oeuvre, focusing on Borzutzky’s 2015 collection Memories of My Overdevelopment,
categorized by its publisher, Kenning Editions, as “nonfiction.”
This way depends on their shared grounds of a hemispheric expanse defined around rhetorics of neoliberalism and resistance,
which Borzutzky has been conceptualizing in increasingly focused texts. His gradual construction of a specific
hemispheric span for his writing – a span where Latin American expression intersects with that of the US, in
translation/poetry worlds – uses those rhetorics as raw material.
As a result, it’s increasingly possible to read Borzutzky’s oeuvre as an extended investigation of life under rampant
corporatization and the bureaucracies it attempts to consume. His intonations serve up the new inter-American epic — or
anti-epic? — in the age of neoliberalism.
Later, Dykstra expands this influence:
As critic Michael Dowdy outlines in a book-length study of US Latino/a literature, different notions of how to define
“freedom” accompany the rise of neoliberalism. For its promotors,
neoliberal theory aims to maximize freedom by reducing citizenship to a rational choice model of atomized, possessive
individualism. This conception ties all valences of freedom to the market, dismantles collective forms of organization
and ownership, converts states into servants to capital, guts social safety nets and the public sphere, and relentlessly commodifies culture, including modes of resistance. (9)
Neoliberalism translates.
And so does resistance to its modalities, though its complications merit time and attention (resources increasingly scarce).
Poetic resistance has included writers who “model freedom as a relational concept rooted in diachronic place-based
cultural practices and constituted interpersonally rather than held individually” (Dowdy 9).
Borzutzky’s explorations, in which the translator exists as fulcrum, a single small-scale point for relations from which
larger motions and visions emerge, offer vivid examples of how such cultural work continues to unfurl.
Chile, one of the famous testing sites for neoliberalism after its 1973 coup d’etat, permeates and restructures Borzutzky’s
contemporary northern city. Remember and historicize neoliberalism’s storied Chicagoan origins and its initial export to
Chile. But Borzutzky’s latest writings emphasize a more recent vector of influence. The Chilean boomerang has returned.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2015/07/newly-translated-letter-from-ezra-pound-clarifies-imagist-movement/

POETRY NEWS
Newly Translated Letter From Ezra Pound Clarifies Imagist Movement
BY HARRIET STAFF

Jared Spears presents and dissects a heretofore untranslated 1928 letter from Ezra Pound to French scholar and critic René Taupin:
The letter was prompted by Taupin’s analysis of Imagism, the avant-garde movement Pound, an American expatriate, had helped found in London after the dawn of the new century. Taupin, then chairman of romance languages at Hunter College, asserted that Imagism was almost inseparable from earlier French Symbolists (an argument which would culminate in his 1929 book, The Influence of French Symbolism on Modern American Poetry). For Pound, Taupin’s assertions belittled what he believed to be the unique accomplishments of his own literary movement.
More from Jacket2:
Pound’s letter to Taupin serves as his rebuttal. Due to Pound’s scattered, almost stream-of-conscious writing style, passages of the letter are dissected here to better follow his logic, beginning with his opening:
Of course, if you permit an inversion of time, in some Einsteinian relativity, it would seem likely to you that I’d received the idea of the image from the poems of Hilda Doolittle, written after that idea was received. See the dates of the various books.
To lay the base for his argument, Pound painstakingly makes a case for a less direct influence on Imagism from modern French writers, asserting that he and his cohorts arrived at their conclusions more or less independently. He describes trademarks of his own style as “[v]ery severe self-examination  —  and intolerance for all the mistakes and stupidities of French poets.”
Pound goes on to trace the general flow of poetic innovation from French writers of the late nineteenth century through Symons, Baudelaire, and Verlaine. “Certainly progress in the poetic technique,” he admits. But it is from Arthur Rimbaud that Pound traced the origin of modernist writing, a fact in general consensus today.
That which Rimbaud reached by intuition (genius) in some poems, created via (perhaps?) conscious aesthetic  —  I do not want to ascribe him any unjust achievement  —  but for all that I know. I’m doing an aesthetic more or less systematic  —  and could have named certain poems of Rimbaud as example. (Yet also some poems of Catullus.)
And it is certain that apart from some methods of expression  —  Rimbaud and I have but a point of resemblance. But almost all of the experimentation, poetic technique of 1830-up to me  —  was made in France.
Experimentation perhaps, but not progress, continues Pound in signature frankness.
Find the full essay and the letter here. Check out the initial publication, in its original French, in Letters of Ezra Pound: 1907–1941 (New Directions 1971).
Tags: Ezra Pound, Jacket2, Jared Spears, New Directions
Posted in Poetry News on Wednesday, July 1st, 2015 by Harriet Staff

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

["She thinks the monkey's bad luck..."]
BY PHILIP JENKS
I.

She thinks the monkey's bad luck because
of all the Institutions it's seen.
A curious curious George hooked to my hoodie,
with arguably racialized, inappropriate lips
curling out to smile and greet the staff
as I ask for the nth time why no release
or where is Albeheary? By now,
anything may well prove to be true,
which, of course, is insane.

II.

Sometimes I lose it. If I can't wear it,
When I'm on the outside, the backpack
Or higgly pocket. Little higgly pigglies
Tearing at the tongue. Speak to me.
Who, art? Thinning. More vodka.
This time Lakeshore third floor,
My DTs I can't dial. The kindest black
Trans/guy who did my dialing for me.
Others tore their hair out or hanged themselves.

My roomie he collapsed his lung
Eleven times. This is his last trip to the place.
Eventual. Even. They moved me I got the same roommate
Last New Year's as the one before.
The shakes are permanent.
The stain all the more so, like nothing.
Inside, a perpetual processing. This is prisoning.
Ever emotion's measured. "wrong" (with you)
This isn't as or like anything. Outside, I just want back in.


III.
At one point, there was something to it.
As when he found a hernia on me in the tub
And suddenly, "operation." Herr Doctor.
Then hospital at five years old and a Curious
Curious George story. How he went too.
Or windup Campbell's Soup.
Of course he slept there, for solace. For comfort.
Night rounds. Book learnt animal instinct.
Aping compassion. Inappropriate lips. The old testament wronged.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This is modern poetry that has a feel, has a meaning. Its very descriptive and shows lots of pain, emotion, thought and imagination.
Vast majority of modern poetry I have no care for but when its good I simply love it..-Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2015/07/judge-how-he-fleeceth-the-country-by-paul-batchelor/


FROM POETRY MAGAZINE

Judge How He Fleeceth the Country
BY PAUL BATCHELOR
Frontispiece to Matthew Hopkins’s The Discovery of Witches
Frontispiece to Matthew Hopkins’s The Discovery of Witches
[Note: Each month we feature a guest post from a contributor to Poetry’s current issue. Paul Batchelor’s “The Discoverer’s Man” appears in the July/August 2015 issue. Previous posts in this series can be found on the Editors’ Blog.]

There’s something disreputable about dramatic monologues. It’s easy to write a passable one but almost impossible to write a good one. They are never fashionable, but there’s never a shortage of them either. I’m not sure that I would mount a defence of the form even if I could. Instead, I want to talk about some of the models I had in mind when writing ‘The Discoverer’s Man’, a dramatic monologue set in the 1680s and spoken by an old man who in his youth acted as a witch-finder’s assistant.
The exploits of my Discoverer and his Man are based loosely on those of the real-life witch-finders Matthew Hopkins (c.1620-1647) and John Stearne (c.1610-1670). I began the poem after reading Witchfinders: a Seventeenth-century English Tragedy by Malcolm Gaskill, which led me to the accounts provided by Hopkins and Stearne themselves (the phrase ‘Judge how he fleeceth the Country’ is taken from Hopkins’s self-justification, The Discovery of Witches). Hopkins, the self-styled ‘Witchfinder General’, is the most famous witch-finder, for reasons that are not altogether clear. The speaker of my poem is an assistant to an unnamed Hopkins-like figure, but the real-life Hopkins himself started out as a Man to Stearne. My Elizabeth Bell is based on Elizabeth Clarke, Hopkins’s first victim; and my John Knowles is based on John Lowes, the vicar whose execution represented Hopkins’s most remarkable success. My description of Knowles’s execution draws on various accounts of similar deaths in John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, a work that Hopkins would have known well. Many of the incidental details of the witch-hunts (e.g., the names of Bell/Clarke’s familiars) were too good to be left out: that a starved and sleep-deprived old woman being tortured by her neighbours would name one of her devilish familiars ‘Newes’ (ie. gossip) is a heartbreaking detail. Similarly, when my Discoverer promises never to accuse anyone, he echoes Hopkins and Stearne, who only ever went where they were invited.
At a certain point, I realised that researching the historical record was inhibiting me. The poem went cold and progress slowed. In the end it took five years to complete, and only when I knew I was nearly finished did I begin a second wave of research, in which I tried to check that the things I’d invented weren’t too far off the mark. In the mean time, what helped me to bring my characters back to life (to me anyway) was thinking of three less obviously relevant figures: Tony Blair, Nick Leeson, and Myra Hindley.
Tony Blair led the Labour party to a landslide win in the 1997 U.K. general election, having stood for vaguely-defined ‘change’, which turned out to mean a continuation of neoliberal economics augmented with higher public spending. Officially, of course, it was the Labour party that won; but really it was Blair and his acolytes. Although what he led was not quite a personality cult, the Labour party has been gripped by an identity crisis ever since he stepped down as Prime Minister. The public euphoria with which his 1997 victory was greeted is easy to forget now that Blair is an almost universally loathed figure in Britain. I’d like to think that everybody hates him because he invaded Iraq in order to protect us from Weapons of Mass Destruction that turned out to be no more real than the Evil Spirits the witch-finders battled. But this can’t be the whole story. Blair won a general election in May 2005 pretty comfortably, long after the truth about WMDs had been revealed. The fact is Britain was mysteriously ready to believe in Blair, and then, at a certain point, it was ready to turn on him. Similarly, Hopkins went from being welcomed as a kind of saviour figure to being demonised within the space of a generation or so. Blair has since got religion and is now a practising Catholic. I knew from quite early on that I wanted my speaker to misquote the Bible as part of his attempted self-justification.
Nick Leeson is the derivatives broker whose actions led to Barings Bank (whose customers included the Queen) being declared insolvent on 26 February 1995. Leeson engaged in unauthorised speculative trading and hid his losses in secret accounts until they ran to over $1.4 billion. In the 90s, this seemed like a lot of money for a bank to lose. I am very attracted to the idea of Leeson as the Monster to Margaret Thatcher’s Frankenstein, as though the Thatcherite vision of liberated provincial youth came true, only to produce an agent of chaos who brought down a 233-year-old institution; but I realise that this is probably wishful thinking. Like Leeson, Hopkins came from what we’d call a lower-middle-class background. Hopkins was the third son of a clergyman in rural Suffolk, and the family’s respectability came from Matthew Hopkins’s grandfather, a yeoman farmer who restyled himself a gentleman after enclosing the common land upon which the poor depended. A stable English society would have checked the rise of such an ‘obscure’ figure, but the social, religious and political chaos of the civil war era allowed Hopkins to flourish, much as it did Oliver Cromwell, or William Dowsing, the puritan iconoclast. In the 1990s, it was the ethical and procedural chaos of market deregulation that gave Leeson his chance.
I don’t know whether readers outside of the U.K. will have heard of Myra Hindley. She was a serial killer, who, along with Ian Brady, kidnapped, tortured and murdered five children, burying their bodies on Saddleworth Moor in northern England, between July 1963 and October 1965. Brady, by his own account, was the leader, with Hindley his eager assistant. One of the strange things about the public interest in the case was the almost obsessive focus on Hindley: when I was growing up in the 80s, she seemed like a mythical figure, a bogeyman, often invoked as a symbol of the danger ‘out there’. The interest never really abated until Hindley died in prison of bronchial pneumonia in 2002. Unlike Brady, who was perceived as having been ‘born bad’, Hindley was disturbing because it was just about possible to imagine an alternative world in which she didn’t meet Brady and turned out—well, not exactly ‘normal’, but at least not homicidal. The motivations of serial killers (in real life or in fiction) are usually banal; what drives their enablers is a much more interesting question. I wanted the fanatical, inhuman Discoverer in my poem to remain a shadowy presence. His Man—the ordinary guy who fell under his spell, promulgated his myth, eased his progress, and then returned to society—would be my speaker and real subject.
These figures interested me because they are simultaneously characters in the story England tells itself, and chancers who seized an opportunity to tell a story of their own. At a certain point, through some confluence of historical and personal circumstance, they were presented with the occasion to seize control of a bigger narrative, to identify and project some aspect of their own self-image, and to implicate others in their version of events. On a smaller scale, much the same processes—projection and identification; suspicion and discovery—are practised by the speaker and implied listener of a dramatic monologue, as well as the writer and the reader.
Tags: dramatic monologue, Paul Batchelor, Poetry guest blogger
Posted in From Poetry Magazine on Wednesday, July 8th, 2015 by Paul Batchelor.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

Walt Whitman 101
A close look at everybody’s radical poet.

Few poets have had such lasting impact as Walt Whitman. Widely considered the American father of free verse, Whitman has been celebrated by poets from Federico García Lorca and Pablo Neruda to Langston Hughes and Patricia Lockwood. His irreverence inspired the surrealists, the Beats, and the New York School. Critic Harold Bloom called Leaves of Grass part of the “secular scripture of the United States.” Schools, malls, and bridges are named for him, and in the past few years, Levi’s and Apple have used his words to sell jeans and iPads.

However, although Whitman is a figure of mythic stature and popular appeal, his work remains strikingly provocative. Profuse, amorous, and candidly grand, his “barbaric yawp” defies all boundaries and borders, reminding readers of the radical possibilities inherent in the democratic ideal.

Beginnings
Whitman’s long road to poetic greatness seemed both unlikely and predestined. One of nine children, several of whom were named for American presidents, he left school at 11 but continued to educate himself while he apprenticed as a printer. For the first half of his life, his literary ambitions lay in journalism and fiction, and he worked for several New York newspapers. He didn’t write a book of poetry until he was 36, when, at his own expense, he first published Leaves of Grass, his great and lifelong work. Though he wrote other prose and poetry volumes over the course of his career, Whitman continually revised and reissued Leaves of Grass, adding to, removing from, rewriting, and reordering the book until his death. When Leaves was first published in 1855, it contained 12 poems; the final 1892 edition contains more than 400. His goal from the beginning was a kind of wholeness: a volume that gathered all of his work into one sustained epic.

If the size and scope of Leaves of Grass was itself audacious, its form and content were even more so. Inspired by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “The Poet,” which called for a distinctly American poetry, Whitman abandoned traditional poetic style and elevated language. He pioneered a unique type of free verse that combined spontaneous, prosaic rhythms with incantatory repetition that he found in the Old Testament; with it, he found a form to match his great subject: the unity and diversity of the limitless American self.

Walt Whitman, Kosmos
His earliest and most fundamental work, “Song of Myself,” carries egalitarianism to its further extent. In long lines and ecstatic catalogues, Whitman embraces everything and everyone—good and bad, male and female, free and not—as equal. Celebrating the individual as both a product of and vessel for the multitude, Whitman adopted the persona of the kosmos, a kind of visionary or seer, and channeled the voices of America—“I am the hounded slave,” he writes provocatively at one point. His praise of the carnal and corporeal was likewise provocative. As he proclaims in “I Sing the Body Electric,” Whitman saw the body and the soul as commensurate and touch as the basis for all personal and political connections.

Ebb Tide
Though it gained him a handful of admirers and detractors, the first edition of Leaves of Grass sold very poorly. In the years following its publication, Whitman lived an unsettled, bohemian life, and his work took a melancholic, personal turn. “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” for example, tells the tale of his artistic birth but roots it in death and loss, and the invitation in his earlier “Song of the Open Road” stands in stark contrast to his warning in “Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand” that he is “not what you supposed.”

Skeptical as they can be, the poems of this period include some of Whitman’s most revolutionary work. “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life” is a doubtful and inconclusive poem that prefigures the Modernist movement, and his “Calamus” sequence, first printed in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass, is historic in its treatment of same-sex attraction and relationships. In comparison to the excited and explicit sexuality of his earlier work, “I Saw in Louisiana A Live-Oak Growing” and “A Glimpse” are meditative, even plaintive in tone. But in lingering on feelings that were, at the time, too obscene to mention, Whitman introduced a language of queer love that, as critics Ed Folsom and Kenneth M. Price write, was essential to the development of gay literature.

Drum-Taps
As befits his signature blending of self and state, the Civil War marked a major turning point in Whitman’s career. Traveling first to the front lines to visit his enlisted brother, and then onto Washington, DC, where he made a home during the war, Whitman became a troubadour of the battlefield. In “Beat! Beat! Drums!” he sings of the war’s inevitability, and poems such as “Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night” acutely capture its horrors. “The Wound-Dresser” describes Whitman’s remarkable experiences at military hospitals, where he nursed thousands of wounded soldiers and befriended many.

These years took a toll on Whitman: one of his brothers died, another was captured, and he watched as one of his dearest infatuations had his leg amputated. But these years also brought the publication of his book Drum-Taps and two of his most widely known poems, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” and “O Captain! My Captain!,” both written in honor of President Abraham Lincoln, who was assassinated at the end of the war.

The Good Gray Poet
Whitman was an avowed rabble-rouser—his abolitionist politics and explicit poetry lost him several jobs—but his image shifted in his later years to something more stately and sanctified. Despite declining health and financial instability, Whitman continued to write and even began to enjoy a certain amount of literary celebrity. He received numerous distinguished visitors, including Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Oscar Wilde, at his home in Camden, New Jersey, where he relocated in 1873 after a stroke.

Inspired more and more by science and engineering, Whitman wrote poems such as “Passage to India,” which hails the opening of the Suez Canal and the rapidly globalizing world, and “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer,” which stages the conflict between scientific reason and cosmic experience. He continued to revise and expand Leaves of Grass and worked on several prose projects, including Specimen Days, which is an unconventional autobiography, and “Democratic Vistas,” an essay about Reconstruction-era America.

If the tone of his poetry grew increasingly laudatory, in “Vistas,” Whitman is at his most critical, excoriating a political culture “saturated in corruption, bribery, falsehood” and “mal-administration.” But if America’s promise remained (or remains) unfulfilled, Whitman’s poetry reminds readers, even today, of democracy’s continuing potential.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Few poets have had such lasting impact as Walt Whitman. Widely considered the American father of free verse, Whitman has been celebrated by poets from Federico García Lorca and Pablo Neruda to Langston Hughes and Patricia Lockwood. His irreverence inspired the surrealists, the Beats, and the New York School. Critic Harold Bloom called Leaves of Grass part of the “secular scripture of the United States.” Schools, malls, and bridges are named for him, and in the past few years, Levi’s and Apple have used his words to sell jeans and iPads.

However, although Whitman is a figure of mythic stature and popular appeal, his work remains strikingly provocative. Profuse, amorous, and candidly grand, his “barbaric yawp” defies all boundaries and borders, reminding readers of the radical possibilities inherent in the democratic ideal.
^^^^ This alone makes him in my top ten favorite poets list !!-Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/250680?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+poetryfoundation%2Findex+%28P oetryFoundation.org%29

ESSAY
The Locals
Why Spoon River Anthology still resonates 100 years later.

BY STEFAN BECK

“I hate small towns,” Lenny Bruce reportedly said, “because once you’ve seen the cannon in the park there’s nothing else to do.” There was a time when I found this line funny and true, but then I had the good fortune to move to a small town in upstate New York. My town has proven a greater source of fascination than any true city I’ve lived in—though the reasons were not entirely clear to me until I reread Edgar Lee Masters’s masterpiece, Spoon River Anthology, which turns 100 years old this year and has never once been out of print.

Spoon River is a doubtful advertisement for small-town life. “I loathed you, Spoon River. I tried to rise above you,” Archibald Higbie declares in his poem’s opening line. Modeled on the epigrams of the Anthologia Graeca, it is a series of more than 200 epitaphs spoken by the dead of Spoon River’s cemetery. (Spoon River is based on the towns of Petersburg and Lewistown, Illinois, where Masters was raised.) Free in death to speak truthfully, spurn propriety, and spill secrets, these ghosts conjure a vision of a small town very much at odds with its own idealized, pastoral self-image.

Almost every kind of unpleasantness imaginable is present in these poems. Some Spoon River residents lead long lives before coming to ruin. Some lose life’s lottery at the outset: “Steel forceps fumbled by a doctor’s hand / Against my boy’s head as he entered life,” grieves the speaker in “State’s Attorney Fallas,” “Made him an idiot.” Some of Spoon River’s talking dead are children. Charlie French recalls being cut down by a toy gun in the midst of great happiness: “The lemonade stands were running / And the band was playing, / To have it all spoiled / By a piece of a cap shot under the skin of my hand.”

Some of Spoon River’s talking dead are children. Charlie French recalls being cut down by a toy gun in the midst of great happiness: “The lemonade stands were running / And the band was playing, / To have it all spoiled / By a piece of a cap shot under the skin of my hand.”

The darker consequences of sex loom large. “I would have been as great as George Eliot,” says Margaret Fuller Slack, but her ambitions suffocate beneath the burden of raising eight children: “Sex is the curse of life!” Slack thunders. The devastating “Nellie Clark” relates a life ruined by reverberations of the speaker’s rape when she was eight years old. In “Minerva Jones,” “Doctor Meyers,” and “Mrs. Meyers,” readers commiserate with three villagers who suffer death or disgrace because of botched, illicit abortions.

Frank talk about sex—not to mention adultery, prostitution, and abortion—was far from common in 1915, and the public was shocked. John Erskine wrote in the November 1922 North American Review of encountering a minister who “could not give his approval to the Spoon River Anthology, brilliant though it was; he could approve of no book that portrayed fornication.” Spoon River was “the sex-shocker, the Peyton Place of its day,” Stanley Edgar Hyman wrote in The New Leader in 1963.
Masters wrote these poems in free verse, still novel—even disturbingly so—at the time. Lawrence Gilman, considering Spoon River in North American Review in June 1915, called the voices of Masters’s speakers “bald, flat, and uncouth.” Masters never tried to pretty up the speech of ordinary people. Their stories, Gilman contended, were “often as rank and candid as the records of a police-court.”

But some found the candor of Masters’s characters refreshing. Alice Corbin Henderson, writing about Spoon River for Poetry in June 1915, argued that “despite the general sense of tragedy” in the book, Masters “makes life seem precious” as well as “humorous, squalid and noble at the same time.” Ezra Pound was also impressed. “At last,” he wrote, “the American West has produced a poet strong enough to weather the climate, capable of dealing with life directly.”

Masters makes small-town life come alive in its variety and specificity and unruliness. His masterstroke was to put these simple folk six feet under. Even though his characters are dead, he was able to emphasize their human energy. His “dead” characters seem more fully alive for speaking from the soil.

This pursuit of realism and psychological nuance should not have been controversial, but it was; Masters’s real project was to show that difficult lives are not failed ones but rather ones whose rewards are earned at greater cost. Spoon River feels neither bitter, as does much of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919), on which it was a major influence, nor dated and gimmicky, as the short stories in Charles Jackson’s 1950 The Sunnier Side do. It is easy to forget that although Spoon River’s conceit necessitates depicting many downfalls and deaths, its monologuists also recount ambition and pride, comic episodes and welcome reversals, passion and love. Many endings in Spoon River feel like natural parts of life, not true tragedies.

In “Richard Bone,” a carver of headstones has a career that outlasts his self-respect; the longer Bone lives among the people of Spoon River, the more readily he sees through the dishonest epitaphs his customers order: “But still I chiseled whatever they paid me to chisel / And made myself party to the false chronicles / Of the stones.” That Bone’s guilt can be read as either noble or comically overwrought—or both, frankly—is frankly typical of Masters’s complex and humane attitude toward his creations.

Indeed, many of Masters’s speakers are both tragic and figures of fun, self-pitying but nevertheless making compelling points. In “Daisy Fraser,” the prostitute asks, “Did you ever hear of Editor Whedon / Giving to the public treasury any of the money he received” for manipulating public opinion and “Did you ever hear of the Circuit Judge / Helping anyone except the ‘Q’ railroad, / Or the bankers?” Daisy maintains that she “never was taken before Justice Arnett / Without contributing ten dollars and costs / To the school fund of Spoon River!” Similarly, in “Judge Somers,” the judge, who “knew Blackstone and Coke / Almost by heart,” fumes about the fact that the town drunkard “has a marble block, topped by an urn, / Wherein Nature, in a mood ironical, / Has sown a flowering weed?”

Masters’s poems, his men and women, endure because they possess blunt force and human nuance. Spoon River shows humanity in microcosm: “Like Chaucer’s pilgrims,” critic Ernest Earnest wrote, “the 244 characters who speak their epitaphs represent almost every walk of life.” Earnest attributed the book’s immediate popularity to “shock of recognition. Here for the first time in America was the whole of a society which people recognized—not only that part of it reflected in writers of the genteel tradition.” He was writing in 1967 and clearly found Spoon River anything but dated.

In his 1992 introduction to an annotated volume of Spoon River Anthology, John Hallwas went a bit further toward identifying Spoon River’s appeal for modern readers; he addressed a tension at the heart of “the myth of America”—that is, its “contradictory thrusts toward individualism and community.” Spoon River is about not only community but also the challenges of knowing and being known by others. As the poet Maurice Manning recently put it, Spoon River belongs to a category of populist poetry that considers “what it is to just be human, and to have imperfections and failings and desperation and joy and love.” For that, it will always feel contemporary.

Indeed, Spoon River has inspired and likely will go on inspiring many contemporary adaptations—and mutations. The Italian musician Fabrizio De André released an album based on Spoon River, Non al denaro non all’amore né al cielo, in 1971. Steve Goodman sang “Spoon River” on his 1975 album Jessie’s Jig and Other Favorites. A number of composers, including Andrew Downes, David Garner, Lita Grier, and Wolfgang Jacobi, have set Spoon River poems to music. There is even an alt-country album by Richard Buckner based on it. A theatrical production of Spoon River was performed at Brooklyn’s famous Green-Wood Cemetery in 2011. Perhaps most improbably, the book was made into a computer game: “There are ghosts in the graveyard who are unable to rest because of unresolved issues in their former lives. Your task will be to end their suffering by performing tasks that resolve those issues.”

A century on, we contemporary readers are at an advantage. Because we do not flinch at subject matter that scandalized the reading public of Masters’s day, we may read Spoon River not as morbidly fixated on the ugly side of life but simply as attentive to all of life’s aspects. Masters’s speakers seize on moments or experiences whose deeper significance an outside observer could never guess, and Masters calls those moments to life with language that is beautiful without being flowery or self-conscious.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

This morning we heard the very sad news that poet and UMass professor James Tate has died at the age of 71. Gazettenet reports:
Acclaimed poet James Tate, a distinguished professor in the English department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, died Wednesday evening, according to a university spokesman. He was 71.
Tate is the author of more than 20 books of poetry, including “Worshipful Company of Fletchers,” which won the 1994 National Book Award. His 1991 collection “Selected Poems” won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry and the William Carlos Williams award.
Tate was a long-time contributor to Poetry, with his first appearance reaching back to the July 1967 issue with “The Whole World’s Sadly Talking to Itself —W. B. Yeats” and “Pity Ascending with the Fog.” His last appearance in the magazine occurred in the January 2005 issue with “Spiderwebs.” Throughout his career Tate’s poetry was championed for its character-driven surrealism, while his teaching was foundational for a variety of poets who attended UMass Amherst.
Head here to read a selection of Tate’s poetry. And to hear Tate reading his work, tune in to this Essential American Poets podcast featuring a reading at the Library of Congress in 1976.
For his legions of readers and students, he’ll be missed.
Tags: James Tate, Obituary
Posted in Poetry News on Thursday, July 9th, 2015 by Harriet Staff.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

FROM POETRY MAGAZINE
A Tapestry for George Starbuck
BY KATHRYN STARBUCK
George Starbuck
George Starbuck
Note: Poetry first published George Starbuck in January 1960, and over the course of nearly three decades he published almost two dozen poems in the magazine. These include elegies, concrete poems, and many others you can find in our online archive. George Starbuck would have been 84 this month. His wife, Kathryn Starbuck, wrote the following post on his poems and the couple’s friendship with the late Patrick Leigh Fermor. Her poem “Sylvia En Route to Kythera” appears in our June 2015 issue.
Alas, I rarely read poetry. But I was married to poetry for nearly three decades in the person of George Starbuck. George was born June 15, 1931. His ten-book body of work was cut short by a twenty-two-year struggle with Parkinson’s disease that ended with his death at home at age 65 in 1996. While thinking of George and his work, I’ve been re-reading Patrick Leigh Fermor’s Roumeli, 1966, his masterpiece about northern Greece, Byron, poetry, and modern Greek history. Leigh Fermor, the incomparable British prose stylist, lived in Greece, and died at 96 in 2011. He was a literary warrior-scholar who loved poetry. As a commando in the British special forces, he became the hero of the Battle of Crete in World War II when he kidnapped Nazi General Heinrich Kreipe.
He admired George’s poetry. Leigh Fermor sent George a fan letter about his poem “A Tapestry for Bayeux” when his first book, Bone Thoughts, came out in 1960. He invited George to visit him in Greece.
George and I stayed with him for a memorable day and night at his home in Kardamyli in the Mani peninsula in the Peloponnesus in the early 1980s. I sang him a song a young Greek shepherd had sung to me in the Tayegetus mountains, which Leigh Fermor had hiked for decades. I sang it in Demotiki and in the rough translation I had fashioned. My father was born in Greece in the Peloponnesus. The Nazis extirpated his family in 1944. Leigh Fermor and I talked late into the night about the Massacre of Meligala. (I published an essay, “Singing for Patrick Leigh Fermor,” in 2014 in The Sewanee Review.)
Leigh Fermor sang folk songs in eight languages. He favored back formations, artificial formations, portmanteau words. I believe my husband had only five languages. George was a master of poetic forms. His Bayeux tapestry poem is a 156 line display in dactylic monometer about the Normandy invasion. In virtuosic metrics, it also conceals bawdy versified digs at a well-known anthologist of the day, Oscar Williams. Leigh Fermor and George were fans of the French Oulipists.
George and Leigh Fermor held a glittering exchange of hilarious rapid-fire shots back and forth like world-class tennis players of their favorite poetic forms, poetic short hand, and archaic forms. They kept outdoing each other, like mountain climbers racing for Everest, with examples of what worked best and what almost never worked for Shelley, but did work for Byron, and usually for Keats and always for Pope…while I, like the journalist I was at the time, took notes.
Nearly five and one-half feet wide and five inches tall, George’s “Elegy in a County Church Yard,” a landscape of shaped tombstone poems, is thought to be the world’s widest concrete poem. Leigh Fermor declared himself dumbstruck, awestruck, and more when he received a copy of it.
Here is an excerpt from the ending of Fermor’s Roumeli:
The seas of Greece are the Odyssey whose music we can never know: the limitless sweep and throb of prosody, the flux and reflux of hexameters scanned by winds and currents and accompanied, for its escort of accents,
for the fall of its dactyls
the calm of its spondees
the run of its tribrachs
the ambiguity of its trochees
and the lash of its anapaests;
for the flexibility of accidents,
the congruence of syntax
and the confluence of its crasis;
for the fluctuating of enclitic and proclitic,
for the halt of caesurae and the flight of the digamma,
for the ruffle of hard and soft breathings,
for its liquid syllables and the collusion of diphthongs,
for the receding tide of proparoxytones
and the hollowness of perispomena stalactitic with
subscripts,
for the inconsequence of anacolouthon,
for the economy of synecdoche,
the compression of hendiadys
and the extravagance of its epithets,
for the embrace of zeugma,
for the abruptness of asyndeton
for the swell of hyperbole
and the challenge of apostrophe,
for the splash and the boom and the clamour
and the echo and the murmur of onomatopoeia
And here is the beginning of George’s 156-line “A Tapestry for Bayeux”:
Over the
seaworthy
cavalry
arches a
rocketry
wickerwork:
involute
laceries
lacerate
indigo
altitudes,
making a
skywritten
filigree
into which,
lazily,
LCTs
sinuate,
adjutants
next to them
eversharp-
eyed, among
delicate
battleship
umbrages
twinkling an
anger as
measured as
organdy.

After George died, I edited his final book of poems, Visible Ink (2002), then The Works (2003), a selection of his best work. When I turned sixty, I wrote my first poem. Greece and grief, the Tayegetus mountains of the Peloponnesus, my father and the Nazis echo throughout my first book Griefmania. I sent a copy of it to Leigh Fermor in 2006. His response brought me to my knees.
Tags: George Starbuck, Kathryn Starbuck, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Poetry magazine archives
Posted in From Poetry Magazine on Tuesday, June 23rd, 2015 by Kathryn Starbuck.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.contemporaryamericanvoices.com


July’s Featured Poet – Sarah Brown Weitzman
July 1, 2015 in Contemporary American Voices, Literature, Poetry, Uncategorized, Writing | Tags: Sarah Brown Weitzman | Leave a comment
__________________________________________________ __________________________________________________ __________________________________________________ _________

Sarah Brown Weitzman-



WHEN I WAS YOUNG

our a radio was a substantial piece of furniture
and the telephones had a rotary dial.
The refrigerator freezer was the size of a shoebox
My father wound his watch every evening before
he went to bed. His La Salle car had a running board.

At the movies there was a double feature, one
coming attraction, a news reel and an aged matron
with a flashlight who shined it on you if you misbehaved
and hauled herself up the stairs when the boys
in the balcony threw their chewed gum down on us.

When my grandmother died a telegram was delivered
right to our front door by the brother
of the girl who worked in the 5 & 10 cent store.
Everyone wore black to her funeral even though
they weren’t related. My mother said the word,
divorcee, in a whisper when a cousin arrived. Copies
of the death certificate were made with carbon paper

I remember when our doctor made house calls.
A dollar allowance went a very long way
because with a penny I could buy twenty jelly beans
or a long strip of candy dots on paper.
My mother believed that steak was good for me
Nothing we ever bought was labeled “Made in China”
and poems rhymed.
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Much more in the linked article but this one poem said enough for me!
It has shown how fast we walked away from naive and simple in order to embrace, fast , loose and endlessly depraved in order to get thrills and justify our sad lives!
I reject such as is now thought to be enlightenment.
The rebel in me has came full circle back to honest , country boy roots.
I can and will slay dragons before I die. You know why?
Because I must for my soul to ever rest. The reason I was spared was to one day fight.
I will write too. At least one thousand poems.
Words may have power, as much as is the TRUTH that they contain......Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2014/11/surrealism-is-a-romantic-critique-of-the-avant-garde-from-within/

[Editor’s Note: Garrett Caples delivered a version this talk at the Poetry Foundation on November 6, 2014 as part of the Harriet Reading Series. Other “Open Door” features can be found here.]


I begin with the penultimate sentence of “Theory of Retrieval,” the capstone to my recent book of essays, Retrievals:
“I admire from a distance other, perhaps grander aspects of [André] Breton—the movement leader, the concept synthesizer—but what I’ve sought to emulate as a poet-critic is his spirit of generosity to the living and the dead.” This is as much to say that I’ve never aspired to be a leader of others or an inaugurator of discourse. Indeed, “Theory of Retrieval” is something of an inside joke, for it’s simply a description of, and an account of various experiences that went into the making of, the book in which it appears. I mean, I don’t have theories. I just do things. Whatever I can get away with, according to the vagaries of my ethical compass. And whatever the drawbacks of such an approach, I’m pleased to report that, by this age, as a writer, editor, even poet, I’ve done a lot of things, things I thought needed to be done.
Notwithstanding all that, I was incautious enough to dub my latest chapbook of poems What Surrealism Means to Me, which led directly to the invitation to deliver this lecture on surrealism and contemporary poetry. The “-critic” is thus called to account for the effusions of the “poet-,” for I have hitherto never self-identified as a surrealist; rather, in the late ’90s, along with my friends Jeff Clark and Brian Lucas, I was accused by a largely forgotten academic of being a surrealist. (I think we were called, derisively, the San Francisco Surrealists.) I can’t speak for my confreres, but for my part, I wouldn’t have presumed to call myself a surrealist, because I took surrealism seriously. While I never held it against those who identified as surrealists, nor did I ever disavow surrealism, at the same time, I felt that calling yourself a surrealist had little bearing on whether or not you could achieve surrealism. Such discretion aside, however, the accusation has more or less stuck and my poetry, insofar as it’s thought about at all, tends to be considered surrealist.
Nonetheless, publishing my latest chapbook under the rubric of surrealism wasn’t a question of “giving in” to the label, but was rather a deliberate decision, as indicated by “Selfie at Delphi,” the poem-manifesto that opens What Surrealism Means to Me:
when i was a young poet, there was all this postmodern distance & irony i couldn’t abide. everyone was great at deriding what they disliked & everyone sucked at deciding what they liked. now that i’m a middle-aged poet, everyone’s vampiric, parasitic, cannibal, in the name of a look-at-me-ism that mistakes the clever for the conceptual: poetry as selfie.
what surrealism has done for me is provide dissident perspective on what otherwise nice, even reasonable employees of museums & universities tell me is cutting-edge, avant-garde, true. a spine to speak get the fuck outta here & an intelligence to back it up. surrealism’s been the light leading me through continuous yet temporary labyrinths & if you think i lit this rush from Lamantia who lit his from Breton, you’re fucking right.
On the one hand, I suppose, this looks for all the world like a midlife crisis; certainly I would never have carried on in this fashion in my youth. Fifteen years ago, I wouldn’t have permitted myself in a poetic text to write so prosaically, nor would I have spoken of my own poetry so directly or invoked surrealism so explicitly. And I definitely wouldn’t have had the grandiosity to propose this lineage from Breton to Lamantia to myself. Yet here is where I find myself. What’s shifted is the context of the discussion in the poetic avant-garde. When I came of age as a poet, the avant-garde in the Bay Area was dominated by language poetry; there was a stifling orthodoxy to the conversation and it was theory-driven at the expense of poetic results. The way to change this conversation was not by writing manifestoes, for language poetry was only too ready to argue, but rather by writing more compelling poetry. If my friends and I had any impact on poetry in terms of younger writers, it was through example, by suggesting other avenues in experimental poetry than those sanctioned by language poetry.
The situation today could be no more different, to the point where I feel a mild nostalgia for language poetry; however wrongheaded I found them, the language poets were worthy opponents, and they were nothing if not sincere. Rightly or, as I maintain, wrongly, they were committed to their ideas and the poetry that flowed therefrom. With the contemporary poetry of conceptualism, however, we are confronted with a whole new animal, one that doesn’t even pretend to believe what it says. As near as I can tell, it began as a cynical land-grab by failed visual artists, using a warmed over version of turn of ’70s minimalism as a way to take out their frustrations about their creative impotence, hence the valorization of “uncreative writing.” It is, on the one hand, all about product, ways of generating product with minimal effort, and in this we can see its academic origins, for this is surely the cut-and-paste solution to the professor’s publish-or-perish problem. On the other hand, it disavows its product, insofar as the texts of conceptualism are self-declaredly meant to be discussed, not read. Conceptualism will do anything for attention, because attention is its only goal. It will not hesitate to engage in the worst forms of ambulance chasing and grave robbing, whether attaching its projects to the suicide of open access activist Aaron Swartz or publishing a remix of the manifesto of mass murderer Elliot Rodger a mere two days after his killing spree. In this, it’s the ultimate symptom of the social media age, and social media has had a pernicious effect on the poetry world. A bubbling cauldron of clickbait and petty resentments, social media has created a permanent MFA class of poet, one concerned chiefly with parsing the activities of his or her peers as opposed to pursuing the ancient art we profess to practice. Poetry is elsewhere.
But why invoke something as unfashionable as surrealism to oppose conceptualism? As a poet, I always feel the need to........................................

Read more at the link provided above. Tooooooooo long to post all here. -Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.montevidayo.com

Montevidayo

about contributors
New edition of The Journal Petra
by James Pate on Apr.20, 2015, under Uncategorized
There’s an excellent new edition of The Journal Petra out now.
Work by such Montevidayo favorites as Kim Hyesoon and Lucas de Lima can be found there,
along with many other great poems.

-----



Johnny Payne reviews The Sugar Book
by Johannes on Apr.17, 2015, under Uncategorized
Over at Cleaver Magazine, Johnny Payne has written a very thoughtful review of The Sugar Book.
In particular, I appreciate the way he – like Carleen Tibbetts in her review in American
Microreviews- thinks through the kind of “barrage” that gave Publisher’s Weekly such issues
with Haute Surveillance. Payne acknowledges that he felt the urge to cut out some of the
stuff from the book but instead of this leading him to knee-jerk attack/dismiss the way
Publisher’s Weekly did, he actually thinks about
his reaction.
Here’s an excerpt:
This is exactly what Kant meant when he described the sublime as a rapid alternation between
the fear of the overwhelming and the peculiar pleasure of seeing that overwhelming overwhelmed:
a raging storm that “takes our breath away.” This book is full of a genetic hybrid of Billie
Holiday’s strange fruit—as a song that became an ekphrastic poem—the ugly philosophical
object of contemplation transmuted, by its very violence, into something lyrical.
Pablo Neruda played with this idea back in 1925, with feismo, the art of the ugly:
el perfume de las ciruelas que rodando a tierra
se pudren en el tiempo, infinitamente verdes.
the perfume of plums that rolling to the ground
rot in time, infinitely green.


The Sugar Book is a full-on assault on the senses, the sharp point of a blunt instrument. I don’t think anyone would accuse this book of subtlety. Its virtue is precisely its overkill. Excess, at its best, becomes a form of complexity. The outrage, while often smirking, runs deep, forcing a core of sincerity into what might easily have become a flippant, cynical take on urban ennui, as I feared when facing such crackling ironic titles as “At the Shrine for the Dead Starlet,” or “ The Heart of Glamour.”

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1581015.ece

‘Man in a Bar’
by Jenny Joseph; introduced by Andrew McCulloch
Published: 14 July 2015

When she was seventeen, Jenny Joseph heard the story of how Federico García Lorca, walking through a strange town, heard a prostitute singing a song. Stopping to listen, he found the words were from one of his own poems. “This at once for me became the ideal”, she wrote in the introduction to a selection of her poems in The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Women Poets (1985). “It seemed the absolute of fame that what one wrote should be so much a part of the world as to rise to the lips of any . . . Joan, Liz or Mary”. This was an ambition she certainly achieved with her poem “Warning” (“When I am an old woman I shall wear purple . . . ”) which, in 1997, beat “Do Not Go Gentle”, “Stop All the Clocks” and “Not Waving but Drowning” to be voted Britain’s favourite post-war poem.

“Warning” is from Joseph’s second collection Rose in the Afternoon (1974), described by Peter Porter as “a sort of walled garden of the suburban imagination, a place part wrecked by cats and disappointment and part illuminated by the light that Samuel Palmer saw over Shoreham”. But her “wholly original” way of mixing “mystery and plain statement” was already evident in The Unlooked-For Season (1960) – in which “Man in a Bar” appeared – a collection also full of “deserted towns, deserted homes, deserted seas, deserted hearts” (A. Alvarez). The poem clearly springs from her lifelong interest in the Robert Browning vein of first-person narrative verse (although it may also owe something to the fact that she was married to a publican) and anticipates the dramatic monologues of U. A. Fanthorpe and Carol Ann Duffy. It reveals Joseph’s fine ear for emotional cadence. Each section opens with a brave attempt to answer an implied question as positively as possible. The speaker’s rueful honesty becomes increasingly visible through his threadbare claims, while his urbanity – even if it is not very convincing – has hardened into more than just a mask. Even his howl of anguish at the end is all but mute.



Man in a Bar


You see I have been here a long time now
And though the work I came for was years ago finished
It is an easy country to stay on in.
I have got used to the way of certain things here.
They can be absurdly irritating at times
But I get on quite well, really quite well with the people.
And then, they take you for granted. And there’s the sun
And the night air in summer. There are the Southern roses.
I am at ease in these frequented ruins
And here at least I have my place as exile.

Oh, I hear quite often from people at home;
Sometimes old friends come out here: I know the place well
And I’m glad to prove of use. I like to see them
But many have married now, and with others I talk
Only of that small time so long ago
When we knew each other; every one, growing old
Grows old with different ruins, different memories,
Different deaths to recall at the sudden sad hour
When, having talked too quickly, each falls silent.

I have become rather lazy about new people
And . . .

No, I suppose there’s nothing to stop me returning
Though my brother’s family has left and I’ve nowhere to go
Where I could stay with ease. I could buy a ticket
Between Thursday and Friday, as they say. There’s nothing to keep me
Except what I create. Ah, to go home . . .

Love is not logical, but has its own
Peculiar philosophy. I know
I shall stay here now.

Whether I regret it, this habit of life that keeps me
Inevitably within its circle, inevitably an exile?
Towards the end of the season, when visitors go
Back to their cooler lands, when sometimes I have
An amusing letter from one reaching home who finds
The garden full of young fruit, goes picnics with friends
I once went with, I, in the splendid South
Could break my heart with longing. I do not go near
The station at such times for there are too many
People who go home.
Usually it is in the season before the storms
And had I not, long since, lost all tears
I could weep enough to bring on thunder.
JENNY JOSEPH (1957)

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

Found this in one of my meandering searches of new poetry sites, blogs and misrepresentations!
Ending verse struck me as being funny as hell, so I share it here.
O', how many times have I felt the same way about certain people! -Tyr

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


http://ecstaticdoggerel.blogspot.com


And one day the boy came back, and the tree was so happy she could barely speak.

"Come, boy, come climb my trunk and have fun again!" she whispered.

"I am too old and sad to have fun," said the boy. "The world is not fun. I need a boat, to sail far away from here. Can you give me a boat?"

"A boat?" said the tree. She didn't know what to say. Only that morning there had been news of wildfires, and drought, and starvation, and beheadings, and mass extinctions, and a bunch of walruses with no ice left in the ocean for resting had come ashore in one giant tusky bawling mass.

"Were you saying something?" asked the boy, checking his stock listings on his smartphone. "Yeah, a boat. My life isn't all sunshine and butterflies and bears scratching their backs on me, like yours."

And the tree looked at him a long time. Then she sighed. "I wish I had not given you all my branches," she said. "Because now I cannot beat you violently with them like you deserve, you whiny little dickhead."

POSTED BY M. C. ALLAN (CARRIE, TO MOST) AT 9:02 AM NO COMMENTS:

[Balu]

... so I share it here. ...
This is Fantastic. Having read this I felt as if I returned back for a moment to the days of my childhood.
Thank you, Robert, for giving me such a feeling. http://www.kolobok.us/smiles/standart/friends.gif

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

This is Fantastic. Having read this I felt as if I returned back for a moment to the days of my childhood.
Thank you, Robert, for giving me such a feeling. http://www.kolobok.us/smiles/standart/friends.gif
Thank you for reading and understanding poetry my friend.
Poetry is meant to be a gift to all that read it. Always the poet's hope is it helps the reader in some way.
Life must be about giving back and helping others. For if not then it fails to be divinely inspired.
We that can and do write with that in mind are rewarded when we may find it has help inspire somebody in some positive way.
As to memories of youth, we all seem to have the happy ones stored for use in our daily lives and anything that brings them out to be remembered yet again is a treasure IMHO. -Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/250736
ESSAY
As Ever
The letters of Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti chart a 40-year friendship and two storied careers.

The story now feels nearly inevitable. In 1955, Allen Ginsberg moved into an apartment in the San Francisco North Beach area, just a few blocks away from Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Pocket Bookshop. Ginsberg showed the fledging publisher his work, and Ferlinghetti was intrigued. He attended an event at the Six Gallery on October 7, 1955, where Ginsberg recited part of “Howl” for the first time. A few days later, Ferlinghetti sent the poet a telegram: “I greet you at the beginning of a great career,” he cabled, echoing Ralph Waldo Emerson’s legendary note to Walt Whitman. “When do I get the manuscript of ‘Howl’?”

So began a decades-long relationship between the two men, as writer and publisher and as friends. From 1955 until Ginsberg’s death in 1997, they exchanged letters on matters large and small, from the 1957 obscenity charges that Ferlinghetti faced as the publisher of Howl to Ginsberg’s precarious finances (“I’m broke, dumb, writeless and nowhere. Send on royalties as soon as you can,” wrote Ginsberg in 1958). They sent each other thoughtful editorial notes and breezy accounts of their far-flung travels. In the early years, letters were their principal mode of communication, and their correspondence tracks not only the arc of their storied careers but also the palpable affection and respect the two men had for each other.

City Lights has just published a collection of Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti’s selected correspondence, I Greet You at the Beginning of a Great Career, edited by Bill Morgan. What follows are excerpts from that volume.



June 22, 1956: Allen Ginsberg onboard the USNS Sgt. Jack J. Pendleton in Seattle to Lawrence Ferlinghetti in San Francisco

Dear Larry:

Well what news? I am in Seattle, will be here over weekend and thru next Friday, will return to San Francisco next weekend for a few days — arrive sometime Sunday I expect, around the 30th or 31st. If therefore you got or will get proofs hold on to them, I’ll look them over myself.
Generally speaking the Greyhound poem [“In the Baggage Room at Greyhound”] stinks on ice, at least the end does — that won’t last no 1000 years — I had a nightmare about it standing on the prow several days ago. I dunno what to do, haven’t written anything better on it since leaving town. Maybe later.
If you call Kenneth by phone tell him I’ll see him in few days, when return, Rexroth that is.
Spending much time gazing at the “misty vast nebulous and never-to-be-knowable clouds,” and reading Shakespeare.

As ever,
Allen





In early August, Ferlinghetti sent an advance copy of the bound book Howl and Other Poems to Ginsberg onboard his ship near the Arctic Circle.

ca. August 9, 1956: Ginsberg onboard the USNS Sgt. Jack J. Pendleton to Ferlinghetti in San Francisco

Dear Larry

Received the copy of the book you sent me promptly — and was excited to see it. Everything worked out fine with the typography — it looks much better this way and it seems to have been real cheap to do — $20 is nuthin. I shuddered when I read the poetry tho, it all seems so jerry-built sloppy and egocentric, most of it. “Greyhound” looks fine, I’m glad you told me to put it in. Reading it all through I’m not sure it deserves all the care and work you’ve put into it and the encouragement you’ve given me, in fact to tell you the truth I am already embarrassed by half of it, but what the hell, thank you anyway for all your courtesy and I hope few people will see it with such jaded eyes as I do, tho I guess it’s best the poems have a truthful fate than an over-sympathetic one. I wonder if we will actually sell the thousand copies.[…]
“Transcription of Organ Music” I still like, I’m not sorry. It’s not revised so it’s not bad “Art” like the rest of the writing. Its ineptness is its own and nature’s not mine.

[unsigned]





After Ginsberg returned from the Merchant Marines, he and Ferlinghetti communicated in person for a time. In the fall of 1956, Ginsberg took a trip to Mexico with Jack Kerouac and Peter Orlovsky, among others, then went to New York City. During this time, Ferlinghetti reprinted 1,500 copies of Howl and Other Poems.

January 15, 1957: Ginsberg in New York to Ferlinghetti in San Francisco

Dear Larry:

January 9 letter received, as well as clipping from [San Francisco] Chronicle. I was going to write [Norman K.] Dorn, the reviewer, a letter but I tried several, each a different tone and they all sounded goofy so I gave up. If you see him ever say we collectively rarely have lice, and I hope he drops dead of clap. No, wasn’t really discouraged, just realized what a weird place New York book reviewing works like. [ . . . ]
Listen, great tragedy. My friend Lucien Carr objects violently to using his name in dedication. His reasons are varied and personal and real enough for him — I had never asked his OK, and he has reasons why not. What can be done about omitting that line in the dedication in the second printing? Is it too late for immediate action?
It’s my fuck up, but I have to straighten it out. Therefore if the whole thing is printed and bound already, have it done all over again and bill me for the second printing. It’s about $100 more or less?
[…]
What did you think of [Kenneth] Koch’s poem “Fresh Air” in I.E. [The Cambridge Review]? I thought very good. Jack Kerouac, Peter Orlovsky and I went out to visit W.C. Williams who said he’d review the book — probably for Times I guess — so (this being Gregory’s book Gasoline) with [Randall] Jarrell intro that ought to set up Gregory. Long funny afternoon we all got drunk and my father* drove us home here raving and weeping about St. Carlos. He dug Jack and his wife also. Gregory unmentioned above was there too, I forgot. He read mad silly poems to Williams and Williams loved him, but worried what he’d be like “in forty years.” [ . . . ]

As ever, Allen

*Louis Ginsberg, Allen Ginsberg’s father, was a poet and schoolteacher in New Jersey.

February 5, 1957: Ferlinghetti in San Francisco to Ginsberg in New York

Dear Allen,

Howl will be delayed an extra two weeks due to deletion of Lucien Carr, and I have been completely out of [copies] for almost a month. However, it should be here in bulk by February 20 at the latest. I caught them in the last stage — the book had already been folded and gathered, but not stitched. Therefore, one section could still be taken out, reprinted, and regathered, etc . . . The total extra cost comes to $25, which I could use as soon as possible, to pay the bill. I have back orders from all over the country now — including big orders for Paper Editions. [Ted] Wilentz at the Eighth Street Bookshop in New York has ordered 100 copies. I sent him the last five I had. Gotham Book Mart has also put in a big standing order, and I sent them five of yours as a stop-gap. [ . . . ]
We all got photographed for Life Sunday night at a mass reading at Kenneth’s [Rexroth] . . . I am sick of all these con operations, and I hope every photographer in the country crawls in a hole somewhere and drops dead. It all has nothing to do with poetry. I am not sending my poetry anywhere unsolicited, and frankly I don’t give a good shit if they come and get it or not. I wasted enough post on Partisan twenty years ago . . . However, as for your book, I will continue to push and will send copy to Lisa Dyer at Hudson Review as soon as I get a copy to send. Poetry writes me that they will include it in a review early this summer . . . by [Frederick] Eckman [ . . . ]

Best, regards, etc, Larry

March 3, 1957: Ginsberg in New York to Ferlinghetti in San Francisco

Dear Larry:

Have investigated but as far as I know, the book can’t be copyrighted here because printed in England. If you know a way it can be, please do so in my name and send me bill for what it costs.
[…]
If necessary, can copyright it in your name or City Lights or whoever, with the understanding that it’s my copyright to use as I wish and get whatever loot I can. Though actually I guess no copyright is necessary and it’s all just a bunch of bureaucratic papers so no point actually in doing anything, nobody has anything to steal except in paranoiac future lands.
[…]
What’s happening? I’ve now extricated myself from publicity work and am sitting quietly reading Blake and Mayakovsky — do you know the latter? — really the end, mad public prophetic style.

I hear [Charles] Olson is there, what’s he like and what’s happening socially?

As ever, Allen

ca. March 1957: Ferlinghetti in San Francisco to Ginsberg in New York

Dear Allen,
The hell with contracts — we will just tell them you have standing agreement with me and you can give me anything you feel like giving me on reprints whenever you get back to States and sit in Poetry Chairs in hinterland CCNYs* and are rich and famous and fat and fucking your admirers and getting reprinted in all of seldenrod-man’s anthologies,** until then, natch, the loot shud be yours since as you say I am getting famous as your publisher anyway. Do you want more Howls and other Pocket Poets sent now (which ones?) and charged against you? How many? . . .

[…]
Will soon send addition on Howl sales to-date. OK? G’bye . . .

larry

*City College of New York.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://mikechasar.blogspot.com

ABOUT ME

My Photo
MIKE CHASAR
SALEM, OREGON, UNITED STATES
Further thoughts on the intersection of poetry and popular culture: this being a record of one man's journey into good bad poetry, not-so-good poetry, commercial poetries, ordinary readers, puns, newspaper poetries, and other instances of poetic language or linguistic insight across multiple media in American culture primarily but not solely since the Civil War
VIEW MY COMPLETE PROFILE

Praise for Everyday Reading: Poetry and Popular Culture in Modern America

"Mike Chasar's brilliant, witty book is the definitive guide to the growing field of American popular poetry. Empowered by prodigious research and informed by thorough knowledge of the traditional poetry canon, Chasar's five chapters take us deep into the way poetry functioned in the lives of ordinary people." — Cary Nelson, University of Illinois, editor of The Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry

"Burma-Shave quatrains, newspaper columns, scrapbooks with thousands of stanzas held together by affection and paste, folksy, pseudonymous, nationally famous radio hosts and the fans who sent them an avalanche of homemade verse: these are just some of the materials taken seriously in Mike Chasar’s extraordinarily memorable, and likely influential, study of popular American verse, and of the popular culture that grew up around it, for most of the twentieth century. Chasar combines the painstaking, arduous archival methods of real historians with the close analyses that we expect from literary critics, applied to verse, to images, and to informative prose ephemera. He persuasively links Williams Carlos Williams’s innovations to roadside signs, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop to the Hallmark card; he may change how you see some eminent writers’ work. Even more than that, however, Chasar should get twenty-first-century readers to sit up and notice the uses that so many Americans, only a couple of generations ago, found for the poetry that they enjoyed. Or, to take up a mode that Chasar appears to be the first to analyze: THIS OLD-TIME VERSE/ HAS LOTS TO SAY/ IF YOU CAN READ IT/ CHASAR’S WAY. His book is an ambitious, serious claim on present-day literary studies; it’s also a surprise, and a delight." — Stephen Burt, Harvard University, author of Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry

"As Bob Dylan put it, 'We have our ideas about poets,' and we certainly have our ideas about poetry. Lately, those ideas have led to a national outcry in favor of bringing poetry back into American public life. But in Everyday Reading, Mike Chasar shows us that if we can rethink our ideas about poets and poetry, we will find that poems have always been part and parcel of modern life. This is an important—really, a necessary—book for anyone interested in modern poetics, in the history of reading, in the many appearances of poetry in the era of its supposed disappearance." — Virginia Jackson, University of California Irvine, author of Dickinson's Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading

"This breakthrough study convincingly shows that American poetry in the opening decades of the twentieth century, far from being a largely elitist product that appealed to a limited audience, circulated among a number of different readers to a remarkable degree and left its traces in surprising areas." — Edward Brunner, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, author of Cold War Poetry



"The lyric spring will never cease creating an emotional pressure, sought after by every searching consciousness—this is what Mike Chasar ... has shown in his book Everyday Reading" — Marina Zagidullina, New Literary Observer

•

"[T]he originality of Chasar's close readings, the sheer amount of research informing each chapter, and the speculations on what can be learned from such careful analyses of popular cultural practices make Everyday Reading not so everyday and well worth reading." — Lisa Steinman, The Journal of American History

•

"[The] tension between the poetic and the popular is the crux of Chasar's fun and thoughtful book. Chasar is a literary archaeologist. He excavates the poetry in Burma Shave ads, literary scrapbooks of the 1920s and 1930s, old time radio shows, and yes, even Hallmark cards. His close reading of [Paul] Engle's poem 'Easter' as well as the reproduction of the actual card is genius. His thesis is that early-twentieth-century market culture was saturated with poetry (as opposed to 'Poetry') that was participatory rather than exclusionary. This emotional interactivity with poetry, Chasar posits, set the stage for the bizarre matrix of media, commerce, and culture that would come to define the second half of the twentieth century." — Dean Rader, American Literature

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2015/06/poet-libertys-crack-my-life-with-christopher-1988/

Poet in the Crack of Liberty: My Life with Christopher, 1988
BY CA CONRAD
CA Conrad
If you steal my idea I swear to God, well, I’ll be mad at you. It’s a moneymaking machine this idea, and
I came up with it when I dated an actor named Christopher. He was very New England-handsome and therefore able to find work dressed as a hot revolutionary war soldier for tourists at Independence Hall. I loved seeing him in his uniform, my sexy Philadelphia hero in his tri-cornered hat, knickers, and of course his gun I loved his gun. He would be cleaning it in the park and I would watch from behind a tree hoping to keep my gun-cleaning voyeurism a secret, but he always caught me. “There’s something wrong with you” he said. “Yes and I LOVE IT” I said.
He liked that I always wanted to see the Liberty Bell. He liked it because he never met anyone who loves it as much as I do. It’s one of my favorite things on Earth and I think he secretly wanted to like something, anything, as much as I do the Liberty Bell. He squeezed my shoulder lovingly in his vicarious bell love. I asked, “can you draw the bell’s crack in the air?” “Yeah, sure” he said. “Okay then, do it.” “There” he said, “like that.” “Not even close” I said, “if you mean to actually know how such a consequential crack exists in the world you need to give it the dignity of seriously studying its character as only the character of such a crack can possess.” “I don’t know why I put up with you,” he said. “We’re talking about the crack of Liberty Christopher stay focused please you have the attention span of a goldfish sometimes.”
Practicing the crack in the air that day is when the million-dollar idea came to me. The crack, it’s the crack of the bell that matters. If you draw the Liberty Bell’s crack on paper without the bell it’s a waterway map, a chocolate stream with chocolate frogs and salamanders. “I KNOW WHAT TO DO” I said, “I’ll create chocolate treats in the shape of the crack, sell them on a stick, a chocolate crack on a stick! I’ll sell them outside the Liberty Bell on a table and call out CHOCOLATE LIBERTY CRACK ON A STICK, GET YOUR CHOCOLATE LIBERTY CRACK ON A STICK, like the poet Gil Ott when he first moved to Philadelphia taking his magazine PAPER AIR out to the corner yelling PAPER AIR PAPER AIR GET YOURS NOW. And then one day a wealthy candy factory owner will be in town with his children and they’ll love my chocolate cracks and he’ll take me on board. And then we’ll have different kinds of chocolate cracks, ones with crushed nuts sprinkled on the crack, or peanut butter injected cracks, cinnamon dusted cracks, delicious DELICIOUS CHOCOLATE LIBERTY CRACKS! It will make millions,” I said excitedly! “Well what do you think of my new idea?” He shrugged and said “I like how crazy your ideas are, but it’s not a good one this one.” “I don’t know why I put up with you,” I said.
Philadelphia is where you move to when you love the Liberty Bell. It’s the reason I’m here and only the National Park security guards have seen it more than I have. You would think after years of seeing me standing at the velvet ropes to gaze at the bell’s crack that we would be on familiar terms but the guards always act like I’m Al-Qaeda. “He’s on his way in again,” they say into their radios as though I can’t hear them. The bell needs more than Taser guns, rubber bullets and paranoia to protect it; it needs liberty in the best sense of the definition. Liberty is a serious word, born from too many examples of tyranny, “The state of being free within society from oppressive restrictions imposed by authority on one’s way of life, behavior, or political views.” If we U. S. Americans are going to actually enjoy the freedom we boast to the world about having, then we should be giving the bell a place of openness.
I’ve most definitely seen the bell more times than anyone alive who is not being paid to be there everyday, and there is a performance idea I’m getting down onto paper, one where I fill the crack of the bell with rich dark chocolate, then eat it out from the bottom up, give it a good tongue licking to get every delicious bit of chocolate. Then I would walk around to the tourists and hand out leaflets on safe sex. This could be a terrific project. Or maybe the other project would be about what happens when I submit the paperwork for the proposal, the project about the project. The project about the official National Park Headquarters reacting to the proposed project I already know they won’t let me do. Write the president, that’s what I’ll do, I mean if it’s okay to drop bombs on unsuspecting families in Afghanistan and Pakistan, what in the hell could be the problem with allowing me to eat out the Liberty Bell of its chocolate filled crack? To be “free within society from oppressive restrictions imposed by authority on one’s way of life, behavior, or political views.” It’s important that I’m ready to answer the National Park Headquarters when they ask if my project is a way of life, a behavior, or a political view. I’m not sure which it is, but I’ll be ready for them!
When I stand in front of the bell I have so many ideas. It’s like a magic idea factory. For instance one day I was standing near tourists with their tiny American flags posing for pictures with the bell when I thought, HEY I want to work in a laboratory doing research on high-powered soul-matter transference lampshades. Not lampshades that cure cancer or AIDS but lampshades that extract some of the creative powers from artists to perforate the armor of those believing themselves undeserving of the Muse’s unction. The light through the lampshade that can sell everyone to themselves, light where we finally get it, we get it that it’s of magnificent importance to be creative each day with something we want to do. Cancer and AIDS are going to sever us from this world no matter what, it’s the way we spend these remaining days, it’s the only thing I want to matter to us. When I look at the Liberty Bell this is one of the things I like to think about, lampshade laboratories of the future of wild unleashing.
Christopher HATED that he was a faggot. I understand that, I mean why on Earth would anyone choose to be queer, it’s very hard. With most families in the world it’s very hard. With most governments it’s very hard. With all monotheistic religions it’s a terrible sin. You deserve whatever you get if you choose to be gay, you’re just asking for trouble. But as far as I know no one chooses it. It’s something to learn to enjoy in our own way and feel beautiful and loved whenever and however we can. I love being loved, don’t you? Of course you do, and we all want to thrive in that love and we should do so whenever possible! When we were together I was the only one with the patience for Christopher’s hard shell and it’s because I got it, that disappointment in yourself that the family who loved you flipped the switch off when you told them you’re a faggot, and it was never going to switch back on again. There are a few faggots and dykes who are lucky enough to have understanding families, but for the rest of us we tenderly fill those dark spaces in one another the best we can.
I decided to make his brooding cold sadness sexy, as much as for me as for him, and it was a dark and lovely task I made for myself. After sex he was always perkier and jovial, and that satisfied me very much knowing I was doing something good for the world. He was always going to New York to try out for plays, and once for a musical. He never got called back, and I knew he was secretly upset that he might be a failure at the only thing he really wanted to do. One day I brought us lunch while he was cleaning his gun and he didn’t look up, his brow furrowed with anger. “Hey hot stuff” I said, “what’s the matter?” “What’s the matter is you pissed off the Benjamin Franklin impersonator again, why can’t you leave that guy alone!” “Look,” I said, “all I did was point out that he was getting Franklin wrong.” Christopher looked up, “yeah well he’s a mean old bastard and he’s giving me shit because he sees us hanging out together and now refers to you as my girlfriend.” “I don’t care what he calls me” I said, “he has no fucking clue how to play the role of Benjamin Franklin, I mean just because he looks like him and dresses like him doesn’t mean he GETS Franklin!” “But nobody cares” he said, “people come from Tokyo, Paris, Buenos Ares, and they want their picture taken with him, that’s it, that’s all they want and he doesn’t need to do anything else.” “Well,” I said, “all I told him was that Franklin wasn’t a goofy buffoon the way he portrays him, Franklin was a GENIUS, and a Lady’s man, he liked beer, he LOVED LIFE, c’mon, he invented the swim flippers as a teenager, he invented the glass harmonica which is the most extraordinary sounding musical instrument ever invented, AND he charmed the French and that’s not easy to do no matter what century you’re talking about!” “Would you please leave the old man alone, when he gets on your bad side he makes your life fucking miserable and I don’t like being in his gun sites frankly.” “Well I think it’s a disgrace,” I said, “to take the only decent founding father we have and turn him into a bumbling goofball, but I’ll stop it, for you I’ll stop it, I’m sorry.” “Thank you, please leave him alone, he hates you.” “Well the real Benjamin Franklin wouldn’t hate me, he would like me very much, and you, he would like us both, and give us some beer and ask us to get naked for a proper ménage a trois the way they taught him in Paris.” Finally Christopher smiled, “I’m not sure why,” he said, “but I do love you.” “Well you better,” I said, “I’m your boyfriend, I’m the man you’re supposed to love and you know what I think is that our odious Benjamin Franklin fake wants to fuck you.” “STOP IT, no he does not!” “Oh yeah, yeah he does.” “Do you think I should fuck him?” “I think you should fuck him, OH YES, his asshole needs to be loosened up Christopher my man, that opening is as small as a sesame seed.”
Most bells are in buildings, you go to the buildings to see the famous church or playhouse and the bell there is the bell that is there, nothing more, and no one cares about the bell. The Liberty Bell is one of the only bells with a building no one goes to see. Who goes to see the Liberty Bell’s building? It was built to house the bell, nothing more and we don’t care about the building we don’t even remember it. It’s the bell, it’s all about the Liberty Bell and you know as well as I do that when you go to see it you’re going through security, having your bag checked, being frisked, waiting in line, and walking the long corridor of short films and giant placards filled with historical trivia because it’s for the crack. You’re there for the finale at the end of the frisking, and that finale is called the crack. No one ever goes to the Liberty Bell to avoid seeing the crack. Millions of people come to Philadelphia each year to see the bell and I bet you not one of them ever averted their eyes from its delicious crack! Not one of them I tell you! Who would do that? Why would you look away from it, you WANT to see it, you know you do, c’mon now! It’s a beautiful crack, look at it with me a second, okay a few minutes more. See in there, it’s a portal into another dimension if we stare long enough. If we were allowed to get closer, touch it, we might just discover it’s an oracle, a sleeping oracle that’s been waiting for us to waken its divinatory powers.
Early one morning after park rangers finished a tour of the bell twenty-six-year-old Mitchell Guilliatt jumped over the velvet ropes and hit it five times with a hammer. Ringing out to the four directions and with one more for the spirit head. JUST BEAUTIFUL I remember thinking that day, wishing I had been there to witness this prophetic act of ringing out liberty. Tourists being interviewed said they were stunned, “I WAS STUNNED I WAS SO STUNNED OH MY GOD” they said. “SHUT UP” I thought, “you are going to remember Mitchell Guilliatt for the rest of your lives, and you HEARD the ringing, you got to HEAR it and you have Mitchell to thank!” He was tackled by security as he yelled out, “I didn’t do anything violent!” I believe this former high school football captain, I really do. I was the only one in Philadelphia who believed him and I was defending him everywhere I went. I was on the verge of making tee shirts with his picture and the words “MITCHELL GUILLIATT WOKE THE ORACLE,” but when I realized I would be the only one to ever wear the shirt I scrapped the whole idea. It’s lonely being the only person in the world on one side of an argument, but I didn’t mind. I held my own at Dirty Frank’s Bar and wherever I met those calling out for justice to have poor Mitchell locked away forever. My good friend Frank Sherlock didn’t agree with me, but I think he liked that I was willing to champion the drifter from Nebraska with a mighty hammer. The federal magistrate charged Mitchell with “causing damage to an archaeological resource.” Resource is a word derived from Old French, meaning, “rise again, recover.” Awaken the oracle, AWAKEN THE ORACLE! For weeks we peered through the glass to see if we could see his hammer marks. We never were sure I mean it’s a broken old bell.
Christopher called very excited and told me to meet him by the Commodore Barry statue behind Independence Hall........

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://jacketmagazine.com/27/schu-linh.html


Susan M. Schultz

Most Beautiful Words:

Linh Dinh’s Poetics of Disgust

This article first appeared in Issue 8 (September 2004) of The Paper, U.K., edited by David Kennedy. It is is 3,400 words or about 8 printed pages long


When I think about the Vietnam war, I remember Hamburger Hill, so called because American soldiers were ground up there in the late 1960s; the battle for Hamburger Hill was one I watched on television as a child. The American guide to Hamburger Hill was CBS newsman, Ed Bradley, best known these days for his recent interview of Michael Jackson. To think about Hamburger Hill not as a battle or as a place (which doubtless has another, Vietnamese, name), rather as the name for a battle, is to think about how language is often used in contemporary poetry to describe suffering.
Linh Dinh by Brian Doan
Linh Dinh, photo by Brian Doan

A mainland Chinese poet, new to the United States and to the English language, once told a class of mine how much he had “suffered” in China. I was less astonished by his suffering than by the fact that he could say it; how many of us can say or write “I suffer” and not have our sincerity turned inside out, its fraudulence presumed? “Hamburger Hill” seems at first a playful, ironic name, referring as much to the product of McDonald’s back home as to the GI’s killed or wounded in that place. As a moment of poetry by an unknown GI, it tells us much about that war, the ways pain was inflicted on soldiers and civilians alike, and the way in which people tried to distance themselves from the war and its political implications. Its real force is this last, an irony that distances us from horror, even if the words themselves refer to it.

But think literally about the name and it ushers up an emotion more like disgust. Men ground up like meat is an image that seeps out of the irony of the term “Hamburger Hill.” Linh Dinh, a poet who comes out of that war, even if his poems do not all address its history, takes the name and renders it as image. His work is like Emily Dickinson’s, as read by Camille Paglia. Rather than domesticate Dickinson’s work for the undergraduate audience, as I am sometimes wont to do (“she thinks about sadness and dying, just like the rest of us”), Paglia reads Dickinson’s images literally. If Dickinson writes about sticking a needle in her eye, goes Paglia’s reading, by golly she means it. There are problems with such readings, to be sure, but what Paglia gets at, and what Linh Dinh does as a poet, is to illustrate how we understand suffering through disgust, rather than through gentler manifestations of feeling, like “grief” or like “compassion” or even “anger.” Disgust, as the BBC reports (January 2004), “evolved to protect us from the risk of disease,” and arose, one scientist claims, “to protect people from rotting meat.”

The disgust that is found in poems cannot claim to have that evolutionary value, the ability to protect us from disease. What, then, can it accomplish? As I read Linh Dinh I see manifestations of disgust in his poetry as paradoxical expressions of suffering: violence, poverty, degradation, and (in the reader) an odd empathy for those caught up in it. When the reader encounters an image that disgusts her, disgust becomes more than a child-like reaction to feces or vomit or blood, more an odd expression of empathy with one who suffers. Empathy as disgust (or is it the other way around?) may seem quite a stretch, but so is much of Dinh’s work. Better put: empathy after disgust, as empathy fills the void disgust leaves behind. If the poem forces us to confront rotting meat, then after an interval, we empathize with the character forced to eat it. The “mudman in earth cafeteria” of one poem does not feel disgust at eating “stinky food,” but the reader feels her emotions aroused by his predicament. It is not direct sympathy that I’m getting at here, the desire to put one’s arm around the mudman, but the kind of empathy that turns away from violence and toward something else. Dinh does not, perhaps, often get to that “something else,” but his poetry provides us with the example of a poetry of witness that comes as close to shattering the language-barrier as possible (disgust being that feeling before language). It’s a poetry of witness that makes the reader a witness, rather than a spectator of witness. And it is one, my friend Deborah Meadows reminds me, that does not depend on arbitrary notions of identity and aesthetics for its power.

Dinh’s disgust is autobiographical in content, if not written in memoir form. Born in 1963, Dinh left Vietnam when he was twelve years old and spent many years in Philadelphia, a city which (despite its name, “brotherly love”) was rife with violence. Responding to Frank Sherlock’s question about the violence in his poems, Dinh responded:
I see violence as a common misfortune and, by extension, fate. It’s what awaits each one of us just around the corner. One cannot think seriously about life without contemplating the destruction of the body. Born in Vietnam, I was baptized early into this awareness. As an adult in Philadelphia, I had many opportunities to gather my bloody evidences.
(Philly Sound Feature, issue #2, 12/ 31/ 03).
Dinh is capable of a nearly scientific view of violence. Poems like “Motate” (fusion of “mutate” and “rotate”; “motet” and “potentate”?) track the violent act with the specificity of super slow motion:
General emission from all orifices.
Blink left eye, then right eye,
then left eye, then right eye.
With index finger, jab at right temple.
Then wheeze quietly as the bullet enters.
(All Around 5)
This is objectivist description, as most of Dinh’s poems are not. In others, Dinh combines violence and, say, food with a literalism (not to be confused with objectivity) that can turn the stomach. Charles Reznikoff’s poems are effective insofar as they present a clean surface, even as that surface moves us to see clearly injustices we cannot, by poem’s end, abide. Dinh’s poems, by way of contrast, are effective on a more visceral level; his images are always precise, like Reznikoff’s, but they are not clean; there is always interference in a Dinh poem, which contributes to its unfolding impact on the reader. Disgust breeds ambivalence, and ambivalence is an unclean emotion. Consider how this speaker regards his spoon: “After each meal, I lick my plastic spoon in a gesture of solidarity with an inanimate object. Did you know that I was once fucked with my own spoon? This very spoon. And then, later, with half a razor” (10). Clearly, the tools of hygiene and health have blood on them; to lick the spoon that raped you sounds like a cliché, but horrifies. Another poet of violence, Chris Abani, has a poem about a teenage boy tortured by the Nigerian authorities by having his penis nailed to a table until he died. That horrific image gains power by its very claim to truth; this happened, and the boy suffered horribly. Dinh’s images are not so “true”; rather, he (like the Vietnamese poets he has translated) uses surrealism as his own tool to oblige the reader to see horror. It’s as if Artaud had been raised in a war zone.

“Earth Cafeteria” undermines every American truism from “organic food” to “ethnic cuisine” and “patriotism” as it explores violence through eating. In Vietnam, as one of Dinh’s favorite

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://ginsbergblog.blogspot.com

Tuesday, July 28, 2015
The Kalevala

AG: Does anybody know the Finnish epic, “The Kalevala”. Has anybody ever read any of that? – I’d like to read a few pages of that. It’s an epic poem which was originally in oral form, and (was) written down in the nineteenth-century by a Swedish scholar, Elias Lönnrot, and translated (fantastically) by Francis Peabody Magoun and published by (the) Harvard University Press. It’s called “(The) Kalevala” – K-A-L-E-V-A-L-A, and in the chapter, or poem, three, that I’m going to read from, this old bard, who has had lots of discipline and lots of experience and is an old dog, finally (old dog, incidentally, is one of the characteristics of tantric mind) – old dog, like an old dog that no longer jumps up (and) barks excitedly when it hears an egg drop.


So, Väinämöinen the old dog bard, meets Joukahainen, a young punk bard coming up the road, and their chariots pass (but) can’t pass each other in the road because there’s a too-narrow road, and so comes “a contest of bards” between the older and the younger. They’ve heard of each other, but finally they’re meeting (at least Joukahainen has heard of Väinämöinen

"..Steadfast old Väinämöinen lives his days/ on those clearings of Väinämöinen's district, on the heaths of Kalevala district./ He keeps singing these songs, keeps singing, goes on practicing his art,/ Day after day he sang, night after night, he recited/ recollections of ancient time those profound origin songs/ which not all children sing not all men understand/ in this dreadful time in this fleeting age/ Far away the news is heard the tidings spread quickly/ of Väinämöinen's singing, of the man's skill./ The tidings spread quickly to the south, the news reached the north country./ Joukahainen was a young, a scrawny, Lappish lad./ Once he was gadding about; he heard that remarkable charms,/ magic songs, were being rattled off, better ones intoned/ on those burned-over tracks of Väinämöinen's district on the heaths of Kalevala District/ - better than what he himself knew, had learned from his father/. That he took greatly amiss, constantly envied/ Väinämöinen being a singer better than himself.."

So there are a few verses where he sets out to meet the older guy:

"..Steadfast old Väinämöinen, eternal sage,/ was driving on his way, covering ground/ on those clearings of Väinämöinen's district, the heaths of Kalevala District./ Young Joukahainen came along, he was driving on the road in the opposite direction./ Shaft caught in shaft, trace got tangled in trace,/ hames became fast in hames, shaft-bow in butt of shaft-bow./ Therefore they then stop, stop deliberate;/ water poured from shaft-bow, vapor steamed from the shafts."

As you'll notice, the formulaic aspect of this is - you make a statement and you modify it, make a statement and you modify it - two halves, one line.

"..Old Väinämöinen asked: "Of what clan are you/ to come along foolishly, recklessly onward./ You break the bent-wood hames, the sapling shaft-bows./ you splinter my sleigh to pieces, my poor sleigh to bits."/ Then young Joukahainen/ uttered a word, spoke thus: "I am young Joukahainen/ but name your own clan;/ of what clan are you, of what crew, miserable creature?"/ . Then steadfast old Väinämöinen now told his name./ Then he managed to say: If you are young Joukahainen,/ pull over to the side. You are younger than I"

"Then young Joukahainen uttered a word, spoke thus:/ "A man's youth is small matter, his youth, his age./ Whichever of two men is better in knowledge, the stronger in memory,/ let him indeed stay on the road, let the other get off the road./ If you are old Väinämöinen, eternal singer,/ let us begin to sing, start to recite magic./ one man to test the other, one to defeat the other"/. Steadfast old Väinämöinen uttered a word, spoke thus:/ - "What can I really do as a singer, as an expert!/ I have always lived my life just on these clearings,/ on the edges of the home field, again and again have listened to the cuckoo by the house./ But, be this as it may, speak, so that I may hear with my ears:/ what do you know about most about, understand beyond other people?"/ Young Joukahainen said: "I indeed know something!/ This I know clearly, understand precisely: "A smoke hole is near a ceiling, a flame is near a fireplace./ It is pleasant for a seal to live, for a pike, dog of the water, to roll about;/ it eats the salmon around it, the whitefish beside it./ A whitefish has smooth fields, the salmon a level ceiling./ A pike spawns in the chill of night, the slobberer in bitter cold weather./ Autumns the timid, obstinate perch, swims deep./ summers it spawns on dry land, flaps about on shores./ "If this may be not enough, I have still another bit of knowledge,/ understand a certain thing:/ "The North ploughs with a reindeer,/ the South with a mare, remotest Lapland with an elk./ I know the trees of Pisa's Hill, the tall evergreens on Goblin's Crag,/ tall are the trees on Pisa's Hill, the evergreens on Goblin's Crag/. There are three strong rapids, three great lakes,/ three high mountains under the vault of this sky./ In Hame is Halla-whirlpool, in Karelia Loon Rapids./ none exceed the Vuoksi rapids (which) surpass those of Imatra" . Old Väinämöinen said: "A child's knowledge, a woman's power of memory! / It is neither that of a bearded man nor indeed of a married man./ Speak of profound origins, of unique matters."/ Young Joukahainen uttered a word, spoke thus:/ "I know the origin of the tomtit, I know the tom-tit is a bird,/ the hissing adder a snake, the roach a fish of the water/, I know iron is brittle, black soil sour,/ boiling-hot water painful, being burned by fire bad./ Water is the oldest of ointments, foam of a rapids oldest of magic nostrums,/ the Creator himself is the oldest of magicians, God the oldest of healers./ The source of water is from a mountain, the source of fire is from the heavens/, the origin of iron is from rust, the basis of copper is a crag./ A wet tussock is the oldest land, the willow the first tree,/ the foot of a tall evergreen the first habitation, a flat stone the first wretched cooking vessel."/ Steadfast old Väinämöinen uttered these words:/ "Do you remember anything more or has your foolish talk now come to an end?"./ Young Joukahainen spoke: "I remember a little more. /I remember indeed that time when I was plowing the sea,/ hoeing out the hollows of the sea, digging deep spots for fish,/ deepening the deep places in the water, putting the lily ponds in place./ overturning hills, heaping up blocks of stone./ I was already the sixth man, seventh person/, when they were creating this Earth, fashioning the sky/, erecting the pillars of the sky, bringing the rainbow,/ guiding the moon, helping the sun,/ arranging the Great Bear, studding the heavens with stars"./ Old Väinämöinen said: "You are certainly lying about this./ No one saw you when they were ploughing the sea,/ hoeing out the hollows of the sea, digging deep spots for fish,/ deepening the deep places in the water, putting the lily ponds in place./ overturning hills, heaping up blocks of stone,/ Nor were you probably seen, /probably neither seen nor heard,/ when the earth was being created, the sky fashioned,/ the pillars of the sky erected, the rainbow brought,/ the moon guided, the sun helped,/ the Great Bear arranged, the heavens studded with stars."/ Young Joukahainen then uttered these words: "If I do not happen to have intelligence, I will ask for intelligence from my sword./ O old Väinämöinen, big-mouthed singer!/ Proceed to measure off our swords, set out to fight a duel"./ Old Väinämöinen said: "I don't think I'm very much afraid/ of those sword of yours, your intelligence, your ice-picks, your thoughts./ But be that as it may, I will not proceed to measure swords/ with you, wretch,/ with you, miserable fellow"./ Then young Joukahainen screwed up his mouth, twisted his head around,/ clawed at his black beard. He uttered these words:/ "Whoever does not proceed to measure swords nor set out to fight a duel,/ him I will sing into a swine, change into a pig with lowered snout./ Such men I enchant, one thus, the other so. /strike dead onto a dunghill, jam into the corner of a cattle shed"./ Old Väinämöinen got angry, then got angry and felt shamed./ He began to sing, got to reciting,/ the magic songs are not children's songs, not children's songs, women's jokes;/ they are a bearded man's which not all children sing,/ nor half the boys indeed, nor one bachelor in three/ in this dreadful time, in this fleeting final age"./ Old Väinämöinen sang. Lakes splashed over, Earth shook/, copper mountains trembled, solid slabs of rock split,/ the crags flew apart, stones on the shore cracked./ He bewitched young Joukahainen. He sang sprouts onto his shaft-bow,/ a willow bush onto his hames, sallows onto the ends of his traces./ He bewitched the lovely basket sleigh. he sang it into a pond as fallen trees./ He sang the whip with the beaded lash into shore reed of the sea./ He sang the horse with the blaze to the bank of the rapid as a rock./ He sang the gold-hilted sword to the sky as flashes of lightning;/ then he sang the ornamented shaft of the crossbow into a rainbow over the waters/ then his feathered arrows into speeding hawks, / then the dog with the undershot jaw, it he sang onto the ground as rocks./ He sang the cap off the man's head into the peak of a cloudbank./ he sang the mittens off his hands into pond lilies./then his blue broadcloth coat to the heavens as a cloud patch/ the soft woolen belt from his waist into stars throughou the heavens/ He bewitched Joukahainen himself,/ sang him into a fen up to his loins,/ into a grassy meadow up to his groin, into a heath up to his arm-pits./ Now young Joukahainen indeed knew and realized./ he knew that he had got on the way, got on the route to a contest,/ a contest in magic singing with old Väinämöinen. /He keeps trying to get a foot free; he could not lift his foot./ However, he tried the other; here his shoe was of stone./ The young Joukahainen indeed becomes anguished,/gets into a more precarious situation. He uttered a word, spoke thus:/ "O wise Väinämöinen, eternal sage!/ Reverse your magic charm, revoke your enchantment,/ Free me from this predicament, get me out of this situation./ I will indeed make the best payment, pay the most substantial ransom"./ Old Väinämöinen said: "Well, what will you give me/ if I reverse my magic charm, revoke my enchantment,/ free you from this predicament, get you out of this situation?"/ Joukahainen spoke, "I have two vessels, two lovely boats. /One is swift in race the other transports much. Take either of these. / Old Väinämöinen spoke, "I do not really care about your vessels. I will not select any of your boats./ These I too have with every rower hauled up, every cove piled full,/ one steady in a high wind, the other that goes into a head wind".. He bewitched young Joukahainen, bewitched him still deeper in./ Young Joukahainen said, "I have two stallions, two lovely steeds./ One is better for racing, the other lively in the traces. Take either of these"./ Old Väinämöinen said, "I don't care about your horses. Don't bother me about white fetlocked horses./ These too I have, with every stall hitched full, every stable full,/ with fat as clear as water on their backbones, a pound of fat on their cruppers"./ He bewitched young Joukahainen, bewitched him still deeper in./ Young Joukahainen said, "Old Väinämöinen, reverse your magic words, revoke your enchantment./ I'll give you a high-peaked hat full of gold pieces, a felt hat full of silver pieces got by my father in the war, brought in from battle"./ Old Väinämöinen said, "I don't care about your silver pieces. I have no need, wretch, for your gold pieces./ These too I have with every storehouse crammed, every little box fully stocked./ They are gold pieces as old as the moon, silver pieces the age of the sun". /He bewitched young Joukahainen, bewitched him still deeper in. /Young Joukahainen said, "O old Väinämöinen , free me from this predicament, release me from this situation. /I'll give you my windrose back home, surrender my fields of sandy soil to free my own head, to random myself". / Old Väinämöinen spoke, "I don't want your wind rose, useless person, nor your fields of sandy soil./ These too I have, filled in every direction, windrose in every clearing./ My own are better fields, my own windrose finer"./ He bewitched young Joukahainen, kept bewitching him further down./ The young Joukahainen at last, however, grew desperate when he was up to his chin in the mud, up to his beard in a bad place./up to his mouth in a fen, in mossy places, up to his teeth behind a rotten tree-trunk. /Young Joukahainen said, "O wise Väinämöinen, eternal sage, now sing your song backward./ Grant me yet my feeble life. Set me free from here./ The current is already dragging at my feet, the sand scratching my eyes./ If you will reverse your magic words, leave off your magic spell, I'll give you my sister, Aino, to rinse out the wooden firkins, to wash the blankets,/ to weave fine stuff, to bake sweet bread."/ Then Väinämöinen was exceedingly delighted when he got Joukahainen's girl to provide for his old age./ He sits down on a song stone, sits himself on a song rock./ He sang once, he sang twice, he sang a third time too./ Young Joukahainen got free, got his chin free of the mud,/ his beard from a bad place, his horse from being a rock in the rapids,/ his sleigh on the shore from being a rotten tree-trunk in the water, his whip from being a shore reed./ He climbed slowly into his basket sleigh, He set out in a sorry state of mind with heavy heart to his dear mother's, to his esteemed parents."

Student: When was that written?

AG: Well, the oral tradition is old, maybe two, three, four, centuries.. It was written down mid nineteenth-century, not long ago, (17), perhaps (18)47. Lönnrot went around to Lapland and other places on field trips collecting these tales and has composed them into an epic. Here's Lönnrot out on his field trip looking for epics (from an 1847 illustration)........

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Sorry about the wall of text but was presented exactly as it was posted....-Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/250732

INTERVIEW
Touchstones
Tavi Gevinson on riot grrrl, Patti Smith, and writing poetry out of necessity.

BY RUTH GRAHAM
Touchstones

Tavi Gevinson has ideas about poetry, but then again, she has ideas about most things.
Gevinson is known, and in certain quarters almost worshipped, for her sophistication
in an ever-expanding series of cultural fields. She was a renowned fashion blogger at
age 12, and at 15, she founded the influential online magazine Rookie, which has a
readership far beyond its supposed audience of teen girls. Last fall, a few months
after she graduated from high school in her suburban Chicago hometown, she starred
in a revival of Kenneth Lonergan’s This Is Our Youth on Broadway, in a performance
the New York Times called “astonishingly assured.”

Rookie has frequently featured poetry on its site. Now, Gevinson has curated a special
section of poems, art, and essays in the July/August issue of Poetry, with most
contributions from “self-proclaimed angsty teens,” as she writes in her introduction.
She spoke with the Poetry Foundation recently about Bob Dylan, getting over embarrassment,
and the 19th-century poem that got her through her first real breakup last year. The
following interview was edited and condensed.

In your introduction, you write about “the fear so many of us have of writing and reading poetry, which is really a fear of seeming like an “angsty teen.” Why do you think so many of us have this idea of poetry as somehow embarrassing?

Certain other mediums or other kinds of writing maybe leave a bit more room to cloak what you’re feeling or thinking or trying to say in irony or detachment. But something about a poem—you’re already saying you’re trying. There’s no way to distance yourself from it because you’re already putting effort into the layout. I remember once in school, one of the definitions we got of a poem was that the writer has a lot more control over how what they’re saying is read. ... I think people in general are conditioned to find something embarrassing about making an effort in regard to wanting [their] own emotions to be understood.

I wonder if part of it is a fear of either liking or creating bad poetry.

Yeah, that goes for all creativity, I guess, and something about poetry is maybe a little more embarrassing. I feel like maybe as you get older, it becomes more and more clear that what you’re experiencing has been experienced many times, and the feelings that you’re feeling are chemical reactions that have run through billions of other bodies. And when you’re a teenager, you don’t really understand that. Like Joan Didion—although she says this happens at like age 21 or 22, but I think it’s very teenager as well—she says there’s this conviction that this has never happened to anyone else before. So when you’re younger, you feel that way, and you put it down on paper, and then you get older, and you realize your experience wasn’t that unique. You get embarrassed.

I mean, you are the only person who has ever been you or who has experienced what you’ve experienced. That’s the next level of perspective that I think is actually a lot more true. But when you reach the one just before it, when you’re like “Oh, I’m not special,” it becomes really embarrassing that you may have ever thought you were.

Why do you think so many people seem to have their most meaningful interactions with poetry during their teen years?

The only adults I know who write—and in a way, read—poetry are poets. It kind of narrows down to the people where that is actually their style of writing and their medium. When you’re a teenager, it’s easier to dabble more. ... Also, in a way, you’re protected. When I think about the poetry I wrote in high school, I felt protected because I felt like I was taking on a tone and an understood amount of drama as opposed to when I was just trying to write a personal essay, and it was straightforward. To use certain writing devices that I had used in poetry seemed melodramatic.

Poetry can feel so vital at that age, but can’t it also feel intimidating?

It probably says a lot about where I’m from that for me it was something that felt raw as opposed to, like, I was discovering the literary canon. My high school had a really great spoken word program. ... I remember the guy who led that program showing us Lil Wayne lyrics. That was more my experience with it.

That it might feel old or stuffy or hard to access—yeah, some poets, but that’s the same as some filmmakers or some writers. That just exists everywhere. I think an easy in for me, I was getting into riot grrrl when I was in high school, and I had ways of getting my hands on old riot grrrl zines. Some of them I guess were lyrics, but I liked that it was this very raw expression I classified as poetry.

I got really into Bob Dylan when I was, I guess, in middle school; he was the first thing I felt like was mine. I loved his music, and then I read Tarantula and kind of knew that it was bullshit but also was into it. Even now, I’ve been reading Patti Smith’s poetry, and it’s interesting to me what ends up accompanied by music and what ends up just itself. In terms of accessibility, I think that songwriters have always been my gateway.

Who are your favorite poets these days?

Margaret Atwood I love, E.E. Cummings I started to really like in high school. Also Jenny Zhang—she wrote an essay for this [Poetry] section, but her poetry I really like as well. We’re working on the fourth Rookie book right now, and there’s a section that’s poetry that a handful of readers sent in. There are so many good ones. There’s one by this girl named Stephanie—I don’t think she included her last name—but it’s just two lines: “We walked to the edge of the world and I pushed you off” or something.

Once I wrote that intro, then I felt like I had to clarify that I’m not just saying, “Oh, these things are great because they’re just so raw.” I don’t like being given work and being told to like it just because it’s earnest or sincere. I think those are really admirable qualities, but that’s not what sets my favorite work apart from the stuff I don’t like. It’s also that I feel that someone is skilled or insightful or what have you. Even in talking so much about the importance of being like an angsty teen, I also feel like everything that’s in this package is also just really good.

When I was in high school, a lot of my peers were really into writing poetry, but it seemed like relatively few were into reading it. Is that still true? Do you think it’s necessarily a problem?

I think with everything, it’s good to have knowledge of what people have done before you and the ways other people have approached the medium and what the standards are. That’s what allows you to break the rules and everything. But I also feel like if young people are, like, feeling like that’s what they want to do, then that’s good, and they’ll get educated at some point. …

There were a lot of classics I read in high school, but for whatever reason, because of my time and place and when I was brought into the world and the things that shaped me, newer works or more unconventional works resonated with me and shaped my brain more than a lot of books where I was able to go, “OK, I get why this is important, I get why this got us from point A to B.” But they weren’t the things that were teaching me how to live. And you can’t really decide what will resonate with you.

When I think about my touchstones that totally shaped the way I view myself and life and growing up and my work, it’s like, I Love Dick, Ghost World, The Virgin Suicides, Franny and Zooey, Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder. And you kind of can’t decide what those things will be. There’s an interview with Miranda July where they ask which books she’s embarrassed not to have read. And she’s just like, we don’t have time. There are way more books, and there’s much more artwork in general than we can ever hope to take in in our short lives. It’s just kind of about whatever finds you at the right time.

So, I think it’s great to have context when you’re writing something, but I also feel like whenever I wrote poetry when I was a teenager, it was out of necessity. I wasn’t thinking about poetry as something that had a history I was responsible for.

What are some of your early memories of falling in love with a poem or a poet?

A year ago, about when I graduated from high school, there were a few that really saved me. I was going through a really insane transition. I wrote out in watercolor Emily Brontë’s “Remembrance.” I had it on my wall at the foot of my bed, so if I started to feel totally consumed by what was happening—just graduating, ending my first-ever relationship, moving to New York and starting a Broadway play—I would look at this poem. There’s one part where she says something like “Dare not indulge in memory’s rapturous pain.” I’m a very nostalgic person, and it helps to look at that and be like high school’s over, this relationship is over.

Similarly, there’s W.H. Auden’s “O let not Time deceive you / You cann...............

[Balu]

Robert, thank you for your two above posts. They were very interesting to read. http://www.kolobok.us/smiles/standart/good.gif

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.rattle.com/poetry/pixel-poetry-a-meritocracy-by-colin-ward/

“pixel poetry: a meritocracy” by colin ward
May 1, 2015
Colin Ward

PIXEL POETRY: A MERITOCRACY

The Only Things Worse Than Generals Are Generalities.

In serving the online literary community as critic, columnist, moderator, administrator, contest facilitator, technician, consultant, designer, and programmer for the last quarter century, I’ve been struck by the differences between its communities and products and those of the offline or “real” world.

When internauts speak of “online” poetry they really mean “online workshoppers’” poetry, not what is found on blogs, vanity sites and personal webzines. For example, the loveable, irrepressible Bill Knott may be the Walt Whitman of our time, promoting, selling and giving away his work. Because he does much of this on the internet, offliners might consider him an online poet. No one who has been plugged in for more than a decade would agree. Similarly, every word that Shakespeare ever wrote can be found on various sites but he’s hardly an “internet poet.” Magazines archiving older issues online don’t make for “online poetry” in any but the most literal sense. Conversely, if Usenet star poet Robert J. Maughan scratched some verse onto birch bark 200 miles from the nearest computer and published it in The New Yorker it would still be an online poem. What distinguishes pixel from page poetry isn’t where it is written, revised, reviewed or published, but whether or not the poet’s technical and critical skills reflect time spent in an online workshop.

At the risk of oversimplification, page poetry is about poets, pixel poetry is about poems. To an offliner, a poem may be a poet’s greeting or business card, a piece in a self-portrait jigsaw puzzle or an invitation to psychoanalysis. “Pragmatic” and “professional” describe what we find in poetry books and magazines. The careerist track of aspiring academics is the most salient example. In this publish-or-perish environment, people more interested in and better suited to teaching poetry than writing it are driven to use up print publishing resources. This impetus, along with other commercial motivations, is unique to the print world. One obvious ramification is that the once common practice of publishing poems anonymously or pseudonymously is unthinkable to today’s print poets.

In contrast, the pixel poet is both a “purist” and an “amateur” who, for better or worse, views each poem as a isolated specimen. Unless part of a series, each poem will serve as its own context. As for the author’s role in this exploratory surgery, well, the biologist rarely speculates about the Creator. Think New Criticism, minus the crazy parts.

When offliners think of workshops they imagine face-to-face (F2F) settings, either writers groups or MFA-style peer gatherings. Academic workshoppers tend to share similarities including occupation (student?), esthetic, education, locale and age. In either model the circumstances can make objectivity and candor difficult. Critics need distance, including physical space. The same verse submitted to an online critical forum may be examined by readers from all continents, ages, occupations, styles and knowledge levels. If posted to an expert venue, a poem might attract the attention of some of the greatest critiquers alive: Peter John Ross, James Wilks, Rachel Lindley, Stephen Bunch, the Roberts (Schechter, Mackenzie and Evans), Richard Epstein, Hannah Craig or John Boddie, to name only a few. There is, quite literally, a world of difference between F2F and online workshops. This diversity and sophistication avoids the homogeneity that F2F workshops can spawn. It also explains why the word “peer” is less frequently used to describe online workshops.

What traits do online workshoppers have in common? The pixel poet must have an abiding interest in improving, obviously, but also in the elements, rather than just the products, of the craft. This is not the place for those who neither know nor care to know that “Prufrock” is metrical. This is not the place for “substance over form” advocates blurbing profound prose with linebreaks. This is not the place for, as Leonard Cohen would say, “other forms of boredom advertised as poetry.” This is a meritocracy of poems, and no one is better than their current effort. If Shakespeare himself posted a clunker to one of the expert-only venues he might be confronted with comments like:

“You use words like a magpie uses wedding rings.”
—Gerard Ian Lewis

“Please tell me there were no dice involved in choosing your words.”
—Manny Delsanto

As you can imagine, the online workshop breeds humility and respect for the art form.

The rules are simple: Critique as much and as thoroughly as you can and thank those who grace you with their thoughts. Newcomers to internet workshopping are urged to start on one of the “friendlies.” Of these, let me recommend:

The Waters

The Critical Poet

Desert Moon Review

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2010/12/why-writers-wont-surrender-to-the-electronic-paper-trail/

POETRY NEWS
Why writers won’t surrender to the electronic paper trail
BY HARRIET STAFF

Besides reading James Somers’ essay in The Atlantic, you can play back and review the entire process of writing it here. Long before word processors overwrote each step on the way to a final product, T.S. Eliot’s meticulous “versioning” of “The Waste Land” allowed scholars to peer into the writer’s process when all of the drafts, notes, and excised portions were published after his death. Had only the finished copy survived, the influence of Ezra Pound would never have been apparent.
Some of Eliot’s typescripts had marks all over them, marks which were known to be the notes of Ezra Pound, Eliot’s champion in the U.S. and a well-known literary critic. He had made massive changes to the original manuscript. Example: that famous opener, “April is the cruellest month,” used to be buried under a section some hundred lines long before Pound cut the whole thing. All told his edits shrunk the poem in half. As a result it became more cryptic, rhymed less, and in some ways mutated into a bleaker, more biting critique of the modern world.
Which is to say that Pound completely transformed “The Waste Land.” And the scary thing is that we might have never known—we might have lost our whole rich picture of the poem’s creation—had Eliot not been such a bureaucrat, typing up and shuffling around so many snapshots of his work in progress.
Software like the kind Somers used to record his progress on these paragraphs exists. We have the technology to rebuild a poem—that is, if authors were willing to use it. Having that capability probably felt intuitive to the software developers who built programs like Etherpad and other text versioning tools. Writing code still requires drafts and revisions. In their case, however, the programmers need to be able to find their way back if something goes wrong or doesn’t work as intended.
That’s because code is so fragile, and simple changes can propagate in complex and unpredictable ways. So it would be stupid not to keep old versions —i.e., versions that worked—close at hand.
Writing is different. A writer explores, and as he explores, he purposely forgets the way he came…
…No need, then, to drop so many breadcrumbs along the way. Especially when such a trail could do more harm than good. Readers could use it to find places where you massaged the facts; they’d be able to see you struggle with simple structural problems; they’d watch, horrified, as you replaced an audacious idea, or character, or construction, with a commonplace.

-----------------------------------
Eliot was great but Pound made him into the giant he is today. Millions that admire him as the best poet never even know this fact..
Now, where is my Ezra Pound? I am sure I must have quite foolishly misplaced him...
My ACHERON poem needs him badly!!! -Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.newpages.com/writers-resources/poets-and-writers-blogs

Interview with Robert Fanning
Published May 11, 2015

Robert Fanning, professor of creative writing at Central Michigan University, shares his manuscripts in process as well as the methods and sources of inspiration he used to draft them. His advice for burgeoning writers, poets in particular, is not the standard cookie-cutter words of wisdom you've heard elsewhere, and his refreshing approach to publishing will help you rethink Submission Sundays. And if you need a new playlist for writing, we have it.



I've heard a couple of indie publishers say that they can always spot an MFA manuscript that's been submitted without reading the bio of the author—and they weren't being complimentary. "The style is always the same." I'd love to hear you address how teachers can create an environment where individual styles can flourish.

I’ve heard that many times. Some of that has to do with editors having to read, yourself included, hundreds and hundreds of manuscripts. That’s a danger, I think, in teaching, that if your students might admire your work they might try to emulate it. I do not see that emulation happening in my classroom. I see a lot of diversity formally and thematically. I think it takes a lot of investment on the teacher’s part. You have to listen to your students and get a feel for what they are doing, their quirks, or where they are doing something different, and then try to feed that. I try to send them to the shelf that has the books that they need. I had a student a few years ago who was writing work that was wildly different from anything I’ve ever written, and I knew that, so I had to do my own research to find for him who his poets needed to be. I think that’s very important: learning to listen to students in order to see what they are trying to do that’s individual or unique, and trying to help foster that.

You have your own forms and structures that you use in your own writing. And you might start with one structure on the page and then realize that’s not what the poem needs. It needs a different structure: same words, different structure. You’ve discovered those structures, discovered what works for you. You’re working with such profound triggers. I’m thinking about Hugo’s Triggering Town here. Do you think that some of what we are doing as teachers is not only helping them find what to read, and helping them to find forms that fit their own work, but also to help them discover and work with and not fear their own triggers?

Absolutely. And to listen to themselves, and to go into their own lives. I would have been a very different teacher had I started teaching right when I came out of my MFA program. Which I didn’t. I went out away from the academy for many years. Returning later was liberating to me as an instructor, because I'm further down the road as a writer. I’m a much different poet; I’m trying new things all the time. So I’m in a particularly good place for working with young poets, I think, because once I’ve done something, I don’t trust it anymore, and I want to do something new. I don’t want to do the same thing again and again. I want each book to be a little different.

Congratulations. That seems to be working. (laughter)

Seems to be. To me, that’s a very good thing. I’m in a very edgy place, where I’m very open to what my students are doing. I don’t create any barriers between myself and my students. I prefer to have them call me by my first name. I write along with them. I think that’s important—for them to see me write and to read some stuff that really sucks, just to let them know we are really peers in this endeavor. Maybe poets who’ve published ten books and won loads of prizes, perhaps in some cases they set themselves above their students, maybe not even consciously. Then the students unconsciously place themselves in a position where they feel they must revere this iconic poet. And maybe that's where a cycle of aesthetic mimicking enters the scene. None of that is my style. We're all on a different journey as poets; I want to foster many styles by honoring what my students are drawn toward, if possible.

Do you think that maybe some of the workshop “feel”—or maybe the sense that we can tell where someone studied based on their writing—is worshipful emulation? Because there’s not the peer feeling?

Perhaps. I do tell my students when they are applying to MFA programs to look at who teaches there, to read their work, to see if they admire the work, to see if they feel they can learn from that person.

But it’s important for teaching poets to give students as many models as they can, and be willing to give students a wide variety of models. Recently, I conducted an independent study with a student on avant-garde writing since 1970, and I researched right along with him, because it’s an area I’d neglected and I’d not read enough of. So I’m always learning with my students. That increases the excitement of it all for me. I arrange my syllabus so I’m going to learn from it. I read right along with my students. In my graduate classes, I’ll read some journals and find poets who have written some compelling new books, maybe a recent prize winner, and I won’t even read the books before the semester. I read them right along with the students so we can have a meaningful, edgy, unrehearsed conversation about what’s going on in each poet's work.

So we are professional writers. We got our jobs in large part because we’re writers, and we’ve published, and we’ve done writerly things. But once we have those jobs, we are urged to become professional teachers. So some of what you just said strikes home with me because there might be this line between the two. We might become such good teachers that we are not authentic in our writing practice anymore, and we can’t bring that authentic writing practice to our students. Instead, we teach them things that anyone could teach them, if we are practicing our pedagogy and doing what all the teaching workshops would have us do. So there’s that line. And the magic moments we have with students are when the sides merge: when we are helping them from our authentic writing practice, but we just also happen to be teaching them something.

That’s what most of us hope for.

How do you manage that line?

It depends on the level. I teach undergraduate through graduate classes. In my intro and intermediate courses, I have a body of things I feel I want them to learn and know. There are things that I did not learn at their age. I want their tool kit to be completely full. I want them to have a really strong sense of form, and rhyme, and meter, as many craft elements as possible to build upon. I try to be a professional teacher, whatever that means, but I don't think I'm any good at that, frankly. To me teaching is a deep and mutual engagement; it's a conversation, and it’s very human. I don’t think students are as willing to open up and trust this wild process of writing and self-examination, if you’re up there being Mister Professor-Man, spewing facts. They’ll start looking out the window, just as I would have. Being able to teach poetry is an absolute privilege, and yes, I prepare to teach; I spend hours and hours and hours preparing, but I don’t lecture, per se. One, I’m not very good at it. And two, then it takes the learning away from me, too. I think that we, as teachers, also learn in those moments that are off the cuff. When that magic is happening in the room, it’s because it’s human, and it’s in the moment.

I love that idea of co-learning. It's not what you said, but it's what you meant.

So when we talk about the models that you use, the texts that you use, in your teaching, what is something you continually return to? I know you want to stay fresh and always bring in new things, but what are some things you constantly reach back to use?

I have certain texts I constantly come back to in my undergraduate classes. I like the Wadsworth Anthology of Poetry. I like the way it’s designed, as a bunch of mini-anthologies designed chronologically and by form. I like The Poet's Companion by Dorianne Laux and Kim Addonizio. Also, Steve Kowit's In the Palm of Your Hand, and other such How-To Manuals that have good, solid advice and poems in them.

My intermediate class is really built around forms and modes. I arrange it so I can "drop poems in" from class to class, that are really good examples of whatever I’m teaching. So if we’re talking about internal rhyme, I have my go-to poets I’ve used for a long time, but then there will be a poet I read yesterday in a journal or a new book, and I realize I can drop that in right here. I build these little modules, but I’m constantly looking for new models as well. Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz” is always a great poem for teaching scansion, because its meter is both simple and surprising. It’s a particularly amazing poem to scan. Yeats is good to scan, and Kim Addonizio is great to scan. I look at Plath for image and metaphor, Yusef Komunyakaa, Phillip Levine, Dorianne Laux, Matthew Olzmann, Vievee Francis, francine j. harris, John Rybicki, Sean Thomas Dougherty, Peter Markus, whatever I'm into that day, week, or month. It’s changing all the time, but I keep a keen awareness of diversity too.

I want a myriad of voices in the room. Poetry is so eclectic and diverse now that it’s quite easy. There are so many good models now, such a wide array of voices, styles and modes. But that’s the hardest thing for me as a teacher—I want to cram the class with so many poems, and it’s really hard. I will have reached a really zen moment in teaching when I can take one poem to class. Instead, I drag my Santa sack of parcels and poems to throw around the room, and that’s too much. It’s overwhelming. I tell students constantly that you can learn so much just from slow, focused reading of just one poem. Just reading it over and over and over. But I love too many poems to bring in just one!

It’s another one of those lines. So many of our students have never really been exposed to poetry. And so when you’re trying to teach a craft class, you want to expose students to forms and drop in examples of all the forms, but then you also think this might be the only opportunity to expose them to all the poetry that turns us on to what we do. Where do you see that line, and how do you manage that?

That’s my hardest line. Teaching is a great sharing process to me. I'm like a tour guide in this incredible country of poetry, but we have limited time. It remains my biggest challenge as a teacher: to try to slow down and really focus on one or two poems. And I think I’ve gotten better at it, but I’ll still have on the syllabus: read these 20 poems, instead of focusing on one poem. It is absolutely the hardest thing for me, because there are so many amazing poets and poems I want my students to experience.

Do you think any forms are dead? Or do you think all forms still have some life in them?

fanning-sleep-poetryNo, and we're reminded of that all the time, as contemporary poets find new approaches to age-old forms, as well as creating new ones. I try to approach it as, first of all, why do this? Why write a sonnet? Are we doing this just to mimic? To try to shove a poem into a box, follow a lot of rules? So we have a conversation about that, organically. Why write a sonnet? What particular advantages does it have for the content you’re bringing forth? A sestina? A pantoum? These forms exist for a reason. They are built to enhance a poem's content. So we examine that.

In studying visual art, a common pedagogical model is to begin with still lives. And I think that’s a great model. When my wife taught sculpture, she spent the first part of the semester just teaching her students how to look, how to see. As poets, that's a good place to begin to, even before we get deep into form. We need to see what we’re looking at before we start to make; we need to have a solid foundation of knowing how to render an image, and to see. Later, when it comes to form: the more organic conversation, then, is about what form even is and how it benefits us as poets. I always work really hard to help my students understand that form is extremely liberating. That’s a hard thing to grasp when you’re 19 years old and resistant to structure, as I was. You don’t want somebody putting a frame around all this passion you have, all this angst. You don’t want somebody to box it all in. So I’ll tell my students: you hate sestinas? Then write a sestina about how much you hate sestinas.

Some students stick with free verse, but not without first writing in various forms, and realizing that free verse is its own challenging form, too, really. Regardless, form is then a tool they possess, and they can use it later, if they choose to—and I believe one's free verse benefits a great deal from wrestling with the armatures of form.

What’s the most important thing students get out of a CW program? And what was the most important thing you got from your own MFA program, and how is that different from what you want our own students to get?

Beyond the mentorship, the reading, the study, I want my students to feel that poetry is deeply meaningful and a sacred way of engaging with the self and the world, and it can sustain you through life’s trials and give meaning to your life. That's the most important thing, frankly, and I want them to take that with them. At this stage of my life, I realize poetry is something that has been there all the time for me. It’s gotten me through a lot of life challenges. It has helped me make sense of things that didn't make sense, and opened worlds up to me. I want my students to leave with that golden key. Whether they publish anything, whether they write a great book, all of that’s great, and certainly I want them to learn a lot about the craft. But the core thing I want them to remember is that poetry is a sacred act. It is a conversation with the world within the self and the self within the world. Yes: I want my students to have a deep knowledge of the craft, the forms, and history, to have a good sense of the movements and trends that inform what’s being done currently; that's important. I want them to have a sense of where they might be at the moment and where they might fit in to all of it. At that age, you’re just really starting to shape your aesthetic, as I was. I noticed that my aesthetic started to shift over time, so I let them know that, too. Find your aesthetic but be open to it changing.

Part of what we bring to our students is the best of what we got as students, and/or what we felt we were missing. I gained so much from my experience at Sarah Lawrence College's MFA program. That’s a brilliant, amazing program. It’s so focused on relationships. They have an individual conference system where you meet with your mentor often. There’s a lot of one-on-one mentorship. So I built that system into my teaching, too. Sarah Lawrence's program felt fairly open, which was a good thing, for me, but can be dangerous because it requires self-discipline, which is good practice for the writing life. I quickly realized I’d have to do a lot of work on my own to make the program what I wanted. So I went into the library; I started at A and wanted to work my way through to Z and read as many poetry books as I could in those two years. So that is something I bring to my teaching, too. I tell my students, don’t wait for me to tell you what to read. You go find the poets you love, too. Then, read everything they’ve written. I bring a big focus on reading and personal exploration in the art.



Try on as many voices as you can, as many modes as you can. Don’t think of yourself as a certain kind of poet, too early on, if ever.


Earlier, we discussed triggers, and not fearing them. Some students, when they are new to it, think every poem has to be original, and new and different from any they’ve already written. Some students fear repeating themselves. We have to guide them and say, well obviously this is what you need to talk about. This is your thing; don’t be afraid of it. So we talk to them about triggers, but also about influence and how we bring our influences into our writing. That can be part of our shift in aesthetic. Do you have those conversations with them?

To speak to the repetitive issue: I think that’s an important thing. It’s tough because, yes, they could be writing the same poem over and over again. On the one hand, I’ll tell them: follow these obsessions as far as you can. If for whatever reason you’re writing these really sad poems about a partner or your father, they need to come out, and you need to work them through. But you get to the point at which you realize you’re sitting down to write another sad father poem, reflexively. And when you know that, maybe you really have to start to make a shift. It’s hard, because it's also important to follow those obsessions to a seeming conclusion. Even in my work, themes keep emerging and emerging over years. That is going to happen organically. On one hand, I’m telling students to follow it through, but on the other hand, also practice writing poems th
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We have a couple teachers here that may find this article/interview interesting aside from its primary poetic evaluations.
Far too little individuality is allow or nurtured in the one size has to fit all public schools today. -Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.newpages.com/writers-resources/poets-and-writers-blogs


The hard part about making a movie from life
is that life was barely plausible enough
to be a movie in the first place.

He barely survived his, a monument
to the human ability
to endure.

For 50 years, her turbulent personal
made her a staple of tabloids.
And last year she revealed
she’d had a double mastectomy.
Now she’s a dervish of manic energy
with large eyes, full lips,
and cheekbones of suffering.

So much, so overwhelming, so negative,
she says. Who was this little troublemaker
who didn’t think he was worth anything
to get me through all the things that keep me
up at night, sitting with the sound
in my boots, working.

She lights up, she recalls,
It’s easy to fudge things.
It’s hard to be devoted.

[NOTE: Found/blackout poem crafted from a TIME article titled
“The Lady and the Scamp. Angelina Jolie Finds Her Equal,” as
written by Lev Grossman about how the actress came to choose
and tell the story of Unbroken.]

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

Amy King


http://www.amyking.wordpress.com

Amy King Raised in Baltimore and Georgia, Amy King earned a BS in English and women’s studies from Towson University, an MFA in poetry from Brooklyn College, and an MA in poetics from SUNY Buffalo. Her writing, which shows elements of Language poetry, has been influenced by her work with Charles Bernstein and Susan Howe in Buffalo, although she is also drawn to confessional and New York School poets. She has cited César Vallejo, Gertrude Stein, Laura (Riding) Jackson, and John Ashbery as her current influences. While applying pressure to the boundaries of “queer” poetry, King also finds inspiration in pop culture, science, social taxonomies, and other questions of gender, ontology, and culture.

King's forthcoming book, The Missing Museum, is a winner of the 2015 Tarpaulin Sky Book Prize. John Ashbery described her poems in I Want to Make You Safe (Litmus Press, 2011) as bringing “abstractions to brilliant, jagged life, emerging into rather than out of the busyness of living.” The book was named one of the Boston Globe’s Best Poetry Books of 2011. King is also the author of the poetry collections Slaves to do These Things (Blazevox, 2009), I’m the Man Who Loves You (Blazevox, 2007), and Antidotes for an Alibi (Blazevox, 2005). Her chapbooks include Kiss Me with the Mouth of Your Country (Dusie Press, 2007), The Good Campaign (2006), The Citizen’s Dilemma (2003), and The People Instruments (Pavement Saw Press, 2002). Her poems have been nominated for several Pushcart Prizes, and her essays have appeared in Boston Review, Poetry, and The Rumpus.

In 2015, King received the WNBA Award from the Women’s National Book Association, joining the ranks of Ann Patchett, Eleanor Roosevelt, Rachel Carson, and Pearl S. Buck. She was also honored by the Feminist Press as one of the “40 Under 40: The Future of Feminism” awardees, and she received the 2012 SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities.

King serves on the executive board of VIDA: Woman in Literary Arts and is. She also moderates the Women’s Poetry Listserv (WOMPO) and for many years she moderated the Poetics List, sponsored by the Electronic Poetry Center. She also founded and curated the Brooklyn-based reading series, The Stain of Poetry, from 2006 to 2010.

King coedited, Poets for Living Waters

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/article/250740

Sweeping Hearts
Writing poems inspired by Native American music and poetry.

BY ELIZABETH RABY
Sweeping Hearts
Having students write poems while listening to a cassette tape of "Earth Spirit" by R. Carlos Nakai, a Navajo-Ute who plays the Native American flute, has been a remarkably successful exercise with young people from grades two through twelve. Inspired in part by the Native American poets at the 1988 and 1992 Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festivals at Hopewell, New Jersey, and in part by Margot Fortunato Gait's article, "The Story in History," in the September-October 1992 issue of Teachers & Writers, I use the tape as a way to bring a Native American presence to the classrooms I visit as a poet-in-die-schools in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

Following Gait's example, I draw both a pyramid and a circle on the chalkboard. Gait says that the European conception of the universe is structured like a pyramid, by which things are ranked "according to their smartness or complexity or similarity to us." On this pyramid, humans are outranked only by the angels and then by God. Students have little difficulty assigning things to a place in this hierarchy. I suggest that dirt may rank near the bottom, hence our tendency to feel justified in treating dirt "like dirt." Students find it easy to think of examples of what we have done to dirt.

We next consider the Native American paradigm of being: a circle that includes, in no hierarchical order, humans and dirt, thunder and bears. I read aloud Joy Harjo's "Eagle Poem," a fine example of the circularity and the respect for the things of this world that such a vision engenders:

Can’t know except in moments
Steadily growing, and in languages
That aren’t always sound but other
Circles of motion.
Like eagle that Sunday morning
Over Salt River. Circled in blue sky
In wind, swept our hearts clean
With sacred wings.
We see you, see ourselves and know
That we must take the utmost care
And kindness in all things.
Breathe in, knowing we are made of
All this, and breathe, knowing
We are truly blessed because we
Were born, and die soon within a
True circle of motion,
Like eagle rounding out the morning
Inside us.
We pray that it will be done
In beauty.
In beauty.
With this poem still echoing in our minds, I tell the class that we will write while listening to a tape of Native American flute music. After making sure that everyone has paper and a sharpened pencil, I explain that while the tape plays I will read three poems aloud, and that afterward there should be no talking for a few minutes. The only sound will be the sound of the flute. I invite the students to go wherever the flute takes them, to hear whatever message it brings them, to follow whatever story it tells—to write down whatever comes to them.

The first poem I read is "Spring Night in Lo-Yang—Hearing a Flute" by Li Po, which I tell the students was written more than a thousand years ago:

In what house, the jade flute that sends these dark notes drifting, scattering on (he spring wind that fills Lo-Yang? Tonight if we should hear the willow-breaking song, who could help but long for the gardens of home?
—Translated by Burton Watson

Then I read Joy Harjo's "Song for the Deer and Myself to Return On":

This morning when I looked out the roof window
before dawn and a few stars were still caught
in the fragile weft of ebony night
I was overwhelmed. I sang the song Louis taught me:
a song to call the deer in Creek, when hunting,
and I am certainly hunting something as magic as deer
in this city far from the hammock of my mother's belly.
It works, of course, and deer came into this room
and wondered at finding themselves
in a house near downtown Denver.
Now the deer and I are trying to figure out a song
to get them back, to get us all back,
because it's too early to call Louis
and nearly too late to go home.

Finally, I read "An Evening at Windy Point for Christopher Jay" by the Hopi poet, Ramson Lomatewama. It begins with the sound of a Japanese bamboo flute (suizen):

The sound of suizen
lingers over a valley of sand.
Desert shadows grow in silence.
The man, sitting at the edge,
brings music to Windy Point.
Below,
juniper and pinon trees listen.
Smooth bamboo songs
touch the face of summer.
There are no monastery walls here,
Only the music,
the man,
the spirit.

The haunting sound of the flute and the softly spoken poems have never failed to achieve a strange combination of attention and peace-fulness in the classroom. Very young children may miss an occasional word or reference, they never miss the beauty of the language or the spirit of the poems. Usually there is so much noise in our lives—perhaps without realizing it we all hunger for the calm this music inspires. Students often ask that it be played as the background to other writing exercises. The music establishes a mood they like to extend, which makes it especially good for the first day of a writing workshop.

The music evokes strong emotions in the students, makes them wish for a more perfect world, and gives many of them a chance to express their anguish and anger about the state of the environment. They take bits and pieces from the poems I read aloud and combine them with their own personal histories and the mood the music creates. Here are some examples:

Watching Wondering
I wake and hear the sweet music of the flute
I follow it
Watching
Wondering
Beauty fills the air
Each step I take
Watching
Wondering
Suddenly the music gets louder
I spot a giant fall of water
Watching
Wondering
The lion was next to the lamb
There meadows and lakes are plenty
Watching
Wondering
I sit under a tree thinking
Has God called me home?
Watching
Wondering.
I close my eyes and fall asleep
Watching and
Wondering no more.
—Carolyn Bahnck, Fifth grade



Mother Earth

As the woman fell to the hot sand,
She started to think about the child she once had,
About the husband she once had not so long ago,
And about the tribe she once had that she would roam the land, sea,
and sky with.
As she sat there too dried out to drop a single tear for her tribe and
her family,
She looked around at her only friends, the sun, the sky, the land, the
plants.
And pleaded for forgiveness, and a child to look after.
Then something strange happened,
She felt a sharp pain, then the cry of a newborn baby
And she no more felt lonely but happy.
Then she looked around and silently said
Thank you to her friends,
She noticed that everything started to bloom and come to life,
And then a second baby was born,
But it was not a real person, it was an animal.
Then a bright light came down to her and told her, "You have been
given the greatest
gift of all time, the gift to create life for all
kinds of living creatures."
Then she closed her eyes and started to think
of all her friends, opened her eyes and saw her
friends and family looking at her,
And from that day on she knew the earth
would have life on the land that she, once, roamed by herself.
—Melissa Janis, fifth grade


Before, Before

I am the blue-green grass,
I bend into the water,
the quickly moving water is
angry,
angry with the vengeance of the
water-god,
He rushes by angrily,
He is mad at the people,
the people in the village,
they are hurting him with their
chemicals,
I have seen better days,
when the water-god was happy
gurgling and laughing,
before the people,
when animals came to drink,
before the hunters,
Before, Before.
—Tania Philkill, sixth grade



The flute calls to me.
Its sounds rush through my body
As an eagle's feather
Falls at my feet.
A wolf calls
From the hills
Joining the sweet sound
Of the music.

The fresh, warm air
From the desert
Fills my lungs, as the flute
Seems to cease, but starts again.

This is a song of pureness and love.

The flute calls to me
Its sounds rush through my body
As I awake
From this dream of time.
—Elisa Keller, seventh grade



The flute sounds like a boy lying on his bed.
Looking at stars through his window.
Trying to express his feelings by playing.
He is sad, very hurt.
He is thinking, wondering where everyone is.
He is lonely, just him and his soul.
He is calling for help, trying to see,
He is thinking, wondering if anyone's out there.
Feeling the way he feels.
—Danielle Scheel, seventh grade



Gone, but Still Alive

The medicine man comes through
the opening in my teepee,
I lie under furs of animals
I trapped last winter.
I lie now shivering from the disease.
It is now part of me.
It grows with me, is me,
and I am it.
We are one.
The medicine man is becoming unclear,
as he kneels beside the fire
to make my healing potion.
The medicine man starts dancing.
I can feel his presence beside me.
By my head, my side, my feet,
yet I cannot see him.
He is becoming more and more unclear.
My shivering ceases.
All is black.
The medicine man is on earth,
but I am now in the sky.
My soul is alive,
soaring above the medicine man.
I am well, I am free!
—Katie Cleary, eighth grade




The
soft wind
wakes up the
sleeping trees.
The cool green forest
is awakening to the radiant
dawn. The sun's golden rays
shine through the well-nourished
trees. The healthy animals scatter around
the forest bottom. The huge mountains stand
high above the never-ending sapphire sky. The forest
creatures scatter back to their homes. The sun goes down
like a ball of fire. The darkness of the sky blankets the
sleeping forest.
—Brooke Holland, eighth grade


As the culminating activity for a unit on history, social studies, or environmental science, writing poems while listening to "Earth Spirit" can help students organize new facts, reflect on their meaning, and make them their own. I have often asked students to think of one single thing, a fact or an idea that they remember from a recently completed unit, and to write a poem about what that fact or idea means to them. In this case, a judicious selection of poems read aloud at the beginning of the session, combined with the music, is all that is needed to get the poems started.




Elizabeth Raby, "Sweeping Hearts: Writing Poems Inspired by Native American Music and Poetry" from Old Faithful: 18 Writers Present Their Favorite Writing Assignments. Copyright © 1995 by Elizabeth Raby. Reprinted by permission of Teachers & Writers Collaborative.
Originally Published: August 11, 2015

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

Counter-Clockwise: Editorial Manifesto

Clockwise Cat exists as a triumph over tyranny: The tyranny of time, the tyranny of linguistic convention, the tyranny of hierarchy and political oppression.

Time in this context is construed as that which constrains and constricts us – the elements that inhibit our imaginations and attempt to confine us in conformist cages. Indeed, these conformist cages are layered like Russian dolls – we break out of one cage only to find we are confined by a still-bigger one. Time is a human construct that was subliminally conceived to delude us into thinking that work, not leisure and creativity, was the “aim” of life. Thus, the tyranny of time is the tyranny of work. We must work because that is the system that power has built. Clockwise Cat, however, hisses at and pisses on the idea that life is about work.

Cats, of course, defy time, and fully apprehend leisure and pleasure. Their purrs are vibrations of the universe reminding us to pace ourselves and enjoy existence. Their fur is like cosmic velvet to the touch, its plush texture calming our agitations. Cats sleep the majority of their day because, well, why not? Sleep is the mystical space between life and death, a delirious oblivion where angels and demons tangle in holy visions, which provides refuge and refreshment.

Cats prove that time doesn’t really exist.

(Granted, the universe operates on a sort of “time” paradigm, but humans have seized upon this elusive idea and ruthlessly pounded out the cosmic core of it. We must aim to re-capture the mystical nexus of time, and not attempt to “tame” it. Time is undomesticated, not doomed for imprisonment in clock-cages.)



Linguistic convention is anything language-wise that complacently perpetuates the status quo. Language is a living entity, and should be employed vigorously and imaginatively, in order to keep it flowing forward rather than stagnating like mosquito-ridden puddles. Indeed, linguistic convention acts as a mosquito to language, sucking it dry of life, bleeding it of its very essence. Language must be free and feral, allowing for radical reinvention, or it crumbles under its own dead weight. Those poets and writers such as the Symbolists, Surrealists, Dadaists, Magic Realists, Beats, the post-modern experimentalists, the Avant Garde-ists, the Gonzo Journalists – hell, even Dickinson and Shakespeare, – hell, even Eliot – were and are intuitively cognizant of the urgency of injecting outlandish innovation into language to keep it fresh and real.

You could say that ALL poets defy linguistic convention in some way, and that may be true to a point. But I say, it’s the ones who instinctively and deliberately subvert convention and create a wild, authentic, individualistic, iconoclastic idiom who are the true language-guerillas. e.e. cummings, anyone?

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/250664?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+poetryfoundation%2Findex+%28P oetryFoundation.org%29


ESSAY
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” Turns 100
The famous poem was nearly not published.

BY THE EDITORS
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” Turns 100
This month marks the 100th anniversary of T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” published when Eliot was just 26 years old. Had it not been for the intervention of Ezra Pound and Harriet Monroe, the seminal poem that helped usher in American Modernism might not have been published at all.

Eliot originally wrote parts of the monologue of a troubled, middle-aged man in 1910 and soon combined these pieces to form the long, complicated poem readers know now. Then he put it in a drawer for four years and focused on his graduate study in philosophy.

In the spring of 1914, Conrad Aiken, Eliot’s college friend, passed “Prufrock” along to Harold Monro, editor of Poetry and Drama. He reportedly remarked that the poem is “absolutely insane” and turned it down.

In September 1914, Eliot first met Pound in London, who was then the acting foreign correspondent of Poetry. Eliot showed him “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” and Pound was elated. “Prufrock,” wrote Pound to Poetry editor Harriet Monroe, is “the best poem I have yet had or seen from an American,” adding exuberantly in all caps, “PRAY GOD IT BE NOT BE A SINGLE AND UNIQUE SUCCESS.”

The following slideshow features three of Pound’s letters to Monroe, proclaiming Eliot’s talent and urging her to publish “Prufrock.” (“I hope you’ll get it in soon,” he wrote.) She found room in the June 1915 issue. Though Monroe’s responses to Pound are not available, his letters hint at her apprehension. “In being the first American magazine to print Eliot you have scored again, though you may not yet think so,” Pound wrote shortly after “Prufrock” appeared in print, still compelled to convince her of its value.


View slideshow of letters from Pound to Monroe

For more background, watch Eliot scholar and editor Christopher Ricks the Prufrock centenary at Harvard University.

Letters by Ezra Pound, from New Directions Publishing Company acting as agent, copyright 2015 by Mary de Rachewiltz and the Estate of Omar S. Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Company. Photos courtesy of the Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.


Originally Published: June 8, 2015

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/250886

INTERVIEW
Living Tradition
Clare Cavanagh talks about the joys and challenges of translation.

BY ALEX DUEBEN
Living Tradition
Image courtesy of Clare Cavanagh.
Growing up in the San Francisco Bay area, Clare Cavanagh had no exposure to the Polish language. In graduate school, she says, she decided to take a class in Polish only because “it was a department requirement.” There, her career as one of the premier Polish-to-English translators began. Earlier this year, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt published Map: Collected and Last Poems, by Nobel Prize–winner Wisława Szymborska, who passed away in 2012. Cavanagh, who translated Szymborska’s poetry for more than three decades, edited the volume. She spoke with the Poetry Foundation recently about the benefits of lengthy collaborations and how manners were instrumental to Szymborska’s work. The following interview was condensed and edited.


How did you get started as a translator? I’m assuming you didn’t wake one day and decide you wanted to translate Polish and Russian poetry.

[laughs] Russian was my first Slavic language, and I dabbled in translation when I was an undergraduate. I started Polish in graduate school only because I had a departmental requirement; my teacher happened to be the person who became my co-translator and my really dear friend, Stanislaw Baranczak. I had only one year of Polish at the time, and we just discovered that we liked translating together. If I hadn’t had Stanislaw holding my hand and saying “Go for it,” I don’t think I would have started.

What was it exactly that interested you?

I went to graduate school knowing I wanted to work on poetry. I knew poetry was going to be my thing, and I wanted to work on Mandelstam. The professor at the time, who taught Russian poetry and will remain nameless, almost convinced me to switch to novels; he was so dreadful. We used to pinch each other to stay awake in his seminars. [laughs] Stanislaw was just the opposite. He was fabulous, and he was so excited that I wanted to do poetry. I was his first American student after he came to the States. He spent extra time talking about Polish poetry with me in his office outside class. He himself was a poet and lived in this poetic world and knew the people. It changed my whole perception of literature. Suddenly, I was seeing things from the inside. It was addictive.

Is it necessary to understand not just the language but also the period and what’s going on around the work to translate effectively?

Knowing the language definitely helps, though lots of translators work from cribs or collaborate with someone else. Stanislaw and I, in our case, both knew English, and we both knew Polish, just to different degrees. I think the only way you get ready is by doing it and then doing it again and then doing it again. And getting a lot of feedback along the way, which I got because I was working in a partnership with someone who was an extremely experienced translator going into Polish. You learn it only by doing it. If you really had to know everything about the milieu, how would you ever even dare? And what would you do with people who have been dead for a couple thousand years?

It turned out that I loved working on this living tradition and watching things unfold. From watching struggles and listening to people, I know the period in a way I never would have otherwise. Who hates whom, who loves whom, who’s influenced by whom, who’s pretending not to be influenced by whom. Mandelstam had a high school teacher who was a minor symbolist poet, and he said that from going to this high school teacher’s house, he learned that the tradition was one, long, extended family argument. Once you dip into that, you start seeing it everywhere. You start seeing literary tradition in a different light. It was really exciting. Now Szymborska’s gone and Stanislaw’s gone and Milosz is gone, so it’s not the same world, but at least I was in it for a while.

When did you first encounter Wisława Szymborska’s work?

It was in a class with Stanislaw. I first read her in a bilingual edition back in 1981 or 1982, and then I kept reading her. Stanislaw and I first started working on the poet Ryszard Krynicki, a dear friend of the Baranczaks whom I’ve gotten to know. He’s a poet of the same generation. Somebody asked Stanislaw to translate some of Ryszard’s poems, and Stanislaw asked me to help. I was his research assistant then. Then we did an anthology. This would have been 1985 or 1986, and [Szymborska] had a collection called The People on the Bridge; we started translating and just couldn’t stop.

What about her work really interested you?

I think she probably has the best sense of humor of any poet I’ve read. [laughs] This isn’t an official critical category, but she has enormous charm as a poet. It’s easy to get drawn in. I always get frustrated when people say she’s plainspoken or straightforward. She’s not. There’s all this stuff just beneath the surface—or sometimes right there on the surface. It looks immediately accessible, but the further you go in, the more you see.

Did you get to meet her and spend time with her over the years?

I met her for the first time at the Nobel Prizes in Stockholm, actually, which was a terrifying way to meet someone for the first time who doesn’t speak English. I kept thinking, My God, it’s like meeting Emily Dickinson, but she speaks only Polish. I was terrified of making mistakes in Polish. But she, bless her heart, turned out to be embarrassed that she didn’t know English. And then we got to be friends. She was a very kind person, but she also liked me. I made the cut. Part of it was because I was friends with the Baranczaks, but part of it was because we just hit it off. She had to be extremely protective of her time. She had a very close-knit group of friends. I know friends who went to some events after her death, and they were shocked at this wide range of friends from all regions who were not even remotely literary. She was immensely protective, not just of her time but of herself. I went to Poland once or twice a year, and she always made time for me—except once. Her assistant told me, “She’d love to see you but she’s in the country writing poems, and she can’t stop right now.” Given that she wrote so few poems for a long life, I thought it best to leave her alone. The last time I saw her was the May before she died.

I’m curious about some choices you made in assembling the book. For example, you chose not to translate Szymborska’s earliest work. In the afterword, you sound very protective of her.

It’s the difference of working on someone you know. In that case, I knew how she would react. Most poets when they’re doing their collected poems, they do a lot of screening. W.H. Auden is a famous example. They cut things they wish they’d never written. She didn’t get a chance. Marina Tsvetaeva said there are poets with history and poets without history. She meant poets who from the first poem sound like themselves versus the poets who have to grow into themselves. Szymborska was someone who you could see where she started finding herself. She laid out all the road markers by looking over these various selected poems so carefully and deciding what not to publish. I wanted to respect that, trying to imagine what she would have wanted it to be. That’s what happens when you know the person.

She reprinted two or three of her socialist realist poems afterward, and really most of them have only historical interest. It’s good to give people an example of what socialist realist poetry looks like, but I wasn’t going to put 40 or 50 of those in the volume. She also wrote a lot of comic poetry, but she never put that in the various selected poems. I’m sure lots of other poets write limericks on the sidelines too.

She wrote so few poems, relatively speaking. Was she writing constantly but happy with only a few of the poems?

A good friend of mine who was also a good friend of hers and who knew her for a very long time said that she threw out 90 percent of what she wrote. I think part of it is privacy again. She didn’t want the poem out there unless it was absolutely as good as she could get it. Otherwise, it was like going out in public with your buttons done wrong. It’s bad manners. She loved Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “Manners,” which she knew in Polish translation. The thing is that you observe good form; you don’t impose your messes on other people. She just didn’t want them out there. There were some poems that I think were very close to being done that she had in draft form, and I’m still of two minds about them, but I can’t do anything about it now.

You made a comment in the book’s afterward that one of her poems was untranslatable. What does that mean, exactly?

It’s the form, the language, and the puns in this case. I remember working on that poem because it was rhyme and meter, plus untranslatable puns about a walk in the woods. They were all forestry-related puns; you couldn’t invent a non-forestry pun. She had a fabulous rhyme; it was gotyk-niebotyk, which means “Gothic” and “skyscraper.” She was using it to describe a pine tree. It works great, and I worked and worked, and it sounded worse and worse, and I told her that. She said, “Oh forget it; you can’t translate that one.” Then she said the Dutch translator had wasted six months before he gave up.

I was trained by Stanislaw that you have to maintain the form. Acting as though that’s the first thing to go means that you’re no longer treating it like a poem. He was phenomenally gifted at it, but he hated the idea that a poem was its literal meaning and the form was just something thrown in for decoration. If she rhymed, we had to rhyme. He got me stuck in that mode. I can recognize that there are other forms of translation, but I can’t do that. I have to work my damnedest to keep the form. It’s also thinking about what Stanislaw would let me get away with. I’ve internalized his voice from working with him for so long.

After working with her for so long, I would imagine that it’s hard to think about what’s next.

I figured out after she died—which I refused to believe for a long time—that I’ve been working on Szymborska pretty much half my life. [laughs] It felt really strange. The book is out, which makes me happy, but it’s strange to develop such an odd skill set in which you say, I can see what she’s doing here, or I know what’s she’s thinking, this is her kind of simile. Now I have no place to put that. I’ve been working on a biography of Czeslaw Milosz for a long time. I’m still translating Adam Zagajewski. I went back to Ryszard Krynicki, the poet Stanislaw and I started with. I’m doing a volume of his poetry for New Directions. So I’ll translate other people. I’ve been working on Zagajewski for a really long time too. I’m so glad he’s still sending me things. I have that same sense of working with someone for decades and saying, “Wow, look what he did with this.” I love working on poets where you live with them, get to be friends with them over years and years.

From my admittedly limited reading, there seems to be a lot of Western European and American notions of poetry and language and politics that don’t match up with Polish or Russian models.

It’s true. There’s a lot of exchange back and forth too, which is also fun and surprising and, again, something I see when I’m in my scholarly mode. I shocked the Poles by pointing out that something they had assumed Milosz had gotten from a Polish thinker he’d actually gotten from reading Faulkner. There’s all this strange back and forth that’s really fun to trace, but the whole idea of what the poet is and what a poem has historically been is radically different. Although the normalization in Poland certainly has changed some, and I can’t really speak so much to what’s happening in Russia right now with poetry. Certainly you don’t have—not just in American literary culture but in the culture generally—a canon of poets who if you don’t know, you’re not a good American. It would be an embarrassment to admit that you’ve never read Pushkin or Akhmatova or Mandelstam. They’re your tradition. They’re part of what constitutes your identity. There are negative sides to that too, but we don’t have that even remotely.

The thing which partly has given Russian and Polish and Eastern European poetry such prestige over the past few decades is the idea that you could actually be oppressed for your poetry or suppressed for your poetry. Mandelstam has a hyperbole about it—only in Russia do they care enough about poets to kill them. A mixed blessing, to say the least.

Originally Published: August 18, 2015
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http://www.examiner.co.uk/news/local-news/poetry-fans-join-nationwide-celebration-7933544


Poetry fans join in with a nationwide celebration in Lindley
13:20, 14 OCTOBER 2014
BY EMMA DAVISON

The event at Lindley Library marked National Poetry Day

Poet Doris Corti with Janice Kilroy, customer service officer from Lindley Library, at celebration of National Poetry Day
Poetry fans have helped mark a national celebration of the creative writing form.

The event at Lindley Library was organised as part of National Poetry Day.

It is the nation’s biggest celebration of poetry and is held every year on the first Thursday in October.

To mark the occasion a group of poetry enthusiasts gathered in the Lidget Street library. They were joined by Lindley poet Doris Corti, who has won awards and seen her work published nationally.

Earlier this year the 85-year-old won top prize in the Open Poetry Competition of the National Association of Writers’ Groups for her poem A Skylark’s Song.

Doris led the event with readings from her new book Avenue of Days. Participants also gave readings and shared poems.

Librarian Judith Robinson said: “The event was well received and well attended. It was a lovely way to celebrate National Poetry Day”.


Just a reminder , my father's side was Brit and Irish. Writing and whiskey drinking came natural to me.
No longer can drink the whiskey but my pen hand still works. Make that keyboard hands.-:laugh::laugh::laugh:- Robert J. Lindley

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://edwardcolettispoetryblog.blogspot.com

(Ed Coletti's) NO MONEY IN POETRY
"There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money either." -- Robert Graves
This is sort of an online portfolio occasionally featuring a few samples of both my work
and that of others. Please also consider looking at
Ed Coletti's P3 (edcolettip3.blogspot.com) for philosopy, politics, and also some poetry.

Tuesday, May 19, 2015
Codrescu Word Shakers NPR Special/Poets and Ego/Robert Creeley and Robert Creeley Reading/


Ain't no money in poetry
That's what sets the poet free
I've had all the freedom I can stand
Cold dog soup and rainbow pie
Is all it takes to get me by
Fool my belly till the day I die
Cold dog soup and rainbow pie
--- from Cold Dog Soup by Guy Clark

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Poets And Ego (Part 1)

About a month ago, I put the word out that I was looking for ideas about "poets and ego."
The replies I received were thoughtful and interesting. Many responded with well-considered
ideas about how the poet does or does not utilize the first person in their poems. For example,
Carlo Parcelli wrote that

All I can say is that I have always shunned the personal 'I' in my poetry except as 'persona'
for basically one reason. Not using it made me think and write in ways where I was not necessarily
the generative element, the psychic haven, if that makes any sense. Material as it appeared and
accrued played off other elements in the poem, not me.
Because my original idea had been to look at personality and behavioral aspects of poets, I
clarified my request like this,


Wondering why I do what I do? Why I paint? Why I publish books? Why I attend readings? Why I
send poems to and am published by journals? Why I'm aware of a certain competitiveness and self
promotion among poets? Why any of this matters? Why there are so many tempests in this tiny
little teapot whose very existence is known or understood by so few?
I was mindful of my own recent poem on this very subject,



Tea and Turmoil

Present universe requiring little,
she demands all things from herself,
“write poems, check Facebook. blog.
paint, create. Do it all before you die,
So little time to breathe, smile, feel.
So much to be before being itself is
no more, and nonbeing is or isn’t. So
why do much of anything requiring
planning, plans at which the gods
laugh and at such mortal fools
falling over each other boiling
like her in her little teapot —
so many kettle storms
felt only in this one crucible
which she with others like her
inhabit unbeknownst to
occupants of all those infinite pots
brewing tea and turmoil and
signifying only babble boiling
invisibly, inevitably, unknown.

So I went to poets like the wonderful Pat Nolan who told me
it’s all ego, Ed, and poets are surfers on the ego wave – gnarly
Ed, there may be a generation blindness. Oldsters not being able to see or have access to the great young talent, and youngsters too busy with themselves to discover the contemporary masters. There are hidden treasures, from Apollinaire to Whalen, that have been bypassed or ignored. It takes the diligence of a scholar to discover them. I don’t see many young poets taking that route.
To by original request for books on the subject, Copper Canyon Founder Sam Hamill replied,

Do I know of anything in print about poets egos? No. But 40 years as editor and friend to poets, I know many are out of control.

Clark County Washington Poet Laureate Christoper Luna gives us a comprehensive answer,


OK, Ed. I look at this way. A writer is one who is compelled to write. It does not necessarily follow that he/she must share it with the world. However, if one has something to say that means something, why not share it? And if what you're writing doesn't mean anything to you, why bother writing in the first place? Sharing the work publicly does involve some ego, but it need not be of the competitive, crush everything in its path variety. My model is Ginsberg, a Buddhist who also had an enormous ego and was a great promoter of himself and others. It is a kind of paradox, but poets grok negative capability, right?

I don't believe that we create in a vacuum. It is good for humans to meet, gather, and exchange ideas with one another. Getting up to read a poem at an open mic or featured reading does not automatically make one an egotistical asshole. That part is up to them. I do believe that we can do this work with humility and a sense of service to the community. I believe Ginsberg had a handle on poetry as a public service and a spiritual practice. If the work means something, then merely sharing it will help others.
Harsh as it may sound, my feeling is that if a writer doesn't believe that the work has the power to change the world, they should do anything else. There are plenty of others who take it seriously, and as you know, there's no money in it.
I find Sonoma County former poet laureate Bill Vartnaw characteristically public-spirited on the subject,

I don't know of a book. My own thoughts: I think "service." Service to poetry, other poets, other causes. For balance. I'm sure you do all this, but that's what I do. Poets need ego because we can be quick change artists and can get it utterly wrong; ego, besides making us think we're idiots when we're down, helps pull us out of the funk, but when we are on a roll, we need service. Hope this helps. . .

Given the subject, I hope I'm not being an enabler, or, if I am, am doing so modestly. This is also an invite to read at the Petaluma Poetry Walk. I don't know what venue yet. We're asking and seeing who can make it first. It's on September 20th. Do you want to read?
Well, of course I do, Bill! I hope these contributions are useful. In the next edition of NMIP, I will do a Part 2 on "Poets and Ego" and will incorporate more of the responses about the poem itself, particularly how poets see the role of themselves in the poem.
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Edit---

OK, Ed. I look at this way. A writer is one who is compelled to write. It does not necessarily
follow that he/she must share it with the world. However, if one has something to say that means
something, why not share it? And if what you're writing doesn't mean
anything to you, why bother writing in the first place? Sharing the work publicly does involve
some ego, but it need not be of the competitive, crush everything in its path variety. My model
is Ginsberg, a Buddhist who also had an enormous ego and was a great promoter of himself and
others. It is a kind of paradox, but poets grok negative capability, right?

I don't believe that we create in a vacuum. It is good for humans to meet, gather, and exchange
ideas with one another. Getting up to read a poem at an open mic or featured reading does not
automatically make one an egotistical asshole. That part is up to them. I do believe that we
can do this work with humility and a sense of service to the community. I believe Ginsberg had
a handle on poetry as a public service and a spiritual practice. If the work means something,
then merely sharing it will help others.
Harsh as it may sound, my feeling is that if a writer doesn't believe that the work has the power
to change the world, they should do anything else. There are plenty of others who take it
seriously, and as you know, there's no money in it.

^^^^^^^^^^^-- This pretty much sums up my view on potery as well.
Idealist, maybe- but why write if not serious-why write if not to eventually share?
And why write poetry if not to be giving of ones self?--Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/guide/250870#guide

Edna St. Vincent Millay: “Renascence”
A Modern poet’s message and her mediums

BY HANNAH BROOKS-MOTL

A person stands and looks at mountains, turns to look at a bay, lies down and screams,
and gets up. This is nearly all that “happens” in Edna St. Vincent Millay’s "Renascence,”
the poem that made her famous at just 20 years of age. But, over 20 stanzas, many more and much
stranger events transpire. The person is wrapped in “Infinity” and enters a state of clairvoyance,
seeing people in distant countries and taking on their pain, experiencing the world unbounded
when “The Universe, cleft to the core, / Lay open to my probing sense,” and the outcome isn’t
pleasant but vampiric: “But needs must suck / At the great wound, and could not pluck
/ My lips away till I had drawn / All venom out.” This kind of experience, in which the boundary
between self and world seems to have dissolved, will be the focus of Millay’s poem. It’s at once
incredibly painful—as these first stanzas attest—and potentially transformative. We might call
it something like immediacy, the sense that nothing stands between you and the events or objects
of the world. “Renascence” will go on to explore just how possible such immediacy is and how
poetry can intervene to create a necessary perspective between persons and their experiences.

The person haunts the world and is haunted by it and then finds relief by encountering God. In
anguish, the person sinks into the ground in a kind of death trance. Somehow, this death is
both metaphoric and literal: listening to the rain (not so dead?), they longingly note,
“For rain it hath a friendly sound / To one who’s six feet underground” (decidedly dead).
The person begins to imagine the world going on without them, and they pray to join it again.
Then, in a sudden thunderstorm, the wish is granted: “And the big rain in one black
wave / Fell from the sky and struck my grave.” The speaker springs up and thanks God, promising
to see God’s presence behind everything: “no dark disguise / Can e’er hereafter
hide from me / Thy radiant identity!” This is the “Renascence,” the renewal, or resurrection,
of the poem’s title.
Over roughly six sections, Millay provides a grid for ecstatic experience—that sense of
immediacy previously discussed. The person is first enmeshed in horizontal logic, bounded by
the earthly panorama, and then caught up in vertical drama; both floating above and dwelling
below states of consciousness prove painful. They return to the starting place armed with the
insight that knowledge for knowing’s sake isn’t sustainable: “For my omniscience paid I toll
/ In infinite remorse of soul.” Witnessing God finally grants the kind of immediate experience
this person craves: “God, I can push the grass apart / And lay my finger on Thy heart!” It seems

that God can unite person and world in a kind of healing whole. However, the poem ends curiously,
with an admonition:

The world stands out on either side
No wider than the heart is wide;
Above the world is stretched the sky,—
No higher than the soul is high.
The heart can push the sea and land
Farther away on either hand;
The soul can split the sky in two,
And let the face of God shine through.
But East and West will pinch the heart
That can not keep them pushed apart;
And he whose soul is flat—the sky
Will cave in on him by and by.

Millay’s final stanza muses explicitly on mediation by brooding over boundaries. Mediation is
a notoriously tricky concept to define. It is important to bear in mind that mediation operates
in part as a process in which boundaries break down and are rearranged. Though “Renascence” seeks
out oneness, immediacy, or wholeness, it also ends with a stanza about the importance of
maintaining distance between “East and West”—as well as one’s soul and the conditions that formed
it. Why?
In her poem, Millay explores the limits of individual perception while gesturing toward poetry’s
ability to permeate the consciousness of others, to infiltrate, possess, or alter how any one
person perceives the world, even if only momentarily. Even the poem’s ordinary opening forces
readers to identify with the speaker: “All I could see from where I stood” becomes all readers
can see from where they stand—literally inside another’s point of view. Readers’ familiarity
with the poem’s thudding tetrameters also helps seal them into the poem’s world; Millay’s
biographer Nancy Milford likens the poem to a child’s counting-out rhyme, and it seems true
that the poem’s prosody lulls readers into accepting its premises. Poetry’s ability to occupy
other perceptions dissolves the speaker’s sense of identity; it also intrudes on its readers’.
When we read “Renascence” we become its “I,” which is poetry’s oldest trick. Millay wants to
draw attention to that process, in which poetry creates or collapses distances between speakers,
readers, and experiences. Poetry, Millay suggests, is a powerful mediator between persons and
worlds.

By the fourth stanza, Millay’s speaker confronts a quasi-Dickinsonian moment of lyric immensity
or “Infinity”, “pressing of the Undefined / The definition on my mind.” The movement is forced,
uncomfortable, and ultimately fatal, as “Infinity”

Held up before my eyes a glass
Through which my shrinking sight did pass
Until it seemed I must behold
Immensity made manifold

Through this “glass” the world is “unmuffled,” horrifyingly so; friendly spheres “gossip”
unkindly, tented skies “creak” precariously, and Eternity “ticks” like a bomb. The terror of
“Renascence’s” middle stanzas suggests that this kind of over identification with the world is
both impossible and not to be pursued at all. It isn’t just hurtful but also arrogant:
“All suffering mine, and mine its rod; / Mine, pity like the pity of God.” Millay’s haunted
and haunting stanzas conjure the scary promises that poetry might offer access to, or come from,
other worlds. But accessing such worlds comes with the price of internment, entombment, and
death. Once in the grave, and without anything to sense, see, or hear, Millay’s speaker falls
into imagination, conjuring the world “multi-colored, multiform.” From those extremes of
indirect and direct experience, a truce is arranged. God enters as the moderator, keeping
boundaries at bay and souls together.

God might be one word for this intermediate agent, poetry another. After all, that final stanza
seems as much a scene of writing as theological landscaping: the repeated allusion to hands—both
in “on either hand” and in sensory verbs such as push and pinch—suggests that the act of writing
may be the activity on the forefront of Millay’s mind. That desire—to touch the source of beauty,
truth, nature, and the infinite—lurks behind many of Millay’s lyrics, and it’s the motor powering
the poem that rocketed her to renown; it’s also the reason “Renascence” could seem in the end to
be a religious poem. If religion offers the hope that God, as a healing agent, might do away with
the sense of distance from our own experiences, making us feel whole by offering us the right kind
of element through which to feel, Millay’s poem suggests that poetry can do something similar.
This isn’t so much un-mediated experience—the uncomfortable immediacy of the first sections—but
properly mediated experience. Poetry might help us find the right kinds of distance or illuminate
how boundaries between our selves and our worlds might not be so bad after all.

It seems fitting, then, that “Renascence,” a poem about immediacy and mediation, has its own
fascinating, and fascinatingly apt, media history. The communication theorist Marshall McLuhan
made famous the idea that “the medium is the message”—the notion that the content of a message,
or its meaning, is bound up with how it is expressed. This seems to be the case with the poem
that made Millay famous. The poem’s history offers a window onto the ways the mediums of print and
performance affect people differently. “Renascence” was first published in 1912 because of a new
type of poetry prize: Millay sent the poem and a few others to New York publisher Mitchell
Kennerley’s anthology The Lyric Year, which advertised $1,000 in cash prizes to the three best
poems of the year and publication to 100 others. Critics responded warmly to the idea of the
anthology, though not to the prize results. “Renascence” failed to earn anything but an honorable
mention. In an outcry difficult to imagine happening now, major poetry critics responded to Millay
’s slighting in print. In a New York Times review, a founder and officer of the Poetry Society of
America named Jessie Rittenhouse devoted a whole paragraph to Millay’s poem, arguing for its
“freshness of first view.” Witter Bynner, Arthur Davison Ficke, and Louis Untermeyer also weighed
in, making Millay one of the most talked-about young poets of her day. > ........................

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/250662

PROSE FROM POETRY MAGAZINE
Drift and Pop: On Writing about W.S. Graham
BY JOHN WILKINSON
What is it to go into an abstracted state? When I find myself abstracted 
or lose myself in abstraction, my self blurs at its boundaries but nonetheless retains a capacity, an enhanced capacity to accept whatever comes across. Memories, freaks, phrases, and passing thoughts escape judgment as to whether they deserve retaining. Even if they hover and unravel trains of thought, they do not cancel or dislodge anything already contained or passing through this elastic “abstract scene.” Contradictions and other dissonance which would become jarring if sentience rose to active reaching, can coexist so long as the mind stays abstracted. What sustains such abstraction may be constitutional, environmental, or even economic. Woolgathering ... (Here I go) transhumant shepherds ... Cornish downpour ... 

Let me pause and drift a little as in the automatism of reaching for a cigarette. In such a sentence, between intentionality and its abjuring, my “I” has been minimally embodied, even while an act deploys according to script. I hesitate (for to hesitate is entailed in some kinds of abstraction) to choose whether I situate my abstraction inside or outside, whether the “me” is dispersed within my abstraction 
or merely a point roaming it, or if I am a psychic skin surrounding it, or what fades at its extremities. Or is the uninterrupted nexus of automatic behaviors: breathing, walking, reaching, what reflection, always belated, comes to acknowledge as the self? What then abstracts? Is abstraction consciousness released from the automaton? Something outside or something within? Imagining a cigarette break, the smoker I once was tells me abstraction can be learnt — or relearnt, since so much of childhood is abstracted or its negative, bored.

Until recently, the garden I look on from an upstairs window as I write had been little more than a backdrop I glanced at or walked through, a present pleasure scarcely noticed, and if I paused outside, it would be to crop an herb, or sometimes in early autumn to gather apples, pears, medlars, damsons, or plums. But I am woolgathering in an English idiom. Abstraction and pastoral have an affinity in England. In autumn the abstract garden gives way to use-value, to selective picking, although some purposeful activities can trigger an abstracted state — a woman pauses with an apple halfway to her mouth, or stands with her hand resting on a fork as she listens to an attendant robin.

A different yield of plums distinguishes the years, but I shall find it hard to remember what flowers flourished or were disappointing this year, to predict which return with a certain season, or even to identify what was planted recently and where. The garden’s visual 
intricacy offers a welcome depth for my study window, and sometimes wildlife is noticed in its seasonal passage: migrant birds, the dragonflies and damselflies, squirrels, and an infrequent muntjac deer. The cooing of wood pigeons makes for a persistent background noise by day; but there are no bats at twilight this year, perhaps nearby building work has dislodged them or they have been afflicted by a fungal disease. I have become late middle-aged. And I admit a marshy bleakness is more typical of an English summer than my bucolic fantasy. Although I am woolgathering, wooly clouds can be sharp-edged with sun setting behind them. It is possible to remain abstracted and nonetheless reflect; these mental states can dress themselves to coincide. That’s where I am. The turning of abstraction like a crystalline and involuted space, set in motion by birdsong, or a continent away by jazz leaking from an apparently vacant warehouse in Brooklyn, coexists with flashes of insight, sidelong links, assessments of risk and practical decisions — although these may be carried out by that embodiment of autonomic and learned behavior others give the name 
I bear. Abstraction might comport with habit. Abstraction and reflection in lockstep.

Now it is twilight and there is a poem I am called upon to read, a poem calls on me to read it. How can a poem call from its perfected internal space? How could my being here for this poem have been anticipated in its advent? This is a poem I have read many times because I wanted to or because professionally I had to, a poem I have talked about in classrooms and informally, a poem my wife read at a celebration of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s life on September 26, 2009, as a little program folded into my book and bearing Eve’s face reminds me. At my sister’s funeral in 2012 I read a few lines from a poem by the same poet. This aquamarine book of his New Collected Poems feels eventful in itself, collecting my reading of these poems over three decades, if not in this particular edition; it accumulates too my reading of other poets who have felt close to this poet, his friends and contemporaries, or those drawn close through later discovering this work as I did. In a state of professional reading, I could scrutinize each word and its relations with surrounding words, both within the particular poem and across a wider range, searching out tracks others have left through their records of reading. I could listen intently and might sound aloud some lines. I could read with others in a class. And if engaged in inquiry I might seek earlier versions of the same poem, thinking how it has changed and why, or thinking what writing on poetics might extend the scope and heft of these poems, enriching, contesting, exemplifying.

But for now I hover about questions of time and space. The spaces this book constructs are bleak, beautiful, and rock-obstructed in a way unique to a landscape the poet dwelt in, even while its spaces 
are drawn toward “pure” abstraction. When I incline to write about the scope of these poems, inclination goes beyond metaphor to the landscape I shared with my sister in childhood. Although my feelings about the poems are intimate, they are experienced by a 
person coexisting with the person who eats, works in his study, and suffers the loss of those he loves. It is the I which is another whom this poem entreats. Scope, for this person brought into being in its space, sends tense cables and grapples and sinews through the medium bringing him to life, and as he reads he feels reconfigured, as though by the dragged vertices of a psychical simulation in 3-D modeling. Such scope does somewhat envisage a Scottish poet in his Penwith peninsula ordinariness, encountered in these poems where he fetches coal and blags drinks, but more urgently entreats me into being from across the page where the poet writes; Graham scratches or taps like a prisoner hoping to hear an answering tap as the start of a communicative code. The time of these New Collected Poems by W.S. Graham may be variously the poet’s and mine and others’ in its details and waymarks, such as the seasonal flowers; but it is also abstract in its swiftness, its suspension, its gathering and its dispersal, abstract in its disclosures. Still, I fear I shall betray this poem, as I open my professional armamentarium. Can my reading still be interlaced with abstraction, can I leave off for a moment, look away from the page in honoring a bidding that commands my attention down toward the poem’s narrowest interstices? Pausing in a caesura I feel the song again, opening beyond boundaries; attention opens into abstraction.

•

Last summer with the previous paragraph I stopped, and now resume in a wet and mild winter, with the improbable blossom of a winter-flowering cherry in the foreground of my gaze. That is what there is to it, a tree commands attention and releases it. I hear the surprisingly violent crepitation of a woodpecker at work beyond the next garden. It is time to write about “Dear Bryan Wynter” by W.S. Graham, this poem I have looked at through the seasons, a poem not addressed to me but, its title announces, to a painter. I recall this poem was written 
soon after the painter’s death in 1975. Memory of an involuntary kind is characteristic of abstraction, a feature separating it from a meditative discipline of “emptying”; how far though can concentration and external reference be tolerated by abstraction, without puncturing the reverie? (Is abstraction a return to being held in a maternal reverie? Is a fact a thorn?) Can abstraction permit a systolic-diastolic rhythm, an expansion and contraction?

I am not yet ready to write about this poem. Fortunately I recall this was not the first time Graham addressed Wynter in a poem (or seemed to), and I shall write about “Dear Bryan Wynter” after finding a way of approaching through an earlier poem. And rather than saying I shall “write about” a poem by W.S. Graham, I shall write toward the poem. I can zero in on what I wish to say, although that may change as I go along, through an indirect route resembling a direct address to objectified texts, an exercise in close reading. Here, though, reading aims to comprise a practice toward, a set of gestures of recognition abstracted and refigured in the interest of .............................................

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2015/04/twilight-of-the-mind-toward-a-poetics-of-interpellation/

Twilight of the Mind: Toward a Poetics of Interpellation
BY PHILP JENKS

Twilight
revisiting a prior version of this (see GutCult *8)
It isn’t exactly as Spicer said that “most things happen at twilight,” but is where the most productive natal spaces are located. It is here that the most interesting interpellations happen and what I hope poetry can be. I don’t want to be front and center, nor do I want to be obliterated. This space between is not-I, nor Thou, but is the space between. It is here that we re-call and re-cover what was/was not. Yes, there is a time and place for individuation and the abyss of night, but it is in relation to the world, between one and another that remembrance takes place. And when it does and is voiced as a beginning into more than what was there before, then this is where some of the greatest work is done. The neither subject nor object, nor neither attunes the body’s relationship to the world—and in so doing produces new experiences with one part of the body while recording those experiences with another. That chiasmic relationship is fundamentally connected to love for me. A poem can sing and sign, but if there is no love of the world or some world, it’s going to strike me as stale.
I’ve vexed on this subject for more hours, countless cups of coffee, heated complaints to the wall (and I fear, my neighbor by proxy), and two monumental efforts of procrastination. One of them involved trying to listen to all of my music from A – Z while the other was the decision to run my first marathon and actually train for it. As a smoker with 1000+ albums, finishing either task is demanding at best. I would fluster at the thought of saying what I think—and for that matter have never been one to venture to explain what this or that line of my writing “means” to me. I could tell you what I didn’t like, but to let you in on who or what I do like, that is frightening. Why? I may tell if you ask me. Ultimately, a loving relationship to an embodied world that sings and signs is what makes me leap and freak out. My incomplete list is long and comprises a generalist approach to poetics. The move is toward “inclusion” not strategically, but because inclusion opens into space, our wide faces. Some of what I would call poetry of twilight includes everyone mentioned above at some juncture, Elizabeth Treadwell, Johnson, Paul Blackburn, Ponge, Donne, Leslie Scalapino, Rilke, Rosmarie Waldrop, Creeley, Robin Blaser, Whitman, Anna Akhmataova, Forrest Gander, Baraka, Duncan, Mackey, Stein, Larry Eigner, Susan Howe, Sappho, Peter O’Leary, Maya Angelou, John Giorno, Michael Smith, Stein, Cavafy, Mallarme, Hölderlin, Cesaire, Kerouac and Snyder. The thing about poetry for me is that it is plenitude, has so many entry points for revelation that constriction to one school is sad, really. Much of the best verse in the United States isn’t coming from the academy, but from the world of music. Art Lange and Nathaniel Mackey’s anthology, Moment’s Notice: Jazz in Poetry & Prose moves significantly toward this. Still, if it is written (or sung) and laid down into recorded form with instrumentation, perhaps the most vibrant “vernacular” (and not so) verse from hip-hop to ? is often ignored. Grandmaster Flash crafts as much of a time in “The Message” and does so with all the standard markings of “poetry” as Ginsberg did with “Howl.”
What these writers share is a certain adhesion to and in the world/s. As Merleau-Ponty notes, that adhesion comes between or at the joints of self/other/world. This chiasm and a careful attuned attendance to it is a vital space, characterized by humility. If humbled before it, then “it” will get the care that the text and world deserves. Paul Blackburn’s “The Net of Place” embodies everything I hope to accomplish in my work.
I turn back to the Rockies, to the
valley swinging East, Glenwood to Aspen, up
the pass, it is the darkest night the hour before dawn,
Orion, old Hunter, with whom
I may never make peace again, swings
just over the horizon at 5 o’clock
as I walk . The mountains fade into light
[…]
It is
An intricate dance
to turn & say goodbye
to the hills we live in the presence of .
When mind dies of its time
It is not the place goes away .
I couldn’t, haven’t, and will never say it better. But, that’s not the point. It’s the charged and natal plenitude of what and who and where “we live in the presence.”

Tags: Aimé Césaire, chiasm, Dan McNaughton, Duncan McNaughton, Elizabeth Treadwell, Gary Snyder, Grandmaster Flash, GutCult, Holderlin, Io Mcnaughton, Jack Kerouac, John Donne, John Giorno, Kevin Killian, Larry Eigner, Mary Barnard, Maya Angelou, Merleau-Ponty, Michael Smith, Nathaniel Mackey, National Poetry Month 2015, Paul Blackburn, Poetry, Ponge, Robin Blaser, Sappho, Susan Howe, The Message, Treadwell
Posted in Featured Blogger on Wednesday, April 29th, 2015 by Philp Jenks.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/250120


ESSAY
Snow Days
From flurries to relentless storms, why snow makes American poetry American.

BY STEPHEN BURT

Snow got you down? Maybe poetry can help—or, at the least, if you live in the part of the United States pummeled by snowstorms over the past few weeks, maybe the poets can bring you back to aspects of snow that aren’t about plows or school closings. “Snow is to water what poetry is to prose,” writes the historian Bernard Mergen in Snow in America. Snow may have been like poetry—beautiful, often impractical, different each time—since time immemorial, but there was not much snow in English-language poetry for centuries: Great Britain got snow (especially in the 18th century, the so-called “Little Ice Age”), but never as much as New England (let alone Minneapolis or Buffalo). Renaissance and Augustan poets could make it a metaphor (“O that I were a mockery king of snow!” exclaims Shakespeare’s Richard II), but they rarely described or enjoyed it for its own sake: James Thomson’s “Winter,” from The Seasons (1750), portrays “one wild dazzling waste, that buries wide / The works of man.” When Thomson tries to admire winter weather, he praises not snowflakes or snowdrifts but crisp ice and frost. British Romantic poets liked snow a lot more—Percy Bysshe Shelley, who had seen a lot of snow in the Swiss Alps, explains why in this poem:

I love snow, and all the forms
Of the radiant frost;
I love waves, and winds, and storms,
Everything almost
Which is Nature’s, and may be
Untainted by man’s misery.
No wonder, then, that when the residents of the United States of America tried to distinguish their poems from those of Great Britain, some of them seized on the snow. Nineteenth-century writers, says Mergen, saw snow as a test of “moral and physical fitness,” as well as a way to “mirror Yankee character.” When Emily Dickinson wrote the line “I see—New Englandly,” she meant that it would not be winter, for her, “without the Snow’s Tableau.” In Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “The Snow-Storm,” snow is a kind of Romantic poet, remaking simple New England farms and fences into elaborate shapes, then leaving human beings “[t]o mimic in slow structures, stone by stone, / Built in an age, the mad wind's night-work, / The frolic architecture of the snow.”

Emerson’s poem supplied the epigraph to John Greenleaf Whittier’s 1866 “Snow-Bound: A Winter Idyl,” widely taught—and recited—in schools for a century. My mother’s parents used to read it aloud when snow closed her school for the day. Whittier’s snow makes a New England farmstead exotic:

The old familiar sights of ours
Took marvellous shapes; strange domes and towers
Rose up where sty or corn-crib stood,
Or garden-wall, or belt of wood;
A smooth white mound the brush-pile showed,
A fenceless drift what once was road;
The bridle-post an old man sat
With loose-flung coat and high cocked hat;
The well-curb had a Chinese roof;
And even the long sweep, high aloof,
In its slant splendor, seemed to tell
Of Pisa’s leaning miracle.
Stuck indoors for a week, the Whittiers do puzzles, play games, and tell stories about New England and Quaker history. Whittier’s snowstorm scares children during the night, with “the shrieking of the mindless wind”— but when the sun comes up his family stays warm, and stays together, thanks to the “hearth-fire’s ruddy glow.”

Whittier was known, before the Civil War, for his poems against slavery, and “Snow-bound” preserves his Abolitionist sentiments, praying that “Freedom’s young apostles” can “[u]plift the black and white alike.” For later readers, though, the poet’s politics could disappear behind his snow-white images and Anglo-Saxon cast: poet and scholar Angela Sorby writes that “Snow-Bound” satisfied postbellum “longing for a simpler, more rustic, more intimate, more democratic, and whiter America.”

Snow can signify racial whiteness, or white supremacy, for African American poets today. Consider Thylias Moss’s response to Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” entitled “Interpretation of a Poem by Frost”: Moss’s young girl, “her face eternally the brown / of declining autumn,” goes into the white woods and finds, not Frost, but “Jim Crow.” She watches “snow inter the grass, / cling to bark making it seem indecisive / about race preference, a fast-to-melt idealism”: the intricacies of literary interpretation can obscure the white privilege still present in literary scenes. But Moss’s girl has her own “promises to keep”:

the promise that she bear Jim no bastards,
the promise to her face that it not be mistaken as shadow,
and miles to go, more than the distance from Africa to Andover,
more than the distance from black to white
before she sleeps with Jim.
Moss taught for years at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, an elite and historically WASPy prep school.

Terrance Hayes’s take on snowy whiteness interrogates Wallace Stevens, the author of “The Snow Man,” who famously made at least a few racist remarks. Hayes’s “Snow for Wallace Stevens” sees the modernist poet’s involuted, introverted, meditative work as part of his “snowed-in life”: “This song is for the wise man who avenges / by building his city in snow,” Hayes writes, quoting the last line of Stevens’s long poem “Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery.”

American poetry, like American history, cannot be separated from race and racism. Yet poetry by white Americans (Stevens among them) has given Hayes materials and techniques for his own self-aware and intricate poems:

I too, having lost faith
in language, have placed my faith in language.
Thus, I have a capacity for love without
forgiveness. This song is for my foe,
the clean-shaven, gray-suited, gray patron
of Hartford, the emperor of whiteness
blue as a body made of snow.
Hayes looks more closely at snow than Stevens did (or so Hayes’s poem implies). Packed snow in cold light, which stands for Stevens’s America, is not entirely white (as in white privilege) but permeated by blue (as in the blues).

Snow in Alaska—especially for Native Alaskan poets—can take on meanings foreign to the Lower 48. For dg nanouk okpik, snowfall belongs to a ritual of renewal:

The smell of wormwood,
fresh snow
on beach greens,
like a place name,
from a hand-scribed map.
For okpik, as for other 21st-century Inupiaq and Inuit poets such as Joan Kane and Cathy Tagnak Rexford, falling snow is one aspect, and not the most important aspect, of the larger hydrological features—permafrost, “a freshwater glacier,” “shelf ice,” “glacial resin,” slush and open water—that have supported native cultures for centuries, but may no longer work as they did. In the title poem from Kane’s Hyperboreal, she watches “the last snowmelt, a tricklet into mud, ulterior,” then contemplates “a glacier’s heart of milk” amid the threat of climate change: “June really isn’t June anymore, / Is it?”

Earlier American poets found melancholy in snow for other reasons. In Randall Jarrell’s poems “Windows” (1955), “Quarried from snow, the dark walks lead to doors / That are dark and closed”: Jarrell’s lonely pedestrian watches the snowbound houses—some of them lit from within by a TV—and feels cut off from the families inside. “The windowed ones within their windowy world / Move past me without doubt and for no reason … If only I were they!” The traveler in Frost’s “Stopping by Woods,” on the other hand, with “miles to go before I sleep,” may not even want to go home; enticed by the “dark and deep” forest, he may want instead to get lost forever. The brightly familiar rhymes belie the equally Frostian terrors underneath.

Frost learned a lot from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, naming his first book, A Boy’s Will, after a Longfellow poem. Both poets became very popular in their own day, both depicted New England winters over and over, and both wrote poems that look like celebrations of cold weather but—seen close-up—hold tears. Longfellow’s great sonnet “The Cross of Snow” compared his own heart, after the death of his wife, to a forever-snowy, never-sunlit mountain crevasse in Colorado. He chose not to publish that poem during his lifetime, but he did publish the often-reprinted “Snow-flakes,” in which snow holds

the secret of despair,
Long in its cloudy bosom hoarded,
Now whispered and revealed
To wood and field.

Because they melt fast, and because they at least seem unique, and because—if you grew up reading “Snow-Bound” or throwing snowballs—they connote childhood, snowflakes can also represent nostalgia. That is how William Matthews regarded the mild precipitation in his finest poem, “Spring Snow,” where “childhood doesn’t end / but accumulates” and memories, after a death, disperse “in flecks, like dust, like flour, like snow.” Accumulating and vanishing (either melted or plowed away), snow represents both erasure and memory, the wispy past and the emptiness of................................

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/250242

ESSAY
First Loves
A formative moment, fixed in poets’ minds.

BY LYNN MELNICK AND BRETT FLETCHER LAUER

The Goodwill near Hollywood in the late ’80s was filled with outdated lampshades, corny figurines, and myriad mugs. It was also where, for 50 cents each, one of us—Lynn, to be specific—purchased The American Poetry Anthology, edited by Daniel Halpern, and Dancing on the Grave of a Son of a Bitch, by Diane Wakoski. As for Brett, he didn’t have to search the used-book bins; when he began writing poetry as a teenager, his older brother sent home volumes from college: Sharon Olds’s Satan Says, Mark Strand’s Selected Poems, and the poetry anthology Walk on the Wild Side.

Years later, when the two of us were talking about our early discoveries, it became apparent how much these collections had provided a gateway for us into the world of contemporary poetry. It was with the hope of providing a similarly exhilarating experience to emerging readers and poets that we compiled our anthology Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poets for the Next Generation.

In editing, we felt it was important not just to bring contemporary poems to a younger audience but to bring contemporary poets to a younger audience. So much of the poetry taught in schools is written by long-dead poets, and we wanted the readers to get to know the poets as real people, with real, 21st-century lives.

To that end, we sent a questionnaire to all 100 poets included in the anthology, and we included excerpts of their answers in the biographical notes of the book. (You can view them in their entirety here.) We asked the poets questions such as “What is your favorite word?” and “What is the natural talent you would most like to have?” (One-third of the poets listed “singing.”)

For us, though, the most compelling answers were to the question “What was the first poem you read and loved?” For poets, this question seems to recall other first questions they might find themselves asked by a friend: Do you remember your first kiss, or the first concert you attended? It is a formative moment, fixed in poets’ minds, and each tells a story.

We realized that the poets’ answers to this question created a persuasive list for further reading, what we began to call a “shadow anthology.” The following is an edited selection of the responses we received on first-poetry loves, from what we consider to be some of the most exciting poets writing today.


Srikanth Reddy
I probably read a lot of poems before I ever fell in love with one—you’ve got to kiss a lot of frogs, as they say—but I do remember the first poem that rocked my world: “Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock” by Wallace Stevens. I’ll never forget that drunk and dreaming sailor at the end.

Jennifer Chang
One of the first poems I found and loved was in a book my grandfather left behind in our house, The World’s Best Poems, edited by Mark Van Doren, which I now keep on my office bookshelves. I was a gloomy little girl of about 11 or 12 and, upon reading that old book, went just crazy for Heinrich Heine, particularly the last stanza of “Mein Kind, Wir Waren Kinder”: “The children’s games are over, / The rest is over with youth— / The world, the good games, the good times, / The belief, and the love, and the truth.” I swooned over this gloomiest of poems and underlined those particular lines repeatedly, as if that would make the words spring to life.

Timothy Donnelly
The first poems I remember loving were among the things I read in high school English class: poems by Dickinson, Keats, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (if that counts); Stevens’s “Sunday Morning” and Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and The Waste Land. Later on I read Baudelaire, Plath, Rimbaud, and Sexton on my own, as well as other Stevens poems, including “Jasmine’s Beautiful Thoughts Underneath the Willow,” the first poem whose hold on me was so powerful I felt like I must have written it myself.

Hafizah Geter
The first two books of poetry I ever owned were Been to Yesterdays: Poems of a Life, by Lee Bennett Hopkins, and a collection of Langston Hughes’s poems for children, Don’t You Turn Back. My mother was always reading Langston Hughes to my sister and me, and she would assign us poems from that book to memorize. At six I was reciting “My People,” and my sister, “Mother to Son,” for family friends. Been to Yesterdays was the first book of poems I ever picked out for myself. I remember staying up late at night and reading it under the covers with a flashlight. The experience of those two books is where I began as a writer. They’ve come with me on every move and are two of my most important possessions.

Dorothea Lasky
Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. I know it is technically a work of fiction, but it reads like a poem to me. I remember staying up one night when I was 10 to read it for the first time and feeling very proud by the time the morning sun arrived that I had finished. The images have stuck with me all my life. Then, years later, at age 15, I first read Sylvia Plath’s “Fever 103°” and I thought: “I want to write poems like this!”

Mark Bibbins
When I was 12 or 13 I saw some E.E. Cummings poems and that was that—their weirdness was something that has sustained and challenged me ever since.

Erika L. Sanchez
I first became enamored with poetry when my sixth-grade teacher had us read Edgar Allan Poe. I was a fairly lonely and depressed 12-year-old, so Poe’s dark and gloomy poems really spoke to me. I specifically remember reading the poem “Alone,” and my first thought was something like “Wow! This creepy guy really understands me!”

Shane Book
The first poems I remember reading were “Alligator Pie” by Dennis Lee and Robert Service’s “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” though perhaps it was actually my father who read them to me while I stared at the black marks on the pages, saying the words a half-second after he did, a little echo curled into him on the couch. I do recall spending every spare waking moment for what seemed like a week but could have been a month, reading Homer’s Iliad and somewhere near the end of the book being stoked to find out there was a sequel and that it was called The Odyssey. Lying on my bed, in this two-minute break between ending one book-length epic poem and starting another I was seized by a feeling, a strange mixture of anxiety and adrenaline.

Adrian Matejka
Other than almost everything in Where the Sidewalk Ends, the first poem I loved was Etheridge Knight’s “Feeling Fucked Up.” I didn’t know poetry permitted cursing. More than that, it was the first time I felt like I got a poem.

Ben Lerner
My mom taught me “The Purple Cow” when I was very little. I loved it and the tragic story of the poet who could never outrun the fame of his nonsense verse, no matter how seriously he wanted to be taken.

CAConrad
I grew up in rural America, where everyone worked in factories and didn’t read much. As a result books, especially poetry books, were hard to come by, but Emily Dickinson was on our local library’s shelf. I fell in love with her poems, and remain in love with them. Don’t listen to any of the stories you will hear about Dickinson being a sad, wilting lily hiding in her Amherst house writing her sad poems. She was courageous! It’s simply not possible to have centuries of poetry come up to your doorstep and reject it all and write something new, and not be absolutely courageous. Emily Dickinson is my American hero.

Metta Sáma
My dad had about a thousand pens imprinted with the last two lines of “Invictus” by the poet William Ernest Henley: “I am the master of my fate; / I am the captain of my soul.” My memory tells me that he added the phrase “By God’s grace,” but that could be a false memory, something to do with having so much of my young life in and about church. Those lines have followed me around my entire life; it was the only poetry (or snippet of poetry) we had in our house, and I both loved and hated the lines. Loved them because, of course, they inspire us to be individual, to control as much of our destiny as we can. Somehow, having the words trapped on pens, particularly those pens with the eraser tops, the heavy tip, the heavier ink, that stayed stored in my father’s drawer, made me question what, exactly, “fate” and “soul” were, for my father, for myself, for this writer whose name I did not know, but whose words my father, beyond the pens, said to us. It was the first time in my (very very young) life that I understood the true nature of words: they are stored in our blood, scratched into our bones; our taste buds are words; fingerprints, words.
Originally Published: March 11, 2015

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/249164

ESSAY
The Writing Class
On privilege, the AWP-industrial complex, and why poetry doesn’t seem to matter.

BY JASWINDER BOLINA


These are some of the ways my immigrant parents survived recessions, layoffs, and the disappearance of entire industries from the U.S. economy. This is how they earned, saved, and invested enough to move us into a brick split-level house with a two-and-a-half-car garage in the suburbs by the time I started secondary school. Though my father clocked into the same hydraulics parts plant as a machinist for more than a decade and my mother did data entry for an hourly wage at a financial publishing company, they could afford to buy me a set of encyclopedias and an Apple computer. They could pay for tennis lessons and give me a stereo system with a CD player and a double-cassette deck. They could send me to the private academy instead of the public high school.

This is how I lived a socioeconomic reality almost entirely separate from theirs. While my parents scrimped and stressed daily as part of the working classes, I went to a school with honors societies, study abroad programs, and AP courses. I went to college. I managed to turn my philosophy major into a high-paying job at a software startup south of Silicon Valley. Higher education had kept its promise of onward and upward mobility, which seemed easy enough in the bloated turn-of-the-century tech economy. Still, after less than six months at the startup, I decided to apply to MFA programs in creative writing. This didn’t make sense to my mother and father. Though we were far removed from the ragged apartments of my childhood, their class consciousness remained rooted in those earlier struggles. It told them we weren’t the kind of people who did certain kinds of things. Abandoning a salaried job with stock options for a graduate degree offering little hope of future employment or reliable income was chief among these, but I liked the integrity in my plan. If a degree in poetry dumped me into bohemian poverty, I thought, so be it. At least I was being earnest in my pursuit. I was that kind of people.

•

My father wrote his share of poems in high school in India. He still recites verses—though never his own—in Punjabi on occasional late evenings. My mother, the daughter of a schoolteacher and at the top of her high school class in a village not far from my father’s, could probably recite a few herself. Poetry wasn’t a bad idea in the abstract to either of them. It might even be a noble pursuit, but it also seemed a thing better left to the children of the wealthy than to the son of working-class immigrants. To their minds, being a poet wasn’t a job. They still felt too near the keen edge of hardship to see me follow so precarious a career path. I didn’t see the danger.

I don’t think I entirely understood that it was the economic advantage they had worked and paid for that permitted me to be so brazen. If I’d been anything other than a protected spectator during my parents’ lean years, if I didn’t have their income and savings for a safety net during and after college, I probably would have stuck with that startup or some other bleary office job. Economists and accountants might make raw distinctions between the classes based on objective metrics such as net worth or income—the 1 percent versus the 99 percent, for instance—but class consciousness might be better defined by the kinds of choices we feel permitted to make. Where the working classes are regularly forced to take pragmatic action out of necessity, the privileged are allowed to act on desire. My parents’ money, modest as it was and still is, did more than pay for the things I needed. It allowed me to want things they couldn’t afford to want themselves.

There isn’t anything inherently bratty about this. It is, after all, what class mobility is meant to accomplish in the too few places such a thing is even possible. The brat is born when the privileged mistakenly believe that we somehow earned and deserve the socioeconomic and structural advantages granted to us by the fluke or fortune of family, gender, race, sexual preference, religion, education, or national origin. To suffer from that delusion is a mostly personal problem. It becomes a problem for everybody else when the privileged also believe that the things we’re permitted to want are necessary or superior to what somebody else wants, when we believe our desires should be respected and even admired by those who don’t share in our advantage.

I don’t know that I ever suffered from cluelessness quite so severe as that. I did believe my dream of a life in poetry to be pure, to be something apart from socioeconomics. My concerns were artistic concerns, I thought, my acceptance of bohemianism an earnest embrace of the artist’s life. The contradiction is that those concerns, however sincere, led me to graduate school. The desire to write and publish poetry leads a lot of us there, which is all well and good, but there’s nothing bohemian about it. Quite the opposite, Western postgraduate education has historically been one of our culture’s most prominent expressions of upper-class privilege. The fact that grad programs in creative writing exist at all is testament to the remarkable abundance of collective, institutional wealth in the United States. Those of us who are able to attend these programs can do so only as beneficiaries of certain structural advantages that are required simply to walk through their gates. Latter-day versions of my parents, meaning those who might appreciate poetry but lack college degrees or the time and resources to spend on graduate schooling, can’t join us there.

This might be acceptable in the context of professional fields such as medicine, business, and law, but poetry is supposed to be an art, which means it should at least attempt to represent the society in which it’s produced. It can’t fully do this if its primary mode of production inherently excludes large swaths of the population. The risk of such exclusions is that they limit the variety and appeal of the kind of writing produced in graduate programs. Nearly every complaint about contemporary poetry in the United States, whether in reference to the lack of diversity among those publishing it or to its opacity or to the very credibility of the genre itself, is rooted in this basic dynamic.

•

I wanted to write poetry. I didn’t need a graduate degree to do this. Nobody does. But graduate programs in creative writing offer a two- to five-year respite from that other life working long hours in restaurants, bars, factories, or offices. We’re given time and money—no matter how brief and how paltry—to focus almost exclusively on our art, which is no small advantage over everyone else writing on the fringes of a 40-or-more-hour workweek. For many of us, that advantage is supplemented by financial support from parents, partners, and spouses along the way. Added to this is the immaterial benefit of receiving feedback on our writing from published faculty and invested classmates, which helps us refine our poems toward publication—an achievement that might finally give us the satisfaction we’re all after to begin with.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/249164

Concluding from previous link and post--Tyr




As for poetry itself, it’s possible that more people are writing, reading, performing, and
publishing it today than at any other point in human history. If, in spite of this, our work
doesn’t seem to bring enough refreshment to readers outside of our industry, if so many feel
disconnected from both, it probably isn’t because their desire for the poetic mode of
expression has gone away. It’s more likely because they can’t afford our version of it.
They don’t have the same time and money some of us have had to invest in it. Our poems, then,
become a thing like that $2 houseplant my parents waged their small war over. Neither is an
object anybody needs. Either can be ignored when more vital concerns loom large. Yet people
want them still. Open-mic nights and slams that take place daily across the country stand as
proof of the desire for poetry. Beyond these, millions turn to the lyrics of singer-songwriters
and hip-hop artists for experiences in verse. The complaint among the poetry-is-dead set is
that too few of those people ever turn to us certified, bona fide poets of the AWP.

If we want to bring those critics and those masses to our poems, if we want poetry to matter
to those outside our classrooms and conference halls—and there may be some poets who don’t;
bully for them—then those others, their lives and their language, have to matter to us first.
The only way they will is if we disrupt the culture of privilege that insulates us. And we
need to disrupt it, not for our egoistic desire for a larger audience, but for the sake of
our art. The only job of the poet is to destabilize and expand language. This is how poetry
changes the world—not by grand ambition or the lauding of critics. It takes the plodding,
unending effort of many to alter line by line, phrase by phrase, word by word the way we
describe ourselves and everything around us. This is how we change perception. This is how we
change the mind. We can’t do it while isolated by our privilege. There are too few of us.
Our language is too limited. We need more words. We need more than ourselves and each other.
We need every broke shoulder to the wheel.

Originally Published: November 12, 2014

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/249062

PROSE FROM POETRY MAGAZINE
The Medium of the English Language
BY JAMES LONGENBACH

The Medium of the English Language
BY JAMES LONGENBACH
The medium of Giorgione’s Tempest is “oil on canvas”; the medium of Robert Rauschenberg’s Bed is “oil and pencil on pillow, quilt, and sheet.” Descriptions of a work of art’s medium seem to tell us everything and nothing, for our entire experience of art is dependent upon the artist’s intimacy with the medium, and yet the medium itself may seem weirdly mundane, especially when the artist harnesses everyday materials like a sheet. In the nineteenth century, the stuff from which art is made came to be called the medium because for hundreds of years the word had referred to something that acts as an intermediary, a piece of money or a messenger. The artistic medium enables a transaction between the artist and the world, and, over time, the history of those transactions has become inextricable from the medium as such, an inherited set of conventions. It’s not coincidental that it was also in the nineteenth century that the word medium was first used to describe a person who conducts a séance, a person who exists simultaneously in the worlds of the living and the dead.

Lots of people sleep on sheets. Very few people handle oil paint as provocatively as Rauschenberg, and even fewer deploy sheets as a way of forging a transaction between the interior space of the mind and the exterior space of the world, a transaction that gives other people, the audience, an enticing and sometimes puzzling way of rethinking their own relationship to those spaces. Members of the audience may draw a little, they may have a fine sense of color, but they respect the transaction that the artistic medium does not simply record but presents as a unique and enduring act in time. Sometimes, however, when the sheer otherness of the medium is foregrounded at the expense of a conventional signal of the artist’s mind at work, they don’t respect the transaction, in part because the artist doesn’t covet such respect: how can art be something made of a bed sheet?

How can art be something made of words, the same words used for newspapers and parking tickets? Unlike the media most commonly associated with visual and sonic artistry, words are harnessed by most people during almost every waking moment of their lives; they’re more like bed sheets than like oil paint or the notes of the diatonic scale. Even small children are skilled manipulators of language, 
capable of detecting and repeating the most subtle nuances of intonation and tone: how swiftly we learn that by shifting the accent from one syllable to the other, the two-syllable word “contract” can be either a noun referring to a kind of agreement (“contract”) or a verb meaning either to acquire or constrict (“contract”). But while children rarely confuse such words when they’re speaking, children don’t write the poems of Shakespeare or the novels of Henry James, and neither do most adults. We may sustain an easy mastery of language in our daily lives, but once we engage language as an artistic medium, that mastery is never secure: our relationship to language is constantly changing as we discover aspects of the medium that our prior failures and, more potently, our prior successes had occluded.

My medium is not language at large but the English language. When I was young I took this for granted, but over the years I’ve become increasingly conscious of the qualities shared by poems because they’re written in English, rather than Italian or French. I’m not fluent in those languages; while I’ve lived for a time in Italy, where my children attended Italian school, I spent much of that time sitting at a desk, trying to write poems in English. But my lack of fluency heightened my awareness of my medium. Living in Florence, I was incapable of taking my mastery of  language for granted, and this incapacity not only reared its head when I was speaking broken Italian to our landlord; it infected my relationship to English, demanding that I hear the medium of the English language in particular ways, ways in which it has also been heard before. In Italian, the word for what we call a landlord is proprietario, just as in French it is propriétaire. And while those languages contain no version of the word landlord, a typically Germanic compound noun, the English language does contain the Latinate word proprietor: when we savor these possibilities, we are (as the meanings of the word medium suggest) undertaking a complex negotiation with the dead.

Every language has different registers of diction, but the English language comes by those registers in a particular way, one that reflects 
the entire history of the language. Unlike the romance languages, which were derived from the Latin spread throughout Italy, France, and Spain during the Roman Empire, English descended independently from German. Old English, the language of the eighth- or ninth-century poem we call “The Seafarer,” now looks and sounds to us like a foreign language, close to the German from which it was derived: with some study, one can see that the Old English line “bitre breostcaere gebiden hæbbe” means “bitter breast-cares abided have” or “I have abided bitter breast-cares.” The language of Chaucer’s fifteenth-century Canterbury Tales, or what we call Middle English, feels less strange, in part because its sense now relies largely on word order rather than on word endings: “Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages” or “then people long to go on pilgrimages.” And the Modern English of the Renaissance we can read easily, because it is the language we speak today, even though the language has continued to evolve: “Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediments.”

Many complicated factors determined this evolution, but one of the most important was the Norman invasion of England in 1066. Once Norman French became the language of the English court, a new vocabulary of words derived from Latin began to migrate into Germanic English. The Old English poet could abide breast-cares, but he could not go on a pilgrimage or suffer impediments; those Latinate words were not available to him. Even today, we raise pigs and cows (from German, via Old English) but eat pork and beef (from Latin, via French), because after the Norman conquest the peasants who raised animals generally spoke English while the noblemen who ate them spoke French. We similarly inhabit a body but bury a corpse because the English language contains Germanic and Latinate words for the same thing, and, over time, we have made discriminations in their meanings. The traditional language of English law is studded with pairs of Germanic and Latinate words (will and testament, breaking and entering, goods and chattels) in which the meaning is not discriminated but reiterated, made available to the widest variety of people who spoke the rapidly developing English language.

Speakers of English may or may not be aware that their language is by its nature different from itself, but any interaction with English as an artistic medium depends on the deployment of words with etymologically distant roots — words that sound almost as different from each other as do words from German and Italian. Notoriously, T.S. Eliot incorporated quotations from foreign languages into his poems, but in The Waste Land, when he jumps from German words (“das Meer”) to words borrowed from the French (“famous clairvoyante”), he is exaggerating what English-language poems do inevitably all the time. The line “Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages” mixes Germanic and Latinate diction strategically (the plain folk playing off the fancy pilgrimages), and the sentence “Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediments” does so more intricately, the Germanic monosyllables let, true, and minds consorting with the Latinate marriage, admit, and impediments to create the richly 
polyglot texture that, over time, speakers of English have come to recognize as the very sound of eloquence itself. One hears it again in Keats (“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”), in Browning (“the quiet-colored end of evening smiles”), or in most any poet writing today. Coleridge famously called Shakespeare “myriad minded,” a phrase that itself wedges together Latinate and Germanic words, and the very medium of English-language poetry is in this sense myriad minded.

It’s possible to write Modern English as if it were an almost exclusively Germanic language, as James Joyce does in this passage of Ulysses, evoking the alliterative rhythms of Old English poetry by giving priority to Germanic monosyllables and treating English as if it were still a highly inflected language, in which sense need not depend on word order:

Before born babe bliss had. Within womb won he worship.
It’s also possible to write English as if it were an almost exclusively Latinate language, as Joyce does in this passage of Ulysses, frontloading Latinate vocabulary and weeding out as many Germanic words as possible:

Universally that person’s acumen is esteemed very little perceptive concerning whatsoever matters are being held as most profitably by mortals with sapience endowed.
But these bravura efforts of parody and pastiche sound more like the resuscitation of a dead language than the active deployment of a living one; it’s difficult to speak English so single-mindedly. In contrast, Shakespeare’s language feels fully alive in Sonnet 116, and yet its drama nonetheless depends on the strategic juxtaposition of a Germanic phrase (“true minds”) with a highly Latinate phrase that a speaker of English might never say (“admit impediments”), just as that speaker probably wouldn’t say “babe bliss had” or “with sapience endowed.” We don’t speak of the cow who jumps over the moon as “translunar,” though we could.

We do speak of the “Grand Canal” when we come to Venice, deploying two Latinate words; but to a native speaker of Italian, the word grande simply means big. As an Italian friend of mine once said, all we’re thinking about is size: the canal is big in the same way that your hat might be too big, “troppo grande.” The difference between our deployment of the Latinate phrases “Grand Canal” and “admit impediments” is that in the former case we are scripted by the language we deploy, our typically awe-struck response to the history of Venice produced by the language we speak. In the latter case Shakespeare has made a choice, as in other circumstances any speaker of English might also make a choice: saying “look how big the canal is” 
is different from saying “look how grand the canal is.” It is at such junctures that our language begins to function as a medium, something that acts as an intermediary, a transitional object. Nothing is automatically an artistic medium, though anything could be.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/248620

PROSE FROM POETRY MAGAZINE
Undead Eliot: How “The Waste Land” Sounds Now
BY LESLEY WHEELER

When reading a poet who found his own voice after 1922, I often come across a cadence or trick of diction which makes me say “Oh, he’s read Hardy, or Yeats, or Rilke,” but seldom, if ever, can I detect an immediate, direct influence from Eliot. His indirect influence has, of course, been immense, but I should be hard put to it to say exactly what it is.
— W.H. Auden

Thomas Sayers Ellis, or a version of him looping eternally on YouTube, is about to read “All Their Stanzas Look Alike,” a weirdly 
hypnotic indictment of academic and aesthetic politics. Before launching into the poem, he remarks:

I was beat digging at the artist’s colony, it’s kind of funny, and I heard “let us go then you and I when the evening is spread out against the sky in a red wheelbarrow and that has made all the difference.” The cadence of that decade became my new haint, the new thing that haunted me, and so I wrote this — this is an homage to that sound.

Imagine this pastiche declaimed in a deep-pitched monotone, as Ellis jiggles nonexistent jowls. He goes on to observe that during his childhood in Washington DC, “the voice that was on television all the time was Richard Nixon, and so when I began my formal training in poetry, you know, they all sounded like Nixon to me.”

Thomas Sayers Ellis reads Thomas Stearns Eliot (and Williams, and Frost) as Nixon, guilty spokesman for a corrupt establishment. This is part of what modernism means now, has meant for decades: not revolutionary art but stiff authority. Despite the stiffness and the guilt, though, Ellis describes enchantment by rhythm. Ellis was beat digging, riffling through old vinyl, haunted less by the denotation of the words than by their detonations. Auden is right that moments of Eliotic influence are hard to finger, but it’s precisely in cadence that Eliot’s work survives.

For twenty-first-century poets, Eliot persists as a sonic obsession more vividly than as a poet who leveled important arguments or shaped literary history. As editor, critic, and builder of poetic landmarks from recycled materials, the man overshadowed Anglo-American poetry for generations. For William Carlos Williams, the atomic blast of The Waste Land knocked American poetry out of its groove. For poets born in the thirties and forties — Craig Raine, Wendy Cope, Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney — Eliot is monumental, although those writers have different responses to his looming edifice. Poets born since, though, metabolized Eliot differently. It’s not that modernism is less relevant. Younger writers claim certain modernist poets over and over: Williams, W.B. Yeats, Robert Frost, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, Langston Hughes, H.D., Robert Hayden, Gwendolyn Brooks. Eliot just isn’t on their public lists quite so often.

The “paradigm shift” lowering Eliot’s status, as David Chinitz puts it, occurred in the eighties. In 1989, Cynthia Ozick commented in The New Yorker on Eliot’s reduced place in school curricula. Books by Christopher Ricks and, slightly later, Anthony Julius brought Eliot’s anti-Semitism to the fore. Also in the late eighties, a prize-winning essay by Wayne Koestenbaum highlighted Eliot’s misogynistic and homoerotic correspondence with Ezra Pound, midwife to The Waste Land. Eliot’s poetry of the teens and twenties communicates fear of women, and often revulsion about their bodies, and Koestenbaum adds force to the point. Then there was Eliot’s portrayal in the 1994 film Tom & Viv by Willem Dafoe, a.k.a. the Green Goblin. Eliot is a synonym for tradition but he also became, for readers attuned to his prejudices, a supervillain.

The gradual mutation of modernist reputations over time is no catastrophe. Certain poetic frequencies, strong at the time, had become buried in interference. Poet-performers such as Hughes, Amy Lowell, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Vachel Lindsay, and Carl Sandburg experimented with new performance modes and ultimately changed what we expect from poetry readings, in addition to publishing verse that hums with theatrical and musical energy — their signals should still reach us. Nor does the swelling of the modernist horde mean Eliot’s resonance has died. People want to voice his poetry and hear it voiced. Four Quartets, for instance, is popular again, inspiring performances by Chicago actor Mike Rogalski and by Ariel Artists, 
a group of classical musicians that stages collaborative events.

For poets making their names now, Eliot endures as a rhythm, an icon of recurrence. His early verse offers a resource for those 
obsessed with linguistic music but skeptical of meter, and particularly for poets who chime radically different registers and references, hoping to revive something human through uncanny convergences. For some writers, these powerful cadences are abstracted from meaning; The Waste Land is an emblem of obscurity, communicating mainly the impossibility of communication. Others, though, understand the noisiness of Eliot’s jazz-influenced verse as a mark and even a means of transformation. Sound is how Eliot expresses personal despair and social critique most forcefully, and also how he survives the apocalypse.

•

“Poetic sound” is a physical phenomenon and a metaphor. Voiced texts, whether performed by the author or by someone else, involve pitch, volume, duration, and all the linguistic prosody of dialect, 
including rhythm, stress, and intonation. Medium matters: live presence and video convey gesture, facial expression, and other visual information, while recording and broadcasting technologies introduce nonhuman noise and strip away most of what the body says. Silent reading is also a physical phenomenon, engaging muscles and parts of the brain associated with vocalization and audition. Printed, digital, or manuscript texts have other sonic attributes, too. Although recitation makes sound structures more audible, a good reader, without voicing a poem, may perceive alliteration, rhyme, and meter or other rhythmic patterns interacting with vocabulary and typography. I often seem to hear a poem as I read it silently, especially if I know the author’s own voice, and most especially if that voice is unusual — 
Brooks’s musical intonations, for example, haunt my inner ear more powerfully than Adrienne Rich’s plain intensity, although both 
authors are deeply important to me.

Because listening to an author’s recitation can change how you read a poem forever, never play Eliot’s 1948 recording of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” “Prufrock” on the page is full of discord, humor, fear, and despair, but the poet’s Talking Dead performance leaches out its urgency. Listeners to the Caedmon version of The Waste Land, recorded in 1947 and 1955 in London, and for a long time the only widely available performance by Eliot, have often felt the same horror. This version is, however, unforgettable. My own copy is a bootleg cassette handed to me in the early nineties by my dissertation adviser, A. Walton Litz. He remarked that Eliot’s recitation 
lasts just under half an hour, meaning, by Edgar Allan Poe’s rule of duration, The Waste Land counts as a lyric poem. Did Walt give this peculiar gift to generations of graduate students, or did he, like Tiresias, foresee my doom?

This aural document is peculiar in several ways. Part of the strangeness rests in pronunciation. Eliot was raised in St. Louis and educated in New England when American classrooms emphasized the art of elocution. The Waste Land was published in 1922, but by the forties, Eliot had lived in England for decades and deliv....................

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/249038

PROSE FROM POETRY MAGAZINE
On “François Villon on the Condition of Pity in Our Time” by Larry Levis
BY DAVID ST. JOHN

Larry Levis’s dramatic monologue, “François Villon on the Condition of Pity in Our Time,” invokes the opening lines of one of Villon’s most famous poems, “Ballade des Pendus,” (Ballade of the Hanged Men), also known as “Frères Humains” or “Epitaphe Villon.” Villon’s poem was published posthumously in 1489 and has been widely — though not conclusively — acknowledged to have been written while Villon was in prison awaiting execution (his sentence was later commuted to banishment from Paris).

Villon’s opening two lines read, in French: “Frères humains, qui après nous vivez, / N’ayez les cœurs contre nous endurcis,” and are translated by Galway Kinnell as: “Brother humans who live on after us / Don’t let your hearts harden against us.” These lines are a conventional plea for Christian charity typical of the Middle Ages, as the following two lines (again, Kinnell’s translation) make clear: “For if you have pity on wretches like us / More likely God will show mercy to you.” Yet the hanged speakers in Villon’s poem don’t seek any simple charity from their “brother humans,” but instead ask for the prayers of their “brothers” so that they, the hanged, might find some form of redemption and absolution, although their bodies have already rotted and been devoured by both birds (in Villon, magpies and crows) and the elements.

During the years 1972–1974, while studying for his doctoral exams in modern letters at the University of Iowa, Levis had become immersed in French poetry and also, under the guidance of Daniel Weissbort, the practice and theory of translation. Levis had been reading both Villon and Baudelaire in French since the time he was an undergraduate, and had more recently discovered other French poets he’d come to love — Gérard de Nerval, Jules Supervielle, and Pierre Reverdy. Of the surrealists, Levis admired most Robert Desnos and Paul Éluard, for their poetry, and André Breton, for his nerve.

Four hundred years after Villon, in his poem “Au Lecteur,” Baudelaire would offer his own trenchant testimony as he cataloged a carnivalesque stream of characters and despairs that could have been drawn directly from Villon’s age and poetry into Baudelaire’s “modern” Paris. The speaker in Levis’s poem is the self-named François Villon — who lives in both his own time and in the equally merciless, equally savage late twentieth century — as voiced by Levis, who has shrewdly chosen Villon as his own Baudelairean semblable, his own poetic frère. In the raw conclusion of the Levis poem, Villon presents himself as being hanged not by the neck but upon a cross, and crucified, a still-living mirror for those of us he is addressing — he is our “disappearing likeness on the cross!” No wonder that we live in a time both ancient and immediate, as Levis-and-Villon notes, when “there’s not one tear left in all of us.”

Originally Published: November 3, 2014
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No wonder that we live in a time both ancient and immediate, as Levis-and-Villon notes, when “there’s not one tear left in all of us.”


Found this very interesting article. -Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2009/05/a-short-highly-personal-observation-completely-lacking-in-examples-which-i-could-have-never-have-made-thirty-years-ago-when-i-was-a-young-poet-still-living-in-new-york-because-i-didn’t-know/

A SHORT, HIGHLY PERSONAL OBSERVATION COMPLETELY LACKING IN EXAMPLES WHICH I COULD HAVE NEVER HAVE MADE THIRTY YEARS AGO WHEN I WAS A YOUNG POET STILL LIVING IN NEW YORK, BECAUSE I DIDN’T KNOW ENOUGH TO KNOW IT WAS TRUE. BUT I DO NOW.
BY MARTIN EARL


W.H. Auden once said that he always felt that he was the youngest person in the room, even at an older age, when this was certainly not the case. I’ve felt similarly while blogging, especially when being reprimanded by commentators half my age. This could have all sorts of explanations. But for the moment let’s file them under “Monkey Glands”, aka W.B. Yeats. Today, I have a more pressing issue at hand, a comment on the younger generations of scriveners; or to reverse Auden’s impression, all of those younger than myself and involved, in one way or another, in the palimpsestic quest of poetry. I mean poets in their twenties, thirties and forties – fifty being the cut-off date.

Of course, there are exceptions but for the moment I am intent on generalizing. In the field of poetry, women make better bloggers than do their male counterparts, also better commentators, better critics and, increasingly, better poets. Of the younger generation of poets I am discovering through my involvement with Harriet, the women are clearly superior. Not only is their poetry more ambitious and achieved but their criticism is more daring, their originality of thought deeper and their wit more honed.
Why should this be? One reason perhaps (and this is undoubtedly one of those clichés for which I will be run out of town) is that women have an ontological connection that men don’t have to making and creating, to nurturing form out of raw materials: out of themselves, out of language and out of the ground, in the sense of both lettuce patches and the Heidegerrean notion of fundamentum absolutum, or der grund. Heidegger posits a reversal of the Cartesian first principle and says “I am therefore I think.” This stands in well for the difference between male and female sensibilities.
Traditionally discouraged or prevented from taking part in social paradigms of creative expression (with the exception, of course, of motherhood) women have learned patience, the art of autonomy and a capacity for restraint. Related to these qualities is the fact that they are more open to difference, generally more tolerant, and less threatened by the mechanisms of authority: those mechanisms that are found in traditional knowledge structures, traditional language structures and traditional institutional structures. Since historically women have had to defend themselves against the power emanating from these structures, their mastery and insight into the workings of power is deeper. Likewise, women’s competitive instincts are more subtly attuned to the task at hand, the medium they are dealing with, the objectives of a given project than they are with the impression they would like to make upon the world. This comes from ease with self-effacement, which in artistic endeavors results in a more thoroughgoing capacity for immersion in the project at hand. They are more apt to experiment in ways that produce organic forms for expressive purposes rather than try, as men so often do, to trick language into duplicating the will. Because women are generally more sensitive to others, they are more sensitive to the needs of the poem. Because they are more coherent, grounded and possess a higher degree of self-knowledge at a younger age, they are better prepared to resist the influences of their teachers, their education and even the expectations of the medium they are working in. Hence they are more original.
Decades of work by women to open new formats, create equalities, to encourage creative and intellectual work, to valorize the special experiences of women (both material and intellectual), and to formulate a critical framework for understanding the various forms of oppression woman have born, and continue to bear, is, in my opinion, and in my special field of concern (poetry and literary criticism) also responsible for the health, innovation and continuing wonder of the medium. But it is not the whole story, and it is time to move on, away from theory and back to practice. On a practical level, that of making and reading poems, male poets now have more to learn from how women work, and from what they are saying and creating than vice versa.
And yet in spite of what I say above (characterizing women’s experience, perhaps inaccurately, and seeing their poetry as having benefited from that experience) I have never been comfortable with the designation “women’s poetry”, or with any of the other normative appellations that marked 20th century discussions on the subject and that led to misleading typologies and atomizations. In fact, I follow Berryman’s cue in not distinguishing between British and American poetry – and I carry that further to all poets writing in English: Irish, South African, Indian and West Indian, Australian etc. (two of my favorite poets, John Kinsella and Less Murray, are from down under).
I’m even uncomfortable (since I live and work in a polyglot setting) with classifying poets or their poems by language. To pit French poets against German poets seems hardly useful when we finally arrive at the poem itself. My Portuguese colleagues, some of whom I’ve translated, are essentially doing the same thing that I do when I write a poem. The fact that they are writing in Portuguese doesn’t matter in the end. Of course different situations produce dif

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/248812

Four Englands
Four Debut British Poets Being Variously English

BY TODD SWIFT


This omnibus review is very much about English poetry, and Englishness in contemporary poetry from England, and, perhaps even better, young English poets. By something like a happy coincidence, these four collections are each by a poet who has won an Eric Gregory Award (more on this in a moment) — and, even more pleasingly, they won their awards more or less consecutively, in 2005, 2007, 2008, 2009 (Martinez de las Rivas, Mort, Berry, Brookes). So, here are four poets who have been noticed, and even encouraged, as some of the main rising stars of new poetry in “these isles.” Well, these isles are crowded with poets, many Welsh, Irish, or Scottish, but any list of the most appreciated of the YBPs (Young British Poets) would include these poets — along with, say, Ahren Warner, Sam Riviere, Luke Kennard, Heather Phillipson, Sandeep Parmar, Caleb Klaces, Jen Hadfield, Jack Underwood, Liz Berry, James Byrne, Jon Stone, and Clare Pollard.

There is something like a broad consensus that has been forming, based on appearances in the larger British magazines, acquisition of prizes and university degrees, and publication in pamphlet form with publishers like Faber and Faber, or, in a smaller way, tall-lighthouse, when Roddy Lumsden was its editor. The Eric Gregory goes every year to a handful of the best poets thirty years or under, for an unpublished manuscript. To win one is to get a nice chunk of money, and 
a very good shot at a publishing deal within the next few years.

In the case of the poets here whose books from late 2012 to 2014 are under review, this wait has been between three and nine years. One of the collections is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, which is the sort of stamp of approval most poets would gnaw a finger off for; Berry has won a Forward Prize, and Mort been asked to judge the Forwards already (a great honor for a debut poet); Brookes was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize; Martinez de las Rivas is being spoken of as a major new Christian poet. Each is from a recognized publisher — Faber and Chatto & Windus, relatively major players; and Salt, the feisty newer kid on the block (despite having published hundreds of poetry books). In short, here are four poets American poets and poetry readers would do well to acquaint themselves with — and yet, none of these debuts are likely to be widely sold, reviewed, or read beyond Britain’s borders, at least for the time being.

These poets come out of a certain tradition, or at an angle from The Tradition, as one might expect of poets in their twenties or early thirties. Each has a few notable precursors, so-called presiding spirits, who have very much shaped their work’s temperament, goals, and style. Helen Mort, a poet from Sheffield in the relatively impoverished North of England (home to the major indie band Arctic Monkeys), writes under the influence of Tony Harrison and Simon Armitage, yet her major themes and music come even more from Sean O’Brien and Don Paterson — each, in their way, very male poets. 
In a sense, Mort is the strong female Northern Poet, come at last (she does not very much resemble the current poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, who nevertheless has publicly praised her work).

Emily Berry is only one of the “Berrywomen” now active in London poetry circles — the other is Liz Berry, whose own debut was published this year. Ms. Emily’s is a berry-red book from Faber, with the very pop title of Dear Boy. Berry is from London, where she has lived her whole life and it is something of a rude shock to actually read a Faber collection by a British poet from the publishing capital itself, who is, for instance, not Irish or Scottish. She is resolutely English in tone and manner, in much the same way as her hero, Morrissey of The Smiths is; indeed, Berry’s key precursors may be said to be the great pop and indie lyricists since the eighties, during which time she grew up. But this is half the story. In other ways, her ironic, edgy, and peculiarly strangled emotionalism seems to reach out and grab Plath from the grave and demand she return, this time as a pastiche ghoul. Berry, then, has a skewed relationship to how contemporary British poetry has heretofore tended to sound — unless one had been reading Luke Kennard, the strongest poet of this new generation, who seems to have invented several of the key tropes, forms, and concepts that Berry herself assays.

James Brookes is even more English than Berry, if such is possible. That is because, in a daring or foolhardy swerve back to confront the major living poet of his place and time, Brookes seeks to take on Geoffrey Hill at his own game. Surely Hill, like Milton or Yeats, has mastered a baroque and learned rhetoric so steeped in history and language as to be inescapably his own? Well, yes, and no. The general way of putting it is that Brookes “reminds” us of Hill. I would say he out-Hills Hill, in being, in this debut, even more concerned with the history of kings and parliament, the violence and graphic details of world wars, and the demands of place, in this instance, Sussex, where he was fortunately born a stone’s throw from Shelley’s “boyhood home.” It is perhaps unimaginable for an American poet born in 1986 (even if it was a few yards from Hailey, Idaho) to unironically compose and publish poems with titles like “Amen to Artillery,” “Silent Enim Leges Inter Arma,” “Surveying the Queen’s Pictures,” or “Lucifer at Camlann.” This is high poetry, full stop.

However, in terms of an attempt to turn lyric modernism’s highest Hill into a mountain, or unaging intellectual monuments, we must end with the Somerset-raised Martinez de las Rivas, whose Christian poetry seems almost impossibly erudite (by contemporary standards), with blatant echoes of Joyce, Yeats, Eliot, Pound, David Jones, and Lowell, and several poems that (seemingly without irony) break off into Anglo-Saxon, Greek, or Latin. It is apparently the most learned debut by a twenty-first-century British poet; we in England last saw work with this Poundian high modernist ethos in Bunting. Depending on your relationship to words like “elitism” and “accessibility,” Terror either appalls or thrills, or both — as it is no doubt (given its title) meant to.

What we have here are excellent emerging poets, each to a certain degree acclaimed, each imbued with a seriousness of purpose that varies between the almost-sentimental to the almost-portentous, with way-stops any fellow traveler will recognize as arch irony, wit, reserve, and tonally restrained elegance. These are the stations of the English poetic cross, and yet these pilgrims make something new of them while revisiting the old blood-dimmed haunts.


•


Helen Mort’s Division Street opens with a quote from Stevenson about Jekyll and Hyde, followed by a poem playing on the fact that her name means “death” in French; and various poems across the book relate to divided loyalties, identities, and the dangers (and promise) of names. Anyone who has followed British poetry since 1990 will know this is territory that deceased British-American poet Michael Donaghy staked out as his own in the poem “Smith,” often cited as a modern British classic. However, this idea of doubles, and doubling, and double identities, central to Scottish literature from James Hogg to Robert Louis Stevenson, indeed, J.K. Rowling, is perhaps most famously explored, even obsessively so, in most of Don Paterson’s collections; Paterson is the best-known advocate of Donaghy’s work (as well as his publisher at Picador). Mort’s collection is almost a direct reply to these influences — and is especially Patersonian in its sensorial enjoyment of alcohol, pubs, and drink in general — few other poetry collections have such a fug of lock-ins as this one. In her most Patersonian moment, in the poem “The Complete Works of Anonymous,” she even says, “I’ll raise a glass to dear Anonymous: the old / familiar anti-signature, the simple courage / of that mark.” In Mort’s Northern English world, raising a glass is no bad thing. Indeed, as she tells us in “Oldham’s Burning Sands,” “people sing the sweetest when they’re drunk.” As a credo for a poet it promises lots of hangovers after the carped diem. “Stainless Stephen,” a local, provincial comedian down on his luck, even when shut out of most establishments, “knows a pub across the river / where the doors will never shut.” Even the elements want to possess the local pub — snow, in the poem “Fur,” wants “to claim The Blacksmith’s Arms.” In the poem “Fagan’s” there is a pub quiz host “part-drunkard, part-Messiah.” The Division seems to be between those sober, and less so. In fact, it is more than that. Mort’s poems can sometimes be a bit sentimental, or force a bonhomie or epiphany past the point of no return, but her music is almost never wrong — indeed, in terms of her skill at expertly deploying fairly conservative rhythm and rhyme, she seems the equal of Paterson or Duffy.

More vitally, her origins appear authentic — her Northern “voice” underwritten by a sense of generational blight and hardscrabble self-empowerment that few poets from the South of England could ever reference. Not since Tony Harrison, it seems, has a poet wanted to make so much of what divides “uz” from them. The two most noteworthy poems in the collection, which as a whole is as openly 
readable as any mainstream British poetry is likely to ever be this decade, and hence, as likely to be prized for such, both emphasize the rather striking (pun intended) contrast between Mort’s non-elite past (growing up Northern, and less privileged) and her elite present, or more recent past (Cambridge student/graduate). This becomes the tension of her own life and work, but, more broadly, the perceived tension of the English current today.

The great poem in the book, a sequence in five parts, is called “Scab.” A scab, which we know is a wound’s barely healed covering often picked at, to no good effect, is also the ugly name for someone who crosses a picket line during a strike to find work — often, poignantly, betraying family and friends in the process of making ends meet. This resonates with the violent history of the suppression of the miners’ strikes under Thatcherism. Mort considers how her own crossing, from Sheffield to Cambridge, is an equivalent selling out of more tribal loyalties. In the bravura last few lines, she achieves a tonal force simple yet worthy of her concerns, likely to make the poem essential reading for anyone concerned with such issues:

One day, it crashes through
your windowpane; the stone,
the word, the fallen star. You’re left
to guess which picket line
you crossed — a gilded College gate,
a better supermarket, the entrance
to your flat where, even now, someone
has scrawled the worst insult they can — 
a name. Look close. It’s yours.
That is the big poem in the book, but to this reader, the more elegantly affecting is “Miss Heath,” a poem in nine more-or-less tercets, whose narrative is easily summarized. Mort writes the kind of popular English poem whose subject and theme can be summed up easily, and is thus ideal for exams; this is what the experimental poets 
loathe about so-called mainstream British poetry, that it d

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/251110

ESSAY
Prufrock, Lewinsky, and the Poetry of History
How T. S. Eliot’s lovelorn classic still sways us.

BY AUSTIN ALLEN

One of the more striking literary essays in recent memory appeared this summer to zero fanfare. That in itself is no surprise: most literary critics could reveal the nuclear codes without even the NSA noticing. Still, you might have expected some buzz around a splashy Vanity Fair tribute to “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” penned by a longtime fan named Monica Lewinsky.

The occasion of the essay was the “Prufrock” centenary; the author’s guiding impulse was sheer enthusiasm. Lewinsky writes that she was “smitten” by T. S. Eliot’s lovelorn classic as a teenager and that after “more than 20 years, these feelings have not waned.” She’s a connoisseur of “Prufrock” allusions, from the pop to the highbrow; one “personal favorite” comes from Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris: “Prufrock is my mantra!” Even her e-mail address contains a “Prufrock” reference—a fruitful conversation starter, she says, with fellow lovers of the poem.

As it turns out, this isn’t the first revelation of her fandom. The 1999 biography Monica’s Story, which Andrew Morton wrote in collaboration with his subject, mentions her “life-changing” love of poetry and of “Prufrock” in particular. Covering the Morton bio for Time in 1999, John Cloud peppered his article with excerpts from the poem. He introduced a section on Lewinsky’s publicity tour with “Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”; he suggested that, like Prufrock pinned to the wall, she’d “begun to feel fixed and formulated by the eyes of the public, the prosecutors and the media.”

In 2004 Lewinsky withdrew from public life, fed up with all those prying eyes. When she re-emerged a decade later as part of an anti-bullying campaign, she invoked her old hero:

I believe my story can help. Help to do something to change the culture of humiliation we inhabit and that inhabits us. I had been publicly silent for a decade—but now I must, as T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock said, disturb the universe.
All in all, you sense that “Prufrock” is her mantra and that her devotion to it verges on spiritual zeal. Although she argues that the poem transports us “beyond meaning,” it seems to have had a sizable and definite meaning in her own life. Reflecting obliquely on his early reading in a 1934 essay, Eliot wrote, “Everyone, I believe, who is at all sensible to the seductions of poetry, can remember some moment in youth when he or she was completely carried away by the work of one poet.” By her own account, Lewinsky was such a reader, and her consuming passion was for the starchy, High-Church Anglican who wrote modern poetry’s great song of shyness.

•

If she’d had the choice, Lewinsky couldn’t have picked a more fitting inspiration. Eliot learned early in his own life that diffidence and daring, intense inwardness and intense exposure, can be twin edges of a single sword. Few 20th-century poets were as painfully reticent or achieved greater fame. None brooded more on the convergence of literature, sex, and history—the ways in which the private mental and physical lives of individuals intersect with the public life of the masses.

That obsession, which burns through the early poems, first flickers to life in the figure of Prufrock. Poor J. Alfred is the archetypal bit player on the world’s stage, anonymous and foppish right down to his abbreviated name. Mockingly comparing himself to biblical and Shakespearean heroes, he mourns his romantic failures and thwarted “greatness”:

Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in
upon a platter,
I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.
In the end, he accepts the role of “attendant lord” in life’s drama, “cautious” and “deferential,” aiding the major players but staying in the background. (He could be describing a model White House intern.)

In his own recent “Prufrock” tribute for the New Republic, Damian Lanigan called the poem “the battle cry for legions of bookish virgins, the supreme validation of the neurotic soul.” At first glance, this seems too triumphalist: surely it’s no battle cry but a cry of disgust and pain. After all, we never feel that Prufrock’s self-mockery is mistaken—that he is destined for greatness or that the beautiful girls will sing to him. However, he is poignantly wrong about one thing: “It is impossible to say just what I mean!” As Lanigan affirms, legions of readers have disagreed. Prufrock may lose out on love and glory, but his neurotic soul is validated in private eloquence.

By Eliot’s own admission, he was himself a frustrated virgin during the poem’s composition. Five years after its publication, his anxieties had curdled further. “Sweeney Erect” (1920) depicts the brutish title figure shaving in a brothel:

(The lengthened shadow of a man
Is history, said Emerson
Who had not seen the silhouette
Of Sweeney straddled in the sun).
Tests the razor on his leg
Waiting until the shriek subsides.
The epileptic on the bed
Curves backward, clutching at her sides.
The diminishment of sex in this sleazy little scene is the failure of history itself. Sweeney’s callous indifference both perverts and grimly affirms the Emersonian metaphor; he’s repellent, but he’s a Representative Man of his time. The prostitute’s seizure is a sort of shadow orgasm, an image of uncontrollable suffering.

This sexual desolation becomes downright apocalyptic in The Waste Land (1922), with its arid plains and rotten marriages, its arrogant youths “assault[ing]” jaded women, its sweeping indictment of cultural sterility. Near the close of that poem, a memory of “daring” breaks the spell of barrenness, heralding regenerative rain:

Then spoke the thunder
DA
Datta: what have we given?
My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment’s surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed
Which is not to be found in our obituaries …
The erotic crackle of the language leaves no doubt: this is the daring that eluded Prufrock. (“Do I dare / Disturb the universe?” … “Do I dare to eat a peach?”) It’s the transgressive daring of Romeo: “For stony limits cannot hold love out, / And what love can do that dares love attempt.” (Lewinsky reportedly once quoted these same lines in a valentine to President Clinton.) The “surrender” is exhilarating but impossible to “retract” and necessary to conceal. The “age of prudence” could be personal or historical, a period of caution, repression, waste.

It’s well known that Eliot wrote The Waste Land after the collapse of his first marriage. Though the poem was received as a judgment on a culture, it was also agonizingly personal—in a sense, the projection of a private breakdown onto the wider world. As both spouses’ letters attest, its vision of exhaustion and impotence drew on the poet’s bleak experience. Eliot hinted as much publicly in a comment on Tennyson’s In Memoriam: “It happens now and then that a poet by some strange accident expresses the mood of his generation, at the same time that he is expressing a mood of his own which is quite remote from that of his generation.”

“Strange accident,” maybe, but in the essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), Eliot argued that the poet’s goal is precisely the depersonalizing (or universalizing) of mere “personality and emotions.” No wonder he has always appealed to readers who conceive of their lives in broad symbolic terms. In the mid-1980s, one young scholar, reflecting on The Waste Land and the “Tradition” essay, wrote to his girlfriend:

Facing what he perceives as a choice between ecstatic chaos and lifeless mechanistic order, [Eliot] accedes to maintaining a separation of asexual purity and brutal sexual reality. … This fatalism is born out of the relation between fertility and death, which I touched on in my last letter—life feeds on itself. A fatalism I share with the western tradition at times.

The astute, brooding commentator was a 20-year-old college kid named Barack Obama.

Of course, few readers see their self-projections onto the “tradition” justified so spectacularly. Yet Eliot entices all of us, even the most Prufrockian schlub, to view history as personal—and to personify it as the source of our daily temptations and frustrations. The heart of this vision is a passage in “Gerontion” (1920):

After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with wh

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/152371

PROSE FROM POETRY MAGAZINE
Responsibilities, by W. B. Yeats
BY EZRA POUND
I live, so far as possible, among that more intelligently active segment of the race which is concerned with today and tomorrow; and, in consequence of this, whenever I mention Mr. Yeats I am apt to be assailed with the questions: “Will Mr. Yeats do anything more?”, “Is Yeats in the movement?”, “How can the chap go on writing this sort of thing?”

And to these inquiries I can only say that Mr. Yeats’ vitality is quite unimpaired, and that I dare say he'll do a good deal; and that up to date no one has shown any disposition to supersede him as the best poet in England, or any likelihood of doing so for some time; and that after all Mr. Yeats has brought a new music upon the harp, and that one man seldom leads two movements to triumph, and that it is quite enough that he should have brought in the sound of keening and the skirl of the Irish ballads, and driven out the sentimental cadence with memories of The County of Mayo and The Coolun; and that the production of good poetry is a very slow matter, and that, as touching the greatest of dead poets, many of them could easily have left that magnam partem, which keeps them with us, upon a single quire of foolscap or at most upon two; and that there is no need for a poet to repair each morning of his life to the Piazza dei Signori to turn a new sort of somersault; and that Mr. Yeats is so assuredly an immortal that there is no need for him to recast his style to suit our winds of doctrine; and that, all these things being so, there is nevertheless a manifestly new note in his later work that they might do worse than attend to.

“Is Mr. Yeats an Imagiste?” No, Mr. Yeats is a symbolist, but he has written des Images as have many good poets before him; so that is nothing against him, and he has nothing against them (les Imagistes), at least so far as I know—except what he calls "their devil's metres."

He has written des Images in such poems as Braseal and the Fisherman; beginning, “Though you hide in the ebb and flow of the pale tide when the moon has set;” and he has driven out the inversion and written with prose directness in such lyrics as, “I heard the old men say everything alters”; and these things are not subject to a changing of the fashions. What I mean by the new note—you could hardly call it a change of style—was apparent four years ago in his No Second Troy, beginning, "Why should I blame her," and ending—

Beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
That is not natural in any age like this,
Being high and solitary and most stern?
Why, what could she have done being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?


I am not sure that it becomes apparent in partial quotation, but with the appearance of The Green Helmet and Other Poems one felt that the minor note—I use the word strictly in the musical sense—had gone or was going out of his poetry; that he was at such a cross roads as we find in

Voi che intendendo il terzo ciel movete.


And since that time one has felt his work becoming gaunter, seeking greater hardness of outline. I do not say that this is demonstrable by any particular passage. Romantic Ireland's Dead and Gone is no better than Red Hanrahan's song about Ireland, but it is harder. Mr. Yeats appears to have seen with the outer eye in To a Child Dancing on the Shore (the first poem, not the one printed in this issue). The hardness can perhaps be more easily noted in The Magi.

Such poems as When Helen Lived and The Realists serve at least to show that the tongue has not lost its cun-ning. On the other hand, it is impossible to take any inter-est in a poem like The Two Kings—one might as well read the Idyls of another. The Grey Rock is, I admit, obscure, but it outweighs this by a curious nobility, a nobility which is, to me at least, the very core of Mr. Yeats’ production, the constant element of his writing.

In support of my prediction, or of my theories, regarding his change of manner, real or intended, we have at least two pronouncements of the poet himself, the first in A Coat,* and the second, less formal, in the speech made at the Blunt presentation.** The verses, A Coat, should satisfy those who have complained of Mr. Yeats’ four and forty followers, that they would “rather read their Yeats in the original.” Mr. Yeats had indicated the feeling once before with

Tell me, do the wolf-dogs praise their fleas?


which is direct enough in all conscience, and free of the “glamour.” I've not a word against the glamour as it appears in Yeats’ early poems, but we have had so many other pseudo--glamours and glamourlets and mists and fogs since the nineties that one is about ready for hard light.

And this quality of hard light is precisely what one finds in the beginning of his The Magi:

Now as at all times I can see in the mind's eye,
In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones
Appear and disappear in the blue depth of the sky
With all their ancient faces like rain-beaten stones,
And all their helms of silver hovering side by side.


Of course a passage like that, a passage of imagisme, may occur in a poem not otherwise imagiste, in the same way that a lyrical passage may occur in a narrative, or in some poem not otherwise lyrical. There have always been two sorts of poetry which are, for me at least, the most “poetic;” they are firstly, the sort of poetry which seems to be music just forcing itself into articulate speech, and, secondly, that sort of poetry which seems as if sculpture or painting were just forced or forcing itself into words. The gulf between evocation and description, in this latter case, is the unbridgeable difference between genius and talent. It is perhaps the highest function of art that it should fill the mind with a noble profusion of sounds and images, that it should furnish the life of the mind with such accompaniment and surrounding. At any rate Mr. Yeats’ work has done this in the past and still continues to do so. The present volume contains the new metrical version of The Hour Glass, The Grey Rock, The Two Kings, and over thirty new lyrics, some of which have appeared in these pages, or appear in this issue. In the poems on the Irish gallery we find this author certainly at prise with things as they are and no longer romantically Celtic, so that a lot of his admirers will be rather displeased with the book. That is always a gain for a poet, for his admirers nearly always want him to “stay put,” and they resent any signs of stirring, of new curiosity or of intellectual uneasiness. I have said the The Grey Rock was obscure; perhaps I should not have said so, but I think it demands unusually close attention. It is as obscure, at least, as Sordello, but I can not close without registering my admiration for it all the same.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/175809

PROSE FROM POETRY MAGAZINE
Facing Altars: Poetry and Prayer
BY MARY KARR
To confess my unlikely Catholicism in Poetry—a journal founded in part on and for the godless, twentieth-century disillusionaries of J. Alfred Prufrock and his pals—feels like an act of perversion kinkier than any dildo-wielding dominatrix could manage on HBO’s “Real Sex Extra.” I can’t even blame it on my being a cradle Catholic, some brainwashed escapee of the pleated skirt and communion veil who—after a misspent youth and facing an Eleanor Rigby-like dotage—plodded back into the confession booth some rainy Saturday.

Not victim but volunteer, I converted in 1996 after a lifetime of undiluted agnosticism. Hearing about my baptism, a pal sent me a postcard that read, “Not you on the Pope’s team. Say it ain’t so!” Well, while probably not the late Pope’s favorite Catholic (nor he my favorite pope), I took the blessing and ate the broken bread. And just as I continue to live in America and vote despite my revulsion for many US policies, I continue to enjoy the sacraments despite my fervent aversion to certain doctrines. Call me a cafeteria Catholic if you like, but to that I’d say, Who isn’t?

Perversely enough, the request for this confession showed up last winter during one of my lowest spiritual gullies. A blizzard’s dive-bombing winds had kept all the bodegas locked for the second day running (thus depriving New Yorkers of newspapers and orange juice), and I found—in my otherwise bare mailbox—a letter asking me to write about my allegedly deep and abiding faith. That very morning, I’d confessed to my spiritual advisor that while I still believed in God, he had come to seem like Miles Davis, some nasty genius scowling out from under his hat, scornful of my mere being and on the verge of waving me off the stage for the crap job I was doing. The late William Matthews has a great line about Mingus, who “flurried” a musician from the stand by saying, “We’ve suffered a diminuendo in personnel...” I felt doomed to be that diminuendo, an erasure mark that matched the erasure mark I saw in the grayed-out heavens.

Any attempt at prayer in this state is a slow spin on a hot spit, but poetry is still healing balm, partly because it’s always helped me feel less alone, even in earliest childhood. Poets were my first priests, and poetry itself my first altar. It was a lot of other firsts too, of course: first classroom/chat room/confessional. But it was most crucially the first source of awe for me, because it eased a nagging isolation: it was a line thrown to my drear-minded self from seemingly glorious Others.

From a very early age, when I read a poem, it was as if the poet’s burning taper touched some charred filament in my rib cage to set me alight. Somehow—long before I’d published—that connection even extended from me outward. Lifting my face from the page, I often faced my fellow creatures with less dread. Maybe secreted in one of them was an ache or tenderness similar to the one I’d just eaten of. As that conduit into a community, poetry never failed me, even if the poet reaching me was some poor wretch even more abject than myself. Poetry never left me stranded, and as an atheist most of my life, I presumed its mojo was a highbrow, intellectual version of what religion did for those more gullible believers in my midst—dumb bunnies to a one, the faithful seemed to me, till I became one.

In the Texas oil town where I grew up, fierceness won fights, but I was thin-skinned—an unfashionably bookish kid whose brain wattage was sapped by a consuming inner life others didn’t seem to bear the burden of. I just seemed to have more frames per second than other kids. Plus, early on, I twigged to the fact that my clan differed from our neighbors. Partly because of my family’s entrenched atheism, kids weren’t allowed to enter my yard—also since my artist mother was known to paint “nekked” women and guzzle vodka straight out of the bottle. She was seductive and mercurial and given to deep doldrums and mysterious vanishings, and I sought nothing so much as her favor. Poetry was my first lure. Even as a preschooler, I could sometimes draw her out of a sulk by reciting the works of e.e. cummings and A.A. Milne.

In my godless household, poems were the only prayers that got said—the closest thing to sacred speech at all. I remember mother bringing me Eliot’s poems from the library, and she not only swooned over them, she swooned over my swooning over them, which felt as close as she came to swooning over me. Even my large-breasted and socially adroit older sister got Eliot—though Lecia warned me off telling kids at school that I read that kind of stuff. At about age twelve, I remember sitting on our flowered bedspread reading him to Lecia while she primped for a date. Read it again, the whole thing. She was a fourteen-year-old leaning into the mirror with a Maybelline wand, saying, Goddamn that’s great...Poetry was the family’s religion. Beauty bonded us.

Church language works that way among believers, I would wager—whether prayer or hymn. Uttering the same noises in unison is part of what consolidates a congregation (along with shared rituals like baptisms and weddings, which are mostly words). Like poetry, prayer often begins in torment, until the intensity of language forges a shape worthy of both labels: “true” and “beautiful.” (Only in my deepest prayers does language evaporate, and a wide and wordless silence takes over.) But if you’re in a frame of mind dark enough to refuse prayer, nothing can ease the ache like a dark poem. Wrestling with gnarled or engrossing language may not bring peace per se, but it can occupy a brain pumping out bad news like ticker tape and thus bring you back to the alleged rationality associated with the human phylum.

So it was for me last winter—my most recent dark night of the soul—when my faith got sandblasted away for some weeks. Part of this was due to circumstances. Right after a move to New York, fortune delivered a triple whammy: my kid off to college, a live-in love ending volcanically, then medical maladies that kept me laid up for weeks alone. In a state of scalding hurt—sleepless and unable to conjure hope at some future prospects—suddenly (it felt sudden, as if a pall descended over me one day) God seemed vaporous as any perfume.

To kneel and pray in this state is almost physically painful. At best, it’s like talking into a bucket. At worst, you feel like a chump, some heartsick fool still sending valentines to a cad. With my friends away for the holidays, poetry seemed my only solace for more than a month. Maybe a few times I dipped into the Psalms or the book of Job. But more often I bent over the “terrible sonnets” of Gerard Manley Hopkins to find shape for my desolation:

I am gall, I am heartburn. God’s most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;
Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.

Self yeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see
The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
As I am mine, their sweating selves, but worse.


I was also reading that bleak scribbler Bill Knott, to find a bitter companion to sip my own gall with. He’d aptly captured my spiritual state in “Brighton Rock by Graham Greene,” where he imagines a sequel for Greene’s book: the offspring that criminal sociopath Pinky Brown conceived in the body of pitiful Rose Wilson before he died becomes a teenager in a skiffle band called Brighton Rockers. This kid’s inborn anguish resounds in the grotesque Mass his mom sits through:

Every Sunday now in church Rose slices

her ring-finger off, onto the collection-plate;
once the sextons have gathered enough
bodily parts from the congregation, enough

to add up to an entire being, the priest sub-
stitutes that entire being for the one
on the cross: they bring Him down in the name

of brown and rose and pink, sadness
and shame. His body, remade, is yelled at
and made to get a haircut, go to school,

study, to do each day like the rest
of us crawling through this igloo of hell
and laugh it up, show pain a good time,

and read Brighton Rock by Graham Greene.


This winter, I felt yelled at by the world at large and God in particular. The rhythm of Knott’s final sentence says it all—“to DO each DAY like the REST/of us”—the first phrase is a stair plod, with an extra stumble step to line’s end, where it becomes a cliff you fall off (no REST here)—“CRAWling through this IGloo of HELL.”

People usually (always?) come to church as they do to prayer and poetry—through suffering and terror. Need and fear. In some Edenic past, our ancestors began to evolve hard-wiring that actually requires us (so I believe) to make a noise beautiful enough to lay on the altar of the Creator/Rain God/Fertility Queen. With both prayer and poetry, we use elegance to exalt, but we also beg and grieve and tremble. We suffer with prayer and poetry alike. Boy, do we suffer.

The faithless contenders for prayer’s relief who sometimes ask me

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/31466

PROSE FROM POETRY MAGAZINE
“I Did Not Advance, I Cannot Retreat”
BY DANIELLE CHAPMAN

The Niche Narrows, by Samuel Menashe.

New York City tends to obsess the poets who live there. Whitman and Crane used the epic city as a metaphor for the epic self-as-New-Yorker; Moore conscientiously collected and arranged its oddities; O’Hara manically maneuvered through its people and experiences. Surely these poets who made it in New York could, as the saying goes, have made it anywhere, and it’s no wonder that the city’s personality bursts through their voices without upstaging them. But contemporary New York poets, rather than inhabiting the city, often seem to have been inhabited by it—even contaminated. Attitudinal, world-weary, neurotic, each is another version of the same caricature of “self-expression.” That’s why it’s such a delight to come across Samuel Menashe, a lifelong New Yorker whose poems exist at a sonorous remove from the frenzy of life downtown. His small poems—most are less than ten lines long—speak to the archetypal condition of the poet or “scribe,” as Menashe calls him, with a quietude and depth virtually unknown in contemporary poetry.

Menashe’s earnest assumption of the title “poet” has made him something of an anachronism in our professional age. While his contemporaries have garnered the fellowships, prizes, and university jobs that represent success in American poetic culture, poetry has been for him an independent, and ultimately isolating, venture. At almost eighty years old, and with only a fraction of his work in print, he is practically unrecognized, except as a sort of eccentric cult figure, the last West Village bohemian. The poetry, however, rises above this kitschy reputation. Menashe’s tiny lyrics are keenly aware of their author’s obscurity; it suspends them in a timeless sort of space, ballasting them between opposing questions of the same dilemma: is there any point in writing a poem? and is there a point in anything but writing a poem? Consider “At a Standstill”:

That statue, that cast
Of my solitude
Has found its niche
In this kitchen
Where I do not eat
Where the bathtub stands
Upon cat feet—
I did not advance
I cannot retreat


What’s most impressive here is the way in which, in so few lines, Menashe manages to encompass an entire life in poetry. In the first line, the poet’s ambition for immortality is evoked, only to be relegated to the humble surroundings of the prototypical bohemian flat—with its kitchen too small for a table, but just big enough for a bathtub. It is an image that is absurd and yet, with the last line, uncompromising and, one feels, true.

Menashe’s portrayal of his self-as-poet is vulnerable, though never sentimental or narcissistic. A poem like “Morning” speaks movingly to the intimate sorrows of the artist:

I wake and the sky
Is there, intact
The paper is white
The ink is black
My charmed life
Harms no one—
No wife, no son


This leanness is typical of the poems in The Niche Narrows. Menashe returns to the same subjects and words time and again, inhabiting particulars in order to expand their significance. A “charmed life,” here a solitary life, harms no one—the kind of slightly enigmatic statement that many poets are content to pass off as interesting in itself—but Menashe presses the point, defining “no one,” as “No wife, no son.” What’s so poignant about this last line is that, in qualifying the line before it, it both narrows and expands the meaning; at once, we are moved to sympathy for the singular speaker and brought to an understanding about the nature of the poet, the costs of such a life. Craft prevents the meditation from becoming hokey or overly self-conscious: the linked vowel sounds and slant rhymes of “wake” and “paper,” “intact” and “black,” as well as the mixed images of the sky and the writing tablet, set up a composition that is slightly askew. In the last three lines, the rhymes get closer: “charmed” and “harms,” then “one” and “son.” As the sounds come together, so does the picture of this poet, whose reason for being is the same as his reason for being lonely.

In most of Menashe’s poems, there is a deeply grounded sense of humor about the self. Often it returns us to the bodily condition with a sort of droll pathos in which the poet sums up the experience of living and dying in a few matter-of-fact phrases, as in “The Visitation”:

His body ahead
Of him on the bed
He faces his feet
Sees himself dead,
A corpse complete


This is an example of Menashe’s “niche,” the tiny poem which intends to encompass the scope of mortal existence; its narrowing is the approach of death, which brings life into stark focus. In the title poem, the mortal predicament is summed up in eleven words:

The niche narrows
Hones one thin
Until his bones
Disclose him


Here, “Hones” and “disclose” describe the body of the poem as well as the body of flesh. The niche is narrowed—visually and sonically—through a series of shortening lines and half-rhymes that hone the general “one” into the particular “him.” It’s a morbid little metaphor of emaciation: the end of the poem is the end of the man.

In his introduction to this volume, Dana Gioia states that “Menashe is essentially a religious poet, though one without an orthodox creed.” Given the fact that Menashe has written poems with such obviously Judeo-Christian titles as “Adam Means Earth,” “Manna,” and “Promised Land”—as well as one that refers, with unchecked intimacy, to Noah’s nipples—this is a reasonable conclusion. With one or two exceptions, though, the overtly religious poems are the most problematic in The Niche Narrows. Those that use too many Biblical references compress meaning and syntax so tightly that they often must be decoded rather than read. Others assume the mannerisms of New Age mysticism, becoming simultaneously emphatic and, well, loopy, as if in creating access for his belief the poet has had to force out all nuances of pathos and wit, those rewards of his best writing.

Nevertheless, Menashe is to be commended for taking the risk of writing poems of outright praise and wonder. He is often capable of achieving an effect that is airy and subtle, as in the aptly titled “Sprite of Delight,” which “Springs, summersaults / Vaults out of sight / Rising self-spun / Weight overcome.” Here, as in other poems-about-poetry such as “Spur of the Moment” and “Walking Stick,” creative power is evoked with both joy and a grounded intelligence. When Menashe’s poems of praise succeed, we are just as rapt in wonder at the way inspiration works through the poet’s mind as he is, as in “Dreams,” where he asks, “What wires lay bare / For this short circuit / Which makes filaments flare—.”

While even Menashe’s most difficult poems have a gentle familiarity to them, they are rarely personal. One of the primary satisfactions of this volume is that no time is wasted getting to know and accept the tastes and preoccupations of the poet; he doesn’t dredge through memories or parade us through his bedroom, and, except as the archetypal mother, father, or friend, he rarely makes mention of specific people or places. His vocabulary is plain—without personality, one might contend. The common nouns are stone, tree, eyes, nose, darkness, light. Common abstractions are Paradise, Solitude, Time, Immortality. In this way, he reminds us of Dickinson, exploiting the duality of simple words and stacking syntax in order to render complex meanings. Yet in Menashe the poems don’t seem as if they are built as scaffolding around existential anguish as they often do in Dickinson. As much as he is a wordsmith and an artist, Menashe is a good son, prone to natural fondness and grief. In “Grief,” he writes:

Disbelief
To begin with—
Later, grief
Taking root
Grapples me
Wherever I am
Branches ram
Me in my bed
You are dead


While it’s not stated, the context of the surrounding poems leads us to believe that this poem is dedicated to one of the poet’s parents, those essential yet unspecific characters who appear throughout the book. We find their influence in a self that has felt itself loved both by the father and the Father, and has created, through poetry, a vigil in order to receive those presences again.

By avoiding explicit autobiographical anecdote and compressing his poems to the point where each word reveals the limits of its meaning, Menashe takes risks that are unfashionable in contemporary terms. But to call him a “difficult” poet would be a misnomer, for there are few poems in The Niche Narrows that require a dictionary or supplemental reading; in fact, the immediate reaction upon reaching the end of a Menashe poem is usually amusement. Afterwards, one basks in the understanding of how simple genuine profundity is. But the “I” in Menashe’s poems, that scribe who is following his true calling, does present a difficult dilemma to contemporary poets—of the kind that requires soul-searching rather than scholarship.

The idea that the existence of a poet is a prerequisite to a poem, and that this implies some confluence of talent, circumstance, and character, is unsettling to us. We have bought into a poetic culture that imitates popular American culture at large—with its cults of personality, its shameless self-marketing, its ethos of maximum productivity, and its surface frenzy—to such a degree that a voice untouched by these factors seems at times naïve, even absurd. That Menashe, who is on the margins of the poetry world, has written good poems about being a poet while so many insiders have become talking heads for the industry begs the question: can “successful” poets speak truthfully to their own condition? If not, po-biz success and poetic integrity may soon become mutually exclusive. Under these circumstances, the pause that Menashe gives is exactly what we need.
Originally Published: October 30, 2005

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/171122

PROSE FROM POETRY MAGAZINE
No Experience Necessary
BY CHRISTINA PUGH
"In some poetry you feel there is too little lived experience—here you feel there is almost more than you can take in." Such was a blurb I found the other day on the back of a first book of poetry. Read this, and be overwhelmed by experience: on the face of it, a strange way to recommend poems. But on the other hand, I knew I'd seen that blurb before. Even in a poetic climate that supports the cerebral, ludic peregrinations of The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries, reviewed by Danielle Chapman in the January 2005 issue of this magazine, there is still a sizable minority of poets and readers who come to poetry looking for a measure of "experience"—and what's more, "lived experience." What, in fact, are they really looking for? Is experience quantifiable? Is it equivalent to an empirically exciting life? Does it drive a red Ferrari, or is it a rambling pedestrian with a long white beard? Is there a difference? And when so many come away from American poetry today—particularly from the work of younger poets—with a feeling of disappointment or outrage, is experience what they are really missing?

The category of experience is seldom defined or questioned; as a concept, it's more like a wink or a nudge in the ribs. But those who uphold it as a value seem to want to appeal to a shared sense of humanity—an unspoken agreement that despite our many cultural, racial, sexual, and economic differences, we all are born, live, and die. In this new, graciously multicultural universalism, the category of "experience" wants to provide a comforting sense that we're all in this together—and that we can, at least, agree on what "this" might be. And of course, "experience" wants even more to be the sine qua non for writing the type of poetry that will speak to "people" and not "just poets."

But as the messy legacy of the American poets known as the Confessionals—particularly Lowell, Plath, and Sexton—the thirst for experience reveals its own fundamental contradictions. Plath died at thirty: from the perspective of anyone but the teenaged, how experienced could she really have been? Sexton and Lowell, for their parts, lived the life of economic privilege—which placed them, in Wordsworthian terms, "at a distance from the kind." The writing of both Plath and Sexton was, to a great degree, forged by their struggle with what Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique called "the problem that has no name": the mind-numbing burden of domesticity faced by women in an America that had yet to undergo the changes brought about by Second-Wave feminism. Can this be what is touted as "lived experience"?

The category of experience seems to promise a place for everyone: like Walt Whitman, it wants to invite all of us to dinner. But it's clear that many readers simply can't identify with the life stories of Lowell, Plath, and Sexton. And though one could easily follow R.D. Laing and claim that mental illness itself is a voyage of discovery, it's not clear how such a voyage, as articulated in the work of the Confessionals, would feed into the common construction of experience as a shared and democratic value.

Fascinatingly, the contemporaneous New York School, who were chattier than the Confessionals and just seemed to have a lot more fun, played down the role of experience in writing. As O'Hara so succinctly put it, "Nobody should experience anything they don't need to, if they don't need poetry bully for them." Or Ashbery's ruminations in an interview with Kenneth Koch: "We seem to be determined both to discuss poetry and not to discuss anything at all. This is probably what we do in our poetry. I only wish I knew why we feel it to be necessary."

An even better indictment of experience-as-value comes in Ashbery's "And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name." There he inimitably asserts that for the poet, "Certainly whatever funny happens to you/ Is OK." In this mock ars poetica, "whatever" becomes both everything and nothing—and the wisdom to know the difference. Kay Ryan has seconded this motion by pressing "the importance to the poet of avoiding or ignoring Kodak moments." In an essay that celebrates the habitual or "novelty-free life," Ryan lauds the least entropic state of being: "Your memory will be deep, quiet, undifferentiated as a pool. Change will enter and twist like a drop of ink, the tiniest bit of new per old."

Perhaps it is precisely that near-invisible shimmer in the old that draws me to certain poets rather than others. I admit that I'm often thrilled by the poets of no experience: no experience at all, if experience is defined in the popular, unexamined way. For people immune to literature, Emily Dickinson "didn't have a life." After a year at Mount Holyoke, she embarked on what can only be called, experience-wise, an early retirement in her twenties. As for Wallace Stevens, how boring can it be to walk to your job at an accident and indemnity company (in Hartford, no less), year in and year out? From this perspective, both were writing books—or fascicles—on "nothing," much as Flaubert sought to do when he began to incubate the book that would become Madame Bovary. Yet we don't fault these poets for their lack of experience, for their humdrum and muted lives, for not having lived enough in the world (wherever we think that may be). For me, a certain contemporary parallel is found in the marvelous work of Charles Wright, which reads as a paean to the limited-experience life. If read collectively, his selected Negative Blue paints a portrait of someone who has done little more—experientially—than sit alone in his own backyard for decades.

Still, experience has long provided a dubious litmus test for poetry, and not just in the American tradition. When Rilke's friend Ellen Key told him that his work "smacked of the writing desk," she clearly meant that it reflected too little actual experience. The poet's aversion to sustained relationships is well-known, as is his avoidance of service during the First World War. Isn't it funny, then, that Rilke's poetry has been popularly seen—even prescribed—as the poetry of experience: the poetry of weddings, funerals, and, according to Rilke scholar Judith Ryan, German soldiers' comfort at the front during both the First and Second World Wars?

So the poetry that, for some, lacks experience can be embraced as the quintessential poetry of experience by others. And the poetry forged in what we might consider to be genuinely hefty experience—manual labor, for example—can also easily become its own template or formula: something just as repeatable as the oft-lamented "academic" poem. If Wright has repeated himself—much as Dickinson repeated herself—the same could be said of a poet like Philip Levine, who is often looked to as a quintessential contemporary poet of experience. Clearly, then, having "experience" doesn't void the risk of repetition in poems. Poetry that is "novelty-free," in Kay Ryan's terms, may be a function of self-actualization in the work, regardless of how much recognizable experience that work does or does not reflect.

The longer I look, the more the category of "experience" dissolves before my eyes. I'm happy to see that dissolution, since it's a fitting prelude to another intimately related argument: one for the viability of reading as a version of, or a substitute for, "lived experience." Calvino's If On A Winter's Night a Traveler provides a good model for what I'm talking about. There, the allegorical Writer and Reader are two separate people: the first male, the second female. Lately I've envied this Reader her fly-by-night quality, her ability to lose herself so irresponsibly in books. But if I superimpose the one allegorical figure upon the other, I end up with a viscerally viable, albeit cartoonish, prescription for who the writer is—or should be, or could be. Might it be that what is missing in the work of some younger poets is not "experience" at all, but reading that is deep enough to effect changes in the self?

Here is where the university, the proverbial elephant in the room, comes in. Many believe universities fail poets, particularly younger poets, by depriving them of experience. This is said categorically of the MFA and other graduate degrees, as well as of academic positions that now support many poets as teachers and writers. Academia becomes, in this model, a sort of double Procrustean bed. We're told repeatedly that graduate programs in creative writing produce poets who crank out the same, experience-challenged, cookie-cutter verse. But do education and "lived experience" have to be so ineluctably incompatible? That question is almost never asked. And few, if any, seem to wonder whether universities are failing poets by not educating them enough, or widely enough—or later, by requiring them to teach only in the workshop model. What if experience were not the missing ingredient after all?

I've thought a lot about this question because, though I'm hardly leading the escapist life of Calvino's Reader, I too am a Reader of sorts: Reader for this magazine. As such, I see an enormous quantity of work by poets who are hoping for publication. Ironically, it often seems that it's an inability to get past one's own experience that causes many of these poems to founder. For the beginner, it's the rather narcissistic belief that, to switch Ashbery a bit, "whatever melodramatic happens to you/Is OK." But even in certain, yes, more experienced poets, there can be an impulse around the anecdotal—around travel, around the family, around "events"—that, if not reworked in what Veronica Forrest-Thomson called the "internal expansion" of the poem, burns as the steady flame of ordinariness.

What's missing in much of the work I see is an ability to distinguish experience from occasion: what I'll define here as the prime mover of the poem, be it based in the poet's empirical life, in imagination, in the jurr of language, in literary texts. Yes, it can even be anecdotal, as in the infamous "I placed a jar in Tennessee." It's the opening, the antechamber of the poem that invites us into the occasion that will, we hope, master us as readers. Consider these openings—how they happen, and how little you can resist them: "I heard a fly buzz—when I died"; "Again last night I dreamed the dream called Laundry"; "My black face fades"; "Yes, it's a joke—in the florist's dictionary"; "flower is becoming the graph." Infinite, the snares of occasion. And polyglot. One of them is even taken from the book whose well-intentioned but ultimately misguided blurb I quoted at the outset of this essay.

Though the term may seem old-fashioned to some, occasion manages to crash the party of even the least referential of poetic schools. The best way I know to get a feel for this—what others might call integrity or bloom or motor—is not necessarily to go out and have an exciting life that you can write about in your work. Instead, I think, it's the ability to read widely enough to know which poetic occasions stir you: be they empirical, imaginative, aleatory, linguistic, discursive—and how various and transhistorical are poems' means to stir. So to argue against the litmus test of experience is not necessarily to argue, as did Eliot, for the extinction of the personality. It's also not to claim that I wouldn't drive the red Ferrari, if I had a license. Instead, it's to note that poetic occasion may not always be the result of "lived experience" per se. Understanding this will open the door to the younger poet who, like Mark Yakich, "divides his time between the bedroom and the kitchen." At the risk of coining yet another new universalism, maybe this is precisely the sort of experience we should all want to have.
Originally Published: October 30, 2005


Though the term may seem old-fashioned to some, occasion manages to crash the party of even the least referential of poetic schools. The best way I know to get a feel for this—what others might call integrity or bloom or motor—is not necessarily to go out and have an exciting life that you can write about in your work. Instead, I think, it's the ability to read widely enough to know which poetic occasions stir you: be they empirical, imaginative, aleatory, linguistic, discursive—and how various and transhistorical are poems' means to stir. So to argue against the litmus test of experience is not necessarily to argue, as did Eliot, for the extinction of the personality. It's also not to claim that I wouldn't drive the red Ferrari, if I had a license. Instead, it's to note that poetic occasion may not always be the result of "lived experience" per se. Understanding this will open the door to the younger poet who, like Mark Yakich, "divides his time between the bedroom and the kitchen." At the risk of coining yet another new universalism, maybe this is precisely the sort of experience we should all want to have.

Certainly in imaginative poetry one can shine and write great poetry, which appeals to many but the greatest poetry-the most famous poetry came from poets that used their life experiences combined with heart's desires to create masterpieces.
Which is harder to accomplish- something from nothing- "imaginative poetry" or taking that which is a known quantity (LIFE EXPERIENCES) AND WEAVING SUCH INTO TRUE MASTERPIECES?
And who has the authority or enough life validation to declare which is superior. Eliot as great as he was had not ALL the answers--nobody does.-Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/176084

PROSE FROM POETRY MAGAZINE
Word’s Worth
BY ROB KENNER

“Art” notwithstanding, some poets are creeps. Upon meeting my ten-year-old sister, Lisa, at an Ezra Pound conference in Orono, Maine, Allen Ginsberg asked if she’d lost her cherry yet. I’ve often wished I’d been present to smack those words out of his mouth.

For better or worse, poetry has always been as familiar as breathing to my six siblings and me. As the offspring of a loving, lifelong literary critic, Hugh Kenner, we were used to spontaneous recitations. Stray refrigerator magnet nouns and verbs would mix up with our breakfast cereal. Headlines from the daily news became haikus or, worse, free verse. I considered it perfectly normal to telephone Louis Zukofsky to discuss “similes” for a sixth-grade homework assignment. Lisa once served Basil Bunting’s sake, keeping his goblet filled as he read during that bittersweet Pound conference. In the house where we grew up, a framed William Carlos Williams typescript, signed with his painful post-stroke scrawl, hung where you could examine it while taking a leak.

Of course we watched plenty of Bugs Bunny and Road Runner cartoons. But at bedtime, while other kids might be hearing Christopher Robin’s observations on the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, my father and I would learn poems from books that I’ve chosen to hide from my own kids for the time being. The Bad Child’s Book of Beasts and More Beasts for Worse Children were two of our favorites. These were the work of Hillaire Belloc, an early twentieth-century British poet whose verse was “designed for the admonition of children between the ages of eight and fourteen years.” By the time I was seven I could spit out the whole grisly tale of “Jim,” a boy who runs away at the zoo and gets eaten by Ponto the lion:

Now just imagine how it feels
When first your toes and then your heels
And then by gradual degrees
Your shins and ankles, calves and knees
Are slowly eaten bit by bit.
No wonder Jim detested it!


Ponto gnawed away until only a “dainty morsel” remained, and then, “the lion, having reached his head/The miserable boy was dead!”

Come to think of it, maybe it wasn’t such a leap for me to end up at VIBE magazine, where I’ve worked as an editor since 1993, the year Quincy Jones launched his journal of hip hop culture. Back when Lisa introduced me to L.L. Cool J and Kool Moe Dee, we never doubted that rap was poetry; we had always understood poems to be performances. Although lots of mindless, hurtful crap gets peddled by the corporate entertainment machine, the essence of rap is samizdat poetry. Of course that artistry is lost on many people, blinded as they are by mass-media stereotypes.

It’s an essential part of being human, this need to shape the chaos of life into language and then to fit that mosaic of words into rhythmic patterns. At the end of the day, Nas and Homer are both in the same line of work. Do we disqualify one because he rhymes over a break-beat instead of a lyre? Because one is blind while the other is merely def?

Our father taught my siblings and me that a work of art should reward prolonged attention, a test that the best hip hop passes with ease. These compositions operate on several levels at once: you can dance to the beat, let the verbal flow wash over you, or wear out your rewind button trying to penetrate the encrypted language. With the best MCs (as most serious rappers prefer to be called) there is no lack of hidden riches. Where Milton may shout out Dante and the Book of Revelation, Jay-Z alludes to The Notorious B.I.G. and Big Daddy Kane, all while taunting rival rappers, social critics, and law enforcement officials. In “Agent Orange” Pharoahe Monch pisses on the White House lawn, then lets the double entendres fly:

I threw a rock and I ran... Y’all wanna ask me who sane?
These biological gases are eating my brain
It’s a political grab bag to rape mother earth
Thirty seconds after they bagged dad for what he’s worth.


I once had the good fortune to edit Harry Allen’s “Hypertext,” an attempt to unpack all the embedded subliminal references and nuances of craftsmanship in “Niggas Bleed,” a single rap by the late Christopher Wallace, AKA The Notorious B.I.G. The final manuscript—fragments of which appeared in the March 1998 issue of VIBE—ran way past twenty thousand words. The complexity of Wallace’s rap was awe-inspiring, especially considering the fact that he wrote nothing down, recording all his rhymes “off the dome.”

Meanwhile, millions of kids around the world can recite Eminem’s latest verse by heart, although they couldn’t care less what any doctoral candidate thinks about it. “See I’m a poet to some/A regular modern-day Shakespeare,” Eminem muses on “Renegade,” a dazzling duet from Jay-Z’s landmark album The Blueprint. Because it’s not exactly cool for any MC to care about that sort of thing—let alone a white boy—he backpedals a few lines later: “I’m just a kid from the gutter/Making this butter offa these bloodsuckers.” But go through his raps and Eminem’s artistic aspirations are undeniable. Tupac Shakur, hip hop’s tragic anti-hero, struggled with a similar internal conflict. Only after his murder at age twenty-five did his legions of fans learn how much he loved acting classes and writing poetry.

Mercenary motives are reliable alibis for the preservation of icy machismo. (“Words worth a million like I’m rapping over platinum teeth,” Jay-Z once boasted.) But other MCs are willing to admit that it’s not necessarily all about the Benjamins. Check Common’s new album Be, especially “The Corner,” an ode to the urban crossroads that features the seventies proto-rap crew, The Last Poets. Some MCs actually covet critical respect. “I’m trying to show these poetry niggas that you can be poetic and into high fashion at the same time,” the Chicago-born bard Kanye West told VIBE: “These people think you need to live on a rock to be poetic. I’m actually consulting with poets as I write this album. Like the way niggas got vocal coaches, I got a poetry coach.”

Reports of the declining state of poetry have been greatly exaggerated. Much of the mail we receive at VIBE (especially the letters stamped with a prison ID) contains loose-leaf sheets of hand-written poetry. Is this what the poet Allen Grossman had in mind when he called poetry “the last recourse before despair”? Or what Lucille Clifton was getting at when she wrote:

...come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.


Maybe it was like that with my dear friend Catherine Barnett. We worked together for years at Art & Antiques magazine, and kept in touch after I went on to VIBE. I was aware that she had begun writing and teaching poetry, but never knew what or why until the publication of Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced, one of the most harrowing books I’ve ever encountered. This series of poems chronicles the death of the poet’s young nieces in a plane crash, registering the family’s disbelief, grief, and—worst of all—the moving on. The cumulative power of each carefully constructed verse is still quite overwhelming for me. In each cluster of particulars, I recognize my friend’s mind struggling to shape all the brutal details into some semblance of meaning. I think that’s what my father meant when he wrote, in this magazine, that “art is a fake but when vital has death somewhere at its roots.”

Hugh Kenner was no hip hop head. His auditory sense was severely compromised for most of his life, and those powerful hearing aids of his would have made listening to one of my favorite mixtapes a painful experience. As far as I know, his only exposure to rap lyrics came while watching the first annual VIBE Awards on TV with the closed captions turned on. Mom and Lisa sat with him as Andre 3000 enjoined the crowd to “shake it like a Polaroid picture.” Dad expressed his sympathy that I had to attend this event and then died four days later of heart failure. But I still believe that he’d fully endorse my defense of the ol’ boom-bap. After all, consider his epitaph: “What thou lov’st well remains. The rest is dross.”
Originally Published: November 28, 2005

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/guide/176628#guide

Robert Browning: “Fra Lippo Lippi”
In the realm of the world-class talkers.

BY W. S. DI PIERO

It’s past midnight in Florence’s red-light district in the mid-15th century, and a man dressed as a monk has just been strong-armed by the police and questioned about his presence in such a place. Wait, he says, I can explain everything.

That’s where we find ourselves at the beginning of Browning’s “Fra Lippo Lippi.” What follows is a wild improvisation on assorted themes—lust, want, religion, art-making, and the nature of beauty. The good Fra Lippo—Carmelite Friar and in-house painter for Cosimo De’ Medici—does explain his presence, explains in fact pretty much his entire life and art, over the course of nearly 400 lines. He is, like other of Browning’s monologists, a world-class talker.

Browning wrote many kinds of poems, but the ones I like best and have been rereading for years are the dramatic monologues, in which the ventriloquist poet throws his voice and we hear a dummy (usually an actual historical personage) talk itself into existence. Although the speaker usually directs his gab to a particular person or persons, he may as well be talking to himself. The Duke of Ferrara in “My Last Duchess” is in love with the sound of his own voice and its homicidal menace. A dramatic monologue also lets the poet shape and set loose a voice that reveals something that matters not just to the speaker but to Browning, too. The “unknown painter” whose voice we hear in “Pictor Ignotus” is soured by what he feels to be his contemporaries’ indifference toward his work. In every monologue we hear the speaker (or what I think of as the consciousness of the poem) working through a crisis, conducting an argument, or rationalizing inclinations, actions, and beliefs.

Some of these poems, such as “Fra Lippo Lippi” and “Pictor Ignotus,” are about painting and are spoken by artists, which makes them ekphrastic poems; that is, they have to do with images—ekphrasis is Greek for description. Even those not in artists’ voices usually involve art. The dying ecclesiast in “The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church,” whose thoughts should be concentrated on last things and the afterlife, obsesses about architecture, stonemasonry, and sculpture.

Every Browning monologue discloses an idiosyncratic, preoccupied mind, and the imaginative arc that connects us to that mind is the same arc we make when reading Shakespeare: it’s a character that speaks to us, not the poet, though it’s the poet who gives spirit and voice to the character’s passions. Browning, like Shakespeare, is everywhere and nowhere in the voices he creates. In “Fra Lippo Lippi,” he has his character argue for the realistic style developed in Renaissance art because he wants to make a case for the vivid textures and psychological realism of his own poems, a prime instance of which is the very monologue we’re reading. In this and other poems, we’re suddenly made eavesdroppers to an already strung-out dramatic situation; it’s like hearing one side of a telephone conversation we’ve tuned into after it has already started.

Browning takes nasty delight in dropping us into situations that engage moral questions attached to rough, unpleasant realities, though his tone is high-spirited and racy, not morose. “Andrea del Sarto,” spoken by the 16th-century artist described by one of his contemporaries as “the faultless painter,” starts with del Sarto’s attempt to have a “relationship talk” with his wife: “But do not let us quarrel any more, / No, my Lucrezia; bear with me for once.” A few years earlier, Lucrezia persuaded him to return from the Court of France (where he’d been invited and won acclaim and prosperity) to Florence—that is, to her and her claims on him—which he fears may have cost him the supreme fame of a Michelangelo or Raphael. We follow the movements of his mind as it dances through various subjects: good technique, nostalgia, fame, and covetousness. We learn that he’s henpecked but loves his wife (in part because she’s a reliable model), that he’s sensitive to personal and professional slights, and that he’s not entirely convinced that being a “perfect painter” is such a good thing after all.

In “My Last Duchess,” the greatest modern poem I know about, the acidic, potentially murderous dynamics of jealousy, the duke of Ferrara is showing his art collection to the representative of a nobleman whose daughter the duke is betrothed to. The collection’s centerpiece is a portrait of his lately deceased duchess, who in life—the duke lets the go-between (and us) know—distributed her attention to the world too indiscriminately to please the egomaniacal owner “of a nine-hundred-years-old name.” Was the duchess superficial and flirty? Did she smile too much at everything alike? We have only the duke’s word for it. There’s no ambiguity about the duke’s solution, though: “I gave commands; / Then all smiles stopped together.” Listening to him, we’re like Othello depending on an Iago for our intelligence.

To read these poems is to experience how a unique consciousness answers to reality. Whatever the monologist says about the world of circumstance is not a shared truth, it’s a person-specific interpretation. Every detail he chooses to include reveals something essential about character. Fra Lippo’s improvised self-defense becomes an eloquent, at times hilarious resume of his orphaned, street-urchin beginnings and how those circumstances shaped his art. This painter, so gifted at rendering psychological subtleties in physiognomies, was once a starving kid who watched people’s faces “to know who will fling / The bits of half-stripped grape-bunches he desires, / And who will curse him or kick him for his pains.” Want taught him to value the pleasures of the flesh. The deprived child grew to become a man who, though a member of a religious order, chases girls. He’s one of several clerics Browning loved to tease for their randy worldliness. The dying priest in “The Bishop Orders His Tomb” moans reverentially about the blue vein in the Blessed Virgin’s breast.

It’s not only the what of the monologues that wakes us into recognitions of character. The how matters just as much. Browning was vilified by critics for obscurity and abused as a language mangler. The speed of the thoughts that issue from his speakers’ mouths sometimes blurs clarity. But the stream of consciousness is a crooked stream, and in the monologues Browning intentionally allows his speakers to indulge in interruptions and gnarly obliqueness. We have to pay attention to his speakers’ patterns of reasoning, however corrupted or manipulative. (Browning’s speakers always represent their own interests, as we do when we conduct monologues in life.) He varies effects from poem to poem. “My Last Duchess,” a viper of a poem, its beautifully reasoned discourse venomous with insinuation at every turn, is quite unlike the twisty confusions of the bishop’s last thoughts on his deathbed, which snap back and forth from his envy of another cleric’s tomb to his resentment toward his sons (don’t ask) to his obsession with lapis lazuli and correct Latin.

The monologues are crafted to reveal the moral character of the speakers, and the crafting depends on the sonorities and rhythms of versification. Browning favored the blank-verse line—unrhymed iambic pentameter. In its stiffest form, with its ten syllable and alternating stressed/unstressed units, the line would sound like “I am, I am, I am, I am, I am.” Gifted versifiers such as Browning work endless variations on this rudimentary pattern. When Fra Lippo gets serious about the relation of art-making to appetite, his meters turn blunt: “This world’s no blot for us, / Nor blank; It means intensely, and means good: / To find its meaning is my meat and drink.”

But when he describes how, while painting night after night all those saints and Madonnas, his attention was drawn by a sound outside his window, the meters dramatize the excitement and arrested attention he felt when he looked out and saw “Like the skipping of rabbits by moonlight—three slim shapes.” The first half of the line prances toward those last three monosyllabic attention-stoppers. When he rhymed, he could do so to chilling effect. The rhyming couplets spoken by the smug, righteous duke in “My Last Duchess” growl with wounded vanity: “She liked whate’er / She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.”

Selfhood in Browning is a mass of disheveled fragments of experience, and the monologues give form to what it feels like to actually live them, what it feels like to work at understanding meaning, with little more to go on than memory, desire, and circumstance. He loves to rake life’s casual messiness across apparent certitude and aphoristic confidence. “Andrea del Sarto” contains Browning’s most famous maxim: “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, / Or what’s a heaven for.” A sparkling nugget, that one. But all around it one hears about the dozens of tiny rips and rents in del Sarto’s marriage, artistic practice, and worldly career. Readers like me who savor these poems go to them not for confirmation of what we already know but to experience the lurching, unstable process of making sense of things.



Selfhood in Browning is a mass of disheveled fragments of experience, and the monologues give form to what it feels like to actually live them, what it feels like to work at understanding meaning, with little more to go on than memory, desire, and circumstance. He loves to rake life’s casual messiness across apparent certitude and aphoristic confidence. “Andrea del Sarto” contains Browning’s most famous maxim: “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, / Or what’s a heaven for.” A sparkling nugget, that one. But all around it one hears about the dozens of tiny rips and rents in del Sarto’s marriage, artistic practice, and worldly career. Readers like me who savor these poems go to them not for confirmation of what we already know but to experience the lurching, unstable process of making sense of things.

^^^^^^^^^^ AND HERE YOU HAVE IT. Why many poets write and why many poets are crazy, methinks.
And I dare to include myself in that broad declaration!-Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/article/177209

The Immense Intimacy, the Intimate Immensity
BY EDWARD HIRSCH

The profound intimacy of lyric poetry makes it perilous because it gets so far under the skin, into the skin. “For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough)—they are experiences,” Rilke wrote in a famous passage from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. I am convinced the kind of experience—the kind of knowledge—one gets from poetry cannot be duplicated elsewhere. The spiritual life wants articulation—it wants embodiment in language. The physical life wants the spirit. I know this because I hear it in the words, because when I liberate the message in the bottle a physical—a spiritual—urgency pulses through the arranged text. It is as if the spirit grows in my hands. Or the words rise in the air. “Roots and wings,” the Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez writes, “But let the wings take root and the roots fly.”

There are people who defend themselves against being “carried away” by poetry, thus depriving themselves of an essential aspect of the experience. But there are others who welcome the transport poetry provides. They welcome it repeatedly. They desire it so much they start to crave it daily, nightly, nearly abject in their desire, seeking it out the way hungry people seek food. It is spiritual sustenance to them. Bread and wine. A way of transformative thinking. A method of transfiguration. There are those who honor the reality of roots and wings in words, but also want the wings to take root, to grow into the earth, and the roots to take flight, to ascend. They need such falling and rising, such metaphoric thinking. They are so taken by the ecstatic experience—the overwhelming intensity—of reading poems they have to respond in kind. And these people become poets.

Emily Dickinson is one of my models of a poet who responded completely to what she read. Here is her compelling test of poetry:

If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know. Is there any other way.
Dickinson recognizes true poetry by the extremity—the actual physical intensity—of her response to it. It’s striking that she doesn’t say she knows poetry because of any intrinsic qualities of poetry itself. Rather, she recognizes it by contact; she knows it by what it does to her, and she trusts her own response. Of course, only the strongest poetry could effect such a response. Her aesthetic is clear: always she wants to be surprised, to be stunned, by what one of her poems calls “Bolts of Melody.”

Dickinson had a voracious appetite for reading poetry. She read it with tremendous hunger and thirst—poetry was sustenance to her. Much has been made of her reclusion, but, as her biographer Richard Sewall suggests, “She saw herself as a poet in the company of the Poets—and, functioning as she did mostly on her own, read them (among other reasons) for company.” He also points to Dickinson’s various metaphors for the poets she read. She called them “the dearest ones of time, the strongest friends of the soul,” her “Kinsmen of the Shelf,” her “enthralling friends, the immortalities.” She spoke of the poet’s “venerable Hand” that warmed her own. Dickinson was a model of poetic responsiveness because she read with her whole being.

One of the books Emily Dickinson marked up, Ik Marvel’s Reveries of a Bachelor (1850), recommends that people read for “soul-culture.” I like that dated nineteenth-century phrase because it points to the depth that can be shared by the community of solitaries who read poetry. I, too, read for soul-culture—the culture of the soul. That’s why the intensity of engagement I have with certain poems, certain poets, is so extreme. Reading poetry is for me an act of the most immense intimacy, of intimate immensity. I am shocked by what I see in the poem but also by what the poem finds in me. It activates my secret world, commands my inner life. I cannot get access to that inner life any other way than through the power of the words themselves. The words pressure me into a response, and the rhythm of the poem carries me to another plane of time, outside of time.

Rhythm can hypnotize and alliteration can be almost hypnotic. A few lines from Tennyson’s The Princess can still send me into a kind of trance:

The moan of doves in immemorial elms
And murmurings of innumerable bees.
And I can still get lost when Hart Crane links the motion of a boat with an address to his lover in part 2 of “Voyages”:

And onward, as bells off San Salvador
Salute the crocus lustres of the stars,
In these poinsettia meadows of her tides,—
Adagios of islands, O my Prodigal,
Complete the dark confessions her veins spell.
The words move ahead of the thought in poetry. The imagination loves reverie, the daydreaming capacity of the mind set in motion by words, by images.

As a reader, the hold of the poem over me can be almost embarrassing because it is so childlike, because I need it so much to give me access to my own interior realms. It plunges me into the depths (and poetry is the literature of depths) and gives a tremendous sense of another world growing within. (“There is another world and it is in this one,” Paul Éluard wrote.) I need the poem to enchant me, to shock me awake, to shift my waking consciousness and open the world to me, to open me up to the world—to the word—in a new way. I am pried open. The spiritual desire for poetry can be overwhelming, so much do I need it to experience and name my own perilous depths and vast spaces, my own well-being. And yet the work of art is beyond existential embarrassment. It is mute and plaintive in its calling out, its need for renewal. It needs a reader to possess it, to be possessed by it. Its very life depends upon it.


Originally Published: January 23, 2006

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This is a very informative article both on Emily Dickinson and on why we poets write.
Even despite criticisms we write!
Ever notice how painters/artists putting color on paper rarely get such criticisms?--Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/177613

PROSE FROM POETRY MAGAZINE
Formal Wear: Notes on Rhyme, Meter, Stanza & Pattern
BY GEORGE SZIRTES
The following opinions are frequently put forward regarding “form” in poetry:

1 Traditional forms are marks of conservatism embodying reactionary values, whereas what is truly valuable in art is what is forward-looking, cutting-edge, challenging;

2 Rhyme, form, and all other such devices are agents of closure, and closure is the mark of repressive, authoritarian societies;

3 Versification is a form of decoration, bourgeois obfuscation, a pretty way of saying something that could be muscular, authentic, straight;

4 Versification is a form of male intellectual abstraction, and antithetical to the play of ecriture feminine;

5 There are few rhymes in English, so re-using the narrow range of the same ones is predictable. Rhyme is therefore the essence of cliché;

6 Versification, particularly metre and rhyme, hampers the free play of the imagination.

The first four objections are essentially political from a left point of view (anarchist rather, though those who support them profess to be of the left) and may be considered as a group. The fifth and sixth are more aesthetic or technical in nature and might be adopted by the right.

An easy reply to the first might be that versification was common to all societies at all times, and that the word “traditional” as used here has little meaning, except as some kind of antithesis to another blanket term: “modernist.” Modernism, as used now, comprises a wide range of practices. If employed in a stricter historical sense, one might ask why a movement that began a hundred or so years ago should be thought to be the last word on anything. Repeating tired “modernist” gestures is perhaps the easiest, most conservative option.

One might go on to argue that closure is not the easy option it is thought to be. A bad closure is not a closure but someone waving goodbye when they haven’t in fact gone anywhere. A good closure might simply mean the sense that an object has become distinct from the person regarding or holding it. The closure in this sense is not an authoritarian gesture: on the contrary it is letting the object go.

Poetry is never a pretty way of saying anything that might be said straight. It is unparaphrasable, or, insofar as it may be paraphrased, it is sold short. Is someone seriously going to contend that all the great verse of the centuries which employs meter and rhyme would be far better paraphrased and digested? I don’t think so. Verse is not decoration: it is structural. It is a forming principle and works at depth.

As to notions of versification being an arid male intellectual pursuit, I wonder what we make of Akhmatova, Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop, Marilyn Hacker? Does the female mind, if we can isolate such a thing, abhor patterns? What of all those quilts, flower schemes, and fancy dances?

Sure, rhyme can be predictable. The good poet’s job is to make it less so. On the other hand rhyme is also a mnemonic and an early pleasure. Rhyme is an extraordinary and surprising coincidence.

On the last point, I would contend that the constraints of form are spurs to the imagination: that they are in fact the chief producers of imagination.


* * *



Having set out six brief objections and six possible counter-arguments, I want to exercise my poetic right and talk a little more figuratively now. Perhaps I might begin with language itself.

My personal sense of language probably has its roots in my family’s transplantation to England and our complete, abrupt switchover to English in 1956. I cannot help feeling that what language theorists tell us must be true, that language is a very thin integument or skin stretched over a mass of inchoate impressions, desires, and anxieties. I cannot help feeling that the gap between signifier and signified is potentially enormous, and that the whole structure of grammar and syntax is a kind of illusion that hides this unpleasant fact from us.

Thin as it may be, however, language is a wonderful catcher and refractor of light, and has, in fact, all the psychological, intellectual, emotional, and sensory qualities one could wish for or imagine, for it is essentially a product of the imagination. Of imagination and memory, I should say, because of course language has a history of usage without which it would be almost useless. Imagination and memory are the central driving forces of poetry: poetry, one might say, is imagination and memory concentrated in language.

A tight skin over chaos: a skim of meaning over meaninglessness. There is an image in Edmund Blunden’s poem, “The Midnight Skaters,” of people wheeling and gliding over the thin ice of a village pond, under which lurks the figure of death who “With but a crystal parapet/Between, he has his engines set.” In response to which the poet exhorts the skaters to “... reel and pass,/And let him hate you through the glass.”

Blunden is a poet of the First World War and the years after, but the power of the ice image in his poem remains, for me, associated not only with the triumph of grace and courage over danger, but with the triumph of meaning and structure over chaos and meaninglessness, and also with the triumph of civilized values over barbarity. I think here of the barbarity that overtook my parents’ generation, that is never as far from us as we believe or hope.

I should say at this point that, instinctively, I have little faith in the benignity of nature, that great good green thing that gives us earthquakes and tsunamis as readily as it gives us daisies and nightingales. I don’t believe man is a bad blight on good nature: I believe he/she is part of nature and shares nature’s qualities. Between Versailles and the rainforest is a vast range of human interventions that move and delight me because I can identify with the instincts that created them.

What I would like to propose here is the notion of poetic form as an act of courage and grace, the wheeling of the skater on the ice, the tightrope walker juggling over Niagara, the builder of frail bridges across dark spaces who is not so very different from the spider spinning a web (a structured web, mind you) from his own body.


* * *



Those images of balance and grace over chasms of various sorts must correspond with elements of my understanding of the world: that the raw material we are given is magnificent but not necessarily well disposed to us, and that, to persist with the Levi-Strauss terms, one has somehow to cook it. This isn’t because we are epicures or restaurant critics, but because cooking is as magnificent as the material it works on.

You could argue that the desire for form or pattern springs out of fear, though I would prefer to say apprehension. Apprehension, desire, and love form a triad—the third term being the cooked version of the first two. The spider’s web is the cooked version of spider spit, the bee’s hive is the cooked version of the bee’s secretions, the sentences I am writing right now are deeply cooked versions of instincts that struggle towards thought. Nor have they been cooked by me alone out of nothing, since, as an inquirer into this area of experience, I have been joined by all other formers of instinct into language.

Not by me alone, then. One of the other attractions of form is community. If I write a sonnet, it has communion with other sonnets littering the sonnet landscape. It calls to them and they call to it. They do not necessarily huddle together or wear uniforms but they are aware of each other’s presence. They are not alone in the world. Nor have I had entirely to reconstruct or reinvent them. That which is given in them is available to me, and my task is to feed them fresh life. There is a complex range of sonnets out there, and while I may note the clear division between the Petrarchan and the Shakespearean, I do not forget Donne or Keats or Wordsworth or Elizabeth Barrett Browning, or John Berryman or Robert Lowell or Seamus Heaney or Tony Harrison, for that matter. And having translated a number of the Hungarian Ottó Orbán’s Lowellian sonnets, they have established themselves as important features in the same terrain.

And so it is with other historical forms, such as terza rima, with its narrative ABA BCB CDC chains and Dantesque smell of sulphur and sadness.

The community is, by its nature, a community of ghosts. One of my favourite images of the artistic act is from Emily Dickinson, who said that art was a house that tried to be haunted. Each artist—but since we are talking of poetry here, let us say each poet—builds some kind of house, the point of the house being to entice the ghost in. My own house is what I am inclined by history and instinct to build, but the ghost it is trying to attract is related to those of other writers of similar predicaments and temperaments. I think I can vaguely see my house as a series of rooms arranged in the form of a tenement block of the kind that seems almost to sing to me in Budapest. I do very much suspect that I am, in some sense, erecting the buildings my own lost selves might have inhabited.

The point then is to get that ghost in, for your house is nothing but a hollow shell without it. I know these are analogies, for they convey something of the power and gravity of poetry. Form, too, is a house that tries to be haunted, and form-with-history is the house that longs for more than just the zeitgeist, the spirit of the age.

But there are delights and games as well as ghosts.


* * *



The first rhymes we hear are in the cot or at our mother’s knee. They are a mixture of the lulling and the playful. The lulling approximates to the predictable heartbeat, the playful to the leap of surprise. These are the earliest physical maps of poetry: the even road, the running stream, the tumbling of pebbles through the blood. Reassurance, progress, delight.

Rhyme can be delight in much the same way as any delicious accident can. How strange that “particle” should rhyme with “article”; how outrageous that “intellectual” should rhyme with “hen pecked you all” (both examples from Byron’s “Don Juan”). The delight of finding unlikely couplings reminds us of the delight of fitting any one thing to any other in childhood, or of the simple pleasures of playing Snap. The pleasure resides in the odds being stacked against the desired coincidence. The first such against-the-odds coincidence might be the matching of a word to its referent. Make that sound, says mother, and you will get the object. So the strange sound meets the desired object much like the surrealist sewing machine meets the umbrella on the operating table.

Somewhere at the heart of language is an initial dislocation that is stitched up (I use the term advisedly) by an apparently arbitrary suture that makes for laughter and disquiet, the laughter of relief that things are not doomed to be dislocated, the laughter of surprise that the dislocation is healed in such remarkable fashion, the laughter of triumph that healing has been achieved, and the laughter of irony that such healing is a clever, disquieting, but hardly permanent device.

Rhyme and pattern as play are part of the spontaneous overflow of pleasure at the sheer existence of anything. They are aspects of the comedy of the human situation. Discovering a pattern or a coincidence can be the beginnings of religious vision or, once revealed to be artificial, simply the occasion of laughter.

The Victorians loved language games: acrostics, double sonnets, puns, nonsense verse, parody, shaped poems, echoes, puzzles. They worked so hard at it that some of their productions seem rather labored now. We prefer our laughter less dutiful. We are more aware of the spaciness, airiness, weightlessness of existence than they were, but patterns still beguile us. Cole Porter and Irving Berlin may be too sophisticated, but a decent hip-hop lyric still aims at some pretty tall rhymes. What is cool but significant lightness?


Rhyme can be unexpected salvation, the paper nurse that somehow, against all the odds, helps us stick the world together while all the time drawing attention to its own fabricated nature. Knowing that rhyme might become part of the field of poetic expectation, we strive to make its arrival as unexpected and therefore as angelic as possible, and, in so doing, we discover more than we knew. Rhyme can be an aid to invention rather than a bar to it. It is an aid because it forces us into corners where we have to act and take the best available course out. In the process of seeking it, we bump up against possibilities we would not have chosen were we in control of the process.

Another analogy: the dance. Imagine a formal dance. Your partner is language. You are not the leading partner in this dance, in which there is no clear leader—if there were, it would be language—but you have to respond to each other’s movements with as much grace as you can muster. You may have chosen to perform a waltz, a fox-trot, a tango, or any other set dance. There are certain determined moves here, and the clumsy dancer will have all his or her time cut out just trying to follow them according to those black and white feet depicted in the diagrams. The pattern must be kept in mind but may be varied, and still leaves room to invent, out of necessity, that whole vocabulary of complementary gestures and moves that soon stop being complementary and become essence, so that the black and white foot diagrams are simply the condition that brings the essence about. That essence may well be art. That invention is the requirement of pattern.

So why do we insist on believing that our solemn faces and grand intentions are all that matter? That the arbitrary gaiety of language has nothing useful to offer us?

None of this is to decry so-called “free verse,” which is, as has been pointed out, never “free” to those who use it well. I don’t want to fight yesterday’s battles all over again. I would prefer to offer some arguments that may be attractive in today’s conditions, not in 1912. Milton thought rhyme a pain, and so, occasionally, did Blake, not to forget Whitman, Williams, Sandburg, the Beats, etc., all of which shows that one needn’t be carrying a metronome or a rhyme-testing device at all times. But rhyme and pattern work, and they work because of where we are, not somewhere else. And I have not forgotten disquiet. How indeed could I? Nor do I think the implications of these technicalities stop at poetry, if only because poetry does not stop at poetry. As the late Bill Shankly said: football isn’t a game of life and death. It’s more important than that.


* * *



“The music of what happens”: counterpoint, sonority.

The phrase is used by James Stephens and also by Seamus Heaney, (“And that moment when the bird sings very close/To the music of what happens”). It is the title of an anthology of poems from the Listener magazine, edited by Derwent May and of a book of criticism by Helen Vendler.

The phrase “the music of what happens” might refer to a hidden and mystical system of high order, as in Heaney, or to the “music” of the arbitrary, as in John Cage. Its roots are certainly Celtic. For me, the music of poetry lies in what I think of as counterpoint: the counterpoint between the line and the sentence. It was Frost in one of his letters who suggested that the basic unit of the poem was the sentence rather than the line or the word, a typically robust piece of Frostian doctrine. After all, the poem on the page is recognized as such by its arrangement into lines, and Frost himself was a pretty regular user of metrical forms and rhymes, features that follow from the line unit.

The rhythm of the line is directed by mood and movement, the length of the line by breath. It is in the line and that regular collection of lines, the stanza, that poetry is closest to song—and often is song: “Spring, the sweet spring, is the year’s pleasant king” (Nashe), “Follow your saint, follow with accents sweet” (Campion), “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may” (Herrick), to take a few early examples; but moving on to Tennyson, Housman, Brecht, Auden, James Simmonds, whoever. The line will make its own music too, with or without instruments: “The woods decay, the woods decay and fall” is deep sonorous music, as is much of Tennyson, despite what Tom Paulin says to the contrary. In fact, one must make an argument for any line of any poem to possess a certain sonority in its pace, its consonant and vowel music, in its caesurae and alliterations.

I sometimes think of a good line as a mouth dance, requiring the mouth to undertake a variety of movements that might well imitate expressions of human emotions. Certainly the mouth can sound cello, violin, flute, trumpet or indeed most string or wind instruments.

The roundness, the fullness, the statement of a sonorous end-stopped line provides a certain security and satisfaction. It also makes life easier for the popular musician and singer for whom time signatures are the stuff/staff/stave of life. The full end-stopped line is therefore well adapted to the usual concerns of song: narrative, mood, address. Song doesn’t do ideas or objects particularly well though, so its idea-content tends towards cliché—towards, at best, the strengths of cliché, which are trust, communality, and proverbialness. You might just as easily be singing the “Horst Wessel Song” as “Carrickfergus,” but that’s the chance you take. I would not willingly forego the delights of “Carrickfergus” because there’s an outside chance of it becoming a Nazi theme song, but a certain distrust tells me that the devil is likely to have some if not all the good tunes. The distrust of closure in an end-stopped line of poetry may well be linked to such suspicion.

A suspicion I share, as I have already said. Once you introduce enjambment, you complicate matters by resisting the natural fullness, or, as it may sometimes seem, the plumpness of the line. But you have to be careful since enjambments are noticeable. They draw attention to themselves and a particularly violent one is not unlike breaking a limb (or jambe) or even, at times, your neck. The best enjambments spice things up; they put, if you like, a snap in the poetic journey, keep you on your toes. Spectacular effects can be achieved in this way; separate the word “steep” at the end of the last line of a stanza from the word “fall” at the beginning of the first line of the next stanza and you really have enacted a falling, though you still have to gather that effect back into the body of the poem as a whole.

But Frost’s notion is not about effects as such. For him it is about naturalness, the assurance that no damned quack-doctor of pretty phrases is going to put one over on him. Out of the naturalness springs the music of counterpoint, which is not an arbitrary meeting of differences but the accommodation of two different expectations that act, literally, in concert.

This counterpoint produces a flexible poetics. If your mind is as liable to lurch and skip as mine is, a flexible poetics can be very useful, for it accommodates the lurches in its sentence structure while keeping a reasonably rigorous set of expectations in its linear structure. It is, to return to the very top of my argument, not a tyranny (no one accuses free verse of being a version of rampant individualist capitalism) but a society with a constitution. It is capable of surprising through its narrative sequence via the sentence, while offering reassurance through rhyme, meter, and stanza—which can, of course, supply their own surprises by way of wit.

Counterpoint, flexibility, and freedom with a constitution don’t seem dated ideals to me. Of course they are not the only available model in this line, but they are not secondhand goods. To mount a defense of them on what seem to me still-valid grounds is not to launch an attack on any other kind of verse. There may be a certain ritual quality in the manner of formal verse, but I observe the formalities in martial arts movies and note how the audience responds to them.

Personal form, of course, is a personal solution, insofar as it is a solution, for solutions sooner or later produce their own resistance. That’s the nature of the poetic enterprise.

You don’t have to dance like this, there are plenty of other dances; you don’t have to jive, you don’t have to tango, and it may take a little time of stumbling over your feet to learn, but it’s exciting once you’ve got it. It’s not going to go away.

Originally Published: February 1, 2006

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1146109/The-remarkable-story-Rudyard-Kiplings-If--swashbuckling-renegade-inspired-it.html

The remarkable story behind Rudyard Kipling's 'If' - and the swashbuckling renegade who inspired it
By GEOFFREY WANSELL
UPDATED: 20:11 EST, 15 February 2009


This week, Rudyard Kipling's If, that epic evocation of the British virtues of a 'stiff upper lip' and stoicism in the face of adversity, will once again be named as the nation's favourite poem.
The choice will certainly reignite the debate about whether it is, in fact, a great poem - which T. S. Eliot insisted it was not, describing it instead as 'great verse' - or a 'good bad' poem, as Orwell called it.
Indeed, when it was last acclaimed as our favourite 14 years ago, one newspaper dismissed it as 'jingoistic nonsense', while another praised it as 'unforgettable'.
What is not in doubt is that Kipling's four eight-line stanzas of advice to his son, written in 1909, have inspired the nation for a century.

Two of its most resonant lines, 'If you can meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two imposters just the same', stand above the players' entrance to the Centre Court at Wimbledon.
My own father gave a copy to me when I was ten and I carried it around in my wallet for the next 15 years. He felt it was the perfect advice for a son born at the end of the last world war, who could not know what triumphs and disasters lay ahead.
But few of the thousands who have voted for If as their favourite poem (in a poll for radio station Classic FM) know the remarkable story that lies behind the lines published in Kipling's collection of short stories and poems, Rewards And Fairies, in 1910.
For the unlikely truth is that they were composed by the Indian-born Kipling to celebrate the achievements of a man betrayed and imprisoned by the British Government - the Scots-born colonial adventurer Dr Leander Starr Jameson.
Although it may not seem so to the millions who can recite its famous first line ('If you can keep your head when all about you'), If is also a bitter condemnation of the British Government led by Lord Salisbury, and the duplicity of its Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain, for covertly supporting Dr Jameson's raid against the Boers in South Africa's Transvaal in 1896, only to condemn him when the raid failed.
Kipling was a friend of Jameson and was introduced to him, so scholars believe, by another colonial friend and adventurer: Cecil Rhodes, the financier and statesman who extracted a vast fortune from Britain's burgeoning African empire by taking substantial stakes in both diamond and gold mines in southern Africa.
In Kipling's autobiography, Something Of Myself, published in 1937, the year after his death at the age of 70, he acknowledges the inspiration for If in a single reference: 'Among the verses in Rewards was one set called If - they were drawn from Jameson's character, and contained counsels of perfection most easy to give.'

But to explain the nature of Kipling's admiration for Jameson, we need to return to the veldt of southern Africa in the last years of the 19th century.
What was to become South Africa was divided into two British colonies (the Cape Colony and Natal) and two Boer republics (the Orange Free State and Transvaal). Transvaal contained 30,000 white male voters, of Dutch descent, and 60,000 white male 'Uitlanders', primarily British expatriates, whom the Boers had disenfranchised from voting.
Rhodes, then Prime Minister of the Cape Colony, wanted to encourage the disgruntled Uitlanders to rebel against the Transvaal government. He believed that if he sent a force of armed men to overrun Johannesburg, an uprising would follow. By Christmas 1895, the force of 600 armed men was placed under the command of Rhodes's old friend, Dr Jameson.
Back in Britain, British Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain, father of future Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, had encouraged Rhodes's plan.
But when he heard the raid was to be launched, he panicked and changed his mind, remarking: 'If this succeeds, it will ruin me. I'm going up to London to crush it.'
Chamberlain ordered the Governor General of the Cape Colony to condemn the 'Jameson Raid' and Rhodes for planning it. He also instructed every British worker in Transvaal not to support it.
That was behind the scenes. On the Transvaal border, the impetuous Jameson was growing frustrated by the politicking between London and Cape Town, and decided to go ahead regardless.
On December 29, 1895, he led his men across the Transvaal border, planning to race to Johannesburg in three days - but the raid failed, miserably.
The Boer government's troops tracked Jameson's force from the moment it crossed the border and attacked it in a series of minor skirmishes that cost the raiders vital supplies, horses and indeed the lives of a handful of men, until on the morning of January 2, Jameson was confronted by a major Boer force.
After seeing the Boers kill 30 of his men, Jameson surrendered, and he and the surviving raiders were taken to jail in Pretoria. The raiders never reached Johannesburg and there

The Boer government handed the prisoners, including Jameson, over to the London government for trial. A few days after the raid, the German Kaiser sent a telegram congratulating President Kruger's Transvaal government on its success in suppressing the uprising.
When this was disclosed in the British Press, a storm of anti-German feeling was stirred and Jameson found himself lionised by London society. Fierce anti-Boer and anti-German feelings were inflamed, which soon became known as 'jingoism'.
Jameson was sentenced to 15 months for leading the raid, and the Transvaal government was paid almost £1million in compensation by the British South Africa Company. Cecil Rhodes was forced to step down as Prime Minister of the Cape Colony.
Jameson never revealed the extent of the British Government's support for the raid. This has led a string of Kipling scholars to point out that the poem's lines 'If you can keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs and blaming it on you' were designed specifically to pay tribute to the courage and dignity of Jameson's silence.
Typical of his spirit, Jameson was not broken by his imprisonment. He decided to return to South Africa after his release and rose to become Prime Minister of the Cape Colony in 1904, leaving office before the creation of the Union of South Africa in 1910.
His stoicism in the face of adversity and his determination not to be deterred from his task are reflected in the lines: 'If you can make a heap of all your winnings / And risk it at one turn of pitch and toss / And lose, and start again from your beginnings / And never breathe a word about your loss . . .'
As Kipling's biographer, Andrew Lycett, puts it: 'In a sense, the poem is a valedictory to Jameson, the politician.'
All in all, an impressive hero for Kipling's son, John. 'If you can fill the unforgiving minute/ With sixty seconds' worth of distance run/ Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it/ And - which is more - you'll be a Man my son!'
But Kipling's anger at Jameson's treatment by the British establishment never abated.
Even though the poet had become the first English-speaking recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907, he refused a knighthood and the Order of Merit from the British Government and the King, just as he refused the posts of Poet Laureate and Companion of Honour.
The tragedy was that Kipling's only son, Lieutenant John Kipling, was to die in World War I at the Battle of Loos in 1915, only a handful of years after his father's most famous poem first appeared. His body was never found.
It was a shock from which Kipling never fully recovered. But his son's spirit, as well as that of Leander Starr Jameson, lives on in the lines of the poem that continues to inspire millions.
As Andrew Lycett told the Daily Mail: 'In these straitened times, the old-fashioned virtues of fortitude, responsibilities and resolution, as articulated in If, become ever more important.'
Long may they remain so.


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1146109/The-remarkable-story-Rudyard-Kiplings-If--swashbuckling-renegade-inspired-it.html#ixzz3pIhHkTl9
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This week, Rudyard Kipling's If, that epic evocation of the British virtues of a 'stiff upper lip' and stoicism in the face of adversity, will once again be named as the nation's favourite poem.
The choice will certainly reignite the debate about whether it is, in fact, a great poem - which T. S. Eliot insisted it was not, describing it instead as 'great verse' - or a 'good bad' poem, as Orwell called it.
Indeed, when it was last acclaimed as our favourite 14 years ago, one newspaper dismissed it as 'jingoistic nonsense', while another praised it as 'unforgettable'.
What is not in doubt is that Kipling's four eight-line stanzas of advice to his son, written in 1909, have inspired the nation for a century

Eliot the poetic genius was rarely wrong in regards to poetry but in this he was! I suspect that jealousy played a big part in his comment. History has now shown Kipling poem's greatness, its lasting fame and the deepness within.
Article above reveals its inspiration.. --Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/177754

PROSE FROM POETRY MAGAZINE
John Masefield
1878–1967

BY CONOR O'CALLAGHAN
He was born the year British Imperial forces were squaring up to the Zulus and Tennyson’s death was still fourteen years in the offing. He once met someone who had met Napoleon. He held a door for Lenin at the British Museum. He was deemed by Ramsay McDonald to be the natural successor to Robert Bridges, a voice-of-the-voiceless laureate for Britain’s first labour prime minister. He lost his son in WWII. He died the year the Beatles released Sgt. Pepper and Norman Mailer was jailed after Vietnam protests in Washington. More than any poet I can think of, his life and work straddle two irreconcilable worlds.

Nowadays it is difficult to credit his fame. The Everlasting Mercy was declared “nine-tenths sheer filth” by that paragon of piety Lord Alfred Douglas. The 1923 edition of Collected Poems sold eighty thousand copies. It is equally difficult to make any serious critical defense. Even Yeats, who was among his closest literary allies, advised him to sing in music halls. He wrote far too much. He did not, as John Betjeman tactfully pointed out, “specialize in brevity.” Nowadays, whenever his name comes to us, it comes to us with a faintly ludicrous patina. He is the seaman poet who suffered chronic seasickness; whose bestseller Gallipoli hailed that squalid massacre as a glorious victory; who died of gangrene brought on by a split toe.

I have liked John Masefield’s poetry for over twenty years. My maternal grandfather, a self-taught detective sergeant from a landlocked county of South Ulster, loved to recite the swaying opening stanza of “Sea-Fever.” I learned “Tewkesbury Road” by heart at secondary school. What class of genius, I wondered, could compose “the grey light drift of the dust”? Until recently, admitting to liking Masefield’s poetry was like confessing sympathy with some far right-wing militia or saying you listen to the Carpenters. Then Manchester’s Carcanet Press brought out a Selected earlier this year. The unexpectedly enthusiastic reviews that have greeted its publication suggest a dormant following.

Masefield’s first book, Salt-Water Ballads, appeared in 1903. By 1913, with fifty-four years still on the clock, his significant poetry had been published. To this day he gets itemized as the original of the Georgian species, even though his first three books were, technically speaking, Edwardian. Those early lyrics possess nothing of the tweedy hothouse pastoral of their age. They are breezy, visceral, caught placelessly between two yearnings like “anchors hungry for English ground.” They impose the see-saw of shanties onto drier literary meters. They have stories, direct speech. They are littered with words—fo’c’s’le, goneys, skysail, spunyarn—that you suspect had not appeared in poetry up until then and have not since.

Masefield’s best poems escape the autopilot optimism of those of his contemporaries. His vision is so clear and realistic that his palette risks appearing monochrome: “the grey dawn breaking,” “the cool grey rush of the dusk.” His lines can be so accentual as to sound vaguely jazzy. Even the anthology anthems, “Sea-Fever” and “Cargoes,” hit willful bum notes. They harbor tongue twisters, at once cherished and unsayable, like “the flung spume and the blown spray and the seagulls crying” or the “Quinquereme of Nineveh from distant Ophir” that Muldoon ventriloquizes via MacNeice in “7 Middagh Street.” “Cargoes,” among popular favorites in English poetry, has to be one of the most pessimistic:

Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke-stack
Butting through the Channel in the mad March days,
With a cargo of Tyne coal,
Road-rail, pig-lead,
Firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays.


Muriel Spark, in her book-length study, argues that Masefield’s gift was for narrative. However untenable that claim seems now, “The Everlasting Mercy” and “Dauber” deserve at least partial survival on the grounds of importance if not sustained quality. The former’s realism broke real ground and influenced a generation. Sassoon happened upon the style of his war poetry by lampooning it. Graves described how its “fresh wind ... exhilarated us youngsters.” While its narrative is off-puttingly moral, the early fight sequence remains vivid and gritty. The latter, a semi-autobiographical tale of the eponymous painter-cum-cabin boy, contains some of the truest, most beautiful images of the sea and seafaring:

the swift ship
Tore on out of the tropics, straining her sheets,
Whitening her trackway into a milky strip,
Dim with green bubbles and twisted water-meets,
Her clacking tackle tugged at pins and cleats,
Her great sails bellied stiff, her great masts leaned:
They watched how the sea struck and burst and greened.


Masefield matured into mediocrity. He became an authority on Chaucerian meter, and his own work drifted slowly into the canon’s Bermuda Triangle. Not a solitary line appears in Paul Keegan’s otherwise magisterial New Penguin Book of English Verse. “I am like the dodo,” the man mused, “no longer known as a bird at all.” Only a twit would argue the case of Masefield’s greatness. Better, I suggest, to see him occupying a position within British poetry similar to that of Edward Arlington Robinson here: a minor poet whose career became an important stepping stone between the Victorian and the modern (both Auden and Larkin acknowledged a debt), and who wrote a few gems of his own that remain unworthy of neglect.
Originally Published: March 2, 2006

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/178263
INTERVIEW
Mind Over Matter
BY THE EDITORS
A conversation between Stanley Kunitz and his assistant, Genine Lentine.

GL: Stanley?

SK: Yes.

GL: Do you believe in mind over matter?

[laughter]

SK: You should ask it the other way, "Do you believe in matter over mind?" and then you’d have to say no.

[ laughter. ]

GL: I can hardly even think about that! I ask because of the way you just scrambled up those stairs, as if you just said, “Well, it doesn’t matter that I don’t have my walking stick.” So much of what you do seems to be the result of just deciding you can do it.

SK: That’s right.

GL: We stop short of our potential so often.

SK: True enough. True enough.

GL: What is it in you that enables you to short circuit that sense of “I can’t do it.”

SK: I don’t know but that’s been a principle all my life to do what I can and more. And it’s amazing that if you believe in that there’s almost nothing that stands in your way except your own restrictiveness.

GL: It’s so much about what we think we can do, and that’s always much less than what we can really do. One of the ways I think of my job is that everyday we have some heretofore impossible task in front of us, and then we do it. Every day I wonder, “What impossible thing are we going to do today?”

SK: That’s a good question.

GL: It’s only a construct, only poverty of mind that defines a task as impossible anyway. It’s just maybe that it hasn’t been done yet.

SK: Well, you know there are situations when you can’t do it, that’s all there is to it, and you have to be realistic up to a certain point.

GL: Yes. It’s foolhardy not to be.

SK: But it goes the other way too. You can do more than you think you can. You can stretch your strength to a point where you . . . you can walk up this path without a cane. If I had a cane I would use it, but without it I feel perfectly able.

GL: Do you think that’s how evolution proceeds? One creature decides, Hey! I’m going to try to eat that shiny blue thing over there, or one member of the herd is able to reach the more plentiful leaves in the upper branches, then gradually, the species starts to have a longer neck.

Do you think the poet is in some way an advance scout for spiritual evolution?

SK: In a way, yes. I cannot think of any other vocation that demands as much of you as the poem does in terms of confronting life and death and everything else.

There’s a bug there.

GL: I know. It’s just sleeping. That’s a nice looking beetle.

SK: Oh, beautiful. [laughs]

GL: It’s got such a great sheen. I like how sticky their legs are too. They’re very effective.

What does the poem demand of you? What were you going to say?

SK: What does the stickiness of the legs do for the beetle?

GL: It allows it to hold onto the leaf.

SK: Prey.

GL: Oh, prey, I was just thinking it allows it to travel where it needs to travel, but probably holding onto its prey is another feature.

Could we talk more about what the poem demands of you?

SK: Everything you can give. In a way, the concept of the poem is boundless. It wants everything you have to give, and then more. That’s its nature.

GL: How does it tell you what it wants?

SK: Well, you have to become the spokesperson for the poem. For poetry itself. You have to demand of yourself a kind of power, understanding, perfection that is beyond your daily self.

GL: What if you were to bring that into your daily life?

SK: You would become impossible.

[pause]

GL: I wonder about that distinction you’re making. The poem both expands—it can receive whatever you give it—but it also pushes back and what I love is that feeling where there’s infinite room, but it’s also resisting me. And it’s at that place of resistance where that effort at articulation, where the heat, where the friction takes place, that impulse to try to resolve that feeling. It’s like when you compared it to a cat scratching its nails on a tree, it’s that feeling. Trying to get language to strike a likeness to your inner state. Language provides both the resistance and the opportunity.

SK: Very true.

GL: and it’s always falling short, but it’s also providing you with these incredible gifts too, these coincidences of form, unimagined concentrations or suspensions of meaning.

I was trying to see what bird that was that was under the yew hedge, but it flew away.

SK: Not a mocking bird?

GL: No.

SK: A catbird.

GL: Yes. I bet it was a catbird. Do they feed on the ground?

SK: That’s the primary occupant of the garden.

GL: I love the call of the catbird.

SK: And you feel it never gets discouraged. It keeps calling.

GL: You talk a lot about testing yourself. Do you think the poem is the ultimate testing ground?

SK: For a poet, yes. [laughs]

GL: I mean for you.

SK: mm hmm.

[pause] It’s so much a testing ground that often, I think, among the poets I know, it is capable affecting one’s capacity to deal with the dailiness of life, because it’s the dailiness that is the enemy of the poem.


GL: That’s so paradoxical though because the day provides the . . .

SK: it gives you material, it gives you a circumstance, but if the poem emerges as daily let’s say as a menu, then it’s a negative impact.

GL: I remember reading in Galway’s book, Walking Down the Stairs, that Rilke wouldn’t go to his daughter’s wedding because he thought he’d be better off staying home . . .

SK: . . . and writing a poem, mm hmm. I don’t think poems should be treated as though they were a substitute for life.

GL: It doesn’t seem like any self-respecting poem would want to be treated that way, because the poem advocates for life.

Have you been feeling like your daily life recently has been inimical to poems?

SK: Well I think any daily life tends to become routine. One doesn’t expect revelation out of daily life.

GL: Isn’t that when revelation comes though?

SK: Surprisingly enough it’s the feeding ground. It’s where the materials of the poem are found, but revelation is not really consistent with dailiness. It has a miraculous aspect to it, and it is not to be encountered in every experience of the day, and especially the routine experiences

GL: Intuitively that feels to me just the kind of place where revelation happens; you’re doing the dishes and your mind reaches a state of equanimity in the task

SK: and then you drop the dish and it shatters

GL: and it was a worthy sacrifice.

Photos Marnie Crawford Samuelson
Originally Published: April 10, 2006

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/178165

POEM SAMPLER
Poems of Sorrow and Grieving
Classic and contemporary poems about ultimate losses

BY THE EDITORS

Remembering a Parent
Making a Fist -- by Naomi Shihab Nye
I who did not die, who am still living,
still lying in the backseat behind all my questions,
clenching and opening one small hand.

oh antic God -- by Lucille Clifton
oh antic God
return to me

Love Lost
Ae Fond Kiss -- by Robert Burns
Ae fond kiss, and then we sever;
Ae fareweel, and then forever!

And Thou art Dead, as Young and Fair-- by Lord Byron
And thou art dead, as young and fair
As aught of mortal birth;

Ebb -- by Edna St. Vincent Millay
I know what my heart is like
Since your love died:

Epigrams: Epitaph on Elizabeth, L.H. -- by Ben Jonson
Wouldst thou hear what man can say
In a little? Reader, stay.

Death of a Child
An Arbor -- by Linda Gregerson
The world’s a world of trouble, your mother must
have told you
that. Poison leaks into the basements

The Bad Season Makes the Poet Sad --by Robert Herrick
Dull to myself, and almost dead to these
My many fresh and fragrant mistresses

The Dying Child by -- John Clare
He could not die when trees were green,
For he loved the time too well

Grieving the Death of a Friend
Buried at Springs --by James Schuyler
There is a hornet in the room
and one of us will have to go

Elegy with a Chimneysweep Falling Inside It by -- Larry Levis
Those twenty-six letters filling the blackboard
Compose the dark

Facing It -- by Yusef Komunyakaa
My black face fades,
hiding inside the black granite.

Regret & Depression
A Daughter of Eve-- by Christina Rossetti
A fool I was to sleep at noon,
And wake when night is chilly

The Debt -- by Paul Laurence Dunbar
This is the debt I pay
Just for one riotous day,

Fragment 3: Come, come thou bleak December wind -- by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Come, come thou bleak December wind,
And blow the dry leaves from the tree!

Originally Published: May 12, 2006

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/guide/251266#guide

Anne Sexton: “The Truth the Dead Know”
The impersonal power of a confessional classic

BY AUSTIN ALLEN

Anne Gray Harvey took the married name Sexton in 1948, thereby joining Swift, Wordsworth, and Frost as one of English literature’s most perfectly named poets. The word sexton, meaning a church officer who serves as bell ringer and gravedigger, is rich in both symbolism and literary history. The figure of the sexton appears in such mainstays of the canon as Hamlet (with its two gravedigger-clowns), Emily Dickinson’s thwarted-love poem “I cannot live with You,” and Hart Crane’s haunting ode “The Broken Tower.” In her brief career, Sexton lived up to virtually all the associations—tragedy and comedy, music and melancholy, death and the embedded word sex—that her name prepared for her.

A member of the mercurial, mid-20th-century group called the confessional poets, Sexton worked in an impressive range of forms and modes, from witty ballads to raw free verse. She broke poetic taboos with flair, writing frankly about menstruation, female masturbation, bipolar disorder, and other topics considered all but untouchable at the time. “A Sexton audience might hiss its displeasure or deliver a standing ovation,” Maxine Kumin recalls in the introduction to Sexton’s Complete Poems. “It did not doze off during a reading.” Like her friend and rival Sylvia Plath, Sexton committed suicide, suffocating herself in her garage at age 45.

Sexton’s titles alone often sound like dispatches from the graveyard. The Pulitzer Prize–winning 1966 collection Live or Die prepared the way for The Death Notebooks (1974) and The Awful Rowing Toward God (posthumous, 1975). Her poems include “The Hangman,” “Imitations of Drowning,” “Suicide Note,” “Godfather Death,” “For Mr. Death Who Stands With His Door Open,” and “Wanting to Die.” Then there’s “The Truth the Dead Know,” the opening poem of All My Pretty Ones (1962) and one of the 20th century’s outstanding poems of loss.

As revealed in its dedication, “The Truth the Dead Know” is an elegy with a double subject:

For my mother, born March 1902, died March 1959
and my father, born February 1900, died June 1959

These are the actual birth and death dates of Mary Gray Staples and Ralph Harvey; their daughter’s poem emerged three years after they died in quick succession. Such autobiographical details, now common in poetry, were then a cutting-edge gesture. In the 1962–1963 Hudson Review, Cecil Hemley reacted with mixed feelings:

There is no doubt that the poet wants us to associate herself with the “I” of the poem. … This identification with the writer has the advantage of intensifying our feelings, but the disadvantage of embarrassing us slightly. There were good reasons why past eras were reticent on such matters. However, the poem rises above the confession and achieves great beauty.

This far removed from confessionalism, Hemley’s embarrassment seems both quaint and beside the point. Distracted by the minor novelty of the framework, he downplays the extent to which the poem is deeply, deliberately traditional. Its imagery could belong to just about any century: church, grave, hearse, shoes, stones, boats, sea, gate, sun that “gutters” like a candle flame.

What was and is fresh about the poem is its bluntness:

Gone, I say and walk from church,
refusing the stiff procession to the grave,
letting the dead ride alone in the hearse.
It is June. I am tired of being brave.

We drive to the Cape. I cultivate
myself where the sun gutters from the sky,
where the sea swings in like an iron gate
and we touch. In another country people die.

From that stark “Gone” onward, the diction is so austerely Anglo-Saxon that the few Latinate words seem like extravagances. Amid stanzas rife with monosyllables, procession sounds highly formal, and cultivate, dangling at the end of a line, sounds almost luxuriant. But cultivate, too, is somehow stiff or hollow in light of the poem’s theme. Both words imply progress, a concept that death mocks. Both offer momentary changes of pace from the prevailing style, which is as plain as loss.

A change of pace is exactly what this speaker craves. Having lost both parents in the space of four months, she escapes to the beach with her unnamed “darling.” There the two lovers feel a sense of overwhelming connection, even communion:

My darling, the wind falls in like stones
from the whitehearted water and when we touch
we enter touch entirely. No one’s alone.
Men kill for this, or for as much.

Despite the bond the couple forges, “this” is no paradise. The “whitehearted water” could be an agitated cousin of Homer’s “wine-dark sea.” It swings “like an iron gate,” recalling the “iron gates of Life” through which Marvell, in “To His Coy Mistress,” insists that we must “tear our pleasures” if we’re to enjoy them at all. The lovers seem besieged, threatened: “the wind falls in like stones,” as in punishment by stoning, and the speaker reflects that “Men kill for this.” Both human and natural forces exact a price for such intense love.

Soon romance fades altogether as Sexton’s dirge marches to its close:

And what of the dead? They lie without shoes
in their stone boats. They are more like stone
than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse
to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.

This final stanza contains just three polysyllabic words: without, refuse, knucklebone. All three reinforce the image of death as a kind of asceticism. The corpses lie shoeless and motionless. Their refusal echoes the speaker’s refusal of the funeral: just as she abandoned the dead en route to the grave, so the dead now dispense with the blessings of the living. That last exposed knucklebone seems pugnacious and, at the same time, naked.

Meanwhile Sexton’s stone sea recalls at least two of Emily Dickinson’s most chilling images: the corpse as stopped clock and the “Valves” of the soul closing “like Stone.” “Stone boats” (i.e., coffins) evokes the long mythological tradition of death-voyages, from Charon rowing souls across the Styx to the Lady of Shalott drifting glassy-eyed into Camelot. The water that pelted the lovers with spray now seems to have engulfed and petrified Sexton’s imagination. Sea, boats, and bodies become stone, stone, stone. Death is universal and irreversible.

But poems themselves soon die if they freeze into straightforward statements. To survive, they must preserve restless undercurrents of ambiguity. What, if anything, is still moving at the end of Sexton’s poem?

One answer lies in that double-edged word refuse. Paradoxically, Sexton grants the dead an action—an emphatic, line-ending verb that combines cold negation and warm defiance. Moreover, their refusal mirrors the speaker’s, so that living and dead, parents and child, each partake of the activity (and, figuratively, the condition) of the other. “In another country people die,” the speaker declares, echoing Hamlet’s image of death as “The undiscovered country from whose bourn / No traveler returns.” Yet like the ghost-haunted Hamlet, Sexton finds that the separation isn’t so absolute. The two countries are joined by a murky psychological sea (Hamlet’s “sea of troubles,” Sexton’s stony waters) and by the indissoluble link between generations.

Sexton’s parents can’t visit her as literal ghosts, but the thought of them in their “stone boats” returns just as she’s trying to get away from it all. Perhaps, as Hemley imagines, they’re “sailing away from her in time,” or perhaps they’re emissaries, harbingers of her own death, floating toward her. Regardless, their “Truth” is what she has to learn and what she has to teach us.

•

“The Truth the Dead Know” employs a timeless diction, and its theme is as old as parents and children. With a slight change to the headnote, it could be a fictional construct about an anonymous speaker. Yet Sexton takes care to present it as a slice of her own life. As Hemley observes, this may have “the advantage of intensifying our feelings”; it also tempts us to read other biographical factors into the poem.

In 1959, the year Sexton’s parents died, Robert Lowell published Life Studies, widely acknowledged as the foundational text of confessional poetry. In that same year, Sexton took one of Lowell’s workshops at Boston University alongside an ambitious young poet named Sylvia Plath. The competitive friendship between the two women has become legendary. Over happy-hour martinis at the Boston Ritz-Carlton, they talked poetry, planned illustrious futures, and traded stories of suicide attempts. Through their mutual admiration ran a vein of envy: Plath brooded in her diary when Sexton landed her first book deal, and Sexton coveted “a scholarship to McLean,” the psychiatric hospital where Plath and Lowell had both been patients. (She taught a poetry seminar there in 1968–69 before finally being admitted herself in 1973.) Sexton even reacted with jealous resentment to Plath’s suicide, as she confessed in “Sylvia’s Death” (1964):

… and I know at the news of your death,
a terrible taste for it, like salt.

(And me,
me too.
And now, Sylvia,
you again
with death again,
that ride home
with our boy.)

Inescapably, they influenced each other. One revealing way to read “The Truth the Dead Know” is in comparison with “The Colossus,” the title poem of Plath’s first (1960) collection and another distinguished elegy by a grieving daughter.

In “The Colossus,” Plath’s speaker crawls over the massive wreck of a statue she calls “father,” fruitlessly trying to reassemble him. The landscape is eerie, primal, a mix of “the Oresteia” and Dalí. The diction is wildly varied (pig-grunt, acanthine, Lysol), the tone both melodramatic and comic, the speaker’s situation both noble and futile. Plath adopts, in critic Margaret Dickie’s words, “the ancient role of the female who mourns the dying god, or the heroine who tends the idol,” but she’s lost all hope of fulfilling her task. She’s doomed to endless filial duty, the same duty she would later renounce in the explosive “Daddy.”

“The Colossus” was Plath’s first masterpiece, and it can’t be a coincidence that Sexton’s poem, published two years later, tackles the same theme from a virtually opposite angle. No mythic conceit. No verbal razzle-dazzle. The speaker anything but noble. Sexton is not the loyal but the disloyal daughter, not a tragic heroine persisting in rites of mourning but a flawed human resisting grief. The dead father in Plath’s poem remains passive and mysterious; the dead parents in Sexton’s, as if punishing their daughter, flatly “refuse / to be blessed.”

“The Truth the Dead Know” is not superior to “The Colossus,” but it is more raw—and that rawness was the product of enormous effort. Kumin reports that the poem “went through innumerable revisions before arriving at its final form, an a b a b rhyme scheme that allows little room for pyrotechnics.” One unpublished version, available via recording, contains phrases such as “loose brows” and “a blushing hermit in the sun”; it ends on a conventional carpe diem note:“live now, live now.” This redemptive ending feels as alien to the final work as the stylized diction. In both respects, Sexton pared the poem down to the bone.

Plath’s “Daddy” may have been, in part, another entry in this contest of one-upmanship. (If Sexton could abandon her father at his funeral, Plath could call hers “you bastard.”) Similarly, the baroque morbidity of Sexton’s late poems may have been a bid to out-Plath Plath. Both poets took confessionalism to startling extremes, but “The Truth the Dead Know” achieves a starkness neither of them found (or perhaps sought) again. It’s both vulnerable and stoic, colloquial and classically restrained. Along with Dickinson’s “I heard a Fly buzz” and Philip Larkin’s “Aubade,” it’s one of the least comforting death poems in the language. Its power hinges not on the revelation of private details but on the recognition of an impersonal truth—one that we all learn sooner or later.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/178034

INTERVIEW
Former Freight Hopper Makes Good
Richard Wilbur on meeting Frost, writing in foxholes, and falling in and out of fashion.

BY D. H. TRACY

Former army cryptographer, freight hopper, and Broadway lyricist Richard Wilbur (1921—) published his first book of poems in 1947. He quickly developed a reputation, cemented by subsequent collections, for felicitous, elaborate, even-tempered verse, and his recent Collected Poems 1943-2004 is a remarkable record of sustained optimism and commitment to craft. No poet of his generation has been more committed to careful, organized expression or has more thoroughly mastered the forms and devices of traditional poetry; this conservative aesthetic and his deep love for “country things” link Wilbur to the Roman poet Horace and to his fellow American Robert Frost. Wilbur had an academic career at Wesleyan University, and remains an active translator, particularly of classic French drama. [Read D.H. Tracy’s extended Wilbur biography.]

Wilbur lives in Cummington, Massachusetts. This conversation took place on April 7, 2006.

D.H. Tracy: You’ve had a very long career—your first book came out 60 years ago next year. Some of the questions I’d like to ask have to do with your perceptions of things over time.

I’m surprised by the strenuousness of the criticism your poetry has sometimes generated, and by the contrast between this strenuousness and the timbre of the poems themselves. When you were starting out, did you have an idea of how controversial it would be to write optimistic formal verse?

Richard Wilbur: Actually, in my background, at that time, most of the poets I admired—and many of them were alive—were capable of writing metrically. Many of them chose to rhyme. My favorite poet, then and always, was Robert Frost, and I didn’t hesitate to follow in his footsteps. There were people at the time I was commencing to write who didn’t regard Frost as a Modernist, but now I believe he’s considered to be one form that Modernism could take.

So I never felt I was electing to be “old hat” from the start. It seemed a kind of poetry that anybody at the moment might like to write, and indeed many people were doing so. It wasn’t really until the ’60s that there was a general turning away from so-called formal verse.

DHT: You knew Frost personally, isn’t that so?

RW: Yes, I did. I had the luck to meet him almost immediately after World War II, when my wife and I and my daughter went up to Cambridge to be at the Harvard graduate school. He was spending his winters in Cambridge.

I had a certain advantage with him right away because my wife’s grandfather, William Hayes Ward, had been the editor of The Independent, in which Frost’s first publication occurred. It was his poem “My Butterfly.” My wife’s great-aunt, Susan Hayes Ward, was an expert on hymnody and a great lover of poetry, and the person whom Frost described all his life as “the first friend of my poetry.” That meant that Frost smiled on us from the beginning.

DHT: Some of the poems from your first book were composed while you were still in the army. And you’ve talked about how you first deeply read Poe out of a paperback in a foxhole at Monte Cassino. Do you remember the circumstances behind the composition of any of the poems?

RW: I’m not sure that I can call up the moment. Even if you’re in a divisional signal company—which means that you are very busy, and imperiled some of the time—you find that, as Evelyn Waugh once said, war is mostly waiting around. You sit in a hole in the ground somewhere, or in a truck somewhere, or behind a couple sandbags, and you pass the time by forgetting, if possible, where you are for the moment.

And I forgot myself in all sorts of places during World War II. I had a young man’s ability to sit down in the corridor of a troop ship going overseas, with people’s feet all around me, and read books and even scribble on a poem. I did that sort of thing at every opportunity.

DHT: Can you give us a basic sketch of a day in the life of an army cryptographer? Were you usually outdoors? In a field office? By a radio? What did your duties consist of?

RW: Most of what I did was, as you say, cryptographic work: I was breaking enciphered messages and sending out messages in cipher. Our greatest weapons, on the cryptographic side, were big machines. Those had to be toted around in large trucks. We worked in a truck, very often. Under unpleasant circumstances, like the Anzio beachhead, we would dig the truck into a bank and make it as secure as possible. At other times, we would just sit there in the damn truck and work. We also established ourselves in buildings, here and there—wherever we could find a little bit of shelter so that we could do complex work with full attention. We sought that shelter.

DHT: You were initially thrown out of cryptanalysis school because of suspected disloyalty and leftist sympathies, after they discovered a copy of Marx in your possession.

RW: Quite ridiculous, really. When I reported to my basic training camp, I took along a large Modern Library volume of Marx’s Capital, which I had never read. I thought that (as I’ve just said) war was going to involve a lot of waiting around, and I might as well read that big fat book. I’ve still never read it.

But the fact is that, during inspection, when we had to have our footlockers open for the eye of the inspecting officer, it looked pretty bad. So the counterintelligence corps people decided they better look into me.

I really wasn’t very radical. You might say I was a strong New Dealer—an admirer of Franklin Roosevelt and an adherent of the union movement. I had no really dangerous leftist convictions. I do think that during World War II—and it’s probably indeed the same right now in Washington—what is preferred is that people who handle secret material should not have strenuous political attitudes of any kind. I can recall that when I was going through basic training, we were shown, as a matter of what they called indoctrination, a couple of rather good films by Frank Capra, one of which essentially traced the development of Fascism in Europe, and the clear moral of which was that we should have stopped them in Spain. You were supposed to sit in front of that movie and absorb it, yet if you went out in the company street thereafter and started talking about how we should have stopped them in Spain, people who were security-minded would feel a certain alarm. They did not want the passionately political in secret work.

DHT: How common an occurrence were these demotions? Did anything similar happen to any of your friends?

RW: Yes. One of my friends, who had I think been in the Communist Party (I’m not sure), was thrown out of some secret work, and comically enough he ended up rather in charge of teletype communications for the southern ETO [European Theater of Operations].

If you had a specialist number of some kind, identifying you as having some sort of ability, you were likely, regardless of people’s doubts about your security, to end up practicing that talent and that training. So I, even though my service record—which was forwarded along with me wherever I went—contained some sort of an indication that I was suspected of disloyalty, I found myself, through a series of accidents, doing exactly the secret work for which I had been trained, because the 36th Infantry Division needed a cryptographer.

DHT: Did this treatment rattle you, or did it seem entirely in keeping with what you knew about the army and the way it operated?

RW: I find it hard to report on my frame of mind about that; I was not dashed by it. It seems to me that I had a considerable feeling of knockabout enjoyment of things in those days, a feeling of adventure. So I just waited to see what would happen to me, and to absorb the shocks that might come.

DHT: Speaking of Edgar Allan Poe in the foxhole, it’s striking that the early American figures you seem to be in conversation with are Poe and Longfellow, and the monumental European figure who most interests you seems to be Milton. More commonly poets seem to fall in with Whitman and Dickinson, and then Dante. Have these figures and affiliations taken you in unusual directions relative to your peers?

RW: I don’t suppose that when I started writing poetry I was trying to place myself in the likely pattern of American poetry as a whole. I really responded to Walt Whitman rather favorably when I was young, and got to like him much more when I was older and teaching a course in American poetry. In spite of the fact that Whitman is thought of as the great American bard, like many people I read very little of him in my youth. He is a great unread poet for most people.

At present, to hear people talk in the academies, you would think that the things that happened in American poetry were Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. But when I was starting to read and know American poetry, I read many other people, and enjoyed, for example, Emerson. I liked the best of Longfellow very much. But my great attachments were to the Modernists. Really I responded to the whole lot of them. The list, if I gave it to you, would simply be the contents of a Modernist poetry anthology.

DHT: In the early ’60s you traveled to the Soviet Union and had contact with a number of writers there, translating, among others, Andrei Voznesensky, whose books were selling hundreds of thousands of copies. Some of the remarks you’ve made about Soviet poets during this period, who were writing “high demotic” poetry for an eager, newly literate public, have been fascinating—you’ve compared their situation with Longfellow’s in the mid-19th century.

RW: That’s right. It was a very comparable situation that I found when I went to the Soviet Union. In the first place, the Soviet reader was someone in many cases proud of a new literacy and seriously aspiring to higher things, and the Soviet poets, even those who had a certain freedom of mind and attitude, felt that they were the servants of those people, and that it was their business to energize and enlighten them. Therefore, people like Andrei Voznesensky sold out very large editions whenever they published. It did seem very enviable to me.

DHT: Have you kept up with any of those writers, either personally or with their work?

RW: For quite a while I did keep up with Voznesensky, but I haven’t really seen him for about ten years now or had any correspondence with him. I suppose that some of our cordiality did have to do with the need to bridge the gap between our countries, and now that doesn’t seem to be the chief aspect of the international situation.

I think actually that Yevgeny Yevtushenko is living and teaching here in the United States, somewhere in the Southwest [editor’s note: at the University of Tulsa]. He’s almost migrated to us.

DHT: What do you think about high demotic poetry in the United States right now? Is there any? If so, is there is a use for it? If not, is there a need for it?

RW: When I think of the 19th-century fireside, it’s rather easy to imagine a volume of Longfellow on the table by the easy chair. There are a lot of other distractions in our contemporary American life—with some of them I’m quite unacquainted. I don’t have a computer, for example. I know nothing of the Internet. But I know that the Internet is a large part of life for people now. And of course there’s television and videos and all the rest. I think that some of the entertainment aspect of poetry is less important to the majority of people now. They find their entertainment more readily in other media.

But just two days ago I was reading poems over at Tufts College in Medford, and a young woman in the audience asked me pretty much the question you’ve asked. I thought, well, instead of talking about how Modernism estranged the common reader and so on, let’s see if I can’t think of what’s positive about the present situation. One thing I thought of was simply the way poetry books sell at present. My first volume came out in an edition of 750 copies. I think that no New York publisher would come out with so small a first printing nowadays. I can’t estimate the likely sales of a good book of poetry now, but they’re much higher than they used to be.

Then there’s the matter of the poetry reading—I don’t mean the slam, but the reading. When I was a kid, the only people who went around on the lecture circuit very notably were pros like Robert Frost and Edna Millay and Carl Sandburg and, a little earlier, Vachel Lindsay. It was a limited number of people who had great power not only as poets but as entertainers. Starting I should say just after World War II, the poetry reading began to be a form of concert that was very frequent and well attended, and didn’t require that the reader be a pro as an entertainer. A kind of savvy audience developed—an audience of people who know that there’s a difference between a poetry concert and a concert of music. I walk out of any concert of music feeling that I’ve heard all the music. Of course I didn’t, but I tell myself that I have, and feel that I have. At poetry readings, you have to be willing to let a few things go by you, to be puzzled and frustrated from time to time, and to tolerate that as part of the poetry-reading experience.

Well, I seem to be running on, but I think there are positive aspects. Of course I could mention also radio broadcasters who read poems of some real quality, apparently to large audiences. That, too, is a good sign.

DHT: Speaking of writing for wide audiences, I wonder if you could speak a bit about your experiences writing Broadway lyrics. What habits did you have to get rid of or rein in to write for musical accompaniment, and to collaborate with others?

RW: You do have to change your way of working, in order to write Broadway lyrics. I know that, except for the occasional happy birthday poem, which is directed to somebody, I don’t write for people “out there”—I write to see if I can’t understand what it is I want to say. I assume myself to be an average human being, and I figure if I make things clear and interesting to myself, others might find them so.

But Broadway lyrics are an entirely different matter. There you have to think as knowledgably as you can about what is going to please a particular kind of New York theatergoer. When I was working on Candide, [Leonard] Bernstein and [Lillian] Hellman and I referred to him as “the man from Scarsdale.” He’s out there in the third or fourth row, he’s been dragged to the show by his wife, and you hope to say things that will keep him awake, will amuse him, and will be fully understandable to him. I remember when I was, as it were, “trying out” for the job of lyricist on Candide, I wrote for Hellman and Bernstein a sample lyric based on a passage in Voltaire’s Candide. It was one in which some shipwrecked kings in the middle of the Atlantic were resolving to lead improved lives if rescued. One of them was saying, “I’ll find myself a humble cot and cultivate the chicken.” The man from Scarsdale would not know that “cot” could mean a cottage or little farmstead of some kind—he would associate it with the army-and-navy store, and with the bunks at summer camp. So you can’t get away with too many clever rhymes of that kind. You really do need to think all the time about the people for whom you’re writing. I always preferred to write for an imaginary, quite bright and amusable person. When you start writing for people, you’d better not be condescending or you’ll lose.

DHT: You’ve talked about the difficulty of writing verse drama, and you spent a year in New Mexico trying to write your own plays. How would you put your finger on the difficulty?

RW: I turned out to be perfectly horrible at the conception and animation of characters. I could think of all sorts of amusing lines, but I could not get any kind of human action going on the stage. I, like many poets, do not have a narrative imagination. I tend to be able to pursue an argument for a certain distance, but I’m not really a storyteller.

I was once given a test by Harry Murray at Harvard. It was called a thematic apperception test. He was asking a number of writers to take it. He put a picture in front of me and said, “Tell me what you see there.” Well, the picture I remember was several frogs sitting around a pond; behind them, a hill; over the hill, a view of a house and a chimney with some smoke coming out of it. What I said was that it interested me the way the clouds in the sky repeated the forms of the frogs. And Mr. Murray said, “Yes, but who lives in that house?” And I said, “I’m damned if I know.” The last thing I was going to do was to tell a story about that picture. But any novelist would instantly have done so.

DHT: Are there poets you admire who do demonstrate this kind of dramatic gift? Yeats, perhaps, or Eliot?

RW: It seems to me that Eliot proved in the best of his poetic plays that he had a capacity for narrative. I think Brad Leithauser does too. I can think of a number of people who have written sustained story poems which I’ve found it pleasant to read. But the most I can do in that line is to write a poem such as my “Mind-Reader,” which is a Browningesque monologue in which the speaker does go from one point to another within his life, but is much more conveying his consciousness than his story.

DHT: A major project of yours has been the translation of the verse plays of Molière and Racine. Did you conceive of the project as “corrective” or “nutritious,” either to yourself or to poetry generally?

RW: I thought it was going to do all sorts of good to translate Molière’s The Misanthrope. It’s such a wonderful play that I wanted to do it properly and make it available to our stage. Happily, it turned out that I did have a talent for that. I don’t think I was trying to improve myself in any way, but actually translating that wonderful play did have an effect on my imagination when it came to my own poems. If you work through a Molière play trying to write lines which an actor will wish to speak with conviction, and the right flavor, it’s going to make it a little more possible to write within your own range. I began to have more of a dramatic voice, and to have more of what amount to characters in my poems.

DHT: You’ve written some children’s poetry of pretty sophisticated riddling and verbal play, requiring some attention to the formation and spelling of words (to find the “pig” in “spigot,” and so on). Were these poems tested on your own children? Or did they come about only after having seen your kids go through their language acquisition?

RW: When I was a kid, I was very amused by amusable poetry. I was fond, for example, of Edward Lear from the beginning, and of all sorts of nonsense verse, and of Lewis Carroll. I loved the Alice books, and read them annually at Christmastime. So I was prepared, I guess, to write some kids’ stuff as I got older. But of course the great catalyst was my children. My children loved to have me tell them stories, and they loved to hear and recite funny poems intended for children—things like the cautionary verses of Hilaire Belloc amused them all a great deal.

Another thing I did with all my children was to play dinner-table games, and that too fed into my initial project as a children’s author. But actually, the first thing I ever did was a book called Loudmouse, which I wrote at the invitation of Louis Untermeyer for a series of books he was editing called Modern Masters Books for Children. Louis had looked around for a lot of writers who had never written for children but might be expected to do it well. My first book, a narrative about a loud-voiced mouse, was written for that series, and it included some little jingles. I got to serious writing of poetry for children with my series of poems called “Opposites.”

I said just now that when I was writing Broadway lyrics, I tried to write for an imagined person of some taste and intelligence. I found myself doing the same thing with children’s verse. I did not write down to an imagined creepy little child; I wrote up to my own children at their best, and to intelligent, lively children generally. This meant when my first Opposites book was published and reviewed in the Times, a reader wrote in and said, “I’m an adult, and I enjoyed that book. Is that all right?” I was always delighted to find there were as many adult readers as there were child readers. A woman I respected very much always kept a copy of Opposites on her bathroom cabinet—I was proud of that.

DHT: It seems there is a pastoral element in your work that has true seductive value, but on the other hand you’re scrupulous about holding the city in equal esteem. Is this a balancing act for you, or does it come naturally?

RW: I think it does come naturally. I have spent more of my life in the country than in the city. But I was born in New York City and have lived there, in Greenwich Village or elsewhere, from time to time. I’ve lived in Cambridge, a delightful town. I don’t see any reason to feel superior to city life when it comes to writing poems. I was always very happy to discover that a nature poet like William Cullen Bryant could also write quite well about the town.

I’m happiest in the country. I was brought up on a farm in New Jersey about 20 miles out of the big city, and I was about a hundred feet from a barn full of cows, and experienced every aspect of farming as I grew up. I’ve also always been a tramper in the woods. Living as I do now in one of the hill towns of northwestern Massachusetts, I find there’s lots of good material all around.

DHT: Does the farm where you grew up still exist?

RW: No. As a matter of fact, the town of North Caldwell is not in any way recognizable now. It’s been absolutely engulfed by the spreading metropolis. So I haven’t seen it for about ten years. One friend of mine still lives there. I ought to go and see him. But none of the trees I climbed are there anymore.

DHT: As a poet who works in received forms, how do you think about originality? Do you feel a responsibility to use form in original ways? Or do you think of originality as overvalued? Is it even a virtue? What does originality consist of, for you?

RW: I don’t have any interest in the repetition of the past. I regard what you just called “received forms” as so much equipment, really—that’s all that they are. I find that the use of meters, rhymes, and stanzas is a way of saying what I want to say with greater power and pleasure. I would be very troubled if people thought my book of poems had too fearfully traditional an air. I try to make every poem different from the last, and I simply use the meters and the other received, inherited formal elements to enforce what it is that I’m saying.

DHT: As fashions have come and gone, have the terms your work has been received in changed much? Do you think the criticism has gotten coarser or finer, closer to the point or farther away?

RW: Anybody who uses forms as I do is going to go in or out of fashion. When I started writing, there was a very warm reception to my poems generally, and they were cheerfully accepted on the formal side. Come the 1960s, I was suddenly very much out of fashion. So I spent a decade or more simply being defiant, and going on doing things the only way I knew how.

Now I should say there’s a revival of tolerance for so-called formal poetry, and also, many people who have gotten a bit sick of the prosaic creative-writing poem of the past few years have learned to read formal poetry with relish and understanding.

DHT: Do you feel any sense of vindication about this? Do you think it’s a temporary development?

RW: I don’t regard form as a cause, so I’m not really militant about it. One of my favorite poets of all time, who never gets tiring for me, is William Carlos Williams. I can’t imagine lining myself up against him, or against any school of writers presumably descended from him. Free verse is awfully hard to write, but I much admire it when somebody can do it well, as most people cannot.

DHT: Elsewhere, talking about William Carlos Williams, you’ve indicated the affinity both of you have for things and objects, and how both of you avoid approaching the spiritual through the immaterial or the abstract. How do you approach airier poets who do approach the spiritual in this fashion? Do they hold any interest for you?

RW: I daresay I could think a bit and come up with a list of poets who seem to me not very much in touch with the concrete world but [who] nevertheless have power. Yeats is rather that way, really. If you look around in Yeats hoping for a good description of something, you’ll look all day. It’s mostly something else—a form of poetry rather close to the incantatory and oratorical, which I find quite wonderful sometimes.

I shall make Yeats my champion of the abstract.

DHT: In 1974 someone asked you where you thought poetry would be in the year 2000, and you replied that you saw “no one powerful style prevailing or developing,” and you spoke somewhat ruefully of the development of a marketplace where work is accorded space according to how easy or difficult it is to classify. Would you say time has borne out this prediction?

RW: I do think that development is tiresome. No really good poet is describable in terms of his school affiliations. I do think that when people begin to put together anthologies in that spirit, they include a lot of inferior work by association, and neglect much that is more original.

I’m not aware, really, of our present poetic scene consisting of a lot of schools. Do you see it that way?

DHT: It seems more fragmented than it was several decades ago, but maybe I’m mistaken.

Are there developments over the past 30, 40, 50 years that have surprised you, ones you would not have been able to predict?

RW: That’s a tough one. I guess that when surprises happen, it’s the emergence of some unpredictably good talent that excites me. I can’t think very well in terms of what people call “the condition of poetry in America.” There are doubtless distinguishable trends, but I don’t see them. I tend to see the individual book as it comes, and rejoice or not.

DHT: Another phenomenon you’ve been able to observe for a long period of time is the entry of poets into the universities. As a social experiment, would you call it a success? Where do you think this experiment stands now, relative to where it did when you were starting your career?

RW: Certainly when I was starting, it was relatively rare for there to be poets working in the English departments of this country. Ridgeley Torrence had done it, Robert Frost had done it, David Morton was doing it at Amherst when I was an undergraduate. But of course there’s been a runaway development of this, together with the establishment of creative writing courses, MFAs, and so on. Anything of this kind is going to be both good and bad. Don Justice spent a very good part of his life running creative writing classes, and if so marvelous a poet as that found it a lively thing to do—I know that he conveyed his liveliness to a certain number of his students—it must have been good.

I have my negative thoughts about the phenomenon too. It seems to me that it has made for a lax, undemanding kind of poem: prosaic, personal, unambitious, and formless. That has been the period style for a bit too long, though that seems to be changing. There are other negative things one could say about poetry camping in the university, but if what poets need is an encounter with life in general, I think it’s still to be had.

DHT: Your most recent teaching appointment was when?

RW: I retired from Smith College in 1986, I think. Because I enjoyed teaching subject-matter courses as well as doing the creative writing sort of thing, I find that I’m sometimes frustrated by the unavailability of persons to whom I can tell the truth about Milton’s “Lycidas,” for example. Every now and then I want to corner people and give them the cold dope on the authors whom I most enjoy teaching.

But on the whole, I find that I’m quite busy enough. At the moment I’m translating Corneille’s extraordinary play L’Illusion Comique. I’m on line 902 of it and forging forward every day. I do that when a poem doesn’t come and insist on being written. And all of that pretty well fills my days.

DHT: Discussions of poets’ work tend to fall into ruts, where the same three or four poems are discussed again and again. Is there a poem of yours that you would like to draw attention to, a poem that you feel has not received adequate notice?

RW: There’s a poem of mine called “Lying” that has had some good attention, but I like it better all the time, and so I hope that people who are at all interested in me will have a look at that one. When I read that poem to an audience, I always tell them that when I showed it first to my wife, she said, “Well, you’ve done it. At last you’ve done it. You’ve written a poem that’s unintelligible from beginning to end.” And it is a tough one in the sense that it’s full of riffing similes and metaphors, and indeed that’s what the poem is about: it’s about resemblances between things, and the idea that all things are ultimately of one nature.

But when I persuaded my wife to reread that poem, she said, “Well, yes. It’s clear now. Busy, but clear.” And I think a number of people have found it so.

DHT: One last question I’ve been dying to ask. In your poem “Walking to Sleep,” there is the passage “What you must manage is to bring to mind / A landscape not worth looking at, some bleak / Champaign at dead November’s end.” I just moved to Champaign, Illinois, last year—is this the Champaign you’re talking about?

RW: [laughs] It’s the same word, but it has a different flavor in the poem—I take a positive view of Champaign, Illinois.

This particular Champaign, in “Walking to Sleep,” is intended to be a part, I suppose, of a strategy of emotional avoidance. The poem begins by trying to bore oneself to sleep, and then, halfway through, it takes a more contagious and courageous view of things. But I’m getting incoherent.

DHT: What was the genesis of that poem? Was there insomnia involved?

RW: Ever since my childhood I’ve been interested in my dreams, and sometimes kept a book in which I wrote them down. So finally, out of many, many years of dreaming, and some years of having insomnia, I decided to make dreaming the whole subject of the poem.

Of course, one of the theses of the poem is that the way you dream will be an indication of the way you take the world as a whole, the way you take this world and the next. And so it is, rather at some length, an account of two strategies for going to sleep. It ends by proposing [that] you go to sleep courageous.


Originally Published: April 18, 2006

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

ESSAY
How Words Fail
Does language reflect the world? Or is it a distorting mirror that never gets reality straight?

BY CATHY PARK HONG
I always felt an anxiety about language, an anxiety that grew more pronounced when I began writing poetry. I rationalized this anxiety by rolling out the immigrant truisms. Growing up, I had to negotiate the yawning gap between speaking Korean at home and battling it out in the schoolyard with my faltering English (for a while, my flimsy arsenal was “You shut up!” for every imaginative invective hurled at me). I thought the English language was a tricky, trap-filled activity I had to somehow master like squash or table tennis. Nabokov once called English “an artificial, stiffish thing” and wrote, “If Russian was his music, English was his murder”; yet he wrote some of the most exquisite prose in the English language. I am no persecuted exile, however, but a pampered second-generation American whose childhood difficulties with English nonetheless left their indelible mark.

When professors first introduced the craft of poetry to me, I felt like Leonard Zelig, Woody Allen’s chameleon-man, who appropriated the behavior of whomever was around him. “Write about your family experience! Write about what is true to you,” one dramatic poetry professor told me in his office, and then gave me poems by Asian American poets who sounded exactly like Sharon Olds. I tried to compose clear, confessional gems but thought of them as interesting exercises in imitation. When the professor looked at them, he told me I was beginning to find a voice. “Whose voice?” I asked. “Yours!” he announced, and the meeting was over.

“Finding your voice” is a familiar workshop trope, one that assumes poetry is an expression of an authentic self. I was asked to write in natural, plainspoken speech (none of which felt natural or plain to me), and this teacher mistook the result as me. He embraced the principle that a poem represents a person who is a unified whole, and that the syntax of the poem is a window to the person’s, or writer’s, mind. The professor’s assumptions proved only that I was a damn good mimic.

My teacher’s concept of “the voice” is shared by many poets, including Adrian Blevins, who wrote an essay about the music of sentences for PoetryFoundation.org. She opines that the sentence structure of a poem gives us a clear diagnosis of the poet’s mind. In her reading of John Berryman’s “Dream Song 29,” she writes, “The ungrammatical . . . excerpt produces the emotional effects of an anxious or scattered psyche.” She sees a direct correlation between Berryman’s progressively unraveling mind and his unraveling syntax, concluding, “It’s interesting to note that Berryman began playing with syntax as a young man, when he was still, as far as anyone can determine, happy enough. As his life becomes more and more pressured . . . he becomes more and more serious and seems to lose, as a result, the sense of daring syntactical play. . . . It is therefore possible to speculate that Berryman’s suicide was at least partly the result of a loss of his syntactical distinctiveness.”

Blevins believes in a causal relationship between the author’s psychological state and the author’s syntactical choices, asserting that Berryman’s “loss of syntactical distinctiveness” helped lead to his own suicide. If we are to follow this logic, how to explain Hart Crane, who offed himself yet wrote poetry that is syntactically distinct? Or Sylvia Plath, who was at the top of her syntactic game when she shoved her head in the oven? Or that many poets today are happy on antidepressants yet write syntactically dull poetry? Blevins also observes that the sentences of Gertrude Stein and certain “post-post-post-postmodernists” are “stark raving mad,” implying that the poets must obviously be bonkers.

Blevins says that the poetic “sentence” is a unit for “talk” and that “talk” is the essence of the poet’s authentic being. I, however, cannot shake the belief that English is “an artificial, stiffish thing” and was grateful to discover Stein and a whole lineage of poets, in particular the Language poets, such as Lyn Hejinian and Ron Silliman, who pretty much thought the same. Their poetry emphasizes the materiality of language rather than language as transparent conduit for soulmaking. They asserted that the “I” in the poem is really a fabrication of the self rather than a direct mirror of the author’s psyche. As Hejinian once wrote, “One is not oneself, one is several, incomplete, and subject to dispersal.” From these ideas, the Language poets stylistically formed their own versions of what poet Ron Silliman dubbed the “new sentence”: poetic lines that are syntactically fractured, purposefully atonal, averse to the first person.

Ultimately, though, I was more drawn to poets who severed syntax out of a sense of cultural or political displacement rather than for the sake of experimentation. History and circumstance alienated these poets from their own language, placed them in the margins of their cultures, where they were witness to language’s limits in articulating a cohesive voice. Through deliberate inarticulation, they managed to strain out a charged music from syntactic chaff, a music borne out of negation. The poet I have most in mind is Paul Celan.

Celan’s relationship with the German language was tortured and ambivalent. Son of Jewish parents, he lived in Romania and grew up speaking German and Yiddish, Hebrew, Romanian, and Russian. When the German forces conquered Romania, they deported Celan’s parents to the concentration camps. Because his German mother tongue was also the language of his parents’ murderers, Celan wrestled with it in his poetry, a tension evident in the fissures, elisions, and neologisms of his poems. From these ruptures, Celan sutured a composition that radiates a haunting and terrifying music. To wit:

No one kneads us again out of earth and clay,
no one incants our dust.
No one.

Blessed art thou, No one.
In thy sight would
we bloom.
In thy
spite.

A Nothing
We were, are now, and ever
shall be, blooming:
the Nothing-, the
No-One’s-Rose.

With
Our pistil soul-bright
Our stamen heaven-waste,
Our corolla red
From the purpleword we sang
Over, O over
The thorn.
The repetition in “Psalm” creates a propulsive cadence. The poem begins with a negation of Genesis. The recurrence of “No one,” a reference to God (or his absence), creates a tonally hammering antiprayer as it denies Creation. “Blessed art thou” is negated by the thudding absence of “No one.” “No one” becomes “Nothing” and then returns as “No-One’s Rose.” The song, driven by absence, ends somewhat redemptively, as the flowering song or the word sings “over” the imagery of suffering, Christ’s thorn. Yet the singing is also fractured—the invocatory “O” in the line “Over, O over” is a hesitant break in cadence. Driven by spiritual necessity, the music of Celan’s poetry is both brutal and brutalized.

Like Celan, the poet John Taggart entwines the music of his linguistic experiments with a deep spiritual sensibility. Son of a Methodist clergyman, Taggart was born in Guthrie Center, Iowa, in 1942 and spent most of his childhood within the church culture. He equates “poem as gospel service,” positing that poetry should have a spiritual power that can be wrought from its own music. But Taggart is no traditional lyricist. His “voice” is not a stand-in for the self. His ultimate goal is to turn the poem into what he calls a “sound object,” where words cease to be metaphor and become part and parcel a compositional score.

Deeply influenced by the experimental music composer and writer John Cage and Objectivist poets such as George Oppen and Louis Zukofsky, Taggart incants through the “silence of the gaps” that surround the unadorned word. His words are mortarless, often unbound by clauses or punctuation. Rather than isolated poems, Taggart composes poetic variations that are circular, repetitive, and serial. In fact, his largest collection of poems, Loop,is aptly titled since his poetry obsessively returns to a set of nouns in different arrangements, as if each poem is a remix of the previous one. “Nativity,” for instance, scrolls down as if it were enacting a feverish sermon:

If you kneel
sender will teach
will teach you
here’s a sender
no bright harness
still a sender
if you kneel
will teach you
teach the shout.
But Taggart does not completely abandon content. Like Celan’s work, Taggart’s poetry can be read within a cultural-political context. Here is an excerpt from “Twenty-one Times,” Taggart’s most explicit poem about Vietnam and his own version of Wallace Stevens’s“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”:

4
Napalm: soap will not wash the word out
The word breaks through partitions and outer-walls
Breakthrough of cells of the word in the mouth.

5
Napalm: the heart rubbed and smeared with soap
The young heart is soiled with fire
Soap cannot cleanse the soiling of the fire.

6
Napalm: why the child caught on fire
The itching as of creatures for possession of words
Glitter for self and nation.
The repeated incantation “napalm” is an attempt at exorcism, as if to cleanse the horrors associated with napalm. But despite the attempt to “wash” it out, the word grows cancerously: “Breakthrough of cells of the word in the mouth.” As in many of Taggart’s other poems, the nouns in “Twenty-one Times” are reshuffled, and each time a noun is reintroduced, its associations become progressively menacing: “the young heart is soiled with fire” leads to “why the child caught on fire.” As the poem’s inexorable momentum builds to a frightening pitch, “napalm” as a word metastasizes inside the mouth, until poem’s end: “Napalm: speak and the word glows and plays / speak and suffer torment for love / because of you no one will have to write the word down.”

Celan and Taggart have created a distinctly haunting and astonishing music through solecisms and hesitations, through the broken sentence. For them, the disassociation of voice from language is not just a philosophical choice. It is also political. The voice is not always a freeing form of self-expression. It can prove to be a difficult transaction, a construction of fragments, as much conflicted demurral as actual communication, as much about what is unspeakable as about what is speakable.

Originally Published: July 31, 2006
Visit Harriet—the Poetry Foundation blog.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/178440
ESSAY
A Biblical Blast of Rage
At a reading for New School students, Frank Bidart is greeted like a god.

BY JAMES MARCUS
For his June reading at Manhattan’s The New School, Frank Bidart was dressed from head to toe in black. This puritanical garb, combined with Bidart’s high forehead, pointy nose, and shock of gray hair, suggested a chic version of Ichabod Crane. Yet Bidart, who was participating in the school’s Summer Writers Colony program, warmed to his audience at once. As well he might: the 30 or so people in the room had already spent three classroom sessions studying his latest collection, Star Dust: Poems, which was nominated for the 2005 National Book Award. Now, after an ecstatic introduction by Dan Chiasson (who called Star Dust one of the “half dozen greatest books of poetry published in my lifetime”), the poet was here in the flesh. He began by taking requests from the crowd.

“Do the third passage from ‘The Third Hour of the Night’!” insisted one admirer. Bidart promised to get around to it. To break the ice, however, he read some shorter lyrics from the first half of Star Dust, including “For the Twentieth Century,” “Young Marx,” “For Bill Nestrick,” and “Advice to the Players,” which he characterized as “a manifesto written by somebody who doesn’t believe in manifestos.” The poet had an urgent platform manner: he shook his fist or made sculpting motions at the audience, many of whom were following along in their own, black-jacketed editions of the book. Except for the girl in front of me, nervously wiggling her heart-shaped ring on and off her finger, the crowd was motionless and rapt. They applauded warmly when Bidart broke off for some Q-and-A. Then a student asked him to continue reading with “The Curse,” which represents something of a departure for the metaphysically inclined poet.

Noting the influence of Robert Lowell—who, Bidart said, wrote about current events without turning them into “disposable poetry”—he read the poem, a biblical blast of rage directed at the 9/11 hijackers: “May what you have made descend upon you.” Next he discussed a signal irony. When this rare venture into public verse appeared in the Threepenny Review in April 2002, it got him into hot water with pundit-for-all-seasons Andrew Sullivan, who interpreted it as condemnation of the victims. There was a certain amount of online skirmishing as the poet’s fans rode to his defense. And did Bidart himself fire back at Sullivan? “I wasn’t online at the time,” he explained—a perplexing notion for his twentysomething audience. “But I did eventually send him a respectful note.”

As promised, Bidart read some passages from “The Third Hour of the Night.” This is the latest installment of a massive enterprise he began in 1990, borrowing structural elements from the inscriptions on the sarcophagus of Seti I. Earlier episodes of this insomniac’s delight dealt with phenomenology and eros. This time around, the poet has explored the creative impulse, along with its paradoxical links to power and violence. (The sequence concludes with a rape scene that would make Quentin Tarantino blanch.)

The generational divide surfaced once again as the discussion turned to the title poem of Bidart’s latest collection, with its uncharacteristic opulence of language. Bidart confessed his distaste for such verbal filigree: “There’s a false luxuriousness in some poems that is a kind of alcohol.” In “Star Dust,” surely one of his finest creations, Bidart serves up some intoxicants of his own. But the problem, it soon became clear, was one of cultural allusion: few students were familiar with the Hoagy Carmichael standard “Stardust,” whose mood of nostalgic reverie the poem inverts like a photographic negative. (Bidart called “Stardust” a “summit” of American popular music and indicated his preference for Nat King Cole’s ethereal version.) Nor did they pick up the nod to Sam Cooke’s “Touch the Hem of His Garment.”



“There’s a false luxuriousness in some poems that is a kind of alcohol.”

^^^^^^ Which is distasteful to me and I have done my damn-best to never include in my poems, to any degree beyond what is necessary for the poem's message to be true and on score.
A pinch of slat tis ok methinks ,but adding in cupfuls detract from the message,the heart and the soul of a poem!-Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/178489
ESSAY
For the Sake of People’s Poetry
Walt Whitman and the Rest of Us.

BY JUNE JORDAN
In America, the father is white; it is he who inaugurated the experiment of this republic. It is he who sailed his way into slave ownership and who availed himself of my mother—that African woman whose function was miserable—defined by his desirings, or his rage. It is he who continues to dominate the destiny of the Mississippi River, the Blue Ridge Mountains, and the life of my son. Understandably, then, I am curious about this man.

Most of the time my interest can be characterized as wary, at best. Other times, it is the interest a pedestrian feels for the fast traveling truck about to smash into him. Or her. Again. And at other times it is the curiosity of a stranger trying to figure out the system of the language that excludes her name and all of the names of all of her people. It is this last that leads me to the poet Walt Whitman.

Trying to understand the system responsible for every boring, inaccessible, irrelevant, derivative and pretentious poem that is glued to the marrow of required readings in American classrooms, or trying to understand the system responsible for the exclusion of every hilarious, amazing, visionary, pertinent and unforgettable poet from National Endowment of the Arts grants and from national publications, I come back to Walt Whitman.

What in the hell happened to him? Wasn’t he a white man? Wasn’t he some kind of a father to American literature? Didn’t he talk about this New World? Didn’t he see it? Didn’t he sing this New World, this America, on a New World, an American scale of his own visionary invention?

It so happens that Walt Whitman is the one white father who shares the systematic disadvantages of his heterogeneous offspring trapped inside a closet that is, in reality, as huge as the continental spread of North and South America. What Whitman envisioned, we, the people and the poets of the New World, embody. He has been punished for the moral questions that our very lives arouse.

At home as a child, I learned the poetry of the Bible and the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar. As a student, I diligently followed orthodox directions from The Canterbury Tales right through The Wasteland by that consummate Anglophile whose name I can never remember. And I kept waiting. It was, I thought, all right to deal with daffodils in the 17th century of an island as much like Manhattan as I resemble Queen Mary. But what about Dunbar? When was he coming up again? And where were the Black poets, altogether? And who were the women poets I might reasonably emulate? And wasn’t there, ever, a great poet who was crazy about Brooklyn or furious about war? And I kept waiting. And I kept writing my own poetry. And I kept reading apparently underground poetry: poetry kept strictly off campus. I kept reading the poetry of so many gifted students when I became a teacher. I kept listening to the wonderful poetry of the multiplying numbers of my friends who were and who are New World poets until I knew, for a fact, that there was and that there is an American, a New World poetry that is as personal, as public, as irresistible, as quick, as necessary, as unprecedented, as representative, as exalted, as speakably commonplace, and as musical as an emergency phone call.

But I didn’t know about Walt Whitman. Yes, I had heard about this bohemian, this homosexual, even, who wrote something about The Captain and The Lilacs in The Hallway, but nobody ever told me to read his work! Not only was Whitman not required reading, he was, on the contrary, presented as a rather hairy buffoon suffering from a childish proclivity for exercise and open air.

Nevertheless, it is through the study of the poems and the ideas of this particular white father that I have reached a tactical, if not strategic, understanding of the racist, sexist, and anti-American predicament that condemns most New World writing to peripheral/unpublished manuscript status.

Before these United States came into being, the great poets of the world earned their lustre through undeniable forms of spontaneous popularity; generations of a people chose to memorize and then to further elaborate these songs and to impart them to the next generation. I am talking about people; African families and Greek families and the families of the Hebrew tribes and all that multitude to whom the Bhagavad-Gita is as daily as the sun! If these poems were not always religious, they were certainly moral in notice, or in accomplishment, or both. None of these great poems would be mistaken for the poetry of another country, another time. You do not find a single helicopter taking off or landing in any of the sonnets of Elizabethan England, nor do you run across rice and peas in any of the psalms! Evidently, one criterion for great poetry used to be the requirements of cultural nationalism.

But by the advent of the thirty-six year old poet, Walt Whitman, the phenomenon of a people’s poetry, or great poetry and its spontaneous popularity, could no longer be assumed. The physical immensity and the farflung population of this New World decisively separated poets from suitable means to produce and distribute their poetry. Now there would have to be intermediaries—critics and publishers—whose marketplace principles of scarcity would, logically, oppose them to populist traditions of art.

Old World concepts would replace the democratic and these elitist notions would prevail; in the context of such considerations, an American literary establishment antithetical to the New World meanings of America took root. And this is one reason why the pre-eminently American white father of American poetry exists primarily in the realm of caricature and rumor in his own country.

As a matter of fact, if you hope to hear about Whitman your best bet is to leave home. Ignore prevailing American criticism and, instead, ask anybody anywhere else in the world this question: As Shakespeare is to England, Dante to Italy, Tolstoy to Russia, Goethe to Germany, Aghostino Neto to Angola, Pablo Neruda to Chile, Mao-Tse-Tung to China, and Ho Chi Minh to Vietnam, who is the great American writer, the distinctively American poet, the giant American “literatus?” Undoubtedly, the answer will be Walt Whitman.

He is the poet who wrote:
A man’s body at auction
(For before the war I often go to the slave-mart and watch the sale.)
I help the auctioneer, the sloven does not half know his business. . .
Gentlemen look on this wonder.
Whatever the bids of the bidders they cannot be high enough for it. (1)
I ask you, today: Who in the United States would publish those lines? They are all wrong! In the first place there is nothing obscure, nothing contrived, nothing an ordinary strap-hanger in the subway would be puzzled by! In the second place, the voice of those lines is intimate and direct, at once; it is the voice of the poet who assumes that he speaks to an equal and that he need not fear that equality. On the contrary, the intimate distance between the poet and the reader is a distance that assumes there is everything important, between them, to be shared. And what is poetic about a line of words that runs as long as a regular, a spoken idea? You could more easily imagine an actual human being speaking such lines than you could imagine an artist composing them in a room carefully separated from the real life of his family. This can’t be poetry! Besides, these lines apparently serve an expressly moral purpose! Then is this didactic/political writing? Aha! This cannot be good poetry. And, in fact, you will never see, for example, The New Yorker Magazine publishing a poem marked by such splendid deficiencies.

Consider the inevitable, the irresistible, simplicity of that enormous moral idea:
Gentlemen look on this wonder.
Whatever the bids of the bidders they cannot be high enough for it . . .
This is not only one man, this the father of those who shall be fathers
in their turns
In him the start of populous states and rich republics, Of him count-
less immortal lives with countless embodiments and enjoyments
Crucial and obviously important and, hence, this is not an idea generally broadcast: the poet is trying to save a human being while even the poem cannot be saved from the insolence of marketplace evaluation!

Indeed Whitman and the traceable descendants of Walt Whitman, those who follow his democratic faith into obviously New World forms of experience and art, they suffer from establishment rejection and contempt the same as forced this archetypal American genius to publish, distribute, and review his own work, by himself. The descendants I have in mind include those unmistakeably contemporaneous young poets who base themselves upon domesticities such as disco, Las Vegas, MacDonalds, and $40 running shoes. Also within the Whitman tradition, Black and First World* poets traceably transform and further the egalitarian sensibility that isolates that one white father from his more powerful compatriots. I am thinking of the feminist poets evidently intent upon speaking with a maximal number and diversity of other Americans' lives. I am thinking of all the many first rank heroes of the New World who are overwhelmingly forced to publish their own works using a hand press, or whatever, or else give it up entirely.

That is to say, the only peoples who can test or verify the meaning of the United States as a democratic state, as a pluralistic culture, these are the very peoples whose contribution to a national vision and discovery meets with steadfast ridicule and disregard.

A democratic state does not, after all, exist for the few, but for the many. A democratic state is not proven by the welfare of the strong but by the welfare of the weak. And unless that many, that manifold constitution of diverse peoples can be seen as integral to the national art/the national consciousness, you might as well mean only Czechoslovakia when you talk about the USA, or only Ireland, or merely France, or exclusively white men.

Pablo Neruda is a New World poet whose fate differs from the other Whitman descendants because he was born into a country where the majority of the citizens did not mistake themselves for Englishmen or long to find themselves struggling, at most, with cucumber sandwiches and tea. He was never European. His anguish was not aroused by thee piece suits and rolled umbrellas. When he cries, towards the conclusion of The Heights of Machu Picchu, “Arise and birth with me, my brother,” (2) he plainly does not allude to Lord or Colonel Anybody At All. As he writes earlier, in that amazing poem:
I came by another way, river by river, street after street,
city by city, one bed and another,
forcing the salt of my mask through a wilderness;
and there, in the shame of the ultimate hovels, lampless
and tireless,
lacking bread or a stone or a stillness, alone in myself,
I whirled at my will, dying the death that was mine (3)
Of course Neruda has not escaped all of the untoward consequences common to Whitman descendants. American critics and translators never weary of asserting that Neruda is a quote great unquote poet despite the political commitment of his art and despite the artistic consequences of the commitment. Specifically, Neruda’s self-conscious decision to write in a manner readily comprehensible to the masses of his countrymen, and his self-conscious decision to specify, outright, the United Fruit Company when that was the instigating subject of his poem, become unfortunate moments in an otherwise supposedly sublime, not to mention surrealist, deeply Old World and European but nonetheless Chilean case history. To assure the validity of this perspective, the usual American critic and translator presents you with a smattering of the unfortunate, ostensibly political poetry and, on the other hand, buries you under volumes of Neruda’s early work that antedates the Spanish Civil War or, in other words, that antedates Neruda’s serious conversion to a political world view.

This kind of artistically indefensible censorship would have you perceive qualitative and even irreconcilable differences between the poet who wrote:
You, my antagonist, in that splintering dream
like the bristling glass of gardens, like a menace of ruinous bells, volleys
of blackening ivy at the perfume’s center,
enemy of the great hipbones my skin has touched
with a harrowing dew (4)
And the poet who wrote, some twenty years later, these lines from the poem entitled “The Dictators”:
Lament was perpetual and fell, like a plant and its pollen,
forcing a lightless increase in the blinded, big leaves
And bludgeon by bludgeon, on the terrible waters,
scale over scale in the bog,
the snout filled with silence and slime
and vendetta was born (5)
According to prevalent American criticism, that later poem of Neruda represents a lesser achievement precisely because it can be understood by more people, more easily, than the first. It is also derogated because this poem attacks a keystone of the Old World, namely dictatorship or, in other words, power and privilege for the few.

The peculiar North American vendetta against Walt Whitman, against the first son of this democratic union, can be further fathomed if you look at some facts: Neruda’s eminence is now acknowledged on international levels; it is known to encompass profound impact upon North American poets who do not realize the North American/Walt Whitman origins for so much that is singular and worthy in the poetry of Neruda. You will even find American critics who congratulate Neruda for overcoming the “Whitmanesque” content of his art. This perfidious arrogance is as calculated as it is common. You cannot persuade anyone seriously familiar with Neruda’s life and art that he could have found cause, at any point, to disagree with the tenets, the analysis and the authentic New World vision presented by Walt Whitman in his essay, Democratic Vistas, which remains the most signal and persuasive manifesto of New World thinking and belief in print.

Let me define my terms, in brief: New World does not mean New England. New World means non-European; it means new; it means big; it means heterogenous; it means unknown; it means free; it means an end to feudalism, caste, privilege, and the violence of power. It means wild in the sense that a tree growing away from the earth enacts a wild event. It means democratic in the sense that, as Whitman wrote:
I believe a leaf of grass is no less than
the journey-work of the stars. . .
And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger
sextillions of infidels (6)
New World means that, as Whitman wrote, “I keep as delicate around the bowels as around the head and heart.” New World means, as Whitman said, “By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms.”

In Democratic Vistas, Whitman declared,
As the greatest lessons of Nature through the universe are perhaps the lessons of variety and freedom, the same present the greatest lessons also in New World politics and progress . . . Sole among nationalities, these States have assumed the task to put in forms of history, power and practicality, on areas of amplitude rivaling the operations of the physical kosmos, the moral political speculations of ages, long, long deffer’d, the democratic republican principle, and the theory of development and perfection by voluntary standards and self reliance.
Listen to this white father; he is so weird! Here he is calling aloud for an American, a democratic spirit. An American, a democratic idea that could morally constrain and coordinate the material body of USA affluence and piratical outreach, more than a hundred years ago he wrote,
The great poems, Shakespeare included, are poisonous to the idea of the pride and dignity of the common people, the lifeblood of democracy. The models of our literature, as we get it from other lands, ultra marine, have had their birth in courts, and bask’d and grown in castle sunshine; all smells of princes’ favors ... Do you call those genteel little creatures American poets? Do you term that perpetual, pistareen, paste-pot work, American art, American drama, taste, verse? ... We see the sons and daughters of The New World, ignorant of its genius, not yet inaugurating the native, the universal, and the near, still importing the distant, the partial, the dead.
Abhorring the “thin sentiment of parlors, parasols, piano-song, tinkling rhymes,” Whitman conjured up a poetry of America, a poetry of democracy which would not “mean the smooth walks, trimm’d hedges, poseys and nightingales of the English poets, but the whole orb, with its geologic history, the Kosmos, carrying fire and snow that rolls through the illimitable areas, light as a feather, though weighing billions of tons.”

Well, what happened?

Whitman went ahead and wrote the poetry demanded by his vision. He became, by thousands upon thousands of words, a great American poet:
There was a child went forth every day,
And the first object he look’d upon, that object he became,
And that object became part of him for the day
Or a certain part of the day,
Or for many years or stretching cycles of years
The early lilacs became part of this child,
And grass and white and red morning-glories,
and white and red clover, and the song of the phoebe-bird. . . (7)
And, elsewhere, he wrote:
It avails not, time nor place—distance avails not,
I am with you, you men and women of a generation,
or ever some many generations hence,
Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky,
so I felt,
Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd,
Just as you are refresh’d by the gladness of the river
and the bright flow, I was refresh’d,
Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet
hurry with the swift current, I stood yet was hurried,
Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships and the
thick-stemm’d pipes of steamboats,
I look’d. . . (8)
This great American poet of democracy as cosmos, this poet of a continent as consciousness, this poet of the many people as one people, this poet of diction comprehensible to all, of a vision insisting on each, of a rhythm/a rhetorical momentum to transport the reader from the Brooklyn ferry into the hills of Alabama and back again, of line after line of bodily, concrete detail that constitutes the mysterious the cellular tissue of a nation indivisible but dependent upon and astonishing in its diversity, this white father of a great poetry deprived of its spontaneous popularity/a great poetry hidden away from the ordinary people it celebrates so well, he has been, again and again, cast aside as an undisciplined poseur, a merely freak eruption of prolix perversities.

Last year, the New York Times Book Review saw fit to import a European self-appointed critic of American literature to address the question: Is there a great American poet? Since this visitor was ignorant of the philosophy and the achievements of Walt Whitman, the visitor, Denis Donoghue, comfortably excluded every possible descendent of Whitman from his erstwhile cerebrations. Only one woman was mentioned (she, needless to add, did not qualify). No poets under fifty, and not one Black or First World poet received even cursory assessment. Not one poet of distinctively New World values, and their formal embodiment, managed to dent the suavity of Donoghue’s public display.

This New York Times event perpetuated American habits of beggarly, absurd deference to the Old World. And these habits bespeak more than marketplace intrusions into cultural realms. We erase ourselves through self hatred. We lend our silence to the American anti-American process whereby anything and anyone special to this nation state becomes liable to condemnation because it is what it is, truly.

Against self hatred there is Whitman and there are all of the New World poets who insistently devise legitimate varieties of cultural nationalism. There is Whitman and all of the poets whose lives have been baptized by witness to blood, by witness to cataclysmic, political confrontations from the Civil War through the Civil Rights Era, through the Women’s Movement, and on and on through the conflicts between the hungry and the well-fed, the wasteful, the bullies.

In the poetry of the New World, you meet with a reverence for the material world that begins with a reverence for human life. There is an intellectual trust in sensuality as a means of knowledge, an easily deciphered system of reference, aspirations to a believable, collective voice and, consequently, emphatic preference for broadly accessible, spoken language. Deliberately balancing perception with vision, it seeks to match moral exhortation with sensory report.

All of the traceable descendants of Whitman have met with an establishment, academic reception disgracefully identical; except for the New World poets who live and write beyond the boundaries of the USA, the offspring of this one white father encounter everlasting marketplace disparagement as crude or optional or simplistic or, as Whitman himself wrote “hankering, gross, mystical, nude.”

I too am a descendant of Walt Whitman. And I am not by myself struggling to tell the truth about this history of so much land and so much blood, of so much that should be sacred and so much that has been desecrated and annihilated boastfully.

My brothers and my sisters of this New World, we remember that, as Whitman said,
I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate
itself or be understood,
I see that the elementary laws never apologize (9)
We do not apologize that we are not Emily Dickinson, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Robert Lowell, and Elizabeth Bishop. Or, as Whitman exclaimed, “I exist as I am, that is enough.”

New World poetry moves into and beyond the lives of Walt Whitman, Pablo Neruda, Aghostino Neto, Gabriela Mistral, Langston Hughes, and Margaret Walker. I follow this movement with my own life. I am calm and smiling as we go. Is it not written, somewhere very near to me:
A man’s body at auction . . .
Gentlemen look on this wonder.
Whatever the bids of the bidders
they cannot be high enough for it . . .
And didn’t that weird white father predict this truth that is always growing:
I swear to you the architects shall appear without fail,
I swear to you they will understand you and justify you,
The greatest among them shall be he who best knows you
and encloses all and is faithful to all,
He and rest shall not forget you, they shall
perceive that you are not an iota less than they,
You shall be fully glorified in them (10)
Walt Whitman and all of the New World poets coming after him, we, too, go on singing this America.


*Given that they were first to exist on the planet and currently make up the majority, the author will refer to that part of the population usually termed Third World as the First World.

Notes

1. from “I Sing the Body Electric,” by Walt Whitman
2. from Section XII of The Heights of Macho Picchu, translated by Nathaniel Tarn, Farrar Straus and Giroux: New York
3. from The Heights of Macho Picchu, translated by Ben Bolitt, Evergreen Press
4. from “Woes and the Furies,” by Pablo Neruda in Selected Poems of Neruda, translated by Ben Bolitt, p. 101
5. Ibid. “The Dictators,” p. 161
6. from “Song of Myself” by Walt Whitman
7. from “There was a Child Went Forth” by Walt Whitman
8. from “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”
9. from “Song of Myself”
10. from “Song of the Rolling Earth”

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

ESSAY
For the Sake of People’s Poetry
Walt Whitman and the Rest of Us.

BY JUNE JORDAN
In America, the father is white; it is he who inaugurated the experiment of this republic. It is he who sailed his way into slave ownership and who availed himself of my mother—that African woman whose function was miserable—defined by his desirings, or his rage. It is he who continues to dominate the destiny of the Mississippi River, the Blue Ridge Mountains, and the life of my son. Understandably, then, I am curious about this man.

Most of the time my interest can be characterized as wary, at best. Other times, it is the interest a pedestrian feels for the fast traveling truck about to smash into him. Or her. Again. And at other times it is the curiosity of a stranger trying to figure out the system of the language that excludes her name and all of the names of all of her people. It is this last that leads me to the poet Walt Whitman.

Trying to understand the system responsible for every boring, inaccessible, irrelevant, derivative and pretentious poem that is glued to the marrow of required readings in American classrooms, or trying to understand the system responsible for the exclusion of every hilarious, amazing, visionary, pertinent and unforgettable poet from National Endowment of the Arts grants and from national publications, I come back to Walt Whitman.

What in the hell happened to him? Wasn’t he a white man? Wasn’t he some kind of a father to American literature? Didn’t he talk about this New World? Didn’t he see it? Didn’t he sing this New World, this America, on a New World, an American scale of his own visionary invention?

It so happens that Walt Whitman is the one white father who shares the systematic disadvantages of his heterogeneous offspring trapped inside a closet that is, in reality, as huge as the continental spread of North and South America. What Whitman envisioned, we, the people and the poets of the New World, embody. He has been punished for the moral questions that our very lives arouse.

At home as a child, I learned the poetry of the Bible and the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar. As a student, I diligently followed orthodox directions from The Canterbury Tales right through The Wasteland by that consummate Anglophile whose name I can never remember. And I kept waiting. It was, I thought, all right to deal with daffodils in the 17th century of an island as much like Manhattan as I resemble Queen Mary. But what about Dunbar? When was he coming up again? And where were the Black poets, altogether? And who were the women poets I might reasonably emulate? And wasn’t there, ever, a great poet who was crazy about Brooklyn or furious about war? And I kept waiting. And I kept writing my own poetry. And I kept reading apparently underground poetry: poetry kept strictly off campus. I kept reading the poetry of so many gifted students when I became a teacher. I kept listening to the wonderful poetry of the multiplying numbers of my friends who were and who are New World poets until I knew, for a fact, that there was and that there is an American, a New World poetry that is as personal, as public, as irresistible, as quick, as necessary, as unprecedented, as representative, as exalted, as speakably commonplace, and as musical as an emergency phone call.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(1.) Excerpt below taken from full body of previous text in my previous post..-Tyr

Pablo Neruda is a New World poet whose fate differs from the other Whitman descendants because he was born into a country where the majority of the citizens did not mistake themselves for Englishmen or long to find themselves struggling, at most, with cucumber sandwiches and tea. He was never European. His anguish was not aroused by thee piece suits and rolled umbrellas. When he cries, towards the conclusion of The Heights of Machu Picchu, “Arise and birth with me, my brother,” (2) he plainly does not allude to Lord or Colonel Anybody At All. As he writes earlier, in that amazing poem:
I came by another way, river by river, street after street,
city by city, one bed and another,
forcing the salt of my mask through a wilderness;
and there, in the shame of the ultimate hovels, lampless
and tireless,
lacking bread or a stone or a stillness, alone in myself,
I whirled at my will, dying the death that was mine (3)
Of course Neruda has not escaped all of the untoward consequences common to Whitman descendants. American critics and translators never weary of asserting that Neruda is a quote great unquote poet despite the political commitment of his art and despite the artistic consequences of the commitment. Specifically, Neruda’s self-conscious decision to write in a manner readily comprehensible to the masses of his countrymen, and his self-conscious decision to specify, outright, the United Fruit Company when that was the instigating subject of his poem, become unfortunate moments in an otherwise supposedly sublime, not to mention surrealist, deeply Old World and European but nonetheless Chilean case history. To assure the validity of this perspective, the usual American critic and translator presents you with a smattering of the unfortunate, ostensibly political poetry and, on the other hand, buries you under volumes of Neruda’s early work that antedates the Spanish Civil War or, in other words, that antedates Neruda’s serious conversion to a political world view.


I do not knock Pablo Neruda being a fine poet.. as truly he is--so are many others for that matter.
However, this legendary status the elitist morons try to bestow upon him is damn sickening to me!
I could point out other so-called minor poets that put Pablo to shame but do not get the fame given Pablo by modern fools simply because his name being Pablo and his leftist political leanings.
Whereas, in my view, in my world -- politics in poetry is a damn invasive cancer that should be cut out every place it invades.
So much of his fame rests upon the desire to advance a political ideology! ffing morons...-Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/177750

PROSE FROM POETRY MAGAZINE
William Bronk
1918–1999

BY KAY RYAN
I love to open the big book of William Bronk poems, Life Supports, and read one at random. It doesn’t matter which one shows up because they all release the same bracing smell and parch of stone, the same chill of stone in the shade. I don’t remember a single individual Bronk poem, and I don’t know if they’re actually memorable; anyhow, they don’t matter to me in that way. For me they’re like the small brown bottle my grandmother carried in her purse and sniffed for the pick-me-up jolt.

However little you thought you’d been trafficking in surfaces and ornament, after a Bronk poem you realize it was much too much; however cleansed of illusions you believed yourself to be, it looks like they built up anyhow. Bronk takes them off like paint stripper. You’re shriven, your head is shaved. The experience is religious in its ferocity and disdain for cheap solace.

Here, let me open to a poem—and I swear this one just turned up:

Wanting the significance that cause and effect
might have (we see it in little things where it is)
not seeing it in any place
important to us (it is in our lives but in ways

that deny each other) and the totality,
I suppose, is what I mean—it isn’t there—
we look around: the possibilities,
dreams and diversions, whatever else there is.
—The Effect of Cause Despaired


If you aren’t familiar with Bronk, maybe this doesn’t thrill you. But if you are, it’s like dropping the needle down into the endless groove of an implacable, insatiable, relentless intelligence that allows itself not the least shred of consolation, not the thinnest veil of protection. Bronk’s poems are almost entirely abstract and disembodied, like the poem above, his language desiccated but also conversationally halting and embedded. There is no flesh, no world, precious little metaphor—as though every human attachment is cheating. If anything seems to work—such as cause and effect—it never adds up to anything. “We look around,” and, in the absence of any system that could explain our actions to ourselves, whatever “dream” or “diversion” we cook up is understood to be just that—a distraction from nothing.

Bronk is thinking and thinking, as purely as possible, about how we want—want not to be alone, want things to matter, want to feel that we are connected to reality. His poems are all about wanting and how there is no end to it. And about how whatever reality is, it is something we only know in the negative—by being constantly wrong about it.

Bronk’s body of work is a strange achievement which it is hard not to call brave. There is such a grave honor in its repetitiveness, how it harps on what it can’t have, and how it won’t bend—can’t bend. If I say that Bronk’s poems are like blocks of stone, similar, but each slightly different and fitted one to another, and if I say that one experiences a strange exhilaration and release in the presence of the stark monument they form, then I am echoing Bronk’s own description of the stonework of Machu Picchu in “An Algebra Among Cats,” my favorite essay in his remarkable book of essays, Vectors and Smoothable Curves.

Bronk is compelled by the “plain perfection” of Machu Picchu’s stones, whose “surfaces have been worked and smoothed to a degree just this side of that line where texture would be lost.” Standing among them, he feels released from the idea of time as moving from past to future and the accompanying illusion of human progress: “It is at least as though there were several separate scales of time; it is even as though for certain achievements of great importance, this city for example, there were a continuing present which made those things always contemporary.”

There are moments of aesthetic transport which weld beauty to beauty, occasional angles which offer a glimpse of something endless and compelling. Bronk feels it in the presence of the pure artifacts of Machu Picchu; I get a touch of it in the presence of Bronk.
Originally Published: February 28, 2006

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/177759
PROFILE
The Ghost Inside
A profile of Jack Gilbert.

BY SARAH MANGUSO
“I don’t want to be at peace,” Jack Gilbert pronounced shortly after his 80th birthday. Yet he has spent much of his life on remote Greek islands, on a houseboat in Kashmir, on a western Massachusetts farm, and in the remote outskirts of Sausalito, California, either alone or in the company of one other. He has never owned a home and has driven a car only twice. A sensible person might even say he’s sought a peace separate from the arena of the “career poets”—and maybe even separate from that of the career adult. But the unique kernel of Gilbert’s poetry is its fearless exploration of the adult heart. It takes a moment to have a fling or write one good line, but sustaining authentic emotional participation, as Gilbert has in his life as a poet, is terrifying and hard, and is practically a lost art.

Gilbert was born in Pittsburgh in 1925 and grew up in the East Liberty district. His father worked in the circus for a time and died after falling out the window of a Prohibition-era men’s club when Jack was 10. After failing out of Peabody High School, Gilbert sold Fuller brushes door-to-door, worked in steel mills, and accompanied his uncle to fumigate houses, a job he began when he was 10 years old. “The cyanide could knock you out with just one breath, and in a matter of minutes you’d be dead,” he said in 1991. “It was an eerie way to grow up.”

He was admitted to the University of Pittsburgh because of a clerical error, where he began writing poetry (having previously written only prose) and earned a B.A. in 1947. After several years in Paris, Aix-en-Provence, and Italy—a chapter notable for his relationship with Gianna Gelmetti, the first of the three women who appear in his best love poems—Gilbert made his way to San Francisco, where the Beat and Haight-Ashbury countercultures were beginning to thrive.

A word about the women in Gilbert’s love poems before I go on. More than a few readers bristle at Gilbert’s apparently “antifeminist” poems. Women appear as totem creatures of mystery and beauty in poems like “Dante Dancing,” “Finding Eurydice,” and “Gift Horses,” but I am convinced that conventional feminism is the wrong filter through which to read these works. In response to a question about his elegiac poems written for his lost wife, Gilbert explained: “It was about grief, not about me.” Despite relationships that had all the signs of intimacy—with Gianna, Linda Gregg, and Michiko Nogami—Gilbert found the women he “knew” unknowable. And so he may write: “We are allowed / women so we can get into bed with the Lord, / however partial and momentary that is.” In the introduction to his own poems in the 1983 volume Nineteen New American Poets of the Golden Gate, Gilbert wrote: “I relish the physical surface of a woman, but I am importantly haunted by the ghost inside.”

Back to San Francisco. Gilbert lived in the Bay Area for 11 years, from 1956 to 1967, during which time he attended San Francisco State, worked with Ansel Adams, took Jack Spicer’s magic workshop, and enjoyed a years-long friendly argument about poetry with Allen Ginsberg. As the story goes, Gilbert didn’t like much of Ginsberg's work until one day when Ginsberg walked through a roadless and undeveloped area of Sausalito to Gilbert's cabin. He read aloud from two pages of poetry he’d just written.

Gilbert liked it. It was the beginning of Ginsberg’s iconic poem “Howl,” read publicly for the first time in 1956 to wild acclaim, and published in 1958. Four years later Gilbert’s first book, Views of Jeopardy, won the Yale Younger Poets Prize and was nominated for a Pulitzer. Gilbert enjoyed a year and a half of stateside fame, then won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1964 and left for Greece with the poet Linda Gregg. Six years would pass before he returned.

Gilbert wrote poems in Greece (and Denmark and England) that became Monolithos, his second book, finally coaxed into publication by editor Gordon Lish in 1982, 20 years after Gilbert’s debut. (Lish wrote a one-sentence essay for the New Orleans Review about Gilbert’s poetry. It read: “Why I like Jack Gilbert’s poetry and why I think Jack Gilbert is one of the best American poets and why I publish[ed] Jack Gilbert’s books is, was, and shall be to bring about the embarrassment of the power of discrimination in force in the assembly of fucking Harold Bloom’s fucking canonicity list. The End.”) That book, too, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize—as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award. By then, Gilbert had separated from Gregg and married Michiko Nogami.

In 1982, after only 11 years of marriage, Michiko died of cancer at age 36. Gilbert next published a limited-edition volume called Kochan, a collection of elegiac poems written for Michiko, whose ghost would inspire what many call his best love poems, written in the early 1990s. Those poems constitute much of Gilbert’s third book, The Great Fires, which appeared in 1994. By this point he had been teaching from time to time, stretching the money in order to live quietly abroad, writing.

Last year Gilbert turned 80 and published his fourth book, Refusing Heaven. Form appears incidental to content in the new poems, as ever in Gilbert’s work. In an interview in the 1990s Gilbert said, “Mechanical form doesn’t really matter to me. . . . Some poets [write within a form] with extraordinary deftness. But I don’t understand why. . . . It’s like treating poetry as though it’s learning how to balance brooms on your head. . . . It’s like people who think sexuality is fun. Sure, it’s fun, but it’s a way of getting someplace, not just running to the corner for a little spasm.”

There are no little spasms in Gilbert’s poems—just giant ones, the immeasurable subjects of love and death, quiet but also somehow deafening. Gilbert’s is an aesthetic of exclusion. “There is usually a minimum of decoration in the best,” he has said. “Both the Chinese and the Greeks were in love with what mathematicians mean by elegance: not the heaping up of language, but the use of a few words with utmost effect.” Despite their streamlined appearance, Gilbert’s poems are not sentimental, obvious, or thin.

One of my favorite poems from The Great Fires contains even fewer elements than a classical haiku: the poem simply describes a man carrying a box. “He manages like somebody carrying a box / that is too heavy, first with his arms / underneath. . . . Afterward, / he carries it on his shoulder, until the blood / drains out of the arm that is stretched up / to steady the box and the arm goes numb. But now / the man can hold underneath again, so that / he can go on without ever putting the box down.” The lines appear almost inconsequential. But the title of the poem is “Michiko Dead.”

In a recent interview in The Paris Review, Gilbert asked, “Why do so many poets settle for so little? I don’t understand why they’re not greedy for what’s inside them. . . . When I read the poems that matter to me, it stuns me how much the presence of the heart—in all its forms—is endlessly available there.”

What is the most important thing a poet must seek, I asked him in February. His response: “Depth and warmth.”

Originally Published: February 27, 2006

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

PROFILE
The Ghost Inside
A profile of Jack Gilbert.

BY SARAH MANGUSO
“I don’t want to be at peace,” Jack Gilbert pronounced shortly after his 80th birthday. Yet he has spent much of his life on remote Greek islands, on a houseboat in Kashmir, on a western Massachusetts farm, and in the remote outskirts of Sausalito, California, either alone or in the company of one other. He has never owned a home and has driven a car only twice. A sensible person might even say he’s sought a peace separate from the arena of the “career poets”—and maybe even separate from that of the career adult. But the unique kernel of Gilbert’s poetry is its fearless exploration of the adult heart. It takes a moment to have a fling or write one good line, but sustaining authentic emotional participation, as Gilbert has in his life as a poet, is terrifying and hard, and is practically a lost art.

Gilbert was born in Pittsburgh in 1925 and grew up in the East Liberty district. His father worked in the circus for a time and died after falling out the window of a Prohibition-era men’s club when Jack was 10. After failing out of Peabody High School, Gilbert sold Fuller brushes door-to-door, worked in steel mills, and accompanied his uncle to fumigate houses, a job he began when he was 10 years old. “The cyanide could knock you out with just one breath, and in a matter of minutes you’d be dead,” he said in 1991. “It was an eerie way to grow up.”

He was admitted to the University of Pittsburgh because of a clerical error, where he began writing poetry (having previously written only prose) and earned a B.A. in 1947. After several years in Paris, Aix-en-Provence, and Italy—a chapter notable for his relationship with Gianna Gelmetti, the first of the three women who appear in his best love poems—Gilbert made his way to San Francisco, where the Beat and Haight-Ashbury countercultures were beginning to thrive.

A word about the women in Gilbert’s love poems before I go on. More than a few readers bristle at Gilbert’s apparently “antifeminist” poems. Women appear as totem creatures of mystery and beauty in poems like “Dante Dancing,” “Finding Eurydice,” and “Gift Horses,” but I am convinced that conventional feminism is the wrong filter through which to read these works. In response to a question about his elegiac poems written for his lost wife, Gilbert explained: “It was about grief, not about me.” Despite relationships that had all the signs of intimacy—with Gianna, Linda Gregg, and Michiko Nogami—Gilbert found the women he “knew” unknowable. And so he may write: “We are allowed / women so we can get into bed with the Lord, / however partial and momentary that is.” In the introduction to his own poems in the 1983 volume Nineteen New American Poets of the Golden Gate, Gilbert wrote: “I relish the physical surface of a woman, but I am importantly haunted by the ghost inside.”

Back to San Francisco. Gilbert lived in the Bay Area for 11 years, from 1956 to 1967, during which time he attended San Francisco State, worked with Ansel Adams, took Jack Spicer’s magic workshop, and enjoyed a years-long friendly argument about poetry with Allen Ginsberg. As the story goes, Gilbert didn’t like much of Ginsberg's work until one day when Ginsberg walked through a roadless and undeveloped area of Sausalito to Gilbert's cabin. He read aloud from two pages of poetry he’d just written.

Gilbert liked it. It was the beginning of Ginsberg’s iconic poem “Howl,” read publicly for the first time in 1956 to wild acclaim, and published in 1958. Four years later Gilbert’s first book, Views of Jeopardy, won the Yale Younger Poets Prize and was nominated for a Pulitzer. Gilbert enjoyed a year and a half of stateside fame, then won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1964 and left for Greece with the poet Linda Gregg. Six years would pass before he returned.

Gilbert wrote poems in Greece (and Denmark and England) that became Monolithos, his second book, finally coaxed into publication by editor Gordon Lish in 1982, 20 years after Gilbert’s debut. (Lish wrote a one-sentence essay for the New Orleans Review about Gilbert’s poetry. It read: “Why I like Jack Gilbert’s poetry and why I think Jack Gilbert is one of the best American poets and why I publish[ed] Jack Gilbert’s books is, was, and shall be to bring about the embarrassment of the power of discrimination in force in the assembly of fucking Harold Bloom’s fucking canonicity list. The End.”) That book, too, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize—as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award. By then, Gilbert had separated from Gregg and married Michiko Nogami.

In 1982, after only 11 years of marriage, Michiko died of cancer at age 36. Gilbert next published a limited-edition volume called Kochan, a collection of elegiac poems written for Michiko, whose ghost would inspire what many call his best love poems, written in the early 1990s. Those poems constitute much of Gilbert’s third book, The Great Fires, which appeared in 1994. By this point he had been teaching from time to time, stretching the money in order to live quietly abroad, writing.

Last year Gilbert turned 80 and published his fourth book, Refusing Heaven. Form appears incidental to content in the new poems, as ever in Gilbert’s work. In an interview in the 1990s Gilbert said, “Mechanical form doesn’t really matter to me. . . . Some poets [write within a form] with extraordinary deftness. But I don’t understand why. . . . It’s like treating poetry as though it’s learning how to balance brooms on your head. . . . It’s like people who think sexuality is fun. Sure, it’s fun, but it’s a way of getting someplace, not just running to the corner for a little spasm.”

There are no little spasms in Gilbert’s poems—just giant ones, the immeasurable subjects of love and death, quiet but also somehow deafening. Gilbert’s is an aesthetic of exclusion. “There is usually a minimum of decoration in the best,” he has said. “Both the Chinese and the Greeks were in love with what mathematicians mean by elegance: not the heaping up of language, but the use of a few words with utmost effect.” Despite their streamlined appearance, Gilbert’s poems are not sentimental, obvious, or thin.

One of my favorite poems from The Great Fires contains even fewer elements than a classical haiku: the poem simply describes a man carrying a box. “He manages like somebody carrying a box / that is too heavy, first with his arms / underneath. . . . Afterward, / he carries it on his shoulder, until the blood / drains out of the arm that is stretched up / to steady the box and the arm goes numb. But now / the man can hold underneath again, so that / he can go on without ever putting the box down.” The lines appear almost inconsequential. But the title of the poem is “Michiko Dead.”

In a recent interview in The Paris Review, Gilbert asked, “Why do so many poets settle for so little? I don’t understand why they’re not greedy for what’s inside them. . . . When I read the poems that matter to me, it stuns me how much the presence of the heart—in all its forms—is endlessly available there.”

What is the most important thing a poet must seek, I asked him in February. His response: “Depth and warmth.”

Originally Published: February 27, 2006




Last year Gilbert turned 80 and published his fourth book, Refusing Heaven. Form appears incidental to content in the new poems, as ever in Gilbert’s work. In an interview in the 1990s Gilbert said, “Mechanical form doesn’t really matter to me. . . . Some poets [write within a form] with extraordinary deftness. But I don’t understand why. . . . It’s like treating poetry as though it’s learning how to balance brooms on your head. . . . It’s like people who think sexuality is fun. Sure, it’s fun, but it’s a way of getting someplace, not just running to the corner for a little spasm.”

There are no little spasms in Gilbert’s poems—just giant ones, the immeasurable subjects of love and death, quiet but also somehow deafening. Gilbert’s is an aesthetic of exclusion. “There is usually a minimum of decoration in the best,” he has said. “Both the Chinese and the Greeks were in love with what mathematicians mean by elegance: not the heaping up of language, but the use of a few words with utmost effect.” Despite their streamlined appearance, Gilbert’s poems are not sentimental, obvious, or thin.

One of my favorite poems from The Great Fires contains even fewer elements than a classical haiku: the poem simply describes a man carrying a box. “He manages like somebody carrying a box / that is too heavy, first with his arms / underneath. . . . Afterward, / he carries it on his shoulder, until the blood / drains out of the arm that is stretched up / to steady the box and the arm goes numb. But now / the man can hold underneath again, so that / he can go on without ever putting the box down.” The lines appear almost inconsequential. But the title of the poem is “Michiko Dead.”

In a recent interview in The Paris Review, Gilbert asked, “Why do so many poets settle for so little? I don’t understand why they’re not greedy for what’s inside them. . . . When I read the poems that matter to me, it stuns me how much the presence of the heart—in all its forms—is endlessly available there.”

What is the most important thing a poet must seek, I asked him in February. His response: “Depth and warmth.”

Originally Published: February 27, 2006

Here Gilbert expounds on the attitude some of us have about the outright demand that we adhere strictly to form!
Or else be declared poor poets, unworthy and/or lacking in poetic talents!
Who gives these arrogant assholes such authority to speak as if-THEY- own poetry!??
Or hold the sole rights to its purity, heart and message?
Pure elitism at its deepest acidity, stupidity and imbecility! Says I, a poet that rebels and only uses form enough to keep the arrows of chaos and insanity away!--Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/177877

ESSAY
Nature Rules
A reading by Mary Oliver at the 92nd Street Y.

BY DARA MANDLE
What do the actor Steve Buscemi and two nuns have in common? An appreciation for Mary Oliver, the reigning queen of nature poetry. Oliver writes often in her newer verse about “the light of the world.” No surprise, then, to spot sisters of mercy at the poet’s January reading at New York’s 92nd Street Y. But Mr. Pink? Wouldn’t lyrics about the virtue of green beans be a touch too cozy for such a rough character? No, it turns out.

Judging from the size of the crowd that night, and from the sales of her current book, New and Selected Poems: Volume Two, it seems that many people—and not just those obviously drawn to daisies—need cheer.

Oliver’s minimalist stage persona and sense of humor undercut the frequent sentimentality of her lyrics. In person, she makes sure her fans are getting their money’s worth—in this case, $17 per ticket. They gave her a rock star’s reception when she strode to the podium after being introduced by Alice Quinn, director of the Poetry Society of America and poetry editor of The New Yorker.

Although she won both a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, Oliver’s demeanor is more PB&J than port. She has what most poets outwardly disdain but secretly covet: readers. Her work might appear only occasionally in graduate curricula, but it registers mightily on the reorder lists at Barnes & Noble.

Many of the poems to which she gave voice at her reading were from her most recent New and Selected volume. The audience responded avidly to the few poems about her dog, Percy. “Oxygen,” a manuscript facsimile of which was reprinted in the evening’s program, was dedicated to her partner of more than 40 years, artist Molly Malone Cook, who died recently (your life . . . is so close / to my own that I would not know / where to drop the knife of / separation. And what does this have to do / with love, except / everything?).

“Do you want to hear this?” Oliver asked as she prepared to read “Wild Geese.” In this popular poem, the sound of geese reminds readers of their “place/in the family of things.” A friend found her question a cringe worthy attention ploy—but he doesn’t go to many poetry readings. I found Oliver’s commitment to her audience refreshing. After all, many had braved rain and two subways to get here.

By reading’s end her directness, which had at first invigorated, began to wear thin. In her introduction, Quinn had noted, “Like Frost, Oliver is a poet of belief.” Yet Frost let the darkness in his poems gradually seep out; one might not even detect it in a first reading. Oliver often tells us point-blank to move toward the light—or, as she writes, toward “the sun, the purely pure sun, shining, all the while, over / all of us.”

And yet, Oliver acknowledges sorrow and mourning. One of the reasons her audience is so dedicated to her is because she lets them in. After reading the poem for her partner, Oliver shared three lines she’d read at her memorial service. In an age when so many writers build walls between themselves and their readers, Oliver opens windows. And why not? Her fans relish the view.
Originally Published: March 20, 2006
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My belief is-- ask a poet to write about Nature and if that poet cannot do so--he/she is a fraud.
For Love and Nature are by far the too easiest subjects to write poetry about IMHO.
With death and despair being on the other side of that scale.. -Tyr

Now do not let the word "easy" in that comment fool you. Easy to write about , but much harder to make an "impression with" in regards to other poets reading your work or getting such published! -Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/177773

PROSE FROM POETRY MAGAZINE
Fear of Narrative and the Skittery Poem of Our Moment
BY TONY HOAGLAND
Aesthetic shifts over time can be seen as a kind of crop rotation; the topsoil of one field is allowed to rest, while another field is plowed and cultivated. In the seventies the American poetry of image covered the Midwestern plains like wheat; in the eighties, perhaps, it was the narrative-discursive sentence which blossomed and bore anthological fruit. This shifting of the ground of convention is one aspect of cultural self-renewal. But the fruitful style and idiom becomes conventional, and then conventionally tired.

In the last ten years American poetry has seen a surge in associative and “experimental” poetries, in a wild variety of forms and orientations. Some of this work has been influenced by theories of literary criticism and epistemology, some by the old Dionysian imperative to jazz things up. The energetic cadres of MFA grads have certainly contributed to this milieu, founding magazines, presses, and aesthetic clusters which encourage and influence each other’s experiments. Generally speaking, this time could be characterized as one of great invention and playfulness. Simultaneously, it is also a moment of great aesthetic self-consciousness and emotional removal.

Systematic development is out; obliquity, fracture, and discontinuity are in. Especially among young poets, there is a widespread mistrust of narrative forms and, in fact, a pervasive sense of the inadequacy or exhaustion of all modes other than the associative. Under the label of “narrative,” all kinds of poetry currently get lumped misleadingly together: not just story but discursion, argument, even descriptive lyrics. They might better be called the “Poetries of Continuity.”

Let me begin with two poetic examples which I think intriguingly register one aspect of the current temper. The first is from “Couples,” by Mark Halliday:


All the young people in their compact cars.
He’s funny and she’s sensible.
The car is going to need some transmission work
soon, but they’ll get by all right—
Aunt Louise slips them a hundred dollars
every chance she gets and besides,
both of them working—
Susan does day-care part-time
and Jim finally got full-time work
at Design Future Associates
after those tough nine months as an apprentice.
Or he’s in law school
doing amazingly well, he acts so casual
but really he’s always pounding the books,
and Susan works full-time
for a markets research firm, she’s
amazingly sharp about consumer trends
and what between her salary and Aunt Louise
Jim can afford to really concentrate on
his studies. Or he’s a journalist
and so is she, and they keep very up
on the news especially state politics.
Plus she does an amazing veal marsala
and he jogs two miles five mornings a week—
and in June they’ll be off to Italy again,
or Mexico; Susan’s photographs are
really tasteful, not touristy, she always
reads up on the culture before their trip.
Jim slips in a wacky shot every once in a while
and everybody laughs, that’s old Jim.
......................................
They’ll get by all right. They have
every one of Linda Ronstadt’s albums, and
they’re amazingly happy together.


And the next poem is called “First Person Fabulous,” by Matthea Harvey:


First Person fumed & fizzed under Third Person’s tongue while Third Person slumped at the diner counter, talking, as usual, to no one. Third Person thought First Person was the toilet paper trailing from Third Person’s shoe, the tiara Third Person once wore in a dream to a funeral. First Person thought Third Person was a layer of tar on a gorgeous pink nautilus, a foot on a fountain, a tin hiding the macaroons & First Person was that nautilus, that fountain, that pile of macaroons. Sometimes First Person broke free on first dates (with a Second Person) & then there was the delicious rush of “I this” and “I that” but then no phone calls & for weeks Third Person wouldn’t let First Person near anyone. Poor First Person. Currently she was exiled to the world of postcards (having a lovely time)—& even then that beast of a Third Person used the implied “I” just to drive First Person crazy. She felt like a television staring at the remote, begging to be turned on. She had so many things she wanted to say. If only she could survive on her own, she’d make Third Person choke on herself & when the detectives arrived & all eyes were on her she’d cry out, “I did it! I did it! Yes, dahlings, it was me!”


These two ingenious poems, written by poets of different generations* and styles, have something strikingly in common: their intention to hold narrative up for our inspection, at arm’s length, without being caught inside its sticky web. Rather than narratives themselves, both poems offer commentaries about narrative, story “samples,” safely told by a narrator who operates at an altitude above plot, narrating from a supervisory position. You could truly say that these poems serve to sharpen awareness of our narrative habits, but you could also say they contain a warning about how generic, how over-familiar, our storytelling is.

Mark Halliday’s poem “Couples” seems to make the point that our most precious personal narratives, despite our tender feelings for them, are generic—that human beings (yuppie couples, at least) are reducible to socioeconomic-historic clichés—no matter that we cling to the idea of our uniqueness and individuality. These stories of the self, the poem makes clear, are an exhausted resource.

Matthea Harvey’s ingenious, funny poem trumps the problem by translating the plot into a drama between “signifiers,” transposing drama into grammar. The ironic title, “First Person Fabulous,” suggests the essential egotism of all first person narratives. Tender and witty though the poem is about its “characters,” a real involvement by the reader is prevented by the latex condom of self-consciousness. “First Person Fabulous” is a poem, we are never allowed to forget, about pronouns.

It seems important to point out that both of these poems, though intrinsically skeptical, are also markedly playful. In their inventiveness of detail, in their teasing, in-and-out, back-and-forth development, in their pleasure in idiom, they are not cold in their detachment but imaginatively frolicsome. In fact, the self-consciousness of the poems creates the verbal dimension in which they play. However, despite the affirmative, vital presence of imagination, that playground area is situated at a great distance from experience. It is distinctly externalized. Distance is as much the distinctive feature of the poems as play; distance, which might be seen as antithetical to that other enterprise of poetry—strong feeling.


* * *


What aspect of narrative is so to be guarded against? A number of familiar explanations present themselves. To start with, it seems likely that narrative poetry in America has been tainted by its over-use in thousands of confessional poems. Not confessionalism itself, but the inadvertent sentimentality and narcissism of many such poems have imparted the odor of indulgence to narrative. Our vision of narrative possibilities has been narrowed by so many first person autobiographical stories, then drowned in a flood of pathos poems. Psychology itself, probably the most widely-shared narrative of the last several generations of American culture, has lost its charisma as a system, if not its currency.

Secondly, many persons think that ours is simply not a narrative age; that contemporary experience is too multitracked, too visual, too manifold and simultaneous to be confined to the linearity of narrative, no matter how well done. As Carolyn Forché says:


Our age lacks the structure of a story. Or perhaps it would be closer to say that narrative implies progress and completion. The history of our time does not allow for any of the bromides of progress, nor for the promise of successful closure.


Forché herself is an aesthetic convert from narrative poetry to a poetry of lyric-associative fragment.

Not only is organized narration considered inadequate to contemporary experience, its use is felt by some to be oppressive, over-controlling, “suspiciously authoritarian.” Because narrative imposes a story upon experience, because—the argument goes—that story implicitly presents itself as the whole story, some readers object to the smugness and presumption of the narration. “Whose narrative is this?” they cry; “Not mine!”

Put more bluntly, the new resistance to conventions of order represents a boredom with, and generalized suspicion of, straightforwardness and orchestration. Systematic development and continuity are considered simplistic, claustrophobic, even unimaginative. In the contemporary arena of the moment, charisma belongs to the erratic and subversive.

There may be yet another more hidden and less conscious anxiety behind the contemporary mistrust of narrative: a claustrophobic fear of submersion or enclosure. Narrative, after all, and other poetries of sustained development, seduce and contain; its feature is the loss of self-consciousness; in the sequential “grip” of narrative, the reader is “swept away,” and loses not consciousness, perhaps, but self-consciousness. The speedy conceptuality which characterizes much contemporary poetry prefers the dance of multiple perspectives to sustained participation. It hesitates to enter a point of view that cannot easily be altered or quickly escaped from. It would prefer to remain skeptical, and in that sense, too, one might say that it prefers knowing to feeling.


* * *


Harvey’s and Halliday’s poems are examples of one kind of hip contemporary skittishness. But they are, actually, too reader-friendly, too lucid and inclusive to truly represent the poetic fashion of the moment. The predominant Poem of Our Moment is a more lyric and dissociative thing, like “Improvisation” by Rachel M. Simon:


One thing about human nature is that nobody
wants to know the exact dimensions of their small talk.
I can’t imagine good advice.
If every human being has skin
how come I can see all of your veins?
Clicks and drips target my skull.
Important voices miss their target.
Some cities are ill-suited for feet.
I’d never buy a door smaller than a tuba, you never know
what sort of friends you’ll make.
In the future there will be less to remember.
In the past I have only my body and shoes.
The gut and the throat are two entirely different animals.
My hands don’t make good shoelaces, but I’m going to stay
in this lane, even if its slower.
The trick was done with saltwater and smoke
and an ingredient you can only find in an
out of business ethnic food store.
It all comes down to hand-eye coordination.
Once it took all of my energy to get you out of the tub
we had converted from an indoor pool to a house.
I ended up on snorkeling spam lists inadvertently.
It is all inadvertent.
If you don’t believe me ask your mom.


“Improvisation” is a quintessential Poem of Our Moment: fast-moving and declarative, wobbling on the balance beam between associative and dissociative, somewhat absurdist, and, indeed, cerebral. Much talent and skill are evident in its making, in its pacing and management of gaps, the hints and sound bites which keep the reader reaching forward for the lynchpin of coherence. One admirable aspect of the poem is the way it seems capable of incorporating anything; yet the correlative theme of the poem is that all this motley data—i.e. experience—doesn’t add up to a story. Even as the poem implies a world without sequence, the poem itself has no consequence, no center of gravity, no body, no assertion of emotional value.

If we ask, what is the subject of “Improvisation,” the answer would be, the dissociated self; and the aspect of self such poems most forcefully represent is its uncatchability, its flittering, quicksilver transience. Poems like “Improvisation” showcase personality in the persona of their chatty, free-associating, nutty-smart narrators. It is a self that does not stand still, that implies a kind of spectral, anxious insubstantiality. The voice is plenty sharp in tone and sometimes observant in its detail, but it is skittery. Elusiveness is the speaker’s central characteristic. Speed, wit, and absurdity are its attractive qualities. The last thing such poems are going to do is risk their detachment, their distance, their freedom from accountability. The one thing they are not going to do is commit themselves to the sweaty enclosures of subject matter and the potential embarrassment of sincerity.

I don’t wish to base a case on one example, so I will offer a few others. Here are the opening stanzas of two other recent poems:


My harvest has engineered a sanctioned nectary.
The transmission of each apple squeals when I apply the compress.
All my obsequities have finished their summer reading,
they are diligent students,
they understand the difference between precision and Kansas.
This was before I had pried up the floorboard to see what was ticking underneath.
I keep busy, every plane that flies through my sky
requires help, sign language for the commercial vector.
My octave’s intact so this may be working.
—From Watercooler Tarmac, by G.C. Waldrep



Oily fellows, earthmen. Spell
freeway, spell monolith, sell
me a fossil. Wholly repellent.
Malls, only relief. Post. Wheel
wells, the atmosphere (lolly-
lolly) honest, simple welfare,
topsoil anywhere—fell smell,
fell smell. Weaponry, hostile
fish, watermelon peels (lolly-
lolly) parentheses, mile, wolf,
fearsome whelp. Listen (lolly-
lolly) stolen female whisper.
Hollow salesman trifle, yelp
then loll. Mayflower slip. See
ELSE. My free hilltop, all snow.
Frost. Meanwhile sleep (lolly-
lolly) meanwhile self. Presto!
Trill myself open wholesale!
—Variations as the Fell of the Fall, Kevin McFadden


Sure, these styles have discernible origins and different, respectable precedents. In “Watermelon Tarmac” and “Improvisation” we might see the cartoony goofiness of James Tate or the unmoored rhetoric of John Ashbery. In the more radical “Variations of the Fell of the Fall,” one senses an aleatory nonsense-language system at work*. Though the modes are different, they are all modes of verbal-psychic dislocation. They all move with a manic swiftness. What is also striking to me, and representative of the aesthetic moment, is how these poems are committed to a sort of pushy exteriority.

Of course, dissociative doesn’t necessarily mean detached, or empty, or even hyperintellectual. “Prufrock” is one example of a dissociated yet passionate poem. In various poetic hands, the dissociated-improvisatory mode can represent vivaciousness of self, or uncontainable passion, or the fractured wash of modernity, or an aesthetic allegiance to randomness. The intention of the maker—if we can recognize what it is—makes all the difference.


* * *


What are the intentions of the current version of “difficult” poetry? Some of the stated, advertised intentions of “elusive” poetics are to playfully distort or dismantle established systems of meaning, to recover mystery in poetry, to offer multiple, simultaneous interpretive possibilities for the energetic and willing reader to “participate” in. The critic Stephen Burt describes some of the traits of this poetic style, for which he offers the term “Elliptical Poetry”:


Elliptical poets are always hinting, punning, or swerving away from a never-quite-unfolded backstory; they are easier to process in parts than in wholes. They believe provisionally in identities... but they suspect the Is they invoke; they admire disjunction and confrontation, but they know how little can go a long way. Ellipticists seek the authority of the rebellious; they want to challenge their readers, violate decorum, surprise or explode assumptions about what belongs in a poem, or what matters in life, and to do so while meeting traditional lyric goals.


Burt’s definition is quite general in order to encompass the diversity of the poetry he champions, but he gets the mania and the declarativeness right. Also the relentless dodging or obstruction of expectation.

Avant-gardes of the past have surely rejected linearity and conventions of coherence, but some of them did so with the motive of asserting worlds of feeling—amazement or distress—which could not be expressed within conventions of order. Consider the surrealism of Lorca or Vallejo, which embraced both arbitrariness and passion with radical subjectivity. Yet surrealism operates out of a faith in psychic veracity, and Surrealism has a heroic aspect to it. As Louis Aragon says, “the marvelous is born of the refusal of one reality, yet also the development of a new relationship, of a brand-new reality this refusal has liberated.” Here is Aragon’s “Pop Song,” performed in a style quite congruent to “Improvisation,” but with a larger, quite different motive:


Cloud

A white horse stands up
and that’s the small hotel at dawn where he who is always first-come-first-served awakes in palatial comfort
Are you going to spend your entire life in this same world
Half dead
Half asleep
Haven’t you had enough of commonplaces yet
People actually look at you without laughter
They have glass eyes
You pass them by you waste your time you pass away and go away
You count up to a hundred during which you cheat to kill an extra ten seconds
You hold up your hand suddenly to volunteer for death
Fear not
Some day
There will be just one day left and then one day more after that
That will be that
No more need to look at men nor their companion animals their Good Lord provides
And that they make love to now and then
No more need to go on speaking to yourself out loud at night in order to drown out
The heating-units lament
No need to lift my own eyelids
Nor to fling my blood around like some discus
Nor to breathe despite my disinclination to
Yet despite this I don’t want to die
In low tones the bell of my heart sings out its ancient hope
That music I know it so well but the words
Just what were those words saying
“Idiot”


Aragon’s bold, clownish poem, typical of this strain of French Surrealism, is an exhortation to wonder. Its leaping, erratic movements are meant to assert the urgency of the speaker, the range of human nature, and the volatile resourcefulness of imagination. The mention of death, the progressive intimacy of the voice, the arrival at self-examination and tonal sincerity, all mark this as a poem which combines rhetorical performance with interiority. “Life is hard,” the poem suggests, “time is unendurable and absurd, the sleep of consciousness is oppressive, but it is still important to try to live.” Aragon’s poem, for all its whimsy and dishevelment, is finally humanist, asserting values.

Narrated and associative poems are not each other’s aesthetic opposites or sworn enemies. Obviously these modes don’t necessarily exclude each other. They overlap, coexist, and often cross-pollinate. Nevertheless, one might truly say that the two modes call upon fundamentally different resources in reader and writer. Narration (and its systematic relatives) implicitly honors Memory; the dissociative mode primarily values Invention. “Poetries of Continuity” in some way aim to frame and capture experience; dissociative poetry verifies itself by eluding structures. Their distinct priorities result in different poetries. A poetry which values clarity and continuity is obligated to develop and deliver information in ways that are hierarchical and sequential, ways which accommodate and orchestrate the capacities of human memory. In contrast, a dissociative poetry is always shuffling the deck in order to evade knowability.

The Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, whose well-known phrase, “the pursuit of the real,” declares his allegiance in this matter, has something to say abo...................................

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

PROSE FROM POETRY MAGAZINE
American Poetry in the New Century
BY JOHN BARR
1

Poetry in this country is ready for something new. We are at the start of a century, and that, in the past, has marked new beginnings for the art. Pound and Eliot launched Modernism in the opening years of the twentieth century, in the pages of this magazine. And in the opening years of the nineteenth, 1802 to be exact, Wordsworth launched poetry's Romantic era with the second edition of Lyrical Ballads. (The centennial calendar does not go further back. The early years of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did not mark new departures for English poetry. And American poetry found its true beginnings in Whitman and Dickinson, who did their writing in the middle of the nineteenth century, not at either end.)

But it's not really a matter of calendar. American poetry is ready for something new because our poets have been writing in the same way for a long time now. There is fatigue, something stagnant about the poetry being written today. If one could say that a characteristic of Romantic poetry was that there was way too much of it written once it became established (weekend versifiers to this day still write in Romantic modes), one could say the same of modern poetry. The manner of it has long been mastered. Modernism has passed into the DNA of the MFA programs. For all its schools and experiments, contemporary poetry is still written in the rain shadow thrown by Modernism. It is the engine that drives what is written today. And it is a tired engine.

A new poetry becomes necessary not because we want one, but because the way poets have learned to write no longer captures the way things are, how things have changed. Reality outgrows the art form: the art form is no longer equal to the reality around it. The Georgian poets wrote, coming after a century of such writing, with the depleted sensibility of Romanticism. Their poetry was in love with an antebellum England: "yet / Stands the Church clock at ten to three? / And is there honey still for tea?" The Georgians did not sense the approach of WWI, and their poetry was unequal to the horrors of trench warfare. (To see how a Georgian sensibility did respond, read Rupert Brooke: "If I should die, think only this of me: / That there's some corner of a foreign field / That is for ever England." This is a beautiful poem, but one far afield from mustard gas.) It took Yeats to give British poetry its first great dose of twentieth-century realism. It took The Waste Land to enable a poetry of chaos.

The need for something new is evident. Contemporary poetry's striking absence from the public dialogues of our day, from the high school classroom, from bookstores, and from mainstream media, is evidence of a people in whose mind poetry is missing and unmissed. You can count on the fingers of one hand the bookstores in this country that are known for their poetry collections. A century ago our newspapers commonly ran poems in their pages; fifty years ago the larger papers regularly reviewed new books of poetry. Today one almost never sees a poem in a newspaper; and the new poetry collections reviewed in the New York Times Book Review are down to a few a year. A general, interested public is poetry's foremost need.

More than a decade ago, Dana Gioia recognized poetry's disjunction from public life, in his seminal essay, "Can Poetry Matter?" The question still pertains. Lacking a general audience, poets still write for one another. (Witness the growth of writing workshops and the MFA programs.) Because the book-buying public does not buy their work, at least not in commercial quantities, they cannot support themselves as writers. So they teach. But an academic life removes them yet further from a general audience. Each year, MFA programs graduate thousands of students who have been trained to think of poetry as a career, and to think that writing poetry has something to do with credentials. The effect of these programs on the art form is to increase the abundance of poetry, but to limit its variety. The result is a poetry that is neither robust, resonant, nor—and I stress this quality—entertaining; a poetry that both starves and flourishes on academic subsidies.

Not surprisingly, poetry has a morale problem. A few years ago I read a review, in the Sunday Times, of three books of poetry. One was about the agonies of old age, one about bombed-out Ireland, one about the poet's dead father. The question arises: how does one rouse an entire art form out of a bad mood? Of course the tragic has a place in poetry. Indeed one of poetry's jobs is to descant on the worst that life can hand us. As Yeats said, let "soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing / For every tatter in its mortal dress." But art should not be only about malfunction. Poetry need not come only from impairment. To the extent it does, it makes for a poetry that is monotonic—mono-moodic, if you will. Yeats recognized this when he wrote, "Seventy years have I lived, / Seventy years man and boy, / And never have I danced for joy." Poetry's limitations today come not from failures of craft (the MFA programs attend to that) but from afflictions of spirit. American poetry has yet to produce its Mark Twain.

The combined effects of public neglect and careerism, then, are intellectual and spiritual stagnation in the art form. Although poets pride themselves on their independence, when did you last read a poem whose political vision truly surprised or challenged you? Attitude has replaced intellect.

2

I wish I could offer a distinct picture of what I think the next poetry will look like. But predicting the future path of poetry is like trying to predict the stock market (Wall Street being my other career). Both are relentlessly resistant to being captured in that way. And poetry the more so because it arises from what is intractable in the human spirit. (Poetry—thank goodness—is the animal that always escapes.) There is, however, another way to approach the subject: by describing how a new poetry might differ from what we have today. This may not give us an exact picture of the elephant, but when we are done we will have the elephant as described by how it differs from the other animals on Noah's ark.

The place to look for the next poetry is probably not where you might look first. Modernism was born amid an upheaval in writing that was heavily technical: Pound's Imagism and Vorticism, Gertrude Stein's automatic writing, Eliot's free verse and collage, Marianne Moore's syllabic verse. It would be natural to look for the next poetry to emerge from other kinds of experimental poetry. But this has been tried, and the innovations that followed those of Modernism (projective verse, Language poetry, concrete poetry) have not carried the art form with them. (I think a dead end is the fate that awaits any poetry that is not a record of the human spirit responding.) Technical innovation for its own sake is like the tail that tries to wag the dog. Formal verse or free, a debate which a century ago was nearly religious in its fervor, has settled into a choice of which method best suits the individual poet. And many poets use either, depending on the needs of the poem. I do believe the next era of poetry will come not from further innovations of form, but from an evolution of the sensibility based on lived experience.

The malaise that lies over poetry today has no single cause, and it will take more than a single change to restore its vitality. Let me elaborate on two of the issues I seldom hear discussed.

POETRY AS A CAREER

My own experience with MFA programs, having taught in one, is that they can make of a writer a better writer. "Better" in this case means more knowledgeable in the traditions and the contemporary scope of the art, more accomplished in the craft of writing, more aware of the nimbus of critical commentary which surrounds and to some extent drives the art. That's the good news: you graduate with a better understanding of the sophistication of your audience and of other writers. At the same time, these programs carry pressures to succumb to the intimidations implicit in a climate of careerism. They operate on a network of academic postings and prizes that reinforce the status quo. They are sustained by a system of fellowships, grants, and other subsidies that absolve recipients of the responsibility to write books that a reader who is not a specialist might enjoy, might even buy.

The MFA experience can confuse the writing of poetry, as a career, with the writing of a poem as a need or impulse. The creation of art is not a matter of fellowship. Writing a poem is a fiercely independent act. It is the furthest thing from mentors, residencies, and tenure. The one valid impulse to write a poem is not to impress but to share: wonder or anger or anguish or ecstasy. But always wonder. For the poet a sense of wonder is prerequisite to afford the possibility of the displacement of language into fresh response. Will the next Walt Whitman be an MFA graduate? Somehow it seems hard to imagine.

LIVE BROADLY, WRITE BOLDLY

At an artists' colony some years ago a fellow resident turned to me at the dinner table and said, "So where do you teach?" It was a reasonable question, since all the other artists there, although living for their art, seemed to teach for a living. Now don't get me wrong: the academic life can provide a perfectly good base of experience from which to write. Witness the quantity of fine poetry that has been written by resident poets. But the effect of how we live on what we write—a linkage which seems to me very under-recognized today—suggests that if everyone teaches in order to support their writing needs, it follows that the breadth of the aggregate experience base available to poetry may suffer. In fact, with a few important exceptions, no major American poet has come from the academic world. Wallace Stevens worked as a vice president for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company. Eliot worked for a time at Lloyds Bank, then in publishing at Faber and Faber. William Carlos Williams was a pediatrician in New Jersey. To varying degrees they all did business with the community of critics based in academia, but none wrote from a lifetime experience gained there. Poetry, like a prayer book in the wind, should be open to all pages at once.

In 1933 Ernest Hemingway went on his first safari, hunting big game in East Africa. Then he came home and wrote short stories ("The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber," "The Snows of Kilimanjaro"), the non-fiction Green Hills of Africa, and an unfinished novel, True at First Light. It is a commonplace among creative writers that we should write what we know, but Hemingway took that a step further by seeking out fresh experience in the service of his writing: ambulance driving in the Spanish civil war, marlin fishing off Cuba, running with the bulls in Pamplona. He sought to live more in order to write better. That's not to say that one has to be chased around Pamplona by bulls to gain experience. It could be something as slight as the difference between the poem one might get from a poet strolling past a construction site versus the poem one might get from the poet who is pouring concrete. Either could produce the better poem, of course, but the latter's will be more deeply informed by experience. "To change your language," as Derek Walcott says, "you must change your life."

But when did you last meet a contemporary poet who takes this approach, seeking out fresh experience or new knowledge specifically for the benefit of his or her poetry? I personally don't know many who would think to cross the street, let alone do what Hemingway did, in the hopes of getting a poem out of it. Rather it is the unconscious habit of poets to wait for the poem to come to them. (In the words of a poet friend, "You don't choose the poem, the poem chooses you.") Most contemporary poets align their role as writer with that of witness. (Mary Oliver: "I don't know exactly what a prayer is. / I do know how to pay attention." Or William Matthews: "I plan to notice everything.") They think of the artist as one more acted upon than acting. This is not to say, of course, that great poetry cannot come out of the most meager repository of lived experience. (Think of Emily Dickinson: all those years of writing in a still house, in the grip of a constant intensity.) The point rather is that poets today don't seem even to be aware that what they write will be influenced by how they live. As Auden wrote:

God may reduce you
on Judgment Day
to tears of shame,
reciting by heart
the poems you would
have written, had
your life been good.
— From Thanksgiving for a Habitat


When poets come to pay as much attention to how they live as to what they write, that may mark one new beginning for poetry. As a Zen tea master, long before the ceremony of making tea, prepares the garden for his guests, sweeps the walk, cleans and composes the room, so poets should give their first attention to the lives they lead. Indeed, if they do not, on what authority can they claim to be Shelley's "unacknowledged legislators of the world?" Indeed, if they do not, how can poetry be a moral act? How can poets answer for the effects of what they write on how their readers live? Poets should live broadly, then write boldly.

3

Poetry, in its long history, has been all things to all people. For warrior peoples, Beowulf and the Icelandic Njal's Saga told the stories of their heroes. Homer's subject, in his twin epics, was that prior world when the gods lived just over the horizon and came to visit men. Lucretius put his science and philosophy into books of hexameter verse. Virgil used the epic to give his Rome a mythical past and divine sponsorship. Chaucer brought the high and low of English society into his pentameter couplets; with his narrative gift and love of human nature he was our first short-story writer. The Elizabethan verse dramatists created an entertainment industry based on the iambic pentameter line. In all these manifestations—epic, elegy, meditation, religious devotion, satire, the public poem, verse drama—poetry was .........................

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/178645
ESSAY
Is It Poetry or Is It Verse?
The president of the Poetry Foundation weighs in on 2Pac Shakur, “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” and “Jabberwocky.”

BY JOHN BARR
1.

Question: What do the following poems have in common?

* * *

It seemed to me a simple thing since my socks was showin’ through:
Turn my old boots out to pasture, and buy a pair—brand new.
Well, they built this cowboy K-mart outa town there in the Mall,
Where I parked my Studdybaker after shippin’ drys this fall.


* * *

There R no words 2 express
how much I truly care
So many times I fantasize of
feelings we can share
My heart has never known
the Joy u bring 2 me
As if GOD knew what I wanted
and made u a reality


* * *

My brother built a robot
that does not exactly work,
as soon as it was finished,
it began to go berserk,
its eyes grew incandescent
and its nose appeared to gleam,
it bellowed unbenignly
and its ears emitted steam.
Answer: They are the opening lines of poems by leading writers in their respective fields. And they all, most likely, set on edge the teeth of the readers of Poetry magazine.

It’s not just snobbery. People who care about their poetry often experience genuine feelings of embarrassment, even revulsion, when confronted with cowboy poetry, rap and hip-hop, and children’s poetry not written by “adult” poets. Their readerly sensibilities are offended. (If the writing gives them any pleasure, it is a guilty pleasure.) The fact that Wallace McRae, Tupac Shakur, and Jack Prelutsky wrote these works for large, devoted audiences simply adds insult to the injury. Somewhat defensively, the serious poetry crowd dismisses such work as verse, not poetry, and generally acts so as to avoid it, if at all possible, in the future. The fact that these different kinds of poetry don’t communicate, don’t do business with one another, is not just a matter of lost e-mail addresses. The advocates of each know what they like, and it’s definitely not what the others are doing. The result is a poetry world of broad divides, a balkanized system of poetries with their own sovereign audiences, prizes, and heroes. The only thing they share is the word poetry, and that not willingly.

There’s nothing wrong with this, a generally peaceful coexistence of live-and-let-live poetry communities, except to those who require, for intellectual comfort, a universal theory of poetry that ties it all together. It also matters to the Poetry Foundation and organizations like it, which must make choices and use their finite resources to support some kinds of poetry while not others.

2.

Efforts to define the difference between poetry and verse (like efforts to define the difference between poetry and prose) have been with us for a long time. Verse is often a term of disparagement in the poetry world, used to dismiss the work of people who want to write poetry but don’t know how. Verse, in this usage, means unsophisticated or poorly written poetry. But quality of writing is not the real difference between the two. Yes, there is plenty of poorly written verse out there, but there is also plenty of poorly written poetry—and sometimes the verse is the better crafted.
There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
I cremated Sam McGee.
Robert Service’s “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” with no help from the critical establishment, is still going strong after a century, while most early Yeats is read today only because it was written by Yeats. To use verse as a pejorative term, then, is to lose the use of it as a true distinction.

George Orwell gives us another way to think about this when he describes Kipling as “a good bad poet.”
A good bad poem is a graceful monument to the obvious. It records in memorable form—for verse is a mnemonic device, among other things—some emotion which very nearly every human being can share.
Into this same pot Orwell puts “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” the work of Bret Harte—and presumably that of Robert Service. “There is a great deal of good bad poetry in English,” says Orwell; by implication, there is even more bad bad poetry. My own nominations for the latter include the work of Edgar Guest, whose Collected Poems, in a signed limp leather edition, was one of two books of poetry in the house where I grew up (a wedding present to my parents).
Ma has a dandy little book that’s full of narrow slips,
An’ when she wants to pay a bill a page from it she rips;
She just writes in the dollars and the cents and signs her name
An’ that’s as good as money, though it doesn’t look the same.
Orwell’s distinction, between good bad poetry and just plain bad poetry, is one based on quality of execution, of craftsmanship. Good bad poetry is verse competently—even memorably—written. But his distinction leaves unaddressed the nature of the poetry itself.

3.

Verse, I have come to think, is poetry written in pursuit of limited objectives: to entertain us with a joke or tall tale, to give us the inherent pleasures of meter and rhyme. It is not great art, nor is it trying to be. Verse, as Orwell says, tells us something we already know—as often as not something we know we already know. Verse is not an instrument of exploration, but rather a tool of affirmation. Its rewards lie not in the excitements of discovery, but in the pleasures of encountering the familiar. Writers of verse have done their job when they make lines that conform to the chosen meter—and do not go beyond it. Frost’s notion, “The possibilities for tune from dramatic tones of meaning struck across the rigidity of a limited meter are endless,” is unvisited territory. Verse does not seek to know the unknown or to express the unexpected, nor does it undertake the risk of failure that both entail.

“Serious” poetry, on the other hand, is written in pursuit of an open-ended goal. It seeks to use language, in its full potential, to encompass reality, both external and internal, in the fullness of its complexity. Unlike verse, poetry does not bring our experience of the world down to the level of the homily or the bromide, and sum it all up in a soothing platitude. It does not pursue simple conclusions or familiar returns. Rather, it is a voyage of discovery into the unknown. Of the figure a poem makes, Frost says,
Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting. . . . Its most precious quality will remain its having run itself and carried away the poet with it. . . . It can never lose its sense of a meaning that once unfolded by surprise as it went.
A poem begins in delight, he says, and ends in wisdom. Verse begins in delight and ends in . . . more delight. The difference between poetry and verse, then, is the difference between an explorer and a tour guide. Verse tells us, finally, that all is well. Poetry, on the contrary, tells us that things are not as we thought they were. Verse does not ask us to change our lives. Poetry does.

At its best, verse can cross over into the realm of serious poetry. Children’s poetry, in particular, can speak at the same time to its intended audience of the young or very young, while holding the attention of an experienced reader.
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
In the recent finals of Poetry Out Loud, the national recitation contest cosponsored by the Poetry Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, if any one poem drove the judges to thoughts of suicide if they had to hear it one more time, it was probably Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky.” Yet the poem probably stands as high today in the critical community as it does with young readers. Constructed wholly out of neologisms, the poem tells its tale from a parallel universe. Many of the new schools of poetry that followed it in the 20th century could claim “Jabberwocky” as a progenitor. With a little effort, you can even get Mother Goose and Dr. Seuss to resonate with contemporary poetry’s fascination for the nonrational. The nonsense of children’s verse converges with the non-sense of the fanciest experimental poetry.

Most verse has no following in the critical world because it needs none to be understood and appreciated. Most verse also receives no support from the programs of the Poetry Foundation (with the exception of children’s poetry). This is not so much because the Foundation takes a position on the value of verse as poetry, although the legacy of Poetry magazine strongly inclines us to the “serious.” It is rather because the mission of the Foundation is to discover and address poetry’s greatest unmet needs. (The estate of Tupac Shakur is presumably doing just fine without the Poetry Foundation, thank you very much.) The exception is children’s poetry, which the Foundation supports because of its importance to the future of the entire art form. Findings from our major study—Poetry in America—show that a lifelong interest in reading poetry is most likely if developed early and reinforced thereafter.

Whether it’s “Jack and Jill ran up the hill” or “There once was a man from Nantucket,” there is a kind of poem that won’t get out of our ears, even as it refuses our serious attention in the matter of its sense. There is a place in the poetry world for verse—if it is memorably written—and we wish it well in all of its variety.
Originally Published: September 18, 2006
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Far too much verse is currently being heralded as magnificent poetry IMHO.
TRUE GREAT VERSE IS OFTEN BETTER THAN AVERAGE POETRY (ESPECIALLY IF IT IS WRITTEN WITH NO SPIRIT AND NO HEART), BUT GREAT VERSE NEVER IS BETTER THAN GREAT POETRY IMHO. -TYR


George Orwell gives us another way to think about this when he describes Kipling as “a good bad poet.”
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ I HAVE ALWAYS FOUND Orwell's criticism of Kipling to be laced with the vilest venom of pure jealousy!
Enough that I have very little respect for Orwell. As I respect no man that deliberately knocks another strictly due to jealousy... --Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/178703

ESSAY
Bob Dylan: Henry Timrod Revisited
When Bob Dylan lifted lines from an obscure Civil War poet, he wasn't plagiarizing. He was sampling.
BY ROBERT POLITO


These happy stars, and yonder setting moon,
Have seen me speed, unreckoned and untasked,
A round of precious hours.
Oh! here, where in that summer noon I basked,
And strove, with logic frailer than the flowers,
To justify a life of sensuous rest,
A question dear as home or heaven was asked,
And without language answered. I was blest!
—Henry Timrod, “A Rhapsody of a Southern Winter Night,” from Poems (1860)


. . . and at times
A strange far look would come into his eyes,
As if he saw a vision in the skies.
—Henry Timrod, “A Vision of Poesy,” from Poems (1860)


The moon gives light and it shines by night
Well, I scarcely feel the glow
We learn to live and then we forgive
O’er the road we’re bound to go
More frailer than the flowers, these precious hours
That keep us so tightly bound
You come to my eyes like a vision from the skies
And I’ll be with you when the deal goes down
—Bob Dylan, “When the Deal Goes Down,” from Modern Times (2006)



As a culture we appear to have forgotten how to experience works of art, or at least how to talk about them plausibly and smartly. The latest instance is the “controversy” shadowing Bob Dylan’s new record, Modern Times, wherein he recurrently adapts phrases from poems by Henry Timrod, a nearly-vanished 19th-century American poet, essayist, and Civil War newspaper correspondent.

That our nation’s most gifted and ambitious songwriter would revive Timrod on the number-one best-selling CD across America, Europe, and Australia might prompt a lively concatenation of responses, ranging from “Huh? Henry Timrod? Isn’t that interesting. . . .” to “Why?” But to narrow the Dylan/Timrod phenomenon (see the New York Times article “Who’s This Guy Dylan Who’s Borrowing Lines from Henry Timrod?” and a subsequent op-ed piece, “The Ballad of Henry Timrod,” by singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega) into a story of possible plagiarism is to confuse, well, art with a term paper.

Timrod was born in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1828, his arrival in this world falling two years after Stephen Foster but two years before Emily Dickinson. His work, too, might be styled as falling between theirs: sometimes dark and skeptical, other times mawkish and old-fashioned. (Dylan, I’m guessing, is fascinated by both aspects of Timrod, the antique alongside the brooding.) Often tagged the “laureate of the Confederacy”—a title apparently conferred upon him by none other than Tennyson—Timrod still shows up in anthologies because of the poems he wrote celebrating and then mourning the new Southern nation, particularly “Ethnogenesis” and “Ode Sung on the Occasion of Decorating the Graves of the Confederate Dead at Magnolia Cemetery.” Early on, Whittier and Longfellow admired Timrod, and his “Ode” stands behind Allen Tate’s “Ode to the Confederate Dead” (and thus in turn behind Robert Lowell’s “For the Union Dead”).

On Modern Times Dylan avoids anthology favorites, but his album contains at least ten instances of lines or phrases culled from seven different Timrod poems, mostly poems about love, friendship, death, and poetry . Dylan also quoted Timrod’s “Charleston” in “Cross the Green Mountain,” a song he contributed to the soundtrack of the 2003 Civil War film Gods and Generals; two years earlier he glanced at Timrod’s “Vision of Poesy” for “Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum” on his CD “Love and Theft.” (Various Dylan Web sites annotate his lyrics, but I found these two related sites invaluable: http://republika.pl/bobdylan/mt/ and http://republika.pl/bobdylan/lat/.)

From the dustup in the Times—after our paper of record found a middle-school teacher who branded Dylan “duplicitous,” Vega earnestly supposed that Dylan probably hadn’t lifted the texts “on purpose”—you might not guess that we’ve just lived through some two and a half decades of hip-hop sampling, not to mention a century of Modernism. For the neglected Henry Timrod is just the tantalizing threshold into Dylan’s vast memory palace of echoes.

Besides Timrod, for instance, Modern Times taps into the Bible (Genesis, Exodus, Samuel, John, and Luke, among others), Robert Johnson, Memphis Minnie, Kokomo Arnold, Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson, Blind Lemon Jefferson, the Stanley Brothers, Merle Haggard, Hoagy Carmichael, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, and standards popularized by Jeanette MacDonald, Bing Crosby, and Frank Sinatra, as well as vintage folk songs such as “Wild Mountain Thyme,” “Frankie and Albert,” and “Gentle Nettie Moore.”

It’s possible, in fact, to see his prior two recordings, Time Out of Mind and “Love and Theft,” as rearranging the entire American musical and literary landscape of the past 150 years, except that the sources he adapts aren’t always American or so recent. Please forgive another Homeric (if partial) catalog, but the scale and range of Dylan’s allusive textures are vital to an appreciation of what he’s after on his recent recordings.

On Time Out of Mind and “Love and Theft,” Dylan refracts folk, blues, and pop songs created by or associated with Crosby, Sinatra, Charlie Patton, Woody Guthrie, Blind Willie McTell, Doc Boggs, Leroy Carr, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Elvis Presley, Blind Willie Johnson, Big Joe Turner, Wilbert Harrison, the Carter Family, and Gene Austin alongside anonymous traditional tunes and nursery rhymes.

But the revelation is the sly cavalcade of film and literature fragments: W.C. Fields, the Marx Brothers, assorted film noirs, As You Like It, Othello, Robert Burns, Lewis Carroll, Timrod, Ovid, T.D. Rice’s blackface Otello, Huckleberry Finn, The Aeneid, The Great Gatsby, the Japanese true crime paperback Confessions of a Yakuza by Junichi Saga, Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, and Wise Blood. So pervasive and crafty are Dylan’s recastings for “Love and Theft” that I wouldn’t be surprised if someday we learn that every bit of speech on the album—no matter how intimate or Dylanesque—can be tracked back to another song, poem, movie, or novel.

One conventional approach to Dylan’s songwriting references “folk process” (and also, in his case, “blues process”) and recognizes that he’s always acted as a magpie, recovering and transforming borrowed materials, lyrics, tunes, and even film dialogue (notably on his 1985 album Empire Burlesque). Folk process can readily map early Dylan, the associations linking say, “It Ain’t Me Babe” and “Go ’Way from My Window” with his current variations on traditional blues couplets in his update of “Rollin’ and Tumblin’” for Modern Times.

Yet what about Twain, Fitzgerald, O’Connor, Confessions of a Yakuza, and Timrod? If those gestures are also folk process, then a folk process pursued with such intensity, scope, audacity, and verve eventually explodes into Modernism. As far back as “Desolation Row,” Dylan sang of “Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot / Fighting in the captain’s tower / While calypso singers laugh at them / And fishermen hold flowers.” Dylan’s insistent nods to the past on Time Out of Mind, “Love and Theft,” and Modern Times can probably best be apprehended as Modernist collages.

To clarify what I mean by Modernist collages, think of them as verbal echo chambers of harmonizing and clashing reverberations that tend to organize into two types: those collaged texts, like Pound’s Cantos or Eliot’s “The Waste Land, ” where we are meant to remark on the discrepant tones and idioms of the original texts bumping up against one another, and those collaged texts, composed by poets as various as Kenneth Fearing, Lorine Niedecker, Frank Bidart, and John Ashbery, that aim for an apparently seamless surface. A conspicuous model of the former is the ending of “The Waste Land”:

London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down
Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina
Quando fiam ceu chelidon—O swallow swallow
Le Prince d’Aquitaine a la tour abolie
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
Shantih shantih shantih

The following passage by Frank Bidart, from his poem “The Second Hour of the Night,” actually proves as allusive as Eliot’s, nearly every line rearranging elements assembled not only from Ovid, his main source for the Myrrha story, but also from Plotinus and even Eliot. But instead of incessant fragmentation, we experience narrative sweep and urgency:

As Myrrha is drawn down the dark corridor toward her father

not free not to desire

what draws her forward is neither COMPULSION nor FREEWILL:—

or at least freedom, here choice, is not to be
imagined as action upon

preference: no creature is free to choose what
allows it its most powerful, and most secret, release:

I fulfill it, because I contain it—
it prevails, because it is within me—

it is a heavy burden, setting up longing to enter that
realm to which I am called from within. . . .

Dylan’s songwriting tilts toward the cagier, deflected mode that Bidart is using here. We would scarcely realize we were inside a collage unless someone told us, or unless we abruptly registered a familiar locution. The wonder of the dozen or so snippets that Dylan sifted from Confessions of a Yakuza for “Love and Theft” is how casual and personal they sound dropped into his songs—not one of those songs, of course, remotely about a yakuza, or a gangster of any persuasion.

Some of Dylan’s borrowings operate as allusions in the accustomed sense, urging us back into the wellspring texts. Timrod, I think, works as a citation we’re ultimately intended to notice, though no song depends on that notice. Dylan manifestly is fixated on the American Civil War. In his memoir Chronicles, Volume One, he recounted that during the early 1960s he systematically read every newspaper at the New York Public Library for the years 1855 to 1865. “The age that I was living in didn’t resemble this age,” he wrote, “but it did in some mysterious and traditional way. Not just a little bit, but a lot. There was a broad spectrum and commonwealth that I was living upon, and the basic psychology of that life was every bit a part of it. If you turned the light towards it, you could see the full complexity of human nature. Back there, America was put on the cross, died, and was resurrected. There was nothing synthetic about it. The godawful truth of that would be the all-encompassing template behind everything I would write.”

His 2003 film Masked and Anonymous takes place against the backdrop of another interminable domestic war during an unspecified future. Dylan clearly sees links between the Civil War and America now—and once you consult a historical map of the red and blue states, would you contradict him? The echoes of Timrod help him frame and sustain those links. For Dylan, Modern Times (and this is the joke in his title, along with the reference to the Chaplin movie) are also old times, ancient times. “The age I was living in didn’t resemble this age, but it did. . . .”

Other borrowings, such as the tidbits of yakuza oral history, aren’t so much formal allusions as curios of vernacular speech picked up from reading or listening that shade his songs into something like collective, as against individual, utterances. But here, too, it’s hard not to discern specific designs. On recordings steeped in empire, corruption, masks, male power, and self-delusion, aren’t Tokyo racketeers (or Virgilian ghosts) as apt as Huck Finn, Confederate poets, and Charlie Patton?

Without ever winking, Dylan is inveterately canny and sophisticated about all this, though after a fashion that recalls Laurence Sterne’s celebrated attack on plagiarism in Tristram Shandy, itself plagiarized from The Anatomy of Melancholy. On “Summer Days” from “Love and Theft,” Dylan sings:

She’s looking into my eyes, and she’s a-holding my hand
She looking into my eyes, she’s holding my hand,
She says, “You can’t repeat the past,” I say, “You can’t? What do you mean, you
can’t? Of course you can.”

His puckish, snaky lines dramatize precisely how one could, in fact, “repeat the past,” since the lyrics reproduce a conversation between Nick and Gatsby from chapter 6 of The Great Gatsby. On “Rollin’ and Tumblin’” from Modern Times, Dylan follows another oblique intimation of Timrod with the confession “I’ve been conjuring up all these long-dead souls from their crumbling tombs.” The quotation marks in the title of “Love and Theft” signal Dylan’s debts to Eric Lott’s academic study Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class; the secondhand title of the CD also specifies his status as a white blues and rock ’n’ roll performer inside an American minstrelsy tradition, as well as his songwriting proclivities (loving stuff enough to filch it).

In a 1996 interview for Newsweek, novelist David Gates asked Dylan what he believed. He replied, “I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music. I don’t find it anywhere else. Songs like ‘Let Me Rest on a Peaceful Mountain’ or ‘I Saw the Light’—that’s my religion. I don’t adhere to rabbis, preachers, evangelists, all of that. I’ve learned more from the songs than I’ve learned from any of this kind of entity. The songs are my lexicon. I believe the songs.”

Let’s presume that by “songs” Dylan also now must mean poems, such as Henry Timrod’s, and novels, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s, as well as traditional folk hymns and blues. His invocation of that expanded “lexicon” might be surprising, and daunting, but it certainly isn’t plagiarism. Who else writes, has ever written, songs like these? Poems, novels, films, songs all partake of a conversation with the great dead—a “conjuring,” as Dylan would say. The embodiment of his conjuring, those conversations with his dead on his recent recordings are among the most daring and original signatures of his art.

Illustration by Tom Bachtell.

Originally Published: October 6, 2006

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/guide/178723#guide

Robert Hass: “The Nineteenth Century as a Song”
Robert Hass, Baudelaire, Marx, and a bomb-building anarchist.

BY JOY KATZ
Imagine a young married professor ensconced in the library on a sunny afternoon. He began his day listening to people argue against the war in Vietnam, and then, perhaps, he met his wife and three small children for lunch. It’s spring. He’s studying revolutionary history and 19th-century poetry. His mind sifts through the events of the morning: uprisings, outrage, a picnic. He reads essays about anarchy and the abolition of the state. Outside, someone is flying a kite in the quadrangle.

Robert Hass meditates on such incongruity in “The Nineteenth Century as a Song,” a poem published in his first book, Field Guide, written while he held his first university teaching job. Hass came of age in San Francisco in the late 1950s and early ’60s, during a turbulent time: the Cambodian conflict, Vietnam, McCarthy. It was a “monstrously inhuman world,” he wrote then. Yet Hass is not a revolutionary. He makes poems “for the peace involved in reading and writing them.” “Feeling human,” he says, is a “useful form of political subversion.” The pleasure in “The Nineteenth Century as a Song” is the poem’s easy movement across an uneasy era, the way it touches down on increasingly discomforting subjects as casually as a bird hops from branch to branch of a tree.

The poem unfolds in Europe, from about 1850 to 1870, also a time of upheaval. Aesthetically the world was on the brink of Modernism. Wordsworth and Coleridge, the great Romantic poets who found redemption in nature, had died. God was dead, too: Darwin had published The Origin of Species. Marx was penning screeds on state-run socialism. Workers toiled in wretched factories. Paris saw a revolution and mob rule. The French poets Paul Verlaine and Charles Baudelaire, both active politically, were writing a new kind of violent, sexual poetry. Baudelaire was even prosecuted for obscenity (just as Allen Ginsberg would be in the late 1950s, in Hass’s San Francisco).

Above all this turmoil there was the sky, of course. Birds. Clouds. Everything that inspired the Romantic poets, and that inspires Hass—who writes often and in detail about the California landscape—was there. What role does beauty have in a time of revolution? That’s the question the poem seems to ask.

The opening image of orderly loveliness seems to say that beauty was thriving in the 19th century. Hass quotes the poet Verlaine (1844–1896): “How like a well-kept garden is your soul.” The soul is not in torment; it’s a pretty place to walk through on a sunny day. Right? Well, all is not what it seems. Verlaine was no stroller in gardens. He was a tormented spirit, a wife-beater and a drunk who died (not entirely unhappily) in a fleabag hotel.

The poem leaps from this apparently peaceful image to an imagined scene in which Baudelaire (1821–1867) shops for the ingredients of his dinner. His butcher

shorted him four centimes on a pound of tripe.
He thought himself a clever man
and, wiping the calves’ blood from his beefy hands,
gazed briefly at what Tennyson called
“the sweet blue sky.”

Baudelaire’s shopkeeper is a devious character, cheating the poet of a bit of change on a cheap cut of meat. But he must need those four centimes: France is in crisis. There’s a depression. This man can’t even vote—the voting privileges of the working class have been revoked. As a révolutionnaire, he has a lot more than calves’ blood on his hands. Still, life is not so hellish that a butcher in a stinking shop can’t admire a beautiful sky.

It was a warm day.
What clouds there were
were made of sugar tinged with blood.
They shed, faintly, amid the clatter of carriages
new settings of the songs
Moravian virgins sang on wedding days.

Hass lingers in that pleasant afternoon. Instead of rain, the clouds are shedding music (a song’s setting is its melody). What would a new melody for a folk song be like in the mid-19th century? Modern music has its roots in the late 1800s. Compared with Romantic and Victorian music, it is cacophonous and dissonant. Hass may have had in mind Gustav Mahler (1860–1911), who spent his childhood in Moravia and whose symphonies, some of which are based on folk songs, began to play with anti-tonality. Perhaps he also thought of the Paris premiere of the ballet Rite of Spring. The audience booed and hissed at the pagan orgy onstage and at the animal-like shrieks of the bassoon in Igor Stravinsky’s score. Now picture a half-dozen country virgins staggering down a forest path to a weird, sort of ugly tune. They are being delivered into the sexuality of wifehood and the brutality of industrial-age life, not a flower-strewn happy ending. Poor virgins!

Hass’s title announces that the poem, too, is a song. Modern classical music has melodious parts that collide with jarring ones. Hass has given us flowers and animal intestines, sugar and blood, leaping from the smelly to the sublime and back again.

The poet is a monarch of the clouds

This line is adrift in space, like—well, like a cloud. I like to picture Robert Hass looking out that library window. Writing is a solitary act, unlike a march on Washington, or on Versailles. Poetry can’t change the world. On the other hand, Hass isn’t bombing Bien Hoa. Verlaine and Baudelaire didn’t exactly help oppressed Paris workers, but they did write impassioned verse. Poets lack power. They rule over a kingdom of ice droplets. Maybe that’s not so bad.

With a simple ampersand and line break, Hass makes another jump, this time from France to England.

& Swinburne on his northern coast
“trod,” he actually wrote, “by no tropic foot,”
composed that lovely elegy

The poet Algernon Swinburne (1837–1909) was attempting to wield perhaps the only public power a poet does have: memorializing the dead, in this case Baudelaire, one of his heroes. The elegy Hass nods to is indeed lovely, but “trod by no tropic foot” isn’t. It’s clunky and silly. Hass is taking a jab at the way Swinburne sometimes chose words for the sake of rhyme, but he rolls his eyes affectionately, as if at an overwrought love letter written by a teenager.

and then found out Baudelaire was still alive
whom he had lodged dreamily
in a “deep division of prodigious breasts.”

In his elegy, Swinburne had imagined the dead poet taken up into the bosom of a Titan woman whose vastness could barely contain Baudelaire’s lusty, rebellious soul and whose heavy tangle of hair smelled like forests. All very noble, except Swinburne had made a mistake: Baudelaire was alive. As a big fan of artifice, Baudelaire would have loved that Swinburne turned literary tradition on its head, however unwittingly. What could be more droll and modern than elegizing someone who wasn’t dead?

Next, Hass stakes his claim for the poet again. He sounds insistent, as if trying to convince himself that art has a purpose, or as if he can tell what you’re thinking: poets traffic in beauty, but the world isn’t beautiful. It’s full of madness, war, and betrayal. What’s the point?

Surely the poet is monarch of the clouds.
He hovers, like a lemon-colored kite,
over spring afternoons in the nineteenth century
while Marx in the library gloom
studies the birth rate of the weavers of Tilsit

Hass has neatly conjured Karl Marx beside him in the library, reading the very book he may be studying himself. If poets are useless, what about revolutionaries? Surely they are more than monarchs of the clouds. But while Hass floats around in the sky, Marx endures a tedious afternoon. Being a revolutionary seems glamorous, but one spends a lot of time waiting around for weavers to revolt.

Hass imagines a different sort of tedium in the affairs of the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876). Bakunin thought Marx didn’t go nearly far enough. Forget any form of government, he said. People should live in communes, farm the land, and rule themselves. It was as sexy a vision as the Age of Aquarius, and as short-lived...............................

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/178919
PROSE FROM POETRY MAGAZINE
Does Poetry Have a Social Function?
BY STEPHEN BURT AND DAISY FRIED AND MAJOR JACKSON AND EMILY WARN
Stephen Burt:

What is the social function of poetry? Well, what is the social function of ER nursing? Of plumbing and carpentry? Whatever you think of the folks who fix your pipes, you know roughly what they get paid to do, and why the people who pay them value their services. An individual poet may think she knows such things about poetry, but put two or more poets (let alone critics) in a room, and their so-called knowledge may reveal itself as clashing opinions or axioms—even though "social," as the antithesis of "individual," implies some ground of agreement, something shared. (One reason we keep seeking a "social function" despite this lack of agreement: those of us who make a living through poetry—by teaching other people how to write more of it, or by writing about it—often feel a bit guilty for getting paid.)

Compared to the writing of poetry, few other human activities take place so widely, at least in America, absent even a tacit consensus as to why we do them, what good they do, what function they serve. When you read a lot of contemporary poetry, you discover that the presumed or stated, implicit or explicit, social function of poetry (if any) varies wildly with the poet. Rae Armantrout's poetry, for example, seeks—at times, it seems to despair of finding—a social function we might identify as the inculcation of skeptical thinking. That's a social function in the sense of "social good," even of "social policy." James Merrill's poetry has a social function in the sense of "social event": it tries to produce—often, in the face of mortality, or dejection, or bodily ills—a sense that the poet has friends who get his jokes, who share his sense of things, who respond in kind. Late Merrill—the Merrill of "Self-Portrait in Tyvek Windbreaker"—wonders whether his poetry might resound beyond that social group. Both poets want to say something about a society, and both poets want to do something we might call "social"—to imagine, and to cause, some sense of relations that extend beyond one-on-one intimacy—but they differ in what they want to do, and in why. To speak usefully about the social function of poetry, we need to decide what—or whose—poetry we intend.

Daisy Fried:

People who talk about poetry's social utility often concentrate on content. They think, perhaps, that poetry Tells the Truth, or Provides Solace. These notions make me queasy, and are treason to poetry. If you're crawling to poems on your hands and knees, as I once heard a famous poet remark—in my view, you're not crawling to poetry. Prozac would probably work better.

Poetry's social function comes not from what it means but from what it is. Its utility is to shake us out of our standard American buy-stuff-and-watch-TV half life. A poem's content matters very little to that utility.

I read the phrase "social function" particularly in terms of politics. Plenty of things need to happen in this country, like impeaching George Bush, nationalizing health care, legalizing same-sex civil union, and bringing the troops home now. Poetry can make none of these happen. Anne Winters's "The Mill-Race," about office workers in lower Manhattan, contains virtuoso description of the urban scene: workers, weather, light, limos of the bosses, buses of the employees. Though its subject matter and politics are both clear and attractive, content has very little to do with why the poem is extraordinary.

Is it a useful poem? I like political poetry; it acknowledges that politics are part of life. Certainly at this historical moment, many of us are hungry for poems that look outward, not just into the self or into what seems like another kind of narcissism, a turning away via the knee-jerk (therefore empty) "avant garde" linguistic gesture. America's crimes may be forcing poets back into the world. It's not as though it's optional. Eventually it becomes political necessity.

But politically-alert poetry is no more intrinsically useful than any other poetry. The only kind of poetry that doesn't have social function is that which tells us how to think about X, Y, or Z, or tells us to buck up, or that the world is a wonderful place. The kind of poetry written to make us feel better, for example, after 9/11, is pro-establishment falsification, for it lets us pull the comforter back over our heads and go on sleeping.

For the record, I never feel guilty getting paid, ever.

Major Jackson:

The function of poetry is that it does not have any function beyond its own construction and being-in-the-world. For this reason, poetry makes everything (and, yes, nothing) happen, especially in a consumer society prone to assessing and dispensing value to everything from lap dances to teachers' salaries. Whether as a form of witness, as a medium which dignifies individual speech and thought, as a repository of our cumulative experiences, or as a space where we "purify" language, poetry, like all imaginative creations, divines the human enterprise. This is poetry's social value.

I hope this does not sound like an exercise in ambiguities. If so, let me add another: one of poetry's chief aims is to illumine the walls of mystery, the inscrutable, the unsayable. I think poetry ought to be taught not as an engine of meaning but as an opportunity to learn to live in doubt and uncertainty, as a means of claiming indeterminancy. Our species is deeply defined by its great surges of reason, but I think it high time we return to elemental awe and wonder. Such a position is necessary to our communal health.

I try to teach my students the full magnitude of what can happen during the reading of a poem. The readerly self, if the music and strategies of the poem are a success, fades away to assume the speaker's identity, or the poem's psychic position. Once a reader has fully internalized the poem's machinations, she collects a chorus within her and is transformed. This ritual generates empathy and widens our humanity. These might seem like grand dreams, but it is just such a belief in the power of poetry that spurs my pen to action, whether I am getting paid or not.

Emily Warn:

Here is a guess at Will Shortz's crossword clue for your collective answer to our question: "A six-letter word for an art form with no public use other than the one each artist defines. You can separate its content from its uses, which are to shake people from their consumer stupor and usher them into indeterminate mystery."

Plato need not have stewed about poets, you seem to be saying. They have banished themselves from the republic, having abdicated their role as loud-mouth rousers of weeping and gnashing. They won't discombobulate the young, especially young soldiers, whom Plato warned off poetry lest it remind them of their dirty little fear of death. Now it is the poets who soldier on; they have, after all, paying jobs to perform, not for the republic, but for the realm of the personal which has subsumed it.

Does the social function of poetry vary so wildly that we cannot generalize about it? What can be commonly said about a skeptic who turns for clarity to a Rae Armantrout poem, a plumber who searches on Yahoo for a wedding toast, a harried person who seeks in poetry refuge from a grueling job, or a Guantanamo prisoner who, denied pen and paper, uses pebbles to scratch poems on Styrofoam cups?

I'll hazard an answer. Poetry binds solitudes. It enacts a central human paradox: we exist as singular selves, yet can only know them through our relations. A poem creates a presence that is so physically, emotionally, and intellectually charged that we encounter ourselves in our response to it. The encounter, which occurs in language, preserves and enlarges our solitude and points out our connections. Pyrotechnic poets, such as Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, and Adrienne Rich, set a charge that reverberates among multitudes, changing the shape of our social relations and, inescapably, our individual and collective consciousness.

"The Mill-Race" by Anne Winters serves as proof text. How can its content not matter? How can one not relate to the drained faces of the women office workers on an evening bus, to their scant hope that, despite their misspent, dwindling hours in the service of Labor, they have preserved a shred of self?

It won't take us
altogether, we say, the mill-race—it won't churn us up
altogether. We'll keep
a glib stretch of leisure water, like our self's self—to
reflect the sky.
But we won't (says the bus rider now to herself).
Nothing's
left over really, from labor. They've taken it all for the
mill-race.


Will this poem end drudgery? No. Does it disclose the pathos of other human beings and the source of their suffering? Yes. Is it this capacity that will help us, better than ammo or dollars, find a way through these harrowing times? Absolutely.

Stephen Burt:

I hope I share Emily Warn's passionate optimism about the scope of our art form, but I either fail to understand, or cannot believe, her argument. Is there some function we should call "social," in some ordinary meaning of that term, which all good poems, and only poems (no non-poems: no sculptures, for example) attain? Emily says yes: "poetry binds solitudes," creating "a presence" in whose contemplation we "encounter ourselves" alongside other readers and writers.

Certainly many poems—one might say all good poems—have this effect. So do many objects and events which are not poems. Would it be nonsensical to say that by building houses with Habitat for Humanity, through the hard work of hammer and nail, on the one hand, and the contemplation of poverty, on the other, I might encounter and come to know both my society and myself? What about reading my great-grandmother's love letters, reading Studs Terkel's oral histories, contemplating Brancusi's "Bird in Flight"? We are more likely to experience great visual art in the presence of others (in museums); we might say such experience connects us more evidently than can the silent reading of verse whose authors we have never met.

Ah, but poetry binds our solitudes, creating this self-encounter which becomes paradoxically social, through language alone. Our current—our late-Romantic—understanding of poetry (by which all poems are really or fundamentally lyric) posits this binding-together through language alone as poetry's chief goal: poetry becomes that way of using language in which that goal (rather than, say, exposition or persuasion) takes center stage.

If that is what Emily means, I accept her claim, with two demurrers. First, it is a historically specific understanding, one which describes many superb poems, but leaves out many—to say the least—wonderfully memorable uses of verse (e.g. Milton's sonnet against the Long Parliament). Second, hers appears to be a sense of "social" by which "social" denotes any experience or quality shared among two or more people, friends or strangers, living or dead. Otherwise a poem could not bind—as many poems do bind—solitudes and make connections among readers who do not live in the same society, nor even in the same century. If we use any more conventional, more restrictive senses for "social"—for example, "having to do with a particular society taken as a whole," or even "having to do with people in large groups"—then there is no social function which all good poems have.

Daisy Fried:

How about a moratorium on using plumbers and other "common" people as mythical readers of poetry? Of course Ms. Hardworking Roto-Rooter reads poetry, at least casually, like anyone who reads at all. I'm only sorry more poets don't know how to fix toilets, myself included. It's easy to talk about some "them" for whom poetry is useful. "Them" seldom includes "us."

Emily Warn seems to argue that content supplies poems' utility. Content matters—poetry is far more than a formal game—but does not supply utility. Quality does. "The Mill-Race" is good and usefulbecause it presents in extraordinary language an aspect of the human condition, not some false solution having to do with feel-good "relat(ing) to drained faces." Emily should reread the very lines she quotes if she thinks this poem is about workers "preserv(ing) a shred of self." The poet is there on the bus, we are there, we are all in the mill-race.

I've never found an explanation for why poetry, apparently alone among the art forms, is asked to do more than be itself. Some people devote their lives to Art Song. They take it quite seriously and expect a small audience, without worrying about whether their obsession is useful or that their audience is small. No one says, "Hey lyric soprano, make me feel better, hey basso profundo, help me understand societal problems."

But poetry's the High Art which is also democratic: inexpensive, portable, reproducible, quickly consumed (except for epic and very difficult poetry), requiring only literacy to participate. So maybe it's good that poetry carries this extra burden, even if it means that the idea of poetry is more necessary to people than individual poems, and that people tend not to pay attention to what's happening on the page. But this doesn't explain why the superfluous demands are often made by educated poetry experts. I doubt most poets, good and bad, political or not, put these demands on their own work. Why should we make them of poetry in general?

I'm also disturbed by Emily's romantic scenario relating to Guantanamo prisoners. I'm not pooh-poohing poetry of witness, quite the opposite. Art of witness is essential. But we should beware of using witness poetry as some cliché of the triumph of the human spirit, providing ourselves with a sop to make us feel better about our government's victims. Poetry's point is not to make safe middle-class readers say, "Poor things! They have it tough. Thank Heavens I vote Democrat!"

Major Jackson:

Daisy Fried wonders why poetry is called to duty, why it "is asked to do more than be itself," especially during moments of political or national crisis. Hers is the same annoyance expressed by disapproving poets who sniff the air upon hearing a 9/11 elegy or an inaugural poem, or upon learning of a famous poet penning her own line of greeting cards. Why do we, as poets, find this function of poetry so regrettable? Is it because it is too social?

Just ask the poet who reluctantly agrees to contribute to a wedding program, a funeral, or a political rally: the assignment pales in comparison to those poems that arise out of his own mysterious and idiosyncratic need. Such poems come forth from a comparatively minor—yet compulsive—desire. They may enact, for example, an obsessive rhythmic movement in the body onto the page, or explore the significance of a gripping image. But they'll likely never mean as much in the public sphere, where content definitely does matter.

And here's where I disagree with Daisy. If a poem has something to say and says it well, it will be remembered. However, what may give a poem its originality and heft—extraordinary language, searing imagery, high lyricism—may be too arcane for the layperson. Ms. Hardworking Roto-Rooter could care less about your dithyrambs. For her, the poem has value and purpose because it says something meaningful to her.

Most poets must admit that they would cherish being seen by their community of friends and relatives as "functional," the voice who sanctions and gives formal expression to their lives in verse, who serves as the repository of their thoughts and experiences, much like the West African djali or griot. One only wishes more poets took on with greater awareness the higher calling of their art, which has always had embedded within it a vision of the social. Instead, what we have been cultivating, probably since the Romantics, is a vision of the self, either as lonely and overly sentimental, or as beleaguered and fractured, and thus modern. Maya Angelou, Billy Collins, as well as the more politically-minded poets like Adrienne Rich, Sonia Sanchez, and Palestinian-American poet Suheir Hammad all reach beyond mere aestheticism and challenge accepted notions of the above solipsistic poet toiling away at a few columns of free verse. Personally, I find the cynicism and disdain for such poets, even mildly detected here, overly familiar and somewhat nauseating.

Emily Warn:

After twenty-four hours of traveling, I get home to Seattle bleary-eyed. A headline swims into sight: "Shooting at Jewish Federation Offices Leaves 1 Dead, 5 Wounded." On high alert, I stop to read. Is my Talmud teacher among the wounded or dead? Is anyone else I know? No names have been released. The next morning Israel bombs a Lebanese village and more than fifty people, most of them children, die. Indeed, as Daisy says, "we are all on the bus." Inevitably, someone here, or in a bomb shelter in northern Israel or southern Lebanon, will turn to poetry to read at a funeral service, or to jump-start terrorized lives and pulverized communities.

Why is poetry called to duty during these crises (Major Jackson)? We avidly read poetry written about repression in other countries (Milosz, Ahkmatova, Darwish, Celan), and yet American poets who write of repression (Cornelius Eady's Brutal Imagination, for instance), we call—often with a slight sneer—"political."

Poems such as "The Mill-Race" make us aware of the social conditions that shape our relations; their language helps us dwell in, puzzle out, and feel the conditions and the relations, no matter how terrible, making a change in them more possible. It is this possibility, this hope, that makes poetry as necessary as a paycheck.

"The Mill-Race" ends on the word "salt," ("but it's mostly the miller's curse-gift, forgotten of God yet still grinding, the salt-/mill, that makes sea, salt"). The salt sting is both our empathy for the workers' weariness and the fact of their individual lives ground to salt. Over centuries, the poem also says, these workers have raised cathedrals, invented art. The work, "the curse-gift" of the poet, is to tell the story of a person who has no story other than the story of relations. As Celan wrote, "I am you / if I am."

But do all poems do this? I agree with Stephen Burt that if we prescribe a single ethical purpose to poetry, if we write toward an ideal, then we stymie the possibility that each poem can address a question raised by particular conditions. Yet if we reject tangled relations to insist on the isolated, fragmented self of modern consciousness, then we remain self-absorbed and self-limiting—and certainly incapable of responding to the woman standing with Ahkmatova in the prison line who asked, "Can you describe this?"

Stephen Burt:

A clarification for Daisy Fried: I meant what plumbers do (fix pipes), not who they are or what they read. (I could have used ASL interpreters, or oncologists.) Plumbers (or interpreters or oncologists) do something which we can easily describe, and for which most of us understand the demand. Poetry, like most of the other arts, cannot be defined in general terms that also make clear its utility; plumbing, ASL translation, and oncology can. I continue to maintain that poetry cannot be defined in terms of a social function at all, even if (and here Emily Warn and I agree) most of the great modern poets do project visions of self which imply paradoxical communities of solitude, social in one sense, antisocial in another.

Maybe no one asks mezzo-sopranos to justify their work in terms of purported political utility, but composers have long encountered such demands. Dmitri Shostakovich faced (and sometimes tried to satisfy) the demands of Soviet musical realism. Theodor Adorno's social (and antisocial) theories demanded that composers, and writers, protect that "isolated, fragmented self of modern consciousness" against the false claims of a bad social whole.

I have no desire to insist on such protection, nor to deny that poems have social functions. Rather, my point is that different poems do different things, and good poems (such as "The Mill-Race") do many things at once. If there are universal truths about the communicative functions in poems—truths about all good poems, not just about "The Mill-Race"—they are so universal that they do not count as social, by my lights: they concern communication among just two persons at a time, whether the two meet face-to-face, or whether implicit author and genuine reader live thousands of years apart. One good reason to read poems from distant times and places is that they take us out of our society, showing us how much emotion and thought isn't social (for, about, or addressed to one particular society) at all.

Daisy Fried:

Why not a summation made up of parts?

1 History matters. The claim that the Romantics weren't interested in politics or society (Major Jackson) can be disproved by anyone who reads Shelley, Byron, or Blake. If, before the Romantics, the poet's job was speaking for society, the Romantics moved towards speaking to and for the individual, including the poor and oppressed. They were revolutionaries opposing the system.

2 Words matter. Use is not function. War and Peace makes an excellent paperweight; I've used it that way myself, after reading it. The function of War and Peace is greater than its many uses. So too poetry. Bad poems are often more useful for healing, persuasion, and celebration than good ones. They lack that rich ambiguity which Keats called negative capability, and so fail as poems. Take, for example, bad 9/11 poems, at which I do "sniff the air." There are good 9/11 poems. The degraded Romanticism of the mass of bad ones often amounts to decorative displays of the poet's own sensibility. Such displays may be emotionally or politically useful, but who needs them? They seem to claim authenticity for individual experiences derived from watching TV—and fail to ask the question, why do these people want to kill us? Good 9/11 poems sustain the possibility that America was both victim and guilty. I believe 9/11 solace poetry has given support, however indirectly and unintentionally, to the Bush administration. Solace poetry is to serious poetry as pornography is to serious art. Sex pornography has its uses, even positive ones, but nobody confuses it with serious art about love. The difference between solace porn and sex porn is that solace pornographers seldom seem aware that they're making pornography. Shame on them.

3 Poetry matters. Great poems don't always fit categories of usage: Martial's hilariously filthy invectives, Dickinson's apolitical lyrics, and, despite their stupid fascism, Pound's Cantos, all function as great poetry. Meanwhile, the four of us write poems. We might begin by intending to be merely useful (I never have). But at some point the poem takes over, makes requirements of us instead of vice versa. That's the moment of poetry; poems exist to let readers share in that moment. So our focus on mere use strikes me as odd: is this really all we know about our poems? Why exclude ourselves from our own readership?

4 Enjoyment matters. Poetry is fun! I mean this seriously. In "Lapis Lazuli," Yeats insists on the gaiety of human existence alongside its tragedy. Yes, there is terrible suffering; we are all going to die. And when, on the carved lapis lazuli, a man "asks for mournful melodies;/Accomplished fingers begin to play;/...their eyes,/Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay." The gaiety of great poetry reinforces and deepens our humanity. That's personal—and therefore social. Forget that, and we forget poetry's true function.

Major Jackson:

Daisy Fried grossly misreads my critique of excessive egoism in Romantic poetry—which an even closer reading of literary history would reveal I mostly cop from Eliot and other anti-Romantic critics. But anyway, let's face it: were Daisy's nineteenth-century poet-revolutionaries alive today, they would be unemployed and writing in obscurity. They would likely be committed to mental institutions for claims of having visions, of the socially relevant and supernatural variety; at least one would be labeled a terrorist or terrorist-sympathizer for speaking against the state and/or professing anti-Christian beliefs; another ostracized for brazenly exercising self-proclaimed, progressive forms of natural love. All, except Keats maybe, would be ignored and cast aside as personae non gratae by the critical, academic, and literary establishments: no Guggenheim for you, Mr. Shelley.

True revolutionary poets are stripped of their laureateships or never reviewed in these pages, for some reason probably having to do with the worn-out argument of lack of aesthetic worth or little merit. Martín Espada, John Yau, and Nikki Finney are just a few of many poets who write poetry that "embraces experience in its full complexity," yet their books never receive a nod in Poetry. Even when the Establishment posthumously highlights a poet such as June Jordan, whose poetics and social vision coalesce into a rich model of the best of art created in a democracy, and whose poetry never suffers from mere narcissism, it does so patronizingly (see Dan Chiasson's review in these pages, November 2005).

What I also read in this exchange is a distasteful cynicism about poetry's ability—its responsibility—to affect lives. If a reading public feels consoled or seeks "a momentary stay against confusion," and poetry provides them this, why deem such works of art failures? Is healing really the domain only of prescriptive drugs?

The worth and importance of all poems is at least partially determined by the context in which they are read and the nature of the audience reading them. I once had a social worker approach me after a reading to thank me for writing a particular poem. "I run a weekly group for abusive men," he said. "I open each session with your poem." Now, I have no idea if this poem will "endure," but it was immensely gratifying that it was "of use" beyond my own desire to write it. I've talked to many other poets who have had similar experiences; it is a sobering moment when one realizes the extent to which art and grace are truly factors in people's lives. Poetry can have an immediate impact in the world. We shouldn't denigrate this capacity, no matter how much we are being paid.

Emily Warn:

Stephen Burt's logic is airtight. Yet his claim that "poetry cannot be defined in terms of a social function at all" except that it "concerns communication among just two persons" seems cramped and unmoored. A long line of poets and thinkers have made great claims about poetry's social use. Burt seems to be stacking and storing different types of poetry in a container ship, removed and protected from the world as it journeys across the sea. The stacks of poetry can be referenced by poet-engineers, not of the sacred or the social, but of the aesthetic.

In contrast, Emerson claims that "Poets are...liberating gods." Emerson thought poems could change reality because they uncover its hardwiring, then jimmy with it. Poetic insight, he wrote, "does not come by study, but by the intellect being where and what it sees, by sharing the path or circuit of things through forms, and so making them translucent to others." Emerson named the current flowing through things divine—a fire our bodies and poems externalize. "For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem—a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing."

Poets, he's saying, weld new relations and add new forms to the world. (Think, for instance, of D.A. Powell's poems about living and loving with HIV, or A.R. Ammons's poems about inlets, woods, and garbage.) In making our circuitry—our social and biological nerves—translucent, it becomes perceivable and so changeable. Our social reality is thus enlarged to include relations and facts that have been obscured (not yet discovered) or repressed. "Poems are born dark," Celan wrote, because language is "loaded with world."

Do other forms of art and work carry out this same task? Yes, of course, but poetry is especially adept at helping us experience, and so understand, celebrate, mourn, curse, or philosophize about our relations. The fact that most often this poetic "exchange of energy" (Rukeyser) is between two people does not mean it ends there. Poets do not know how their poems will be used in the future. Whitman did not know his work would inform a gay liberation movement. Housman did not know A Shropshire Lad would speak to people suffering the horrors of WWI.

Poetry can leap across and charge the synapse between us and the world, altering both. If we abandon this use, then poets become one more group of wage-laboring specialists, gathered into "ghettos," speaking our own language, and designing complicated objects which serve as prophylactics to protect us from people still naïvely seeking this life-making force.

Originally Published: December 28, 2006

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

Stephen Burt's logic is airtight. Yet his claim that "poetry cannot be defined in terms of a social function at all" except that it "concerns communication among just two persons" seems cramped and unmoored. A long line of poets and thinkers have made great claims about poetry's social use. Burt seems to be stacking and storing different types of poetry in a container ship, removed and protected from the world as it journeys across the sea. The stacks of poetry can be referenced by poet-engineers, not of the sacred or the social, but of the aesthetic.

In contrast, Emerson claims that "Poets are...liberating gods." Emerson thought poems could change reality because they uncover its hardwiring, then jimmy with it. Poetic insight, he wrote, "does not come by study, but by the intellect being where and what it sees, by sharing the path or circuit of things through forms, and so making them translucent to others." Emerson named the current flowing through things divine—a fire our bodies and poems externalize. "For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem—a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing."

Poets, he's saying, weld new relations and add new forms to the world. (Think, for instance, of D.A. Powell's poems about living and loving with HIV, or A.R. Ammons's poems about inlets, woods, and garbage.) In making our circuitry—our social and biological nerves—translucent, it becomes perceivable and so changeable. Our social reality is thus enlarged to include relations and facts that have been obscured (not yet discovered) or repressed. "Poems are born dark," Celan wrote, because language is "loaded with world."

Do other forms of art and work carry out this same task? Yes, of course, but poetry is especially adept at helping us experience, and so understand, celebrate, mourn, curse, or philosophize about our relations. The fact that most often this poetic "exchange of energy" (Rukeyser) is between two people does not mean it ends there. Poets do not know how their poems will be used in the future. Whitman did not know his work would inform a gay liberation movement. Housman did not know A Shropshire Lad would speak to people suffering the horrors of WWI.

Poetry can leap across and charge the synapse between us and the world, altering both. If we abandon this use, then poets become one more group of wage-laboring specialists, gathered into "ghettos," speaking our own language, and designing complicated objects which serve as prophylactics to protect us from people still naïvely seeking this life-making force.

Five very important paragraphs(and right on cue methinks) from the previous very lengthy article. -Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/178842

PROSE FROM POETRY MAGAZINE
In Praise of Rareness
“The more respect you have for poetry, the less of it you will find adequate to your taste and needs.”

BY CHRISTIAN WIMAN
Every time we print an issue of Poetry that has more prose than poetry in it, we get at least one letter of complaint. These complaints vary in tone and temperateness, but inevitably there are sentences which run something like this: "Given the nature of your journal, and given its very name, what's with all the prose? Couldn't you use those pages for more poems? Shouldn't poetry be your emphasis?"

Well, yes and no. Yes, poetry should be (and most definitely is) our emphasis; but no, that does not necessarily translate into publishing more of it. In fact, I think a strong case can be made that the more respect you have for poetry, the less of it you will find adequate to your taste and needs. There is a limit to this logic, of course, or else Plato would be the patron saint of the art. But still, an overdeveloped appetite for poetry is no guarantee of taste or even of love, and institutionalized efforts at actually encouraging the over-consumption of poetry always seem a bit freakish, ill-conceived, and peculiarly American, like those mythic truck stops where anyone who can eat his own weight in rump roast doesn't have to pay for it.

Reading through old literary journals is not an activity I would ordinarily recommend, but it can be instructive in this context. People who know the history of Poetry usually point to a couple of indisputably high moments, the first under Harriet Monroe, who published the early work of just about all of the major Modernists; and the second under Henry Rago, who was on the whole more eclectic and adventurous than Monroe. It's interesting, then, to look at a couple of memorable issues from those times.

In June 1915 Monroe, in a now-famous story, took the advice of Poetry's foreign correspondent, Ezra Pound, and printed the first published poem of T. S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." The other contributors of verse in that issue include Skipwith Cannéll, William Griffith, Georgia Wood Pangborn, Dorothy Dudley, Bliss Carman, Arthur Davison Ficke, and Ajan Syrian, all of whose work sounds pretty much like this:


O leaves, O leaves that find no voice
In the white silence of the snows,
To bid the crimson woods rejoice,
Or wake the wonder of the rose!

Just over forty years later, when Rago was editor, Sylvia Plath made her first appearance in the magazine with six poems that, though not representative of Plath at her best, nevertheless practically blaze with radiance beside the poems of Lysander Kemp, Louis Johnson, Edith Tiempo, William Belvin, August Kadow, etc., etc.

My point here is not to illustrate how badly most poetry ages, nor to present some sort of "long perspective" by which to judge a contemporary journal. Because one generation's treasures are the next generation's jokes does not invalidate the earlier meanings people may have found. It's quite possible that for many people those now-indistinguishable poems alongside "Prufrock" provided just the provocation or consolation they needed on a bad day, or caused them to look at their immediate world not, Lord knows, with new eyes, but at least with old eyes, at least to look. (And in fact the general reaction to "Prufrock" was decidedly negative.) Time is the ultimate test of art, but it is not the only test of art. It is possible for a work that will not survive its own time to nevertheless speak truly to that time. For us, coming across passages like those I've just quoted is like discovering some foul, furred thing at the back of the refrigerator: one's whole spirit winces. But for someone somewhere they were once fresh. What happened then is happening now, I guarantee you. It is the bliss and curse of being alive.

But that's a digression. The point I want to make here has to do with the prose in these issues, which in both cases remains surprisingly fresh, readable, even relevant. In the 1913 issue there is a memorable, sharply-worded piece by Ezra Pound, which, ironically, fulsomely praises the utterly forgotten poetry of T. Sturge Moore. In the issue edited by Rago, there are excellent reviews by Thom Gunn and Charles Tomlinson, as well as an astute piece on verse drama by William Meredith. This tendency is borne out by other back issues of Poetry (issues old enough to allow for some perspective, I mean). The poetry is pretty much a steady backdrop of competence for the occasional and (now) unmistakable masterpieces. The prose is surprisingly consistent in its quality and appeal.

Does it follow from this that prose is the more durable art? Of course not. No one is reading that prose I just mentioned, nor is there any particular reason why they should be. Critical prose exists solely for the sake of the moment in which it is written. Its function is either to bring to light some work from the past that has been neglected or misunderstood for the sake of enlarging and refining contemporary consciousness, or to help readers know what contemporary works to read, and how to read them. The bulk of the critical prose that survives is written by famous poets, and it survives only because the poetry of these people has survived. There are a few exceptions to this, but in general aiming at eternity with critical prose is like praying to a potato. You may very well get God's attention, but probably only because He likes a good laugh.

Is prose simply easier to write than poetry? Again, not necessarily. Prose can be damnably difficult to write, but it's been my experience that one can always will oneself to write it. Right now, for instance, because I am busy and lazy in equal measure, I am bashing these sentences out hurriedly before the issue goes to the printer. I think we can all agree that what I am writing here is not, let us say, for the ages. But perhaps at least a majority of us can also agree that it is written in perfectly adequate prose. All sorts of useful things may be written in perfectly adequate prose: editorials, history, philosophy, theology, even lasting novels. But there is no such thing as a perfectly adequate poem, because a poem into which some strange and surprising excellence has not entered, a poem that is not in some inexplicable way beyond the will of the poet, is not a poem.

The truth is, sometimes poetry is almost embarrassingly easy to write. There are the famous stories: Keats writing "Ode to a Nightingale" in a single morning, Coleridge channeling "Kubla Kahn," Milton essentially taking dictation from God (or perhaps from the Devil, because that's who came out looking better) while writing Paradise Lost. But besides these instances, just about every poet admits to some simultaneous feeling of helplessness and unaccustomed power in the writing of his best poems, some element of mystery. "If you do not believe in poetry," Wallace Stevens once wrote, "you cannot write it," and indeed this is the chief "difficulty" in poetry, that it comes so infrequently, that it remains beyond our will.

Anyone involved with the institutions of poetry would do well to remember this. With all the clamor in this country about the audience for poetry, a veritable barnyard of noise into which I myself have been known to bray, we shouldn't lose sight of one of poetry's chief strengths: how little of it there is. I don't mean how little there is in the culture, but how little there is at any one time that is truly excellent. Poetry's invisibility is deplorable and worth fighting. Its rareness is admirable and the chief source of its strength. Indeed, I sometimes think that if we honored its rarity more, poetry's invisibility would be less of a problem, or at least we might define the notion of visibility differently. Seamus Heaney has noted that if a person has a single poem in his head, one that he returns to and through which, even in small ways, he understands his life better, this constitutes a devotion to the art. It is enough. And in fact I find that this is almost always how non-specialists read poetry—rarely, sparingly, but intensely, with a handful of high moments that they cling to. The emphasis is on the memorable individual poem, and poetry in bulk is rarely memorable.

All of this ought to have implications for the writer of poems as well. If poetry is so rare in the world, if so much of it is dross, just think how much rarer it must surely be in your (our!) own work. There is nothing wrong with thinking of poetry as a process, with developing a way of writing that allows you to churn out verse. Nothing wrong with it, that is, unless you give up all attempt at discrimination and insist on publishing all of these efforts. It may not be the case that anyone who is writing a book of poems every two or three years is writing too much, but he or she is certainly publishing too much. The great thing about writers like Hopkins, Larkin, Bishop, Bunting, Eliot, Herbert, Justice, and Bogan is that they demanded more from their work than anyone else did, and their discipline and dissatisfaction are now our pleasure.

What might all this mean for a literary magazine? Sixty years ago George Dillon and Hayden Carruth, who were then editors of this magazine, created a firestorm when they published an issue that had a mere eleven pages of verse in it. They explained their actions by saying that there simply weren't enough poems on hand that merited publication, and that to have lowered the bar of admittance would have been to lower the prestige of the magazine. It's impossible to know whether or not they were justified, because it's impossible to recover the material from which they were choosing. My suspicion, though, being familiar with Carruth's work as an anthologist and critic, and having edited this magazine myself for several years, is that they were. I also suspect that it was not at all a denigration of poetry, but an exaltation of it.
C.W.

Originally Published: January 8, 2007

Very interesting take on poetry. His truth but not necessarily my truth.
A poet should never or else rarely ever write Prose .
And by writing that I just broke that rule. -:laugh:--Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/183637

POEM SAMPLER
From the Archive: Robert Lowell
His minor masterpieces, first featured in Poetry magazine.

BY THE EDITORS
"Friend,
the hours will hardly pardon you their loss,
those brilliant hours that wear away the days,
those days that eat away eternity."
—From "Spanish Sonnets," October-November 1963

As it turns out, one of the bastions of twentieth-century American verse didn't have all that much to do with another: Robert Lowell published sparsely in Poetry, sprinkling eight poems in the magazine over almost twenty years. This seems an especially surprising total when considering Lowell's prodigious output (fifteen of his books were reviewed in Poetry) and the role of "public poet" he achieved later in life. March 1, 2007 marks Robert Lowell's ninetieth birthday. The occasion affords an opportunity to reflect on Lowell's history with Poetry, one that hints at the larger, more complex saga of his poetic and personal life.


Lowell's upbringing in the classics and his New Formalist attentions reveal themselves in his first Poetry publication, a series of metrically demanding stanzas written in homage to Sextus Propertius, in 1946. A year later, fresh off the Pulitzer Prize for Lord Weary's Castle, Lowell published "The Fat Man in the Mirror," which foreshadows the interiority of his later work: "But this flabby terror.../Nurse, it is a person! It is nerves." The rest of the poems Lowell printed in Poetry sketch out this famous transition from the strict forms and rhetorical bombast of his early career to a looser, more personal style exemplified by Life Studies in 1959. But the fascination with Lowell's poetic "conversion," like the fascination with his wavering mental health, obscures a complete consideration of his oeuvre. Forty years after the poet's death, the brash young formalist and the inventive elder statesman remain in constant conflict, as evidenced by these minor masterpieces first published by Poetry.

Originally Published: March 1, 2007

One of the few modern famous poets that I have respect for . -Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/179325
ESSAY
What to Do About Poetry
The argument that keeps on giving.

BY THE EDITORS
In a recent article on the Poetry Foundation, The New Yorker lobs the latest volley in an ongoing intellectual debate. That is, who reads poetry, what does it mean to “understand” poetry, and who cares about poets? According to The New Yorker (or to the critics it quotes), the Poetry Foundation's mission to broaden the audience for poetry is a lamentable one, for with popularity comes mediocrity. Artists should worry about making art, not about who's looking at it. A position similar to The New Yorker’s was put forth by August Kleinzahler in the April 2004 issue of Poetry, when he and Dana Gioia faced off over Garrison Keillor's populist anthology, Good Poems. More recently John Barr's article calling for a "new American poetry" that speaks to a broader audience fomented debate in the academic and creative writing world. And, in Christian Wiman's editorial in the December 2006 issue of Poetry, he argues that "if we honored its rarity more, poetry's invisibility would be less of a problem, or at least we might define the notion of visibility differently."

Harriet Monroe, the founder of Poetry, was passionately engaged in these arguments when she started the magazine in 1912. With Ezra Pound as her editor at large, she published great modernists such as T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and H.D., and she introduced William Butler Yeats to American audiences. She believed there was new writing the world needed to read. (Further proof poet-bickering never stops, Pound considered Monroe hopelessly provincial and tame.) There's always been—and may always be—tension between the process of discovering true poetry and getting that poetry into the hands of people who want to read it, or into the hands of people who didn’t know to read it, but may find within it revelation, satisfaction, humor, mystery. Here are a few links in the chain of this argument, which, by its very persistence, is evidence that poetry is not dead.

Read The New Yorker article>>

Read David Orr's article "Annals of Poetry" in the The New York Times Book Review>>


Read August Kleinzahler's article from the April 2004 issue of Poetry>>

Read Dana Gioia's article from the April 2004 issue of Poetry>>

Read John Barr's essay>>

Read Christian Wiman's editorial from the December 2006 issue of Poetry>>

Read Helen Vendler's "The Closet Reader">>

Read Robert Pinksy on "Poets Who Don't Like Poetry">>

Read Bill Knott on whether institutionalized “creative writing” changed American literature>>

Read Adrienne Rich's "Poetry and Commitment">>

Read Jane Hirshfield on "Poetry Beyond the Classroom">>

Read Daniel Halpern and Langdon Hammer on William Logan's review of Hart Crane's Complete Poems and Selected Letters>>

Read Jorie Graham's "Introduction to the Best American Poetry">>

Read D.W. Fenza on "Who Keeps Killing Poetry?">>
Originally Published: March 10, 2007



Harriet Monroe, the founder of Poetry, was passionately engaged in these arguments when she started the magazine in 1912. With Ezra Pound as her editor at large, she published great modernists such as T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and H.D., and she introduced William Butler Yeats to American audiences. She believed there was new writing the world needed to read. (Further proof poet-bickering never stops, Pound considered Monroe hopelessly provincial and tame.) There's always been—and may always be—tension between the process of discovering true poetry and getting that poetry into the hands of people who want to read it, or into the hands of people who didn’t know to read it, but may find within it revelation, satisfaction, humor, mystery. Here are a few links in the chain of this argument, which, by its very persistence, is evidence that poetry is not dead.
^^^^ This. Tis' so verrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrry true!--Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/guide/177309#guide
John Donne: “The Sun Rising”
The poet tries to start a revolution from his bed.

BY STEPHEN BURT
John Donne (1572-1631) wrote a prose work called Paradoxes and Problems, and his life presents plenty of both: he was born a Catholic, gained notoriety for sacrilegious verse, and later in life became an Anglican priest. Though some of his poems defended libertinism and casual sex, he destroyed his first career by falling in love, and stayed with the woman he married until her death. His poems picked up a reputation for head-scratchingly bizarre intellectualism—one reason they're now called metaphysical—but some of them are the most deeply felt poems of romantic love in the language. One such poem is "The Sun Rising."

A former law student whose London relatives were persecuted for remaining Catholic after England had turned Protestant, Donne ruined what could have been a fine career at court when in 1601 he secretly married his employer's niece, Anne More. The next year, Donne's employer found out and fired him. Donne later found his calling as an Anglican cleric, giving dramatic sermons at London's most famous church. Until after his death, most of Donne's poems circulated only in manuscript: his friends copied them by hand, then showed them to their friends, who copied them into their commonplace books. (If you think of a book of poems as like a compact disc, then a commonplace book is like a mix tape, or an iPod; Donne's poems were like popular, unreleased MP3s.)

Donne liked to make long, odd comparisons, called conceits: he compared two lovers to the parts of a compass, for example, and likened a teardrop to a navigator's globe. Later poets such as Abraham Cowley (1618-1667) built whole careers by imitating those conceits. By the time Cowley died, though, conceits had gone out of fashion. When the influential critic Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) coined the term metaphysical poets, he meant it as an insult: "Metaphysical poets" such as Cowley and Donne, he wrote, used their conceits to present "heterogenous ideas ... yoked by violence together"; "they were not successful in representing or moving the affections." (In other words, they had too much head, not enough heart.) The term metaphysical stuck, though the judgment did not: when modernist critics and poets such as T.S. Eliot wanted to rehabilitate Donne, they defended something called metaphysical poetry, and praised the metaphysical conceit.

Readers like to believe that Donne's libertine poems—which insult women in general, or recommend sex with many partners—date from his law-student days, while the passionate, sincere-sounding love poems reflect his romance and marriage with Anne. As with Shakespeare's sonnets, nobody really knows. It's no wonder, though, that so many readers (myself included) imagine "The Sun Rising" as written to Anne. In it, Donne and his beloved wake up together, and Donne fears that someone will walk in on them: the unwelcome intruder is (not her father, nor his boss, nor a London stranger, but) the sun, which (here's the conceit) Donne treats as a person:


Busy old fool, unruly sun,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains call on us?
Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run?
Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide
Late school boys and sour prentices,
Go tell court huntsmen that the king will ride,
Call country ants to harvest offices,
Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.

"Prentices" are apprentices, who (like today's sullen teens) oversleep; "motions" are regular changes, such as sunset or sunrise, spring or fall. Donne and Anne (we might as well call her Anne) believe it's more important to be in love than to be on time: they won't let the hour, or the month, or even their relative ages, tell them what to do.

Nor do they want to get up out of their shared bed. From medieval French to modern English, there's a tradition of poems called aubades, about lovers who awaken at dawn: often they are adulterous or illicit lovers, who don't want to separate but don't want to get caught. Donne wrote such a poem himself, called "Break of Day." In "The Sun Rising," though, Donne and Anne feel right at home: there's no chance either of them will go anywhere, because their love has placed them where they belong, and everything else must reorient itself around them.

It follows that Donne is the master of the house; the sun, as a guest, should respect and obey him. Donne therefore reverses the conceit: having likened the sun to a person, he now gives a person—himself—the powers of the sun:


Thy beams, so reverend and strong
Why shouldst thou think?
I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink,
But that I would not lose her sight so long;
If her eyes have not blinded thine,
Look, and tomorrow late, tell me,
Whether both th' Indias of spice and mine
Be where thou leftst them, or lie here with me.
Ask for those kings whom thou saw'st yesterday,
And thou shalt hear, All here in one bed lay.

Donne could occlude or outshine the sun (because he, too, is a celestial body), but he won't (because then his beloved would not see him, and he would not see her). Since everything important to Donne (i.e., Anne) stays indoors, not outside, Donne feels as if everything commonly believed important—spices from the Indian Ocean, precious metals from West Indies mines—remains securely indoors too.

In fact (here we see the extravagance of the conceit), everything and everyone of any importance is already in Donne's bed:


She's all states, and all princes, I,
Nothing else is.
Princes do but play us; compared to this,
All honor's mimic, all wealth alchemy.
Thou, sun, art half as happy as we,
In that the world's contracted thus.
Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
To warm the world, that's done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere;
This bed thy center is, these walls, thy sphere.

The sun, having been shown the door, now gets asked to remain. The pronouns "I" and "she" disappear, leaving only "us" and "we"; thus combined, the lovers become the whole Earth, and since the sun's job is to warm the Earth, it ought to stay where the lovers are, and orbit them. Not only will Donne and Anne escape detection and censure, since the sun will never shine anywhere else, but the lovers won't even have to get out of bed.

Fancy metaphysical conceits differ from plain-Jane metaphors not just because conceits run all the way through a poem, but also because they often bring in the latest in Renaissance science and technology. Remember that the sun is like a person, but Donne is like a celestial body: he and Anne, together, replace the Earth. "Sphere" comes from the old, Ptolemaic cosmology (the one Galileo and Copernicus disproved), in which the sun supposedly went round the Earth (as did all other planets, each in its own "sphere"). In Donne's time, astronomers (and astrologers) still argued about what went around what. His interest in scientific controversy, in ongoing disputes about natural and supernatural truths, gave him metaphors for his poems. The same interest helps give this poem its emotional force: nobody knows if the sun goes around the Earth, or vice versa, that last line implies, but I'm quite certain that my life revolves around yours.

Donne's conceit describes the sun as a human being who walks in on the lovers, and then—with help from what was, to Donne, modern science—makes himself and his beloved into their own cosmic entity, their own world. You might see how readers who (like Johnson) thought poets should stay away from complex images found such flights of figuration distasteful. In "The Sun Rising," though—and in other Donne poems akin to it ("The Canonization," for example, and "The Relic")—the figure of speech is extreme for a very good reason: Donne's devotion is extreme, too, and only "heterogenous ideas yoked by violence together," only the language of the metaphysical conceit, can express the depths of his love.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/246906

PROSE FROM POETRY MAGAZINE
Melodrama
Defending the windy cliffs of forever

BY MARIANNE BORUCH
Which may get a bad rap. My son tells me something I never knew before. It’s a musical term. It means opera, first of all: a story set to music, a drama carried by melo, song. Mom, don’t get your knickers in a twist over this again, he implies as I hold the landline receiver close to my ear.

Long distance, we used to say about such phone calls. I imagine him singing the get over it I hear in his tone, maybe his regular voice or as joke-falsetto where inflation has a rightful place, our once mock-doing La bohème in the kitchen, staging the simplest request in D-minor:

Oh please please! Take out the compost!
Okay okay! I see it overfloweth!
But — seriously? It’s just that melodrama has always worried me. What about the standard bad stuff always about to happen in opera, I argue, the raised hands as exclamation points, the collective choral shriek of onlookers, the hit-the-lights plunge into dark after the shiny knife goes down? Be fair, my son says. Then it could be we’re both thinking of those subtle duets, gradual and intricate, how they tear your heart, ending abruptly before you expect: La bohème’s Mimì wrapped in Rodolfo’s arms, The Consul’s Magda mournfully interrupting her husband John, or the tomb-with-a-view finale — as my brother calls it — between Aida and Radamès, all the lush, various stops and starts from Puccini, Menotti, Verdi. And big, this tangle, always so earnest, such grand charged dignity to whatever ordinary or outrageous shard of word or deed, a grave eternal eye on whatever mess we made — or will make. In the body, the very sound exhausts and thrills.

Familiar pathways the nerve finds through muscle, the electrical charge of realizing anything crucial: are we so predictable a creature, that we all cave the same way? How a sonnet has some opening jab, heartbeat unto argument, then turn, a new way to see, a winnowing and an arrival echoed ever since in free verse. Is our brain so used to this that it’s become theater? Or consider Freytag’s triangle — 
the guy, not surprisingly, a nineteenth-century drama critic — and how it freezes narrative into formula, his pyramid drawn on the board by English teachers a hundred million times, a dream for our next step and the next nicked from Aristotle: the rising until get it, get the point? falling slow or fast then at an angle. That’s another get over it, meaning something actually to get over and get on with, I suppose, an honest-to-god human fate that takes an hour, a day, years. Who cares if you know what will happen, the waterfall of sorrow’s same old, same old — boredom’s deliberate silence pushing off into another way to notice.

Or to remember. For instance, from Dickinson’s slush pile, her torn notebook page photographed for a valuable book of such drafts, Open Folios. After Dickinson’s few words about a tree in winter, she writes this:

I never heard
you call anything
beautiful before – 
It remained
with me
Not the tree but the telling keeps ringing in the ear: “remained / with me.” A musical idea, say the musicians, is a thing that recurs. Thus, is memorable.  Just this: It makes a shape.

Perhaps what we do, our movement through time, is musical — it repeats, repeats — therefore is melo, is drama. One hears it linked, like singing links, one note, slight breath before another, voice next to voice in whisper or resistance. No filter though. Sound enters the body any which way, the ear an indifferent machine, little incus and malleus and stapes in there, merging, making sense of whatever onslaught. Its hunger is huge. High contrast, cause and effect, loud, soft, the edges sharp. Something happens. It sings to us, or we sing it to the world that goes on, open to us or not. What was it that Elizabeth Bishop said in a conversation once recalled by Wesley Wehr in the Antioch Review? That we always reveal “the truth about ourselves 
despite ourselves. It’s just that quite often we don’t like how it comes out.” A given then: melodrama lurks behind any story, pattern, poem. It’s like a virus that way, always in the air. And some of us succumb.

To succumb. That includes a lot but what about my rage at the feel-good end of some hokey movie? — so melodramatic! we say, the punch of   it, a few tears coming anyway, though such manipulation 
toward that moment so clear. Are we so predictably hot-wired? Really? Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, I keep hearing from childhood, from the old Latin Mass: through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault    . . .    Tears! How is it the body knows — in spite of good sense and taste, in plain dogged embarrassment — releasing them regardless? Take that, oh fine cool aesthetic, sophisticated mind with its perfect engineering.

To be moved, moved. I love that word, how it happens to you, a surprise, a kind of miraculous undoing about which Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote in his journal:

there is always one touch, something striking sideways and unlooked for    ...    and this may be so delicate that the pathos seems to have gone directly to the body and cleared the understanding in its passage.

Delicate isn’t exactly how to get at melodrama’s not-so-sleight-of-hand. But a little wallowing in the theater’s large dark can’t be that bad, can it?

Meanwhile, this delicate meanwhile: Bishop’s greatest hit, “One Art,” a model of reserve and passion and wit, plus terrible — however brief — altogether human realization. Her poem’s a courtly, careful mash-up, the unsaid speaking as clearly as what actually makes it to the page. Irony, after all, orbits the wink-wink-nod-nod of the unspoken, a secret life that’s semiobvious, delicious to share. “One Art” is an immediate insider pleasure via Bishop’s colloquial ease, however measured its villanelle givens of obsessive repetition. Her well-known refrain — “The art of losing isn’t hard to master” — 
comes right off the bat, first line and already tongue-in-cheek, a staged shrug about beloved things in peril, disappearing, though she starts comic and small-scale — keys, an “hour badly spent” — as in any practice to learn a great art, fast morphing into a more weighted personal mode, “my mother’s watch” vanished, and loved houses — 
three! Then she’s going larger, unto global:

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.
But all “hard to master,” such losses, still partly whimsical by way of simple geography, wild leaps, and a bird’s migratory, exacting eye until the final move inward that really does switch, click, get down, get close, never to be saved by offhand humor or anything else. “Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture / I love) I shan’t have lied.”

Her characteristic steel won’t belabor this vulnerable moment, won’t and can’t — “It’s evident / the art of losing’s not too hard to master,” Bishop re-insists after her revealing slip. But we get a stained new thought, “though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster,” she says, in fact writing that, ending the poem in a quickened second twist of that screwdriver parenthetical. Thus her “Write it” — old Anglo-Saxon’s mono-stress emphatic — goes on, secret and regardless and of course as lifeline, way beyond the poem. And then there’s that wrenching do-it-anyway hit of italics. Here it’s grief in this momentary dive under the surface where loss   looks like, probably is, “like disaster,” a greater dark that even the soothing rhyme against the predictable “master” can’t fix, though getting back to work must be a kind of solace. It’s a villanelle, for god’s sake; you have to forge on — write it! — repeat, to end only this way. That does cut short the release of tears, a sudden almost bit of melodrama in its wake. And that wake could be as haunting as the one-thousand-foot spread of watery lurch and undertow any ocean liner worth its tonnage leaves behind.

What we think of as the first draft of Bishop’s poem, then titled “How to Lose Things” or “The Gift of Losing Things” or “The Art of  Losing Things” — from Vassar’s archives — might be such a wake; that early version does seep back. On her old manual machine, she typed a very sprawling attempt, notes really, including this initial stab at closure:

A piece of one continent -
and one entire continent. All gone, gone forever and ever..

One might think this would have prepared me
for losing one average-sized not especially -------- exceptionally
beautiful or dazzlingly intelligent person
(except for blue eyes) (only the eyes were exceptionally beautiful and
But it doesn’t seem to have, at all . . . the hands looked intelligent)
the fine hands
a good piece of one continent
and another continent - the whole damned thing!
He who loseth his life, etc. - but he who
loses his love - never, no never never never again - 
Hear that? Think Verdi, think Puccini, think King Lear for that matter: never, no never never never again    . . .    The orchestra rising, hands to a collar, a flood of sound from a throat.

Pure melodrama! Though reason’s logical build is here (those eyes, the intelligent hands), and a reasonable tone (“one might think”), it’s because of melodrama that we have Bishop’s lasting, heartbreaking 
poem — plus her numerous drafts that wrestled such sorrow down to mere mention. Still, which is greater, more necessary in this struggle — her witty reserve pressing hard or that great ache that must have started everything? No answer yet. Sincerity and irony still restlessly at it and at it . . .



•



Three thoughts now — 

1. The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, around 1973, right before a reading there. The poet Paul Carroll is in the audience, most generous editor of  The Young American Poets, an anthology that meant much to those of us young, but old enough, when it appeared in 1968, where I discovered Louise Glück — not to mention Charles Simic and James Tate and Ron Padgett, not far from their baby fat. The pre-reading chat and buzz narrowed to Roy Lichtenstein, whose massive paintings patched the wall. Everyone around us with something to say.

I recall his campy cartoons, one big weepy female face, her talk balloon blown up to read It doesn’t matter what I say! while a male face in another painting, equally oversized, speaks into his bubble: Forget it! Forget me! I’m fed up with your kind!, looking off as a girl sulks in the background. At these cliches and earnest exaggerations rose up a lively, happy scorn in the room, many living out a similar melodrama in their own young lives of  break up and come back, only to break up again — at twenty-two, I was among them — who pointed and mocked, made fun of . . .

And Paul Carroll — so much older than we were, a large man, 
impeccable against our fashion-of-the-day ragged jeans, his derby and pin-striped suit, his great charm and goodwill and sadness — went 
silent for a while before saying: but that’s the way people really talk, isn’t it?



2. Impossibly beautiful — with all the necessary shadow that claim implies — is Theodore Roethke’s poem “The Far Field,” off what might be my favorite jump-start first line (and shouldn’t this really be on his tombstone?): “I dream of  journeys repeatedly.” But to tamp that down, there’s the “driving alone, without luggage,” to the end of “a long peninsula” only to stall, “Churning in a snowdrift / Until the headlights darken.” That’s it for section one of four, all lush renderings of the natural world. Next — “At the field’s end    . . .    Haunt of the cat-bird, nesting-place of the field-mouse” where “Among the tin cans, tires, rusted pipes, broken machinery, — / One learned of the eternal.” Eternal. Thus high abstraction enters (“the thinky-thinky” Roethke called it) to enrich or weigh down, but first this gorgeous unapologetic countdown of spring delights:

For to come upon warblers in early May
Was to forget time and death:
How they filled the oriole’s elm, a twittering restless cloud, all one morning,
And I watched and watched till my eyes blurred from the bird shapes, — 
Cape May, Blackburnian, Cerulean, — 
Moving, elusive as fish, fearless,
Hanging, bunched like young fruit, bending the end branches,
Still for a moment,
Then pitching away in half-flight,
Lighter than finches.
Or later, lines that put us in our rightful place on the planet, the speaker in a “slow river, / Fingering a shell, / Thinking: / Once I was something like this, mindless.” On and on this stunning meditation goes, idea to hard detail and back again, to arrive midway at this: perhaps the worst worst worst, most squishy melodramatic phrase in the history of good poetry: “the windy cliffs of forever,” Roethke wrote. Huh? That’s what my thought balloon says in the margin, were I to write one. Granted, he’s already jacked up the mood music in the previous line — “I learned not to fear infinity.” But it continues to shock me that Roethke kept on going into poetry la-la land with this bit of purple prose. The windy cliffs of forever! What does that even mean?

My beloved old cousin Elinor had her Achilles’ heel, known to her worried daughters as her “wheee! factor,” which meant she’d spend her savings, spend down to nothing left, if given half a chance. Who knows how that crazy let loose in her. That impulse to pitch it all — 
caution included — made everything else we miss and cherish about her possible: her wit and warmth and zero self-absorption, her 
intolerance of   intolerance, her embrace of   the world and its weirdness.

In more merciful, if not saner moments, I can think: So what? Roethke gave way now and then. But it’s brave and it’s great. And probably crucial to every fine thing he wrote that he dared that edge.



3. A couple of words come back, dragging their ghost: Sylvia Plath. A single numbing stress begins then ends that run of four syllables, and with that name, the terrible last work looms up, late 1962 into the 
bitter winter of ’63 before her death in London that February, her scathing, meticulous attention to the present moment, day after day, that made so many poems in Ariel. “Daddy” is among them, its wrath a trademark by now, drowning out the quieter, more compelling 
parts of her genius. The poem’s commonly read as near melodrama, 
an operatic outburst, an invective against father and husband. Biography has done it in good.

No doubt for good reason. There’s a breadcrumb trail of image from life, Plath’s difficult father and his German heritage, his position as professor of entomology squaring with the poem’s figure “at the blackboard,” his death when she was eight an experience identical to the speaker’s. The drafts for the poem, now in the Mortimer Rare Book Room of the Smith College libraries, show fury imprinted and measured out from the first through the last stanza and its memorable ending utterance — “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through” — was a fiery addenda handwritten into the typed second version, albeit not much different in tone from her famous opening, in place from the start:

You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.
The melo in her drama is heated exclamatory on obsessive repeat, 
possibly made more deliberate — and slightly whimsical, that “Achoo” there, capitalized à la A.A. Milne, no less — by the storybook rhymes she must have been reading to her small children.

Her drafts for the piece aren’t a flip-book; she didn’t start slowly and change a lot. Pretty much the poem roars, teeth bared from the get-go. Still it’s staggering what can happen in the making, the writer remade too, scaring herself until fact itself fades, to get all jacked up via metaphor and analogy to become somehow truer. How else to account for the poem’s last hammer blow, her final stanza’s over-the-top, weirdly animated, medieval folktale-grim lines that proceed her ringing “Daddy    . . .   I’m through” by way of those murderous near-
Lilliputian “villagers” who “never liked you. /    . . .    dancing and stamping on you. / They always knew it was you.” That vengeful you you you, the triggering heart of all this to pierce pierce pierce    . . .    By the end of   her working through the drafts, who was writing that?

Plath, to a bbc interviewer, later carefully removes herself. “The poem is,” she tells him, “spoken by a girl with an Electra complex. Her father died when she thought he was God. Her case is complicated by the fact that her father was also a Nazi.” Come again?

Backstory then, poem as case study, a persona piece. Sure, like 
anyone believes that, says whatever Plath fan/fanatic you choose, passionate young women mostly who have just discovered her, a few of them my undergraduate students who stand with me in the hallway after class, and fight for her right to be a woman wounded and fierce, unaware it was the grounded, dogged artist in her — not the suicide — 
who made this brilliant work. Remote control is still control.

On the radio, Plath is almost dismissive in her acquired British 
accent, calling “Daddy” an “awful little allegory” spoken by that Nazi’s daughter locked in her own terrible twentieth-century 
moment, a layer that adds weight and historical edge to the piece to change it and alter our received idea of the poet herself. Had Plath lived, is this mainly — or at least first — how we would see her poem?

All these claims and reads after the fact. What is the link between art and life? No one knows, even the writer sometimes, what happens in the night-blind whirlpool of the making.



•



Then there’s this: girls in my grade school collected holy cards, those fake-gilt-edged, frozen, sentimental pictures of saints, the Sacred Heart, the Virgin Mary, given out at funerals and by our teachers at Christmas, Easter, the end of school, hoarded up to vie with our brothers’ baseball stashes, their cards coming in packs with a hard pink slab of bubble gum in the middle. I had — still have — favorites in my cache, including a John F. Kennedy printed hurriedly after the assassination and inexplicably sealed in plastic. But in my whole 
childhood not one St. Sebastian turned up, every inch of him — 
minus the skivvied bits — pincushioned brightly by arrows, the ultimate martyrdom, Rome, ad 288. Was it his near nudity that put the nuns off? Or it may well be the holy card extruders simply played it safe, going for the more sickly-sweet options for the kids and old ladies who would fondly save their handiwork.

As a devout lapsed Catholic for decades, I might be allowed this one arched-eyebrow thought: is it not partly the sick genius of the Church that he is also the patron saint of archers? (How comic is that? No waste. Use the whole chicken, I call it.) He’s the guardian of soldiers, too, once in the Roman army himself. Most astonishing and least known: he is the patron saint of surviving the plague.

The fact is — breaking news! — Sebastian did outlast those arrows. Proof: at least one painting of St. Irene lovingly tending his many wounds as he slumps against her, though another artist followed the competing legend and put an angel in full wingspan to that task. In any case, he healed; he lived to tell the tale. Which is why my husband and I can play Where’s Waldo? to find him over and over, 
museums in Europe — or America, for that matter — room after 
gallery room of Sebastians in various melodramatic, tormented gyrations, even ridiculously out of place at times, in the lower corner of some large, cozy Nativity, say, Mary and Joseph and a lit baby Jesus basking in cow breath and sheep warmth. There he is, to the right and down, oblivious, practically naked and tangled in rope, feathered arrows starry-haywire, the saint in agony or indifference, depending, but surely foreseeing his recovery, already plotting his return to Rome to mouth off to the Emperor and get his dream of  being beaten to death, properly martyred at last.

But to survive that first assault! A miracle of the first order.

Think of it this way: It’s 1349. If Sebastian made it, then certainly his presence in whatever painting you commission will shield self and family from the Black Death sweeping the known world, some seventy-five to two-hundred million dead before it’s over. That’s the deal. That was the deal — and with it, the St. Sebastian survivor 
industry duly cranked up for melodrama, artists both good and only so-so at the ready.

Which is to say, not only does image last, it humbles and overwhelms. But it’s desperately practical too. Sebastian then, as metaphor 
and model, a signal, a white flag, bloodied saint-as-tattoo on some bicep to flash in a fight. Sebastian, a stay against danger, a safety valve, a vaccine, luck’s rabbit-foot, puppeteer of salvation. You rack up your chips for dear life and shove them all to the center of the table, Sebastian with his zillion arrows a hope against hope, a lamb nailed to the door to trick an angel, the stand-alone and cut to the quick but healing in secret regardless, the so there, the in your face, the held high note in an aria, or the moment in the poem before — beware! — 
it really gets dark. Sebastian twisting there in his corner, or skinny-hogging the whole canvas, shape to allegory, larger than life in painting 
after painting until he’s a musical idea, a repeat, repeat to make melo this drama, the worst of it to best all bad things. A charm. And please, a future. Poetry knows we are as close as a feather to disaster.

Is it hope then, since she intuited so much? Plath, for her bbc interview, making herself distant, even haughty, certain that in “Daddy” her scarred, giant, triumphant name-calling speaker “has to act out the awful little allegory once over before she is free of it.” She — nice try.

Melodrama: to exaggerate is to get bigger. And so continue, to last a little longer like those birds whose wings carry markings to fake a huge eye. It will scare away snakes, or attract a mate.

Originally Published: December 2, 2013

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/246128

ESSAY
Lost at Sea
Why shipwrecks have engaged the poetic imagination for centuries.

BY CASEY N. CEP
Less than a month before his 30th birthday, Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned in the Gulf of Spezia. A summer storm overtook his sailboat, and the poet never made it from Livorno, where he had been visiting Lord Byron and Leigh Hunt, to Lerici, where his wife, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, waited. Shelley’s body washed ashore weeks later, ravaged by the sea and scarcely recognizable.

The bright beauty of Edward Onslow Ford’s marble monument for the poet, completed in 1892, did its best to obscure this ravaging. Fixed in irenic composure, Shelley now rests on a bronze plinth above a weeping muse flanked by two winged lions at University College Oxford. His cold marble eyes are forever closed; his right arm stretches across his slender, supine body to meet his left; one of his sublunary legs is folded beneath the other. The monument became one of the high altars of the cult that developed around the Romantic. Rival accounts of Shelley’s shipwreck and drowning circulated for decades, including one persistent legend that his heart resisted crematory fire, only to be removed and preserved by a friend.

The narrative of Shelley’s life was revised so that all of its features foreshadowed his shipwreck. His early love of sailing, beginning with paper boats made from bank notes, became ominous; his earlier brushes with shipwrecks—most notably in the decade before he died, on the Rhine River with his wife and on Lake Geneva with Lord Byron—ceased to be signs of providence, becoming instead portentous siren songs. Lines from Shakespeare’s The Tempest were even taken for his epitaph: “Nothing of him that doth fade, / But doth suffer a sea-change / Into something rich and strange.”

Shelley’s poetry was not spared this revision. His elegy for John Keats, written a year before his own death, was suddenly taken for prophecy. The final stanza of “Adonais” laments: “My spirit’s bark is driven, / Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng / Whose sails were never to the tempest given.” Shelley, like Keats, was understood to have been prematurely and tragically “borne darkly, fearfully, afar.” His shipwreck came to symbolize both his life and work, not only his death.

Shipwrecks have engaged the poetic imagination for centuries. Remnants of several million shipwrecks are estimated to rest on the ocean floor. When sailing was the only way of navigating the world, shipwrecks were fierce, living terrors; even now, as other modes of transportation dominate travel, shipwrecks maintain their prominence in metaphors of isolation and ennui as well as in images of wreckage and destruction. Ships themselves still wreck in poetry, but so, too, do relationships, souls, and states.

Ubiquitous as the sea itself, the metaphor endures even as its referent has diminished. The antecedents of these modern literary wrecks come from ancient sources. Sea-faring Odysseus barely survived a shipwreck engineered by Poseidon’s wrath. The Apostle Paul shipwrecked four times, once on the way from Caesarea to Rome, the only shipwreck narrated in the Bible. These early wrecks inspired Shakespeare and Shelley and remain strangely powerful, as symbols of both survival, with castaways living to tell the tale, and terror, presenting unsettling or unresolved visions of death.

Even Emily Dickinson, whose life was practically landlocked, was seized by the shipwreck metaphor. “If my Bark sink / ’Tis to another sea —,” she wrote, “Mortality’s Ground Floor / Is Immortality.” Borrowing the first two lines from Transcendentalist poet Ellery Channing, she married the wrecked, drowned soul-ship with the stable, grounded metaphor of the house. The soul’s death is like a sinking ship, falling beneath the surface of one sea and resting on the floor of another.

Dickinson contrasts the safety of the shore with the chaos of the sea. That same distinction interested Elizabeth Bishop in her poem “Crusoe in England,” which fixates on the liminal status of castaway. Bishop’s Robinson Crusoe, already rescued and returned to Britain, muses, “Now I live here, another island, / that doesn’t seem like one.” Abraded by time and the death of his companion Friday from measles, Crusoe remembers his former island home. He says, “I’d have / nightmares of other islands / stretching away from mine, infinities / of islands, islands spawning islands.”

Bishop was well acquainted with islands, but also with shipwrecks of the kind that cast Robinson Crusoe away. In 1919, when she was only eight years old, she was aboard a steamer headed from Boston to Yarmouth that wrecked in the fog. No one died, but the accident did link Bishop to her great-grandfather, who drowned in a shipwreck off Sable Island in 1866, and to one of her most beloved poets, Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose epic poem “The Wreck of the Deutschland” chronicled a shipwreck off the British coastline.

Thirty-five stanzas long, “The Wreck of the Deutschland” marked Hopkins’s return to poetry after seven years of devoting himself to his vocation as a Jesuit priest. Conflicted about his writing and his call to the priesthood, Hopkins had destroyed his earlier poems and vowed never to write again. But when the Deutschland foundered on the Kentish Knock at the mouth of the Thames in 1875, and took the lives of five nuns fleeing religious persecution in Germany, Hopkins was moved by the tragedy. He felt that his writing was blessed by the suggestion of a superior that someone write a poem to honor the dead.

One hundred and fifty-seven passengers died when the Deutschland wrecked, but Hopkins was concerned chiefly with those escaping Bismarck’s Kulturkampf. “Rhine refused them, Thames would ruin them;” he wrote, dedicating the poem “To the happy memory of five Franciscan Nuns, exiles by the Falk Laws, drowned between midnight and morning of Dec. 7th, 1875.”

The dedication is integral not only to Hopkins’s understanding of this particular shipwreck but, moreover, to his sense of every soul at sea in this world. For Hopkins, the Deutschland’s fate presented an essential task of theodicy: the need to reconcile “[t]he all of water,” capable of callously taking human lives, with the mercy of God, who made the world and its violent seas. The poem’s first stanza addresses “Thou mastering me / God! giver of breath and bread; / World’s strand, sway of the sea.” It is the first of many aquatic accounts of God, whom Hopkins calls “master of the tides.”

Elizabeth Bishop took bits of Hopkins’s poems as epigraphs for her poetry and even wrote an essay on his meter, but it was his shipwreck poem that consumed her. “The Wreck of the Deutschland” is the shipwreck sundered: literal description and detail of the ocean liner’s wreck are gradually, relentlessly severed from the metaphor of the soul adrift in the world.

While for Hopkins the shipwreck was a theological challenge, for Bishop it was a poetic challenge. She was forced to reconcile poetry’s past with its present, to find new meaning for language that was becoming anachronistic. The poet could no longer document wrecks, but needed to invent new connotations for them, so unlike Hopkins, Bishop occupied herself with survivors.

For Bishop, the sea’s greatest danger is no longer death, but solitude and isolation. “Crusoe in England” considers how the soul, always already shipwrecked, can speak of its survival. As W.S. Merwin writes in “The Shipwreck”: “The tale is different if even a single breath / Escapes to tell it. The return itself / Says survival is possible.” Survivorship and testimony, then, come to define the modern shipwreck poem; less attention is given to the action of wrecking and more to its aftermath.

One of kari edwards’s poems begins with the ominous declaration that “there is a shipwreck on each side of innuendo.” She describes how “tears gather around the collective / shadow of shadows;” pooling into seas deep and dangerous enough for wrecks. The shipwreck of edwards’s poem is not nautical but emotional: its three block stanzas dramatize the self as a ship at sea. When the narrator says she is “trying to read the consequential future, apply anything to anything,” she is navigating a life adrift between “wretched normality and remote productivity.”

The same unmooring haunts Keith Waldrop’s “Shipwreck in Haven.” One sequence in the trilogy he called Transcendental Studies, the poem unfolds under an epigraph from Erasmus: “I can’t swim at all, and it is dangerous to converse with an unaccustomed Element.” The sea is largely absent from Waldrop’s long, fragmented poem, visible only through the safety of windows, relegated to a rumor in fairytales and fishing stories, like those of a “vicar, who used to tell us the story of Robinson Crusoe.” So antiquated are the dangers of the sea that they can only be imagined, not faced. The speaker mocks an addressee: “You claim the dearest wish of your // life is to sink into a soul-freezing / situation of horror.”

By Waldrop’s telling, shipwrecks no longer threaten travel, only dreams. No longer Dickinson’s bark sinking beneath the ocean, modern shipwrecks are relationships dissolved, careers run aground, lives unmoored. When Waldrop won the National Book Award in 2009 for Transcendental Studies, he explained in interviews that the poems in the collection, including “Shipwreck in Haven,” had been constructed through a collage method. Collecting words like a bowerbird, he arranged the bits and phrases he gathered from prose works into the colossus that is Transcendental Studies.

Along the way, Waldrop revised the romantic image of shipwreck into a postmodern metaphor. No longer does one seek “rambles and adventures among the rocky banks,” for “waves and their whelps” appear only in dreams and waking nightmares. Nostalgia forever washes Shelley ashore in his glistening marble monument and keeps Robinson Crusoe forever cast away on his island home, but Waldrop resists these wistful fallacies to catalog the actual threats of daily life that make the metaphor of shipwreck worth preserving: terror and dread, anonymity and solitude.


Originally Published: July 9, 2013

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/247782#article

INTERVIEW
Widening the Conversation
Edward Hirsch holds forth on his Poet’s Glossary.

BY ANNIE FINCH
Widening the Conversation
Edward Hirsch
One summer 15 years ago, Edward Hirsch, author of eight books of poetry and five books of poetic criticism, winner of a MacArthur Fellowship and the Rome Prize, and a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, began compiling a glossary of basic poetic terms to include in his book How to Read a Poem.

Now that initial 25 pages has mushroomed into a book of its own, A Poet’s Glossary. Nearly 750 pages in length, it encompasses more than a thousand entries on styles, techniques, forms, genres, movements, and all manner of other poetic curiosities from abecedarian to zeugma. Unlike most poetry reference books, which bring together entries written by numerous contributors, A Poet’s Glossary is very much the reflection of one unified sensibility. Dramatically international in perspective, both comprehensive and eclectic, it is clearly informed by Hirsch’s background in folklore. (He holds a PhD in folklore from the University of Pennsylvania.)

Hirsch and I spoke on the phone for nearly an hour about A Poet’s Glossary. There was much to talk about: We have known each other for years, ever since I studied with him at the University of Houston in the mid-1980s, and I too have recently published a book about the craft of poetry. It was a lively conversation covering diverse topics, from why poetry is so much larger than the timeworn quarrels that have recently defined it to how poetic forms create spells. What follows is a compressed and edited version of our conversation.

How do you imagine the ideal reader for A Poet’s Glossary?

I see this as a book for the initiated as well as for the uninitiated reader. People who don’t know much about poetry can find what they need to know about certain basics, like the nature of the line or the stanza, or the characteristics of a form, like the ghazal or the sestina. But there are also a lot of things in this book that even widely read readers of poetry may not know much about because they are outside our tradition. So, for example, you might not know to look up a form of African praise poem called the oríkì. If you care to think about praise poetry—what it is, how it functions—then the oríkì has a lot to tell you. To help the reader along different pathways, I’ve added “See also” at the bottom of every entry.

That’s wonderful. I see at the bottom of praise poems here, you have “encomium, epithet, griot, oríkì, panegyric.”

The idea is to lead you to something that you may not know much about, such as Ifa divination verses or panegyrics or drum poetry, which is an amazing form of oral poetry. I hope the book will enrich people’s knowledge of what they know, or think they know, and introduce them to a lot that they’ve never encountered. I hope it will enlarge the conversation about poetry, which has been somewhat narrow in contemporary discourse, and help us to think a little outside of the categories we’ve inherited.

Can you say a little more about those categories?

I think contemporary poetry seems to have inherited a 1950s and ’60s divide between the poets of traditional form and the poets of organic form. I think these divides rehearse tired narratives about poetry, as if we still had to choose between, say, Elizabeth Bishop and Charles Olson, or between Robert Hayden and Robert Creeley. By seeing these divides so categorically, I think we’ve impoverished the resources of American poets. My idea is that poetry is so much larger than these timeworn quarrels, which put too many poets into boxes. I’m hoping that my book can contribute to a fuller conversation and way of thinking about poetry. There is so much more to poetry than the sociological alignment of different groups.

I feel this divide is connected with the hegemony of iambic pentameter, which is still widely treated as basically the only meter available to poets who want to write in form. I’ve been talking up the concept of metrical diversity for a while. It seems to me that when meter is limited to iambic pentameter, poets get bored and let go of the entire potential of metrical structure.

Iambic pentameter can be very rich and flexible—think of Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, Robert Frost—but there’s no reason that it should have the kind of hold on English-language poetry that, say, the alexandrine once had on French poetry.

It’s interesting to think that our idea that there should be just one dominant meter has been influenced by the French—as opposed to the Celtic cultures, which had so many different meters, or the Persians.

The number of meters in any given poetry is often very wide. I’m thinking, for example, of the 24 meters that were memorized by the Welsh poets in the 14th and 15th century. The training period for bardic poets could extend for as long as 12 years. John Montague says that one way of describing the training of the Irish bards is as “seven winters in a dark room.” The poets who came through this regimen had a vast repertoire of meters to call upon.

You have a background in folklore. Are there particular aspects of our idea of poetry that you thought needed to be enlarged, or that you were especially excited about enlarging?

Yes, this book gave me the opportunity to bring my study of folklore into our consideration of poetry. I’m thinking of what I would call the poetry of everyday life, like proverbs, riddles, and lullabies, like counting-out rhymes and the African American game of playing the dozens. I’m also thinking of the poetry of indigenous tribes around the world, especially in Africa, and what these tribal poetries bring to our thinking about poetry in general.

When you say we don’t think of proverbs and riddles as poetry, what is the quality that you think makes them poetry that we have been overlooking?

I think of poetry as a form of marked speech. It sets words apart. It specializes and frames language, separating it from the otherwise ordinary discourse that surrounds it. Here I rely on the linguist Roman Jakobson, who calls the proverb “the largest coded unit occurring in our speech and at the same time the shortest poetic composition.” It involves sound patterns, and it is compressed and memorable, like the aphorism and the maxim. It is activated by performance.

It seems to me that what moves poetry into the hypnotic, magical realm is the physical nature of repetition that takes poetry out of meaning, out of words.

I agree. In all cultures it’s said that certain rhythmic patterns have magical properties. Forms are often considered conventional or traditional or somehow conservative, but in fact they are formulations of primary impulses of repetition. They create spells, which have an irrational potency. They are ways of delivering certain kinds of information. Rhythm is sound in motion. And this is related to our pulse and our heartbeat, to the way we breathe.

With my students, I have field-tested the idea that the length of a line corresponds to one breath and four or five heartbeats, and it seems true that basic metrical lines in English sync up perfectly with the body in this way. It has been said that a traditional poetic line is the same length in all languages. Do you have any sense of the truth of that from doing the book?

I can’t say that the four- or five-beat line is universal. I would say that it seems universal to the stress languages. We’d have to get native speakers of syllabic and tonal languages to explain to us how beat works for them. My instinct is that poetry is related to the body everywhere. Poetry is a bodily art, and the forms of poetry grow out of our bodies. Of course, there are also abstractionists, who want to move poetry as far away from the body as possible. I think their experiments are enriching, useful, and doomed.

You spent 15 years making this book. It also took me 15 years to complete my own book on craft. I know that your sense of the book must have changed constantly during that time. If you had to pick out a few favorite entries today, what would they be?

That’s tough. I like wine poetry—who doesn’t?—and some of the anthropological terms I discovered, such as tlamatini (which is one of the names for poet in the Aztec world and means “one who knows”), ghinnawa (a stylized form of folk poetry practiced in Bedouin cultures), and bird sound words (the systematic language of song poetics of the Kaluli people of Papua New Guinea). I’m struck by the fact that we don’t have English equivalents for certain words, like rasa (the most important term in Sanskrit poetics) and saudade (a Portuguese terms that suggests a profoundly bittersweet nostalgia). If you want to poetically insult someone, I highly recommend the Scottish flyting. If you want to blow their minds, I recommend the Russian futurist term zaum, which means something like “trans-rational” or “beyond-sense.”

Your book describes so many different ways to be a poet, staggeringly different kinds of cultural roles and aesthetic stances.

This has all been a great education for me. It has widened my own view of being a poet, what poetry does and can do, how it works. I had some sense, and it turned out to be truer than I even realized, that being a poet is different in different parts of the world. The role of poetry can be much larger than the way poets often think about it. I’m an American poet, and I don’t really want to be anything else. I just want the widest view of what it is to be an American poet. While I wouldn’t trade my role for that of a griot or a Russian Acmeist, my idea of poetry is vastly enlarged by reading the Russian poets of the 1920s, or the T’ang Dynasty poets, or the Renaissance poets in Italy, Spain, and England, or learning about the epic poets of India and the Balkans. Then there is Zen poetry. The 18th-century Zen monk Ryokan states categorically:

Who says my poems are poems?
My poems are not poems.
When you know that my poems are not poems,
Then we can speak of poetry.
(tr. John Stevens)


Originally Published: May 20, 2014

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/246768

INTERVIEW
Unsettling Emily Dickinson
The co-editor of The Gorgeous Nothings talks about the challenges of editing the iconic poet.

BY THE EDITORS

Years ago, when scholar Marta Werner turned 22, she received a birthday present that she calls life-altering. It was a copy of Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson. “I had no idea that a work of scholarship could take this form—and could embody such freedom,” Werner says. The editors of poetryfoundation.org recently spoke with Werner about her collaboration with Jen Bervin on The Gorgeous Nothings, why she’d prefer to distance herself from the term “envelope poems,” and why Emily Dickinson’s work remains so relevant today.

Can you talk about the publishing history of Emily Dickinson?

Yes, but I’d like to go back to a moment before that history begins so we can see what is at stake in that history. And so, perhaps, we can imagine a counterhistory.

According to Dickinson’s niece, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, Dickinson’s “only writing desk [was] … a table, 18-inches square, with a drawer deep enough to take in her ink bottle, paper and pen … [and] placed in the corner by the window facing west.” This image of Dickinson’s desk is so familiar to her readers, so imprinted on our imaginations. And yet the desk can only be a supreme fiction.

The instant we begin to picture it, we realize it could not have been Dickinson’s writing desk—at least not her only desk. How could the delicate table have withstood the weight of her books? How could it have tolerated the pressure of her hand in the “white heat” of writing every day across the days of more than 30 years? And how could it have accommodated the thousands of leaves of blank paper Dickinson turned into manuscripts?

Just past the image of the pristine writing desk another, more unruly image is forming. I see the desk laden with volumes, open and closed—the family Bible; the novels of the Brontës, George Eliot, Charles Dickens; Ruskin’s Modern Painters. I see it covered with rows of botanical specimens: Jasminum, Calendula officinalis, Digitalis. And beyond it, I see the room that gives the desk space, filling with papers. There are stacks of them on the table, on the floor, on the bed.

She moves them. Others living in the household and coming from outside of it move them. The wind moves them. Time moves them. My imagination moves them.

I see, of course, only what I see in the mind’s eye. For, like Bianchi, like everyone, I have arrived too late: I do not catch Dickinson in the act of writing.

I do not see how she arranges and stab-binds the gatherings of poems we call fascicles, or how she archives them, whether with other bound gatherings only, or intermixed with loose sheets and fragments. I do not see how, or even if, she distinguishes among poems, prose, and passages of indeterminate genre. I do not see her search for a poem written years earlier to revise or only to reread it. As she herself wrote, there is so much more I “cannot see to see -”

Just as I do not see the room as it appeared while Dickinson lived within it, I do not see it in the days and months following her death, when her papers were discovered, sorted, some destroyed, and others disseminated.

I do not see the clearing away of her effects, nor do I know if this process was carried out systematically or at chance’s hands. I do not know if those entrusted to the task worked patiently or were overwhelmed by what they found. Was there, as the story goes, only a single locked box containing thousands of poem manuscripts? Where has this (Pandora’s) box and its key gone? And if there was only one box, containing the poems, where were the letter drafts and fragments? Was one box actually many boxes?

After all the manuscripts have been carried away from Dickinson’s room, questions whirl in their place and do not settle.

All the editions of Dickinson’s writings are also attempts to “settle” the work. And it’s for that reason that I work on unediting her writings. It’s a way of unsettling them—though not, of course, the way Dickinson may have unsettled them.

The poems and other writings in The Gorgeous Nothings were all in print by 1958. A careful reader can find them in Johnson’s Poems (1955) and in his Letters (1958). But you’d be surprised to know how many people think that the writings in The Gorgeous Nothings are new discoveries. Even people who know Dickinson well can’t recall seeing them before. And of course that’s because they haven’t seen them—they’ve only read them. Somehow, for reasons I don’t wholly understand, reading in manuscript is fundamentally different from reading in print. For some people—myself among them—it’s a kind of further seeing. It’s my hope—and Jen Bervin’s too, I’m sure—that The Gorgeous Nothings functions like a kind of light-table for these writings.

How did you first encounter Emily Dickinson’s envelope poems? Who first called them “envelope poems”? What does that mean?

I’ve been aware of Emily Dickinson’s envelope poems for many years—at least since the mid-’90s, when I was working a lot in the Amherst College archives on Dickinson’s late drafts and fragments. At the time, I was fascinated by the various different constellations of documents that seemed, at least momentarily, to coalesce—poems pinned together, poems marked by cancellations and cross-outs, poems on envelopes, etc. Of course I don’t mean to suggest that these constellations or sets were conceived of as such by Dickinson—I have no idea how she organized her papers, and, beyond those she stab-bound into fascicles, there’s no readily discernible organizational schema. I just mean that when you look at documents for a long time—in an intense, even myopic way—you start to see things. Literally! The mind seeks formal principles—even where there may be none. I saw—and still see—all kinds of different sets and orders of Dickinson’s writings.

I’m not sure who first called these writings envelope poems. And, in some way, I’d like to distance myself from the term. It’s perhaps one of the hallmarks of Dickinson’s writings that they defeat the bibliographical and descriptive terms we use to talk about them. “Envelope poem,” then, is just a kind of shorthand we’ve used to identify writings—largely but not invariably in verse—composed on envelopes or envelope parts. The earliest of these envelope writings was probably composed around 1864, the date Ralph Franklin assigns to the last of Dickinson’s fascicles, and a small handful of other envelope texts belong to the same decade. The remaining envelope writings—or writings on envelopes, as I prefer to say—bear approximate composition dates ranging from 1870 to 1885. These writings were composed, then, in the aftermath of the fascicles and in a late period in the trajectory of Dickinson’s writing when, I believe, she was testing differently and for a final time the relationship between message and medium.

The envelopes are one of the many makeshift and fragile textual homes Dickinson imagined for her late writings. When I look at them, I think of Simone Weil’s moving words, “Vulnerability is the mark of their existence.”

That such documents survived—that they were saved—always amazes me.

What draws you to her work? And particularly her manuscripts? What’s it like to handle her manuscripts? To see her handwriting?

Writing is such a “reportless” place—the word is Dickinson’s, and it comes from a poem—indeed, a manuscript—that I love and that begins: “In many and reportless places – one feels a joy….”

While writing or thought is reportless, the manuscript is the material trace of that process and, I believe, of the joy that attends it.

When we review the history of our experience of the modern manuscript, we find that a specific vocabulary emerges, one suggestive of intimacy. Again and again, we find references to the “face” or “physiognomy” of the manuscript. In the earliest, least critical accounts of the manuscript, it was imagined as a reflecting glass by which we might see directly into the mind of the writer and the creative process. In extreme versions of this story, the manuscript might even appear as a surrogate for the writer.

Now, of course, very few manuscript scholars would subscribe to such beliefs. Today, we see manuscripts as cultural artifacts—not intimate keepsakes but artifacts estranged from us by distance and time. But this very distance—this alienation—also makes them readable in new ways. For me, the manuscript is a marvelous zone of inquiry. It reports something of the reportlessness of Dickinson’s compositional process—something about the disorderly dynamics of writing.

I’m painfully aware that no written document can ever translate completely the immaterial path of thought into material signs, but Dickinson’s manuscripts do permit us to follow that path, sometimes a short distance, sometimes much farther, and where the signs break off or become unreadable, where we come to a dead end, that too tells us something about the horizon of writing and the limits of any interpretation.

By abandoning the idea of the manuscript as mirror and, with it, our search for depth, we may begin to traverse its surface and decipher the traces inscribed upon it. When we do this, we encounter what the textual scholar Louis Hay has called the “third dimension” of the text, the passage of writing traced through time, the multiple, contradictory decisions made during the process of composition and registered in part in the spatial play of the hand across the paper.

And we see new things—things we didn’t see before. Signs of speed and of slowness often appear on the manuscript of the draft. In Dickinson’s case, accelerations in thought are marked in the slant of the writing or the blurring of ink or graphite. And sometimes we can also see a slowing down of composition, as if she was making her way more uncertainly, moving like a “stranger through the house of language.” There’s a beautiful draft of Dickinson’s poem “As Summer into Autumn slips” in which she compulsively reworks a passage, repeating and substituting the words “thought” and “shaft,” and when I look at these marks on the page, I can almost see her trying to redynamize the trace of writing. Gabriel Josipovici said that writing is “something that is happening … at the cross-roads of the mental and the physical.”

I think this is true. And beautiful.

The manuscript doesn’t necessarily encourage a teleological reading, either. For me, at least, the manuscript promotes a reading that wanders—and wonders. It compels us to attend to the minutest and most unrepeatable gestures of writing—to writing losing its thread sometimes in liberated strokes, sometimes in scribbles and erasures. For me, anyway, the draft tends to disturb the very idea of the still, absolute text, revealing it as only one possible realization of a matrix that precedes and sometimes follows it. Its interest lies in the uniqueness of its itinerary and its awareness of contingency.

I called the manuscript “reportless.” The poem I drew that word from reads: “In many and reportless | places | We feel a Joy – | Reportless, also, but | sincere as Nature | Or Deity - || It comes, without a | consternation - | Dissolves [Abates – Exhales -] – the same - | But leaves a | sumptuous [blissful] Destitution - | Without a Name - || Profane it by a | search – [pursuit] we cannot - | It has no home - | Nor we who having | once inhaled it – [waylaid it] | thereafter roam.”

But you have to see the manuscript—the way the final lines roam around the edges of the paper.

You’ve spoken about the work you did with Susan Howe at Buffalo—can you tell us about that again? How has Susan’s work inspired yours?

For my 22nd birthday, in 1987, a dear friend gave me a copy of Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson. We were first-year graduate students then, in the English department at SUNY Buffalo, and Buffalo’s long connection with radical poetics made this an appropriate, perhaps even an expected, gift. But for me, My Emily Dickinson was a revelation. As an undergraduate at Ithaca College, I had read widely in poetry, but also conservatively. I’d never heard of Howe, and probably my former teachers had not either. More to the point, I had no idea that a work of scholarship could take this form—and could embody such freedom. It’s not an exaggeration to say that this single book changed the course of my work on Dickinson and very likely the course of my life.

The next year—to my great delight and terror—Howe came to Buffalo to teach a course. She was then about the age I am now, which is rather strange to think about! The course she taught focused on early American literature, and at its center were documents—17th-century captivity narratives and conversion narratives—most composed by women, most composed in extremis. It was riveting. Howe was always prepared. I think she must have spent hours and hours, probably days or weeks, writing her lectures. And when she spoke, she was moved by a kind of intensity and nervousness and conviction all at once that was profoundly compelling. She was—she is—fierce and fragile. She’s always at the very edge of thought.

I was unbelievably privileged to be her student. And it was just sheer luck. I never felt that I deserved the attention she gave me. There were so many others whose claims were greater—so many others who knew so much more about poetry than I did (or do). But she stayed with me, pressing me forward. She could be a harsh mentor—because she expected one’s artistic and scholarly commitments to be absolute—but she was also generous without measure.

When we finished The Gorgeous Nothings, I drafted the acknowledgment to her. It follows the formal, official acknowledgments to the libraries that gave us permission to study their collections, but it’s a private message, too, and one that conveys, I hope, love.

It reads:

“In the Dickinson archives where I have worked, I have sometimes fancied that an unseen hand guided my own, sifting the documents, holding one or another up to the light. That hand belongs to Susan Howe, whose original discoveries among Dickinson’s manuscripts encouraged these further forays. To her, whose felicitous joining of historical inquiry with poetic speculation transformed forever the landscape of Dickinson scholarship, I owe the deepest debt: ‘Sweet Debt of Life – Each Night to owe - / Insolvent – every Noon’ (Fascicle 15).”

What do you think Dickinson’s intention was in writing these poems?

I have no idea! But then again, I don’t really believe in a textual practice that seeks out authorial intentions. Perhaps I’m enough of an old formalist to imagine that these intentions are beside the point. Or perhaps—and this seems more likely to me—my long apprenticeship as a textual scholar has made me circumspect about such a project of recovery.

I don’t know “Emily Dickinson.” What I know—or try to know, as far as it is possible to do so—is the unruly textual body that survived her.

But I do think she was writing poems with an awareness of their significance—and, in the case of the envelope poems, of their strangeness. A lot of questions swirled around these documents when I looked at them—and very few of them can be answered.

In some cases, Dickinson wrote on envelopes that had carried letters into the Homestead from the outside world. We know this because these envelopes are addressed—sometimes to her, sometimes to another member of the household—by the familiar hands of Judge Lord, the Norcrosses, and others. In other cases, though, Dickinson herself addressed the envelopes to intimate friends—Mrs. Holland, Helen Hunt Jackson—outside the Homestead, but she seems never to have enclosed letters in the envelopes or sent them out into the world.

What we have instead of these letters—if, in fact, they ever existed—are poems. It’s tempting to think that the poems have taken the place of the letters—perhaps, even, that they were the true messages she wished to transmit. But this is far from certain.

What is more certain is that when she turned from the address to writing the poem, she was redirecting it. The addresses are all written in a beautiful, fair copy hand; the poems, by contrast, are all in her rough copy hand, which Higginson described as looking like the “fossil tracks of birds.” Maybe this is a sign that the address is public, while the poem is private. I don’t know. Somehow, I think the reverse may be true. Unlike the messages, those “fine and private things” that seem destined for enclosure in envelopes, the poems are freely dispersed to all. Although they may never have left her desk, they are en route, their itinerary open.

Tell us how The Gorgeous Nothings book came about.

When Jen Bervin and I first met to talk about collaborating on a Dickinson project, we knew each other’s work, but not each other. Bervin is a visual artist and a poet, and she has produced, among many other works, the remarkable Dickinson Composites, a series of six large-scale embroidered works based on palimpsestic collations of the punctuation and variant markers in Dickinson’s fascicles. I’m an itinerant textual scholar covering poetic grounds of the 19th and 20th centuries. We came from different worlds—she from an art and poetry world, and I from a scholarly and academic world—and we met on the margins of Dickinson’s poetry. Collaboration is never easy. We knew this. But we were both drawn to the problem of how best to represent the conditions of Dickinson’s late works—those works composed specifically beyond the book, in its aftermath—and we were both committed to finding a form for her unbound writings that might gather and scatter them at once. “The way | Hope builds his | House,” Dickinson wrote on an envelope in the shape of a house, “It is not with a sill -- | nor Rafter --”

We did not seek to produce an “edition” or even a “catalog raisonée,” since we felt that both these structures—carrying with them a history of definiteness and closure—countered Dickinson’s aims or, since those must remain unknowable, the manuscripts’ aesthetics of open-endedness. Rather, we imagined the object we were producing as a temporary shelter for the late work, open to reassembly and even disassembly in future.

That’s really how it started, and of course the first incarnation of The Gorgeous Nothings, published by Steve Clay at Granary Books, reflects this original vision. The contents arrive not between two covers but in an archival box, 12 by 15 inches, which must be unpacked, unfolded, and slowly sifted.

There are all kinds of centrifugal forces at work here. Of all the materials enclosed in The Gorgeous Nothings, the loose facsimiles and diplomatic transcripts, the guides and indices, only my essay introducing them—“Itineraries of Escape”—is bound, an acknowledgment that my own thoughts on my encounter with Dickinson’s writings are also bound to this specific moment in time. All the other contents of the box remain unfastened: “all adrift to go.” Like Emerson’s souls, neither touching not mingling, never quite composing a set, the envelope poems belong to a discontinuous series, or, as Cixous writes, a “book from which each page could be taken out.”

I wasn’t at all sure that the bound volume of these writings published by New Directions could capture this feeling—but I think it has. The design is simply splendid. I don’t know how they did it! I’ll always be deeply grateful to New Directions for their vision of the book.

Can you talk about the experience of discovering fragments A 821 and A 821a?

I’d love to. I tell this story in my essay “Itineraries of Escape,” and, I have to warn you, it sounds like a fairy tale from the archives!

I was in Amherst researching the poems and other writings Dickinson had pinned together. In some cases, all the evidence that’s left is the very tiny pinholes; in other cases (at least in the 1990s, when I was first looking at them), the pins were still in place. This was so for A 821/821a. When I opened up the acid-free envelope, I saw this exquisite document inside. I swear it seemed to rise out of the envelope and take flight! This can’t have happened, I realize, but it looked just like a bird to me, and the handwriting—both the writing itself and the way it was deployed over the page—imparted to the manuscript a kind of motion. Even to read it requires that we rotate the text. And which direction we’re supposed to read in—well, I don’t know.

We could read the text like this: “Clogged | only with | Music, like | the Wheels of | Birds - [turn MSS 90 degrees to the right] Afternoon and | the West and | the gorgeous | nothings | which | compose | the | sunset | keep [pinned corner] their high | Appoint | ment”

But we could rotate the text 360 degrees and read the lines backwards: “– Afternoon and | the West and | the gorgeous | nothings | which | compose | the | sunset | keep [pinned corner] their high | Appoint | ment” [turn MSS 90 degrees to the left] "Clogged | only with | Music, like | the Wheels of | Birds –”

There are so many astonishing things about this manuscript.

First, there is the question of how it was composed: all at once, at different times, in fragments. The handwriting differs depending on which sector of the document you are looking at, suggesting perhaps that it wasn’t composed in one sitting, although it could have been…. And the boundary lines in the manuscript also create a kind of physical caesura that gets repeated in the lines—where there is also a kind of braking action, or a kind of leap across the boundary. Caesura and syncope. We hear the grammar of discontinuity.

Second, there is the way it was assembled—in the manner of a collage. It’s made up of two sections of envelope. The larger piece is the inside of the back of an envelope, the address face of which has been torn away. The smaller piece is the triangular corner of an envelope seal. A pin once held them together….

Third, there is the very delicate center fold in the document—a fold that bisects the document and makes it appear like a kind of diptych. We don’t know who folded it—if Dickinson did or if it was folded later. But at some moment in time, the fold became part of the manuscript and it determined how the reader opened it—how the text was revealed. The suddenness of the message seems to me related to the document’s unfolding.

Fourth, there’s the mysterious presence on A 821 of other sets of pinholes. Was this document pinned to other documents we haven’t yet identified?

Fifth, there’s the message it records and that flashes by us: a message about how day falls into night; a message about the moment when the world is overtaken by—engulfed in—birdsong. It’s a message—I’d call it a poem—about the instantaneous translation from one condition into another, an essentially ecstatic experience.

Sixth, there’s the document’s past and its future(s). These lines, or variants of them, appear in three drafts of a letter Dickinson was writing to Helen Hunt Jackson in 1885. Dickinson’s letter—probably a response to Hunt Jackson’s earlier message, sent from California, about her broken leg—is abandoned when Dickinson learns that Hunt Jackson has died. It’s not known which text came first: the letter or the fragment. That is, we can’t be sure whether the text on A 821 was integrated into the letter, or whether, when the letter was abandoned, Dickinson “released” the fragment from it. Whatever happened, A 821 does migrate beyond the letter into a freer air.

And finally, we should know that there’s a variant of this fragment, A 822, which was also composed by pinning. “It is very still in the world now - Thronged only with Music like the Decks of Birds and the Seasons take their hushed places like figures in a Dream –”

For me, A 821 / A 821a, composed on the reverse of the empty, unaddressed envelope, no longer the container for a message but the message itself, will always be a trope for Dickinson’s late, contrapuntal communications, in which “arrival” is only ever another name for “departure.”

There are countless ways of reading this fragment. But when I read it—when I see it—it always seems to be en route to the outermost edges of Dickinson’s oeuvre—and maybe out of this world.

You’ve mentioned that time and history imprint on documents. Can you talk a bit about that?

The envelope poems are a special case, I think. When the envelopes were just envelopes, carrying the original messages someone sealed into them, they were literally supposed to travel across time and space in order to find their recipient. Sometimes they bear stamps issued from a particular year, or postmarks that tell us what time—sometimes what hour—they passed through a particular place on their journey. And of course, many are marked by the damages—torn seals, etc. They are beautiful and fallen cultural artifacts. Beautiful because they are fallen.

When Dickinson turned the envelopes into a space for writing, she changed their relationship to time and space. For a few moments, while we’re reading them, they seem to stop time. But then, when we get to the end of the reading, we see that they’re already departed for the future—futures.

Why do you think there is so much interest in Dickinson at this time?

Well, I think people have always been interested in Dickinson! My father read Dickinson’s poems to me when I was a little girl—and he wasn’t a literary man at all. It’s just that something in Dickinson moved him deeply. At the end of his life, he returned to her. We used to exchange letters the entire text of which consisted of lists of first lines of Dickinson poems. I think he was trying to communicate something to me. It’s a message I will keep forever. I imagine that many people feel the way my father did.

But I do think there’s a reason why reading these poems Dickinson recorded on envelopes in the latter days of the 19th century seems like such an urgent project at this moment in the 21st century.

There’s a new connection. Our obsessive seeking through the new technologies available to us—the most pervasive of which is, of course, the Internet—to collapse the distance between private and public, between inner thought and outer word, even between self and other—began at the close of the 19th century, when, as media historian John Durham Peters observes, we first “defined ourselves in terms of our ability to communicate with each other.” While we exist seemingly at the end of this age, Dickinson lived at its beginnings. In her century, the advent of tele-phenomena such as the telegraph and, later, the telephone, like the advent of the Internet in our own age, seemed to open up the potential to breach the barriers of time and space.

One of the uncanniest documents in the constellation of Dickinson’s writings on envelopes is a Western Union Telegraph blank. While the urgent message it conveyed has long since been lost, the poems that take its place—“Glass was | the Street - | in Tinsel | Peril” and “It came his | turn to beg --,” appear to translate the electrical pulses of the unrecoverable bulletin into new messages associating speed and shock.

But the grammatical breakdown and cancellation of the final words of the poems is also a sharp reminder that transmissions in this world are often asymmetrical and full of gaps. The very century that first experienced these unprecedented transformations in the forms of human contact also bore witness to the new and frightening horizons of incommunicability that still haunt us today. Not only the telegraph office but also the Dead Letter Office came into being in the 19th century, when it was not uncommon for the clerks of this strange agency to handle as many as 23,000 pieces of “dead” mail daily. “The media,” as Friedrich Kittler has remarked, “yield ghost phenomena.”

Today, the Dead Letter Office—renamed, in Orwellian fashion, the Mail Recovery Center—still exists. In 2012, the very year The Gorgeous Nothings first saw light, more than 90 million items ended up in this office—undeliverable as addressed. If we add to this the estimated billions of emails lost without a trace each day, we might wonder if, rather than becoming ever more closely connected, we are more drifting toward greater and greater states of disconnection.

A message enclosed in an envelope, or a poem inscribed upon it and prepared for sending over miles or millennia, or an email sent into thin air, is not a bit or byte of information but an archive of longings. And to send a signal at a distance, it must be kept from dying along the way. Dickinson knew and experienced this before we did. She knew, too, that the interval separating the writer of a message from the addressee—whether seconds, hours, days, or years—is indeterminate and may be(come) infinite, and that we can never verify the degree to which what is transmitted matches what is received.

And still, she wrote. Her late envelope writings, scattered by the winds of the future, intercepted by unknown and invisible readers, remind us of the contingency, transience, vulnerability, and hope cathected in all her messages and in all of our varied replies.

Originally Published: October 17, 2013

Trust me on this. Emily Dickinson was the greatest female poet to have ever lived. -Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/245762

ESSAY
Significant Soil
Meditations on the Merger of T.S. Eliot’s “Waste” and “Land.”

BY CHRISTINA DAVIS
Significant Soil
“This is the land,” T. S. Eliot asserts in Ash-Wednesday.

Not the “wasteland,” but “the land.”

And yet, if you’ve happened upon any mention of Eliot’s most famous poem, more likely than not you’ve witnessed the title rendered as a single immutable unit: “The Wasteland.”

Over the years I’ve grown increasingly curious about this phenomenon, which made its debut as early as December 1922 (the year of the poem’s publication) in a notice in The Bookman, a Georgian magazine that published Walter Pater and Edward Thomas in its heyday. Since then, “The Wasteland” (in lieu of “The Waste Land”) has appeared in everything from the New York Times, The New Yorker, Salon, and the BBC Online to the library catalog of Eliot’s alma mater, Harvard University.

The penchant for this elision may simply be an inheritance of error: a typographical lapse or editorial blind spot that the Internet has only served to exacerbate. But I’d like to consider some cultural parallels to this occurrence, as well as social forces that might contribute to a phenomenon of this kind: perhaps the way in which difficulty or experimentalism is assimilated, or the way in which a symbol-making (and unmaking) entity—a poem—is itself made into a hard-and-fast symbol during the course of its collective reception.

While I don’t think a poet’s intentions require our protection, I do believe that for Eliot the separateness of “waste” and “land” was of supreme significance. And, given that the title of the poem “gave a heading to the time” (according to the New York Times) and, perhaps misguidedly, to our historical understanding of that era and its so-called “Wastelanders” (New York Review of Books, 1988), I believe that that significance warrants at least a momentary attention.

A Momentary Attention

Other than “In my beginning is my end. In my end is my beginning,” it’s possible that the greatest epitaphic language I have encountered is that of Sir Thomas Browne who, in the midst of a meditation on urn-burial, suddenly situates himself on the brink of death and declares himself: “Ready to be anything…. ” It’s a line that would make a breathtakingly bold and accurate sign-off for any of us whose molecules will become a little bit of everything. Or, at the very least, what Eliot would call “significant soil.”

The first time I read “The Waste Land,” I experienced the same elation that I felt on reading Browne’s epitaph—a conviction that the catalyzing proximity (and yet resilient apartness) of those two words was central to the recombinant possibilities of the poem.

In other words, it was because the “waste” was a temporal, impermanent modifier—and not an enduring quality of the land—that the land was redeemable and open to (what Eliot called in a different landscape, that of “Burnt Norton”) “perpetual possibility.” In this phrase, he was likely echoing St. Augustine’s concern about the ossification of certain written words into an orthodoxy: “I should write so that my words echo rather than to set down one true opinion that should exclude all other possibilities.”

In “The Waste Land,” Eliot is fastidious in keeping most of his adjectives and nouns apart, thereby perpetuating their other possibilities: “Unreal City,” “Hyacinth garden,” “red rock,” “brown fog,” “empty rooms,” and so on. This separation frequently allows for a different combination to occur later in the poem. For instance, “Unreal City” is resurrected as “O City city,” and “Hyacinth garden” sheds its specificity and becomes the plural and possessive: “your gardens.” And, perhaps most importantly, the “dead land” recurs as “brown land” and makes its culminating cameo in the plural and possessive incarnation: “my lands” (“Shall I at least set my lands in order?”).

Most of Eliot’s poem titles are characterized by this same simple and purposeful pattern, an adjective placed next to a noun: “Burnt Norton,” “Four Quartets,” “The Hollow Men.” But while I have never seen the latter rendered as “The Hollowmen,” “The Waste Land” is frequently inscribed in the aforementioned cultural shorthand. What is it about the poem (and its title) that inspires such a frequent and un-authored fusion, forcing the title to “rest in peace” instead of permitting it to exist on the verge of becoming anything?

Ready to Be Anything

"It wiped out our world as if an atom bomb had been dropped upon it and our brave sallies into the unknown were turned to dust."
—William Carlos Williams on “The Waste Land”

I remember that shortly after September 11, 2001, many who endured that day up-close (including myself) were offended when media outlets began to call the complex events of that morning “9/11,” and I swore that I would never consent to so collapsed a term. And yet, now, it is the only one I use. I’m interested in that consent and that condensary, the welding of the term into a seemingly immutable unity.

What happens to a specific day, or to a work of art for that matter, when it is coded and condensed in this manner? Does it still retain the possibility of becoming anything, or is it destined to become the one thing? Do we (as a culture and as individual receivers and transmitters) deaden and flatten the dimensionality of our terms too soon?

When I encounter “The Wasteland” in its elided form, I see something shorn of its idiosyncrasies, facets, flaws, and contradictions and rendered knowable, containable, its dangerous elements stabilized. It reminds me of Miguel de Unamuno’s observation that “the mind seeks what is dead”—what is stable, unified, knowable—“…what is living escapes it.”

While it’s hard to imagine now, “The Waste Land” was dangerous and destabilizing at the time of its publication, at least to those who elected to see it that way. The earliest instances of the elision I’ve been discussing tend to occur on both sides of the pond in articles that are demonstratively against or antagonized by the poem—and also, in some cases, in publications that are simply poking fun at the poem’s unnerving effects. Though I wouldn’t suggest that the elision was directly related to resistance, I would say that a person is far more likely to misquote a piece that (s)he hasn’t fully fathomed or that (s)he has opposed emblematically instead of experientially.

As an example, shortly after The Dial selected Eliot’s poem for its annual prize, John Farrar (and/or his editors) repeated the 1922 typo in The Bookman in the following review:

It is only proper to mention “The Wasteland” by T. S. Eliot in The Dial. Mr. Eliot has received this year’s prize award from that magazine and is rapidly gaining what might almost be called a “cult” of adorers among the intellectuals. I hesitate to recommend any poem which I am incapable of understanding. In this class falls “The Wasteland.” (February 1923)

In those early years, the elision also appeared frequently in Life magazine (not to be confused with the later photojournalistic magazine), which was a popular Onion-like humor journal of the era. In its March 12, 1925, issue, Life awarded The Dial the “Brass Medal of Second Class” for honoring “The Wasteland”: “[in so doing] The Dial has succeeded in speeding up to mass production the synthetic prose decomposition that passes with the feeble-minded for poetry.”

In an effort to avoid fallacies, I should say that there are several articles by Eliot’s antagonists which correctly cite the poem and even emphasize the distinction between “waste” and the noun it modifies, such as Humbert Wolfe’s “Waste Land and Waste Paper” (Weekly Westminster, November 17, 1923) and H.P. Lovecraft’s sidesplitting anti-Eliot spoof, “Waste Paper.” But the first few incidents of the elision seem to fall on the side of those who perceived in the poem a threat.

Curiously, the poem was anathema not only to many who were striving to retain (or continue to evolve) a more Georgian poetics but also to those who had been looking forward to a distinctly different set of experimental possibilities. As William Carlos Williams famously observed in his 1948 autobiography:

I felt at once that it [“The Waste Land”] had set me back twenty years … at the moment when I felt that we were on the point of an escape to matters much closer to the essence of a new art form itself—rooted in the locality which should give it fruit. I knew at once that in certain ways I was most defeated.… Eliot had turned his back on the possibility of reviving my world.

In other words, the poem (which many articles interpreted as reflecting “contemporary despair” over a lost world or, as Harriet Monroe writes of the poem in March 1923, “the malaise of our time … the world crumbling to pieces before our eyes”) was for Williams itself the source of that destruction, “wiping out our world.” For him, the publication and reception of “The Waste Land” were a catastrophe for American letters, creating an epicenter of attention around which all of the energy that ought to have been focused on evolving a distinctly American mode was expended on parading European erudition. Though Eliot’s poem did not emerge sui generis (the underlying aesthetics were evident in poetry that predated World War I), Williams found in it a useful and inciting symbol for his concerns. In many ways, I too am consenting to the same penchant: that of making “The Waste Land” into a symbol for my own preoccupations.

“This Land Is Your Land”

Walt Whitman, who passed away during Eliot’s first decade on earth, persisted throughout his lifetime in referring to his nation in the form of a tentative plural: “The United States are destined either to surmount the gorgeous history of feudalism, or else prove the most tremendous failure of time,” he writes in his 1871 Democratic Vistas.

It turns out that Whitman was not alone. According to historian Shelby Foote, the singular (“The United States is …”) was not generally used until after the Civil War, and it took until 1902 for the House of Representative’s Committee on Revision of the Laws to officially rule that “the United States should be treated as singular, not plural.” It seems the federal government and the media were slow to impose a singularity on something that had not yet achieved that status.

But with the 20th century came a new rapidity in the construction and articulation of the present and recent past. And, I might add, aeronautical as well as photographic advances permitted the surveying and summarizing of vast tracts of land in a single shot—and not sequentially over time—offering a swift unity of viewpoint. In his superb book The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918, Stephen Kern documents how the sinking of the Titanic in 1912—ten years prior to the publication of “The Waste Land”—was the first collective, global catastrophe, one that almost the entire (technologically linked) world was able to experience, and in many cases respond to, at the same time. In the decades that followed, the time between an event (or an artistic creation) and the reaction to it (or assessment of it) was shortened: “The telephone … [allowed people] to respond at once without the time to reflect afforded by written communication.” In addition, “business and personal exchanges suddenly became instantaneous instead of protracted and sequential” and the new broadcast technologies enabled journalism to focus the “attention of the inhabitants of an entire city on a single experience.”

I sometimes think that T. S. Eliot’s infamous displeasure over his “Waste Land” fame was less about being identified with a particular aesthetics of fragmentation or neo-barbarism than about a frustration with the way that critics, readers, and the general public used the poem to swiftly generalize for a generation and conflate the text’s complexities and “innumerable sources” (as Mark Twain writes of the Mississippi) into a single, convening truth. It strikes me as a great irony that a poem composed of a series of recombinant symbols and phonemes should itself have become a hard-and-fast symbol—as if to say, “‘The Waste Land’ was written; therefore, we must be in ‘the wasteland.’” Case closed.

In later conversations and writings, Eliot often attempted to downplay the dominion of the poem over the literary and cultural landscape by inserting an indefinite article into his discussions (“a poem called ‘The Waste Land’”)—as if to say it was just “a poem,” just “a way of putting it—not very satisfactory.” I don’t think this was false humility; I believe it was a genuine attempt to assert the poem’s temporariness—to return it (and him) to its (and his, and perhaps even our) possibilities. As critic Eloise Knapp Hay writes, the poem

expressed Eliot’s own “way” at the time, it was not intended to lay down a way for others to follow. “I dislike the word generation [he said in “Thoughts after Lambeth” in 1931], which has been a talisman for the last ten years; when I wrote a poem called “The Waste Land” some of the more approving critics said that I had expressed the “disillusionment of a generation,” which is nonsense. I may have expressed for them their own illusion of being disillusioned, but that did not form part of my intention. (T. S. Eliot’s Negative Way, 1982)

“Generation” itself was a collective moniker that disheartened Eliot: a way of grouping the past, of consolidating recent history into a convenient narrative unit. That the very poem that had experimented with perceiving “the past in a new pattern,” a “new way” of writing which Eliot called “not destructive, but re-creative” should be frozen into a single pattern, into a single despairing way of seeing it, a “talisman” of its times, was (and remains) a profound irony. It was an experiment that ossified into an orthodoxy: poetry’s own personal leopards-in-the-temple.

“The Future Is a Faded Song”

I think poems are living things that grow from the earth into the brain, rather than things that are planted within the earth by the brain.… [P]oems can, in a small way, remind the world of what’s still possible.
—Dorothea Lasky

Almost 20 years after the publication of “The Waste Land,” as Eliot was penning the distinct poems that were later unified into “Four Quartets,” poet and musician Woody Guthrie was composing a piece of music in opposition to Irving Berlin’s ubiquitous and bravado, “God Bless America.”

The song he wrote, “This Land Is Your Land,” was edgy and communist-inclined; and in its original refrain, “God blessed America for me,” it came off sounding a lot more like Bob Dylan’s spitfire protest tune “With God on Our Side” than its current, calming Dan Zanes incarnation. The song included references to deserts and fog and cities of hungry people—sound familiar?—and its culminating verse expressed doubt that this land was “made for you and me,” since it seemed everywhere to prevent its people from receiving “relief.”

Though recording history has tended to unify the tune into a single rousing and patriotic rendering, Guthrie frequently varied its units, at times infusing it with fierce political activism and in other contexts removing the provocative verses altogether. Which version is the actual “This Land Is Your Land”? I’d say, it is all of them. Or, as Jorge Luis Borges has written: “No one is the homeland—it is all of us.”

We have lived (for better or worse) with the properties of Eliot’s poem for almost 100 years. Its unsettling presence has tested our capacity to perpetuate the unknown and not to foreclose—out of resistance, fear, or uncertainty—our multitudinous experiences of it (and of the earth it observes) into a single order of understanding.

In my reading of the end of “The Waste Land,” the poem perpetuates the possibilities of three different interpretations and recombinations of the Brahmanic “Da”—permitting these particulates to coexist with and catalyze one another instead of settling into a single immutable unit.

“This is the land”—not the fenceable, knowable, ownable, but the as yet unknown—waste and vast at the moment of creation. And, as René Char has asked: What would we do without the Unknown in front of us?

Originally Published: April 9, 2013

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/251704


ESSAY
Iffy
Behind the mask of Rudyard Kipling’s confidence.

BY AUSTIN ALLEN
Iffy
Rudyard Kipling
It’s easy to imagine “If—” as a great modernist title. Terse, mysterious, hesitant, it could have introduced a Williams fragment full of precarious gaps and leaps, or an Auden riff on the As You Like It line about evasive speech: “Much virtue in If.” Instead the title belongs to Rudyard Kipling, to the year 1910, and to a didactic poem that remains a classic of righteous certitude.

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
Meanwhile, Kipling himself remains an icon of obnoxious wrongness. George Orwell’s 1942 disclaimer has been widely quoted: “It is no use pretending that Kipling’s view of life, as a whole, can be accepted or even forgiven by any civilized person.” Imperialist racist, aggressive militarist: Kipling was this and more, and very publicly. Even in his least controversial work, the outlook Orwell called “morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting” bleeds in at the margins. Read “If—” beside Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden,” and the line “Yours is the Earth and everything in it” starts to smell like colonialist arrogance—or “jingoistic nonsense,” as one British paper put it in 1995, after Britain had voted “If—” its all-time favorite poem.

And therein lies the reason for issuing disclaimers at all: Kipling has lasted. For decades, Orwell wrote, “every enlightened person has despised him, and at the end of that time nine-tenths of those enlightened persons are forgotten and Kipling is in some sense still there.” In his 1939 elegy for W.B. Yeats, Auden judged that time had “Pardoned Kipling” by separating his writing talent from his bigotry. Auden dropped that stanza from later versions of the poem, but global culture has never dropped Kipling.

Disney’s Jungle Book remake comes out next year, and “If—” still tops those polls in Britain. The poem adorns coffee mugs and dorm posters; it’s been quoted on The Simpsons and in Joni Mitchell lyrics; it ranks among the most-searched-for titles in the Poetry Foundation’s online archive. Former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, who says he first heard it recited on an NFL broadcast, defiantly quoted it during his downfall on corruption charges. Onward it swaggers like its own idealized “Man,” indifferent to love and loathing, refusing to quit. It’s the poetic advice column forwarded around the world, the kind of timeless wisdom everyone thinks someone else should follow.

Kipling himself dryly remarked, in his late memoirs, that the poem offers “counsels of perfection most easy to give.” One of its pearls adorns the players’ entrance to the Centre Court at Wimbledon: “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster / And treat those two impostors just the same.” No Wimbledon competitor has ever done this.

Still, the poem clearly speaks to an ideal or an aspiration. When thousands of readers search the Web for “If—,” what are they hoping to find? Why do its lessons lodge so easily in the memory, even if we’re not trying to learn them? To reckon with—maybe even outgrow—this old-school lecture on maturity, it’s not enough to heap our enlightened scorn on the poet. We have to examine his character and our own.

•


“If—” was published in the last year of the Edwardian era, the year in which Virginia Woolf believed “human character changed” and modernity began. But Kipling had conceived it 15 years earlier, in 1895, and as a cultural document, it’s purely Victorian.

Kipling had one of the great unhappy Victorian childhoods: beatings, public humiliations, absentee parents, wretched eyesight. Born in India to British parents in 1865—December 30th will mark his 150th birthday—he was packed off to England for schooling at the age of six. Under the “care” of an abusive guardian, a military widow, his acute homesickness turned to lasting misery. Edmund Wilson recounts the grim story in The Wound and the Bow (1941), plausibly arguing that childhood trauma was the “wound” Kipling carried into his adult work. For one thing, it seems to have informed the “definite strain of sadism” Orwell detected in his writing. It also surely informed his deep interest in childhood itself and in strict codes of moral correctness.

By the time Kipling began writing “If—,” his powerless days were behind him. He’d rocketed to fame in 1890 with Barrack-Room Ballads—the collection that contained “Tommy,” “Danny Deever,” and other future anthology fodder—and had secured his place in the history of children’s literature with The Jungle Book in 1894. At the time, he and his young family were living in Brattleboro, Vermont, where he drew rapt attention as “the Genius of the place” (in his friend Mary Cabot’s words) until his reluctant return to England in 1896. International celebrity had amplified his strident politics, and “If—” first developed as a topical comment on a now-obscure controversy.

In December 1895, a dashing colonial administrator named Leander Starr Jameson led a raid against the Boers in the Transvaal of South Africa. He was trounced by his opponents and jailed by the British government that had originally backed him, but the British public—riding a gathering wave of what became known as jingoism—glorified him. The incident helped ignite the Second Boer War, which Kipling witnessed firsthand while visiting troop hospitals and producing a troop newspaper. For Kipling, Jameson was a martyr to official hypocrisy, a model of stoic pride, and, perhaps, a projection of his self-image as an adventurer among petty critics.

The poem soon gained a second inspiration: the birth of Kipling’s son, John, in 1897. When it finally appeared in print (in the children’s book Rewards and Fairies) in 1910, John was just reaching adolescence—the age of its ideal reader. In the interim, Kipling had met with two of his greatest triumphs and disasters: winning the Nobel Prize in 1907 at age 42 (he remains the youngest laureate in literature) and losing his daughter Josephine to pneumonia in 1899. During this period his politics had only grown noisier and harsher, and by 1910, according to Wilson, they had touched off “the eclipse of [his] reputation” that progressed until his death.

But “If—” was an instant hit. Orwell reports that, along with some of Kipling’s other “sententious poems,” it was “given almost biblical status.” Like William Ernest Henley’s “Invictus,” it dangles the promise of mastery over self and world. Like First Corinthians, it sketches a blueprint for maturity without filling in too many specifics. And like all fatherly advice, it’s tempting to read as an older man’s counsel to his younger self, the sweet or bitter harvest of lessons learned. “If you can dream—and not make dreams your master,” you’re well on your way to a successful career in the arts. “If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,” you’re not so much stoic as intensely self-protective. A remarkable number of lines are about handling abuse.

•

T.S. Eliot was fascinated by Kipling and once wrote a cautiously approving introduction to his verse. (In one spine-tingling moment, he praises Kipling’s skillful use of the word whimper.) Where Orwell ultimately judged Kipling a “good bad poet,” Eliot saw him as a writer who “was not trying to write poetry at all,” but sometimes tossed off a great poem anyway.

“If—” certainly isn’t trying to do anything “poetic” by modern standards: present rich ambiguities, capture shifting moods or the texture of consciousness. It’s just preaching. Now and then, critics have scoured the poem for deeper intent; in one ingenious reading, Harry Ricketts argues that it “destabilisingly” echoes John Donne’s “The Undertaking” (which advises a male “you” in a series of “if” clauses) and Thomas Gray’s “Ode to Adversity” (“Teach me to love and to forgive … and know myself a man”). Yet “If—” lacks the density and argumentative subtlety of those poems. Beside the stormy imagery of Yeats’s “A Prayer for My Daughter” (1919) and the disillusioned candor of Langston Hughes’s “Mother to Son” (1922)—two well-known “advice” poems with which “If—” nearly shares an era—it reads like a pre-game pep talk. (You don’t see many modernist lines inscribed in sports arenas.) Its tone recalls Polonius’s “To thine own self be true” speech, minus the surrounding symphony of Shakespearean irony.

The poem’s sheer daddishness—its blend of creakiness and timelessness—has left it wide open to parody. Long before Grampa recited it at the roulette tables on The Simpsons, Elizabeth Lincoln Otis affectionately tweaked it in “An ‘If’ for Girls” (1931), which registers both the nearness and distance of Kipling’s cultural universe:

If you can dress to make yourself attractive,
Yet not make puffs and curls your chief delight;
If you can swim and row, be strong and active,
But of the gentler graces lose not sight;
If you can dance without a craze for dancing,
Play without giving play too strong a hold,
Enjoy the love of friends without romancing,
Care for the weak, the friendless and the old;

Otis’s ideal girl at times seems destined to become a Victorian helpmeet: a “loyal wife and mother” who can “make good bread as well as fudges.” Yet she’s also expected to “swim and row,” “master French and Greek and Latin,” and know how to “ply a saw and use a hammer”—in other words, to be as well educated and well rounded as the boys. Though ostensibly deferential (“With apologies to Mr. Rudyard Kipling”), Otis ends up giving Kipling’s “Yours is the Earth” line a proto-feminist twist:

You’ll be, my girl, the model for the sages—
A woman whom the world will bow before.

Kipling deals mostly in moral generalities; Otis promotes concrete skills and actions. Kipling wants readers to “fill the unforgiving minute / With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run”—a metaphorical statement about effort. Otis literally tells readers to get some exercise. Kipling’s is finally a spiritual and not a practical guide; in that one sense, it’s a little ambiguous, a little elusive, a little “poetic.”

•

After promising an entire world’s worth of freedom, “If—” concludes by promising something “more”: two limiting labels.

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

To be a “Man” in prewar England was to maneuver inside an armored suit of gender conventions. To be Rudyard Kipling’s son was to be trapped in a generational tragedy.

John was named after Rudyard’s own father, John Lockwood Kipling, who had fueled Rudyard’s youthful misery by sending him away but also collaborated in his son’s adult success. (An artist and art-school principal, he illustrated several of Rudyard’s volumes, including The Jungle Book.) Rudyard’s parental legacy was similarly mixed. On the one hand, he spun some of the most inventive bedtime stories ever recorded; on the other hand, he wrote high-level support-our-troops sermons such as “Tommy”; favored compulsory military service for men; and generally trumpeted martial virtues at every opportunity. He internalized a code that even some of his contemporaries found stodgy, and he passed it on. He’d never fought in the trenches himself, but “when the drums [began] to roll” for the Great War, he helped John march—pulling strings to maneuver his eager but severely myopic son past the army’s eyesight requirements. John went missing in the Battle of Loos in 1915 and was confirmed dead two years later.

As a celebrity author, Kipling remained an official booster of the war; as a grieving father, he sank into a deep bitterness. “Kipling spent the later part of his life in sulking,” wrote Orwell, whose essay never mentions John’s death. “Somehow history had not gone according to plan.” The world he’d seemed to master as a literary prodigy crumbled around him; the decade that began with “If—” ended with Eliot’s “Gerontion.” Belatedly, he confronted “the wastage of Loos” in the 1925 story “The Gardener,” whose heroine loses an adopted son to the war and resents “being manufactured into a bereaved next of kin.”

And so, in its dark-glass way, “If—” reflects modern uncertainty after all. It’s a masterpiece of timing, of structure, of rhetoric (the genre that Yeats pointedly contrasted with poetry). But the more you read it, the more you hear a countersong beneath the assurance. In that long series of perfectly balanced clauses, you hear a mounting fear that the child won’t succeed. The sentence keeps building; the number of required conditions keeps growing. Maturity starts to seem like a very big “if.”

For both author and readers, the anxiety is justified. What we want to find in the poem—as in so many Victorian/Edwardian relics—is precisely an authoritative, prelapsarian sense of certainty. Once upon a time, the unconscious thinking goes, there were no world wars. God, parents, and country could be trusted. Poetry didn’t need instability and iconoclasm. Men were Men. But those simpler values were always tainted where they existed at all. The rigid composure of “If—” foreshadows the madness that split poetry into fragments. The world Kipling promises was fallen already.

Originally Published: December 15, 2015

George Orwell’s criticisms are steeped in insane liberal ideology. Countless millions living in savagery and 5th century backwardness were brought centuries forward by British expansionism and its spreading influence around the world!
No other nation or Empire has ever behaved in the way the stupid liberals cry about and condemn Britain and its Empire for not doing!
Tis' another reason why I hate Orwell. He is a self-righteous idiot attempting to destroy the works of a writer/ poet that is/was far, far greater than he(Orwell) ever was or ever will be with truly intelligent people. -Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/246790

ESSAY
A Little Society
From the Brontës to Dorothy and William Wordsworth, literary siblings challenge assumptions of lonely genius.

BY CASEY N. CEP

For years, a tiny pub on the road between the English villages of Haworth and Keighley has been home to a peculiar rumor. The Cross Roads Inn was one of Branwell Brontë’s favorite haunts. It was at the Cross Roads that two of Branwell’s friends claim he read from a manuscript that featured the characters who would later appear in the novel Wuthering Heights.

Despite Charlotte Brontë’s insistence that her sister Emily wrote Wuthering Heights, the rumor that their brother Branwell penned the novel has persisted. In their various biographies, Juliet Barker, Daphne du Maurier, Lucasta Miller, and Fannie Elizabeth Ratchford all considered the possibility that Branwell was the true author of Wuthering Heights. Barker claimed to have identified a story of Branwell’s that influenced the relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff; du Maurier pointed to poems written by Emily and Branwell as evidence of an early collaboration between the two that could have blossomed into Wuthering Heights.

The persistence of the rumor reflects the curious, cloistered upbringing of the Brontës, but also the more universal experience of siblings. Collaboration and competition between brothers and sisters exists no matter their vocations, but literary siblings challenge our assumptions of lonely genius, isolated writers alone at their desks. Patrick Brontë, father to the four artists, who raised them himself after their mother died, wrote: “As they had few opportunities of being in learned and polished society, in their retired country situation, they formed a little society amongst themselves—with which they seem’d content and happy.”

“A little society” is the perfect description of siblings. Brothers and sisters have long encouraged one another’s literary careers: letters and drafts change hands; carefully chosen words of praise and criticism pass between lips; scraps of paper, coveted notebooks, and particular pens move between writing desks.

The Brontës—Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, and Anne—were all prolific writers as children. When Charlotte was ten and Branwell was nine, they began to write plays set in the fictional world of Glass Town. When Emily and Anne were old enough to contribute, Glass Town grew into the separate kingdoms of Gondal and Angria. Together, the four children filled miniature books and tiny magazines with poetry and stories.

Their juvenilia reveal young artists finding their voices, but also their audience. Writing first for one another, they learned how to write for others. When the sisters finally published a book in 1846, it was a collection of poems. Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell sold poorly, and the sisters redirected their efforts to fiction. Emily and Anne continued writing poetry privately, but Charlotte would write poems again only to mark the deaths of her siblings.

“On the Death of Anne Brontë” is one of Charlotte’s most sorrowful poems. “There’s little joy in life for me,” it begins. From the first stanza (“I’ve lived the parting hour to see / Of one I would have died to save”) to the last (“And now, benighted, tempest-tossed, / Must bear alone the weary strife”), she laments her sister’s death and her fresh solitude. She outlived all of her siblings: Branwell and Emily died in 1848; Anne followed them to the grave less than a year later. Charlotte would be their literary executor after their deaths just as she had been their literary champion in life.

That same closeness characterized the relationship between Dorothy and William Wordsworth. Although they lived apart during much of their childhood, the siblings were reunited as adults and eventually cohabited for many years in the Lake District. In an essay on Dorothy, Virginia Woolf wrote: “It was a strange love, profound, almost dumb, as if brother and sister had grown together and shared not the speech but the mood, so that they hardly knew which felt, which spoke, which saw the daffodils or the sleeping city; only Dorothy stored the mood in prose, and later William came and bathed in it and made it into poetry.”

Dorothy would copy verses for her brother and assist him with correspondence, but she was also a talented writer. While she wrote little for publication, her journals, travelogues, and poetry are all now in print. It is clear that her writing influenced her brother’s or, as Woolf noted, that “one could not act without the other.”

It was Dorothy who made notes in her journal about a fateful walk the siblings took on April 15, 1802, when they “saw a few daffodils close to the water side … a long belt of them along the shore, about the breadth of a country turnpike road.” Dorothy recorded that she “never saw daffodils so beautiful [—] they grew among the mossy stones and about them, some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness and the rest tossed and reeled and danced.”

Only a few years later, William would return to that entry and craft from it one of the most iconic poems in the English language. Written in iambic tetrameter, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” captures “a crowd, / A host, of golden daffodils.” While the poem celebrates “the bliss of solitude,” the poet himself rambled through the Lake District with his sister. In one of her own poems, “Floating Island,” Dorothy wrote that “the lost fragments shall remain, / To fertilize some other ground.” She might very well have been thinking of the way her own writing nurtured her brothers.

The collaboration between siblings is not always so indirect. Charles and Mary Lamb co-authored several collections of poetry and prose for children. Long before he had established his reputation as an essayist and a critic, Charles collaborated with Mary on Tales from Shakespeare (1807), Mrs. Leicester’s School (1809), and Poetry for Children (1809).

Mary, who suffered from mental illness, wrote poetry and stories almost constantly when fueled by her mania; Charles, not without his own struggles, suffered from depression and alcoholism, both of which led to severe writer’s block. Brother and sister were linked not only in illness but in tragedy. Mary came to live with Charles after murdering their mother in a psychotic episode. Although Mary was 31 and Charles was only 21, he became her legal guardian and refused to have her committed. They lived together for 40 years, until Charles died.

Well known in literary circles, Charles and Mary were forever linked to one another. It was Thomas Carlyle who called the siblings “a very sorry pair of phenomena,” but everyone from Keats to Coleridge to Wordsworth enjoyed their company. While they hosted many of London’s literati, their deepest friendship, their strongest relationship, was with one another. It was brother and sister who saw one another through madness and depression, frustration and addiction. “You would laugh, or you would cry, perhaps both,” Mary wrote in 1805, “to see us sit together looking at each other with long and rueful faces, & saying how do you do? & how do you do? & then we fall a crying & say we will be better on the morrow.”

Unlike the Lambs and the Wordsworths, pairs of siblings in which the brother’s reputation far exceeded the sister’s, one Victorian family produced a daughter whose fame has outlasted that of her brother. Christina Rossetti is considered one of the greatest Victorian poets, while her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti is remembered more for his status as sibling than painter or poet.

Born to an accomplished poet and Dante scholar, Christina and her brother were the “two storms” in a family of four children whose other dyad was known as the “two calms.” All four of the Rossetti children had accomplished careers as writers and critics, encouraged by a childhood filled with arts and letters. As teenagers, they played rounds of bouts-rimés, racing against one another to write sonnets with specified forms and rhymes; Christina was the youngest, but is said to have excelled most at the game.

While Dante Gabriel founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood to surround himself with other artists, Christina found support from the Portfolio Society, a group of female poets. Despite their esteemed position in literary society, they remained each other’s best critics. Exchanging letters almost daily for years, they critiqued one another’s work, suggested new topics and themes, and helped to organize poems into volumes for publication.

Private disagreements, including Dante Gabriel’s suggestion that certain topics are unsuitable for female writers and Christina’s increasing unwillingness to accept her brother’s revisions, did not keep them from championing one another’s work in public. And while Christina’s most remarkable poem, Goblin Market, testifies to the love between sisters (“For there is no friend like a sister / In calm or stormy weather”), it was her brother Dante Gabriel whose illustrations accompanied its publication. And like Branwell Brontë, who painted a famous portrait of his sisters, Dante Gabriel produced iconic images of Christina.

Tellingly, Branwell’s painting of his sisters, the only surviving group portrait, originally included his likeness: the blurred pillar between Emily and Charlotte was once Branwell. As the oil paint fades, the canvas is slowly revealing Branwell’s figure. Brothers and sisters are not always at peace, and posterity plays favorites. Branwell is as spectral a figure in the portrait as he is in the pages of literary history. The competition for prizes, publication, and readers in life often continues posthumously, and not all siblings are peaceable partners in literary creation.

Where there is ink, there is envy. Literary siblings are certainly not exempt from the rivalries that animate other families. One sibling’s success fuels another sibling’s writing with jealousy and ambition or thwarts the other sibling’s efforts entirely; the connections of one sibling to the literary establishment facilitate another sibling’s career or, less ceremoniously, earn the lesser sibling a footnote in literary history as simply that, a biological relation.

Literary siblings are not only a thing of the past. Contemporary poetry is home to at least two of these little societies: Matthew and Michael Dickman are twin brothers who edit one another’s poetry and share a publisher; Fanny and Susan Howe are sisters whose poetic careers span decades. While many artists long to be orphans, free of family and obligation, some poets find strength in their siblings. The complicated dynamics of these little societies are fascinating and fraught. Collaborating on juvenilia, editing one another’s drafts, supporting one another through depression and doubt, championing each other’s work: these little societies sustain one another in ways only siblings could.
Originally Published: October 22, 2013
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If students find the story pulling away from the truth, that’s OK. You might remind them that they’re serving the poem, not the story, which is simply the impetus, the fuel for the piece of art they find themselves making. You might remind them here of the old adage: “Trust the poem, not the poet.”

The poem, the message(!) must be the truth from your heart. Otherwise its fiction and not poetry IMHO.
WHEN ONE CAN TRUST THE POET, THAT POET AND HIS/HER POETRY RISES TO THE TOP AND BECOMES GREAT.
As in great, even if not recognized as GREAT by the literary powers that be.
And quite often, as history has shown, future generations see , marvel at and thus pronounce its greatness!
Emily Dickinson's legendary greatness - CAME DECADES AFTER HER DEATH AND FROM A DIFFERENT GENERATION THAN THE ONE SHE ACTUALLY WROTE TO.

Example, in my writings, I have had several teachers ask may they copy, and use one of my poems in class to illustrate certain forms, poetic devises and/or styles of writing. Strange that none of them have been American teachers, all were foreign teachers, several were at universities.
I've never turned down such a teaching request and always sent additional information as to the meaning, inspiration and my concluding thoughts on the finished poem.
THE POEM CITED BELOW HAS BEEN REQUESTED TO BE COPIED AND USED BY 4 TEACHERS AND 3 OTHER PEOPLE JUST ASKING FOR PERSONAL REASONS. One asked permission to copy it , to frame and hang in her living room.
IT ALSO PLACED FIRST IN TWO DIFFERENT POETRY CONTESTS.--Tyr


River Laps Softly

The ripples of water lap river's edge
quietly I sit, a man seeking love
The orange twilight stirs my lonely soul
nearby, lonely call of a single dove

Sweetest place roaring river moans and churns
fish splashing about in a soft replay
Continuance as the world slowly turns
colors splash endings to wonderful day

The smell is that of fish , water and mud
cool air spreading its greatest soft relief
Comfort gives to stop anger in my blood
as Nature gifts a most calming belief

Soon its quiet , knowledge enters my soul
Victory came because I made it so

Robert J. Lindley, 08-08-2014

Poem Syllable Counter Results
Syllables Per Line: 10 10 10 10 0 10 10 10 10 0 10 10 10 10 0 10 10
Total # Syllables: 140
Total # Lines: 17 (Including empty lines)
Total # Words: 101

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/article/251518

ARTICLES FOR TEACHERS & STUDENTS

The Sonnet as a Silver Marrow Spoon
Finding pleasure and insight where it lies hidden, using in a fixed poetic form

BY ADAM O'RIORDAN

The Sonnet as a Silver Marrow Spoon
A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
Better go down upon your marrow-bones
And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones ...
—William Butler Yeats, “Adam’s Curse”

There is a restaurant in London that advertises “nose-to-tail eating,” and it prides itself that no part of an animal is left unused. I had a friend who when eating there would invariably order the bone marrow on toast. The dish came with a small implement, no bigger than a little finger, which the diner used to extract the marrow, a silver marrow spoon, perfectly engineered to slide inside the baked bone and remove its contents.

Perhaps it was the marrow and its Yeatsian echo that pushed my mind into a literary mode, but this elegant, antiquated tool always struck me as a metaphor for the sonnet: probing, incisive, finding pleasure and insight where it lies hidden, a form that allows poets to make use of what might ordinarily be overlooked or discarded.

As an eighteen-year-old undergraduate, I struggled for a long time to write a sonnet. It seemed like the correct form, the form I should be writing in. But I would become snagged in the intricacies of the meter and struggle for rhymes only to find that they felt forced.

I was at the same time aware of poems on both sides of the Atlantic influenced by the New Formalist school of poets: each iamb weighed, each volta perfectly placed, the rhymes fulsome and plangent but the sum of the whole, on second or third reading, saying very little whatsoever.

So I would strip the sonnet down to its simplest form: an idea or a story that, somewhere around the eighth or ninth line, is nudged or diverted slightly in its path so that it turns and says something else.

The thing I would like to put to a class of seniors is the sonnet in its loosest, least restrictive form. (In fact, some of my favorite sonnets are not sonnets at all. Richard Wilbur’s masterly sequence “This Pleasing Anxious Being” in Mayflies seems to me to do everything a sonnet should but over a more leisurely eighteen to twenty lines per section.)

Seamus Heaney’s sonnets in the sequence “Clearances,” from his collection The Haw Lantern, show how something as simple as a memory of peeling potatoes can be substance enough for a poem:

When all the others were away at Mass
I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.
They broke the silence, let fall one by one
Like solder weeping off the soldering iron:
Cold comforts set between us, things to share
Gleaming in a bucket of clean water.
And again let fall. Little pleasant splashes
From each other’s work would bring us to our senses.

So while the parish priest at her bedside
Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying
And some were responding and some crying
I remembered her head bent towards my head,
Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives—
Never closer the whole rest of our lives.

Begin by directing students to the narratives, the secrets, the unshared, the family myths or legends. Have them think back to half-remembered episodes, stories or confidences older brothers or sisters or cousins or uncles might have shared with them, casually, unthinkingly, in passing, as such stories are often shared.

Ask them to tell a story as they remember it for the first eight or nine lines and then allow themselves to comment on it from their present vantage point. What do they know now that they did not know then? What light does the present cast back onto that particular story?

The sonnet’s volta is its turn, the point at which it shifts. We see this vividly in Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 18” with its declaration in the ninth line: “But thy eternal summer shall not fade”—the addressee of the poem has so far been compared to a summer day, but at that line things change. I’ve added a space here to indicate the shift:

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;
So while the parish priest at her bedside
Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying
And some were responding and some crying

But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.

The turn in a sonnet allows the poet to interrogate and cast new light on the previous eight lines. In the case of the above exercise, in which the students are relating some sort of narrative, the turn allows reassessment; it’s a chance to comment upon what came before or to include a twist.

Remind students that people carry these narratives around for a long time, and so when we gaze at them through the vehicle of the sonnet, there are things about them we will discover that we did not know we knew: twists, turns, reinterpretations of that intimate cache of stories and tales that accrue over the course of childhood. These seniors on the edge of adulthood might now want to reassess, or comment upon, these stories from childhood.

If students find the story pulling away from the truth, that’s OK. You might remind them that they’re serving the poem, not the story, which is simply the impetus, the fuel for the piece of art they find themselves making. You might remind them here of the old adage: “Trust the poem, not the poet.”

And that’s it, really. Show young writers the sonnet in its simplest, most stripped-back form. Direct them to the stories from their past. Let the sonnet, memory’s own silver marrow spoon, with its turn, its volta, generate within them comments on the stories they are telling. The writing of the sonnet—as with any poem—should be a form of discovery, a digging down into the self, like that dish in the London restaurant that most of us might balk at if it were placed before us: intimate and strange upon the tongue.

This essay was originally published in Open the Door: How to Excite Young People about Poetry (2013), a co-publication of the Poetry Foundation and McSweeney's Publishing, edited by Dorothea Lasky, Dominic Luxford, and Jesse Nathan.
Originally Published: December 14, 2015

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/246088

PROSE FROM POETRY MAGAZINE
Earthward
Why Russian must be sung.

BY AMY FRYKHOLM
Rusanna and I sit at my linoleum-topped kitchen table with the oven door propped open for heat. On the table in front of us are half-drunk cups of sugared tea and copies of Marina Tsvetaeva’s poem Uzh Skol’ko Ikh (Already how many). Rusanna is coaching me to read it in Russian. She is a painstaking teacher of pronunciation, 
correcting all of my soft and hard ts, my improperly rounded vowels, my strewn accents. But she is also moody and distractible. She 
interrupts our lesson to say, “Tell me about how American men make love.” When I confess that, at twenty-one, I have never had any 
lovers, American or otherwise, she scoffs and then pouts, “Why don’t you tell me the truth? I tell you everything. Everyone knows that American girls have more lovers than anyone.”

Disappointed in love, Rusanna imagines that the country of Montana and John Wayne has men to equal her passion. She takes my reticence on the subject as selfish — I want all the men for myself, she says. We reach this impasse again and again. In our youth and vanity, we are like the poem’s speaker:

All will grow cold
that once sang and struggled
glistened and rejoiced
the green of my eyes,
the gold of my hair
my gentle voice
Rusanna is Armenian. My kitchen table is in Estonia, where Rusanna is raising her daughter and I am teaching English. We are studying Russian almost covertly because both of us know that Estonian would be more useful and certainly more politically correct. But both of us have also become obsessed with the idea that 
I might pronounce myagkiznak with just the right softness. Truth be told, Rusanna hates the Estonian language, Estonian winters, and not least of all, Estonian men, whom she finds cold and unfeeling. 
I have become her repository for these complaints on the long, dark nights of winter, and in the meantime I recite and memorize Uzh Skol’ko Ikh until its forms are so familiar I feel they have entered my cells. The door to the Russian language creaks open under Rusanna’s instruction, and I whisper the words of the poem on the bus, at the market, and as I fall asleep.

I did not grasp at first that Russian would be best learned through its poetry. I memorized grammar structures and vocabulary lists. 
I treated the language like a fill-in-the-blank exercise, but when I 
arrived in Russia for the first time in my junior year of college, communication eluded me. After two years of study, no one understood me when I ordered bread at a bakery or wished a friend happy 
birthday. Near despair, I sat one day in phonetics class while the teacher tried to prod her American students to hear the melodies of the Russian language. We rehearsed the same sentence over and over again, testing different intonation patterns. Suddenly I understood. Russian was first and foremost a music. To speak it, you had to learn to sing it.

The Russian language and Russian poetry are inextricably linked. Russians memorize dozens of poems. They employ poems in arguments and recite them on street corners. Their poets are beloved 
authorities on any subject. In 1991, when I went to study in a provincial Russian city, I was invited to an elementary school so that the children could meet an actual American. “Be alert, children,” the teacher said. “This will be the only opportunity you may ever have to see an American.” Then she demanded that I recite a poem in English so they could hear my “American speech.” I did not know how to 
explain that Americans don’t typically recite poems — maybe nursery rhymes, maybe a line or two memorized in high school. But 
beyond “Hickory Dickory Dock,” we are an impoverished people.

To my relief, I had recently, in a lovesick state, memorized Robert Frost’s “To Earthward,” and I was able to recite at least part of it while the children stared at me uncomprehendingly. They sensed the lack of authority I brought to the recitation. It was that, as much as the foreign language, that befuddled them.

I have never stopped turning to Russian poems. Tsvetaeva was the first. But like a dog with a bone, I bury Russian poems in my subconscious and bring them out to chew on. I’ve buried Anna Akhmatova’s simple, earthy phrases like those she wrote upon learning of the 
arrest of her son:

U menya sevodnya mnogo delo:
Nado pamyat’ do kontsa ubit’,
Nado, chtob dusha okamenela
Nado snova nauchit’sya zhit’

Today I have a lot to do
I must destroy all my memory
I must turn my soul to stone
I must learn again how to live
—From The Sentence
Or Mandelstam’s aching fluidity, or the poem-songs of  Yuri Shevchuk from the rock group DDT. Whenever I am lonely or tired, have a painful commute, cannot sleep, or lose the thread of my life, these poems, written in a language that even after two decades of study I only slightly comprehend, serve as touchstones. My very 
inability to master their meanings or even to perfect my ts serves a mysterious, orienting purpose beyond the knowledge of my mouth or consciousness. These poems stir what the visionary Julian of Norwich called my “love-longing.” They remain always just beyond my reach.

Originally Published: July 1, 2013

Poetry is a universal language. Yet some languages that its written even when translated into English do not serve to display its true intent,cultural meanings, spirit, heart ,message, rhyme, rhythm, depth, inspiration, beauty and/or cadence!--Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/245762

ESSAY
Significant Soil
Meditations on the Merger of T.S. Eliot’s “Waste” and “Land.”

BY CHRISTINA DAVIS


“This is the land,” T. S. Eliot asserts in Ash-Wednesday.

Not the “wasteland,” but “the land.”

And yet, if you’ve happened upon any mention of Eliot’s most famous poem, more likely than not you’ve witnessed the title rendered as a single immutable unit: “The Wasteland.”

Over the years I’ve grown increasingly curious about this phenomenon, which made its debut as early as December 1922 (the year of the poem’s publication) in a notice in The Bookman, a Georgian magazine that published Walter Pater and Edward Thomas in its heyday. Since then, “The Wasteland” (in lieu of “The Waste Land”) has appeared in everything from the New York Times, The New Yorker, Salon, and the BBC Online to the library catalog of Eliot’s alma mater, Harvard University.

The penchant for this elision may simply be an inheritance of error: a typographical lapse or editorial blind spot that the Internet has only served to exacerbate. But I’d like to consider some cultural parallels to this occurrence, as well as social forces that might contribute to a phenomenon of this kind: perhaps the way in which difficulty or experimentalism is assimilated, or the way in which a symbol-making (and unmaking) entity—a poem—is itself made into a hard-and-fast symbol during the course of its collective reception.

While I don’t think a poet’s intentions require our protection, I do believe that for Eliot the separateness of “waste” and “land” was of supreme significance. And, given that the title of the poem “gave a heading to the time” (according to the New York Times) and, perhaps misguidedly, to our historical understanding of that era and its so-called “Wastelanders” (New York Review of Books, 1988), I believe that that significance warrants at least a momentary attention.

A Momentary Attention

Other than “In my beginning is my end. In my end is my beginning,” it’s possible that the greatest epitaphic language I have encountered is that of Sir Thomas Browne who, in the midst of a meditation on urn-burial, suddenly situates himself on the brink of death and declares himself: “Ready to be anything…. ” It’s a line that would make a breathtakingly bold and accurate sign-off for any of us whose molecules will become a little bit of everything. Or, at the very least, what Eliot would call “significant soil.”

The first time I read “The Waste Land,” I experienced the same elation that I felt on reading Browne’s epitaph—a conviction that the catalyzing proximity (and yet resilient apartness) of those two words was central to the recombinant possibilities of the poem.

In other words, it was because the “waste” was a temporal, impermanent modifier—and not an enduring quality of the land—that the land was redeemable and open to (what Eliot called in a different landscape, that of “Burnt Norton”) “perpetual possibility.” In this phrase, he was likely echoing St. Augustine’s concern about the ossification of certain written words into an orthodoxy: “I should write so that my words echo rather than to set down one true opinion that should exclude all other possibilities.”

In “The Waste Land,” Eliot is fastidious in keeping most of his adjectives and nouns apart, thereby perpetuating their other possibilities: “Unreal City,” “Hyacinth garden,” “red rock,” “brown fog,” “empty rooms,” and so on. This separation frequently allows for a different combination to occur later in the poem. For instance, “Unreal City” is resurrected as “O City city,” and “Hyacinth garden” sheds its specificity and becomes the plural and possessive: “your gardens.” And, perhaps most importantly, the “dead land” recurs as “brown land” and makes its culminating cameo in the plural and possessive incarnation: “my lands” (“Shall I at least set my lands in order?”).

Most of Eliot’s poem titles are characterized by this same simple and purposeful pattern, an adjective placed next to a noun: “Burnt Norton,” “Four Quartets,” “The Hollow Men.” But while I have never seen the latter rendered as “The Hollowmen,” “The Waste Land” is frequently inscribed in the aforementioned cultural shorthand. What is it about the poem (and its title) that inspires such a frequent and un-authored fusion, forcing the title to “rest in peace” instead of permitting it to exist on the verge of becoming anything?

Ready to Be Anything

"It wiped out our world as if an atom bomb had been dropped upon it and our brave sallies into the unknown were turned to dust."
—William Carlos Williams on “The Waste Land”

I remember that shortly after September 11, 2001, many who endured that day up-close (including myself) were offended when media outlets began to call the complex events of that morning “9/11,” and I swore that I would never consent to so collapsed a term. And yet, now, it is the only one I use. I’m interested in that consent and that condensary, the welding of the term into a seemingly immutable unity.

What happens to a specific day, or to a work of art for that matter, when it is coded and condensed in this manner? Does it still retain the possibility of becoming anything, or is it destined to become the one thing? Do we (as a culture and as individual receivers and transmitters) deaden and flatten the dimensionality of our terms too soon?

When I encounter “The Wasteland” in its elided form, I see something shorn of its idiosyncrasies, facets, flaws, and contradictions and rendered knowable, containable, its dangerous elements stabilized. It reminds me of Miguel de Unamuno’s observation that “the mind seeks what is dead”—what is stable, unified, knowable—“…what is living escapes it.”

While it’s hard to imagine now, “The Waste Land” was dangerous and destabilizing at the time of its publication, at least to those who elected to see it that way. The earliest instances of the elision I’ve been discussing tend to occur on both sides of the pond in articles that are demonstratively against or antagonized by the poem—and also, in some cases, in publications that are simply poking fun at the poem’s unnerving effects. Though I wouldn’t suggest that the elision was directly related to resistance, I would say that a person is far more likely to misquote a piece that (s)he hasn’t fully fathomed or that (s)he has opposed emblematically instead of experientially.

As an example, shortly after The Dial selected Eliot’s poem for its annual prize, John Farrar (and/or his editors) repeated the 1922 typo in The Bookman in the following review:

It is only proper to mention “The Wasteland” by T. S. Eliot in The Dial. Mr. Eliot has received this year’s prize award from that magazine and is rapidly gaining what might almost be called a “cult” of adorers among the intellectuals. I hesitate to recommend any poem which I am incapable of understanding. In this class falls “The Wasteland.” (February 1923)

In those early years, the elision also appeared frequently in Life magazine (not to be confused with the later photojournalistic magazine), which was a popular Onion-like humor journal of the era. In its March 12, 1925, issue, Life awarded The Dial the “Brass Medal of Second Class” for honoring “The Wasteland”: “[in so doing] The Dial has succeeded in speeding up to mass production the synthetic prose decomposition that passes with the feeble-minded for poetry.”

In an effort to avoid fallacies, I should say that there are several articles by Eliot’s antagonists which correctly cite the poem and even emphasize the distinction between “waste” and the noun it modifies, such as Humbert Wolfe’s “Waste Land and Waste Paper” (Weekly Westminster, November 17, 1923) and H.P. Lovecraft’s sidesplitting anti-Eliot spoof, “Waste Paper.” But the first few incidents of the elision seem to fall on the side of those who perceived in the poem a threat.

Curiously, the poem was anathema not only to many who were striving to retain (or continue to evolve) a more Georgian poetics but also to those who had been looking forward to a distinctly different set of experimental possibilities. As William Carlos Williams famously observed in his 1948 autobiography:

I felt at once that it [“The Waste Land”] had set me back twenty years … at the moment when I felt that we were on the point of an escape to matters much closer to the essence of a new art form itself—rooted in the locality which should give it fruit. I knew at once that in certain ways I was most defeated.… Eliot had turned his back on the possibility of reviving my world.

In other words, the poem (which many articles interpreted as reflecting “contemporary despair” over a lost world or, as Harriet Monroe writes of the poem in March 1923, “the malaise of our time … the world crumbling to pieces before our eyes”) was for Williams itself the source of that destruction, “wiping out our world.” For him, the publication and reception of “The Waste Land” were a catastrophe for American letters, creating an epicenter of attention around which all of the energy that ought to have been focused on evolving a distinctly American mode was expended on parading European erudition. Though Eliot’s poem did not emerge sui generis (the underlying aesthetics were evident in poetry that predated World War I), Williams found in it a useful and inciting symbol for his concerns. In many ways, I too am consenting to the same penchant: that of making “The Waste Land” into a symbol for my own preoccupations.

“This Land Is Your Land”

Walt Whitman, who passed away during Eliot’s first decade on earth, persisted throughout his lifetime in referring to his nation in the form of a tentative plural: “The United States are destined either to surmount the gorgeous history of feudalism, or else prove the most tremendous failure of time,” he writes in his 1871 Democratic Vistas.

It turns out that Whitman was not alone. According to historian Shelby Foote, the singular (“The United States is …”) was not generally used until after the Civil War, and it took until 1902 for the House of Representative’s Committee on Revision of the Laws to officially rule that “the United States should be treated as singular, not plural.” It seems the federal government and the media were slow to impose a singularity on something that had not yet achieved that status.

But with the 20th century came a new rapidity in the construction and articulation of the present and recent past. And, I might add, aeronautical as well as photographic advances permitted the surveying and summarizing of vast tracts of land in a single shot—and not sequentially over time—offering a swift unity of viewpoint. In his superb book The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918, Stephen Kern documents how the sinking of the Titanic in 1912—ten years prior to the publication of “The Waste Land”—was the first collective, global catastrophe, one that almost the entire (technologically linked) world was able to experience, and in many cases respond to, at the same time. In the decades that followed, the time between an event (or an artistic creation) and the reaction to it (or assessment of it) was shortened: “The telephone … [allowed people] to respond at once without the time to reflect afforded by written communication.” In addition, “business and personal exchanges suddenly became instantaneous instead of protracted and sequential” and the new broadcast technologies enabled journalism to focus the “attention of the inhabitants of an entire city on a single experience.”

I sometimes think that T. S. Eliot’s infamous displeasure over his “Waste Land” fame was less about being identified with a particular aesthetics of fragmentation or neo-barbarism than about a frustration with the way that critics, readers, and the general public used the poem to swiftly generalize for a generation and conflate the text’s complexities and “innumerable sources” (as Mark Twain writes of the Mississippi) into a single, convening truth. It strikes me as a great irony that a poem composed of a series of recombinant symbols and phonemes should itself have become a hard-and-fast symbol—as if to say, “‘The Waste Land’ was written; therefore, we must be in ‘the wasteland.’” Case closed.

In later conversations and writings, Eliot often attempted to downplay the dominion of the poem over the literary and cultural landscape by inserting an indefinite article into his discussions (“a poem called ‘The Waste Land’”)—as if to say it was just “a poem,” just “a way of putting it—not very satisfactory.” I don’t think this was false humility; I believe it was a genuine attempt to assert the poem’s temporariness—to return it (and him) to its (and his, and perhaps even our) possibilities. As critic Eloise Knapp Hay writes, the poem

expressed Eliot’s own “way” at the time, it was not intended to lay down a way for others to follow. “I dislike the word generation [he said in “Thoughts after Lambeth” in 1931], which has been a talisman for the last ten years; when I wrote a poem called “The Waste Land” some of the more approving critics said that I had expressed the “disillusionment of a generation,” which is nonsense. I may have expressed for them their own illusion of being disillusioned, but that did not form part of my intention. (T. S. Eliot’s Negative Way, 1982)

“Generation” itself was a collective moniker that disheartened Eliot: a way of grouping the past, of consolidating recent history into a convenient narrative unit. That the very poem that had experimented with perceiving “the past in a new pattern,” a “new way” of writing which Eliot called “not destructive, but re-creative” should be frozen into a single pattern, into a single despairing way of seeing it, a “talisman” of its times, was (and remains) a profound irony. It was an experiment that ossified into an orthodoxy: poetry’s own personal leopards-in-the-temple.

“The Future Is a Faded Song”

I think poems are living things that grow from the earth into the brain, rather than things that are planted within the earth by the brain.… [P]oems can, in a small way, remind the world of what’s still possible.
—Dorothea Lasky

Almost 20 years after the publication of “The Waste Land,” as Eliot was penning the distinct poems that were later unified into “Four Quartets,” poet and musician Woody Guthrie was composing a piece of music in opposition to Irving Berlin’s ubiquitous and bravado, “God Bless America.”

The song he wrote, “This Land Is Your Land,” was edgy and communist-inclined; and in its original refrain, “God blessed America for me,” it came off sounding a lot more like Bob Dylan’s spitfire protest tune “With God on Our Side” than its current, calming Dan Zanes incarnation. The song included references to deserts and fog and cities of hungry people—sound familiar?—and its culminating verse expressed doubt that this land was “made for you and me,” since it seemed everywhere to prevent its people from receiving “relief.”

Though recording history has tended to unify the tune into a single rousing and patriotic rendering, Guthrie frequently varied its units, at times infusing it with fierce political activism and in other contexts removing the provocative verses altogether. Which version is the actual “This Land Is Your Land”? I’d say, it is all of them. Or, as Jorge Luis Borges has written: “No one is the homeland—it is all of us.”

We have lived (for better or worse) with the properties of Eliot’s poem for almost 100 years. Its unsettling presence has tested our capacity to perpetuate the unknown and not to foreclose—out of resistance, fear, or uncertainty—our multitudinous experiences of it (and of the earth it observes) into a single order of understanding.

In my reading of the end of “The Waste Land,” the poem perpetuates the possibilities of three different interpretations and recombinations of the Brahmanic “Da”—permitting these particulates to coexist with and catalyze one another instead of settling into a single immutable unit.

“This is the land”—not the fenceable, knowable, ownable, but the as yet unknown—waste and vast at the moment of creation. And, as René Char has asked: What would we do without the Unknown in front of us?

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/245710

Reading Primo Levi Off Columbus Circle

BY J. T. BARBARESE


Re-reading him in Bouchon
past noon, it is mobbed midtown,
like an ant farm seen through painkillers.
God, what a bust it’s all been,

capitalism, communism, feminism,
this lust to liberate.
Che should have stayed in medicine.
The girls here admit they can’t wait

to marry and get to the alimony,
before they hit thirty. The men,
heads skinned like Lager inmates,
know only the revolutions

in diets and spinning classes.
Still, one table away,
these two, with gnarled empretzled hands,
seem unhappy in the old way.

Source: Poetry (April 2013).

[Drummond]

George Orwell’s criticisms are steeped in insane liberal ideology. Countless millions living in savagery and 5th century backwardness were brought centuries forward by British expansionism and its spreading influence around the world!
No other nation or Empire has ever behaved in the way the stupid liberals cry about and condemn Britain and its Empire for not doing!
Tis' another reason why I hate Orwell. He is a self-righteous idiot attempting to destroy the works of a writer/ poet that is/was far, far greater than he(Orwell) ever was or ever will be with truly intelligent people. -Tyr

Well said on Orwell, though I'm nonetheless thankful for his '1984' novel. It does a lot to quantify what really drives the Leftie dream .. of crushing control, even to the point of dictating what others must think.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

Well said on Orwell, though I'm nonetheless thankful for his '1984' novel. It does a lot to quantify what really drives the Leftie dream .. of crushing control, even to the point of dictating what others must think.
As a writer and a poet Kipling was a genius. Orwell condemned him for his patriotism and extremely strong sense of Christian morality! However Orwell, did not do so openly in a political philosophy attack, rather he attacked the man's work, the work that inspired tens of millions ! Inspires even to this day!
To me, that is unforgivable and Orwell clearly showed his base nature, jealousy, envy and yes his liberal ideology.
However, primary the first three bad traits I listed were the motivation for his scathing criticisms IMHO.-TYR

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/guide/245494#guide

John Donne: “A Valediction: of Weeping”
Reality and representation mix in this classic poem.

BY JOEL BROUWER
John Donne probably wrote “A Valediction: of Weeping” after he met his future wife, Ann More, and before he took holy orders and turned most of his authorial energies to sermons and spiritual meditations. We can’t be sure about the timing, though; while we have Donne’s biography and his poems, aligning the two is tricky. We know that Donne wrote poems only for himself and a close circle of friends and patrons, never for fame and seldom for publication. It would seem reasonable to guess that “A Valediction: of Weeping”—which, like a number of Donne’s love poems, dramatizes a scene of lovers parting—might have been written during the early years of his marriage, when Donne was often obliged to be away from home, leaving his young wife and children alone. But we can’t be sure that the poem isn’t wholly an act of imagination with no connection to Donne’s personal experience.

This uncertainty has permitted some of Donne’s readers to regard his poems not as acts of self-expression, but as the abstracted, cerebral constructions of a fierce wit. Yes, the poems may be autobiographical, but Donne’s predilection for intricate rhetorical figures, paradoxes, surprising swerves in tone, associative leaps, and ingenious conceits can make them feel artificial, or made of artifice. Donne’s reputation as merely a wit made his work deeply unpopular for many years after his death. Probably the most famous condemnation came from Samuel Johnson, who labeled Donne’s style “metaphysical”—he didn’t intend the term as a compliment.

In the early 20th century, incipient Modernists, most notably T.S. Eliot, found new layers of value in Donne. His perceived cool intellectualism seemed fresh and vigorous to poets grown weary of Romanticism’s emotionalism and emphasis on the self. Donne soon became a favorite of the New Critics as well. That school’s emphasis on reading poems as autonomous systems—discounting extra-textual considerations such as the author’s intentions and historical situation—was well suited to Donne’s poetry; his intentions are difficult or impossible to determine, and each poem he wrote seemed designed to function as, to use a phrase from one of Donne’s Holy Sonnets, “a little world made cunningly.”

Donne’s poems in general, and “A Valediction: of Weeping” in particular, are certainly cunning. But it would be a mistake to think of them as nothing more than exercises in cleverness. We’ll find in this poem, as in many others by Donne, that his wit often serves as a means to a larger end rather than as an end in itself. The poem may be a highly organized “little world,” but it consistently gestures toward a larger world: the actual, chaotic, emotional one in which we live.

“A Valediction: of Weeping” begins with a scene of two lovers parting:

Let me pour forth
My tears before thy face, whilst I stay here,
For thy face coins them, and thy stamp they bear,
And by this mintage they are something worth

The poet is asking for his lover’s indulgence. If he cries now, while he’s still with her, her “face” will be reflected in his tears, transforming them from ordinary waste into objects of value—“coins.” The poet isn’t asking for a physical connection here; he doesn’t say “embrace me before I go.” Instead he seeks to reflect and be reflected by the beloved, at once emphasizing their connection and the fact that they are already—even now before his departure—undeniably separate. This dynamic might be similar to the one we enter into while reading Donne’s poem. On the one hand, the clever figures and rhyme scheme remind us that the poem is an artificial construct of symbols and sounds. But at the same time, the poem’s dramatic situation encourages us to identify with the speaker’s authentic human grief. Let’s look at the entire first stanza:

Let me pour forth
My tears before thy face, whilst I stay here,
For thy face coins them, and thy stamp they bear,
And by this mintage they are something worth,
For thus they be
Pregnant of thee;
Fruits of much grief they are, emblems of more,
When a tear falls, that thou falls which it bore,
So thou and I are nothing then, when on a divers shore.

The financial metaphor of lines 3 and 4 suggests that there’s a transaction involved here, and we see already an example of the kind of hall-of-mirrors paradox Donne so relished, and will soon use again, in this very poem. Perhaps the speaker is departing to earn actual coins to support the beloved. If so, that would be a gesture of unification and shared purpose, but at the same time one ironically requiring separation. In order to be with you, Donne seems to imply, I must leave you.

In line 7 Donne suggests that his tears are both “fruits” of his present grief at parting and “emblems” of his future grief, when he will be away. (Of course, this “grief” might also be understood not as the grief of parting from the beloved, but as the grief of having to undertake the journey in the first place.) So the tears are literal and metaphorical, physical and symbolic, at the same time. Similarly, the poem as a whole can be seen both as a sincere expression of grief and as an “emblem”—a representation, that is—of grief.

The next two lines feature a tricky metaphor for the speaker’s future sorrow:

When a tear falls, that thou falls which it bore,
So thou and I are nothing then, when on a divers shore.

As his own tear falls, his beloved’s reflection falls with it. He and she both become “nothing”; her reflection falls and thus vanishes, and he, like his tear, departs. If he is departing on a sea voyage—as “divers shore” might suggest—then we may add another dimension to this already crowded conceit. Both tears and the sea are salty water, and here tears figuratively signify the impending separation, just as the sea will literally enforce it. Keeping in mind that a “fall” in a relationship can refer to unfaithfulness, this line could even be read as a premonition of adultery: the tears provoked by my sorrow at leaving you fall, just as you will fall into unfaithfulness when I’m gone. Following this line of thinking, “So thou and I are nothing then, when on a divers shore” turns to pure bitterness: when we’re apart, we’re nothing to each other.

So while we could read this first stanza as the heartfelt cry of a lover in anguish, devastated to be separated from his beloved, it’s also possible to take these lines as the cynical complaint of a husband who feels persecuted in his role as breadwinner and, even worse, unsure of his wife’s fidelity. Which of these is the correct reading? It’s a natural question to ask, but also a misleading one, because the great pleasure in reading Donne lies in just this kind of ambiguity. His poems are incredibly detailed, specific, and intricate, but at the same time mysterious, vague, and elusive. Here again, we’re led to consider the ways in which the poem both invites us to identify with the speaker’s emotions, and reminds us that what we’re looking at here is not a person but a poem. We’ll see this dynamic continue throughout the rest of the poem, as Donne oscillates between the tangible and the conceptual, the literal and the metaphorical. By the time we get to the final lines, it may even seem that the poem is more concerned with the gap between reality and imagination than it is with its ostensible subject of two lovers parting.

The next stanza introduces a new metaphor that is related—appropriately, given the occasion of the poem—to the idea of travel.

On a round ball
A workman that hath copies by, can lay
An Europe, Afric, and an Asia,
And quickly make that, which was nothing, all,
So doth each tear,
Which thee doth wear,
A globe, yea world by that impression grow,
Till thy tears mixed with mine do overflow
This world, by waters sent from thee, my heaven dissolved so.

This stanza’s transformation of a “nothing” into an “all” is similar to an idea expressed near the end of another Donne poem, “The Canonization.” Both poems use the figure of a world contained in a reflection, and in each case great stress is put on the metaphysical nature of that containment: the physical object is captured in a reflection, but so is the object’s essence. In “The Canonization” it isn’t just the “world” that is contained in the “glasses of your eyes,” but the “whole world’s soul.” The distinction is important. Donne is alluding to the Christian theory of transubstantiation, where the base physical representations of bread and wine are transformed, by the intercession of the Holy Ghost, into holy reality: the body and blood of Christ. Analogous processes occur in “A Valediction: of Weeping.” Much as the tears in line 7 were shown to be both physical “fruits” and metaphysical “emblems,” here Donne conflates reality (the “world” in which we actually live) and representation (the “globe” we use as an icon of that world). A blank ball is nothing until it’s overlaid with maps to become an “all.” A tear is nothing until it reflects the face of the beloved and becomes an “all.” And perhaps the poem itself is both a nothing—a mere collection of sounds and symbols—and yet also an “all,” a container for the poet’s genuine emotions.

The final lines of the second stanza may contain the most knotty ideas in a very knotty poem:

Till thy tears mixed with mine do overflow
This world, by waters sent from thee, my heaven dissolved so.

How are we to understand the phrase “This world” here? There are several possible readings, and as elsewhere in the poem, they range from the simple and concrete to the complex and abstract. “This world” could be the real world the lovers see around them: If we both cry, our eyes will fill with tears, and we literally won’t be able to see each other anymore. But of course the figure also works as a metaphor for the characters’ emotional states: Our mutual sorrow at parting destroys the heaven-on-earth we make when we’re together. Finally, keep in mind the maps Donne showed us earlier in the stanza. The speaker’s tears might also be obscuring his vision of that globe, a “little world made cunningly” that in turn represents the literal earth. Again Donne succeeds in “mixing” the real and the figurative.

“Mixed” might not refer to a literal mixing of the two lovers’ tears, but instead to the process of reproduction—the oscillation of reality and representation—that is gradually manifesting itself as the poem’s central concern. The two lines might suggest that watery reflections of the lovers are being created and destroyed endlessly: in reflecting, or mixing with, each other’s tears, the lovers “overflow” and destroy those reflections, the faces-within-tears from the first stanza. We see the lovers’ (real) tears as images within images, endlessly generative and endlessly in decay.

Immediately following his sequence of globe and water imagery, Donne compares his beloved to the moon, the sphere that controls the flow of tides.

O more than moon,

Draw not up seas to drown me in thy sphere,
Weep me not dead, in thine arms, but forbear
To teach the sea, what it may do too soon;
Let not the wind
Example find,
To do me more harm, than it purposeth;
Since thou and I sigh one another’s breath,
Whoe’er sighs most, is cruelest, and hastes the other’s death.

The beloved is “more than” the moon: not only can she can draw tears from herself, but she can pull those tears all the way up into her own “sphere,” or presence, where the poet is as well. Donne exhorts her not to use her power to “draw … up seas,” that is, to weep, because it could “drown” him in at least three ways. His reflection would be drowned when caught in her tears; seeing her cry would figuratively drown him in sorrow; and if her tears inadvertently “teach the sea” and give an “example” to the wind, he might literally be drowned when he sets sail on his voyage.

The poem’s closing “breath” metaphor, which appropriately follows the “wind” image, once again asserts the union of the lovers: Because we breathe as one when we’re together, our sighs of sorrow use up each other’s breath, and so hasten each other’s death. As we might have expected, Donne ends the poem with a paradox. We tend to associate breath with life, but here an excess of breath leads to death. This metaphor, like the earlier tear/reflection conceit, warns the beloved that her physical expressions of grief—crying, sighing—cause emotional harm. When she cries she drowns his reflection in her tears; when she sighs she steals his life-breath. Once again, the metaphorical and the real appear to be so closely aligned as to become indistinguishable.

This breath figure also has an echo in “The Canonization,” where we find similar images of the lovers as a single being:

Call her one, me another fly,
We are tapers too, and at our own cost die,
And we in us find the eagle and the dove…

In these lines, as in “A Valediction: of Weeping,” the poet and his beloved form one being. That’s not an original idea, but it becomes original when we note that in each case this union is destructive as well as creative. In “The Canonization” the lovers are both flies and the candles that burn the flies, so they “at [their] own cost die”: the fact of their union is also the cause of their destruction. “The eagle and the dove” is a similarly murderous figure, since eagles kill doves. So too in “A Valediction: of Weeping” the lovers are united—in teary reflections and in breath—but those very unions threaten the lovers with ruin. As in the lines about mixed tears overflowing “this world,” the poem’s closing lines suggest the idea of love as a self-perpetuating cycle of creation and destruction. The great achievement of “A Valediction: of Weeping” is its powerful evocation of this very paradox—not only in terms of the lovers, who appear to be simultaneously united and divided, but in terms of the poem itself, which persistently demands that we read it as both artificial and earnest, self-contained and suggestive, a “nothing” and an “all.”

[Drummond]

As a writer and a poet Kipling was a genius. Orwell condemned him for his patriotism and extremely strong sense of Christian morality! However Orwell, did not do so openly in a political philosophy attack, rather he attacked the man's work, the work that inspired tens of millions ! Inspires even to this day!
To me, that is unforgivable and Orwell clearly showed his base nature, jealousy, envy and yes his liberal ideology.
However, primary the first three bad traits I listed were the motivation for his scathing criticisms IMHO.-TYR

Points taken, & thanks !

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/245036

ESSAY
Rimbaud in Embryo
The lost poet Samuel Greenberg and the critical debate over his influence.

BY JACOB SILVERMAN
Rimbaud in Embryo
Self-portrait by Samuel Greenberg, courtesy of the Fales Library & Special Collections, New York University.
Some writers leave only traces, contrails across the literary firmament. They expire with few or no publications to their names, their legacies left as much to chance as to the efforts of the occasional passionate admirer. Contemporaries offer testimonies of superlative talent unfulfilled, of death robbing posterity of a name that, given time and circumstance, surely would have been added to the rolls of the great. And while some work might survive, appearing in the occasional anthology, it is shrouded in the pall of its author’s biography.

Samuel Greenberg belongs in the pantheon of literary manqués. He’s not totally forgotten—a few hundred poems survive; some were published in posthumous editions. In the 95 years since his death at the age of 23, he has endured as the prototypical “cult writer,” his works passed around like samizdat and occasionally earning an ardent, powerful admirer.

One of those admirers was Hart Crane, who, depending on your interpretation, drew significant influence from Greenberg or baldly plagiarized him. Crane’s poem “Emblems of Conduct” contains lines, either verbatim or with slight modifications, from six different Greenberg poems, including one called “Conduct.” Other work by Crane shows marks of Greenberg, whom Crane never met. The debate over just how much Crane took from Greenberg has animated Greenberg scholarship for decades, and has produced some worthwhile commentary on the nature of authorial influence. But at times it also obscures what is, on its own, a fascinating (albeit brief) life and oeuvre, deserving of its own consideration.

Born in Vienna in 1893, Samuel Greenberg was the sixth of eight children. At the turn of the century, his family immigrated to the United States, settling in the crowded tenements of the Lower East Side. In those early years he attended public and religious schools, learning to read Hebrew, and had a bar mitzvah, but in 1908, the same year his mother died, he left school in order to work.

The Greenbergs were a family of artisans. Samuel’s father worked with brocade, making decorative materials for synagogues’ Torah arks, and his brother Adolf made leather bags. After dropping out of school, Samuel worked with both of them.


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But sometime in 1912, around the same time he began writing poems in notebooks, Greenberg contracted tuberculosis and underwent what would be the first of many hospitalizations. Later that year, he also began taking piano lessons, though he reportedly had difficulty reading music and remaining focused. All the same, looking over one of Greenberg’s sketchbooks in the Fales Collection at NYU, which contains the bulk of his papers, I stumbled upon drawings of staff lines pebbled with musical notes, the name of each note written underneath; they were clearly some attempt at memorization. On the same page were a pair of delicately shaded hands—perhaps simply an exercise in anatomical drawing, though placed as they were, with the fingers curved slightly inward, they recalled a conductor leading an ensemble.

Greenberg read deeply of the British Romantics, as well as Blake, Milton, and Wilde, but he had a particular regard for music, attending concerts when he could and writing poems about Richard Strauss and Mendelssohn. After a concert at Carnegie Hall, Greenberg gave a copy of his poem “The Pianoforte Artist” to pianist Josef Hofmann. (In an autobiographical essay addressed to his brother Daniel, Greenberg wrote of these concerts, “I know we liked it better than life!”) Another poem, riffing about Brahms’s Paganini Variations, sends the reader through a gyre of rhapsody: “In each phrase / Beats, the patriotism of lyre love, improvised impulse spreads / Its familiar Master glow, Communication with the spirit muse.”

By April 1915, Greenberg was writing to William Murrell Fisher, a scholar and art critic whom Greenberg had met two years earlier at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in hopes of getting his work published. Time was running out for the young poet—“Sickness closed in with its careful teeth,” he wrote in that autobiographical essay. His tuberculosis had worsened (“the old story of weakness returned”); he had spent the previous two years in and out of hospitals, treatment facilities, and family members’ homes in New York, New Jersey, and Rhode Island. That summer, a doctor would remove a kidney. Through it all he wrote, not only hundreds of poems but also some short plays. When health allowed, he worked for his brother Adolf, the leather craftsman.


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Greenberg was also a prolific painter and sketch artist. Many of his sketches are of young men, done on scraps of paper or in small, dilapidated sketchbooks, and he reportedly liked to sit in Washington Square Park, where he drew strangers. The men tended to be in profile, finely dressed; occasionally they appeared as the barest silhouette, as if evaporating from the page. He also drew self-portraits—one shows him lounging in an ornately carved wooden chair, staring out almost playfully—and illustrations of his family members and fellow hospital patients. (One sketch is dedicated “to my friend William Fisher” and dated February 1915.)

The sketchbooks doubled as all-purpose notebooks. Besides the musical notations, there are scraps of verse and one apparently undelivered note, which reads, “Young man — 19. — wishes position in any office,” and is signed below.

Some of Greenberg’s handwriting is cramped and nearly indecipherable. In the Fales Collection, a line stuck out for me. It appeared below a simple, blocky sketch of a man’s dour face, cigarette prominently perched between his lips. The poet had written, “It is the gazing at the people one gets that way.”

With his own fragile health and both of his parents having died young, Greenberg was deeply conscious of his own mortality. In his drafts, he dated and initialed each poem, perhaps with an eye toward posterity. In the work itself, he treated death with respect but also not without a kind of sly playfulness. In the poem “To Dear Daniel”—Daniel was one of Samuel’s brothers—Greenberg wrote, “There is a loud noise of Death / Where I lay; / There is a loud noise of life / Far away.” The speaker knows that he is closer to his end than to his beginning. Some poems respond to death with disbelief that it could come so prematurely. One piece opens with the following lines: “Nurse brings me Medicine! Medicine? / For me! God, 20 years old! / Medicine!? I’ll leave it to thee! / The truth is a draught!”

Greenberg’s poetry employed bizarre spelling and syntax (many editions of his work have smoothed over these errors, at the cost of authenticity). He also tended to create what Philip Horton, an early Hart Crane biographer, called “archaic contractions”—'pon, e'en, e'er. Some words are unexpectedly capitalized. This is easily chalked up to his autodidact nature, but it may also owe something to Greenberg’s taste for Milton and Blake and the short plays he wrote, which were a mélange of Spenserian fantasy and Elizabethan drama. Like some of his poems, these plays took place in what New Directions founder James Laughlin, who published the first book of Greenberg’s poems in 1939, described as a “literary mythland.” One short drama, which I read in the Fales Collection, is titled “Capablanka” and dated October 1916. It concerns an anthropomorphic statue (the list of dramatis personae calls it “a motional statue”), three woodsmen, a talking “fairy snake,” and “an unknown magician” named Valotif, as well as several others.

Told in three short acts—the whole thing is only about 16 pages in typescript—the play’s basic action is mostly intelligible, but its prose tends toward the opaque, at times appearing like a deliberately obscure pastiche of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It features Greenberg’s characteristic spelling—“obsured,” “devine,” “familiars” used as a verb—and some evocative lines that show the beauty of what Laughlin called his “unconscious dictation.” “I varnish his throat,” one of the woodsmen offers by way of a threat; another, not believing that a monument can move, claims that there are “no such furies in granite”; the third speaks of “the cliffs sea / that moan their messages of wander foam / and dash over high sprays of lust.”

Perhaps fearful of giving him more than his due, critics have tended to praise and condemn Greenberg in a single line. They often dwell on his wildness, his untended lyricism, considering it both a virtue and a deficit, deeply intertwined.

John Berryman once remarked that Greenberg had “some power of phrasing” but “with rare exceptions so little control over syntax.” Thomas Lux, in his poem “Here’s to Samuel Greenberg,” describes Greenberg as “semi-illiterate / coughing it out among total / illiterates during the only time / in your life you had time / to write: on your back.” And yet, later in the same poem, Lux refers to him as “small master.”

Laughlin vacillated between even greater extremes, writing in the 1939 introduction: “The poetry of Greenberg is not great poetry, and it is not even important minor poetry ... and yet ... poetry it is, pure poetry, to an extent equalled by the work of few other writers.”

Philip Horton, writing in the Southern Review in 1936, also knocked Greenberg down before building him back up. “One has the successive impressions that the author was mad, illiterate, esoteric, or simply drunk,” Horton wrote. “And yet there flash out from this linguistic chaos, lines of pure poetry, powerful, illuminating, and original, lines unlike any others in English literature, except Blake’s perhaps.” Repeatedly, we observe a strange kind of diffidence: Greenberg is both semi-illiterate and a master, a powerful lyricist but out of control, not even a minor poet but also a creator of “pure poetry” (a phrase that both Laughlin and Horton used).

Could he be all of this—not either/or but both/and? Or did these critics, particularly the early ones such as Horton and Laughlin, not fully understand what they were looking at? The former called Greenberg “a visionary” before going on to ask, “But who was he, or is he? Did Hart Crane, who had his poems, know?”

Indeed, it is in Crane that we find someone whose critiques of Greenberg serve only to amplify his appreciation of him, cementing the picture of Greenberg as an untutored, untamed, and splendid lyricist—the poet equivalent of a naïve artist. Crane, in a letter to Gorham Munson praised Greenberg’s “hobbling yet really gorgeous attempts.” In the tragic poet’s work, Crane saw “a quality that is unspeakably eerie and the most convincing gusto.”

Crane first encountered Greenberg’s work in the winter of 1923–24. Greenberg had already been dead for six years, and Crane was staying in Woodstock, New York, where he spent time with William Murrell Fisher, likely the only person to know both men. Fisher showed Crane some of Greenberg’s poems, and Crane was immediately electrified, pacing around the room, declaiming lines.

In his letter to Munson, Crane also called Greenberg “a Rimbaud in embryo”—an epithet that makes some sense, as Rimbaud, though better educated, had left school by 15 and was done with poetry by 20. It’s difficult not to think in turn of Victor Hugo’s own description of Rimbaud: he called the fiery young poet “an infant Shakespeare.” In both cases, the young poet is granted a claim toward genius, but his precocity—he is embryonic, or he is an infant—somehow holds him back.

Rimbaud was a proto-surrealist, and in some of Greenberg’s work, one finds a surrealist bent. Laughlin cited Greenberg’s “The Pale Impromptu” as surrealist, “with its use of words for their own sake.” Its coded narrative and succession of disjointed phrases—“Water waves / torque blocks / Skulls of saints / patience absent / Yellow dreams / Sensive Stirs / Silent hills”—support this assessment. But Greenberg’s best work forsakes this experimentation, instead melding passionate first-person narratives—about the sea, death, God, poetry, mythological landscapes—with imagery that shimmers because it appears all the more carefully rendered.

Yet he also showed a surprising talent for restraint. “Conduct” begins with a painter illustrating a valley before giving way to Technicolor descriptions of an exploding volcano and darkening skies. But then Greenberg dials down his music to a pianissimo, and the poem resolves with a curious, almost mournful scene:

The wanderer soon chose
His spot of rest, they bore the
Chosen hero upon their shoulders
Whom they strangly admired — as,
The Beach tide Summer of people desired

After their meeting, Fisher gave Crane a sheaf of Greenberg’s poems and Crane set about retyping them. This sort of transcription, or re-scription, has been a common practice among writers for ages, but Crane took the process further. Greenberg, like such poets as Whitman before him, drew inspiration from the Brooklyn Bridge, and after copying Greenberg’s “The ‘East River’s Charm,” Crane added the following lines:

And will I know if you are dead?
The river leads on and on instead
Of certainty...

Drawing on “Conduct” as well as five other Greenberg poems, Crane cobbled together “Emblems of Conduct” from January to March 1924. (Marc Simon’s forensic analysis of Crane’s borrowings is the essential work on this subject. Simon, a literary scholar whose NYU PhD dissertation was about the Greenberg/Crane connection, would go on to edit The Complete Poems of Hart Crane.) He changed some lines, tinkering here and there, but the resulting three stanzas are largely a collage. Laughlin compared the final product to “centones of the Middle Ages, those patch-work poems in which Christian stories were told in lines torn from their contexts in pagan authors.” Laughlin continues, largely approvingly: “Crane did more than steal from Greenberg—he recreated, making something entirely new, entirely his own, from the original materials.”

The contemporary term for this is remixing, which at the moment has much cultural cachet. While I acknowledge the worth of remix in anything from Warhol to hip-hop sampling, it’s difficult not to think that Crane took more than his fair share and that he has benefited from his (understandable) stature as the greater poet. But many critics feel compelled to defend Crane, as if criticizing him in this instance, arguing that he let his enthusiasm for Greenberg get away from him, would undercut his otherwise formidable achievements.

“I do not think we even need to mention the word plagiarism,” Laughlin writes in his introduction to the 1939 volume, though he does just that. “We must strongly censure Crane for his failure to clearly state his source,” yet “no doubt he meant to acknowledge his debt ... it simply slipped his mind.” Yes, no doubt. It’s a pale justification, for Crane could have easily included a line of dedication or acknowledgment.

Another Crane biographer, Paul L. Mariani, calls Crane’s borrowings “problematic.” “Emblems of Conduct” was “a dreamlike poem, uncharacteristic of Crane,” Mariani writes, and “Crane’s attempt to take by eminent domain the scattered remains of a dead young poet was not, finally, one of his best efforts.”

But notions of influence, even of plagiarism, are rarely clear, even when, as in this case, there is a large body of inculpatory evidence. As Marc Simon has shown, Greenberg was not wholly sui generis. In 1915, Fisher gave Greenberg a copy of Thomas Carlyle’s Heroes and Hero-Worship (an apposite title, given the relationships here), and some of Carlyle’s imagery describing Iceland’s geography made it into Greenberg’s “Conduct” and, later, Crane’s “Emblems of Conduct.” Greenberg’s borrowings were not so direct, but they give some sense of where he looked for his own raw materials.

Greenberg may never escape the shadow of Hart Crane (though he surely deserves to have his complete works, including the drawings, published in a new edition). But the obligatory irony is that without Crane’s, say, overabundant enthusiasm for poems like “Conduct,” we might never know of Greenberg’s poetry at all. In stealing from Greenberg, Crane assured the lesser poet’s immortality.

Still, there is some sadness in knowing that Greenberg’s work will never quite stand on its own. Despite his fragile health and lack of education, Greenberg was uncommonly prepossessing. “The poet seeks an Earth in himself,” he wrote in one verse. He sought a world of his own making, but it was to be an ephemeral one, as he was subsumed by forces—and poets, too—greater than himself.

Originally Published: November 27, 2012

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/245266

Useful Old Rhymer
--------------------------------------------Laura Kasischke on Thomas Tusser.

BY LAURA KASISCHKE
For the brief and perhaps best years of my life, when I was mother to a very young child, I found myself most nights in the company of poets, wits, storytellers, moralists, advisors, and pundits-lite who offered their words up to my son and myself for our pleasure, our safety, our welfare, our betterment, and our instruction. I never doubted for a moment that Margaret Wise Brown had written The Runaway Bunny because she foresaw a time when my son might doubt the fierceness of his mother’s love and need the reassurance that it was not only eternal but all-powerful: “If you become a fish in a trout stream,” said the mother, “I will become a fisherman and I will fish for you.”

And how many other poets and storytellers explained the essentials to us! How to tie a shoe. How to grieve a pet. How to sleep in the dark. How to count to ten. How to stand up for yourself. How to be a friend. How to eat food you fear.

We had a lot of books, and there were a lot of years, a lot of bedtime stories, and then he got a driver’s license and a girlfriend and my library shelves seemed strangely bare of  books that had been written with a reader’s well-being in mind. In fact, I realized, I could run my fingers down the length of four bookshelves full of the contemporary poetry I love and not find more than a volume or two that seemed to have been written with a reader in mind at all, let alone that 
reader’s life.

That’s why I love Thomas Tusser. His thousands of  lines of  poetry 
more than prove to us that he was devoted to the art, that his poetic ambitions were great, but you can’t read one of those lines and not know that he has taken up the craft for your sake, that he is writing to tell you something, and that he wants what he’s saying to matter to you, to make your life richer, easier, safer, and in all ways more 
understandable. True, Tusser is a didactic poet, and although “didactic” 
may have earned its bad reputation (Poe named didacticism as the worst of the poetic heresies), in the case of  Tusser we are reminded that poetry which educates can also be beautiful, meaningful, and fun. When I turn to the Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry, 
after a longish spell spent reading contemporary poets, I am startled to encounter a poet who is writing to me, for me, and who has 
chosen poetry as a way to communicate — across distance, time, and space — with me (the reader) in his mind.

It’s believed that Thomas Tusser was born around 1524. He died in 1580. He was an educated man who, through a variety of circumstances, found himself spending his life as a farmer. By most accounts, he was not successful at it, but he must have loved it. His long poem on Good Husbandry records a country year in rhyming couplets, and his advice and observations pretty much cover everything from the lending of tools to the castration of roosters, the nature of the afterlife to the ten characteristics (via negation) of the perfect cheese:

Not like Gehazi, dead white, like a leper
Not like Lot’s wife, all salt
Not like Argus, full of eyes
Not like Tom Piper, “hoven and puffed”
Not like Crispin, leathery
Not like Lazarus, poor
Not like Esau, hairy
Not like Mary Magdalene, full of  whey or maudlin
Not like the Gentiles, full of maggots
Not like a Bishop, made of   burnt milk

In his poetry, Tusser comes across as what he was said by his contemporaries to have been — a thrifty, intelligent, kind man, who wants you to succeed. His work is full of weather-lore, country customs, maxims and proverbs (“Sweet April showers, / Do spring May flowers”), and comforting predictions right alongside dire warnings. The poetry lets us know that he has learned his lessons the hard way, and that he wants to save his readers that trouble if  he can.

And although Thomas Tusser doesn’t seem to care much about whether he’s reaching great poetic heights, he often reaches them. Part of this is his musical ear, but the rest might be attributed to the reverence he has for his material, the respect with which he 
approaches his reader, and, of course, the everyday hallowedness of life and work on the farm. Robert Southey called him a “good, honest, 
homely, useful old rhymer.” Clearly, that’s what Tusser wanted to be.

What a noble ambition when it is combined with an empathetic 
spirit! That Tusser’s book was to be found on the mantles of so many farmers in his day speaks to how much Tusser had to say to his peers; and, although both poetic traditions and agricultural ones have changed greatly since his period, what we learn from Tusser today, and from the real relationship, the true communication, he sought to have with his reader — well, what we have to learn from Tusser shames and thrills me with its honest compassion, its urgent desire to be of service, and its plain, sane, sacred ambition to write poetry that will be read, remembered, and understood.

Originally Published: February 1, 2013

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/244608

PROSE FROM POETRY MAGAZINE
Nature and Panic
Can beauty save us?

BY C. K. WILLIAMS
The first evidence we have of any human doings with nature other than utilitarian artifacts for hunting and fishing are the Paleolithic paintings in caves in France and Spain. These great works of art were created over a period of twenty thousand years, and then stopped; we don’t really know why they first began to be created or why they didn’t continue.

I think most of us have been tempted to play the game of trying to intuit the vast number of individuals who were born and died during those uncountable millennia and to imagine what a single person’s life, a “first person” in both senses of the term, would really have been. For me, the daydream invariably leads me to picture my poor ancestor living in almost constant fear of threats to life and well-being: the predators, the droughts, the erratic cold that sometimes descended and stayed for thousands of years, and sometimes, for reasons we still don’t understand, didn’t. “Nasty, brutish, and short,” to quote the Hobbesian cliche.

So, were those people really that much more anxious for themselves than we are? To return to the Paleolithic paintings: there’s little evidence of anguish or dread in their subject matter and execution. The creatures in them are depicted with accuracy and detail and with that breathlessly assured brushwork that could have been acquired through nothing but aesthetic dedication and love. There are almost no depictions of nature as threatening. In one painting there’s a lion, but she’s treated with a whimsical humor; in another two, someone seems to have been killed by a bison, the beginning of what some researchers suspect may have been a series of myths. The only truly malignant matters that are recorded in the caves are a few mysterious and so far uninterpreted recumbent human figures, riven with what seem to be spears: they were possibly murdered, perhaps even tortured. But generally, if the society in which these artists lived was fraught with fear, it certainly isn’t manifested in their work. Even their span of years, it turns out, wasn’t as short as was once thought: the most recent evidence suggests that people during these eras regularly lived to the age of fifty or sixty.

At the same time, if we pull back a little and consider larger currents of human existence, there does seem to have been ample reason for anxiety. The climate, as I mentioned, often dramatically changed in those epochs. There were long droughts and, at some point, the almost total dying off of reindeer, which had been humans’ primary food—with what precise consequences we probably will never know, beyond that humans somehow adapted, and survived.

And we also can’t possibly know whether any single person, or group, or group of generations would have been aware, and especially daunted, by these grim developments. Perhaps one year, winter came earlier; perhaps another year, the reindeer migrations arrived later, then not at all. Would there have been a history to contain these matters? We don’t know that either, but if there was, what would have been the emphasis of those who recorded it? Would they have been depressives, manic-depressives, optimists, pessimists?

I’ll continue on a more personal note. Like many people I know, I often have a somewhat—no, a wholly—frightening vision of the future of humanity and of our earth. There are periods when I live in a state of acute anxiety, indeed, near panic, about what awaits our children and grandchildren. Last year, I realized one day that every poem I was writing, or attempting to write, had global warming and its consequences either as its overt or implied theme. Sometimes I’m depressed beyond writing or saying anything at all; I fall into a funk that threatens never to end.

Given all the evidence that’s being accumulated about global warming and its ramifications, this seems a perfectly reasonable response to the only future in sight. However, I’ve also had to realize over the course of my life that I’m intrinsically somewhat of a depressive person, about much else besides the end of the world, and that my instinctive response to fear, or threat, or despair is to plunge deeper into the darkness that so readily takes me. It required a long time for me to notice that many people respond differently; some friends, for instance, who, when deeply concerned about large matters, can turn readily away from them to a relatively cheerful vision of existence, while I go on brooding, frightened, trembling. And certainly not unsensible public figures can manage to convey a bright vision that confounds personalities like mine. One of my favorite recent examples is Fred Kavli, a wealthy scientist philanthropist who recently established a program of million dollar prizes for scientists and who announced at the first presentation ceremony: “The future is going to be more spectacular than we can ever imagine.” I hope with all my heart that he knows something I don’t.

I’ve come to wonder lately what the implication of all this is for my life and work as an artist, a poet. Certainly the traditions of literature, particularly in the last century and a half, have had their fair share of dark personalities—more than mere pessimists, sometimes outrageous nihilists. One of my most enduring poetic influences has been Baudelaire, hardly a paragon of healthy thought. Don’t I have a right to express my own sadnesses? I have often enough, Lord knows, in the past, and I’m sure I will again, but at the same time, mightn’t there be some responsibility in my artistic endeavors I hadn’t suspected, hadn’t conceived of, until now?

Surely the most extreme vision of the future in recent literature is Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road. McCarthy is a novelist of craft, with a powerful gift for verisimilitude, and in his book he puts all his talents at the service of the literally darkest non–science-fiction fate that has ever been conceived for human beings. The earth—land and sea—is black with soot and ash, utterly silent except for the wind, some mysterious intermittent explosions, and the several words, most of them threats, human beings still manage to pass between them, before, in many cases, they devour each other. Those of you who have read the book know that the word “grim” hardly begins to do justice to the sheer horror McCarthy inflicts on the planet, and on us, his readers.

I use the word “inflict” intentionally. I’m not the only person I know who’s expressed regret at having ingested the book: I feel sometimes indignant that I have to have it in my consciousness. If there ever was a book that embodied the extremity of the emotion we call panic, this has to be it. I find it’s like having a piercing scream in my mind, one that, when the book comes to mind, which it does more often than I’d like, goes off like a siren.

Another recent, much different, book that deals with the possible dark times ahead of us is Gretel Ehrlich’s The Future of Ice—also a book of premonition and dire prophecy. I’ll admit that when I began reading it, I thought I wouldn’t be able to go on. Ehrlich’s prognostications about the grim future in store for the world seemed mostly to consist of information I already possessed—reading it felt like watching an autopsy of a living body. As I went further into the book, though, I was taken with its intimacy, its presentation of an actual person living a real life while at the same time reflecting on so much melting away, and I found the book finally inspiring, perhaps because it doesn’t manifest the kind of annihilating cosmic panic that McCarthy’s book does. It tells of the passions and sadnesses of experiencing, having to experience, the fear of knowing what may come to us, but all of that is tempered by the dailiness of the life and loves of the author. The Future of Ice contains its own epigraph, its own enduring motto: “Beauty saves me.” Until I went back to look for the phrase to quote, I had remembered it as “Beauty saves us,” and I’ve allowed myself to keep it that way.
I find it a bit odd to be using the word “beauty” this way. I’ve never thought terribly hard about the concept, certainly not as a theoretician, which I’m emphatically not. We all, though, have ideas about what is beautiful and what isn’t, and generally we think we know why. And it is, or at least was, tempting, as a poet, to try to be an aesthetician rather than an artist: there’s an aura of immediate authority associated with the one that isn’t associated with the other. I know that at any moment I’ll be able to think and talk for five or ten minutes about beauty: I never know whether in the next five or ten minutes or five or ten years I’ll be able to create any.

Beauty won’t save the world from the depredations with which it’s already been savaged, but it can save us from the enervating despair that is the outcome of panic, that paralysis that might keep us from doing what we can to confront what’s before us. We’ll never know how our ancestors, so put upon by the enormous unknown world in which they found themselves, persevered and survived, but we do know that they bequeathed to us, and probably infused into our genes, the conviction that the dream and execution of the beautiful made the world ours in a way nothing else could.
However it happens—by whatever complex, forbiddingly imprecise, dauntingly imperfect means—all over the world, if not every day then in every age, art is created and beauty manifested: beautiful paintings and poems and pieces of music and buildings are generated. One can almost imagine small flaring lights on the surface of the earth, like those seen in photos from space, though they are much sparser and more scattered than the illuminating devices that bespeckle our globe. And then over time these embodiments of the beautiful are harvested, amassed, collected in books, in museums, in concert halls, to be distributed into the lives of individual human beings, to become crucial elements of their existence. Often, our experience of beauty will be the first hint of what each of us at some point will dare call our soul. For don’t those first stirrings of that eternally uncertain, barely grasped notion of something more than mere mind, mere thought, mere emotion usually first come to us in the line of a poem, a passage of music, or the unreal yet more than real image in a painting?
And isn’t it also the case that beauty is the one true thing we can count on in a world of insufferable uncertainty, of obdurate, relentless moral conflicts? I’ve wondered sometimes if humans invented gods not to tend to our moral or immoral selves but to have something appropriately sensitive and grand and wise enough to appreciate these miraculous modes of beauty that are so different in material and quality from anything else in the world. Might gods have first been devised not to assuage our fears and hear our complaints and entreaties but for there to be identities sufficiently sublime to understand what those first painters and sculptors, and surely, though the words and tunes have been lost, those poets and singers had wrought?

Perhaps this is why those first great art works were executed deep in caves, so as to be certain the divinities who were their audience wouldn’t be distracted by the wonder of the natural world, and so lose the concentration necessary to glory in, and be glorified by, these singular human creations that equaled and even surpassed what had been given by nature for meditation. And perhaps that’s why poets and painters, who may half-remember such matters, go off into what can look to others like solitary caverns, shadowed with loneliness, but which surely aren’t. Beauty saves us. Beauty will save us. The world, though, is still ours to cherish, and ours to protect.

Originally Published: October 1, 2012

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/guide/243866#guide


Rae Armantrout: “Our Nature”
How did you become who you are?

BY STEPHEN BURT
Look at an old picture of yourself—a candid group photo is best, but a posed head shot or even a painting will do. How would you have described yourself back then? Would you describe yourself the same way now? How much do you have in common with the person whose portrait you see? Did you want to stand out? Can you feel proud, special, melancholy, or just resigned when you realize how much you have grown up and changed? In “Our Nature,” Rae Armantrout pursues such questions in her characteristically terse, harsh style.

An Armantrout poem can make no claim, and pursue no query, without trying to undermine its own terms: under the patient pressure of her short lines, key words in this poem, such as “nature” and even “latest,” can seem to come apart from their usual meanings, even as we come apart from our previous selves. Like most of her poems, “Our Nature” invites us to seek ironies and uncover the dubious axioms under each phrase. It also stands out, among those poems, for the open pathos of its ending, which addresses the life of an ambitious artist, and perhaps also the afterlife of an art movement, even while it asks about the changes that can pry any of us apart from our friends.

The poem begins with a look at an old image, or perhaps a general claim about the images that remain in our minds:

The very flatness
of portraits
makes for nostalgia
in the connoisseur.

All pictures are “flat” compared to real life, though some revel in their flatness, while others disguise it; what could be flat, in particular, about a portrait, and why would that “flatness” provoke “nostalgia”?

A portrait presents one moment, in space and in time: it is thus “flat” compared to the four-dimensional (in time and space) extent of a life, and looking back over that life might well prompt “nostalgia.” But to be “flat” or two-dimensional is also to look unreal. Is all portraiture unrealistic, in words or in visual art? Are all our mental portraits “unrealistic” as well, turning evolving personalities into all too comprehensible objects, as if we could possess the people we knew?

Considered thoroughly enough, do our ideas about people dissolve, as a picture dissolves or loses focus, when looked at for long? The second stanza, like a second take or a second look at the same picture, enacts that dissolution, with help from puns:

Here’s the latest
little lip of wave
to flatten
and spread thin.

Here a person’s “little lip” becomes the edge of a wave. Armantrout, who has always lived on the West Coast (in San Diego and in northern California), once censured another poet for comparing the sea to beads, since “the ocean can resemble a vertical sequence of discrete, solid objects in almost no way imaginable.” “Our Nature” seems to assert that we, too, are less like “discrete, solid objects” than our habits—and other poets’ “portraits”—assume. Our impressions of the people we think we know are more like a series of low waves, coming at us and then, usually, falling away. That image of liquid succession (“the latest” impression, and then something later still) gains force and irony from its contrast with the self-contained, solid, “hard” stanza in which it rests.

If the poem ended there it would be a cryptic rebuke, reminding us with a dry, uneasy authority that people always change. But Armantrout has more to say. Let’s say / it” becomes a hinge on which the poem turns, leaving the self-contained, pronoun-less quatrains behind. In their stead, we find one extended sentence, broken into one- and two-line bits, about a group of friends or allies who stuck together long enough to share adventures and to establish a “loyalty” later overruled, or contradicted, by the ambitions of its members (“our infatuation / with our own fame”).

Earlier Armantrout described everyone; now she speaks primarily of an “us,” who might be her generation, or her friends, or her political and artistic allies. The figure in Armantrout’s poem, one of the people included in her pronoun “we,” wants to show inner consistency as well as moral worth (we might say, encompassing both, that she wants to show character). But she is betrayed by her nature: “our nature,” human nature, or the nature of art, which undermine whatever character they construct. It is the nature of artists and their “gang” to strive for eminence, even at the cost of disconnection, as it is the nature of youthful “gangs” to grow apart. Outlaws of the Old West, quick on the draw, like the guerrilla movements of more recent decades, sometimes prided themselves on how they could “blend in // with the peasantry,” escaping the law. Remembering their subterfuges, Armantrout also invokes bands of youth, in schools or in street gangs, whose loyalty to one another cannot last, since it conflicts with their members' desire to get ahead in the adult world. (The young W.H. Auden, too, wrote that “love” required the “death of the old gang.”)

It’s tempting to associate Armantrout’s “old gang” with the real people who became her friends and allies early in her career: the Language writers, named after the magazine L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, one of several small journals from the 1970s (others include Hills and This) whose young, left-wing contributors declared their opposition to first-person lyric, to traditional narrative, and to any poems that emulated clear prose. Other Language writers included, on the West Coast, Ron Silliman, Lyn Hejinian, and Bob Perelman, and in New York City, Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein.

It is hard to read “Our Nature,” which comes from Armantrout’s book Veil (2001), without thinking about how Language writing, with its sometime promise of ego-less investigation, of radical anti-subjective critique, actually became (for better and worse) a name for a group of sometimes superb individual poets and poems. Armantrout recently collaborated with nine other Language writers on The Grand Piano (2006–10), “an experiment in collective autobiography” that tells the story of their West Coast scene. She seems, in retrospect, essential to that scene, though she did not publish prolifically in the early years, when she ran the reading series that gave The Grand Piano its name. And yet she admits, “I spent most of the 70s wondering whether I was in or out of the new nexus [of the Bay Area avant-garde]. (In that way it was a little bit like junior high.)." She remembers asking, at that time, "What was this new poetics that later came to be known as ‘language poetry’ and was I part of it or not?”

For a writer of Armantrout’s skeptical temperament, emerging from a shared movement or moment, the desire to stand out—though perhaps part of “our nature”—must have been especially vexed and vexing. Her poems remain ambivalent about ambition, as her halting manner—the matter of this self-critical poem, with its silenced “fast gun”—might imply. Yet they stay ambivalent about loyalty, too, since loyalty can discourage critical thought. Hopes for group belonging, no less than aspirations to singularity, make Armantrout ask herself how she knows what she knows, and what her wishful thinking might conceal. “I do wonder,” she asked in The Grand Piano, “how much we, ‘language poets,’ identify with and/or objectify one another.”

Readers who single out Armantrout among other Language writers often notice her links to traditions of lyric poetry, that is, to brief poems whose singularities of sound represent a single voice, a single speaker, a putatively unique inward life. Writing in the New Yorker in 2010, when Armantrout won the Pulitzer Prize, Dan Chiasson claimed that Armantrout “takes the basic premises of Language writing somewhere they were never intended to go: towards … a single individual’s … uniquely broken heart.” We may hear in this poem, with its rueful plural (“we,” not “I”), anticipatory reaction to such praise.

Yet Armantrout’s lines in “Our Nature” do not fit just one movement or moment, nor do they confine themselves to one art. How can we all succeed together in an enterprise where individuality and unique achievement is held out as the goal and the prize? And what if that enterprise is not art, but life? Most of us want to be “singled out” or noticed in some way, even if we do not try to write new kinds of poems; most of us also want, or at one time wanted, to stand with our peers, to keep our friends, to stay close.

We rarely get both; sometimes we get neither one. That broader disappointment informs Armantrout’s lines too: they end up with something like a tragic sense of how we grow up, itself the kind of sense sometimes, and wrongly, denied to the densely suggestive and demanding poetic traditions from which her style arose.

And yet the word “nature,” repeated in the penultimate line, should put us on alert, since Armantrout’s poems so frequently (as she has put it) “examine claims to naturalness and objectivity carefully to find out what or who is being suppressed.” Whose nature is ours? Was it always ours? Who are “we”? Should we resign ourselves to the alienating consequence of our ambitions, as inevitable as waves on sand, or can we construct some better choice?

Armantrout elsewhere likens her poems’ fitful movement to the mythical worm Ouroborous, which ate its own tail. Punning lines from her poem “Falling: I” warn us not to believe the stories we tell ourselves: “To swallow your own tail— // or tale— / is no longer // an approved / form of transportation.” It does not say what we should swallow, nor how we should transport ourselves, instead. Similarly, the ending of “Our Nature,” having pointed out “our infatuation,” leaves us with no clear place to stand, no more reliable substitute for the fallacies and hypocrisies, the cognitive and emotional mistakes, that Armantrout’s melancholy juxtapositions diagnose. Instead, the idea of a person with one nature, capable of sitting for a unique portrait, falls down when we try to make it explain “our nature,” to say why we do what we do.

Armantrout’s poems work hard not to settle on stable answers to the questions they raise. Be true to yourself, be yourself, pursue your own nature: Armantrout’s friable phrases cast some suspicion on those all-American instructions, whether or not we can learn to live without them. Her memoir True (1997) sets her desire to escape her cliché-ridden blue-collar childhood against her own suspicion about the stories of artists’ escapes: “Somehow my life was leading me to the conclusion that received opinion was my enemy,” she writes, adding, “I’m afraid, now, that I’m making my own myth.” We may not be able to live without myths, but we should not let ourselves get trapped by them. Neither the myth of solidarity forever, nor the romance of the individual becoming herself at all costs, nor any heroic story of rebels defying old norms and creating great change in the arts, survives the careful scrutiny of Armantrout’s curt, melancholy, and chastened phrases, which ask instead how we can remain, or even become, the people that we think we are.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/244156

PROSE FROM POETRY MAGAZINE
Inky Binky Bonky
How the words stick.

BY WILLIAM BUTLER
As far as the poetry I like, I sometimes feel like a cranky old man. I turn to old, formal poetry, or the super-famous poetry of the twentieth century—Eliot, Auden, Yeats, et al. I don’t think time is a distiller. Poems that emerge after passing through time are not necessarily more pure or more fundamentally true than the poems that disappear. But I do think that through the evolutionary dodgeball rounds of taste and fashion, population migrations, religious movements, library fires, world wars, and natural disasters, “being a good poem” is a trait that increases the odds of survival. I do sometimes read recent poetry, especially if it’s recommended by a friend. But I don’t have that many friends reading recent poetry.

“Poetry I like” and “poetry that affects my life” are slightly different sets. The poetry important to me is random. Random in time period, topic, length, style, author, even quality. It’s not a question of liking or disliking—it’s just that there are bits embedded deep in my brain grooves.

Sometimes this poetry comes out on specific occasions. I will be out on a walk and will round a corner, and the sun will be shining down in that golden hour before sunset, and a distant bird will loose a cry, and nature will confront me with all her majestic wonder. “What a strange bird is the pelican,” I will think, “Its beak can hold more than its belly can.” I always thought this was a couplet by Ogden Nash. But it’s a slightly wrong quotation from a limerick by some poet named Dixon Lanier Merritt. Regardless, I heard it when I was a kid, and ever since, all of nature has seemed a little ridiculous to me.

Sometimes, though, an idyllic nature scene will raise deep unease. Or I’ll look out a hotel room window at a still city and get the willies. Occasional fear of silence is a fundamental human response. For me, this feeling is tied up with the phrase “As idle as a painted ship/Upon a painted ocean.” Which is a prelude, in the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, to everyone dying slowly of thirst, and slimy things coming out and crawling with legs upon a slimy sea. The pelican may be zany, but the Mariner’s albatross is a little terrifying.

I once bought a book of Chinese poems because I liked the cover. (It was one of those seventies Penguin editions, not with the orange stripes, but with a beautiful wallpapery graphic.) I read this poem:

In these days I am ever befuddled with wine,
But it is not for nourishing my nature and soul.
When I see that all men are drunk,
How can I bear to be the only one sober?

I don’t know a lick of Chinese, but that translation seems stiff. Still, whenever I start complaining in my head about how everyone in the world is crazy, I see this Chinese poet, Wang Ji, totally wasted and grabbing an American stranger by the arm fourteen centuries in the future. I don’t draw a moral from the poem—it just takes me out of myself, and that’s enough.

When I was a kid, my dad paid me $7.50 for memorizing “If” by Rudyard Kipling. ($7.50 was the inflation-adjusted $1.00 my grandfather was paid by his father for the same task.) “If” is not attached deeply to my soul. I don’t turn to it in times of trouble. But I can still recite it as a party trick. (What sort of party? OK, you got me. There has never been a party where I have been asked to recite Kipling. Unless you count Thanksgiving as a party. Which it is. It is an awesome party.) But there is other Kipling. My dad’s parents would sing versions of his poems, like “The Ladies” (which has not aged well: “For she knifed me one night ’cause I wished she was white/And I learned about women from ’er!”) and “The Road to Mandalay”:

By the old Moulmein Pagoda, lookin’ eastward to the sea,
There’s a Burma girl a-settin’, and I know she thinks o’ me.

“Mandalay” moves me. That lost actual paradise—I’m a sucker for nostalgia. My dad’s family is made up of sailors descended from sailors, and the devolution of the sea from the realm of freedom and mystery to a playground for rich sporty types is an ache I’ve inherited. Generally, I’ll shed a tear for any yearning poem that mentions the sea. Tennyson is good for that, too.

I could list more. I haven’t yet got to George Herbert, or the poems of my impressionable teenage years. Or that epic of chance and loss:

Inky binky bonky,
Daddy had a donkey,
Donkey died, Daddy cried,
Inky binky bonky.

Some of this poetry is carved in quick, deep cuts. There are poems I can’t help but remember. Some are like ghosts I hear mumbling (something important?) in the next room. I have to go to the page to summon them and shut them up. It’s a mysterious mechanism, how the words stick. It feels different to me than words and music, where so much of the mystery is bound up in the music itself. And it’s different from ideas I want to pass on, or stories I want to relate, in which the words fall however they fall. I’ve thought about it. I have no idea how the brain works.

Originally Published: June 1, 2012

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/guide/251834#guide

W.S. Merwin: “Berryman”

A poet revisits his legendary teacher’s advice.

BY STEPHEN BURT
What can one poet teach another, in person, that cannot be learned just by studying the poems? How can a poem on a page embody that live, one-time-only connection? If you don’t have to meet the poet—if all that matters are the poems—why do so many of us want to meet or take classes with poets?

These questions of artistic mentorship are not new (the Victorian poet Robert Browning poked fun at them in his poem “Memorabilia”), but they have special salience for the generation of W.S. Merwin (born in 1927), the first cohort of American poets that could take poetry-writing classes in college and then go on to teach writing as a career. Though Merwin himself has rarely taught for a living, earning money as a translator, tutor, and professional writer instead, he has been surrounded by poets who did. His poem about what he learned from an early master sets literary celebrity against a more important, but ultimately unknowable, idea of literary value. It also presents a pedagogy separate from—maybe even superior to—whatever students can learn from assignments, for grades, in schools and colleges, even though the encounter that Merwin records took place in one of them.

The poet John Berryman (1914–1972) was teaching at Princeton University when 17-year-old Merwin matriculated there in 1944. Berryman had already published poems in nationally prominent magazines, such as The Nation, but his first book, The Dispossessed, would not appear until 1948. Along with the critic and poet R.P. Blackmur, Berryman in those years launched Princeton’s creative writing program. Merwin remembered in 2010 that he discussed literature with Blackmur (“the wisest man and the greatest literary intelligence I ever knew”) but showed his own poems instead to Berryman, who “was absolutely ruthless. It was very good for me.”

Perhaps the older poet saw Merwin’s potential. He described Merwin’s verse in kinder terms to others: Berryman’s then wife, Eileen Simpson, in her memoir, Poets in Their Youth (1982), remembers that Berryman “was particularly excited by the work of Frederick Buechner, who had shown him part of a novel, and by W.S. Merwin, who was writing poetry. Both of them were ‘the real thing.’”

How do you know that a young poet is “the real thing” before you have seen many poems that you admire? How do you know, or transmit, the sense that a poet will write valuable poems before he has written them? You can’t “know” in the sense that you can know the square root of nine: you can only describe a feeling and try to give reasons for it. But you can’t “know” that any complete individual poem will last either: the unconfirmable feeling you can have about a person’s potential might differ only in degree from the feeling you can have about a poem, the inexplicable sense that something or someone will matter to someone else.

As a teacher, Berryman seems to have communicated exactly that sense to his student, a knowledge that can be neither separated from craft nor reduced to craft: it feels more like a laying on of hands. The great man praised “presence” and “passion” and seemed to give Merwin both: Berryman also furnished both good and bad examples of how poets ought to live. But the most important gift he gave Merwin—so Merwin implies—was permission to live with what he could not know.

Merwin won the Yale Younger Poets prize in 1952, but he became a name to conjure with later on, with The Lice (1967), whose spare free verse denounced the Vietnam War and contemplated the end of civilization. Merwin’s subsequent books often took the side of nonhuman nature, of silence, and of spiritual resistance against the busy, crowded, destructive, reckless work of human beings. The characteristic lack of punctuation in his poetry—he has used very little in 50 years—tends to give his poetry a kind of hushed seriousness and requires him to break many lines at the ends of phrases, clauses, and sentences because his line breaks can do the work of commas and periods. (Notice, in “Berryman,” the shock of the pause at “corner and he.”) That seriousness removes the poetry from the high formality of older styles but also from the sharp variety and interchange of ordinary conversation. Merwin’s lines, meditative and almost secluded, occupy a tonal space of their own.

The style of Berryman’s most famous work now looks like the opposite of his former protégé’s: “Homage to Mistress Bradstreet” (1956) and The Dream Songs (1963, 1968) are gregarious, polyphonic, sometimes outrageous, well-populated poems. One is set in 17th-century New England, the others in Berryman’s own busy (and drunken) life, recording the vicissitudes of lust, hunger, shame, and regret in a way that seems almost amoral and never self-effacing. Yet Merwin implies that Berryman was somehow fundamental to the creation of Merwin’s style: how can this be?

The answer lies not in Berryman’s poems but in the poet’s attitude toward the writing of them. Merwin sees Berryman not just as a teacher but also as close kin, thanks to their shared vocation. But can whatever wisdom Berryman offered, in person, by virtue of that kinship, be shared with us (“I will tell you,” Merwin writes), through the limited medium of the printed page?

Merwin’s Berryman stands out not just for giving good advice (“why point out a thing twice”?) but also for the respectful way that he gave it. He acts out the passion he wants his poems to contain, or at least he says he does: “he / said he meant it literally,” but he did not leave the party, or stop the class, in order to kneel. Yet the advice is no joke: Merwin later said in an interview that “pray to the Muse” was “excellent advice.” (A few significant English-language poets have knelt to pray unpredictably in public, notably the 18th-century visionary Christopher Smart, who was put in a mental institution for it.)

Merwin’s tender, almost embarrassed account of the great man, and the advice the man gave, makes poetry sound less like a craft (much less an academic discipline) than like a religious vocation. The wall, papered with rejection slips, resembles a monkish cell. Transmute remains the rarest word in a poem whose diction remains educated but unremarkable, and transmute points to alchemy, magic, discredited science; those processes, not scientific ones, correspond to the making of poetry, and the word passion, of course, has Christian religious roots as well.

Berryman’s almost religious devotion to poetry might be mistaken for self-absorption: “he was deep / in tides of his own,” though these tides were not—Merwin has to add—the tides of the alcoholism that later carried him away. It would be easy to rewrite Merwin’s “Berryman” as the pretext for an insult: who is this young man with an “affected” accent, and what makes him so sure of himself? Where does he get off recommending, with such “vehemence,” clichés such as “movement and invention”? In Poets in Their Youth, Simpson confirms Merwin’s portrait of a man who was thinking of poetry all the time—to the neglect of his family. Yet Merwin’s poem works as homage, where it fails as advice: John Berryman “was certainly one of the two or three brightest individuals I’ve ever known,” Merwin said, “and his sense of language was passionate and had immense momentum. His integrity was absolute. He was a wacky man, but that devotion was like a pure flame all the time, and that was a great example for me.”

The poem amounts to a sketch of an eccentric, his oddity visible even to his fingertips, a man few people could emulate directly. Berryman’s inimitability and charisma are not exactly the same thing as but rather stand in for and resemble the inimitability, the unpredictability, and the weirdness of poetic language itself. The shortest line in the poem—“you die without knowing”—is also one of the few one-line sentences, as is the memorable final line.

Berryman’s good advice to the young Merwin also pushes back against the image of Berryman that we might get from Berryman’s own later poems. The critic David Haven Blake writes that those poems present Berryman as “a public figure, a poet characterized by fame,” a modern celebrity tracking and sometimes mocking Berryman’s own “confusion about the nature of literary fame.” For example, in “Dream Song 342,” Berryman reflects on evidence of his public success, such as “fan-mail from foreign countries,” “imitations & parodies in your own, / translations,” and other trappings of celebrity, before concluding that the quality, not the quantity, of readers’ attention is what matters: “A lone letter from a young man: that is fame.”

Merwin’s poem is, in one sense, that letter. Merwin sets up his own early teacher as a figure beyond celebrity, a model for poetic integrity of the kind Merwin invites himself to seek. What looks like an unseemly preoccupation with poetic power and literary prominence is rewritten here as just the right kind of “arrogance,” a way to prevent worldly “vanity” by focusing on the art of poetry: an art of uncertain and unworldly rewards.

The undergraduate Merwin wanted to know how to get an A in great poetry writing. He did not know any better than to ask, and he got the only possible answer. You can learn, for a grade, right answers to questions about how to read already existing poetry and how to hear it. As for the question of how to write poetry so that people remember it, how to write poetry that will “transmute” the language or itself wind up “transmuted” by “passion”—that question cannot be answered: “you can never be sure.” The lines end in a kind of proof by least likely case: if this learned, charismatic figure cannot be sure what makes a poem last, then no one can; and if that answer did not satisfy Merwin in his late teens, it might satisfy him now.

That ability to live with uncertainty might be the most important of the many gifts—attention, seriousness, and charisma among them—that Berryman gave the young Merwin. “Poetry,” Merwin told an interviewer in 2014, “does not come from what you know. All that you know is very important, and not to be put down or ignored or got rid of, but finally it is from the unknown that poetry comes to you.” Knowing an author, taking a class, might help, but it is never a requirement. What you learn by meeting a great poet might just be how little the poet knows.

( That ability to live with uncertainty might be the most important of the many gifts—attention, seriousness, and charisma among them—that Berryman gave the young Merwin. “Poetry,” Merwin told an interviewer in 2014, “does not come from what you know. All that you know is very important, and not to be put down or ignored or got rid of, but finally it is from the unknown that poetry comes to you.” )

True words, the poems most often come from an inner Spring that ones taps at will and the waters just flow. Of course often the waters need a bit more- like inspiration that the heart may add or imagination the mind may gift. Or that unknown essence that arrives just in time when stumped on how to continue a poem. -Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/article/251540

ARTICLES FOR TEACHERS & STUDENTS
The Image List
Starting with images rather than words can help show an experience, instead of telling it.

BY MICHAEL MCGRIFF
The Image List
Image Courtesy of Chris Lott via Flickr.
Whether you’re writing a poem for the first time in your life or working on your tenth award-winning book, starting a new poem is often an intimidating and daunting task. “What am I supposed to write about!?”—this is the question that often stops writers before they start. The exercise that follows, which I call the “Image List,” is one I’ve used in every class I’ve ever taught, from graduate-level courses to elementary school classes. It’s also a process that I use when I’m starting a new poem or feel as though I’ve run out of ideas.

One thing: this is a timed exercise. It’s important to stick to the time limits because this writing exercise is based on the idea that your first thought might be your best thought.

FIVE MINUTES

In five minutes, make a list of at least fifty objects that are important to you. Remember, these are objects that are important to you—they don’t need to sound special or “poetic.” For example, your list might include things such as “the grass by our fence, Dad’s boots, the old woodstove in our living room,” to use a few examples from my own image list. There are no right or wrong objects to include on this list. Everyone is going to have a very different list containing a wide range of objects. The key to this exercise is to keep from overthinking—make a list of whatever comes to mind first. Keep your pen moving (or your fingers typing) until you’ve reached five minutes. Once you get started you’ll quickly see that you can generate far more than fifty objects.

TEN MINUTES

Now that you have these fifty objects in your mind, it’s time to make a second list. Take ten minutes to list the first twenty memories that you associate with the objects on your list. These memories don’t need to be elaborate; think of these as notes to yourself. Your list might look something like this:

Visiting my mom in the hospital
Noticing the way the rain sounded against my window the night I got in trouble with the cops
Listening to Chopin for the first time
And so on. Again, there is no right or wrong way to make this list. Everyone is going to have different memories. Some memories might be serious, some might be funny, and some might seem very ordinary. Again, the key to this list is to write down anything and everything that comes to mind. After all, there is no subject too ordinary, too outrageously funny, or too serious for a poem.

FIVE MINUTES

For the third and final list, select two memories from the list of memories you just made. For each memory, make a list of as many sensory details as you can think of. Remember, a sensory detail is a detail that pertains to how something looks, feels, tastes, sounds, or smells.

Combine all three lists, and you have what I call an image list, a blueprint that contains everything you’ll need for making a poem. The image list is full of things you know, full of things you have a personal connection to, and full of sensory details. Just as important, the image list is devoid of abstractions and generalities. Abstractions and generalities can often feel vague, unconvincing, and unimportant to a reader, whereas the contents on the image list will feel personal, intimate, and convincing. The more a writer can show an experience, the more the reader will sympathize and understand it. The contents on the image list can be used to make a small poem, such as one of Buson’s great haiku, or a large, detail-stuffed epic such as Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.

To see how this exercise can be used, check out the following poems, each of which use the kinds of details and plain language that you’d find on an image list: “Things I Didn’t Know I Loved,” by Nâzim Hikmet; “Nostalgic Catalogue,” by Garrett Hongo; “Getting It Right,” by Matthew Dickman; “We Went Out to Make Hay,” by Stephan Torre; “To a Friend,” by Zubair Ahmed; and “Inventory” by Günter Eich.

This essay was originally published in Open the Door: How to Excite Young People about Poetry (2013), a co-publication of the Poetry Foundation and McSweeney's Publishing, edited by Dorothea Lasky, Dominic Luxford, and Jesse Nathan.
Originally Published: December 14, 2015

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/article/246408

ARTICLES FOR TEACHERS & STUDENTS
Learning the Epistolary Poem
Poems that serve as letters to the world

BY HANNAH BROOKS-MOTL
Learning the Epistolary Poem
Paul Simpson
It’s an old story: star-crossed lovers don’t know they’re star-crossed. They fall in love through the exchange of letters (or emails), not realizing that in real life they despise each other—until letter is matched to person and true love results (see the movie The Shop Around the Corner and its remake, You’ve Got Mail). Art that showcases epistolary practice—the writing and exchange of letters—comes stocked with such themes of romance, revelation, deception, and authenticity. Letters are vehicles for our truest selves, but they’re also a space in which we construct those selves.

What does this have to do with epistolary poetry? Like our movie couples, poets use epistolary techniques to reveal and construct. On one hand, letters expose the fact that poetry itself is a form of communication. We frequently write to something or someone. On the other hand, poems that use the conventions of letters make us think about how we read, categorize, and imagine both letters and poems. Although our glossary’s definition of an epistle appears to be simple enough, its brevity belies crucial questions. Does the poem have to be an actual letter? If it was sent to a person—especially one “close to the writer”—what does it mean that other people are now reading it? If it wasn’t sent to a person, how does it count as a letter? Why write a poem that looks like a letter, or use a letter as a poem, anyway?

Epistolary verse is one of poetry’s oldest forms, yet the questions it raises remain remarkably consistent through the centuries. In this guide, we’ll look at the history of epistolary poetry and explore how poets have adopted the form; you’ll also try your hand at composing some original-verse epistles.



August Beginnings

Some of the earliest epistolary poetry occurs in ancient Greece and Rome. Horace, in his Epistles, and Ovid, in the Heroides, set the terms for one of the epistolary debates that continues to this day: the distinction between epistles that appear to be true letters—written by the poet, ostensibly as a communiqué to an actual person—and epistles that are obviously fictional, perhaps because they’re written in a persona other than the poet’s. Both types are poems and letters, but the first might emphasize a poem’s letter qualities, while the second foregrounds the poem as a poem.

Horace’s Epistles are the first kind: a series of poems written to real persons—fellow writers, patrons, and even Augustus, the Emperor himself. Since these are distinguished as epistles, we might assume that these poems were initially sent as letters. But their appearance, in 20 BCE, as a book suggests that they were open letters “sent” via publication itself. In David Ferry’s translation, the poems can begin with salutations—“Dear Fuscus, I, a lover of the country, / Send greetings to you, a lover of the city”—or start with the kinds of contextualization we associate with letters: “While you’re in Rome, studying declamation,” Horace writes to Lollius Maximus, “Here I am in Praeneste, reading Homer.” That kind of casual situating remark is a hallmark of epistolary poems. Horace uses such effects throughout the Epistles to achieve a meandering, digressive, and conversational style. These poems are chatty, ask questions, and make inside or private jokes. Here is the beginning of his letter to Vinius Asina:

Just as I’ve told you over and over, Vinny,
Deliver these books of mine to Augustus only
If you know for sure that he’s in good health and only
If you know for sure that he’s in a good mood and only
If it comes about that he asks in person to see it.
From the familiar form of Vinius’s name, to an expectation that Vinny will know Augustus’s “good mood” when he sees it, we can tell that Horace’s poem is clearly written to a specific, singular person. The poem reiterates a conversation between the two—“as I’ve told you over and over”—reinforcing the sense that we are intercepting a letter intended for someone else. The poem’s qualities as both letter and poem are tied up in its casual style and authentic address. And this brings us to our first writing exercise:

Exercise 1: Try writing a poem that enacts a similar experience for the reader. Write about a past event to a friend, and frame it as a private letter in which you explain your side of what happened. Keep in mind that others will end up reading your “letter.” How does knowledge of a larger audience affect your letter-poem?

Horace’s poem to Vinny is the kind of “true” letter-poem to which Ovid’s Heroides stands in opposition. The Heroides are a collection of letters written in the voices of women from classical mythology. They’re not real letters, but fictional letters written using the technique of persona. Addressed mainly to absent lovers, the letter-poems exemplify another truism of epistolary practice: that letters are outpourings of our innermost selves. Ovid’s letter-writers beg, cajole, mourn, and indict the men who have abandoned them. But Ovid also gives the women recourse to introspection.

Exercise 2: Try writing a letter from someone else’s perspective, perhaps a famous person or a literary or mythical character. Have your character write to someone they’re angry or upset with and explain why.



Ladies, Letters, the 18th Century

The 18th century was an epistolary heyday. A regular mail service and newly literate masses encouraged writers to adopt the conventions of letters in many genres, from political treatises to a newfangled form called the novel. Aspects of epistolarity—salutations, dating, and address to a specific person—mark much poetry of the 18th century, not all of which we’d call verse epistles. Odes and occasional poems, for example, also tend to address a person directly. But as the category of epistolary poetry expanded, the distinction between true and fictional epistles remained. Alexander Pope exploited the possibilities of the latter in “Eloisa to Abelard,”one of the most famous verse epistles of the period. The poem, like Ovid’s Heroides before it, purports to be an outpouring of impassioned speech from one lover to another. Eloisa writes to Abelard:

Yet write, oh write me all, that I may join
Griefs to thy griefs, and echo sighs to thine.
Abelard and Eloisa are “joined” despite distance through letters. Correspondence might allow them to literally correspond, in a kind of emotional echo. Of course, the reality is that Eloisa is in a convent; Abelard is, well, no longer the man he once was; and Pope is the real author of the poem. Epistolary writing in the 18th century frequently remarked on its own limitations, even as letters and letter-poems imagined they might overcome them. It’s a theme that runs throughout epistolary writing: you’re absent, but also present, because I’m writing to you.

Exercise 3: Take out your cell phone and find a contact you haven’t talked to in six months or more. Now, write him or her a letter-poem describing how you feel about the silence between the two of you.

Pope’s other verse epistles are less fervent than “Eloisa to Abelard,” and yet might strike us as just as “fictive.” His poem “Epistle to Miss Blount” and the series “Epistles to Several Persons” are clearly labeled as letters, but sound like traditional poems (or even criticism, in the case of “An Essay”). Unlike Horace, Pope valued epistolary poetry not for its ability to mimic conversation, but for the particular kinds of decorum it permitted. As Ange Mlinko has pointed out in a poem guide to “The Answer,” an epistolary poem by Anne Finch that responds to Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock,”poets of the 18th century—another Augustan age—wrote to amuse, provoke, and persuade friends and foes in their immediate circles, almost like an older, slower, and more formal version of today’s social media.

Mlinko’s guide focuses on female poets, and women and epistolary writing have always been linked. Yet 18th-century female poets’ use of epistolary verse can call into question those categories of true and fictional—whether a poem was intended as a poem or a letter. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s letter to Lord Herveyis a good example of the blurred boundaries between letters and poems in the period. As scholar Bill Overton points out, “epistolary verse was a social practice of the period, and … especially for upper-class women, the writing of a letter in verse by no means entailed an intention to publish it."Yet even unpublished poems and letters were circulated, and it is likely that letter writers in the 18th century understood that their words would be read and reread by people they might not know personally.

Epistolary scholars call this sense that a letter is written not just for its recipient, but for a potentially wider audience, the “third-person reader.” It’s especially useful in thinking about verse epistles because letter-poets acknowledge that their missive is at once public and private. For female poets writing in a time when normal modes of publishing were difficult or undesirable, this third-person reader was often their first and only reader. Anne Finch’s “A Letter to Daphnis” is a good example of this interplay. Lady Mary Chudleigh’s verse epistle addresses itself explicitly “To the Ladies,” but it uses epistolary style in title only—the poem forgoes greetings or situating remarks in favor of pure polemic.

Exercise 4: Try writing an epistle to an entire group of people. As in your Horace imitation, think about how the sense of a third-person reader might shape what, and how, you write.



New-Fashioned Epistolary Verses

The distinction between true and fictional continues to mark epistolary poetry to this day. Poems such as Ezra Pound’s “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter” are obviously in the tradition of Ovid. More contemporary examples of this kind of letter-poem include Evie Shockley’s “From the Lost Letters of Frederick Douglass,” Carolyn Kizer’s “Fanny,” and William Stafford’s “Report to Crazy Horse.” Such poems are related to the dramatic monologue in their reliance on readers’ suspension of disbelief.

While all letter-writers consciously construct a version of themselves in their letters, letter-poems from a persona might strike us differently than those from a “real” poet. And letter-poems intended, as Horace’s were, for actual friends and acquaintances of the poet seem unlike those letter-poems, such as Julia Bloch’s Letters to Kelly Clarksonor Major Jackson’s “Letter to Brooks: Spring Garden,” obviously written as poems first. The question is as old as Horace and Ovid, Pope and Montagu: letter or poem? And why?

Emily Dickinson might help us here. Dickinson’s publication history is long and tangled, but scholars have started to emphasize the importance of epistolary practice to her work; recent editions even try to recover the way poems were knit into, and seemed to spring from, her letters. Her letters and poems circulated—like Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, she wrote to a public-private audience—but Dickinson used her missives both to communicate and to describe communication’s difficulty. Dickinson’s “letter lyrics,” in the words of scholar Sarah Hewitt, “theorize poetry as a specific kind of social communication.”

Poetry, especially lyric poetry, was not thought to be especially communicative after Romanticism. So when Jack Spicer published letters as poems, as he did with “Letter to Gary Bottone” and “Letters to James Alexander,”he upended such notions, placing a poem squarely between people. James Schuyler’s letter-poems do similar work. Often embracing epistolary embellishments such as dates, greetings, and sign-offs, Schuyler’s poems frequently use the kind of patter real letters feature. Yet the poem “A Stone Knife”also includes a title, lineation, and extended ekphrasis, common telltale markers of poetry. Letter-poems by Schuyler or Spicer can complicate our automatic categories of what is or isn’t poetry.

Exercise 5: Find an email or letter you’ve written, and break it into lines. Does it sound or feel like a poem? Try adding a title.

Letters and letter-poems also help us think about how poetry is built—and again, it’s a blow to any notions of a visit from the muses. Lorine Niedecker and W.S. Graham both used letters to write poems, suggesting that a poem is less an inspired rush of language than the careful placement and arrangement of words. Here is Niedecker in a letter to Louis Zukofsky from 1948:

Dear Zu:

Saturday I arose from my primordial mud with bits of algae, equisetum, etc . . to attend an expensive church wedding. Whole of history went thru my head, a big step from algae to CHURCH […] from cell division to the male sweating it out while the other collects International Sterling Silver and dons and takes off satins and continues to sweat to pay for ’em. The little slave girl bride and the worse slave, her husband.

Compare this to Niedecker’s “I rose from marsh mud.” Niedecker doesn’t just raid her letter’s content for her poem’s purposes, she cribs actual phrases and words. Graham does something similar in his letter-elegy to his friend titled “Dear Bryan Wynter.”In that poem, Graham repurposes phrases from letters he sent to friends and Wynter’s widow. Both Niedecker and Graham take language from letters and tweak it for poems.

Exercise 6: Look at the letter or email you used in Exercise 5. Can you find phrases and even sentences that you might incorporate into your next poem?

Contemporary poets who use epistolary forms can also let language remain in its “lettered” state. During her third pregnancy, Bernadette Mayer wrote a series of letters. Never sent, they were published as The Desire of Mothers to Please Others in Letters (1994). Here is the opening of “To the Tune of ‘Red Embroidered Shoes’”:

It’s a rare windy day where the sun never goes away, some new weather must be moving toward us very fast as they say, you always say I notice the weather too much, that most people don’t know if it’s hot or cold, I find it hard to remember I’m not supposed to have to include it all. I think to myself I’ve gotta say that to you and then when I forget it it’s lost. To celebrate without a plan—will he buy her an ice cream on the way home?

Mayer’s long, fast sentences move us through a dizzying range of observation. The allusions are private and opaque, and the speed with which Mayer delivers them almost guarantees that our understanding is only partial. Yet Mayer wrote this letter not to send but to publish, as a prose poem. Like Spicer and Schuyler, Mayer explores the boundaries between letters and poems and our expectations of each.

One thing we expect of poems is that they stand alone: we shouldn’t have to know context or background to understand a poem. Poems should contain their own directions, allow us to assemble and read them on their own terms. But we know that letters are only products of context. They are part of endless chains of other letters and communications, and when we read them we can be comfortable and even delight in our only partial knowledge. From Horace and Ovid to Mayer and Spicer, poets have used letter-poems to explore not just the ways letters help poets write, but how letter-poems force readers to read.

Epistolary poetry also focuses our attention on the audience (the “to whom”) of poetry rather than its subjects and meanings (the “what”). And since we’re reading a poem not initially intended for “us,” one thing letter-poems ask is that we consider how we are, and are not, like the real people they’re addressed to. Poets who use epistolary address also attempt to figure out not just who that “you” is—whether it’s a close friend or all posterity—but what, and how to meaningfully communicate with them. It’s a question poets have been asking themselves since writing, and letters, appeared.

Originally Published: August 29, 2013

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/244150



PROSE FROM POETRY MAGAZINE
The Necessary Fluster
On the art of finding.

BY NAOMI BECKWITH

Though I do not have a “favorite” of many things, I do have a favorite poem: Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art.” Its words on loss are so even-keeled for five stanzas that I immediately became a devotee of its matronly, metaphysical advice. But suddenly, in the sixth stanza, the poem cracks open, leaking vulnerability. I love the poem for its timeless subject, its progression, and especially for its title, which I consider a pun on my own professional interests as a curator. When I mentioned this to an English professor friend, he commanded I recite “One Art” like a pop quiz. I consented and got through four lines until my friend interrupted me—“Elizabeth Bishop would never use the word fluster.” An argument ensued, Google was consulted, and eventually I was vindicated.

Our argument was essentially an academic one about Bishop’s practice, but it mirrored ongoing debates about what type of language and forms are appropriate for poetry. In this case “fluster” was common, colloquial, too close to slang, and, for my friend, inconsistent with Bishop’s lyricism. It’s as if poetry’s only function were embellished erudition.

My own notions about what constitutes poetry veer toward the decorative as well, but when I think back on the poetry that first grabbed my imagination—“We real cool. We/Left school”—its diction was akin to slang. The monosyllabic words, the idiosyncratic meter, the creative verbs (to “Jazz June”?): these weren’t simple aesthetic choices for Gwendolyn Brooks, they were linguistic portraits. Like Brooks, I lived for much of my life on the South Side of Chicago. The familiarity of her cadences primed my young mind for poetry.

The familiar or colloquial isn’t base but inspirational—and, I would argue, necessary. Over one hundred years prior to “The Pool Players,” Charles Baudelaire stated that art must find its inspiration in the urban street, in the everyday, in the nineteenth-century version of the pool hall. Baudelaire was known as much as an art critic as a poet, and his ideas helped engender the cultural shift from the Romantic age into modernism.
Visual art and poetry have continued along separate aesthetic tracks, but I often return to poetry when I think about contemporary visual art. For instance, Kenneth Goldsmith’s concept of uncreative writing: Goldsmith—a true heir of Baudelaire’s dandyism—advocates for the wholesale borrowing or repurposing of language from any source rather than creating “new” text. It is a radical notion in a world saturated with cliches and nostalgic references. Goldsmith’s view is about making lateral moves rather than justifying what language is appropriate for poetry. It’s a vision of language that accepts “fluster.”

I also see Goldsmith’s ideas in direct conversation with visual art’s notion of the “found object.” An artist utilizing appropriation or a found object forces her audience to look anew—and critically—at the world. Artists and poets who do this go beyond style to pose conceptual questions: what does it mean, like Brooks or Baudelaire, to engage directly with the world surrounding you rather than looking toward the academy? How do you take advantage of the familiar while making it unfamiliar and surprising? These questions are now my guiding principles as I consider contemporary art.

Originally Published: June 1, 2012

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

Warning some graphic/vulgar language in the article.--Tyr

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/245164

PROSE FROM POETRY MAGAZINE
All My Pretty Hates
Reconsidering Charles Baudelaire.

BY DAISY FRIED
I’m writing this in Paris, so, from my many poetic aversions (“all my pretty hates,” to quote Dorothy Parker): Charles Baudelaire, oozing with decay, pestilence, and death. Baudelaire, tireless invoker of  muses, classical figures, goddesses, personifications: O Nature!...Cybele!... 
Sisyphe ... O muse de mon coeur! Baudelaire, who makes an old perfume bottle an invocation of the soul wherein

A thousand thoughts were sleeping, deathly chrysalids,
trembling gently in the heavy darkness,
which now unfold their wings and take flight,
tinged with azure, glazed with pink, shot with gold*
— From The Phial

Anyone ever counted how many times “azure” shows up in Les Fleurs du Mal?

When she had sucked all the marrow from my bones
And I languidly turned to her
To give back an amorous kiss, I saw no more.
She seemed a gluey wine-skin full of pus.
— The Vampire’s Metamorphosis

I’m not one to criticize poems about blowjobs but Really, Charles? My fourteen-year-old self might have been impressed. Ew, gross. Then again, shouldn’t one be aware of not reading through one’s fourteen-year-old eyes? After all, he and Poe invented poetic goth. It’s not Baudelaire’s fault his modern-day followers are goofballs. And not their fault I’m a boring middle-aged American.

The main trouble is that English is a mash-up of Anglo-Saxon, Latin, and other languages, while French, like all romance languages, is more purely Latinate. I think, feel, imagine, and dream in twentieth-century English. Different associations and emotions attach to Latinate versus Anglo-Saxon synonyms. Latinate words seem inflated and emotionless; Anglo-Saxon alternatives are, for me, concrete, emotional, complex. I can stumble along in Baudelaire’s French, and know enough of the language to argue with translators. Carol Clark turns “L’Art est long et le Temps est court” (“Le Guignon”) into “Art is long and Time is fleeting.” Why not the sonically similar “short”? She makes Cybele’s “tétines brunes” in the untitled third poem of Les Fleurs du Mal literary and Eliotish — “brown dugs” — 
instead of “brown tits.”

In “The Venal Muse,” Baudelaire describes the muse of his heart, a lover of palaces, warming her frozen purple feet during the “noirs ennuis” (black boredom) of snowy evenings. Next he asks her: “Récolteras-tu l’or des voûtes azurées?” Azure again. Carol Clark translates this line: “Will you gather gold from the vaults of heaven,” leaving out the explicit sky color and adding a religious whiff with “heaven.” But even in more literal translation, “Will you reap gold from the azure vaults,” thud goes the poem. Of course, this poem’s interest and innovation is partly structural: the thrill ride from register to register, palaces to purple feet to sky blue vaults. Baudelaire conformed to many of the straitjacket conventions of nineteenth-century French poetry: strict syllabics, indefatigable personifications, classical references. In her excellent introduction, Clark explains that his wedging of the hideous, erotic body into those strictures was radical. And yet: gold, azure, vaults — I just don’t like this poem’s escape into the windy figurative.

But. As I reread and edge closer to feeling the French late in my two-month Paris trip, I start to find Baudelaire... lovable. Not only that, but a good model. In the Cybele poem quoted above, Baudelaire imagines a lost arcadia, “époques nues” when men and women “jouissaient sans mensonge et sans anxiété.” Jouissaient: 
“enjoyed each other”  — fucked, presumably — “without lying or 
anxiety.” Sentimental? Maybe. But then he contrasts that dream-age to modern diseased, debauched nineteenth-centry women:

And you, women, alas, pale as church candles, fed and gnawed away by debauchery, and you, virgins, dragging along the inheritance of your mothers’ vice and all the hideous appurtenances of fecundity! (Clark)

Never mind that “hideous appurtenances of fecundity.” Finally, the disgust is glorious, vivid, diagnostic. Objections to sexism in this passage are anachronistic; Baudelaire’s always most revolted by himself.
We in America could use more romantic self-disgust. (Frederick Seidel thinks so. Ooga Booga is the Fleurs du Mal of our time.)

Or take the great poem “Le Cygne” (“The Swan”) in which Baudelaire compares drastically-changing Paris of  the mid-nineteenth century to a swan escaped from its cage, rubbing webbed feet on dry pavement, dragging plumage on rough ground, opening its beak near a dry gutter, bathing wings in dust, dreaming of  home, a beautiful lake, and of water, water. Look up the original. There’s seldom been in 
poetry anything so terribly dry and so full of yearning.

In “The Swan,” Baudelaire invokes Andromache several times. Elsewhere his classical references can seem perfunctory. Here, Hector’s widow injects, finally, an enormous sorrow into the poem, and provides a segue near the end to a strange, and strangely relevant, intrusion:

I think of the negress, wasted and consumptive, trampling in
the mud and looking with wild eyes for the missing coconut
palms of proud Africa behind the immense wall of the fog;
Of whoever has lost what can never be found. (Clark)

It’s true, Baudelaire can be awfully windy. But I apologize to my 
editors. I’ve developed an aversion to my aversion. If that’s wind, well, sometimes you have to listen to the wind.



* This and some other translations are prose ones by Carol Clark, from Penguin’s Selected Poems, hereafter designated “(Clark).” Where I make no citation, I’ve cobbled together versions from Google Translate, Clark, and other translators, with apologies and no blame.

Originally Published: January 2, 2013

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/251964
ESSAY
Immortal Beloved
On the missing persons of love poetry.
BY AUSTIN ALLEN

Immortalizing the beloved is supposed to be one of the poet’s supreme powers. What journal-toting teenager hasn’t tried to wield it? Shakespeare himself claims in his sonnets:

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. (XVIII)

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme;
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone, besmear’d with sluttish time. (LV)
There’s no disputing these lines as boasts of literary prowess. The sonnets are monuments; they’ll outlast us all. But are they truly personalized? Who is “thee”?

Scholars have never identified the “Fair Youth” Shakespeare celebrated; he may have been a lover, friend, patron, or fantasy. Two earls, William Herbert and Henry Wriothesley, are leading suspects, but no one has clinched the case for either, and both are unknown outside of English departments.

Of course, the sonnets promise to keep alive a spirit, not a name. But who is the Youth in spirit? We learn little about his temperament, his quirks, the mind behind the handsome face. Despite all the flattering tributes, he eludes us—as does that other specter of the sonnets, the “Dark Lady.” In what sense, then, does the poet give them life? More convincing is the claim, in Sonnet LV, that “your praise shall still find room / Even in the eyes of all posterity”—emphasis mine, praise Shakespeare’s.

Like so many love poems before and since, the sonnets whisper, “I’m gonna make you a star, kid.” So why do we remember only the starmaker? Whose fame are we really talking about here?

•

“How I envy the novelist!” Sylvia Plath wrote in her 1962 essay “A Comparison,” without mentioning that she was turning into one herself. The previous summer, she had finished her first, headlong draft of The Bell Jar, which she would publish (under the alter ego Victoria Lucas) in the winter of ’63. The private agonies she poured into that novel are well known, but her essay reveals the artistic impulse behind her foray into fiction. Casting the novelist as a spoiled rival, she exclaims:

To her, this fortunate one, what is there that isn’t relevant! [In a novel] old shoes can be used, doorknobs, air letters, flannel nightgowns, cathedrals, nail varnish, jet planes, rose arbors and budgerigars; little mannerisms … any weird or warty or fine or despicable thing. Not to mention emotions, motivations—those rumbling, thunderous shapes.
The surprise comes in that last sentence. Yes, novels accommodate more lavish variety and miscellaneous detail, but aren’t emotions just as “relevant” to poems? Plath seems to mean that poets can’t depict emotion with the novel’s sprawling complexity; working on smaller canvases, they’re confined to fewer and proportionately broader brushstrokes.

Emotions, motivations, accessories, “little mannerisms”—these are the things characters are made of. One of Plath’s implicit fears is that poetry lacks what E. M. Forster called “round characters”: three-dimensional human presences. Where the novel gives people “leisure to grow and alter before our eyes,” poems restrict them to stagy lyric moments, discarding much of their everyday baggage in the process. Plath confesses with regret: “I have never put a toothbrush in a poem.”

In fact, these general distinctions have stark, specific relevance to Plath’s own work. In Ariel, emotions are not just broad but operatic. People are more than types; they’re mythic heroes and monsters. Her father is a Fascist; her mother is Medusa; Ted Hughes, her wayward husband and fellow poet, is a vampire (in “Daddy”); she herself is the avenging “Lady Lazarus.” It’s brilliant psychodrama, but it helps explain why Plath sought refuge in the novel. As the poems’ hellish atmosphere thickens, it kills off large tracts of normal human experience. Vampires don’t even use toothbrushes. Neither do resurrected spirits who “eat men like air.”

Hughes’s own portrayal of the marriage, the 1998 collection Birthday Letters, demonstrates Plath’s point from another angle. The best Hughes poems are as efficiently compact as a naturalist’s rucksack, but Hughes fills this late volume with so many “poetical toothbrushes”—so much descriptive trivia, labored psychologizing, and embroidery on Plath’s myths—that it bulges and drags. (Do we need to know the prices of both the “walnut desk” and the “Victorian chair” in the home he shared with Plath? Does having her stamp on her father’s coffin “like Rumpelstiltskin” add anything to the original image in “Daddy”?) For all his earnest effort, Hughes never evokes Plath as sharply as he’d described a hawk some forty years earlier: “There is no sophistry in my body, / My manners are tearing off heads.”

And so this great literary power couple—in life, a notoriously charismatic pair—leaves us feeling that their poems never quite captured each other. To view their marriage in three dimensions we need to consult Plath’s overflowing journals, or the endless biographies for which their fans continue to thirst. Partly this is due to their particular sensibilities and Plath’s early death. But I’m tempted, like Plath, to seek part of the reason in poetry itself.

•

There are always motives for discretion in writing about a lover. Sometimes, too, there’s a coy thrill in opening the curtain only halfway. When Robert Browning, at the end of Men and Women, drops his dramatis personae and addresses his poet-wife directly, he delights in the true selves they’ve concealed from the reading public:

God be thanked, the meanest of His creatures
Boasts two soul-sides, one to face the world with,
One to show a woman when he loves her.

… but think of you, Love!
This to you—yourself my moon of poets!
Ah, but that’s the world’s side, there’s the wonder,
Thus they see you, praise you, think they know you!
But coyness isn’t the exclusive province of poets, and discretion isn’t the heart of the Shakespearean promise. The promise is to “give life to thee.” Why, then, does poetry so rarely capture a lover in three dimensions?

Plath would blame space constraints (“so little room! So little time!”), but these can’t be the whole story. Average poem length aside, nothing prevents a poetry collection from covering as much ground as a novel.

A likelier culprit is the lyric genre, which has dominated English poetry at least since the Romantics. More than narrative, lyric encourages a fixed inward gaze. Critic Heather Dubrow sums up the usual divide in The Challenges of Orpheus: “lyric is static and narrative committed to change, lyric is internalized whereas narrative evokes an externally realized situation, lyric attempts to impede the forward thrust of narrative, and so on.” This chimes with Plath’s point about people “grow[ing] and alter[ing]” in novels but not in poems. Dubrow goes on to argue, however, that these distinctions are flimsy and that Modernism made a virtue of ignoring them.

If Joyce and Woolf could import lyric techniques wholesale into the novel, nothing prevents poets from accomplishing the reverse. And, in fact, recent decades have seen a minor vogue for “verse novels,” including such distinguished love-and-heartbreak sagas as Robert Lowell’s The Dolphin, Rita Dove’s Thomas and Beulah, Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red and The Beauty of the Husband, and Louise Glück’s Meadowlands. Each of these books offers an original fusion of narrative and lyric. Their other merits aside, those that venture farthest outside the lyric “I”—especially Thomas and Beulah and Autobiography—seem to me most successful in creating full-fledged characters. (Dove’s chronicle of a marriage, loosely based on her grandparents’, has been staged as an opera; Carson’s Geryon and Herakles won enough fans that she revived them in a sort of sequel.) By contrast, Lowell’s deeply personal Dolphin, which caused a scandal by quoting from his ex-wife’s letters, seems to chafe against the lyric’s limits in representing others’ perspectives. (I suspect Lowell shared Plath’s novelist envy: “The ideal modern form seems to be the novel,” he once mused.)

In any case, projects like these remain anomalies. If I started listing novels that plumb the depths of their authors’ marriages, I could fill this whole essay. Yet when you look at the great sequences of English love poetry, you find that they overwhelmingly portray wanting or missing, not shared experience. In other words, they thrive on isolation.

The “wanting” group, of which Sappho is the godmother, includes everything from Petrarch’s and Shakespeare’s sonnets to Dickinson’s lovelorn ballads to Yeats’s lifelong poetic courtship of Maud Gonne. The “missing” group includes breakup sequences (as in Ariel) and countless studies in grief: I think immediately of Thomas Hardy’s elegies for his wife Emma, Jack Gilbert’s for Michiko Nogami, Donald Hall’s for Jane Kenyon (Without, The Painted Bed), and Gjertrud Schnackenberg’s for Robert Nozick (Heavenly Questions). Karen Green’s recent Bough Down (a collection of prose poems centered on the suicide of her husband, David Foster Wallace) falls into the same category, as does that Victorian epic of sorrow, Tennyson’s In Memoriam A.H.H.

These disparate works share a tendency to foreground the poet’s emotions while lending the beloved—the distant or departed one—a tinge of unreality. David Foster Wallace’s famous claim that “every love story is a ghost story” seems to me even truer of poetry than fiction. Petrarch projects his fantasies onto a woman he barely knows. Dickinson’s “Master” goes virtually undescribed and remains unidentified (candidates include her sister-in-law, a minister, and God). Yeats’s love poems are one of the great literary labors ever devoted to a single person; they’re also a profound evasion. His Gonne is Helen of Troy, the spirit of Ireland, an embodiment of radicalism, or simply the Unattainable—but rarely the busy, idealistic woman we meet in her correspondence.

Elegiac sequences are even more apt to turn lovers into phantoms, conjured only through a few devastating details: Arthur Hallam’s “hand that can be clasp’d no more” (In Memoriam), Emma Hardy’s “original air-blue dress” (“The Voice”), the long black hair Gilbert finds in the dirt (“Married”). Hall weaves the voice of his late wife, Jane Kenyon, in with his own, but his most powerful tributes to her, such as “Kill the Day,” are terrifyingly lonely:

When she died, at first an outline of absence defined
the presence that disappeared. He yowled for the body
he could no longer reach out to touch in bed on waking.
He yowled for her silver thimble. He yowled when the dog
brought him a white slipper that smelled of her still.
In the second summer, her pheromones diminished.
The negative space of her body dwindled as she receded…
And yet these visceral traces, however “diminished,” announce what Hall’s insistent negations ironically affirm: the staying power of the departed.

In his prose “Appreciation” of Hall, Louis Begley says of the short, erotic poems mixed into the Kenyon cycle: “They are not about Kenyon, which magnifies their effect.” I see what he means, but I can’t quite agree with the first half of this, just as I’d hesitate to claim full-stop that the elegies are about her. So much of their impact derives from trapping us inside Hall’s mind, where Kenyon is both constant absence and constant presence. The love lyric is diabolically good at springing traps like these.

•

Temperament might be a factor: poetry is a solitary art, and its icons have inspired jokes about self-absorption since Wordsworth and the “egotistical sublime.” But even a “people poet” like Frank O’Hara—famed for gregariousness, loyalty, and warmth—turns love on the page into an oddly one-sided affair.

How much do we learn about the exalted “You” in “Having a Coke With You”? Comically little: he’s wearing an orange shirt, and he likes yogurt. As for his chemistry with O’Hara,

in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth
between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles
Like a tree breathing through its spectacles, this clears nothing up. So it goes with O’Hara: he fills his poems with friends, lovers, love interests—the roles blur together—yet he rarely enters their heads or describes them to the point where they upstage him. (“You” was the dancer Vincent Warren, who also inspired numerous other O’Hara love lyrics; but this fact tends to get lost in the poems’ giddy jumble of names, sights, and happenings.)

Look closely at O’Hara’s definition of “Personism,” the movement that started as a joke with Amiri Baraka but that is now beloved in its own right: “It does not have to do with personality or intimacy, far from it! ... It puts the poem squarely between the poet and the person, Lucky Pierre style, and the poem is correspondingly gratified. The poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages.” The poem gets the best of this three-way; it’s a close intermediary, not closeness itself.

Still, “intimacy” isn’t really banished: “persons” are vital to the action, and the fun. For O’Hara, just getting someone on the page is a joyous gesture, a benediction to be conferred far and wide. In that sense, most of his Lunch Poems are authentic love poems. And knowing how hard it is—how exposing—to write anything at all about our close attachments, we might bring some of his generosity to our judgments of love poetry in general. We might even turn Plath’s envy of novelists on its ear.

•

When you want or miss someone badly, the world contracts. Everything that isn’t the loved one irritates you with its irrelevance. The plot arc of your life coils into a vicious loop. Here is Hall again:

There is nothing so selfish as misery nor so boring,
and depression is devoted only to its own practice.
Mourning resembles melancholia precisely except 

that melancholy adds self-loathing to stuporous sorrow. …
The grim truth of these lines contains one saving glimmer of contradiction. Hall’s “selfish” misery has found an outlet: poetry. True, it’s a small and tightly focused outlet—but at this stage of grief, anything more would seem almost profane.

For writers struggling in these waters, even the handiest narrative tools—plot, setting, characterization—can feel like dead weight. The lyric allows us to grab them only as needed, or ditch them altogether. Along with relief there can be a purity to this unburdening.

In “Left Behind,” her fine essay on the poetry of grief, Joy Katz celebrates poems that “open up the isolating process of mourning” by “translat[ing] sorrow through poetic form.” She means primarily that such poems refuse false epiphanies and closure, but she also touches on the way they resist fully characterizing the dead. She praises, for example, a Mary Szybist poem in which a ghostly girl “hovers in the uncomfortable place between metaphor and reality.”

This description fits nearly all the lovers, living and dead, in the sequences I’ve mentioned. In another Anne Carson book, her critical study Eros the Bittersweet, she proposes that “Eros… folds the beloved object out of sight into a mystery, into a blind point where it can float known and unknown.” Death enforces a more extreme version of the same separation. The lyric reflects this—and reflects the mystery back onto the lyric “I.”

The sonnets may seem like the closest thing we have to unfiltered Shakespeare, but they’re maddeningly short on autobiographical specifics. No one has ever disproved the theory that they’re all an artifice, another masquerade to join his suite of plays. Similarly, Dickinson mythologizes herself along with the “You” she “cannot live with,” spinning a Calvinist, yet blasphemous narrative of savior and saved. Hall in “Kill the Day” distances himself into a case study, recording his psychological flux with unbearable precision while noting biography only in shorthand. In Section LXIX of In Memoriam, Tennyson dreams an allegorical angel who may or may not be the transformed Arthur Hallam:

… I found an angel of the night;

The voice was low, the look was bright;

He look’d upon my crown and smiled:



He reach’d the glory of a hand,

That seem’d to touch it into leaf:

The voice was not the voice of grief,

The words were hard to understand.
Notice that the visitation turns Tennyson himself into a crowned, prophetic witness.

Such guises might wear out over the course of a realist novel, but in the lyric they open a broad space for reader projection. (What lover has ever struggled to “identify with” a Shakespearean sonnet?) They also capture the self-estrangement of infatuation and grief—the sense that all of this is happening to someone else; that the dead will soon return or the desired accept us, relieving us of the burdens of role-playing. At the same time, they provide their authors a brief respite from the burden of the self. (Recall T. S. Eliot’s line in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” about art as an escape from “personality and emotions”—at least for those who “know what it means to want to escape from these things.”)

The resulting poems may not eliminate pain, but they can, in a real sense, transcend it. Despite my nagging curiosity, I’m satisfied in the end by the way Shakespeare’s sonnets anonymize their subjects—by the way they float free of any context at all. Scholars aren’t sure Shakespeare ever intended them to be published, let alone dedicated to a particular lover. Forged in the full heat of want, they became the most casual of monuments.
Originally Published: January 26, 2016

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/essay/238686

ESSAY ON POETIC THEORY
Expressive Language (1963)
BY AMIRI BARAKA




INTRODUCTION
Poet and political activist Amiri Baraka first published as LeRoi Jones in the 1950s as a member of the Beat poetry movement. Baraka’s 1959 visit to Cuba, where he encountered a group of politically active writers, and his involvement in the burgeoning civil rights movement led him to move to Harlem in the 1960s, where he became a black nationalist and founded the Black Arts Movement.

Baraka’s essay “Expressive Language” first appeared in Kulchur in the winter of 1963, and was published in his collection Home: Social Essays (1966). The book grounds Baraka’s creative work in a commitment to defining and promoting a black aesthetic, which critic Houston Baker defines as “a distinctive code for the creation and evaluation of black art.” Asserting that “words’ meanings, but also the rhythm and syntax that frame and propel their concatenation, seek their culture as the final reference for what they are describing of the world,” Baraka argues that the artist must use the language and semantics unique to his culture to create his art, and that the work should also be understood within the context of that culture.

While Baraka’s political stance has shifted over the years, he has consistently focused on the spoken word rather than the written page, and his interest in the nuances of sound and pronunciation can be heard in this essay. Baraka’s work has variously found its form in poetry, fiction, essay, drama, music criticism, and performance. The volume in which this essay appeared marks the beginning of the controversy that would surround his politically driven, uncompromising work in the decades to come.

Speech is the effective form of a culture. Any shape or cluster of human history still apparent in the conscious and unconscious habit of groups of people is what I mean by culture. All culture is necessarily profound. The very fact of its longevity, of its being what it is, culture, the epic memory of practical tradition, means that it is profound. But the inherent profundity of culture does not necessarily mean that its uses (and they are as various as the human condition) will be profound. German culture is profound. Generically. Its uses, however, are specific, as are all uses . . . of ideas, inventions, products of nature. And specificity, as a right and passion of human life, breeds what it breeds as a result of context.

Context, in this instance, is most dramatically social. And the social, though it must be rooted, as are all evidences of existence, in culture, depends for its impetus for the most part on a multiplicity of influences. Other cultures, for instance. Perhaps, and this is a common occurrence, the reaction or interreaction of one culture on another can produce a social context that will extend or influence any culture in many strange directions.

Social also means economic, as any reader of nineteenth-century European philosophy will understand. The economic is part of the social—and in our time much more so than what we have known as the spiritual or metaphysical, because the most valuable canons of power have either been reduced or traduced into stricter economic terms. That is, there has been a shift in the actual meaning of the world since Dante lived. As if Brooks Adams were right. Money does not mean the same thing to me it must mean to a rich man. I cannot, right now, think of one meaning to name. This is not so simple to understand. Even as a simple term of the English language, money does not possess the same meanings for the rich man as it does for me, a lower-middle-class American, albeit of laughably “aristocratic” pretensions. What possibly can “money” mean to a poor man? And I am not talking now about those courageous products of our permissive society who walk knowledgeably into “poverty” as they would into a public toilet. I mean, The Poor.

I look in my pocket; I have seventy cents. Possibly I can buy a beer. A quart of ale, specifically. Then I will have twenty cents with which to annoy and seduce my fingers when they wearily search for gainful employment. I have no idea at this moment what that seventy cents will mean to my neighbor around the corner, a poor Puerto Rican man I have seen hopefully watching my plastic garbage can. But I am certain it cannot mean the same thing. Say to David Rockefeller, “I have money,” and he will think you mean something entirely different. That is, if you also dress the part. He would not for a moment think, “Seventy cents.” But then neither would many New York painters.

Speech, the way one describes the natural proposition of being alive, is much more crucial than even most artists realize. Semantic philosophers are certainly correct in their emphasis on the final dictation of words over their users. But they often neglect to point out that, after all, it is the actual importance, power, of the words that remains so finally crucial. Words have users, but as well, users have words. And it is the users that establish the world’s realities. Realities being those fantasies that control your immediate span of life. Usually they are not your own fantasies, i.e., they belong to governments, traditions, etc., which, it must be clear by now, can make for conflict with the singular human life all ways. The fantasy of America might hurt you, but it is what should be meant when one talks of “reality.” Not only the things you can touch or see, but the things that make such touching or seeing “normal.” Then words, like their users, have a hegemony. Socially—which is final, right now. If you are some kind of artist, you naturally might think this is not so. There is the future. But immortality is a kind of drug, I think—one that leads to happiness at the thought of death. Myself, I would rather live forever . . . just to make sure.

The social hegemony, one’s position in society, enforces more specifically one’s terms (even the vulgar have “pull”). Even to the mode of speech. But also it makes these terms an available explanation of any social hierarchy, so that the words themselves become, even informally, laws. And of course they are usually very quickly stitched together to make formal statutes only fools or the faithfully intrepid would dare to question beyond immediate necessity.

The culture of the powerful is very infectious for the sophisticated, and strongly addictive. To be any kind of “success” one must be fluent in this culture. Know the words of the users, the semantic rituals of power. This is a way into wherever it is you are not now, but wish, very desperately, to get into.

Even speech then signals a fluency in this culture. A knowledge at least. “He’s an educated man,” is the barest acknowledgment of such fluency . . . in any time. “He’s hip,” my friends might say. They connote a similar entrance.

And it is certainly the meanings of words that are most important, even if they are no longer consciously acknowledged, but merely, by their use, trip a familiar lever of social accord. To recreate instantly the understood hierarchy of social, and by doing that, cultural, importance. And cultures are thought by most people in the world to do their business merely by being hierarchies. Certainly this is true in the West, in as simple a manifestation as Xenophobia, the naïve bridegroom of anti-human feeling, or in economic terms, Colonialism. For instance, when the first Africans were brought into the New World, it was thought that it was all right for them to be slaves because “they were heathens.” It is a perfectly logical assumption.

And it follows, of course, that slavery would have been an even stranger phenomenon had the Africans spoken English when they first got here. It would have complicated things. Very soon after the first generations of Afro-Americans mastered this language, they invented white people called Abolitionists.

Words’ meanings, but also the rhythm and syntax that frame and propel their concatenation, seek their culture as the final reference for what they are describing of the world. An A flat played twice on the same saxophone by two different men does not have to sound the same. If these men have different ideas of what they want this note to do, the note will not sound the same. Culture is the form, the overall structure of organized thought (as well as emotion and spiritual pretension). There are many cultures. Many ways of organizing thought, or having thought organized. That is, the form of thought’s passage through the world will take on as many diverse shapes as there are diverse groups of travelers. Environment is one organizer of groups, at any level of its meaning. People who live in Newark, New Jersey, are organized, for whatever purpose, as Newarkers. It begins that simply. Another manifestation, at a slightly more complex level, can be the fact that blues singers from the Midwest sing through their noses. There is an explanation past the geographical, but that’s the idea in tabloid. And singing through the nose does propose that the definition of singing be altered . . . even if ever so slightly. (At this point where someone’s definitions must be changed, we are flitting around at the outskirts of the old city of Aesthetics. A solemn ghost town. Though some of the bones of reason can still be gathered there.)

But we still need definitions, even if there already are many. The dullest men are always satisfied that a dictionary lists everything in the world. They don’t care that you may find out something extra, which one day might even be valuable to them. Of course, by that time it might even be in the dictionary, or at least they’d hope so, if you asked them directly.

But for every item in the world, there are a multiplicity of definitions that fit. And every word we use could mean something else. And at the same time. The culture fixes the use, and usage. And in “pluralistic” America, one should always listen very closely when he is being talked to. The speaker might mean something completely different from what we think we’re hearing. “Where is your pot?’’

I heard an old Negro street singer last week, Reverend Pearly Brown, singing, “God don’t never change!” This is a precise thing he is singing. He does not mean “God does not ever change!” He means “God don’t never change!” The difference, and I said it was crucial, is in the final human reference . . . the form of passage through the world. A man who is rich and famous who sings, “God don’t never change,” is confirming his hegemony and good fortune . . . or merely calling the bank. A blind hopeless black American is saying something very different. He is telling you about the extraordinary order of the world. But he is not telling you about his “fate.” Fate is a luxury available only to those fortunate citizens with alternatives. The view from the top of the hill is not the same as that from the bottom of the hill. Nor are most viewers at either end of the hill, even certain that, in fact, there is any other place from which to look. Looking down usually eliminates the possibility of understanding what it must be like to look up. Or try to imagine yourself as not existing. It is difficult, but poets and politicians try every other day.

Being told to “speak proper,” meaning that you become fluent with the jargon of power, is also a part of not “speaking proper.” That is, the culture which desperately understands that it does not “speak proper,” or is not fluent with the terms of social strength, also understands somewhere that its desire to gain such fluency is done at a terrifying risk. The bourgeois Negro accepts such risk as profit. But does close-ter (in the context of “jes a close-ter, walk withee”) mean the same thing as closer? Close-ter, in the term of its user is, believe me, exact. It means a quality of existence, of actual physical disposition perhaps . . . in its manifestation as a tone and rhythm by which people live, most often in response to common modes of thought best enforced by some factor of environmental emotion that is exact and specific. Even the picture it summons is different, and certainly the “Thee” that is used to connect the implied “Me” with, is different. The God of the damned cannot know the God of the damner, that is, cannot know he is God. As no Blues person can really believe emotionally in Pascal’s God, or Wittgenstein’s question, “Can the concept of God exist in a perfectly logical language?” Answer: “God don’t never change.”

Communication is only important because it is the broadest root of education. And all cultures communicate exactly what they have, a powerful motley of experience.

Copyright should read: Amiri Baraka, "Expressive Language" from Home: Social Essays, published by William Morrow & Company, Inc. Copyright © 1963 by Amiri Baraka. Reprinted by permission of Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc.


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Being told to “speak proper,” meaning that you become fluent with the jargon of power, is also a part of not “speaking proper.” That is, the culture which desperately understands that it does not “speak proper,” or is not fluent with the terms of social strength, also understands somewhere that its desire to gain such fluency is done at a terrifying risk. The bourgeois Negro accepts such risk as profit. But does close-ter (in the context of “jes a close-ter, walk withee”) mean the same thing as closer? Close-ter, in the term of its user is, believe me, exact. It means a quality of existence, of actual physical disposition perhaps . . . in its manifestation as a tone and rhythm by which people live, most often in response to common modes of thought best enforced by some factor of environmental emotion that is exact and specific.

Some gems in this article overall . Not sure I can buy the message as presented in that , somebody will always have the power, thusly the many will always be under the thumb of that minority's power regardless of the race/color of the power holder..

And when they resent what great and benevolent masters they would be- they are lying as we all are only human!!!!!
Look around the world and add in its past history to that equation, then try to seriously tell me that another race would be more benevolent than the white race.
If you do, then methinks you lack a proper and wise understanding of what being human entails..

Rest of the essay about words, speech, writing , rhyme and poetry etc. , hits high marks
and is informative. -Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/251642

PROSE FROM POETRY MAGAZINE
All the Animals in My Poems Go into the Ark
Jon Silkin’s Complete Poems, R.F. Langley’s Complete Poems, and Charlie Louth and Patrick McGuinness’s A C.H. Sisson Reader.

BY VIDYAN RAVINTHIRAN
Complete Poems, by Jon Silkin.

Carcanet. £29.99.

Complete Poems, by R.F. Langley.

Carcanet. £12.99.

A C.H. Sisson Reader, edited by Charlie Louth and Patrick McGuinness.

Carcanet. £19.95.

As founding editor of Stand Magazine — which, associated with the University of Leeds, still represents an important Northern contribution to the English poetry and short prose scene — Jon Silkin used to scribble his own verse on the back of submitted poems. Those, that is, whose authors failed to include the all-important Stamped Addressed Envelope. (The SAE has always been, I suppose, a gesture of status-confirming humility — you provide the editor with all necessary postage, then your spurned works return in an envelope on which you’ve written your own name, almost as if you’ve rejected yourself; nowadays, of course, there’s often a website telling you “How to Submit.”) The poems Silkin wrote over others’ were biblically-tinged in cadence and seriousness; left-wing-political; intrigued by man’s relationship to nature, and, not quite the same thing, man as an instance of nature. Here is “Orion and the Spiders,” one of “Three Poems to Do with Healing,” from a posthumous collection he wished to entitle Making a Republic:

We hunt the squealing mouse.
But we gasp at the ocelot, mostly she’s grey, tinged with fawn
in naked ovals, her lovely glistening polar underside.
Who would fire into her belly? Who?
Silkin’s is nature red in tooth and claw, but also hopefully glimpsed as an egalitarian utopia. (The influence of D.H. Lawrence is evident here — “We foul / The stones we have sprung from / That we share this modest space with, / Brutishly refined / In plucked skirts, and stiff pants” — as is the Quaker folk-painter Edward Hicks, whose Peaceable Kingdom provided a book title and an idea to live and write by; Jon Glover and Kathryn Jenner’s introduction suggests an ecopoet ahead of his time.) Born in London in 1930, and of Lithuanian Jewish stock, Silkin wrote a monograph on the Jewish WWI poet Isaac Rosenberg, and a famously microscopic close reading, requoted at length by Christopher Ricks, of Geoffrey Hill’s “September Song,” that acknowledged masterpiece — if too clever-clever, too Silkin-anticipating? — of Holocaust elegy. So it’s not surprising that he was 
troubled by the influence of T.S. Eliot on his own work. (“Mister Eliot was a Jew-hater,” says the speaker of “A woman from Giannedes,” previously unpublished.) Our political beliefs, our deeply held convictions about who we are, don’t always coincide with the opinions of those who creatively inspire us.

But to return to how Silkin wrote, rather than what, for I realize the American reader might be under the impression that he could only write all over other people’s poems: a demented fetishist driven to repeat within the creative act the literary critic’s passive-aggressive lunge for dominance. In fact, he was an omnicompositionalist who, the introduction tells us, “wrote everywhere,” a double-sided phrase that links Silkin’s global travels with his habit of writing on all possible surfaces, envelopes and letters as well as other people’s poems. On page lxxxv (!) of Glover and Jenner’s heroically and at times stiflingly meticulous introduction, we find this explanation:

Even in lengthy poems with a background (or foreground) story 
he couldn’t resist letting language “just happen.” The temptation to “slow down,” to let interpenetrating metaphors and similes do what they want, was something he either enjoyed successfully or (depending on the reader’s point of view) failed to control. Perhaps he did not appreciate that intense image-making could itself tell stories and explore action.

“Enjoyed successfully” nicely captures how, experimenting with language, the ambitious poet may also be indulging himself. Yet this introduction too often replaces the literary fact (the poems on the page; their style and value) with the literary life. Sure, for Silkin, “writing and publishing were not an adjunct to a ‘normal’ life; they were life” — and it’s important, if dispiriting, to understand how networks contribute to a poet’s reputation. But Glover and Jenner seem to argue at points that because Silkin always was writing, because he did so much as an editor, and published his verse with such frequency in so many places (the magazine publications preceding each collection are exhaustively listed), and knew so many people, especially when he broke into America — that, because of all this, he must be a major poet. Swathes of unpublished work are collected here, with alternative versions of poems, and an extensive bibliography of Silkin’s published articles. (Of the previously unpublished poems, my favorites are “From the inside of the wilderness,” “Going On,” a smack at Thom Gunn, and “Choosing” — the poem on page 219; there is another with the same title on page 822 — which gives both the discrete and the processual its due; acknowledges in the erotic the presence of cognition; and discovers quickly something marvelous within the word “completely”: “ ‘Love’ I said / ‘Is ... ’ You completely / Leaned forward, and kissed me / As if you were naked.”)

A massively impressive editorial achievement, is this nine-hundred-page tome the best way to experience Silkin as a poet? A poet who wrote too many poems, and also, perhaps, wrote his poems too much; an accretive process, confirmed and extended by the editors — I certainly don’t approve of the disfiguring of poems on the page with endnote markers. The image that suggests itself is an all-inclusive ark, because of the first poem, or “Prologue,” of Silkin’s true debut, The Peaceable Kingdom:

All the animals in my poems go into the ark
The human beings walk in the great dark
The bad dark and the good dark. They walk
Shivering under the small lamp light
And the road has two ways to go and the humans none.
The other two stanzas also begin with “the animals in my poems go into the ark.” Repetition is important to Silkin (I have a soft spot for his lines about “love” in which that ineffectual ultimate word bumpily 
and beautifully repeats, heading nowhere) and is key to his curious mixture of active urging of language and passive wondering at its restlessness. The poet as both editor and anti-editor of himself — Silkin treating Silkin both as he treats others (for example, those hapless contributors to Stand) and also differently, as someone special. A refrain, or a repeated word like dark — Milton’s Samson Agonistes lurks behind this seeming nursery rhyme — might parse either as a 
restatement of the poet’s ordering power or an abdication of it. The words, stripped, apparently, of authorial control, brilliantly or hollowly self-replicate.

The Peaceable Kingdom also features Silkin’s most famous poem, “Death of a Son” — a more simply understandable and touching elegy, the rhyming epigraph tells us, for a child “who died in a mental hospital aged one.” The rhyme of title and epigraph, “son” and “one,” is the first intimation this is no straightforwardly anecdotal poem, even though the awful incident can be retrieved from its texture without too much trouble:

Something has ceased to come along with me.
Something like a person: something very like one.
And there was no nobility in it
Or anything like that.
A scornful start. In fact this could function as a whole poem, a statement of elegiac seriousness akin to Hill’s. The icily impersonal 
pronoun “it” — as if the child who never became a person were turned, cruelly, into a thing — is reminiscent of Marianne Moore’s shortened version of “Poetry”: “I, too, dislike it.” Yet she does continue: “Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in it, after all, a place for the genuine.” And Silkin’s poem also goes forth, writing itself onward, refusing to be laconically realist and instead allowing, as elsewhere, the language to do its own thing, to live.

The form is repeated throughout his first collection — a diamond-shaped four-line stanza, which Silkin breaks with at the very end:

He turned over on his side with his one year
Red as a wound
He turned over as if he could be sorry for this
And out of his eyes two great tears rolled, like stones,
and he died.

The repetition is more than a repetition of Eliot’s Ash Wednesday — 
“Because I do not hope to turn again / Because I do not hope / Because I do not hope to turn” — and the refusal to cauterize into fact a 
complex experience also recalls Rosenberg, in whom “the language-inducing process” (this is Silkin in Out of Battle, his monograph on WWI poets) understands the “full and proper expression” of an idea as inseparable from “its sensuous ramification — the poetry itself.”

It isn’t right to judge a poet simply by their popular, well-known, even radio-friendly verse. But Silkin wrote so much that peters out in try-hard scrimmage; he stage-manages, perversely amplifies. His voyeurism in the face of linguistic drift might read as self-regarding, for could authentic self-suspicion put forth so unendingly? The poem “A self-directing psalm” compares to “an aphid that cannot let itself be destroyed” the light in a summer night’s sky, which is also “unlike the burned prisoners in a camp,” and then the vertiginous phrase “like, and not like” takes us to “the journey of Abraham with Isaac.” A rich nexus, then, in Rosenberg’s vein. But though “Death of a Son” was right to go on, press through, continuance isn’t always heroic. Silkin may begin compellingly: “Many liberals don’t just / Make love, they first ask each other.” But this poem, “Respectabilities” — from The Re-ordering of the Stones, which I see I’ve dog-eared less than any other section of this book, and is crammed with these dull titles — just doesn’t know when, or how, to stop. “All men are treated / With such perception as stones / Get into subjection to / Their shaper”: the judged thrill of each line-ending provides the poet with a sufficing hit, no doubt, of electrifying clarification the reader cannot share.

I believe the problem lies precisely with Silkin’s omnicompetence, his facility, his possession of both an elaborative and compressive gift. This second often recalls Hill in its insistence on historical time and the civic attentiveness of the poet capable of honed micro-miracles of attention. Of Jews taken by train through the snow to concentration camps: “Some vomit, softly, in lumps, falling past the edge / of a wagon. Prayers made. None bidding us safe conduct. / In a woman’s back / the butt’s thud.” Ghastly facts, shaped: “some” hesitates harshly between describing vomit or (dehumanized) people; there is the little rhythmic shift in that line, and the reversed syntax at the end. “Bruised” reveals the influence, on the “lapidary poems” of The Psalms with Their Spoils, of another Northern poet, Basil Bunting, whose clenched and tender sadism deepens wonderfully here:

Lapidary words: for it is hard
to chisel stone; and to detain
the reader at the tomb
softened by moss, and the lichen’s bruised studs
of gold, is not seemly.

You, too, would not want
to take from the wanderer
grazing the mild squares of London
his time you now bear.

There’s no more; the lichen’s nail innocently
feeds its point
into the child’s burying place.
— Lapidary Words
“The lichen’s nail” is both tender moss and nature’s chisel. A tomb is softened, ruralized, its hard truth disguised by its verdure; the final stanza complicates a dual vision of the lichen as both naive growth and long-standing destroyer. How strange it is to read this poem, with its statement about the limited attention of the reader, and how it mustn’t be abused, alongside Silkin’s more interminable verse!



•


R.F. Langley wrote and published sparingly. A mystique attaches to poets of this kind — really, they are super-poets, repeating and reinforcing on a career level the standard value-logic of lyric verse: drastically fewer words than in any other literary form, but each, for that reason, precious. (And they seem so uncareerist — Langley taught English and art history to schoolchildren before retiring to the Suffolk countryside — so unforcing of their rare lovely bursts of inspiration; they have grown up, lived well, in a wider world.) Educated at Cambridge, Langley is linked with the school of poetry named for that university, but while his verse does move in unobvious ways, fusing wittily (modern complexities are assumed) mysteriously different registers, there remains the feeling of — he differs here from his friend J.H. Prynne, who read at his memorial service — an individual mind making sense of its surroundings.

That said, simple sense can’t always be made. A reductive immediacy is complicated, perception combining with, flooded by, 
intellection; Jeremy Noel-Tod, the editor of this wonderful Complete Poems, has argued persuasively that they “shrink interestingly from the single, arrogating point of view, the self-possessed lyric ‘I’. You, I, he, she, we, it are liable to take each other’s place without warning.” Langley’s sentences fragment, they are crisp, multifarious, hastened by internal rhymes, sometimes wordplay:

The warm sun in some June. This June.
Both Junes. Take now and make a then.
A room. A roomy workshop. Elderflowers.
Forget the scent. Here is a carpenter,
singing. It is a hymn.
— From The Ecstasy Inventories
A wineglass of water on
the windowsill where it will
catch the light. Now be quiet
while I think. And groan. And blink.
— From Still Life with Wineglass
The beetle runs into the future. He takes
to his heels in an action so frantic its
flicker seems to possess the slowness of deep
water. He has been green. He will be so yet.
— From Blues for Titania
The final quotation enlarges the phrasing of Langley’s introductory “Note,” first published in 1994, where running becomes a metaphor less for conscious composition than for the eerie volition of poems themselves: “Juan Fernandez,” he says, “ran ahead of me well, feeling fit, keeping me surprised.... I don’t write many poems, so each one has to be able to keep running, faster than I can, for as long as possible.” The slow flicker of that weightily frantic beetle also evokes Langley’s style, which has a way of sounding at once both urgent and curiously unurgent. A breathy swiftness of utterance — or is this 
silent and self-directed speech, a rapid mental flusker? — doesn’t prevent more sculptured effects. The poet frames, underlines, points things out.

Given Langley’s profession I do catch the teacher’s accent in these lines, though the bad word “didactic” isn’t relevant, not in the least. 
I also wonder how quickly, and with what emphasis, he should be read. The shaping is undeniable, as a duration is lifted out of the tingling instant and allowed to expand:

The wineglass stands fast in a
gale of sunlight, where there is
one undamaged thistle seed
caught on its rim, moving its
long filaments through blue to
orange, slowly exploring
the glorious furniture.
— From Still Life with Wineglass
“Where” and “its” do much of the work here; these are subtle ligatures, intimate and unobtrusive. Perception is renovated and a field of force — Langley’s own phrase, which I quote later — is acknowledged. Here the sentence elongates under scrutiny and the recognitions 
of the poet’s wonderfully attentive ear. (Of its umpteen delicacies I would pick out the interaction of “stands fast” and “thistle,” which ever so gently quashes that sandwiching st sound; also the lingering Keatsian richness of “caught,” “long,” “orange,” “exploring,” and “glorious.”)

In this “Still Life” the interest in color is indeed painterly, and those “filaments” turn the thistle seed into a paintbrush moving along the palette or canvas. (These lines also recall Frank O’Hara’s “Why I Am Not a Painter,” which reaches a crescendo with the word “orange,” and has the same lightly lineated look on the page.) As Langley writes in his aforementioned note, “every brushstroke changes the picture. If it’s crimson it intensifies all the greens and there’s the new problem in how to respond to that.” In discussing him as both an experimentally vagarious and an immediately exciting poet, the parallel that suggests itself is with Howard Hodgkin, whose paintings seem abstract but, he insists, are actually representational — one should lift, as out of a magic-eye poster, the emotional situation of two lovers in embrace out of swoops of luscious color.

Langley extends a strand of pictorial writing (he’s particularly fond of the word, and color tone, “cream”) that develops out of the poet’s journal, expresses a fascination with the overlap of casual prose with verse artistry, and is turned into publishable set-pieces by John Ruskin before it marvelously matures in the neglected notebooks of that queasily and deliciously Victorian-modern genius, Gerard Manley Hopkins. Langley’s own Journals were published in 2006 by Shearsman, and extracts previously appeared in PN Review; these are private writings, “necessarily impromptu,” says Langley, which have yet reached an audience through an intelligently understanding magazine, and are pitched — like Hopkins’s supposedly private jottings — at an understanding reader. In his preface, Langley mentions,

a series of journals that I have been keeping since the 1970s. During the years they cover my parents have died, I have been divorced and remarried, our two children have been born and have grown up, found jobs, left home.

Yet none of this is mentioned in the journals, which “are not the sort of journals that directly confront such things.” So do they indirectly confront them, in their energized minute descriptions of birds, beasts, and flowers, so close to those of his verse, but also apprehending of the propensities and potentialities of prose? In August 1992: “So long since I wrote. A year. Who cares? What then? Little. Not really any better. No change after the journeying.” Yet elsewhere those short sentences are, as in the verse, molecular wonders — “small flints crunch”; “the bent leaves are a sight I see”; “small flies tickle” — alert, like Ruskin and Hopkins, to the question of how, in a modern disenchanted universe, to “string all this together.” December 25, 1970: “No sound of the snow except when you stand by bits of the hedge where oak leaves are thick, golden fawn, dry as chapattis, and broken like them, rather than torn, at their edges.”

Here the oak, that most English of trees, is compared to an Indian flatbread — an ingenious and even cosmopolitan connection. As Homa Khaleeli writes in The Guardian, although Indian restaurants in England “multiplied in the 1950s and 60s to feed the newly arrived south Asian factory workers, their boom time only begun in the 70s, when they adapted their menus for a working-class, white clientele.” So the journal observation is very much of its moment; and if I’ve lingered overlong on a tiny detail — race isn’t one of Langley’s subjects — it’s because there does seem to be a cultural idea behind his community of particular details, sometimes harshly separate, and vanishing, but elsewhere unified. Langley also takes, I think, not only from nursery rhyme but also from Hopkins, his everyman “Jack,” who first appears as “Man Jack” in Twelve Poems and later in a verse-sequence from the Collected Poems: “Jack built himself a house to hide in and / take stock”; “Jack meets / me and we go to see what we must do”; “There’s Jack. / A figure I imagine / I can see far off in a / dark library.” And in “Tom Thumb”:

We should accept the obvious facts of physics.
The world is made entirely of particles in
fields of force. Of course. Tell it to Jack. Except it
doesn’t seem to be enough tonight. Not because
he’s had his supper and the upper regions are
cerulean, as they have been each evening
since the rain.
This perspective isn’t anti-scientific, but it does insist on the more than material, on a sense of universal being evasive of empirical explanation. “Tell it to Jack” is interesting, because the more clearly impatient “Tell that to Jack” — where Jack would represent the stalwart resister of such unspiritual blockheadedness — is the expected phrase. “It,” which repeats, shows Langley playing with pronouns again, and it occurs to me (returning here to Noel-Tod’s remark, that in his poetry “You, I, he, she, we, it are liable to take each other’s place without warning”) that not just an atomic universe but an atomized society is apprehended with sensitivity in his verse.

Langley’s style (those short sentences; the darting doubt; recognition of beauty; the desire, as he puts it in “Tom Thumb,” to “stop taking stock, and listen”) would, then, be a style of cultural enquiry, into how disparate minds could possibly meet, or at least communicate. This is why, in that poem, Jack is said to have

involved himself in how
the gnats above the chimney shared their worrying
together, working out their troubles in a crowd.
They must have done that every summer, all my life. 
Jack says he never saw them doing it till now.
Langley searches for, and postulates, uncommon experiences that may yet be held in common: “We leave unachieved in the / summer dusk. There was no / need for you rather than me”; “It is a common experience to come upon a / pale, glittering house set far back across / a meadow. It is certainly inside you.” “The Gorgoneion,” named for a protective and horrifying pendant with a gorgon’s head on it, is rightly compared by Noel-Tod with Larkin’s “Aubade.” Yet Larkin describes of the pre-dawn hours a state of total isolation from both other people and the religious myths that once enlivened and made life meaningful. He speaks out of an Englishness entirely sure of the hard bare facts of the matter denied by the weak, and skeptical of the suggestion that life among others could evince its own joyousness. Langley begins in the same darkness, but unlike Larkin he doesn’t speak on behalf of a presumed “we,” a cultural grouping that apparently shares the poet’s opinions, and yet with whom he could never belong. He moves, instead, uncertain yet responsive, from “you” to “someone”:

Once more the menace of the small
hours and of coming to light and of
each sharper complication. There was
a loosening which let much neglected
detail out of the dark. You can’t look
away once it’s started to move. This.
Must. And so must this. In bitter little
frills and hitches. About in a suspicious
twiddle are the tips of someone’s ten
fingers which could, sometime, touch
mine.
Larkin’s poem is surer and for that reason the more spectacular. It knows what it knows. “I know / the sort of thing,” says Langley, less convincingly, and more likeably. His isolato acknowledges, yet is skeptical of, his suffering. (Does a differently recognizable, unmelodramatic English voice lurk within these lines, saying tersely: “Mustn’t complain”?) The poem cannot utterly embrace disaster given its saving recognition of the presence, the similitude in pain, of others: a both threatening and redemptive “touch.” It ends: “a hand is laid down and / another turns itself upward to be clasped.”


•


To say that C.H. Sisson is an “unfashionable” poet, as Charlie Louth and Patrick McGuinness do several times in their introduction to the new Reader, is to refuse the vulgar media criterion of, God help us, “relatability” — though the lucid back note does say that, published on the centenary of his birth, this book restores to us a writer who “speaks with clarity to the twenty-first century reader’s expectations and discontents.” Sisson is both different to us, then, and the same. A modernist conservative (“Toryism as defined by Johnson,” he writes, “has almost always been a doctrine of opposition, and so it will 
remain”) whose politics, in shrewdly sculpted essays on not just verse but culture more broadly, reveals a — the editors again — “specifically English suspicion of the grand scheme, the total plan, a willingness to work with what is fallen and imperfect.”

Reading the prose collected here alongside the verse, I found 
myself repeatedly underlining effects of style, where patrician tonalities are renewed by a constant, conscious liveliness — Sisson remarks the priority of “rhythm” in verse, and understands its value in prose, too. On the style of Wyndham Lewis, whose work “is so intensely patterned that, starting from almost any sentence chosen at random, one could start an explanation which would not stop short of the completed oeuvre”:

Not unrelated to the difficulties of using speech as the medium of political philosophy are the difficulties arising from those aspects of Lewis’s writing which are called his personality. Not even Ben Jonson himself emitted a more obsessive penumbra. One is the presence of mannerisms, not unrelated to art, apparently as compulsive as the habit a woman might have of screwing 
up her handkerchief, or a swallow has of building, repeatedly, a certain sort of nest.

I’m afraid this is one of those hackneyed moments where the critic, me, says of the poet-critic writing of another — a skein of commentary tough to acknowledge without wincing — that he may as well be talking about himself. (Perhaps style is the outward struggle of our egotism, a hope that, in talking of ourselves, we may say with surety real things of others, too.) In Sisson’s prose the mannerisms we might designate reductively, for the moment, “middle-class English,” establish a tonal music: it reminds me of reading through and being ravished by the nature descriptions of Hopkins, wishing absent from his journals words like “delightfully,” but coming to accept these Victorian social tics as inextricable features of his prose fabric, no less than his identity. The equivalents in Sisson may even be load-bearing.

The first sentence quoted is instantly donnish: “not unrelated to” has, like the querying of the label “personality,” its air of fussy specification — not for Sisson, the inadvertence or vulgarity of direct statement. Yet there follows the contrarily forthright assumption that in discussing Lewis’s prose along these lines, Ben Jonson is the benchmark; “himself,” which bridges unobtrusively the style and the man; and that self-consciously relished, and even overwritten close: does “obsessive” really belong, there, before “penumbra”? Stymied by Sisson’s tortuousness, in my first reading of this passage I mistook the next clause for “One is in the presence of.” In the presence of whom, I wondered — royalty? No one uses “one” quite like Sisson, and he appeared here to insist on proper respect before a figure of authority, on reading as an activation of exquisite proprieties. But I had in fact supplied — reading with the skimming eye, alas, not the hearing ear — the missing word in, which he didn’t write.

“One” actually refers back to the “difficulties” arisen from “aspects of Lewis’s writing.” I missed this because of the intervening sentence about Jonson, for Sisson’s gliding spoken drift doesn’t pause to place that aside in parentheses. “Mannerisms” — though his own style makes the case for them — is possibly pejorative, so there’s need of arch nuance: “not unrelated to art.” “Apparently” is a social word, a tic of speech, which masks a depth/surface judgment about the value of Lewis’s writing, and “compulsive” (pejorative again) is gradually redeemed, if not by the woman screwing up her handkerchief, then by the swallow “building, repeatedly” (another comma-ruffle!) its true nest. If there is a complexity to Sisson’s politics, so difficult to pin down, because of its coarse coding today but also his own elusiveness, it must inhere in, inhabit, his curated style.

At least this is what I would like to believe, for if one tots up more simply the grumpy propositions a less sympathetic figure emerges. I’ve starred with my pencil Sisson’s various objections: to our “age,” in which “a certain sloppiness goes into the general conception of art, and nowhere more than in Anglo-Saxondom,” and “fashions now well up from the lower orders, happily supplied with money to indulge their fancy in a world of mass-produced gew-gaws”; to “that rubbish of imaginary rights which are conceived of as a sort of 
metaphysical property of each individual”; and all in all “the great obligatory truths of the left, which all decent people” — you can hear the sneer — “take without choking: put compendiously, a belief in the harmony of democracy, large-scale organization, and individual self-expression.” He confronts “the idiotic dogmatist of the permissive,” thinks “the word ‘democracy’ is now so full of air that it is about to burst,” and claims that the “ease of technology will, in any case, in the end produce a race of diminishing consciousness, for whom the only persuasion is by force.” He describes Edward Thomas’s wife and children, with a typically coat-trailing remark, as among the “natural objects” that tutored him, and there is an essay here praising the work of Montgomery Belgion, the anti-Semitic essayist whose opinions, published in The Criterion, have damaged the reputation of T.S. Eliot and were indeed taken by some commentators for those of Eliot himself. You don’t want to believe Sisson is a crypto-fascist — “this brand of conservative cultural politics ... does not tarry with the radical right,” insist Louth and McGuinness — but in this case he doesn’t do himself any favors.

He is also, however, anti-economistic, a now attractive position: an excerpt from The Case of Walter Bagehot makes the case against the “shadow republic” of high finance. It’s unsurprising that previously, yes, “unfashionable” writers like Sisson and F.R. Leavis now seem possible spokespeople: the humanities feel the need of self-defense, and imagination-confounding wealth disparities reveal a society drastically in need of restructuring. We want something else, something better, but seem to have pledged ourselves, and those who theorize on behalf of culture, quality, and, in short, art — who have 
defended the sensibility of, often, an unhappy few against the bean-counters and their death of a thousand cuts — tend to arrive with a good deal of reactionary baggage in tow. For if you don’t believe in capital, what form of (intangible, non-empirical, snobby) currency do you endorse? Fine, Sisson is reactionary, but can we, intent on preserving, through our attentions to literature, the radical thought of past ages, be so sure that the spirit of the age, iPhone in hand, doesn’t understand us, too, as culturally conservative?

Many who, in a more rational system,
Would be thought mad if they behaved as they do in this one
Are obsessed by the more insidious forms of property:
They buy and sell merchandise they will never see,
Hawking among Wren’s churches, and, if they say their prayers,
Say them, without a doubt, to stocks and shares.
That’s “The London Zoo,” a longish poem published in 1961 but still absolutely on the money in its jibes at economic “rationality” and the unquestioning faith in funds that turn out, to the detriment of all but the super-rich, to not exist. One might not agree with Sisson that the church provides any longer an intact alternative, but it’s hard to read this variously dated and hyper-relevant, both mannered and 
scorchingly immediate, poem without longing for the return to the poetic scene of full-blown (rather than knowingly compromised, complicit, self-deprecating) satire:

Out on the platform like money from a cashier’s shovel
The responsible people fall at the end of their travel.
Some are indignant that their well-known faces
Are not accepted instead of railway passes;
Others faithfully produce the card by which the authorities
Regulate the movement of animals in great cities.
With growing consciousness of important function
Each man sets out for where he is admired most,
The one room in London where everything is arranged
To enlarge his importance and deaden his senses.
The secretary who awaits him has corrected her bosom;
His papers are in the disorder he has chosen.
Anxieties enough to blot out consciousness
Are waiting satisfactorily on his desk.
The influence of Eliot and The Waste Land (a poem, writes Sisson, healing the pejorative again, of “decisive novelty”) is strong here in both content and form; couplets clobberingly arrive, others are strangled in the cradle, as Pound did with “The Fire Sermon.” But the key word is “consciousness,” which occurs twice: first as a type of bad self-regard, and then as a given, obscured by false anxieties. It’s a concept Sisson returns to in both verse and criticism. For him, 
“consciousness — as is not perhaps widely understood — is purely traditional,” a “product of history.” It is what anchors us in time and place and answers to the more parochial side of the poet’s thinking: “You cannot be Plato in Bechuanaland or George Herbert in Connecticut,” he says, sounding, himself, weirdly like Wallace Stevens. But Sisson also requires of poetry that it should not be willful or calculated, and explains his turn to translation as a defense against “the embarrassing growth of the area of consciousness” that imperils original creation. He quotes, and appears to agree with, Shelley’s revolutionary contention (you couldn’t, on first glance, imagine two thinkers or writers so far apart) that poetry “is not subject to the control of the active powers of the mind, and that its birth and recurrence have no necessary connexion with the consciousness or will.” “So much,” remarks Sisson drolly, “for recording that moment when Philip Larkin got up for a piss”; and you could argue that his baffled talk of “consciousness” represents only a cripplingly English self-consciousness trying to outwit its own hampering borders, and a weapon to be used, in this case, against the “journalistic” verse he happens to dislike. (He does sound like Larkin, whatever he claims: “Now I am forty I must lick my bruises / What has been suffered cannot be repaired / I have chosen what whoever grows up chooses / A sickening garbage that could not be shared.”) But Sisson also follows Shelley to the point of rejecting conventional notions of identity, and writes in “My Life and Times”:

So damn the individual touch
Of which the critics make so much;
Remember that the human race
Grins more or less in every face.
Characteristically acid — “more or less” — these lines nevertheless present a poetics, and an ethics, heartening in its confusions. Not a tepid universalism but an agonized thinking of individuals as centerless extrusions from different places, soiled by alternative parishes with the dirt of selfhood.

Despite a few early squibs, Sisson really began writing verse while serving in India during WWII, and there’s a relevant poem here, “In Time of Famine: Bengal,” about, apparently, a starving beggar-child:

I do not say this child
This child with grey mud
Plastering her rounded body
I do not say this child
For she walks poised and happy
But I say this
Who looks in at the carriage window
Her eyes are big
Too big
Her hair is touzled and her mouth is doubtful
And I say this
Who lies with open eyes upon the pavement
Can you hurt her?
Tread on those frightened eyes
Why should it frighten her to die?
This is a fault
This a fault in which I have a part.
This isn’t an entirely successful poem, but I quote it in full since its unsuccess — all those thistly and unyieldingly separate pronouns; the poised and happy, specific child, overlaid with a conventional fantasia of poverty and domination — does reflect Sisson’s concern with consciousness and the individual and how these concepts or categories give to airy nothing only a local habitation and a name. It’s one of Sisson’s poems that refuses or at least troubles everyday syntax and grammar, it splinters and repeats; the later work isn’t always so obvious about it, but still looks, stop-start and cautious, in more than one direction. Although he wouldn’t be impressed by my leap from literary form to politics — “the world is changing fast, and not even formal rhyme-schemes will save us from this,” quips Sisson — it does seem to me that the conservative poet’s belief, like that of Edmund Burke, in the slow organic growth of an irresistible culture, sits oddly, if at all, with his more periodic, oblique, fractured verse. “It is as if Eliot would not yield to the muse until he had tested all that rationality could do for him” and this opinion-clad civil servant, essayist, and editor would also follow his embattled sense of nationality, his prickly, perhaps merely prickly, architectures of contumely, into the void:

Alone
But to say “alone” would be to give validity
To a set of perceptions which are nothing at all
— A set as these words are
Set down
Meaninglessly on paper, by nobody.
— From The Desert
Originally Published: January 4, 2016

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/249514

PROSE FROM POETRY MAGAZINE

No to Aristotle
Marvelous Things Overheard, by Ange Mlinko.

BY ROWAN RICARDO PHILLIPS
Marvelous Things Overheard, by Ange Mlinko.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $15.00.

This is a book I adore, but I feel compelled to begin with a complaint: when Ange Mlinko goes to such lengths to point out Aristotle’s presence in Marvelous Things Overheard, evoking him rather unnecessarily in both her epigraph and in the concluding notes (“A selected bibliography would include Aristotle’s treatises ‘On the Naming and Situation of the Winds’ and ‘On Marvelous Things Heard’”), 
I cringe and feel more than a slight tinge of misplaced cultural 
authority attempting to bookend this lovely work.

Aristotle almost certainly did not write the work commonly known in Latin as De mirabilibus auscultationibus or simply, De mirabilibus. The presence of Pseudo-Aristotles throughout history is neither new nor a secret and, aside from Mlinko feeling the need for some reason to spell out her riff in the title, there’s no reason at all for this book to anchor itself to Aristotle in the way that it does. Mlinko’s poetry is ambitious and nimble; ideas on the history of art and thought inhabit her poems like dollar bills on the table in a shell game. But shell games and poetry both function smoothly as a matter of trust: the balance between too much and too little is of the utmost importance. If a poet feels obliged to offer a selected bibliography at the end of a book of poems it’s a good idea for the poet to have a handle on who did and did not likely write what. Typically, the Pseudo–Aristotle would be more of a rhyme with the book anyway. Sometimes the traveler through the history of ideas needs to make sure to carry sunblock or read scholarship or, heaven forbid, consult the original.

Marvelous Things Overheard, sumptuous as it is, has nothing to do with philosophy, and this is to its merit. We are hitting our head against the same wall that we do with Stevens: the poetry is not philosophy, not better understood via philosophy, does not enhance our understanding of philosophy, nor is it a replacement for philosophy. It’s poetry. Beautiful poetry. And Mlinko’s book is neither smarter nor more significant for having cited il maestro di color che sanno. Speaking of Dante, he followed the medieval tradition of referring to Aristotle as “the Philosopher”: enough said, no further information needed; and you’ll have trouble finding a bigger name-dropper than Dante.

The raw power of Marvelous Things Overheard comes from the absence of a hierarchical center toward which the intellect is inevitably pulled. The book revels in Mlinko’s kaleidoscopic imagination and her incurable case of word-fascination, all brought together tautly by her ear’s wonderful ability to edit and shape an idea — “You never hear of Ixion, tied to a revolving wheel, /  but it’s an axiom that, sooner 
or later, a hurricane’ll hit here”; “snakes desquamate their own simulacra”; “the rough marine roof / kicked up by the hoof of Notus if necessary” — if stone tablets could breathe through their hard skins, this may be what they would sound like.

So, no to Aristotle and yes to lyric poetry. Mlinko’s turn on the phrase Marvelous Things Heard to Marvelous Things Overheard 
brings immediately to mind the theory of the lyric. Particularly Mill’s defining statement:

Poetry and eloquence are both alike the expression or utterance of feeling. But if we may be excused the antithesis, we should say that eloquence is heard; poetry is overheard.

The love of lyric poetry and the very idea of the lyric is so ripe in Mlinko’s fourth collection of poems that it almost reads as a defense of poetry, or at least as a defense of the types of poetry that Mlinko writes.

This work is an arabesque stroll through the gardens, orchards, wild growths, shores, and splendid ruins of the English language. It’s a love letter to the history of poetry in our language — a love letter apparently lost in transit, its contents recited by heart to anyone willing to listen by someone who had found it and, not knowing its destination, still felt moved to sing of the joy found in those pages.

Of course, we learn as children that these types of transmissions lose things in transit: “love” may become “live”; “blew” may become “blue”; or, as in the case of Mlinko’s poem “Bayt,” “ana” as the Anglo-Saxon word for “alone” can become the Arabic word for “I”: “But ana [“alone”/“I”] do not grieve”; “And ana [“alone”/“I”] have drawn / the wilderness around me,” etc.

“Bayt” braids the two aforementioned traditions — the Anglo-Saxon and the Arabic — via subject and form. The poem evokes in its three subtitled sections the pre-Islamic era poets Abu Aqil Labīd ibn Rabī’ah (or simply “Labīd,” whose work has been preserved in the Mu’allaqat) and al-Shanfara. Meanwhile, each line carries a heavy 
visual split in it, representing the distich-making effect caused by 
alliteration in Anglo-Saxon poetry. Add to this that the poem is peppered with Anglo-Saxon words and you end up with moments such as:

On leftovers ana breakfast
like the spleenish wulf the wéstenes chase.

He sets out hungry,
nose in the wind, up the wulfhleoþu.
There is a glossary at the conclusion of the poem to glean the words in italics: “ana” has been mentioned above, “wulf” means “wolf,” “wéstenes” is said to be the plural of “desert” or another highly-loaded word in the history of poetry in English, “wasteland.” It hardly needs saying that this is an entirely different poem without the glossary at the end of it; or that some of the definitions offered should be taken with a grain of salt — like the aforementioned “wasteland.” All of this is a part of poetry’s play, as is the pastiche of forms and cultures and the formal signifying.

In short, provided you love how poems can sound and have a simultaneous abiding interest in the history of the lyric you’ll likely have a sense of what Mlinko is up to, which is nothing short of searching for a cup capacious enough to hold as much poetry in a given moment as it can. It is my hope that all readers of poetry are interested in how poems can sound and in the history of the lyric. Mlinko is seeking to meet us there, although very much on her own terms.

As a consequence, Marvelous Things Overheard swims in the glimmering waters between islands of pleasure and knowledge. Take “The Med,” for instance, which touches on Tanaquil LeClercq’s life upon performing with a smitten Balanchine in New York in 1944 and subsequently leaping, in the same sentence, to Copenhagen in 1956 — tethered, unnamed, to the tragic irony of events. The first of its two stanzas ends with:

But consider a worse fate, my dear:
Consider a ballerina
who dances a benefit for her choreographer
as the villain Polio; she pretends to fall, stricken;
but gold ingots, tossed at her by a ring of children,
heal her miraculously;
a dozen years later polio, for real,
cuts her at the waist.
Largely a compendium of Mlinko’s life in Beirut and her travels to Greece and Cyprus, Marvelous Things Overheard gathers a certain amount of wild energy from Mlinko’s travels that subsequently is tempered into very thought-out, mapped-out poems. Temporarily living elsewhere renders one a type of intimate stranger (a condition made still more severe when one doesn’t know the languages of the place). The symptoms of such a condition are rife in Mlinko’s poems: “The Med,” for example, after fingering the biographical edges of a ballerina’s life, finds its footing, and its conclusion, after a telling line (“remember this, and think instead”) in those embassies of the visitor: the museum and the sea.

In the museum where we saw it, Aimée, it glows
the color of the sea near certain villages where fall
the narrow blades of shadow rudders
pointing to bedrooms
darkened at midday;
the sea is violet with iodine.
“The Heliopolitan” likewise creates a palimpsest of place and events: a hotel in Baalbek, Lebanon, the presence in that hotel of a sketch by Jean Cocteau, and thus the implied metonymic presence of Cocteau himself “as he drew in his sketch pad the rooster with a toe.” But where does the palimpsest end and where does it begin? Baalbek was conquered by Alexander and named Heliopolis and the native gods syncretized into the more familiar Western gods. Mlinko chooses her subjects wisely throughout, finding topics that poems can flesh out but can barely contain. “The Heliopolitan,” in this instance, appears to be settling into a reflection heading in one direction, when suddenly “L’ange Heurtebise,” Death’s chauffer in Cocteau’s classic film Orphée, and “____ the Flaccid” make their way through Mlinko’s tercets, “a rhododactyl turns the page.” There is nothing surreal about this. Rather, it is incident caused by coincidence made into poetry. It doesn’t stand against reality, rather it stands beside reality as a record of, well, a marvelous thing overheard.

The scope and achievement of Marvelous Things Overheard reaches its highpoint in the villanelle sequence, “Wingandecoia,” a terrific poem somewhat about the lost colony of Roanoke and the pleasure found in words like “psittacines,” “pot pot chee,” and “swisser swatter”; how they move in the mind like a concentrate in liquid, settling into something marvelously heard or overheard; or perhaps — as Mlinko writes in the finale of her final poem, rather tellingly titled “Reason, Love, Control” — something “evolving / only toward more feeling.”

Coolly the bodies of experts,
the professional committees,
hone their vocab to tweezers.
And I love it too. I love how it controls
my breathing — subcortical, ischemic — 
for we life-forms are evolving
only toward more feeling.
“Only” here can mean “merely” or “single-mindedly” and thus takes some of the semantic pressure off of “feeling” and places more emphasis on “evolving” — a suitable close for this poet of process and this book of processes.

Originally Published: January 5, 2015

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/250854

PROSE FROM POETRY MAGAZINE
Forever Writing from Ireland
Billy Ramsell's The Architect’s Dream of Winter, Tara Bergin's This Is Yarrow, Alan Gillis's Scapegoat, and Doireann Ní Ghríofa's Clasp.

BY MAYA CATHERINE POPA
What defines Irish poetry today? A survey of recently published Irish titles suggests the striking variety of voices, aesthetics, and anxieties emerging from the Emerald Isle. It should come as no surprise that a country that so prides itself on its literary heritage (poems still grace the pages of the Irish Examiner and The Irish Times) would inspire each generation to upkeep and further push poetic practice to new realms. And yet, we think of Joyce, Yeats, MacNeice, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, and Heaney as roots in the Irish soil from which future generations have sprung, and from whose shadows poets still face the daunting task of emerging.

Many very fine contemporary Irish poets have found ways to inherit this legacy of genius while carving their own paths and reaching new international audiences. Paul Muldoon comes to mind (though he, too, gets compared to Heaney), as well as Eavan Boland. Notably, both have lived as expats in the United States while sustaining irrefutable, lasting literary ties to Ireland. Indeed, this speaks to one quality that begins to address the simplistic opening probe: inheritance must be reckoned with in Irish poetry, beyond the usual measure for poets. Whether sustained or challenged, tradition poses a question, and uncertainty is often a generative place from which to begin.

Consulting the polished preface of any book on Irish history confirms that it is full of complexities, wrought with the kind of political drama and dissent that invites TV dramatization. Northern Ireland (part of the United Kingdom) has long been considered the center of Irish poetry, while those hailing from the Republic (independent, and whose national language continues to be Irish Gaelic) have formed their own schools. While Irish is the main language of only three percent of households, over ten percent have some fluency. In the matrix of Irish identity, the historical and political are intimately tied to the language, yielding interesting ground for exploration in literature.

The four Irish poets under review, Cork-born and educated Billy Ramsell, Dublin-born Tara Bergin (who moved to England in 2002), Belfast-born Alan Gillis (now editor of the influential Edinburgh Review), and Galway-born Doireann Ní Ghríofa (long-settled in Cork), have received an impressive list of awards between them, including Chair of Ireland Bursaries, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, a T.S. Eliot Prize shortlisting, and other accolades. 
Yet, what proves equally remarkable is their relationship to Ireland and their role in transmitting Irish poetry. Ramsell, a translator of Irish poetry, served as editor of the Irish section of Poetry International from 2012–2015. Bergin has lectured on “Ireland as a State of Mind” internationally, while Gillis has edited several critical works on Irish writing, including The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry (2012). Ní Ghríofa’s previous collections were in Irish, published by Coiscéim, an exclusively Irish-language publisher.

These poets confront old subjects in a renewed capacity, recasting myths of transformation and pondering both global and personal politics in a world driven by technology. They show an appreciation for tradition that, rather than creating superficial echoes, demonstrates daring, playful appropriation, and purposeful departure from their sources. And above all else, these four collections share the sense that you never really leave Ireland — it surfaces in memory, which stakes its claim on poetry.



The Architect’s Dream of Winter, by Billy Ramsell.

The Dedalus Press. €12.00.

Gilbert Ryle coined the term “ghost in the machine” in his 1949 work The Concept of Mind. In The Architect’s Dream of Winter, Ramsell explores the idea of human and technological consciousness in poems of great formal variety and tonal range. Servers offstage, wires, and machines become inextricably tangled with their human foils: memory, veins, and the heart. “We’re programmed, both of us, viral,” the speaker remarks, appropriating the term used to describe massive popularity and circulation on the internet, “I’ll infect the deepest, most secret nooks of your memory, / delete your first kiss, your first lover’s hands.”

“Lyric poems spring from moments of disequilibrium: something has happened to disturb the status quo,” writes Helen Vendler. Indeed, Ramsell’s poems are full of restless searching, pondering the actions and stakes of our technological revolution. Where one might expect a sort of anti-lyric (after all, computer jargon isn’t known for its lyric qualities), Ramsell’s exploration is highly musical, punctuated 
by modified traditional lyric forms. The poems feel decidedly voiced, with moments of poignant tenderness derived from the poet’s life. Reflecting on a POS reader at dinner, the speaker considers how “It knows everything about us, / every element of the meal we’ve just eaten.”

Central to the collection is an attempt to conceive of the human lifespan and its, as of yet, inevitable end after ninety or so years by way of the cutting edge, as well as through inherited systems and analogies. In “Lament for Esbjörn Svensson,” Ramsell reconciles the sacred and the scientific, wondering “if dying translates us into the condition of music; // leaves us weightless, melodious, floating bars of thought / uploaded like data into the mind of God.” Similarly, in “Lament for Christy Ring,” a decidedly Irish subject, Ramsell describes the legendary hurler, interrogating the possibility of seamless integration:

He swerves, ducks his shoulder, elegantly jerks.
And what gap now between thought and act,
his spirit and firmware fusing?
The poems perform a consciousness grappling with, and defining, correlations. In an over-stimulated world, Ramsell takes a moment to acknowledge the repetitiousness of the heart’s essential task: “Such monotonous heroism / all alone in that blackness.” Here, too, he contemplates the possibility of merging with machines: “And though you’re part-mechanical now I still cherish you, my brother, / for the body’s a machine like any other.”

Rather than man vs. machine, an easier dichotomy to depict (but one exhausted by dystopian books and film), Ramsell infuses the 
collection with a reciprocity — machines, too, dream their human counterparts: “The circuits whisper and it dreams our names.” Elsewhere, the speaker declares, “I outsourced all my memories to machines.” Even objects that predate machines are considered through this updated eye, creating a new inter-text:

This piano speaks the language of machines.
Through the foyer’s raucous out-of-town rhubarbing
our eardrums search for patterns in the ragtime data-stream
of chords and choruses; locate them, make them beautiful.
— From Jazz Weekend
The prose poem “The Silence Bar” offers a summer menu of precisely what its title promises: different types of — increasingly scarce — silence. Here, Ramsell’s playfulness and wit is on display, though the idea of having to enter and pay for silence on HD-800 headsets provokes bouts of nostalgia. He takes the reader to his native Cork on the Irish West Coast:

The people who brought you “Hagia Sophia,” one of last year’s most popular silences, now take you inside Cork’s own St Fin Barre’s Cathedral.... Let it cleanse you of sirens and background muzak, of office-gossip and radio ads.

“They dance to keep from falling,” a title adapted from a poem by Ilya Kaminsky, most explicitly confronts the screen-life with which we are accustomed. The poem’s margins provide familiar system updates in bold font: “All imaging processes normal”; “Your session has expired.” These impersonal, uninvited messages jarringly punctuate a narrative lyric, offsetting the speaker’s voice and the passage of time:

And I think that in this December light
there’s something almost Spanish about your beauty,
something piquant, out of place in this winter, ungovernable.
The collection’s concluding poem, “Ahead vast systems hunger,” recycles the form and language with slight variations: “there’s something almost Russian about your beauty, / something chilly, beyond compass, ungovernable.” The language in the margins, which speaks of updates, current session, and imaging processes, sounds almost prophetic as the couple walks off the beach.



This Is Yarrow, by Tara Bergin.

Carcanet. £9.95.

Tara Bergin’s debut is full of idiosyncratic voices, folkloric motifs, and reflections on the rhetoric and decorum of war. Her highly 
allusive verse is adept at a kind of conversational strangeness, a quality that offsets the violence discussed. Her speakers suffer from metaphysical illness, “I get breathless climbing, / thinking up whole men, / whole women, and I / add them to the list.” Bergin reveals the startling psychology of fairy tales populated with symbolic creatures that often meet terrible fates. These unsettling elements are riddled with nostalgia for youth idioms (indeed, brides and wives make appearances), and figurative substitutions that serve to complement the catastrophic political disputes.

Bergin, who received a PhD from Newcastle University, playfully appropriates the academic tradition, placing its formal register against the lyric confession:

In summary: water is a liquid consisting chiefly of this.
Just one of these things, so the Fowlers say,
is due to appetite.
But I have a thirst / 
I have a fear of / I have a sin of — 
— From Water Is Difficult
The slashes are intentionally left to evoke the unpolished accumulation. The facing poem, “All Fools’ Day: An Academic Farewell,” has a tongue-in-cheek opening: “In this paper / I will make no direct reference to the above title.” But not everything in Bergin’s work is rhetorical — her speakers seem to personally engage with the reader, infusing the collection with a personality that feels very much part of the idiom. When a question is posed, an answer might indeed be granted: “Ask me: / have I fallen in love with the mechanic? Perhaps — perhaps, for a moment.” Weaving confession and fantasy, Bergin creates psychologically stirring metaphors: “He thought my clothes were my skin. / He thought these soft things, / this lace and these buttons, / were things I belonged in.” Elsewhere, her speaker’s musings function almost as an ars poetica, outlining how one thing transforms into another in the poet’s mind:

I sit and I think of the single ringlet
and the green star of leaves.

I think of the meaning found for these things.

That the leaves are the clutching hands of soldiers,
that the tendrils are the whips — 
— From The Passion Flower
Organized violence functions as a metaphorical engine, nature changing into soldiers and whips. WWII surfaces repeatedly, with titles that summon Armistice Day and St. Patrick’s Day address. Violence is often normalized and, indeed, even ignored by the crowd: “They don’t see me but I walk / into Fitzgeralds with them the half-wounded, / I sit in there at the high table with my pint, / half-wounded, thinking, I will drag my / wounds in here.” In “Military School,” Bergin powerfully confronts violence’s seduction of language, weaving it into England and Ireland’s political history:

The voice of violence enters our mouths
and our skin, and under my own nails
I hear it seduce me. I argue with nothing it says.
The voice is a swan of the estuary.
It laments, it recites:
Sixteen Dead Men; The Rose Tree,
out of pages yellowed from 1953 — 
it bangs oh it bangs
a bodhran.
Here, again, the metaphor is riddled with folkloric details and literary allusions. Bergin invokes Yeats’s “Sixteen Dead Men,” a poem that condemns the British execution of sixteen Irishmen after the 1916 Easter Uprising, and the gruesome English fairy tale of “The Rose-Tree,” drawing from the violence of the historic event and children’s story. The mention of the bodhran, the traditional Celtic frame drum often used in war, reminds the reader that though Bergin grew up in England, the palette of her references is as Irish as it comes.

“St. Patrick’s Day Address, 1920” further interrogates tradition, this time the widely-visited Blarney Stone in Cork: “Still we insist on bending backwards / to touch the filthy stone with our lips. / What tradition is this?” The greatest tradition of all, Bergin’s collection seems to suggest, is conflict. “Garrison Supermarket” offers one of the most haunting moments in the collection; the speaker watches a group of soldiers enter the supermarket and recognizes their almost mechanical appearance: “their hands are the same — / and their faces are the same — / and no one is afraid — .” To Bergin, that restraint and desensitization seems most troubling of all.

The collection concludes with a return to Bergin’s dreamlike atmosphere, weaving the folkloric (yarrow is an age-old remedy) and the urban: “In this country house I had a dream of the city / as if the thick yarrow heads had told me, / as if the chokered dove had told me.” This conversation with the past, nature, and the psyche makes Bergin’s a memorable, haunting debut, full of idiomatic strangeness that is fully her own mixture.


Scapegoat, by Alan Gillis.

The Gallery Press. €11.95.

The collection opens with a condemning epigraph: “The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved,” Jeremiah, 8:20. Well, that might be alright if the result is as rich, frenetic, visually and audibly pleasurable a landscape as Gillis provides. Scapegoat lyrically and variously interrogates memories of youth through a blend of Irish dialect and imaginative narratives. Gillis’s skillful modulation of tone and his aphoristic precision allow him to create moments that ring true to feeling and afterthought, articulating the complex emotional resonance of memory.

The opening poem, “Zeitgeist,” a series of four sonnets, introduces the reader to Gillis’s particular music; phonetically rich and conversational, his blend of irreverence and serious existential consideration is uniquely fitted for considering a wide variety of 
contemporary blights. Here, as elsewhere, Gillis considers the energy and excessiveness of urbanization, the poem’s diction evoking the populated environment it describes and providing a catalogue of voices for the collection:

Outside on shopped streets swarm mothers,
alpha males, screenagers, old, young, lovers,
the homeless, the bewildered, ill, unique,
the beautiful with their self-as-boutique — 
so many, thronged into one body.
Like Ramsell, Gillis is interested in technology’s impact on memory, discovery, and knowledge: “Inside the machine or, at least, on the screen / I discover everything that has been, / will be, or might never be has a place.” Unlike Ramsell, however, the collection only lingers momentarily on these considerations, drawing its power from moments that feel personal to Gillis’s past, and which he captures with brevity and intelligence. In “The Hourglass,” the speaker recollects a conversation the morning after spending the night at the apartment of a beloved:

You ask: “One half empties, the other
fills. Now which half is happier?”

Both ends look dead by the end.
The hourglass shows how time gathers
but only lives through the movement of the sands.
Balancing a delicate narrative between the couple, this unpretentious, reflective moment in a kitchen blooms into a meditation on time. Each stanza layers the issue of compromise, closing with a lyric gesture that displays Gillis’s trademark music and skillfully-placed slant rhymes: “How the rain and wide-roamed / dead, rivers and wilds, give and take, / hollow as they accumulate.”

Gillis’s emphasis on the revelatory in ordinary actions is pleasurably offset by a baroque phonetic sensibility: “while the rinsing breeze / ripples the leaves // and sashaying twig-tips / with a shush /  to the ear.” Gillis frequently plays with line length and alliteration, creating poems whose logic appears driven by sound and lush visual images. “August in Edinburgh,” a modified sestina form, recounts a moment at a festival with wit and tender precision:

Not a cloud in the sky and it’s raining.
It’s the brusqueness of things,
and the drag of things, that hurts.
The most beautiful woman in the world
is in Edinburgh, at the festival.
She looks me in the eye and says please
move I’m trying to look at the artworks.
“No. 8,” the collection’s long and often humorous poem, recounts commuter proceedings in a sprawling, essayistic form. With charm and insight, Gillis takes us from the minutes prior to boarding the bus, to boarding, “Everyone looks like / they’re in an art installation /  where the central concept is / they’re completely normal,” to the wandering stream of consciousness inspired by gazing out the window. These musings range from those that reflect on the collection’s 
central themes, “so much mystery between us / disguised as indifference,” to the circumstantial, light-hearted remarks of a bored 
commuter. He playfully acknowledges the poem’s meta-thinking: “Does one have depths? / To get to them, I’m sure, / one might board a bus.” Here, as in other poems, Gillis masterfully modulates from humor to — not quite pathos — but a sense of restlessness with urban rituals and acknowledgment of communality with strangers. “No. 8” is recalled in a later poem: “The mind is like a Wednesday morning / on a bus to work when exhaust fumes cling / the air.”

Gillis carefully conjures “real” voices, down to the Irish names and colloquialisms: “Morning, when it comes, might snigger / the way Shonagh O’Dowd raised her finger / to McCandless, then split her smackers / at the sight of me in my undercrackers.” But “The Field” most closely resembles what we associate with Irish poetry, the affinity for relaying nostalgia for a place:

This lane can’t help but lead
onto that lane I followed
when I was nine, stretched to green
fields from my aunt’s farm
along the hedgeway that gives,
through a gap, to a blackthorn-guarded glade.
The poem invokes a Heaney-esque sensibility in its graceful pace, harking to a specific age in boyhood, and a catalogue of details challenging for urbanites to envision (hedgeways, blackthorn, glades). The emotional life of memory is palpable throughout the collection, suggesting that, ultimately, paths carved through memory occupy a dual place in the past and present.


Clasp, by Doireann Ní Ghríofa.

The Dedalus Press. €11.50.

“There is a fearlessness in Ní Ghríofa’s work,” writes Paula Meehan. One could just as well argue that the fear of loss — and the careful examination of kinds of human loss — is equally generative for the poet. Clasp, Ní Ghríofa’s English debut, explores absence (and possibilities of rebirth) through imaginative constructs and figurative retellings of tales. The speaker in “Museum” is employed with this consideration:

I am custodian of this exhibition of erasures, curator of loss.
I watch over pages of scribbles, deletions, obliterations,
in a museum that preserves not what is left, but what is lost.
Contrastingly, “Instructions to Kill a Daughter’s Minotaur” is a more gruesome exploration, while “Narcissus” explores the emptiness behind the excess of connections on social media. Narcissus “swipes, smiles: so many likes, so many / friends. His soundless words flash onto strangers’ screens // until silence no longer feels like loneliness.” Other sparse, suggestive poems draw from absence to fuel their intimated narratives (memorably, fried rashers show how absence assumes its own space).

Though Ní Ghríofa is a bilingual poet, Clasp is only occasionally speckled with Irish, infused instead with Irish flora and fauna, bogs, breweries, and skylines of Cork. The poems excel in their consideration of motherhood, particularly its paradoxical losses and gains, separation and unity. In “Inventory: Recovery Room,” the speaker considers the processes of motherhood shared with all of nature:

I think of milk, of beestings squeezed from a cow’s udders,

of my fingers between a calf’s gums: the fierce suck of a new mouth,
and the echo of a mother’s angry bellows from the field.
The poem facing it, “From Richmond Hill,” an area in Cork City, tenderly recalls the newborn’s first days home. As the speaker remembers, stories of breweries and pubs carefully enter and offer the long-awaited moment a sense of history, serving as the speaker’s reflection on the past, and the child’s introduction to it:

Home from hospital, you doze in my arm, milk-drunk,
all eyelashes, cheeks and raw umbilical, swaddled
in the heavy black smells of the brewery.

Your great-grandfathers worked all their lives in that factory.
Every day they were there, breathing the same air, hoisting
barrels, sweating over vats where black bubbles rose like fat.
Ní Ghríofa captures the anxiety of motherhood and of inhabiting the body. Certain poems feel ultimately celebratory of this cycle, as “Your Throat, a Thrush,” in which the speaker again contemplates the lineage to her son: “Countless layers fold between our time and theirs / and still, in each new skin, we sing.” And, like Ramsell, Ní Ghríofa celebrates the heart’s dual-nature as the figurative seat of emotions and a necessary engine. But there is violence and trespass, too, as the doctor breaks the speaker’s breastbone to access the place:

Stitch by stitch, he attaches
the heart of a stranger to the stump
and sets it moving like electricity.
Under his hands, a new heart stutters and starts,
filling the cavity with applause. He closes my ribcage.
The machines sing.
— From A History in Hearts
In Ní Ghríofa’s English debut, what seem to be long-considered obsessions are explored with tenderness and unflinching curiosity. The collection’s section titles, “Clasp,” “Cleave,” “Clench,” suggest the muscularity of attachment to the past, place, and the body that drives the poetic impulse.

•

“Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can’t be too optimistic,” said Seamus Heaney, but that paints a rather different picture than these collections offer. Indeed, though Scapegoat’s epigraph might befit this assessment, one wonders how these four poets would respond to Heaney. The verve of Irish streets, unforgettable seascapes, hurling heroes, ballads, and songs — the affluence of memorable details seems pretty optimistic. From its folkloric hills to its Tescos, its riddled, disputed language, and its busses and POS cables leading elsewhere, what is indisputable is the central place that Ireland plays in memory. And from this difficult imagination emerges a variety of voices and possibilities that draw their center from the island and stretch far beyond it.

Originally Published: September 1, 2015

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/249062

PROSE FROM POETRY MAGAZINE
The Medium of the English Language
BY JAMES LONGENBACH
The medium of Giorgione’s Tempest is “oil on canvas”; the medium of Robert Rauschenberg’s Bed is “oil and pencil on pillow, quilt, and sheet.” Descriptions of a work of art’s medium seem to tell us everything and nothing, for our entire experience of art is dependent upon the artist’s intimacy with the medium, and yet the medium itself may seem weirdly mundane, especially when the artist harnesses everyday materials like a sheet. In the nineteenth century, the stuff from which art is made came to be called the medium because for hundreds of years the word had referred to something that acts as an intermediary, a piece of money or a messenger. The artistic medium enables a transaction between the artist and the world, and, over time, the history of those transactions has become inextricable from the medium as such, an inherited set of conventions. It’s not coincidental that it was also in the nineteenth century that the word medium was first used to describe a person who conducts a séance, a person who exists simultaneously in the worlds of the living and the dead.

Lots of people sleep on sheets. Very few people handle oil paint as provocatively as Rauschenberg, and even fewer deploy sheets as a way of forging a transaction between the interior space of the mind and the exterior space of the world, a transaction that gives other people, the audience, an enticing and sometimes puzzling way of rethinking their own relationship to those spaces. Members of the audience may draw a little, they may have a fine sense of color, but they respect the transaction that the artistic medium does not simply record but presents as a unique and enduring act in time. Sometimes, however, when the sheer otherness of the medium is foregrounded at the expense of a conventional signal of the artist’s mind at work, they don’t respect the transaction, in part because the artist doesn’t covet such respect: how can art be something made of a bed sheet?

How can art be something made of words, the same words used for newspapers and parking tickets? Unlike the media most commonly associated with visual and sonic artistry, words are harnessed by most people during almost every waking moment of their lives; they’re more like bed sheets than like oil paint or the notes of the diatonic scale. Even small children are skilled manipulators of language, 
capable of detecting and repeating the most subtle nuances of intonation and tone: how swiftly we learn that by shifting the accent from one syllable to the other, the two-syllable word “contract” can be either a noun referring to a kind of agreement (“contract”) or a verb meaning either to acquire or constrict (“contract”). But while children rarely confuse such words when they’re speaking, children don’t write the poems of Shakespeare or the novels of Henry James, and neither do most adults. We may sustain an easy mastery of language in our daily lives, but once we engage language as an artistic medium, that mastery is never secure: our relationship to language is constantly changing as we discover aspects of the medium that our prior failures and, more potently, our prior successes had occluded.

My medium is not language at large but the English language. When I was young I took this for granted, but over the years I’ve become increasingly conscious of the qualities shared by poems because they’re written in English, rather than Italian or French. I’m not fluent in those languages; while I’ve lived for a time in Italy, where my children attended Italian school, I spent much of that time sitting at a desk, trying to write poems in English. But my lack of fluency heightened my awareness of my medium. Living in Florence, I was incapable of taking my mastery of  language for granted, and this incapacity not only reared its head when I was speaking broken Italian to our landlord; it infected my relationship to English, demanding that I hear the medium of the English language in particular ways, ways in which it has also been heard before. In Italian, the word for what we call a landlord is proprietario, just as in French it is propriétaire. And while those languages contain no version of the word landlord, a typically Germanic compound noun, the English language does contain the Latinate word proprietor: when we savor these possibilities, we are (as the meanings of the word medium suggest) undertaking a complex negotiation with the dead.

Every language has different registers of diction, but the English language comes by those registers in a particular way, one that reflects 
the entire history of the language. Unlike the romance languages, which were derived from the Latin spread throughout Italy, France, and Spain during the Roman Empire, English descended independently from German. Old English, the language of the eighth- or ninth-century poem we call “The Seafarer,” now looks and sounds to us like a foreign language, close to the German from which it was derived: with some study, one can see that the Old English line “bitre breostcaere gebiden hæbbe” means “bitter breast-cares abided have” or “I have abided bitter breast-cares.” The language of Chaucer’s fifteenth-century Canterbury Tales, or what we call Middle English, feels less strange, in part because its sense now relies largely on word order rather than on word endings: “Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages” or “then people long to go on pilgrimages.” And the Modern English of the Renaissance we can read easily, because it is the language we speak today, even though the language has continued to evolve: “Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediments.”

Many complicated factors determined this evolution, but one of the most important was the Norman invasion of England in 1066. Once Norman French became the language of the English court, a new vocabulary of words derived from Latin began to migrate into Germanic English. The Old English poet could abide breast-cares, but he could not go on a pilgrimage or suffer impediments; those Latinate words were not available to him. Even today, we raise pigs and cows (from German, via Old English) but eat pork and beef (from Latin, via French), because after the Norman conquest the peasants who raised animals generally spoke English while the noblemen who ate them spoke French. We similarly inhabit a body but bury a corpse because the English language contains Germanic and Latinate words for the same thing, and, over time, we have made discriminations in their meanings. The traditional language of English law is studded with pairs of Germanic and Latinate words (will and testament, breaking and entering, goods and chattels) in which the meaning is not discriminated but reiterated, made available to the widest variety of people who spoke the rapidly developing English language.

Speakers of English may or may not be aware that their language is by its nature different from itself, but any interaction with English as an artistic medium depends on the deployment of words with etymologically distant roots — words that sound almost as different from each other as do words from German and Italian. Notoriously, T.S. Eliot incorporated quotations from foreign languages into his poems, but in The Waste Land, when he jumps from German words (“das Meer”) to words borrowed from the French (“famous clairvoyante”), he is exaggerating what English-language poems do inevitably all the time. The line “Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages” mixes Germanic and Latinate diction strategically (the plain folk playing off the fancy pilgrimages), and the sentence “Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediments” does so more intricately, the Germanic monosyllables let, true, and minds consorting with the Latinate marriage, admit, and impediments to create the richly 
polyglot texture that, over time, speakers of English have come to recognize as the very sound of eloquence itself. One hears it again in Keats (“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”), in Browning (“the quiet-colored end of evening smiles”), or in most any poet writing today. Coleridge famously called Shakespeare “myriad minded,” a phrase that itself wedges together Latinate and Germanic words, and the very medium of English-language poetry is in this sense myriad minded.

It’s possible to write Modern English as if it were an almost exclusively Germanic language, as James Joyce does in this passage of Ulysses, evoking the alliterative rhythms of Old English poetry by giving priority to Germanic monosyllables and treating English as if it were still a highly inflected language, in which sense need not depend on word order:

Before born babe bliss had. Within womb won he worship.
It’s also possible to write English as if it were an almost exclusively Latinate language, as Joyce does in this passage of Ulysses, frontloading Latinate vocabulary and weeding out as many Germanic words as possible:

Universally that person’s acumen is esteemed very little perceptive concerning whatsoever matters are being held as most profitably by mortals with sapience endowed.
But these bravura efforts of parody and pastiche sound more like the resuscitation of a dead language than the active deployment of a living one; it’s difficult to speak English so single-mindedly. In contrast, Shakespeare’s language feels fully alive in Sonnet 116, and yet its drama nonetheless depends on the strategic juxtaposition of a Germanic phrase (“true minds”) with a highly Latinate phrase that a speaker of English might never say (“admit impediments”), just as that speaker probably wouldn’t say “babe bliss had” or “with sapience endowed.” We don’t speak of the cow who jumps over the moon as “translunar,” though we could.

We do speak of the “Grand Canal” when we come to Venice, deploying two Latinate words; but to a native speaker of Italian, the word grande simply means big. As an Italian friend of mine once said, all we’re thinking about is size: the canal is big in the same way that your hat might be too big, “troppo grande.” The difference between our deployment of the Latinate phrases “Grand Canal” and “admit impediments” is that in the former case we are scripted by the language we deploy, our typically awe-struck response to the history of Venice produced by the language we speak. In the latter case Shakespeare has made a choice, as in other circumstances any speaker of English might also make a choice: saying “look how big the canal is” 
is different from saying “look how grand the canal is.” It is at such junctures that our language begins to function as a medium, something that acts as an intermediary, a transitional object. Nothing is automatically an artistic medium, though anything could be.

A medium, says the psychoanalyst Marion Milner in On Not Being Able to Paint, is a little bit of the world outside the self that, unlike the resolutely stubborn world at large, may be malleable, subject to the will while continuing to maintain its own character. The medium might be chalk, which cannot be made to produce the effects of watercolor. It might be a copper plate coated with a thin layer of silver and exposed to light. It might be a rosebush, pruned and fertilized into copious bloom, or an egg, exquisitely poached. In the realm of psychoanalysis, the medium is the analyst, a person who can be counted on to respond to the wishes of the analysand without needing 
to assert his own, as any person in an ordinary human relationship inevitably would.

But neither the analysand nor the artist may indulge in any infantile wish of dominating the medium completely. A visitor to Picasso’s studio once recalled that, after squeezing out the paint on his palette, Picasso addressed it, first in Spanish, saying, “You are shit. You are nothing.” Then he addressed the paint in French, saying, “You are beautiful. You are so fine.” This conflict of attitudes (in this case so contentious that two languages are required to enact it) seems crucial. For if the artist loves the medium enough to submit himself to its actual qualities, resisting exaggerated notions of what the medium can do at his beck and call, then the result will likely be something recognizable as a work of art, a transaction between the mind and the world that is played out in the material reality of the medium.

The satisfaction of art may consequently be found in a poached egg or a child’s speech, but I suspect that we’re most often moved to call a work of art great when we feel the full capacity of the medium at play, nothing suppressed, as if the artist’s command of the medium and the long history of the medium’s deployment by previous artists were coterminous — which, in a sense, they are.

It is for Shakespeare’s power of constitutive speech quite as if he had swum into our ken with it from another planet, gathering it up there, in its wealth, as something antecedent to the occasion and the need, and if possible quite in excess of them; something that was to make of our poor world a great flat table for receiving the glitter and clink of outpoured treasure. The idea and the motive are more often than not so smothered in it that they scarce know themselves, and the resources of such a style, the provision of images, emblems, energies of every sort, laid up in advance, affects us as the storehouse of a kind before a famine or a siege — which not only, by its scale, braves depletion or exhaustion, but bursts, through mere excess of quantity or presence, out of all doors and windows.
These two sentences by Henry James enact the Shakespearean work they describe: they overwhelm us with a feeling of an unstoppable excess that’s registered in rhythm, sonic echo, syntax, and, most fundamentally, diction. The strategic juxtaposition of Germanic and Latinate words is as immediately apparent here (“constitutive speech,” “great flat table,” “the occasion and the need”) as it is in Shakespeare, and at the end of each sentence this strategy is raised to virtuosic heights with phrases that revel in the collision of Germanic bluntness and Latinate elaboration: “the glitter and clink of outpoured treasure,” the “mere excess of quantity or presence, out of all doors and windows.”

These sentences sound like James, but by performing the action 
they describe, the sentences also imply that linguistic virtuosity in Modern English is in some indelible way Shakespearean, and the implication, though easily abused, is not merely sentimental. Shakespeare was a powerful writer who in his lifetime was poised at exactly the right moment to take advantage of the medium that the English language had only recently become. He could reach for effects that had been unavailable to the poets of both “The Seafarer” and The Canterbury Tales, and because of the particular power with which he did so, poems we think of as great, poems that harness the full capacity of the medium, tend to sound to us Shakespearean. But what we are really hearing in such poems is the medium at work; what we are hearing is the effort of a particular writer to reach for the effects that Modern English most vigorously enables. The polyglot diction of a phrase like John Ashbery’s “traditional surprise banquet of braised goat” feels idiosyncratic because it is also conventional, empowered by its author’s intimacy with his medium.

Yet unlike Shakespeare, James, or Ashbery, some writers hang back from harnessing the full capacity of the medium. At least since the time of Plato, artists working in any medium have been both covetous and distrustful of artifice, and at least since the time of Chaucer, writers working with the English language have tended to associate apparently trustworthy plainness with Germanic vocabulary and possibly suspicious artifice with Latinate vocabulary: the diction of the English language has become the site of an ancient conflict.

Would you believe, when you this monsieur see,
That his whole body should speak French, not he?
That so much scarf of France, and hat, and feather,
And shoe, and tie, and garter should come hither,
And land on one whose face durst never be
Toward the sea, farther than half-way tree?
These lines from Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s contemporary, express a common enough impatience with the affectation of French fashion, associated here as it might be even today with insincerity and pernicious notions of femininity. The lines sound different from Shakespeare (“Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediments”) or James (“the glitter and clink of outpoured treasure”) because Jonson has clothed the English monsieur in an unnaturally high proportion of Germanic words (body, speak, hat, feather, shoe, tie, land, face, sea, tree), avoiding the French-derived Latinate vocabulary that the monsieur would presumably affect. Our propensity to associate truthfulness with this strategically plain diction is encouraged by a directness of argument (“Would you believe”) and an 
attenuated series of nouns (“and hat, and feather, / And shoe, and tie”). Jonson’s condemnation of artifice is achieved through exquisitely artificial means.

One can think easily of more polemical versions of this strategy in both verbal and visual art, versions that encourage us to imagine artifice as something categorically to be avoided. But inasmuch as the medium of the English language offers choices, those choices must constantly be renegotiated, for once they harden into principles (“good writing depends on direct statement and plain vocabulary”or “good writing depends on elaborate surfaces and arcane vocabulary”), then the language is no longer being engaged profitably as a medium. The formulator of the principle has suffered the illusion that his love for the medium has conquered the medium, and the words are no longer (like the paint on Picasso’s palette) beautiful shit; they’re simply beautiful. Shit, from the Germanic scitte. Beautiful, from the Latin bellus, via the Old French bel.

English words derived from German may often seem vulgar or truthful; English words derived from Latin may often seem officious or magical. But while words come trailing centuries of associations, the context in which the words are redeployed may alter those associations instantly, if not permanently.

They have imposed on us with their pale
half-fledged protestations, trembling about
in inarticulate frenzy, saying
it is not for us to understand art; finding it
all so difficult, examining the thing

as if it were inconceivably arcanic, as symmet-
rically frigid as if it had been carved out of chrysoprase
or marble — strict with tension, malignant
in its power over us and deeper
than the sea when it proffers flattery in exchange for hemp,
rye, flax, horses, platinum, timber, and fur.
The effect of these final lines of Marianne Moore’s “The Monkeys” depends, like the effect of Jonson’s poem, on a variety of interdependent elements (syntax, line, rhythm, sonic echo), but once again the effect is registered most deeply in the poem’s diction. Moore manipulates her medium, segregating Germanic from Latinate diction, so that when we finally reach the catalog with which the poem concludes, its string of mostly Germanic monosyllables seems to rise magically, extruded from the intricate sentence that has preceded it: “hemp, / rye, flax, horses, platinum, timber, and fur.” In contrast, almost all of the nouns preceding the poem’s final line have been derived from Latin (protestations, frenzy, tension, power, flattery, 
exchange) and so have most of the modifiers (inarticulate, difficult, 
inconceivably, symmetrically, frigid, malignant).

But of the verbs driving us through this sentence, luring us through a verbal texture that is almost overwhelmingly rich but never grammatically unclear, only about half of them are Latinate (impose, 
examine, proffer); the other half of them are as bluntly Germanic as the string of nouns with which the sentence concludes (understand, find, carve). And of the seven nouns in that final string, while six of them would readily have been harnessed by the Old English poet of “The Seafarer” (hemp, rye, flax, horses, timber, fur), one of them stands out as egregiously Latinate. Platinum was first discovered in the new world by the Spanish, who thought it was an inferior form of silver: they called it platina, a diminutive form of the word plata, meaning silver. Why does Moore compromise her division of her medium into Germanic and Latinate vocabularies if the effect of the final line depends on that division?

Moore is an incessantly virtuosic writer, but it’s important to see that in this sentence the power of her diction is not showy or contrived. A blunt shift from Latinate to Germanic vocabulary might seem like a trick or a joke, as when T.S. Eliot begins “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service” with the word (which is also a tetrameter line) “Polyphiloprogenitive.” Such effects have their place, but it is almost always a place created by comic juxtaposition. In contrast, Moore wants her shift in diction to feel revelatory or uncanny, not clever, and the effect depends not on a principled division of the medium of the English language into its constituent elements but on a more nuanced inhabitation of the medium’s varieties of diction, the blunt string of nouns (hemp, rye,  flax) prepared for by a group of more widely spaced verbs (stand, find, carve) that have already opened our ears to the range of possibilities available in our language. Though Moore’s sentence is a theatrical manipulation of those possibilities, it sounds not like an artificial reduction of the medium (“babe bliss had”) but like an inhabitation of the medium (“the glitter and clink of outpoured treasure”).

Even today, more than a century after her birth, Moore is often thought of as an egregiously fastidious or impersonal poet, a writer who offers us the verbal equivalent of something like embroidery. 
I find this judgment of her achievement unfathomable, as does anyone who registers the way in which the passionate momentum of her 
sentences embodies her convictions. What we’re hearing in those 
sentences is, once again, the power of the harnessed medium, for Moore is, like Shakespeare or James or Ashbery, not simply a writer with an extraordinarily large vocabulary but also a writer who is acutely conscious of inherited gradations within that vocabulary, gradations we harness unconsciously in every sentence we speak. This is why her sentences, like those of her greatest predecessors, may feel simultaneously ordinary and revelatory, elaborate and plain. The sentence I’ve quoted from the end of “The Monkeys,” a sentence that asks us to attend not to what is artificial or contrived but to what is fundamental and plain, is after all spoken by a cat. Once again, a work of art’s interrogation of artifice is achieved through exquisitely (or, perhaps in this case, bluntly) artificial means. Is platinum a false kind of silver or is it a thing unto itself, like hemp or flax?

It would be difficult to register the force of the collision of proffers flattery with hemp, rye, flax in a more exclusively Latinate language or a more exclusively Germanic language, but this does not mean that anything is lost when Moore’s poem is translated into German or Italian; on the contrary, it means that something is discovered, just as something is discovered when we look at Zanetti’s engravings of frescos by Giorgione on the Fondaco dei Tedeschi in Venice, frescos that are so damaged that one can barely see them at all. We can’t expect one language to replicate the effects to which another is particularly amenable, but the act of translation does, when the host language is engaged as a medium, create a new poem, a poem that asks us to attend to the sound of the words, just as we attended to the words of the original.

Poetry, no matter if it is spoken or written, is most fundamentally a sonic art: we experience the language as an event in itself, not as a disposable container for meaning. In Old English poems the sounds of the words are organized in lines, lines that have four stressed syllables that must alliterate with one another in one of several patterns.

Bitre breostcaere gebiden hæbe
This line ends where it ends not because of how it looks but because of how it sounds, and when Old English poems were finally written down, they were written down as if they were prose: the line, which emphasizes the sound of the language, did not need to be registered visually on the page. In contrast, Shakespeare’s way of organizing the sound of the English language into lines (lines that contain five stressed syllables that do not necessarily alliterate but have a particular relationship to the unstressed syllables surrounding them) was registered visually on the page.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments.
We nevertheless recognize the first nine words of this sentence as a strategic variation of the iambic pentameter line not because of how they look; we recognize the line because of how it sounds, just as Shakespeare made it by listening to how the words sound.

Yet our now long-established habit of looking at poems, fostered by the rise of print culture, has altered the way poets think about the sound of poetry. Beginning in the later seventeenth century, poets we call Augustan or neoclassical grew to prefer a smoother iambic pentameter line, free of egregious variation, as if the line’s neatness of finish were a reflection of its appearance on the printed page. More recently, 
the habit of looking at poems has encouraged the production of a toneless free-verse line whose length is determined merely by its 
visual relationship to other lines on the page. Just as it seems logical that films will change to the degree that we expect to watch them on an iPad rather than in a movie theater, poems have changed because of the changing technologies through which the English language has been experienced, print being the most obvious. What electronic media will do to poetry remains largely to be seen.

But what is more remarkable is the fact that, over many hundreds of years, poetry in the English language has changed so little. The iambic pentameter line, which eclipsed the alliterative four-beat line deployed by Old English poets, was developed in response to the prosody of French poems that entered the ears of Middle English writers along with the French language itself, and no subsequent change in the sound of English-language poetry has been more 
momentous. It would be difficult to wedge Latinate words like “impediments” or “pilgrimage” into the Old English alliterative line even if those words had been available to Old English poets, and as Middle English settled into Modern English, the pentameter became essential not only to Shakespeare but to Pope, Keats, and Stevens.

The line remains essential to innumerable poets writing in English today, but this continuity of formal procedure is a symptom of a deeper continuity, one that also underlies the disruptive formal 
procedures of innumerable poets writing today. Like many of her modernist contemporaries, Marianne Moore avoided the pentameter; she often organized her poems in purely syllabic patterns, listening to syllables as such rather than to stressed syllables in relation to unstressed syllables. But the difference between Moore’s syllabic lines and Shakespeare’s metered lines — or Henry James’s prose, for that matter — pales in comparison to the pressure exerted on these lines by the material fact of the language. “The marriage of true minds,” “the glitter and clink of outpoured treasure,” “the sea when it proffers flattery in exchange for hemp,” “the traditional surprise banquet of  braised goat” — this is the medium of the myriad-minded English language talking.

Once, when I was living in Florence, my daughter came home from school amused that an Italian friend had called her an “amica preferita” — a preferred friend, or what my daughter would have more naturally called, employing a Germanic rather than a Latinate modifier, a best friend. To my daughter’s ears, the friend’s Italian phrase sounded a little grand, but to Italian ears the phrase sounds completely ordinary, since Latinate vocabulary is the baseline in Italian, not an imported level of diction conventionally associated with high-class, official, or magical speech. Of course Italians have other ways of registering such distinctions, especially since the language we call Italian, which is what Latin became in Tuscany, is still for many Italian citizens a second language, the first being the language that Latin became in their particular region. But when English or Italian or any other language is harnessed as a medium, these givens become opportunities. There aren’t many occasions when a speaker of English would employ the phrase “preferred friend,” yoking the Latinate word with the Germanic, but in the unexpected 
context of a work of art, this phrase makes the music most typical of a great English sentence.

Originally Published: November 3, 2014

A very in-depth article on language , poetry and the human mind.--Tyr


The line remains essential to innumerable poets writing in English today, but this continuity of formal procedure is a symptom of a deeper continuity, one that also underlies the disruptive formal 
procedures of innumerable poets writing today. Like many of her modernist contemporaries, Marianne Moore avoided the pentameter; she often organized her poems in purely syllabic patterns, listening to syllables as such rather than to stressed syllables in relation to unstressed syllables. But the difference between Moore’s syllabic lines and Shakespeare’s metered lines — or Henry James’s prose, for that matter — pales in comparison to the pressure exerted on these lines by the material fact of the language. “The marriage of true minds,” “the glitter and clink of outpoured treasure,” “the sea when it proffers flattery in exchange for hemp,” “the traditional surprise banquet of  braised goat” — this is the medium of the myriad-minded English language talking.

I agree with not being slave to poetry form or letting the current poetry elites continue to demand form over that of message and substance! I write with as much or as little form as I may decide to use in one of my poems.
Yet the usual snobs will cry you fail to adhere rigidly to form because you lack the talent and the ability to do so. poppycock, says I...
I NOW HAVE MY POEMS PUBLISHED IN TWO DIFFERENT BOOKS AND TWO INTERNET PUBLISHING SITES, AT MY HOME POETRY SITE AND EVEN HERE. -TYR

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/guide/252114#guide

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: “Frost at Midnight”
The poet shows how reality and imagination can become one.

BY KATHERINE ROBINSON
Romantic-era poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge famously defined imagination as the human mind’s temporary replication of the divine creation of the world. “The primary Imagination,” he wrote, “I hold to be … a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation.” In other words, the human mind’s creative powers—finite as they are—imitate in miniature the divine words that called a world into being. In “Frost at Midnight,” Coleridge meditates on creation by pairing poetic composition with the magical appearance of frost crystals on the windowpane and eaves outside. Coleridge explores how the individual mind mirrors the natural world and shows how patterns repeat at different scales, revealing universal elements underlying landscapes, thought structures, frost crystals, and poetry.

At the beginning of the poem, the speaker sits awake in the dead of night as frost laces the window. Everyone else has gone to bed, and his infant son Hartley sleeps by the low fire. An old English word for frost, rime, survived in rural northern English dialects, and in the late 18th century, around the time Coleridge was writing, it came into use once again—mostly among poets. Because it sounded like rhyme, it provided fodder for symbols and wordplay. Both poetry and frost create complex, interwoven patterns, and both arise in secret, out of mystery. During long winter nights, frost spreads unseen up windows and across the grass. People once explained its glittering, sudden appearance by saying that “Jack Frost”—a rascally fairy tale character said to delight in bringing snow and sleet—had painted intricate white designs while the household slept. In “Frost at Midnight,” Coleridge forges poetic patterns to represent the workings of memory and imagination. As he describes the frost, he poetically mimics its recurring shapes. Looked at closely, frost patterns vary somewhat but repeat the same basic designs, branching up the window, replicating themselves.

The poem begins by evoking a repeated birdcall in the winter silence: “The Frost performs its secret ministry, / Unhelped by any wind. The owlet’s cry / Came loud—and hark, again! loud as before.” The syntax enacts the repeated call of the owlet, probably shrieking for food, whose smallness mirrors the baby lying in the cradle. Like the frost, which imitates itself as it spreads, the sleeping boy also embodies the idea of replication; children are, in some ways, replicas of their parents.

Paradoxically, Coleridge acknowledges, however, that repetition often hails and creates change; an element of strangeness enters whatever is re-created. Thus, as the poem progresses, he gladly imagines how his son’s childhood will differ from his own. Coleridge spent his school years in London, “pent ‘mid cloisters dim,” but his child Hartley will grow up in the wild countryside where he can “wander like a breeze / By lakes and sandy shores. …” When Coleridge wrote “Frost at Midnight” in 1798, he was living in a small thatched cottage in Somerset, where he had moved because he wanted to be close to William Wordsworth, with whom he shared a legendary literary collaboration, and to Wordsworth’s sister, Dorothy, whom he adored.

“Frost at Midnight” is written in blank verse, and the poem’s first metrical variation occurs when Coleridge syntactically enacts repetition: “The owlet’s cry / Came loud—and hark, again! loud as before.” The second loud disrupts the iambic meter: “came LOUD | —and HARK, | a-GAIN! | LOUD as | be-FORE.” Later, as Coleridge evokes his son’s coming rural childhood, his language again doubles back on itself:

But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze
By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags
Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,
Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores
And mountain crags: …

Clouds tower like mountains, loom like jagged crags, and spread like wind-ruffled lakes. Just as the clouds replicate the landscape below, the verse reiterates its catalog of geologic features: “lakes and shores / And mountain crags,” although, this time, description condenses into a list.

Equating replication with change is one of many ways Coleridge quietly insists that opposite qualities often inhabit the same space. At the beginning of the poem, Coleridge sits in a silent room where even the fire hovers low and unmoving. He describes a film of ash flapping on the grate, which in folkloric belief was called a “stranger” and was said to foretell the arrival of an unexpected guest:

Only that film, which fluttered on the grate,

Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing.
Methinks, its motion in this hush of nature
Gives it dim sympathies with me who live. …

This “stranger” unites opposites: it is both the burnt residue of the fire and the harbinger of a new arrival; it is both a remnant and an omen. Coleridge describes the leaping film as “unquiet,” a word of negation that contains quiet and is created from its own opposite. This negative construction echoes the poem’s first lines in which he observes that the frost is “unhelped” by any wind.

Although the appearance of the “stranger” on the grate signals the coming arrival of a guest, seeing it makes Coleridge remember his own childhood when he sat at school watching the “stranger” flapping on the grate and wondering what visitor might arrive:

For still I hoped to see the stranger’s face,
Townsman, or aunt, or sister more beloved,
My play-mate when we both were clothed alike!

In the 18th century, both boys and girls wore dresses until they went to school. The last line evokes a time when certain differentiating customs had not yet come into effect, and obvious gender distinctions had not yet emerged. Likewise, his meditative anticipation contains multiple suspended possibilities—the unexpected guest could be anyone. As Coleridge watches the fluttering ash, the imagined stranger remains in the multiplicitous realm of imagination and has not yet crystalized into a singular, real person.

Because the film of ash is the only thing stirring in the hushed house, the poet suggests that the film has “dim sympathies” with him, thus equating his mind with this image of restlessness. Coleridge’s descriptions of stillness imbue it, paradoxically, with turbulence: “Tis calm indeed! so calm, that it disturbs / And vexes meditation with its strange / And extreme silentness.” Quietness “disturbs” and “vexes” the poet’s thoughts. Mysteriously tumultuous, the silence invites the poet into a world of mimetic possibilities in which forms are not confined to their own limits. The word extreme derives from a Latin adjective meaning far away or foreign—outside the boundaries of a given territory. This “extreme” silence dissolves the boundaries of the self and draws the poet toward something distant. In this case, the distance is temporal; watching the “stranger,” the poet recalls old memories and also vividly imagines his son’s future. In the imagination, multiple time frames coexist at once; time is no longer simply a linear progression. Silence turns the self into a wanderer just as Coleridge imagines that his son Hartley will “wander like a breeze.”

Just as clouds imitate the landscape, Coleridge’s metaphor turns his son into the world he will inhabit. In the poem’s imagined future, Hartley becomes like the animating wind racing across mountains and shores. In Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination, critic Gregory Leadbetter argues that Coleridge believed “our metaphysical ideas shape our becoming,” citing Coleridge’s beautiful statement that “we become that which we believe our gods to be.” As Hartley comes to know and understand the spiritual wisdom embedded in landscapes, he himself will begin to meld with his surroundings.

Coleridge imagines God’s “language” suffusing “all things”—a kind of linguistic connective tissue that underlies the land and, once we understand it, allows our minds to meld with nature. Coleridge envisions that his son will

… see and hear
The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
Of that eternal language, which thy God
Utters, who from eternity doth teach
Himself in all, and all things in himself.
Great universal Teacher! he shall mould
Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.

Knowledge leads to more questions. Satiation and thirst are conflated, and the congruence of opposites is the tension that allows creation to proceed. (The child himself, after all, comes from melding two different genetic lines.) Coleridge also introduces the idea that one thing leads back into another, an image of circular experience mirrored by the structure of the poem—a rondo—which, at the end, repeats the phrase secret ministry and returns to the image of frost.

Coleridge wrote that “the common end of all narrative, nay of all poems, is to convert a series into a whole: to make those events which in real or imagined History move in a strait Line, assume to our Understandings a Circular motion—the snake with its Tail in its Mouth.” Coleridge is describing the ouroboros—an ancient image of a snake eating its own tail. This strange creature symbolized the idea that endings cannot be separated from beginnings.

The poem’s final stanza evokes the ouroboros-like progression of seasons and unifies them through metaphor. Coleridge writes that because Hartley will understand God’s “eternal language”:

… all seasons shall be sweet to thee,
Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
Of mossy apple-tree, while the night-thatch
Smokes in the sun-thaw. …

The “tufts of snow” on the winter branch evoke white sprays of apple blossoms that, in spring, will cover the tree. Winter replicates spring; the image similarly erodes boundaries between plants and animals: tufts—of blossoms, of snow—evoke tufts of feathers on the redbreast’s belly. Similarly, the thatch “smokes” in the “sun thaw.” If Coleridge’s picturesque but highly flammable roof actually began to smoke, the house would be destroyed. The thaw, on the other hand, hails spring and new growth, and, thus, language melds destruction and creation. In his creative autobiography, Biographia Literaria, Coleridge defines imagination as the human capacity to invent new realities, replicating—on a small scale—divine creation. He also identifies another role of the imagination: to unify the world around us. Coleridge writes that this secondary aspect of imagination “dissolves, diffuses, dissipates in order to recreate: or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify.” Coleridge uses general to mean “creative”—the “general earth” generates life. But, of course, general also means universal—spiritual wisdom and poetic language fuse different forms and reveal their commonality.

Understanding God’s “language” will make all seasons “sweet” to the poet’s son—whether the leaves cover the trees, whether snow coats the branches, or

whether the eave-drops fall
Heard only in the trances of the blast,
Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.

At the end, the imagined future and the physical present merge. The poet envisions a future version of what he is already experiencing: the stillness of a frosty night. “Trances of the blast” means snatches of quiet between gusts of wind, but trance also evokes enchantment. Silence enfolds magic, the possibility of unexplained revelation. Trance derives from a Latin verb meaning to “go across.” Trance, silence, draws the speaker across the border of the self and into union with the world around him. Midnight is the witching hour, the moment when one day becomes another, when one thing transforms into another. Coleridge evokes ice turning to water, a change that serves only to illustrate how different forms are composed of the same material. The assonance threading through the final lines sonically unites words: “silent icicles, / quietly shining to the quiet Moon.” The icicles shine because they are catching the light of the moon, which, in turn, reflects the sun. Seemingly disparate forms gleam with the same light. The icicles decking the house replicate the distant moon, and the poem’s branching, reiterating patterns reproduce the frost’s intricate designs. The child reflects the father and then becomes like the rushing wind; imagination refigures him in the image of the wild, unbounded world. The temporary imagination imitates the divine, endless transfigurations that shape the mountains and cliffs and fill them with an “eternal language” that, rushing through the wilderness, is caught and replicated briefly in the poem’s stillness.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/249028

The Wind
--------------------------------BY DAFYDD AP GWILYM

TRANSLATED BY GWYNETH LEWIS



Skywind, skillful disorder,
Strong tumult walking over there,
Wondrous man, rowdy-sounding,
World hero, with neither foot nor wing.
Yeast in cloud loaves, you were thrown out
Of sky’s pantry, with not one foot,
How swiftly you run, and so well
This moment above the high hill.

Tell me, north wind of the cwm,
Your route, reliable hymn.
Over the lengths of the world you fly,
Tonight, hill weather, please stay high,
Ah man, go over Upper Aeron
Be lovely and cool, stay in clear tune.
Don’t hang about or let that maniac,
Litigious Little Bow, hold you back,
He’s poisonous. Society
And its goods are closed to me.

Thief of nests, though you winnow leaves
No one accuses you, nor impedes
You, no band of men, nor magistrate’s hand,
Nor blue blade, nor flood, nor rain.
Indeed, no son of man can kill you,
Fire won’t burn nor treason harm you.
You shall not drown, as you’re aware,
You’re never stuck, you’re angle-less air.
No need of swift horse to get about,
Nor bridge over water, nor any boat.
No officer or force will hand you over
To court for fingering treetop feathers.
Sight cannot see you, wide-open den,
But thousands hear you, nest of great rain.

You are God’s grace across the world,
The roar when breaking tops of oaks are hurled,
You hang clouds’ notes in heavens’ score
And dance athletically over moors
Dry-humored, clever creature,
Over clouds’ stepping-stones you travel far,
Archer on fields of snow up high,
Disperser of rubbish piles in loud cries.
Storm that’s stirring up the sea
Randy surfer where land meets sea.
Bold poet, rhyming snowdrifts you are,
Sower, scatterer of leaves you are,
Clown of peaks, you get off scot-free,
Hurler of mad-masted, foaming sea.

I was lost once I felt desire
For Morfudd of the golden hair.
A girl has caused my disgrace,
Run up to her father’s house,
Knock on the door, make him open
To my messenger before the dawn,
Find her if there’s any way,
Give song to the voice of my sigh.
You come from unsullied stars,
Tell my noble, generous her:
For as long as I’m alive
I will be her loyal slave.
My face without her’s a mess
If it’s true she’s not been faithless.

Go up high, see the one who’s white,
Go down below, sky’s favorite.
Go to Morfudd Llwyd the fair,
Come back safe, wealth of the air.

Translated from the Welsh
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TRANSLATOR'S NOTES
Translator’s Note: “When I’d reported to the couple, thus” by Bertolt Brecht
BY TOM KUHN
T.S. Eliot, writing on Tennyson, found in him the three qualities that make a great poet: abundance, variety, and complete technical competence. Brecht is a great poet, one of the three or four best in the whole of German literature (a literature not short of first-rate poetry). He is abundant: the Berlin-Frankfurt edition of his Complete Works contains more than two thousand poems. He is various: in dozens of modes, genres, and forms, from epigram to epic, from sonnets to ballads and marching songs; he is widely eclectic, a thieving magpie of much of world literature — he took from Greece and Rome, China, Japan, Britain, America, his own compatriots, the living and the long dead, across frontiers of space and time. His technical virtuosity in traditional forms and in forms he invented or developed for his own needs, is breathtaking. He works effectively in hexameters, in tight rhyming quatrains, in unrhyming verse in irregular meters, and in numerous other shapes and forms as the poetic occasion demands. He was, moreover, a lyric poet all his writing life. He is known, very properly, for his engagement as a writer in the bitter and violent politics of his age; but he should also be known as a poet driven by Eros. Brecht was always more or less in love; in his total oeuvre love, or let us say Eros, is expressed, discussed, enacted in an astonishing variety of modes, forms, tones, and circumstances.

This loose sonnet, written in the late 1930s, is a riff on Dante (and the story of Paolo and Francesca), complete with echoes of terza rima; as a formal model, Brecht may also have had Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” in mind. Both poets were favorites. Here he reflects on the politics of male-female relationships in a capitalist and a playfully imagined post-capitalist society.

Originally Published: November 3, 2014

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/246936

ESSAY
The Imaginative Man
C.S. Lewis’s first love was poetry, and it enabled him to write the prose for which he is remembered.

BY LAURA C. MALLONEE
The Imaginative Man
Image from The Magician's Nephew by C.S. Lewis
In 1926, at the height of modernism’s golden age, a young C.S. Lewis and a few of his friends decided to play a literary prank. As told in Alister McGrath’s clear-eyed biography, they wrote a spoof of T.S. Eliot’s poetry and submitted it for publication at The Criterion, where Eliot was editor. “My soul is a windowless façade,” the poem began, and went on to ruminate over the Marquis de Sade, upholstered pink furniture, and mint juleps. If the older poet took the bait and published the poem, Lewis, who was then 27 years old and a fellow at Magdalene College, would use the event “for the advancement of literature and the punishment of quackery.” If not, it might prove there was something more to modernist poetry than he thought.

But Eliot never answered Lewis’s letter, and looking back on the ruse now is like watching a mouse brazenly challenge a cat. Eliot was then at the pinnacle of his career, having already published Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) and The Waste Land (1922); the younger Lewis’s literary future was still nebulous. Eliot has been called the most important poet of the 20th century; few today are aware that Lewis, the mastermind behind The Chronicles of Narnia, wrote poetry at all. But poetry was his first love, and his devotion to the form will be officially honored this month with the unveiling of a monument at the Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, 50 years after his death.



Why was Lewis’s poetry forgotten? It is not so much that he fell out of fashion as a poet as that he openly spurned the fashions of his day. Amid the tide of modernism, Lewis’s narrative and lyrical poetry addressed an already dwindling audience. “I am conscious of a partly pathological hostility to what is fashionable,” he wrote in 1940. But while his poetry might have been overlooked, it was the generative force of his writing life, an idle wheel that enabled him to write the powerful prose for which he is remembered.

•



It was in the wake of tragedy that Lewis first encountered poetry in 1908. He was nine years old, and his mother was dying of cancer. One day, as she lay in a sick room, “Jack”—a nickname he adopted after a car killed the family dog, Jacksie—was roaming the family’s Belfast home when his eyes fell on one of his father’s books. He opened it to read from a translation of Tegner’s Drapa by Longfellow:

I heard a voice that cried
Balder the Beautiful
Is dead, is dead!
These strange lines pierced a deep nerve. In his 1955 autobiography, Surprised by Joy, which takes its title from Wordsworth’s 1815 poem, Lewis regarded that moment as seminal in his young life; the sensation that entered him was a fleeting joy of “sickening intensity” that he would seek in poetry from then on. His self became divided between an external persona and a “secret, imaginative life” that concerned itself primarily with joy, a self-perpetuating desire that “makes nonsense of our common distinction between having and wanting. There, to have is to want and to want is to have.”

Just two weeks after his mother died, Jack was packed off to a series of bleak boarding schools in England, where these “stabs of Joy” became all the more crucial. Through readings of Robert Browning, William Morris, Percy Shelley, George MacDonald, Wordsworth, and Norse and Greek mythology, Jack escaped the grim world into which he had been cast, and he worked diligently at composing his own narrative verse. He was especially inspired by Homer’s Iliad, enthusing to a friend in 1914, “Those fine, simple, euphonious lines … strike a chord in one’s mind that no modern literature approaches.” His poetic self—what he called “the imaginative man”—had been hatched.

If Romantic poetry and myth occupied one hemisphere of his mind, the other was quickly giving way to a rationalism that, in his view, threatened their legitimacy. “Nearly all that I loved I believed to be imaginary, nearly all that I believed to be real I thought grim and meaningless,” he explained in Surprised by Joy. By 1916, the church-raised Lewis would write:

Come let us curse our Master ere we die,
For all our hopes in endless ruin lie
The good is dead. Let us curse God most High.
The poem is one of several angst-ridden rhymes drafted in a notebook he self-deprecatingly entitled Metrical Meditations of a Cod. Many of them appeared in his poetic debut, Spirits in Bondage (1919),which also included poems he wrote during the war. He had been accepted to Oxford’s University College in December, 1916, but the following April he enlisted in the army. In the fall, he was sent to the front in France. Among the poems he composed in the trenches was “Death in Battle,” his first publication outside a school journal when it appeared in February 1919. It ran in Reveille, a small magazine geared toward disabled veterans whose other contributors included Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves. Though he wrote little else about these grim experiences, it seems probable that the harrowing sights the 20-year-old saw goaded his anger against an absent God—a tempest that rages throughout Spirits in Bondage.

Yet he never found acclaim as a war poet. Published just four years after Eliot’s now-iconic poem, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, appeared in Poetry, Lewis’s first collection was rooted in an exacting craft of meter and rhyme that had already become outmoded. Though it won him a flurry of attention at Oxford—where he returned as a student after the war—interest quickly faded. “Indeed the current literary set is one I could not afford to live in anyway,” he reassured himself, since “their tastes run rather to modernism….”

From a 21st-century vantage point, it is easy to view Lewis as simply a reactionary, rejecting what was new without attempting to understand it. Yet his aversion to the moderns was born out of love for Homer, Milton, Spenser, Shelley, and Yeats—writers considered challenging for contemporary readers. He genuinely feared that modernists were “unmaking language” and was zealous to defend a millennia-old tradition of rhyme, meter, and myth that filled his life with meaning. By isolating himself from the moderns, he fulfilled Shelley’s image of the poet as a nightingale, “who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.”

Lewis soldiered on, even while expressing in his diary mounting anxieties about writing. When the London Mercury rejected a few poems in April 1922, he spent a restless night pondering whether he would be forced to give up poetry. On February 9, 1923, he was again kept awake by “gloomy thoughts” of failure—“one of those moments when one is afraid one may not be a great man after all.”

But it was Lewis’s instinct to kick against the goads. He had long been working on a narrative poem called Dymer and finally managed to publish it in September 1926—just months after his fruitless hoax on Eliot. An epic written in Chaucer’s rhyme royal, the poem—which McGrath calls the passion of Lewis’s life—was an aesthetic and ideological reflection of all the Belfast-born writer had come to be. Dymer investigated the temptations of fantasy, following the path of a young man who escapes a totalitarian reality to indulge in a dream world that kills him. But it too was a critical failure. After reading Dymer, an acquaintance told Lewis, “The metrical level is good, the vocabulary is large: but Poetry—not a line.”

Even as he floundered, Lewis continued critiquing Eliot and his ilk. In 1928, he wrote to his brother, “There is no longer any chance of discovering a long poem in English which will turn out to be just what I want and which can be added to the Faerie Queene, the Prelude, Paradise Lost, the Ring and the Book, The Earthly Paradise and a few others – because there aren’t any more.” By 1931 he had become an earnest Christian who believed art and literature should be “the handmaids of religious or at least moral truth,” a view that made him even less inclined to regard the modernists affectionately—or they him. (When Eliot himself converted in 1927, Virginia Woolf called him “dead to us all from this day forward.”)

Despite their newfound common ground, Lewis dubbed Eliot’s The Waste Land “infernal” in a 1935 letter, and in 1939 lamented, “I am more and more convinced that there is no future for poetry.” His scathing poem “The Country of the Blind,” penned decades later in 1951, describes moderns as having “blind mouths” incapable of understanding what words mean. In a letter written two years later to Joy Davidman, whom he would eventually marry, he pondered, “Twenty years ago I felt no doubt that I should live to see it all break up and great literature return; but here I am, losing teeth and hair, and still no break in the clouds.”

It is only in his 1954 poem “A Confession”—which lifts a line from Eliot’s own Prufrock—that Lewis wryly expressed his resignation as a poet long out of step with his time. Describing himself as “that odd man Wordsworth knew, to whom / A primrose was a yellow primrose,” he wrote,

I am so coarse, the things the poets see
Are obstinately invisible to me.
For twenty years I've stared my level best
To see if evening—any evening—would suggest
A patient etherized upon a table;
In vain. I simply wasn't able.
To me each evening looked far more
Like the departure from a silent, yet a crowded, shore
Of a ship whose freight was everything, leaving behind
Gracefully, finally, without farewells, marooned mankind.
•





It seems inevitable that Lewis’s contrarianism would lead him to become a critic. Throughout the nearly three decades he spent as an Oxford don—during which he became a close friend of J.R.R. Tolkien, who encouraged him as he funneled his love of verse into works of fiction—and later years as a professor at Cambridge, he focused much of his energy on the late Middle Ages. In his 1944 essay “On the Reading of Old Books,” Lewis condemned what he saw as the chronological snobbery of his day and argued for an “intimate knowledge of the past”:

Not that the past has any magic about it, but because we cannot study the future, and yet need something to set against the present, to remind us that the basic assumptions have been quite different in different periods and that much which seems certain to the uneducated is merely temporary fashion.

Today, his perceptive critical studies remain highly regarded. The Allegory of Love (1936) revived scholarly interest in medieval narratives such as Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. A Preface to “Paradise Lost” (1942) is still one of the most valued introductions to the poem. “His work on Milton drew attention to an aspect of his poetry that had been neglected—how it sounded to its readers,” McGrath writes. “Lewis became acutely sensitive to the rhythm of the English language, whether poetry or prose. He never used a typewriter, explaining that the clattering of its keys destroyed his ‘sense of rhythm.’”

It was not through poetry but prose that Lewis finally found his audience, though it’s doubtful his prose would have been as powerful without his sharp poetic and critical instinct. The scholar Don W. King points to the writer’s “rich lyrical passages, vivid description; striking similes, metaphors and analogies; careful diction; and concern for the sound of words” in works ranging from science fiction to literary criticism. Alister McGrath observes, “Here we find one of the keys to his success as a writer—his ability to express complex ideas in simple language, connecting with his audience without losing elegance of expression.” The Chronicles of Narnia series is not easily forgotten by those who read it. The series has sold more than 100 million copies and has been translated into more than 40 languages.

It’s unsurprising that many of his later books—including Perelandra (1943), Surprised by Joy (1955), and Till We Have Faces (1956)—had early origins in verse. The Pilgrim’s Regress (1933) not only began as a poem but also included several lyrical pieces within the narrative. Among these, “Because of Endless Pride” is a graceful rumination on the narcissism with which Lewis struggled as a writer. In the throes of vanity, the narrator is nearly dying of want when his eye catches a form in the mirror—

Who made the glass, whose light
Makes dark, whose fair
Makes foul, my shadowy form reflected there
That self-Love, brought to bed
of Love may die and bear
Her sweet son in despair.
Lewis never stopped writing poetry. He would write more than 200 lyrical poems, 81 of which were published before his death in 1963. Among the most touching of these are those written for his wife, Joy Davidman, whom he married late in life while she, like his mother, was dying of cancer. “All this is flashy rhetoric about loving you”—he admits in “As the Ruins Fall”—“I never had a selfless thought since I was born.” After her death, he mourned his loss in “Joys That Sting”:

To take the old walks alone, or not at all,
To order one pint where I ordered two,
To think of, and then not make, the small
Time-honoured joke (senseless to all but you);
Critics have since held varying views of Lewis’s poetry. He has been called “big enough to be worth laughing at” by the novelist Kingsley Amis, who also wrote that Lewis was someone he respected highly. Chad Walsh dubbed him an “almost poet,” and Charles Huttar called him a “minor” one. W.W. Robson has written that in some of Lewis’s poems he “touches greatness.” After a selection of his verse was published in 2002, the New York Times Book Review described his poems as taking “an important place in the Lewis canon,” while Thomas Howard gushed, “This is the best—the glorious best—of Lewis. For here, with the gemlike beauty and hardness that poetry alone can achieve, are his ideas about the nature of things that lay behind his writings."

In a letter addressed to the Milton Society of America, who honored him in 1954, Lewis offered hindsight on his own relationship to poetry:

The imaginative man in me is older, more continuously operative, and in that sense more basic than either the religious writer or the critic. It was he who made me first attempt (with little success) to be a poet. It was he who, in response to the poetry of others, made me a critic, and in defense of that response, sometimes a critical controversialist…. And it was of course he who has brought me, in the last few years, to write the series of Narnian stories for children….

Lewis’s poetry never came close to securing him the towering reputation of a titan such as Eliot, but he used his disappointments to begin anew, channeling his poetic sensibilities into prose works that enlarge the imaginations of all who read them. That he will now be honored in the same sacred space as Milton, Spenser, and—yes—even Eliot seems a fitting tribute—far greater than Lewis ever dreamed.



Originally Published: November 19, 2013

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/guide/243476#guide

W.S. Graham: “Dear Bryan Wynter”

How a poem brings language to loss and speaks to the dead.

BY HANNAH BROOKS-MOTL
Asked to list the key figures of 20th-century British poetry, even the most widely read of us might forget to include W.S. Graham. A Scottish poet who lived in Cornwall, England for over 40 years, Graham enjoyed a paradoxical relationship to literary fame as well. Though his books were published by Faber & Faber, Graham’s relative isolation and extreme poverty often left him bereft of an audience: a 15-year silence punctuated his career. On one end of that gap is The Nightfishing (1955), a book that showcases Graham’s earlier, more difficult phases, when he was disparaged as a “dazed disciple of Dylan Thomas.” Though the comparison is unfair, Graham’s early work does frequently include mouthfuls like this, from “Many Without Elegy”:

Saying ‘there’s my bleached-in-tears opponent
Prone on his brothering bolster in the week
Of love for unbandaged unsprayed-for men.’

This is difficult to both articulate and apprehend. But the collections that come after Graham’s 15-year publishing hiatus do herald a shift in focus—his later books were much less interested in big, burly words. What Graham allowed to shine through instead were the concerns central to all his work, early and late: the problems and possibilities of communication, as well as the ways language allows, develops—and complicates—relationships between people, and between people and poems. As Graham himself wrote in a letter to a friend, “Communication is what our lives are about. We must try. To be better or not doesn’t matter. Measurement is out of our reach. One only tries to send a message, a note, however inadequate from one aloneness to another.”

Graham wrote many letters in his life, though only a selection has been published as The Nightfisherman. His life in Cornwall was remote, his sense of “aloneness” acute. He never held a steady job, and his missives to friends are salted with requests for financial help. “How terrible to think I never get in touch with you but to ask for money,” he wrote to his friend Bryan Wynter, an artist, in 1971. “Can you please let us have £5?” Graham’s letters are full not just of talk about poetry but actual phrases of it. As the scholar Fiona Green has noted, “Graham’s poems and letters speak across to each other in several ways, one of which is simply that words sometimes travel between them.”

Graham wrote letters with poems in them, but his poems often mimicked letters as well. Even his earliest books include titles such as “1st Letter” and “A Letter More Likely to Myself.” His epistolary poetry speaks to his concern with communication. After all, we write letters (or e-mails or texts) to people who are not with us, relying on language to communicate the information we want to to relay, but we also depend on language to embody our sense of longing, to convey the loss we feel without that person, to that person. Graham’s letter-poem “Dear Bryan Wynter” is at once elegy and letter, written to a dear friend who had recently died.

Graham lived among artists in Cornwall, and his work reflects their influence to varying degrees. He befriended avant-garde and abstract expressionist painters such as Wynter, Roger Hilton, and Ben Nicolson; his interest in “work in which abstract and figurative meet” is partially due to their influence, according to critic Ralph Pite. “Dear Bryan Wynter” is both elegy and letter, but it’s also a meditation on language and image, on what can be seen and said to someone who is absent and what might be imagined in the space of that loss.

“Dear Bryan Wynter” pretends to be a single letter, and it quotes letters that Graham wrote to friends and Wynter’s widow, Monica: “This is just a word or two in the middle of the night,” he wrote to her. “You mustn’t think I am eccentrically making a thing of Bryan dying. It is only me writing to you, suddenly being struck by the realisation of his absence.” The poem’s opening, “This is only a note / To say how sorry I am / You died” transfers the tone of Graham’s letter to Monica; it also mimics the abashed way we use language when writing to someone in grief through the tiny, throw-away adjective only and the reliance on simple, straightforward phrasing. The entire poem uses trivial small talk and the kinds of clichéd language we stuff correspondence with: “Anyhow, how are things?” and “Do you want anything?” become all the more poignant because they are language acts stripped of their action. They fill space but can never be fulfilled themselves. Graham uses stock phrases to suggest the paucity of language, but language allows the poem to exist in the first place—it even suggests that Wynter might be on some kind of receiving end after all. Lines such as “You will realize / What a position it puts / Me in” and “Bryan, I would be obliged / If you would scout things out / For me” allow Bryan a future, even if it’s only a future tense.

Language maintains the fiction of Bryan’s presence in other ways too. The poem obsessively posits questions to Wynter and to itself as though endless questioning might delay the “realisation of his absence,” the mute response that Wynter can only give:

Are you still somewhere
With your long legs
And twitching smile under
Your blue hat walking
Across a place? Or am
I greedy to make you up
Again out of memory?
Are you there at all?

And in the next section:

Do you want anything?
Where shall I send something?
Rice-wine, meanders, paintings
By your contemporaries?
Or shall I send a kind
Of news of no time
Leaning against the wall
Outside your old house.

Later in the poem comes the admission: “This is only a note / To say I am aware / You are not here.” Graham’s reliance on large, empty nouns such as anything, something, and somewhere, as well as the floating adjectives here and there, is notable here and in other late poems, which are spare, seemingly empty places. Gone are the large, loud lexicons of his first books. In their stead, Graham relies on place holders such as place, here, and there for their suggestive emptiness: they conjure the feeling of location without defining it. They are both actual and abstract in the way that Pite described Wynter’s and his fellow artists’ work.

This poem confronts absence as well as landscape. Graham’s language turns from a banality such as “Where shall I send something?” to an existential image that captures loss and longing in the barest outline of objective reality imaginable: “Or shall I send a kind / Of news of no time / Leaning against the wall / Outside your old house.” The lines work with and against one another to create and complicate the image of the poet in front of Wynter’s old house. As the phrases unspool, it becomes unclear whether the poet or the “news of no time” is “leaning against the wall”; the poem wants readers to see this seemingly simple image in both concrete and abstract ways. Such effects turn the poem into a kind of homage to Wynter’s work as well as his person.

In a retrospective of Wynter’s work at Tate St. Ives, the curators noted that Wynter’s “works are fundamentally concerned with man’s inner relationship to nature.” A Bryan Wynter painting often glides around representing actual objects, persons, and scenes, always on the brink of falling into them. His long, dream-like shapes can recall human forms or natural processes. The curators go on to quote Wynter himself, describing the importance to his work of capturing first impressions:

I find it helpful to think of that moment at which the eye looks out at the world it has not yet recognised, in which true seeing has not yet been translated into the useful concepts with which the mind immediately swamps it.

Graham re-creates that sense of “true seeing” in the third section of “Dear Bryan Wynter,” which starts, as Wynter recommends, upon waking:

I am up. I’ve washed
The front of my face
And here I stand looking
Out over the top
Half of my bedroom window.
There almost as far
As I can see I see
St Buryan’s church tower.
An inch to the left, behind
That dark rise of woods,
Is where you used to lurk.

The small dislocations and additions within this stanza build the scene strangely: the poet hasn’t washed his face but “the front of [his] face”; he’s not looking out his window but “out over the top / half” of it. Line breaks also contribute to a jagged, shifting sense of action. They pile on top of one another in unexpected ways, seeming to proceed as units of sense—“And here I stand looking”—but actually working as slices of scenery that require readers to constantly adjust their understanding of the scene’s perspective. Delaying the verb in the last sentence attaches the description “An inch to the left, behind” to “St Buryan’s church tower” (nearly an anagram of “St Bryan,” as Fiona Green notes). “That dark rise of woods” floats on its own line, almost without location at all, which seems fitting because it’s modified not by another piece of landscape but by the ghost of Wynter himself. Like the first section, which included the line “Your blue hat walking,” this part of the poem shows how language can disorient and distract us from “the useful concepts” we immediately reach for. The poem distorts landscape, but grief and absence have also distorted its language.

Both Graham and Wynter were interested in distortion. Wynter’s later work included a series of installations he called Images Moving Out Onto Space (IMOOS). Hanging a series of objects in front of a huge parabolic mirror, Wynter allowed each “work” to be the product of each individual viewer. Graham alternately celebrated and feared that poetry might constitute a similar process. To the poet and critic C.H. Sisson, he wrote:

Without diminishing at all the responsibility of the poet’s intention the poem never goes through the ‘space’ between the poet and the reader without distortion. But the distortion is necessary and its ultimate value in the mind of the reader is the poem plus his best effort of beholding.

In his manifesto of sorts, “Notes on a Poetry of Release,” Graham exclaimed, “The poem is not a handing out of the same packet to everyone, as it is not a thrown-down heap of words for us to choose the bonniest. The poem is the replying chord to the reader. It is the reader’s involuntary reply.” Yet Graham’s own life story suggests his persistent belief that both language and poetry allow people to talk to, even know, one another.

Graham devoted himself to poetry; he chose it over financial security, a sense of filial and national belonging, even health. “The effort to speak honestly and be heard is difficult, communication is difficult,” he wrote Alan Clodd. “To speak of one’s self honestly is difficult.” However difficult communication might be, it wasn’t impossible, as Graham’s entire life and body of work show. “To Bryan Wynter,” the last poem in his last book, eloquently speaks to the dependability of even the most hollow and over-used phrases. The morning after Wynter died, Graham wrote to his friend Robin Skelton: “This is not a letter to tell you that somebody has died. You don’t know him anyhow.… Are you there? Is your dog there? I make your dog a symbol.” Graham again lifts his own language from letter to poem. “Dear Bryan Wynter” ends

Bryan, I would be obliged
If you would scout things out
For me. Although I am not
Just ready to start out.
I am trying to be better,
Which will make you smile
Under your blue hat.

I know I make a symbol
Of the foxglove on the wall.
It is because it knows you.

Graham’s final request to Wynter uses the stock phrases he’s recycled throughout: “I would be obliged,” “scout things out,” “I am trying to be better.” And yet his last admission, “I know I make a symbol,” speaks to his awareness of the comfort we find in such locutions. Graham doesn’t parody clichés in this poem, but depends on them—they are a kind of language always available, and they exist in common for all of us. “There aren’t any words,” “I don’t know what to say” become the very things we do say, the words we do use to fill the emptiness when a loved one has died. Even these artless phrases become, for Graham, evidence of the attempt to overcome the difficulty of saying anything to anyone. Graham wrote to a friend about “the paradoxical hunger” of art: “To always want to share aloneness, to share what happens within one’s own lonely room, to wonder how alike or unalike one is from someone else.” “Dear Bryan Wynter” shows how language can at once make present an absent loved one and acknowledge the sleight of hand such conjuring requires. It is because we can make things symbols that we might speak to the dead, re-creating landscapes that pre-date and persist through loss. In the end, Graham’s work shows how language and writing, letters and elegies, sustain us.

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A very enlightening read.. And has given me a new and extremely talented poet to research and study.Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/guide/242398#guide

Philip Sidney: Astrophil and Stella 63 (“O Grammar rules…”)
An Elizabethan plays a Modernist language game

BY ANGE MLINKO
Sir Philip Sidney is a key figure of the Elizabethan era, the fountainhead of the modern poetic tradition. He was born in 1554 in Kent, England, around the same time that the first sonnets in English (by Sir Thomas Wyatt) were posthumously published. Sidney was the contemporary of Walter Raleigh, Edmund Spenser, Fulke Greville, and William Shakespeare, among others: poets who occupied the vanguard of Tudor society as courtiers, soldiers, diplomats, and explorers. Poetry was almost inextricable from song—most gentlemen-poets could play a passable lute, much the way learning guitar is a rite of passage today—and the language itself was still young: unstandardized, mongrelized, and versatile. It lent itself readily to creative uses, and the challenge was met by poets who lived in a sparkling societal milieu where games—tournaments, sports, theater, dance—flourished.

That is to say, the Renaissance poets played games with language. They did so from the baseline of the Petrarchan sonnet, and Sir Philip Sidney stands out because he both played and commented on the playing—imitated Petrarch and criticized Petrarch—while mastering the form. His prose treatise, A Defence of Poesy, still influences what we perceive as the finest poetry, that which Wallace Stevens called the supreme fiction. This alone justifies Sidney’s claim as the first major poet-critic in English; but what makes him particularly modern—or perhaps what makes us particularly Sidneyan—is that his landmark sonnet sequence, Astrophil and Stella, incorporates the conflict between the poet and the critic, the stylist and the chastiser of style, in the sequence itself. Detractors of the self-reflexive tendencies of contemporary poetry (epitomized by, say, John Ashbery) call it postmodernist, or deconstructive, and it has become common to deplore the artifice and playfulness of a poetry born from the premise that language is "slippery"—as likely to elude our meanings as give meaning to experience. But Sidney was one of our predecessors, and this is nowhere more evident than in Sonnet 63 of Astrophil and Stella.

At this point in the sequence, Astrophil has reached a pitch of bitterness at unrequited love. Starting at about sonnet 52 (“A strife is grown between Virtue and Love”), the paradox—of a Love that is supposed to be good but creates only pain, and Goodness, which is supposed to be rewarded with love but often isn’t—is shown to be a source of metaphysical and erotic misery. He proceeds to play with a series of paradoxes that mock-reconcile extremes: “So sweets my pains, that my pains me rejoice,” “Blest in my curse, and cursed in my bliss,” and “Dear, love me not, that you may love me more.” But by sonnet 63, it becomes apparent that language is utterly futile. To break this stalemate, Astrophel resorts to a bit of farce that pretends to trap Stella in a sleight-of-hand at the same time that it mocks his own tendency to take his love-logic game too seriously:

O Grammar rules, O now your virtues show;
So children still read you with awful eyes,
As my young Dove may in your precepts wise
Her grant to me, by her own virtue know.
For late with heart most high, with eyes most low,
I crav’d the thing which ever she denies:
She lightning Love, displaying Venus’ skies,
Least once should not be heard, twice said, No, No.
Sing then my Muse, now Io Pæan sing,
Heav’ns envy not at my high triumphing:
But Grammar’s force with sweet success confirm,
For Grammar says (O this dear Stella weigh,)
For Grammar says (to Grammar who says nay)
That in one speech two Negatives affirm.

Before we take a closer look at Sidney’s sportive sonnet, we should step back and review the rules that governed the game. Astrophil and Stella is an innovative take on the Petrarchan sonnet sequence, and it inaugurated a craze for sequences that culminated in the crowning glory of Renaissance poetry: Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Both Sidney and Shakespeare use the Petrarchan convention of addressing an anonymous lover by a nickname or pseudonym, which itself was inspired by the Roman poet Catullus. Over 2,000 years ago, Catullus wrote hendecasyllabics to his “Lesbia”; then, in the 1300s, the Italian poet Petrarch wrote 14-line sonnets to his “Laura”; and 200 years later, Shakespeare’s addressees (there are two) remain the subject of intense speculation, but Sidney used allegorical pseudonyms: Astrophil (Latin for “star-lover,” with a pun on his own name, Philip) and Stella (“star”), who is believed to be a stand-in for a married lady at court, Penelope Rich, with whom Sidney was infatuated.

Unlike conventional troubadour love poems up to that point, Astrophil and Stella does not extol and flatter the lady so much as refract the turbulent heart of the thwarted lover. Astrophil is center stage; the drama of the poem is enacted through his inner monologue, not through the action of the lovers. As we read through the 108 sonnets and 11 songs that form the arc of their relationship, we are treated to a series of modulating tones and arguments. But unlike Modernist stream-of-consciousness, Astrophil’s thought process is governed by formal constraints and conceits. Each module is packaged in 14 decasyllabic lines (iambic pentameter as we know it was still being invented) that roughly break down into four rhyming quatrains and a final, epigrammatic couplet, though there is still the Petrarchan convention of having a voltaafter the first eight lines (known as the octave). But this is the general case; there are individual sonnets in Astrophil and Stella that vary the parameters. For instance, sonnet 89 alternates the end-words day and night in place of proper rhymes. And sonnet 63 gives us Petrarchan rhymes that interlock, creating couplets embedded in quatrains (rhyme patterns ABBA, ABBA) whose volta is marked by an impromptu couplet introducing a new rhyme (CC), before reverting back to the Petrarchan quatrain (DEED).

There are more famous sonnets in Astrophil than number 63—the opening sonnet (“Loving in Truth, and fain in verse my love to show”) and 31 (“With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climb’st the skies”)—but the mock sophistry of sonnet 63 is a little gem of Elizabethan wit. We usually speak of wit and wisdom, but here wit is totally subjugated to fancy: it is the logic of love speaking, masquerading as rationality to coax the beloved to surrender to passion.

O Grammar rules, O now your virtues show;
So children still read you with awful eyes,
As my young Dove may in your precepts wise
Her grant to me, by her own virtue know.

Astrophil is apostrophizing Grammar, turning it into a person, and an authoritative one at that. Personification is what artists all over the world do when they make animals and gods speak as humans; why not rules of grammar? Meanwhile, Sidney creates a little trompe l’oeil with grammar himself: when I think of how that quatrain might be parsed, or diagrammed as one sentence, I am first stymied by the ambiguity of O Grammar rules. Rules can be either noun or verb; which is it? It forms a parallel with the verb show, which tricks me for a moment into thinking that Grammar rules is a subject-verb construction instead of an adjective-noun construction. Sidney is conjuring the presence of a minor, reigning god, Grammar. Awful is the archaic term for “awe-filled,” and the presence of child-pupils sets a scene of respect, wonder, and obedience; this second line is offered as an analogy to Stella (my young Dove), who is enjoined to respectfully obey Grammar’s precepts (rules) as they do.

But again the parts of speech trip me up, and the different ways of reading this poem grammatically shape its possible meanings: in the third line, is wise an adjective modifying precepts (which makes sense, and is suggested by the integrity of the line), or is wise a verb? Up to the 19th century, wise was a verb meaning to guide, direct, instruct, or inform. If wise is a transitive verb, its object would be her grant, meaning her erotic submission to Astrophil, compelled by her own virtue to obey the laws of grammar (we’ll see why at the end of the poem). Thus lines 3–4, “may in your precepts wise / Her grant to me,”seem to be enjambed.

But some versions of Sidney’s poem contain a comma after precepts wise, which would make wise an adjective (wise precepts). In that case, the young dove’s active verb, grant, is not modified by her. Her, in this case, is the object of the sentence: She is hypothetically granting herself to her lover with the realization that she committed an act of grammar that binds her. The strangeness and ambiguity of the grammar in these lines make the point that Grammar is, indeed, powerful and magical in its ability to seem double, and to bend even reason itself into all kinds of shapes.

For late with heart most high, with eyes most low,
I crav’d the thing which ever she denies:
She lightning Love, displaying Venus’ skies,
Least once should not be heard, twice said, No, No.

Now the poem gets more straightforward. The syntactical muscularity eases up in this second quatrain, which starts to explicate Astrophil’s strange proposition: After reaching a pitch of frustration in which he loses coherence (he raved, a verb that has associations with madness; the inversion of heart and eye, high and low, suggests a contortion), Stella has rejected him with “No, No.”At this point the sonnet turns: the interlocking rhymes are replaced with a couplet that switches apostrophes from Grammar to his “Muse”:

Sing then my Muse, now Io Pæan sing,
Heav’ns envy not at my high triumphing:

Instead of continuing to address Grammar, Astrophil addresses his “Muse,” as in Homeric and Virgilian song—“Sing, Muse” is how Homer opens The Iliad; IoPæan is the Latinized version of it, a “hurrah” of victory. Why the sudden change to triumphalism? The rhythm and meter broadcast the uptick in Astrophil’s pulse as he unveils his strategy; I have bolded the heavy stresses and underlined the light stresses to indicate the way the poetic language relaxes into easy regularity, mimicking the suavity of the lover’s verbal chess move:

But Grammar’s force with sweet success confirm,
For Grammar says (O this dear Stella weigh,)
For Grammar says (to Grammar who says nay)
That in one speech two Negatives affirm.

Stella has inadvertently fallen into a linguistic trap: double negatives grammatically work out to a positive. This is Astrophil’s clever variant on the seducer’s timeless formula: “No, No means yes!” The stubbornness of the sonnet’s first quatrain unravels beautifully as the revelation occurs to Astrophil (coded in that lovely lightning image) that Stella has verbally betrayed herself. His heart lightens, and he triumphantly dances out the iambs. The last line is sing-songy if read as strict iambic pentameter; if read with natural emphasis, the rhythm is nicely varied while still alluding to the pattern.

Aside from the teasing sophistry of the rhetoric, the salient formal device here is the doubling embedded in the poem—the two “O” phrases in line 1, the hearts and eyes, the repetition of “sing” and “for Grammar says”—all reinforced by the presence of rhyming couplets and sealed at the end with the finality of the repeating rhyme, -firm. All this doubling is a kind of amplification and mockery of Stella’s “No, No.” It’s as though the poem, by black magic, put on the power of grammar to ravish her. (“To Grammar who says nay”? Astrophil asks rhetorically. The answer: nobody. Grammar rules.)It is an elaboration of the previous sonnet (62), which declares, “Deare, love me not, that you may love me more,” but hints at the dark side of paradox, its ability to stymie and silence one’s interlocutor.

It would be an exaggeration to call sonnet 63 dark. Again, Sidney is playing a game, signaling that he is emerging from the lover’s funk that extended from sonnet 52 to 62. You can argue that sonnet 63 is a caprice, a light bit of froth. Basil Bunting had some harsh words for Petrarch, and by extension Sidney:

To Petrarch love was mainly an excuse for displaying his skill as a versifier and his knowledge of classical mythology. He hardly ever pays any real attention to Laura: he focuses the reader’s attention on his own cleverness, and that cleverness is far too often trivial, quite often a matter of puns. (Basil Bunting on Poetry, p. 48)

Of all the Renaissance poets, Bunting asserts, Sidney is the one who “rarely” breaks from Petrarch’s example. (Ibid.) But Bunting, also a great poet, did not place a premium on games in poetry, and Sidney’s audience did. Sonnet 63 is a language game and a love game, whose obstructive rhythms loosen as the poet’s excitement mounts; it’s hard to call this poem inauthentic just because it is clever. Its rhythm betrays emotion. Besides, Sidney was obviously of two minds about everything in Astrophil and Stella. It is a complex, dense, and innovative work at the same time that he periodically argues against artifice: “‘Fool,’ said my Muse to me, ‘look in thy heart and write’” is the dialectical opposite of “inventions fine” (sonnet 1); then, in sonnet 90, he proclaims, “Stella, think not that I by verse seek fame, / Who seek, who hope, who love, who live but thee. . . .” Sincerity and ambition are in flux; claims to speak from the heart are at odds with lyric’s homage to itself. “Poetry,” wrote Wallace Stevens, “is a scholar’s art.”

The scholastic overtones of sonnet 63 echo at other nodes in the series. For instance, sonnets 4 and 10 apostrophize Virtue and Reason, respectively (and the final line of the latter, “By reason good, good reason her to love,” anticipates the grammatical snare in 63). In sonnet 11, Cupid is compared to a child enthralled by a beautiful tome he cannot read; in sonnet 19, Cupid makes fun of Astrophil’s academicism: “‘Scholar,’ saith Love, ‘bend hitherward your wit.’” Sonnet 35 is about the inadequacy of language and wit: “What may words say, or what may words not say, / Where truth itself must speak like flattery?”

In his Defence of Poesy, Sidney defended the intellectual strain of poetry as against a naturalistic or realistic mode:

Only the Poet disdeining to be tied to any such subjection, lifted up with the vigor of his own invention, doth grow in effect into another nature: in making things either better then nature bringeth foorth, or quite a new, formes such as never were in nature . . . not enclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts, but freely raunging within the Zodiack of his owne wit.

In other words, the true poet doesn’t reflect the world as it is but invents a newworld from the imagination. Of course, many poets from Coleridge to Keats to Stevens to Ashbery reinforced this poetics, and we often think of them before we think of Sidney. By his logic, too, “It is not rhyming and versing that maketh poesy. One may be a poet without versing, and a versifier without poetry.” Sidney would not be amused to know that debate still rages—over 400 years later—as to whether poets are being trivial or inauthentic when they engage in ludic play, or whether their unrhymed efforts deserve to be called poems.

Sir Philip Sidney, in fact, left us perhaps the most inspiring curse in the annals of English literature, directed at those who have no ears to hear:

But if (fie of such a but) you bee borne so neare the dull-making Cataract of Nilus, that you cannot heare the Planet-like Musicke of Poetrie; if you have so earth- creeping a mind that it cannot lift it selfe up to looke to the skie of Poetrie, or rather by a certaine rusticall disdaine, wil become such a mome, as to bee a Momus of Poetrie: then though I will not wish unto you the Asses eares of Midas, nor to be driven by a Poets verses as Bubonax was, to hang himselfe, nor to be rimed to death as is said to be done in Ireland, yet thus much Curse I must send you in the behalfe of all Poets, that while you live, you live in love, and never get favour, for lacking skill of a Sonet, and when you die, your memorie die from the earth for want of an Epitaphe.

He himself died too young, at the age of 32, after being wounded in battle in the Netherlands. On his deathbed, he called for a tune known as La cuisse rompue. It translates, basically, as “The worn-out thigh guard.” Now here was a poet who could balance contradictions to the bitter end: suffering mortal pain, he wanted a comic song. Sonnet 63, ludicrous as it may seem (and ludicrous of course shares a root with ludic), serves as a lens to read Astrophil and Stella in its most modern light.
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In his Defence of Poesy, Sidney defended the intellectual strain of poetry as against a naturalistic or realistic mode:

Only the Poet disdeining to be tied to any such subjection, lifted up with the vigor of his own invention, doth grow in effect into another nature: in making things either better then nature bringeth foorth, or quite a new, formes such as never were in nature . . . not enclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts, but freely raunging within the Zodiack of his owne wit.

In other words, the true poet doesn’t reflect the world as it is but invents a newworld from the imagination. Of course, many poets from Coleridge to Keats to Stevens to Ashbery reinforced this poetics, and we often think of them before we think of Sidney. By his logic, too, “It is not rhyming and versing that maketh poesy. One may be a poet without versing, and a versifier without poetry.” Sidney would not be amused to know that debate still rages—over 400 years later—as to whether poets are being trivial or inauthentic when they engage in ludic play, or whether their unrhymed efforts deserve to be called poems.

Sir Philip Sidney, in fact, left us perhaps the most inspiring curse in the annals of English literature, directed at those who have no ears to hear:

But if (fie of such a but) you bee borne so neare the dull-making Cataract of Nilus, that you cannot heare the Planet-like Musicke of Poetrie; if you have so earth- creeping a mind that it cannot lift it selfe up to looke to the skie of Poetrie, or rather by a certaine rusticall disdaine, wil become such a mome, as to bee a Momus of Poetrie: then though I will not wish unto you the Asses eares of Midas, nor to be driven by a Poets verses as Bubonax was, to hang himselfe, nor to be rimed to death as is said to be done in Ireland, yet thus much Curse I must send you in the behalfe of all Poets, that while you live, you live in love, and never get favour, for lacking skill of a Sonet, and when you die, your memorie die from the earth for want of an Epitaphe.

^^^^^^ Exactly what I decided and had found about poetry at age 16.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/244826#article

INTERVIEW
A “Poetry-Fueled War”
During the Civil War, poetry didn’t just respond to events; it shaped them.

BY RUTH GRAHAM
A “Poetry-Fueled War”
When Edmund Wilson dismissed the poetry of the Civil War as “versified journalism” in 1962, he summed up a common set of critiques: American poetry of the era is mostly nationalist doggerel, with little in the way of formal innovation. On the contrary, argues scholar Faith Barrett. In her new book, To Fight Aloud Is Very Brave, Barrett contends that a broad range of 19th-century writers used verse during the Civil War to negotiate complicated territory, both personal and public. Taking its title from a poem by Emily Dickinson, Barrett’s book also argues that Civil War poetry was much more formally destabilizing than scholars have traditionally acknowledged.

The book explores work by Northern writers such as Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and black abolitionist poet Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, along with amateur “soldier-poets” and several Southern poets, including the so-called poet laureate of the Confederacy, Henry Timrod. Barrett devotes a chapter to Herman Melville’s little-read postwar collection Battle-Pieces, and another to the close connection between poetry and songs during the war.

Barrett co-edited a 2005 anthology of Civil War poetry called Words for the Hour, and her own published poetry includes a 2001 chapbook, Invisible Axis. She spoke with the Poetry Foundation from Appleton, Wisconsin, where she teaches English and creative writing at Lawrence University.

You write that the Civil War was a “poetry-fueled war.” What do you mean by that?

Poetry in mid-19th-century America was ubiquitous in a way that it just isn’t now. It was everywhere in newspapers and magazines, children were learning it in school…. Americans were encountering poetry on a weekly basis, if not a daily basis, in the Civil War era, and that’s a profound difference from contemporary poetry and its place in our culture.

There are so many accounts in newspapers of soldiers dying with a poem in their pockets, poems written on a scrap of paper folded up inside a book; so many accounts of songs or poems being sung or read to political leaders at particular moments. For example, after Lincoln announced the second call for a draft ... James Sloan Gibbons wrote this song poem called “Three Hundred Thousand More,” which he supposedly sang to Lincoln in his office one day. So there’s a kind of immediacy of impact, that poetry is actually, I suggest, shaping events, not just responding or reflecting on them.

How did these poems reach the general public? They must have traveled somewhat quickly since they’re responding to political events.

The technological development of the railroad and then also the increasingly affordable technologies of printing and reproduction had the result of dramatically increasing the speed with which poetry could move around. ... Harper’s [Weekly] featured poetry pretty regularly. It’s the equivalent of readers seeing poetry in a magazine like Newsweek or Time, or maybe even People magazine. ... Then also it’s a shorter genre, it can be more quickly written; it can be written in response to immediate events….

You say that it’s hard to find poetry arguing against the war; why?

There was very strong support for the war from both North and South. ... You do see, starting in 1863 and of course continuing through the last year and a half of the war, poems where people register horror and shock at the vast numbers of soldiers that are dying. Dickinson and Melville both register that shock in their poetry. But writers who were well known didn’t want to attach their names to work that was anti-war.

If we think of “Civil War poetry” as a genre, what did it look like formally?

There’s a lot of variety and a lot of range. One of the reasons why this body of work has been neglected by scholars until fairly recently is there was this assumption that the work is all formally so regular as to be monotonous: singsong, rocking-horse rhythms. Regularity of meter makes this work more difficult for us to approach.

But one thing I’ve noticed in my years of working on Civil War poetry is that there’s just phenomenal formal range. There’s lots of experimentation; there’s lots of variety in terms of the formal commitments the poets are working with. So you have lots of ballads, not surprisingly, lots of story poems, poems written with traditional commitments to the ballad form, and also elegies. You have poets experimenting with pushing beyond rhythmic and metrical patterns that are formal. ... I would actually say that maybe half the poets writing in this era are doing interesting and unexpected things with form even though they’re not yet writing free verse.

My friend and coeditor [of Words for the Hour] Cristanne Miller has a wonderful new book called Reading in Time that analyzes Dickinson’s formal commitments by resituating Dickinson in her 19th-century context. Cris argues very persuasively that there’s far more formal experimentation happening in mid-19th-century poetry than we have previously acknowledged. … Cris cites Longfellow as one of the great formal innovators of this period, and in addition to Longfellow, I would also mention [John Greenleaf] Whittier, Herman Melville, George Moses Horton, George Henry Boker, Lucy Larcom, and Ethelinda Beers. These are all poets who are writing rhymed, metrical verse, but who are experimenting within that framework.

Do you see wildly different things coming from Northern and Southern poets?

The similarities between Northern and Southern poems far outweigh the differences. ... Both sides are arguing that God is on their side. Both sides—and this is particularly startling to us as 21st-century readers—are arguing they’re fighting for independence, although obviously they’re using that word quite differently with quite different meanings.

You write that popular song and poetry became closely connected in a new way during the war years. Are poets writing specifically with the idea that their poems would quickly be turned into songs?

It goes both ways. In some cases you have composers taking up poems and saying, “I like this a lot—let me set it to music.” And then in other cases, as in Julia Ward Howe’s case [with “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”], you have a poet saying, “This ‘John Brown’s Body,’ that’s an interesting poem. Let me see if I could do a different kind of approach to it in my lyrics.” And it’s clear that Howe hoped that her lyrics would be sung, but also that she intended to circulate it as a poem. So its first appearance is in the Atlantic Monthly, where it appears on the page as a poem, but then it’s quickly put into sheet music so people can play it at home and soldiers can sing it.

“The Battle Hymn of the Republic” is such a fascinating case, because it’s still ubiquitous. How did that particular poem become the most lasting anthem of the Civil War?

Yes, it still has this huge cultural pull. Think about all the ceremonies after 9/11 where “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” was performed. It’s a song that has extraordinary cultural staying power. ...

First of all, the song that she’s imitating, “John Brown’s Body,” is a very interesting song in which you have soldiers basically performing their bravado about how many of them will die in battle, and that’s all right. So the refrain of that song is “John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave, but his soul goes marching on.”

So it’s a very typical kind of marching song for soldiers, saying, “Many of us are going to die, and we don’t care!” Howe takes that tune and lifts the lyrics up to a more lofty, less graphic tone. ... [But] the overwhelming argument of that song, verse after verse, is that God supports our violent actions. That’s why I find it so deeply disturbing culturally that it’s in such wide use now.

You’ve talked about how lots of Civil War poetry is unfairly dismissed as overly conventional, but in contrast to that, you actually see Emily Dickinson as more traditional in some ways than her critical reputation suggests. Can you explain that?

The first scholars to approach Dickinson potentially as being a war poet—I’m thinking of the ’80s and ’90s—tended to read Dickinson as a poet who’s deeply skeptical about nationalistic ideologies and deeply skeptical about the rise of militarism and patriotic rhetoric in the Union. ...

I’m of the opinion that she does both things: that she thinks skeptically and quizzically about the war, the nationalist rhetoric and patriotic fervor that sort of drove the nation to war; but I think she also writes poems of grief and mourning that suggest that death in battlefield is a noble and good thing. In this sense I think she really belongs to her community of Amherst. She writes to and from that community, and these poems of grief and mourning that are supposed to offer consolation to herself, to her family, to others, not surprisingly share in some of the sentiments of that community. But it’s an unusual reading of Dickinson to suggest she’s participating in that kind of sentimental rhetoric.

Dickinson and Whitman are sometimes taken as the only “interesting” poets of the war years. Is the broad range of Civil War poetry underappreciated by contemporary scholars?

Edmund Wilson was very influential in dismissing this work as “versified journalism.” ... It’s also the case that scholars were reluctant to approach this body of work because the “But is it any good?” question persists much more strongly with poetry than it does with prose texts. If we pick up the dime novels that were written in the Civil War era, the political thrillers about female spies, we don’t expect those works to have the kind of narrative or linguistic complexity of Moby-Dick, but we still find them interesting and worthy of study.

You propose that mid-19th-century poets—beyond Dickinson and Whitman—influenced modernist preferences for things like skepticism, introspection, and fragmentation. But that influence, too, has gone mostly unacknowledged.

Another feature of Civil War–era poetry that has made scholars very uncomfortable in approaching it is all those national commitments writ large in the poetry. The fact that people took up their cause and proclaimed for it is something that has made critical approaches to the work more challenging, more difficult. ...

Undergraduates often find it very moving and powerful. They don’t have the whole trained scholarly apparatus to think, “Well, this is boring and uninteresting because of its formal regularity.” Instead, they read the poems on their own terms on the page and still find a kind of power in them that 19th-century readers found in them.

Do you see a way for poetry to get back to that point of engaging directly with political issues of the day, and being heard when it does so?

I don’t think that contemporary poets are disengaged politically. On the contrary. ... The issue is that the cultural position of poetry is quite dramatically changed. In a way, the readership of poetry is a much narrower segment of the reading population. These days I think we think—not me as part of that “we,” but a lot of people—if you asked people, “In what literary genre do you think the most important philosophical questions of the 21st century are being debated?,” people would say right away, “The novel. You have to go to that weighty, hefty, complex genre to really grapple with important political issues.” I don’t think that’s true at all. ... Myung Mi Kim is [a] poet I would cite as someone who is really thinking about global identity, about the political legacies of violence and nationalism, as an ongoing preoccupation for her in her work.

If you were tasked with naming an official national poet for our current political season, someone for every American to read, whom would you pick?

George Moses Horton. First, his life story is just so fascinating. The idea that someone who was an enslaved African American could have made a living [as a poet]—and that is what Horton did, made a living for himself a poet while still enslaved.

And then the work is just astonishing. Horton’s work has been unfairly dismissed as being imitative, as being facile. He does do all sorts of things stylistically. So he imitates Romantic poetry in some cases, he imitates neoclassical poetry in other cases. As a young man, he supports himself by writing love poems made to order for young white male students at the University of North Carolina.

I think the work holds up very well for contemporary readers. There’s such a mix of ideas and commitments. There’s this poem “Weep,” which is lamenting the downfall of the South, the devastation of the South, but it’s also just lamenting how deeply divided the nation has become, and the devastation of war. This is a poem that I think about in relation to our contemporary political context, where we have such deep divisions and so much anger on both sides, and so little common ground, seemingly, between the right and the left.

Originally Published: November 13, 2012

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Do you see wildly different things coming from Northern and Southern poets?

The similarities between Northern and Southern poems far outweigh the differences. ... Both sides are arguing that God is on their side. Both sides—and this is particularly startling to us as 21st-century readers—are arguing they’re fighting for independence, although obviously they’re using that word quite differently with quite different meanings.

You write that popular song and poetry became closely connected in a new way during the war years. Are poets writing specifically with the idea that their poems would quickly be turned into songs?

It goes both ways. In some cases you have composers taking up poems and saying, “I like this a lot—let me set it to music.” And then in other cases, as in Julia Ward Howe’s case [with “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”], you have a poet saying, “This ‘John Brown’s Body,’ that’s an interesting poem. Let me see if I could do a different kind of approach to it in my lyrics.” And it’s clear that Howe hoped that her lyrics would be sung, but also that she intended to circulate it as a poem. So its first appearance is in the Atlantic Monthly, where it appears on the page as a poem, but then it’s quickly put into sheet music so people can play it at home and soldiers can sing it.

“The Battle Hymn of the Republic” is such a fascinating case, because it’s still ubiquitous. How did that particular poem become the most lasting anthem of the Civil War?

Yes, it still has this huge cultural pull. Think about all the ceremonies after 9/11 where “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” was performed. It’s a song that has extraordinary cultural staying power. ...

First of all, the song that she’s imitating, “John Brown’s Body,” is a very interesting song in which you have soldiers basically performing their bravado about how many of them will die in battle, and that’s all right. So the refrain of that song is “John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave, but his soul goes marching on.”

So it’s a very typical kind of marching song for soldiers, saying, “Many of us are going to die, and we don’t care!” Howe takes that tune and lifts the lyrics up to a more lofty, less graphic tone. ... [But] the overwhelming argument of that song, verse after verse, is that God supports our violent actions. That’s why I find it so deeply disturbing culturally that it’s in such wide use now.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/246906

PROSE FROM POETRY MAGAZINE
Melodrama
Defending the windy cliffs of forever

BY MARIANNE BORUCH
Which may get a bad rap. My son tells me something I never knew before. It’s a musical term. It means opera, first of all: a story set to music, a drama carried by melo, song. Mom, don’t get your knickers in a twist over this again, he implies as I hold the landline receiver close to my ear.

Long distance, we used to say about such phone calls. I imagine him singing the get over it I hear in his tone, maybe his regular voice or as joke-falsetto where inflation has a rightful place, our once mock-doing La bohème in the kitchen, staging the simplest request in D-minor:

Oh please please! Take out the compost!
Okay okay! I see it overfloweth!
But — seriously? It’s just that melodrama has always worried me. What about the standard bad stuff always about to happen in opera, I argue, the raised hands as exclamation points, the collective choral shriek of onlookers, the hit-the-lights plunge into dark after the shiny knife goes down? Be fair, my son says. Then it could be we’re both thinking of those subtle duets, gradual and intricate, how they tear your heart, ending abruptly before you expect: La bohème’s Mimì wrapped in Rodolfo’s arms, The Consul’s Magda mournfully interrupting her husband John, or the tomb-with-a-view finale — as my brother calls it — between Aida and Radamès, all the lush, various stops and starts from Puccini, Menotti, Verdi. And big, this tangle, always so earnest, such grand charged dignity to whatever ordinary or outrageous shard of word or deed, a grave eternal eye on whatever mess we made — or will make. In the body, the very sound exhausts and thrills.

Familiar pathways the nerve finds through muscle, the electrical charge of realizing anything crucial: are we so predictable a creature, that we all cave the same way? How a sonnet has some opening jab, heartbeat unto argument, then turn, a new way to see, a winnowing and an arrival echoed ever since in free verse. Is our brain so used to this that it’s become theater? Or consider Freytag’s triangle — 
the guy, not surprisingly, a nineteenth-century drama critic — and how it freezes narrative into formula, his pyramid drawn on the board by English teachers a hundred million times, a dream for our next step and the next nicked from Aristotle: the rising until get it, get the point? falling slow or fast then at an angle. That’s another get over it, meaning something actually to get over and get on with, I suppose, an honest-to-god human fate that takes an hour, a day, years. Who cares if you know what will happen, the waterfall of sorrow’s same old, same old — boredom’s deliberate silence pushing off into another way to notice.

Or to remember. For instance, from Dickinson’s slush pile, her torn notebook page photographed for a valuable book of such drafts, Open Folios. After Dickinson’s few words about a tree in winter, she writes this:

I never heard
you call anything
beautiful before – 
It remained
with me
Not the tree but the telling keeps ringing in the ear: “remained / with me.” A musical idea, say the musicians, is a thing that recurs. Thus, is memorable.  Just this: It makes a shape.

Perhaps what we do, our movement through time, is musical — it repeats, repeats — therefore is melo, is drama. One hears it linked, like singing links, one note, slight breath before another, voice next to voice in whisper or resistance. No filter though. Sound enters the body any which way, the ear an indifferent machine, little incus and malleus and stapes in there, merging, making sense of whatever onslaught. Its hunger is huge. High contrast, cause and effect, loud, soft, the edges sharp. Something happens. It sings to us, or we sing it to the world that goes on, open to us or not. What was it that Elizabeth Bishop said in a conversation once recalled by Wesley Wehr in the Antioch Review? That we always reveal “the truth about ourselves 
despite ourselves. It’s just that quite often we don’t like how it comes out.” A given then: melodrama lurks behind any story, pattern, poem. It’s like a virus that way, always in the air. And some of us succumb.

To succumb. That includes a lot but what about my rage at the feel-good end of some hokey movie? — so melodramatic! we say, the punch of   it, a few tears coming anyway, though such manipulation 
toward that moment so clear. Are we so predictably hot-wired? Really? Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, I keep hearing from childhood, from the old Latin Mass: through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault    . . .    Tears! How is it the body knows — in spite of good sense and taste, in plain dogged embarrassment — releasing them regardless? Take that, oh fine cool aesthetic, sophisticated mind with its perfect engineering.

To be moved, moved. I love that word, how it happens to you, a surprise, a kind of miraculous undoing about which Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote in his journal:

there is always one touch, something striking sideways and unlooked for    ...    and this may be so delicate that the pathos seems to have gone directly to the body and cleared the understanding in its passage.

Delicate isn’t exactly how to get at melodrama’s not-so-sleight-of-hand. But a little wallowing in the theater’s large dark can’t be that bad, can it?

Meanwhile, this delicate meanwhile: Bishop’s greatest hit, “One Art,” a model of reserve and passion and wit, plus terrible — however brief — altogether human realization. Her poem’s a courtly, careful mash-up, the unsaid speaking as clearly as what actually makes it to the page. Irony, after all, orbits the wink-wink-nod-nod of the unspoken, a secret life that’s semiobvious, delicious to share. “One Art” is an immediate insider pleasure via Bishop’s colloquial ease, however measured its villanelle givens of obsessive repetition. Her well-known refrain — “The art of losing isn’t hard to master” — 
comes right off the bat, first line and already tongue-in-cheek, a staged shrug about beloved things in peril, disappearing, though she starts comic and small-scale — keys, an “hour badly spent” — as in any practice to learn a great art, fast morphing into a more weighted personal mode, “my mother’s watch” vanished, and loved houses — 
three! Then she’s going larger, unto global:

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.
But all “hard to master,” such losses, still partly whimsical by way of simple geography, wild leaps, and a bird’s migratory, exacting eye until the final move inward that really does switch, click, get down, get close, never to be saved by offhand humor or anything else. “Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture / I love) I shan’t have lied.”

Her characteristic steel won’t belabor this vulnerable moment, won’t and can’t — “It’s evident / the art of losing’s not too hard to master,” Bishop re-insists after her revealing slip. But we get a stained new thought, “though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster,” she says, in fact writing that, ending the poem in a quickened second twist of that screwdriver parenthetical. Thus her “Write it” — old Anglo-Saxon’s mono-stress emphatic — goes on, secret and regardless and of course as lifeline, way beyond the poem. And then there’s that wrenching do-it-anyway hit of italics. Here it’s grief in this momentary dive under the surface where loss   looks like, probably is, “like disaster,” a greater dark that even the soothing rhyme against the predictable “master” can’t fix, though getting back to work must be a kind of solace. It’s a villanelle, for god’s sake; you have to forge on — write it! — repeat, to end only this way. That does cut short the release of tears, a sudden almost bit of melodrama in its wake. And that wake could be as haunting as the one-thousand-foot spread of watery lurch and undertow any ocean liner worth its tonnage leaves behind.

What we think of as the first draft of Bishop’s poem, then titled “How to Lose Things” or “The Gift of Losing Things” or “The Art of  Losing Things” — from Vassar’s archives — might be such a wake; that early version does seep back. On her old manual machine, she typed a very sprawling attempt, notes really, including this initial stab at closure:

A piece of one continent -
and one entire continent. All gone, gone forever and ever..

One might think this would have prepared me
for losing one average-sized not especially -------- exceptionally
beautiful or dazzlingly intelligent person
(except for blue eyes) (only the eyes were exceptionally beautiful and
But it doesn’t seem to have, at all . . . the hands looked intelligent)
the fine hands
a good piece of one continent
and another continent - the whole damned thing!
He who loseth his life, etc. - but he who
loses his love - never, no never never never again - 
Hear that? Think Verdi, think Puccini, think King Lear for that matter: never, no never never never again    . . .    The orchestra rising, hands to a collar, a flood of sound from a throat.

Pure melodrama! Though reason’s logical build is here (those eyes, the intelligent hands), and a reasonable tone (“one might think”), it’s because of melodrama that we have Bishop’s lasting, heartbreaking 
poem — plus her numerous drafts that wrestled such sorrow down to mere mention. Still, which is greater, more necessary in this struggle — her witty reserve pressing hard or that great ache that must have started everything? No answer yet. Sincerity and irony still restlessly at it and at it . . .



•



Three thoughts now — 

1. The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, around 1973, right before a reading there. The poet Paul Carroll is in the audience, most generous editor of  The Young American Poets, an anthology that meant much to those of us young, but old enough, when it appeared in 1968, where I discovered Louise Glück — not to mention Charles Simic and James Tate and Ron Padgett, not far from their baby fat. The pre-reading chat and buzz narrowed to Roy Lichtenstein, whose massive paintings patched the wall. Everyone around us with something to say.

I recall his campy cartoons, one big weepy female face, her talk balloon blown up to read It doesn’t matter what I say! while a male face in another painting, equally oversized, speaks into his bubble: Forget it! Forget me! I’m fed up with your kind!, looking off as a girl sulks in the background. At these cliches and earnest exaggerations rose up a lively, happy scorn in the room, many living out a similar melodrama in their own young lives of  break up and come back, only to break up again — at twenty-two, I was among them — who pointed and mocked, made fun of . . .

And Paul Carroll — so much older than we were, a large man, 
impeccable against our fashion-of-the-day ragged jeans, his derby and pin-striped suit, his great charm and goodwill and sadness — went 
silent for a while before saying: but that’s the way people really talk, isn’t it?



2. Impossibly beautiful — with all the necessary shadow that claim implies — is Theodore Roethke’s poem “The Far Field,” off what might be my favorite jump-start first line (and shouldn’t this really be on his tombstone?): “I dream of  journeys repeatedly.” But to tamp that down, there’s the “driving alone, without luggage,” to the end of “a long peninsula” only to stall, “Churning in a snowdrift / Until the headlights darken.” That’s it for section one of four, all lush renderings of the natural world. Next — “At the field’s end    . . .    Haunt of the cat-bird, nesting-place of the field-mouse” where “Among the tin cans, tires, rusted pipes, broken machinery, — / One learned of the eternal.” Eternal. Thus high abstraction enters (“the thinky-thinky” Roethke called it) to enrich or weigh down, but first this gorgeous unapologetic countdown of spring delights:

For to come upon warblers in early May
Was to forget time and death:
How they filled the oriole’s elm, a twittering restless cloud, all one morning,
And I watched and watched till my eyes blurred from the bird shapes, — 
Cape May, Blackburnian, Cerulean, — 
Moving, elusive as fish, fearless,
Hanging, bunched like young fruit, bending the end branches,
Still for a moment,
Then pitching away in half-flight,
Lighter than finches.
Or later, lines that put us in our rightful place on the planet, the speaker in a “slow river, / Fingering a shell, / Thinking: / Once I was something like this, mindless.” On and on this stunning meditation goes, idea to hard detail and back again, to arrive midway at this: perhaps the worst worst worst, most squishy melodramatic phrase in the history of good poetry: “the windy cliffs of forever,” Roethke wrote. Huh? That’s what my thought balloon says in the margin, were I to write one. Granted, he’s already jacked up the mood music in the previous line — “I learned not to fear infinity.” But it continues to shock me that Roethke kept on going into poetry la-la land with this bit of purple prose. The windy cliffs of forever! What does that even mean?

My beloved old cousin Elinor had her Achilles’ heel, known to her worried daughters as her “wheee! factor,” which meant she’d spend her savings, spend down to nothing left, if given half a chance. Who knows how that crazy let loose in her. That impulse to pitch it all — 
caution included — made everything else we miss and cherish about her possible: her wit and warmth and zero self-absorption, her 
intolerance of   intolerance, her embrace of   the world and its weirdness.

In more merciful, if not saner moments, I can think: So what? Roethke gave way now and then. But it’s brave and it’s great. And probably crucial to every fine thing he wrote that he dared that edge.



3. A couple of words come back, dragging their ghost: Sylvia Plath. A single numbing stress begins then ends that run of four syllables, and with that name, the terrible last work looms up, late 1962 into the 
bitter winter of ’63 before her death in London that February, her scathing, meticulous attention to the present moment, day after day, that made so many poems in Ariel. “Daddy” is among them, its wrath a trademark by now, drowning out the quieter, more compelling 
parts of her genius. The poem’s commonly read as near melodrama, 
an operatic outburst, an invective against father and husband. Biography has done it in good.

No doubt for good reason. There’s a breadcrumb trail of image from life, Plath’s difficult father and his German heritage, his position as professor of entomology squaring with the poem’s figure “at the blackboard,” his death when she was eight an experience identical to the speaker’s. The drafts for the poem, now in the Mortimer Rare Book Room of the Smith College libraries, show fury imprinted and measured out from the first through the last stanza and its memorable ending utterance — “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through” — was a fiery addenda handwritten into the typed second version, albeit not much different in tone from her famous opening, in place from the start:

You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.
The melo in her drama is heated exclamatory on obsessive repeat, 
possibly made more deliberate — and slightly whimsical, that “Achoo” there, capitalized à la A.A. Milne, no less — by the storybook rhymes she must have been reading to her small children.

Her drafts for the piece aren’t a flip-book; she didn’t start slowly and change a lot. Pretty much the poem roars, teeth bared from the get-go. Still it’s staggering what can happen in the making, the writer remade too, scaring herself until fact itself fades, to get all jacked up via metaphor and analogy to become somehow truer. How else to account for the poem’s last hammer blow, her final stanza’s over-the-top, weirdly animated, medieval folktale-grim lines that proceed her ringing “Daddy    . . .   I’m through” by way of those murderous near-
Lilliputian “villagers” who “never liked you. /    . . .    dancing and stamping on you. / They always knew it was you.” That vengeful you you you, the triggering heart of all this to pierce pierce pierce    . . .    By the end of   her working through the drafts, who was writing that?

Plath, to a bbc interviewer, later carefully removes herself. “The poem is,” she tells him, “spoken by a girl with an Electra complex. Her father died when she thought he was God. Her case is complicated by the fact that her father was also a Nazi.” Come again?

Backstory then, poem as case study, a persona piece. Sure, like 
anyone believes that, says whatever Plath fan/fanatic you choose, passionate young women mostly who have just discovered her, a few of them my undergraduate students who stand with me in the hallway after class, and fight for her right to be a woman wounded and fierce, unaware it was the grounded, dogged artist in her — not the suicide — 
who made this brilliant work. Remote control is still control.

On the radio, Plath is almost dismissive in her acquired British 
accent, calling “Daddy” an “awful little allegory” spoken by that Nazi’s daughter locked in her own terrible twentieth-century 
moment, a layer that adds weight and historical edge to the piece to change it and alter our received idea of the poet herself. Had Plath lived, is this mainly — or at least first — how we would see her poem?

All these claims and reads after the fact. What is the link between art and life? No one knows, even the writer sometimes, what happens in the night-blind whirlpool of the making.



•



Then there’s this: girls in my grade school collected holy cards, those fake-gilt-edged, frozen, sentimental pictures of saints, the Sacred Heart, the Virgin Mary, given out at funerals and by our teachers at Christmas, Easter, the end of school, hoarded up to vie with our brothers’ baseball stashes, their cards coming in packs with a hard pink slab of bubble gum in the middle. I had — still have — favorites in my cache, including a John F. Kennedy printed hurriedly after the assassination and inexplicably sealed in plastic. But in my whole 
childhood not one St. Sebastian turned up, every inch of him — 
minus the skivvied bits — pincushioned brightly by arrows, the ultimate martyrdom, Rome, ad 288. Was it his near nudity that put the nuns off? Or it may well be the holy card extruders simply played it safe, going for the more sickly-sweet options for the kids and old ladies who would fondly save their handiwork.

As a devout lapsed Catholic for decades, I might be allowed this one arched-eyebrow thought: is it not partly the sick genius of the Church that he is also the patron saint of archers? (How comic is that? No waste. Use the whole chicken, I call it.) He’s the guardian of soldiers, too, once in the Roman army himself. Most astonishing and least known: he is the patron saint of surviving the plague.

The fact is — breaking news! — Sebastian did outlast those arrows. Proof: at least one painting of St. Irene lovingly tending his many wounds as he slumps against her, though another artist followed the competing legend and put an angel in full wingspan to that task. In any case, he healed; he lived to tell the tale. Which is why my husband and I can play Where’s Waldo? to find him over and over, 
museums in Europe — or America, for that matter — room after 
gallery room of Sebastians in various melodramatic, tormented gyrations, even ridiculously out of place at times, in the lower corner of some large, cozy Nativity, say, Mary and Joseph and a lit baby Jesus basking in cow breath and sheep warmth. There he is, to the right and down, oblivious, practically naked and tangled in rope, feathered arrows starry-haywire, the saint in agony or indifference, depending, but surely foreseeing his recovery, already plotting his return to Rome to mouth off to the Emperor and get his dream of  being beaten to death, properly martyred at last.

But to survive that first assault! A miracle of the first order.

Think of it this way: It’s 1349. If Sebastian made it, then certainly his presence in whatever painting you commission will shield self and family from the Black Death sweeping the known world, some seventy-five to two-hundred million dead before it’s over. That’s the deal. That was the deal — and with it, the St. Sebastian survivor 
industry duly cranked up for melodrama, artists both good and only so-so at the ready.

Which is to say, not only does image last, it humbles and overwhelms. But it’s desperately practical too. Sebastian then, as metaphor 
and model, a signal, a white flag, bloodied saint-as-tattoo on some bicep to flash in a fight. Sebastian, a stay against danger, a safety valve, a vaccine, luck’s rabbit-foot, puppeteer of salvation. You rack up your chips for dear life and shove them all to the center of the table, Sebastian with his zillion arrows a hope against hope, a lamb nailed to the door to trick an angel, the stand-alone and cut to the quick but healing in secret regardless, the so there, the in your face, the held high note in an aria, or the moment in the poem before — beware! — 
it really gets dark. Sebastian twisting there in his corner, or skinny-hogging the whole canvas, shape to allegory, larger than life in painting 
after painting until he’s a musical idea, a repeat, repeat to make melo this drama, the worst of it to best all bad things. A charm. And please, a future. Poetry knows we are as close as a feather to disaster.

Is it hope then, since she intuited so much? Plath, for her bbc interview, making herself distant, even haughty, certain that in “Daddy” her scarred, giant, triumphant name-calling speaker “has to act out the awful little allegory once over before she is free of it.” She — nice try.

Melodrama: to exaggerate is to get bigger. And so continue, to last a little longer like those birds whose wings carry markings to fake a huge eye. It will scare away snakes, or attract a mate.

Originally Published: December 2, 2013

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/252190

ESSAY
Spring Ahead
Poets have a close relationship to this tender season.

BY ANNIE FINCH
Spring Ahead
Spring. Photo courtesy of eljoja.
Spring, like poetry, makes us humble. Poets have a perennially close relationship with this cruel and tender season, a time for celebration and renewal and a reminder of our powerlessness over creation. Robert Graves is said to have remarked that there are only three themes for poetry—love, death, and the changing of the seasons—and the poetry of spring treats them all, with inspiration to spare. A tour of some of this season’s best poems, from Sappho and Basho to Countee Cullen, offers a sense of the variety and breadth of traditions, strategies, and brilliance that enrich poetry itself. Margaret Walker observed spring as a homecoming:

my Mississippi Spring—
My warm loving heart a-fire
with early greening leaves …
Neruda captured the poet’s empathy of spring in the intimate phrase “at last the eyelids of the pollen open.” Consider the memorable close to E.E. Cummings’s “o sweet spontaneous earth” with one of the most delightful line breaks in all of free verse:

true

to the incomparable
couch of death thy
rhythmic
lover

thou answerest

them only with

spring)
In Amy Lowell’s “Lilacs,” the poet is transformed not into the nightingale but into earth:

Heart-leaves of lilac all over New England,
Roots of lilac under all the soil of New England,
Lilac in me because I am New England.
The transformative power of spring can be felt through the subtler means of synesthesia, intertwining sight and smell in this haiku by Basho:

Spring air
— woven moon
and plum scent.
However it occurs, the loss of self to the unity of spring can feel like magic. It is a season ruled by its own classical goddess, Flora, as described in Phillis Wheatley’s “On Imagination”:

Fair Flora may resume her fragrant reign,
And with her flow'ry riches deck the plain.
Centuries after Wheatley, the supernatural impulse remains for the determinedly skeptical Robert Creeley in “The Door”:

My knees were iron, I rusted in worship, of You.

For that one sings, one
writes the spring poem, one goes on walking.
For Hafez, the Sufi poet, the season is a reminder that spiritual experience rests within the moment: “This meadow is composing a tale of a spring day in May; / The serious man lets the future go and accepts the cash now.” (From “The Garden,” translated by Robert Bly). For Gerard Manley Hopkins, who became a Jesuit priest, “Spring” inspires a meditation strikingly similar to Hafez’s, this time using the framework of Eden:

What is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden. – Have, get, before it cloy,
Before it cloud …
A natural outgrowth of such spiritual awakening, spring is a season of pilgrimage. Chaucer’s “General Prologue” to the Canterbury Tales, memorized by generations of college undergraduates (including myself), set the tone:

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote,
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote …
But the tradition of spring as a journey existed long before Chaucer, as the following charming opening from the early 14th century suggests:

Lenten ys come with love to toune,
With blosmen & with briddes roune,
That al this blisse bryngeth.
—Anonymous, 1310
Whatever the difficulties of life in England in the Middle Ages, it is clear from the spring poetry of that preindustrial period that the season was extraordinarily beautiful. One of my favorite spring poems, this Renaissance showstopper by Thomas Nashe, makes me feel transported to that time.

Spring, the sweet spring, is the year’s pleasant king
…
Cold doth not sting, the pretty birds do sing:
Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo!
Nashe’s onomatopoeia conveys the melodious annual babble that must have flooded the English countryside 500 years ago before songbird populations fell into sharp decline.

Birds, bees, flowers: this season has birthed much love poetry, of course, from the days of Sappho’s fragment “From Crete,” “With the flowers of spring, and breezes ... / flowing here like honey” to the romantic opening of Pound’s translation of the subdued Chinese love-poem “The River-Merchant’s Wife, A Letter”:

While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead,
I played about the front-gate, pulling flowers.
You came by ...”
Ever-new, ever-fertile, even in its rebellions and perversions, spring keeps inspiring. In fact, there is so much spring poetry that, unlike poetry of other seasons, spring poetry can easily be categorized according to months, each with a distinct flavor.

March poetry is daring, edgy. There isn’t as much poetry for this month as for the others, but what exists is passionate and distinctive. Dickinson was big on March.

March is the month of expectation,
The things we do not know,”
The Persons of prognostication
Are coming now.
—poem 48, The Single Hound

March poems often convey a bittersweet message. It’s a time for rough beaches, as Elizabeth Bishop writes in “The End of March”:

It was cold and windy, scarcely the day
to take a walk on that long beach.
Swinburne, in “March: An Ode,” grapples with the contradictions of the month’s “madness and might”:

That the sea was not lovelier than here was the land, nor the night than the day, nor the day than the night,
Nor the winter sublimer with storm than the spring: Such mirth had the madness and might in thee made,
March, master of winds, bright minstrel and marshal of storms that enkindle the season they smite.
March can be rough and unpredictable, and when a poet does consider the month as a time of spring loveliness, the beauty can feel shockingly new. Shakespeare writes in The Winter’s Tale:

daffodils,

that come before the swallow dares, and take
the winds of March with beauty.
April, of course, is another story. This month has been celebrated, adored as the pinnacle and quintessence of spring from at least the time of Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender. Could any month possibly be National Poetry Month but April? Poets aiming to do something memorable with this month need to try all the harder. And of course, the potential rewards are great. Was T.S. Eliot thinking of that other great long poem that embarks with the name “Aprille” when he opened his own ambitious masterwork with the word?

April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire. …
For female poets, April poses a whole different set of challenges. For many centuries, pastoral tradition associated women with spring flowers. Maybe that’s why even supposedly “sentimental” women poets in the 20th century like to flaunt and play with the flowery versions of April. Edna St. Vincent Millay builds her unflinching tone from the confrontational opening of “Spring”:

To what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough.
to its unforgettably mocking ending:

It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.
If Millay wants more out of life than life alone, Sara Teasdale, struggling with a difficult love affair, seems to want less; she sketches a disturbing preview of her own grave in spring in that small masterpiece of the self-destructive revenge fantasy “I Shall Not Care”:

When I am dead and over me bright April
Shakes out her rain-drenched hair.
Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson takes a more worldly approach, dwelling at length on her urban disillusionment with spring in “Sonnet” before she consciously leads herself back to the “sweet real things” that “spring beneath your feet / In wistful April days. …” If April is alive with traditions of beauty and innocence, the poetry of May is far more “lusty,” to use Thomas Malory’s word. Even the bird tongue in Alice Cary’s “The Field Sweet-Brier” oozes its own kind of sensuality, manifest in the music of the lines:

All of the early and the latter May,
And through the windless heats of middle June,
Our green-armed brier held for us day by day,
The morning coolness till the afternoon;
And every bird that took his grateful share,
Sang with a heavenlier tongue than otherwhere.
Imagery of weddings, brides, the Queen of May, and pre-Christian traditions, such as the Maypole— often associated with fertility and with phallic symbolism—abound.

But I must gather knots of flowers and buds, and garlands gay,
For I'm to be Queen o' the May, mother, I'm to be Queen o' the May.
—Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “The May Magnificat” connects the tradition of the May queen with the Christian Mary, who, as Hopkins writes, is “mothering earth.”

May is Mary’s month, and I
Muse at that and wonder why …
When the “mighty mother” is asked, “What is Spring?,” her answer evokes the miraculous connection between spiritual and physical growth: “Growth in every thing.”

The danger with spring, as with any repeated miracle, is the possibility of taking it for granted. “Sweet April showers / Do spring May flowers,” writes Thomas Tusser in his instructional poem “A Hundred Good Points of Husbandry” (1557). However charming the raw innocence of the familiar couplet in its native habitat, centuries later, we may be tempted to shake off the miracle as a truism. Even love itself is not immune:

In the Spring a livelier iris changes on the burnish'd dove;
In the Spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.
—Tennyson, “Locksley Hall”
For poets who want to re-engage with the urgent reality of the season, one cure is to play against type—to temper cliché with the surprise of grief, humor, or pain. The assumption that joy is spring’s default emotion makes spring grief that much more shattering. In “Adonais,” written upon Keats’s death in 1821, Shelley achieves a quintessential spring elegy:

Grief made the young Spring wild, and she threw down
Her kindling buds, as if she Autumn were,
Or they dead leaves; since her delight is flown,
For whom should she have wak'd the sullen year?
A generation later, Whitman takes a subtler approach, weaving spring and mourning so tightly they seem inseparable in his elegy for Lincoln:

Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring,
Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west,
And thought of him I love.
By the 20th century, had the bittersweet, ambivalent taste of spring mourning become too familiar for even passionate grief? Philip Larkin’s spring ennui in “The Trees” is laconic, jaded, but no less sad:

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.
Robert Frost’s “Spring Pools” are even more energetically ominous. Summer is presented almost like a death; the pools “chill and shiver” and will “like the flowers beside them soon be gone,” sacrificed for the greater power of summer’s “dark foliage.” With spring’s shadow associations so firmly established, some 20th-century poets of spring have turned again to whimsy and humor. E.E. Cummings, in perhaps his most famous poem, made spring fresh and muddy by using a child’s perspective in “[in Just-]” and emphasizing smudges and balloons over birdsong and flowers. A spring haiku by Richard Wright is anchored with an unforgettable vignette:

Coming from the woods,
A bull has a lilac sprig
dangling from a horn.
And Countee Cullen brings in Keats to bolster his stance as a nature poet, using a light tone and playful rhyme to revel in both nature and poetic traditions in “To John Keats, Poet, at Spring Time:

Folks seeing me must think it strange
That merely spring should so derange
My mind. They do not know that you,
John Keats, keep revel with me, too.
In a situation that Camille T. Dungy has eloquently described and impressively addressed in her anthology Black Nature, African American poets have often been missing in conversations about nature in American nature poetry—a fact that adds poignant meaning to Cullen’s invocation of Keats. But Cullen’s feeling that in addressing spring, he is accompanied in spirit by poets of past traditions is one that it seems almost any poet who has experienced the season will be likely to share.

So many poets, of various eras, cultures, sensibilities, personal positionings, and aesthetics, have trodden this green, flower-filled season before us that, perhaps, it’s understandable if sometimes we want to stop thinking about how best to write about spring and just let ourselves revel as openly as possible in its innocent joys. For such times, perhaps something in the simplicity, trust, and directness of these lines from Herrick’s “Corrina’s going a-Maying,” written during the springtime of the English language itself, may speak for this season to poets and poetry lovers alike:

Rise; and put on your Foliage, and be seene
To come forth, like the Spring-time, fresh and greene.
Originally Published: March 29, 2016

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/245418

PROSE FROM POETRY MAGAZINE
How Difficult It Is to Live
Mark Levine on Philip Levine.

BY MARK LEVINE
It is unlikely I would have gone on to live my life in poetry, for better and worse, had I not taken a class with Philip Levine in 1985. 
I was nineteen at the time. I had never met a published writer, or an artist of any kind, and although I had read a small amount of poetry that had moved me deeply — The Waste Land, Howl, a few poems of Wallace Stevens, Sylvia Plath, Dylan Thomas — and had even, for some time, carried around a notebook of my own clumsy effusions, somehow it didn’t occur to me that “poets” still existed, let alone that someone like me could aspire to be one.

I showed up at his class because his last name was the same as mine. It was the first day of the winter semester of my sophomore year, a Wednesday in January, three days after Ronald Reagan’s second 
inaugural. I went to breakfast in the dark, empty dining hall and came across an article in a student newspaper about a visiting writer named Levine. I had gone to school with other kids named Levine, but their parents were dentists or accountants. My own Levines were a junior high phys ed teacher and a civil servant. According to the article, this Levine was a well-regarded poet. There was a picture of him: gap-toothed, with wavy, unkempt hair, a working man’s mustache, and a nose that suggested a turbulent background. The class met at 1:00 pm in the chemistry building, which was on my way across campus. 
I had no hope of being allowed in — it was reserved, I imagined, for a small group of sophisticates — but I decided to stop by. A year earlier, I had shown up at a similar class to get a glimpse of  Susan Sontag, and was quickly turned away.

The room was less crowded than I had expected. Levine wore tennis shoes and an old raincoat. I recall he joked about a student’s ridiculous handbag, which was clear vinyl inset with colorful 
plastic fish. The student seemed put off by the remark, and Levine happily referred to himself as a schmuck. He told us he was glad to have taken the job for the semester because he only had to show up on campus once a week and the salary was excellent. “I demanded what they had to pay me and they said, ‘Levine, we can’t pay you that much — you’ve only got a master’s, everyone else has a doctorate and they make less.’ And I told them, ‘That’s why I need to be paid more — you don’t want to make me feel inferior because of my poor education.’”

He asked our names. I told him mine and he said, “That sounds familiar. I have a son who goes by that.” Then he said, “Imagine how I must feel among friends with names like Donald Justice and Galway Kinnell and W.S. Merwin” — he drew out the syllables, as though he were saying “Rockefeller” and “Vanderbilt” and “DuPont.” “Lucky sons-of-bitches, put on earth with poets’ names. And here I am, Phil Levine from Detroit.” Someone asked about the procedure for applying to the class. He glanced around the room and said, “You look like nice people. You’re in.”

When I came back the next week, I was a few minutes late and had to climb over other students to an empty seat. Levine stopped talking and looked over at me. “Levine, you schmuck, get here on time,” he said. He laughed. It was, I think, the first moment during my time in college that a teacher had addressed me with anything like personal regard. I began writing down everything he said. He wasn’t like other professors. He spoke in little jabs, like a boxer, crisp and precise but without any concern for academic refinement. At the beginning of class he bit into an apple and he didn’t stop eating until he had consumed the whole thing, core and all. He was blunt and categorical in his statements. He introduced the class to Hemingway’s notion of a “shit detector.” He pointed to the use of “azure” in a student’s poem. “Question: When is the last time you heard the word ‘azure’?” A few students fidgeted uncomfortably. “Answer: The last time you did a crossword puzzle.” There was something like a collective gasp in the room. We were accustomed to having teachers address us as “the best and the brightest.” This was new. About half the students in class were veterans of the college literary scene and seemed to consider themselves members of a vanguard. Levine didn’t coddle or equivocate. Fake language made bad poems. He mocked pretension. Another student read aloud her poem in a tone full of silences, exclamations, urgencies. The writer’s circle of friends took turns celebrating her. After a pause, Levine spoke. “I heard better language coming over on the bus this morning.”

He seemed uninterested in interpreting poems, which was at first mystifying to a student like me, who had been trained to believe that the most valuable response to a poem was finding something clever or unexpected to say about it. He thought that the right words in the right sequence held a power that was magical and instantaneous. He read poems to us — W.B. Yeats, Thomas Hardy, Wilfred Owen, Elizabeth Bishop — with a passion I had never before encountered. His voice was rough and magisterial. Words were alive in him. He read with a clenched jaw and his body almost shaking. He described John Keats’s letters and made clear his sense that the imagination was a sacred place breeding authenticity in words. He insisted that the poem be lived. One student turned in a poem that used the word “lion” a single time, to symbolize power. Levine almost blew up. “Goddamn it,” he shouted, “if you’re going to put a poor lion in your poem, I want that lion to be there.” He seemed to hunger after the texture of reality, which took many forms, but which was instantly recognizable to him. Another student’s poem began: “A window. 
A baseball. The possibilities.” It was a sparse and, in certain ways, abstract poem. He loved it. He saw a world in it: the object in flight, clean and clear; the suspension of time; the opening of   imaginative possibility, of promised lands, however shattered, within the disappointments of the actual one.

Right away, it felt to me that Levine entered my life by the logic of dreams, bringing me to poetry when it was what I most needed, without having any idea I needed it. I had just returned to school following a five-week winter break in Toronto, where I grew up. There was heavy snowfall and bitter cold. My parents were both out of work for health reasons. My father had a spinal injury; my mother had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer the previous spring. They lived in a tiny two-bedroom house they had bought with the hope of enlarging, but construction had stopped when they ran out of money. By then, it was evident my mother’s rounds of chemotherapy had been unsuccessful, though the possibility she might die was never discussed. She was forty-nine years old and I was closer to no one. She spent most of that winter break in bed beneath an old afghan in a cramped room whose only window had been boarded over during construction. One night my father took me aside and told me he had noticed a widening crack in a wall. He was certain that the load of snow and ice on the roof was going to lead to the collapse of the house. He told me he didn’t want to alarm my mother with the news. Nonetheless, he said, he could think of nothing else. He hadn’t slept in weeks.

The first poem I turned in to Levine’s class was called “Racing.” It started with a memory of racing my mother down the hallway of our apartment building when I was six years old. She would slow down toward the end of the hallway to allow me to arrive at the finish with her. “My mother’s days have numbers on them,” the poem began. It was full of shrill writing. It had many of the traits I believed poems were required to include: elaborate metaphor, compulsive vividness, heavy-breathing strains of  high music. But it also had, it’s possible, a trace of the inarticulate desperation I was living with. For a year, I had spoken to no one about my mother’s illness, though it dominated my mind throughout every day. I certainly couldn’t speak of it to my father. But I had managed, for the first time, to turn to poetry in an effort to specify emotions that were otherwise too harrowing for me to bear or to confront. Some connection I felt with this other Levine — born, uncannily, just a week before my father — had allowed me to do it. I deeply cared what he would say in class. He took the poem seriously. He was kind. He didn’t patronize me. He told me what he liked and didn’t like. He deflected the criticism of others in the class. He said, “Mr. Levine has work to do, but he has written the first draft of a genuine poem.”

He began one class by asking, “Why do you write poetry?” Several students dared to answer. “To make something beautiful” — “To interrogate the dominant ideology” — “To give voice to the powerless.” The student with the vinyl fish bag offered, “To get the bug out of my ear.” Levine said, “There’s only one reason to write poetry. To change the world.”

He believed it. He believed poetry was the most important thing a person could do, and that poems bore the impulse for collective transformation without which lies and injustice would prevail. He loathed Reagan. He spoke of the crimes that politicians and capitalists had done to language. The right words mattered, he said, because poems could restore meaning to language. Poems were forbidden from lying.

Did some students find him cruel? Perhaps. His commitment was ferocious. He read aloud a poem by a senior, one of the literary stars of the campus. In Levine’s voice, the poem, full of wordplay, ironic 
jabs, and references to literary theory, sounded spectacular. “Our friend Mr. D. has a flair for language,” Levine said. “He’s written something very smart, very knowing. It’s charismatic and very appealing. It takes pains to show you what a wit the poet is. And if he continues this way, there’s a good chance Mr. D. will never write a poem.”

Week by week, though, it became clear that Levine was enjoying our group enormously, and the class developed both intimacy and boisterousness. Word got around, and visitors would come to sit in. Most everyone in the room was writing better, more ambitiously, more honestly, and Levine celebrated our small triumphs. He often reminded us how much he preferred us to the graduate students he met immediately after our class. “There’s very little talent in that class,” he told us. “Last week a student brought in a poem and asked, ‘How can I make it better, Phil? How can I make it better?’ And I said, ‘There’s only one way to make it better. Throw it away.’”
He was fifty-seven, but he was not famous and his bearing was embattled. “I didn’t find my voice until I was older,” he told us. “It was good for me to have the time to work at becoming a poet, and it would be good for you, too. But by the time I was thirty-five and still didn’t have a book, I’d had enough, and I was in danger of  becoming a real asshole.”

Less than halfway through the semester, I returned to Toronto. My mother was in the hospital. I spent the next three weeks in her room. She suffered tremendously. She put up with one monstrous procedure after another in an effort to live marginally longer. I had terrible fights with my father. A stream of visitors came to the room, draining my mother of what energy she had. I had a poem folded in my pocket that I wanted to read to her, but I couldn’t find the right moment. Just before she died, as a nurse was struggling to prod a needle into a vein, my mother turned to me and said, “To hell with it.”

I returned to school. In the dining hall, prior to Levine’s class, 
I wrote a draft called “Poem For My Birthday, April 17, 1985”:

I have shoveled gravel onto our muddy driveway
To keep the mourner’s cars from sinking,
Spreading the stones with my old hockey stick.

I brought the poem to class. Levine’s presence, his voice, his vision of poetry, had become something of a lifeline for me. After class I went to the bookstore and bought his Selected Poems as a birthday present for myself. It was the first book I owned by a living poet. I had never seen such poems: “Baby Villon,” “Silent in America,” “Animals Are Passing from Our Lives,” “Zaydee,” “1933.” I was overwhelmed. The work was living proof of  what I had been hearing in his class: that art could be made out of forceful, hard-won everyday language; that poems didn’t have to decide between rage and humor, sorrow and joy; that the imagination gave access to a larger life. I hadn’t imagined that one could write poetry as an unapologetic urban Jew — not a tony, long-assimilated German Jew, but one of the more recently arrived, a child of  Yiddish-speaking, tenement-dwelling Russian and Polish Jews, shopkeepers and laborers, who didn’t have fine manners, who were over-concerned with money, who argued loudly and ate bad food and sometimes got sick and died young and were inconsolable.

A few weeks later, I showed up to the last class. It was a beautiful spring day. Levine was all smiles. “I’m feeling great,” he told the group. “I just picked up my paycheck.” I brought in a new poem called “My Milieu,” about being on vacation with my parents when I was fifteen. “In other times,” it began:

My parents and I woke early
To eat at a bar,
A ninety-five cent meal
On stools.

It was, I think, a hard thing for me to have written, let alone to have brought to class: a poem about being embarrassed by my parents; 
about being attached to them; about belonging to a family that was gone. The poem ended, “They liked the food, / For them it was / Eating out.” My draft of the poem has my handwritten transcription of  the class discussion. One student said, reasonably enough, 
“I don’t believe it. It feels pretentious.” Another observed, “It’s about the relationship of the self to particular societal classes.” Levine 
responded, “What it’s about is how difficult it is to live, to live as 
a young person and then to live as an old person.” He recommended I read Rimbaud’s “Poet at Seven.” He added, “I may be wrong — this poem may be a piece of shit.” Several members of the class challenged the poem for its cynicism. Levine interrupted. “You know, people often call my poems cynical,” he said. “They say, ‘Levine, why are you so damn cynical? Why must you be so cynical?’ And I say, ‘Fuck you. I’m not being cynical, I’m being realistic.’”

After class, I got my courage up to ask him if we could have a beer together. It wasn’t possible that day, he said, but we would find a time to do it soon. He told me I could send him a few poems in the mail when I felt ready to do it. He had given me his honest attention when I needed it, and he would step back and let me be free of  his influence when that was called for. It’s what one would hope for, but rarely receive, from a teacher or from a parent. A month later I was back in Toronto. It was a difficult time. That June, I received Levine’s written evaluation of my classwork. It was a more than generous paragraph. Its last words shocked me — “He could make his mark as a poet” — and changed the course of my life.

Originally Published: March 1, 2013

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I brought the poem to class. Levine’s presence, his voice, his vision of poetry, had become something of a lifeline for me. After class I went to the bookstore and bought his Selected Poems as a birthday present for myself. It was the first book I owned by a living poet. I had never seen such poems: “Baby Villon,” “Silent in America,” “Animals Are Passing from Our Lives,” “Zaydee,” “1933.” I was overwhelmed. The work was living proof of  what I had been hearing in his class: that art could be made out of forceful, hard-won everyday language; that poems didn’t have to decide between rage and humor, sorrow and joy; that the imagination gave access to a larger life. I hadn’t imagined that one could write poetry as an unapologetic urban Jew — not a tony, long-assimilated German Jew, but one of the more recently arrived, a child of  Yiddish-speaking, tenement-dwelling Russian and Polish Jews, shopkeepers and laborers, who didn’t have fine manners, who were over-concerned with money, who argued loudly and ate bad food and sometimes got sick and died young and were inconsolable.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/252184


Prose from Poetry Magazine



From “The Hatred of Poetry”
Does poetry make us human?

by Ben Lerner

We were taught at an early age that we are all poets simply by virtue of being human. Our ability to write poems is therefore in some sense the measure of our humanity. At least that’s what we were taught in Topeka: we all have feelings inside us (where are they located, exactly?); poetry is the purest expression (the way an orange expresses juice?) of this inner domain. Since language is the stuff of the social, and poetry the expression in language of our irreducible individuality, our personhood is tied up with our poethood. “You’re a poet and you don’t even know it,” Mr. X used to tell us in second grade; he would utter this irritating little refrain whenever we said something that happened to rhyme. I think the jokey cliché betrays a real belief about the universality of poetry: some kids take piano lessons, some kids study tap dance, but we don’t say every kid is a pianist or dancer. You’re a poet, however, whether or not you know it, because to be part of a linguistic community — to be hailed as a “you” at all — is to be endowed with poetic capacity.

If you are an adult foolish enough to tell another adult that you are (still!) a poet, they will often describe for you their falling away from poetry: I wrote it in high school; I dabbled in college. Almost never do they write it now. They will tell you they have a niece or nephew who writes poetry. These familiar encounters — my most recent was at the dentist, my mouth propped open while Dr. X almost gagged me with a mirror, as if searching for my innermost feelings — have a tone that’s difficult to describe. There is embarrassment for the poet — couldn’t you get a real job and put your childish ways behind you? — but there is also embarrassment on the part of the non-poet because having to acknowledge one’s total alienation from poetry chafes against the early association of poem and self. The ghost of that romantic conjunction makes the falling away from poetry a 
falling away from the pure potentiality of being human into the vicissitudes of being an actual person in a concrete historical situation, your hands in my mouth. I had the sensation that Dr. X, as he knocked the little mirror against my molars, was contemptuous of the idea that genuine poetry could issue from such an opening. And Dr. X was right: there is no genuine poetry; there is only, after all, and at best, a place for it.

The awkward and even tense exchange between a poet and non-poet — they often happen on an airplane or in a doctor’s office or some other contemporary no-place — is a little interpersonal breach that reveals how inextricable “poetry” is from our imagination of social life. Whatever we think of particular poems, “poetry” is a word for the meeting place of the private and the public, the internal and the external; my capacity to express myself poetically and to comprehend such expressions is a fundamental qualification for social recognition. If I have no interest in poetry or if I feel repelled by actual poems, either I am failing the social or the social is failing me. 
I don’t mean that Dr. X or whoever thinks in these terms, or that these assumptions about poetry are present for everyone or in the same degree, or that this is the only or best way of thinking about poetry, but I am convinced that the embarrassment or suspicion or anger that is often palpable in such meetings derives from this sense of poetry’s tremendous social stakes (combined with a sense of its tremendous social marginalization). And it’s these stakes which make actual poems an offense: if my seatmate in a holding pattern over Denver calls on me to sing, demands a poem from me that will unite coach and first class in one community, I can’t do it. Maybe this is because I don’t know how to sing or because the passengers don’t know how to listen, but it might also be because “poetry” denotes an impossible demand. This is one underlying reason why poetry is so often met with contempt rather than mere indifference and why it is periodically denounced as opposed to simply dismissed: most of us carry at least a weak sense of a correlation between poetry and human possibility that cannot be realized by poems. The poet by his very claim to be a maker of poems is therefore both an embarrassment and accusation.

And when you are foolish enough to identify yourself as a poet your interlocutors will often ask: A published poet? And when you tell them that you are, indeed, a published poet, they seem at least vaguely impressed. Why is that? It’s not like they or anybody they know reads poetry journals. And yet there is something deeply right, I think, about this knee-jerk appeal to publicity. It’s as if to say: Everybody can write a poem, but has your poetry, the distillation of your innermost being, been found authentic and intelligible by others? Can it circulate among persons, make of its readership, however small, a People in that sense? This accounts for the otherwise 
bafflingly persistent association of poetry and fame — baffling since no poets are famous among the general population. To demand proof of fame is to demand proof that your song is at once utterly specific to you and exemplary for others.

(At the turn of the millennium, when I was the editor of a tiny poetry and art magazine, I would receive a steady stream of submissions — our address was online — from people who had clearly never read our publication but whose cover letters expressed a remarkable desperation to have their poems printed anywhere. Some of these letters — tens of them — explained that the poet in question was suffering 
from a terminal condition and wanted, needed, to see his or her poems published before he or she died. I have three letters here that contain the sentence “I don’t know how long I have.” I also received multiple letters from prisoners who felt poetry publication was their best available method for asserting they were human beings, not merely criminals. I’m not mocking these poets; I’m offering them as examples of the strength of the implicit connection between poetry and the social recognition of the poet’s humanity. It’s an association so strong that the writers in question observe no contradiction in the fact that they are attempting to secure and preserve their personhood in a magazine that no one they know will see. It is as though the actual poem and publication do not matter; what matters is that the poet will know and can report to others that she is a published poet, a distinction that nobody — not Death, not the social death of exclusion from the Law — can take from her. Poetry makes you famous without an audience, an abstract or kind of proto-fame: it is less that I am known in the broader community than that I know I could be known, less that you know my name than that I know that I am named: I am a poet / and you know it.)

And when you are foolish enough to identify yourself as a poet your interlocutor will often ask you to name your favorite poets. When you say, “Cyrus Console,” he squints as if searching his memory and nods as if he can almost recall the work and the name, even though of course he can’t (none of the hundreds of non-poet acquaintances who have asked you this sort of question ever can). But I have decided — am deciding as I write — that I accept that look, that I value it; I love that the non-poet is conditioned to believe that the name and work are almost within reach even though the only poems he’s encountered in the last few decades have been at weddings and funerals. I love how it seems like he’s on the verge of recalling a 
specific line before he slowly shakes his head and concedes: I’ve never heard of him; it doesn’t ring a bell. Among other things this is a (no more than semiconscious) performance of the demands of poetry, at this point almost a muscle memory: the poem is a technology for mediating between me and my people; the poem must include me, must recognize me and be recognizable — so recognizable I should be able to recall it without ever having seen it, like the face of God.

Exchanges of this sort strike me as significant because I feel they are contemporary descendants, however diminished, of those founding dialogues about poetry that have set, however shakily, the terms for most denunciations and defenses in the West. Plato, in the most influential attack on poetry in recorded history, concluded that there was no place for poetry in the Republic because poets are rhetoricians who pass off imaginative projections as the truth and risk 
corrupting the citizens of the just city, especially the impressionable youth. (Socrates’s questions in the Republic are so leading and full of traps that he might as well have his hands in his interlocutors’ mouths). One difference between Plato’s Socrates and Dr. X is that Socrates fears and resents the corrupting power of actual poetic performance — he thinks poets are going to excite excessive emotions, for instance — whereas Dr. X presumably fears and resents his inability to be moved by or comprehend what passes for a poem. Still, Socrates’s interrogations of poets — what do they really know, what do they really contribute — will feel familiar to many of my contemporaries. Plato/Socrates is trying to defend language as the medium of philosophy from the unreason of poets who just make stuff up as opposed to discovering genuine truths. The oft-remarked irony of Plato’s dialogues, however, is that they are themselves poetic — formally experimental imaginative dramatizations. We might say that Socrates (“He who does not write,” as Nietzsche put it) is a new breed of poet who has found out how to get rid of poems. He argues that no existing poetry can express the truth about the world, and his dialogues at least approach the truth by destroying others’ claims to possess it. Socrates is the wisest of all people because he knows he knows nothing; Plato is a poet who stays closest to poetry because he refuses all actual poems. Every existing poem is a lie and Plato “reads” the claims made on behalf of those poems and refutes them in order to promote the endless dialectical conversation that is reason over the false representation that is an actual poem. Socratic irony: perfect contempt. Plato’s famous attack on poets can be read, therefore, as a defense of poetry from poems. Socrates: “Of that place beyond the heavens none of our earthly poets has yet sung, and none shall sing worthily.”

I remember first reading Plato at the Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library and feeling poetry must be a powerful art if the just city depended on its suppression. How many poets’ outsized expectations about the political effects of their work, or critics’ disappointment 
in what actual poems contribute to society, derive from Plato’s bestowing us with the honor of exile? Of course, many poets under totalitarian regimes have been banished or worse because of their writing; we must honor those — like Socrates himself — who died for their language. But the Republic’s attack on poets has helped sponsor for thousands of years the vague notion that poetry has profound political stakes even in contexts where nobody can name a poet or quote a poem. Anybody who reads (or reads the SparkNotes for) the Republic is imbued with the sense that poetry is a burning social question. When I declared myself a poet, I knew it was an important 
calling not because I had seen the impact of actual poems, but because the founding figure of the Western tradition was convinced that poets had to go. (The difference between what Socrates and I meant by “poet” or “poem” never occurred to me; the point was my work would be revolutionary; I, like many poets and critics, acquired my idealism via Platonic contempt).

It didn’t stop, of course, with the Greeks; when I read around in the Renaissance, there were more assaults on poetry, the assailants often deriving their authority from Plato — poetry is useless and/or corrupting (somehow it’s at once powerless and dangerous); it’s less valuable than history or philosophy; in some important sense it’s less real than other kinds of making. Philip Sidney’s famous and beautiful and confusing The Defense of Poesy — a work that helped establish the posture of poets and critics of poetry as essentially defensive — is the 
assertion of an ideal of imaginative literature more than an exaltation of actual poems. Poetry, Sidney says in his wonderful prose, is superior both to history and philosophy; it can move us, not just teach us facts; the poet is a creator who can transcend nature; thus poetry can put us in touch with what’s divine in us; and so on. But Sidney doesn’t worry much about specific poems, which often suck: we shouldn’t say “that poetry abuseth man’s wit, but that man’s wit abuseth poetry” — we shouldn’t knock poetry because of bad poems. At the end of the defense, instead of supplying examples of great 
poems, Sidney just pities people who “cannot hear the planet-like music of poetry.” (I, too, can’t hear it).

Even the most impassioned Romantic defenses of poetry reinscribe a sense of the insufficiency of poems. Percy Bysshe Shelley: “the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions of the poet.” A feeble shadow of an original conception sounds like Plato, although Plato didn’t think a poet could really conceive of much. In Plato’s time poetry was dominant relative to the new mode of philosophy he was attempting to advance; by the nineteenth century, defenses of poetry had to assert the relevance of the art for a (novel-reading) middle class preoccupied with material things, what Shelley calls the “excess of the selfish and calculating principle.” To defend poetry as an alternative to material concerns is both to continue and invert the Platonic critique. It is to accept the idea that poems are less real — less truthful, according to Plato — than other kinds of representation, but to recast this distance from material reality as a 
virtuous alternative to our insatiable hunger for money and things, credit and cattle. This enables poets and their defenders to celebrate poetic capacity — “original conceptions” — over and against the “feeble shadow” of real poems.

Reading in my admittedly desultory way across the centuries, 
I have come to believe that a large part of the appeal of the defense as a genre is that it is itself a kind of virtual poetry — it allows you to describe the virtues of poetry without having to write poems that have succumbed to the bitterness of the actual. Which is not to say that defenses never cite specific poems, but lines of poetry quoted in prose preserve the glimmer of the unreal. To quote the narrator of my first novel who is here describing an exaggerated version of my own experience:

I tended to find lines of poetry beautiful only when I encountered them quoted in prose, in the essays my professors had assigned in college, where the line breaks were replaced with slashes, so that what was communicated was less a particular poem than the echo of poetic possibility.

•

Many of the periodic essays worrying over the state of American poetry have — despite their avowed democratic aspirations — an implicit politics that makes me uneasy. Consider one of the most recent 
high-profile jeremiads, Mark Edmundson’s “Poetry Slam: or, The decline of American verse,” which appeared in the July 2013 Harper’s. Edmundsons’s essay contends that contemporary poets, while talented, have ceased to be politically ambitious. The primary problem is that, while many poems are “good in their ways,” they “simply aren’t good enough”; this is because “they don’t slake a reader’s thirst for meanings that pass beyond the experience of the individual poet and light up the world we hold in common.” Once again, the problem with poets is their failure to be universal, to speak both to and for everyone in the manner of Whitman, who Edmundson of course evokes. (Why Whitman should be considered a success and not a failure is never addressed; again, it’s as if Whitman’s dream was realized in some vague past the nostalgists can never quite pinpoint.)

Edmundson makes a few silly claims, e.g. that contemporary writers haven’t responded to the influence/language of popular culture (maybe he didn’t read any of the Ashbery he criticizes?), or that the poets he singles out — mainstream, celebrated poets such as Jorie Graham and Frank Bidart — have never attempted to take on issues of national significance. Whatever you think of these poets, these claims are merely false. Putting that aside: according to Edmundson, the problem with contemporary poets is that they’re concerned with the individual voice.

Contemporary American poets now seem to put all their energy into one task: the creation of a voice. They strive to sound like no one else. And that often means poets end up pushing what is most singular and idiosyncratic in themselves and in the language to the fore and ignoring what they have in common with others.

Seamus Heaney is criticized for sounding like Seamus Heaney and not everyone; “John Ashbery sounds emphatically like John Ashbery”; etc. Individuals are too individual to speak for everyone. Who is at fault? The university.

How dare a white female poet say “we” and so presume to speak for her black and brown contemporaries? How dare a white male poet speak for anyone but himself? And even then, given the crimes and misdemeanors his sort have visited, how can he raise his voice above a self-subverting whisper?

Well, how dare he or she? Edmundson raises these questions as if it were obviously PC cowardice not to claim the right to speak for 
everyone. But then, his essay strongly suggests that he considers speaking for everyone the exclusive domain of white men. He praises Sylvia Plath, for instance, but note how her work — singled out as an example of the ambitious writing we currently lack — turns out only to speak for women:

Sylvia Plath may or may not overtop the bounds of taste and transgress the limits of metaphor when she compares her genteel professor father to a Nazi brute. (“Every woman adores a Fascist.”) But she challenges all women to reimagine the relations between fathers and daughters.

Edmundson apparently cannot imagine a father reading the poem and feeling challenged. When Robert Lowell writes, however, he is “calling things as he believed them to be not only for himself but for all his readers.” Somehow, according to Edmundson, “Waking Early Sunday Morning” — one of Lowell’s most famous anti-war poems — speaks for everyone: “Lowell speaks directly of our children, our monotonous sublime: few are the consequential poets now who are willing to venture that ‘our.’” Plath helps daughters reimagine their relationships with their fathers; Lowell is everybody’s father. Lowell’s specific cultural allusions — the title echoes Wallace Stevens, the prosodic structure recalls Andrew Marvell — apparently make him universal (Whitman, by the way, would have rejected these techniques as too exclusive and staid for the American experiment).

The weirdest moment in the essay might be when Edmundson, probably eager to give an example of a nonwhite person who can speak for the collective, discusses what he calls Amiri Baraka’s “consequential and energetic political poem,” “Somebody Blew Up America.” The poem received widespread attention because Baraka — who was then the poet laureate of New Jersey — included the following quatrain:

Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed
Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers
To stay home that day
Why did Sharon stay away?

The poem was “consequential” in the sense that it caused New Jersey to dissolve the position of poet laureate — Baraka refused to resign and it turned out there was no constitutional mechanism for his removal — and the poem earned a place in the Anti-Defamation League archive. I can imagine cogent arguments praising or excusing or bashing Baraka’s poem, but I am startled by Edmundson’s claim that this poem is at least “an attempt to say not how it is for Baraka exclusively but how it is for all.” It’s true that Baraka’s poem is not concerned with the particulars of his individual experience, but it is not at all true that the poem isn’t unmistakably in Baraka’s voice; regardless, how do lines like the following speak for “all”:

They say its some terrorist,
some barbaric
A Rab,
in Afghanistan
It wasn’t our American terrorists
It wasn’t the Klan or the Skin heads
Or the them that blows up nigger
Churches, or reincarnates us on Death Row
It wasn’t Trent Lott
Or David Duke or Giuliani
Or Schundler, Helms retiring

Most of the poem is devoted to cataloging the violence done to people of color by white Americans. Since Edmundson evokes Baraka’s intentions, we might as well quote Baraka’s account of his own poem:

The poem’s underlying theme focuses on how Black Americans have suffered from domestic terrorism since being kidnapped into US chattel slavery, e.g., by Slave Owners, US & State Laws, Klan, Skin Heads, Domestic Nazis, Lynching, denial of rights, national oppression, racism, character assassination, historically, and at this very minute throughout the US. The relevance of this to Bush’s call for a ‘War on Terrorism,’ is that Black people feel we have always been victims of terror, governmental and general, so we cannot get as frenzied and hysterical as the people who while asking to dismiss our history and contemporary reality to join them, in the name of a shallow ‘patriotism’ in attacking the majority of people in the world, especially people of color and in the third world.

The “we” here is purposefully not “all”; indeed, Baraka’s point is explicitly to refuse the false “we” politicians are attempting to deploy — a “we” that tactically forgets the history of anti-Black violence as it attempts to constitute a unified front in the “War on Terror,” which in turn involves killing more people of color. To suggest that Baraka’s “we” is an attempt to speak for “all” is therefore to repeat the dismissal of “our [people of color’s] history and contemporary reality.”

I can forgive Edmundson for his bad examples only in the sense that there are no good examples of “superb lyric poetry” that at once “have something to say” utterly specific to a poet’s “experience” and can speak for all. (Edmundson might say what he demands is that a poet attempt that impossible task and fail, but his readings lead us to suspect he believes that white men will fail better.) The lyric — that is, the intensely subjective, personal poem — that can 
authentically encompass everyone is an impossibility in a world characterized by difference and violence. This is not to indict the desire for such a poem — indeed, the word we often use for such desire is “poetry” — but to indict the celebration of any specific poem for having achieved this unreachable goal because that necessarily involves passing off particularity as universality. Edmundson lacks a perfect contempt for the actual examples he considers.

The capacity to transcend history has historically been ascribed to white men of a certain class while denied to individuals marked by difference (whether of race or gender). Edmundson’s (jokey?) acknowledgment of the “crimes and misdemeanors” white men have committed in their effort to speak as if they were everyone can hardly count as an engagement with — let alone a refutation of — this inequality. As Beth Loffreda and Claudia Rankine put it in a recent essay:

What we want to avoid at all costs is ... an opposition between writing that accounts for race ... and writing that is “universal.” If we continue to think of the “universal” as better-than, as the pinnacle, we will always discount writing that doesn’t look universal because it accounts for race or some other demeaned category. The universal is a fantasy. But we are captive, still, to a sensibility that champions the universal while simultaneously defining the universal, still, as white. We are captive, still, to a style of championing literature that says work by writers of color succeeds when a white person can nevertheless relate to it — that it “transcends” its category.

What makes Walt Whitman so powerful and powerfully embarrassing a founding figure for American poetry is that he is explicit about the contradictions inherent in the effort to “inhabit all.” This is also what makes it so silly to imply Whitman’s poetic ideal was ever accomplished in the past and that we’ve since declined — because of identity politics — into avoidable fractiousness. “I am the poet of slaves, and of the masters of slaves,” Whitman wrote in his journal, indicating the impossible desire to both recognize and suspend difference within his poems, to be no one in particular so he could stand for everyone. You can hate contemporary poetry — in any era — as much as you want for failing to realize the fantasy of universality, but the haters should stop pretending any poem ever successfully spoke for everyone.
Originally Published: April 1, 2016

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/guide/252114#guide


Samuel Taylor Coleridge: “Frost at Midnight”
The poet shows how reality and imagination can become one.
By Katherine Robinson

Romantic-era poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge famously defined imagination as the human mind’s temporary replication of the divine creation of the world. “The primary Imagination,” he wrote, “I hold to be … a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation.” In other words, the human mind’s creative powers—finite as they are—imitate in miniature the divine words that called a world into being. In “Frost at Midnight,” Coleridge meditates on creation by pairing poetic composition with the magical appearance of frost crystals on the windowpane and eaves outside. Coleridge explores how the individual mind mirrors the natural world and shows how patterns repeat at different scales, revealing universal elements underlying landscapes, thought structures, frost crystals, and poetry.

At the beginning of the poem, the speaker sits awake in the dead of night as frost laces the window. Everyone else has gone to bed, and his infant son Hartley sleeps by the low fire. An old English word for frost, rime, survived in rural northern English dialects, and in the late 18th century, around the time Coleridge was writing, it came into use once again—mostly among poets. Because it sounded like rhyme, it provided fodder for symbols and wordplay. Both poetry and frost create complex, interwoven patterns, and both arise in secret, out of mystery. During long winter nights, frost spreads unseen up windows and across the grass. People once explained its glittering, sudden appearance by saying that “Jack Frost”—a rascally fairy tale character said to delight in bringing snow and sleet—had painted intricate white designs while the household slept. In “Frost at Midnight,” Coleridge forges poetic patterns to represent the workings of memory and imagination. As he describes the frost, he poetically mimics its recurring shapes. Looked at closely, frost patterns vary somewhat but repeat the same basic designs, branching up the window, replicating themselves.

The poem begins by evoking a repeated birdcall in the winter silence: “The Frost performs its secret ministry, / Unhelped by any wind. The owlet’s cry / Came loud—and hark, again! loud as before.” The syntax enacts the repeated call of the owlet, probably shrieking for food, whose smallness mirrors the baby lying in the cradle. Like the frost, which imitates itself as it spreads, the sleeping boy also embodies the idea of replication; children are, in some ways, replicas of their parents.

Paradoxically, Coleridge acknowledges, however, that repetition often hails and creates change; an element of strangeness enters whatever is re-created. Thus, as the poem progresses, he gladly imagines how his son’s childhood will differ from his own. Coleridge spent his school years in London, “pent ‘mid cloisters dim,” but his child Hartley will grow up in the wild countryside where he can “wander like a breeze / By lakes and sandy shores. …” When Coleridge wrote “Frost at Midnight” in 1798, he was living in a small thatched cottage in Somerset, where he had moved because he wanted to be close to William Wordsworth, with whom he shared a legendary literary collaboration, and to Wordsworth’s sister, Dorothy, whom he adored.

“Frost at Midnight” is written in blank verse, and the poem’s first metrical variation occurs when Coleridge syntactically enacts repetition: “The owlet’s cry / Came loud—and hark, again! loud as before.” The second loud disrupts the iambic meter: “came LOUD | —and HARK, | a-GAIN! | LOUD as | be-FORE.” Later, as Coleridge evokes his son’s coming rural childhood, his language again doubles back on itself:

But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze
By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags
Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,
Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores
And mountain crags: …

Clouds tower like mountains, loom like jagged crags, and spread like wind-ruffled lakes. Just as the clouds replicate the landscape below, the verse reiterates its catalog of geologic features: “lakes and shores / And mountain crags,” although, this time, description condenses into a list.

Equating replication with change is one of many ways Coleridge quietly insists that opposite qualities often inhabit the same space. At the beginning of the poem, Coleridge sits in a silent room where even the fire hovers low and unmoving. He describes a film of ash flapping on the grate, which in folkloric belief was called a “stranger” and was said to foretell the arrival of an unexpected guest:

Only that film, which fluttered on the grate,

Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing.
Methinks, its motion in this hush of nature
Gives it dim sympathies with me who live. …

This “stranger” unites opposites: it is both the burnt residue of the fire and the harbinger of a new arrival; it is both a remnant and an omen. Coleridge describes the leaping film as “unquiet,” a word of negation that contains quiet and is created from its own opposite. This negative construction echoes the poem’s first lines in which he observes that the frost is “unhelped” by any wind.

Although the appearance of the “stranger” on the grate signals the coming arrival of a guest, seeing it makes Coleridge remember his own childhood when he sat at school watching the “stranger” flapping on the grate and wondering what visitor might arrive:

For still I hoped to see the stranger’s face,
Townsman, or aunt, or sister more beloved,
My play-mate when we both were clothed alike!

In the 18th century, both boys and girls wore dresses until they went to school. The last line evokes a time when certain differentiating customs had not yet come into effect, and obvious gender distinctions had not yet emerged. Likewise, his meditative anticipation contains multiple suspended possibilities—the unexpected guest could be anyone. As Coleridge watches the fluttering ash, the imagined stranger remains in the multiplicitous realm of imagination and has not yet crystalized into a singular, real person.

Because the film of ash is the only thing stirring in the hushed house, the poet suggests that the film has “dim sympathies” with him, thus equating his mind with this image of restlessness. Coleridge’s descriptions of stillness imbue it, paradoxically, with turbulence: “Tis calm indeed! so calm, that it disturbs / And vexes meditation with its strange / And extreme silentness.” Quietness “disturbs” and “vexes” the poet’s thoughts. Mysteriously tumultuous, the silence invites the poet into a world of mimetic possibilities in which forms are not confined to their own limits. The word extreme derives from a Latin adjective meaning far away or foreign—outside the boundaries of a given territory. This “extreme” silence dissolves the boundaries of the self and draws the poet toward something distant. In this case, the distance is temporal; watching the “stranger,” the poet recalls old memories and also vividly imagines his son’s future. In the imagination, multiple time frames coexist at once; time is no longer simply a linear progression. Silence turns the self into a wanderer just as Coleridge imagines that his son Hartley will “wander like a breeze.”

Just as clouds imitate the landscape, Coleridge’s metaphor turns his son into the world he will inhabit. In the poem’s imagined future, Hartley becomes like the animating wind racing across mountains and shores. In Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination, critic Gregory Leadbetter argues that Coleridge believed “our metaphysical ideas shape our becoming,” citing Coleridge’s beautiful statement that “we become that which we believe our gods to be.” As Hartley comes to know and understand the spiritual wisdom embedded in landscapes, he himself will begin to meld with his surroundings.

Coleridge imagines God’s “language” suffusing “all things”—a kind of linguistic connective tissue that underlies the land and, once we understand it, allows our minds to meld with nature. Coleridge envisions that his son will

… see and hear
The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
Of that eternal language, which thy God
Utters, who from eternity doth teach
Himself in all, and all things in himself.
Great universal Teacher! he shall mould
Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.

Knowledge leads to more questions. Satiation and thirst are conflated, and the congruence of opposites is the tension that allows creation to proceed. (The child himself, after all, comes from melding two different genetic lines.) Coleridge also introduces the idea that one thing leads back into another, an image of circular experience mirrored by the structure of the poem—a rondo—which, at the end, repeats the phrase secret ministry and returns to the image of frost.

Coleridge wrote that “the common end of all narrative, nay of all poems, is to convert a series into a whole: to make those events which in real or imagined History move in a strait Line, assume to our Understandings a Circular motion—the snake with its Tail in its Mouth.” Coleridge is describing the ouroboros—an ancient image of a snake eating its own tail. This strange creature symbolized the idea that endings cannot be separated from beginnings.

The poem’s final stanza evokes the ouroboros-like progression of seasons and unifies them through metaphor. Coleridge writes that because Hartley will understand God’s “eternal language”:

… all seasons shall be sweet to thee,
Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
Of mossy apple-tree, while the night-thatch
Smokes in the sun-thaw. …

The “tufts of snow” on the winter branch evoke white sprays of apple blossoms that, in spring, will cover the tree. Winter replicates spring; the image similarly erodes boundaries between plants and animals: tufts—of blossoms, of snow—evoke tufts of feathers on the redbreast’s belly. Similarly, the thatch “smokes” in the “sun thaw.” If Coleridge’s picturesque but highly flammable roof actually began to smoke, the house would be destroyed. The thaw, on the other hand, hails spring and new growth, and, thus, language melds destruction and creation. In his creative autobiography, Biographia Literaria, Coleridge defines imagination as the human capacity to invent new realities, replicating—on a small scale—divine creation. He also identifies another role of the imagination: to unify the world around us. Coleridge writes that this secondary aspect of imagination “dissolves, diffuses, dissipates in order to recreate: or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify.” Coleridge uses general to mean “creative”—the “general earth” generates life. But, of course, general also means universal—spiritual wisdom and poetic language fuse different forms and reveal their commonality.

Understanding God’s “language” will make all seasons “sweet” to the poet’s son—whether the leaves cover the trees, whether snow coats the branches, or

whether the eave-drops fall
Heard only in the trances of the blast,
Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.

At the end, the imagined future and the physical present merge. The poet envisions a future version of what he is already experiencing: the stillness of a frosty night. “Trances of the blast” means snatches of quiet between gusts of wind, but trance also evokes enchantment. Silence enfolds magic, the possibility of unexplained revelation. Trance derives from a Latin verb meaning to “go across.” Trance, silence, draws the speaker across the border of the self and into union with the world around him. Midnight is the witching hour, the moment when one day becomes another, when one thing transforms into another. Coleridge evokes ice turning to water, a change that serves only to illustrate how different forms are composed of the same material. The assonance threading through the final lines sonically unites words: “silent icicles, / quietly shining to the quiet Moon.” The icicles shine because they are catching the light of the moon, which, in turn, reflects the sun. Seemingly disparate forms gleam with the same light. The icicles decking the house replicate the distant moon, and the poem’s branching, reiterating patterns reproduce the frost’s intricate designs. The child reflects the father and then becomes like the rushing wind; imagination refigures him in the image of the wild, unbounded world. The temporary imagination imitates the divine, endless transfigurations that shape the mountains and cliffs and fill them with an “eternal language” that, rushing through the wilderness, is caught and replicated briefly in the poem’s stillness.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/177656

Essay
Two Drama Kings Take on a Master
Paul Giamatti and Alfred Molina read "Fra Lippo Lippi" and "My Last Duchess."
by The Editors

In some of Browning’s dramatic monologues, major Italian Renaissance painters talk about sticky situations and obsess about painting. They typically address a silent listener who for one reason or another blames the painter for a bad situation. In the audio recordings below, you can hear why these poems rival Shakespeare's character studies.

In some of the recordings, critics and actors explain and read the poems. In others, an art critic explains the paintings by the actual artists who appear as characters in the monologues.

1. Paul Giamatti reads “Fra Lippo Lippi”
2. W.S. Di Piero explains “Fra Lippo Lippi” with excerpts read by Paul Giamatti
3. Alfredo Molina reads “My Last Duchess”
4. W.S. Di Piero explains “Andrea del Sarto” with excerpts read by Dion Flynn
5. W.S. Di Piero explains a painting by Fra Lippo Lippi
6. W.S. Di Piero explains a painting by Andrea del Sarto
7. W.S. Di Piero explains a painting by Fra Angelico


“Fra Lippo Lippi”
By Robert Browning read by actor Paul Giamatti.
Dressed like a monk and caught by the police in the red light district after hours, Fra Lippo Lippi tells his life story to get out of the jam.
Read the poem
Listen


Audio Reading Guide to “Fra Lippo Lippi”
Narrated by W.S. Di Piero with excerpts from the poem read by Paul Giamatti.
Read the poem
Listen


“My Last Duchess”
By Robert Browning read by actor Alfredo Molina.
In “My Last Duchess,” the duke of Ferrara shows off his art collection to the representative of a nobleman to whose daughter the duke is engaged. The centerpiece of his collection is a portrait of his recently deceased wife, whom the duke has had murdered because of her supposedly indiscriminate attentions.
Read the poem
Listen


Audio Reading Guide to “Andrea del Sarto”
Narrated by W.S. Di Piero with excerpts from the poem read by Dion Flynn.
“Andrea del Sarto” is spoken by the 16th-century artist who was described by one of his contemporaries as “the faultless painter.” In this monologue, Andrea del Sarto attempts to have a “relationship talk” with his wife Lucrezia: “A few years earlier, she persuaded him to return from the Court of France where he’d been invited and won acclaim and prosperity. Now he fears his return may have cost him the supreme fame of a Michelangelo or Raphael."
Read the poem
Listen


Audio Guide to the painting Portrait of a Man and Woman at a Casement (1440) by Fra Lippo Lippi
Narrated by W.S. Di Piero.
This opulent portrait of a man and a woman who appear devoted to one another is an example of Fra Lippo Lippi's attentiveness to sensual beauty. Visit the Met to view the painting.
Listen
Fra Filippo Lippi (Italian, Florentine, born about 1406, died 1469)
Portrait of a Woman and a Man at a Casement, ca. 1440
Tempera on wood; 25 1/4 x 16 1/2 in. (64.1 x 41.9 cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Marquand Collection, Gift of Henry G. Marquand, 1889 (89.15.19)


Audio Guide to the painting Holy Family by Andrea del Sarto
Narrated by W.S. Di Piero.
The great rivalry in Italian Renaissance painting was between Fra Angelico and Andrea del Sarto. W.S. Di Piero explains why this painting, in which Saint John the Baptist hands a globe to the Christ child, exemplifies the charm of del Sarto’s paintings, which Fra Angelico's often lacked. Visit the Met to view the painting.
Listen
Andrea del Sarto (Andrea d'Agnolo) (Italian, Florentine, 1486-1530)
The Holy Family with the Infant Saint John the Baptist, ca. 1530
Oil on wood; 53 1/2 x 39 5/8 in. (135.9 x 100.6 cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Maria DeWitt Jesup Fund, 1922 (22.75)


Audio Guide to the painting The Last Judgment: Paradise by Fra Angelico
Narrated by W.S. Di Piero.
This portion of Fra Angelico's triptych, The Last Judgment, shows a procession of souls into heaven. The swaying angels dance toward heaven while down in the right corner of the third panel (not shown) crouch miserable creatures, brutalizing each other. As W.S. Di Piero explains, Angelico made these demons an ugliness that "menaces the beauty of God’s creation, a corruption that claws at vulnerable but divinely authored human souls."
Listen
Fra Angelico, The Last Judgment: Paradise. Staatliche Museen, Berlin, Germany. Photo: Jörg P. Anders / Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Gemäldegalerie


BIOGRAPHIES
Robert Browning (1812-1889) was born in Camberwell, England, and his education mostly took place among his father’s 6,000-book library. As a writer, Browning was regarded as a failure for many years, living in the shadow of his wife Elizabeth Barrett Browning. However, late in life Browning’s brilliant use of dramatic monologue made him a literary icon. Today, his most widely read work is Men and Women, a collection of dramatic monologues dedicated to his wife.

Fra Angelico (1400-55) is popularly viewed as an inspired saint and monk, a belief that Pope John Paul II solidified when he beatified him in 1984. In fact, he was a highly skilled artist engaged in the aesthetic debates in contemporary Florentine art. He lived for most of his life in the S. Domenico in Fiesole, where he became Prior in 1450. His most famous works, though, were painted at S. Marco in Florence, a Sylvestrine monastery that was taken over by his order in 1436. He and his assistants painted about 50 frescos in the friary (c.1438-45) that are at once the expression of and a guide to the spiritual life of the community. Many of the frescos are in the friars' cells and were intended as aids to devotion. With their immaculate coloring, their economy in drawing and composition, and their freedom from the accidents of time and place, they attain a sense of blissful serenity.

Paul Giamatti was born in New York City to A. Bartlett Giamatti, a Yale University professor who later became president of the university and commissioner of Major League Baseball. He appeared in a number of supporting roles in big-budget movies such as The Truman Show, Saving Private Ryan, and The Negotiator and has also appeared in more major roles in Big Momma's House, Planet of the Apes, and Big Fat Liar. Giamatti's most acclaimed performances include lead roles in American Splendor and Sideways. He recently won a Screen Actors Guild award and received an Oscar nomination for his role in 2005's Cinderella Man.

Alfred Molina has over 50 film, television, and theatre productions to his credit. Most recently, he has played Diego Rivera in Frida, himself in Coffee and Cigarettes, and the villain, Doc Ock, in Spiderman II. In his next film, he plays opposite Tom Hanks in Ron Howard’s The Da Vinci Code.

W.S. Di Piero is the author of numerous volumes of poetry and essays. His latest book of poems, Brother Fire, appeared in 2004 from Knopf, which will publish his New and Selected Poems in early 2007. He writes frequently on the visual arts for Threepenny Review and is the art columnist for the San Diego Reader. He lives in San Francisco.


The Fra Angelico exhibition ran from October 26, 2005, through January 29, 2006, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Originally Published: February 7, 2006

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/detail/69764

Prose from Poetry Magazine
Potsherds & Arrowheads
The rubble of an era.
By V. Penelope Pelizzon

Vachel Lindsay, from the Poetry magazine archives

A year ago I proposed to the editor of this magazine that, in honor of its centennial, I do some archeological digging through Poetry’s first three decades. Joseph Parisi’s and Stephen Young’s Poetry Anthology1912–2002 collects work first published here, but most of their selections are by known poets. I sought truly obscure yet glittering potsherds. Armed with tissues and eye drops and call slips, I entered the Dodd Research Center archive and opened the brittle Pegasus-fledged pages of 1912.

For several months I sifted. There were pleasures that could come only from reading poems in this context. Above the faintly floral-scented verses of the early years, regionalists like Carl Sandburg and Vachel Lindsay tower. (If you need a jolt of madcap kookiness, I suggest reciting aloud Lindsay’s “The Firemen’s Ball” from July 1914, in which “the ding-dong doom-bells” ring with a “Clangaranga, clangaranga/Clang, clang, clang” to imitate “the burning of a great building”) Then, if I did not already suspect that Pound’s early Cantos dropped from another planet, their extraterrestriality was confirmed by seeing them in situ in the June 1917 issue. And the shock of coming upon Louise Bogan or Langston Hughes or Weldon Kees amidst thirties period bric-a-brac—thrilling!

Yet so much was numbingly forgettable. Really, what keeps any poem from sinking into the midden? Obviously it’s not just formal facility. It’s heartbreaking to hear how much of the early detritus is tightly-rhymed verse: I could feel the hours that went into these finicky clockworks bearing down on me; I aged. Nor does a poet’s spurt of establishment fame keep her work alive. I was excited to see how many female Pulitzer-winners had published here. Sadly, the offerings by Leonora Speyer and Audrey Wurdemann and Marya Zaturenska are all fossils of the dustiest kind. A poet’s experimental stance is no insurance that his poems will speak to a later age. Oddballs like Harry Crosby, Emanuel Carnevali, and Alfred Kreymborg appeared in these pages, and while I loved the idea of salvaging one of their pieces—Carnevali’s serio-comic “His Majesty the Letter-Carrier,” say—its drollery didn’t quite carry the poem. Meanwhile, any number of forgotten Poetry house favorites over the years illustrate that being prolific is not the sole key to longevity.

Poetic fashion is fickle, of course. It was a surprise, then, that reading decades of back issues suggests that there is a sort of historical poetic justice; the epoch-making poems that first appeared here are still staggering. And other voices that have been recovered already—Lola Ridge, Genevieve Taggard, Elinor Wylie—don’t sound quite like anyone else in the magazine. That they’ve been sifted out of the strata is understandable. What rule of lasting does this suggest? Enough of the recovered poems (what is minimally “enough”? Five? Ten? Twenty?) sound distinctive enough (ditto uncertainty on quantifier) to make them register in the collective ear as a singular voice.

But what about the flints and chips left behind? The fugitive poems that never quite added up to “a voice”? In the April 1916 issue, Pound issued one of his cranktankerous edicts:

As for the sickly multitude pouring out mediocre and sub-mediocre work...in the first place, they don’t count, and, in the second place, if any among them do turn out a good scrap of work these scraps neutralize.

Pace E.P., I’m not ready to believe that there’s nothing worth salvaging from the scraps. Let me show you a handful of obsidian points that can still draw blood.

•

Here is a startling ballad variation from April 1915. This is twenty-one years before Abel Meeropol’s “Strange Fruit,” made famous by Billie Holiday:

Blackbird, blackbird in the cage,
There’s something wrong tonight.
Far off the sheriff’s footfall dies,
The minutes crawl like last year’s flies
Between the bars, and like an age
The hours are long tonight.

The sky is like a heavy lid
Out here beyond the door tonight.
What’s that? A mutter down the street.
What’s that? The sound of yells and feet.
For what you didn’t do or did
You’ll pay the score tonight.

No use to reek with reddened sweat,
No use to whimper and to sweat.
They’ve got the rope; they’ve got the guns,
They’ve got the courage and the guns;
And that’s the reason why tonight
No use to ask them any more.
They’ll fire the answer through the door—
You’re out to die tonight.

There where the lonely cross-road lies,
There is no place to make replies;
But silence, inch by inch, is there,
And the right limb for a lynch is there;
And a lean daw waits for both your eyes,
Blackbird.

Perhaps you’ll meet again some place.
Look for the mask upon the face:
That’s the way you’ll know them there—
A white mask to hide the face.
And you can halt and show them there
The things that they are deaf to now,
And they can tell you what they meant—
To wash the blood with blood. But how
If you are innocent?

Blackbird singer, blackbird mute,
They choked the seed you might have found.
Out of a thorny field you go—
For you it may be better so—
And leave the sowers of the ground
To eat the harvest of the fruit,
Blackbird.
—“The Bird and the Tree”

Lynching: like jazz, an American invention. If you followed poetry between the wars, you might recognize this as an anthology piece by Ridgely Torrence, a bright light of the twenties. Today Torrence is remembered mainly as a playwright, editor, and friend of the more famous. His ThreePlays for a Negro Theatre were a hit in 1917, where they were the first dramas to run on Broadway with all-black casts. Though their wince-inducing dialect and Christian moralizing date them, the plays are a serious attempt by a white author to represent the effects of violence on the black community. Meanwhile, as poetry editor of the New Republic from 1920–1933, Torrence championed emerging poets including Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens, and Elinor Wylie. His own 1925 collection, Hesperides, was lauded. But Torrence published no further poetry books until 1941; after that, only a volume reprinting much earlier work appeared. And though he was awarded the Shelley Memorial Award in 1942, by his death eight years later he had slipped into what The Dictionary of Literary Biography acknowledges “must charitably be called a minor position in American literature.”

Admiration for Torrence’s good citizenship doesn’t make it easier to slog through most of his writing today, sadly. But “The Bird and the Tree”? I left the archive haunted. The poem’s unsettling, irregular rhyme is accented by moments that seem hyper-modern. The abrupt, twice-recurring drop of “Blackbird” feels like the fall of a body. And the metaphor tying the black man who will swing from the tree with a bird that could fly to safety from its boughs is queasily ambiguous. Is this a redemptive image of freedom? I have no idea if Torrence ever witnessed a lynching; certainly even in his native Ohio, mobs were a threat. Photographs of hangings circulated widely in postcard form, as the Without Sanctuary project makes clear (withoutsanctuary.org.) I began to wonder if Torrence arrived at his blackbird image because of how a bound body looks from below, silhouetted against a cage of branches. (If that seems like a stretch, go look at the pictures.) As I read with this awful counter-image in mind, the po
Associate editor Marion Strobel at a “Pegasus Party,” January 1, 1947

Originally Published: January 3rd, 2012

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/detail/88729

Prose from Poetry Magazine
Poetry Is Everywhere
On texts and textiles.

By Tilleke Schwarz

I make hand-embroidered work that contains images, texts, and traditional items such as sampler designs. My work typically has what some might call a poetic character, a result of the content, lively composition, and sensitive use of color. I love poetry and relate to it, not by quoting lines in my work, but through the inspiration that is offered by the free spirit of poets. A great example of such a poet is Kira Wuck. Here is one of her poems, which I have translated myself:

Finnish girls seldom say hello
They are not shy nor arrogant
One only needs a chisel to come closer
They order their own beer
Travel all over the world
While their men are waiting at home
When angry they send you a rotten salmon.
— From Finnish Girls

I am very impressed by this young Dutch poet. In 2011, she won the Dutch Poetry Slam Championship. Wuck is half Finnish and half Indonesian. The poems have a remote kind of humor with unusual but precise language. I relate to the free and creative way she combines images, like a chisel, beer, and a rotten salmon. I combine items in a similar way in my own work. I have not used this beautiful text in my work yet, but I often use repetition of a traditional image. 
I now have started to add a carrot in each work as a kind of running gag. I was very happy when Nigel Cheney machine-stitched plenty of 
carrots for me when he heard I had run out of carrots.

In art school we practiced a kind of calligraphy while copying a section of “Lament for the Death of Ignacio Sánchez Mejías” by Frederico García Lorca. (We needed to practice calligraphy and our teacher thought it would be best to use a good poem instead of a stupid text. A great idea!) The repetition of “A las cinco de la tarde” (At five in the afternoon) had a huge impact on me. The rhythm of the second (repeating) line reminds me of the ringing of church bells. It is one of the few lines of poetry I remember after all these years.



Playground, 2008, by Tilleke Schwarz, with detail.

I rarely include lines of poetry in my work, but a few times I was invited to do so. For instance, when I was participating in a group exhibition that celebrated the two hundredth birthday of Alfred Lord Tennyson, the curator sent several lines for inspiration. In general I hate to use other people’s themes for my work but the lines of poetry spoke to me and I rather appreciated them, so I included “As the thistle shakes / When three gray linnets wrangle for the seed” and 
“I am a part of all that I have met” in my work Playground.

I always like to include text in my work, mostly out of its original context, whether it is poetry or not. I like to think that it becomes a kind of poetry (if not already) as new meanings appear and the oddities of our modern society surface, which seems to be the main theme in my work. For instance, last summer I had a layover in Detroit. The airport is modern and pleasant, and not only people but also dogs are welcome. There were specially designated “pet relief areas,” which sounds a lot more inviting than the blunt toilet or WC for human beings. Pet relief can be understood variously as a device to get rid of one’s dog or as a kind of liberation. This poetry leaked through to the design of the facility itself, including the tiny dog bidets. I probably will use some of this inspiration in my work. As the visual artist Susan Hiller has said in her work, which mainly consists of huge texts, “There is no distinction between ‘reading’ images and reading text.”

Security is an extremely important issue in our modern world. It makes us behave stranger than ever and dominates our way of living. I love signs that say “secret access code” for a simple locker at the train station or “suspicious circumstances” for an area one is not allowed to enter. This sounds so mysterious but does not give any clues to what is going on. Last year I received a parcel from the US with the notice that it “does not contain any unauthorized explosives, destructive devices, or hazardous materials.” The US seems to require the sender to add this kind of information to a package. To me it is absolutely unusual to inform the addressee about what is not in the package.



100% Checked, 2005, by Tilleke Schwarz, with detail.

When on holiday in Iceland I was intrigued by the content of their national phone book. The first pages contained instructions for the general public regarding natural disasters. Attention was paid to volcanic eruptions (“Always wear a helmet in the vicinity of eruptions”), lightning and thunderstorms, earthquakes, and avalanches. Exciting! The text would even improve when shortened (“take the shortest way out by moving perpendicular to the wind”). It offered me 
something to think about: Why the general public? Why natural disasters? My favorite line is: “Stay where the wind blows and do not go into low (!) areas.” First of all, it sounds romantic. Then I realized that I am also living in a low area (below sea level) and that area is also called the “low countries” (the Netherlands and Belgium). So maybe I am risking my life over here.

Sometimes quotes knock on my door and insist to be part of my work. “On ne mange pas tulipes” (one does not eat tulips) is an original quote from the French chef Paul Bocuse when a Dutch television host interviewed him about what kinds of Dutch ingredients he uses in his world-famous cuisine. His first answer was Gouda cheese, but the interviewer insisted on hearing a bit more. Bocuse’s answer was a little arrogant and humorous, but probably more dramatic than he realized. Tulip bulbs were a common dish near the end of WWII when there was a great shortage of food in Holland. My mother-in-law told me she even liked them as they taste like onions. Needless to say, she is not a very fussy eater.

I was born in 1946 but WWII had quite an influence on my life. 
I am Jewish and my parents survived the war by being hidden by very courageous farmers in the north of Holland. My eldest sister was protected by a minister and his wife. Most of my relatives, however, were murdered. My parents hardly spoke about those times or the loss of their numerous relatives. We hardly dared to ask; even in our childhood we somehow sensed that it was too painful and too difficult to cope with.



Losing our memory, 1998, by Tilleke Schwarz, with detail.

The famous Dutch visual artist, writer, and poet Armando was raised in the town of Amersfoort near a “transition camp” for prisoners who were to be sent to concentration camps in Germany. The suffering of the victims and the cruelty of the Nazi camp guards, so near to his home, influenced him for the rest of his life and became the main theme in his work. He blames “guilty landscapes and guilty trees” and wonders why they did not do anything when the drama took place.

Yes, the trees are still there, actually. But that
noise, where does that noise come from.
That did not used to be there.
— From Notes on the Enemy

I like the way he makes very short poems, often consisting of just a few lines with subtle references to the past. I try to deal with this past in a similar way. I have known them all has many references to WWII and my family. Tally marks recall the many murdered people. I used different colors from reddish to gray to black to indicate that their fire is still slightly burning. In 1999 I included the Star of David and the words “millenium proof” in my work Losing our memory.

Leo Vroman was a very interesting and sensitive Dutch poet. Like Armando, he is multitalented as a Dutch-American hematologist, a prolific poet (mainly in Dutch), and an illustrator.

If I know better as a poet
My heart I do not know you very well
And uncertain if you know me well;
You are maybe used to me
Or mainly attached to me.
— From If I know better as a poet

I am not certain about the meaning behind the quoted lines. But I assume they are part of a love song for his wife, Tineke. Their mutual history is a moving love story. I have never expressed my love on linen, except for maybe the love for my main muse: my cats. Almost all my works contain some cats.

Originally Published: April 1st, 2016

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/articles/detail/88731

Essay
Make the Machine Sing
Christopher Logue’s War Music: An Account of Homer’s “Iliad”
By Michael Robbins

War Music: An Account of Homer’s “Iliad,” by Christopher Logue.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $28.00.

In 1937 Sergei Eisenstein noted an affinity between filmic montage and the imagistic sequencing Homer employed in The Iliad. Joanna Paul, in Film and the Classical Epic Tradition, traces several arguments “that certain pre-modern societies understand visuality in a way that can be equated to cinema.” Paul Leglise, working from Lucretius’s conception of vision, wrote in 1958 that “it is no paradox to claim that the new terms” of cinema “define very exactly certain literary techniques used by an ancient Latin poet.” Leglise thought of Virgil, not Homer, as the first cineaste; in 1970 we find Alain Malissard 
arguing that Homer’s poetry, but not Virgil’s, anachronistically 
exemplifies the seventh art.

Obviously, it is problematic to liken ancient poetry to a medium that was invented around the same time as Coca-Cola. But I’ve been thinking of The Iliad in cinematic terms since I first read it in college, when I was also learning about Eisenstein and Dovzhenko, Godard and Nicholas Ray. Eisenstein, drawing on Lessing’s Laocoon, isolates Homer’s description of Hera’s chariot, pointing out how the poet depicts the wheels in stages. In Stanley Lombardo’s flinty rendition:

Hebe slid the bronze, eight-spoked wheels
Onto the car’s iron axle, wheels with pure gold rims
Fitted with bronze tires, a stunning sight,
And the hubs spinning on both sides were silver.

Strangely, there is no good film version of Homer’s epic. Or perhaps that’s not so strange. As cinematic as its techniques may be, The Iliad does not lend itself easily to conventional commercial moviemaking. Maybe it would take something like Jacques Rivette’s Out 1 — a thirteen-hour film in which theater groups rehearse avant-garde adaptations of Aeschylus — to capture its sweep and roil. (This is one reason Godard’s Le Mépris remains the best Homeric 
movie — among other things, it’s a consideration of how one might bring Homer to the screen; Fritz Lang plays himself, hired to adapt The Odyssey.) Directors tend to play up the romance angle and tack the sack of Troy from The Aeneid onto the end, as in Robert Wise’s Helen of Troy (1956) and Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy (2004). As Paul notes, The Iliad “does not claim to be ‘about’ the Trojan War, and it does not matter that it ends before the war does.”

Troy is a bad movie, peppered with basic errors and laughable dialogue. But it contains one scene that seems to me to possess genuine Homeric insight. It’s the battle between Achilles, played pretty well by Brad Pitt, and Eric Bana’s Hector. Achilles is insane with rage and grief over Patroclus — you know the story — and controls the fight from the outset. But at one point, Hector scores a blow, nicking Achilles’s breastplate. Achilles looks down at the mark in astonishment. It’s just a scratch on the leather, not worth a second thought, but Achilles can’t believe it — and you realize, no one has ever penetrated his defenses that far before. No sword-point has ever been that close to his flesh. It’s a brilliant moment: it tells you how good Hector is, and, even more, how good Achilles is. And in a flash, from a simple glance, you have a sense of these two warriors as titans — the son of a god contending with the son of a king.

This is the sort of effect that the late Christopher Logue achieves again and again in War Music: An Account of Homer’s “Iliad,” the greatest film adaptation of Homer ever set down on paper. The new edition gathers the poem, written over forty years and published in installments over twenty-five — War Music (1981, covering books 16–19); Kings (1991, books 1 and 2); The Husbands (1995, books 3 and 4); All Day Permanent Red (2003, books 5 and 6); Cold Calls (2005, Books 7–9) — and adds as an appendix Big Men Falling a Long Way, editor Christopher Reid’s reconstruction of Logue’s projected final installment, which contains fragments from books 10–24.

It’s very far from a translation, by design — Logue, who couldn’t read ancient Greek and worked from existing translations, rearranges Homer’s material as he pleases and drags the diction into the present by way of Pound’s Cantos, even borrowing lines from August Kleinzahler. The redoubtable classics scholar Bernard Knox was shocked at the liberties taken in The Husbands. It might have helped to think of it as a movie. Indeed, Logue opens with an establishing shot worthy of John Ford:

Picture the east Aegean sea by night,
And on a beach aslant its shimmering
Upwards of 50,000 men
Asleep like spoons beside their lethal Fleet.

Now look along that beach, and see
Between the keels hatching its western dunes
A ten-foot-high reed wall faced with black clay
Split by a double-doored gate;
Then through the gate a naked man
Run with what seems to break the speed of light
Across the dry, then damp, then sand invisible
Beneath inch-high waves that slide
Over each other’s luminescent panes.

The filmic qualities become explicit at times, infiltrating the poem’s vocabulary. The shift of speakers in Achilles’s insolent exchange with Agamemnon is produced by “Silence. // Reverse the shot. // Go close. // Hear Agamemnon ... ” After Hector kills Patroclus, as the Greeks mass on the beach to attack: “Close-up on Bombax; 45; fighting since 2.” “Quick cuts like these may give / Some definition to the mind’s wild eye.”

Critics have focused on these cinematic aspects of the poem, but Paul brings out how properly Homeric they are — how The Iliad is “primed and ready to be made cinematic.” Logue’s poem, I’d argue, zooms in closer to Homer than the plodding literalism of a version like Richmond Lattimore’s, made to “please professors,” as Guy Davenport said. Of course lines like these take us far from the Greek text:

‘There’s Bubblegum!’ ‘He’s out to make his name!’
‘He’s charging us!’ ‘He’s prancing!’ ‘Get that leap!’
thock! thock!
‘He’s in the air! ‘Bubblegum’s in the air!’ ‘Above the dust!’
‘He’s lying on the sunshine in the air!’ ‘Seeing the Wall!’ ‘The arrows keep him up!’
thock! thock!

And you’ll find Kansas in these pages, and Uzis, binoculars, Stalingrad and Cape Kennedy, “headroom” and guitars, helicopters, airplanes, fly-fishing, gigantic font, and the earth revolving around the sun. But like Brad Pitt’s stunned face, War Music finds a visual and emotional equivalent for Homer’s human realities, as when Achilles looks over the armor Thetis has brought him:

Spun the holy tungsten like a star between his knees,
Slitting his eyes against the flare, some said,
But others thought the hatred shuttered by his lids
Made him protect the metal.

His eyes like furnace doors ajar.

When he had got its weight
And let its industry assuage his grief:
‘I’ll fight,’
He said. Simple as that. ‘I’ll fight.’

And so Troy fell.

It doesn’t always work. But Logue’s reconciliations of idea and image are often perfect.

Think of a raked sky-wide Venetian blind.
Add the receding traction of its slats
Of its slats of its slats as a hand draws it up.
Hear the Greek army getting to its feet.

These lines even have a soundtrack, the repeated staccato alliteration of the slats recalling Ginsberg’s “boxcars boxcars boxcars.”

There are fine passages in the unfinished material culled from Logue’s notes — with a title as delicious as Big Men Falling a Long Way there would almost have to be — including an initial stab at Brad Pitt vs. Eric Bana, the scene I most lament Logue’s not having lived to complete. But welcome as it is, this material is mostly undeveloped and diffuse, and can’t add much to our experience of the poem. We can all regret that the poet was unable to undertake his planned rewriting of Homer’s famous 130-line description of Achilles’s shield, which Logue proposed in his notes to extend.

But War Music is complete in its way, one of the mad socko follies of the twentieth century, writhing with coarse, fevered life. Logue conveys the terrible rush of war with the guerilla pathos of Samuel Fuller’s epigraph to The Big Red One: “‘Why are you crying?’ — An insane child to a burning tank.” Odysseus to Achilles:

They do not own the swords with which they fight,
Nor the ships that brought them here.
Orders are handed down to them in words
They barely understand.
They do not give a whit who owns queen Helen.
Ithaca’s mine; Pythia yours; but what are they defending?
They love you? Yes. They do. They also loved Patroclus.
And he is dead, they say. Bury the dead, they say.
A hundred of us singing angels died for every knock
Patroclus took — so why the fuss? — that’s war, they say,
Who came to eat in Troy and not to prove how much
Dear friends are missed.
Yes, they are fools.
But they are right. Fools often are.
Bury the dead, my lord,
And I will help you pitch Troy in the sea.

Western literature is born in rage. But it is also born in song. μῆνιν and ἀείδω. “Our machine was devastating,” Michael Herr wrote of America’s profane destruction of Indochina. “And versatile. It could do everything but stop.” Logue’s Homer makes the machine sing.

Originally Published: April 1st, 2016

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/h-d

H. D.
Poet Details
1886–1961
H.D.’s life and work recapitulate the central themes of literary modernism: the emergence from Victorian norms and certainties, the entry into an age characterized by rapid technological change and the violence of two great wars, and the development of literary modes which reflected the disintegration of traditional symbolic systems and the mythmaking quest for new meanings. H.D.’s oeuvre spans five decades of the twentieth century, 1911-1961, and incorporates work in a variety of genres. She is known primarily as a poet, but she also wrote novels, memoirs, and essays and did a number of translations from the Greek. Her work is consistently innovative and experimental, both reflecting and contributing to the avant-garde milieu that dominated the arts in London and Paris until the end of World War II. Immersed for decades in the intellectual crosscurrents of modernism, psychoanalysis, syncretist mythologies, and feminism, H.D. created a unique voice and vision that sought to bring meaning to the fragmented shards of a war-torn culture. The development of H.D.’s increasingly complex and resonant texts is best understood when placed in the context of other important modernists, many of whom she knew intimately and all of whom she read avidly—especially poets such as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, and the Sitwells: and novelists such as D. H. Lawrence, Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Colette, May Sinclair, Djuna Barnes, and William Faulkner. Within this modernist tradition, H.D.’s particular emphasis grew out of her perspective as a woman regarding the intersections of public events and private lives in the aftermath of World War I and in the increasingly ominous period culminating in the Atomic Age. Love and war, birth and death are the central concerns of her work, in which she reconstituted gender, language, and myth to serve her search for the underlying patterns ordering and uniting consciousness and culture.

Following in the footsteps of Henry James and Mary Cassatt and paralleling the paths of Pound, Eliot, and Stein, H.D. lived as an expatriate in England and Europe from 1911 until her death in 1961. Her roots, however, were fully American and provided a heritage that permeated her later life and art. It is well worth knowing about her early life and the meanings she discovered in it because these clusters of associations appear repeatedly not only in memoirs such as The Gift (1982), Tribute to Freud (1956), and End to Torment (1979), but also in much of her poetry and fiction.

H.D.’s childhood began on Church Street in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in the close-knit Moravian community in which her mother’s family had been influential since its founding in the eighteenth century by a small band of people persecuted for their membership in the Unitas Fratrum, a mystical Protestant sect. Her grandfather, a noted biologist, was the director of the Moravian Seminary; her mother’s brother was a musician, the founder of the well-known Bethlehem Bach Festivals. Also an artist, her mother taught music and painting to the seminary children. Something of an outsider, H.D.’s father was a professor of astronomy at Lehigh University. To H.D. he was always the calm, detached scientist whom she characterized as “pure New England,” descendant in spirit as well as fact from the Puritan fathers who “burned witches and fought the Indians.” When she was nine, her father became professor of astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania and director of the Flower Observatory in Upper Darby, near Philadelphia. Into this different world dominated by the upper-middle-class conventions of university life and Main Line society, H.D. brought her rich Bethlehem memories, which blended the warmth of her large extended family, the omnipresent art of her mother’s family, the vivid imagery and melodies of Moravian hymns, and the familiar but mysterious rituals of the Unitas Fratrum—the love feasts, the kiss of peace, and candlelight processions on Christmas Eve.

Hilda was the sixth child and the only daughter to survive in the professor’s large family. From his first marriage, there were Alice (who died in infancy), Alfred, and Eric (H.D.’s favorite half brother and her father’s assistant). With Helen Wolle there were five more children: Gilbert, Edith (who died as a baby), Hilda, Harold, and Melvin. Always feeling “different” as the only girl among five brothers, H.D. remembered asking, “Why was it always a girl who had died?” She later decided that her survival was linked to her “gift,” the combined capacity for artistic and religious inspiration that came from her mother’s family.

Hilda was her austere father’s favorite child. Only she was allowed to play quietly in his study and cut the pages of his new books. As a child, she associated the fables and myths she loved to read with her father’s stars and the astrological symbols filling the pages of his work. Influenced by feminism’s advocacy of the “new woman,” the Professor was ambitious for his daughter. He wanted her to be a second Marie Curie, but his efforts to tutor her in math led to the now familiar syndrome of math anxiety. “The more he explained,” H.D. recalled, “the less I understood.” Eric, to whom she was very close, was more successful, helping Hilda with math and providing her with books by writers such as Louisa May Alcott, Jane Austen, and the Brontës. William Carlos Williams remembered the Professor as a very distant man whose eyes did not focus on anything nearer than the moon, and Sigmund Freud told H.D. that he was “cold.”

Hilda was drawn to her more spontaneous, artistic mother but was repeatedly hurt by her mother’s open favoritism of Gilbert. Trying to get close to her mother, Hilda identified with Gilbert, the prototype of the many brother figures who people her later novels and poems. It was to her mother that she expressed excitement at a performance of Uncle Tom’s Cabin which prompted her to ask, “‘Can ladies write books?’ ‘Why, yes,’ her mother replied, ‘lots of ladies write very good books,’“ Hilda wanted to be an artist like her mother. But her father forbade art school, and her mother’s self-effacement and conventional devotion to the Professor’s work provided a problematic model for her aspiring daughter. H.D. recalled that as a child her mother had loved to sing, but she never once sa

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/detail/57067

Hymn to Life

By Timothy Donnelly

There were no American lions. No pygmy mammoths left
or giant short-faced bears, which towered over ten feet high
when rearing up on their haunches. There were no stout-
legged llamas, stilt-legged llamas, no single Yukon horse. The last
of the teratorns, its wingspan broader than the room in
which I’m writing now, had long since landed on a tar pit’s

surface and was lost. There might be other things to think of
strobing in the fume or sometimes poking through the thick of it
like the tiny golden toads once so prevalent in the cloud
forests north of Monteverde, only none of them were living
anywhere anymore. The last was seen on May 15, 1989, the week
Bon Jovi’s “I’ll Be There for You” topped Billboard’s Hot 100.

Then it dropped to three. A teratorn might have fit in here
the long way come to think of it. A study claims it wasn’t
climate change that killed the golden toad but a fungal epidemic
provoked by cyclical weather patterns. Little things like that
had a way of disappearing: thimbles, the Rocky Mountain
grasshopper, half the hearing in my patient ear. There were

no Eastern elk, no sea mink, and no heath hens, a distinct
subspecies of the prairie chicken. Once common to the coastal
barrens of New Hampshire down to Virginia, they’re often thought
to have been eaten in favor of wild turkey at the inaugural
Thanksgiving feast. To work on my character I pretend to be
traveling Portsmouth to Arlington in modern garb at first,

then backwards into costumes of the past: tee shirt and shorts,
gray flannel suit, a cutaway jacket and matching breeches
tucked into boots, taupe velvet getup with ruffles and ribbons
streaming into Delaware till I’m buckled like a Puritan, musket
in hand, not half-famished, and there’s plenty of heath hens
everywhere I look. But there were still no Carolina parakeets

and no Smith Island cottontails, a long contested subspecies
of the Eastern cottontail. These lost rabbits, somewhat shaggier
than their mainland cousins, were named for the barrier
island off the tip of Virginia’s Eastern Shore, where Thomas Dale,
deputy governor of the Virginia Colony, set up a salt works
back in 1614, and not for the Chesapeake’s other Smith Island

up in Maryland, birthplace of the Smith Island cake, that state’s
only official dessert — a venerable confection whose pencil-
thin layers, numbering eight to twelve on average, lie divided
by a fudge-like frosting cooked for greater lastingness, making it
suitable for local oystermen to take with them on the long
autumn harvest. Smith Island in Washington offers nesting

sites for tufted puffins on its rocky cliff faces as well as rest
stations for migrant sea lions. Situated in Long Island Sound,
Connecticut’s Smith Island is among that state’s famed Thimble
Islands, a cluster of landmasses named for the thimbleberry,
cousin to the black raspberry. During the Revolutionary War,
the Thimbles were deforested to rid the sound of hiding

places for British ships. Alabama boasts no fewer than three
Smith Islands. Little can be said about the one in Minnesota’s
Voyageurs National Park. Its neighboring islands include
Rabbit, Snake, Wolf, Wigwam, Sweetnose, and Twin Alligator
down here on the American side, and Little Dry, Big, and Big Dry
up on the Canadian. Tomorrow should be 82° and sunny

but it won’t be. The blue pike cavorted through the waters
of the Great Lakes no longer. Ditto the somber blackfin cisco.
Overfishing, pollution, and the introduction of nonnative
species did both fish in as early as 1960 and ’70, respectively.
There were no spectacled cormorants, no Goff’s pocket gophers,
and no Ainsworth’s salamanders, a species known to us only

through two specimens found on Ainsworth family property
in Mississippi on June 12, 1964. That same day Nelson Mandela
was sentenced to life in prison. I remember the feeling of
another kind, the way they alternately lay limp in my hands
then pleaded to be free. They took naps in the dampness
of softened logs. There’s a fine dirt, a dust I guess, that collects

under the rug I’m sitting on. I think the rough weave of it
acts as rasp to our foot-bottoms then sieve to what it loosens.
There were no Caribbean monk seals, eight of which no less
than Christopher Columbus killed for food in 1494, and therefore
no Caribbean monk seal nasal mites, an objectively hideous
arachnoid parasite that resided nowhere but in the respiratory

passages of the Monachus tropicalis. When it occurs to me I
sweep it up. Back in the day they used to darken our skies
in flocks a mile wide and 300 miles in length, enough to feather
the air from Fall River down to Philadelphia, their peak
population hovering above five billion, or 40% of the total
roll of  birds in North America, but there were no remaining

passenger pigeons, the last of their red eyes having shut
in Cincinnati on September 1, 1914. Her name was Martha.
Martha Washington went by Patsy as a child. Her pet raccoon
was Nosey. Cozumel Island’s pygmy raccoon is actually a distinct
species and not, like the Barbados raccoon, a subspecies
of the common. There might be as few as 250 of the former

hidden in the mangroves or prowling the wetlands for ghost
crabs and lizards, whereas the latter was last seen in ’64
when one was struck dead by a car in Bathsheba, a fishing village
built on Barbados’s eastern shore, magnet for hurricanes
and pro surfers, its foamy white waters calling to mind
the milk baths rumored to have kept Solomon’s mother so

perilously beautiful. First the milk’s lactic acid would have
acted as an exfoliant, gently removing layers of the dead,
dry skin to uncover younger, fresher skin waiting like artwork
in Dunkirk underneath, then the milk’s natural fat content
would restore moisture lost to the exacting atmosphere
of biblical Jerusalem, whose name in Hebrew, yireh shalem,

means “will see peace.” Most versions of the story make her
into an exhibitionist but the Midrash says Bathsheba, modest,
was washing behind a wicker screen when Satan, seizing
opportunity, appeared as a red bird to David who, cocksure
with projectiles now, aimed the stone in his hands at the bird
but hit the screen instead, splitting it in half and thereby

revealing our bather, the wife of Uriah the Hittite at the time
but not for much longer. All these gains and losses, so mysterious
from a distance, held together it has felt by nothing stronger
than momentum, like a series of bicycle accidents or a pattern
in the pomegranate, come to hint at a logic in time, but whether
it’s more fitting to say that they promise to reveal it or else

threaten to is debatable. Attempts to stem the vast mosquito
population in salt marshes abutting Kennedy Space Center
on Florida’s Merritt Island, technically a peninsula but more like
a question mark of land flopped into the Atlantic, devastated
the dusky seaside sparrow. Its last known specimen died
on June 17, 1987, when the ballad “Always” by Atlantic Starr

dominated radio. Mosquitoes would have taken to the nasty
Olduvai water hole around which two clans of hominids battle
at the start of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. This is after
the first monolith shows up. The film’s monoliths are artifacts
of alien origin, identical in ratio but varying in size, designed
to provoke large-scale changes in human life. As when it dawns

on the wiry leader of the clan the first monolith appears to
to bludgeon the other to death with a leg bone. Later on he hurls it
into the air to celebrate his power, the image of its tumbling
weaponhood at half-speed match-cutting to that of a long
white nuclear satellite angled in orbit against the scintillant
anthracite of space. Pan right to the Earth, a quarter of it silvery

blue in the corner, aloofly beautiful for sure but only a pale
idea of a planet when set beside photographs taken years later
by the crew of Apollo 17 on December 7, 1972, annus finalis
for the Lake Pedder earthworm, bush wren, and possibly
the Toolache wallaby as well, long considered among kangaroos
to have been the most elegant. The sapphire blue, the ochre

of Africa, the chalk-white spirals convolving as if an ice cap’s
wispy tentacles. They were killed for fur, sport, and frequently
with the aid of greyhounds, who hunt mostly by way of sight
as opposed to scent. Then the Earth is at the left as the satellite
approaches it almost dozily to the opening bars of Strauss’s
Blue Danube, first performed on February 15, 1867, in th
Source: Poetry (July/August 2014)

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/s_z/strand/poetics.htm

from "Notes on the Craft of Poetry"

For some of us, the less said about the way we do things the better. And I for one am not even sure that I have a recognizable way of doing things, or if I did that I could talk about it. I do not have a secret method of writing, nor do I have a set of do's and don'ts. Each poem demands that I treat it differently from the rest, come to terms with it, seek out its own best beginning and ending. And yet I would be kidding myself if I believed that nothing continuous existed in the transactions between myself and my poems. I suppose this is what we mean by craft: those transactions that become so continuous we not only associate ourselves with them but allow them to represent the means by which we make art. But since they rarely declare themselves in procedural terms, how do we talk about them? To a large extent, these transactions I have chosen to call craft are the sole property of the individual poet and cannot be transferred to or adopted by others. One reason for this is that they are largely unknown at the time of writing and are discovered afterwards, if at all.

. . .

One essay that had great importance for me when I began to write was George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language." Reading it, I encountered for the first time a moral statement about good writing. True, Orwell was not considering the literary use of language, but language as an instrument for expressing thought. His point was that just as our English can become ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, so the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The following rules, he explains, can be relied upon when the writer is in doubt about the effect of a word or phrase and his instinct fails him.

1. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

These are of course very elementary rules and you could, as Orwell admits, keep all of them and still write bad English, though not as bad as you might have. But how far will they take us in the writing of a poem? And how much of that transaction I mentioned earlier is described by them? If following a simple set of rules guaranteed the success of a poem, poems would not be held in very high esteem, as, of course, they are. And far too many people would find it easy to write them, which, naturally, is not the case. For the poems that are of greatest value are those that inevitably, unselfconsciously break rules, poems whose urgency makes rules irrelevant.

. . .

I believe that all poetry is formal in that it exists within limits, limits that are either inherited by tradition or limits that language itself imposes. These limits exist in turn within the limits of the individual poet's conception of what is or is not a poem. For if the would-be poet has no idea what a poem is, then he has no standard for determining or qualifying his actions as a poet; i.e., his poem. "Form," it should be remembered, is a word that has several meanings, some of which are near opposites. Form has to do with the structure or outward appearance of something, but it also has to do with its essence. In discussions of poetry, form is a powerful word for just that reason: structure and essence seem to come together, as do the disposition of words and their meanings.

It hardly seems worthwhile to point out the shortsightedness of those practitioners who would have us believe that the form of the poem is merely its shape. They argue that there is formal poetry and poetry without form -- free verse, in other words; that formal poetry has dimensions that are rhythmic or stanzaic, etc., and consequently measurable, while free verse exists as a sprawl whose disposition is arbitrary and is, as such, nonmeasurable. But if we have learned anything from the poetry of the last twenty or thirty years, it is that free verse is as formal as any other verse. There is ample evidence that it uses a full range of mnemonic devices, the most common being anaphoral and parallelistic structures, both as syntactically restrictive as they are rhythmically binding. I do not want to suggest that measured verse and free verse represent opposing mnemonics. I would rather we considered them together, both being structured or shaped and thus formal, or at least formal in outward, easily described ways.

Form is manifested most clearly in the apparatus of argument and image or, put another way, plot and figures of speech. This aspect of form is more difficult to discuss because it is less clear-cut; it happens also to be the area in which poems achieve their greatest individuality and where, as a result, they are more personal. This being the case, how is it possible to apply ideas of craft? Well, we might say that mixed metaphors are bad, that contradictions, unless they constitute intentional paradox, must be avoided, that this or that image is inappropriate. All of which is either too vague, too narrow, or mostly beside the point -- although there are many creative-writing teachers who have no difficulty discussing these more variable and hidden characteristics of form. And I use the word "hidden" because somehow, when we approach the question of what a poem means, we are moving very close to its source or what brought it into being. To be sure, there is no easy prescription, like George Orwell's, of what to say and what not to say in a poem.

. . .

In discussing his poem "The Old Woman and the Statue," Wallace Stevens said:

While there is nothing automatic about the poem, nevertheless it has an automatic aspect in the sense that it is what I wanted it to be without knowing before it was written what I wanted it to be, even though I knew before it was written what I wanted to do.

This is as precise a statement of what is referred to as "the creative process" as I have ever read. And I think it makes clear why discussions of craft are at best precarious. We know only afterwards what it is we have done. Most poets, I think, are drawn to the unknown, and writing, for them, is a way of making the unknown visible. And if the object of one's quest is hidden or unknown, how is it to be approached by predictable means? I confess to a desire to forget knowing, especially when I sit down to work on a poem. The continuous transactions of craft take place in the dark. Jung understood this when he said: "As long as we ourselves are caught up in the process of creation, we neither see nor understand; indeed we ought not to understand, for nothing is more injurious to immediate experience than cognition." And Stevens, when he said: "You have somehow to know the sound that is the exact sound: and you do in fact know, without knowing how. Your knowledge is irrational." This is not to say that rationality is wrong or bad, but merely that it has little to do with the making of poems (as opposed, say, to the understanding of poems). Even so rational a figure as Paul Valéry becomes oddly evasive when discussing the making of a poem. In his brilliant but peculiar essay "Poetry and Abstract Thought," he says the following:

I have . . . noticed in myself certain states which I may well call poetic, since some of them were finally realized in poems. They came about from no apparent cause, arising from some accident or other; they developed according to their own nature, and consequently I found myself for a time jolted out of my habitual state of mind.

And he goes on to say that "the state of poetry is completely irregular, inconstant, and fragile, and that we lose it, as we find it, by accident," and that "a poet is a man who, as a result of a certain incident, undergoes a hidden transformation." At its most comic, this is a Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde situation. And I suppose at its most tragic it still is. But it is astonishing that craft, even in such a figure as Valéry, is beside the point. One feels that Valéry, if given more time, might have become more like Bachelard, who said among other things that "intellectual criticism of poetry will never lead to the center where poetic images are formed."

And what does craft have to do with the formation of poetic images? What does it have to do with the unknown sources of a poem? Nothing. For craft, as it is taught and discussed, functions clearly only if the poem is considered primarily as a form of communication. And yet it is generally acknowledged that poetry invokes aspects of language other than that of communication, most significantly as a variation, though diminished, of a sacred text. Given such status, a status it has for the poet while he is writing, it is not validated by an appeal to experience but exists autonomously, or as autonomously as history will allow. In his essay "On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry," Jung comes closest to addressing this issue when he says:

The work presents us with a finished picture, and this picture is amenable to analysis only to the extent that we can recognize it as a symbol. But if we are unable to discover any symbolic value in it, we have merely established that, so far as we are concerned, it means no more than what it says, or to put it another way, that it is no more than what it seems to be.

This strikes me as a generous statement, for it allows poems an existence ultimately tautological. On the other hand, Freud, who suggests a connection between daydreams and poems -- but does not elaborate -- and who addresses himself to the fantasies of the "less pretentious writers of romances, novels and stories," making their works into protracted forms of wish fulfillment, seems most intent on establishing the priority of mental states. But the purpose of the poem is not disclosure or storytelling or the telling of a daydream; nor is a poem a symptom. A poem is itself and is the act by which it is born. It is self-referential and is not necessarily preceded by any known order, except that of other poems.

If poems often do not refer to any known experience, to nothing that will characterize their being, and thus cannot be understood so much as absorbed, how can considerations of craft be applied when they are justified on the grounds that they enhance communication? This is perhaps one of the reasons why most discussions of craft fall short of dealing with the essentials of poetry. Perhaps the poem is ultimately a metaphor for something unknown, its working-out a means of recovery. It may be that the retention of the absent origin is what is necessary for the continued life of the poem as inexhaustible artifact. (Though words may represent things or actions, in combination they may represent something else -- the unspoken, hitherto-unknown unity of which the poem is the example.) Furthermore, we might say that the degree to which a poem is explained or paraphrased is precisely the degree to which it ceases being a poem. If nothing is left of the poem, it has become the paraphrase of itself, and readers will experience the paraphrase in place of the poem. It is for this reason that poems must exist not only in language but beyond it.

from Strand's The Weather of Words. (New York: Random House, Inc. 2000)

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetrysoup.com/article/the_nostalgia_of_john_masefield-1449

The Nostalgia of John Masefield

Written by: J. Middleton Murry

Mr Masefield is gradually finding his way to his self-appointed end, which is the glorification of England in narrative verse. Reynard the Fox marks we believe, the end of a stage in his progress to this goal. He has reached a point at which his mannerisms have been so subdued that they no longer sensibly impede the movement of his verse, a point at which we may begin to speak (though not too loud) of mastery. We feel that he now approaches what he desires to do with some certainty of doing it, so that we in our turn can approach some other questions with some hope of answering them.

The questions are various; but they radiate from and enter again into the old question whether what he is doing, and beginning to do well, is worth while doing, or rather whether it will have been worth while doing fifty years hence. For we have no doubt at all in our mind that, in comparison with the bulk of contemporary poetry, such work as Reynard the Fox is valuable. We may use the old rough distinction and ask first whether Reynard the Fox is durable in virtue of its substance, and second, whether it is durable in virtue of its form.

The glorification of England! There are some who would give their souls to be able to glorify her as she has been glorified, by Shakespeare, by Milton, by Wordsworth, and by Hardy. For an Englishman there is no richer inspiration, no finer theme; to have one's speech and thought saturated by the fragrance of this lovely and pleasant land was once the birthright of English poets and novelists. But something has crept between us and it, dividing. Instead of an instinctive love, there is a conscious desire of England; instead of slow saturation, a desperate plunge into its mystery. The fragrance does not come at its own sweet will; we clutch at it. It does not enfold and pervade our most arduous speculations; no involuntary sweetness comes flooding in upon our confrontation of human destinies. Hardy is the last of that great line. If we long for sweetness—as we do long for it, and with how poignant a pain!—we must seek it out, like men who rush dusty and irritable from the babble and fever of the town. The rhythm of the earth never enters into their gait; they are like spies among the birds and flowers, like collectors of antique furniture in the haunts of peace. The Georgians snatch at nature; they are never part of it. And there is some element of this desperation in Mr Masefield. We feel in him an anxiety to load every rift with ore of this particular kind, a deliberate intention to emphasise that which is most English in the English country-side.

How shall we say it? It is not that he makes a parade of arcane knowledge. The word 'parade' does injustice to his indubitable integrity. But we seem to detect behind his superfluity of technical, and at times archaic phrase, an unconscious desire to convince himself that he is saturated in essential Englishness, and we incline to think that even his choice of an actual subject was less inevitable than self-imposed. He would isolate the quality he would capture, have it more wholly within his grasp; yet, in some subtle way, it finally eludes him. The intention is in excess, and in the manner of its execution everything is (though often very subtly) in excess also. The music of English place-names, for instance is too insistent; no one into whom they had entered with the English air itself would use them with so manifest an admiration.

Perhaps a comparison may bring definition nearer. The first part of Mr Masefield's poem, which describes the meet and the assembled persons one by one, recalls, not merely by the general cast of the subject, but by many actual turns of phrase, Chaucer's Prologue. Mr Masefield's parson has more than one point of resemblance to Chaucer's Monk:—

'An out-ryder, that loved venerye;
A manly man to ben an abbot able….'

But it would take too long to quote both pictures. We may choose for our juxtaposition the Prioress and one of Mr Masefield's young ladies:—

'Behind them rode her daughter Belle,
A strange, shy, lovely girl, whose face
Was sweet with thought and proud with race,
And bright with joy at riding there.
She was as good as blowing air,
But shy and difficult to know.
The kittens in the barley-mow,
The setter's toothless puppies sprawling,
The blackbird in the apple calling,
All knew her spirit more than we.
So delicate these maidens be
In loving lovely helpless things.'

And here is the Prioress:—

'But for to speken of hir conscience,
She was so charitable and so pitous,
She wolde weepe if that she sawe a mous
Caught in a trappe, if it were ded or bledde.
Of smalle houndes had she, that she fed
With rosted flesh, or milk, or wastel bread,
But sore wepte she if oon of hem were ded
Or if men smote it with a yerde smerte:
And all was conscience and tendere herte.'
Ful semely hir wympel pynched was;
His nose tretys; hir eyen greye as glas;
Hir mouth full small, and thereto soft and red,
But sikerly she hadde a fair forhed.'

There is in the Chaucer a naturalness, a lack of emphasis, a confidence that the object will not fail to make its own impression, beside which Mr Masefield's demonstration and underlining seem almost malsain. How far outside the true picture now appears that 'blackbird in the apple calling,' and how tainted by the desperate bergerie of the Georgian era!

It is, we admit, a portentous experiment to make, to set Mr Masefield's prologue beside Chaucer's. But not only is it a tribute to Mr Masefield that he brought us to reading Chaucer over again, but the comparison is at bottom just. Chaucer is not what we understand by a great poet; he has none of the imaginative comprehension and little of the music that belong to one: but he has perdurable qualities. He is at home with his speech and at home with his world; by his side Mr Masefield seems nervous and uncertain about both. He belongs, in fact, to a race (or a generation) of poets who have come to feel a necessity of overloading every rift with ore. The question is whether such a man can hope to express the glory and the fragrance of the English country-side.

Can there be an element of permanence in a poem of which the ultimate impulse is a nostalgie de la boue that betrays itself in line after line, a nostalgia so conscious of separation that it cannot trust that any associations will be evoked by an unemphasised appeal? Mr Masefield, in his fervour to grasp at that which for all his love is still alien to him, seems almost to shovel English mud into his pages; he cannot (and rightly cannot) persuade himself that the scent of the mud will be there otherwise. For the same reason he must make his heroes like himself. Here, for example, is the first whip, Tom Dansey:—

'His pleasure lay in hounds and horses;
He loved the Seven Springs water-courses,
Those flashing brooks (in good sound grass,
Where scent would hang like breath on glass).
He loved the English country-side;
The wine-leaved bramble in the ride,
The lichen on the apple-trees,
The poultry ranging on the lees,
The farms, the moist earth-smelling cover,
His wife's green grave at Mitcheldover,
Where snowdrops pushed at the first thaw.
Under his hide his heart was raw
With joy and pity of these things…'

That 'raw heart' marks the outsider, the victim of nostalgia. Apart from the fact that it is a manifest artistic blemish to impute it to the first whip of a pack of foxhounds, the language is such that it would be a mistake to impute it to anybody; and with that we come to the question of Mr Masefield's style in general.

As if to prove how rough indeed was the provisionally accepted distinction between substance and form, we have for a long while already been discussing Mr Masefield's style under a specific aspect. But the particular overstrain we have been examining is part of Mr Masefield's general condition. Overstrain is permanent with him. If we do not find it in his actual language (and, as we have said, he is ridding himself of the worst of his exaggerations) we are sure to find it in the very vitals of his artistic effort. He is seeking always to be that which he is not, to lash himself into the illusion of a certainty which he knows he can never wholly possess.

'From the Gallows Hill to the Kineton Copse
There were ten ploughed fields, like ten full-stops,
All wet red clay, where a horse's foot
Would be swathed, feet thick, like an ash-tree root.
The fox raced on, on the headlands firm,
Where his swift feet scared the coupling worm;
The rooks rose raving to curse him raw,
He snarled a sneer at their swoop and caw.
Then on, then on, down a half-ploughed field
Where a ship-like plough drove glitter-keeled,
With a bay horse near and a white horse leading,
And a man saying "Zook," and the red earth bleeding.'

The rasp of exacerbation is not to be mistaken. It comes, we believe, from a consciousness of anæmia, a frenetic reaction towards what used, some years ago, to be called 'blood and guts.'

And here, perhaps, we have the secret of Mr Masefield and of our sympathy with him. His work, for all its surface robustness and right-thinking (which has at least the advantage that it will secure for this 'epic of fox-hunting' a place in the library of every country house), is as deeply debilitated by reaction as any of our time. Its colour is hectic; its tempo feverish. He has sought the healing virtue where he believed it undefiled, in that miraculous English country whose magic (as Mr Masefield so well knows) is in Shakespeare, and whose strong rhythm is in Hardy. But the virtue eludes all conscious inquisition. The man who seeks it feverishly sees riot where there is peace. And may it not be, in the long run, that Mr Masefield would have done better not to delude himself into an identification he cannot feel, but rather to face his own disquiet where alone the artist can master it, in his consciousness? We will not presume to answer, mindful that Mr Masefield may not recognise himself in our mirror, but we will content ourselves with recording our conviction that in spite of the almost heroic effort that has gone to its composition Reynard the Fox lacks all the qualities essential to durability.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/detail/69883

Prose from Poetry Magazine
December 1912
By Paul Durica

December 1912 issue

Readers of the third issue of Poetry received an unexpected Christmas present in the form of the first English-language publication of 
poems by the Bengali writer, musician, and artist Rabindranath Tagore (translated by himself), who would, in the following year, become the first non-European to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Tagore’s appearance in the magazine marked an “event in the history of English poetry and of world poetry” according to Ezra Pound in an introduction that accompanied the poems. In private letters to Harriet Monroe, Pound as the magazine’s “foreign correspondent” used the language of a big city journalist, proclaiming Tagore’s work “The Scoop    ...    the event of the winter    ...    the only real fever of excitement among the inner circle of literature that I’ve ever seen here.” While Pound came across as giddy in his awareness that Poetry had acquired “six poems at least” while “nobody else will have any,” Tagore seemed “only vaguely aware of the seething literary wire-pulling that swishes beneath his Olympus.” Tagore would receive a copy of the December 1912 issue from his son, who was then a student at the University of Illinois. A visit to Urbana in January 1913 led to a trip north to Chicago where Tagore became one of the first visitors to Poetry’s office at 543 Cass Street. The awarding of the Nobel Prize later that year was followed by Tagore receiving a knighthood from the British Empire in 1915, solidifying his position in English as well as Bengali literature. The December 1912 issue also contained poems by William Butler Yeats, who would write the introduction to Tagore’s Gintanjali: Song Offerings (1912), and John Reed, who would die in Soviet Russia in 1920, a year after Tagore renounced his knighthood in protest of the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre.

Originally Published: December 4th, 2012

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Farming Family, 1912

By Adam Kirsch
'Farming Family, 1912,' by August Sander
"Farming Family, 1912," by August Sander

The cruelty of the men when they’re alone,
The women’s tiredness and resignation,
Do not get multiplied, as you’d expect,
When the extended families collect,
One day a year, to get their pictures taken.
It’s not that any of their faces soften,
Nor that there’s any obvious affection
Between the farmer’s mother and his son;
And only an idealist could see
In this brief cutting from the family tree
A symbol of the strength of rootedness—
Three generations dwelling in one place—
Knowing how soon the root will lose its branch,
Cut down and hacked to pieces in a trench.
The only explanation that makes sense
For the illusion of resilience
That lights their eyes and makes them look at home
Is that with every added generation
Buried potentialities appear:
The son who poses strumming his guitar
Refutes his father’s brandished Iron Cross
No more convincingly than his bare face
Proves that his father’s beard is obsolete;
Denying one another, they complete
Their likeness to the contradictory
God who commanded us to multiply
So He could manifest, in every birth,
Another of His attributes on earth.
Source: Poetry (April 2010)

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/detail/69450


Prose from Poetry Magazine
Lazy Bastardism: A Notebook
Boredom is the highest state of creativity.
By Carmine Starnino
Introduction

I’ve never had a good feeling about writing poetry. Unease set in early, when I was about seventeen, and, after two decades, the deed still doesn’t sit quite right. I’m a victim, I tell myself, of the southern Italian distrust of books.

I’ve never had a good feeling about writing poetry. Unease set in early, when I was about seventeen, and, after two decades, the deed still doesn’t sit quite right. I’m a victim, I tell myself, of the southern Italian distrust of books. For the immigrants who docked in North America midcentury, education was something to be encouraged, but only as a means to a better-paying end (laborers wanted to sire lawyers, not artsy-fartsy layabouts). My parents were more tolerant than most, but there was obvious alarm that all my reading would leave me “mixed up.”

Then there was the language. Like most of the little Fonzies bred in Montreal north, I was raised almost entirely in Italian. This had an interesting effect on my English. In high school, for example, “skinned” was what you said if you came in close contact with something (“that car nearly skinned me”). If you had just stuffed your face, you used “shkoff” (“shkoffed a sangwich”). The weird sentences I spoke ensured that much of my university life would be spent in disguise. Hanging around silver-tongued creative writing students, I watched what I said and how I said it. I worked hard to suppress the accent in my voice, to better play the fit-to-be-in-literary-company part.

Today the verse hook is planted deep. And with it, the wound: that one of the central activities of my life is tinged with the sense of being dissolute, escapist, fey. Even at those rare moments when, fresh off a new poem, I feel the artisanal high of every word fitting flush, the crash comes swiftly: depression and anxiety at having gotten away with something slightly preposterous. I’m in it now for better or worse, but I’m always on the lookout for some clue that can help explain the emergence of the poet who bears my name.

* * *

My first contact with poetry was the “Our Father” and “Hail Mary.” Yes, they’re prayers, but they’re also packets of linguistic energy. Not enough is made of their epic-accented statements (“lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil”), the wonderfully archaic usages (“forgive us our trespasses”), the tone nibbed with rhapsodic oddities (“blessed is the fruit of thy womb”). At the time—the only literature in my house was the daily tabloid Le Journal de Montréal—this was otherworldly speech. I found lots of other prayers I liked (St. Francis’s “The Canticle of All Creatures” was a favorite) but none that introduced me to such fresh noises and suggestions. Other prayers were loaded with religiosity, but uninterestingly flat. “Hallowed is thy name” filled my mouth with sound (modernization has scrubbed the prayer clean of out-of-date fillips: “Holy is your name” is what kids now recite). Nothing in my life matched that language and I rejoiced in its acoustic plushness. Linguistically speaking, I suppose I saw myself as upwardly mobile. These prayers fixed in place my core criteria for a good poem: memorizable, talismanically glamorous, and endlessly repeated to stave off setbacks, fears, sins.

* * *

It occurs to me that some might interpret that last paragraph to mean that I believe in some equivalency between prayer and poetry. I don’t. The distance between prayer, which Thomas Merton called “a raid on the unspeakable,” and poetry, which T.S. Eliot called a “raid on the inarticulate,” is further apart than many might otherwise think.

Writing poetry is not, in itself, a prayerful activity. That’s because prayer is not a craft; it is the opposite of a craft. It is a focused devotional feelingfulness, a self-aware, non-naming amplification of faith, a mind tuned to the frequency of the unsayable (Simone Weil described it as “paying attention to God.”) Setting this mystical alertness down as poetry—dressing it in stanzas, line lengths, and rhythm—requires the unmystical means of prosody. Poetry can speak about God, it can even speak to God, but poetry is, at bottom, a secular art: its artistry predicated precisely on facing down any threat to its clear-headedness.

In fact, regarded a certain way, poetry might even be said to be a menace to religious belief. This is because poetry, to work, needs to strip religious belief of its theological privilege (poetry, said Valéry, is literature “purged of idols of every sort”). Put into poetic form, that belief therefore becomes something else: a patient, precise, purposeful, adhesively held-together succession of sounds. Unlike prayer, poems live entirely inside their linguistic devices and designs. Indeed, the poet is someone for whom language is so important it gets the whole of his or her attention—for whom language is more important than God.

Now, I don’t want to suggest that one has to be a heretic to write good poetry. (And indeed nothing stops us from enlarging the notion of worship to include poetry’s secularists. Sometimes what seem the most superstition-free acts of description are the stirrings of a deeper devoutness: A.R. Ammons’s nature poetry fits here, maybe even Ted Hughes’s.) My point is that it seems to me impossible to offer up your poem as a kind of worship without recognizing the paradox inherent in the act. The best religious verse—George Herbert comes quickest to mind, Geoffrey Hill too—flirts with faithlessness. There is a Flaubertian attention to style that suggests the poet understands he or she cannot praise God without also, and simultaneously, turning attention away from him and toward language (which doesn’t happen during prayer). The utter devotion to crafting a poem, the selfishness it requires, traps one in competing priorities. A good religious poem, like Donne’s “Holy Sonnets,” can lock the two struggles together, but one priority is more important than the other. Delete it, and you get mush.

* * *

Can critical faculties show signs of wear and tear? Eliot thought so. “As one gets older,” he said in his 1959Paris Review interview, when he was seventy-one, “one is not quite confident in one’s own ability to distinguish new genius among younger men. You’re always afraid that you are going as you have seen your elders go.” Helen Vendler admitted as much in her 2006New York Times profile. Then seventy-three, Vendler said she avoided poets under fifty, citing new “frames of reference” that baffled her. “They’re writing about the television cartoons they saw when they were growing up. And that’s fine. It’s as good a resource of imagery as orchards,” she said. “Only I’ve seen orchards and I didn’t watch these cartoons . . . So I don’t feel I’m the best reader for most of the young ones.”

I’m nearly forty, and, while I don’t think I’m altogether out of it, I already feel younger Canadian poets are writing poetry that is faster, more sophisticated, and smarter than what my generation grew up writing—poetry whose margins of success I struggle to measure, engendering flashes of hostility. Feeling myself touch the edge of philistinism puts me on notice. “I shouldn’t like to feel that I was resisting,” said Eliot in the same interview, “as my work was resisted when it was new, by people who thought that it was imposture of some kind or other.” Joseph Epstein, at seventy-two, is still a very nimble essayist, but now enjoys nothing more than digging in his heels and watching history sweep past him; not “getting it” has become a matter of pride. Although fifty-eight, fogeyism has begun to

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

Prose from Poetry Magazine

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/detail/69763

Infallible Pope of Letters
The Letters of T.S. Eliot. Volumes 1 and 2.
By Adam Kirsch

In the summer of 1918, T.S. Eliot was alarmed by the news that the American armed forces in Europe, then engaged in the final campaign against Germany, would begin to conscript American citizens living in England. Eliot had arrived in England at the beginning of wwi, four years earlier, and had sunk deep roots in his new country: he was already well known in advanced literary circles, had taken a full-time job as a clerk in Lloyds Bank, and, most important, had married an English woman, Vivienne Haigh-Wood. But he was still an American—he would not adopt British citizenship until 1927—and he was worried that if he did not secure an officer’s commission, he would end up as a grunt in the American army.

The first volume of the new edition of Eliot’s Letters shows how quickly he went into action, trying to get a suitable post in the Naval Intelligence Division. He worked his society contacts and he asked all his prominent literary acquaintances for letters of recommendation. One writer who came through for the twenty-nine-year-old poet was Arnold Bennett, then the dean of English novelists. As it turned out, the war ended before Eliot could enlist, but that December he wrote to Bennett thanking him for his recommendation. “Happily,” Eliot wrote, “the letter remains in my possession, to be realised upon by my heirs at Sothebys.”

This was a piece of flattery, suggesting that Bennett’s signature would make the letter valuable. The irony, of course, is that what would bring a high price today is not Bennett’s name, but Eliot’s. The senior writer and his whole generation of Edwardian realists—Shaw, Galsworthy, Wells—now occupy a distinctly minor place in English literary history; and it was Eliot and his generation, the Modernists, who secured their elders’ demotion. To many readers today, Bennett is known only as the target of Virginia Woolf’s Modernist manifesto “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”—which was published in T.S. Eliot’s magazine, the Criterion, in 1924. In volume two of the Letters of T.S. Eliot, which is dominated by correspondence related to the Criterion, we see Eliot thanking Woolf for this contribution: “with your paper and unpublished manuscripts of Marcel Proust and W.B. Yeats, the July number will be the most brilliant in [the magazine’s] history.”

One wonders if Eliot would have been surprised, even in 1918, to learn that his reputation would one day eclipse Bennett’s. At the time, he was not yet the author of “Gerontion” or The Waste Land or “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” and the best testimony of his genius, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” had been written eight long years before. “I often feel that ‘J.A.P.’ is a swan song,” he wrote his brother Henry in 1916, “but I never mention the fact because Vivien is so exceedingly anxious that I shall equal it, and would be bitterly disappointed if I do not.”

Yet there is no doubt that Eliot was already aiming for the highest heights—or that he felt he was well on his way to achieving them. “There is a small and sele

more at link

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/detail/69793


Prose from Poetry Magazine
Correspondence
William Empson and Geoffrey Grigson on climbers, criticism, and the morality of rudeness.
By William Empson and Geoffrey Grigson

The influential British poet, critic, and editor Geoffrey Grigson (1905–1985) published a “Letter from England” in the November 1936 issue of Poetry in which he disparaged the work of Dylan Thomas, C. Day Lewis, David Gascoyne, F.R. Leavis, and others; though he praised a number of writers including W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and Christopher Isherwood, Grigson wrote that he mostly found “a jelly of mythomania, or self-deception, careerism, dishonesty, and ineptitude.” The “scarcest quality among young English writers,” he wrote, was “integrity.” The piece triggered a vigorous correspondence between Grigson and the estimable William Empson.

Dear Sir:

Somebody ought to explain about Grigson, when he introduces himself to a new circle of readers, as he apparently did in the November Poetry. The trick of being rude to everybody is, of course, paying journalism of a certain kind, but in Grigson it also comes from the one honest admiration discernible in him, for the work and methods of Wyndham Lewis. However, Grigson shows no sign of having any theoretical basis to be rude from, which Lewis has plenty of; nor has Grigson any capacity in poetry himself; published partly under an assumed name, Martin Boldero, his stuff has been pathetic. This of course need not stop him from being rude to good effect, and he has a good journalistic nose for what he can safely be rude to. But it is annoying to have him call people “climbers” when no other brickbat seems handy. Grigson himself is the only climber in the field. Not that a climber is anything very shocking; but he has got himself a comfortable job as critic by nose and noise alone. He may have published some decent criticism which I have not read, but in his magazine he does not so much as pretend to give reasons for insulting people. (He has not attacked me; I had rather a sharp review in his paper from someone else, but that was criticism all right.) Of course apart from this “climber” talk it is a good thing to have someone making a lively noise, but someone else, as he points out, ought to say Boo.

The coxcomb bird, so talkative and grave,
Who from his cage calls cuckold, whore, and knave,
Though many a passenger he rightly call,
You hold him no philosopher at all.

W. Empson
January 1937



To the Editor of Poetry:

You observe: say one word about writers in England, stick in one millimeter of pin, and out come petulance and squeal, for that is all that Mr. Empson’s letter is made of. “The trick of being rude to everybody.... paying journalism of a certain kind.... a good journalistic nose for what he can safely be rude to.... a comfortable job as critic by nose and noise alone”—very neat, very delicate, but wouldn’t Mister Empson have used your space a little more sensibly, in replying to my “Letter from England”? Is there or is there not, a remarkable inertia masquerading in England as activity? Do English writers, or do they not, form defensive fronts of the fifth-rate? Do David Gascoyne and Dylan Thomas and F.R. Leavis and Michael Roberts, and Herbert Read, and Day Lewis, et al., deserve, or do they not deserve, the things I said about them? Mr. Empson, ranging himself with the Sitwells as an English gentleman, might have stood up for his friends, if he had had anything to write beyond innuendoes and exaggerations about New Verse. For must the reason for insult always be stated? Can it never be obvious? And does not “nose” contradict “everybody”? Mr. Empson is right; I am not rude (if he must have the word) from “any theoretical basis.” I attempt to be rude—a typically inert theorizer and poetical pasticheur of Mr. Empson’s kind would scarcely see it—I say, I attempt to be rude from a moral basis, a basis of differentiating between the fraudulent and inert and the active, genuine, and desirable. The inert verbalism in which Mr. Empson deals may not be fraudulent, but it has always, if Mr. Empson would care to know, struck me as quarter-man stuff so unreadably trivial that it is not worth insulting or attacking.

Geoffrey Grigson
May 1937



To the Editor of Poetry:

The important thing here seems to be the anti-intellectual stuff. I wouldn’t want to deny that it lets Grigson put up a case; in fact, that is the danger of it, that it will defend anything. For instance, it is a bad thing to be a quarter-man, but it is a great sign of being a quarter-man if you strut about squaring your shoulders and seeing how rude you can be. And it is necessary to make your final judgments “on a moral basis,” but if you haven’t done some thinking first, your moral intuitions will as like as not be mistaken and harmful. If you set out to forget simple truths like these it gets easy to be proud of yourself for being manly and moral.

The anti-intellectual line can be a useful defense for valuable things; a man like D.H. Lawrence had a right to it. But as to whether the fifth-rate (not that I agree about who is fifth-rate) form defensive fronts—they do, they do; and this is one of their fronts.

William Empson
May 1937

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetrysoup.com/article/a_criticism_of_gerard_manley_hopkins-1439


A Criticism of Gerard Manley Hopkins
Written by: J. Middleton Murry

Modern poetry, like the modern consciousness of which it is the epitome, seems to stand irresolute at a crossways with no signpost. It is hardly conscious of its own indecision, which it manages to conceal from itself by insisting that it is lyrical, whereas it is merely impressionist. The value of impressions depends upon the quality of the mind which receives and renders them, and to be lyrical demands at least as firm a temper of the mind, as definite and unfaltering a general direction, as to be epic. Roughly speaking, the present poetical fashion may, with a few conspicuous exceptions, be described as poetry without tears. The poet may assume a hundred personalities in as many poems, or manifest a hundred influences, or he may work a single sham personality threadbare or render piecemeal an undigested influence. What he may not do, or do only at the risk of being unfashionable, is to attempt what we may call, for the lack of a better word, the logical progression of an oeuvre. One has no sense of the rhythm of an achievement. There is an output of scraps, which are scraps, not because they are small, but because one scrap stands in no organic relation to another in the poet's work. Instead of lending each other strength, they betray each other's weakness.

Yet the organic progression for which we look, generally in vain, is not peculiar to poetic genius of the highest rank. If it were, we might be accused of mere querulousness. The rhythm of personality is hard, indeed, to achieve. The simple mind and the single outlook are now too rare to be considered as near possibilities, while the task of tempering a mind to a comprehensive adequacy to modern experience is not an easy one. The desire to escape and the desire to be lost in life were probably never so intimately associated as they are now; and it is a little preposterous to ask a moth fluttering round a candle-flame to see life steadily and see it whole. We happen to have been born into an age without perspective; hence our idolatry for the one living poet and prose writer who has it and comes, or appears to come, from another age. But another rhythm is possible. No doubt it would be mistaken to consider this rhythm as in fact wholly divorced from the rhythm of personality; it probably demands at least a minimum of personal coherence in its possessor. For critical purposes, however, they are distinct. This second and subsidiary rhythm is that of technical progression. The single pursuit of even the most subordinate artistic intention gives unity, significance, mass to a poet's work. When Verlaine declares 'de la musique avant toute chose,' we know where we are. And we know this not in the obvious sense of expecting his verse to be predominantly musical; but in the more important sense of desiring to take a man seriously who declares for anything 'avant toute chose.'

It is the 'avant toute chose' that matters, not as a profession of faith—we do not greatly like professions of faith—but as the guarantee of the universal in the particular, of the dianoia in the episode. It is the 'avant toute chose' that we chiefly miss in modern poetry and modern society and in their quaint concatenations. It is the 'avant toute chose' that leads us to respect both Mr Hardy and Mr Bridges, though we give all our affection to one of them. It is the 'avant toute chose' that compels us to admire the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins[5]; it is the 'avant toute chose' in his work, which, as we believe, would have condemned him to obscurity to-day, if he had not (after many years) had Mr Bridges, who was his friend, to stand sponsor and the Oxford University Press to stand the racket. Apparently Mr Bridges himself is something of our opinion, for his introductory sonnet ends on a disdainful note:—

'Go forth: amidst our chaffinch flock display
Thy plumage of far wonder and heavenward flight!'

[Footnote 5: Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Edited with notes by
Robert Bridges. (Oxford: University Press.)]

It is from a sonnet written by Hopkins to Mr Bridges that we take the most concise expression of his artistic intention, for the poet's explanatory preface is not merely technical, but is written in a technical language peculiar to himself. Moreover, its scope is small; the sonnet tells us more in two lines than the preface in four pages.

'O then if in my lagging lines you miss
The roll, the rise, the carol, the creation….'

There is his 'avant toute chose.' Perhaps it seems very like 'de la musique.' But it tells us more about Hopkins's music than Verlaine's line told us about his. This music is of a particular kind, not the 'sanglots du violon,' but pre-eminently the music of song, the music most proper to lyrical verse. If one were to seek in English the lyrical poem to which Hopkins's definition could be most fittingly applied, one would find Shelley's 'Skylark.' A technical progression onwards from the 'Skylark' is accordingly the main line of Hopkins's poetical evolution. There are other, stranger threads interwoven; but this is the chief. Swinburne, rightly enough if the intention of true song is considered, appears hardly to have existed for Hopkins, though he was his contemporary. There is an element of Keats in his epithets, a half-echo in 'whorled ear' and 'lark-charmèd'; there is an aspiration after Milton's architectonic in the construction of the later sonnets and the most lucid of the fragments,'Epithalamion.' But the central point of departure is the 'Skylark.' The 'May Magnificat' is evidence of Hopkins's achievement in the direct line:—

'Ask of her, the mighty mother:
Her reply puts this other
Question: What is Spring?—
Growth in everything—

Flesh and fleece, fur and feather,
Grass and greenworld all together;
Star-eyed strawberry-breasted
Throstle above her nested
Cluster of bugle-blue eggs thin
Forms and warms the life within….

… When drop-of-blood-and-foam-dapple
Bloom lights the orchard-apple,
And thicket and thorp are merry
With silver-surfèd cherry,

And azuring-over graybell makes
Wood banks and brakes wash wet like lakes,
And magic cuckoo-call
Caps, clears, and clinches all….'

That is the primary element manifested in one of its simplest, most recognisable, and some may feel most beautiful forms. But a melody so simple, though it is perhaps the swiftest of which the English language is capable without the obscurity which comes of the drowning of sense in sound, did not satisfy Hopkins. He aimed at complex internal harmonies, at a counterpoint of rhythm; for this more complex element he coined an expressive word of his own:—

'But as air, melody, is what strikes me most of all in music and design in painting, so design, pattern, or what I am in the habit of calling inscape is what I above all aim at in poetry.'

Here, then, in so many words, is Hopkins's 'avant toute chose' at a higher level of elaboration. 'Inscape' is still, in spite of the apparent differentiation, musical; but a quality of formalism seems to have entered with the specific designation. With formalism co

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/detail/70219


Prose from Poetry Magazine
Scholium
Poetry as pageantry
By Donald Revell

Allegory is a pageant of metaphor and simile. Trailing clouds of glory all its own, figurative language comes upon the scenes of our imagining there. No poet writing in English writes pageantry so in-close as does Robert Herrick. Here, in its entirety, is “The Coming of Good Luck”:

So Good-luck came, and on my roof did light,
Like noiseless snow; or as the dew of night:
Not all at once, but gently, as the trees
Are, by the sunbeams, tickled by degrees.

Given substance, shape, and agency, Good-luck enters upon the advent of itself. Notice how it remains itself — not embodied by snow, not portrayed by snow, but given over to a like behavior, a noiselessness. In pageant, then, there are two: Good-luck and snow. Then there are three. “The dew of night” adds to noiseless Space (the snowy rooftop) the quiet Time of night. Given space and time, then, Good-luck is wholly born.

Once born, Good-luck possesses not only similitude, but absolute Being. The enjambment between lines three and four is climacteric. “As the trees” leads us to expect another simile; but suddenly, capitalized and alone, stands the one word “Are.” Snow and night and trees all blend into plural singularity, into the apotheosis of Good-luck. 
Apt to apotheosis, there is radiance; Herrick provides “sunbeams.” Here, “Are” is the instance of Amor, after which the upturn bends, “tickled by degrees” toward home. After the radiance, we are returned to homely simile: “as the trees are tickled by degrees.” But with this difference: an apotheosis added, embedded. Herrick’s figures of speech alone could not have anticipated such a birth.

Out of Allegory they emerge, the words and phrases, into pageants 
great and small. They return home afterward, completing a world in which allegory and fact, allegory and actual experience, are one flesh.

Ek gret effect men write in place lite;
Th’entente is al, and nat the lettres space.
— From Troilus and Criseyde, by Geoffrey Chaucer

The storm of flung flowers rises and falls, and in that cloud of beauty ‘donna m’ apparve — a lady appeared to me’ ... it is even permissible to let ‘the flash of a smile’ pass at that phrase, so often noted.... She wore some kind of dress ‘di fiamma viva — of living flame,’ and over it a green mantle; white-veiled, olive-crowned, she paused there, and Dante — 
The great pageant has been so, and more than so. We may not be able to stay its pace, but Dante could. He has heaped up references and allusions; he has involved doctrine and history and myth, and the central dogma of the twy-natured Christ itself. He has concentrated meanings, and now the living figure for whom all the structure was meant is here.
— From The Figure of Beatrice, by Charles Williams

Reverie is at an end. Purgatory might well have been a pilgrim fantasy, and Inferno a gothic nightmare. Dream visions sort very well with vengeance and remorse; they are the pretty conscience of child’s play. But Paradise, upon whose brink the breathing heralds of Allegory welcome Beatrice, is real. Beatrice speaks a name: “Dante.” And Dante writes it down. Allegory is splendid entertainment, but it entertains neither mask nor alias. Dante crosses over. Heir of allusion and son of reference, he crosses over into pageant and Paradise under his given name. He’s wide awake — voi vigilate ne l’eterno die. The story is true. William Blake has painted so many eyes into the picture. There are witnesses.

It’s no accident that upon the verge of Heaven itself, Dante hesitates for eight full cantos. He is all eyes. He is the pageant while the pageant lasts. In Purgatorio, earthly paradise is Eden still, regained through material witness. In states of perfection, all things are exculpatory evidence of themselves. I want to cross over under my own names, all of them, alongside pageantry. Yet it’s not by accident that I hesitate. I like my allegories allegorical. “Better ... to stay cowering / 
Like this in the early lessons, since the promise of learning / Is a delusion,” as John Ashbery writes (“Soonest Mended”) so early and so well. Allegory is safekeeping. It is shield and buckler in the mock-siege of spring 1970, Fort Tryon Park, New York. Boys hurl themselves toward the battlements. Girls, laughing in midair in false miniver, 
urge them on. Simply to remember them, as one amongst them, is to know that Happiness exists: Allegory the shield; Allegory the buckler; Allegory the actual Name, walking away into The Romance of the Rose. Together in eternity now, the authors appear, historically, in ideal sequence. First, Guillaume de Lorris, poet of the opening four thousand lines. His story is true. Happiness is the image of itself. How do I find it?

By keeping steadily before you both the literal and allegorical sense and not treating the one as a mere means to the other but as its imaginative interpretation; by testing for yourself how far the concept really informs the image and how far the image really lends poetic life to the concept.
— From The Allegory of Love, by C.S. Lewis

Fort Tryon Park was Eden still. I was a boy. I was there, part and parcel of the tatty materials, and I bear witness to it still. It’s there to be learned forever in the first four thousand lines or so.

Few poets have struck better than Guillaume de Lorris that note which is the peculiar charm of medieval love poetry — that boy-like blending (or so it seems) of innocence and sensuousness which could make us believe for a moment that paradise had never been lost.
— From The Allegory of Love

Moments have a way of yielding to the next moment — “some climbing / before the take-off,” as Pound said, speaking also of battlements and Paradise and of voluptuaries turning upward out of pageant, continuing the pageantry. Guillaume de Lorris, poet of courtly love, yields to Jean de Meun, poet, scholar, sceptic, and tireless exegete. Adding eighteen thousand lines of his own, completing The Romance, de Meun takes the Rose by storm, by sheer force of numbers.

It was the misfortune of Jean de Meun to have read and remembered everything: and nothing that he remembered could be kept out of his poem.
— From The Allegory of Love

I think that we all, one way or another, become the Jean de Meuns of ourselves. We annotate the finest days again and again. We exhaust our happiness, meaning only to complete the dream. We lay broad waking. The only cure for love, Guillaume, is to love more. As for de Meun, as for ourselves in the long afterglow of the great poems, we must read more. We must travel the allegory the right way round.

Committed to the safekeeping of every name, commodius vicus brings a traveler the right way round. Back from the brink leads back to the brink and also to questions of conduct. What is a fallen man to do in Eden when Eden never fell? Love more. Read more. William Blake painted many eyes into the picture. A man could use them. As a through passenger — 

My head is hands and feet. I feel all my best faculties concentrated in it. My instinct tells me that my head is an organ for burrowing, as some creatures use their snout and fore paws, and with it I would mine and burrow my way through these hills.
— From Walden, by Henry David Thoreau

As a tourist — 

You would be so thoroughly prepared to understand what you saw — You would make fewer traveller’s mistakes.
— From Henry David Thoreau’s journal, June 12, 1851

As prodigal son — 

Life is not long enough for one success.
— From Henry David Thoreau’s journal, July 19, 1851

Return excels itself by virtue of a simple turn. Sing the Shaker hymn. Sing it with Henry.

Here or nowhere is our heaven.
— From A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, by
 Henry David Thoreau

Is Grasmere just across the verge of Paradise? Does a man, on the far side of pageant, forgive the fathering child he was? Is Paumanok Eden? Is the absconded she-bird forgiven, either by her fathering mate or by the out-setting bard? Loving more, reading more, the painted eyes begin to number the heavens. Is England a green and pleasant one? Is America?

Walt, tell me, Walt Whitman, if infinity
Be still the same as when you walked the beach
Near Paumanok —
— From Cape Hatteras, by Hart Crane

Brink and verge and selvage: crossing over, up, and into the pageant, close-reading is close-loving. “My hand / in yours, / Walt Whitman —/ 
so — .” My head is hands and feet: all eyes.

So very close is first a cloud of emblems, images, words. So very close — loving reading, reading loving — the qualities of joy are indistinguishable from objects each possesses. My cloud was on the cover of The Norton Anthology of Poetry, in color. Beatrice Addressing Dante from the Car by William Blake shows an awakening cloud, envisioned as colors blazoned forth with eyes in pl

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http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/detail/70095


Prose from Poetry Magazine
Playing by Ear, Praying for Rain: The Poetry of James Baldwin
By Nikky Finney

Baldwin was never afraid to say it. He made me less afraid to say it too.

The air of the Republic was already rich with him when I got here. James Arthur Baldwin, the most salient, sublime, and consequential American writer of the twentieth century, was in the midst of publishing his resolute and prophetic essays and novels: Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), The Amen Corner (1954), Notes of a Native Son (1955), and Giovanni’s Room (1956). I arrived on planet earth in the middle of his personal and relentless assault on white supremacy and his brilliant, succinct understanding of world and American history. In every direction I turned, my ears filled a little more with what he always had to say. His words, his spirit, mattered to me. Black, gay, bejeweled, eyes like orbs searching, dancing, calling a spade a spade, in magazines and on the black-and-white tv of my youth. Baldwin, deep in thought and pulling drags from his companion cigarettes, looking his and our danger in the face and never backing down. My world view was set in motion by this big, bold heart who understood that he had to leave his America in order to be. Baldwin was dangerous to everybody who had anything to hide. Baldwin was also the priceless inheritance to anybody looking for manumission from who they didn’t want or have to be. Gracious and tender, a man who had no idea or concept of his place, who nurtured conversation with Black Panthers and the white literati all in the same afternoon. So powerful and controversial was his name that one minute it was there on the speaker’s list for the great August 28, 1963, March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, and then, poof, it was off. The country might have been ready to march for things they believed all God’s children should have in this life, but there were people, richly miseducated by the Republic, who were not ready for James Baldwin to bring truth in those searing ways he always brought truth to the multitudes.

The eldest of nine, a beloved son of Harlem, his irreverent pride and trust in his own mind, his soul (privately and sometimes publicly warring), all of who he was and believed himself to be, was exposed in his first person, unlimited voice, not for sale, but vulnerable to the Republic. Baldwin’s proud sexuality and his unwillingness to censor his understanding that sex was a foundational part of this life even in the puritanical Republic and therefore should be written, unclothed, not whispered about, not roped off in some back room, informed all of his work, but especially his poetry. Uninviting Baldwin was often the excuse for the whitewashing of his urgent and necessary 
brilliance from both the conservative black community and from whites who had never heard such a dark genius display such rich and sensory antagonism for them. Into the microphone of the world Baldwin leaned — never afraid to say it.

Only once did I see James Baldwin live and in warm, brilliant person; it was 1984, a packed house at the University of California at Berkeley. I was twenty-seven, he was sixty, and we would never meet. None of us there that night, standing shoulder to shoulder, pushed to the edge of our seats, knew that this was our last embrace with him, that we would only have him walking among us for three more years. I remember the timbre of his voice. Steadfast. Smoky. Serene. His words fell on us like a good rain. A replenishing we badly needed. All of us standing, sitting, spread out before this wise, sharp-witted, all-seeing man.

I had met James Baldwin by way of his “Sweet Lorraine,” a seventeen-hundred-and-seventy-six-word loving manifesto to his friend and comrade, the playwright Lorraine Hansberry. Hansberry died from cancer at the age of thirty-four, soon after her great work, A Raisin in the Sun, yanked the apron and head rag off the institution of the American theater, Broadway, 1959. Baldwin’s intimate remembrance became the introduction to Hansberry’s posthumous collection, To Be Young, Gifted and Black, a book that, as a girl of fourteen, I was highly uncomfortable ever letting out of my sight. I was the black girl dreaming of a writing life and Hansberry, the black woman carving one out. Hansberry had given me two atomic oars to zephyr me further upstream: I am a writer. I am going to write. After her untimely death, I had a palpable need to still see and feel her in the world. Baldwin’s lush remembrance brought her to me in powerful living dimension. His way of seeing her, of remembering what was important about her, helped her stay with me.

I had needed Hansberry to set my determination forward for my journey. And I needed Baldwin to teach me about the power of rain.



•



Baldwin wrote poetry throughout his life. He wrote with an engaged, layered, facile hand. The idea being explored first cinched, then stretched out, with just enough tension to bring the light in. His language: informal, inviting; his ideas from the four corners of the earth, beginning, always, with love:

No man can have a harlot
for a lover
nor stay in bed forever
with a lie.
He must rise up
and face the morning sky
and himself, in the mirror
of his lover’s eye.
 — From A Lover’s Question

Baldwin’s images carry their weight and we, the reader, carry their consequence. In one turn of phrase and line, something lies easy in repose; in the next, he is telling the Lord what to do; the words jump, fall in line, with great and marching verve:

Lord,
when you send the rain,
think about it, please,
a little?
Do
not get carried away
by the sound of falling water,
the marvelous light
on the falling water.
I
am beneath that water.
It falls with great force
and the light
Blinds
me to the light.
  — Untitled

Baldwin wrote as the words instructed, never allowing the critics of the Republic to tell him how or how not. They could listen in or they could ignore him, but he was never their boy, writing something they wanted to hear. He fastidiously handed that empty caricature of a black writer back to them, tipping his hat, turning back to his sweet Harlem alley for more juice.

James Baldwin, as poet, was incessantly paying attention and always leaning into the din and hum around him, making his poems from his notes of what was found there, making his outlines, his annotations, doing his jotting down, writing from the mettle and marginalia of his life, giving commentary, scribbling, then dispatching out to the world what he knew and felt about that world. James Baldwin, as poet, was forever licking the tip of his pencil, preparing for more calculations, more inventory, moving, counting each letter being made inside the abacus of the poem. James Baldwin, as poet, never forgot what he had taught me in that seventeen-hundred-and-seventy-six-word essay — to remember where one came from. So many of the poems are dedicated ba

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http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/detail/89028

Prose from Poetry Magazine
Australian Poetry Now
By Bronwyn Lea

Once asked what poets can do for Australia, A.D. Hope replied: “They can justify its existence.” Such has been the charge of Australian poets, from Hope himself to Kenneth Slessor, Judith Wright to Les Murray, Anthony Lawrence to Judith Beveridge: to articulate the Australian experience so that it might live in the imagination of its people. While the presence and potency of the Australian landscape remains an abiding interest, a great deal of Australian poetry has been innovative and experimental, with poets such as Robert Adamson, Michael Dransfield, Vicki Viidikas, John Forbes, Gig Ryan,   J.S. Harry, and Jennifer Maiden leading the way. The richness, strength, and vitality of Australian poetry is marked by a prodigious diversity that makes it as exhilarating to survey as it is challenging to encapsulate.

While the most convincing justification for the existence of Australia might come from its indigenous poets, Aboriginal poetry in Australia has been particularly overlooked, both its historical traditions and the innovative work being written today. Australian Aboriginal culture is thought to date back over forty thousand years, making it the oldest continuous culture on the planet. Of the 250 indigenous languages in circulation before European settlement in 1788, fewer than 150 survived the advance of English, and the numbers are dwindling. Fortunately, linguists have managed to transcribe and translate at least some of the rich and diverse Aboriginal oral traditions before they are lost. According to R.D. Wood, T.G.H. Strehlow’s Songs of Central Australia is “the most majestic, complete, and important” contribution to Aboriginal oral poetry called “songpoetry,” for the linguistic artistry of the lyrics. While frequently ceremonial or ritualistic in nature, some songpoems take an interest in quotidian matters, such as love, hunting, flora, fauna, settlement, and local history. The eponymous songpoem in Martin Duwell and R.M.W. Dixon’s Little Eva at Moonlight Creek, for instance, recalls the December 1942 crash of a US B–24 heavy bomber, “Little Eva,” in the Gulf of Carpentaria from the perspective of the Aboriginal stockmen who took part in the search for survivors.

The most recent contribution to Aboriginal songpoetry publications is Stuart Cooke’s translation of George Dyuŋgayan’s Bulu Line: A West Kimberley Song Cycle, which narrates the dreams of Dyuŋgayan, a twentieth-century Nyigina lawman from the Roebuck Plains in Western Australia, in which he is visited by his late father’s spirit and given the seventeen verses of the Bulu Line. Every age demands its own translation, it is said, and as such Cooke’s translation of Dyuŋgayan draws on various tropes found in contemporary Anglophone poetry — repetition, fragmentation, variations in typeface, and so on — to create a mesmerizing, multivocal text. For example, in “Verse 2” of Bulu Line Cooke spins Dyuŋgayan’s rhyming tercet — “guwararrirarri yinanydina / dyidi yarrabanydyina / nanbalinblai yinanydina” — into twenty lines describing the courtship flight of snipes, whose feather vibrations in the slipstream produce a throbbing sound known as “drumming,” as in this sample:

a flock of snipes
flying toward us
wait! they’re rai
fast approaching
we nearly collide
their bellies like birds’
wait they’re flying
belly-up
becoming rai
racing through sky

Aboriginal poetry written in English, a more recent development, frequently engages the politics of race, ecology, and Aboriginal land rights. Oodgeroo Noonuccal’s We Are Going holds the distinction of being both the first book of poems published by an Aboriginal poet and one of Australia’s bestselling poetry titles. Kargun, Lionel G. Fogarty’s debut collection of poems appeared in 1980 and, along with the rest of his oeuvre, has helped to reformulate the role of poetic discourse in both black and white communities. Born in 1958 on Wakka Wakka land in South Western Queensland, Fogarty’s poetry deploys language in innovative and disruptive ways and has 
pioneered a new space of Aboriginal writing: “I see words beyond any acceptable meaning,” he explains, “this is how I express my dreaming.” His poem “Am I,” for example, concludes with the cry of a kangaroo that presages the collapse of boundaries between self and other:

I heard a roo cry
Am I hearing attendants
to my hearts
Am we lovin’ in these days
Am I sadden these nights
Forever it possess you man
something must tell
Am I me or you am us.

There is less crisis, perhaps, but not less bite in the poetry of Samuel Wagan Watson, the most prominent of the younger generation of Aboriginal poets. Watson’s recent collection, Love Poems and Death Threats, presents the particulars of his urban, contemporary life: the Dreaming and Aboriginal mistreatment — past and present — but also the war in Afghanistan, Hollywood, manga comics, the Beat poets, love, divorce, and the international poetry circuit he frequents. Watson’s language is loose, refusing economy and structure, but his eye is sharp. In the poem “Road Fire,” heat-haze is a “working ghost” on a highway in Mununjali country, where a “red-belly-black serpent / animates the bitumen” to remind us of what we too often forget: “venom is always ahead” but “some paths need to be crossed.”

The verse novel has enjoyed curious prominence in Australian poetry publishing for the past forty years, with many of the country’s established poets attempting at least one at some point in their career: Les Murray, Alan Wearne, Dorothy Porter, Philip Hodgins, Geoff Page, John Tranter, John A. Scott, John Jenkins, Ken Bolton, and Judy Johnson, to name some. For some poets, interest in the hybrid genre is a pivot away from the dominant lyrical mode toward the dramatic possibilities of voice, vernacular, temporality, and character beyond the persona of the poet. One apparent ambition of the Australian verse novel, Christopher Polnitz points out, “is to synthesize all narrative genres and medias, from opera to sacred allegory, radio drama to film.” For other poets, the reclamation of narrative is an honest attempt to recapture poetry audiences lost to fiction and film in the twentieth century.

One of the earliest Australian verse novels is Murray’s The Boys Who Stole the Funeral: A Novel Sequence, which Peter F. Alexander credits as “root and origin of   both Australian and American developments of the genre.” Wearne followed up with The Nightmarkets, a novel written in sixteen-line sonnets that came out the same year that Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate appeared across the Pacific. Both Murray and Wearne went on to contribute more ambitious works to the genre: Murray’s epic Fredy Neptune tackled the horror of twentieth-century genocide in loosely-rhymed, eight-line stanzas while Wearne’s momentous verse novel The Lovemakers arranged three decades of Australian suburbia into 750 pages of couplets, quatrains, and sestinas. Dorothy Porter, the author of nine (including two posthumous) collections of lyric poetry, wrote five verse novels in the space of fifteen years and is credited for popularizing the verse novel with fiction audiences in the nineties. Porter’s bestselling The Monkey’s Mask, a lesbian crime thriller written in punchy free-verse lyrics, was adapted for radio, stage, and eventually the screen. Verse novels for young-adult audiences also emerged around this time, proving a commercial success for authors such as Steven Herrick, Catherine Bateson, Margaret Wild, Libby Hathorn, and Michelle Taylor.

The Australian verse novel, young adult notwithstanding, has lost some momentum in recent years but a handful continue to turn up each year. The historical verse novel is proving to be a popular subgenre; Aboriginal poet Ali Cobby Eckermann’s second verse novel, Ruby Moonlight, is set in the nineteenth century and t

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http://www.poetryfoundation.org/resources/learning/articles/detail/89288

Article for Teachers and Students
Why Write in Form?
Mastering the traditional ways to forge new ones
By Rebecca Hazelton


When we think of mastery, we think of practice, and when we think of practice, we often think of repetition. Violinists spend much of their early years running scales before their fingers automatically and thoughtlessly assume their proper positions on the fretboard. Ceramicists must learn to wedge clay and center the clay on the wheel before they can successfully make pots. Outside art and music, basketball players put in countless hours perfecting their lay-ups, ballet dancers’ toes bleed inside their pointe shoes, and swimmers crisscross the length of a pool countless times hoping to shave milliseconds off their time.

Although repetition is necessary, practice isn’t just repetition. When we practice, we do two things: we isolate a technique for study, and we engage with difficulty. In art and in sport, we acquire muscle memory by putting our bodies through movements over and over, repeatedly challenging our skills and abilities and refining our technique. If making a bank shot in pool was easy, we’d all be pool sharks.

In poetry, one of the best ways to practice technique is to write in traditional forms. But for many writers—and I’ve been guilty of this as well—this notion can elicit not just avoidance but also outright opposition. It’s easy enough to look at the current literary landscape and say there’s no point to practicing these old forms. Most journals don’t seem interested in publishing formal poetry, and though there are some fantastic poets working in form today, they are in the minority. Even when there is a resurgence of interest in form (such as New Formalism), it’s seen as an outlier, even reactionary.

Perhaps some of this opposition stems from a common misconception. Unlike other arts—and perhaps even other forms of writing—readers and writers alike often associate poetry with feeling, not technique. Part of this may stem from a misunderstanding of William Wordsworth’s famous definition of poetry, in which he begins, “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. …” His wording encourages a reading in which poetry simply occurs and does so uncontrollably. If this is the part of the quotation that sticks with you, it’s no surprise that you might associate poetry more with emotional intensity and less with the how of its conveyance. But in the second half of that quotation, Wordsworth tempers his original statement: “... it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” Those unexpected and powerful feelings are actually being observed at a calming distance from that emotion.

More important, Wordsworth’s statement doesn’t acknowledge the structure that serves as a scaffolding for those feelings, a framework that makes a poem more than just cathartic release. It doesn’t acknowledge form. Why would it? For Wordsworth and his contemporaries 200 years ago, form was assumed. If a poem didn’t rhyme, readers could be sure it employed some sort of metrical scheme.

Associating poetry with feeling can seem very egalitarian because everyone has feelings. Although that’s true, not everyone is a poet, and the message of this model of art is actually exclusionary: it doesn’t offer an aspirant poet a pragmatic path forward because it hides the real work behind the scenes. What is an aspiring poet supposed to do in this model—feel harder?

I want to clarify that some of the best poets have qualities that can’t be practiced. It’s that ill-defined, hard-to-put-your-finger-on something that separates merely technically proficient writing from the work we call genius. Whether we have that spark is out of our hands, but we can have all the inspiration in the world, and it won’t matter if we can’t express it well. Setting aside romantic notions of poetry and dealing with the nitty-gritty of technique gives all of us the ability to improve our poetry. We all, with practice, might move others to feel something that we have felt or to see the world as we do. If we’ve got that spark, technique gives us a way to share it. For my money—mind you, I am a poet, so that’s not much—writing in form is one of the best ways for poets to practice technique.

Even if you have no desire to be a “formal” poet (and no one says you must choose a side!), the skills you learn by grappling with form are skills that will serve you well in free verse. Poets who tune their ears to iambs and trochees are poets who have a better sense of a line’s rhythm. After all, free verse isn’t entirely without meter—rather, its meter just doesn’t have a consistent, discernable pattern. Look at these lines from the second stanza of W.S. Merwin’s “In the Winter of My Thirty-Eighth Year”:

Walking in fog and rain and seeing nothing
I imagine all the clocks have died in the night
Now no one is looking I could choose my age
It would be younger I suppose so I am older

The first line of this stanza catches my ear. I hear a pattern: WALKing in | FOG and | RAIN and | SEEing | NOTHing. There are five feet to the line, a dactyl followed by four trochees. Such a musical line in a free verse poem arrests readers, even if they don’t recognize why.

Because the first line seems metrical, I look more carefully at the second line. I hear it like this: I iMAgine ALL the CLOCKS have DIED in the NIGHT. I want all to be unstressed so that “all the CLOCKS” and “in the NIGHT” are matching anapests. I like that idea because it nicely links the two images. But when I say the whole line aloud, I keep stressing that ALL. The line doesn’t seem metrical, but it almost does. Viewed in the context of the previous line, Merwin sets up a metrical pattern and then lets it dissipate. This structure reinforces the sense of the lines, in which clocks, the keepers of order, have lost their power.

What about those last lines? I would argue that they aren’t just unmetrical but anti-metrical. Because Merwin doesn’t use punctuation in the poem, it challenges our sense of syntax. The first and second lines are complete clauses; it’s no great challenge to our sensibility to view the line breaks as the missing punctuation between them. But in lines three and four, independent clauses butt up against each other in the same lines. This gives the lines a rushed quality, a sense that things are running together. To my ear, it also has the effect of flattening the stresses in the line. I hear stresses on CHOOSE and YOUNGer, but on the whole, the lines have a monotone quality. This effect amplifies their meaning. In the first two lines, the speaker indulges in a fantasy in which time ceases to matter. But as the stanza continues, the lines rush together just as time rushes on, and the conclusion of the fantasy (“I could choose my age / It would be younger”) only confirms its impossibility (“so I am older”).

I very much doubt that Merwin, while composing this poem, said to himself, “I’m gonna slip a line of iambicpentameter into this free verse poem just to mess with them.” Instead, I suspect that he had spent some time in the past reading and writing metrical poetry and employed these techniques more or less unconsciously. His knowledge of meter attuned him to the line’s rhythm. Imagine if he had instead written “WALKing in the FOG and RAIN, SEEing NOTHing.” Suddenly, it’s a very different poem; we lose the rhythm of walking.

Meter is like allusion. We use it all the time whether we know it or not—it’s inescapable. Just as the idea of two kids in love from warring families can’t help but conjure up Romeo and Juliet, so too does language fall into patterns that evoke older associations. We do this without even thinking; free verse poetry is littered with meter. By writing intuitively, we naturally fall in and out of meter. But if you’re unable to identify that meter and understand how it is or isn’t working with your meaning, you’re abdicating a large degree of control.

I begin with meter because prosody is the first formal element to leap to most poets’ minds and perhaps the most intimidating. Rhyme is probably the second and has a worse reputation. Many of us think of poetry with a set rhyme scheme as old-fashioned and just bad. Here’s an example of what may come to mind when we think of formal, rhymed poetry:

It was biting cold, and the falling snow,
Which filled a poor little match girl’s heart with woe,
Who was bareheaded and barefooted, as she went along the street,
Crying, “Who’ll buy my matches? for I want pennies to buy some meat!”

These lines are by William McGonagall from his poem “The Little Match Girl.” I hope you’ll forgive me for picking on him a little. He was a fascinating figure—former Shakespearean actor, self-styled “Knight of the White Elephant of Burma”—but not a great poet. When rhyme is bad, it’s really bad, and it’s bad because we know what rhymes are coming. Of course he rhymes snow with woe. I know that from the moment I see the word filled. But—ignoring meter for the moment (and McGonagall seems to, often)—imagine if those lines instead read, “It was biting cold, and the falling snow / scraped the match girl’s heart hollow.” I’m not saying it’s brilliant, but in this version, we don’t know exactly where the line is going before we get there. There’s a little bit of surprise, not to mention personification and image.

But what makes this rhyming poem “bad” isn’t just that McGonagall is picking expected rhymes. It’s that you can see him working so hard to get to them. We may look at a poem like this and think that the writer lacks control over the language—but what we’re really seeing is a poet who can’t give up control. The meter and even the line length in his work is all over the place because McGonagall knows what rhyme he wants and will do whatever he can to get there.

It’s an unfair comparison, but take a look at the first two stanzas of “Two Violins,” by A.E. Stallings:

One was fire red,
Hand carved and new—
The local maker pried the wood
From a torn-down church's pew,
The Devil's instrument
Wrenched from the house of God.
It answered merrily and clear
Though my fingering was flawed;

The rhyme new/pew is straight and simple, but as a reader, I don’t see pew coming until I get to church. At that point, the rhyme slips easily into place. Likewise, the second stanza’s rhyme of God/flawed feels natural and unforced, and pairing the idea of imperfection with that of God further reinforces the almost sacrilegious origins of this violin, “the Devil’s instrument.” There’s a sense of the inevitable with rhymes such as these, yet there’s also surprise.

I’ve heard more than one creative writing teacher say, “I had to ban rhymes in my workshop.” Believe me, I sympathize. Reading bad rhyme can feel as though someone is intentionally trying to hurt you. But those wooden or clumsy rhymes are still going to be present in free verse poetry; there will simply be fewer of them. Formal poems lay these deficiencies bare. When we prioritize a rhyme’s completion over syntax or sense, then rhyme is only a problem to solve, not a tool to amplify meaning. Creating a poem with a graceful rhyme scheme asks us to experiment with many different structures to improve our fluidity and even our vocabulary. Yes, we’ll write a lot of clunkers on the way. Struggling with rhyme in a formal poem, successfully or not, means the rhymes we use in free verse will be more subtle. We’ll better understand the effects of pl

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

Article for Teachers and Students
Why Write in Form?
Mastering the traditional ways to forge new ones
By Rebecca Hazelton


When we think of mastery, we think of practice, and when we think of practice, we often think of repetition. Violinists spend much of their early years running scales before their fingers automatically and thoughtlessly assume their proper positions on the fretboard. Ceramicists must learn to wedge clay and center the clay on the wheel before they can successfully make pots. Outside art and music, basketball players put in countless hours perfecting their lay-ups, ballet dancers’ toes bleed inside their pointe shoes, and swimmers crisscross the length of a pool countless times hoping to shave milliseconds off their time.

Although repetition is necessary, practice isn’t just repetition. When we practice, we do two things: we isolate a technique for study, and we engage with difficulty. In art and in sport, we acquire muscle memory by putting our bodies through movements over and over, repeatedly challenging our skills and abilities and refining our technique. If making a bank shot in pool was easy, we’d all be pool sharks.

In poetry, one of the best ways to practice technique is to write in traditional forms. But for many writers—and I’ve been guilty of this as well—this notion can elicit not just avoidance but also outright opposition. It’s easy enough to look at the current literary landscape and say there’s no point to practicing these old forms. Most journals don’t seem interested in publishing formal poetry, and though there are some fantastic poets working in form today, they are in the minority. Even when there is a resurgence of interest in form (such as New Formalism), it’s seen as an outlier, even reactionary.

Perhaps some of this opposition stems from a common misconception. Unlike other arts—and perhaps even other forms of writing—readers and writers alike often associate poetry with feeling, not technique. Part of this may stem from a misunderstanding of William Wordsworth’s famous definition of poetry, in which he begins, “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. …” His wording encourages a reading in which poetry simply occurs and does so uncontrollably. If this is the part of the quotation that sticks with you, it’s no surprise that you might associate poetry more with emotional intensity and less with the how of its conveyance. But in the second half of that quotation, Wordsworth tempers his original statement: “... it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” Those unexpected and powerful feelings are actually being observed at a calming distance from that emotion.

More important, Wordsworth’s statement doesn’t acknowledge the structure that serves as a scaffolding for those feelings, a framework that makes a poem more than just cathartic release. It doesn’t acknowledge form. Why would it? For Wordsworth and his contemporaries 200 years ago, form was assumed. If a poem didn’t rhyme, readers could be sure it employed some sort of metrical scheme.

Associating poetry with feeling can seem very egalitarian because everyone has feelings. Although that’s true, not everyone is a poet, and the message of this model of art is actually exclusionary: it doesn’t offer an aspirant poet a pragmatic path forward because it hides the real work behind the scenes. What is an aspiring poet supposed to do in this model—feel harder?

I want to clarify that some of the best poets have qualities that can’t be practiced. It’s that ill-defined, hard-to-put-your-finger-on something that separates merely technically proficient writing from the work we call genius. Whether we have that spark is out of our hands, but we can have all the inspiration in the world, and it won’t matter if we can’t express it well. Setting aside romantic notions of poetry and dealing with the nitty-gritty of technique gives all of us the ability to improve our poetry. We all, with practice, might move others to feel something that we have felt or to see the world as we do. If we’ve got that spark, technique gives us a way to share it. For my money—mind you, I am a poet, so that’s not much—writing in form is one of the best ways for poets to practice technique.

Even if you have no desire to be a “formal” poet (and no one says you must choose a side!), the skills you learn by grappling with form are skills that will serve you well in free verse. Poets who tune their ears to iambs and trochees are poets who have a better sense of a line’s rhythm. After all, free verse isn’t entirely without meter—rather, its meter just doesn’t have a consistent, discernable pattern. Look at these lines from the second stanza of W.S. Merwin’s “In the Winter of My Thirty-Eighth Year”:

Walking in fog and rain and seeing nothing
I imagine all the clocks have died in the night
Now no one is looking I could choose my age
It would be younger I suppose so I am older

The first line of this stanza catches my ear. I hear a pattern: WALKing in | FOG and | RAIN and | SEEing | NOTHing. There are five feet to the line, a dactyl followed by four trochees. Such a musical line in a free verse poem arrests readers, even if they don’t recognize why.

Because the first line seems metrical, I look more carefully at the second line. I hear it like this: I iMAgine ALL the CLOCKS have DIED in the NIGHT. I want all to be unstressed so that “all the CLOCKS” and “in the NIGHT” are matching anapests. I like that idea because it nicely links the two images. But when I say the whole line aloud, I keep stressing that ALL. The line doesn’t seem metrical, but it almost does. Viewed in the context of the previous line, Merwin sets up a metrical pattern and then lets it dissipate. This structure reinforces the sense of the lines, in which clocks, the keepers of order, have lost their power.

What about those last lines? I would argue that they aren’t just unmetrical but anti-metrical. Because Merwin doesn’t use punctuation in the poem, it challenges our sense of syntax. The first and second lines are complete clauses; it’s no great challenge to our sensibility to view the line breaks as the missing punctuation between them. But in lines three and four, independent clauses butt up against each other in the same lines. This gives the lines a rushed quality, a sense that things are running together. To my ear, it also has the effect of flattening the stresses in the line. I hear stresses on CHOOSE and YOUNGer, but on the whole, the lines have a monotone quality. This effect amplifies their meaning. In the first two lines, the speaker indulges in a fantasy in which time ceases to matter. But as the stanza continues, the lines rush together just as time rushes on, and the conclusion of the fantasy (“I could choose my age / It would be younger”) only confirms its impossibility (“so I am older”).

I very much doubt that Merwin, while composing this poem, said to himself, “I’m gonna slip a line of iambicpentameter into this free verse poem just to mess with them.” Instead, I suspect that he had spent some time in the past reading and writing metrical poetry and employed these techniques more or less unconsciously. His knowledge of meter attuned him to the line’s rhythm. Imagine if he had instead written “WALKing in the FOG and RAIN, SEEing NOTHing.” Suddenly, it’s a very different poem; we lose the rhythm of walking.

Meter is like allusion. We use it all the time whether we know it or not—it’s inescapable. Just as the idea of two kids in love from warring families can’t help but conjure up Romeo and Juliet, so too does language fall into patterns that evoke older associations. We do this without even thinking; free verse poetry is littered with meter. By writing intuitively, we naturally fall in and out of meter. But if you’re unable to identify that meter and understand how it is or isn’t working with your meaning, you’re abdicating a large degree of control.

I begin with meter because prosody is the first formal element to leap to most poets’ minds and perhaps the most intimidating. Rhyme is probably the second and has a worse reputation. Many of us think of poetry with a set rhyme scheme as old-fashioned and just bad. Here’s an example of what may come to mind when we think of formal, rhymed poetry:

It was biting cold, and the falling snow,
Which filled a poor little match girl’s heart with woe,
Who was bareheaded and barefooted, as she went along the street,
Crying, “Who’ll buy my matches? for I want pennies to buy some meat!”

These lines are by William McGonagall from his poem “The Little Match Girl.” I hope you’ll forgive me for picking on him a little. He was a fascinating figure—former Shakespearean actor, self-styled “Knight of the White Elephant of Burma”—but not a great poet. When rhyme is bad, it’s really bad, and it’s bad because we know what rhymes are coming. Of course he rhymes snow with woe. I know that from the moment I see the word filled. But—ignoring meter for the moment (and McGonagall seems to, often)—imagine if those lines instead read, “It was biting cold, and the falling snow / scraped the match girl’s heart hollow.” I’m not saying it’s brilliant, but in this version, we don’t know exactly where the line is going before we get there. There’s a little bit of surprise, not to mention personification and image.

But what makes this rhyming poem “bad” isn’t just that McGonagall is picking expected rhymes. It’s that you can see him working so hard to get to them. We may look at a poem like this and think that the writer lacks control over the language—but what we’re really seeing is a poet who can’t give up control. The meter and even the line length in his work is all over the place because McGonagall knows what rhyme he wants and will do whatever he can to get there.

It’s an unfair comparison, but take a look at the first two stanzas of “Two Violins,” by A.E. Stallings:

One was fire red,
Hand carved and new—
The local maker pried the wood
From a torn-down church's pew,
The Devil's instrument
Wrenched from the house of God.
It answered merrily and clear
Though my fingering was flawed;

The rhyme new/pew is straight and simple, but as a reader, I don’t see pew coming until I get to church. At that point, the rhyme slips easily into place. Likewise, the second stanza’s rhyme of God/flawed feels natural and unforced, and pairing the idea of imperfection with that of God further reinforces the almost sacrilegious origins of this violin, “the Devil’s instrument.” There’s a sense of the inevitable with rhymes such as these, yet there’s also surprise.

I’ve heard more than one creative writing teacher say, “I had to ban rhymes in my workshop.” Believe me, I sympathize. Reading bad rhyme can feel as though someone is intentionally trying to hurt you. But those wooden or clumsy rhymes are still going to be present in free verse poetry; there will simply be fewer of them. Formal poems lay these deficiencies bare. When we prioritize a rhyme’s completion over syntax or sense, then rhyme is only a problem to solve, not a tool to amplify meaning. Creating a poem with a graceful rhyme scheme asks us to experiment with many different structures to improve our fluidity and even our vocabulary. Yes, we’ll write a lot of clunkers on the way. Struggling with rhyme in a formal poem, successfully or not, means the rhymes we use in free verse will be more subtle. We’ll better understand the effects of pl

PRESENTED BUT I DO NOT AGREE WITH ALL OF IT.
Rhyme is far harder to compose in than is free verse, prose , etc....
Thus many ill -equipped to write using rhyme come up with thousands of reasons why they dislike or do not write in rhyme.
I write in rhyme primarily but also do free verse when I am lazy!
I could easily write a hundred short free verse poems a day--but why do so?
Could I do a hundred rhyme poems a day? NO.....
REASON WHY IS ONE MUST THINK 4 TO 8 VERSES AHEAD WHEN WRITING IN RHYME .
WHERAS FREE VERSE ONE CAN GO ON A RAPID FLOW....

Granted, I've been told by poets that I collaborate with -- that I am by far, the fastest composer of poetic verse, that they've ever encountered.
Ive written a 32 verse free verse poem in 11 minutes--my average time for a 32 verse in rhyme is about 32 minutes, which most other poets call that 32 minutes lightning fast.
Some tell me that it takes them several days to write a 14 verse sonnet!
Which I often do in 6/7 minutes.--Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.thehypertexts.com/Voltaire%20by%20Clarence%20Darrow%20Essay.htm


Voltaire an Essay
---------------------------by Clarence Darrow


Clarence Darrow's essay on Voltaire was first hand-typed and edited from two sources by Cliff Walker. It was then published here, with around a dozen minor edits by Tom Merrill, who also provided the intro below. After Tom made his edits, which involved some educated guesswork, by amazing good fortune he was able to obtain the essay in the form of a small printed booklet that Darrow distributed at his lectures. The text below was revised after Tom carefully consulted Darrow's printed lecture notes. If the reader notices possible "quirks" of grammar or punctuation, please keep in mind that Tom thought it best to remain faithful to Darrow and the work of his genius. In fact, Tom thought the essay was "flawless, a virtual miracle of enlightenment" and that "any miniscule compositional flaws that could possibly have suggested themselves could just as well have been ignored, since fussing with them seemed a virtual violation of natural perfection."

In the handsome essay below, famous American civil libertarian Clarence Darrow, perhaps best remembered for his notable performance in The Scopes Monkey Trial, which took place in 1925 in Dayton Tennessee and contested the constitutionality of a new law banning the teaching of evolution in that state, or possibly for his successful defense in Chicago a year earlier of precocious teenage "thrill" murderers Leopold and Loeb, pays unabashed tribute to a brave and tireless champion of free speech, decency tolerance and social justice by the name of Francois-Marie Arouet, better known to the world as Voltaire, a name he said he adopted in the hope it might bring him better luck.

Darrow's essay is an unreserved paean to Voltaire's life and mind. His obvious deep admiration for the prolific French author and pamphleteer, whose lifelong heroic outspokenness against the forces of tyranny and oppression in a time and place in which the price to be paid for open opposition to church and state and a harshly imposed social order was vastly higher than it is today—in the West at any rate—is a very encouraging thing to encounter and serves as a reminder that the better legal minds may still be our best hope for social progress short of the sort of upheaval that began in France very soon after Voltaire's death in 1778.


Voltaire was born in Paris in 1694. At that time, Louis XIV was on the throne in France. Though long years of profligacy and dissipation the lords and rulers of France had reduced the country to poverty and the people to slavery and superstition. France was nothing but the king and the favorites of the court. Noblemen, priests and women of easy virtue were the rulers, and people lived only to furnish them amusement and dissipation. Everyone believed in miracles, witchcraft and revealed religion. They not only believed in old miracles but in new ones. A person may be intellectual and believe in miracles, but the miracles must be very old.

Doctors plied their trade through sorcery and sacred charms. Lawyers helped keep the poor in subjection; the criminal code was long, cruel and deadly. The priest, the doctor and the lawyer lived for the rich and helped make slaves of the poor. Doctors still believe in sorcery, but they administer their faith cures through a bottle instead of vulgar witchcraft. Lawyers still keep the poor in their place by jails and barbarous laws, but the criminal code is shorter and less severe.

When Voltaire was born there was really but one church which, of course, was ignorant, tyrannical and barbarous in the extreme. All creeds are alike, and whenever there is but one, and the rulers honestly believe in that one, they are bound to be ignorant, barbarous and cruel. All sorts of heresies were punishable by death. If anyone dared to write a pamphlet or book that questioned any part of the accepted faith, the book was at once consigned to flames and the author was lucky if he did not meet the same fate. Religion was not maintained by the precepts of the priest, but by the prison, the torture chamber and the fagot. Everyone believed; no one questioned. The religious creeds, while strict and barbarous, did not interfere with the personal conduct of any of the rulers. They were left free to act as they pleased, so long as they professed to believe in the prevailing faith.

France was on the verge of bankruptcy. Her possessions were dwindling away. There was glitter and show and extravagance on the outside; poverty, degradation and ignorance beneath. It was in this state and at that time that Voltaire was born. He was a puny child, whom no one thought would live. The priest was called in immediately that he might be baptized so his soul would be saved.

Voltaire's father was a notary of mediocre talents and some property, but his name would have been lost, excepting for his brilliant son. His mother was his mother, and that was all. In his writings, the most voluminous ever left by any author, he scarcely mentions his mother a half dozen times. He had a brother and sister whose names have only been rescued from oblivion by the lustre of Voltaire. No one can find in any of his ancestors or kin, any justification for the genius of Voltaire.

Had the modern professors of eugenics had power in France in 1694, they probably would not have permitted such a child to have been born. Their scientific knowledge would have shown conclusively that no person of value could have come from the union of his father and mother. In those days, nature had not been instructed by the professors of eugenics and so Voltaire was born.

In a few days, his parents and nurse grew tired of waiting for him to die, and while he was yet a child, his education was left in charge of a priest named Chateauneuf. His teacher drew a salary as a priest, but was irreligious, profligate, clever and skeptical in the extreme. He was kind-hearted and good-natured and fond of his pupil, who was also his godson, and did his best to keep the young mind free from the superstition of the age.

Before he was ten years old, it was plain that the young Voltaire had a clever mind. At that age he was sent to a boys' school in France. His body was lean and thin and his mind was keen and active, and neither his body nor his mind changed these characteristics to the day of his death. At the school he says he learned "Latin and nonsense," and nothing else. In two hundred years, the schools are still teaching Latin and nonsense. The course of Latin is the same, but the kinds of nonsense have somewhat changed. At the school he was not like the other boys. He did not care for games or sports. While the other children were busy with youthful games he was talking with the fathers, who were the teachers in the school. In vain they tried to make the boy join the rest in play. He turned his eyes to his professors and said, "Everyone must jump after his own fashion." One of the professors, who was close to him, remarked, "That boy wants to weigh the great questions of the day in his little scales."

While a boy at school he began to write verses, not, of course, the easy, fluent, witty poetry of his later years, but still verses of such promise and originality as to attract the attention of his teachers. The one father who disliked him at school, in answering a brilliant retort of the child, said, "Witch, you will one day be the standard bearer of Deism in France."

On his return from school, about fifteen, his father decided to make him an advocate. He picked out the profession for his son, as most fathers do, because it was his own; but Voltaire's early efforts at poetry had given him the ambition to write and he insisted that he should not follow his father's footsteps, but devote his life to literature. This his father would not consent to. "Literature," said the parent, "is the profession of the man who wishes to be useless to society, and a burden to his relatives, and to die of hunger." But even Voltaire's father could not make a lawyer out of a genius. To be a good lawyer, one must have a mind and a disposition to venerate the past, a respect for precedents; believe in the wisdom and the sanctity of the dead. Voltaire had genius, imagination, feeling, and poetry, and these gifts always have been, and always will be incompatible with the practice of law. While he was studying law, he was writing verses: verses that were wicked, sacrilegious, and sometimes malicious. He was also making up for the play he missed in youth and was having a gay time with his friends. On account of some boyish scrape, he was sent by his father to Caen and, although in a way under restraint, at once captured the society and intellect of the town. His father seeing something of the boy's brilliancy, sent him word that if he would come back home he would buy him a good post in the government. "Tell my father," was the answer, "I do not want any place that can be bought. I will make one for myself that will cost nothing." Later in his life, in writing the story of the great dramatist Molière, he said, "All who have made a name for themselves in the fine arts, have done so in spite of their relations. Nature has always been much stronger with them than education." and again, "I saw early that one can neither resist one's ruling passion nor fight one's destiny."
Voltaire is only one illustration of the wisdom of these remarks. The usual is always mediocre. When nature takes it into her head to make a man, she fits him with her own equipment and educates him in her own school.

His father got him a post in Holland, where he wrote more verses, and fell in love, or at least thought he did, which comes to the same thing. He was forbidden to see his mistress. After various difficulties in meeting, she wisely concluded that the chances were so uncertain, she had better take someone else. Naturally this serious matter made a deep impression on a boy. He concluded there was nothing to live for and turned more deliberately to literature for consolation. He went seriously to work and never stopped until he died at eighty-four. Had he been able to marry the girl, then—but what's the use in speculating upon that?

Louis XIV died in 1715. His reign was splendid, corrupt and profligate. The people were hungry and turbulent; the notables tyrannical and insolent. The last few years the king was the absolute monarch of France, and he was ruled by a woman and a priest. The news of his death was received with joy by the multitude. Young Voltaire was at the funeral. This funeral resembled a fête more than a day of mourning.

Voltaire by this time was known for his epigrams, his rhymes and his audacity. The salons of Paris were at once opened to him. Whatever else he was during his life, he was never dull, and the world forgives almost anything but stupidity. Commencing early in his life, most of the epigrams and brilliant satires in France were charged to Voltaire. On account of a particularly odious epigram, he was exiled to Sully. His keepers found him a most agreeable guest, and he was at once a favorite in the society of the place. "It would be delightful to stay at Sully," he wrote, "If I were only allowed to go away from it." He spent his time hunting, flirting and writing verses. In his verses and his epigrams he could flatter when he thought flattery would accomplish his end, and by this means his exile was brought to a close and he returned to Paris after an absence of about a year.

No sooner was he back, than a violent attack on the government appeared. This was at once charged to Voltaire, who had in fact not written it. During this time he had been writing his first play, which had been accepted and was then on rehearsal at the theater, but on account of the anonymous verses, which he did not write, he was sent to the Bastille. A few days after he was placed in prison he signed a receipt for "two volumes of Homer, two Indian kerchiefs, a little cap, two cravats, a night cap and a bottle of essence of cloves."

It was some time before he was given a pen and ink, which all his life he needed more than anything else; but without these, he began to compose a new play. He was able to carry in his mind whole cantos of the play and, as Frederick the Great said, "His prison became his Parnassus." Voltaire was not the first or last man to convert a prison into a hall of fame. A prison is confining to the body, but whether it affects the mind, depends entirely upon the mind.

It was while in prison that he changed his name from the one his father gave him—Arouet—to the one he has ma *************

.............................................

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.thehypertexts.com/Louise%20Bogan%20Poet%20Poetry%20Picture%20Bio.htm


The HyperTexts

Louise Bogan: Poems and Quotes

Louise Bogan has long been one of my favorite poets, and it's a shame (actually, a travesty) that she isn't better known today. In my opinion she's a major poet; some critics obviously agree, as she has been called "the most accomplished woman poet of the twentieth century." On this page we have published some of her finest poems, including the hard-to-find "After the Persian," followed by an essay by Jeffrey Woodward on Bogan's poem "The Mark." — Michael R. Burch, editor, The HyperTexts



Louise Bogan Quotes

Innocence of heart and violence of feeling are necessary in any kind of superior achievement: The arts cannot exist without them.
But childhood prolonged, cannot remain a fairyland. It becomes a hell.
Your work is carved out of agony as a statue is carved out of marble.
Perhaps this very instant is your time.
I hope that one or two immortal lyrics will come out of all this tumbling around.
Stupidity always accompanies evil. Or evil, stupidity.
Rank does not confer privilege or give power. It imposes responsibility.
Because language is the carrier of ideas, it is easy to believe that it should be very little else than such a carrier.
No more pronouncements on lousy verse. No more hidden competition. No more struggling not to be a square.
The intellectual is a middle-class product; if he is not born into the class he must soon insert himself into it, in order to exist. He is the fine nervous flower of the bourgeoisie.
In a time lacking in truth and certainty and filled with anguish and despair, no woman should be shamefaced in attempting to give back to the world, through her work, a portion of its lost heart.
The women rest their tired half-healed hearts; they are almost well.
It is not possible, for a poet, writing in any language, to protect himself from the tragic elements in human life ... Illness, old age, and death—subjects as ancient as humanity—these are the subjects that the poet must speak of very nearly from the first moment that he begins to speak.

Pasture, stone wall, and steeple,
What most perturbs the mind:
The heart-rending homely people,
Or the horrible beautiful kind?

Parochial punks, trimmers, nice people, joiners true-blue,
Get the hell out of the way of the laurel.
It is deathless And it isn't for you.



After the Persian

I

I do not wish to know
The depths of your terrible jungle:
From what nest your leopard leaps
Or what sterile lianas are at once your serpents' disguise
and home.

I am the dweller on the temperate threshold,
The strip of corn and vine,
Where all is translucence (the light!)
Liquidity, and the sound of water.
Here the days pass under shade
And the nights have the waxing and the waning moon.
Here the moths take flight at evening;
Here at morning the dove whistles and the pigeons coo.
Here, as night comes on, the fireflies wink and snap
Close to the cool ground,
Shining in a profusion
Celestial or marine.

Here it is never wholly dark but always wholly green,
And the day stains with what seems to be more than the
sun
What may be more than my flesh.

II

I have wept with the spring storm;
Burned with the brutal summer.
Now, hearing the wind and the twanging bow-strings,
I know what winter brings.

The hunt sweeps out upon the plain
And the garden darkens.
They will bring the trophies home
To bleed and perish
Beside the trellis and the lattices,
Beside the fountain, still flinging diamond water,
Beside the pool
(Which is eight-sided, like my heart).

III

All has been translated into treasure:
Weightless as amber,
Translucent as the currant on the branch,
Dark as the rose's thorn.

Where is the shimmer of evil?
This is the shell's iridescence
And the wild bird's wing.

IV

Ignorant, I took up my burden in the wilderness.
Wise with great wisdom, I shall lay it down upon flowers.

V

Goodbye, goodbye!
There was so much to love, I could not love it all;
I could not love it enough.

Some things I overlooked, and some I could not find.
Let the crystal clasp them
When you drink your wine, in autumn.




Song For The Last Act

Now that I have your face by heart, I look
Less at its features than its darkening frame
Where quince and melon, yellow as young flame,
Lie with quilled dahlias and the shepherd's crook.
Beyond, a garden. There, in insolent ease
The lead and marble figures watch the show
Of yet another summer loath to go
Although the scythes hang in the apple trees.

Now that I have your face by heart, I look.

Now that I have your voice by heart, I read
In the black chords upon a dulling page
Music that is not meant for music's cage,
Whose emblems mix with words that shake and bleed.
The staves are shuttled over with a stark
Unprinted silence. In a double dream
I must spell out the storm, the running stream.
The beat's too swift. The notes shift in the dark.

Now that I have your voice by heart, I read.

Now that I have your heart by heart, I see
The wharves with their great ships and architraves;
The rigging and the cargo and the slaves
On a strange beach under a broken sky.
O not departure, but a voyage done!
The bales stand on the stone; the anchor weeps
Its red rust downward, and the long vine creeps
Beside the salt herb, in the lengthening sun.

Now that I have your heart by heart, I see.



Roman Fountain

Up from the bronze, I saw
Water without a flaw
Rush to its rest in air,
Reach to its rest, and fall.

Bronze of the blackest shade,
An element man-made,
Shaping upright the bare
Clear gouts of water in air.

O, as with arm and hammer,
Still it is good to strive
To beat out the image whole,
To echo the shout and stammer
When full-gushed waters, alive,
Strike on the fountain's bowl
After the air of summer.



Juan's Song

When beauty breaks and falls asunder
I feel no grief for it, but wonder.
When love, like a frail shell, lies broken,
I keep no chip of it for token.
I never had a man for friend
Who did not know that love must end.
I never had a girl for lover
Who could discern when love was over.
What the wise doubt, the fool believes
Who is it, then, that love deceives?



The Alchemist

I burned my life, that I may find
A passion wholly of the mind,
Thought divorced from eye and bone
Ecstasy come to breath alone.
I broke my life, to seek relief
From the flawed light of love and grief.

With mounting beat the utter fire
Charred existence and desire.
It died low, ceased its sudden thresh.
I had found unmysterious flesh—
Not the mind's avid substance—still
Passionate beyond the will.



Knowledge

Now that I know
How passion warms little
Of flesh in the mould,
And treasure is brittle,—

I'll lie here and learn
How, over their ground
Trees make a long shadow
And a light sound.



Chanson un Peu Naïve

What body can be ploughed,
Sown, and broken yearly?
But she would not die, she vowed,
But she has, nearly.
Sing, heart sing;
Call and carol clearly.

And, since she could not die,
Care would be a feather,
A film over the eye
Of two that lie together.
Fly, song, fly,
Break your little tether.

So from strength concealed
She makes her pretty boast:
Plain is a furrow healed
And she may love you most.
Cry, song, cry,
And hear your crying lost.



Sonnet

Since you would claim the sources of my thought
Recall the meshes whence it sprang unlimed,
The reedy traps which other hands have times
To close upon it. Conjure up the hot
Blaze that it cleared so cleanly, or the snow
Devised to strike it down. It will be free.
Whatever nets draw in to prison me
At length your eyes must turn to watch it go.
My mouth, perhaps, may learn one thing too well,
My body hear no echo save its own,
Yet will the desperate mind, maddened and proud,
Seek out the storm, escape the bitter spell
That we obey, strain to the wind, be thrown
Straight to its freedom in the thunderous cloud

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/detail/69663

Prose from Poetry Magazine
Public Poetry?
Thomas Sayers Ellis’s Skin, Inc., Timothy Donnelly’s The Cloud Corporation, C.D. Wright’s One with Others, and Elenor Wilner’s Tourist in Hell.
By David Orr
Introduction

All poetry is public, in the sense that every poem implies an audience. But some publics are more public than others. Most contemporary poets, for example, address a public that consists only of close friends, professional acquaintances, and a few handy abstractions like the Ideal Reader and Posterity. This kind of public is very different from (and much smaller and more homogeneous than) the one that buys novels by Zadie Smith or Jonathan Franzen. And of course both of these audiences pale beside the public that we usually think of as “The Public”—the ocean of humanity that votes in elections, watches the Super Bowl, and generally makes America what it is, for better and worse. Poetry has famously little contact with this last and largest public. Indeed, the only such “Public” appearance by a poet in recent memory was Elizabeth Alexander’s reading at the inauguration of President Obama, which earned a predictably ambivalent reaction from segments of poetry’s own public.

But if poets don’t often find themselves reading before a million citizens on the National Mall, that doesn’t mean they don’t address issues of national concern. The question is, which public gets to hear those public thoughts—and exactly how public are they, anyway?

All poetry is public, in the sense that every poem implies an audience. But some publics are more public than others. Most contemporary poets, for example, address a public that consists only of close friends, professional acquaintances, and a few handy abstractions like the Ideal Reader and Posterity. This kind of public is very different from (and much smaller and more homogeneous than) the one that buys novels by Zadie Smith or Jonathan Franzen. And of course both of these audiences pale beside the public that we usually think of as “The Public”—the ocean of humanity that votes in elections, watches the Super Bowl, and generally makes America what it is, for better and worse. Poetry has famously little contact with this last and largest public. Indeed, the only such “Public” appearance by a poet in recent memory was Elizabeth Alexander’s reading at the inauguration of President Obama, which earned a predictably ambivalent reaction from segments of poetry’s own public.

But if poets don’t often find themselves reading before a million citizens on the National Mall, that doesn’t mean they don’t address issues of national concern. The question is, which public gets to hear those public thoughts—and exactly how public are they, anyway?



Skin, Inc.: Identity Repair Poems,by Thomas Sayers Ellis.
Graywolf Press.$23.00.

Thomas Sayers Ellis’s Skin, Inc. follows up his 2005 collection The Maverick Room and focuses on the always fraught issue of race in America, particularly race in American literature, and even more particularly, race in American poetry. The book is roughly 170 pages and is divided into seven sections, some dominated by eponymous long poems (“The Pronoun-Vowel Reparations Song,” for instance), others organized around a theme (“Gone Pop” consists of fifteen poems about Michael Jackson). The work here is conspicuously public in the largest sense, which is to say that Ellis talks about issues of obvious societal concern in a manner that smart general readers might follow, and possibly even admire or criticize. He is blunt, rude, sometimes intentionally clumsy, and determined to get some awkward things said, fair or not. It’s an admirable and sadly unusual thing for a contemporary poet to attempt.

Nor is it easy to pull off. As Ellis realizes, speaking broadly isn’t a matter of writing simply or straightforwardly; on the contrary, there’s an appealing slyness to Ellis’s best poetry that recalls the cagey work of Gwendolyn Brooks, who remains one of the touchstone poets of the modern era. Indeed, in the strongest poems in Skin, Inc., Ellis proves himself a true heir to Brooks’s uncanny talent for addressing multiple audiences while still remaining faithful to her own ambiguities and ambivalent feelings. Most poets, faced with the challenge of such audiences, produce poem-by-committee blandness (q.v., September 11th, poetry thereof). Ellis’s approach, however, is utterly distinctive, even as he happily tosses everything but the kitchen sink onto the page. The diction here ranges from “discourse” to “mo betta” to “eeeeeeeeeeeyow”; forms run the gamut from the villanelle (“A Few Excuses”) to visual poetry (“The Pronoun-Vowel Reparations Song”); and as if that weren’t enough, Ellis throws in photographs and footnotes. The overall effect is of a table sagging with the day’s labor of a manic chef, and individual results can sometimes be similarly excessive (the visual poem is better as an eye chart). But the best work is enriched by its sense of superabundance, as in the beginning of “Or”:

Or Oreo, or
worse. Or ordinary.
Or your choice
of category

or
Color

or any color
other than Colored
or Colored Only.
Or “Of Color”

or
Other

Ellis has an excellent ear, and he uses it here to convey the uncertainty and possibility that surrounds any discussion of race (as Ellis is well aware, the conjunction “or” can be both prison and key). The strongest poem here is “The Identity Repairman,” which takes up the labels—for example, “Negro” and “Colored”—that have attached over time to African-Americans. Here are its final sections:

black

My heart is a fist.
I fix Blackness.
My fist is a heart.
I beat Whiteness.


african american

Before I was born,
I absorbed struggle.
Just looking
at history hurts.

So the heart is a fist (as in Black Power) that “fixes”—repairs—Blackness. But “to fix” also means “to hold in place,” and “to neuter,” allowing Ellis to quietly suggest both the strength and the limitations of the label. Similarly, when the fist becomes a heart that “beat[s] Whiteness,” the victory is necessarily incomplete, because it requires the perpetuation of the thing beaten: the idea of Whiteness is circulated like blood (the heart beats it) even as it is overcome. In work like this, Ellis is writing some of the finest, truly public poetry of our time.

But there is, it has to be said, another, less interesting side to Skin, Inc. This is the side that still clings to an exalted idea of the public that we call the poetry world, and especially the poetry world as filtered through the lens of Cambridge (Ellis went to Harvard). It’s helpful here to pause and think again about the idea of a poem’s “public” presence. When Ellis writes as he does in “The Identity Repairman,” he’s writing for almost anyone who’s ever thought about what it means to talk about himself or herself “as” something. That audience is large, heterogeneous, and interesting. And when he’s writing about poetry—not the poetry world, but poetry itself—that audience, too, is heterogeneous and interesting, if not necessarily large. But who’s the audience for lines like this from “The Judges of Craft”?:

Someone in charge decides.
Someone in charge
designs.

A someone considered worthy of width,
wider than content,
country,
continent.

I have disappointing news, but there’s a big silver lining. We discussed your poems at length and with admiration and excitement, but in the end we didn’t find one in this batch that we felt would be a great début for you in the magazine. It’s just that so many of them are about writing, and we try to shy away from poems explicitly addressing the subject of writing—much less the politics of the writing scene. But you are definitely on the screen here, and I’m only (and deeply) sorry I took so long.

Yes, there is actually a poem in this book that includes the text of various rejection letters that Ellis apparently has received from poetry journals. Imagine a gifted and widely acclaimed operatic tenor pausing mid-song to deliver a rant about how Opera News once failed to mention him in an article, and you’ll have some idea of the jarring note this performance strikes. Along the same lines, Ellis pauses elsewhere in Skin, Inc. to compare John Ashbery’s rhythm and imagery unfavorably to that of “bling-bling,” and to snipe at “the Grolier,” a poetry bookstore in Harvard Square where he apparently worked as a college student.

The problem is not that these criticisms are undeserved. Maybe the editors who sent Ellis rejection notes are indeed insensitive. Maybe Ashbery does pale in comparison with Lil Wayne. Maybe the bookstore was a lousy place. The problem is that these criticisms seem unambitious when compared with the provocations in Ellis’s better work. Who, after all, even knows what “the Grolier” is? Contrary to Ellis’s suggestion, one odd local bookshop isn’t symbolic of “American Poetry,” much less “American Literature,” and considerably much less “American Society.” At most, the store is representative of a provincial subculture in the American poetry world, and on the list of things that are of great cultural import, that probably puts it about even with wherever Boston-area Renaissance Faire participants go to get their tunics hemmed. A writer this good ought not spend his time peeling potatoes this small.

That said, the motivation here isn’t hard to fathom, or to sympathize with. There’s a lingering insecurity behind the swagger in some of these poems, and because Ellis is a tough-minded poet, he’s reluctant to admit (much less surrender) to that uncertainty. So he stands his ground; he pushes back. The instinct is entirely to his credit, but when the thing that makes you feel belittled is itself tiny, then the consequences of such a response can be unfortunate. And there is almost nothing tinier than the poetry world, just as there is almost nothing bigger, stranger, and more disturbing than the bloody country that contains it. It’s clear throughout Skin, Inc. that Ellis is equal to this latter, larger challenge; in his next book, maybe he’ll make it the sole focus of his considerable attention. If so, we will all be, if not repaired, at least made slightly better.



The Cloud Corporation,by Timothy Donnelly.
Wave Books.$16.00.

Timothy Donnelly, like Thomas Sayers Ellis, is a talented writer who has recently released a second collection that isn’t short. But for the most part, the similarities end there. Donnelly’s new book, The Cloud Corporation, is a nearly immaculate exercise in haute academic style, from its aggressively quirky titles (“Team of Fake Deities Arranged on an Orange Plate”) to its deliberately affected tone and pose (“Roll back the stone from the sepulcher’s mouth!”), to its frequently Jamesian syntax (sentences here regularly wind through six or seven lines). On top of that, we have diction borrowed equally from business-speak (“optimize my output”) and the vernacular (“I was totally into it”); the deployment of bizarre phrasing generated by collage (“a consistent sweat paragraph”); a mood of pessimism, anxiety, and unhappiness (“We revolt ourselves; we disgust and annoy us”); general distaste for finance and / or capitalism (“To His Debt”); and finally, a fundamental reliance on abstraction (“the sky again // the temple of the mind perceiving it”). If you were trying to concoct a recipe involving every flavor in the cupboard of the hip contemporary poem, you would come up with The Cloud Corporation. It is the epitome of Our Moment.

And it is, in many respects, a strong statement on the vitality of that moment. That may seem an odd way to put things, given that Donnelly spends roughly 135 of the book’s 140 pages being depressed in some way or another. He is depressed by conspicuous consumption (“the circuitry that suffers me to crave // what I know I’ll never need, or what I need but have / in abundance already”). He is depressed by empire-building and militarism (“that photograph / of women and children shot down by an American / battalion”). But mostly, he’s depressed by the fact that he spends a lot of time inside his own head (“thoughts / lilt back to the terms of this existence, its fundamental // insignificance”). This could all easily end up as sub-Stevensian moping, a sort of “Auroras of Ugh.” But Donnelly is an astonishing technician who is capable of finding nearly infinite shades in the gray of his malaise. Consider the beginning of “Antepenultimate Conflict with Self”:

The times the thought of being pulled apart from
you comes as a relief have now come to outnumber
those it startles me like light from a hurricane
lamp left burning unattended dangerously near
the curtains of the theater we both attend and are.

To unpack: the thought of being separated from his own self now relieves him more often than it threatens him with a sense of impending dissolution (and, of course, who is “he” if not himself). Also, the thought of dissolution is worrying like the prospect of a hurricane lamp threatening a theater (Metaphor #1) that is both attended by the poet and his self (Metaphor #2) and composed of the poet and his self (Metaphor #3). The key to this stanza is its speed, which Donnelly intends to mimic the crazy tilt of the ideas he’s assembling. The lines, with their heavy breaks (“hurricane / lamp”) and densely-packed, interrelated metaphors, come out almost as an exhausted gaspor gulp (it’s not surprising when Donnelly later defines a unit called the “snailsdeath” as being “roughly // equivalent to the pause between swallows in a human / throat”). And if Donnelly’s technical skill is impressive, his humor can be winning. “The world tries hard to bore me to death,” he notes at the beginning of one poem, “but not hard enough.” You can be as mopey as you like when you write this well.

What makes the book more than simply an example of highly polished competence, however, is its peculiar combination of whimsicality and desperation. “Desperation” isn’t a word you’d expect Donnelly to be fond of; it’s all too often a eu

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/thomas-traherne

Thomas Traherne
Poet Details
1637–1674

Unlike the major figures of the "Metaphysical Revival," John Donne and George Herbert, whose works were widely known and discussed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Thomas Traherne is almost wholly a discovery of twentieth-century scholarship. In his own lifetime he published only one book, Roman Forgeries (1673), and, as a clergyman he did not rise to prominence. So obscure is his background, in fact, that scholars once argued about what family and even what part of the country he came from. Biographers have not gone far beyond Anthony Wood, who in Athenæ Oxonienses (1691, 1692) claimed that Traherne was of modest parentage from the Welsh border area, that he attended Brasenose College, Oxford, took an M. A. in 1661, and was soon assigned a living in a parish near Hereford. Later, he was made chaplain to Sir Orlando Bridgeman, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, a connection which was to prove extremely important in identifying him as the author of some anonymous works thought of as indicative of the author of the Centuries and Poems of Felicity . Not long after Wood's account John Aubrey published in his Miscellanies (1696) a brief description of some visions related by Traherne, a basket floating in the air and an oddly attired apprentice, which presumably show his particular piety. If the few biographical remnants can be believed, he was a devoutly religious man, known for his charity to the poor and his rigorous devotional practices. As the anonymous author of the preface to A Serious and Pathetical Contemplation (1699) writes, "He never failed any one day either publickly or in his private closet, to make use of her [the church's] publick offices."

Even though much of the Traherne canon remains unpublished, the discovery of his work is one of the great stories of modern literary scholarship. In the winter of 1896-1897 William T. Brooke came across two manuscripts at a London bookstall. Thinking that they might be the work of Henry Vaughan, he showed them to Alexander Grosart. Convinced that they were Vaughan's, Grosart prepared to bring out a new edition of Vaughan, and, had he lived, it appears that he would have done so. After his death in 1899 the manuscripts found their way to Bertram Dobell, who decided they were the work of someone other than Vaughan. Brooke's acquaintance with an anonymous work, A Serious and Pathetical Contemplation, part of which he had anthologized in The Churchman's Manual of Private and Family Devotion (1883), proved helpful to Dobell. After study he recognized that the author of the manuscripts and the author of A Serious and Pathetical Contemplation were one and the same; but who was that author? The preface to the latter work, hereafter referred to as the Thanksgivings, identified him as chaplain to "the late Lord Keeper Bridgman." Once Dobell consulted Wood, the connection between Bridgeman and Traherne was established. Traherne was known to have written Christian Ethicks (1675), and Dobell discovered that some verse in this work was almost identical with a passage in one of the manuscripts, thus confirming Traherne's authorship. This manuscript, called the "Centuries," was made up of short prose passages interspersed with a few poems. Half of the other manuscript comprised poetry; the rest was devoted to prose extracts and notes. Dobell brought out an edition of the poetry in 1903, and in 1908 he published the "Centuries" as Centuries of Meditations.

Yet there was little that could be added to Wood's biographical sketch. It is known that during Traherne's residence as a student at Brasenose, Oxford was an outpost of Royalist sentiment, and, in fact, the last military outpost of Charles I's forces. Even after the Royalist cause was lost, Oxford remained the center of Royalist publications. Traherne was there for the last eight years of the Protectorate; and, although the Puritans had power, student and faculty sentiment was never with them. The central issue for Traherne (and for many others at Oxford, no doubt) was ecclesiastical thought and practice. It was on the great issue of church government that Traherne wrote the only one of his works that would appear in his lifetime, Roman Forgeries, published anonymously in 1673. Traherne died the following year and was buried on 10 October in Teddington (near Hampton Court) under the reading desk of the church where he had preached. A disputatious essay, Roman Forgeries betrays its academic origins. Speaking in propia persona, Traherne claims that the work grew out of an argument that he had with a Roman Catholic. Having just emerged from the Bodleian Library, Traherne encountered a friend, who introduced him to his cousin, with whom Traherne was soon at loggerheads over the correct definition of a martyr to the Catholic church. Discussion turned, first, on what is unique to the Roman cause (as that would determine the numbers of martyrs Rome could legitimately claim), but it soon devolved into contention over the issue of the ancient documents on which church authority purportedly rested. According to Traherne's account, the other young man, apparently in frustration, denied that it made any difference whether or not contested documents were forgeries. Leaping on this statement as his point of departure, Traherne advanced his own thesis that the early church was uncorrupted by arbitrary power.

More than any of his other writings (except perhaps for certain entries in his unpublished "Commonplace Book"), Roman Forgeries exhibits Traherne's training as a scholar. It has been suggested that the work might have been Traherne's M. A. thesis. The work proceeds from the narrative of this heated exchange on various doctrinal issues (transubstantiation, papal authority, purgatory, the doctrine of merits, and so on) to the textual thesis of the volume, which Traherne presents dramatically. He braces his friend's cousin: "You met me this Evening at the Library door; if you please to meet me there to morrow morning at eight of the Clock, I will take you in; and we will go from Class to Class, from Book to Book, and there I will first shew you in your own Authors, that you publish such Instruments for good Records; and then prove, that those Instruments are downright frauds and forgeries, though cited by you upon all occasions." Traherne's interlocutor gives a flippant response, but agrees to continue the debate, and the thesis unfolds.

The tone of Roman Forgeries is at times so intemperate that some Traherne critics have felt obliged to apologize for it. This is a little bit like apologizing for an epic because there is violence in it; the flaw of intemperate diction in Roman Forgeries, if it is a flaw, is a shared feature of polemical treatises of the time. As modern readers look back at the issues involved in Roman Forgeries, they might be tempted to think of the participants as excessive or naive. But this may reflect a twentieth-century preference for such words as "xenophobia" to describe phenomena once delineated as "nationalism." One need only look at areas of controversy—economic, social, and military policies, for instance—to recognize how a tone of intemperance persists as part of polemical rhetoric, even though the subjects of controversy have changed considerably. Certainly Roman Forgeries exhibits erudition far in excess of most current doctoral dissertations in the humanities. Yet it must be admitted that Traherne stacks the deck by eliminating questions of doctrine. Furthermore, he insists that the only legitimate claims for Catholic authority date from before the year 420. Making the pronouncements of the Nicene Council the virtual equivalent of Scripture, Traherne builds his case for the earliest practices as the only ground of ecclesiastical order. The fact that the Vatican housed most of the relevant manuscripts, then, "proves" Traherne's major thesis that the documents had been corrupted, misused, or suppressed. Roman Forgeries builds on a conspiratorial theory of history, which goes hand in hand with the abusive tone of the work—in this respect atypical of Traherne's poems and Centuries.

Christian Ethicks: Or, Divine Morality. Opening the Way to Blessedness, By the Rules of Vertue and Reason concerns many of the same issues, but the latter work is more concerned with the theological implications of Calvinist thought on freedom and necessity. Besides, this posthumous work is not at all polemical. On the contrary, parts of it are imbued with the themes and style of the Centuries and poems. With Christian Ethicks, Traherne comes as close as he gets to sustained theological discourse, and yet this work (as the subtitle suggests) is more ethical than religious in nature. Indeed, many features of the work can be construed as part of a reaction against the overheated, legalistic aspects of the controversy surrounding Calvinist thought on predestination. In this way, Traherne's work can be seen as a reaction against such thinkers as Thomas Hobbes; Traherne resists the tendency toward a conventional ethics. (History gave the victory to his adversaries in at least this matter.)

Yet, like Hobbes and Francis Bacon before him (in the unpublished "Early Notebook" Traherne includes a lengthy extract from Bacon's De Augmentis Scentiarum , 1623), Traherne was fascinated by the "new science," in particular, by its notion of infinite space, which he incorporates in some of his best writings. The interest in science of religious poets of the time is not sufficiently appreciated today; critics interested in "demystifying" the beliefs of poets like Herbert and Traherne are particularly inclined to ignore it in favor of an emphasis on their retrograde attachment to liturgical forms and the like. In any case, Traherne implicitly denies in Christian Ethicks the secular foundation of ethics by refusing to recognize any difference between justice and the other virtues. He stresses the individual's free and open access to the infinite enjoyment of "Felicity": "WHEN our own Actions are Regular, there is nothing in the World but may be made conducive to our highest Happiness." The only apparent obstacle to this enjoyment is a failure on man's part to exercise the God-given capacity of will: "This I would have you note well, for the intrinsick Goodness and Glory of the Soul consists in the Perfection of an excellent Will."

It may sound as if, in the end, Traherne succumbs to a Calvinist view of man's incapacity to preserve the innocent "seeing" of the infant, but nothing could be more remote from his thought on the subject. He recognizes human limitation, but he does not emphasize it, and he surely does not build a system of belief on it:

IT is a great Error to mistake the Vizor for the Face, and no less to stick in the outward Kind and Appearance of things; mistaking the Alterations and Additions that are made upon the Fall of Man, for the whole Business of Religion. And yet this new Constellation of Vertues, that appeareth aboveboard, is almost the only thing talked of and understood in the World. Whence it is that the other Duties, which are the Soul of Piety, being unknown, and the Reason of these together with their Original and Occasion, unseen; Religion appears like a sour and ungratefull Thing to the World, impertinent to bliss, and void of Reason; Whereupon GOD is suspected and hated, Enmity against GOD and Atheism, being brought into, and entertained in the World.

The crucial word in this thoughtful passage is "bliss." If one knows oneself, one knows the infinite love of God, which is infinitely expressed:

HE that would not be a stranger to the Universe, an Alien to Felicity, and a foreiner to himself, must Know GOD to be an infinite Benefactor, all Eternity, full of Treasures, the World it self, the Beginning of Gifts, and his own Soul the Possessor of all, in Communion with the Deity.

By a perhaps mysterious geometry of the cosmos, the soul is like a multifaced sand crystal, infinitely extended because of its connection--"Communion"--with God. Thus, one of the poems included in Christian Ethicks

reads:



In all Things, all Things service do to all:

And thus a Sand is Endless, though most small.

And every Thing is truly Infinite,

In its Relation deep and exquisite.

The "Sand is Endless" because it presents the self with an occasion to see and know infinity. Traherne's expression here is not logical; nor do the chapters of Christian Ethicks proceed logically. The order of the cosmos--and of the work--may seem like disorder, but it is illuminated in the smallest segment: "its Relation deep and exquisite."

The more one reads Traherne, the more one is struck by the incantatory effects of repetition. Traherne piles up words and phrases, proliferating synonyms, as if to suggest that individual segments, isolated by junctures in periodic sentences, might--or might not--suffice to convey a sense of the immensity of the infinite world:

THE Sun is a glorious Creature, and its Beams extend to the utmost Stars, by shining on them it cloaths them with light, and by its Rayes exciteth all their influences. It enlightens the Eyes of all the Creatures: It shineth on forty Kingdomes at the same time, on Seas and Continents in a general manner; yet so particularly regardeth all, that every Mote in the Air, every Grain of Dust, every Sand, every Spire of Grass is wholly illuminated thereby, as if it did entirely shine upon that alone. Nor does it onely illuminate all these Objects in an idle manner, its Beams are Operative, enter in, fill the Pores of Things with Spirits, and impregnate them with Powers, cause all their Emanations, Odors, Vertues and Operations; Springs, Rivers, Minerals and Vegetables are all perfected by the Sun, all the Motion, Life and sense of Birds, Beasts and Fishes dependth on the same.

Passages like this, critics have argued, suggest a new attitude, associated with the romanticism that was to emerge a century later, concerning man's relationship with nature. Because of his themes of nature and of childhood innocence, Traherne is often compared to William Wordsworth. But his radically synecdochic style has more in common with William Blake or Walt Whitman. For them, the word is a miniature epiphany of divine love in the world; and it is this theme, which is poetic but which, for Traherne, bore important theological implications, that carries over from Christian Ethicks to his poems and Centuries."

As for Traherne's poetry, only the poems in Christian Ethicks and Thanksgivings appeared during the seventeenth century. The great critics of the Restoration and of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries--Wordsworth, John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Joseph Addison, Samuel Johnson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin--had never heard of Traherne. It has been suggested that the famous opening of Blake's "Auguries of Innocence," "To see the World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, / Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand / And Eternity in an hour," owes something to Traherne's Centuries : "You never Enjoy the world aright, till you see how a Sand Exhibtieth the Wisdom and Power of God." But there is no evidence that Blake ever saw the manuscript of the Centuries, which was not "discovered" until 1875, and not published until 1908."

Furthermore, even though several volumes of Traherne's writings appeared in the first half of the twentieth century, critical attention was slow in coming until the publication in 1958 of H. M. Margoliouth's two-volume, Clarendon Press edition of Centuries, Poems, and Thanksgivings. Other editions followed, and, from time to time, sch .........................

more at link

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/detail/69643

Prose from Poetry Magazine
Poetry And, Of, and About
Language, the law, and lazy power.
By David Orr

The anthology on my desk is titled Poetry of the Law: From Chaucer to the Present, edited by David Kader (a law professor at Arizona State) and Michael Stanford (a public defender in Phoenix). I’m both a lawyer and a poetry critic, so asking me to discuss this book would seem to present an especially harmonious pairing of subject and analyst—like handing an animal cracker recipe to a zoologist-pastry chef. And indeed, flipping through, I find plenty of work that appeals to me as a reader of poems who is also, when necessary, a filer of briefs. We have some well-chosen passages from Spenser (“Then up arose a person of deepe reach, / . . . / That well could charme his tongue, and time his speach”), an intriguing poetic performance from the seminal jurist Sir William Blackstone (“The Lawyer’s Farewell to His Muse”), and a number of more recent efforts that, while mixed in quality, manage to give the reader a sense of the ways in which contemporary poetry can encompass legal subjects. Lawrence Joseph’s “Admissions against Interest,” for example, nicely captures the atmosphere of nervous, chilly efficiency that permeates American corporate law, as in the beginning of the second section:

Now, what type of animal asks after facts?
—so I’m a lawyer. Maybe charming,

direct yet as circumspect as any other lawyer
going on about concrete forces of civil

society substantially beyond anyone’s grasp
and about money. Things like “you too

may be silenced the way powerful
corporations silence, contractually”

attract my attention.

Not the warmest way in which to regard legal thinking, but then, the average lawyer’s existence rarely bears much resemblance to the life of Ben Matlock, let alone Atticus Finch. Poems by Browning, Kenneth Fearing, and the underrated William Empson are similarly successful at engaging with legal concepts and language. As with any anthology, there are a few pieces that don’t quite come off (“Why does a hearse horse snicker / Hauling a lawyer away?” asks Carl Sandburg, inviting prosecution for felony anthropomorphizing). But the project as a whole is a pleasure for the casual reader, as any collection of good poems ought to be.

And yet something here is slightly troubling. Not the book itself—or at least, not this book in particular. Rather, there’s something unsettling in the preposition that anchors this anthology’s title: poetry of the law. The phrasing is an interesting choice. One can understand, of course, the practical reasoning behind it; for one thing, that “of” permits the inclusion of poems whose relation to the law is, to put it mildly, tenuous. For instance, John Ashbery’s “Ignorance of the Law Is No Excuse” begins:

We were warned about spiders, and the occasional famine.
We drove downtown to see our neighbors. None of them were home.
We nestled in yards the municipality had created,
reminisced about other, different places—
but were they? Hadn’t we known it all before?

Title aside, this poem isn’t “about” the law in any meaningful sense; it could just as easily have been called “Déjà vu Redux” or “Concerning the Halibut, However, We Were Sadly Uninformed.” We’d read it exactly the same way. But if we say the poem is “of” the law rather than simply “about” the law—well, surely that provides more room to maneuver. And it’s comforting, isn’t it, to suppose that pursuits like law and poetry aren’t really “about” each other in the almost aggressive way that instruction manuals are about food processors, but rather are as delicately interrelated as sea and shore, or bees and roses.

* * *

Are they, though? And what does that “of” really signify, anyway? In order to answer that question, it’s first necessary to recognize that an anthology like this one isn’t simply positioned between two subjects, but two audiences. The first is the one I mentioned earlier: the general, casual reader; the person who picks up a book called Poetry of the Law because he’s a lawyer who’s always liked Whitman, or because he’s a poetry reader whose beloved Uncle Ralph was a public defender in Gatlinburg. The second potential audience consists of scholars, and more particularly, as the editors of Poetry of the Lawput it, “scholars of law and literature.”

That description may require some explanation. Most people probably would assume that the phrase “scholars of law and literature” is meant to refer to scholars of law and also, separately, to scholars of literature. But what Kader and Stanford actually have in mind here is a specific movement in the legal academy known as (bingo) “law and literature.” As they put it:

In 1973, James Boyd White’s The Legal Imagination inaugurated the scholarly study of law and literature. Since then, it has burgeoned as an academic field, yielding dozens of books, hundreds of articles, and several specialized journals.

They aren’t kidding. The past two and a half decades have given us Law and Literature(a journal edited at Cardozo School of Law), Law and Literature(a book by Richard Posner), Law and Literature: Text and Theory(by Lenora Ledwon), Law and Literature: Possibilities and Perspectives(by Ian Ward), A Critical Introduction to Law and Literature(by Kieran Dolin), and Law and Literature: How to Respond When the Epistolary Novel Files a Motion to Dismiss Pursuant to frcp 12(b)(6)(okay, maybe not that one). In any case, there’s a lot of material out there. “Yet for all the richness of this scholarship,” as the editors observe, “[the law and literature movement] has focused almost entirely on fiction and drama.” So part of the goal of Poetry of the Law is to demonstrate that poetry, like its sister arts, can provide “considerable new matter worthy of study.”

And who wouldn’t want that? But when we’re talking about new matter worthy of study, we should acknowledge that the project taken up by Poetry of the Law is different from that of anthologies focused on, for instance, bicycles or basketball. This is a distinction that gets elided, however, when the editors assert that this book

fill[s] a striking gap in the universe of contemporary poetry anthologies, which includes, after all, multiple collections of poems focused on such central human concerns as love, war, and politics, as well as...more specialized topics like travel, sports, dogs, cats, birds, flowers, mothers, fathers, and poetry itself.

That sounds reasonable. But an anthology of poems about love might include work from Rilke, Szymborska, and Li Po; the same goes for an anthology about travel. Poetry of the Law, though, includes only poets from the United States, Great Britain, and Ireland, and could therefore be more accurately titled Poetry of the Common Law Tradition, Extending into Modern American Jurisprudence—or more simply, Poetry for the Modern American Law School. It’s not entirely correct, then, to say that this book intends to give us poems having to do with a “central human concern” (like love) or interesting things that pretty much everyone can look at or participate in (like roller coasters or birthday parties). This is, rather, a book that aims at something a little more peculiar: uniting the specific, local incarnations of two modern practices. It’s a book about combining academic disciplines.

* * *

And with that, the dread word “interdisciplinary” descends. Before going any further, though, I’d probably better explain what I mean by referring to poetry as an “academic discipline.” As countless letters to Poetry have demonstrated, the academic status of poetry is a subject that gets poets riled up—and while being riled up is often a fine thing, especially for poets, it’s usually best to save that sort of energy for subjects that deserve it. So the claim here is modest and, I think, inarguable: At present, the single largest institutional factor in the world of American poetry is the American university system (as opposed to, say, the world of corporate publishing or the non-profit arts sector). Poets are largely employed by universities or are trying to become so; the audience for poetry, such as it is, exists largely within the university; and a large part of the distribution of poetry in the us is handled by universities, typically by means of academic presses. The art form, as Mark McGurl put it recently in The Program Era, “has been all but entirely absorbed by institutions of higher education.”

For reasons I’ll explain shortly, I believe the “all but” in McGurl’s characterization is an essential qualifier. But for now, the point is simply that poetry exists in large part as a manifestation of creative writing departments (and again, I’m neither praising nor condemning this structure, merely acknowledging that this is the lay of the land). As such, poetry is now exposed to the same anxieties that all academic practices face, one of which is simply the anxiety that comes from realizing that one’s fellow practitioners are modern academics arranged in (or maybe confined in) a discipline.

The critic Louis Menand believes this anxiety helps account for the intense popularity of interdisciplinary studies, the university trend that motivates and sustains books like Poetry of the Law and has given rise to such academic sub-specialties as the philosophy of physics and evolutionary psychology. Interdisciplinarity is, as Menand puts it in The Marketplace of Ideas, simply “the name for teaching and scholarship that bring together methods and materials from more than one academic discipline,” and “there are few terms in twenty-first-century higher education with a greater buzz factor . . . No one, or almost no one, says a word against it. It is evoked by professors and by deans with equal enthusiasm.” Menand himself is skeptical about this excitement, however, and speculates (this is a long quote, but bear with it):

Maybe, in the case of the academic subject, self-consciousness about disciplinarity and about the status of the professor . . . is a source of anxiety. . . . Academics have been trained to believe that there must be a contradiction between being a scholar or an intellectual and being part of a system of socialization. They are conditioned to think that their workplace does not operate like a market, even as they compete with one another for status and advantage. Most of all, they are ambivalent about the status they have worked so hard to achieve. Interdisciplinary anxiety is a displaced anxiety about the position of privilege that academic professionalism confers on its initiates and about the peculiar position of social disempowerment created by the barrier between academic workers and the larger culture.

So the desire to reach toward other disciplines often isn’t so much a way of combating the limits of one’s own methods as a manifestation of a deeper co

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/detail/69713

Prose from Poetry Magazine
I Thought You Were a Poet
A Notebook.
By Joshua Mehigan

Samuel Johnson, in his life of Dryden, reports that throughout the spring of 1686 the fifty-six-year-old laureate could often be seen strolling Leicester Field at daybreak, barefoot, in his nightclothes, skimming dew from leaves into a glass beaker. Dryden apparently ignored anyone who addressed him during these excursions. The beaker full, he would disappear into 44 Gerrard Street to work, in the same nightclothes, on The Hind and the Panther. No one is sure what Dryden did with the dew. Johnson admits uneasily that he is supposed to have drunk it, though Green and Giordani argue that he used it to boil gallnuts for ink. According to neighbors, Dryden sometimes leaned from his study window during work and in an inaudible whisper asked passing children or carriages to be quiet while elaborately pretending to shoot them down with bow and arrow. At 1:00 pm sharp, Dryden would scratch out his last five couplets, rise from his writing desk, pray, dress, and walk to his day job as Historiographer Royal, where he behaved normally. At day’s end he went home, dined with his wife, took laudanum, and slept with an upholstered wood block for a pillow.

In my experience, if a contemporary reader of poetry has never before heard this account of Dryden, it can add considerable interest. I know this was true for me, and I made the whole thing up. I like Dryden well enough (what I’ve read) and I don’t mean to suggest he’s not great, only that today, as Ian Ousby says in The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English, he is often “admired but not quite enjoyed.” This phrase surely describes the reputation of most Augustan poets, and I wonder if it could have anything to do with their sense of balance and self-control, with their methodical technique and taste for grace and wit—in short, with their relative sanity. Part of the fun of a poet is rehearsing the legend, even if it’s false. In Dryden’s case, whatever gossip exists—his cruel taunting of Thomas Shadwell or his Catholic conversion—may seem tame if you’ve heard the one about the Blakes playing Adam and Eve in the garden. But poetic eccentricity is a game of continual escalation. Like the gossip it creates, it’s both sensational and boring.

•

Onward from Enheduanna, poets seem almost required to manifest some degree of psychic disturbance, whether as a true affliction, a poetic persona, or a pose. “Despondency and madness” were the expectation before Wordsworth, and reached pandemic proportions in the twentieth century. Readers are disappointed by poets who aren’t at least a little mad, which is to say visionary, melancholic, tormented, debauched, or somehow awry. The prodromal period in English-language poetry seems to have been the eighteenth century, otherwise known for its high appraisal of order and reason. But some minds we might imagine as tidy—Johnson’s, for instance—are thought to have been privately a little off. Things really got rolling with William Collins, Christopher Smart, and William Cowper, and then it was one small step to Thomas Chatterton, whose decision to drink arsenic at seventeen helped make suicide cool. (Henry Wallis’s Tiger Beat portrait shows the garret window ajar so that Chatterton’s soul can escape.) Smart was the eldest of this wave to put florid psychosis into his writing, but Blake made poetic capital from it, positioning himself not as a lunatic but a seer. On the continent, Hölderlin was smitten by both Apollo and madness. Now the gate stood open, and out flew Byron, Keats, and Shelley, and John Clare, and Thomas Lovell Beddoes, who followed Chatterton, along with all Miss Flite’s other birds, including Wigs, Rags, Sheepskin, Plunder, Precedent, Jargon, Gammon, and Spinach.

In Paris, as everyone knows, Gérard de Nerval walked his lobster Thibault on a ribbon through the Palais-Royal gardens. American lunacy found its apotheosis in Poe. And where Blake’s madness had mirrored Ezekiel’s, Baudelaire, Lautréamont, and Rimbaud sought transport in dissipation. By Modernism, the greatest poets are like the villains on the old Batmantv show, each known for his or her own inimitable brand of eccentricity, whether it’s Marianne Moore’s tricorn, Cummings’s typography, or Pound’s broadcasting career. This is also the period when sane poets begin composing poetry reminiscent of schizophrenia, like these lines from Gertrude Stein:

Do I see cake Do I do the reverse of acting
Yes Do I feel sensually deceived
thoughts in mental suggestion in increase of
senses in suggestion
senses deceptive
in in deception deception deception
deception
vanilla lemon as lemon vanilla as the beginning
of in in suggestion suggestion suggestion
suggestion of the suggestions as the
beginning of in suggestion

Real despondency and madness also continued, with a host of poets whose lives have earned wider repute than their poems. Meanwhile, many poets said to define our period, from Eliot to Ginsberg, and from Ashbery to Jorie Graham, have forged styles that echo the dislocations of madness: fragmented language, surreal imagery, oblique thought, shifting points of view, violent emotion. Surrealism, Dada, Imagism, the Beats, the Black Mountain poets, Language Poetry, and Flarf all adopt one or more of these characteristics as constitutive. But the power of this general stylistic tendency can also be felt in the work of popular poets like Mary Oliver, of traditionalists like Anthony Hecht and Donald Justice, and perhaps also of most mfa students.

•

On the subject of poetry and mental illness, I can’t pretend to impartiality. First, I and many of my closest friends and acquaintances are poets. Second, I’ve been extensively treated for what insurance companies resourcefully call “behavioral health” problems. While I have often behaved in behaviorally unhealthy ways, I should add for clarity’s sake that I am also diagnosed with disorders thought to be caused not by behavior at all but by inborn neurochemical imbalances. Many of my closest friends exhibit “behavioral health” issues as well, sometimes diagnosed and sometimes not, but plain to everyone. As someone preoccupied with both madness and poetry, I’ve often wondered what’s lost in the gap at the center of the collocation “mad poet.”

•

The above-quoted passage isn’t really the writing of Gertrude Stein but, according to Dr. Silvano Arieti, author of Interpretation of Schizophrenia, that of “a very regressed schizophrenic.” This is the last time I’ll lie for effect (here).

•

People still think of poets as an odd bunch, as you’ll know if you’ve been introduced as one at a wedding. Some poets spotlight this conception by saying otherworldly things, playing up afflictions and dramas, and otherwise hinting that they might be visionaries. In the past few centuries, of course, the standard picture of psychopathology has changed a great deal. But as it’s often invoked, the idea of the mad poet preserves, in fossil form, a stubbornly outdated and incomplete image of madness. Modern psychiatry and neuroscience have supplanted this image almost everywhere else. It’s true that these sciences are still young and still vexed by Freud’s ghost. But, in spite of horrors like insulin shock therapy, lobotomy, and overmedication, they’ve given us the crucial knowledge that insanity is not caused by supernatural forces, lovesickness, or wrath. They’ve dispelled unhelpful belief in conditions like spirit possession, tipped uterus, astral misalignment, and humorous imbalance. True, older medicine created those beliefs. But science, unlike magic, has the advantage of changing course, and slowly there emerge life-changing legislation and therapies. In 1961, Michel Foucault worried about the consequences of this new paradigm, but fifty years later the Stultifera Navis sails upstream to the heart of Poetryland. In his conclusion to Madness and Civilization, discussing Artaud, Nietzsche, and Van Gogh, Foucault writes: “madness is precisely the absence of the work of art.”

•

I had a philosophy professor, once, who visited the ussr in the late fifties for a debate. He met people in the countryside who fretfully asked whether he thought Sputnik would discover Heaven.

•

Fashion, which hyperbolizes everything until it’s both excessive and compulsory, must have something to do with the literary dimension of poetic madness. Still, nothing could be more obvious than the fact that some deep connection exists between “madness” and the compressed thought and emotion typical of memorable art. When I haphazardly list twenty-five poets I’ve known—most, as it happens, with books, and some with big awards—the group includes two suicides, two attempted suicides, twelve on meds, three who’ve been committed, and two treated with electroconvulsive therapy. There are fifteen addicts, mainly recovering (eleven alcoholics, assorted coke and heroin addicts, and an opium addict). Only three have no mood issues or addictions. But these aren’t simply occupational hazards. Extremity, natural and artificial, often helps poets wrest something sublime from the “dividing and indifferent blue.” For many poets, it is crucial, whether as a pitiful love obsession or a belief that one is actually Lord Byron.

•

Could I be conflating “visionary” and “mad”? Maybe. But I’ve never had a vision. I’ve never known anyone who has had a vision without drugs or severe illness. I therefore assume that most visionaries are either psychotic or shamming, or that they are imitating other visionaries who are psychotic, shamming, or imitating. If this assumption holds, it may be that much recent visionary poetry is written by imitators imitating imitators imitating imitators imitating imi ........................

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/detail/70040

Prose from Poetry Magazine
Sharp Biscuit — Some Thoughts on Translating
Notes from a guilty business.
By Michael Hofmann

A handful of lucky or gifted poets fill their lives with poetry. I’m thinking of the likes of Ashbery, Brodsky, Ted Hughes, Les Murray. They write, respectively wrote poems, it seems to me, practically 
every day, the way prose writers write their novels. The date at the bottom of Mandelstam poems. Plath poems. It’s a question of the force of the gift, the pounds-per-square-inch of the Muse. Heaney, too, comes close. The rest of us strike compromises, do something else “as well,” mostly teach, in a handful of cases, do other, unrelated work, have “a job” in the “real world.” The job is the enemy of the poetry, its successful, favored rival (the job is everything, the poem nothing; who wants the poem, and who doesn’t want the job?), but may also be the dirt from which the poetry grows. Such, anyway, is my hope, translating.

•

Meetings with remarkable translators. To coin a phrase. The first was Ralph Manheim (translator of Grass and Handke, then as now the two most prominent living German authors, but also of Brecht and Céline and Danilo Kiš and any number of others — Mein Kampf, anyone?), who invited me to drinks at his flat in Paris. A native of Chicago, if  I remember, and one of the great generation of American translators that was produced by the war. 1980, 1982, something like that. Six o’clock. Yard-arm time. I turn up, meet him and his charming wife, who has suffered a stroke and whom he is looking after. 
I feel a bond with him: the unusual, “thin” spellings of our names, he has only one n in his, I have only one f in the same place, plus he is exactly fifty years older than me, born in 1907. We talk about the vexatious Handke, who is also living in Paris, and with whom he says, in a gallant adaptation of the German idiom (which exists in the negative form), “ist gut Kirschen essen,” you can share a bowl of cherries, i.e., a companionable and generous and uncomplicated sort. I demur, but he says it, and he may after all be right. (Years later, I am with friends in Paris. Very late, long after supper, there is a knock on the door, it is Peter Handke, who only ever walks everywhere, 
unannounced, with his hat full of  mushrooms he has picked. They are straightaway cooked and eaten, and I am surprised by Handke, who is tanned and strong and kind, and has a firm handshake, and I think about the cherries, and the Manheims.) I drink a beer, they both have whiskey. Ralph has come from his office in another building. The sense, then, of  it being a job, that he keeps regular hours, locks it up and comes home. Doesn’t allow it to sprawl greedily or disfiguringly over his life. I think, if  I think at all, of  my father who writes at home, giving dictation — furthermore — to my mother, in what passes for our living room. His writing is everywhere, fills the airwaves, fills our family space, governs our lives like national economy.

Then Joseph Brodsky, some time later in the eighties, in the Tufnell Park flat of a friend of  his. Espresso and Vecchio Romano in a somewhat redundant, spotless kitchen. (He wrote about Auden’s “real library of a kitchen” in Kirchstetten, but I guess that for him and in his life, most of the action will have been in, so to speak, the real kitchen of this or that library. As he said, “freedom is a library”; it isn’t a kitchen.) “Circumcised” cigarettes. The practiced fingers pull out the sponge, pull out the fluff, discard the fluff, return the sponge. Only then is it safe to smoke. He is translating Cavafy, whom he loves. The classicism, the history, the anonymity. Into Russian. He has brought with him from New York a Russian portable typewriter he is using. Greek into Cyrillic. In bourgeois north London. A bizarre, Conradian phenomenon. The translator as bacillus.

Maybe one more. A rare (for me) gathering of translators in New York City, perhaps some awards ceremony, I don’t remember. We fill the front stalls of a theater somewhere, feeling unusually 
effervescent, like a gathering of missionaries, or spies on day release. Optimistic. Righteous. Both full of ourselves and among ourselves, unter uns. Ourselves alone — Sinn Féin. The charabanc effect. To make things better/worse, Paul Auster is brought on to address us. Then someone announces that Gregory Rabassa is of the company, somewhere right and front of  us. A slight, stooped figure rises, bows. From the stage, a beam tries to pick him out, to try and somehow give him some plasticity. I don’t think I would recognize him on the street. The first translator I was aware of, I read his Marquez when I was twenty, and doorstepped his London publishers. (Remember Marquez’s praise for him as “the best Latin American writer in the English language”?) A little pencil mustache, maybe? An imperial? I doubt myself, and think probably I’m making it up, extrapolating, literarizing. We applaud frantically. Such are the heroes of a secret business, a guilty business, even.

•

I translate to try to amount to something. When I first held my first book of poems in my hands (the least extent acceptable to the British Library, forty-eight pages including prelims), I thought it would fly away. To repair a deficit of  literature in my life. My ill-advised version 
of Cartesianism: traduco, ergo sum. Ill-advised because the translator has no being, should neither be seen nor heard, should be (yawn) faithful, should be (double yawn) a plate of glass. Well, Kerrang!!!

•

Many, if not most translators, operate with an acquired language, or languages, and their own, which is the one, according to Christopher Logue, they have to be really good at. (I never trust people who translate both into and out of a language: isn’t there something unsanitary about that, like drinking the bathwater?) That brings a certain dispassion to their proceedings, a lab coat, tweezers, a fume cupboard. But both my languages are “my own”: German, my so-called mother tongue, and English, which I have no memory of  learning at the age of four, and was the language I first read and wrote in. Both are lived languages, primal languages: the one of family and first namings, and now, of companionship and love; the other of decades of, I hope, 
undetectable and successful assimilation in England. Which should I be without?

I was happily bilingual till my mid-twenties, when I began, by economic necessity, to translate. The matching of my two languages is an inner process, the setting of a broken bone, a graft, the healing of a wound. Perhaps it can even be claimed that in me German is in some way an open wound, which is soothed and brought to healing by the application of  English. Translation as a psychostatic necessity. Look, there is no break in my life, no loss of Eden, no loss of childhood certainties, no discontinuity, no breach, no rupture, no expulsion. English, then, as a bandage, a splint, a salve.

•

Late on in my translation of my father’s novel of small town Germany in the thirties and forties, The Film Explainer, about his grandfather, my great-grandfather, you may read:

Anyone who now saw Grandfather on the street, under his artist’s hat, with which “he shields his thick skull from others’ ideas” (Grandmother) no longer said: Hello, Herr Hofmann! He said: Heil Hitler! Or: Another scorcher!

Yes, this one is ontologically and humorously important to me, it’s a family book, the hero’s name is Hofmann, and I identify with everyone in it, because they’re all a part of me: the vainglorious oldster (like me, a wearer of hats), the acerbic Grandmother, the anxious-to-please small boy — but even beyond that, the expressing of that history, its domestication in English, gives me immense satisfaction. Where is the rift, the breach, if it is a matter of chance whether you say the Terry-Thomas “Another scorcher!” or the truly villainous “Heil Hitler!” It could just as well have happened to you, it implies, and: look, I am making a joke of it, and: how can you think I am different. I am putting together something in myself, and in my history.

Hence — though of course no one likes a bad review — the way 
I react unusually badly (it seems to me) to mistakes (I do make them) and to readers’ or reviewers’ rebukes. It interferes with my healing, my knitting-together, my convalescence. It tears off a bandage, and scrapes open my hurt, or my heart. Don’t disturb my circles, I think.

•

Translation is the production of words, hundreds of thousands of words, by now many millions of words. I prefer short books, I am lazy, I am a poet, one page is usually plenty for me. But even so, the long books have snuck up on me, and passed through me. The Radetzky March perhaps 140,000 words. Two long Falladas, two hundred thousand apiece. Fallada short stories, another hundred thousand. Ernst Jünger 130,000, and with a bunch of other war books — how did I get into that? — comfortably four hundred thousand. Sixty books, millions and millions of words, like millions and millions of numbers, like π, an unreal number. Once I notice myself starting to repeat (    . . .    3141592    . . .    ), I promise myself, then I will stop.

•

This is all distraction on an industrial scale, the “still small voice” of poetry decibelled over, my puny resources vastly overstretched, the six-stone weakling unhappily running amok with a chest expander. 
In the Nietzsche  /  Jünger way, it will either kill me, or make me strong. Again, how did it happen? Out of fealty to my novelist father: prose. Out of my German nature: Tüchtigkeit, energetic production, industry, diligence. Out of dissatisfaction with my own slow, wool-gathering, window-gazing methods: all-consuming tasks in unbroken 
sequence. Out of a desire to make more — and heavier — books: translation. Given his druthers, what does moony Narcissus take upon himself? — Why, the labors of  Hercules!

•

If you want someone to look after your sentences for you, who or what better than a poet? If you want someone to regulate — enterprisingly regulate — your diction, cadence your prose, hook a beginning 
to an ending, jam an ending up against a beginning, drive a green fuse through the gray limbs of clauses — a poet. If you’re looking for prose with dignity, with surprise, with order, with attention to detail. That’s why the first item in Tom Paulin’s book of electric free translations, The Road to Inver, is his version of the opening of  Camus’s The Plague. Prose. Well, up to a point.

•

And the resources, the tools? Well, they ca ..................................

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/detail/69680

Prose from Poetry Magazine
Reading the Living Archives: The Witness of Literary Art
To hell and back, with poetry. 
By Carolyn Forché

The letter arrived on a series of plain postcards in Joseph Brodsky’s penciled cursive, mailed separately from his newly imposed exile in Ann Arbor, Michigan, very near the township of my childhood. They contained his advice to a young poet brash enough to send her youthful efforts to him. You should consider including in your poems more of your own, well, philosophy, he wrote. And on another card: It is also a pity that you do not read Russian, but I think you should try to read Anna Akhmatova.

It was, I believe, two years earlier that I had read excerpts from the transcript of Brodsky’s trial in the former Soviet Union, condemning him to forced labor. When asked on what authority he pronounced himself a poet, he had answered that the vocation came from God. Now he was advising me to read Akhmatova, and so that winter I went into the stacks of the Library of Congress and found a volume of her poems, translated by Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward. Kneeling on the floor between the shelves, I read a passage no doubt well known to readers of Poetry:

In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror I spent seventeen months waiting in line outside the prison in Leningrad. One day somebody in the crowd identified me. Standing behind me was a woman, with lips blue from the cold, who had, of course, never heard me called by name before. Now she started out of the torpor common to us all and asked me in a whisper (everyone whispered there):
“Can you describe this?”
And I said, “I can.”
Then something like a smile passed fleetingly over what had once been her face.

Akhmatova referred to this passage as Vmesto predisoviia (Instead of a Preface), adding it as prologue to her great poem, “Requiem,” written during the years of her son Lev Gumilev’s imprisonment. The poem was her podvig, her spiritual accomplishment of “remembering injustice and suffering” as experienced within herself and as collectively borne. Anna’s friend, Lidiya Chukovskaya, remembers her subsisting on black bread and tea. According to the research of Amanda Haight:

She was extremely thin and frequently ill. She would get up from bed to go and stand, sometimes in freezing weather, in the long lines of people waiting outside the prisons, hoping against hope to be able to see her son or at least pass over a parcel. . . . The poems of “Requiem,” composed at this time, were learnt by heart by Lidiya Chukovskaya, Nadezhda Mandelstam, and several other friends who did not know who else was preserving them. Sometimes Akhmatova showed them a poem on a piece of paper which she burnt as soon as she was sure it had been committed to memory. . . . In a time when a poem on a scrap of paper could mean a death sentence, to continue to write, to commit one’s work to faithful friends who were prepared to learn poems by heart and thus preserve them, was only possible if one was convinced of the absolute importance and necessity of poetry.

As I was still in my early twenties and educated in the United States, I hadn’t thought of poetry in these terms. I had not yet encountered evil in anything resembling this form, and had not yet, therefore, imagined the impress of extremity upon the poetic imagination, nor conceived of our relation to others as one of infinite obligation: to stand with them in the hour of need, even abject and destitute, in supplication and without need of response. If it were so—if description were possible, of world and its sufferings, then the response would be that smile, or rather something resembling it, passing over what had once been her face.

“Requiem” meditated on the fate of Russia in her torment, marking the stages of suffering, as one would visit the stations of Christ’s passion. Akhmatova wrote it in the cry of a woman who had become all women. In the poem’s progression, Akhmatova takes leave of herself and becomes vigilant beyond all wakefulness. By turns she accepts and disowns her pain, survives, forsakes the tribute of remembrance, and consigns her monument to a prison wall.

I was as yet unaware that most of the prominent twentieth-century poets beyond the English-speaking countries (and even some within them) had endured such experiences during their lives, and those blessed to survive wrote their poetry not after such experiences but in their aftermath—in languages that had also passed through these sufferings; languages that also continued to bear wounds, legible in the line breaks, in constellations of imagery, in ruptures of utterance, in silences and fissures of written speech.

Aftermath is a temporal debris field, where historical remains are strewn (of large events as well as those peripheral or lost); where that-which-happened remains present, including the consciousness in which such events arose. This is writing to be apprehended “in the light of conscience,” as another Russian poet, Marina Tsvetaeva, once wrote. As such, it calls upon the reader, who is the other of this work, to be in turn marked by what such language makes present before her, what it holds open and begets in the reader.

•

In his Ethics and Infinity, Emmanuel Levinas writes:

The witness witnesses to what is said by him (through him, or as him). For he has said “Here I am!” before the other one; and from the fact that before the one other he recognizes the responsibility which is incumbent upon him, he finds himself having manifested what the face of the other one has meant for him. The glory of the Infinite reveals itself by what it is capable of doing in the witness.

This witness is a call to the other (perhaps in both senses, as the other within the poet, and the one other whom the text addresses), very much as in the face-to-face encounter of Martin Buber’s I and Thou, later elaborated and extended by Levinas as

an awakening that is neither reflection upon oneself nor universalization. An awakening signifying a responsibility for the other, the other who must be fed and clothed—my substitution for the other, my expiation for the suffering, and no doubt for the wrongdoing of the other. An expiation assigned to me without any possible avoidance, and by which my uniqueness as myself, instead of being alienated, is intensified by my irreplaceability.

This awakening is also a readerly coming to awareness before the saying of poetry which calls the reader to her irrevocable and inexhaustible responsibility for the other as present in the testamentary utterance. A poem is lyric art, but Levinas claims that

a poetic work is at the same time a document, and the art that went into its making is at once a use of discourse. This discourse deals with objects that are also spoken in the newspapers, posters, memoirs and letters of every passing age—though in the case of poetry’s strictly poetic expression these objects merely furnish a favorable occasion and serve as pretexts. It is of the essence of art to signify only between the lines—in the intervals of time, between times—like a footprint that would precede the step, or an echo preceding the sound of a voice.

This voice is the saying of the witness, which is not a translation of experience into poetry but is itself experience.

Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, writing on the work of Celan, proposes

to call what [the poem] translates “experience,” provided that we both understand the word in its strict sense—the Latin ex-periri, a crossing through danger—and especially that we avoid associating it with what is “lived,” the stuff of anecdotes.

But a poem, in its witnessing, “arises out of experience that is not perceived as it occurs, is not registered in the first-person ‘precisely since it ruined this first person, reduced it to a ghostlike status, to being a “me without me.”’” So the poem’s witness is not a recounting, is not mimetic narrative, is not political confessionalism, and “it is not simply an act of memory. It bears witness, as Jacques Derrida suggests, in the manner of an ethical or political act.”

•

The “poetry of witness,” as a term of literary art, had not yet had its genesis, but soon after learning of Brodsky and Akhmatova I began an epistolary friendship with the late Terrence Des Pres, author of The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps, in which he cites Akhmatova’s preface to “Requiem” as epigraph to a chapter on the survivor’s will to bear witness. Within months of meeting Des Pres in the summer of 1977, I traveled to Spain to translate Claribel Alegría, herself a poet in exile, and in January of 1978 was welcomed by one of her relatives to El Salvador, where I was to work as a documenter of human rights abuses in the period immediately preceding a twelve-year civil war (working closely with associates of Monsignor Óscar Romero, then archbishop of San Salvador, and with my contact in the International Secretariat of Amnesty International.)

If asked when I returned from El Salvador for the last time in those years, I have said March 16, 1980, a week before the assassination of Monsignor Romero. After thirty years, I now understand that I did not return on that date, that the woman who traveled to El Salvador—the young poet I had been—did not come back. The woman who did return wrote, in those years, seven poems marked by the El S ............

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/articles/detail/89565

True Bones
The many appetites of Jim Harrison.
By John McIntyre

Though his reputation owes much to his fiction and memoirs, Jim Harrison, who died this past March at the age of 78, regarded the 14 volumes of poetry he published between 1965 and 2016 as the essence of his work as a writer. Poetry was “this fantastic invocation,” he wrote; his fiction “sometimes strike[s] me as extra, burly flesh on the true bones of my life.” He received his first major recognition as a writer for his poetry, a Guggenheim award in 1969, and he approached his work as a poet with humor and reverence informed in part by his Buddhist practice. “To write a poem you must first create a pen that will create what you want to say,” he wrote. “For better or worse, this is the work of a lifetime.”

That working lifetime for Harrison the poet spanned 50 years and hundreds of poems. Joan Reardon called the great food writer and gastronome M.F.K. Fisher a “poet of the appetites.” Harrison could rightly share the distinction. His poems frequently draw on his knowledge and enthusiasm at the table. A section from the title poem of his 1989 collection, The Theory & Practice of Rivers, consists of such detailed descriptions of food that it’s practically a cross between a recipe and an elaborate menu. “Early Fishing,” from In Search of Small Gods (2009), recalls a simple meal his father prepared for the two of them after a fishing trip, and “Vallejo,” from the same volume, laments the poet César Vallejo's impoverished diet. These moments in Harrison’s poetry distill the matters that preoccupied him in his acclaimed book of food essays, The Raw and the Cooked (2002). During his final years, he wrote a column on his culinary fixations for the Canadian literary journal Brick.

Yet Harrison’s hungers extend far beyond food, to weather, color and light, flesh, laughter, and all the beauty and variety of the natural world. This commitment is evident from his earliest published work, Plain Song (1965). In “Poem,” Harrison features “a bobcat padding through red sumac” and a “dead, frayed bird” with “beautiful plumage, / the spoor of feathers / and slight, pink bones.” That precision and specificity in writing about nature quickly became hallmarks of Harrison’s poetry. Yet his early work often registers as grave and spare, a bit restrained, as in poems such as “David,” again from Plain Song:

He is young. The father is dead.
Outside, a cold November night,
the mourners’ cars are parked upon the lawn;
beneath the porch light three
brothers talk to three sons
and shiver without knowing it.

Plain Song also finds the subject of “Dead Doe” “curled, shaglike, / after a winter so cold / the trees split open.” There are lyrical glints and moments of mystery elsewhere in the book, as in “Return,” in which Harrison writes of “A spring day too loud for talk / when bones tire of their flesh / and want something better.” In “Suite to Fathers,” he writes, “In the night, from black paper / I cut the silhouette of this exiled god, / finding him as the bones of a fish in stone.” In the context of Harrison’s body of work, such poems are more akin to gesture drawings than fully executed canvases.

Three books later, with the poems in Letters to Yesenin (1973), Harrison’s sensibility assumed its full dimensions. In “North American Image Cycle,” we find Harrison dispensing advice to President Nixon:

More mad dogs and fewer streetlights, Mr. Nixon. That advice
will cost you a hundred bucks, has been billed for that amount ...
The mad dogs
can be gotten from Spain, cheap. And everyone loves
to throw stones at streetlights.

The poems in Letters to Yesenin were born in the wake of Harrison’s doubts about his ability to create the life he wanted for himself. He found ways to earn a living, but as he noted in his memoir Off to the Side, “the most obvious economic lesson of all became obvious: survival work requires your entire life.” That meant stifling himself as a poet and facing the accompanying depression at his inability to find a suitable balance. Harrison had struggled with depression for years, remarking in Off to the Side that he’d “clocked seven depressions in my life that might qualify as ‘clinical,’ beginning at the age of fourteen.” Now, during the most trying period he’d yet faced, he contemplated suicide. As a means of coping with his own crisis, Harrison turned to the life and work of the Russian poet Sergei Yesenin, who committed suicide at age 30. He wrote prose poems to Yesenin daily, and the practice gradually brought him a new equanimity. Afterward, it was as if Harrison had stepped from the darkness with a new balance, an affirmation of his purpose. In Letters to Yesenin, he paired reflective moments with a generous dose of humor, sometimes wry, sometimes absurd. Consider this moment, in which he finds an unexpected plot of wild mushrooms a tonic for the world’s disinterest in him and his work:

The mushrooms helped again: walking hangdoggedly to the granary
after the empty mailbox trip I saw across the barnyard at the base
of an elm stump a hundred feet away a group of white morels. How
many there were will be kept concealed for obvious reasons.

There’s Harrison’s literal appetite here, but he also demonstrates that a poet of the appetites must live at the ready, open to the next opportunity that awakens the senses. When he spies a high school graduation ceremony on his way to the bar, he writes, “June and mayflies fresh from the channel fluttering in the warm still air.” Harrison bears down and offers a coda: “After a few drinks I felt jealous and wanted someone to say, ‘Best of / luck in your chosen field,’ or ‘The road of life is ahead of you.’”

This is the same poet who, on the previous page, observes:

we must closely watch any self-
pity and whining. It simply isn’t manly. Better by far to be a cow-
boy drinking rusty water, surviving on the maggots that unwittingly
ate the pemmican in the saddlebags.

This is humor as a complementary element, humor as seasoning, an essential ingredient in Harrison’s work.

Harrison grew up in rural Michigan, honing his love of the natural world as the son of a county agricultural agent. If there’s a single, defining episode from his childhood, it’s the loss of an eye at the age of seven. He had a “quarrel with a neighbor girl near a cinder pile in a woodlot behind the town hospital,” he writes in his 2002 memoir Off to the Side. “She had shoved a broken bottle in my face, and my sight had leaked away with a lot of blood.” In the wake of his compromised vision, Harrison seems to have redoubled his efforts at taking in the world around him. He speaks to this focus in “The Golden Window” (2009):

With only one eye I've learned
to celebrate vision, the eye a painter,
the eye a monstrous fleshy camera
which can't stop itself in the dark
where it sees its private imagination.

He pairs that attention to detail with a sense of openness and wonder, as evidenced in “Tomorrow,” which begins, “I'm hoping to be astonished tomorrow / by I don’t know what.” Beyond his attention and perceptiveness, Harrison’s eye—his literal eye—gradually emerges in his poems as a motif, both regulating his vision and serving as the object of playful references. Consider “Counting Birds” (1989):

As a child, fresh out of the hospital
with tape covering the left side
of my face, I began to count birds.
At age fifty the sum total is precise
and astonishing, my only secret.

Harrison understood exaggeration as more than simple untruth. He used it as a form of possibility as well, a malleable, speculative element. Sometimes what’s said pales next to what could have been said or, better still, should have been. “Of course, the reader should be mindful that I'm a poet, and we tend to err on the side that life is more than it appears rather than less,” he writes in a preface to After Ikkyū & Other Poems (1996). Still, he reliably knows when to opt for an extra stitch and when to apply one in a bolder color.

His years of Buddhist practice helped him cultivate humility and restraint. Those readings and meditation also informed his changing attitudes toward mortality. Whereas the younger Harrison took a somber view of death, in “After Ikkyū,” he writes “Time gets foreshortened late at night. / Jesus died a few days ago, my father / and sister just before lunch.” Though his early portrayals of death are notable for their concrete detail, as he aged, Harrison approached the subject with a sense of wonder bordering on mystical, as in “Insight,” in which he writes from the perspective of the recently dead, observing that mourners “are singing but the words / don’t mean anything in our new language.”

“The cost of flight is landing,” Harrison writes in “The Present.” Such low-key philosophical moments anchor much of his work. It’s also fitting that a man with such outsized appetites should consider the costs attached to the choices available to him. Those calculations never impinge on Harrison's essential gratitude, though, for all life has offered, or the large heartedness that underpins his work.

Years before the end of his life, Harrison imagined the occasion on which he would reveal the secret number of birds he had tallied over the years, in the aforementioned “Counting Birds”:

On my deathbed I’ll write this secret
number on a slip of paper and pass
it to my wife and two daughters.
It will be a hot evening in late June
and they might be glancing out the window
at the thunderstorm's approach from the west.
Looking past their eyes and a dead fly
on the window screen I'll wonder
if there’s a bird waiting for me in the onrushing clouds.
O birds, I’ll sing to myself, you’ve carried
me along on this bloody voyage,
carry me now into that cloud,
into the marvel of this final night.

How lovely to picture Harrison singing himself to the end, preparing for his next journey. He always did travel well.

Originally Published: May 31st, 2016

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/detail/70058

Prose from Poetry Magazine
To Our Readers
Poetry's new editor on the motive of the magazine
By Don Share

“I’ve received some letters asking me to state publicly my editorial position    ...”

Ezra Pound’s injunction to “Make it new” seems not to apply to the question of what an incoming editor of this magazine intends. Though Harriet Monroe established Poetry’s vision in an editorial in her first issue (“The Motive of the Magazine”) and in the famous “Open Door” policy published in the second, the question gets asked anew when there’s a change at the top of our masthead. In 1949 for example, when Hayden Carruth became the editor, one of the magazine’s long-standing guarantors posed it, commenting that though Poetry’s policy may have been clear to the staff, it certainly wasn’t to her. (“You don’t seem to get enough important names,” she complained.) Called upon to make a definitive statement, Carruth wrote that though he thought the answer was inherent in the magazine’s pages, it was: “we aim to publish good poems.” Sensible as this seems, he only lasted a year in the job. When Karl Shapiro took over from him in 1950, Time magazine sent a reporter to ask what his editorial “policy” would be. Shapiro was “horrified,” he later said, because — 
either ignoring or embodying the “Open Door” doctrine — he’d “never thought of a literary magazine having a policy.” Nevertheless, in his third issue he wrote that the explanation for the “persistence” of  Poetry magazine was threefold: it discovered and encouraged “new talent,” presented the new work of known poets, and preserved a month-to-month record of American poetry. No surprises there, in spite of which Shapiro lasted but five years. Understandably, the succeeding run of editors, from Henry Rago and Daryl Hine to John Frederick Nims and Joseph Parisi, published no introductory statements on the subject, and let the poems speak for themselves.

Then ten years ago next month an editorial, less than two pages long, appeared. Poetry’s new editor, Christian Wiman, began calmly enough, with the neutral-sounding words quoted above. But that first sentence was a ruse, for Wiman memorably inaugurated his tenure by indicating a distaste for poets who have a poetics (“bores”), describing an office under attack by submissions from “a horde of  iambic zombies,” admitting a suspicion “that ‘editor’ and ‘idiot’ are synonyms” — and imagining ruthless future readers who “will look at all these poems into which we’ve poured the wounded truths of our hearts, all the fraught splendor and terror of these lives we suffered and sang”    ...    and giggle. All he wanted, he announced, was “poems from poets whose aim is way beyond Poetry magazine, indeed, beyond all magazines.”

I don’t see how any post-Wiman editor could top that.

I’m recounting this history to let myself more or less off the hook. Changes will surely come as I take over from Chris, with whom 
I worked these last six years — years that proved him to be one of the magazine’s canniest and most stalwart stewards. Though editors, like poets, must avoid cliche, I’m happy to admit up front that his will be hard footsteps to follow. It’s an honor, but an even greater
 responsibility, for me to take over from him. And I hope in the 
issues to come readers feel that the vision of the magazine is being refreshed, without disruption to its proven record. The “motive” of the magazine, as Harriet put it, will remain what it always has been: “to keep free of entangling alliances with any single class or school,” to be, that is, eclectic.

In thinking about my predecessors’ work, and wondering how to live up to it, I’ve asked myself why Harriet Monroe’s original and originating policy has endured so well. It’s fascinating to note that Harriet knew her own mind, but when it came to poetry she had a sixth sense that guided her in spite of  herself. Her own taste was for a poetics that, though she called it “new,” was rooted, like Modernism itself, firmly in the late nineteenth century. She liked, and wrote herself, poems that seem hopelessly dated now. Fortunately, that countervailing sixth sense allowed her to make literary history. She invented a box, you could say — and promptly set to work thinking outside it. Her magazine was, therefore, like she was: unpredictable, difficult, and infuriating. As a consequence of these traits, we can now take for granted that poets such as Eliot, Williams, Stevens, Pound, H.D., Hart Crane, Marianne Moore, Langston Hughes, and many more, are part of the pantheon of English-language poetry. Their poems, confounding and aggravating to readers when they first appeared in our pages, exemplify what Peter Quartermain calls “stubborn poetries” — opaque at first, this was work that became clearer and dearer to us over time.

Of necessity, then, but also by inclination, I’m going to take the long view, which means taking risks with unpredictable, difficult, and infuriating work — just as all my predecessors have. The value of “stubborn” poems, apart from the considerable pleasure of thinking about what they’re up to, is that they get us to focus our attention and sharpen our critical skills, something we need more than ever in an age, like ours, of distraction. As it happens, poems teach us how to read other poems, so I’ll always be looking over my shoulder as 
I move forward: a bad way to walk or drive, but a time-tested way of editing Poetry. The composer Van Dyke Parks, when asked about the tension between eclecticism and traditionalism, said that it was wonderful when somebody called him a “futuristic traditionalist.” 
I hope to be called that someday, too.
A glance all the way back to 1914 fortifies and emboldens me. Quartermain’s essay in this issue takes as an epigraph these lines from William Carlos Williams’s “At Dawn”— 

O marvelous! what new configuration will come next?
I am bewildered with multiplicity.

Nearly a century later, Poetry receives about 120,000 poems a year. At the dawn of my tenure as editor, I share Williams’s exuberance: it’s a joy to be bewildered with poetry’s multiplicity. Faced with the new, poems from the past still accompany us. So let me issue an invitation to readers with a stanza from another poem from the time of the magazine’s founding, Robert Frost’s “The Pasture”:

I’m going out to clean the pasture spring;
I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):
I sha’n’t be gone long. — You come too.

Some serendipitous lines from Alice Fulton’s “Make It New,” in this issue, may also suffice:

It will be new

whether you make it new
or not. It will be full of neo-

shadows. Full of then — both past and next,
iridescent with suspense.

Originally Published: October 1st, 2013

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/detail/69863

Prose from Poetry Magazine
October 1947
By Paul Durica

In October 1917, on Poetry’s fifth anniversary, Harriet Monroe looked back at the founding of the magazine while acknowledging that the “second period of our history” had begun. The “five-year endowment” that had financed Poetry had run its course, and Monroe wondered if, in a time of war and economic upheaval, there was still a place for the magazine in American art and culture. “Poetry may not be a grand enough portal,” she wrote, “and the lamps that light it may burn dim in drifting winds; but until a nobler one is built it should stand, and its little lights should show the way as they can.” Of course, the magazine survived—on the tenth anniversary, Monroe was looking forward to finding “abler minds and even more liberal auspices” that could sustain it well into the future—and subsequent anniversaries have been marked in a variety of ways. The sixtieth anniversary issue, for example, focused on the first appearances of poets long associated with Poetry, including James Dickey, Elizabeth Bishop, and John Berryman. The most visually striking memorial can be found in the thirty-fifth anniversary issue, which contained a Poetry timeline paired with photographs of contributors and ending with the following image of the soon-to-be vacated Erie Street office. In the accompanying essay, “543 Cass Street,” co-editor Marion Strobel reflected upon how the office had become a museum to Monroe, who had died in 1936:

Work goes on at her desk; many of the same photographs, the “poets gallery” which she herself hung in the Cass Street office, pepper our present walls; her Louis xvi clock, accurate as ever, still ticks time, and still, as then, we pay no attention to it.

In Monroe’s time, as now, the editors knew that, as Strobel wrote, “yesterday’s poet, whom we love, is not the one we are looking for.”

Originally Published: October 1st, 2012

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/detail/70178


Prose from Poetry Magazine
Larry Eigner, Six Letters: An Introduction
By George Hart

Larry Eigner (1927–1996) wrote over three thousand poems on a manual Royal typewriter (a bar mitzvah gift) with the thumb and index finger of his right hand. Disabled by a forceps injury at birth, Eigner lived with cerebral palsy his whole life; able to walk only with support or assistance, he made his way through the world in a wheelchair. Until his father died and his mother was too old to care for him, he lived at home in Swampscott, Massachusetts, writing many of his poems in the glassed-in front porch that served as his office. In 1978, Eigner relocated to Berkeley, California, at first living in a communal house for adults with disabilities and then residing with poet-friends, mainly Robert Grenier and Kathleen Frumkin, who also served as his caregivers.

In late 1949, Eigner heard Cid Corman reading Yeats on his Boston radio program This Is Poetry. Eigner didn’t like the manner in which Corman read Yeats’s poetry aloud and wrote a letter to tell him so. 
A long friendship and correspondence between the two poets followed. Through Corman, Eigner was introduced to Robert Creeley, whose Divers Press published his chapbook From the Sustaining Air in 1953. Creeley and Corman were both associated with Charles Olson and the Black Mountain school of poetry, and through them Eigner began reading Olson’s Maximus Poems and the work of modernist poets such as William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound.


Throughout the fifties, Eigner absorbed Olson’s theory of Projective Verse, and he was grouped with the Black Mountain poets in Donald Allen’s groundbreaking The New American Poetry anthology in 1960. Of the poets in this group — Olson, Creeley, Robert Duncan, and Denise Levertov (Corman chose not to be included in the anthology) — Eigner might be the one who put Olson’s theories to work most productively. Projective Verse, with its emphasis on the exchange of energy between poet and reader, and the typewriter as a means of graphing or scoring words on the space of the page, seems particularly well-suited to Eigner’s embodiment and temperament. The fact that Olson put so much stress on the stance of the poet and the poet’s breath as a form of measure, which might seem to discourage someone like Eigner who had difficulty walking and speaking, makes Eigner’s achievement even more impressive. In excerpting Eigner’s correspondence for this special feature, Jennifer Bartlett and I have chosen to focus on passages in which he writes about, or directly to, Olson regarding his poetry, poetics, and other Black Mountain poets.

In his review of The New American Poetry, published in the July 1961 issue of Poetry, X.J. Kennedy chided Olson for his proposal that the typewriter can replace meter as a means of graphically scoring the poet’s breath, writing, “Who would have thought his Corona portable an instrument of such sensitivity?” In 1962, the September issue of Poetry included six poems by Eigner and a review of his first full-length collection, On My Eyes, by Galway Kinnell, who also found fault with Projective Verse’s claims for the typewriter. He writes,

The real value of getting rid of rhyme and meter, I had supposed, was in order to throw the responsibility for the poem wholly on speech itself. Here this is not done. The laying out of a kind of score by typewriter-spacing only supplants those old devices with a newer one, which is, this time, not even integral with the words.

The four-volume Collected Poems of Larry Eigner, edited by Curtis Faville and Robert Grenier (Stanford University Press, 2010), provides enough examples for readers to judge for themselves whether or not Eigner succeeded in using the typewriter as Olson had proposed, but there is no doubt that a 1940 Royal typewriter is integral to his words. Without that bar mitzvah present, wisely chosen by his mother Bessie and purchased by an aunt, we may never have heard his voice.


•



Because it was difficult for him to insert a piece of paper into the carriage of his typewriter, Eigner tended to use as much of the page as possible before starting another (a habit also motivated by his obsession with saving paper). He would commonly type multiple poems on a single sheet, and when writing in prose he would type as close to the margin as possible, or fill up the margins with additional notes and comments after writing the main text. We have indicated relevant marginal comments made by Eigner in brackets. Eigner also used abbreviations to save time while typing. Some are standard abbreviations such as yrs for years or bk for book, but some are produced by Eigner omitting letters in his own elliptical way — wndr for “wonder,” for example, or grp for “group.” We have retained these when the context clarifies what word is meant, or added a bracketed word if needed. Eigner occasionally mistrikes the keys on his typewriter — 
we have silently corrected any such obvious mistakes but have left misspellings and other typos. Two other idiosyncratic uses of the typewriter should be mentioned: Eigner often indicated poem titles by inserting a space between each character and he indicated notes or asides by overstriking an open and close parenthesis to form his own piece of punctuation. These have been retained. Material omitted from the letters by the editors is indicated by bracketed ellipses.

— George Hart

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/detail/69917

Prose from Poetry Magazine
Introduction
Joan Mitchell and the art of painting a poem.
By Laura Morris

“My paintings repeat a feeling about Lake Michigan, or water, or fields   ...   it’s more like a poem, and that’s what I want to paint.”


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Joan Mitchell was born in Chicago in 1925 to Marion Strobel and James Herbert Mitchell. Her mother (a fiction writer, editor, and poet) was an associate editor at Poetry magazine from 1920 to 1925 and remained affiliated with the magazine for more than forty-five years. Because of Strobel’s involvement in literary circles, Mitchell grew up in a home filled with books and often visited by poets and writers, including T.S. Eliot, Thornton Wilder, Dylan Thomas, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Mitchell’s father was a dermatologist, as well as an amateur artist who encouraged her to observe the visual world closely and to dedicate herself to a chosen path. When she was young he took her to the zoo, the Field Museum, and the Art Institute of Chicago, where they would draw and paint watercolors together, and look at paintings by Mitchell’s early favorites: Van Gogh, Cézanne, and Matisse.

As a child, Mitchell wrote poems, including “Autumn,” published 
in Poetry in 1935 and reprinted in this portfolio. Although she stopped writing soon afterward, poems and literature would remain sources of inspiration and comfort throughout her life. Her library contained well-worn volumes by Rainer Maria Rilke, William Wordsworth, Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, Jacques Dupin, Pierre Schneider, T.S. Eliot, Samuel Beckett, and others.

As an adult, Mitchell developed friendships with many poets and writers, including O’Hara, Schuyler, Beckett, and the authors whose reminiscences are included in this portfolio: Paul Auster, Bill Berkson, Lydia Davis, Nathan Kernan, and John Yau. (She and Marjorie Perloff did not know one another.) She collaborated on 
numerous illustrated books of poetry, made pastel drawings on typed poems, and often read poems when preparing to paint. She titled several paintings after poems particularly meaningful or beautiful to her.

Although Joan Mitchell lived most of her adult life in France, her childhood memories of  Lake Michigan — and the trees and vast fields of the Midwest — were always with her as part of the inner landscape that she drew upon while painting. Feelings of places, especially the Chicago of her childhood, never left; as she often said, “I carry my landscapes around with me.” Her paintings are visual distillations of feeling and experience, abstract translations of the flux and movement of the natural world, of  light, color, space, and form. They transform remembered landscapes and experiences through a masterful use of color and remarkable ability to attain balance and stillness in the midst of dynamic motion. They are at once contemplative and exuberant, restless and calm, strong and fragile, defiant and tender.

Like a poet, Joan Mitchell strove for precision. Her canvases contain nothing superfluous. Although her work might initially appear spontaneous and immediate, she worked slowly and deliberately, with an intense focus on the relationships of colors to one another, on the structure and space of the whole canvas, on gesture and line. Her multi-paneled paintings bear a particularly palpable kinship to poems in their structure and inherent rhythm. Like poems, her paintings are organic constructions in which each element — in this case brushstrokes rather than words — is necessary and essential, in delicate balance with those surrounding it.

Mitchell was generally averse to writing about art. She believed that paintings should be seen and not read, that they are ultimately 
indescribable, complete in and of themselves. As John Ashbery wrote: “Paintings are meaning and therefore do not have a residue of meaning which can be talked about.” Still, Mitchell did greatly admire some writing about art, and the writing she respected most was by poets: Jean Genet on Giacometti; Antonin Artaud on Van Gogh, Rilke on Cézanne. In fact, this passage from Rilke’s Letters on Cézanne could describe Joan’s work as well as it does Cézanne’s:

As if these colors could heal one of indecision once and for all. The good conscience of these reds, these blues, their simple truthfulness, it educates you; and if you stand beneath them as acceptingly as possible, it’s as if they were doing something for you.… It’s as if every place were aware of all the other places — it participates that much; that much adjustment and rejection is happening in it; that’s how each daub plays its part in maintaining equilibrium and in producing it; just as the whole picture finally keeps reality in equilibrium.



Joan Mitchell: At Home in Poetry will be on view in the Poetry Foundation gallery February 4 – May 31, 2013. The exhibition includes the large-scale quadriptych painting Minnesota (1980), as well as photographs, letters, and books of poems illustrated by Mitchell, and explores her relationships and collaborations with poets.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/detail/69327

Prose from Poetry Magazine
The Necessary Minimum
Dunstan Thompson slides out of the shadows.
By Clive James
Introduction

At a time when almost everyone writes poetry but scarcely anyone can write a poem, it is hard not to wish for a return to some less accommodating era, when the status of “poet” was not so easily aspired to.

At a time when almost everyone writes poetry but scarcely anyone can write a poem, it is hard not to wish for a return to some less accommodating era, when the status of “poet” was not so easily aspired to, and the only hankering was to get something said in a memorable form. Alas, we would have to go a long way back. Samuel Daniel(1562–1619) certainly wanted to be thought of as a poet—it was his career, even when he was working for nobles as a gentleman servant—and there must have been critics who wanted to deny him the title, or they would not have attacked him for too often revising his work, and he would not have defended himself thus:

And howsoever be it, well or ill
What I have done, it is mine owne, I may
Do whatsoever therewithal I will.
I may pull downe, raise, and reedifie.
It is the building of my life, the fee
Of Nature, all th’inheritance that I
Shal leave to those which must come after me.

—From To the Reader

The battle was fought out more than four hundred years ago, and Daniel won it. Unless we are scholars of the period, we might have small knowledge of his work in general, but this one stanza is quite likely to have got through to us. It is often quoted as an example of how there were poets much less important than Shakespeare who nevertheless felt that they, too, might be writing immortal lines to time, and were ready to drub any popinjay who dared to suggest that they weren’t. But clearly the stanza did not get through to us just because of the story it tells or the position it takes. It got through by the way it moves. Within its tight form, it is a playground of easy freedom: not a syllable out of place, and yet it catches your ear with its conversational rhythm at every point.

It would be tempting to say that any poet, in any era, needs to be able to construct at least one stanza like that or he will never even join the contest. Daniel’s technique was so meticulous that it can teach us how words were pronounced in his time. The opening line of one of the sonnets in which he complains about harsh treatment from his vainly adored Delia runs “Fair is my love, and cruel as she’s fair.” Thus we can tell that the word “cruel” was probably pronounced with a full two syllables, or there would be a syllable missing from the line. (If he had written “she is” instead of “she’s,” we would have known that he scanned “cruel” as one syllable, and presumably pronounced it that way too, as we do now.) Unfortunately Daniel seldom wrote an entire poem—not even his beautifully entitled “Care-charmer Sleep”—in which every line was as vivid as that. But he did compose that one stanza, and we only have to read it once before we are drawn in to see how it is held together, and to start asking why we put up with so much unapologetic awkwardness from poets now. Limping numbers from poets writing in free verse are presumably meant, but limping numbers from poets who are avowedly trying to write in set forms must be mere clumsiness. The perpetrators might say that they are getting back to the vitality of an initial state, in which Donne demonstrated the vigor that roughness could give before the false ideal of smoothness arrived. But Daniel was already writing before Donne, and we have at least one stanza to prove that lack of vigor was not his problem. All too often his lines lacked semantic pressure, but they always moved with a precise energy, and he could put them together into an assemblage that danced.

Perhaps to ask for a whole stanza is asking too much, and just a few lines will work the trick. The drawback there, however, is that the few lines tend to break free not just from the poem, but from the poet’s name. Very few readers of poetry now, however wide their knowledge, would be able to give a name to the poet who wrote this:

At moments when the tide goes out,
The stones, still wet and ringing with
The drained-off retrogressive sea,
Lie fresh like fish on market stalls
And, speckled, shine. Some seem to float
In crevices where wavelets froth
Forgotten by the watery
Departure towards the moon.

As a thought experiment, I see myself presented with this fragment in a practical criticism class of the kind that I took in Cambridge in the mid-sixties. Even with the benefit of the knowledge that I have acquired since, I might still be at a loss to name its author, partly because it could have had so many authors. Almost certainly it stems from a period when free form Modernism was already being reacted against: all the scrupulous tension of Modernist diction is in it, but there is also a conscious heightening, as of a return to well-made elegance, so we are probably, at the very earliest, somewhere in the years after 1945, when the American formalists were already operating and Britain’s phalanx of Movement poets were on their way up. The line “The drained-off retrogressive sea” might have been turned by Philip Larkin, who was fond of coupling his adjectives into a train. The fresh fish on the market stalls might have come from “The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World,” the long poem in which Galway Kinnell took out the patent on fish imagery. Except that Elizabeth Bishop took out a rival patent when she, too, got into the seafood business. Could it be her? With my supervisor looking at his watch and pressing for an answer, I would have to say that the watery departure towards the moon sounds like Richard Wilbur writing just after the end of WWII, or perhaps James Merrill a bit later, or perhaps Stephen Edgar writing last year, or perhaps . . . But the flock of names, mere shorthand for a flock of tones, would only mean that I had found a single voice unidentifiable. And indeed the poet’s name is probably still unidentifiable when I reveal it: Dunstan Thompson.

I would have liked to say that Thompson (1918–1975) is the missing man from the post-WWII poetic story, but the sad truth is that he has gone missing for a reason. Born and raised in America, he had an enviably cosmopolitan education that culminated at Harvard, from which he went into the army. During the war, his poetic career started off brilliantly with his collection Poems (Simon and Schuster, 1943) and continued after the war with Lament for the Sleepwalker (Dodd, Mead and Company, 1947). These were big-time publishing houses and he won big-time recognition, his name often included in the magic list of voices built to last. Stephen Spender gave Thompson a papal imprimatur, thereby, perhaps, signaling that there might be a fertile context waiting for Thompson across the Atlantic. When Thompson’s second book came out he had already resettled in England, and there he began the long business—difficult, for one so prominently placed in several of the “war poets” anthologies—of ensuring that he would be forgotten. There was quite a lot to forget, and how exactly he managed to translate prominence into oblivion raises some unsettling questions. He wrote one poem, “Largo,” whose qualities should have been remembered, even though it runs to some length and not all of it is in tight focus. Here is a sample stanza:

All friends are false but you are true: the paradox
Is perfect tense in present time, whose parallel
Extends to meeting point; where, more than friends, we fell
Together on the other side of love, where clocks
And mirrors were reversed to show
Ourselves as only we could know;
Where all the doors had secret locks
With double keys; and where the sliding panel, well
Concealed, gave us our exit through the palace wall.
There we have come and gone: twin kings, who roam at will
Behind the court, behind the backs
Of consort queens, behind the racks
On which their favorites lie who told them what to do.
For every cupid with a garland round the throne still lacks
The look I give to you.

This majestic form, one of his own devising, is continued through all ten stanzas of the poem, with a scarcely faltering interplay between the hexameters, tetrameters, and trimeters—everything except pentameters, in fact. Anywhere in the poem’s wide panorama, the half rhymes are handled with an infallibly musical tact: the modular balancing of “well,” “wall,” and “will” in the quoted stanza is only a single instance of a multiple enchantment. You would say that a man who could build such an exquisite machine could do anything, technically. But even though bringing all this mastery to bear, he couldn’t do anything definite with the subject matter. From what thin biographical evidence exists, it is possible to conclude that Thompson was one of those gay male poets trapped between the urge to speak and the love that dare not speak its name. Auden escaped the trap by scarcely dropping a hint until the safety whistle blew decades later. But Thompson wanted to spill the beans, not just about Damon and Pythias and Richard II and A.E. Housman—whether named or merely alluded to, they all crop up during the poem—but about himself and his lover, evidently a fellow serviceman. Unfortunately he could spill only a few beans at once. There were limits to what he could say, and the result is a flurry of tangential suggestions, a cloud of innuendo.

“Largo” was a clear case—the only clear thing about it—of a poem written before its time, and by the time its time had come, the poem was gone. Oscar Williams, the best anthologist of the post-war years on either side of the Atlantic, published it in his invaluable A Little Treasury of Modern Poetry, but I have never seen it anywhere else. I would like to call the poem magnificent. But it gives only flashes of the total effect it might have had, and there lay the problem that dogged Thompson’s poetry for the rest of his career, and eventually buried him.

In England after the war, Thompson went on writing poems, most of which were collected posthumously in Poems 1950–1974. The book has an impressive physical appearance, rather along the lines of a Faber collection of the shorter poems of Auden or MacNeice. But the publishing house was an off-trail outfit called Paradigm Press, who can’t have printed many copies. During decades of haunting second-hand bookshops all over the world, I only ever saw a single copy, and that was in Cambridge in 2006. I picked it up, wondering who he was, read the lines about the seashore quoted above, and took it home to read it through.

Fragments of high quality were everywhere, but a completely integrated poem was hard to find. “Seascape with Edwardian Figures” came nearest, but even that one tailed off: when the tide departed towards the moon, the poem went with it. There was a long poem, “Valley of the Kings,” about Egyptian tombs. Freighted with his curious learning, it could have rivaled the stately march of “Largo,” but its points of intensity were scattered, like the momentarily illuminated wall paintings in the tombs themselves, and nothing held them together except the darkness between them. Flaring moments slid away into shadow:

This painted food will feed
Only imperishable people. Stars which glow
Like real stars lose
Their seeming lustre when you need
Them to disclose the way. From what? I do not know.

I talk about “Valley of the Kings” in the past tense because it is no longer alive, and the same applies, alas, to the whole of his later achievement. There is just too little of Samuel Daniel’s “It is mine owne,” and too much of Dunstan Thompson’s “I do not know.” Throughout the book, Thompson’s talent—in the complex sense that involves perception, precision, and musicality—is everywhere, but that’s just the trouble. It’s everywhere without being anywhere. The lesson, I think, is that a talent might be the necessary minimum, but it will not be sufficient if it can’t produce a poem, or at least a stanza, assured enough to come down through time and make us ask, “Who wrote that?”

James Merrill(1926–1995), another gay American poet who came to prominence a little later, wrote a poem about his upbringing, “The Broken Home,” that would have ensured his survival even if his every other manuscript had gone up in smoke. The poem doesn’t bring his sexuality into focus—other poems did—but it does illuminate his early life. This single stanza about his father would have been enough to prove that a masterful voice had arrived:

Each thirteenth year he married. When he died
There were already several chilled wives
In sable orbit—rings, cars, permanent waves.
We’d felt him warming up for a green bride.

He could afford it. He was “in his prime”
At three score ten. But money was not time.

I quote the stanza because it was the first thing I read of Merrill’s that made me realize I would have to read everything else. When I began to, I soon realized that the assurance of his early formal patterns provided the warrant for following him when his patterns became more complicated and finally ceased to be patterns at all. In the twentieth century, this was a not uncommon progression among revolutionary spirits in all the arts. Picasso had conspicuously mastered every aspect of draughtsmanship and painting that had ever been applied to the recognizable before he moved on into the less recognizable, and the best reason for trying to follow what he was up to was that he had proved he could actually do what he was no longer doing. Stravinsky composed melodies you could hum and whistle—I can still do my version of the major themes from Petroushka unless somebody stops me—before he moved on to composing what could only be listened to, and the best reason for listening hard was your memory of the authority he had displayed when the listening was easy. In poetry, Eliot went on proving that he was a master of tight forms even as he became famous for works that apparently had no form at all, and that was the best reason for supposing that those works still depended on a highly-schooled formal sense. So there was nothing new about Merrill’s progression from poems with apprehensible boundaries to poems whose lack of boundaries was part of their subject. It was in the tradition of Modernism. But it depended on an assurance that made paying attention compulsory.

This compulsory quality was what Dunstan Thompson lacked even in his brightest moments. Thompson didn’t have Merrill’s vast financial resources—which enabled Merrill to do pretty much what he liked all his life, including, commendably, helping other poets when they were short of cash—but Thompson did have nearly all of Merrill’s technical resources. Exploiting those, he might have built an impregnable position for himself, but you can’t help feeling that he didn’t really want to. His relocation from America to England need not necessarily have been fatal. Earlier in the century it had worked triumphantly for Pound and Eliot, and the only reason that Lowell made a hash of it later on was that his intermittent psychic disturbance had become almost continuous, and had weakened his strategic judgment to the point where he failed to recognize that he wasn’t getting beyond the discipline of his wonderfully self-contained early poems, but was neutralizing that discipline in the name of an illusory scope. And it wasn’t as if Lowell lacked a welcome in London. (If anything, he was too welcome: the locals would print anything he gave them.) The possibilities of working on both sides of the pond were rich, as was proved in the next generation by Michael Donaghy, who was born in New York in 1954 and died in London at the age of only fifty.

At the time of writing, Donaghy’s complete works are being published in Britain by Picador in two neatly matched volumes: Collected Poems, which contains all four of the collections published in his lifetime plus a sheaf of previously unpublished poems uniformly excellent, and The Shape of the Dance, which amounts to his collected prose. I was asked to write the introduction for the prose volume and was glad to do so, because I think Donaghy was an important critic, even a necessary one. But the reasons to think so would be crucially fewer if he had not been so authoritative as a poet. Within the first few lines of any poem he writes, he has made paying attention compulsory. There are simply dozens, even scores, of poems by which this fact could be easily demonstrated, but let’s make it harder for ourselves, by choosing a poem where the reader has to dig a bit to figure out what is going on. That we feel compelled to dig is, I think, a further illustration of the quality of command that we are talking about. The poem, “Shibboleth,” was the title poem of the first collection he published in 1988. Here is the poem entire:

One didn’t know the name of Tarzan’s monkey.
Another couldn’t strip the cellophane
From a GI’s pack of cigarettes.
By such minutiae were the infiltrators detected.

By the second week of battle
We’d become obsessed with trivia.
At a sentry point, at midnight, in the rain,
An ignorance of baseball could be lethal.

The morning of the first snowfall, I was shaving,
Staring into a mirror nailed to a tree,
Intoning the Christian names of the Andrews Sisters.
“Maxine, Laverne, Patty.”

For anyone of my generation it is obvious that this poem is about the Battle of the Bulge in 1944, when a special SS unit formed by Otto Skorzeny penetrated the American lines with a view to creating havoc. The SS men—most of them Volksdeutsche who had been brought up in America—wore American uniforms, carried captured American weapons, spoke perfect English, and could be identified only by what they didn’t know, because they had spent the last few years in Germany. One could make an objection based on just that point: none of the suspects would have sh

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/louis-zukofsky


Louis Zukofsky
Poet Details
1904–1978
Louis Zukofsky is an important American poet. The son of immigrant Russian Jews, he was born into the Jewish ghetto of the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1904. His conception of himself as a poet was indebted to Kaballistic Judaism, with both its emphasis on the magically transforming power of language and its division of the world into a tiny circle of initiates and a great mass of ignorant outsiders.

Zukofsky was a New York Jewish poet, responsive to the cacophonous voice of the cosmopolitan city and determined to find a place for himself in the world beyond the ghetto. Zukofsky's route out of the ghetto was poetry. In his brief Autobiography he reported how he began to appropriate the heritage of Western literature, first in Yiddish and then in English: "My first exposure to letters at the age of four was thru the Yiddish theaters.... By the age of nine I had seen a good deal of Shakespeare, Ibsen, Strindberg and Tolstoy performed—all in Yiddish. Even Longfellow's Hiawatha was to begin with read by me in Yiddish, as was Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound.... By eleven I was writing poetry in English, as yet not 'American English.'"

At age sixteen, Zukofsky entered Columbia University, where he wrote for and helped edit various student literary magazines. He identified with the literary avant garde (as represented especially by James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot) that saw itself as an elite committed to a revolutionary assault upon a dead bourgeois culture. Zukofsky's first major poetic work, "Poem Beginning 'The,'" written in 1926 and published in Exile in 1928, demonstrates his commitment to a modernist poetic. "The poem's obvious predecessor," said Barry Ahearn in Zukofsky's "A": An Introduction, "is [T. S. Eliot's] 'The Waste Land.' In an attempt to surpass Eliot, Zukofsky pushes formal details to an excessive, but liberating, limit." "Poem Beginning 'The'" cultivates a tone of Eliot-like irony, as the poet tries to mediate between the insistently alien, Jewish particulars of his experience and an aspiration toward a broader American, "English," vaguely Christian culture.

If "Poem Beginning 'The'" resonates with echoes of Eliot, Zukofsky soon abandoned Eliot for Ezra Pound, who was at once more approachable and more overpowering. Pound's warm response to "Poem Beginning 'The'" led to a flurry of letters between the two men, and Zukofsky eventually visited Pound at his home in Rapallo, Italy. Pound gave Zukofsky's poetic career an important boost by urging Poetry editor Harriet Monroe to appoint the young New Yorker as guest editor of a special issue devoted to new English and American poets.

For this Poetry issue Zukofsky invented the name "objectivists" to describe himself and the other poets—including Charles Reznikoff, George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, and Basil Bunting—whose work he liked. (Zukofsky, however, never used the term "objectivism" and never claimed to be the leader of a movement named "objectivism.") Most of these objectivists also appeared in Zukofsky's An "Objectivists" Anthology, where they were joined by Pound and even Eliot. The core group of Zukofsky, Reznikoff, Bunting, Oppen, Rakosi, and Niedecker eventually cohered into something approaching a movement, with Zukofsky established as both the principal theorist and—until World War II—the most diligent critic of and advocate for the poetry of his friends.

Objectivist verse owed a great deal to imagism. Indeed, in his preface to An "Objectivists" Anthology Zukofsky quoted Pound's 1912 Imagist credo: "direct treatment of the 'thing' whether subjective or objective." But in two respects objectivist poetry went beyond imagism. First, unlike such imagists as Amy Lowell, most of the objectivists were unwilling to treat the poem simply as a transparent window through which one could perceive the objects of the world. Rather the objectivists wanted, as Zukofsky declared in his Poetry essay "Sincerity and Objectification," to see the "poem as object," calling attention to itself by, for example, deliberate syntactic fragmentation and by line breaks that disrupt normal speech rhythm. Second, following Pound's poetic practice of the 1920s, the objectivist poets were at least as much interested in historic particulars as they were in immediate sensory images. All the objectivists shared Pound's aspiration to create a "poem containing history"; and Pound's incorporation into his Cantos of various historic documents showed these poets a way of incorporating history into their poems without violating the principle of objectivity.

As the Western world slid into the economic and political crisis of the 1930s, a concern with history more and more often translated into some form of political engagement. During the 1930s Zukofsky regularly described himself as a communist. At times in the 1930s, Zukofsky's Leftism took the form of a vague, sentimental admiration for Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, but Zukofsky was also outspokenly critical of the crude dogmatism characteristic of certain Stalinists. During this period Zukofsky did become, however, a serious student of the writings of Karl Marx.

The short poems that Zukofsky wrote in the 1920s and 1930s, ultimately gathered in the opening two sections of All, bring together in various complex ways three currents: a Pound-like faith that truth can be achieved through a poetry which stays with the movement of "the particulars"; a neo-formalist concern with the poem as a shaped object; and a Marxist concern with social oppression and class struggle. A case in point is "Mantis" and "'Mantis,' an Interpretation," written in 1934 and constituting a single two-part poem. The theme of "Mantis" is overtly political: a praying mantis becomes a symbol of "the poor," lost and harried in a harshly mechanical world. Individually the "separate poor," like the solitary mantis, are powerless; but the work ends with a vision of the mantis drawing up the "armies of the poor," which, inspired by this fragile bit of nature that has managed to survive in the stone subway, will "arise like leaves" to "build the new world."

In "'Mantis,' an Interpretation," which is written in free verse, Zukofsky annotates his own poem; describes his own compositional process (providing, for example, lines from early drafts); and deconstructs the very symbol that he has created within the poem. ("The Mantis," he says, "might have heaped up upon itself a / Grave of verse, / But the facts are not a symbol.") As his commentary demonstrates, Zukofsky isn't so much interested in the perfectly shaped created object, the "well-made poem," as he is in the process of objectification; and the full text of the mantis sequence demonstrates his conviction that poetry faithful to this process will justify both the particulars of the world (the mantis as fact rather than symbol) and a history in which the poor are struggling to become the masters of their own destiny.

Generally, the poems in All seek the condition of song, a distilled lyric quintessence. In "A," Zukofsky allows himself a much looser method. Like Pound's Cantos, "A" is a ragbag: in theory anything can go in, and the sheer heterogeneity of the materials is itself the point. Yet there are thematic continuities in "A," and the opening ten sections return repeatedly to the social and political concerns of "Mantis." Beginning with an image of a young Jewish man (apparently Zukofsky) listening to a Carnegie Hall performance of The Passion According to St. Matthew, these opening sections of "A" revolve obsessively around the relationship between insider (economic, artistic, ethnic, religious) and outsider in American society—the young poet at once finds himself identifying with German composer Johann Sebastian Bach's artistic purity and repelled by the capitalist world that has, among other things, built Carnegie Hall and paid the musicians.

Zukofsky composed the first seven sections of "A" between 1928 and 1930, and then abandoned the project for five years, returning to it in 1935 with the much longer "A"-8, where paraphrases of Henry Adams and Marx interweave in an extended meditation on "Labor as creator/Labor as creature." Here Zukofsky struggles to redefine art itself, still represented chiefly by Bach, as a form of labor in Marx's sense—that is, as the creation of use value. The Marxist concerns of "A"-8 return in the first half of "A"-9, an intricately musical text made up largely of phrases from Das Kapital. And in "A"-10 written in 1940, Zukofsky laments the Nazi violation of Europe and summons the people of the world to fight back.

After "A"-10, however, the social and political concerns that dominated Zukofsky's work in the 1930s retreat into the background. The years around 1940 mark a major rupture caused not only by the fading of the revolutionary hopes that had stirred Zukofsky and others during the 1930s but also by a re-centering of Zukofsky's life around home and family. Zukofsky met Celia Thaew, a musician and composer, in 1933, and they married in 1939; their only child, Paul, became a concert violinist in his early teens. (Zukofsky's only novel, Little, is a roman a clef centered on Paul's musical career.)

The short poems that Zukofsky wrote in the 1940s often record the music of domestic life, as in the delicate "Song for the Year's End" collected in All: "Daughter of music / and her sweet son / awake / the starry sky and bird." But in the 1940s Zukofsky both suspended work on "A" and wrote considerably fewer short poems than he had written in the previous two decades. He also largely suspended the various entrepreneurial poetic activities to which he had devoted much of his energy through the 1930s. This partial withdrawal from poetry may have been dictated by the need to support his family. At least while Paul was a small child, the combined demands of job and family seem to have left Zukofsky with relatively little time for writing.

In 1950 Zukofsky returned to "A" with the brief, dense "A"-11 and the expansive "A"-12. As Ahearn explained in Zukofsky's "A", both these new sections "use the family Zukofsky as a foundation." "A"-12 is built thematically, like the final section of Bach's The Art of the Fugue, on the letters B, A, C, and H. At both the beginning and end of the movement is a repeated sequence of words: Blest, Ardent, Celia, Happy. The sequence dances harmoniously, impelled by a love which is, for Zukofsky as for Dante, "the force that moves the sun and the other stars," and which is music—the music of the spheres, of Bach, of Paul practicing his violin. The outside world disrupts this harmony from time to time: in the middle of "A"-12 a young family friend is drafted and sent off to Korea, and Zukofsky incorporates his wistful letters into the poem. But the harmony here sounded can absorb into itself even such discords, for the poem breathes a confidence that the poet has found a place within a larger order.

Despite the sense of confidence and control pervading "A"-12, this poem seems less a new beginning than the finale of the first part—what might be called the neo-Poundian part—of Zukofsky's career. "A"-12 is still essentially a collage text, layering incidents from domestic life with passages paraphrased from such sources as Spinoza and Aristotle. Zukofsky's line in the first twelve sections of "A" is shorter than Pound's, but it too is Poundian in that it attempts "to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase," as Pound declared in "A Retrospect." Thus Zukofsky says, in an often quoted passage from "A"-12: "I'll tell you. / About my poetics— / music / speech / An integral / Lower limit speech / Upper limit music."

But after "A"-12 the flexible Poundian line, ranging freely between speech and music, gives way to another kind of line, more artful, perhaps more brittle, certainly further from the cadences of everyday speech; and the musical pattern of organization also gives way to something new, heard in the opening of "'A' 13" and continued through its thirteen-page first section: "What do you want to know / What do you want to do, / In a trice me the gist us; / Don't believe things turn untrue / A sea becomes teacher; / When the son takes his wife / Follows his genius, / Found in search / Come out of mysteries."

Roughly two decade separates "A"-12 from "A"-13—which was written in 1960—and during this period Zukofsky's poetic method underwent an enormous change. Hints of this new method appeared in some of the earlier short poems, where there the intricate, mannered patterns justified themselves as varieties of song—distinctly modern, often jaggedly atonal songs, but songs nonetheless. However, in "A"-13 and thereafter, Zukofsky began composing long poems organized not by music but by arbitrary, quasi-mathematical patterns. Zukofsky worked out the principles of this new poetics in a monumental prose work titled Bottom: On Shakespeare, written between 1947 and 1960 and published in 1963.

If Pound influenced the first half of Zukofsky's career, Shakespeare influenced the second half. To Zukofsky, everything Shakespeare wrote revealed that love is ineffable: The language used to describe it is always too little or too much. Seeing love is no problem, but in speaking of it, love and reason split apart, creating a tragic world. The distance between eye and tongue troubled Zukofsky, as it troubled Shakespeare. This distance in turn meant that a "true" language must constantly reinforce the idea that it is a more or less arbitrary construct, not an infallible vehicle for conveying certainties about the world. Shakespeare's language, Zukofsky proposed, enacts its own arbitrariness by constantly changing the terms of its engagement with the world. But poetic language, at least since William Wordsworth, has sought to validate itself by its claim to embody the felt truth of experience. When this claim becomes untenable, what happens to poetry? This is the question that Zukofsky's later poetry systematically explores.

The new direction in which Zukofsky's poetry moved during the 1950s is perhaps most clearly evident in his English adaptation of all the poetry of Catullus. Zukofsky's versions of Catullus are best described as transliterations rather than as translations, for they seek to reproduce the sound as well as the sense of Catullus's Latin. Or more accurately, it might be said that they reproduce the sound first and the sense only secondarily. He had given himself an insurmountable task. As Davenport noted, "To translate all of Catullus so that the English sounds like the Latin Zukofsky had to pay attention to three things at once: sound, rhythm, and syntax. The choice of each word therefore involved three decisions. This is of course impossible."

In the later sections of "A" Zukofsky also explored language. For example, "A"-14, forty-four pages long, is composed entirely of three-line stanzas. In the first sixteen pages almost every line consists of two words; then it shifts to a three-word line, with occasional passages in one-word lines. The poet allows himself dashes, question marks, and quotation marks, but only an occasional period or comma. The resulting sense of syntactic indeterminacy was described as follows by Bruce Comens in a 1986 Sagetrieb article: "Rather than excluding meaning, Zukofsky's increasing suppression of context ... expands meaning.... [His] method results in a multiplicity of meanings having no central 'point,' so that, while the poem itself is remarkably assured, the reader is likely to feel considerable insecurity among the rapidly shifting perspectives available in reading any given line. Becoming more or less constantly ironic, the text achieves that ... skepticism which [in Zukofsky's words] 'doubts its own skepticism and becomes the only kind of skepticism true to itself.'"

The remarkable opacity of Zukofsky's later poetry offended many critics and even some his former friends—for example, Zukofsky quarrelled bitterly with George Oppen, his objectivist comrade from the 1930s, after Oppen accused Zukofsky of using obscurity as a tactic. But the 1960s and 1970s also brought Zukofsky a degree of public recognition that he had never before received. By the late 1960s, critics were also beginning to acknowledge the importance of Zukofsky's work. In particular, the influential scholar Hugh Kenner became a close friend of Zukofsky and an advocate of his work. More important still, the later years brought Zukofsky the warm admiration of many younger poets. Such major poets as Robert Duncan and Robert Creeley ha

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/detail/69724

Prose from Poetry Magazine
Uncollected Hecht: An Introduction
By David Yezzi

Do poets, as Auden wrote of Yeats, become their readers when they die? In one sense, it’s unavoidable: the work, if it continues to attract readers, remains and is “modified in the guts of the living.” Poems are often modified for the living by the clarifying light cast on them by archival material—the poet’s worksheets, letters, notebooks, and uncollected poems. It is rare that these supplementary works contain lost masterpieces, but they do frequently round out our appreciation. That said, some uncollected work stands with a poet’s best.

“Omissions are not accidents,” Marianne Moore insisted in an epigraph to her Complete Poems. Yet every poet—unless particularly assiduous with the shredder—leaves behind work of value that, for whatever reason, did not find its way into published collections. What follows in this portfolio is a selection of poems—all uncollected, some previously unpublished—by Anthony Hecht. They are striking in their own right and even more so for the resonances they share with Hecht’s signature poems of love and death, wit and melancholy. A selection of archival photographs has also been made available by Hecht’s estate and by the poet’s widow, Helen Hecht.

When Anthony Hecht died in 2004, at the age of eighty-one, his Collected Later Poems had been out from Knopf for three years. Along with his Collected Earlier Poems (1990), the volume constitutes all of the work that Hecht chose to keep in print. Missing from the two volumes are a number of poems from his debut collection, A Summoning of Stones(1954). (These poems fell away when Hecht’s editor, Harry Ford, appended half of them to Hecht’s second book, The Hard Hours[1967].) J.D. McClatchy’s new edition of Hecht’s Selected Poems places the poems from Stones back in chronological order, and presumably a Complete Poems will restore the entire text.

Much has been written about Hecht’s experience as an infantryman in wwii, both in combat and at the liberation of Flossenbürg concentration camp. “The place, the suffering, the prisoners’ accounts were beyond comprehension,” Hecht said of the camp, an annex of Buchenwald, in an interview with Philip Hoy. “For years after I would wake shrieking.” The survivors were naked, skeletal, their yellowed skin stretched over bony frames; contemporary reports note that the smell was unbearable. Hecht explained to Hoy how he let go completely any illusions of heroism when on another occasion he saw American soldiers mow down a group of women and children who were attempting to surrender.

Hecht’s war poems are among his finest—“‘More Light! More Light!’,” “‘It Out-Herods Herod. Pray You, Avoid It.’,” “The Book of Yolek,” “Persistences,” and the third section of “Sacrifice.” The war poems here provide background music to these well-known works, adding notes of visionary intensity to Hecht’s often understated depiction of horror. “The Plate” is taken from an undated typescript and refers to the silver-like metal plates (of tantalum, most likely) that were used as prostheses to repair severe head wounds during the war. In the fire that burns the body into extinction, one hears the wordplay on gunfire. The poem ends with the word alive, an oxymoron, since it is the fire of death that exhibits such vitality. (The humorous riff on Wordsworth, a bit of spirit-bolstering from Hecht’s early days in the Army, is touching given how difficult Hecht’s war experience would prove.)

The subject of “A Friend Killed in the War” (which appeared in the Spring 1948 number of Reed Whittemore’s Furioso) has not been identified. Hecht saw a number of friends and fellow soldiers die in combat. The description of the opening wound and the heavy bandoleers recalls the account in section three of “The Venetian Vespers” of a death Hecht witnessed:

He haunts me here, that seeker after law
In a lawless world, in rainsoaked combat boots,
Oil-stained fatigues and heavy bandoleers.
He was killed by enemy machine-gun fire.
His helmet had fallen off. They had sheared away
The top of his cranium like a soft-boiled egg,
And there he crouched, huddled over his weapon,
His brains wet in the chalice of his skull.

“Mathematics Considered as a Vice” describes L’Âne qui veille, the upright figure of a donkey playing the lyre on a buttress of Chartres Cathedral. The significance of the figure is the subject of wide speculation. Hecht suggests it is the donkey that Jesus rode, placed there to sing his story. By alluding to Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly, Hecht points readers to Erasmus’s adage: asinus ad lyram (an ass to the lyre), which correlates roughly with “pearls before swine.” Hecht also nods to Bottom from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, whom we hear echoed in “man is but an ass.” For Hecht, the ideal signs of mathematics are ill-suited to describe our contingent world. This unpublished poem was enclosed in a letter from Ischia, where Hecht first met W.H. Auden, to Hecht’s younger brother, Roger (also a poet), in November 1950.
“An Offering for Patricia” is a bittersweet poem from Hecht’s first marriage to Patricia Harris, which lasted from 1954 to 1961. Hecht later described the marriage as an unhappy one. This poem, which exists in typescript in the Hecht archive at Emory University, and (according to Jonathan F.S. Post) likely dates from 1955 describes the couple’s time together in Italy, before Pat returned by herself to the us. In a letter from June 1955, Hecht asks his father to be supportive of her:

Please try to be gentle with Pat when you see her. She is very sick and she knows it, but tries hard to forget it most of the time. I hope she will want to try to do something about it.

(The entire letter appears in Post’s edition of Hecht’s correspondence forthcoming from the Johns Hopkins University Press.) Though “An Offering” suggests perhaps a happier time together, its undercurrent of melancholy is palpable throughout.

Also in the archive at Emory is the typescript of one of Hecht’s early attempts to translate Baudelaire’s “Le Jet d’eau.” He ultimately preferred the version (under the French title) that appears in his last volume, The Darkness and the Light(2001). As Hecht wrote to his son Evan, in a letter dated April 2, 1998:

The original is a poem that has haunted me since the time I was a college undergraduate, and I have tried time and again to produce some English version that captured some of the magic, beauty and pathos of the French.

“The Fountain” is the only record remaining of those earlier attempts.

“Dilemma” came out of Hecht’s long collaboration with the artist Leonard Baskin. Two collaborations between them appear in the collected poems—“The Seven Deadly Sins” from The Hard Hours and “The Presumptions of Death” from Flight Among the Tombs(1996). “Dilemma” was intended to accompany a Baskin woodcut in their Gehenna Florilegium, but was ultimately dropped. “I’m aware of course,” Hecht wrote to Baskin in October 1997,

that the columbine poem is something of a cheat, but I found it a stumbling-block, its name supposedly derived from a “cluster of five doves, which the blossom is thought to resemble.”

Columbine’s charming dilemma, in which she eats her cake and has it too, employs Hecht’s wry mastery, at once “dark and amusing.” I have heard from people who knew Hecht well that he had seemed to them initially intimidating—perhaps because of his impressive achievement and authority as a poet, perhaps due to a quiet melancholy of his own. But those I have spoken with also shared the experience I had, when meeting Hecht late in his life, of a wit that admitted glints of mischief and of a thoughtful and patient generosity.

—David Yezzi

Originally Published: September 1st, 2011

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/detail/69357


Prose from Poetry Magazine
To Let You Pass
Remembering Craig Arnold.
By Christian Wiman
Introduction

It is now seven months since Craig Arnold died—or vanished, as most notices have termed it. We have delayed running an obituary for him partly because of the circumstances of his death. As most people in the poetry world now know, he disappeared while exploring a volcano on a Japanese island, and all indications are that he suffered a fatal fall in such a remote and dense location that his body may never be found. Another part of the delay, though, perhaps the better part of it, is this: I knew Craig, and knew him to be a person in whom life burned so intensely and immediately that not only is his death at forty-one a shock, but in some part of my brain it simply will not register.

It is now six months since Craig Arnold died—or vanished, as most notices have termed it. We have delayed running an obituary for him partly because of the circumstances of his death. As most people in the poetry world now know, he disappeared while exploring a volcano on a Japanese island, and all indications are that he suffered a fatal fall in such a remote and dense location that his body may never be found. Another part of the delay, though, perhaps the better part of it, is this: I knew Craig, and knew him to be a person in whom life burned so intensely and immediately that not only is his death at forty-one a shock, but in some part of my brain it simply will not register.

I first met Craig about ten years ago at a little college in Virginia, where he was part of a symposium of young poets I had organized. Tall, lean, and with his head shaved, clad in black leather pants and tight white T-shirt, he didn’t “read” his poems: he performed them, strutting elastically about as if he were on stage, whipsawing lines and limbs in precise, rehearsed ways, electrifying that quaint little lecture hall as if it were the Moulin Rouge. I tend to be allergic to this kind of self-dramatization in poetry, but I loved it. All of it: the flair that seemed to arise naturally out of his character rather than being appliquéd on; the mercurial and protean nature of his subjects (and, I would learn, his own life); the hell-bent hungers and raptures kept in check—or at least kept intact, intelligible—by the tough-minded conscience and craft that ran through the poems like a spine.

Those were the poems of Shells, Craig’s first book, which had been selected by W.S. Merwin for the Yale Series of Younger Poets in 1998 (published in 1999). The poems hold up, to say the least. In fact, what strikes me when reading them now is how little they need any embellishment of drama or gesture, how absolute their integrity is on the page. “Hot,” a long, tightly-wrought narrative which is emblematic of the book as a whole, is about—besides life and death and art, I mean—two friends who share a passion, of a sort, for ever-hotter peppers:

I called in sick
next morning, said I’d like to take

time off. She thinks I’ve hit the bottle.
The high those peppers gave me is more subtle—

I’m lucid, I remember my full name,
my parents’ birthdays, how to win a game

of chess in seven moves, why which and that
mean different things. But what we eat,

why, what it means, it’s all been explained
—Take this curry, this fine-tuned

balance of humors, coconut liquor thinned
by broth, sour pulp of tamarind

cut through by salt, set off by fragrant
galangal, ginger, basil, cilantro, mint,

the warp and woof of texture, aubergines
that barely hold their shape, snap beans

heaped on jasmine, basmati rice
—it’s a lie, all of it—pretext—artifice

—ornament—sugar-coating—for . . .

For what? Well, that’s the whole heart of “Hot,” the whole heart of Craig, really, who seems to me as powerfully present in these poems as when I first heard him perform them all those years ago—and as teasingly elusive.

Nine years would pass between the publication of Shells and the appearance of Craig’s next book, Made Flesh, nine years in which Craig lived in Rome and Bogotá and Wyoming and Utah and I don’t know where else. It was in some ways the typical twenty-first-century up-and-coming American poet’s life—the pick-up jobs and the scramble for publishers, the fellowships and relationships (for the past six years of his life, Craig was very happily partnered with another poet, Rebecca Lindenberg), the constant effort to find a way of staying alive without allowing one’s lifeblood to congeal into a career.

And yet it wasn’t so typical, too: Craig was perhaps the only poet I have known personally—the only good poet, I should say—who seemed completely at ease with being a poet. Don’t get me wrong: Craig had all of the existential friction and psychic disquiet we’ve come to expect from post-Romantic poets—an excess of it, actually. You don’t have to read his poems autobiographically—and they’re too cunningly, winningly imagined to do that—to get a hint of the tempest that was their source. But he also had, right down to his soul (I guess it was his soul), a calm and clarifying equanimity about his purpose on this earth, and always over the years when I would encounter him—a few days in Virginia again, a dinner in San Francisco, a breakfast in Chicago—I would discover my own bristling insecurities melting away in his presence, and would feel my own relationship with poetry renewed. This wasn’t because Craig had achieved some sort of monkish calm with regard to ambition (ha!), and it certainly wasn’t because he was placidly and brainlessly open to everything he encountered (in fact, he could be quite sudden and sharp in his opinions). No, what Craig had, besides his endless and endlessly inclusive charisma, was a capacity to be at once absolutely grounded in the physical world, and in his own body, and yet utterly, mysteriously permeable. I’m not sure how this played out in his daily life, but I know it affected mine, and for the better. I also know that this quality gives the concrete things of his poetry, and especially his later poetry, a powerful sense of being more themselves by being more than themselves:

Here is a small café
opening for breakfast
a zinc counter catching the light
at every angle in bright rings of glitter
A cup of black coffee is placed before you
brimming with rainbow-colored foam
a packet of sugar a pat of butter
a split roll of bread
scored and toasted and still warm
The butter is just soft enough to spread
the coffee hot and sugared to perfect sweetness
the bread grilled to the palest brown
crisp but not quite dry
You tear it neatly into pieces
eat them slowly when you finish
you are exactly full

Here are bread butter and coffee
Here you are your own body
eating and drinking what you are given
as one day you in turn will be devoured
and that is all You were never the lord
of a lightless kingdom any more
than she has ever been its queen
and the world you talked into a prison
suddenly seems to be made of glass
and your eyes see clear to the horizon
and you feel the molecules of air
part like a curtain as if to let you pass
—From “Couple From Hell”

This is from Made Flesh, which is a different sort of book from Shells. Shells is often about the immediacy of experience, but there is just as often a detachment to the poems, a very palpable (and altogether successful) sense of artifice, of talent that is in some way distancing a world even as it brings that world wildly alive. In Made Flesh that distance is gone. The language is sparer, all irony is obliterated, the poems are less obviously “formal,” and their raptures are at once quieter and more complete. There is something both precise and encompassing about these poems, something at the same time piercing and liberating (for a straight shot of what I mean, flip a few pages back and read the more recent “Meditation on a Grapefruit”). Time abrades talent. Some poets don’t seem to notice this and continue to make the same ever-thinning sound right on into oblivion. Others lapse into embittered silence. In some, though, the abrasions bloom:

On the fire escape of your rented room
we sat and felt the empty city
sweat and fret we passed a cigarette
back and forth as once we passed
words like these between us without
hope of keeping
Now I write
without hope of answer to say
that what we gave each other nakedly
was too much and not enough
To say that since we last touched
I am not empty I hear you named
and my heart starts the pieces of your voice
you left are interleaved with mine

and to this quick spark in the emptiness
to say Yes I miss how love
may make us otherwise
—From “Asunder”

The bracing, rule-breaking (show, then tell), completely convincing move from detail to abstraction, from sensation to realization; the space-ghosted form of the lines so apt for their subject; the careful, graceful assurance of the poem as it charts an entirely new route through a minefield of emotional and poetic cliches: it takes an enormous amount of skill to speak one’s pain in this way, and it takes a rare, clear heart.

I last saw Craig back in February, when he came into town for the AWP conference. He showed up at the Poetry offices one afternoon and practically lifted me off the floor in a hug. As always, the twitchy intelligence, the solar flares of his energy, surprised me—and, as always, surprised a happiness in me I hadn’t known was there. We locked him in an office all afternoon in hopes that he would write the long-overdue prose note to the translation he had done for our April issue, and for hours he sat there (weird: how suddenly still he could become, how creaturely focused), finally emerging near dusk with a single brilliant and self-revealing page on a poet he had recently met while living in Colombia (“to hit upon such an image requires an intimate acquaintance with all the flavors of pain and persistence and hopelessness—here, I thought, was a conscience to reckon with”). The next day he led—with great kindness, and much to my surprise—a reading he’d shaped as a celebration of the magazine. He’d given up the extravagant reading style of years before because, he said, he began to think it was actually deflecting people’s attention and detracting from the work. Still, even understated (as if that word could ever be used for Craig!), he was searing, mesmerizing, unforgettable.

Craig stayed with my wife and me that week, and somehow in between the dozens of friends he was seeing, or tending to, or shuttling to and from the airport, we found time to talk. I remember most clearly his last morning here, when he made us “migas” for breakfast, and the conversation turned to something he and I had talked of many times over the years: the necessary but destabilizing intensities of poetry, and the life that one risks by cultivating those intensities, and the life that—in some cases, our cases, we both felt—poetry also rescues. Out in the front yard he gave me another of his no-holds-barred hugs and promised to be back in August. Only as he drove off did I realize I’d forgotten to get him to sign our copy of Made Flesh, which is a shame, since the inscription he wrote for me on Shells all those years ago is a gem. Filling the entire page, and linking quotations from Fight Club and Baudelaire with a self-consciously absurd smiley face, it’s Craig all over. “I hope this stays with you,” he scrawled on the very last bit of space at the end of the page. “I certainly will.”

Originally Published: October 1st, 2009

What is the life of a man?
A mere blink it often seems when looking from the outside in.
Yet looking inside out, the person is massively filled with hope, promise,burning desire and living yet to be done
Always the magnificent treasure- the hopeful promise of---- "sweetest living yet to be done"!--Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/detail/70112

Prose from Poetry Magazine
Reputation Is a Funny Thing
The Complete Poems of  James Dickey, ed. by Ward Briggs
By Michael Robbins

The Complete Poems of  James Dickey, ed. by Ward Briggs.

The University of South Carolina Press. $85.00.

I would begin with a word against collected editions — or at least against the current trend of issuing them in gigantic, overpriced formats that resemble the compact OED. You should not be able to stun a moose with anyone’s Complete Poems. In recent years, we’ve had enormous, expensive editions of, inter alios, Robert Lowell, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch, Frederick Seidel, James Merrill, Lucille Clifton, Louise Glück, Jack Gilbert, and Denise Levertov. Even so skinny a poet as Philip Larkin, in FSG’s recent (and superfluous) Complete Poems, has bloated beyond recognition. I’m all for having these folks’ oeuvres in print (although I’d also say a word against the fantasies of totality that compel editors to include drafts, revisions, juvenilia, and the like). But what’s wrong with affordable and portable? The Library of America and Faber and Faber, for instance, manage to produce wieldy omnibuses (the former’s, admittedly, not exactly budget-friendly). Another world is possible.

This rant was inspired by the University of South Carolina Press, whose 4.2-pound Complete Poems of James Dickey will run you eighty-five dollars. If you have any interest in (and are not writing a dissertation or monograph on) James Dickey’s poetry, may I suggest a used copy of The Whole Motion: Collected Poems, 1945–1992, published by Wesleyan University Press, which lacks ninety-three poems published in the USC edition and contains many typos but has the virtues of arranging the poems by individual collection (editor Ward Briggs has printed the poems in order of initial publication) and of fitting in a messenger bag or backpack?

Illustration by Rob Funderburk

So much for The Complete Poems of James Dickey. What about the complete poems of  James Dickey? Reputation is a funny thing. Dickey was once king of the cats — winner of the National Book Award (for Buckdancer’s Choice, 1966), consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress (1966–68), author of the novel (1970) and screenplay (1972) Deliverance (but not of the immortal line “I bet you can squeal like a pig”). In the sixties, Peter Davison pronounced Dickey and Lowell the only major poets of their generation (Davison appears to have backed away from this; such are the hazards of cultural prophecy). The poet appeared on national talk shows, wrote Jimmy Carter’s inaugural poem, and commemorated the Apollo missions in the pages of Life. In 1976, the Paris Review said his name was “a household word.” A sense of the critical veneration to which Dickey was subject can be gleaned from Robert Kirschten’s introduction to The Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 1998): “I think you will agree that one would as soon read James Dickey as live.” Hmm, let’s see  ...    read Dickey; live  ...    read Dickey; live  ...    

It is possible that the relative dim of  Dickey’s star since his death is simply a reversion to sanity. But it’s also, I think, an implicit recognition that his best poems, as Richard Howard implies in his brief 
foreword to the Briggs edition, are those collected under the title Poems 1957–1967, and particularly the ones published in the last few years of that decade. In the last thirty years of his career, Dickey too often gave full-throated vent to an oracular windiness. Consider these lines from “The Surround”:

Pray, beginning sleeper, and let your mind dissolve me as I
Straighten, upright from the overflow crouch: pray with all
Your heart-muscle,
The longing-muscle only, as the bird in its hunting sorrows
Bides in good falling — gone
The gather-voices, and more the alone ones.
Pray with the soul-straining of echo

Of the lost ax, that the footprints of all
Predators, moving like old-stone, like
Clean leaves, grey and sensitive as willows’,
Will have left their intensified beauty
And alertness around you, when you wake,
And that the blood and waste of them
Will be gone, or not known. Become
All stark soul and overreach the ax in the air
Now come, now still half-way.

Part of me wants to respond: Whose longing-muscle prays not, as the bird in its hunting sorrows bides in good falling?

But my better angel protests that the artificiality of this register is not inherently ridiculous — that its true fault lies in settling too easily for the bombastic, and it attains to a certain power even so. “Pray, beginning sleeper  ...    as I / Straighten, upright from the overflow crouch” has a satisfying oddity that is undermined by the blurriness of dissolving minds and longing muscles. The trope of death as a form of sleep is shocked into life by the addition of  “beginning,” with its ambitious suggestion that the newly dead are initiates into cultic mysteries, with ropes to learn. All stark soul and overreach: that’s James Dickey in a nutshell. But you could say the same of  Whitman, or Stevens, or Pound.



•



I fell in love with the poems of Dickey’s friends James Wright and Richard Hugo at too early an age, blessedly, to hear how often they sound like the smartest drunk at the bar on any small-town afternoon. I didn’t come to Dickey until after I’d been delivered by the good news John Ashbery brings to middle-American poets manqué in their early twenties, and by then it was too late. Reading him again at forty, I’m amused to find my prejudices both confirmed and upended. Flipping from some of the almost priggishly static early work — 

Shines, like a marsh, the sun
On the crossed brow of listening.
He beats his empty hands on his ears, and twists
All around his leg, white, edged gold, sewn flat
Beside a hooded falcon burned in grass.
— From The Work of Art

— to the war whoop of the last poems — 

Real God, roll
roll as a result
Of a whole thing: ocean:
Thís: wide altar-shudder of miles

Given twelve new dead-level powers
Of glass, in borrowed binoculars, set into

The hand-held eyes of this man

And no other, his second son coming to his head

Like Armageddon, with the last wave. Real God,
Through both hands and my head, in depth-bright distance, roll
In raw free sharpness.  
— From Show Us the Sea

— you get the sense someone told him he was holding the reins too tightly and he thought, “All right, then, I’ll go to hell.” The later poems have a Poundian energy, an arrogance, that can be both daft and charming. But they seem to want to say more than they do — they would speak of final things in thunder but must settle for yelling into a megaphone about next-to-last things. Howard says “Dickey grew too big for mere poetry,” but poetry, even at its merest, is big enough for anything James Dickey could have thrown at it. It’s rather that his own poetry grew too small for its unruly grandiloquence. Even while acknowledging, with the trope of binoculars, that his eyes are borrowed and too powerful for the scene — the Beowulf poet at the beach — he compares his son’s riding in on the surf to the Last Days.

It’s in the middle poems that Dickey flashes out into “raw free sharpness.” A real god rolls through “May Day Sermon to the Women of Gilmer County, Georgia, by a Woman Preacher Leaving the Baptist Church,” a diesel-fumed negative hallelujah of backwoods terror:

Each year at this time I shall be telling you of the Lord
 — Fog, gamecock, snake and neighbor — giving men all the help they need
To drag their daughters into barns.    
 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
each May with night coming I cannot help
Telling you how he hauls her to the centerpole how the tractor moves
Over as he sets his feet and hauls hauls ravels her arms and hair
In stump chains: Telling: telling of  Jehovah come and gone
Down on His belly descending creek-curving blowing His legs

Like candles, out putting North Georgia copper on His head

Dickey moves into the sermon form like the devil himself, flicking his forked tongue above the congregants, preaching at full throttle for ten giant pages, his voice never breaking, soaring past country girls “dancing with God in a mule’s eye,” “the black / Bible’s white swirling ground,” past an incestuous father “rambling / In Obadiah,” past a needle passing “through the eye of a man bound for Heaven,” past hogs and quartermoons, an old man “with an ice-pick on his mind, /  A willow limb in his hand,” the kudzu advancing, “its copperheads drunk and tremendous / With hiding, toward the cows.”

And I would just go on quoting if I could, because Dickey finds in this poem — and in “The Christmas Towns” and “For the Last Wolverine” and “Adultery” and a dozen more — a canvas large enough for his palette. The closing lines of “May Day Sermon ...” are worth a hundred Armageddons:

the animals walk through
The white breast of the Lord muttering walk with nothing
To do but be in the spring laurel in the mist and self-sharpened
Moon walk through the resurrected creeks through the Lord
At their own pace the cow shuts its mouth and the Bible is still
Still open at anything we are gone the barn wanders over the earth.



•



Dickey remained to the end a votary of that period style that liked its bourbon neat and its hawks locked in spiritual combat. “The Surround,” Dickey said,

is a kind of elegy for the American poet James Wright, a close friend of mine for years, who feared the change from day to night and the coming of the predators, when the whole climate of fighting in the animal world changes to that of prey and predator, in the dark: he used to say that he feared the dark because he feared the change “in the surround.” I am telling him in the poem that he is not to fear this any more, for he is the surround; the whole thing good and bad, and that the moon is beautiful on water, and that the tree grows its rings in the dark as well as the light.

This is, on the one hand, sentimental trash, and, on the other, an eloquent deployment of a vocabulary in which Dickey and certain of his contemporaries were so at home that they mistook it for a kind of natural language. Robert Bly, who accused Dickey of macho warmongering, had more in common with him than he imagined.

For all their stylistic differences, these poets shared a somewhat desperate (and somewhat ridiculous) refusal to accept that the cultural authority of the Poet had been eclipsed. If I’ve lapsed into psychological criticism, it is because their poetry was so often nakedly psychological — a sifting of correlatives of moods and inner states. For Dickey, these were often “old-stone,” deliberately archaic, as if the only horses alive enough were painted on the recesses of Altamira. Someone should count the appearances of  the moon — that old bone — in Dickey’s poetry. Even now he is crouched beneath it, wrapped in a bearskin and stoned on glory, trying to shape-shift into a wolf.

Originally Published: May 1st, 2014

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/detail/69178


Prose from Poetry Magazine
The Linebacker and the Dervish
Lowell stormed the literary world; while Bishop orbited its periphery. On closely reading their collected letters, a poet and critic uncovers a new way to read their mythologized friendship.
By Michael Hofmann
Introduction
"This is the poet as house plant, as aspirin-munching studio beast, as day-for-night alice band. Lowell is the linebacker-turned-pasha as poet, Bishop is the lifelong dervish."
Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. Edited by Thomas Travisano with Saskia Hamilton.Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $45.00.

This is such a formidably and dramatically and lingeringly wonderful book, it is hard to know where to begin. Well, begin in the manner of the physical geographer and the embarrassed statistician and the value-for-money merchant, with quantity, though that's absolutely the wrong place. Here then are 459 letters, three hundred of them not previously published, exchanged over thirty years, between 1947 when the two great poets of late-twentieth-century America first met—Robert Lowell just thirty, Elizabeth Bishop thirty-six, each with one trade book and one round of prizes under their belts—and 1977 when Lowell predeceased his friend by two years; covering, all told, some nine hundred pages, from Bishop end-papers—one hand-scrawled, one typed—to Lowell end-papers—one in his laborious, also not greatly legible child-print ("I know I'm myself beyond self-help; and at least you can spell"), one typed. The apparatus of footnotes, chronology, and compendious glossary of names—take a bow, Thomas Travisano and Saskia Hamilton—is modest, helpful, and accurate. At this point in our post-epistolary (no joke), post-literary, almost post-alphabetical decline, we would probably receive any collection of letters with a feeling of stupefied wistfulness and a sigh of valediction, but Words in Air is way beyond generic. It feels like a necessary and a culminating book, especially for Bishop. To read, it is completely engrossing, to the extent that I feel I have been trekking through it on foot for months, and I don't know where else I've been. "Why, page 351," I would say. "Letter 229; March 1, 1961. Where did you think?"

But what is it like? How in fact do you read it? "I am underlining like Queen Victoria," Bishop remarks at one stage. How do you filter, assimilate, crunch it down to the space of a review? Its eight-hundred pages of letters—every one of them bearing my ambiguous slashes of delight, interest, controversy, revelation—still left me with eight sheets full of page numbers of my own. It's like starting with a city, and ending up with a phone book—hardly useful as a redaction. Really, I might as well have held a pencil to the margin and kept it there, for bulk re-read.

It's an epistolary novel, if not a full-blown romance then at least at moments an amitié amoureuse. It's a variation on Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera. Or it's an Entwicklungsroman in later life, both parties already poets but perhaps more importantly still on the way to becoming poets (echoing the title of David Kalstone's study), as perhaps one only ever and always is becoming a poet. It's an ideally balanced, ideally complex account of a friendship, a race, a decades-long conspiracy, a dance (say, a tango?). It's a cocktail of infernal modesty and angelic pride. It's a further episode in Bishop's increasingly sweeping posthumous triumph over her more obvious, more ambitious, more square-toed friend. It's a rat-a-tat-tat ping-pong rally, an artillery exchange, a story told in fireworks, a trapeze show. One can read it for gifts sent up and down the Atlantic, from Lowell's traditional northeast seaboard to Bishop's serendipitously-arrived-at Brazil, where she mostly lived from 1951 on, having arrived on a freighter for a short visit; for projects completed, adapted, revised, abandoned, published, and responded to; for blurbs solicited, struggled with, and delivered to greater or lesser satisfaction; for houses bought and done up and left; for other partners encountered and set down; for visits and time together passionately contrived, put off, and subsequently held up to memory or guiltily swept under the carpet; for gossip and the perennial trade in reputations; for a startlingly unabashed revelation of mutual career aid ("we may be a terrible pair of log-rollers, I don't know," writes Bishop in 1965, having asked Lowell for a blurb for Questions of Travel after he had asked her for one for Life Studies); for loyalty and demurral, independent thinking and prudent silence, insistent generosity and occasional self-seeking; a longing to submit to the other's perceived discipline and a desire to offer unconditional admiration; for personal, professional, and public events. One can read it for movements of place, for gaps in time, and discrepancies and disharmonies in feeling or balance; for the dismayed Bishop's agonized criticism of aspects of two of Lowell's books, the rather coarse free translations in Imitations of 1961 and the use of private letters from his second wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, in The Dolphin of 1973; for various other crises and cruxes: their heady, teasy-flirty mutual discovery of 1947, Bishop's difficult visit to a near-manic Lowell in Maine in 1957, Lowell's visit to Brazil and another manic episode in 1962, the death by suicide of Bishop's companion Lota de Macedo Soares in 1967, Bishop's uneasy return to Boston (to fill in for Lowell's absence, if you please), and Lowell's ultimate shuttling between wives and countries of the late seventies. It's social history, comedy of manners, American dissidence, the search for a style. It's not least a gender myth more astute about men and women than that of Atalanta and Hippolytus (in any case, I always think Atalanta, like Bishop, should have won—she should have been provided with the apples, and Hippolytus, the ambitious, distractable male, goofed off in their pursuit, rather than the other way round). He is her anchor, she his kite.

The haunting issue in these letters is how much the vast difference between their authors brings them together and how much it pulls them apart. Because Lowell and Bishop are unmistakably and unignorably and quite intractably dissimilar—of that there can be no doubt. The letters might as well have been printed in different type or different colors, so little is there ever any question of who is writing. (Which, if you think about it, is rather striking over some eight hundred pages of often close personal communication.) Even when, in the manner of friends, Lowell mimics Bishop, or Bishop teases Lowell, there is no real blurring of identities. "Parce que c'etait lui, parce que c'etait moi" is Montaigne's classic definition of friendship in his essay on the subject. It's a definition that itself resists further definition. It glories in something arbitrary and utterly unappealable. To try and soften this, we standing outside and looking on at such a friendship would hope or expect to see the "lui" and the "moi"—or here the "elle" and the "moi"—as at least converging in a sort of dynamic narcissism, in the way of people coming to resemble their spouses, or dog-owners their dogs. But this is a friendship, it seems to me, across the lines, that from the very beginning asserts itself in spite of everything, that enlists the whole sum and detail of its two divergent personalities to satisfy its absolutely irrational and resolutely Montaignesque basis. The attraction of opposites is a simplification in this context, but the Lowell-Bishop association does bring to mind the school construction of a molecule: the proton (Lowell) massive, positively charged, hugging the center, and the electron (Bishop) almost weightless, negatively charged, speedy and peripheral and orbiting.

All this is exacerbated, of course, by the way one reads, which is to question, to cross-refer and compare, to doubt, to go behind the back of words, to tap for hollowness and cracks and deadness. One reads not with a vise or glue, but with a hammer and chisel, or an awl. It's not—or at least not by intention, or not immediately—a consolidating or fortifying activity, but more like looking for safe passage across a frozen river. Hence, the very form of this book—not one voice, but two voices, and then such different voices and such completely different temperaments—inclines one to further doubt. It's as though two incompatibles had re-based themselves and in some Nietzschean way sworn undying loyalty. The loyalty, whether unspoken or occasionally voiced along the lines of "I don't know what I'd do without you," one tends to disregard—it makes, as it were, the hard covers for this book—while the reader is again and again made aware of the incompatibility, which is everything in between.

The thought came to me early on that this is a dialogue of the deaf, or to put it in the way I first conceived: it's like an arm writing to a leg. It's all a matter of what you want to do, tickle, or walk. Bishop is acute, Lowell obtuse; Bishop sensitive, solicitous, moody, Lowell dull, sometimes careless, rather relentlessly productive; she is anxious, he when not shockingly and I think genuinely self-critical, insouciant; she is open to the world, whereas with him—and this is an understatement—"sometimes nothing is so solid to me as writing"; her poems in her account of them are fickle, small-scale, barely worth pursuing—and how many of them seem to get lost in the making—whereas his are industrial-scale drudgery and then quite suddenly completed. It seems symptomatic that as these letters begin, Lowell is working on his long poem, "The Mills of the Kavanaughs," "12 hours a day—it's now 24 sections almost 400 lines, and I think may go to about 50 sections," only for that to be followed by his prose memoir in the fifties, various translations and dramatic adaptations in the sixties—Imitations, The Old Glory, The Oresteia, Phaedra—and the several versions of another "section" poem, Notebook, followed by another long poem, The Dolphin. He writes like a man consumed—and not at all made happy—by his own industry, a sort of tin Midas: "I have a four hundred line sequence poem which might make a book, twenty pages on a New England essay, and my obituary on Randall. Thank God, we two still breathe the air of the living." If Lowell proceeds like a brickie—you see the string and the plumbline, everything is so and so many courses of bricks—Bishop is like a butterfly hunter, now one, now another, in pretty pursuit, a little forlorn, and quite likely to come home at night with nothing to show for a day's gallivanting. (Strange to think that they were both fishermen, and on occasions fished together.) She is much more protective of her poems too, either not mentioning them at all, or else habitually deprecating them: "I have two new ones I'll send you when I get back, but not very serious ones I'm afraid." Even length—and the term is relative—is not comforting to her, but rather the opposite: "However I have just about finished a long & complicated one about Key West." The poem in question is "The Bight," which barely goes over a page.

The catalog of differences goes on. Not only is Lowell a sort of monad of literature, with little interest outside its bounds—his occasional comments on painters seem dull and contrived, and in music as well he lags way behind Bishop, a one-time music major, who is capable of recommending jazz clubs in Boston, Gesualdo, Purcell, Webern, and Brazilian sambas, all with deep knowledge and understanding—even within it he is drawn with laddish (or loutish) insistence to the monumental, the papier-mâché, the Ben Hur. The contrast in their reading is illuminating: he comes to her, at various times, with Faulkner, Pope, Middlemarch, Chaucer, Dryden, Tasso, Shakespeare, Carlyle, Macaulay, Dr. Zhivago, "all of Thucydides. Isn't Moliére swell!"; she counters with such things as Marius the Epicurean, Frank O'Hara, Captain Slocum, Mme de Sévigné ("so much better than most things written on purpose"—which might be an epigraph for the present volume), Sergey Aksakov. It's not that her writers are impressively obscure or recherché—though they are that, too!—they bespeak a taste as his, frankly, don't. They are the product of longer and more grown-up searching. This emerges beautifully in one of the most lovely and softly assertive passages of hers in the book, where she is talking initially about an Anton Webern record, then makes this into nothing less than an ars poetica:

I am crazy about some of the short instrumental pieces. They seem exactly like what I'd always wanted, vaguely, to hear and never had, and really "contemporary." That strange kind of modesty that I think one feels in almost everything contemporary one really likes—Kafka, say, or Marianne, or even Eliot, and Klee and Kokoschka and Schwitters . . . Modesty, care, space, a sort of helplessness but determination at the same time.

This brave and smart piece of improvisation, on an aesthetic that is not even wholly her own (and fighting contrary tendencies in Kokoschka and Eliot, at least), is surely quite beyond Lowell, whose programmatic remarks in books and interviews are few, lazy, and approximate—which might not seem to matter very much, except that the regrettable "confessional" label goes unopposed.

Literary style is another constant source of difference. Bishop has humor—the lovely air of amusement and being amused that plays over almost everything she writes—Lowell has the more deliberate, more solitary quality of wit. I don't think Oscar Wilde ever wrote or said anything wittier than Lowell's observation—itself a witty variation on Juvenal—on his friend (and perennial bone of contention in this correspondence: he likes him, she doesn't) Randall Jarrell: "Then Randall thinks nothing adult is human." Bishop seeks balance and harmony, even in her most far-flung sentences, so that one's impression is of a chord: "The man wore a very strange buttoned bow-tie, and as a youth he had carried gold, around his waist, for Wells Fargo." (Who else would have thought to make one sentence out of that?!) Lowell is drawn to energy, imbalance, exaggeration, caricature; here he is on his son, aged just one: "We'll be at Bill Alfred's sometime after the 15th, though I dread the effect of Sheridan on Bill's fragile furniture. Unfortunately he has made great strides in the last month and now walks, and I think takes strength exercises. A little girl visited him and he looked in contrast like a golden gorilla." To such a distanced, perhaps word-bound, way of looking (remember, please, those "great strides" are actually literal), everything is apt to seem monstrous; and did anyone ever use the little word "girl" with that undertow of sexual speculation with which Lowell always endows it?! Bishop noticed it too: in "North Haven," her marvelous elegy for him, she has, "Years ago, you told me it was here / (in 1932?) you first 'discovered girls.'" There seem to be almost two competing notions of literature at work here: to Bishop it is seeing everything clearly and fairly and in complicated harmony, through to the horizon; to Lowell it is something compacted and impacted, often a single quality driven in and in on itself, somehow caricatured even when kind. He does have some wonderful passages, but they seem—compared to hers—so utterly planned and worked: the account of a literary conference in New York, the description of a weekend's sailing in Maine with the Eberharts and others, a piece of passionate recollection of Delmore Schwartz (on July 16, 1966) which reaches the level of his brilliant published memoirs of Jarrell and Allen Tate:

Delmore in an unpressed mustard gabardine, a little winded, husky voiced, unhealthy, but with a carton of varied vitamin bottles, the color of oil, quickening with Jewish humor, and in-the-knowness, and his own genius, every person, every book—motives for everything, Freud in his blood, great webs of causation, then suspicion, then rushes of rage. He was more reasonable than us, but obsessed, a much better mind, but one really chasing the dust—it was like living with a sluggish, sometimes angry spider—no hurry, no motion, Delmore's voice, almost inaudible, dead, intuitive, pointing somewhere, then the strings tightening, the roar of rage—too much, too much for us!

This is hammer work, a hammer on the piano or a hammer on the drums; Bishop makes writing seem like breathing.

If one leaves the sheltered hunting grounds of literature—as to an extent we have already—then the differences grow still more apparent. Bishop likes strong Brazilian coffee, Lowell drinks American dishwater coffee (or tea, sometimes he's not sure). Bishop is the one who brings in words: desmarcar, "when you want to get out of an engagement," or "found a lovely word at Jane Dewey's—you probably know it—ALLELOMIMETIC. (Don't DARE use it!)." And she is the one too whose work requires a dictionary: "Dearest Elizabeth: It was fun looking up echolalia (again), chromograph, gesso, and roadstead—they all mean pretty much what I thought. Oh and taboret, an object I've known all my life, but not the name." It's as though these correspondents have separate vocabularies! And of course separate lives, or rather—to put it a little too brusquely—one life as well: hers. She is the one who travels on freighters, who likes bullfighting, whose "favorite eye shadow—for years—suddenly comes in 3 cakes in a row and one has to work much harder at it and use all one's skill to avoid iridescence . . ." (I belatedly realize what a strangely Hemingwayesque collocation this is). It's not just that Lowell didn't do these things, but that even if he had done them, it seems probable that they would have been wasted on him. He after all was at different times in three European cities—Florence, Amsterdam, and London—and was reminded in all three of them of Boston. Meantime, from Boston, his Boston, she wrote him in 1971: "It is nice autumn weather—the ivy turns bright colors but the trees just an unpleasant yellow. On the library steps I realized the whole place smelt exactly like a cold, opened, and slightly rotten watermelon." It is hard not to contrast this gift to him of his own place with his hard, raptor-like, plaid-golfing-slack announcement: "We would like to come and see you and then rapidly a little more of South America."

A great majority of the arresting and beautiful observations in this book are Bishop's; and one's sense of the book as a whole is largely conditioned by her part of it. From tiny sparking details like the salutation "Dear Lowellzinhos" or the signing off "recessively yours," to a charming haiku-like sentence on a postcard from Italy, "Lovely weather—green wheat, wild-flowers, swallows, a ruin with a big fox," that is like a fast-forward of the creation, it seems she is always good for a vivid and pell-mell and noticing transcription—if not, to use I think it was Derek Mahon's neologism, "danscription"—of the natural world that is a match for anything in her poetry:

All the flowering trees are in blossom, delicate patches of color all up the mountains, and nearer to they glisten with little floating webs of mist, gold spider-webs, iridescent butterflies—this is the season for the big pale blue-silver floppy ones, hopelessly impractical, frequently frayed, in vague couples. They hover over our little pool, and pink blossoms fall into it, and there are so many dragon flies—some invisible except as dots of white or ruby red or bright blue plush or velvet—then they catch the light and you see the body and wings are really there, steely blue wire-work. We sat out in the evenings and the lightning twitched around us and the bigger variety of fireflies came floating along like people walking with very weak flashlights, on the hill—well—you missed this dazzlingness—and the summer storms. Lots of rainbows—a double one over the sea just now with three freighters going off under it in three different directions.

The Lowells had paid a more or less calamitous visit the previous year ("hopelessly impractical, frequently frayed"), and this magnificent paragraph is nothing less than a remaking of paradise ("steely blue wire-work"), and a sign of forgiveness ("a double one") for them all. Even an occasional striking-a-pose of brisk, tweedy, maiden-auntish refusal is delightful in her: "A very cursory look at the Munch Museum—it was too beautiful a day and I was feeling too cheerful to be bothered with all that nordic nonsense." For much of this book, Lowell makes really remarkably little showing compared to Bishop's ironically proferred "superbly underdeveloped country and this backward friend."

Why this matters, I suppose, is that—other things being equal—one likes a poet to have some hinterland (ugly Tory word!)—some hinterland basically of prose: to have experiences, to hold opinions, to store memories, to lead a rich and varied life of the senses. (The other type of poet is a unicorn who lives in an ivory tower: he's frightening and different and real, and we don't get him. When Lowell spends an evening reading poems aloud with I.A. Richards, that feels like unicorn behavior to me.) It's the famous Louis MacNeice prescription: "I would have a poet . . ." and so forth. This Elizabeth Bishop embodies triumphantly, to the extent that over the course of her life her poems—four short books—have a hard time emerging. She gets involved in the turbulent Brazilian politics of the fifties and sixties (and the characteristically ham-fisted American responses to them); Lowell writes: "Let's not argue politics. I feel a fraud on the subject," but that sort of retrenchment applies everywhere, and to some extent the feeling of fraudulence too. Bishop is so prodigal with sympathy, attention, interest; Lowell, by contrast, seems to endow even people quite close to him (even Elizabeth Bishop, as we will see) with very little reality. It comes down to something like focal length—his is about a foot. See him in his heavy, black-rimmed spectacles, recumbent on a leather sofa in the Fay Godwin photograph ("my tenth muse, Sloth"), in a study described (in the poem "The Restoration") as: "unopened letters, the thousand dead cigarettes, / open books, yogurt cups in the unmade bed," and writing things like:

Now, heart's ease and wormwood,
we rest from all discussion, drinking, smoking,
pills for high blood, three pairs of glasses—soaking
in the sweat of our hard-earned supremacy,
offering a child our leathery love. We're fifty,
and free! Young, tottering on the dizzying brink
of discretion once, you wanted nothing
but to be old, do nothing, type and think.

This is the poet as house plant, as aspirin-munching studio beast, as day-for-night alice band. Lowell is the linebacker-turned-pasha as poet, Bishop is the lifelong dervish.

Small wonder that Lowell (maybe) felt fraudulent. He knew the value of Bishop's letters—when he sold his papers to Harvard, he made sure she was paid a decent sum for hers, but that's not what I mean—even as he apologized ("your letters always fill me with shame for the meager illegible chaff that I send you back") for the thinness of his own. "You & Peter Taylor always make me feel something of a fake—so I love you both dearly," he remarks in 1949. It sounds flip, but of course it was deadly earnest. Lowell understood that there was an agility and a naturalness that Bishop had that he would never have; he and most of the rest of his generation were manufactured. To my possibly anachronistic modern ear, he sentimentalizes and patronizes her all the time. His letters keep her in place, and almost invariably the wrong place; telling an audience that with her he "felt like a mastodon competing with tanks" is typically inept, but maybe no more than telling her, "Honor bright, I'm not a rowdy." For decades he champions her prose, the story "In the Village" in particular ad nauseam (an obviously ambiguous accolade t ................
................

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/detail/69327

Prose from Poetry Magazine
The Necessary Minimum
Dunstan Thompson slides out of the shadows.
By Clive James
Introduction

At a time when almost everyone writes poetry but scarcely anyone can write a poem, it is hard not to wish for a return to some less accommodating era, when the status of “poet” was not so easily aspired to.

At a time when almost everyone writes poetry but scarcely anyone can write a poem, it is hard not to wish for a return to some less accommodating era, when the status of “poet” was not so easily aspired to, and the only hankering was to get something said in a memorable form. Alas, we would have to go a long way back. Samuel Daniel(1562–1619) certainly wanted to be thought of as a poet—it was his career, even when he was working for nobles as a gentleman servant—and there must have been critics who wanted to deny him the title, or they would not have attacked him for too often revising his work, and he would not have defended himself thus:

And howsoever be it, well or ill
What I have done, it is mine owne, I may
Do whatsoever therewithal I will.
I may pull downe, raise, and reedifie.
It is the building of my life, the fee
Of Nature, all th’inheritance that I
Shal leave to those which must come after me.

—From To the Reader

The battle was fought out more than four hundred years ago, and Daniel won it. Unless we are scholars of the period, we might have small knowledge of his work in general, but this one stanza is quite likely to have got through to us. It is often quoted as an example of how there were poets much less important than Shakespeare who nevertheless felt that they, too, might be writing immortal lines to time, and were ready to drub any popinjay who dared to suggest that they weren’t. But clearly the stanza did not get through to us just because of the story it tells or the position it takes. It got through by the way it moves. Within its tight form, it is a playground of easy freedom: not a syllable out of place, and yet it catches your ear with its conversational rhythm at every point.

It would be tempting to say that any poet, in any era, needs to be able to construct at least one stanza like that or he will never even join the contest. Daniel’s technique was so meticulous that it can teach us how words were pronounced in his time. The opening line of one of the sonnets in which he complains about harsh treatment from his vainly adored Delia runs “Fair is my love, and cruel as she’s fair.” Thus we can tell that the word “cruel” was probably pronounced with a full two syllables, or there would be a syllable missing from the line. (If he had written “she is” instead of “she’s,” we would have known that he scanned “cruel” as one syllable, and presumably pronounced it that way too, as we do now.) Unfortunately Daniel seldom wrote an entire poem—not even his beautifully entitled “Care-charmer Sleep”—in which every line was as vivid as that. But he did compose that one stanza, and we only have to read it once before we are drawn in to see how it is held together, and to start asking why we put up with so much unapologetic awkwardness from poets now. Limping numbers from poets writing in free verse are presumably meant, but limping numbers from poets who are avowedly trying to write in set forms must be mere clumsiness. The perpetrators might say that they are getting back to the vitality of an initial state, in which Donne demonstrated the vigor that roughness could give before the false ideal of smoothness arrived. But Daniel was already writing before Donne, and we have at least one stanza to prove that lack of vigor was not his problem. All too often his lines lacked semantic pressure, but they always moved with a precise energy, and he could put them together into an assemblage that danced.

Perhaps to ask for a whole stanza is asking too much, and just a few lines will work the trick. The drawback there, however, is that the few lines tend to break free not just from the poem, but from the poet’s name. Very few readers of poetry now, however wide their knowledge, would be able to give a name to the poet who wrote this:

At moments when the tide goes out,
The stones, still wet and ringing with
The drained-off retrogressive sea,
Lie fresh like fish on market stalls
And, speckled, shine. Some seem to float
In crevices where wavelets froth
Forgotten by the watery
Departure towards the moon.

As a thought experiment, I see myself presented with this fragment in a practical criticism class of the kind that I took in Cambridge in the mid-sixties. Even with the benefit of the knowledge that I have acquired since, I might still be at a loss to name its author, partly because it could have had so many authors. Almost certainly it stems from a period when free form Modernism was already being reacted against: all the scrupulous tension of Modernist diction is in it, but there is also a conscious heightening, as of a return to well-made elegance, so we are probably, at the very earliest, somewhere in the years after 1945, when the American formalists were already operating and Britain’s phalanx of Movement poets were on their way up. The line “The drained-off retrogressive sea” might have been turned by Philip Larkin, who was fond of coupling his adjectives into a train. The fresh fish on the market stalls might have come from “The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World,” the long poem in which Galway Kinnell took out the patent on fish imagery. Except that Elizabeth Bishop took out a rival patent when she, too, got into the seafood business. Could it be her? With my supervisor looking at his watch and pressing for an answer, I would have to say that the watery departure towards the moon sounds like Richard Wilbur writing just after the end of WWII, or perhaps James Merrill a bit later, or perhaps Stephen Edgar writing last year, or perhaps . . . But the flock of names, mere shorthand for a flock of tones, would only mean that I had found a single voice unidentifiable. And indeed the poet’s name is probably still unidentifiable when I reveal it: Dunstan Thompson.

I would have liked to say that Thompson (1918–1975) is the missing man from the post-WWII poetic story, but the sad truth is that he has gone missing for a reason. Born and raised in America, he had an enviably cosmopolitan education that culminated at Harvard, from which he went into the army. During the war, his poetic career started off brilliantly with his collection Poems (Simon and Schuster, 1943) and continued after the war with Lament for the Sleepwalker (Dodd, Mead and Company, 1947). These were big-time publishing houses and he won big-time recognition, his name often included in the magic list of voices built to last. Stephen Spender gave Thompson a papal imprimatur, thereby, perhaps, signaling that there might be a fertile context waiting for Thompson across the Atlantic. When Thompson’s second book came out he had already resettled in England, and there he began the long business—difficult, for one so prominently placed in several of the “war poets” anthologies—of ensuring that he would be forgotten. There was quite a lot to forget, and how exactly he managed to translate prominence into oblivion raises some unsettling questions. He wrote one poem, “Largo,” whose qualities should have been remembered, even though it runs to some length and not all of it is in tight focus. Here is a sample stanza:

All friends are false but you are true: the paradox
Is perfect tense in present time, whose parallel
Extends to meeting point; where, more than friends, we fell
Together on the other side of love, where clocks
And mirrors were reversed to show
Ourselves as only we could know;
Where all the doors had secret locks
With double keys; and where the sliding panel, well
Concealed, gave us our exit through the palace wall.
There we have come and gone: twin kings, who roam at will
Behind the court, behind the backs
Of consort queens, behind the racks
On which their favorites lie who told them what to do.
For every cupid with a garland round the throne still lacks
The look I give to you.

This majestic form, one of his own devising, is continued through all ten stanzas of the poem, with a scarcely faltering interplay between the hexameters, tetrameters, and trimeters—everything except pentameters, in fact. Anywhere in the poem’s wide panorama, the half rhymes are handled with an infallibly musical tact: the modular balancing of “well,” “wall,” and “will” in the quoted stanza is only a single instance of a multiple enchantment. You would say that a man who could build such an exquisite machine could do anything, technically. But even though bringing all this mastery to bear, he couldn’t do anything definite with the subject matter. From what thin biographical evidence exists, it is possible to conclude that Thompson was one of those gay male poets trapped between the urge to speak and the love that dare not speak its name. Auden escaped the trap by scarcely dropping a hint until the safety whistle blew decades later. But Thompson wanted to spill the beans, not just about Damon and Pythias and Richard II and A.E. Housman—whether named or merely alluded to, they all crop up during the poem—but about himself and his lover, evidently a fellow serviceman. Unfortunately he could spill only a few beans at once. There were limits to what he could say, and the result is a flurry of tangential suggestions, a cloud of innuendo.

“Largo” was a clear case—the only clear thing about it—of a poem written before its time, and by the time its time had come, the poem was gone. Oscar Williams, the best anthologist of the post-war years on either side of the Atlantic, published it in his invaluable A Little Treasury of Modern Poetry, but I have never seen it anywhere else. I would like to call the poem magnificent. But it gives only flashes of the total effect it might have had, and there lay the problem that dogged Thompson’s poetry for the rest of his career, and eventually buried him.

In England after the war, Thompson went on writing poems, most of which were collected posthumously in Poems 1950–1974. The book has an impressive physical appearance, rather along the lines of a Faber collection of the shorter poems of Auden or MacNeice. But the publishing house was an off-trail outfit called Paradigm Press, who can’t have printed many copies. During decades of haunting second-hand bookshops all over the world, I only ever saw a single copy, and that was in Cambridge in 2006. I picked it up, wondering who he was, read the lines about the seashore quoted above, and took it home to read it through.

Fragments of high quality were everywhere, but a completely integrated poem was hard to find. “Seascape with Edwardian Figures” came nearest, but even that one tailed off: when the tide departed towards the moon, the poem went with it. There was a long poem, “Valley of the Kings,” about Egyptian tombs. Freighted with his curious learning, it could have rivaled the stately march of “Largo,” but its points of intensity were scattered, like the momentarily illuminated wall paintings in the tombs themselves, and nothing held them together except the darkness between them. Flaring moments slid away into shadow:

This painted food will feed
Only imperishable people. Stars which glow
Like real stars lose
Their seeming lustre when you need
Them to disclose the way. From what? I do not know.

I talk about “Valley of the Kings” in the past tense because it is no longer alive, and the same applies, alas, to the whole of his later achievement. There is just too little of Samuel Daniel’s “It is mine owne,” and too much of Dunstan Thompson’s “I do not know.” Throughout the book, Thompson’s talent—in the complex sense that involves perception, precision, and musicality—is everywhere, but that’s just the trouble. It’s everywhere without being anywhere. The lesson, I think, is that a talent might be the necessary minimum, but it will not be sufficient if it can’t produce a poem, or at least a stanza, assured enough to come down through time and make us ask, “Who wrote that?”

James Merrill(1926–1995), another gay American poet who came to prominence a little later, wrote a poem about his upbringing, “The Broken Home,” that would have ensured his survival even if his every other manuscript had gone up in smoke. The poem doesn’t bring his sexuality into focus—other poems did—but it does illuminate his early life. This single stanza about his father would have been enough to prove that a masterful voice had arrived:

Each thirteenth year he married. When he died
There were already several chilled wives
In sable orbit—rings, cars, permanent waves.
We’d felt him warming up for a green bride.

He could afford it. He was “in his prime”
At three score ten. But money was not time.

I quote the stanza because it was the first thing I read of Merrill’s that made me realize I would have to read everything else. When I began to, I soon realized that the assurance of his early formal patterns provided the warrant for following him when his patterns became more complicated and finally ceased to be patterns at all. In the twentieth century, this was a not uncommon progression among revolutionary spirits in all the arts. Picasso had conspicuously mastered every aspect of draughtsmanship and painting that had ever been applied to the recognizable before he moved on into the less recognizable, and the best reason for trying to follow what he was up to was that he had proved he could actually do what he was no longer doing. Stravinsky composed melodies you could hum and whistle—I can still do my version of the major themes from Petroushka unless somebody stops me—before he moved on to composing what could only be listened to, and the best reason for listening hard was your memory of the authority he had displayed when the listening was easy. In poetry, Eliot went on proving that he was a master of tight forms even as he became famous for works that apparently had no form at all, and that was the best reason for supposing that those works still depended on a highly-schooled formal sense. So there was nothing new about Merrill’s progression from poems with apprehensible boundaries to poems whose lack of boundaries was part of their subject. It was in the tradition of Modernism. But it depended on an assurance that made paying attention compulsory.

This compulsory quality was what Dunstan Thompson lacked even in his brightest moments. Thompson didn’t have Merrill’s vast financial resources—which enabled Merrill to do pretty much what he liked all his life, including, commendably, helping other poets when they were short of cash—but Thompson did have nearly all of Merrill’s technical resources. Exploiting those, he might have built an impregnable position for himself, but you can’t help feeling that he didn’t really want to. His relocation from America to England need not necessarily have been fatal. Earlier in the century it had worked triumphantly for Pound and Eliot, and the only reason that Lowell made a hash of it later on was that his intermittent psychic disturbance had become almost continuous, and had weakened his strategic judgment to the point where he failed to recognize that he wasn’t getting beyond the discipline of his wonderfully self-contained early poems, but was neutralizing that discipline in the name of an illusory scope. And it wasn’t as if Lowell lacked a welcome in London. (If anything, he was too welcome: the locals would print anything he gave them.) The possibilities of working on both sides of the pond were rich, as was proved in the next generation by Michael Donaghy, who was born in New York in 1954 and died in London at the age of only fifty.

At the time of writing, Donaghy’s complete works are being published in Britain by Picador in two neatly matched volumes: Collected Poems, which contains all four of the collections published in his lifetime plus a sheaf of previously unpublished poems uniformly excellent, and The Shape of the Dance, which amounts to his collected prose. I was asked to write the introduction for the prose volume and was glad to do so, because I think Donaghy was an important critic, even a necessary one. But the reasons to think so would be crucially fewer if he had not been so authoritative as a poet. Within the first few lines of any poem he writes, he has made paying attention compulsory. There are simply dozens, even scores, of poems by which this fact could be easily demonstrated, but let’s make it harder for ourselves, by choosing a poem where the reader has to dig a bit to figure out what is going on. That we feel compelled to dig is, I think, a further illustration of the quality of command that we are talking about. The poem, “Shibboleth,” was the title poem of the first collection he published in 1988. Here is the poem entire:

One didn’t know the name of Tarzan’s monkey.
Another couldn’t strip the cellophane
From a GI’s pack of cigarettes.
By such minutiae were the infiltrators detected.

By the second week of battle
We’d become obsessed with trivia.
At a sentry point, at midnight, in the rain,
An ignorance of baseball could be lethal.

The morning of the first snowfall, I was shaving,
Staring into a mirror nailed to a tree,
Intoning the Christian names of the Andrews Sisters.
“Maxine, Laverne, Patty.”

For anyone of my generation it is obvious that this poem is about the Battle of the Bulge in 1944, when a special SS unit formed by Otto Skorzeny penetrated the American lines with a view to creating havoc. The SS men—most of them Volksdeutsche who had been brought up in America—wore American uniforms, carried captured American weapons, spoke perfect English, and could be identified only by what they didn’t know, because they had spent the last few years in Germany. One could make an objection based on just that point: none of the suspects would have shown an “ignorance of baseball” in general. They just would have been ignorant about the latest scores. (And one of the Andrews Sisters has her name misspelled: “Maxine” was really “Maxene.”) But Donaghy has a far wider audience in mind than just my contemporaries. For his own contemporaries, the whole episode might not be in their frame of reference; and he has done very little to clue them in. They have to figure it out. The reference to “GI’s,” to the Andrews Sisters, or perhaps to Tarzan’s friend Cheetah, would probably be a starting point to help them identify which war it was. Finally they will get it right, and thus find out that the shaving narrator can’t be Donaghy, who, at the time, was ten years short of being born. He has put his narrator into a war that could be any American war in which infiltrators have to be detected according to their knowledge of American culture. It’s a Battlestar Galactica scenario, with the Germans as the Cylons. The new generation, who are just coming to poetry now, might have that as their first thought. Donaghy future-proofed the poem by cutting back on its context. He often did that; or, rather, does that—let’s put him in the present, where he belongs.

The typical Donaghy poem isn’t typical. Each poem has its own form and, remarkably, its own voice. Underlying this protean range of creative expression there is a critical attitude, which is probably best summed up in a single essay contained in The Shape of the Dance. The essay is called “American Revolutions” and it sums up his lifelong—lifelong in so short a life—determination to make sense out of the twentieth-century conflict between formal and free verse. As a musician by avocation, Donaghy had no trust in the idea of perfectly unfettered, untrained expression. He agreed with Stravinsky that limitations were the departure point for inspiration. Donaghy believed that a living poem could emerge only from an idea in “negotiation” (the key word in his critical vocabulary) with an imposed formal requirement, even if it was self-imposed, and might be rendered invisible in the course of the negotiation. The split between ........................

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/detail/70095

Prose from Poetry Magazine
Playing by Ear, Praying for Rain: The Poetry of James Baldwin
By Nikky Finney

Baldwin was never afraid to say it. He made me less afraid to say it too.

The air of the Republic was already rich with him when I got here. James Arthur Baldwin, the most salient, sublime, and consequential American writer of the twentieth century, was in the midst of publishing his resolute and prophetic essays and novels: Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), The Amen Corner (1954), Notes of a Native Son (1955), and Giovanni’s Room (1956). I arrived on planet earth in the middle of his personal and relentless assault on white supremacy and his brilliant, succinct understanding of world and American history. In every direction I turned, my ears filled a little more with what he always had to say. His words, his spirit, mattered to me. Black, gay, bejeweled, eyes like orbs searching, dancing, calling a spade a spade, in magazines and on the black-and-white tv of my youth. Baldwin, deep in thought and pulling drags from his companion cigarettes, looking his and our danger in the face and never backing down. My world view was set in motion by this big, bold heart who understood that he had to leave his America in order to be. Baldwin was dangerous to everybody who had anything to hide. Baldwin was also the priceless inheritance to anybody looking for manumission from who they didn’t want or have to be. Gracious and tender, a man who had no idea or concept of his place, who nurtured conversation with Black Panthers and the white literati all in the same afternoon. So powerful and controversial was his name that one minute it was there on the speaker’s list for the great August 28, 1963, March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, and then, poof, it was off. The country might have been ready to march for things they believed all God’s children should have in this life, but there were people, richly miseducated by the Republic, who were not ready for James Baldwin to bring truth in those searing ways he always brought truth to the multitudes.

The eldest of nine, a beloved son of Harlem, his irreverent pride and trust in his own mind, his soul (privately and sometimes publicly warring), all of who he was and believed himself to be, was exposed in his first person, unlimited voice, not for sale, but vulnerable to the Republic. Baldwin’s proud sexuality and his unwillingness to censor his understanding that sex was a foundational part of this life even in the puritanical Republic and therefore should be written, unclothed, not whispered about, not roped off in some back room, informed all of his work, but especially his poetry. Uninviting Baldwin was often the excuse for the whitewashing of his urgent and necessary 
brilliance from both the conservative black community and from whites who had never heard such a dark genius display such rich and sensory antagonism for them. Into the microphone of the world Baldwin leaned — never afraid to say it.

Only once did I see James Baldwin live and in warm, brilliant person; it was 1984, a packed house at the University of California at Berkeley. I was twenty-seven, he was sixty, and we would never meet. None of us there that night, standing shoulder to shoulder, pushed to the edge of our seats, knew that this was our last embrace with him, that we would only have him walking among us for three more years. I remember the timbre of his voice. Steadfast. Smoky. Serene. His words fell on us like a good rain. A replenishing we badly needed. All of us standing, sitting, spread out before this wise, sharp-witted, all-seeing man.

I had met James Baldwin by way of his “Sweet Lorraine,” a seventeen-hundred-and-seventy-six-word loving manifesto to his friend and comrade, the playwright Lorraine Hansberry. Hansberry died from cancer at the age of thirty-four, soon after her great work, A Raisin in the Sun, yanked the apron and head rag off the institution of the American theater, Broadway, 1959. Baldwin’s intimate remembrance became the introduction to Hansberry’s posthumous collection, To Be Young, Gifted and Black, a book that, as a girl of fourteen, I was highly uncomfortable ever letting out of my sight. I was the black girl dreaming of a writing life and Hansberry, the black woman carving one out. Hansberry had given me two atomic oars to zephyr me further upstream: I am a writer. I am going to write. After her untimely death, I had a palpable need to still see and feel her in the world. Baldwin’s lush remembrance brought her to me in powerful living dimension. His way of seeing her, of remembering what was important about her, helped her stay with me.

I had needed Hansberry to set my determination forward for my journey. And I needed Baldwin to teach me about the power of rain.



•



Baldwin wrote poetry throughout his life. He wrote with an engaged, layered, facile hand. The idea being explored first cinched, then stretched out, with just enough tension to bring the light in. His language: informal, inviting; his ideas from the four corners of the earth, beginning, always, with love:

No man can have a harlot
for a lover
nor stay in bed forever
with a lie.
He must rise up
and face the morning sky
and himself, in the mirror
of his lover’s eye.
 — From A Lover’s Question

Baldwin’s images carry their weight and we, the reader, carry their consequence. In one turn of phrase and line, something lies easy in repose; in the next, he is telling the Lord what to do; the words jump, fall in line, with great and marching verve:

Lord,
when you send the rain,
think about it, please,
a little?
Do
not get carried away
by the sound of falling water,
the marvelous light
on the falling water.
I
am beneath that water.
It falls with great force
and the light
Blinds
me to the light.
  — Untitled

Baldwin wrote as the words instructed, never allowing the critics of the Republic to tell him how or how not. They could listen in or they could ignore him, but he was never their boy, writing something they wanted to hear. He fastidiously handed that empty caricature of a black writer back to them, tipping his hat, turning back to his sweet Harlem alley for more juice.

James Baldwin, as poet, was incessantly paying attention and always leaning into the din and hum around him, making his poems from his notes of what was found there, making his outlines, his annotations, doing his jotting down, writing from the mettle and marginalia of his life, giving commentary, scribbling, then dispatching out to the world what he knew and felt about that world. James Baldwin, as poet, was forever licking the tip of his pencil, preparing for more calculations, more inventory, moving, counting each letter being made inside the abacus of the poem. James Baldwin, as poet, never forgot what he had taught me in that seventeen-hundred-and-seventy-six-word essay — to remember where one came from. So many of the poems are dedicated back to someone who perhaps had gone the distance, perhaps had taught him about the rain: for David, for Jefe, for Lena Horne, for Rico, for Berdis, for Y.S.

When the writer Cecil Brown went to see James Baldwin in Paris in the summer of 1982, he found him “busy writing poems,” quite possibly these poems. Brown reports that Baldwin would work on a poem for a while and then stop from time to time to read one aloud to him. “Staggerlee wonders” was one of those poems, and “Staggerlee wonders” opens Jimmy’s Blues, the collection he published in 1983. The poem begins with indefatigable might, setting the tone and temperature for everything else in this volume, as well as the sound and sense found throughout Baldwin’s oeuvre. “Baldwin read to me from the poem with great humor and laughter,” Brown wrote in his book Stagolee Shot Billy.

Baldwin felt that black men in America, as the most obvious targets of white oppression, had to love each other, to warn each other, and to communicate with each other if they were to escape being defined only in reaction to that oppression. They had to seek and find in their own tradition the human qualities that white men, through their unrelenting brutality, had lost.

I do not believe James Baldwin can be wholly read without first 
understanding white men and their penchant for tyranny and “unrelenting brutality.” If you read Baldwin without this truth, you will mistake Baldwin’s use of the word nigger as how he saw himself, instead of that long-suffering character, imagined, invented, and marched to the conveyor belt as if it was the hanging tree, by the founding fathers of the Republic, in order that they might hold on for as long as possible to “the very last white country the world will ever see” (Baldwin, “Notes on the House of Bondage”).

I always wonder
what they think the niggers are doing
while they, the pink and alabaster pragmatists,
are containing
Russia
and defining and re-defining and re-aligning
China,
nobly restraining themselves, meanwhile,
from blowing up that earth.
— From Staggerlee wonders

With prophetic understanding, harmony, and swing, creating his own style and using his own gauges to navigate the journey, Baldwin often wrote counter-metrically, reflecting his African, Southern, Harlem, and Paris roots. “What is it about Emily Dickinson that moves you?” he was once asked in a Paris Review interview. His answer: “Her use of language . . .    Her solitude, as well, and the style of that solitude. There is something very moving and in the best sense funny.”

James Baldwin made laughter of a certain style even as he reported the lies of  the Republic. He was so aware of that other face so necessary in this life, that face that was present in all the best human dramatic monologues, the high historic black art of laughing to keep from crying. He knew that without the blues there would be no jazz. Just as Baldwin dropped you into the fire, there he was extinguishing it with laughter.

Neither (incidentally)
has anyone discussed the Bomb with the niggers:
the incoherent feeling is, the less
the nigger knows about the Bomb, the better:
the lady of the house
smiles nervously in your direction
as though she had just been overheard
discussing family, or sexual secrets,
and changes the subject to Education,
or Full Employment, or the Welfare rolls,
the smile saying, Don’t be dismayed.
We know how you feel. You can trust us.
 — From Staggerlee wonders

Baldwin wrote poetry because he felt close to this particular form and this particular way of saying. Poetry helped thread his ideas from the essays, to the novels, to the love letters, to the book reviews, stitching images and feeling into music, back to his imagination. From the beginning of his life to the very end, I believe Baldwin saw himself more poet than anything else: The way he cared about language. The way he believed language should work. The way he understood what his friend and mentor, the great American painter Beauford Delaney, had taught him — to look close, not just at the water but at the oil sitting there on top of the water. This reliable witnessing eye was the true value of seeing the world for what it really was and not for what someone reported, from afar, that it was.

When Baldwin took off for Switzerland in 1951, he carried recordings by Bessie Smith, and he would often fall asleep listening to them, taking her in like the sweet black poetry she sang. It must have been her Baby don’t worry, I got you voice and their shared blues that pushed him through to finish Go Tell It on the Mountain in three months, after struggling with the story for ten years. Whenever Baldwin abandoned the music of who he was and how that sound was made, he momentarily lost his way. When he lost his way, I believe it was poetry that often brought him back. I believe he wrote poetry throughout his life because poetry brought him back to the music, back to the rain. The looking close. The understanding and presence of the oil on top of the water. Compression. Precision. The metaphor. The riff and shout. The figurative. The high notes. The blues. The reds. The whites. This soaking up. That treble clef. Bass. Baldwin could access it all — and did — with poetry.

He was standing at the bath-room mirror,
shaving,
had just stepped out of the shower,
naked,
balls retracted, prick limped out of the
small,
morning hard-on,
thinking of nothing but foam and steam,
when the bell
rang.
  — From Gypsy

Baldwin integrated the power of sex and the critical dynamics of the family with ease. He spoke often and passionately about the preciousness of children, the beloved ones. He never hid from any language that engaged the human conundrum, refusing to allow the narrow world to deny him, black, bejeweled, Harlem insurgent, demanding to add his poetic voice to all others of his day. Sometimes employing a simple rhyme scheme and rhythm, as in “The giver,” a poem dedicated to his mother, Berdis, and then, again, giving rise to poetic ear-play in “Imagination.”

Imagination
creates the situation,
and, then, the situation
creates imagination.

It may, of course,
be the other way around:
Columbus was discovered
by what he found.

In several of his last interviews you hear James Baldwin repeat something you know is on his mind as he grew older: “You learn how little you know.” This black man of the black diaspora, born in 1924, the same year that J. Edgar Hoover was appointed the new director of the fbi, forever taking stock of his life as it unfolded:

My progress report
concerning my journey to the palace of wisdom
is discouraging.
I lack certain indispensable aptitudes.
Furthermore, it appears
that I packed the wrong things.
  — From Inventory / On Being 52

Jimmy’s Blues and Other Poems is being published in what would have been Baldwin’s — our loving, long-cussed, steadfast witness in this world’s — ninetieth year. These poems represent the notations, permutations, the Benjamin Banneker–like wonderings of a curious heart devoted to exposing tyranny, love, and the perpetual historical lies of the Republic.

In a 1961 interview, Studs Terkel asks Jimmy Baldwin after Baldwin’s first twenty years as a writer, “who are you, now?” Baldwin answers,

Who, indeed. Well, I may be able to tell you who I am, but I am also discovering who I am not. I want to be an honest man. And I want to be a good writer. I don’t know if one ever gets to be what one wants to be. You just have to play it by ear and . . .    pray for rain.

He never rested on any fame, award, or success. He didn’t linger in the noisy standing ovation we gave him that night in California. He didn’t need the poison of whatever it meant “to be famous” pounding at his door. Refusing to stand in any shadow, Baldwin understood that any light on his life might open some doors, but in the end it was his pounding heart, caring and remaining focused on the community, that had always defined him, that mattered. In his work he remained devoted to exposing more and more the ravages of poverty and invisibility on black and poor people. He loved it when people came to talk and listen to his stories, his rolling laughter, and consented to be transformed by his various arenas of language and his many forms of expression. These were friends and strangers, artists, who only wanted to feel him say what he had to say. People hungry to hear James Baldwin unabridged, before the night got too late and his devotion would make him rise and return him to the aloneness of his work, in that space he called his “torture chamber,” his st

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/resources/learning/essays/detail/69568

Essay on Poetic Theory
Cracks in the Oracle Bone: Teaching Certain Contemporary Poems (2006)
By Brenda Hillman
Introduction

In 2006, poet Brenda Hillman delivered the lecture “Cracks in the Oracle Bone: Teaching Certain Contemporary Poems” at the University of California at Berkeley as part of the Judith Lee Stronach Memorial Lecture Series. Hillman—whose own poetry often brings together narrative fragments, language-led lyricism, ideas steeped in social activism and Gnosticism, and a deeply personal voice—here examines the role of complexity in contemporary poetry and the benefits that engaging such complexity can offer readers.

As an advocate of poems that some readers might regard as difficult and therefore intimidating or off-putting, Hillman offers close readings of several such works by tracking their syntactic, tonal, and imagistic shifts. Contemporary poetry, Hillman notes, “favors process over destination,” and her readings model a way to enter, rather than paraphrase, these poems.

While her students have often praised what they call “flow,” Hillman examines inventive or disruptive grammar as a means of indicating where “the yes of a brush stroke meets the maybe of a thought.” She notes that contemporary poetry should be read in its historical context, in the wake of Modernism, which challenged and redefined our relationship to the world as well as made room for disjunction and fragmentation in the arts.

Hillman organizes her lecture according to the four main ways in which she believes poetry can serve contemporary readers. First, she argues, poetry helps us see ourselves in the context of a range of environments, and thus to find our place in the world. Secondly, poetry displays the breadth of language’s power and potential. Thirdly, truly engaging with the matter of a poem can offer a reader a means by which to process emotion. Finally, poetry can help a reader tap into the precise beauty and strangeness of our days.

Hillman’s lecture draws on her experience as a teacher of poetry as well as her own poetry’s engagement with difficulty and complexity.

I’m thrilled to be presenting a lecture honoring Judith Stronach to many colleagues and friends, and I’m grateful to Ray for publishing this series of lectures by poets—I feel fortunate to be among such illustrious company.

When I began to work on this lecture some time ago, I had just received an email saying that former Attorney General John Ashcroft, having retired from the Cabinet, was seriously hoping to be selected as Poet Laureate of the United States. Ashcroft’s best-known poem, “Let the Eagle Soar,” was used at President Bush’s swearing-in ceremony:

Let the eagle soar,
Like she’s never soared before.
From rocky coast to golden shore,
Let the mighty eagle soar.
Soar with healing in her wings,
As the land beneath her sings:
“Only God, no other kings.”
This country’s far too young to die.
We’ve still got a lot of climbing to do,
And we can make it if we try.
Built by toils and struggles
God has led us through.

I don’t want to spend too much time analyzing this poem. It makes a straightforward patriotic statement based on an image of a bird; it rhymes. The problem here isn’t straightforwardness, or rhyming, or birds; Dickinson, Hopkins, and Frost all employ those things. The problem is that Mr. Ashcroft has not used his imagination in his poem. He needs to sign up for my introductory creative writing class at Saint Mary’s, where we could help him begin his poetry studies in just two weeks. The fact that Ashcroft wants to represent American poetry officially and to be its servant is frightening. His poem reminds me of the 21-year old pipe-bomber planting his bombs all over the Kansas countryside in the shape of a gigantic smiley face. The world quite literally suffers from a lack of imagination.

Here is a poem with imagination, written by Lisa Fishman, It’s called “Note”:

Was wintered in
unmade of stone and what-
not

This compact poem, like the inverse of a dreamed place, invites a sense of uncertainty and of safety. Its three-line form suggests haiku, but it is not haiku. The lines hold an unbalanced number of stresses: 2-3-1. The poem has neither noun nor pronoun for its subject; who is speaking? It begins mid-thought: someone or something has been entrapped by winter. The second line, after an implied comma, seems an extension of the first thought; the someone or something being “unmade of stone” is either being released from a previous condition of being “made” of stone, or the “unmade” means “not yet made.” The third thought-perception is the colloquial, but not current, “what-/not,” broken in half by a hyphen and a new line: “what-not” points to the tentative quality of the initial perceptions. To live without expectation seems a particular terror and amazement in this brief structure.

Could the same thought have been expressed in any way other than in these nine words? A poem cannot be paraphrased. But it can be described, its effects analyzed to heighten appreciation for how such a delicate mechanism plays itself out. In poems, the meanings coincide with the rhythms of someone thinking them; they are the subjects of their own making.

My argument for this talk stems from the idea that it is all right for poetry to have made it into the twentieth century and beyond, and that it is a healthy thing for us that poetry engages with complexity, that this complexity is practical and aesthetically pleasing in ways that offer beginning and advanced readers more reality. Complexity and simplicity are not mutually exclusive. The paradoxical inevitability and openness of poetic expression make it both satisfying and mysteriously difficult to teach. To engage the mysterious or the difficult is not such a bad thing. It is mysterious and difficult to be alive and to express why. For lovers of poetry, there is disequilibrium between ourselves and the world that nothing restores to balance but poetry. The Stronach Lectures are meant to address issues of teaching poetry for audiences that have both scholarly and non-scholarly interests in the subject. I want to approach the topic in a fairly intuitive and jargon-free manner, and to present four survival tools for contemporary culture that poetry is especially good at providing: (1) the sense of who we are in our historical, cultural and—for want of a better term—natural (but I really mean “not man-made”) environments; (2) a sense of the power of language, of each word and phrase; (3) the ability to think through emotion on many levels—literal, abstract, concrete, metaphysical, figurative; and (4) an awareness of how particular and odd everything is, especially in moments of compressed thought captured in time. Taking delight in this four-fold toolkit provides my primary pedagogical energy. I think about these things when composing my own poetry and when teaching at all levels. Poetry is the most powerful method I’ve found for expressing the particular and extreme states life has to offer.

The idea for this talk came from hearing hundreds of questions over several decades—not only in the classroom, but also in conversations with friends and strangers—about the challenges of current poetry. “I can’t say I read much poetry; it really kinda loses me,” someone will say. “Why can’t they just say it normally?” or “Am I supposed to feel stupid when I read it?” as a friend recently asked.

The challenges of reading contemporary poetry also came up in a stimulating lunchtime conversation I had with Judith Stronach in the late nineties. We discussed stylistic difficulties of poetry in relation to states of mental suffering. Judith was troubled by a struggle she was having understanding a particular poem, and asked me whether poetry might not have a special obligation to present directly what might seem inexpressible. I said I thought poetry has the obligation to try to express what cannot be expressed, but that it could not always be done in direct ways. We talked about how the confusion of daily life, the impossibilities, the unredeemed moments of spiritual darkness, as well as massive social and political injustices, could all find shapes in poetry. I know Judith wrestled with these things, and I thought of this lecture as a way of continuing that conversation with her. Thinking about stylistic difficulty and the ineffable in poetry resonates in other types of hermeneutical reading I’ve done for decades—including literary theory, gnostic and occult writings of the second century, spam sent by pharmaceutical companies, and instructions for various pieces of technology. I would say all of these require considerably more interpretation than poetry!

A while back, my husband showed me a thrilling article in the magazine Representations by David Keightley, a Berkeley scholar, about the origins of writing in ancient China. I will try to summarize a few of the main points. Keightley discusses divination by fire (pyromancy), and the development of writing in neolithic Chinese culture. In the Shang dynasty (that’s 1200–1050 B.C.E.—around the time of the expulsion of the Jews from Egypt and of the Trojan Wars), the bones of ancestors and animals were used for this sort of pyromancy, often exhumed from burial grounds, and then reburied and exhumed again, and then burned for the purposes of divination. After the diviners interpreted the messages from the stress-cracks resulting from fire, they uttered sounds as they “read” the cracks, and the sounds of their spoken prophecies were carved deeply into the bones and emphasized with ink. It is in part from these painted carvings that the written Chinese language evolved. Keightley notes that these rituals of divination and writing were open only to a few, and that their interpretation remained a specialized field. He demonstrates that this form of Chinese writing kept the power of knowledge specific to the scholar classes over the centuries. It seems these individual logographic signs were different from the alphabetic or syllabilary scripts in other cultures (Microsoft did not recognize “syllabilary” and tried to suggest “salability” in my laptop)—for instance, those in Mesopotamia—that combined syllables or signs to make meaning. Nor were they pictographic. Each sign came with a single sound and a prediction, with its own meaning. When Bob and I were in Paris last summer we visited the Asian Museum and saw some of these amazing bones and turtle shells and my breath was taken away by the beauty of the markings—like the tracks of small animals surrounding their own absence.

The ability to produce and to interpret the cracks, to utter the sounds from the dead, and to carve the encoded signs became the most valued form of literacy. The signs produced in this manner were more stylized and abstract than those of ordinary writing. Because they came directly from the ancestors whose power was considered to be of an abstract and collective nature (unlike the Egyptian and Greek idea of the particularized soul existing after death), these writings had a powerfully generalized aesthetic function in the culture. I am intrigued by this idea of purely abstract, sound-based script—the signals from the ancestors. The value of these markings lay in their very mystery and abstraction, and in the fact that the accompanying sacred sounds had a social function. This oracle bone script exists between words and music.

A few weeks ago, a poet-friend, Lauren Levato, gave me an article about the development of nüshu, an encoded secret script developed more recently by women in the mountains of southern China for the purpose of sending secret messages men couldn’t read. It is thought that this script derived from the oracle bone tradition. The figures are graceful and stylized—even more so than the bone scratches—bird prints, chevrons, spiked angles. Both these scripts seem like modernist practices in the twentieth century. As Robert Kaufman reminds us that Theodor Adorno reminds us, the vast expressiveness of the abstract and the lyric—as in Kandinsky paintings—help aesthetic culture reconceive its social function. The oracle bone signs and nüshu script both remind me of Mandelstam’s poems criticizing Stalin in secret metaphors, and of reports that servicemen in Iraq are doing highly encoded rap and hip-hop in order to express criticism of the military hierarchy and of the presence of multinational corporations benefiting from their labors.

One of the big jobs of a teacher is to convince students that any effort whatsoever is worth it. In the remarks that follow I’m thinking mostly of introductory poetry classes, but the students might be of any age. Some of my students, especially those new to reading poetry, become afraid when they think they are supposed to understand contemporary poems and can’t. Slant or oblique styles of poetry make them feel stupid, even if the very same techniques are used in music videos. Panicked that they will produce the wrong response, students may grow impatient in an increasingly impatient culture, believing that if poetry does not have an immediate appeal, it is undemocratic and ungenerous. Even some grown-up, famous poets put forth these opinions—arguing that poetry should be easy, should give a quick story, should never make them feel as if a highbrow or academic trick is being played on them. My goal as a teacher is to bring students closer to the initiating impulses of the poem, so that what might have evoked a hostile response can move them to a sense of accomplishment, to the deep pleasures of finding multiple interpretations for what may have seemed obscure.

The fearful student and the equally fearful famous poet might need a small review of the basics of twentieth-century modernism, which redefined the nature of art in several important ways: (1) in light of—or in the dark of—the First World War, modernism broke from the past—but also brought a new consciousness of cultural history—think art deco with its Egyptian motifs; (2) modernism brought an interest—through Freud, but not only Freud—in the mind’s psychological processes, which inspired artists to incorporate images reflecting mental process; (3) modernism defined creativity in new ways (by redefining god and nature); and finally, (4) modernism recognized that the modern city—people living together as alienated beings—was as important to the subject matter of aesthetic expression as rural scenes had been to pastoral traditions. (Readers might want to take a look at Charles Altieri’s The Art of 20th Century American Poetry.)

To most of you this will seem basic, but I wanted to remind the reader that a little background goes a long way. These redefinitions—what we are, what art is, what nature/god is, what we are in cities in relation to our mental lives—and the fact that dramatically new forms of art can include the threadlike, the fragmentary, the unfinished, that objects can point to their own synthetic qualities—all these are concepts worth reminding students of—even if “make it new” is by now one hundred years old. Much contemporary poetry that readers find mysterious makes use of modernist modes, tones, types, levels, styles that we take for granted in other aspects of our lives. It doesn’t take more than half a day to present this summary to students, though it might take them many years to absorb the art itself. Not having arrived at the twentieth century is, incidentally, one of the many problems in Mr. Ashcroft’s poem.

The fact that art comes from other art as well as from non-art, that it should be current, that the dilemmas of our present poetry come from unresolved arguments about representation and expression in the nineteenth century should not dismay us—it is a good thing. As romantic emotion, symbolist moody alienation, surrealist wild irrationality or Russian formalist philosophy make their way into contemporary poetry, we can remind students that originality in art, as in the human genome, resides in the way things are reconfigured, not in some god-given attribute (though I personally talk to rocks, plants, birds and the piece of paper when composing my own poetry, and thus do not want to put down people who think an actual muse still exists). Oracle bones of ancient China speak metaphorically through their ancestors’ recirculating messages. An overwhelmed, busy, depressed, confused or mystified contemporary reader can depend on the poet to make expressive signs, to give meaning to—or even to undermine meaning in—the sounds of her time.

I want to go through the four-fold toolkit I mentioned earlier: the sense of who we are in our environments; the understanding that every word and phrase matters and can be of interest; the idea that meaning circulates on many levels; and the conviction that the strange mystery of our existence can be represented. To proceed inductively, I thought about some poems I have taught in the last few years, and recalled some of the pedagogical challenges they present.

I. The sense of who we are in our environments

Contemporary poetry has a huge range of approaches to this question of who we are. What we find in nineteenth-century poetry—Wordsworth’s hopeful meditations, Coleridge’s depressed intimate ones, the symbolist Baudelaire’s haunted outsider descriptions, Rimbaud’s hallucinatory narratives, Whitman’s capacious sweep, Dickinson’s uncanny metaphysical puzzles—provided twentieth century poetry with a satura—“satura” being a food medley, what the word “satire” comes from—of mental states. In that mix, for example, Stevens’s speakers are both Keatsian and très français; Eliot and Pound offer collage fragments of literature, polyphonies of urban, pastoral, medieval and Renaissance voices; Gertrude Stein assembles human thought patterns in abstract, cubist fashion; HD introduces vatic and oracular lyricism, while Williams uses concrete, everyday American speech, and so on.

Often the persona in poetry is assumed to be that of the poet recounting an experience, or series of thoughts, about an experience in narrative or meditative form. That this became the main mode in the twentieth century is probably because personal accounts have, and well continue to have, a particular appeal. When students first come to poetry, they are excited that it can address their own states of feeling, their questions: Who am I? What is my problem? The lyric poem is still going steady with the turbulent heart that loves its own turbulence. The basic desire for emotional identification, and the lack of it, brings most people to poetry in the first place. No poet forgets the power of emotion. My introductory students have often been drawn to Sylvia Plath’s poetry despite—or perhaps because of—the perilous nature of her metaphors. Here is one of her poems:

Morning Song

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your foot-soles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.

Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.
In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.

I’m no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind’s hand.

All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.

One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat’s. The window square

Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.

Many students can enter this poem rel .....................................




"Contemporary poetry has a huge range of approaches to this question of who we are. What we find in nineteenth-century poetry—Wordsworth’s hopeful meditations, Coleridge’s depressed intimate ones, the symbolist Baudelaire’s haunted outsider descriptions, Rimbaud’s hallucinatory narratives, Whitman’s capacious sweep, Dickinson’s uncanny metaphysical puzzles—provided twentieth century poetry with a satura—“satura” being a food medley, what the word “satire” comes from—of mental states. In that mix, for example, Stevens’s speakers are both Keatsian and très français; Eliot and Pound offer collage fragments of literature, polyphonies of urban, pastoral, medieval and Renaissance voices; Gertrude Stein assembles human thought patterns in abstract, cubist fashion; HD introduces vatic and oracular lyricism, while Williams uses concrete, everyday American speech, and so on. "

And some poets go their own path and mix methods and pay homage to the greats by doing so..-Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/articles/detail/89623

Interview
Filling a Vacuum
Kwame Dawes on directing the African Poetry Book Fund.
By Alex Dueben
Image Courtesy of University of Nebraska-Lincoln / Craig Chandler

Kwame Dawes is celebrated as a gifted poet, playwright, novelist, scholar, and journalist. His numerous accomplishments as an editor, however, are less known. He is the Glenna Luschei editor in chief of the journal Prairie Schooner, and, for the past four years, he has served as the founding director of the African Poetry Book Fund, an impressive venture that publishes books by both young and established African poets, from the debut collection by Ethiopian American writer Mahtem Shiferraw to the collected poems of Gabriel Okara, an elder statesman of Nigerian literature.

Dawes recently spoke with the Poetry Foundation about his many editorial projects, how the African Poetry Book Fund came into being, and finding time for his own writing. The following interview was edited and condensed.


What exactly is the African Poetry Book Fund?

The African Poetry Book Fund was established about four years ago in response to an absence. There was no publisher exclusively devoted to publishing African poets. This seemed ridiculous to me, even as it explained why so often people complained to me that they did not know where to find the work of African poets in print. A few of us felt that something needed to be done, so we formed this entity and brought together a group of gifted and successful writers who all have a remarkable track record of supporting the work of other writers. Chris Abani, Bernardine Evaristo, John Keene, Matthew Shenoda, and Gabeba Baderoon constitute the remarkable editorial team for the Fund, and we work in the engine room for this enterprise.

Our goal is to see more books of poetry published and to create an environment that encourages the advancement of African poetry. We are now adding to this work a translation effort to bring work published in traditional African languages as well as in other colonial languages to readers.

What was your thinking about what the project would encompass? You’re publishing such a range: established poets, younger poets, poets from Africa, poets from the diaspora, chapbooks.

We are filling a vacuum. So while we are publishing work by first-time writers, we are also publishing the work of established poets and, of course, by the folks we regard as the senior poets from Africa. Given the poor publishing opportunities for even highly regarded poets from Africa, we feel it is imperative that people have access to the work of the best poets in Africa at all stages of their careers. Our goal is not to monopolize this publishing but to start to build interest in and awareness of the work. Eventually, we believe, other publishers will start to pay attention and acquire the work of African poets. In fact, this has already started to happen, and we expect this to only get better. In the meantime, we are committed creating a publishing home for poets so they can grow. In three years, we have published some 30 African poets. This is just the start.

The African Poetry Book Fund awards the Sillerman Prize annually to an African poet who has not yet published a collection of poetry. The University of Nebraska Press then publishes the book for which you write an introduction. You do a great job of analyzing the poets’ work, and you also provide an excellent frame and context to consider their work.

Each book is different. Each poet is different. That is the point. It is not my job to start to speak of a school of African poetry or even trends in African poetry. I am more interested in ensuring that the work of African poets is published so that scholars, critics, reviewers, and other poets can do that work. This strikes me as important. So when I come to the winners of the Sillerman Prize, I simply try to engage their work as I encounter it. What I can say is that our winners are truly writing some of the best poetry being published today, anywhere. I read and edit poetry for a living. I teach writing for a living. I pay attention to poetry from all over the world. I am not exaggerating here. [Sillerman winners] Clifton Gachagua, Ladan Osman, Mahtem Shiferraw and Safia Elhillo are startlingly gifted poets. Their books vary in style and content but share the qualities of urgency, vulnerability, and sheer poetic skill.

When you’re looking for established poets to publish, such as Gabriel Okara or Kofi Awoonor, what are your criteria? Did you just start with a long list of great poets?

We do have a list. The list is of the poets who have helped shape African poetry and whose work has not been treated to the kind of attention and presentation that we give to major writers in other traditions. Our list is long, but we have to find a team to work on each project. Collected volumes and new and selected volumes can be challenging because we have to secure permissions for reprints, and we have to work closely with the authors to ensure that we have a book that does justice to their body of work. We have several such works in the pipeline. We believe that it is pointless to pretend that African poetry is somehow new. There is a long tradition, and we believe that it should be made available to readers.

You’ve also been involved with the building—and stocking—of poetry libraries. I wondered if you could talk a little about these projects.

We have not built libraries. We have worked with various partners in five African countries to establish poetry libraries. These are reading libraries for writers and lovers of poetry. The partners in Ghana, Gambia, Kenya, Uganda, and Botswana have found venues for these libraries and have been running these libraries with volunteer staff for the past two years. The APBF procures the books through donations from publishers, journals, arts organizations, and individuals and ships them to these countries. We also developed a cataloging system for each library, and we help organize these libraries. The libraries have become hubs for poetry readings, workshops, and much else. This has been the plan.

So far we have made three shipments of about 400 to 500 books and journals to each library. Contemporary works of poetry make up the bulk of these books. The plan is to work with the libraries to develop their own network of sources for books to add to their stacks.

The logic is simple. Serious poets read poetry, all kinds of poetry. Poets who don’t have access to contemporary poetry are writing outside of community. Poets learn from one another, and we believe that poets can grow only by reading other poets. Africa is not a country, it is a continent, and in many ways, these libraries can be instrumental in getting poets from one nation to read the work of poets from another African nation. It is a simple project, modest but effective.

It feels as though you are really trying to build a community of writers and readers.

The community has long existed, but a community struggles to benefit from its existence if it is not communicating. There are many literary festivals all over Africa, and African writers have been in contact with one other for a long time. We are not inventing a community. What we are doing, though, is adding to the community’s ability to communicate. Books will help do that. And the publishing of books is supported by the willful creation of a network of mentors that can strengthen the work being produced. The process of finding poets involves multiple conversations with poets from all over Africa and the diaspora, and it is beautiful to have writers recommending the work of other poets. I suppose this is what community is about.

You’ve edited another book coming out later this year, A Bloom of Stones, which is a trilingual anthology of work about the Haitian earthquake. What was the impetus for the project, and how did you go about assembling it?

I was in Haiti a few months after the catastrophic earthquake in 2010, and I visited that country about five times over an eight-month period to report on the impact that the earthquake was having on people living with HIV/AIDS. As you know, I am also a journalist, and much of my work has involved reporting on HIV/AIDS. Well, as is my wont when I visit a new country, I try to find out what poets are doing. I was very interested in finding out how Haitian poets were responding to the earthquake. I had some good contacts in Haiti who helped me set up a soiree with Haitian poets while I was there. It was a powerful gathering. I vowed then to edit a volume of poems by Haitian poets responding to the earthquake. It has taken a few years to get this completed as it has involved a great deal of translation work. It is a beautiful volume.

I suppose some people will read about all the work that you’re doing as an editor—and of course there’s more we haven’t even talked about—and wonder how you find time for your own writing.

There is more time than we imagine. I have never found myself feeling conflicted about my time. Here is the truth: if you get the impression that I am always working and running everything, I am afraid you might be misinformed. The truth is that I work with some really good people.

My own writing is something I look forward to doing. I make time. It never really has to compete for attention. But who knows—maybe I should have published 40 books of poems by now instead of 20! No, the world does not need that.

Originally Published: June 8th, 2016

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2016/04/poetry-of-self-trust-brian-blanchfields-proxies-essays-near-knowing/

Poetry News
Poetry of Self-Trust: Brian Blanchfield’s Proxies: Essays Near Knowing
By Harriet Staff

Blanchfield_Proxies

At Flavorwire, a great piece about Brian Blanchfield’s new collection of essays, Proxies: Essays Near Knowing (Nightboat, 2016). Jonathan Sturgeon casts the work against similar poets-gone-prose writers Maggie Nelson and Ben Lerner, noting that “although it often looks like poststructuralism is the strongest influence, it’s more likely poetry — poetry is the common.” More:

If Sontag saw interpretation as the “revenge of the intellect upon art,” maybe now we’re experiencing the revenge of poetry upon the intellect. In any case, the poetic refusal of the metaphysics of genre is becoming a genre. Proxies, with its rejection of conventional knowingness, is an act of fidelity to it.

So it’s not surprising that, like Lerner’s 10:04, Blanchfield’s Proxies considers the idea of proprioception (“the sense of the body’s orientation and balance and the weighted proportion of its parts”). Or that, like Nelson’s The Argonauts (and other works of queer autotheoretical writing), it reconsiders family structures. On this subject, Proxies is especially good. In “On House Sitting,” the essay I liked best, Blanchfield recounts his experiences as a house-sitter (another kind of proxy), an occupation that comes with its own politics and “commensalist” gestures; following the convention of a previous house-sitter (his friend Eileen Myles), Blanchfield learns to leave a poem-gift for the “permanent resident” of the house. In this act Blanchfield locates the first-person plural of his own poetry; house sitting becomes a metaphor for “a queer kind of family”:

A family attuned alike, who find each other eventually and dovetail their several courses far from families of origin: the we I mean in my poems, connected preternaturally, manifested similarly, recognizable to one another, is active in our trade of relations and interdependences, a guild, or troupe or battalion of us thrown together by like circumstances, managing perforce a solidarity. The young help the old, and the old help the young, likewise the vagrant and the situated, passing keys, leaving notes. “Here we are all by day. By night we’re hurl’d / by dreams each one…” Robert Herrick gave us bed as a place to be distinct; Whitman cited that same nightly tendency to separate as what we most share.

Read it all at Flavorwire!

Tags: Brian Blanchfield, Flavorwire, Jonathan Sturgeon
Posted in Poetry News on Monday, April 18th, 2016 by Harriet Staff.


"" A family attuned alike, who find each other eventually and dovetail their several courses far from families of origin: the we I mean in my poems, connected preternaturally, manifested similarly, recognizable to one another, is active in our trade of relations and interdependences, a guild, or troupe or battalion of us thrown together by like circumstances, managing perforce a solidarity. The young help the old, and the old help the young, likewise the vagrant and the situated, passing keys, leaving notes. “Here we are all by day. By night we’re hurl’d / by dreams each one…” Robert Herrick gave us bed as a place to be distinct; Whitman cited that same nightly tendency to separate as what we most share. ""

^^^^^ I agree WHOLEHEARTEDLY. . Concluding paragraph is solid gold IMHO..-TYR

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

Part one of two- bio of John Clare.-Tyr


http://www.poetrysoup.com/article/the_life_of_john_clare-1381


The life of John Clare
Written by: EDMUND BLUNDEN

The life of John Clare, offering as it does so much opportunity for sensational contrast and unbridled distortion, became at one time (like the tragedy of Chatterton) a favourite with the quillmen. Even his serious biographers have made excessive use of light and darkness, poetry and poverty, genius and stupidity: that there should be some uncertainty about dates and incidents is no great matter, but that misrepresentations of character or of habit should be made is the fault of shallow research or worse. We have been informed, for instance, that drink was a main factor in Clare's mental collapse; that Clare "pottered in the fields feebly"; that on his income of "L45 a year … Clare thought he could live without working"; and all biographers have tallied in the melodramatic legend; "Neither wife nor children ever came to see him, except the youngest son, who came once," during his Asylum days. To these attractive exaggerations there are the best of grounds for giving the lie.

John Clare was born on the 13th of July, 1793, in a small cottage degraded in popular tradition to a mud hut of the parish of Helpston, between Peterborough and Stamford. This cottage is standing to-day, almost as it was when Clare lived there; so that those who care to do so may examine Martin's description of "a narrow wretched hut, more like a prison than a human dwelling," in face of the facts. Clare's father, a labourer named Parker Clare, was a man with his wits about him, whether educated or not; and Ann his wife is recorded to have been a woman of much natural ability and precise habits, who thought the world of her son John. Of the other children, little is known but that there were two who died young and one girl who was alive in 1824. Clare himself wrote a sonnet in the London Magazine for June, 1821, "To a Twin Sister, Who Died in Infancy."

Parker Clare, a man with some reputation as a wrestler and chosen for thrashing corn on account of his strength, sometimes shared the fate of almost all farm labourers of his day and was compelled to accept parish relief: at no time can he have been many shillings to the good: but it was his determination to have John educated to the best of his power. John Clare therefore attended a dame-school until he was seven; thence, he is believed to have gone to a day-school, where he made progress enough to receive on leaving the warm praise of the schoolmaster, and the advice to continue at a nightschool—which he did. His aim, he notes later on, was to write copperplate: but there are evidences that he learned much more than penmanship. Out of school he appears to have been a happy, imaginative child: as alert for mild mischief as the rest of the village boys, but with something solitary and romantic in his disposition. One day indeed at a very early age he went off to find the horizon; and a little later while he tended sheep and cows in his holiday-time on Helpston Common, he made friends with a curious old lady called Granny Bains, who taught him old songs and ballads. Such poems as "Childhood" and "Remembrances" prove that Clare's early life was not mere drudgery and despair. "I never had much relish for the pastimes of youth. Instead of going out on the green at the town end on winter Sundays to play football I stuck to my corner stool poring over a book; in fact, I grew so fond of being alone at last that my mother was fain to force me into company, for the neighbours had assured her mind … that I was no better than crazy…. I used to be very fond of fishing, and of a Sunday morning I have been out before the sun delving for worms in some old weed-blanketed dunghill and steering off across the wet grain … till I came to the flood-washed meadow stream…. And then the year used to be crowned with its holidays as thick as the boughs on a harvest home." It is probable that the heavy work which he is said to have done as a child was during the long holiday at harvesttime. When he was twelve or thirteen he certainly became team-leader, and in this employment he saw a farm labourer fall from the top of his loaded wagon and break his neck. For a time his reason seemed affected by the sight.

At evening-school, Clare struck up a friendship with an excise-man's son, to the benefit of both. In 1835, one of many sonnets was addressed to this excellent soul:

Turnill, we toiled together all the day,
And lived like hermits from the boys at play;
We read and walked together round the fields,
Not for the beauty that the journey yields—
But muddied fish, and bragged oer what we caught,
And talked about the few old books we bought.
Though low in price you knew their value well,
And I thought nothing could their worth excel;
And then we talked of what we wished to buy,
And knowledge always kept our pockets dry.
We went the nearest ways, and hummed a song,
And snatched the pea pods as we went along,
And often stooped for hunger on the way
To eat the sour grass in the meadow hay.

One of these "few old books" was Thomson's "Seasons", which gave a direction to the poetic instincts of Clare, already manifesting themselves in scribbled verses in his exercise-books.

Read, mark, learn as Clare might, no opportunity came for him to enter a profession. "After I had done with going to school it was proposed that I should be bound apprentice to a shoemaker, but I rather disliked this bondage. I whimpered and turned a sullen eye on every persuasion, till they gave me my will. A neighbour then offered to learn me his trade—to be a stone mason,—but I disliked this too…. I was then sent for to drive the plough at Woodcroft Castle of Oliver Cromwell memory; though Mrs. Bellairs the mistress was a kind-hearted woman, and though the place was a very good one for living, my mind was set against it from the first;… one of the disagreeable things was getting up so early in the morning … and another was getting wetshod … every morning and night—for in wet weather the moat used to overflow the cause-way that led to the porch, and as there was but one way to the house we were obliged to wade up to the knees to get in and out…. I staid here one month, and then on coming home to my parents they could not persuade me to return. They now gave up all hopes of doing any good with me and fancied that I should make nothing but a soldier; but luckily in this dilemma a next-door neighbour at the Blue Bell, Francis Gregory, wanted me to drive plough, and as I suited him, he made proposals to hire me for a year—which as it had my consent my parents readily agreed to." There he spent a year in light work with plenty of leisure for his books and his long reveries in lonely favourite places. His imagination grew intensely, and in his weekly errand to a flour-mill at Maxey ghosts rose out of a swamp and harried him till he dropped. This stage was hardly ended when one day on his road he saw a young girl named Mary Joyce, with whom he instantly fell in love. This crisis occurred when Clare was almost sixteen: the fate of John Clare hung in the balance for six months. Then Mary's father, disturbed principally by the chance that his daughter might be seen talking to this erratic youngster, put an end to their meetings. From this time, with intervals of tranquillity, Clare was to suffer the slow torture of remorse, until at length deliberately yielding himself up to his amazing imagination he held conversation with Mary, John Clare's Mary, his first wife Mary—as though she had not lived unwed, and had not been in her grave for years.

But this was not yet; and we must return to the boy Clare, now terminating his year's hiring at the Blue Bell. It was time for him to take up some trade in good earnest; accordingly, in an evil hour disguised as a fortunate one, he was apprenticed to the head gardener at Burghley Park. The head gardener was in practice a sot and a slave-driver. After much drunken wild bravado, not remarkable in the lad Clare considering his companions and traditions, there came the impulse to escape; with the result that Clare and a companion were shortly afterwards working in a nursery garden at Newark-upon-Trent. Both the nursery garden and "the silver Trent" are met again in the poems composed in his asylum days; but for the time being they meant little to him, and he suddenly departed through the snow. Arrived home at Helpston, he lost some time in finding farm work and in writing verses: sharing a loft at night with a fellow-labourer, he would rise at all hours to note down new ideas. It was not unnatural in the fellow-labourer to request him to "go and do his poeting elsewhere." Clare was already producing work of value, none the less. Nothing could be kept from his neighbours, who looked askance on his ways of thinking, and writing: while a candid friend to whom he showed his manuscripts directed his notice to the study of grammar. Troubled by these ill omens, he comforted himself in the often intoxicated friendship of the bad men of the village, who under the mellowing influences of old ale roared applause as he recited his ballads. This life was soon interrupted.

"When the country was chin-deep," Clare tells us, "in the fears of invasion, and every mouth was filled with the terror which Buonaparte had spread in other countries, a national scheme was set on foot to raise a raw army of volunteers: and to make the matter plausible a letter was circulated said to be written by the Prince Regent. I forget how many were demanded from our parish, but remember the panic which it created was very great. No great name rises in the world without creating a crowd of little mimics that glitter in borrowed rays; and no great lie was ever yet put in circulation without a herd of little lies multiplying by instinct, as it were and crowding under its wings. The papers that were circulated assured the people of England that the French were on the eve of invading it and that it was deemed necessary by the Regent that an army from eighteen to forty-five should be raised immediately. This was the great lie, and then the little lies were soon at its heels; which assured the people of Helpston that the French had invaded and got to London. And some of these little lies had the impudence to swear that the French had even reached Northampton. The people were at their doors in the evening to talk over the rebellion of '45 when the rebels reached Derby, and even listened at intervals to fancy they heard the French rebels at Northampton, knocking it down with their cannon. I never gave much credit to popular stories of any sort, so I felt no concern at these stories; though I could not say much for my valour if the tale had proved true. We had a crossgrained sort of choice left us, which was to be found, to be drawn, and go for nothing—or take on as volunteers for the bounty of two guineas. I accepted the latter and went with a neighbour's son, W. Clarke, to Peterborough to be sworn on and prepared to join the regiment at Oundle. The morning we left home our mothers parted with us as if we were going to Botany Bay, and people got at their doors to bid us farewell and greet us with a Job's comfort 'that they doubted we should see Helpston no more.' I confess I wished myself out of the matter. When we got to Oundle, the place of quartering, we were drawn out into the field, and a more motley multitude of lawless fellows was never seen in Oundle before—and hardly out of it. There were 1,300 of us. We were drawn up into a line and sorted out into companies. I was one of the shortest and therefore my station is evident. I was in that mixed multitude called the battalion, which they nicknamed 'bum-tools' for what reason I cannot tell; the light company was called 'light-bobs,' and the grenadiers 'bacon-bolters' … who felt as great an enmity against each other as ever they all felt against the French."

In 1813 he read among other things the "Eikon Basilike," and turned his hand to odd jobs as they presented themselves. His life appears to have been comfortable and a little dull for a year or two; flirtation, verse-making, ambitions and his violin took their turns amiably enough! At length he went to work in a lime-kiln several miles from Helpston, and wrote only less poems than he read: one day in the autumn of 1817, he was dreaming yet new verses when he first saw "Patty," his wife-to-be. She was then eighteen years old, and modestly beautiful; for a moment Clare forgot Mary Joyce, and though "the courtship ultimately took a more prosaic turn," there is no denying the fact that he was in love with "Patty" Turner, the daughter of the small farmer who held Walkherd Lodge. In the case of Clare, poetry was more than ever as time went on autobiography; and it is noteworthy that among the many love lyrics addressed to Mary Joyce there are not wanting affectionate tributes to his faithful wife Patty.

Maid of Walkherd, meet again,
By the wilding in the glen….

And I would go to Patty's cot
And Patty came to me;
Each knew the other's very thought
Under the hawthorn tree….
And I'll be true for Patty's sake
And she'll be true for mine;
And I this little ballad make,
To be her valentine.

Not long after seeing Patty, Clare was informed by the owner of the lime-kiln that his wages would now be seven shillings a week, instead of nine. He therefore left this master and found similar work in the village of Pickworth, where being presented with a shoemaker's bill for L3, he entered into negotiations with a Market Deeping bookseller regarding "Proposals for publishing by subscription a Collection of Original Trifles on Miscellaneous Subjects, Religious and Moral, in verse, by John Clare, of Helpstone." Three hundred proposals were printed, with a specimen sonnet well chosen to intrigue the religious and moral; and yet the tale of intending subscribers stood adamantly at seven. On the face of it, then, Clare had lost one pound; had worn himself out with distributing his prospectuses; and further had been discharged from the lime-kiln for doing so in working hours. His ambitions, indeed, set all employers and acquaintances against him; and he found himself at the age of twenty-five compelled to ask for parish relief. In this extremity, even the idea of enlisting once more crossed his brain; then, that of travelling to Yorkshire for employment: and at last, the prospectus which had done him so much damage turned benefactor. With a few friends Clare was drinking success to his goose-chase when there appeared two "real gentlemen" from Stamford. One of these, a bookseller named Drury, had chanced on the prospectus, and wished to see more of Clare's poetry. Soon afterwards, he promised to publish a selection, with corrections; and communicated with his relative, John Taylor, who with his partner Hessey managed the well-known publishing business in Fleet Street. While this new prospect was opening upon Clare, he succeeded in obtaining work once more, near the home of Patty; their love-making proceeded, despite the usual thunderstorms, and the dangerous rivalry of a certain dark lady named Betty Sell. The bookseller Drury, though his appearance was in such critical days timely for Clare, was not a paragon of virtue. Without Clare's knowing it, he acquired the legal copyright of the poems, probably by the expedient of dispensing money at convenient times—a specious philanthropy, as will be shown. At the same time he allowed Clare to open a book account, which proved at length to be no special advantage. And further, with striking astuteness, he found constant difficulty in returning originals. In a note written some ten years later, Clare regrets that "Ned Drury has got my early vol. of MSS. I lent it him at first, but like all my other MSS. elsewhere I could never get it again…. He has copies of all my MSS. except those written for the 'Shepherd's Calendar.'" Nevertheless, through Drury, Clare was enabled to meet his publisher Taylor and his influential friend of the Quarterly, Octavius Gilchrist, before the end of 1819.

By 1818, there is no doubt, Clare had read very deeply, and even had some idea of the classical authors through translations. It is certain that he knew the great English writers, probable that he possessed their works. What appears to be a list of books which he was anxious to sell in his hardest times includes some curious titles, with some familiar ones. There are Cobb's Poems, Fawke's Poems, Broom's, Mrs. Hoole's, and so on; there are also Cowley's Works—Folio, Warton's "Milton," Waller, and a Life of Chatterton; nor can he have been devoid of miscellaneous learning after the perusal of Watson's "Electricity," Aristotle's Works, Gasse's "Voyages," "Nature Display'd," and the European Magazine ("fine heads and plates"). His handwriting at this time was bold and hasty; his opinions, to judge from his uncompromising notes to Drury respecting the text of the poems, almost cynical and decidedly his own. Tact was essential if you would patronize Clare: you might broaden his opinions, but you dared not assail them. Thus the friendly Gilchrist, a high churchman, hardly set eyes on Clare before condemning Clare's esteem for a dissenting minister, a Mr. Holland, who understood the poet and the poetry: it was some time before Gilchrist set eyes on Clare again.

The year 1820 found Clare unemployed once more, but the said Mr. Holland arrived before long with great news. "In the beginning of January," Clare briefly puts it, "my poems were published after a long anxiety of nearly two years and all the Reviews, except Phillips' waste paper magazine, spoke in my favour." Most assuredly they did. The literary world, gaping for drouth, had seen an announcement, then an account of "John Clare, an agricultural labourer and poet," during the previous autumn; the little cloud, no bigger than a man's hand, in a little while seemed to usurp the whole sky—or in other terms, three editions of "Poems Descriptiveof Rural Life and Scenery" were sold between January 16 and the last of March. While this fever was raging among the London coteries, critical, fashionable, intellectual, even the country folk round Helpston came to the conclusion that Clare was something of a phenomenon. "In the course of the publication," says Clare, "I had ventured to write to Lord Milton to request leave that the volume might be dedicated to him; but his Lordship was starting into Italy and forgot to answer it. So it was dedicated to nobody, which perhaps might be as well. As soon as it was out, my mother took one to Milton; when his Lordship sent a note to tell me to bring ten more copies. On the following Sunday I went, and after sitting awhile in the servants' hall (where I could eat or drink nothing for thought), his Lordship sent for me, and instantly explained the reasons why he did not answer my letter, in a quiet unaffected manner which set me at rest. He told me he had heard of my poems by Parson Mossop (of Helpston), who I have since heard took hold of every opportunity to speak against my success or poetical abilities before the book was published, and then, when it came out and others praised it, instantly turned round to my side. Lady Milton also asked me several questions, and wished me to name any book that was a favourite; expressing at the same time a desire to give me one. But I was confounded and could think of nothing. So I lost the present. In fact, I did not like to pick out a book for fear of seeming over-reaching on her kindness, or else Shakespeare was at my tongue's end. Lord Fitzwilliam, and Lady Fitzwilliam too, talked to me and noticed me kindly, and his Lordship gave me some advice which I had done well perhaps to have noticed better than I have. He bade me beware of booksellers and warned me not to be fed with promises. On my departure they gave me a handful of money—the most that I had ever possessed in my life together. I almost felt I should be poor no more—there was L17." Such is Clare's description of an incident which has been rendered in terms of insult. Other invitations followed, the chief practical result being an annuity of fifteen pounds promised by the Marquis of Exeter. Men of rank and talent wrote letters to Clare, or sent him books: some found their way to Helpston, and others sent tracts to show him the way to heaven. And now at last Clare was well enough off to marry Patty, before the birth of their first child, Anna Maria.

Before his marriage, probably, Clare was desired to spend a few days with his publisher Taylor in London. In smock and gaiters he felt most uncertain of himself and borrowed a large overcoat from Taylor to disguise his dress: over and above this question of externals, he instinctively revolted against being exhibited. Meeting Lord Radstock, sometime admiral in the Royal Navy, at dinner in Taylor's house, Clare gained a generous if somewhat religiose friend, with the instant result that he found himself "trotting from one drawing-room to the other." He endured this with patience, thinking possibly of the cat killed by kindness; and incidentally Radstock introduced him to the strangely superficial-genuine lady Mrs. Emmerson, who was to be a faithful, thoughtful friend to his family for many years to come. In another direction, soon after Clare's return to Helpston, the retired admiral did him a great service, opening a private subscription list for his benefit: it was found possible to purchase "L250 Navy 5 Per Cents" on the 28th April and a further "L125 Navy 5 Per Cents" a month or so later. This stock, held by trustees, yielded Clare a dividend of L18 15s. at first, but in 1823 this income dwindled to L15 15s.; and by 1832 appears to have fallen to L13 10s. To the varying amount thus derived, and to the L15 given yearly by the Marquis of Exeter, a Stamford doctor named Bell—one of Clare's most energetic admirers—succeeded in adding another annuity of L10 settled upon the poet by Lord Spencer. But in the consideration of these bounties, it is just to examine the actual financial effect of Clare's first book. The publishers' own account, furnished only through Clare's repeated demands in 1829 or thereabouts, has a sobering tale to tell: but so far no biographer has condescended to examine it.

On the first edition Clare got nothing. Against him is entered the item "Cash paid Mr. Clare for copyright p. Mr. Drury … L20"; but this money if actually paid had been paid in 1819. Against him also is charged a curious "Commission 5 p. Cent… L8 12s.," while Drury and Taylor acknowledge sharing profits of L26 odd.

On the second and third editions Clare got nothing; but to his account
is charged the L100 which Taylor and Hessey "subscribed" to his fund.
"Commission," "Advertising," "Sundries," and "Deductions allowed to
Agents," account for a further L51 of the receipts: and Drury and
Taylor ostensibly take over L30 apiece.

The fourth edition not being exhausted, the account is not closed: but "Advertising" has already swollen to L30, and there is no sign that Clare benefits a penny piece. Small wonder that at the foot of these figures he has written, "How can this be? I never sold the poems for any price—what money I had of Drury was given me on account of profits to be received—but here it seems I have got nothing and am brought in minus twenty pounds of which I never received a sixpence—or it seems that by the sale of these four thousand copies I have lost that much—and Drury told me that 5,000 copies had been printed tho' 4,000 only are accounted for." Had Clare noticed further an arithmetical discrepancy which apparently shortened his credit balance by some L27, he might have been still more sceptical.

Not being overweighted, therefore, with instant wealth, Clare returned to Helpston determined to continue his work in the fields. But fame opposed him: all sorts and conditions of Lydia Whites, Leo Hunters, Stigginses, and Jingles crowded to the cottage, demanding to see the Northamptonshire Peasant, and often wasting hours of his time. One day, for example, "the inmates of a whole boarding-school, located at Stamford, visited the unhappy poet"; and even more congenial visitors who cheerfully hurried him off to the tavern parlour were the ruin of his work. Yet he persevered, writing his poems only in his leisure, until the harvest of 1820 was done; then in order to keep his word with Taylor, who had agreed to produce a new volume in the spring of 1821, he spent six months in the most energetic literary labour. Writing several poems a day as he roamed the field or sat in Lea Close Oak, he would sit till late in the night sifting, recasting and transcribing. His library, by his own enterprise and by presents from many friends, was greatly enlarged, and he already knew not only the literature of the past, but also that of the present. In his letters to Taylor are mentioned his appreciations of Keats, "Poor Keats, you know how I reverence him," Shelley, Hunt, Lamb—and almost every other contemporary classic. Nor was he afraid to criticize Scott with freedom in a letter to Scott's friend Sherwell: remarking also that Wordworth's Sonnet on Westminster Bridge had no equal in the language, but disagreeing with "his affected godliness."

Taylor and Hessey for their part did not seem over-anxious to produce the new volume of poems, perhaps because Clare would not allow any change except in the jots and tittles of his work, perhaps thinking that the public had had a surfeit of sensation. At length in the autumn of 1821 the "Village Minstrel" made its appearance, in two volumes costing twelve shillings; with the bait of steel engravings,—the first, an unusually fine likeness of Clare from the painting by Hilton; the second, an imaginative study of Clare's cottage, not without representation of the Blue Bell, the village cross and the church. The book was reviewed less noisily, and a sale of a mere 800 copies in two months was regarded as "a very modified success." Meanwhile, Clare was writing for theLondon Magazine, and Cherry tells us that "as he contributed almost regularly for some time, a substantial addition was made to his income." Clare tells us, in a note on a cash account dated 1827, "In this cash account there is nothing allowed me for my three years' writing for the London Magazine. I was to have L12 a year."

To insist in the financial affairs of Clare may seem blatant, or otiose: actually, the treatment which he underwent was a leading influence in his career. He was grateful enough to Radstock for raising a subscription fund; he may have been grateful to Taylor and Hessey for subscribing L100 of his own money; but what hurt and embittered him was to see this sum and the others invested for him under trustees. Indeed, what man would not, if possessed of any independence of mind, strongly oppose such namby-pamby methods? It is possible to take a more sinister view of Taylor and Hessey and their reluctance ever to provide Clare with a statement of account; but in the matter of Clare's funded property folly alone need be considered.

In October 1821, notably, Clare saw an excellent opportunity for the future of his family. A small freehold of six or seven acres with a pleasant cottage named Bachelor's Hall, where Clare had spent many an evening in comfort and even in revelry, was mortgaged to a Jew for two hundred pounds; the tenants offered Clare the whole property on condition that he paid off the mortgage. Small holdings were rare in that district of great landowners, and this to Clare was the chance of a lifetime. He applied therefore to Lord Radstock for two hundred pounds from his funded property; Radstock replied that "the funded property was vested in trustees who were restricted to paying the interest to him." It would have been, thought Clare, no difficult matter for Radstock to have advanced me that small amount; and he rightly concluded that his own strength of character and common sense were distrusted by his patrons. Not overwhelmed by this, he now applied to his publisher Taylor, offering to sell his whole literary output for five years at the price of two hundred pounds. Taylor was not enthusiastic. These writings, he urged, might be worth more, or might be worth less; in the first case Clare, in the second himself would lose on the affair; besides, there were money-lenders and legal niceties to beware of; let not Clare "be ambitious but remain in the state in which God had placed him." Thus the miserable officiousness went on, and if Clare for a time found some comfort in the glass who can blame him? In his own words, "for enemies he cared nothing, from his friends he had much to fear." He was "thrown back among all the cold apathy of killing kindness that had numbed him … for years."

In May, 1822, Clare spent a brief holiday in London, meeting there the strong men of the London Magazine, Lamb, Hood, and therest. From his clothes, the London group called him The Green Man; Lamb took a singular interest in him, and was wont to address him as "Clarissimus" and "Princely Clare." Another most enthusiastic acquaintance was a painter named Rippingille, who had begun life as the son of a farmer at King's Lynn, and who was now thoroughly capable of taking Clare into the most Bohemian corners of London. Suddenly, however, news came from Helpston recalling the poet from these perambulations, and he returned in haste, to find his second daughter born, Eliza Louisa, god-child of Mrs. Emmerson and Lord Radstock.

At this time, Clare appears to have been writing ballads of a truly rustic sort, perhaps in the light of his universal title, The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet. He would now, moreover, collect such old ballads and songs as his father and mother or those who worked with him might chance to sing; but was often disappointed to find that "those who knew fragments seemed ashamed to acknowledge it … and those who were proud of their knowledge in such things knew nothing but the senseless balderdash that is brawled over and sung at country feasts, statutes, and fairs, where the most senseless jargon passes for the greatest excellence, and rudest indecency for the finest wit." None the less he recovered sufficient material to train himself into the manner of these "old and beautiful recollections." But whatever he might write or edit, he was unlikely to find publishers willing to bring out. The "Village Minstrel" had barely passed the first thousand, and the "second edition" was not melting away. Literature after all was not money, and to increase Clare's anxiety and dilemma came illness. In the early months of 1823, he made a journey to Stamford to ask the help of his old friend Gilchrist.

Gilchrist was already in the throes of his last sickness, and Clare took his leave without a word of his own difficulties. Arriving home, he fell into a worse illness than before; but as the spring came on he rallied, and occasionally walked to Stamford to call on his friend, who likewise seemed beginning to mend. On the 30th of June, Clare was received with the news "Mr. Gilchrist is dead." Clare relapsed into a curious condition which appeared likely to overthrow his life or his reason when Taylor most fortunately came to see him, and procured him the best doctor in Peterborough. This doctor not only baffled Clare's disease, but, rousing attention wherever he could in the neighbourhood, was able to provide him with good food and even some old port from the cellar of the Bishop of Peterborough.

At last on the advice of the good doctor and the renewed invitation of Taylor, Clare made a third pilgrimage to London, and this time stayed from the beginning of May till the middle of July, 1824. Passing the first three weeks in peaceful contemplation of London crowds, he was well enough then to attend a London Magazine dinner, where De Quincey swam into his ken, and the next week a similar gathering where Coleridge talked for three hours. Clare sat next to Charles Elton and gained a staunch friend, who shortly afterwards sent him a letter in verse with a request that he should sit to Rippingille for his portrait:

His touch will, hue by hue, combine
Thy thoughtful eyes, that steady shine,
The temples of Shakesperian line,
The quiet smile.

To J. H. Reynolds he seemed "a very quiet and worthy yet enthusiastic man." George Darley, too, was impressed by Clare the man, and for some time was to be one of the few serious critics of Clare the poet. Allan Cunningham showed a like sympathy and a still more active interest. A less familiar character, the journalist Henry Van Dyk, perhaps did Clare more practical good than either.

With these good effects of Clare's third visit to town, another may be noted. A certain Dr. Darling attended him throughout, and persuaded him to give up drink; this he did. The real trouble at Helpston was to discover employment, for already Clare was supporting his wife, his father and mother, and three young children. Farmers were unwilling to employ Clare, indeed insulted him if he applied to them: and his reticence perhaps lost him situations in the gardens of the Marquis of Exeter, and then of the Earl Fitzwilliam.

In spite of disappointments, he wrote almost without pause, sometimes making poems in the manner of elder poets (with the intention of mild literary forgery), sometimes writing in his normal vein for the lately announced "New Shepherd's Calendar"; and almost daily preparing two series of articles, on natural history and on British birds. A curious proof of the facility with which he wrote verse is afforded by the great number of rhymed descriptions of birds, their nests and eggs which this period produced: as though he sat down resolved to write prose notes and found his facts running into metre even against his will. As if not yet embroiled in schemes enough, Clare planned and began a burlesque novel, an autobiography, and other prose papers: while he kept a diary which should have been published. Clare had been forced into a literary career, and no one ever worked more conscientiously or more bravely. Those who had at first urged him to write can scarcely be acquitted of desertion now: but the more and the better Clare wrote, the less grew the actual prospect of production, success and independence.

On the 9th of March, 1825, Clare wrote in his diary: "I had a very odd dream last night, and take it as an ill omen … I thought I had one of the proofs of the new poems from London, and after looking at it awhile it shrank through my hands like sand, and crumbled into dust." Three days afterwards, the proof of the "Shepherd's Calendar" arrived at Helpston. The ill omen was to be proved true, but not yet. Clare continued to write and to botanize, and being already half-forgotten by his earlier friends was contented with the company of two notable local men, Edward Artis the archaeologist who discovered ancient Durobrivae, and Henderson who assisted Clare in his nature-work. These two pleasant companions were in the service of Earl Fitzwilliam. It was perhaps through their interest that Clare weathered the hardships of 1825 so well; and equally, although the "Shepherd's Calendar" seemed suspended, did Clare's old patron Radstock endeavour to keep his spirits up, writing repeatedly to the publisher in regard to Clare's account. The hope of a business agreement was destroyed by the sudden death of Radstock, "the best friend," says Clare, "I have met with."

Not long after this misfortune, Clare returned to field work for the period of harvest, then through the winter concentrated his energy on his poetry. Nor was poetry his only production, for through his friend Van Dyk he was enabled to contribute prose pieces to the London press. In June, 1826, his fourth child was born, and Clare entreated Taylor to bring out the "Shepherd's Calendar," feeling that he might at least receive money enough for the comfort of his wife and his baby; but Taylor felt otherwise, recommending Clare to write for the annuals which now began to flourish. This Clare at last persuaded himself to do. Payment was tardy, and in some cases imaginary; and for the time being the annuals were not the solution of his perplexities. He therefore went back to the land; and borrowing the small means required rented at length a few acres, with but poor results.

The publication of Clare's first book had been managed with excellent strategy; Taylor had left nothing to chance, and the public responded as he had planned. The independence of Clare may have displeased the publisher; at any rate, his enthusiasm dwindled, and further to jeopardize Clare's chances it occurred that in 1825 Taylor and Hessey came to an end, the partners separating. Omens were indeed bad for the "Shepherd's Calendar" which, two years after its announcement, in June, 1827, made its unobtrusive appearance. There were very few reviews, and the book sold hardly at all. Yet this was conspicuously finer work than Clare had done before. Even "that beautiful frontispiece of De Wint's," as Taylor wrote, did not attract attention. The forgotten poet, slaving at his small-holding, found that his dream had come true. Meanwhile Allan Cunningham had been inquiring into this non-success, and early in 1828 wrote to Clare urging him to come to London and interview the publisher. An invitation from Mrs. Emmerson made thevisit possible. Once more then did Clare present himself at 20, Stratford Place, and find his "sky chamber" ready to receive him. Nor did he allow long time to elapse before finding out Allan Cunningham, who heartily approved of his plan to call on Taylor, telling him to request a full statement of account. The next day, when Clare was on the point of making the demand, Taylor led across the trail with an unexpected offer; recommending Clare to buy the remaining copies of his "Shepherd's Calendar" from him at half-a-crown each, that he might sell them in his own district. Clare asked time to reflect. A week later, against the wish of Allan Cunningham, he accepted the scheme.

Clare had had another object in coming to town. Dr. Darling had done him so much good on a previous occasion that he wished to consult him anew. On the 25th of February, 1828, Clare wrote to his wife: "Mr. Emmerson's doctor, a Mr. Ward, told me last night that there was little or nothing the matter with me—and yet I got no sleep the whole of last night." Already, it appears, had coldness and dilemma unsettled him. That they had not subdued him, and that his home life was in the main happy and affectionate, and of as great an importance to him as any of his aspirations, is to be judged from his poems and his letters of 1828 and thereabouts. They show him as the very opposite of the feeble neurotic who has so often been beworded under his name:

20, STRATFORD PLACE, March 21st, 1828.

MY DEAR PATTY,

I have been so long silent that I feel ashamed of it, but I have been so much engaged that I really have not had time to write; and the occasion of my writing now is only to tell you that I shall be at home next week for certain.—I am anxious to see you and the children and I sincerely hope you are all well. I have bought the dear little creatures four books, and Henry Behnes has promised to send Frederick a wagon and horses as a box of music is not to be had. The books I have bought them are "Puss-in-Boots," "Cinderella," "Little Rhymes," and "The Old Woman and Pig"; tell them that the pictures are all coloured, and they must make up their minds to chuse which they like best ere I come home.—Mrs. Emmerson desires to be kindly remembered to you, and intends sending the children some toys. I hope next Wednesday night at furthest will see me in my old corner once again amongst you. I have made up my mind to buy Baxter "The History of Greece," which I hope will suit him. I have been poorly, having caught cold, and have been to Dr. Darling. I would have sent you some money which I know you want, but as I am coming home so soon I thought it much safer to bring it home myself than send it; and as this is only to let you know that I am coming home, I shall not write further than hoping you are all well—kiss the dear children for me all round—give my remembrances to all—and believe me, my dear Patty,

Yours most affectionately,

JOHN CLARE.

During this stay in London, Clare had had proofs that his poems were not completely overlooked. Strangers, recognizing him from the portrait in the "Village Minstrel," often addressed him in the street. In this way he first met Alaric A. Watts, and Henry Behnes, the sculptor, who induced Clare to sit to him. The result was a strong, intensely faithful bust (preserved now in the Northampton Free Library). Hilton, who had painted Clare in water-colours and in oils, celebrated with Behnes and Clare the modelling of this bust, all three avoiding a dinner of lions arranged by Mrs. Emmerson. On another occasion, Clare found a congenial spirit in William Hone.

But now Clare is home at Helpston, ready with a sack of poetry to tramp from house to house and try his luck. Sometimes he dragged himself thirty miles a day, meeting rectors who "held it unbecoming to see poems hawked about": one day, having walked seven milesinto Peterborough, and having sold no books anywhere, he trudged home to find Patty in the pains of labour; and now had to go back to Peterborough as fast as he might for a doctor. Now there were nine living beings dependent on Clare. At length he altered his plan of campaign, and advertised that his poems could be had at his cottage, with some success. About this time Clare was invited to write for "The Spirit of the Age," and still he supplied brief pieces to the hated but unavoidable annuals. Letters too from several towns in East Anglia, summoning John Clare with his bag of books, at least promised him some slight revenue; actually he only went to one of these places, namely Boston, where the mayor gave a banquet in his honour, and enabled him to sell several volumes—autographed. Among the younger men, a similar feast was proposed; but Clare declined, afterwards reproaching himself bitterly on discovering that they had hidden ten pounds in his wallet. On his return home not only himself but the rest of the family in turn fell ill with fever, so that the spring of 1829 found Clare out of work and faced with heavy doctor's-bills.

Intellectually, John Clare was in 1828 and 1829 probably at his zenith. He had ceased long since to play the poetic ploughman; he had gained in his verses something more ardent and stirring than he had shown in the "Shepherd's Calendar"; and the long fight (for it was nothing less) against leading-strings and obstruction now began to manifest itself in poems of regret and of soliloquy. Having long written for others' pleasure, he now wrote for his own nature.

I would not wish the burning blaze
Of fame around a restless world,
The thunder and the storm of praise
In crowded tumults heard and hurled.

There had been few periods of mental repose since 1820. His brain and his poetic genius, by this long discipline and fashioning, were now triumphant together. The declension from this high estate might have been more abrupt but for the change in his fortunes. He had again with gentleness demanded his accounts from his publisher, and when in August, 1829, these accounts actually arrived, disputed several points and gained certain concessions: payment was made from the editors of annuals; and with these reliefs came the chance for him to rent a small farm and to work on the land of Earl Fitzwilliam. His working hours were long, and his mind was forced to be idle. This salutary state of affairs lasted through 1830, until happiness seemed the only possibility before him. What poems he wrote occurred suddenly and simply to him. His children—now six in number—were growing up in more comfort and in more prospect than he had ever enjoyed. But he reckoned not with illness.

In short, illness reduced Clare almost to skin-and-bone. Farming not only added nothing but made encroachment on his small stipend. In despair he flung himself into field labour again, and was carried home nearly dead with fever. Friends there were not wanting to send food and medicine; Parson Mossop, having long ago been converted to Clare, did much for him. Even so the landlord distrained for rent, and Clare applied to his old friend Henderson the botanist at Milton Park. Lord Milton came by and Clare was encouraged to tell him his trouble; his intense phrases and bearing were such that the nobleman at once promised him a new cottage and a plot of ground. At the same time, he expressed his hope that there would soon be another volume of poems by John Clare. This hope was the spark which fired a dangerous train, perhaps; for Clare once again fell into his exhausting habit of poetry all the day and every day. He decided to publish a new volume by subscription.

The new cottage was in the well-orcharded village of Northborough, three miles from Helpston. It was indeed luxurious in comparison with the old stooping house where Clare had spent nearly forty years, but there was more in that old house than mere stone and timber. Clare began to look on the coming change with terror; delayed the move day after day, to the distress of poor Patty; and when at last news came from Milton Park that the Earl was not content with such strange hesitation, and when Patty had her household on the line of march, he "followed in the rear, walking mechanically, with eyes half shut, as if in a dream." There was no delay in his self-expression.

I've left mine own old home of homes,
Green fields and every pleasant place;
The summer like a stranger comes;
I pause and hardly know her face.
I miss the hazel's happy green,
The bluebell's quiet hanging blooms,
Where envy's sneer was never seen,
Where staring malice never comes.

This and many other verses, not the least pathetic in our language, were written by John Clare on June 20th, 1832, on the occasion of his moving out of a small and crowded cottage in a village street to a roomy, romantic farmhouse standing in its own grounds. Was this ingratitude? ask rather, is the dyer's hand subdued to what it works in?

Clare rapidly proceeded with his new collection of poems, destined never to appear in his lifetime. In a thick oblong blank-book, divided into four sections to receive Tales in Verse, Poems, Ballads and Songs, and Sonnets, he copied his best work in a hand small but clear, and with a rare freedom from slips of the pen. His proposals, reprinted with a warm-hearted comment in theAthenaeum of 1832, were in these terms:

The proposals for publishing these fugitives being addressed to friends no further apology is necessary than the plain statement of facts. Necessity is said to be the mother of invention, but there is very little need of invention for truth; and the truth is, that difficulty has grown up like a tree of the forest, and being no longer able to conceal it, I meet it in the best way possible by attempting to publish them for my own benefit and that of a numerous and increasing family. It were false delicacy to make an idle parade of independence in my situation, and it would be unmanly to make a troublesome appeal to favours, public or private, like a public petitioner. Friends neither expect this from me, or wish me to do it to others, though it is partly owing to such advice that I was induced to come forward with these proposals, and if they are successful they will render me a benefit, and if not they will not cancel any obligations that I may have received from friends, public and private, to whom my best wishes are due, and having said this much in furtherance of my intentions, I will conclude by explaining them.

Proposals for publishing in 1 volume, F.c. 8vo, The Midsummer Cushion, or Cottage Poems, by John Clare.

1st. The Book will be printed on fine paper, and published as soon as a sufficient number of subscribers are procured to defray the expense of publishing.

2nd. It will consist of a number of fugitive trifles, some of which have appeared in different periodicals, and of others that have never been published.

3rd. No money is requested until the volume shall be delivered, free of expense, to every subscriber.

4th. The price will not exceed seven shillings and sixpence, and it may not be so much, as the number of pages and the expense of the book will be regulated by the Publisher.

In his new home .....

Part two to follow****

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/detail/70186

Prose from Poetry Magazine
Orality, Literacy, and the Memorized Poem
Hearing art's heartbeat.
By Mike Chasar
I

Partway through Francis Ford Coppola’s 1983 film adaptation of S.E. Hinton’s 1967 novel The Outsiders, Ponyboy Curtis (played by C. Thomas Howell) and Johnny Cade (Ralph Macchio) are hiding out in an abandoned church in the country because Johnny knifed and accidentally killed a guy in a late-night fight. In the church, separated from the pain and gang violence of their low-income lives, the teens can be most fully themselves, and they spend their time reading Gone with the Wind to each other as they wait for Dallas (Matt Dillon) to show up and say the coast is clear.

One morning, the blond-haired and poetically-inclined Ponyboy gets up early and watches the sunrise through the mist. He is joined by Johnny, who remarks, “Too bad it can’t stay like that all the time.” Ponyboy responds, “Nothing gold can stay,” and proceeds to recite in full Robert Frost’s well-known poem of the same title:

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

When Johnny asks, “Where’d you learn that?” Ponyboy replies, “Robert Frost wrote it. I always remembered it because I never quite knew what he meant by it.”

This is a memorable and moving scene (it is also in Hinton’s novel), and Ponyboy’s interesting answer — a non-answer, really — raises 
a number of questions. Why does Ponyboy not answer Johnny’s question (“Where’d you learn that”)? Why do the film and novel cite Frost in particular? What do we make of Ponyboy’s reason for remembering the poem (“because I never quite knew what he meant by it”)? And — the apparent question to which Johnny wants an answer — where and how did Ponyboy come to memorize “Nothing Gold Can Stay”?




II

Although it can’t answer all of these questions, Catherine Robson’s absorbing, amazingly-detailed, and at times startling new book Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem is certainly a good place to start. Indeed, in tracing the rise and decline of poetry memorization and recitation as a common assignment in British and American schools from the 1870s through much of the twentieth century, Heart Beats reveals not just how central the pedagogical practice was to an era of mass education in both nations, but also its unanticipated effects on poems, on cultural practices we wouldn’t be inclined to link to poetry, and in the lives of people like Ponyboy.

It so happens that Ponyboy and Johnny are among the final generation of students who would have experienced mandatory poetry memorization and recitation as a common element of their American education. (In fact, so was Hinton, who was fifteen years old when she began writing The Outsiders and eighteen when it was published.) As Robson reveals in part one, which traces the practice’s history from pedagogical and institutional standpoints, poetry memorization was freighted with unusual importance up through the forties in Britain and the sixties of Johnny and Ponyboy’s America. For many reasons (it was justified as a type of brain calisthenics that also introduced students to literature, enlisted them in stories central to national identity, rid them of their working-class or regional accents, etc.), poetry memorization and recitation served not only as a benchmark of individual student achievement, but of teacher and school achievement as well. Students, teachers, and schools were all rewarded or punished, sometimes in No Child Left Behind-like ways, for how well they executed this component of what was essentially, if not always formally, a common core of the curriculum. In the parlance of today’s educators, poetry recitation was oftentimes a “high stakes” assessment tool, and many parties — not just individual, clammy-handed grade-schoolers standing in front of the classroom — had an investment in how well students performed.

The longstanding importance of poetry memorization and 
recitation couldn’t fail, Heart Beats thus argues, to have had far-reaching effects, three of which Robson explores in part two’s case studies centered, respectively, on “Casabianca,” by Felicia Hemans, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” by Thomas Gray, and “The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna,” by Charles Wolfe. Arguing that today’s audiences “will never feel the beat [of these poems] with quite the same urgency” as students once did, Robson puns on the prosodic term “beat” and begins her “Casabianca” case study by tracing the common threat of corporal punishment — the threat of a literal beating — that could result from unsuccessful memorization. Therein (and via a lesser-known Elizabeth Bishop poem also titled “Casabianca”) she finds a figure for the individual child’s experience of standing anxious and alone in front of the classroom seeking the teacher’s approval: the main character of “Casabianca” itself. The poem is perhaps the most commonly memorized of the era and is about the grisly death of a school-age boy waiting faithfully for his father’s permission to leave his post at the burning deck of a ship in battle:

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 child-like form.

In fear of the rod, cane, switch, ruler, paddle, or hand, generations of students standing “beautiful and bright” in front of the classroom relied on — indeed clung to — the poem’s meter as a mnemonic handhold, and the cumulative force of their desperation had a much more far-reaching secondary effect on the poem’s critical fortunes. Students so over-exaggerated the poem’s sing-songy rhythm, Robson contends, that the shapers of the literary canon in the twentieth century — onetime students who were perhaps assigned the poem to memorize and recite themselves — were unable to hear anything but the “jog-trot meter” of the poem as it was performed in school and thus dismissed the piece and its actual metrical variety as 
unsophisticated and unworthy of study by adults. The critical 
reception of a memorization standard like “Casabianca,” Robson thus argues, may have had as much or more to do with “the particular circumstances of its assimilation into a culture” (i.e., recitation in school) than with the features of the text itself.

While the “Casabianca” case study focuses on the relationship between the student’s body, poetic meter, and the subsequent impact of memorization on the poem’s critical legacy, the following chapter on Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” centers on the relationship between the poem and the student’s inner life — specifically on the intellectual and emotional contradictions experienced by the upwardly-mobile British “scholarship boy” who would have been charged, near the end of his education, with memorizing Gray’s long and difficult poem that justifies why the poor and uneducated (like the scholarship boy himself) benefit from being kept poor and 
uneducated. Robson writes:

Although the successfully memorized poem undoubtedly played a role as acquired cultural capital, a pleasing and often permanently possessed symbol of that expertise that might enable an individual to rise first within the educational, and then the social, system, it also carried the potential to act as a persistent reminder of the school’s ability to alienate an individual from his or her earliest associations.

Furthermore, a poem like Gray’s could also serve as a depressing reminder that despite the scholarship boy’s individual achievement, the education system and the texts it assigns don’t necessarily have as their goal the empowerment of the lower classes in general.

Something of this dynamic informs the melancholy nature of the scene I’ve cited from The Outsiders. As Robson explains was often the case with rote memorization, Ponyboy appears to have learned “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” but he hasn’t been taught how to understand it; as plenty of examples in Heart Beats also attest, it is only later in life — as figured by the literal daybreak in the movie — that the memorized poem’s possible meanings dawn on him. (“I never quite knew [until now] what he meant by it.”) So, even as school has given him a “permanently possessed” symbol of his learning, it has nevertheless also given him a metaphor painfully naturalizing his own entrance into what Gray’s “Elegy” calls “the short and simple annals of the poor.” In this context, then, it is thus possible to hear Johnny’s question as referring not to the poem itself (“Where’d you learn that [poem]?”) or to the site of its learning (after all, Johnny would have had experiences memorizing poems in school himself). Instead, the “that” of Johnny’s question refers to Ponyboy’s depressing realization about the inevitably frustrated dreams of the lower and working classes that his teachers would have rewarded him for learning by — and taking to — heart.

The “Casabianca” and “Elegy” studies are ambitious, almost impossibly researched, and at times entertaining; Robson can spin a helluva yarn telling the reception histories and social lives of the poems she considers. For this reader, though, the third case study (the shortest in Heart Beats) makes the most astonishing and perhaps most audacious claims in the book. Here, Robson argues for the impact of “The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna” — Charles Wolfe’s “one-hit wonder” that became a standard recitation piece — on the development and formalization of modern memorial practices for common soldiers who, at earlier points in history, would have been buried in unmarked graves. The mass memorization of this thirty-two-line poem in schools — and especially the phrase “no useless coffin,” which became a sort of meme quoted by individuals, in 
newspaper obituaries, and elsewhere, especially during the U.S. Civil War — offered readers a sort of “cultural shorthand” that helped to express and spread the belief that rank-and-file soldiers deserved the type of commemoration that the hero of Wolfe’s poem himself deserved but did not get. Far from “[making] nothing happen” (as W.H. Auden wrote of poetry in his own memorial poem “In Memory of W.B. Yeats”), the “functional presence of Wolfe’s poem in the minds of ordinary individuals,” Robson argues, was instrumental in “the raising of a million stones” marking the graves of soldiers in national cemeteries on both sides of the Atlantic. Amazing? You bet.




III

In his now classic study Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, Walter J. Ong traces the differences in communication forms and dynamics between oral and literate cultures, distinguishing between the fixity and abstracted knowledge of print (which “sets up conditions for ‘objectivity,’ in the sense of personal disengagement or distancing”) and the “situational, operational frames of reference” of orality and its real-time, personal exchanges. “Written words,” he argues:

are isolated from the fuller context in which spoken words come into being. The word in its natural, oral habitat is a part of a real, existential present. Spoken utterance is addressed by a real, living person to another real, living person or real, living persons, at a specific time in a real setting which includes always much more than mere words. Spoken words are always modifications of a total situation which is more than verbal. They never occur alone, in a context simply of words.

For Ong, the values of oral and print economies exist in relation to one another in the modern, Western world of widespread literacy, where most oral communication is in some way underwritten, made possible by, or in a sort of dialogue with, the technology and authority of print. No matter how oral in nature Ponyboy’s recitation of “Nothing Gold Can Stay” appears to be, for example (it’s in the context of a single moment and spoken to and for Johnny in a real setting that includes their friendship, their shared experiences, the rising sun, their class affiliation, and so on), it is nevertheless a rendition of a printed source text, and insofar as we admire (or check for) his word-for-word fidelity to Frost’s original, it is measured by, or subject to, the values of print.

I bring up Ong and the relationship between oral and print economies because, for all of its historical reach, and only partly justifiable 
by virtue of its focus on the classroom, Heart Beats doesn’t say much, if anything, about the function or status of the memorized poem in today’s world. If we view Robson’s history from a slightly different perspective, however — not from the perspective of educational history, but from the perspective of media studies or media history — then the material in Heart Beats proves to be revealing about how and why we now value (or don’t value) various types of poetries in the ways that we do.

Among its other functions, the memorized poem in the schoolroom becomes a crucial intersection of oral and print economies, as the spoken display of one’s mastery enlists values associated with orality (bodily carriage, gesture, intonation, and elocution) even as word-for-word fidelity to the original, printed text remains the 
primary measure of achievement; as Heart Beats shows, students could get away with exaggerating the meter of “Casabianca” because it was most important for them to remember the printed poem’s exact wording. Such an interplay between aspects of oral and print economies worked to transition students — especially students like scholarship boys (or like Johnny and Ponyboy) raised in environments where the values of orality were oftentimes rewarded more than they would have been in educated, bourgeois society — away from a comparatively “primitive” mode of communication and toward a more sophisticated, “advanced” one; one might say that, in the process, students became more and more “book smart.” The process of memorizing and reciting (after all, proof of memorization could have been achieved by writing the poem down) thus helped to segue children from the lived, relational values associated with orality and into the abstract and impersonal knowledge systems facilitated by print.

The emphasis on print-based values (duplication, fidelity to the text) structuring the memorization and recitation of poetry during the period which Robson studies — and which Heart Beats gives us a chance to see more clearly than we’ve ever seen, perhaps — did not lose influence with the decline of poetry memorization as a widespread pedagogical activity. Having gained momentum and come to seem even more natural thanks to the privileged place of rote memorization, those values still inform, albeit in somewhat refracted ways, how we relate to certain sorts of poetry (and poetry delivery systems) 
differently than to others today. Publication in the little magazine or the slim volume, for example, is a far more “credible” sign of a poet’s accomplishment — far more likely to elicit respect, scholarly consideration, and even promotion or tenure — than poetry in performance or other non-print contexts, historical or contemporary. The same poem is likely to acquire a credibility when presented in Poetry that it loses if “interpreted” on air by Garrison Keillor. This is one reason why poets with print-based, rather than performance-based, résumés “read” at presidential inaugurations. And it’s a reason 
why many people are predisposed to judge slam poetry, in which memorization is de rigueur, as the aesthetically uninteresting work of amateurs. (Harold Bloom, for instance, dismissed slam poetry in distinctly acoustic and infantilizing terms as “rant and nonsense.”)

I could go on — citing the historical lack of respect afforded to oral forms of poetry such as spoken-word poetry, HBO’s Def Poetry, or popular music lyrics including hip-hop and rap — but my point is that, more likely than not, poetries distributed 
in, incorporating, or appealing to oral/aural formats are tainted by affiliation with the values of the worlds of oral communication out of which people are meant to be educated. Memorized or oral 
poetries now associate in our minds with childhood, emotion, occasional verse, amateurism, popular or mass culture, lack of aesthetic sophistication, and knowing “by heart” rather than objectively by mind and print; published by Disney’s Hyperion Books and featuring lots of enjoyable watercolor illustrations by Jon J. Muth, Caroline Kennedy’s 2013 anthology Poems to Learn by Heart feeds right into this mix. Alternately, poetries inclined toward print tend to associate with notions of professional authorship, literariness, complexity, and impersonal judgment on the part of their editors and readers.

Such distinctions owe much to the history Heart Beats brings into view, and I’ll venture to say that digital media — especially in tandem with other non-print media like movies and television shows that digital formats make increasingly available — are currently putting those distinctions under paradigm-changing pressure. Indeed, the rise in poetry memorization and/or recitation over the past decade, ranging from Poetry Out Loud competitions to Def Poetry, all sorts of YouTube videos, and Disney’s celebrity-studded “A Poem Is    ...    ” video series that premiered during National Poetry Month 2011 and serves as a sort of companion to Poems to Learn by Heart, may be read in one way or another as responses to a weakening print hegemony put under pressure by the emergence of digital media. How digital media will ultimately affect poetry as it relates to print and oral communication economies, not to mention new or revised educational theories and practices, has yet to become clear. But when it does, I’d wager that what Robson claims in her “Casabianca” study — that a poem may be more likely than we think to acquire or shed value in relation to “the particular circumstances of its assimilation into a culture” — will still hold true.




IV

The management of the relationship between oral and print value economies comes into view most clearly (at least in the context of what Charles Bernstein has called “official verse culture”) in the phenomenon of the professional poetry “reading,” which uses 
a print-based term to describe what is otherwise a recitation for the purposes of saving the endeavor from its affiliation with the oral. The last thing a professional poet wants is to risk being linked to the history of recitation and its accumulated values, and so he or she goes through a set of gestures meant to anchor his or her performance in print. She reads in a more or less standardized, even impersonal, style with little intonation and few if any theatrical gestures. She disengages from the work itself by not memorizing it. She makes a show of displaying, paging through, or talking ab .......................

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/samuel-johnson

Samuel Johnson
Poet Details
1709–1784

Samuel Johnson, the premier English literary figure of the mid- and late eighteenth century, was a writer of exceptional range: a poet, a lexicographer, a translator, a journalist and essayist, a travel writer, a biographer, an editor, and a critic. His literary fame has traditionally—and properly—rested more on his prose than on his poetry. As a result, aside from his two verse satires (1738, 1749), which were from the beginning recognized as distinguished achievements, and a few lesser pieces, the rest of his poems have not in general been well known. Yet his biographer James Boswell noted correctly that Johnson's "mind was so full of imagery, that he might have been perpetually a poet." Moreover, Johnson wrote poetry throughout his life, from the time he was a schoolboy until eight days before his death, composing in Latin and Greek as well as English. His works include a verse drama, some longer serious poems, several prologues, many translations, and much light occasional poetry, impromptu compositions or jeux d'esprit. Johnson is a poet of limited range, but within that range he is a poet of substantial talent and ability.

Johnson, the son of Sarah and Michael Johnson, grew up in Lichfield. His father was a provincial bookseller prominent enough to have served as sheriff of the town in 1709, the year of Samuel's birth, but whose circumstances were increasingly straitened as his son grew up. Samuel was a frail baby, plagued by disease. He contracted scrofula (a tubercular infection of the lymph glands) from his wet nurse, which left him almost blind in one eye and nearsighted in the other, deaf in one ear, and scarred on his face and neck from the disease itself and from an operation for it. He also was infected with smallpox. These early and traumatic illnesses presaged the continuing physical discomfort and ill health that would mark his entire life.

The Johnson household was not a particularly happy one, for financial difficulties only exacerbated his parents' incompatibilities. The serious psychological problems Johnson experienced throughout his life were undoubtedly connected in part with the troubled domestic situation of his childhood. Johnson's major advantage from the beginning was his mind, for the intellectual powers that were to astonish his associates throughout his life appeared early. He excelled at the Lichfield Grammar School, which he attended until he was fifteen.

According to his boyhood friend Edmund Hector, Johnson's first poem, "On a Daffodill, the first Flower the Author had seen that Year," was composed between his fifteenth and sixteenth years (in 1724). Written in heroic quatrains, the poem is largely an accumulation of traditional lyric conventions typical of poets from Robert Herrick to Matthew Prior. At moments, however, its weighted seriousness, and particularly the melancholy sense of process and the moral that ends it, suggests some of the points where the poetic strengths of the mature Johnson would focus. The poem poses no serious challenge to William Wordsworth but is not an entirely inauspicious beginning. Hector later told Boswell that Johnson "never much lik'd" the poem because he did not feel "it was ... characteristic of the Flower." Significantly, even so young, Johnson recognized the need for the concreteness and specificity that in his later poems would infuse the more abstract intellectual conceptions that dominated his first effort.

Johnson spent the next year at Stourbridge. Initially he made a protracted visit to his older cousin Cornelius Ford, enjoying the company of this genial, witty, and worldly relative and access to a social world significantly wider than life at Lichfield had offered. Later Johnson worked at the Stourbridge Grammar School with the headmaster, John Wentworth. About a dozen of Johnson's poems from this period survive, mainly translations. Most of them were school exercises, such as his translations of Virgil's first and fifth eclogues and the dialogue between Hector and Andromache in the sixth book of the Iliad. Johnson later told Boswell that Horace's odes were "the compositions in which he took most delight," and he had already translated the Integer vitae ode (I:xxii) before studying with Wentworth. At Stourbridge he translated three other odes (II: ix, xiv, and xx) and two epodes of Horace's (II and XI). All are capable and fairly accurate performances, although the epodes show more energy. The most interesting of his early translations is that of Joseph Addison's Latin poem "The Battle of the Pygmies and the Cranes" (1698), for it anticipates the vigor, the sympathetic involvement and resulting moral poignance, and the ability to revivify known truths that are characteristic of Johnson's greatest poems.

Two more school exercises, "Festina Lente" (Make Haste Slowly) and "Upon the Feast of St. Simon and St. Jude," are original poems. The latter, written in the stanzaic form that Christopher Smart would employ over three decades later in the Song to David (1763), is singular among Johnsonian poems for what it terms "extatick fury," and it shows his youthful willingness to experiment with verse forms and varieties of poetic expression. Despite its interest, it is in many ways the "rude unpolish'd song" that it claims to be, and it suggests that Johnson's decision to confine himself to couplets and quatrains was not unwise. Wentworth's preservation of Johnson's early pieces reflects his high opinion of his pupil's talent and skill, and the early poems show an increasing command of diction and rhythm. W. Jackson Bate has pointed out that although merely school exercises, they are "as good as the verse written by any major poet at the same age."

Johnson returned to Lichfield in the fall of 1726 and spent two more years there, working and also reading in his father's bookshop. Once again he found a mentor, this time Gilbert Walmesley, a scholarly, sophisticated, hospitable lawyer who was registrar of the Ecclesiastical Court at Lichfield. In 1728, when Johnson was nineteen, his parents managed to scrape together enough money to send him to Pembroke College, Oxford. In his first interview he impressed his tutor by quoting Macrobius, and with the wide knowledge he had accumulated over his years of reading, he continued to impress members of the college with his intellectual prowess. Although a desultory and often irresponsible student, he loved college life. His reading of William Law's A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1728) during this period led him to think seriously about religion, and he gradually developed the deep, though troubled, acceptance of the Christian faith and its principles that marked his life.

As a youth in Lichfield, Johnson had first attempted Latin verse in a now-lost poem on the glowworm, but several of his Latin poems composed as college exercises survive. Of these the most important is a translation of Alexander Pope's Messiah (1712), made as a 1728 Christmas exercise at the suggestion of his tutor. Working through Isaiah, Virgil, and Pope, Johnson produced his own Latin poem of 119 lines at remarkable speed, writing half of it in an afternoon and completing the rest the next morning. This kind of facility in poetic composition was characteristic of Johnson, whether he was writing original poetry or translating, just as he later wrote prose with incredible speed. He could effectively organize and even edit in his mind; he later explained to Boswell that in composing verses, "I have generally had them in my mind, perhaps fifty at a time, walking up and down in my room; and then I have written them down, and often, from laziness, have written only half lines." The manuscript of The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749) reflects this practice, for the first half of many lines is written in different ink than the last half.

The translation of The Messiah was received enthusiastically at Pembroke. Although the extant evidence is conflicting, one close friend said that Johnson's father had it printed without his son's knowledge and even dispatched a copy to Pope. Johnson, who had always experienced difficulties in getting along with his father, was furious at the interference, for he had his own plans for having the poem presented properly to the English author. Whatever actually happened in this connection, the translation was Johnson's first published poem, for in 1731 it was included in A Miscellany of Poems, edited by John Husbands, a Pembroke tutor. But by the time it appeared, lack of money had forced Johnson to leave Oxford and return once more to Lichfield.

Johnson's early translations and his Latin verse reflect two poetic modes that he would pursue for the rest of his life. Other poems extant from his earlier years show his abilities in the kind of occasional or impromptu verses that appear in large numbers in his later writings. In addition to the more serious and substantial "Ode on Friendship," there are the complimentary verses "To a Young Lady on Her Birthday" and "To Miss Hickman Playing on the Spinet," along with "On a Lady leaving her place of Abode" and "On a Lady's Presenting a Sprig of Myrtle to a Gentleman," the latter composed hastily to help a friend. A Latin quatrain, "To Laura," resulted when a friend proposed a line and challenged Johnson in company to finish it; he complied instantly. Finally, an epilogue written for a play acted by some young women at Lichfield presages his later theatrical pieces, while "The Young Author" prepares for the future treatment of a similar theme in one of his great verse satires. Almost the entire range of Johnson's mature poetic interests is represented in his early pieces.

Barred from returning to Oxford because of his family's increasingly desperate financial situation, Johnson lacked an occupation, had no prospects of one, and faced a bleak future on his return to Lichfield. Worst of all was his psychological state. For him the early years of the 1730s were a period of despair, ultimate breakdown, and only gradual recovery. Indolence had always been a problem for him; indeed, it would plague him throughout his life. But during this period, despite his best efforts to pull himself together and focus his life, he could not break the terrible lassitude afflicting him. Deeply depressed, paralyzed with gilts and fears, he suffered a massive emotional collapse that lasted for about two years and left him unsteady for three more. He later dated his constant health problems from this period, writing in a letter in his early seventies that "My health has been from my twentieth year such as seldom afforded me a single day of ease" (Letters of Samuel Johnson, II: 474). In addition, during this time he developed the convulsive gestures, tics, and obsessional mannerisms that contributed to making his demeanor so odd. Johnson was a large, powerful man, but his awkwardness, his scrofula and smallpox scars, and his compulsive mannerisms, combined with his disheveled and slovenly dress, created a grotesque initial impression.

After failing in attempts to secure several positions, Johnson was briefly employed in 1732 as an undermaster at Market Bosworth Grammar School in Leicestershire. He hated the job and particularly the chief trustee who controlled the school, and he quit during the summer. In the autumn he visited his old friend Hector in Birmingham and lived there for over a year, still trying to settle his mind and his life. By 1734 he managed to complete a translation of Father Jeronymo Lobo's account of Abyssinia, Johnson's first published book (1735). He had not forgotten poetry. Returning to Lichfield, he published proposals for a subscription edition of the Latin poems of the fifteenth-century writer Politian, with a history of Latin poetry from the age of Petrarch to Politian. Like most of his endeavors during this bleak period, the project failed.

In July 1735 Johnson married Elizabeth Jervis Porter, whom he referred to as "Tetty," a widow twenty years his senior. To this unusual marriage, which he always described as a love match, she brought a substantial amount of money, and with it Johnson began a small school at Edial. It opened in the fall with only three students, among them David Garrick, who was to become the greatest actor of the century. As the school rapidly declined, Johnson decided to try to earn money—and perhaps to make a name for himself—by writing a blank-verse tragedy, a historical drama in the vein that Addison's Cato (1713) had popularized. Usually a rapid writer, this time he was unable to proceed with any celerity on his ill-fated play Irene (not published until 1749). He had completed only half of it when the school failed. With Tetty's resources now steadily diminishing, he decided to go to London, where he hoped to find work writing for journals and translating and to complete and sell Irene. Tetty stayed behind. On 2 March 1737 Johnson and young Garrick set out for London, sharing a single horse between them. In London and then in Greenwich, Johnson continued to work on Irene, but in the summer he returned to Lichfield, and after three months there he finally finished the drama. No evidence exists to indicate that any other work cost Johnson as much effort as Irene. The manuscript of his first draft is extant, and it shows his extensive research, his careful organization, and his detailed descriptions of scenes and characters.

Johnson and Tetty moved back to London in October, and Johnson sought unsuccessfully to get Irene produced. Meanwhile he began to do some work for Edward Cave on the Gentleman's Magazine. In March 1738 his first contribution to it appeared, an elegant and dignified Latin poem, "To Sylvanus Urban" (Cave's editorial pseudonym), which defended Cave against current attacks by rival booksellers. Other poems that year included light complimentary verses to Elizabeth Carter and Lady Firebrace, and Latin and Greek epigrams to Carter, Richard Savage, and Thomas Birch.

As he worked for Cave, Johnson also sought something to write on his own that might sell. A natural choice was the "imitation," a popular contemporary poetic form. Dryden in his Preface to Ovid's Epistles (1680) had described the imitation as a kind of translation, "where the translator (if now he has not lost that name) assumes the liberty not only to vary from the words and sense, but to forsake them both as he sees occasion; and taking only some general hints from the original, to run division on the groundwork, as he pleases." Johnson himself would later define it in the Life of Pope (volume 7 of Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, 1779-1781) as "a kind of middle composition between translation and original design, which pleases when the thoughts are unexpectedly applicable and the parallels lucky." Pope, whose Imitations of Horace had been appearing during the 1730s, was the acknowledged master of the mode, which had been developed extensively during the Restoration by such poets as Abraham Cowley, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, and John Oldham and had also been employed by Swift. Johnson turned to the Latin poet Juvenal and imitated his Satura III on urban life inLondon. Late in March 1738 he sent a copy of the poem to Cave, with a letter in which he claimed to be negotiating for a needy friend who had actually composed the poem. He even offered to alter any parts of it that Cave disliked. Cave printed London and arranged for Robert Dodsley, who was well known for his abilities to promote poetry, to publish it. From Dodsley, Johnson received ten guineas for the copyright, because, as he explained to Boswell years later, the minor poet Paul Whitehead had recently gotten ten guineas for one of his pieces, and he would not settle for less than Whitehead had earned. London was published on 13 May 1738.

In Juvenal's third satire his friend Umbricius pauses at the archway of the Porta Capena to deliver a diatribe against city life as he leaves Rome forever for deserted Cumae. Johnson's Thales in London similarly rails as he waits on the banks of the Thames at Greenwich to depart for Wales. (Much ink has been spilled over whether or not Thales is modeled on Johnson's friend Savage, but the best evidence suggests that Johnson had not met Savage at the time he wrote the poem.) Following the example of Pope and others, Johnson insisted that the relevant passages from Juvenal's satire be published with his own poem at the bottom of the pages, because he believed that part of any beauty that London possessed consisted in adapting Juvenal's sentiments to contemporary topics. Thus Juvenal's work provides a natural point of departure for evaluating Johnson's achievement.

Between an introduction and conclusion, Juvenal's original satire is broken into two major sections. The first focuses primarily on the difficulties faced by an honest man trying to make a living in the city, while the second part considers the innumerable dangers of urban life (falling buildings, fires, crowds, traffic, accidents, and crimes). Johnson in general follows Juvenal's structure, but as he reworks the subject, the sections he retains and those he alters reveal his own particular concerns.

Johnson when he wishes can capture Juvenal's meanings exactly. "SLOW RISES WORTH, BY POVERTY DEPREST" is a classic example, as he powerfully restates Juvenal's "haud facile emergunt quorum virtatibus obstat / Res angusta domi" (it is scarcely easy to rise in the world for those whose straitened domestic circumstances obstruct their abilities). Johnson can also use balance and antithesis in the couplet to juxtapose for satirical effect in a manner reminiscent of Pope; a fawning Frenchman, for example, will "Exalt each Trifle, ev'ry Vice adore, / Your Taste in Snuff, your Judgment in a Whore." But Johnson does not usually concentrate either on details or on close rendition of Juvenal, and because of his different satiric emphases, London becomes in important ways his own poem.

First of all, Johnson's treatment of country life includes significant additions to Juvenal. Early in London, with no Juvenalian basis whatsoever, he adds two lines describing what Thales expects to find in the country: "Some pleasing Bank where verdant Osiers play, / Some peaceful Vale with Nature's Paintings gay." This couplet sets the tone for Johnson's subsequent rural depictions. In Satura III Juvenal lauds the country not for its beauty or the ease of life there, but as the only possible alternative to the city. Johnson, however, takes Juvenal's simple descriptions of country life and produces a combination of eighteenth-century garden (with pruned walks, supported flowers, directed rivulets, and twined bowers) and Miltonic Paradise (including nature's music, healthy breezes, security, and morning work and evening strolls). Such idealization of the country is totally incongruous with Johnson's views; he loved the bustling life of London and, like George Crabbe, always emphasized that human unhappiness emanates from the same causes in both the city and the country. His treatment of the country in London reflects prevailing poetic convention rather than conviction; his predominantly conventional additions to Juvenal in this area highlight the extent to which London is very much the work of a young poet eager to please, who played to contemporary tastes accordingly.

If Johnson's additions to Juvenal in the rural depictions are significant, his omissions in portraying the wretched life of the urban poor are even more telling. "SLOW RISES WORTH," justly the best-known line in the poem, has had impact enough to obscure the fact that Johnson's general treatment of poverty in London is cursory, particularly when compared to Juvenal's. He leaves out fully half of Juvenal's section on the general helplessness of the poor in making a living in the city. In surveying urban vexations, he omits Juvenal's sections on crowds, traffic, accidents, and thefts, leaves out the falling buildings (although collapsing older houses were a frequent hazard in eighteenth-century London), and condenses the fight scene. In the process he loses some of Juvenal's most telling episodes, for urban life is, of course, made intolerable not so much by huge disasters as by incessant small annoyances. The noise, the loss of sleep, and the difficulties in getting from one place to another disappear in Johnson's version because he is not interested in the small personal perils of city life.

No one, however, could accuse Johnson of not caring deeply about the conditions of the urban poor. He told Boswell that the true test of civilization was a decent provision for the poor, and he personally offered such provision to unfortunates whenever he could. Although his passages on the poor in London are usually competent and occasionally eloquent, he drastically condensed Juvenal's treatment because he wanted to focus his own poem on political rather than personal conditions."

The accuracy of Boswell's description of London as "impregnated with the fire of opposition" is clear from the many political references that Johnson adds to Juvenal. He expands Juvenal's introductory section to include nostalgic references to the political and commercial glories of the Elizabethan age and several times in the poem opposes Spanish power. In elaborating Juvenal's passage on crimes and the jail, he manages to attack Walpole's misuses of special juries and secret-service funds, the House of Commons, and the king himself. Johnson never forgets politics in London, even when he is at his most conventional. For example, the lines on the country include references to the seat of a "hireling Senator" and the confections of a "venal Lord."

Johnson's emphasis on politics in London was undoubtedly due to factors in the contemporary political scene as well as his personal life at the time. The year 1738 was one of widespread popular unrest, and the nation, already in ferment over the court and Walpole's ministry, was outraged over alleged Spanish suppression of British commerce. In the midst of the uproar Johnson, a newcomer to London, unsure of himself and his ability to achieve success anywhere, associated with various acquaintances who opposed the government as he eked out the barest of livings in the great capital. Young and frustrated, he was understandably eager enough to view the current political situation as the direct cause of adverse personal as well as national conditions. During his first few years in the city he produced the most violent political writings of his life. The year after London, he published Marmor Norfolciense (1739), a feigned prophetical inscription in rhymed Latin verse with a translation and long commentary attacking Walpole. This satire was so virulent that, according to Johnson's early biographer James Harrison, even a government inured to invective issued a warrant for his arrest.

London in many places shows Johnson's technical proficiency in employing the heroic couplet. It is an exuberant poem, full of life and high spirits. London does not finally bring out all of Johnson's powers, because the satire is weakened in places by the false stances into which he is forced by convention and political themes. But it is an impressive performance, and certain passages, such as the description of the dangers of friendship with great men, reflect Johnson's full poetic abilities. The final lines of this passage show Johnson rising above the specific poetic situation to present the overview of the moralist. The movement of satire into reflection here, buttressed by the enlargement and extension of the particular into the general, is characteristic of Johnson at his best. Indeed, these movements from satire to meditation and from the particular to the general combine a decade later with a more mature view, sometimes savage about life itself but always sympathetic to the struggles of suffering individuals, to produce The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749), Johnson's second Juvenalian imitation.

Pope's One Thousand Seven Hundred and Thirty Eight, another of his Horatian imitations, was published—also by Dodsley—a few days after London, and the two poems were favorably compared. Boswell reports that Pope himself responded generously to his putative rival; he asked Jonathan Richardson to try to discover who the new author was, and when told that he was an obscure man named Johnson, Pope commented that he would not be obscure for long. The popular success of the poem seemed to support Pope's prediction. Within a week a second edition was required, a third came out later that year, and a fourth in the next year. It was reprinted at least twenty-three times in Johnson's lifetime. However, the political topicality and the poetic conventionality that contributed so much to the contemporary success of London considerably lessened its later appeal. Its status as a major Johnsonian poem has always been secure and its substantial poetic power recognized. But it has also suffered from inevitable comparisons with The Vanity of Human Wishes. Modern readers have uniformly preferred the second poem for its moral elevation, its more condensed expression, and its treatment of more characteristic Johnsonian themes and ideas. Many of these elements are present in London, but to a lesser degree.

During this early period in London it was increasingly clear that Johnson's marriage was in trouble. Bruised by this second marriage to which she had brought so much and which had so reduced her circumstances, Tetty was retreating steadily from Johnson and also from life in general. The two gradually began to live apart much of the time, as Tetty steadily deteriorated, ultimately taking refuge in alcohol and opium and in her final years seldom leaving her bed. Johnson did all that he could to support her, writing furiously and stinting himself to provide for his wife. He sometimes walked the streets all night because he lacked money for even the cheapest lodging. For the next fifteen or twenty years he was a journalist and a hack writer of incredible productivity and variety. He became a trusted assistant to Cave on the Gentleman's Magazine from 1738 until the mid 1740s, writing many reviews, translations, and articles, including a long series of parliamentary debates from 1741 until 1744. He helped to catalog the massive Harleian Library and worked on the eight volumes of The Harleian Miscellany (1744-1746). In addition to a series of short biographies for Cave, he contributed biographical entries to A Medicinal Dictionary (1743-1745) by his friend Dr. Robert James, for whom he had composed the Proposals for the work (1741). His own Account of the Life of Mr. Richard Savage, a short masterpiece of biography, appeared in 1744. In 1745 he published a proposal for a new edition of Shakespeare, composing Miscellaneous Observations on the Tragedy of Macbeth to illustrate his critical approach. This project did not materialize, but a greater one did. The next year he signed a contract with a group of publishers to produce an English dictionary, on which he labored for the next seven years in the garret of the house he rented at 17 Gough Square. Even as he worked on it, however, he always continued with many other miscellaneous writing projects.

During these years Johnson wrote substantially more prose than poetry, but he did publish various minor poems in the Gentleman's Magazine. An epitaph on the musician Claudy Phillips, composed almost extemporaneously and years later set to music, appeared there in September 1740. He revised several of his early poems (the Integer Vitae ode, "The Young Author," the "Ode to Friendship," and "To Laura") and published them in the Magazine in July 1743, along with a Latin translation, described as "the casual amusement of half an hour," of Pope's verses on his grotto. When Cave needed a revision of Geoffrey Walmesley's Latin translation of John Byrom's "Colin and Phebe" in February 1745, Johnson and Stephen Barrett alternated distiches, rapidly passing a sheet of paper between them "like a shuttlecock" across the table. In 1747, when the editor of the poetry section of the magazine was away and the copy available for the May issue was insufficient, Johnson contributed some half-dozen poems. Most were light occasional pieces written years before, including "The Winter's Walk," "An Ode" on the Spring, and several complimentary poems to ladies, but a more substantial English poem loosely based on the Latin epigraph of Sir Thomas Hanmer also appeared.

In the same year Johnson also supplied a prologue for the celebration of the reopening of the Drury Lane Theatre under his friend Garrick's management. He had already helped Garrick out by writing a preface for his first play, Lethe, for a benefit performance for Henry Gifford in 1740. The Prologue Spoken at the Opening of the Theatre in Drury-Lane was a much more considerable piece. Johnson later said that the whole poem was composed before he put a line on paper and that he subsequently changed only one word in it, making that alteration solely because of Garrick's remonstrances. The Drury Lane prologue offers an overview of the history of English drama, tracing it from "immortal" Shakespeare's "pow'rful Strokes" through Ben Jonson's "studious Patience" and "laborious Art" and the "Intrigue" and "Obscenity" of Restoration wits to the playwrights of his own age. After censuring contemporary tragedy and the taste for pantomimes and farces, he speculates pessimistically on the future of the stage, closing by reminding the audience that "The Stage but echoes back the publick Voice" and urging them to "bid the Reign commence / Of rescu'd Nature, and reviving Sense". The prologue is a fine poem that reflects premises Johnson would later employ in his dramatic criticism, particularly in his edition of Shakespeare. When published a few weeks after the opening, it did not bear Johnson's name, and the public was left to assume that Garrick was the author.

In each of the next three decades Johnson wrote one prologue, and they can be considered as a group, despite their chronological dispersion. In 1750 Johnson learned that John Milton's only surviving granddaughter, Elizabeth Foster, was living in poverty, and he convinced Garrick to put on a benefit performance of Comus (1637) to aid her. The new prologue Johnson composed lauds "mighty" Milton's achievement and the fame he has garnered, but characteristically Johnson also praises "his Offspring" Mrs. Foster for "the mild Merits of domestic Life" and "humble Virtue's native Charms." Late in 1767 he wrote a prologue that he had promised long before to Oliver Goldsmith for his comedy, The Good Natur'd Man (1768). With a parliamentary election approaching, Johnson, in a rather gloomy piece that, unsurprisingly, was not very popular, compared the pressures on the playwright and the politician to please the rabble. Thomas Harris, the manager of Covent Garden, solicited Johnson's last prologue in 1777 for a performance of Hugh Kelly's A Word to the Wise (1770) to benefit the author's widow and children. When first produced in 1770 the play had been disrupted by Kelly's political enemies, and Johnson's conciliatory and well-received prologue asked the audience to "Let no resentful petulance invade / Th' oblivious grave's inviolable shade." All Johnson's prologues resulted from the generosity to friends and to those in need so characteristic of him throughout his life. All of them are competent examples of the genre, while the poem for the opening of the Drury Lane Theatre, and to a lesser extent the prologue for Comus, rise to real excellence. The Drury Lane prologue has long remained one of Johnson's best-known poems.

In the fall of 1748 Johnson had returned to Juvenal, and in The Vanity of Human Wishes, an imitation of Juvenal's tenth satire, he wrote his greatest poem. He later said that he wrote the first seventy lines of it in one morning, while visiting Tetty at Hampstead. Like the Drury Lane prologue, the entire section was composed in his head before he put a line of it on paper. He also mentioned to Boswell in ano ................

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/detail/70219

Prose from Poetry Magazine
Scholium
Poetry as pageantry
By Donald Revell

Allegory is a pageant of metaphor and simile. Trailing clouds of glory all its own, figurative language comes upon the scenes of our imagining there. No poet writing in English writes pageantry so in-close as does Robert Herrick. Here, in its entirety, is “The Coming of Good Luck”:

So Good-luck came, and on my roof did light,
Like noiseless snow; or as the dew of night:
Not all at once, but gently, as the trees
Are, by the sunbeams, tickled by degrees.

Given substance, shape, and agency, Good-luck enters upon the advent of itself. Notice how it remains itself — not embodied by snow, not portrayed by snow, but given over to a like behavior, a noiselessness. In pageant, then, there are two: Good-luck and snow. Then there are three. “The dew of night” adds to noiseless Space (the snowy rooftop) the quiet Time of night. Given space and time, then, Good-luck is wholly born.

Once born, Good-luck possesses not only similitude, but absolute Being. The enjambment between lines three and four is climacteric. “As the trees” leads us to expect another simile; but suddenly, capitalized and alone, stands the one word “Are.” Snow and night and trees all blend into plural singularity, into the apotheosis of Good-luck. 
Apt to apotheosis, there is radiance; Herrick provides “sunbeams.” Here, “Are” is the instance of Amor, after which the upturn bends, “tickled by degrees” toward home. After the radiance, we are returned to homely simile: “as the trees are tickled by degrees.” But with this difference: an apotheosis added, embedded. Herrick’s figures of speech alone could not have anticipated such a birth.

Out of Allegory they emerge, the words and phrases, into pageants 
great and small. They return home afterward, completing a world in which allegory and fact, allegory and actual experience, are one flesh.

Ek gret effect men write in place lite;
Th’entente is al, and nat the lettres space.
— From Troilus and Criseyde, by Geoffrey Chaucer

The storm of flung flowers rises and falls, and in that cloud of beauty ‘donna m’ apparve — a lady appeared to me’ ... it is even permissible to let ‘the flash of a smile’ pass at that phrase, so often noted.... She wore some kind of dress ‘di fiamma viva — of living flame,’ and over it a green mantle; white-veiled, olive-crowned, she paused there, and Dante — 
The great pageant has been so, and more than so. We may not be able to stay its pace, but Dante could. He has heaped up references and allusions; he has involved doctrine and history and myth, and the central dogma of the twy-natured Christ itself. He has concentrated meanings, and now the living figure for whom all the structure was meant is here.
— From The Figure of Beatrice, by Charles Williams

Reverie is at an end. Purgatory might well have been a pilgrim fantasy, and Inferno a gothic nightmare. Dream visions sort very well with vengeance and remorse; they are the pretty conscience of child’s play. But Paradise, upon whose brink the breathing heralds of Allegory welcome Beatrice, is real. Beatrice speaks a name: “Dante.” And Dante writes it down. Allegory is splendid entertainment, but it entertains neither mask nor alias. Dante crosses over. Heir of allusion and son of reference, he crosses over into pageant and Paradise under his given name. He’s wide awake — voi vigilate ne l’eterno die. The story is true. William Blake has painted so many eyes into the picture. There are witnesses.

It’s no accident that upon the verge of Heaven itself, Dante hesitates for eight full cantos. He is all eyes. He is the pageant while the pageant lasts. In Purgatorio, earthly paradise is Eden still, regained through material witness. In states of perfection, all things are exculpatory evidence of themselves. I want to cross over under my own names, all of them, alongside pageantry. Yet it’s not by accident that I hesitate. I like my allegories allegorical. “Better ... to stay cowering / 
Like this in the early lessons, since the promise of learning / Is a delusion,” as John Ashbery writes (“Soonest Mended”) so early and so well. Allegory is safekeeping. It is shield and buckler in the mock-siege of spring 1970, Fort Tryon Park, New York. Boys hurl themselves toward the battlements. Girls, laughing in midair in false miniver, 
urge them on. Simply to remember them, as one amongst them, is to know that Happiness exists: Allegory the shield; Allegory the buckler; Allegory the actual Name, walking away into The Romance of the Rose. Together in eternity now, the authors appear, historically, in ideal sequence. First, Guillaume de Lorris, poet of the opening four thousand lines. His story is true. Happiness is the image of itself. How do I find it?

By keeping steadily before you both the literal and allegorical sense and not treating the one as a mere means to the other but as its imaginative interpretation; by testing for yourself how far the concept really informs the image and how far the image really lends poetic life to the concept.
— From The Allegory of Love, by C.S. Lewis

Fort Tryon Park was Eden still. I was a boy. I was there, part and parcel of the tatty materials, and I bear witness to it still. It’s there to be learned forever in the first four thousand lines or so.

Few poets have struck better than Guillaume de Lorris that note which is the peculiar charm of medieval love poetry — that boy-like blending (or so it seems) of innocence and sensuousness which could make us believe for a moment that paradise had never been lost.
— From The Allegory of Love

Moments have a way of yielding to the next moment — “some climbing / before the take-off,” as Pound said, speaking also of battlements and Paradise and of voluptuaries turning upward out of pageant, continuing the pageantry. Guillaume de Lorris, poet of courtly love, yields to Jean de Meun, poet, scholar, sceptic, and tireless exegete. Adding eighteen thousand lines of his own, completing The Romance, de Meun takes the Rose by storm, by sheer force of numbers.

It was the misfortune of Jean de Meun to have read and remembered everything: and nothing that he remembered could be kept out of his poem.
— From The Allegory of Love

I think that we all, one way or another, become the Jean de Meuns of ourselves. We annotate the finest days again and again. We exhaust our happiness, meaning only to complete the dream. We lay broad waking. The only cure for love, Guillaume, is to love more. As for de Meun, as for ourselves in the long afterglow of the great poems, we must read more. We must travel the allegory the right way round.

Committed to the safekeeping of every name, commodius vicus brings a traveler the right way round. Back from the brink leads back to the brink and also to questions of conduct. What is a fallen man to do in Eden when Eden never fell? Love more. Read more. William Blake painted many eyes into the picture. A man could use them. As a through passenger — 

My head is hands and feet. I feel all my best faculties concentrated in it. My instinct tells me that my head is an organ for burrowing, as some creatures use their snout and fore paws, and with it I would mine and burrow my way through these hills.
— From Walden, by Henry David Thoreau

As a tourist — 

You would be so thoroughly prepared to understand what you saw — You would make fewer traveller’s mistakes.
— From Henry David Thoreau’s journal, June 12, 1851

As prodigal son — 

Life is not long enough for one success.
— From Henry David Thoreau’s journal, July 19, 1851

Return excels itself by virtue of a simple turn. Sing the Shaker hymn. Sing it with Henry.

Here or nowhere is our heaven.
— From A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, by
 Henry David Thoreau

Is Grasmere just across the verge of Paradise? Does a man, on the far side of pageant, forgive the fathering child he was? Is Paumanok Eden? Is the absconded she-bird forgiven, either by her fathering mate or by the out-setting bard? Loving more, reading more, the painted eyes begin to number the heavens. Is England a green and pleasant one? Is America?

Walt, tell me, Walt Whitman, if infinity
Be still the same as when you walked the beach
Near Paumanok —
— From Cape Hatteras, by Hart Crane

Brink and verge and selvage: crossing over, up, and into the pageant, close-reading is close-loving. “My hand / in yours, / Walt Whitman —/ 
so — .” My head is hands and feet: all eyes.

So very close is first a cloud of emblems, images, words. So very close — loving reading, reading loving — the qualities of joy are indistinguishable from objects each possesses. My cloud was on the cover of The Norton Anthology of Poetry, in color. Beatrice Addressing Dante from the Car by William Blake shows an awakening cloud, envisioned as colors blazoned forth with eyes in plumage, eyes in flowers, 
pageant-wise.

Così dentro una nuvola di fiori
che dalle mani angeliche saliva
e ricadeva in giù dentro e di fuori,
Sovra candido vel cinta d’oliva
donna m’apparve. 
— From Purgatorio, by Dante Alighieri

All the loves at once, donna m’apparve, a lady appeared to me — says Dante, says I, says anyone whose name is spoken aloud on the skirt of Heaven. It’s written down. In the spring of 1972, in Professor G’s “Introduction to Literary Analysis,” and on a narrow bridge through flowers and farther, into the mounted policemen surrounding the Pentagon, all the loves at once appeared, una nuvola di fiori, already written down. I fell in love a dozen times. Beatrice Addressing Dante from the Car was a cloud I carried everywhere it carried me. Numbering heavens, 1972 was such a number, each numeral possessed by joy.

How can one joy absorb another? Are not different joys
Holy, eternal, infinite! and each joy is a Love.
— From Visions of the Daughters of Albion, by William Blake

The daughters of 1972 appeared to me as gaze in plumage, gaze in flowers, asymptotes of actually beautiful human being touching the curve of my eye. Said curve continues pageant now, for joy. And Blake was right of course. One joy cannot absorb another. Eyes do not absorb the light. They rise to it, pageant-wise. I’m saying nothing about symbols. This is allegory. My college, Harpur College, was then, as now, incorporate with Binghamton University. The school itself, however, was not in the city of Binghamton. More heavily wooded then than now, campus lay to the west, in the town of Vestal. I lived very near, on Vestal Avenue, number 123, upstairs. It was a four-room apartment, to begin with. Sometime in March, one of the rooms came away and fell into the street. The monthly rent remained the same. My weekly writing assignments for Professor G likewise remained the same: five hundred words on “Among School Children.” Yeats’s pages in my Norton were the heavily annotated skirt of the cloud I carried everywhere, and a long schoolroom, too. I am sixty this year, smiling. As I was smiling in 1972 when Professor G invited me to dinner and I saw, for the one and only time, her remarkable daughter. I’ve forgotten her name. She wore a cream-colored dress with intricate bodice. Her only jewelry was a crucifix, silver, set with five red stones. All the air and all the light of that evening belonged to her. She spoke very little. She smiled often. I have never forgotten. There was pretty plumage once. This is the chase! (From among the heaped-up references and allusions, it is proper to choose from The Winter’s Tale; in the fall of ’72 I would take Professor G’s Shakespeare class, and there would come a morning when, staring out a window into the small, first snow, listening to her sing to us a song of Autolycus’s, I was born. There was a mischievous breath between small snow and William Shakespeare I had never breathed before. My life ever since depends upon it.) The daughter’s smile and unaffected elegance, the color of her cheek and hair, made her a daughter of the swan to my close-reading eye. In “Among School Children,” Yeats names no woman’s name, but she goes without saying. “Ledaean” suffices. In pursuit of atonement, not of possession, close-reading is chaste.

In the spring of 1972, I loved them all and was lover to none. Atonement is magical chastity: “a living child”; “yolk and white of the one shell.” Sylvia, an Arcadian by name, was the friend of some friends of mine. One afternoon I saw her fall and tear the seat of her dungarees. The gesture, the nonchalance (to use Whitman’s word) with which she folded the rough tear together and went on speaking to her friends, was unspeakably lovely. I’m saying nothing about symbols. This is allegory. I fell in love, and never spoke to her until an accident of the anti-war movement made a change. In Vietnam, the Easter Offensive — which dragged on well into the autumn — was horrifically underway. Protests and escalations kept steady pace with atrocity on all sides, in all dialects and distortions. Not a single branch or trellis flowered that April and May, in Vestal, in echt Binghamton, in Syracuse (where a strange girl kissed me the softest kiss of my life as a policeman took away my whistle and my flag), in Washington, DC (where I saw Sesame Street for the very first time with two small girls who called me “Mr. Demonstrator” because I was a guest in their parents’ home), and across the river in Northern Virginia (where many ran a gauntlet of bowing branches and rearing horses, 
I with those same two children under my arms, to escape the tear gas), but that branch or that trellis seemed outraged or afraid. It’s hard to smile when all that smile are terrified, even the flowers and small girls. No one is comfortable, and no one lives to grow old beneath a gauntlet.

I had my Norton with me everywhere. I continued writing my weekly assignments “Among School Children” literally, young and old, at play in peril. In the midst of all, “bent / Above a sinking fire” one late night on vigil on a courthouse lawn, I spoke with Sylvia and got to know her, if only a little. Our purpose was solemn presence, round the clock, every day, in quiet protest of the arraignments and convictions of schoolmates subsequent to their arrest at other, more clamorous demonstrations around town. The midnight was damp and chilly; we were a drab contingent huddled around the fire I’d built in a trash barrel. (The police didn’t mind. This was Binghamton, New York, a gentle place. In the morning, they’d bring us buns and coffee.) Drab, except for Sylvia. After forty hours of vigil, we’d looked to be the sullen, bewildered children we mostly were. For once, the heckler’s daylight shout of “dirty hippies” would ring true. But not of Sylvia. Hers was a Ledaean body sure enough, and a face always tilted slightly across the shadow-line where, if you looked closely, a smile began. When she stepped into the circle of firelight, I stood up straight and tried my best to look like a Moses in fatigues, prophetic behind my skimpy beard. She was so nice, so easy in her zeal. She hated the War. She hated the draft. Everyone did, and so we might as well stay close to the fire and talk about music and school and summer plans. There was a long night still ahead. And so we talked, leaning into the warmth together, sometimes laughing. One by one, our companions drifted off to doze on benches, strum guitars, read beneath streetlamps. For a while, Sylvia and I were alone. Then, out of the shadows came a voice, and a man, not much older than ourselves, dressed in a business suit, sto ...............

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/detail/55298

Keats’s Phrase
Related Poem Content Details

By Albert Goldbarth
My father’s been dead for thirty years
but when he appears behind my shoulder
offering advice, or condemnation, or a quiet pride
in something I’ve done that isn’t even thistledown
or tiny shavings of balsa wood in the eyes of the world
—“Albie, grip in the middle and turn
with a steady pressure”—it’s measurable,
if not the way the wind is in a sock,
or ohms, or net-and-gross, it registers the way
an absence sometimes does, and I listen to him
with a care I never exhibited when he was a presence,
alive, in his undershirt, chewing his tiny licorice pellets
and radiating a rough-hewn love. “Negative
capability”—the phrase of course is Keats’s,

from his letters, but we make it ours a hundred times
a day. A hundred times we do our own pedestrian
version of early maritime cartography: the known world
stops, and over its edge the fuddled mapmaker writes
Here There Be Monsters and then illustrates
their non-existing coiled lengths and hell-breath
with a color-splotched vivacity he wouldn’t waste
on inhabited shores. Or: “Don’t think
of a polar bear!”...the game one plays
with a child. But I say with adult certainty that
when Eddie’s wife Fiona went back to stripping
he couldn’t stand to be at the club and see, and yet
those empty hours in his mind were populated just
as unbearably—and indeed, yes, there

were monsters in that void, and the vigilant bears
of insecurity and jealousy padded hungrily behind
his eyes each night until her return. For Keats,
however, the force that emptiness makes kinetic is
a positive one, the way that the invisible, unknowable
“dark energy” is seminal, a kind of funding agency
or sugar daddy powering the universe in all
its spangled beauty and veiled mystery
from behind the scenes. Last night, a woozy few of us
were mourning the demise of The Dusty Bookshelf.
“Well I tried to support it,” I said, “by stopping in from time
to time.” And B, the king of local kleptobibliomania, with
his nimble touch and expando-capacious overalls, said
“I tried to support it by not going in.”

Source: Poetry (February 2012)

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

Sir Thomas Wyatt has been credited with introducing the Petrarchan sonnet into the English language. His father, Henry Wyatt, had been one of Henry VII's Privy Councilors, and remained a trusted adviser when Henry VIII came to the throne in 1509. Thomas Wyatt followed his father to court. But it seems the young poet may have fallen in love with the king’s mistress. Many legends and conjectures suggest that an unhappily married Wyatt had a relationship with Anne Boleyn. Their acquaintance is certain, but whether or not the two actually shared a romantic relationship remains unknown. But in his poetry, Wyatt called his mistress Anna, and sometimes embedded pieces of information that seem to correspond with her life. For instance, this poem might well have been written about the King’s claim on Anne Boleyn:

Whoso List to Hunt
by Sir Thomas Wyatt

Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind, [Whoever longs to hunt , I know where there is a female deer]
But as for me, alas, I may no more.
The vain travail hath wearied me so sore,
I am of them that farthest cometh behind.
Yet may I by no means my wearied mind
Draw from the deer, but as she fleeth afore
Fainting I follow. I leave off therefore,
Since in a net I seek to hold the wind.
Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt,
As well as I, may spend his time in vain.
And graven with diamonds in letters plain
There is written, her fair neck round about:
Noli me tangere, for Caesar's I am, [Touch me not, for I belong to the King]
And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.

Noli me tangere means "Touch me not." According to the Bible, this is what Jesus said to Mary Magdalene when she tried to embrace him after the resurrection. So perhaps after her betrothal to Henry, religious vows also entered into the picture, and left Wyatt out.

They Flee from Me
by Thomas Wyatt

They flee from me that sometime did me seek
With naked foot stalking in my chamber.
I have seen them gentle tame and meek
That now are wild and do not remember
That sometime they put themselves in danger
To take bread at my hand; and now they range
Busily seeking with a continual change.

Thanked be fortune, it hath been otherwise
Twenty times better; but once in special,
In thin array after a pleasant guise,
When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,
And she me caught in her arms long and small;
And there withal sweetly did me kiss,
And softly said, Dear heart, how like you this?

It was no dream, I lay broad waking.
But all is turned thorough my gentleness
Into a strange fashion of forsaking;
And I have leave to go of her goodness
And she also to use new fangle-ness.
But since that I so kindly am served,
I would fain know what she hath deserved

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetrysoup.com/article/the_evolution_of_english_literature-1643

Home » Articles » The Evolution of English Literature

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The Evolution of English Literature
Written by: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition

ENGLISH LITERATURE. The following discussion of the evolution of English literature, i.e. of the contribution to literature made in the course of ages by the writers of England, is planned so as to give a comprehensive view, the details as to particular authors and their work, and special consideration of the greater writers, being given in the separate articles devoted to them. It is divided into the following sections: (1) Earliest times to Chaucer; (2) Chaucer to the end of the middle ages; (3) Elizabethan times; (4) the Restoration period; (5) the Eighteenth century; (6) the Nineteenth century. The object of these sections is to form connecting links among the successive literary ages, leaving the separate articles on individual great writers to deal with their special interest; attention being paid in the main to the gradually developing characteristics of the product, quâ literary. The precise delimitation of what may narrowly be called “English” literature, i.e. in the English language, is perhaps impossible, and separate articles are devoted to American literature (q.v.), and to the vernacular literatures of Scotland (see Scotland; and Celt: Literature), Ireland (see Celt: Literature), and Wales (see Celt: Literature); see also Canada: Literature. Reference may also be made to such general articles on particular forms as Novel;Romance; Verse, &c.

I. Earliest Times to Chaucer

English literature, in the etymological sense of the word, had, so far as we know, no existence until Christian times. There is no evidence either that the heathen English had adopted the Roman alphabet, or that they had learned to employ their native monumental script (the runes) on materials suitable for the writing of continuous compositions of considerable length.

It is, however, certain that in the pre-literary period at least one species of poetic art had attained a high degree of development, and that an extensive body of poetry was handed down—not, indeed, with absolute fixity of form or substance—from generation to generation. This unwritten poetry was the work of minstrels who found their audiences in the halls of kings and nobles. Its themes were the exploits of heroes belonging to the royal houses of Germanic Europe, with which its listeners claimed kinship. Its metre was the alliterative long line, the lax rhythm of which shows that it was intended, not to be sung to regular melodies, but to be recited—probably with some kind of instrumental accompaniment. Of its beauty and power we may judge from the best passages in Beowulf (q.v.); for there can be little 608doubt that this poem gained nothing and lost much in the process of literary redaction.

The conversion of the people to Christianity necessarily involved the decline of the minstrelsy that celebrated the glories of heathen times. Yet the descendants of Woden, even when they were devout Christians, would not easily lose all interest in the achievements of their kindred of former days. Chaucer’s knowledge of “the song of Wade” is one proof among others that even so late as the 14th century the deeds of Germanic heroes had not ceased to be recited in minstrel verse. The paucity of the extant remains of Old English heroic poetry is no argument to the contrary. The wonder is that any of it has survived at all. We may well believe that the professional reciter would, as a rule, be jealous of any attempt to commit to writing the poems which he had received by tradition or had himself composed. The clergy, to whom we owe the writing and the preservation of the Old English MSS., would only in rare instances be keenly interested in secular poetry. We possess, in fact, portions of four narrative poems, treating of heroic legend—Beowulf, Widsith, Finnesburh and Waldere. The second of these has no poetical merit, but great archaeological interest. It is an enumeration of the famous kings known to German tradition, put into the mouth of a minstrel (named Widsith, “far-travelled”), who claims to have been at many of their courts and to have been rewarded by them for his song. The list includes historical persons such as Ermanaric and Alboin, who really lived centuries apart, but (with the usual chronological vagueness of tradition) are treated as contemporaries. The extant fragment of Finnesburh (50 lines) is a brilliant battle piece, belonging to a story of which another part is introduced episodically in Beowulf. Waldere, of which we have two fragments (together 68 lines) is concerned with Frankish and Burgundian traditions based on events of the 5th century; the hero is the “Waltharius” of Ekkehart’s famous Latin epic. The English poem may possibly be rather a literary composition than a genuine example of minstrel poetry, but the portions that have survived are hardly inferior to the best passages of Beowulf.

It may reasonably be assumed that the same minstrels who entertained the English kings and nobles with the recital of ancient heroic traditions would also celebrate in verse the martial deeds of their own patrons and their immediate ancestors. Probably there may have existed an abundance of poetry commemorative of events in the conquest of Britain and the struggle with the Danes. Two examples only have survived, both belonging to the 10th century: The Battle of Brunanburh, which has been greatly over-praised by critics who were unaware that its striking phrases and compounds are mere traditional echoes; and the Battle of Maldon, the work of a truly great poet, of which unhappily only a fragment has been preserved.

One of the marvels of history is the rapidity and thoroughness with which Christian civilization was adopted by the English. Augustine landed in 597; forty years later was born an Englishman, Aldhelm, who in the judgment of his contemporaries throughout the Christian world was the most accomplished scholar and the finest Latin writer of his time. In the next generation England produced in Bede (Bæda) a man who in solidity and variety of knowledge, and in literary power, had for centuries no rival in Europe. Aldhelm and Bede are known to us only from their Latin writings, though the former is recorded to have written vernacular poetry of great merit. The extant Old English literature is almost entirely Christian, for the poems that belong to an earlier period have been expurgated and interpolated in a Christian sense. From the writings that have survived, it would seem as if men strove to forget that England had ever been heathen. The four deities whose names are attached to the days of the week are hardly mentioned at all. The names Thunor and Tiw are sometimes used to translate the Latin Jupiter and Mars; Woden has his place (but not as a god) in the genealogies of the kings, and his name occurs once in a magical poem, but that is all. Bede, as a historian, is obliged to tell the story of the conversion; but the only native divinities he mentions are the goddesses Hreth and Eostre, and all we learn about them is that they gave their names to Hrethemonath (March) and Easter. That superstitious practices of heathen origin long survived among the people is shown by the acts of church councils and by a few poems of a magical nature that have been preserved; but, so far as can be discovered, the definite worship of the ancient gods quickly died out. English heathenism perished without leaving a record.

The Old English religious poetry was written, probably without exception, in the cloister, and by men who were familiar with the Bible and with Latin devotional literature. Setting aside the wonderful Dream of the Rood, it gives little evidence of high poetic genius, though much of it is marked by a degree of culture and refinement that we should hardly have expected. Its material and thought are mainly derived from Latin sources; its expression is imitated from the native heroic poetry. Considering that a great deal of Latin verse was written by Englishmen in the 7th and succeeding centuries, and that in one or two poems the line is actually composed of an English and a Latin hemistich rhyming together, it seems strange that the Latin influence on Old English versification should have been so small. The alliterative long line is throughout the only metre employed, and although the laws of alliteration and rhythm were less rigorously obeyed in the later than in the earlier poetry, there is no trace of approximation to the structure of Latin verse. It is true that, owing to imitation of the Latin hymns of the church, rhyme came gradually to be more and more frequently used as an ornament of Old English verse; but it remained an ornament only, and never became an essential feature. The only poem in which rhyme is employed throughout is one in which sense is so completely sacrificed to sound that a translation would hardly be possible. It was not only in metrical respects that the Old English religious poetry remained faithful to its native models. The imagery and the diction are mainly those of the old heroic poetry, and in some of the poems Christ and the saints are presented, often very incongruously, under the aspect of Germanic warriors. Nearly all the religious poetry that has any considerable religious value seems to have been written in Northumbria during the 8th century. The remarkably vigorous poem of Judith, however, is certainly much later; and the Exodus, though early, seems to be of southern origin. For a detailed account of the Old English sacred poetry, the reader is referred to the articles on Cædmon and Cynewulf, to one or other of whom nearly every one of the poems, except those of obviously late date, has at some time been attributed.

The Riddles (q.v.) of the Exeter Book resemble the religious poetry in being the work of scholars, but they bear much more decidedly the impress of the native English character. Some of them rank among the most artistic and pleasing productions of Old English poetry. The Exeter Book contains also several pieces of a gnomic character, conveying proverbial instruction in morality and worldly wisdom. Their morality is Christian, but it is not unlikely that some of the wise sayings they contain may have come down by tradition from heathen times. The very curious Dialogue of Solomon and Saturn may be regarded as belonging to the same class.

The most original and interesting portion of the Old English literary poetry is the group of dramatic monologues—The Banished Wife’s Complaint,The Husband’s Message, The Wanderer, The Seafarer, Deor and Wulf and Eadwacer. The date of these compositions is uncertain, though their occurrence in the Exeter Book shows that they cannot be later than the 10th century. That they are all of one period is at least unlikely, but they are all marked by the same peculiar tone of pathos. The monodramatic form renders it difficult to obtain a clear idea of the situation of the supposed speakers. It is not improbable that most of these poems may relate to incidents of heroic legend, with which the original readers were presumed to be acquainted. This, however, can be definitely affirmed only in the case of the two short pieces—Deor and Wulf and Eadwacer—which have something of a lyric character, being the only examples in Old English of strophic structure and the use of the refrain. Wulf and Eadwacer, indeed, exhibits a still further 609development in the same direction, the monotony of the long line metre being varied by the admission of short lines formed by the suppression of the second hemistich. The highly developed art displayed in this remarkable poem gives reason for believing that the existing remains of Old English poetry very inadequately represent its extent and variety.

While the origins of English poetry go back to heathen times, English prose may be said to have had its effective beginning in the reign of Alfred. It is of course true that vernacular prose of some kind was written much earlier. The English laws of Æthelberht of Kent, though it is perhaps unlikely that they were written down, as is commonly supposed, in the lifetime of Augustine (died a.d. 604), or even in that of the king (d. 616), were well known to Bede; and even in the 12th-century transcript that has come down to us, their crude and elliptical style gives evidence of their high antiquity. Later kings of Kent and of Wessex followed the example of publishing their laws in the native tongue. Bede is known to have translated the beginning of the gospel of John (down to vi. 9). The early part of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (q.v.) is probably founded partly on prose annals of pre-Alfredian date. But although the amount of English prose written between the beginning of the 7th and the middle of the 9th century may have been considerable, Latin continued to be regarded as the appropriate vehicle for works of any literary pretension. If the English clergy had retained the scholarship which they possessed in the days of Aldhelm and Bede, the creation of a vernacular prose literature would probably have been longer delayed; for while Alfred certainly was not indifferent to the need of the laity for instruction, the evil that he was chiefly concerned to combat was the ignorance of their spiritual guides.

Of the works translated by him and the scholars whom he employed, St Gregory’s Pastoral Care and his Dialogues (the latter rendered by Bishop Werferth) are expressly addressed to the priesthood; if the other translations were intended for a wider circle of readers, they are all (not excepting the secular History of Orosius) essentially religious in purpose and spirit. In the interesting preface to the Pastoral Care, in the important accounts of Northern lands and peoples inserted in the Orosius, and in the free rendering and amplification of the Consolation of Boethius and of the Soliloquiesof Augustine, Alfred appears as an original writer. Other fruits of his activity are his Laws (preceded by a collection of those of his 7th-century predecessor, Ine of Wessex), and the beginnings of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The Old English prose after Alfred is entirely of clerical authorship; even the Laws, so far as their literary form is concerned, are hardly to be regarded as an exception. Apart from the Chronicle (see Anglo-Saxon Chronicle), the bulk of this literature consists of translations from Latin and of homilies and saints’ lives, the substance of which is derived from sources mostly accessible to us in their original form; it has therefore for us little importance except from the philological point of view. This remark may be applied, in the main, even to the writings of Ælfric, notwithstanding the great interest which attaches to his brilliant achievement in the development of the capacities of the native language for literary expression. The translation of the gospels, though executed in Ælfric’s time (about 1000), is by other hands. The sermons of his younger contemporary, Archbishop Wulfstan, are marked by earnestness and eloquence, and contain some passages of historical value.

From the early years of the 11th century we possess an encyclopaedic manual of the science of the time—chronology, astronomy, arithmetic, metre, rhetoric and ethics—by the monk Byrhtferth, a pupil of Abbo of Fleury. It is a compilation, but executed with intelligence. The numerous works on medicine, the properties of herbs, and the like, are in the main composed of selections from Latin treatises; so far as they are original, they illustrate the history of superstition rather than that of science. It is interesting to observe that they contain one or two formulas of incantations in Irish.

Two famous works of fiction, the romance of Apollonius of Tyre and the Letter of Alexander, which in their Latin form had much influence on the later literature of Europe, were Englished in the 11th century with considerable skill. To the same period belongs the curious tract on The Wonders of the East. In these works, and some minor productions of the time, we see that the minds of Englishmen were beginning to find interest in other than religious subjects.

The crowding of the English monasteries by foreigners, which was one of the results of the Norman Conquest, brought about a rapid arrest of the development of the vernacular literature. It was not long before the boys trained in the monastic schools ceased to learn to read and write their native tongue, and learned instead to read and write French. The effects of this change are visible in the rapid alteration of the literary language. The artificial tradition of grammatical correctness lost its hold; the archaic literary vocabulary fell into disuse; and those who wrote English at all wrote as they spoke, using more and more an extemporized phonetic spelling based largely on French analogies. The 12th century is a brilliant period in the history of Anglo-Latin literature, and many works of merit were written in French (see Anglo-Norman). But vernacular literature is scanty and of little originality. The Peterborough Chronicle, it is true, was continued till 1154, and its later portions, while markedly exemplifying the changes in the language, contain some really admirable writing. But it is substantially correct to say that from this point until the age of Chaucer vernacular prose served no other purpose than that of popular religious edification. For light on the intellectual life of the nation during this period we must look mainly to the works written in Latin. The homilies of the 12th century are partly modernized transcripts from Ælfric and other older writers, partly translations from French and Latin; the remainder is mostly commonplace in substance and clumsy in expression. At the beginning of the 13th century the Ancren Riwle (q.v.), a book of counsel for nuns, shows true literary genius, and is singularly interesting in its substance and spirit; but notwithstanding the author’s remarkable mastery of English expression, his culture was evidently French rather than English. Some minor religious prose works of the same period are not without merit. But these examples had no literary following. In the early 14th century the writings of Richard Rolle and his school attained great popularity. The profound influence which they exercised on later religious thought, and on the development of prose style, has seldom been adequately recognized. The Ayenbite of Inwyt (see Michel, Dan), a wretchedly unintelligent translation (finished in 1340) from Frère Lorens’s Somme des vices et des vertus, is valuable to the student of language, but otherwise worthless.

The break in the continuity of literary tradition, induced by the Conquest, was no less complete with regard to poetry than with regard to prose. The poetry of the 13th and the latter part of the 12th century was uninfluenced by the written works of Old English poets, whose archaic diction had to a great extent become unintelligible. But there is no ground to suppose that the succession of popular singers and reciters was ever interrupted. In the north-west, indeed, the old recitative metre seems to have survived in oral tradition, with little more alteration than was rendered necessary by the changes in the language, until the middle of the 14th century, when it was again adopted by literary versifiers. In the south this metre had greatly degenerated in strictness before the Conquest, but, with gradually increasing laxity in the laws of alliteration and rhythm, it continued long in use. It is commonly believed, with great intrinsic probability but with scanty actual evidence, that in the Old English period there existed, beside the alliterative long line, other forms of verse adapted not for recitation but for singing, used in popular lyrics and ballads that were deemed too trivial for written record. The influence of native popular poetic tradition, whether in the form of recited or of sung verse, is clearly discernible in the earliest Middle English poems that have been preserved. But the authors of these poems were familiar with Latin, and probably spoke French as easily as their mother tongue; and there was no longer any literary convention to restrain them from adopting foreign metrical forms. The 610artless verses of the hermit Godric, who died in 1170, exhibit in their metre the combined influence of native rhythm and of that of Latin hymnology. The Proverbs of Alfred, written about 1200, is (like the later Proverbs of Hendyng) in style and substance a gnomic poem of the ancient Germanic type, containing maxims some of which may be of immemorial antiquity; and its rhythm is mainly of native origin. On the other hand, the solemn and touching meditation known as the Moral Ode, which is somewhat earlier in date, is in a metre derived from contemporary Latin verse—a line of seven accents, broken by a caesura, and with feminine end-rhymes. In the Ormulum (see Orm) this metre (known as the septenarius) appears without rhyme, and with a syllabic regularity previously without example in English verse, the line (or distich, as it may be called with almost equal propriety) having invariably fifteen syllables. In various modified forms, the septenarius was a favourite measure throughout the Middle English period. In the poetry of the 13th century the influence of French models is conspicuous. The many devotional lyrics, some of which, as the Luve Ronof Thomas of Hales, have great beauty, show this influence not only in their varied metrical form, but also in their peculiar mystical tenderness and fervour. The Story of Genesis and Exodus, the substance of which is taken from the Bible and Latin commentators, derives its metre chiefly from French. Its poetical merit is very small. The secular poetry also received a new impulse from France. The brilliant and sprightly dialogue of the Owl and Nightingale, which can hardly be dated later than about 1230, is a “contention” of the type familiar in French and Provençal literature. The “Gallic” type of humour may be seen in various other writings of this period, notably in the Land of Cockaigne, a vivacious satire on monastic self-indulgence, and in the fabliau of Dame Siviz, a story of Eastern origin, told with almost Chaucerian skill. Predominantly, though not exclusively French in metrical structure, are the charming love poems collected in a MS. (Harl. 2253) written about 1320 in Herefordshire, some of which (edited in T. Wright’s Specimens of Lyric Poetry) find a place in modern popular anthologies. It is noteworthy that they are accompanied by some French lyrics very similar in style. The same MS. contains, besides some religious poetry, a number of political songs of the time of Edward II. They are not quite the earliest examples of their kind; in the time of the Barons’ War the popular cause had had its singers in English as well as in French. Later, the victories of Edward III. down to the taking of Guisnes in 1352, were celebrated by the Yorkshireman Laurence Minot in alliterative verse with strophic arrangement and rhyme.

At the very beginning of the 13th century a new species of composition, the metrical chronicle, was introduced into English literature. The huge work of Layamon, a history (mainly legendary) of Britain from the time of the mythical Brutus till after the mission of Augustine, is a free rendering of the Norman-French Brut of Wace, with extensive additions from traditional sources. Its metre seems to be a degenerate survival of the Old English alliterative line, gradually modified in the course of the work by assimilation to the regular syllabic measure of the French original. Unquestionable evidence of the knowledge of the poem on the part of later writers is scarce, but distinct echoes of its diction appear in the chronicle ascribed to Robert of Gloucester, written in rhymed septenary measures about 1300. This work, founded in its earlier part on the Latin historians of the 12th century, is an independent historical source of some value for the events of the writer’s own times. The succession of versified histories of England was continued by Thomas Bek of Castleford in Yorkshire (whose work still awaits an editor), and by Robert Mannyng of Brunne (Bourne, Lincolnshire). Mannyng’s chronicle, finished in 1338, is a translation, in its earlier part from Wace’s Brut, and in its later part from an Anglo-French chronicle (still extant) written by Peter Langtoft, canon of Bridlington.

Not far from the year 1300 (for the most part probably earlier rather than later) a vast mass of hagiological and homiletic verse was produced in divers parts of England. To Gloucester belongs an extensive series of Lives of Saints, metrically and linguistically closely resembling Robert of Gloucester’s Chronicle, and perhaps wholly or in part of the same authorship. A similar collection was written in the north of England, as well as a large body of homilies showing considerable poetic skill, and abounding in exempla or illustrative stories. Of exempla several prose collections had already been made in Anglo-French, and William of Wadington’s poem Manuel des péchés, which contains a great number of them, was translated in 1303 by Robert Mannyng already mentioned, with some enlargement of the anecdotic element, and frequent omissions of didactic passages. The great rhyming chronicle of Scripture history entitled Cursor Mundi (q.v.) was written in the north about this time. It was extensively read and transcribed, and exercised a powerful influence on later writers down to the end of the 14th century. The remaining homiletic verse of this period is too abundant to be referred to in detail; it will be enough to mention the sermons of William of Shoreham, written in strophic form, but showing little either of metrical skill or poetic feeling. To the next generation belongs the Pricke of Conscience by Richard Rolle, the influence of which was not less powerful than that of the author’s prose writings.

Romantic poetry, which in French had been extensively cultivated, both on the continent and in England from the early years of the 12th century, did not assume a vernacular form till about 1250. In the next hundred years its development was marvellously rapid. Of the vast mass of metrical romances produced during this period no detailed account need here be attempted (see Romance, and articles, &c. referred to; Arthurian Romance). Native English traditions form the basis of King Horn, Guy of Warwick, Bevis of Hamtoun and Havelok, though the stories were first put into literary form by Anglo-Norman poets. The popularity of these home-grown tales (with which may be classed the wildly fictitious Coer de Lion) was soon rivalled by that of importations from France. The English rendering of Floris and Blancheflur (a love-romance of Greek origin) is found in the same MS. that contains the earliest copy of King Horn. Before the end of the century, the French “matter of Britain” was represented in English by the Southern Arthur and Merlin and the Northern Tristram and Yvaine and Gawin, the “matter of France” by Roland and Vernagu and Otuel; theAlexander was also translated, but in this instance the immediate original was an Anglo-French and not a continental poem. The tale of Troy did not come into English till long afterwards. The Auchinleck MS., written about 1330, contains no fewer than 14 poetical romances; there were many others in circulation, and the number continued to grow. About the middle of the 14th century, the Old English alliterative long line, which for centuries had been used only in unwritten minstrel poetry, emerges again in literature. One of the earliest poems in this revived measure, Wynnere and Wastour, written in 1352, is by a professional reciter-poet, who complains bitterly that original minstrel poetry no longer finds a welcome in the halls of great nobles, who prefer to listen to those who recite verses not of their own making. About the same date the metre began to be employed by men of letters for the translation of romance—William of Palerne and Joseph of Arimathea from the French, Alexander from Latin prose. The later development of alliterative poetry belongs mainly to the age of Chaucer.

The extent and character of the literature produced during the first half of the 14th century indicate that the literary use of the native tongue was no longer, as in the preceding age, a mere condescension to the needs of the common people. The rapid disuse of French as the ordinary medium of intercourse among the middle and higher ranks of society, and the consequent substitution of English for French as the vehicle of school instruction, created a widespread demand for vernacular reading. The literature which arose in answer to this demand, though it consisted mainly of translations or adaptations of foreign works, yet served to develop the appreciation of poetic beauty, and to prepare an audience in the near future for a poetry in which the genuine thought and feeling of the nation were to find expression.

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Bibliography.—Only general works need be mentioned here. Those cited contain lists of books for more detailed information. (1) For the literature from the beginnings to Chaucer:—B. ten Brink, Geschichte der englischen Litteratur, vol. i. 2nd ed., by A. Brandl (Strassburg, 1899) (English translation from the 1st ed. of 1877, by H.M. Kennedy, London, 1883); The Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. i. (1907). (2) For the Old English period:—R. Wülker, Grundriss zur Geschichte der angelsachsischen Litteratur (Leipzig, 1885); Stopford A. Brooke, English Literature from the Beginning to the Norman Conquest (London, 1898); A. Brandl, “Altenglische Litteratur,” in H. Paul’s Grundriss der germanischen Philologie, vol. ii. (2nd ed., Strassburg, 1908). (3) For the early Middle English Period:—H. Morley, English Writers, vol. iii. (London, 1888; vols. i. and ii., dealing with the Old English period, cannot be recommended); A. Brandl, “Mittelenglische Litteratur,” in H. Paul’sGrundriss der germanischen Philologie, vol. ii. (1st ed., Strassburg, 1893); W.H. Schofield, English Literature from the Norman Conquest to Chaucer (London, 1906).

(H. Br.)

II. Chaucer to the Renaissance

The age of Chaucer is of peculiar interest to the student of literature, not only because of its brilliance and productiveness but also because of its apparent promise for the future. In this, as in other aspects, Chaucer (c. 1340-1400) is its most notable literary figure. Beginning as a student and imitator of the best French poetry of his day, he was for a time, like most of his French contemporaries, little more than a skilful maker of elegant verses, dealing with conventional material in a conventional way, arranging in new figures the same flowers and bowers, sunsets and song-birds, and companies of fair women and their lovers, that had been arranged and rearranged by every poet of the court circle for a hundred years, and celebrated in sweet phrases of almost unvarying sameness. Even at this time, to be sure, he was not without close and loving observation of the living creatures of the real world, and his verses often bring us flowers dewy and fragrant and fresh of colour as they grew in the fields and gardens about London, and birds that had learned their music in the woods; but his poetry was still not easily distinguishable from that of Machault, Froissart, Deschamps, Transoun and the other “courtly makers” of France. But while he was still striving to master perfectly the technique of this pretty art of trifling, he became acquainted with the new literature of Italy, both poetry and prose. Much of the new poetry moved, like that of France, among the conventionalities and artificialities of an unreal world of romance, but it was of wider range, of fuller tone, of far greater emotional intensity, and, at its best, was the fabric, not of elegant ingenuity, but of creative human passion,—in Dante, indeed, a wonderful visionary structure in which love and hate, and pity and terror, and the forms and countenances of men were more vivid and real than in the world of real men and real passions. The new prose—which Chaucer knew in several of the writings of Boccaccio—was vastly different from any that he had ever read in a modern tongue. Here were no mere brief anecdotes like those exempla which in the middle ages illustrated vernacular as well as Latin sermons, no cumbrous, slow-moving treatises on the Seven Deadly Sins, no half-articulate, pious meditations, but rapid, vivid, well-constructed narratives ranging from the sentimental beauty of stories like Griselda and the Franklin’s Tale to coarse mirth and malodorous vulgarity equal to those of the tales told later by Chaucer’s Miller and Reeve and Summoner. All these things he studied and some he imitated. There is scarcely a feature of the verse that has not left some trace in his own; the prose he did not imitate as prose, but there can be little doubt that the subject matter of Boccaccio’s tales and novels, as well as his poems, affected the direction of Chaucer’s literary development, and quickened his habit of observing and utilizing human life, and that the narrative art of the prose was influential in the transformation of his methods of narration.

This transformation was effected not so much through the mere superiority of the Italian models to the French as through the stimulus which the differences between the two gave to his reflections upon the processes and technique of composition, for Chaucer was not a careless, happy-go-lucky poet of divine endowment, but a conscious, reflective artist, seeking not merely for fine words and fine sentiments, but for the proper arrangement of events, the significant exponent of character, the right tone, and even the appropriate background and atmosphere,—as may be seen, for example, in the transformations he wrought in the Pardoner’s Tale. It is therefore in the latest and most original of the Canterbury Tales that his art is most admirable, most distinguished by technical excellences. In these we find so many admirable qualities that we almost forget that he had any defects. His diction is a model of picturesqueness, of simplicity, of dignity, and of perfect adaptation to his theme; his versification is not only correct but musical and varied, and shows a progressive tendency towards freer and more complex melodies; his best tales are not mere repetitions of the ancient stories they retell, but new creations, transformed by his own imaginative realization of them, full of figures having the dimensions and the viv ..................

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

Poets of The Alexandrian Age
Written by: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition

The Alexandrian Age.—The study of the Greek classics begins with the school of Alexandria. Under the rule of Ptolemy Philadelphus (285-247B.C.), learning found a home in the Alexandrian Museum and in the great Alexandrian Library. The first four librarians were Zenodotus, Eratosthenes, Aristophanes of Byzantium, and Aristarchus. Zenodotus produced before 274 the first scientific edition of the Iliad and Odyssey, an edition in which spurious lines were marked, at the beginning, with a short horizontal dash called an obelus (—). He also drew up select lists of epic and lyric poets. Soon afterwards a classified catalogue of dramatists, epic and lyric poets, legislators, philosophers, historians, orators and rhetoricians, and miscellaneous writers, with a brief biography of each, was produced by the scholar and poet Callimachus (fl. 260). Among the pupils of Callimachus was Eratosthenes who, in 234, succeeded Zenodotus as librarian. Apart from his special interest in the history of the Old Attic comedy, he was a man of vast and varied learning; the founder of astronomical geography and of scientific chronology; and the first to assume the name of φιλ?λογος. The greatest philologist of antiquity was, however, his successor, Aristophanes of Byzantium (195), who reduced accentuation and punctuation to a definite system, and used a variety of critical symbols in his recension of the Iliad and Odyssey. He also edited Hesiod and Pindar, Euripides and Aristophanes, besides composing brief introductions to the several plays, parts of which are still extant. Lastly, he established a scientific system of lexicography and drew up lists of the “best authors.” Two critical editions of the Iliad and Odyssey were produced by his successor, Aristarchus, who was librarian until 146 B.C. and was the founder of scientific scholarship. His distinguished pupil, Dionysius Thrax (born c. 166 B.C.), drew up a Greek grammar which continued in use for more than thirteen centuries. The most industrious of the successors of Aristarchus was Didymus (c. 65 B.C.-A.D.10), who, in his work on the Homeric poems, aimed at restoring the lost recensions of Aristarchus. He also composed commentaries on the lyric and comic poets and on Thucydides and Demosthenes; part of his commentary on this last author was first published in 1904. He was a teacher in Alexandria (and perhaps also in Rome); and his death, about A.D. 10, marks the close of the Alexandrian age. He is the industrious compiler who gathered up the remnants of the learning of his predecessors and transmitted them to posterity. The poets of that age, including Callimachus and Theocritus, were subsequently expounded by Theon, who flourished under Tiberius, and has been well described as “the Didymus of the Alexandrian poets.”

The Alexandrian canon of the Greek classics, which probably had its origin in the lists drawn up by Callimachus, Aristophanes of Byzantium and Aristarchus, included the following authors:—

Epic poets (5): Homer, Hesiod, Peisander, Panyasis, Antimachus.

Iambic poets (3): Simonides of Amorgos, Archilochus, Hipponax.

Tragic poets (5): Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Ion, Achaeus.

Comic poets, Old (7): Epicharmus, Cratinus, Eupolis, Aristophanes, Pherecrates, Crates, Plato. Middle (2): Antiphanes, Alexis. New (5): Menander, Philippides, Diphilus, Philemon, Apollodorus.

Elegiac poets (4): Callinus, Mimnermus, Philetas, Callimachus.

Lyric poets (9): Alcman, Alcaeus, Sappho, Stesichorus, Pindar, Bacchylides, Ibycus, Anacreon, Simonides of Ceos.

Orators (10): Demosthenes, Lysias, Hypereides, Isocrates, Aeschines, Lycurgus, Isaeus, Antiphon, Ándocides, Deinarchus.

Historians (10): Thucydides, Herodotus, Xenophon, Philistius, Theopompus, Ephorus, Anaximenes, Callisthenes, Hellanicus, Polybius.

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The latest name in the above list is that of Polybius, who died about 123 B.C. Apollonius Rhodius, Aratus and Theocritus were subsequently added to the “epic” poets. Philosophers, such as Plato and Aristotle, were possibly classed in a separate “canon.”

While the scholars of Alexandria were mainly interested in the verbal criticism of the Greek poets, a wider variety of studies was the characteristic of the school of Pergamum, the literary rival of Alexandria. Pergamum was a home of learning for a large part of the 150 years of the Attalid dynasty, 283-133 B.C.

The grammar of the Stoics, gradually elaborated by Zeno, Cleanthes and Chrysippus, supplied a terminology which, in words such as “genitive,” “accusative” and “aorist,” has become a permanent part of the grammarian’s vocabulary; and the study of this grammar found its earliest home in Pergamum.

From about 168 B.C. the head of the Pergamene school was Crates of Mallus, who (like the Stoics) was an adherent of the principle of “anomaly” in grammar, and was thus opposed to Aristarchus of Alexandria, the champion of “analogy.” He also opposed Aristarchus, and supported the Stoics, by insisting on an allegorical interpretation of Homer. He is credited with having drawn up the classified lists of the best authors for the Pergamene library. His mission as an envoy to the Roman senate, “shortly after the death of Ennius” in 169 B.C., had a remarkable influence on literary studies in Rome. Meeting with an accident while he was wandering on the Palatine, and being detained in Rome, he passed part of his enforced leisure in giving lectures (possibly on Homer, his favourite author), and thus succeeded in arousing among the Romans a taste for the scholarly study of literature. The example set by Crates led to the production of a new edition of the epic poem of Naevius, and to the public recitation of the Annals of Ennius, and (two generations later) the Satires of Lucilius.

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Modern poets would do well to read and study more of the ancient poetry and the foundation thus laid methinks.
Not to be a slave to it but rather to add to their understanding.
History being a treasure and a great teacher.... if one seeks more!! --Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetrysoup.com/article/villon_the_first_modern_poet-394

Villon: The First Modern Poet
Written by: ARTHUR SYMONS

Villon was the first modern poet; he remains the most modern of poets. One requires a certain amount of old French, together with some acquaintance with the argot of the time, to understand the words in which he has written down his poems; many allusions to people and things have only just begun to be cleared up, but, apart from these things, no poet has ever brought himself closer to us, taken us into his confidence more simply, than this personnage peu recommandable, fainéant, ivrogne, joueur, débauché, écornifleur, et, qui pis est, souteneur de filles, escroc, voleur, crocheteur de portes et de coffres. The most disreputable of poets, he confesses himself to us with a frankness in which shamelessness is difficult to distinguish from humility. M. Gaston Paris, who for the most part is content to take him as he is, for better for worse, finds it necessary to[Pg 38] apologize for him when he comes to the ballad of La Grosse Margot: this, he professes, we need not take as a personal confession, but as a mere exercise in composition! But if we are to understand Villon rightly, we must not reject even la grosse Margot from her place in his life. He was no dabbler in infamy, but one who loved infamous things for their own sake. He loved everything for its own sake: la grosse Margot in the flesh, les dames du temps jadis in the spirit,
Sausses, brouets et gros poissons,
Tartes, flaons, œfs frits et pochez,
Perdus, et en toutes façons,

his mother, le bon royaume de France, and above all, Paris. Il a parcouru toute la France sans rapporter une seule impression de campagne. C'est un poète de ville, plus encore: un poète de quartier. Il n'est vraiment chez lui que sur la Montague Sainte-Geneviève, entre le Palais, les collèges, le Châtelet, les tavernes, les rotisseries, les tripots et les rues où Marion l'Idole et la grande Jeanne de Bretagne tiennent leur 'publique école'. It is in this world that he lived, for this world that he wrote. Fils du peuple, entré par l'instruction dans la classe [Pg 39]lettrée, puis déclassé par ses vices, il dut à son humble origine de rester en communication constante avec les sources éternelles de toute vraie poésie. And so he came into a literature of formalists, like a child, a vigorous, unabashed, malicious child, into a company of greybeards.

Villon, before any one in French literature, called things by their names, made poetry as Homer made it, with words that meant facts. He was a thief and a vagabond who wrote in the 'grand style' by daring to be sincere to himself, to the aspect under which human things came to him, to the precise names of precise things. He had a sensitiveness in his soul which perhaps matched the deftness of his fingers, in their adroit, forbidden trade: his soul bent easily from his mother praying in the cloister to the fat Margot drinking in the tavern; he could dream exquisitely over the dead ladies who had once been young, and who had gone like last year's snow, and then turn to the account-book of his satirical malice against the clerks and usurers for whom he was making the testament of his poverty. He knew winter, 'when the wolves live on[Pg 40] wind,' and how the gallows looks when one stands under it. And he knew all the secrets of the art of verse-making which courtly poets, like the King, used for the stringing together of delicate trifles, ornamental evasions of facts. He was no poet of the people, but a scholar vagabond, loving the gutter; and so he has the sincerity of the artist as well as the only half-convincing sincerity of the man. There has been no greater artist in French verse, as there has been no greater poet; and the main part of the history of poetry in France is the record of a long forgetting of all that Villon found out for himself.

1901.

Interesting viewpoint, I myself am no big fan of Villon.
However, that is not to say, Villon's writings were of no value..
His honesty in his writings , baring of his true self --tis to be admired methinks..-Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetrysoup.com/article/beaumont_and_fletcher,_english_dramatists-1425

Beaumont and Fletcher, English Dramatists
Written by: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition

BEAUMONT and FLETCHER, English dramatists The names of Francis Beaumont (1584-1616) and John Fletcher (1579-1625) are inseparably connected in the history of the English drama. John Fletcher was born in December 1579 at Rye in Sussex, and baptized on the 20th of the same month. Richard Fletcher, his father, afterwards queen’s chaplain, dean of Peterborough, and bishop successively of Bristol, Worcester and London, was then minister of the parish in which the son was born who was to make their name immortal. That son was just turned of seven when the dean distinguished and disgraced himself as the spiritual tormentor of the last moments on earth of Mary Stuart. When not quite twelve he was admitted pensioner of Bene’t College, Cambridge, and two years later was made one of the Bible-clerks: of this college Bishop Fletcher had been president twenty years earlier, and six months before his son’s admission had received from its authorities a first letter of thanks for various benefactions, to be followed next year by a second. Four years later than this, when John Fletcher wanted five or six months of his seventeenth year, the bishop died suddenly of over much tobacco and the displeasure of Queen Elizabeth at his second marriage—this time, it appears, with a lady of such character as figures something too frequently on the stage of his illustrious son. He left eight children by his first marriage in such distress that their uncle, Dr Giles Fletcher, author of a treatise on the Russian commonwealth which is still held in some repute, was obliged to draw up a petition to the queen on their behalf, which was supported by the intercession of Essex, but with what result is uncertain.

From this date we know nothing of the fortunes of John Fletcher, till the needy orphan boy of seventeen reappears as the brilliant and triumphant poet whose name is linked for all time with the yet more glorious name of Francis Beaumont, third and youngest son of Sir Francis Beaumont of Grace-Dieu, one of the justices of the common pleas—born, according to general report, in 1586, but, according to more than one apparently irrefragable document, actually born two years earlier. The first record of his existence is the entry of his name, together with those of his elder brothers Henry and John, as a gentleman-commoner of Broadgates Hall, Oxford, now supplanted by Pembroke College. But most lovers of his fame will care rather to remember the admirable lines of Wordsworth on the “eager child” who played among the rocks and woodlands of Grace-Dieu; though it may be doubted whether even the boy’s first verses were of the peaceful and pastoral character attributed to them by the great laureate of the lakes. That passionate and fiery genius which was so soon and for so short a time to “shake the buskined stage” with heroic and tragic notes of passion and of sorrow, of scorn and rage, and slighted love and jealousy, must surely have sought vent from the first in fancies of a more ardent and ambitious kind; and it would be a likelier conjecture that when Frank Beaumont (as we know on more authorities than one that he was always called by his contemporaries, even in the full flush of his adult fame—“never more than Frank,” says Heywood) went to college at the ripe age of twelve, he had already committed a tragedy or two in emulation of Tamburlaine, Andronicus or Jeronymo. The date of his admission was the 4th of February 1597; on the 22nd of April of the following year his father died; and on the 3rd of November 1600, having left Oxford without taking his degree, the boy of fifteen was entered a member of the Inner Temple, his two brothers standing sponsors on the grave occasion. But the son of Judge Beaumont was no fitter for success at the bar than the son of Bishop Fletcher for distinction in the church: it is equally difficult to imagine either poet invested with either gown. Two years later appeared the poem of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, generally attributed to Beaumont, a voluptuous and voluminous expansion of the Ovidian legend, not on the whole discreditable to a lad of eighteen, fresh from the popular love-poems of Marlowe and Shakespeare, which it naturally exceeds in long-winded and fantastic diffusion of episodes and conceits. At twenty-three Beaumont prefixed to the magnificent masterpiece of Ben Jonson some noticeable verses in honour of his “dear friend” the author; and in the same year (1607) appeared the anonymous comedy of The Woman-Hater, usually assigned to Fletcher alone; but being as it is in the main a crude and puerile imitation of Jonson’s manner, and certainly more like a man’s work at twenty-two than at twenty-eight, internal evidence would seem to justify, or at least to excuse those critics who in the teeth of high authority and tradition would transfer from Fletcher to Beaumont the principal responsibility for this first play that can be traced to the hand of either. As Fletcher also prefixed to the first edition of Volpone a copy of commendatory verses, we may presume that their common admiration for a common friend was among the earliest and strongest influences which drew together the two great poets whose names were thenceforward to be for ever indivisible. During the dim eleven years between the death of his father and the dawn of his fame, we cannot but imagine that the career of Fletcher had been unprosperous as well as obscure. From seventeen to twenty-eight his youth may presumably have been spent in such painful struggles for success, if not for sustenance, as were never known to his younger colleague, who, as we have seen, was entered at Oxford a few months after Fletcher must in all likelihood have left Cambridge to try his luck in London: a venture most probably resolved on as soon as the youth had found his family reduced by the father’s death to such ruinous straits that any smoother course can hardly have been open to him. Entering college at the same age as Fletcher had entered six years earlier, Beaumont had before him a brighter and briefer line of life than his elder. But whatever may have been their respective situations when, either by happy chance or, as Dyce suggests, by the good offices of Jonson, they were first brought together, their intimacy soon became so much closer than that of ordinary brothers that the household which they shared as bachelors was conducted on such thoroughly communistic principles as might have satisfied the most trenchant theorist who ever proclaimed as the cardinal point of his doctrine, a complete and absolute community of bed and board, with all goods thereto appertaining. But in the year following that in which the two younger poets had united in homage to Jonson, they had entered into a partnership of more importance than this in “the same clothes and cloak, &c.,” with other necessaries of life specified by Aubrey.

In 1608, if we may trust the reckoning which seems trust-worthiest, the twin stars of our stage rose visibly together for the first time. The loveliest, though not the loftiest, of tragic plays that we owe to the comrades or the successors of Shakespeare, Philaster, has generally been regarded as the first-born issue of their common genius. The noble tragedy of Thierry and Theodoret has sometimes been dated earlier and assigned to Fletcher alone; but we can be sure neither of the early date nor the single 593authorship. The main body of the play, comprising both the great scenes which throw out into full and final relief the character of either heroine for perfect good or evil, bears throughout the unmistakable image and superscription of Fletcher; yet there are parts which for gravity and steady strength of style, for reserve and temperance of effect, would seem to suggest the collaboration of a calmer and more patient hand; and these more equable and less passionate parts of the poem recall rather the touch of Massinger than of Beaumont. In the second act, for example, the regular structure of the verse, the even scheme of the action, the exaggerated braggardism which makes of the hero a mere puppet or mouthpiece of his own self-will, are all qualities which, for better or for worse, remind us of the strength or the weakness of a poet with whom we know that Fletcher, before or after his alliance with Beaumont, did now and then work in common. Even the Arbaces of Beaumont, though somewhat too highly coloured, does not “write himself down an ass,” like Thierry on his first entrance, after the too frequent fashion of Massinger’s braggarts and tyrants; does not proclaim at starting or display with mere wantonness of exposure his more unlovely qualities in the naked nature of their deformity. Compare also the second with the first scene of the fourth act. In style and metre this second scene is as good an example of Massinger as the first is of Fletcher at his best. Observe especially in the elaborate narrative of the pretended self-immolation of Ordella these distinctive notes of the peculiar style of Massinger; the excess of parenthetic sentences, no less than five in a space of twenty lines; the classical common-place of allusion to Athens, Rome and Sparta in one superfluous breath; the pure and vigorous but somewhat level and prosaic order of language, with the use of certain cheap and easy phrases familiar to Massinger as catchwords; the flat and feeble terminations by means of which the final syllable of one verse runs on into the next without more pause or rhythm than in a passage of prose; the general dignity and gravity of sustained and measured expression. These are the very points in which the style of Massinger differs from that of Fletcher; whose lightest and loosest verses do not overlap each other without sensible distinction between the end of one line and the beginning of the next; who is often too fluent and facile to be choice or forcible in his diction, but seldom if ever prosaic or conventional in phrase or allusion, and by no means habitually given to weave thoughts within thoughts, knit sentence into sentence, and hang whole paragraphs together by the help of loops and brackets. From these indications we might infer that this poem belongs altogether to a period later than the death of Beaumont; though even during his friend’s life it appears that Fletcher was once at least allied with Massinger and two lesser dramatists in the composition of a play, probably the Honest Man’s Fortune, of which the accounts are to be found in Henslowe’s papers.

Hardly eight years of toil and triumph of joyous and glorious life were spared by destiny to the younger poet between the date assigned to the first radiant revelation of his genius in Philaster and the date which marks the end of all his labours. On the 6th of March 1616 Francis Beaumont died—according to Jonson and tradition, “ere he was thirty years of age,” but this we have seen to be inconsistent with the registry of his entrance at Oxford. If we may trust the elegiac evidence of friends, he died of his own genius and fiery overwork of brain; yet from the magnificent and masculine beauty of his portrait one should certainly never have guessed that any strain of spirit or stress of invention could have worn out so long before its time so fair and royal a temple for so bright and affluent a soul. A student of physiognomy will not fail to mark the points of likeness and of difference between the faces of the two friends; both models of noble manhood, handsome and significant in feature and expression alike;—Beaumont’s the statelier and serener of the two, with clear thoughtful eyes, full arched brows, and strong aquiline nose, with a little cleft at the tip; a grave and beautiful mouth, with full and finely curved lips; the form of face a long pure oval, and the imperial head with its “fair large front” and clustering hair set firm and carried high with an aspect at once of quiet command and kingly observation: Fletcher’s a more keen and fervid face, sharper in outline every way, with an air of bright ardour and glad fiery impatience; sanguine and nervous, suiting the complexion and colour of hair; the expression of the eager eyes and lips almost recalling that of a noble hound in act to break the leash it strains at;—two heads as lordly of feature and as expressive of aspect as any gallery of great men can show. That spring of 1616, we may note in passing, was the darkest that ever dawned upon England or the world; for, just forty-eight days afterwards, it witnessed, on the 23rd of April, the removal from earth of the mightiest genius that ever dwelt among men. Scarcely more than a month and a half divided the death-days of Beaumont and of Shakespeare. Some three years earlier by Dyce’s estimate, when about the age of twenty-nine, Beaumont had married Ursula, daughter and co-heiress to Henry Isley of Sundridge in Kent, by whom he left two daughters, one of them posthumous. Fletcher survived his friend just nine years and five months; he died “in the great plague, 1625,” and was buried on the 29th of August in St Saviour’s, Southwark; not, as we might have wished, beside his younger fellow in fame, who but three days after his untimely death had added another deathless memory to the graves of our great men in Westminster Abbey, which he had sung in such noble verse. Dying when just four months short of forty-six, Fletcher had thus, as well as we can now calculate, altogether some fourteen years and six months more of life than the poet who divides with him the imperial inheritance of their common glory.

The perfect union in genius and in friendship which has made one name of the two names of these great twin brothers in song is a thing so admirable and so delightful to remember, that it would seem ungracious and unkindly to claim for either a precedence which we may be sure he would have been eager to disclaim. But if a distinction must be made between the Dioscuri of English poetry, we must admit that Beaumont was the twin of heavenlier birth. Only as Pollux was on one side a demigod of diviner blood than Castor can it be said that on any side Beaumont was a poet of higher and purer genius than Fletcher; but so much must be allowed by all who have eyes and ears to discern in the fabric of their common work a distinction without a difference. Few things are stranger than the avowal of so great and exquisite a critic as Coleridge, that he could trace no faintest line of demarcation between the plays which we owe mainly to Beaumont and the plays which we owe solely to Fletcher. To others this line has always appeared in almost every case unmistakable. Were it as hard and broad as the line which marks off, for example, Shakespeare’s part from Fletcher’s in The Two Noble Kinsmen, the harmony would of course be lost which now informs every work of their common genius, and each play of their writing would be such another piece of magnificent patchwork as that last gigantic heir of Shakespeare’s invention, the posthumous birth of his parting Muse which was suckled at the breast of Fletcher’s as a child of godlike blood might be reared on the milk of a mortal mother—or in this case, we might sometimes be tempted to say, of a she-goat who left in the veins of the heaven-born suckling somewhat too much of his nurse Amalthaea. That question however belongs in any case more properly to the study of Shakespeare than to the present subject in hand. It may suffice here to observe that the contributions of Fletcher to the majestic temple of tragedy left incomplete by Shakespeare show the lesser workman almost equally at his best and at him worst, at his weakest and at his strongest. In the plays which we know by evidence surer than the most trustworthy tradition to be the common work of Beaumont and Fletcher, there is indeed no trace of such incongruous and incompatible admixture as leaves the greatest example of romantic tragedy—for Cymbeline and the Winter’s Tale, though not guiltless of blood, are in their issues no more tragic thanPericles or the Tempest—a unique instance of glorious imperfection, a hybrid of heavenly aid other than heavenly breed, disproportioned and divine. But throughout these noblest of the works inscribed generally with the names of both dramatists we trace on every other page the touch of a surer hand, we hear at every other turn the note of a deeper 594voice, than we can ever recognize in the work of Fletcher alone. Although the beloved friend of Jonson, and in the field of comedy his loving and studious disciple, yet in that tragic field where his freshest bays were gathered Beaumont was the worthiest and the closest follower of Shakespeare. In the external but essential matter of expression by rhythm and metre he approves himself always a student of Shakespeare’s second manner, of the style in which the graver or tragic part of his historical or romantic plays is mostly written; doubtless, the most perfect model that can be studied by any poet who, like Beaumont, is great enough to be in no danger of sinking to the rank of a mere copyist, but while studious of the perfection set before him is yet conscious of his own personal and proper quality of genius, and enters the presence of the master not as a servant but as a son. The general style of his tragic or romantic verse is as simple and severe in its purity of note and regularity of outline as that of Fletcher’s is by comparison lax, effusive, exuberant. The matchless fluency and rapidity with which the elder brother pours forth the stream of his smooth swift verse gave probably the first occasion for that foolish rumour which has not yet fallen duly silent, but still murmurs here and there its suggestion that the main office of Beaumont was to correct and contain within bounds the overflowing invention of his colleague. The poet who while yet a youth had earned by his unaided mastery of hand such a crown as was bestowed by the noble love and the loving “envy” of Ben Jonson was, according to this tradition, a mere precocious pedagogue, fit only to revise and restrain the too liberal effusions of his elder in genius as in years. Now, in every one of the plays common to both, the real difficulty for a critic is not to trace the hand of Beaumont, but to detect the touch of Fletcher. Throughout the better part of every such play, and above all of their two masterpieces, Philaster and The Maid’s Tragedy, it should be clear to the most sluggish or cursory of readers that he has not to do with the author of Valentinian and The Double Marriage. In those admirable tragedies the style is looser, more fluid, more feminine. From the first scene to the last we are swept as it were along the race of a running river, always at full flow of light and ...........


(A. C. S.)

Bibliographical Appendix

The chief collected editions of the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher are: Comedies and Tragedies written by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher Gentlemen, printed by Humphrey Moseley in folio in 1647 as containing plays “never printed before”; Fifty Comedies and Tragedies written, &c.(fol. 1679); Works ... (11 vols. 1843-1846), edited by Alexander Dyce, which superseded earlier editions by L. Theobald, G. Colman and H. Weber, and presented a modernized text; a second two-volume edition by Dyce in 1852; The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher (15 vols. 1905, &c.) edited by Arnold Glover and A.R. Waller in the “Cambridge English Classics” from the text of the 2nd folio, and giving variant readings from all separate issues of the plays previous to that edition; and Works ... (12 vols. 1904, &c.), under the general editorship of A.H. Bullen, the text of which is founded on Dyce but with many variant readings, the last volume containing memoirs and excursuses by the editor.

The foundation of all critical work on Beaumont and Fletcher is to be found in Dyce. Discrimination between the work of the two dramatists and their collaborators has been the object of a series of studies for the establishment of metrical and other tests. Fletcher’s verse is recognizable by the frequency of an extra syllable, often an accented one, at the end of a line, the use of stopped lines, and the frequency of trisyllabic feet. He thus obtained an adaptable instrument enabling him to dispense with prose even in comic scenes. The pioneer work in these matters was done by F.G. Fleay in a paper read before the New Shakspere Society in 1874 on “Metrical Tests as applied to Fletcher, Beaumont and Massinger.” His theories were further developed in the article “Fletcher” in his Biog. Chron. of the Eng. Drama. Further investigations were published by R. Boyle inEnglische Studien (vols. v.-x., Heilbronn, 1882-1887), and in the New Shakspere Society Transactions (1880-1886), by Benno Leonhardt in Anglia(Halle, vols. xix. seq.), and by E.H. Oliphant in Englische Studien (vols. xiv. seq.). Mr Oliphant restores to Beaumont much which other critics had been inclined to deny him. On the sources of the plays see E. Köppel in Münchener Beiträge zur roman. u. eng. Phil. (Erlangen and Leipzig, 1895). Consult further articles by A.H. Bullen and R. Boyle respectively on Fletcher and Massinger in the Dict. of Nat. Biog.; G.C. Macaulay, Francis Beaumont, a Critical Study (1883); and Dr A.W. Ward’s chapter on “Beaumont and Fletcher” in vol. ii. of his Hist. of Eng. Dram. Lit. (new ed. 1899).

A list of the plays attributed to Beaumont and Fletcher, with some details, is added, with the premiss that beyond the main lines of criticism laid down in Mr Swinburne’s article above it is often difficult to dogmatize on authorship. Even in cases where the play was produced long after Beaumont had ceased to write for the stage there can be no certainty that we are not dealing with a piece which is an adaptation of an earlier play by a later hand.

The Joint Works of Beaumont and Fletcher.—The Scornful Lady (acted c. 1609, pr. 1616) is a farcical comedy of domestic life, in which Oliphant finds traces of alteration by a third and perhaps a fourth hand. Philaster or Love Lies a-Bleeding is assigned by Macaulay to Beaumont practically in its entirety, while Fleay attributes only three scenes to Fletcher. It was probably acted c. 1609, and was printed 1620; it was revised (1695) by Elkanah Settle and (1763) by the younger Colman, probably owing its long popularity to the touching character of Bellario. Beaumont’s share also predominated in The Maid’s Tragedy (acted c. 1609, pr. 1619), in A King and No King (acted at court December 26, 1611, and perhaps earlier, pr. 1619), while The Knight of the Burning Pestle (c. 1610, pr. 1613), burlesquing the heroic and romantic play of which Heywood’s Four Prentices is an example, might perhaps be transferred entire to Beaumont’s account. In Cupid’s Revenge (acted at court January 1612, and perhaps at Whitefriars in 1610, pr. 1615), founded on Sidney’s Arcadia, the two dramatists appear to have had a third collaborator in Massinger and perhaps a fourth in Nathaniel Field.

The Coxcomb (acted c. 1610, and by the Children of the Queen’s Revels in 1612, pr. 1647) seems to have undergone later revision by Massinger. Fletcher’s collaboration with other dramatists had begun during his connexion with Beaumont, who apparently ceased to write for the stage two or three years before his death.

Works Assigned to Beaumont’s Sole Authorship.—The Woman Hater (pr. 1607, as “lately acted by the children of Paul’s”) was assigned formerly to Fletcher. The Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray’s Inn was presented at Whitehall on the 26th of February 1612, on the marriage of the Prince and Princess Palatine. Of Four Plays, or Moral Representations, in One (acted 1608, pr. 1647), the Induction, with The Triumph of Honourand The Triumph of Love, both founded on tales from the Decameron, are by Beaumont.

Works Assigned to Fletcher’s Sole Authorship.—The Faithful Shepherdess (pr. c. 1609) was ill received on its original production, but was revived in 1634. That Fletcher was the sole author is practically unquestioned, though Ben Jonson in Drummond’s Conversations is made to assert that “Beaumont and Fletcher ten years since hath written The Faithful Shepherdess.” It was translated into Latin verse by Sir R. Fanshawe in 1658, and Milton’s Comus owes not a little to it. In Four Plays in One, the two last, The Triumph of Death and The Triumph of Time, are Fletcher’s. In the indifferent comedy of The Captain (acted 1612-1613, revived 1626, pr. 1647) there is no definite evidence of any other hand than Fletcher’s, though the collaboration of Beaumont, Massinger and Rowley has been advanced. Other Fletcher p .............................

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

'I Carry Your Heart With Me,' A Discussion of the Poem by E. E. Cummings

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'I Carry Your Heart With Me,' A Discussion of the Poem by E. E. Cummings
Written by: Garry Gamber

The poem, "i carry your heart with me," by E. E. Cummings has been a favorite love poem and a favorite selection at weddings for many years. The poem has gained renewed interest since being featured in the film, "In Her Shoes." It is used with devastating effect in the film’s climactic wedding scene and again to close the movie. Countless fans have been inspired to review the touching words of "i carry your heart with me."

The Poet

E. E. Cummings was born Edward Estlin Cummings in 1894 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He died in North Conway, N.H., in 1962. Cummings earned a B.A. degree from Harvard in 1915 and delivered the Commencement Address that year, titled "The New Art." A year later he earned an M.A. degree for English and Classical Studies, also from Harvard.

Cummings joined an ambulance corps with the American Red Cross in France during World War I. The French imprisoned him on suspicion of disloyalty, a false accusation that put Cummings in prison for three months. He wrote the novel, The Enormous Room, about his experience. Many of Cummings' writings have an anti-war message.

Cummings was a fine artist, playwright and novelist. He studied art in Paris following World War I and he adopted a cubist style in his artwork. He considered himself as much a painter as a poet, spending much of the day painting and much of the night writing. Cummings particularly admired the artwork of Pablo Picasso. Cummings' understanding of presentation can be seen in his use of typography to "paint a picture" with words in some of his poems.

During his lifetime Cummings wrote over 900 poems, two novels, four plays, and had at least a half dozen showings of his artwork.

Contrary to popular opinion Cummings never legalized his name as, "e.e. cummings." His name properly should be capitalized.

The Poem

E. E. Cummings’ poetry style is unique and highly visual. His typographical independence was an experiment in punctuation, spelling and rule-breaking. His style forces a certain rhythm into the poem when read aloud. His language is simple and his poems become fun and playful.

Cummings’ poem, "i carry your heart with me," is about deep, profound love, the kind that can keep the stars apart and that can transcend the soul or the mind. The poem is easily read, easily spoken, and easily understood by people of all ages. The poem could almost be called a sonnet. It has nearly the right number of lines in nearly the right combination. But, typical of a Cummings poem, it goes its own direction and does so with great effect.

The poem makes an excellent love song when set to music. The outstanding guitarist, Michael Hedges, has set "i carry your heart" to music on his "Taproot" album. Hedges himself sings the lead, but the backing vocals are sung by David Crosby and Graham Nash.

More than 168 of Cummings' original poems have been set to music.

Enjoy the words and the sentiments of this famous poem.

i carry your heart with me

i carry your heart with me (i carry it in
my heart) i am never without it (anywhere
i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing, my darling)

i fear
no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet) i want
no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)

********************
Garry Gamber is a public school teacher and entrepreneur. He writes articles about politics, real estate, health and nutrition, and internet dating services. He is the owner of http://www.Anchorage-Homes.com and http://www.TheDatingAdvisor.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Garry_Gamber

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https://www.poetryfoundation.org/resources/learning/articles/detail/90407

Article for Teachers and Students
Memory Is a Cozy Old Blanket
Giving students of all ages a sense of the past
By Opal Palmer Adisa

I have been teaching writing, primarily poetry, to students in the second grade through college for many years, and I have found that the same lesson that I use successfully with college students works just as well with younger students. I call it “Memory Is a Cozy Old Blanket.”

Although I have never done this exercise as the first session of my workshops with students, I have done so in workshops for writers and other adult participants. With junior high and high school students, I play music to set the mood, often jazz. (Quincy Jones’s Body Heat album works very well, as does any type of relaxing music). I believe in jumping right in, and allowing students to take off as soon as I sense that they know what I expect from them. But before I do this, I like to do some lead-in discussion with the class. The amount of time I spend on this varies with the age and skills of the students. I begin by relating a personal anecdote, usually from my childhood:

“When I was about five years old I used to love to crawl under our house that was built on stilts. Often when my mother called me, I would pretend not to hear her, all the while lying quietly and laughing that I could not be seen. From where I lay I would watch the feet of adults moving about, often in search of me. One day, as I lay amused, pretending not to hear my mother calling me, I was suddenly aroused by Spotty, our cat, who was dragging a dead rat by the tail. I was terrified of rats. I tried to stand up. I bumped my head and crawled screaming from under the house. That was the last time I pretended not to hear my mother calling me.”

After relating this personal anecdote, I say, “Think about all the things you remember: your name; birthdate; address; places; things; events. Can you remember all the things you did yesterday? Make a list, starting with the very first thing you did. Begin this way: Yesterday I remember waking at 6 a.m. Then string the memories together. Are you surprised at how much or how little you accomplished? Is there anything you would want to do differently? Try writing about yourself as if you’re writing about someone else.”

This warm-up activity is intended to get students to relax, to write quickly, and to have fun. I often do the activity along with students, on the board. When everyone is done, I usually take ten minutes to have a few students read their lists. This is often met with giggles or “dissing,” but also it gives students ideas. I have a number of variations on this warm-up activity.

Sometimes I do the warm-up by going around the room and having each student state what she or he had for dinner. There are always those who don’t remember, didn’t have dinner, or had something that produces laughter from the group. But this is part of the fun of this exercise.

Then I go on: “How come some days we can’t even remember what we ate for dinner the night before, yet we remember other things that happened long ago, when we were very young? What is the first thing you remember about yourself? Jot it down. How old were you? Do you remember the name of your first friend? Your first birthday party? Your first day at your very first school? Don’t be afraid to remember someone who has died or who has moved away. Learn to honor and trust all your memories. Think of that special person. See yourself with them. Relive some of the happy moments. Write a series often memories, begin each with ‘I remember. ...’ Memory is selective. Because we cannot remember everything, we unconsciously select what we will remember.”

Then I ask: “What do these memories teach you about yourself? What feelings do you associate with the different memories?”

After the students do this warm-up activity, I ask them to write a poem or prose piece or even a play in which they use the voices and actions of other people associated with a specific memory.

If individual students get stuck, I may say, “Sometimes our memories are a shield, protecting us from reliving bad things that happen to us, or sadness we’ve experienced. Sometimes our memories are a green light, leading us to a certain place where we need to go. Sometimes they are a friend that keeps us company when we’re alone. Sometimes they can be an enemy, keeping us from doing what we need to do, stalking us with fear of a past failure.”

The poems below are lightly edited first drafts by students from Bret Harte Junior High in Oakland, California. These students were very quiet throughout the entire writing activity, and they wrote for roughly twenty minutes.

I Remember

I remember
taking my
great grandmother to the store
walking in the store
and buying this and that

I remember
walking to the park,
smelling the air
and looking at the grass
and flowers

I remember
lottery tickets in her hand
with five dollars
she handing the money to me and
me saying, “No, thanks.”

I remember
seeing her in a coffin
not moving at all
I remember she passed away
dead, gone.
—Brian Tu


Three Flights of Stairs

I remember walking up three flights of stairs
just to see if she was there.

I remember talking to her
sharing all my secrets
going to the movies
and playing jump rope

Or just sitting there enjoying each other’s company
playing video games at her house
laughing and talking
eating popcorn and talking about school.

Those times I’ll always remember.
—Danielle Shelton


Uncle Sammy

I remember Uncle Sammy
His laugh, his smile, his way

The way he would cheer us up on a gloomy day

The way he drove his car
Taking me and others near and far

The way he danced at family parties
He danced pretty good for his age

The way he sang with his brothers
In their group, The Quartets

The way he was
I’ll never forget

The way he lay so still
In the hospital, now he is gone

I’ll never forget him

I remember Uncle Sammy
His laugh, his smile, his way
—Erica Gamble


I Can Only Imagine

I search within me to remember how it was
But I just can’t remember
Is it because I was too young?

Parents told me it was dirty
Older sisters and brothers said it was fun
Everyone told me about the delicious fruits
They told me how cheap everything was
They told me it was hard to make money

I don’t remember a thing
I can only imagine
I imagine trees with tons of fruits on them
Kids running around laughing, having fun

Sometimes I wish I remembered those things
Sometimes I wish I knew how Vietnam was really like.
—Quyen Ha

From students at California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland, I got other results. I was teaching a creative writing class in which students—most of whom have strong visual memories—could write either poetry or prose. With these young adults I began by turning out the lights and having them rest their heads on the table as I led them through a memory journey.

“Go back, all the way back to when you were so small you could not even turn over. See yourself. Are you there yet? What do you see?
What d.......

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https://www.poetryfoundation.org/resources/learning/articles/detail/90407?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+poetryfoundation%2Findex+%28P oetryFoundation.org%29

Article for Teachers and Students
Memory Is a Cozy Old Blanket
Giving students of all ages a sense of the past
By Opal Palmer Adisa


I have been teaching writing, primarily poetry, to students in the second grade through college for many years, and I have found that the same lesson that I use successfully with college students works just as well with younger students. I call it “Memory Is a Cozy Old Blanket.”

Although I have never done this exercise as the first session of my workshops with students, I have done so in workshops for writers and other adult participants. With junior high and high school students, I play music to set the mood, often jazz. (Quincy Jones’s Body Heat album works very well, as does any type of relaxing music). I believe in jumping right in, and allowing students to take off as soon as I sense that they know what I expect from them. But before I do this, I like to do some lead-in discussion with the class. The amount of time I spend on this varies with the age and skills of the students. I begin by relating a personal anecdote, usually from my childhood:

“When I was about five years old I used to love to crawl under our house that was built on stilts. Often when my mother called me, I would pretend not to hear her, all the while lying quietly and laughing that I could not be seen. From where I lay I would watch the feet of adults moving about, often in search of me. One day, as I lay amused, pretending not to hear my mother calling me, I was suddenly aroused by Spotty, our cat, who was dragging a dead rat by the tail. I was terrified of rats. I tried to stand up. I bumped my head and crawled screaming from under the house. That was the last time I pretended not to hear my mother calling me.”

After relating this personal anecdote, I say, “Think about all the things you remember: your name; birthdate; address; places; things; events. Can you remember all the things you did yesterday? Make a list, starting with the very first thing you did. Begin this way: Yesterday I remember waking at 6 a.m. Then string the memories together. Are you surprised at how much or how little you accomplished? Is there anything you would want to do differently? Try writing about yourself as if you’re writing about someone else.”

This warm-up activity is intended to get students to relax, to write quickly, and to have fun. I often do the activity along with students, on the board. When everyone is done, I usually take ten minutes to have a few students read their lists. This is often met with giggles or “dissing,” but also it gives students ideas. I have a number of variations on this warm-up activity.

Sometimes I do the warm-up by going around the room and having each student state what she or he had for dinner. There are always those who don’t remember, didn’t have dinner, or had something that produces laughter from the group. But this is part of the fun of this exercise.

Then I go on: “How come some days we can’t even remember what we ate for dinner the night before, yet we remember other things that happened long ago, when we were very young? What is the first thing you remember about yourself? Jot it down. How old were you? Do you remember the name of your first friend? Your first birthday party? Your first day at your very first school? Don’t be afraid to remember someone who has died or who has moved away. Learn to honor and trust all your memories. Think of that special person. See yourself with them. Relive some of the happy moments. Write a series often memories, begin each with ‘I remember. ...’ Memory is selective. Because we cannot remember everything, we unconsciously select what we will remember.”

Then I ask: “What do these memories teach you about yourself? What feelings do you associate with the different memories?”

After the students do this warm-up activity, I ask them to write a poem or prose piece or even a play in which they use the voices and actions of other people associated with a specific memory.

If individual students get stuck, I may say, “Sometimes our memories are a shield, protecting us from reliving bad things that happen to us, or sadness we’ve experienced. Sometimes our memories are a green light, leading us to a certain place where we need to go. Sometimes they are a friend that keeps us company when we’re alone. Sometimes they can be an enemy, keeping us from doing what we need to do, stalking us with fear of a past failure.”

The poems below are lightly edited first drafts by students from Bret Harte Junior High in Oakland, California. These students were very quiet throughout the entire writing activity, and they wrote for roughly twenty minutes.

I Remember

I remember
taking my
great grandmother to the store
walking in the store
and buying this and that

I remember
walking to the park,
smelling the air
and looking at the grass
and flowers

I remember
lottery tickets in her hand
with five dollars
she handing the money to me and
me saying, “No, thanks.”

I remember
seeing her in a coffin
not moving at all
I remember she passed away
dead, gone.
—Brian Tu


Three Flights of Stairs

I remember walking up three flights of stairs
just to see if she was there.

I remember talking to her
sharing all my secrets
going to the movies
and playing jump rope

Or just sitting there enjoying each other’s company
playing video games at her house
laughing and talking
eating popcorn and talking about school.

Those times I’ll always remember.
—Danielle Shelton


Uncle Sammy

I remember Uncle Sammy
His laugh, his smile, his way

The way he would cheer us up on a gloomy day

The way he drove his car
Taking me and others near and far

The way he danced at family parties
He danced pretty good for his age

The way he sang with his brothers
In their group, The Quartets

The way he was
I’ll never forget

The way he lay so still
In the hospital, now he is gone

I’ll never forget him

I remember Uncle Sammy
His laugh, his smile, his way
—Erica Gamble


I Can Only Imagine

I search within me to remember how it was
But I just can’t remember
Is it because I was too young?

Parents told me it was dirty
Older sisters and brothers said it was fun
Everyone told me about the delicious fruits
They told me how cheap everything was
They told me it was hard to make money

I don’t remember a thing
I can only imagine
I imagine trees with tons of fruits on them
Kids running around laughing, having fun

Sometimes I wish I remembered those things
Sometimes I wish I knew how Vietnam was really like.
—Quyen Ha

From students at California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland, I got other results. I was teaching a creative writing class in which students—most of whom have strong visual memories—could write either poetry or prose. With these young adults I began by turning out the lights and having them rest their heads on the table as I led them through a memory journey.

“Go back, all the way back to when you were so small you could not even turn over. See yourself. Are you there yet? What do you see? What do you notice about yourself? Now what do you remember? Your first memory of yourself. Where are you? Is anyone with you? How do you feel? Find that time, that memory when you were hurt or felt afraid. Don’t be afraid, it can’t hurt you anymore. What is important about that memory? Who is hurting you? Why? Go to another memory when you were still a child, maybe six or so. What do you see? Are you happy? What are you doing?”

On and on I led students up to their young-adult selves. All this took about fifteen minutes, as some students had difficulty settling down at first. After I led them through the memory journey, I told them to select any memory and write, and avoid using the words “I remember.” Here are some of their pieces:

I Remember

My fifth grade prize shoes. Red imitation snakeskin with gold infinity
signs for buckles. I’d walk onto Bagby’s playground with these on, no
one would beat me. Played better tetherball on those days. Stephanie
Patterson called them the “Wizard of Oz” shoes. Other people just
called them “loud.”
But it wasn’t just the shoes. Mostly, I wore them with my polyester
lime-green dress. And yellow stretch shorts underneath. Got to. Play
double dodgeball, you got to be prepared. Guys look to nail all the girls,
especially in dresses, just to make them fall so they can peep under their
underwear or hear them gasp as they bounce on their backsides. The
red shoes were a perfect target too. On the days I’d wear that green
dress, with a little flared skirt, I remember thinking it was the sharpest
outfit. I know the concept of clashing colors never crossed my head in
the morning. This was power dressing.
Only color close to that green dress in nature is the insides of can-
taloupe or those hard, bright green Granny Smith apples. Used to see
them when I went with my mom to the old vegetable and fruit stand
five blocks from school. It was a family operation, a covered wooden
stand with lots of little areas where they arranged the fruit. If Mom was
shopping for a barbeque or picnic or dinner, we’d go to Cosentino’s. I
didn’t like grocery shopping but I’d go to look at the colors of the fruit
and packing crates. And for the smell. Everything smelled warmer,
sweeter as the day went on, mixed with dust stirred up from the rutted
dirt area where cars parked every whichway. My treat was to strip the
corn, or stroke the smooth eggplants in the next bin. Thumping the
melons was allowed so I’d check the watermelons and cantaloupes. The
cantaloupes looked just like tetherballs.
My tetherball partner, Grant, didn’t care about playing with a girl
just as long as we would win our challenges. He was my best playground
buddy. We’d play all kinds of games as a team but at tetherball, there
was no question: Grant was bad just by himself. Together we were
monsters. Even I was scared of his hits. He was lanky, bony, had freck-
les and a gap betw...........

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https://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/articles/detail/90148


Essay
Fever Pitch
On the function of authority in poetry and politics.
By Kathleen Rooney
Photo Courtesy of ABC via Flickr

In a speech at Harvard University in 1956, John F. Kennedy, then a senator, said, “If more politicians knew poetry, and more poets knew politics, I am convinced the world would be a little better place in which to live.”

The lovely, innocuous statement employs some classic Kennedy chiasmus. It also invites us to consider what exactly poetry and politics have to offer each other. Practically all politicians, even those who style themselves as plainspoken and folksy, have to walk a tricky line between being articulate and appearing authentic. The public expects both, but the two are often perceived as contradictory. (This distinction also squares with Mario Cuomo’s famous dictum, “You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.”) Quoting poetry allows politicians to be eloquent without seeming pretentious because the beautiful words are not theirs; they are the poets’.

It might surprise some, but Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has made use of poetry on the campaign trail. At rallies in Florida and Illinois, he has delivered readings of the poem/lyric “The Snake,” by the poet, singer, playwright, and civil rights activist Oscar Brown Jr. Best known from soul singer Al Wilson’s 1968 recording, “The Snake” tells the story of a generous old woman who takes in a sick snake out of the goodness of her heart only to have the animal turn around and bite her. Based on one of Aesop’s fables, this narrative—like most fables—has a great deal of potential resonance with a variety of scenarios. Predictably, given his long and vocal campaign history of bigotry and xenophobia, Trump frames the story as a warning: the United States should not take in immigrants or refugees lest its citizens end up snakebitten. He recited the lyrics, the Chicago Tribune reported in March, “just after the part of his campaign speech where he alluded to the threat of Islam and his thoughts on terrorism. The song, he said, prepping his audience, ‘represents terrorism.’”

Brown died in 2005, but Trump’s performance of the poem has been a source of dismay to Brown’s family. They have asked the candidate to stop. “We don't want him using these lyrics,” Brown’s daughter Maggie Brown, also a distinguished singer, told the Chicago Tribune. “If Dad were alive, he would've ripped [Trump] with a great poem in rebuttal. Not only a poem and a song, but an essay and everything else.” Others have suggested that Trump’s lawyers, meanwhile, could claim these readings fall under fair use.

The enlistment of an artist’s work by politicians whose views run counter to the artist’s is nothing new and extends well beyond the realm of literature. Musicians frequently ask candidates to cease playing their music at political rallies. In Ronald Reagan’s 1984 reelection campaign, his attempted use of Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” offers perhaps the most famous example. (The singer said no and began speaking out against the president.) The song’s upbeat tempo and chorus sound almost jingoistic, but the lyrics present a scathing takedown of the military industrial complex, America’s treatment of veterans, and the lack of opportunities in the narrator’s hometown.

At other times, musicians object to the political application of their music not because a candidate’s views are at odds with their own but because they are simply not comfortable with the loss of control over their creation. In 2008, Barack Obama’s presidential campaign used the Sam & Dave hit “Hold On! I’m Comin’” to fire up supporters. Sam Moore wrote Obama a letter that was complimentary to his presidential hopes but requested that he please stop using the song.

When the person whose work is being borrowed is a long-dead poet, however, who has the standing to object? Actor Scott Baio recently adapted a line from Langston Hughes’s poem “Let America be America Again” to conclude his speech at the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland. Baio evinced no awareness of the phrase’s origin, but as Rebecca Traister observed in New York Magazine:

Ironically, Baio and Hughes were probably meditating on a similar version of America, one in which white male power was assumed, in which Baio could assure himself that the promise of freedom and opportunity was on offer to all, but in which many other Americans, including Hughes, understood America was not America to them.

Similarly, during a brief period in 2011, the staff of Republican Senator Rick Santorum, then a presidential candidate, adopted as his campaign slogan “Fighting to Make America America Again.” Santorum, who has stated on the record that homosexuality is a sin equivalent to incest, backpedaled once he learned that this line was written by an African American poet who was most likely gay.

Trump’s use of “The Snake” might be odious, but his interpretation of the lyric and the underlying fable are sound—the flexibility and capaciousness of Brown’s words and lines mean that they support a huge variety of interpretations. Trump doesn’t so much misinterpret “The Snake” as insist on a reading of it that pins it to specific circumstances, which undermines its value as a poem. Poems are often built to mean many things at once. When a poem is used expediently in political speech, it can foreclose other interpretations. When Trump tells us that Brown’s poem “represents terrorism,” he’s shutting the poem down, reducing it to purely cautionary, single-use rhetoric.

Authority in literature doesn’t typically operate the way it works elsewhere. The authority that readers give writers is contingent; readers can always abandon a book or poem and find something else to read, or they can quit reading altogether.

The story in politics is different. As much as we are told that individual votes matter, ultimately, if Trump wins the presidency, the desire of those who voted for another candidate to grant or not grant authority to him is immaterial. In democracy, authority is granted on a majority-rules basis. It doesn’t matter if, as an individual voter, I reject a senator who accepts money from the NRA and denies equal rights to LGBTQ people, and it doesn't matter if I reject his beliefs—he is still a member of the Senate that decides the laws that rule my life. I cannot stop reading the nightmare story of the current Congress or of the frustration and anger that I and so many people feel in the wake of the massacre at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando.

Because the function of authority in literature cuts both ways, Oscar Brown Jr. and Langston Hughes can’t prevent politicians such as Trump and Santorum and their followers from reading their works in a way that fits their ideology, even if that ideology is anathema to their beliefs as authors. Writers or artists don’t decide whom they give authority to either—once a poem or book is written, people can interpret it however they like.

This exemplifies the awesome and awful double-edged sword of authority in art, particularly political art: it has to admit multiple interpretations. No one—including the author—possesses the unimpeachable authority to insist on a particular definition of a poem or piece.

Not all politicians want to straitjacket literature. Former Democratic presidential candidate Martin O’Malley evinced a well-documented love for Irish poetry on the campaign trail and kept a copy of John O’Donohue’s “A Blessing for Leaders” under the glass on his desk at the governor’s office in Annapolis. He seemed to recognize poetry as an effective means of inspiring and energizing not only his audience but also himself. Or as O’Donohue’s poem says, “When the way is flat and dull in times of grey endurance, / May your imagination continue to evoke horizons.”

Sometimes, a politician can pull a work free of its original context and intent in a way that expands its beauty and reach in keeping with O’Donohue’s idea about imagination. After the Challenger space shuttle disaster in 1986, President Reagan addressed the nation. His speechwriter Peggy Noonan borrowed lines from the poem “High Flight,” written by John Gillespie Magee, an American airman who died at the age of 19 while training during World War II.

“We will never forget them,” Reagan said, “nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and ‘slipped the surly bonds of earth’ to ‘touch the face of God.’” Here, Reagan arguably situates Magee’s words in a nobler and more enduring context than they ever would have enjoyed otherwise.

Politicians have this freedom to inspiringly or expediently apply the words of poets and musicians to amplify their ideological messages because rhetoric, at least per Aristotle’s classically defined three pillars of persuasion, operates differently there.

Logos—a statement’s content or argumentation—in art behaves more malleably than the logos of a speech or an actual argument. A song, painting, film, or poem’s logos is often elastic to such an extent that it can be co-opted; its ethos—the chara ................



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https://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/articles/detail/90526

Donald Revell: "Death"
A poem about death is actually a celebration of life.
By Craig Morgan Teicher

Donald Revell has mastered a poetic genre few poets even attempt: the happy poem. That’s not to say that his poetry doesn’t grapple with darkness—it does, and deeply. This poem is called “Death,” after all, and Revell tries as hard as he can in this small space to meet mortality head-on. One of Revell’s possible goals is to engender a sense of awe: in his poems, life is fundamentally amazing, even though—even because—it has an ending. Poets write poems for many reasons, chief among them to express feelings, to articulate the vagaries and fine points of an emotional state. Poets also write to create emotional states in readers, and this Revell poem invites readers to accept death. Without ever forgetting the mortal stakes of every moment, Revell manages to sing joyfully, no matter his subject. He knows deeply what the words have always been telling him: that all our terrors, such as “space and time,” are “inventions / Of sorrowing men”; in this poem, he chooses not to be one.

As a celebratory poet, Revell is in good company: Shakespeare, Donne, Blake, Herbert, Dickinson, and Whitman come to mind as voices playing in the background of “Death.” All these poets revel—a pun on Revell’s name that he seems to have taken seriously—in details and in the capacity of the imagination to elevate them toward a kind of holiness. Of course, many of these poets also had a particular kind of holiness in mind, as does Revell; when he (or the others) uses the word soul, he means it in the Christian sense: the immortal soul that will live eternally in heaven. Revell is one of the leading Christian poets now at work, though—like Whitman and Dickinson—in his work, he also seeks heaven on Earth. In poetry at least, the “soul is my home.” Revell sees heaven everywhere. He has crafted a poetry that lets him “live outwardly,” embrace the unfolding, enjoy even its darkest surprises, and let go of what is “left behind. …”

Finally, Revell is also an experimental poet—this poem’s quick jump cuts and seeming non sequiturs are a big part of what make it so satisfying—and so meaningful. The idea of death is perhaps too confusing and terrifying to be described in a poem using plain logic, direct cause and effect, and straightforward narration. They are perhaps less than helpful when grappling with something as seemingly unreasonable as death. Revell has used these techniques for many years, even before his later poetry’s religious focus. The truth of the language is ever unfolding, is itself unfolding. It is “whirligig”—meaning “constantly changing”—one of the poem’s most fitting words and an unlikely bit of linguistic archeology.

How does a celebratory, religious, experimental poet describe and prepare for death? With this cheerful, chatty, transcendent poem. Of all the death-poems I know, this is the least fearful, yet it appropriately accords death its massive power.

The poem’s overall rhetorical structure is that of a conversation. The speaker is talking to his readers, occasionally quoting from another conversation (“‘Death,’ I said …”) with the personified figure of death itself. Revell alternates between the longer stanzas, which meditate in florid language about what Death did and how Death is, and the couplets (and one five-line stanza) addressed to Death. It’s a kind of call and response but a sideways one: Revell interrogates the nature of life and mortality from a bird’s-eye view: “For what are days but the furnace of an eye?”; “For what are space and time. …”

Revell ribs his old friend Death, almost flirts with him, teasing with seemingly silly statements—“‘Death,’ I said, ‘if your eyes were green / I would eat them,’” and “‘I know someone, a woman, / Who sank her teeth into the moon’”—and rhetorical questions: “How is it I remember everything / That never happened and almost nothing that did? / Was I ever born?” But though these lines may at first seem silly, the stakes here are as high as they can be. All of this figurative language about eating eyes and the moon is a fun way of calling for something such as carpe diem, exuberance, living life fully. Revell continues in this leaping, metaphorical manner, nodding, perhaps, to Blake’s “The Tyger” (“In what distant deeps or skies. / Burnt the fire of thine eyes?”) and Ginsberg’s “Sunflower Sutra,” which itself alludes to Blake. Revell melds Blake’s awe and terror (what is the Tyger but looming death) with Ginsberg’s exuberance and ends with a celebratory turn that is all his own:

For what are days but the furnace of an eye?
If I could strip a sunflower bare to its bare soul,
I would rebuild it:
Green inside of green, ringed round by green.
There’d be nothing but new flowers anymore.
Absolute Christmas.

This stanza is extraordinary for its lucidity and simple but deeply penetrating archetypal imagery, and it shows how Revell operates at his best. We can’t read his description of the “days” literally, but it may conjure the bright afterimages of the world projected on our eyelids when we close our eyes—a gorgeous and strange vision like that but with the eyes open. This is a prescriptive poem, a poem about how to look. Revell wants us to see the world as magical and strange and charged in that way: a kind of visual miracle, the familiar made strange.

Revell then breaks down one of these everyday visions to make it miraculous and strange. Lots of poets have seized on sunflowers as powerful emblems (Ginsberg calls the sunflower “a sweet natural eye to the new hip moon”) and Revell’s sunflower is an ecstasy atomized, its basic elements laid out to reveal “its bare soul,” which, rebuilt, is composed of “Green inside of green, ringed round by green.” This “green” is an old archetype, nature’s generative power, the same green that makes someone with a green thumb a great gardener. The redundancy of the line—three greens in one sentence—suggests nature’s lush, irreducible creativity—living things grow, and when they die, new ones grow, leaving “nothing but new flowers anymore.” And then there is that lovely, surprising flourish, a nod to God: “Absolute Christmas”—it’s Christianity’s annual celebration of birth, death, and rebirth that is made general, accessible, almost secular. Revell doesn’t seem to want to alienate non-Christians here; instead, we readers can find our own divinity in nature, our own place in the cycles of life and death.

This is what I come to poetry for, what, I believe, we all seek in poems: language that can show us a life unbound by time. It’s hard won, demanding absolute faith in the intelligence of the words themselves. Hence Revell’s huge associative leaps, his trust in simple, indelible symbols—green for youth, the moon for distance, hope, and desire—and all the fun the poems are having as they “remember everything / That never happened. …”

For Revell, death is personal, right-sized; it accompanies each of us like a shadow, a version of one’s self, growing “beside me, always taller. …” Though shadows often have darker valences, this one is of the friendly, rather than the corner-lurking, sort, a kind of Peter Pan shadow, egging on the one who casts it or beckoning him to keep up, depending on the angle of the sun or perhaps how close he is to death.

It requires a special poetic sensibility not to take the typical grim aspects of death. The speaker of this poem is exaggerating: he has been confused plenty, like everyone, but not, now, about death “whose only story / Is the end of the story, right from the start. …” Perhaps death is the confused one here because of how surprising it is that this particular voice is so accepting, so open-hearted about what death usually means. Death is not expecting a friend but finds one in this poem.

Of course, as Revell says in the poem’s most extraordinary and visionary stanza, “boys and girls murdered / In their first beauty” are “now with children of their own.” It’s what we want for them, what they deserve, and we invented language or were beckoned to discover it forever ago and again every day of every life, to hold that wish for us, to uphold it, to keep it safe from the withholding of our fear. Revell finds real consolation in envisioning these injustices righted in the afterlife, which is a religious word for the lifeblood of poetry: the imagination, the realm where wishes can be fulfilled, where pain can be healed, where death can be transcended. Yes, the poem presents a vision of Christian heaven: “the explosion of happy souls / Into the greeny, frozen Christmas Eve air: / Another good Christmas, a white choir,” but it’s one we can all relate to.

At its close, the poem returns to the boy and his shadow “Beside each other still. …” When Revell reaches out to his lost mother, saying “I miss you,” he is speaking to her in the afterlife of the poem, in the imagination, where we his “Dear reader[s]” also reside at this very moment, beside his mother, with his shadow. The poem’s capacity to converse with the dead is the same as its capacity to reach out and converse with us, Revell’s imaginary readers, who, like the “you” Whitman addresses when he says “what I assume you shall assume” at the opening of “Song of Myself,” are ever present in the room of the poem, whether alive, dead, known, unknown, whether or not we ever read Revell’s words.

The poem proposes a mighty act of communion, a gathering together of readers and writers, speakers and listeners, living and dead. This is a poem of deep empathy, of comforting and keeping company. Revell wants us to feel less alone and less afraid to die, whatever we believe. Revell’s poem can help us: so that when we think of death, we can remember we are blessed with life.

Originally Published: August 24th, 2016

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/resources/learning/articles/detail/90421

Article for Teachers and Students
Hidden Beauty, Willful Craziness
Teaching poems by Jayne Cortez and Lucille Clifton
By Mark Statman




Under the Edge of February

Under the edge of February
in hawk of a throat
hidden by ravines of sweet oil
by temples of switch blades
beautiful in its sound of fertility
beautiful in its turban of funeral crepe
beautiful in its camouflage of grief
in its solitude of bruises
in its arson of alert
Who will enter its beautiful calligraphy of blood

Its beautiful mask of fish net
mask of hubcap mask of ice picks mask
of watermelon rinds mask of umbilical cords
changing into a mask of rubber bands
Who will enter this beautiful beautiful mask of
punctured bladders moving with a mask of chapsticks

Compound of Hearts Compound of Hearts

Where is the lucky number for this shy love
this top heavy beauty bathed with charcoal water
self conscious against a mosaic of broken bottles
broken locks broken pipes broken
bloods of broken spirits broken through like
broken promises

Landlords Junkies Thieves
enthroning themselves in you
they burn up couches they burn down houses
and infuse themselves against memory
every thought
a pavement of old belts
every performance
a ceremonial pick up
how many more orphans how many neglected shrines
how many more stolen feet stolen guns
stolen watch bands of death
in you how many times

Harlem

hidden by ravines of sweet oil
by temples of switch blades
beautiful in your sound of fertility
beautiful in your turban of funeral crepe
beautiful in your camouflage of grief
in your solitude of bruises in
your arson of alert
beautiful

Whenever I’ve taught this poem by Jayne Cortez (usually with ten-to fourteen-year-olds), I’ve always been surprised by how willing the students are to tackle the poem’s complexities: its harsh descriptions of urban life, its anger, and its notion—serious and ironic—of what, in al this chaos, is beautiful. Cortez’s ideas about beauty often frame out conversations. Most students are not used to thinking about beauty as something that isn’t obvious, something that can be hidden. They’re not used to taking images or ideas that are ostensibly “ugly” and thinking of them as beautiful in another context.

To get students thinking in this direction, I ask them to think about what “beauty” means, what they mean when they call something “beautiful.” Their initial responses are often conventional: from natures—flowers, a meadow, sun, stars, moon; from the urban—gleaming skyscrapers, glittering night streets, well-dressed people strolling; from people—those nice clothes again, muscular men, slim women, implications of good times.

A natural response to what Cortez describes is to look away. But Cortez demands the opposite: she wants us to look and to look hard. So where in the poem, I’ll ask the students, given what they’ve described as beautiful, is the beauty? The poem is full of sadness and grief (“broken / bloods of broken spirits broken through like / broken promises”), violence (“they burn up couches they burn down houses”), garbage (“mask of hubcaps mask of ice picks mask / of watermelon rinds mask of umbilical cords”). It's a poem of anger. And yet, Cortez insistently speaks about the beauty. How? Why?

As the students think about the poem and my questions, I’ll begin to discuss other possible conceptions of beauty, where else we can see it and of the possibility of beauty growing out of what we might also think of as “ugliness.” For example, they've all seen rainbow oil sheen in puddles on the street. Many know about the spectacular effects air pollution has on sunsets. I'll talk about London's mysterious, evocative fog of previous decades and its ordinary origins in coal smoke. I’ll mention Monet’s paintings of the Seine, where the magnificent colorations he depicts are actually a reflection of the river’s pollution, as well as the excitement of the billowing smoke in his railroad station paintings. I’ll talk about spiders spinning their gorgeous webs as a way to trap and kill. I’ll even bring up ambergris, which I’ll describe as "whale vomit," and how it is used in making fine perfumes. We’ll come up with examples of destructive beauty: hurricanes, tornadoes, volcanoes. Great structures like pyramids and sphinxes built by slaves. We’ll talk about perspective, how some people find things beautiful and others can’t see them, how this happens with art, poetry, clothes, music, weather. Finally we’ll return to “Under the Edge of February.” “What's beautiful here?” I’ll ask again.

At this point, we’re able to read new things in the Cortez poem. We can talk about the action in the poem, the characters in it, the setting. I’ve taught this poem in different places, but when I teach it in New York City schools, the students will always relate it to their own neighborhoods. They think about their streets, the people they know, their own lives. We talk not just about what they see, but what they know about what they see. The students’ comments become both intensely observant and personal. They often remark on the fact that where they live is home: whatever the limitations, their neighborhoods are important to them. These are places where my students have friends, where they’ve played and been happy. They’ll talk about the life of where they live: the sounds and smells, people walking on the streets and hanging out in groups talking, the fact of people’s homes being here, that there are people eating, sleeping, dreaming.

My students also respond to the “negatives” of Cortez's poem, particularly the problems of outsiders misreading and misunderstanding the world they know. We’ll discuss the problems of public perception arising from skewed media depictions: that newspapers, television, and movies show one side of where they live (the crime and the violence, the poverty), and not the other side (schools, stores, churches, homes, the community). In other words, the not-so-obvious, the hidden in Cortez’s “beautiful.” When we’ve reached this point in the discussion, we’re also at the starting point for their writing: I ask the students to respond to Cortez’s poem by writing their own poems to, of, for, and about beauty, and where they find it.

Poem

Blue is cool
I found it in the sky
in the ocean, on pottery

Red is hot
I found it in the sun
the rainbow
on flowers, the outside of a building
on clothes

White is delicate
I found it in the clouds
in the classroom
in my house
on flowers
inside and outside buildings
on dogs
—Regina Smith, seventh grade


Dreamer

Once I had a dream
I could see all the places of the world
In my mind I could see
Japan, Russia, Germany
All the people wanted to sleep
and sleep on
Their sleep
seemed very beautiful to them
All I could see everywhere
was people with eyes
closed
—Tara Thomas, eighth grade


It’s winter in the morning
It’s snowing
It’s snowing white big flakes
Cars are covered with snow
Too many accidents
People are falling down
Breaking legs
Cars lose control of their breaks
There is no service
Cars hitting people
People bleeding through everywhere
Snow is getting red
Because of the bleeding
Of the person who had the big accident
Too many people are dying
This weather’s got to change
This weather is cold below
—Francisco Rodriguez, sixth grade


Night

It was night
and it was 9:00
and I’m flying in the sky
and I can see the North Star
Some people are watching “The Jeffersons”
Some people are watching “Jeopardy”
There are people doing exercise
There is a person riding a bike in the street
I went to sit on a tree branch
It broke
I fell on a van
and hurt my back

and then I flew
I saw the Statue of Liberty
It is so beautiful
I saw the ocean
The world is so beautiful
I saw Broadway
The lights look wonderful
I can see people
The people are doing their show
—Charisse Robinson, fifth grade


Beauty

The feeling of beauty
It’s like
falling in
Love
Diamonds
Jewelry
It is such a good feeling
You feel like getting
Married
In a
White clean
Crystal
Dress
Your hair
long and
beautiful
The water in the Dominican
Republic
Crystal clean
The streets clean
No, no dirt, dust
mud
but beauty like
Romeo and Juliet
Adam and Eve
Emotions of a
Dream
Love
Fantasy
It feels so real
having Beauty
But dream love fantasy
is all it is in this
Dirty World
—Jeanette Cortijo, eighth grade


It is black but the white
freckles of the stars stand out
I am blind but I can still
see the shining light of the
moon standing out in the
night
I am a person but
to the creatures that lurk
beyond I am prey
I look and listen
but there is nothing
nothing to see or hear
the sounds of
a furious river
the shadows of
a soundless bird
shows in the moon light
I think of what humans
are
doing to the silent and
peaceful land
the animals, not mean but
nice
in a strange way
I was glad that we hadn’t
destroyed it all
Yet I had to go back
this was not my home
my home was in the smog of
technology
—Jason Ozner, sixth grade


What Is Beauty

A cold January night
What happens at night
All the killing
All the shots in the wall
All the drugs in the world
Is this beauty?
Beauty.
I’ll tell you
about Beauty
What is good
Beauty is real
That’s Beauty
What about living,
is that Beauty?
I know it is for me
All the beauty in the world
is what I am living for
I know that’s what I am
living for
—Shantel Bumpurs, fifth grade


Happiest

I was walking down
the street
I heard a noise and
I was looking
for it and I could
not see it
and thought it was
a cat
but when I saw
that it was
not a cat I saw
something big
it was bigger
than a cat and then
I thought it was a
dog but it
was not a dog
and when I saw it
was a poor man I
gave the person $20
because I was not
happy that
he lived in the
street so I
was going to take
him to a shelter
and he was hidden
because he was
afraid and when
I saw his face
he did look like
good people but
he looked like
a child and the
child was hidden
the man went to the
shelter and he
had a good life
and house
—Jose Martinez, fifth grade


If one way to read Jayne Cortez’s poem is to look for not-so-obvious beauty, Lucille Clifton’s poem “roots” is about the announcement of beauty, not necessarily as something we observe, but as something we assume: our beauty is in our character, it is active, about one’s self, and the identification of that self with a kind of spirituality that reflects hope and possibility about the way life ought to be. This is a poem I often teach after having taught “Under the Edge of February.” I like how they stand with and against each other: Cortez’s explosive barrage of images, her intense language, followed by Clifton’s language much more simple and direct, yet no less complex in its drive to think about the lives we lead.

roots

call it our craziness even,
call it anything.
it is the life thing in us
that will not let us die.
even in death’s hand
we fold the fingers up
and call them greens and
grow on them,
we hum them and make music.
call it our wildness then,
we are lost from the field
of flowers, we become
a field of flowers.
call it our craziness
our wildness
call it our roots,
it is the light in us
it is the light of us
it is the light, call it
whatever you have to,
call it anything.

My students are often initially quite puzzled by the poem—what is she talking about? What does she mean by “the light,” what does she mean about death, what is this thing of becoming the field? Although the Cortez poem is much longer and much more detailed, the immediacy of the details, coupled with forcefulness of the long lines and the repetition, helps the students to enter the world of the poem. But Lucille Clifton’s seeming simplicity confuses them.

To help them, I’ll ask t.....................

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More at link...-Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/guides/detail/90277


September 2016 Discussion Guide

Do I Wake or Sleep?
Betwixt and Between in the September 2016 Poetry


The September 2016 issue of Poetry offers two poems by Max Ritvo, who passed away in August at the age of 25. Both catch their protagonists wandering between worlds—the worlds of sleep and waking, youth and age, life and death—and, at moments, existing in multiple worlds at once. “The Big Loser” begins:

The guardian angel sits in the tree
above the black lip of street
the man walks down.
He calls the man Cargo.

The angel sees a pinewood box in place of the man,
and the street he walks is a boat,
the hull like a coal crater.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The angels call these overlays dreams,
and believe they crop up because angels
can’t sleep but want to — 

space falls apart when you have unlimited time.

This scene is itself a dreamy overlay, one whose images ceaselessly shift: the man turns into cargo, then box; the street turns into a boat whose hull recalls yet something else—a crater (with a pun, perhaps, on “crate”). The first stanza operates vertiginously, with the angel propped in a tree “above” the street the man walks “down”—a street compared to a “lip,” as though the world is a mouth capable of swallowing him down. The images are as dark as this nighttime scene: “cargo” suggests the man is inanimate, and en route to some final destination; “pine wood” tells us this box is a coffin; and the crater-like hull hints at a deadly collision.

The man’s place in the world seems least stable of all: is he the box, or the cargo that the box holds? Wooden or human? Living or dead? The man’s in-between state recalls that of the angel—who is neither asleep nor awake—and, later, takes on a starker meaning:

The man reaches the end of the street. He’s a sick man
and he starts to ponder death
as he often does these days:

All of death is right here
— the gods, the dark, a moon.
Where was I expecting death
to take me if everywhere it is
is on earth?

In more ways than one, the man is nearing the end of the street. His question brings to mind a logical knot: if all we can imagine of death is what we already know from earthly existence—the moon, the dark—then we can conceive of death only as a continuation of life. Perhaps that’s why the poem has shifted into past tense from present: “Where was I expecting death / to take me,” he asks, as though death has already taken him somewhere—as though he has already died, and yet, still alive, walks down the street, in an “overlay” of dying and living.

Such overlays continue throughout the poem. At the end of life, Ritvo writes, one is like

the child whose parents
step out for a drive — 

everyone else out on a trip,
but the child remains in the familiar bed,
feeling old lumps like new
in the mattress — the lights off — 

not sleeping, for who can sleep
with the promise of a world beyond the door?

What, exactly, is the “world beyond the door”? For the dying person, it could be the world of the living, from which he is increasingly excluded. Or it could be the world of the dead, which he will soon join. As earlier in the poem, those worlds blur together. Here, both qualify as “promising,” such that the dying man, like the excited child—and like the insomniac angel—cannot sleep, cannot truly enter death. Instead, he remains in between worlds, tantalized by both: in bed but alert, near but not yet at the end of the street.

Like “The Big Loser,” Ritvo’s other poem, “Dawn of Man,” lingers in the either-or and neither-nor:

After the cocoon I was in a human body
instead of a butterfly’s. All along my back

there was great pain — I groped to my feet
where I felt wings behind me, trying

to tilt me back. They succeeded in doing so
after a day of exertion. I called that time,

overwhelmed with the ghosts of my wings, sleep.

Is this speaker human or butterfly, drowsing or awake? His “sleep”—like the non-sleep of the angel—involves a chaotic combination of images, an unlikely mix of animal and personal. The wings tilt him back metaphorically as well as literally, returning him to another identity and another time.

Later, despite those ghost-wings, he starts making a complex kind of progress:

My mouth produced language

which I attempted to spin over myself
and rip through happier and healthier.

Language becomes his new, self-generated cocoon—a source of development and renewal, a tool that permits him to gestate and then birth himself. Spinning and re-spinning the cocoon, ripping through it again and again, he lurks forever on the border, dwelling in a vibrant and violent puberty—“like a boy,” the poem concludes, “who takes a razor from a high cabinet / puffs out his cheeks and strips them bloody.”

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetrysoup.com/article/robert_herrick_a_true_cavalier-1633


Robert Herrick: A True Cavalier

Written by: William J. Long

Robert Herrick (1591-1674). Herrick is the true Cavalier, happy, devil-may-care in disposition, but by some freak of fate a clergyman of Dean Prior, in South Devon, a county made famous by him and Blackmore. Here, in a country parish, he lived discontentedly, longing for the joys of London and the Mermaid Tavern, his bachelor establishment consisting of an old housekeeper, a cat, a dog, a goose, a tame lamb, one hen,--for which he thanked God in poetry because she laid an egg every day,--and a pet pig that drank beer with Herrick out of a tankard. With admirable good nature, Herrick made the best of these uncongenial surroundings. He watched with sympathy the country life about him and caught its spirit in many lyrics, a few of which, like "Corinna's Maying," "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may," and "To Daffodils," are among the best known in our language. His poems cover a wide range, from trivial love songs, pagan in spirit, to hymns of deep religious feeling. Only the best of his poems should be read; and these are remarkable for their exquisite sentiment and their graceful, melodious expression. The rest, since they reflect something of the coarseness of his audience, may be passed over in silence.

Late in life Herrick published his one book, Hesperides and Noble Numbers (1648). The latter half contains his religious poems, and one has only to read there the remarkable "Litany" to see how the religious terror that finds expression in Bunyan's Grace Abounding could master even the most careless of Cavalier singers.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/detail/90278

Prose from Poetry Magazine
From “You Must Change Your Life: The Story of Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin”
By Rachel Corbett

Biographers would begin at the beginning. They would describe a boy too busy etching his dull blade into wood to eat. A young man working at a vase factory in Sèvres. They would identify his early influences — Dante, Baudelaire, and Michelangelo — and his youthful prophetic awakening, the flash point upon which his future genius hinged. It would be both “common and touching.”

But this would be the wrong way to tell the story of Auguste Rodin, or at least not the way Rainer Maria Rilke wanted to tell it. In October, Rodin went to visit a friend in Italy, leaving Rilke with three uninterrupted weeks to write his monograph. At his broken-down desk in the hostel, he began to imagine all the ways he might approach the dreaded first page.

He stared out the window at the brick wall on the other side. He paced and procrastinated. Unaccustomed to shutting his windows, he suffered the fatty stench of pommes frites wafting in and commingling with iodine vapors from the hospitals. When the odor became overwhelming, he took a walk to the Luxembourg Gardens, leaned his head against the gate, and took a deep breath. But even then the smell of flowers, packed too tightly into their sidewalk gardens, 
irritated his delicate senses.

He would always return to the hotel by eight o’clock, before the drunks invaded the streets. Back at his desk, the smell replaced in the evenings by burnt kerosene from the lamp, he considered starting the book with explanations of the sculptures that made Rodin famous. But Rodin’s fame had nothing to do with his work, he decided. He wrote it down on his stationery: “Fame is no more than the sum of all the misunderstandings that gather around a new name.”

Nor could it begin with Rodin’s childhood, because, after observing the sculptor in the flesh, Rilke had concluded that Rodin was born great. His eminence felt as eternal as that of a Gothic cathedral, or a chestnut tree in full bloom. To tell that story, Rilke would have to start in the branches and grow backward, reaching down into the trunk, then plunging into the dirt where the cracked seed lay.

Rilke lay down in bed, knowing he wouldn’t sleep. The vibrating 
trams kept him from fully relaxing. Even if he did doze off for a moment, the neighbors would soon be coming home, stomping up the steps so loudly that he’d jolt upright in fear that they would barge right through the door.

Lying there awake, he would often summon Baudelaire, like a guardian angel. Rilke would recite to himself the beginning of his prose poem “One O’Clock in the Morning” from Paris Spleen: “At last! I am alone! ... the tyranny of the human face has disappeared.” But then he would begin to compare himself to Baudelaire and a new anxiety would set in.

Rodin never had this problem. He never questioned why he was an artist, or whether he should be. He knew that such doubts only distracted one from work, and Rilke was beginning to accept that work was all there was. He had spent so much time with the master by now that he could hold an entire conversation with him in his head:

“What was your life like?”
“Good.”
“Did you have any enemies?”
“None that could keep me from my work.”
“And fame?”
“It made work a duty.”
“And your friends?”
“They expected work from me.”
“And women?”
“I learned to admire them in the course of my work.”
“But you were young once?”
“Then I was like all the rest. You know nothing when you are young; that comes later, and only slowly.”

•

In Rodin’s absence, Rilke sought out the company of other artists he admired. He met the Spanish portrait painter Ignacio Zuloaga, who was only five years older than Rilke but already well established in Europe, with several works on view at the Venice Biennale that year. From his barrel chest and thick black mustache the Basque artist exhaled an effortless confidence. He did not bother making sketches for his paintings, instead outlining figures in black streaks of charcoal directly on the canvas, then filling them in with a dark palette of paints.

Rodin had been so impressed with Zuloaga that he once traded him three bronze sculptures for one painting. Rilke would later conclude that, aside from Rodin, Zuloaga was the only figure in Paris “who affected me deeply and lastingly.” But their connection seems to have been largely one-sided. Despite several letters expressing Rilke’s admiration for the Basque painter, Zuloaga never responded as enthusiastically as Rilke probably would have liked. Yet Zuloaga did allow him to visit his studio once, where he introduced him to another great master: El Greco. The stormy biblical scenes of the Greek-born Spanish Renaissance painter struck Rilke with a violent intensity he had only before known in nightmares. El Greco’s misproportioned bodies, long and sinuous as candle flames, seemed so far ahead of the present day, much less that of the sixteenth century, when they were painted.

That month, Rilke also had to arrange for the imminent arrival of his wife, Clara Westhoff, in Paris. He rented them each apartments a few blocks south of his Latin Quarter hostel, at 3 rue de l’Abbé de l’Épée. They would share the same roof, but keep separate rooms. The couple saw each other only on Sundays, when they often read each other passages from Niels Lyhne. For her birthday, Rilke bought her a volume of Gustave Geffroy’s essays, The Artistic Life, and inscribed it, “To Clara. The beloved mother. The artist. The friend. The woman.” No mention of the wife or the lover. But Westhoff may not have minded the omission then. She had already received several sculpture commissions within that first month, so this second residency in Paris was already proving far more rewarding than her first.

Most importantly, she finally had Rodin’s eyes. She brought him her work for critique nearly every Saturday, when he hosted an open house at his studio. “The nearness of Rodin, which does not confuse her, gives to her effort and becoming and growth a certain security and peace — and it proves to be good for her to be in Paris,” Rilke wrote. Of a visit to Meudon with her husband, she recalled a feeling “of being set free, of being surrounded by everything that did one good. The beautiful figures and fragments stood next to one in the grass or against the sky, the lawn invited one as if to children’s games, and in the middle of a little depression an antique torso stood in the sun.”

By this time, Rilke had nearly finished writing the monograph. He had observed and considered Rodin’s art from every angle and it had changed the way he saw the world: “Already flowers are often so 
infinitely much to me, and excitements of a strange kind have come to me from animals. And already I am sometimes experiencing even people in this way, hands are living somewhere, mouths are speaking, and I look at everything more quietly and with greater justness.” But while Rilke was learning to see like an artist, he had not yet mastered the handicraft of one. Where was the “tool of my art, the hammer, my hammer?” he wondered. How could he build objects out of words? How could he apply the principles of Rodin’s art to his poetry?

Rodin suggested that Rilke try out an assignment that he himself had undertaken as a student many years earlier. Regardez les animaux, professor Barye had told young Rodin. To the aspiring figurative sculptor, staring at beasts had seemed a second-rate task. But Rodin soon understood why animals have been objects of reverence for artists dating back to the cave painters.

Zoos at that time were research centers for the study of heretofore undiscovered specimens and symbols of colonial might. Displaying a lion or monkey at home paid tribute to France’s brave explorers abroad. For artists, they were museums of animals, providing contact with previously unseen aesthetic forms. For Barye, the Jardin des Plantes “was his Africa and Asia,” the author Henry James once said. The painter Henri “Le Douanier” Rousseau also spent years seated on a bench there, taking inspiration for his dreamlike jungle tableaux.

For Rilke, the menagerie of bears, gazelles, flamingos, and snakes was a sanctuary compared to the human zoo on the other side of the gates. He began to study the caged animals, displayed behind bars like objects, the way Rodin looked at sculptures on pedestals. Each one was a frontier to be discovered. To guide him on this journey, Rilke recalled the teachings of his old professor from Munich, Theodor Lipps, and devised a process of conscious observation, which he would come to call einsehen, or “inseeing.”

Inseeing described the wondrous voyage from the surface of a thing to its heart, wherein perception leads to an emotional connection. Rilke made a point of distinguishing inseeing from inspecting, a term which he thought described only the viewer’s perspective, and thus often resulted in anthropomorphizing. Inseeing, on the other hand, took into account the object’s point of view. It had as much to do with making things human as it did with making humans thing.

If faced with a rock, for instance, one should stare deep into the place where its rockness begins to form. Then the observer should keep looking until his own center starts to sink with the stony weight of the rock forming inside him, too. It is a kind of perception that takes place within the body, and it requires the observer to be both the seer and the seen. To observe with empathy, one sees not only with the eyes but with the skin.

“Though you may laugh,” Rilke wrote to a friend, “if I tell you where my very greatest feeling, my world-feeling, my earthly bliss was, I must confess to you: it was, again and again, here and there, in such in-seeing — in the indescribably swift, deep, timeless moments of this godlike in-seeing.”

In describing his joy at experiencing the world this way, Rilke echoed Lipps’s belief that, through empathy, a person could free himself from the solitude of his mind. At the same time that Rilke was studying at the zoo in Paris, Lipps was in Munich working on his theory of empathy and aesthetic enjoyment. In his seminal paper on the subject he identified the four types of empathy as he saw them: general apperceptive empathy, when one sees movement in everyday objects; empirical empathy, when one sees human qualities in the nonhuman; mood empathy, when one attributes emotional states to colors and music, like “cheerful yellow”; and sensible appearance empathy, when gestures or movements convey internal feelings.

Animals provided Rilke with a uniquely rewarding case study of his old professor’s teachings. One can relate to animals on the basis that they possess drives similar to those of people, but because they do not share with people a common language they remain fundamentally mysterious to us. Artists can scrutinize animals as curiosities, 
then, but unlike objects, animals look back. The two-way gaze tethers 
these separate lives together and fulfills the “beholder’s involvement,” which the Austrian art historian Alois Riegl argued was a necessary component in a successful work of art.

Rilke returned to the zoo day after day, practicing his inseeing skills before returning home at night to draft rough portraits of the creatures he had seen. He found himself especially drawn to a solitary panther, pacing in its cage. It reminded him of a small plaster panther that Rodin kept in his studio. The sculptor adored the thing so much — “‘C’est beau, c’est tout,’ he says of it” — that Rilke had gone to the Bibliothèque Nationale to see the original bronze version it was modeled after. He visited that display cabinet again and again until he finally began to understand what Rodin saw in it:

And from this little plaster cast I saw what he means, what 
antiquity is and what links him to it. There, in this animal, is the same lively feeling in the modeling, this little thing (it is no higher than my hand is wide, and no longer than my hand) has hundreds of thousands of sides like a very big object, hundreds of thousands of sides which are all alive, animated, and different. And that in plaster! And with this the expression of the prowling stride is intensified to the highest degree, the powerful planting of the broad paws, and at the same time, that caution 
in which all strength is wrapped, that noiselessness.

The plaster panther stirred in Rilke a sensation much like what Rodin had felt when he stumbled upon Barye’s greyhounds in a shop window, when he realized that an inanimate object could move with as much vitality as a living beast. Rilke had this in mind when he began to describe the panther in one of his impressionistic zoo sketches, which he called his “mood-images,” and later when he developed it into “The Panther,” one of his most celebrated poems. It begins with an image of the cat circling its cage:

His vision from the passing of the bars
is grown so weary that it holds no more.
To him it seems there are a thousand bars
and behind a thousand bars no world.
— Translated by M.D. Herter Norton

A reader might be tempted to see the panther’s pacing as a reference to Rilke’s own artistic plight. Yet there is no poet present here. Rilke does not draw attention to himself with his old florid descriptions. He tells us nothing about the panther’s size, for example, or the texture of its fur. He instead defines it only in terms of its captivity: it becomes the freedom it does not possess. The “passing” bars move, while the animal has become the cage, become thing.

The perspective then shifts from Rilke’s to the panther’s when it begins to hear the sound of its feet padding around. In doing so, Rilke makes the circuit of empathy itself a subject of the poem. Near the end, Rilke returns to the panther’s eyes: “the curtain of the pupil / soundlessly parts — .” Then images enter its vision, tunnel into the center of its body and into its heart, where they are captured and consumed for eternity.

Rilke had at last found a way out of himself and into the material world of objects. Just as young Rodin memorized paintings in the Louvre, the poet now allowed images to gather and take shape inside him before writing. He received them rather than created them, waiting while they formed him. It was as his future protagonist Malte Laurids Brigge would say, “Poems are not, as people think, feelings (those one has early enough) — they are experiences.”

Written in November 1902, “The Panther” was Rilke’s first composition for his breakthrough collection of New Poems, which he often referred to as his “thing-poems.” This sculpturally composed work, deeply bearing the ma ........................

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

Sorry-- I have been so busy lately that I have not post this thread in over a week.--Tyr



https://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/articles/detail/90613

Essay
Dahl's Songs
Poetry is what makes Roald Dahl’s characters come alive.
By Adrienne Raphel




This month marks Roald Dahl’s centenary, and celebrations are already afoot. Llandaff,
Wales, his birthplace, is staging a citywide performance in tribute, and this year, Oxford University Press released the Oxford Roald Dahl Dictionary. Dahl is, of course, famous for his characters: Willy Wonka, Miss Trunchbull, the BFG. He’s also notorious as a character himself. He was a renowned misanthrope, infamous for his anti-Semitic comments. Tragedy marked his marriage to actress Patricia Neal: a taxicab struck their infant son, Theo; their daughter Olivia died of measles at age seven; and while Neal was pregnant with their fifth child, Lucy, in 1965, she suffered three cerebral aneurysms that left her in a coma for three weeks. Dahl helped nurse Neal back to health, but 18 years later, he divorced her and married the much younger Felicity Crosland.

Dahl is rightly famous for his fiction, but he published several collections of poetry as well, and a Roald Dahl novel is rarely, if ever, solely in prose. As illustrator Quentin Blake, Dahl’s longtime collaborator, writes in the introduction to Vile Verses, a 2005 anthology of Dahl’s poetry, “It is hard to read one of your favourite Dahl books without soon coming across some kind of song or a piece of verse.” Characters burst into lyric, as if the story line were an elaborate song and dance to get them to the actual song and dance. Roald Dahl’s poems are almost exclusively in tetrameter couplets, a loose ballad meter well suited to his frank, pragmatic voice. Dahl’s prose is charged with poetic devices—think of Esio Trot, tortoise spelled backward, or the dyslexic title character of The Vicar of Nibbleswicke. The people and creatures may be what readers remember of Dahl, but the poetry is what makes them come alive.

It is his poetry, as embedded in his prose, that brings out the quintessence of Dahl. His early novels burst with original poems. In James and the Giant Peach, first published in 1961, the Centipede celebrates the discovery that the Peach they inhabit is edible by bursting into an extemporaneous ode to the fruit. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which first appeared in 1964, is even thicker with poems than James. The prose itself is high octane, charged with alliteration and anaphora. When Wonka takes the Golden Ticket winners on a boat ride down the Chocolate River, the parents cry out:

He’s balmy!
He’s nutty!
He’s batty!
He’s dippy!
He’s dotty!
He’s daffy!
He’s goofy!
He’s beany!
He’s buggy!
He’s wacky!
He’s loony!

The monometer list, full of slant rhyme, becomes incantatory. The repetition of He’s is hypnotic, a string of unstressed syllables that create a singsong effect as we read down the column. Dahl has an incredible facility for putting words in our mouths: putting this poem into the voices of the nervous parents forces readers to vocalize the adjectives too. The words all mean the same thing, and they’re all trochees; we get the sense that the shouts could go on forever. Finally, Charlie’s grandfather breaks the spell: “No, he is not!” Grandpa Joe shouts, cutting off the endlessly iterative form.

Dahl becomes his most fantastical when poems enter the story. The Oompa-Loompas are the Greek chorus of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, providing commentary about the children in biting couplets. As the bad children are plucked off one by one, the manner of each child’s fall is sweet poetic justice, recounted even more sweetly in gleeful rhyme: just desserts, indeed. Augustus Gloop, the “great big greedy nincompoop,” is sucked into the Fudge Machine, where, the Oompa-Loompas tell us, we can be sure “that all the greed and all the gall / Is boiled away for once and all.” When Violet is turned into a giant blueberry, the Oompa-Loompas tell the cautionary tale of a Miss Bigelow, such a prodigious gum chewer that she, like “a clockwork crocodile,” eventually chews out her own tongue. Miss Bigelow is of the same world as Auden’s macabre spinster Miss Gee. Veruca Salt, the “little brute,” gets pitched down the garbage chute, descending from being spoiled rotten to living with rotten spoils. “It’s all nonsense, every bit of it!” Wonka assures the children—and us. But whether or not the poems are strictly true in content, they infuse the story with their spirit, a mix of sing songy lullaby and sheer terror. The couplets make the poems feel as though they should be soothing, though the content is anything but.

In Dahl’s collections of verse—Revolting Rhymes (1982), Dirty Beasts (1983), and Rhyme Stew (1989)—he riffs on familiar tropes from nursery rhymes and fables but gives them brutal twists. Revolting Rhymes presents updated fairy tales in which the heroes delight in skewering the villains and delivering deliciously wicked comeuppances. The chains of couplets entail that each rhyme will be met with its match, a sonic counterpart of the eye-for-an-eye code of justice that prevails. Goldilocks is presented as guilty of “crime on crime,” and justice must be served. “Myself, I think I’d rather send / Young Goldie to a sticky end,” declares Dahl. Big Bear tells Baby Bear, “Your porridge is upon the bed / But as it’s inside mademoiselle / You’ll have to eat her up as well.” In Dahl’s “Snow White,” the Dwarfs are gamblers, addicted to betting on horseraces. Instead of chastising them and helping them help themselves, as Disney’s Snow White might have done, Dahl’s heroine breaks into the palace, steals the Queen’s Magic Mirror, and takes it back to the Dwarfs, who ask it for the name of the winner of the next day’s horserace. The Mirror gives the name of the winning horse, the Dwarfs pool all their resources and bet on the horse, and they win big, providing the poem’s anti-Aesop moral: “Which shows that gambling’s not a sin / Provided that you always win.” That’s Dahl’s peculiar genius: he knows which characters need to get their comeuppance, but he also understands the delicious schadenfreude of letting heroes delight in wickedness at the expense of the bad guys. The Queen thought she’d eaten Snow White’s heart, so why shouldn’t Snow White and her fiends profit from the Queen’s prized possession?

Dirty Beasts is the heir to Struwwelpeter, Heinrich Hoffman’s brutal and wonderful 1844 collection of nursery rhymes that skewer rotten kiddies and adults. “The Pig,” for example, presents a precocious hog who realizes that his only reason for existence is to be made into food for humans. To save himself, the pig preemptively eats up Farmer Bland first. The anaphora and exclamations make readers feel for the pig:

“They want my bacon slice by slice
“To sell at a tremendous price!
“They want my tender juicy chops
“To put in all the butchers’ shops!

The pig creates a blazon to himself: he identifies all his wonderful body parts and makes himself seem like a porcine paragon, only to lament that all these excellent components are destined for the marketplace. Because the pig doesn’t want to be sliced and diced into products, he kills the farmer. It’s a Marxist justification of eating the hand that’s only feeding you to fatten you up for the slaughterhouse. (We could feel a twinge of guilt for Farmer Bland, but we don’t; after all, he’s Farmer Bland, not Farmer Grand.)

In “The Ant-Eater,” also from Dirty Beasts, Roy, a “plump and unattractive boy” from San Francisco who wants for nothing and whines for everything, acquires an anteater. The creature scours Roy’s garden day and night but can’t find a single ant, and Roy, a budding young literalist, refuses to serve him any other form of food: “Roy shouted, ‘No! No bread or meat! / Go find some ants! They’re what you eat!” So the anteater must resort to wordplay for his supper:

Some people in the U.S.A.
Have trouble with the words they say.
However hard they try, they can’t
Pronounce a simple word like AUNT.
Instead of AUNT, they call it ANT,
Instead of CAN’T, they call it KANT.

Our sympathies lie with the echidna, not with the rotten kid, and we cheer at the end when the beast turns on Roy for dessert.

Dahl is at his most poetic not strictly in the poems but in the interweaving of poetry and prose in his novels. The poems step outside to announce the author directly or to ensnare readers. Consider, for instance, the role of poems in the novel Matilda, published in 1988. Unlike James and the Giant Peach or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda is not studded with nonsense song and whimsical rhymes; other than a few ditties (“Mrs D, Mrs I, Mrs F I, Mrs C, Mrs U, Mrs L T Y”), the characters do not burst into poem or song. (This is not the same in the Broadway musical adaptation of Matilda, in which the characters do burst into frequent song.) Rather, the poems in Matilda are, for the most part, poems quoted from the outside world, not ones written by Dahl. Usually, Dahl’s novels create totalizing experiences: we are in the world that the novel creates, which is distinctly separate from our daily lives. But the poems are points that break the fourth wall. The poems from the real world that enter Matilda suggest that readers can enter this world too.

To discover the scope of Matilda’s reading abilities, Miss Honey tests her with a poem, bringing her a “thick book” and opening it at random:

“This is a book of humorous poetry,’ [Miss Honey] said. “See if you can read that one aloud.”
Smoothly, without a pause and at a nice speed, Matilda began to read:

“An epicure dining at Crewe
Found a rather large mouse in his stew.
Cried the waiter, ‘Don’t shout
And wave it about
Or the rest will be wanting one too.’”

This anonymous limerick appears in several publications well before Matilda, such as a 1946 edition of LIFE magazine, for example, as well as several anthologies of children’s poetry. But Miss Honey’s use of the specific adjective humorous cues us that her “thick book” is likely A Century of Humorous Verse, 1850–1950, edited by Roger Lancelyn Green. Green, who wrote many children’s books and beloved retellings of myths, was perhaps most famous as part of the Inklings, the legendary Oxonian discussion circle that included C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien among its core members.

Though Green is never mentioned by name, his shadow presence in the classroom evokes the Inklings: a whiff of The Eagle and Child, the pub where the Inklings convened, wafts into Miss Honey’s classroom. When Miss Honey asks Matilda about other books that she’s read, Matilda volunteers that she likes C.S. Lewis, though she critiques both Mr. Lewis and Mr. Tolkien for their lack of “funny bits.” Matilda and Miss Honey become a sort of counterpart to the Inklings, a feminist revision of the boys’ club.

The Oxford Roald Dahl Dictionary gives two definitions of funny: something that “makes you laugh or smile” and something that is “strange or surprising.” “Funny bits” are at the center of Matilda but not always amusing. The book chronicles Matilda’s fall from innocence and gain of self-knowledge, and funny shifts from the first to the second definition over the course of the novel.

Of course, Dahl has already bested Messrs. Lewis and Tolkien: Matilda implicitly offers a corrective to the literary criticism that Matilda explicitly voices to Miss Honey. The beginning of Matilda chronicles her pranks against her father, such as replacing his hair tonic with her mother’s hair dye. Matilda begins the story as a trickster figure, a Brer Rabbit or Reynard the Fox who survives in a hostile environment by outmaneuvering her oppressors.

It’s no accident that Miss Honey rhymes with funny. Dahl ascribes to a Dickensian theory of names. (Dahl loves Dickens, and the highest compliment he can pay himself is when the BFG names his favorite author as “Dahl’s Chickens”: both Charles Dickens and Dahl himself.) When someone named Aunt Spiker or Mr. Wormwood or Gizzardgulper appears, we’re on our guard; when we meet Miss Honey, we know we’re in sweet hands.

It’s also no accident that the shift in the book from funny-amusing to funny-strange occurs through a poem. When Matilda visits Miss Honey’s house, Miss Honey recites the first stanza of “In Country Sleep,” Dylan Thomas’s long, romantic poem about childhood and loss in the British countryside. Over the course of the poem, the “girl” in the first stanza becomes a medley of all fairy-tale heroines: she is Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel, any pure girl threatened by the encroaching evils of the outside world. The poem describes the lush, enchanted world as a beautiful garden, a place where the heroine remains safe. But this Eden is also a prison. “Sleep, good, for ever, slow and deep, spelled rare and wise” begins the second stanza: though the lovely woods may seem to be a haven protecting the girl from outside evils, the speaker also spins a magic spell around the heroine, keeping her permanently within the enchanted woods. No one will come “to court the honeyed heart from your side before sunrise,” the speaker assuages the girl, but it is unclear whether the reassurance is a promise or a threat. Is the speaker a parent lulling a child to sleep? Or is the speaker the witch in Rapunzel, keeping the princess locked in the tower, insulated from evil but isolated from good?

Dahl is extremely good at creating characters and plots that keep us moving lickety-split through the fantastical, the weird, the terrifying. But when Dahl wants us to get up close and personal with emotions—shock, disgust, glee, terror, triumph—he turns to poetry as a means of directly accessing the senses. Through poetry, Dahl gets under our skin.

Originally Published: September 6th, 2016

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/articles/detail/90781


Essay
"Gabble Like a Thing Most Brutish"
How Caliban, The Tempest, and a poet’s exile became the perfect storm for a first book.
By Safiya Sinclair


I’ve spent a good part of the last 14 years thinking about Caliban. The first time I read The Tempest, his anguish and corrugated selfhood spoke to me so acutely, I felt him to be real. His fevered dreaming as a slave in a stolen kingdom has also been my dreaming, his twangling instruments my own strange music.

Like him, I’ve always been an outsider. Home for me has always been a place of unbelonging. This is the strange yet all-too-familiar exile of living in the Caribbean, of being a part of the African diaspora: belonging in two places and no place at all. Home was not my island, which never belonged to us Jamaicans, though it’s all we’ve known, and home was not my family’s house, which we’ve always rented, all of us acutely aware of the fact that we were living in borrowed space, that we could never truly be ourselves there. Home was not the body. Never the body—grown too tall and gangly too quickly, grown toward womanhood too late. Like a city built for myself, home was a place I carved out in my head, where the words were always the right words, where I could speak in English or patois, could formulate a song or a self. Home for me has always been poetry.

It was the Old Poet, a Trinidadian writer and mentor, who first got me thinking about Caliban. At 15, I had just graduated from high school and for the first time faced the grim reality of a hopeless future that most Jamaicans understand to be the bleak circumstance of their birth. No one dared dream too far outside the confines of what history ungifted us, the poverty of this “developing country.” Neither of my parents had gone to college—going to a university was something hazy on the blurred horizon, far away and intangible—no one in my family knew how to apply to colleges or how they would ever afford them. I had been the top student at a private high school founded by rich white Jamaicans and American expats, who had also endowed a full scholarship for poor and talented students like me. Though I had flourished there, I realized much too late that this school had also prepared me for a future at an American university that my family did not have the means or the immigration papers to supply me with. While everyone in my class left for new lives and schools abroad, I stayed home, optionless.

Days grew into weeks, weeks into a year. I turned inward, turned to poetry as the only way to make sense of the world I had been given. In Montego Bay, we had scant access to books. I read everything I could find. I studied the Oxford English Dictionary. At 16, I submitted my first poem to be published in the Jamaica Observer, a riff off Plath’s “Daddy.” I still remember when the phone rang, and the Old Poet said with much authority: “This is serious. You have to come to Kingston and work with me.” For the first time, I felt seen. My parents (who didn’t have a car) hired a taximan who would drive me and my mother three and a half hours each way from Montego Bay to Kingston to visit the Old Poet every week. He gave me access to his impressive bookshelves and demanded I read the classics. Life felt full of possibilities as I dared to peer into the impoverished face of my own hope once again. For five years, I studied poetry, wrote, and workshopped with the Old Poet, a vital education that nourished my mind and kept me hungry until I finally received a full scholarship to go to college, six years after high school. I read and recited Yeats, Chaucer, Stevens, Walcott, Shakespeare. I performed my lessons as one bewitched.

Back then, the Old Poet was a god until, like all men, he wasn’t. “The Tempest is Shakespeare’s best,” he said with finality. “In each line, we can hear the rhythms of the sea as a poet who is nearing the end of his life.” In a lost letter that I remember well, he wrote, “Gollum is very much like a Caliban-figure, both gnarled and tortured,” and with those words, he pried open my own affinity for anguish—at this age I was very much drawn to anything suffering. So the damage was done—gone was my flirtation with the comedies, promises of star-crossed meetings that so appealed to youth—there in its place, blooming darkly, was my obsession with the ocean of magic and finality of The Tempest, still unaware that this ocean of magic and finality was the story of Jamaica itself. The play tells of Prospero, exiled from Milan and shipwrecked on an island, where he banishes the witch Sycorax (Caliban’s mother) and somehow learns enough magic to subjugate the island and its inhabitants in the flesh (Caliban) and spirit (Ariel). Prospero’s daughter, Miranda, too, is under his control.

As the first child of four, the fact of my girlhood was already disappointing. Very briefly, I danced with Miranda’s wild-eyed wonder under her father’s strict patriarchy as something similar to my own; I lived in a no-nonsense, disciplinary, Rastafarian household. We were a family of three girls and one boy, and every year that my sisters and I grew older so too did the separation between my father and my brother and the women in the house. Rastas openly accepted that a woman’s rightful place was in childrearing and household duties, to be confined to the kitchen except when she was menstruating. Many of my father’s Rasta friends refused to eat food cooked by a woman on her period and even made their menstruating wives sleep in a separate bedroom. Finally, the body fulfilled its dark promise and turned against me. Dear Miranda, Who taught you how to bleed? Did you anticipate and dread its arrival for many moons, like me? This was my first reading—that being a young woman exempted me from the same freedoms my brother had, that being a woman was the original site of exile. Like most Jamaicans, I arched toward another world, hoping to make a new place for myself. In America, wouldn’t I be my own Miranda, as reflected through a dark mirror—“O brave new world / That hath such people in’t!” Dear Jamaica, Is it true what Kamau Brathwaite said? That “the desire (even the need) to migrate is at the heart of West Indian sensibility, whether that migration is in fact or by metaphor.”? He has suggested that a Caribbean person becomes a Caribbean person only when they actually leave the Caribbean. Perhaps this is true.

•

The thick weed of the Sargasso, like the Middle Passage, is the largest gathering of all that is lost, clinging to the ghosts of things that never were. And the lost things, men and women of the African diaspora, scattered to sea on imperial ash, are now washed ashore in a postcolonial world. But what fractures the identity of the marginalized is the recognition of new, strange selves in that dark mirror, a tortured contemplation of duality—English language grown thick inside an African mouth. How do West Indian poets make sense of it, when the very language we speak betrays the history of our selves? Coming to America forced me to consider my blackness in a new light. Here, the world held me at arm’s length and highlighted all my differences as a strangeness: remarkable and invisible all at once. Being one of only four or five black students in the nearly all-white Bennington College cast a sharp spotlight on the actual site of my lingering exile—my blackness.

This was my second reading. It was a vital lesson: Here I was on a scholarship, six years after leaving high school, at another late start, estranged in another place. Fixed in time. I had left so much behind, but I had kept The Tempest. I carried the words and verses with me; the familiarity of its violence broke and reset daily in my bones. It was not Miranda, but Caliban who represented the fragmented psyche of West Indian poets like me. This, I realized, was the storm I carried around inside, the hurricane I was born under. Over the course of four years in the bright white bubble of Vermont, I encountered Caliban at the most important moments of my education. I was nearly always the only black student in class. Once, a teacher decided to make a hypothetical lesson of my being quiet in class: “For example,” she said, “if our black students never comment in class, then could we infer that all black students are lazy?” Once, a white student wanted to enact a minstrel show, blackface and all, as his final senior project. And so on. In a class on Shakespeare’s poetry, we were tasked to memorize and recite a verse from any of his plays. It didn’t seem like a choice, as I’d been feeling all along that my exile had always belonged to Caliban, who speaks entirely in lyric. I devoured the verse like fire and spoke each word as if I’d always known them. Because I had. Like Caliban, I was token, othered. Monstrous even. Like him, I felt home hardening like a wayward seed in my gut. I had lived and known each line to be true. His home was my home. His dis-ease:

Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me that, when I waked,
I cried to dream again.
Caliban, (Act 3, Scene 2, 135-143)

Dear Caliban, You know the rest of this story as if you had lived it yourself. In a Bennington workshop, a white woman first crossed her pen marks across the Jamaican patois in my story and wrote over and over: “Can you say this in English?” “Can you say this in English?” When I felt the too-familiar rage rise up in my throat and the slow choke of hurt that these words filled me with, I finally understood exactly why I was writing. In the face of prejudice, something indestructible had flourished. What had been only a hardening seed finally devoured all the air in my lungs and all by itself grew roots, became cannibal. The next week, I returned to workshop with a message I titled simply “Literary Manifesto.” It was here that I would first declare myself as Caliban:

Always at my heart is the quote of Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite: “The hurricane does not roar in pentameters.” This quote has been plaguing me recently, and defines what I’m most afraid of with this project—that presenting this [work] piecemeal to a coven of foreigners has somewhat corrupted the integrity of the work. Many people in this workshop have sought to subdue the work with the colonial marks of their pens—questioning the flora, fauna, and dialect of my native land, questions that have offended and plagued me as I contemplated who I was writing for. … Like Caliban, I have to question my identity as an Other, as defined by the colonist, while I am expected to express myself in the language of the colonist. But I want to define my identity and writing on my own terms, if me haffi bruk it dung inna patois, or iron it out in the Queen’s English—while always keeping the “u” in colour.

Many members of the class—all white—took great offence to this manifesto. Yes, I’d had a flair for rhetoric. I’d called them a “coven of foreigners” and “corn-fed strangers,” their pen marks “colonial.” But it stays with me to this day that they were offended. One student even threw my pages back across the table at me in disgust. Here in this workshop, this wasn’t a dialogue, and I finally understood the truth of America, as Caliban came to understand Prospero as a malevolent visitor—here freedom was only an invented jingle and not only would I never know the notes, I would always be exiled by its language.

•

This is my third reading. Historically and psychologically, the greatest cruelty of Prospero is not only the enforcement of his worldview but also the imperialism of his language. Caliban is enslaved by Prospero’s rules and laws and is taught Prospero’s language—in what Miranda declares a great kindness: the benevolent cultivation of the savage—but this really benefits only Prospero and Miranda. They arrive at Caliban’s island as cultural hegemonists who expect their language and customs to be understood but make no room for, or even consider, a cultural exchange with Caliban. If Prospero is to be believed, Caliban was born a cultureless animal, with no language, no identity: “thou didst not, savage, / Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like /A thing most brutish.” Prospero’s enslavement does not foster Caliban’s “cultivation” but instead hastens the eradication of his being; the autochthony of his personhood, written asunder.

What woman in Caliban’s position wouldn’t rage? Who wouldn’t feel a biological imperative to rebel, to people the “isle with Calibans”? In rebellion, Caliban seethes and plots, cursing Prospero’s linguistic imperialism; he wants to kill Prospero as much he wants to kill the part of Prospero that is within himself—“You taught me language; and my profit on’t / Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you / For learning me your language!” Shakespeare’s measured representation of Caliban’s fractured psyche is still the same broken reflection with which modern Caribbean people must contend. We are all Caliban. As Cuban essayist and critic Roberto Fernández Retamar explores in his essay “Caliban,” a postcolonial examination of Latin American and Caribbean identity, Caliban is our dark mirror and a direct metaphor of the chaotic Caribbean soul:

Prospero invaded the islands, killed our ancestors, enslaved Caliban, and taught him his language to make himself understood. What else can Caliban do but use that same language—today he has no other—to curse him, to wish that the “red plague” would fall on him? I know no other metaphor more expressive of our cultural situation, of our reality. …what is our history, what is our culture, if not the history and culture of Caliban?

Over the years, as I continued to navigate a life in the mostly white and cobwebbed corners of American academia, I realized that my poetry was not only informed by The Tempest itself, but that the voice in many of my poems was the voice of Caliban, as I had claimed him. Like Césaire and Brathwaite before me, how could I not identify with Caliban, the “savage” Prospero uses to catch fish and gather wood, whom Prospero uses to teach him the secrets of the island, and who speaks almost entirely from the root of his body? Caliban’s world is ruined when Prospero and Miranda arrive, and he is forcefully voided of his autonomy. He faces exile not only in his own land but also in his own skin (his thoughts are no longer in his own words), a psychic dilemma that overturns his world entirely, leaving Prospero as the grand arbiter of the change on the island. Both linguistically and metaphorically, the character of Caliban is a direct representation of what is seen as barbaric in me—the savage subaltern in the imperial narrativization of history.

Ever in the shadows of the play, even Caliban’s features are never quite precisely described—Shakespeare’s list of characters describe him simply as a “savage and deformed native of the island, Prospero’s slave,” and he is continuously referred to as a “monster” by the other characters inhabiting The Tempest, ambiguously described as being an animal or half-animal. Trinculo and Stefano degradingly address Caliban as “this puppy-headed monster. / A most scurvy monster!” “half a fish, and half a monster,” and “debauched fish.” From Shakespeare’s own evidence, we can assert that Caliban is not an animal—he is a sentient man, with his own thoughts and feelings, his own wants and claims to the island, who naturally dreams of peopling the “isle with Calibans.” The very name Caliban is a Shakespearean anagram of the word cannibal, the English variant of the Spanish word canibal, which originated from caribal, a reference to the native Carib people in the West Indies, who Columbus thought ate human flesh. It is there that the word Caribbean originated. By simply being born Caribbean, all “West Indian” people are already, etymologically, born savage. Whole worlds codified around my discovery of this simple fact of language, the linguistic fact of my birth, and I knew that from this one barbarous root, my debut poetry collection, Cannibal, was born.

Here I was, in a hurricane. I could not escape the work. Over the course of two and a half years, I worked on the manuscript of Cannibal (which the University of Nebraska Press published this month). In each new poem I wrote, I noticed the word cannibal popping up, if not in a line, then in the ghost meter of its sea. As I began organizing the book into sections, I realized that each section spoke to all these scattered points of exile—exile at home, exile of being in America, exile of the female body, and the exile of the English language. Quotes from Caliban, Prospero, and Miranda all reflected these different aspects of what had been lost, then found again in The Tempest, through a dark mirror. Soon I realized that Cannibal was in direct collision with The Tempest, interrogating these disruptive histories and the power of the language I live with.

It has always been my hope that beyond the margins of The Tempest, Caliban might find beauty and power in his own nature, flawed or not. The last poem I wrote for Cannibal, “Crania Americana,” tackles white supremacy and pseudo-scientific texts, sung through the defiant throat of Caliban, who seeks control of his assumed “savagery” on his own terms. In this poem, he boldly wears his “brutish” gabble “like a diadem, / this flecked crown of dictions, / this bioluminescence.” Circling the ocean-magic and a poet’s finality at the end of his life, I combed through The Tempest for every word and slur Caliban was called and alchemized there the rage of my family, my country, my identity. Mother, your cannibal lives there. What was once seen as monstrous, I sought to make beautiful. This was my final reading. Caliban’s anger is my father’s anger is my anger. What my native dialect of patois represents, and what my poetry represents, is not only a linguistic rebellion against colonization but also a willful remaking of the world to reflect all aspects of the Caribbean self. I am Caliban. I am cannibal. Dear Father, may I unjungle it?



Originally Published: September 20th, 2016

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/articles/detail/90711

Essay
Close Viewing
Touring the history of poetry in the YouTube age.
By Austin Allen



There she is, just after Willa Cather and before Eugene O’Neill. She’s bending toward a window, her lips soundlessly moving. A breeze stirs the curtain. Suddenly, from out of frame, a bird flies straight into her outstretched hand. It rests there for a second, takes in the room, then flits away again.

The video is a montage of New York in the Roaring Twenties: a jumble of street scenes, speakeasies, film stars, famous artists. The woman with the Mary Poppins touch is Edna St. Vincent Millay. She’s likely in her 30s, at the height of her notoriety as poet and bohemian. More than most of the writers featured, she seems posed, her scene clearly contrived. (How long was she waiting with birdseed in hand?) As a Greenwich Village literary star, she had an image to cultivate. This, her vignette seems to suggest, is what poets do all day: gaze out the window and wait for Inspiration to come to hand.

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Fifteen years ago, finding a clip of this kind would have taken some serious grunt work. Now, abracadabra, I reach out and summon it to my browser window. I didn’t know it existed; I just trusted that I’d be able to watch some Millay on a whim.

The age of online video has been a gift to many art forms: dance, stand-up comedy, piano music played by cats. For poetry—a musical art that often sits quietly on the page, a performative art whose icons are only sporadically recorded—it’s been a less obvious, but no less lucky, windfall. Quality film in this area has long been hard to come by. There have been just a few good poetry documentaries over the years, most notably Richard Moore’s USA: Poetry series for PBS (1965-66), which spotlights poets as varied as John Ashbery, Denise Levertov, and Richard Wilbur. I’m also fond of Annenberg Learner’s 1988 Voices & Visions, a classroom-friendly primer on great American poets from Whitman to Bishop, featuring a dream roster of commentators: Seamus Heaney, Helen Vendler, James Baldwin, and many more.

But most gifts from the windfall are as casual as YouTube itself. The video featuring Millay contains no credits; it’s simply labeled “New York City in the 1920s.” It was posted anonymously under the handle “historycomestolife.” For all I know, it’ll be gone tomorrow.

However scruffy by academic standards, online video libraries have dredged some remarkable treasures from obscurity. Even as they change the way new poets present their work, they’re reshaping our relationship to the history of the craft. “Read at random,” Randall Jarrell advised, and now poetry lovers can view at random too, free-associating our way through the most precious archival footage. It’s a new mode of research, a conjuring of spirits to our private theaters, where at a moment’s notice we can evaluate—or just savor—records that scholars a generation ago would have killed for.

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When I told a friend I was writing about great poets on video, he guessed right away which poet had sparked the concept. In 1967, Al Alvarez interviewed John Berryman for the BBC, sharing beers with him in a Dublin pub and letting the old lion hold forth. The footage has become legendary in poetry circles, for good reason.

Berryman’s verse is known for its contrarian rhythms, the quirks of emphasis he sometimes signals with fastidious accent marks. Watching him declaim his “Dream Songs,” you realize how physical those rhythms were, how he converted bodily and vocal tics into metrical ones. You see him hunch and rock, stroke his outrageous beard, jab a pedantic finger on the line “this is not for tears; thinking”—and jab even harder as he shouts the word But in an explosive volta.

Sure, he’s drunk, as the YouTube commenters gleefully point out. But sobriety wouldn’t smooth over such spiky eccentricity. We sense that for better or worse, we’re getting the full Berryman; the man, the poet, and the personae all come together. We witness the qualities that made him both brilliant and incorrigible, the awkwardness and passion that tangle so gloriously in The Dream Songs. We also see that he’s a bit of a ham—as though, if the BBC hadn’t been there, he might have recited to the nearest barfly.

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In the popular imagination, poets are Dickinsonian loners who would wilt in front of a camera. The video evidence tells a more complex tale. Browsing a century’s worth of clips, I was surprised at how many famous poets revealed a knack for showmanship.

Of course a few figures fit the elusive unicorn stereotype, whether because they neglected the public or vice versa. Footage of Elizabeth Bishop is scarce even though she lived until 1979. Lorine Niedecker appeared in someone’s holiday home movies and that’s it. Robert Hayden was rarely filmed even after becoming what’s now called US poet laureate; the NBC tape of one of his few screen appearances, on the talk show At One With, was erased. (Happily, at least one filmed Hayden interview survives: a fascinating conversation with Donald Hall, preserved in the University of Michigan online archives.)

There were also poets whose onscreen “careers” were constrained by their era. We would undoubtedly have seen more of Millay—by all accounts a magnetic performer—if she had lived past 1950. No extant footage of Dylan Thomas, the consummate celebrity poet, was on record until 2014, when researchers spotted him in the background of a 1951 film called Pandora and the Flying Dutchman.

But as the moving image conquered the culture, more and more poets ventured out to court its attentions, its different kind of fame and unreality. No figure is more emblematic of this shift than Marianne Moore. Here was one of the great literary recluses: a woman who for decades shared an apartment (and bed) with her mother, a profoundly inward writer whose family nicknamed her “Rat,” as in book rat. Then the overbearing mother died, the poetry collected some major prizes, and Rat emerged, blinking, into full-blown celebrity. There she is, in a Voices and Visions clip, throwing out the Opening Day pitch at Yankee Stadium. There she is charming a Today Show host who has asked about her work routine: “I save up things that I like pretty well until I need them.” She adds that she saves them “in a little book called School Assignments,” perhaps lending a fresh twist to her contention (in “Poetry”) that poetry seekers shouldn’t “discriminate against ‘business documents and school-books.’” She even looks the part of the eccentric writer—a part she tailored to her whims. Has any other morning show guest ever appeared in a tricornered hat?

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This self-promotional flair grew among the generation of poets born in the 1920s and 1930s, including the New York School and the Confessionals. For starters, quite a few of them participated in the abovementioned Richard Moore doc, including several whose segments we can look up for ourselves: Robert Duncan, Michael McClure, Frank O’Hara, Anne Sexton.

O’Hara’s appearance has already fed his legend; Ron Silliman likens the figure he cuts to “the Tasmanian Devil cartoon character, writing, drinking, smoking, talking to the camera, to friends in the room & to someone on the phone simultaneously with an ease & grace that was jaw-dropping. …” That’s fair enough, although anyone who has loved O’Hara’s poems won’t be too surprised by this whirlwind. Equally striking is Sexton, puffing her Salem cigarettes and radiating Old-Hollywood glamour. “My husband hates the way I read poems,” she coolly confides. “He says, ‘You sound like a minister.’” When this same husband appears in the doorway, she scolds, “Honey, don't be camera-shy.” She issues darker pronouncements too: “A hospital encases your soul.”

A few poets even gained something like media savvy. As his profile rose in the 1960s and 1970s, James Dickey became a recurrent talk show guest—and proved he was a born talker. He also scored a cameo in the film version of his novel Deliverance (after reconciling with the director, with whom he reportedly had an on-set fistfight). His performance as the menacing sheriff hovers somewhere between campy and inspired.

And of course there was Allen Ginsberg. None of his many tele-visitations ever matched his 1968 spot on William F. Buckley’s Firing Line, during which he recited a poem he’d written on LSD (“the fifth hour of LSD, for those who are specifically technologists in this”). It deserves to be an iconic ’60s moment: the beatnik icon preaching to the founder of modern conservatism, the poet’s blissed-out vibes meeting the pundit’s eerie grin, the guru conjuring “visible orchards of mind language,” “the brown vagina-moist ground” of a Welsh mountain, and other wonders as Buckley’s mugging condescension turns to concentration. The audience hushes, too. Ginsberg exerts an undeniable pull; with each zealous gesture he really is trying to commune with the host. The host isn’t high enough—no one ever could be—but when the poem reaches its triumphant climax, Buckley flashes his grin, his blue eyes, and admits, “I kinda like that.”

Yet Ginsberg’s appearances also capture what is least filmable about poetry, the aspects of the job that evaporate in limelight. During the same Firing Line broadcast, he delivers a tougher kind of wisdom: “No one can understand the problem of police brutality in America … without understanding the language of the police. The language that the police use on hippies or Negroes is such that I can’t pronounce it to the middle-class audience.” He’s taking a swipe at Buckley’s viewership—and probably at the network censors too. Those censors would have reviled much of Ginsberg’s own language; all these years later, the networks would still bleep out parts of Howl. And if the screen abhors certain kinds of frankness, it’s all but lethal to the state of inwardness that produces poems. In 1978, we find Ginsberg on The Dick Cavett Show, instructing Cavett in Tibetan-style meditation. Though Ginsberg stresses that the practice “includes the world ... it’s not a trip to the moon,” he seems to realize the absurdity of performing it for a crowd. However vital it was to his artistic life, the studio stage reduces it to an actor’s affectation. He keeps the lesson short and jokes about receiving “applause for doing nothing.”

Later, Cavett challenges him to improvise a haiku about the FBI. Ginsberg obliges: “FBI poring / over ancient Xeroxes, / beards growing white on their chins.” Hearing the tepid applause, he revises a line. Then he changes it back, declaring, “First thought, best thought.” But this apostle of poetic spontaneity doesn’t seem pleased with either version.

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What the camera is much better at eliciting—and even dramatizing—are the stories behind existing poems, including the secrets of an author’s “process.” Consider a 1982 episode of The South Bank Show devoted to Philip Larkin. Apart from publicity stills, his screen presence is limited to his hands as they leaf through an old notebook. Luckily, he revisits a masterpiece, “The Whitsun Weddings,” and his voice-over comments on the drafts reveal more than pages of criticism could.

“I thought I wrote it pretty quickly,” he recalls, “because I’ve always said that this was one poem that anybody could have written.” Reviewing his notes, however, he finds that not only did it take “an enormous time” but that “I didn’t even stick to it very conscientiously.” The poem, published in 1959, turns out to have had a glacial genesis: the train ride that inspired it took place in 1955, and he jotted down the first lines two years later. His puzzlement sounds genuine: “This is not the way I normally work.”

As he goes on to explain his working method, we might be surprised by Larkin’s surprise. “I advance very cautiously and slowly, and when I think I’ve got far enough, I cross it out and rewrite it.” A close-up shows pages full of tidy lines, nearly all of them struck through; the poem really is “advancing” like a wary army under massive attrition. Even when the battle is won, it isn’t: Larkin allows that the majestic ending is “deeply symbolic in various ways” but frets that “I don’t know whether, in fact, [it’s] as good as it could be.” He also notices that the final draft version ends with the words turning to rain rather than the familiar (and metrically superior) becoming rain. He muses that he must have made that change in typescript: “Type makes [a poem] look very different, and all sorts of unsuspected weaknesses catch your eye.”

The overall effect is to dampen any notion of a divine outpouring. For Larkin, this was a long trek from greater to lesser dissatisfaction. Reaching the end—that flawless arrival—required no miracles, just dogged patience and an implacably fussy ear.

A scholar could glean some of this from the archived drafts themselves, but other videos unearth context that would surely have been lost otherwise. If not for an obscure public-access TV interview, how could we have known about Lucille Clifton’s editing skirmish with Toni Morrison? Clifton told the tale to fellow poet Roland Flint on a 1991 episode of The Writing Life, backed by a set so heroically low-budget it makes your heart soar. Apparently Morrison, who edited Clifton’s early volume An Ordinary Woman, “couldn’t stand” a passage from the autobiographical “my poem” sequence:

she’ll keep on trying
with her crooked look
and her wrinkled ways,
the darling girl.

Although the younger writer “was in awe of Toni Morrison,” she refused to change that last line because, after all, “I write poems and she writes prose.” Besides, she adds with a big laugh, “I am a darling girl—why shouldn’t I say so?”

We encounter a few romantic anecdotes too, flashes of that side of the writing life that extends beyond proof pages and phone calls. Bantering with Robert Lowell in an uncredited clip from around 1969, Dickey reveals that he has a lovely, recurring dream more “heartbreaking” than any nightmare. “I fear those tears of loss, and deprivation … when you’re at the happy swimming pool, which is kind of like Eden, you see, for a few minutes of one anonymous suburban night, and is forever gone.” Dickey fans will hear echoes of his dreamlike anthology piece “The Lifeguard,” in which a tranquil lake becomes a place of irrecoverable innocence:

As I move toward the center of the lake,
Which is also the center of the moon,
I am thinking of how I may be
The savior of one

Who has already died in my care.

Almost as fantastical is the true story Adonis (Ali Ahmad Said Esber) tells a Danish interviewer about his beginnings as a writer. When he learned as a Syrian teenager that President Shukri al-Quwatli would be visiting his province, he resolved to read a welcome poem so impressive that Quwatli would grant his wish: “to go to school.” Incredibly, it worked. He got his audience with the president, recited his poem practically barefoot, and was rewarded with a prestigious scholarship. Later, infuriated by rejection letters, he took the pen name Adonis—because poetry editors “were trying to kill me” just as the wild boar killed the Greek hero—and saw his luck immediately change. All these decades later, he smiles: “In one way or another my own life became a sort of a myth. … Sometimes I hesitate to tell it. Because how can someone have a dream which becomes a reality?” But something in his manner—a restrained intensity, a puckish self-confidence—hints at the answer.

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What videos give poetry fans above all are performances: windows onto authors’ conceptions of pieces we’ve carried in our own heads; cadences we never detected on the page; obscure material, curiosities, “extras.” After one more viewing of the Berryman, I drink another late-night coffee and browse on.

Here’s Langston Hughes reading “The Weary Blues,” backed by an all-white jazz band, on Canadian TV in 1958. His voice and manner faintly recall the anchormen of that era—maybe it’s his direct, bespectacled gaze at viewers. His smooth, professional tone doesn’t oversell the poem’s musicality; he knows it’s already there in the language.

And here, just as effective, is Basil Bunting crooning “Briggflatts”—a bard of the old school, rolling his r’s and reveling in his vowels, wringing each drop of lyricism out of the verse.

And a performance that isn’t poetry at all but actual song. A few years ago, the Cortland Review filmed the late Claudia Emerson and her husband, Kent Ippolito, duetting on the country standard “How’s the World Treating You?” They’re strumming guitars at home as their cat paces the floor. Their harmonies are as sweet as their chemistry. Now that Emerson is gone, I can’t help hearing that moody little melody—Every day is blue Monday / Every day you’re away—in the background of her poems, which became self-elegies much too soon.

As the Web grows up, more and more such clips will surface, and countless others will be created by savvy younger writers. The kind of video interviews produced by the Academy of American Poets will become more common, even as performance pieces such as those featured by Button Poetry—not to mention crossover experiments such as Beyoncé and Warsan Shire’s Lemonade—draw viewers in the millions. We’ll see better organized archives with full scholarly apparatus. But I love the disorder we’ve got now, the haphazard flotsam that’s turned up on digital shores for people like me to pick through: home movies, blurry audience recordings, vintage Canadian TV. It suits the art form, which can seem both mysteriously remote and humbly local. And it confirms our sense that even the hammiest great poets remain somehow elusive, not quite adapted to the mass media hive—that the essence of their legacy floats somewhere out of focus, out of frame.

Originally Published: September 13th, 2016

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetrysoup.com/article/edda_its_prose_and_poetry-1647


Edda: Its Prose and Poetry
SOURCE: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition

EDDA, the title given to two very remarkable collections of old Icelandic literature. Of these only one bears that title from antiquity; the other is called Edda by a comparatively modern misnomer. The word is unknown to any ancient northern language, and is first met with in Rigspula, a fragmentary poem at the end of Codex Wormianus, dated about 1200, where it is introduced as the name or title of a great-grandmother. From the 14th to the 17th century, this word—but no one has formed a reasonable conjecture why—was used to signify the technical laws of Icelandic court metre, Eddu regla, and “Never to have seen Edda” was a modest apology for ignorance of the highest poetic art. The only work known by this name to the ancients was the miscellaneous group of writings put together by Snorri Sturlason (q.v.; 1178-1241), the greatest name in old Scandinavian literature. It is believed that the Edda, as he left it, was completed about 1222. Whether he gave this name to the work is doubtful; the title first occurs in the Upsala Codex, transcribed about fifty years after his death. The collection of Snorri is now known as the Prose or Younger Edda, the title of theElder Edda being given to a book of ancient mythological poems, discovered by the Icelandic bishop of Skálaholt, Brynjulf Sveinsson, in 1643, and erroneously named by him the Edda of Saemund.

1. The Prose Edda, properly known as Edda Snorra Sturlusonar, was arranged and modified by Snorri, but actually composed, as has been conjectured, between the years 1140 and 1160. It is divided into five parts, the Preface or Formáli, Gylfaginning, Bragaraeður, Skáldskaparmál andHáttatal. The preface bears a very modern character, and simply gives a history of the world from Adam and Eve, in accordance with the Christian tradition. Gylfaginning, or the Delusion of Gylfi, on the other hand, is the most precious compendium which we possess of the mythological system of the ancient inhabitants of Scandinavia. Commencing with the adventures of a mythical king Gylfi and the giantess Gefion, and the miraculous formation of the island of Zealand, it tells us that the Aesir, led by Odin, invaded Svithjod or Sweden, the land of Gylfi, and settled there. It is from the Ynglingasaga and from the Gylfaginning that we gain all the information we possess about the conquering deities or heroes who set their stamp upon the religion of the North. Advancing from the Black Sea northwards through Russia, and westward through Esthonia, the Aesir seem to have overrun the south lands of Scandinavia, not as a horde but as an immigrant aristocracy. The Eddaic version, however, of the history of the gods is not so circumstantial as that in the Ynglingasaga; it is, on the other hand, distinguished by an exquisite simplicity and archaic force of style, which give an entirely classical character to its mythical legends of Odin and of Loki. The Gylfaginning is written in prose, with brief poetic insertions. TheBragaraeður, or sayings of Bragi, are further legends of the deities, attributed to Bragi, the god of poetry, or to a poet of the same name. TheSkáldskaparmál, or Art of Poetry, commonly called Skálda, contains the instructions given by Bragi to Aegir, and consists of the rules and theories of ancient verse, exemplified in copious extracts from Eyvindr Skáldaspillir and other eminent Icelandic poets. The word Skáldskapr refers to the form rather than the substance of verse, and this treatise is almost solely technical in character. It is by far the largest of the sections of the Edda of Snorri, and comprises not only extracts but some long poems, notably the Thorsdrapa of Eilifr Guðrúnarson and the Haustlaung of Thjóðólfr. The fifth section of the Edda, the Háttatal, or Number of Metres, is a running technical commentary on the text of Snorri’s three poems written in honour of Haakon, king of Norway. Affixed to some MS. of the Younger Edda are a list of poets, and a number of philological treatises and grammatical studies. These belong, however, to a later period than the life of Snorri Sturlason.

The three oldest MSS. of the prose Edda all belong to the beginning of the 14th century. The Wurm MS. was sent to Ole Wurm in 1628; the Codex Regius was discovered by the indefatigable bishop Brynjulf Sveinsson in 1640. The most important, however, of these MSS. is the Upsala Codex, an octavo volume written probably about the year 1300. There have been several good editions of the Edda Snorra Sturlusonar, of which perhaps the best is that published by the Arne-Magnaean Society in Copenhagen in 1848-1852, in two vols., edited by a group of scholars under the direction of Jón Sigurdsson. There are English translations by T. Percy, Northern Antiquities, from the French by P.H. Mallet (1770); by G. Webbe Dasent (Stockholm, 1842); by R.B. Anderson (Chicago, 1880).

2. The Elder Edda, Poetic Edda or Saemundar Edda hins froða was entirely unknown until about 1643, when it came into the hands of Brynjulf Sveinsson, who, puzzled to classify it, gave it the title of Edda Saemundi multiscii. Saemund Sigfusson, who was thus credited with the collection of these poems, was a scion of the royal house of Norway, and lived from about 1055 to 1132 in Iceland. The poems themselves date in all probability from the 10th and 11th centuries, and are many of them only fragments of longer heroic chants now otherwise entirely lost. They treat of mythical and religious legends of an early Scandinavian civilization, and are composed in the simplest and most archaic forms of Icelandic verse. The author of no one of them is mentioned. It is evident that they were collected from oral tradition; and the fact that the same story is occasionally 922repeated, in varied form, and that some of the poems themselves bear internal evidence of being more ancient than others, proves that the present collection is only a gathering made early in the middle ages, long after the composition of the pieces, and in no critical spirit. Sophus Bugge, indeed, one of the greatest authorities, absolutely rejects the name of Saemund, and is of opinion that the poetic Edda, as we at present hold it, dates from about 1240. There is no doubt that it was collected in Iceland, and by an Icelander.

The most remarkable and the most ancient of the poems in this priceless collection is that with which it commences, the Völuspá, or prophecy of the Völva or Sibyl. In this chant we listen to an inspired prophetess, “seated on her high seat, and addressing Odin, while the gods listen to her words.”

She sings of the world before the gods were made, of the coming and the meeting of the Aesir, of the origin of the giants, dwarfs and men, of the happy beginning of all things, and the sad ending that shall be in the chaos of Ragnarök. The latter part of the poem is understood to be a kind of necromancy—according to Vigfusson, “the raising of a dead völva”; but the mystical language of the whole, its abrupt transitions and terse condensations, and above all the extinct and mysterious cosmology, an acquaintance with which it presupposes, make the exact interpretation of theVöluspá extremely difficult. The charm and solemn beauty of the style, however, are irresistible, and we are constrained to listen and revere as if we were the auditors of some fugual music devised in honour of a primal and long-buried deity. The melodies of this earliest Icelandic verse, elaborate in their extreme and severe simplicity, are wholly rhythmical and alliterative, and return upon themselves like a solemn incantation. Hávamál, the Lesson of the High One, or Odin, follows next; this contains proverbs and wise saws, and a series of stories, some of them comical, told by Odin against himself. The Vafprúðnismál, or Lesson of Vafprúðnir, is written in the same mystical vein as Völuspá; in it the giant who gives his name to the poem is visited by Odin in disguise, and is questioned by him about the cosmogony and chronology of the Norse religion. Grimnismál, or the Sayings of The Hooded One, which is partly in prose, is a story of Odin’s imprisonment and torture by King Geirrod. För Skirnis, or the Journey of Skirnir, Harbarðslióð, or the Lay of Hoarbeard, Hymiskviða, or the Song of Hymir, and Aegisdrekka, or the Brewing of Aegir, are poems, frequently composed as dialogue, containing legends of the gods, some of which are so ludicrous that it has been suggested that they were intentionally burlesque. Thrymskviða, or the Song of Thrym, possesses far more poetic interest; it recounts in language of singular force and directness how Thor lost his hammer, stolen by Thrym the giant, how the latter refused to give it up unless the goddess Freyia was given him in marriage, and how Thor, dressed in women’s raiment, personated Freyia, and, slaying Thrym, recovered his hammer. Alvíssmál, or the Wisdom of Allwise, is actually a philological exercise under the semblance of a dialogue between Thor and Alvis the dwarf. In Vegtamskviða, or the Song of Vegtam, Odin questions a völva with regard to the meaning of the sinister dreams of Balder. Rígsmál, or more properly Rígspula, records how the god Heimdall, disguised as a man called Rig, wandered by the sea-shore, where he met the original dwarf pair, Ai and Edda, to whom he gave the power of child-bearing, and thence sprung the whole race of thralls; then he went on and met with Afi and Amma, and made them the parents of the race of churls; then he proceeded until he came to Faðir and Moðir, to whom he gave Jarl, the first of free men, whom he himself brought up, teaching him to shoot and snare, and to use the sword and runes. It is much to be lamented that of this most characteristic and picturesque poem we possess only a fragment. InHyndluljóð, the Lay of Hyndla, the goddess Freyia rides to question the völva Hyndla with regard to the ancestry of her young paramour Ottar; a very fine quarrel ensues between the prophetess and her visitor. With this poem, the first or wholly mythological portion of the collection closes. What follows is heroic and pseudo-historic. The Völundarkviða, or Song of Völundr, is engaged with the adventures of Völundr, the smith-king, during his stay with Nidud, king of Sweden. Völundr, identical with the Anglo-Saxon Wêland and the German Wieland (O.H.G. Wiolant), is sometimes confused with Odin, the master-smith. This poem contains the beautiful figure of Svanhvít, the swan-maiden, who stays seven winters with Völundr, and then, yearning for her fatherland, flies away home through the dark forest. Helgakviða, Hiörvarðs sonar, the Song of Helgi, the Son of Hiörvarð, which is largely in prose, celebrates the wooing by Helgi of Svava, who, like Atalanta, ends by loving the man with whom she has fought in battle. Two Songs of Helgi the Hunding’s Bane, Helgakviða Hundingsbana, open the long and very important series of lays relating to the two heroic families of the Völsungs and the Niblungs. Including the poems just mentioned, there are about twenty distinct pieces in the poetic Edda which deal more or less directly with this chain of stories. It is hardly necessary to give the titles of these poems here in detail, especially as they are, in their present form, manifestly only fragments of a great poetic saga, possibly the earliest coherent form of the story so universal among the Teutonic peoples. We happily possess a somewhat later prose version of this lost poem in the Völsungasaga, where the story is completely worked out. In many places the prose of the Völsungasaga follows the verse of the Eddaic fragments with the greatest precision, often making use of the very same expressions. At the same time there are poems in the Edda which the author of the saga does not seem to have seen. But if we compare the central portions of the myth, namely Sigurd’s conversation with Fafnir, the death of Regin, the speech of the birds and the meeting with the Valkyrje, we are struck with the extreme fidelity of the prose romancer to his poetic precursors in the Sigurðarkviða Fafnisbana; in passing on to the death of Sigurd, we perceive that the version in the Völsungasaga must be based upon a poem now entirely lost. Of the origin of the myth and its independent development in medieval Germany, this is not the place for discussion (see Nibelungenlied). Suffice to say that in no modernized or Germanized form does the legend attain such an exquisite colouring of heroic poetry as in these earliest fragments of Icelandic song. A very curious poem, in some MSS. attributed directly to Saemund, is the Song of the Sun, Sólarlióð, which forms a kind of appendix to the poetic Edda. In this the spirit of a dead father addresses his living son, and exhorts him, with maxims that resemble those of Hávamál, to righteousness of life. The tone of the poem is strangely confused between Christianity and Paganism, and it has been assumed to be the composition of a writer in the act of transition between the old creed and the new. It may, however, not impossibly, be altogether spurious as a poem of great antiquity, and may merely be the production of some Icelandic monk, anxious to imitate the Eddaic form and spirit. Finally Forspjallsljóð, or the Preamble, formerly known as the Song of Odin’s Raven, is an extremely obscure fragment, of which little is understood, although infinite scholarship has been expended on it. With this the poeticEdda closes.

The principal MS. of this Edda is the Codex Regius in the royal library at Copenhagen, written continuously, without regard to prose or verse, on 45 vellum leaves. This is that found by Bishop Brynjulf. Another valuable fragment exists in the Arne-Magnaean collection in the University of Copenhagen, consisting of four sheets, 22 leaves in all. These are the only MSS. older than the 17th century which contain a collection of the ancient mythico-heroic lays, but fragments occur in various other works, and especially in the Edda of Snorri. It is believed to have been written between 1260 and 1280. The poetic Edda was translated into English verse by Amos Cottle in 1797; the poet Gray produced a version of theVegtamskviða; but the first good translation of the whole was that published by Benjamin Thorpe in 1866. An excellent edition of the Icelandic text has been prepared by Th. Möbius, but the standard of the original orthography will be found in the admirable edition of Sophus Bugge, Norroen Fornkvaeði, published at Christiania in 1867.

The Eddaic poems were rearranged, on a system of their own which differs entirely from that of the early MSS., by Gudbrand Vigfusson and F. York Powell, in their Corpus poeticum boreale (Oxford, 1883). This is a collection, not of Edda only but of all existing fragments of the vast lyrical literature of ancient Iceland. It supplies a prose translation.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2016/09/searching-for-tia-harriet/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+HarrietTheBlog+%28Harriet%3A+ The+Blog%29


Searching for Tía Harriet
By Urayoán Noel


Every once in a while I’ll hear a Latinx poet on social media describe getting published in Poetry as a dream come true. Invariably I’ll roll my inner eye. Sure, I get the prestige and the fact that the journal pay$ its contributors, and I find the current iteration of the journal a welcome joy to read, both for its formal adventurousness and its range of voices. Still, a part of me will instantly go back to those summer days in 1999 when I would try to stay cool by reading litmags at the Union Square Barnes & Noble. I would always struggle to care about the issues of Poetry, and as a young and hungry Boricua poet new to the U.S. lit game, I would wonder what was wrong with me: this wasn’t one of those genteel yawnfest journals for endlessly replicated high-society whitewashing, this was frickin’ Poetry magazine, Harriet Monroe’s Poetry, the Poetry of Eliot’s Prufrock (June 1915) and Langston’s “Po’ Boy Blues” (November 1926)!

I would spend a lot of that summer at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, new on the scene and taking in an alternative poetic history. Little did I know that I would end up writing a dissertation, and eventually a book, on Nuyorican poetry and the alternative it offered to print-centric histories of literary life in the U.S. Even now, as a professor of Latinx literature who can marvel at the cool Latinx work being published in recent issues of Poetry, I can’t let go of those memories of summer afternoons struggling to read the journal and thinking I should be at the Nuyorican instead, so I knew when I was asked to blog for Tía Harriet that I had to write this post.

Despite an auspicious beginning and an encouraging last few years, Poetry has hardly been a home to Latinx voices, especially as these have informed and been informed by social movements and political struggles over the last century. Certainly, Poetry is not unusual in this regard, not many places have. Still, given its stature and the outsize role of its Poetry Foundation in shaping the contours of poetry in an increasingly Latinx U.S., it becomes crucial to at least minimally reflect on Poetry’s Latinx history. (Also, as a poet who survives thanks to the generic version of expensive epilepsy medication, I’m happy the Poetry Foundation’s pharmaceutical fortune can be used for dissident purposes!)

In the early days of Harriet Monroe’s Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, a few Latinx poets figured as part of the modernist ferment. Most notably William Carlos Williams—whose Puerto Rican mother and British father met in the Dominican Republic—was part of the journal from almost the very beginning, its second year. In the June 1913 issue he appears alongside Rabindranath Tagore and others, and a couple of years later in the poem “A Confidence” (May 1915), he writes with a diasporic Caribbean intimacy about the dystopian climes of El Norte: “Today, dear friend, this gray day, / I have been explaining to a young man of the West Indies / How the leaves all fall from the little branches / And lie soon in crowds along the bare ground.”

Then there’s Salomón de la Selva, who crashed the New York scene with his 1918 debut Tropical Town and Other Poems but would later gain renown in Latin America for El soldado desconocido (The Unknown Soldier, 1922), an autobiographical book, informed by his experiences fighting in World War I, that also anticipates aspects of antipoetry. De la Selva’s “My Nicaragua” (November 1917) is an at once loving and ironic evocation of his homeland that dares to unwrite the exportable pastoral and with it the fantasy of the exotic other: “Not picturesque, just dreary commonplace—/ As commonplace and dreary as the flats / Here, in your cities, where your poor folks live.” There’s a clear global-south consciousness that links the everyday struggle of Latin America’s “tropical towns” to the barrios in the U.S., an especially important connection given that Nicaragua was occupied by the U.S. at the time. Williams’s and de la Selva’s translocal landscapes tropicalize the modern canon.

After the modernist heyday, however, things get bleak for Latinx Poetry. And I’m not even thinking of late-modernist giants such as Américo Paredes (who wasn’t primarily known as a poet) and Julia de Burgos (who wrote almost exclusively in Spanish and wasn’t substantively translated into English until the 1990s, unless, as Harris Feinsod notes, we count the FBI). What’s depressing is the almost total absence of poets from the Chicano and Puerto Rican Movements of the 1960s and 1970s, which were and remain crucial to shaping the field of Latinx poetry, and are also key to our contemporary social history.

In their introduction to the anthology Angels of the Americlypse: New Latin@ Writing (May 2014), editors Carmen Giménez Smith and John Chávez rightfully claim writers like Juan Felipe Herrera, Alurista, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Pedro Pietri, as key innovators and forerunners of the contemporary poets in their anthology, yet Alurista, Anzaldúa, and Pietri are all otherwise invisible in the pages of Poetry. (I used the search bar on the journal’s archive page, and I also browsed dozens of issues through JSTOR.) Even Herrera, the current United States Poet Laureate and certainly the most widely recognized poet emerging from the movimiento ferment of the 1960s and 1970s, only finds his way into the pages of Poetry in July 2016 (!), and then only as part of a dossier curated by the indefatigable Francisco Aragón, for his fantastic PINTURA : PALABRA project. (Aragón’s dossier also marks the first appearance of Lorna Dee Cervantes and Tino Villanueva, two major figures in Chicano poetry.) Herrera’s Rebozos of Love came out in 1974, and he had already mapped a radical post-movimiento poetics with the scores and photo-poems of 1983’s classic Exiles of Desire before receiving the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry for Half of the World in Light: New and Selected Poems. Given all this, his 2016 publication in Poetry is a literal afterthought.

Missing along with these 1960s and 1970s poets are the oral and performance traditions they recovered and reimagined at Flor y Canto festivals and cultural spaces such as the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. As far as I can tell, not a single Nuyorican poet from the Cafe scene has ever been published in Poetry, not foundational figures such as Pedro Pietri, Tato Laviera, Sandra María Esteves, and Miguel Algarín, and not even widely published younger poets emerging from the 1990s slam generation, such as Willie Perdomo and Edwin Torres. Lastly, largely missing along with Anzaldúa is the essential tradition of Chicana feminist poetics, without which we lose a proper framework for reading Latinx poetics from the perspective of not only gender, but also sexuality, race, language, territoriality, poetic form, and so on.

True, a number of these poets appear in a poets sampler called “U.S. Latino/a Voices in Poetry,” published on the Poetry Foundation website and apparently last updated in 2015. Still, this is simply a series of links to the poets’ individual pages on the Foundation website, many of which (and especially in the case of the elders whose key work predates the Web) contain no poems. Anzaldúa’s is a particularly sad case, given her stature and influence and how unfairly neglected her poetry has been compared to her essays. Her author page includes no poems, and as for articles “about” her only a review of TC Tolbert and Trace Peterson’s landmark 2013 anthology Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics, which mentions Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga’s legendary This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981).

While I can’t quibble with the biography’s claim that Anzaldúa’s “poems and essays explore the anger and isolation of occupying the margins of culture and collective identity,” I find it ironic how the author page reinforces Anzaldúa’s marginality with its lack of texts and its “Poet Categorization” limited to listing her “Life Span” (1942-2004). (I guess borderlands/frontera poet and Chicana/Xicana and radical-woman-of-color writer aren’t viable categorizations, for all of Anzaldúa’s best efforts.) Sure, we’re encouraged to make a suggestion if we “disagree with this poet’s categorization,” but although we’re glad to help, really that shouldn’t be our job!

Keeping in mind Audre Lorde’s distinction between a facile diversity managed from above and a difference that’s difficult and necessarily negotiated from within, we can ask that the Poetry Foundation’s fortune do more than just “diversify” poetry (ugh! versify or die!), and that it engage with the modes of difference that poets such as Anzaldúa present. Have the Poetry Foundation folks read Anzaldúa’s poetry and do they think it demands a new Borderlands category? Then they should create it! It would be cool to see, say, Rodrigo Toscano, a poet from the Borderlands of California currently listed as a “U.S., Mid-Atlantic” (?) poet, sharing a region with Anzaldúa, who was from the Rio Grande Valley. Poets aren’t just from places, they create spaces.

I’m grateful for the monumental undertaking that is the Poetry Foundation website as an archive of contemporary poetry in the U.S., and I’ve used it many times and will continue to use it in my classes, but I’m also concerned by its hegemonic might. Given its algorithmic weight, the Poetry Foundation page is typically among the first results when one searches for a given poet, and for deceased poets or poets who can’t, for any number of reasons, curate their web presence, the Poetry Foundation page becomes all the more important, as do its thoroughness and accuracy. What criteria determine the choice of content for these pages? How can individual poets and communities participate in the process beyond reporting “a problem” with a biography or disagreeing with a poet’s categorization? What about creating new categorizations, even ones that might make the Poetry Foundation question its own taxonomies? The shift from the taxonomy to the folksonomy, from the expert-generated to the community-generated, is the whole point of Web. 2.0 after all. Without it what we have is the illusion of participation.

That’s one of the lessons that I learned at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, that poetry is lived community, and that approaches to poetry that don’t make room for the messiness and beauty of that living, and for the difficulties that come with it, are just diversity without difference, the purely the managerial tokenism of the status quo. And if we don’t demand more from the Poetry Foundation’s millions, then rooting for Poetry magazine is no different from rooting for Citigroup or the DNC, for hegemonic and top-down liberal do-goodism, no matter who’s editing or how cool the new table of contents is. I’m not (much of?) a hater, so I’m not rooting against. I’m happy poets I love and admire are getting published and I’m happy that the 2016 version of Poetry is making Tía Harriet proud by doing what it should’ve been doing all along, but what do you want from me? Una cuki? Brown-y points? (Sorry!) I have a blog post to finish.

The 1980s brings with it the institutional visibility of Latinx literature and the rise of Latinx poets with MFAs, a number of them featured in Poetry. Standouts include Gary Soto, who appears numerous times and as early as May 1974 with work from what would become his debut The Elements of San Joaquin (1977), a classic of Chicano poetics of place. Another is Julia Alvarez, who although best known for her later novels, is well represented with poems such as “Heroics” (May 1982), a characteristically elegant lyric full of transnational feminist resonances: “Once, revolution / in the third world. / Now it’s love.” Alvarez’s work is especially important given the paucity of explicitly Latina feminist work, as well as the continuing invisibility of Dominican American poetry. Still, I was surprised not to come across work by some leading Latinx poets of the 1980s and 1990s, including Ray Gonzalez, Virgil Suárez, Carmen Tafolla, Jimmy Santiago Baca, and, among the Diasporican poets, Aurora Levins Morales, Judith Ortiz Cofer, (de Burgos translator) Jack Agüeros, and (Williams scholar) Julio Marzán. A more recent glaring omission is Rigoberto González, a leading poet and critic who has arguably done more than anybody else for Latinx literature over the past 15 years.

Nonetheless, the past decade has seen an increased Latinx presence in the pages of Poetry, first under the editorship of Christian Wiman, and especially since 2013 with Don Share at the helm. The past few years of Poetry have featured some established poets such as Ricardo Pau-Llosa (February 2013), but especially encouraging has been Share’s inclusion of an exciting range of newer voices such as Cynthia Cruz (May 2014, October 2015), Orlando Ricardo Menes (March 2016), David Tomas Martinez (June 2015), Rodrigo Toscano (May 2014), J. Michael Martinez (May 2014), Aracelis Girmay (April 2016), and Eduardo Corral (December 2011, April 2012, March 2014, March and September 2016). Particularly noteworthy is the inclusion of poets with roots and routes in Central and South America, who are remapping the contours of Latinidad beyond Chicano, Diasporican, and Cuban American imaginaries (Javier Zamora, November 2015, January 2016; Jennifer Tamayo, May 2014). I hope this trend continues.

Along the way, there were pleasant surprises. I discovered poets such as Engracia Melendez, whose “In Berkeley” (December 1923) beautifully reflects on how the speaker can only sing of Jalisco “In the coolness, the dampness— / Here in the north.” I also came across the work of Brazilian Canadian poet Ricardo Sternberg (November 1978), which challenges the limits of Latinidad, as if translating Bishop’s translations of Carlos Drummond de Andrade. I also enjoyed some stiff translations of Lorca (often considered an honorary Latinx) published shortly after his murder (April 1937), as well as a short and wonderfully weird youthful poem called “Umbrella” (December 1924) by future architect of the Puerto Rican “commonwealth” Luis Muñoz Marín, who wrote in English and lived in New York during the 1920s. Lastly, I appreciated coming across several poems by Rhina P. Espaillat, a Dominican American poet whose work remains unjustly neglected in Latinx contexts, perhaps because its elegant formalism is seen as passé in a post-1960s socioaesthetic context which equates formal liberation with political liberation. While, sadly, none of Espaillat’s bilingual or translingual poems are featured, a poem such as “Changeling” (August 1991) haunts me with its authoethnographic music: “I want to tell myself she is not you, / this sullen woman wearing Mama’s eyes.”

Speaking of transligual poems, it’s wonderful to see recent issues of Poetry feature poets such as Toscano and Barbara Jane Reyes (May 2014) and Craig Santos Perez (July/August 2016), who allow us to imagine what Doris Sommer calls a “nonmonolingual” public sphere that can “irritate” the state, especially since many of the older poets who are foundational to Sommer’s and my own aesthetic (Anzaldúa, Tato Laviera, Victor Hernández Cruz) never made it into the pages of Poetry. (A review of Cruz’s debut Snaps appears in the May 1970 issue, and he’s fortunately still around.)

Similarly, it’s thrilling to read a poet like Douglas Kearney (December 2013) mine the lyric, social, and verbivocovisual possibilities of rap in a journal that seemed to proceed as if hip-hop had never happened. Kearney’s poem embodies a point made by the late and sorely missed Amiri Baraka in a memorable review essay published in Poetry a few months earlier, that mainstream poetry venues can still get away with claiming to represent the vitality of contemporary work by poets of color while showing “little evidence of the appearance of spoken word and rap.” (Note to self: Poetry’s home city of Chicago is also home to the poetry slam and the Young Lords.)

In that same essay, Baraka argues that Cave Canem “has energized us poetry by claiming a space for Afro-American poetry, but at the same time presents a group portrait of Afro-American poets as mfa recipients.” This is a crucial challenge. As much as 23-year-old me would probably have liked the 2016 version of Poetry, and maybe even subscribed, it remains, like the bulk of Poetrilandia, largely MFA-centric and removed from other forms of poetry community. Maybe that’s not Poetry’s job, as it can afford to concern itself with publishing the “best” poetry, but it’s an issue for those of us thinking about poetry communities more generally.

In the wake of my own (beautiful, transformative) experience as a CantoMundo fellow, I have often asked myself and some of my fellow cantomundistas whether CantoMundo and its peer organizations can afford to be farm systems for Poetry. What happens when the editorial team changes, or the political climate? And what of all the poets on the outside, who have no shot (statistically and aesthetically) of ever being published in its pages, poets perhaps too raw or inelegant but who sustain poetry as a social and community practice, or who publish in community-oriented journals as daring and essential as PALABRA and The Acentos Review?

I know that CantoMundo, to its credit, has been moving toward allowing prospective fellows to establish eligibility in ways other than publication, including through a history of poetry readings and performances. Still, there’s a tension for me between the dream of (a living) poetry and the dream of (publishing in) Poetry, and I can’t imagine a version of Latinx poetics or U.S. poetics that didn’t properly account for that living poetry, something the Poetry Foundation website, with all its millions and media might, could do much better if it wanted to. So if I roll my eyes, it’s because I’m thinking back to the Poetry that wasn’t, to the poets that didn’t see its pages. Forget poetry foundations; you’re the foundation. You’re all beautiful. I’m sure Tía Harriet would dig you.

Tags: Amiri Baraka, Aracelis Girmay, Audre Lorde, Aurora Levins Morales, Barbara Jane Reyes, CantoMundo, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Carmen Giménez Smith, Carmen Tafolla, Cave Canem, Cherríe Moraga, Craig Santos Perez, Cynthia Cruz, David Tomas Martinez, Doris Sommer, Douglas Kearney, Eduardo Corral, Edwin Torres, Engracia Melendez, Federico Garcia Lorca, Francisco Aragón, Gary Soto, J. Michael Martínez, Jack Agüeros, Javier Zamora, Jennifer Tamayo, Jimmy Santiago Baca, John Chavez, Juan Felipe Herrera, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Julia Alvarez, Julia de Burgos, Julio Marzán, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Luis Muñoz Marín, Miguel Algarín, Nuyorican Poets Cafe, Orlando Ricardo Menes, Pedro Pietri, Rabindranath Tagore, Ray Gonzalez, Rhina P. Espaillat, Ricardo Pau-Llosa, Ricardo Sternberg, Rigoberto Gonzalez, Rodrigo Toscano, Salomón de la Selva, Sandra María Esteves, Tato Laviera, TC Tolbert, Tino Villanueva, Trace Peterson, Victor Hernandez Cruz, Virgil Suárez, William Carlos Williams, Willie Perdomo
Posted in Featured Blogger on Friday, September 30th, 2016 by Urayoán Noel.

I am a huge fan of the lesser known poets (especially my favorite one --Frank Stanton) as well as the legendary ones..
In fact, I am now considering starting a thread on the lesser known poets that so engage and enthrall we few that see their brilliance despite the
massive weight cast by the shadows of the legendary poets.--Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/articles/detail/69896

Essay
Rimbaud in Embryo
The lost poet Samuel Greenberg and the critical debate over his influence.
By Jacob Silverman
Self-portrait by Samuel Greenberg, courtesy of the Fales Library & Special Collections, New York University.

Some writers leave only traces, contrails across the literary firmament. They expire with few or no publications to their names, their legacies left as much to chance as to the efforts of the occasional passionate admirer. Contemporaries offer testimonies of superlative talent unfulfilled, of death robbing posterity of a name that, given time and circumstance, surely would have been added to the rolls of the great. And while some work might survive, appearing in the occasional anthology, it is shrouded in the pall of its author’s biography.

Samuel Greenberg belongs in the pantheon of literary manqués. He’s not totally forgotten—a few hundred poems survive; some were published in posthumous editions. In the 95 years since his death at the age of 23, he has endured as the prototypical “cult writer,” his works passed around like samizdat and occasionally earning an ardent, powerful admirer.

One of those admirers was Hart Crane, who, depending on your interpretation, drew significant influence from Greenberg or baldly plagiarized him. Crane’s poem “Emblems of Conduct” contains lines, either verbatim or with slight modifications, from six different Greenberg poems, including one called “Conduct.” Other work by Crane shows marks of Greenberg, whom Crane never met. The debate over just how much Crane took from Greenberg has animated Greenberg scholarship for decades, and has produced some worthwhile commentary on the nature of authorial influence. But at times it also obscures what is, on its own, a fascinating (albeit brief) life and oeuvre, deserving of its own consideration.

Born in Vienna in 1893, Samuel Greenberg was the sixth of eight children. At the turn of the century, his family immigrated to the United States, settling in the crowded tenements of the Lower East Side. In those early years he attended public and religious schools, learning to read Hebrew, and had a bar mitzvah, but in 1908, the same year his mother died, he left school in order to work.

The Greenbergs were a family of artisans. Samuel’s father worked with brocade, making decorative materials for synagogues’ Torah arks, and his brother Adolf made leather bags. After dropping out of school, Samuel worked with both of them.


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But sometime in 1912, around the same time he began writing poems in notebooks, Greenberg contracted tuberculosis and underwent what would be the first of many hospitalizations. Later that year, he also began taking piano lessons, though he reportedly had difficulty reading music and remaining focused. All the same, looking over one of Greenberg’s sketchbooks in the Fales Collection at NYU, which contains the bulk of his papers, I stumbled upon drawings of staff lines pebbled with musical notes, the name of each note written underneath; they were clearly some attempt at memorization. On the same page were a pair of delicately shaded hands—perhaps simply an exercise in anatomical drawing, though placed as they were, with the fingers curved slightly inward, they recalled a conductor leading an ensemble.

Greenberg read deeply of the British Romantics, as well as Blake, Milton, and Wilde, but he had a particular regard for music, attending concerts when he could and writing poems about Richard Strauss and Mendelssohn. After a concert at Carnegie Hall, Greenberg gave a copy of his poem “The Pianoforte Artist” to pianist Josef Hofmann. (In an autobiographical essay addressed to his brother Daniel, Greenberg wrote of these concerts, “I know we liked it better than life!”) Another poem, riffing about Brahms’s Paganini Variations, sends the reader through a gyre of rhapsody: “In each phrase / Beats, the patriotism of lyre love, improvised impulse spreads / Its familiar Master glow, Communication with the spirit muse.”

By April 1915, Greenberg was writing to William Murrell Fisher, a scholar and art critic whom Greenberg had met two years earlier at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in hopes of getting his work published. Time was running out for the young poet—“Sickness closed in with its careful teeth,” he wrote in that autobiographical essay. His tuberculosis had worsened (“the old story of weakness returned”); he had spent the previous two years in and out of hospitals, treatment facilities, and family members’ homes in New York, New Jersey, and Rhode Island. That summer, a doctor would remove a kidney. Through it all he wrote, not only hundreds of poems but also some short plays. When health allowed, he worked for his brother Adolf, the leather craftsman.


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Greenberg was also a prolific painter and sketch artist. Many of his sketches are of young men, done on scraps of paper or in small, dilapidated sketchbooks, and he reportedly liked to sit in Washington Square Park, where he drew strangers. The men tended to be in profile, finely dressed; occasionally they appeared as the barest silhouette, as if evaporating from the page. He also drew self-portraits—one shows him lounging in an ornately carved wooden chair, staring out almost playfully—and illustrations of his family members and fellow hospital patients. (One sketch is dedicated “to my friend William Fisher” and dated February 1915.)

The sketchbooks doubled as all-purpose notebooks. Besides the musical notations, there are scraps of verse and one apparently undelivered note, which reads, “Young man — 19. — wishes position in any office,” and is signed below.

Some of Greenberg’s handwriting is cramped and nearly indecipherable. In the Fales Collection, a line stuck out for me. It appeared below a simple, blocky sketch of a man’s dour face, cigarette prominently perched between his lips. The poet had written, “It is the gazing at the people one gets that way.”

With his own fragile health and both of his parents having died young, Greenberg was deeply conscious of his own mortality. In his drafts, he dated and initialed each poem, perhaps with an eye toward posterity. In the work itself, he treated death with respect but also not without a kind of sly playfulness. In the poem “To Dear Daniel”—Daniel was one of Samuel’s brothers—Greenberg wrote, “There is a loud noise of Death / Where I lay; / There is a loud noise of life / Far away.” The speaker knows that he is closer to his end than to his beginning. Some poems respond to death with disbelief that it could come so prematurely. One piece opens with the following lines: “Nurse brings me Medicine! Medicine? / For me! God, 20 years old! / Medicine!? I’ll leave it to thee! / The truth is a draught!”

Greenberg’s poetry employed bizarre spelling and syntax (many editions of his work have smoothed over these errors, at the cost of authenticity). He also tended to create what Philip Horton, an early Hart Crane biographer, called “archaic contractions”—'pon, e'en, e'er. Some words are unexpectedly capitalized. This is easily chalked up to his autodidact nature, but it may also owe something to Greenberg’s taste for Milton and Blake and the short plays he wrote, which were a mélange of Spenserian fantasy and Elizabethan drama. Like some of his poems, these plays took place in what New Directions founder James Laughlin, who published the first book of Greenberg’s poems in 1939, described as a “literary mythland.” One short drama, which I read in the Fales Collection, is titled “Capablanka” and dated October 1916. It concerns an anthropomorphic statue (the list of dramatis personae calls it “a motional statue”), three woodsmen, a talking “fairy snake,” and “an unknown magician” named Valotif, as well as several others.

Told in three short acts—the whole thing is only about 16 pages in typescript—the play’s basic action is mostly intelligible, but its prose tends toward the opaque, at times appearing like a deliberately obscure pastiche of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It features Greenberg’s characteristic spelling—“obsured,” “devine,” “familiars” used as a verb—and some evocative lines that show the beauty of what Laughlin called his “unconscious dictation.” “I varnish his throat,” one of the woodsmen offers by way of a threat; another, not believing that a monument can move, claims that there are “no such furies in granite”; the third speaks of “the cliffs sea / that moan their messages of wander foam / and dash over high sprays of lust.”

Perhaps fearful of giving him more than his due, critics have tended to praise and condemn Greenberg in a single line. They often dwell on his wildness, his untended lyricism, considering it both a virtue and a deficit, deeply intertwined.

John Berryman once remarked that Greenberg had “some power of phrasing” but “with rare exceptions so little control over syntax.” Thomas Lux, in his poem “Here’s to Samuel Greenberg,” describes Greenberg as “semi-illiterate / coughing it out among total / illiterates during the only time / in your life you had time / to write: on your back.” And yet, later in the same poem, Lux refers to him as “small master.”

Laughlin vacillated between even greater extremes, writing in the 1939 introduction: “The poetry of Greenberg is not great poetry, and it is not even important minor poetry ... and yet ... poetry it is, pure poetry, to an extent equalled by the work of few other writers.”

Philip Horton, writing in the Southern Review in 1936, also knocked Greenberg down before building him back up. “One has the successive impressions that the author was mad, illiterate, esoteric, or simply drunk,” Horton wrote. “And yet there flash out from this linguistic chaos, lines of pure poetry, powerful, illuminating, and original, lines unlike any others in English literature, except Blake’s perhaps.” Repeatedly, we observe a strange kind of diffidence: Greenberg is both semi-illiterate and a master, a powerful lyricist but out of control, not even a minor poet but also a creator of “pure poetry” (a phrase that both Laughlin and Horton used).

Could he be all of this—not either/or but both/and? Or did these critics, particularly the early ones such as Horton and Laughlin, not fully understand what they were looking at? The former called Greenberg “a visionary” before going on to ask, “But who was he, or is he? Did Hart Crane, who had his poems, know?”

Indeed, it is in Crane that we find someone whose critiques of Greenberg serve only to amplify his appreciation of him, cementing the picture of Greenberg as an untutored, untamed, and splendid lyricist—the poet equivalent of a naïve artist. Crane, in a letter to Gorham Munson praised Greenberg’s “hobbling yet really gorgeous attempts.” In the tragic poet’s work, Crane saw “a quality that is unspeakably eerie and the most convincing gusto.”

Crane first encountered Greenberg’s work in the winter of 1923–24. Greenberg had already been dead for six years, and Crane was staying in Woodstock, New York, where he spent time with William Murrell Fisher, likely the only person to know both men. Fisher showed Crane some of Greenberg’s poems, and Crane was immediately electrified, pacing around the room, declaiming lines.

In his letter to Munson, Crane also called Greenberg “a Rimbaud in embryo”—an epithet that makes some sense, as Rimbaud, though better educated, had left school by 15 and was done with poetry by 20. It’s difficult not to think in turn of Victor Hugo’s own description of Rimbaud: he called the fiery young poet “an infant Shakespeare.” In both cases, the young poet is granted a claim toward genius, but his precocity—he is embryonic, or he is an infant—somehow holds him back.

Rimbaud was a proto-surrealist, and in some of Greenberg’s work, one finds a surrealist bent. Laughlin cited Greenberg’s “The Pale Impromptu” as surrealist, “with its use of words for their own sake.” Its coded narrative and succession of disjointed phrases—“Water waves / torque blocks / Skulls of saints / patience absent / Yellow dreams / Sensive Stirs / Silent hills”—support this assessment. But Greenberg’s best work forsakes this experimentation, instead melding passionate first-person narratives—about the sea, death, God, poetry, mythological landscapes—with imagery that shimmers because it appears all the more carefully rendered.

Yet he also showed a surprising talent for restraint. “Conduct” begins with a painter illustrating a valley before giving way to Technicolor descriptions of an exploding volcano and darkening skies. But then Greenberg dials down his music to a pianissimo, and the poem resolves with a curious, almost mournful scene:

The wanderer soon chose
His spot of rest, they bore the
Chosen hero upon their shoulders
Whom they strangly admired — as,
The Beach tide Summer of people desired

After their meeting, Fisher gave Crane a sheaf of Greenberg’s poems and Crane set about retyping them. This sort of transcription, or re-scription, has been a common practice among writers for ages, but Crane took the process further. Greenberg, like such poets as Whitman before him, drew inspiration from the Brooklyn Bridge, and after copying Greenberg’s “The ‘East River’s Charm,” Crane added the following lines:

And will I know if you are dead?
The river leads on and on instead
Of certainty...

Drawing on “Conduct” as well as five other Greenberg poems, Crane cobbled together “Emblems of Conduct” from January to March 1924. (Marc Simon’s forensic analysis of Crane’s borrowings is the essential work on this subject. Simon, a literary scholar whose NYU PhD dissertation was about the Greenberg/Crane connection, would go on to edit The Complete Poems of Hart Crane.) He changed some lines, tinkering here and there, but the resulting three stanzas are largely a collage. Laughlin compared the final product to “centones of the Middle Ages, those patch-work poems in which Christian stories were told in lines torn from their contexts in pagan authors.” Laughlin continues, largely approvingly: “Crane did more than steal from Greenberg—he recreated, making something entirely new, entirely his own, from the original materials.”

The contemporary term for this is remixing, which at the moment has much cultural cachet. While I acknowledge the worth of remix in anything from Warhol to hip-hop sampling, it’s difficult not to think that Crane took more than his fair share and that he has benefited from his (understandable) stature as the greater poet. But many critics feel compelled to defend Crane, as if criticizing him in this instance, arguing that he let his enthusiasm for Greenberg get away from him, would undercut his otherwise formidable achievements.

“I do not think we even need to mention the word plagiarism,” Laughlin writes in his introduction to the 1939 volume, though he does just that. “We must strongly censure Crane for his failure to clearly state his source,” yet “no doubt he meant to acknowledge his debt ... it simply slipped his mind.” Yes, no doubt. It’s a pale justification, for Crane could have easily included a line of dedication or acknowledgment.

Another Crane biographer, Paul L. Mariani, calls Crane’s borrowings “problematic.” “Emblems of Conduct” was “a dreamlike poem, uncharacteristic of Crane,” Mariani writes, and “Crane’s attempt to take by eminent domain the scattered remains of a dead young poet was not, finally, one of his best efforts.”

But notions of influence, even of plagiarism, are rarely clear, even when, as in this case, there is a large body of inculpatory evidence. As Marc Simon has shown, Greenberg was not wholly sui generis. In 1915, Fisher gave Greenberg a copy of Thomas Carlyle’s Heroes and Hero-Worship (an apposite title, given the relationships here), and some of Carlyle’s imagery describing Iceland’s geography made it into Greenberg’s “Conduct” and, later, Crane’s “Emblems of Conduct.” Greenberg’s borrowings were not so direct, but they give some sense of where he looked for his own raw materials.

Greenberg may never escape the shadow of Hart Crane (though he surely deserves to have his complete works, including the drawings, published in a new edition). But the obligatory irony is that without Crane’s, say, overabundant enthusiasm for poems like “Conduct,” we might never know of Greenberg’s poetry at all. In stealing from Greenberg, Crane assured the lesser poet’s immortality.

Still, there is some sadness in knowing that Greenberg’s work will never quite stand on its own. Despite his fragile health and lack of education, Greenberg was uncommonly prepossessing. “The poet seeks an Earth in himself,” he wrote in one verse. He sought a world of his own making, but it was to be an ephemeral one, as he was subsumed by forces—and poets, too—greater than himself.

Originally Published: November 27th, 2012

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/guides/detail/90642?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+poetryfoundation%2Findex+%28P oetryFoundation.org%29


Repeating Ourselves
Iteration and Reiteration in the October 2016 Poetry



In the no-name old tapestries, many
with halos, a glow or
a circle of jagged lines around each head
never bowed at the table, simply
looking straight on like a mirror gives us
back to ourselves.

In Marianne Boruch’s “The No-Name Tapestries,” the speaker sees herself in the anonymous figures of an artwork, and her own identity—like that of the work—grows hazy. Even the sentence’s grammar leaves us unsure of who’s doing what, confounding characters with a single ambiguous phrase: does “simply / looking straight on like a mirror” refer to the speaker’s gaze, or to the figures’?

If Boruch turns a tapestry into a mirror, Wayne Holloway-Smith’s “Some Waynes” is a funhouse mirror of a poem, reflecting its author in dozens of cartoonish variations:

Magic Wayne with flowers; Wanye West; Box-of-Tricks Wayne; Wayne sad on Facebook, proving he loves his daughter; the sporty Wayne — loves himself skinny; Bald Wayne, head like a rocking chair; Amy Waynehouse; Wayne the ironic; Fat Wayne — tits pushed beneath a Fred Perry Wayne…. all of them have stopped what they’re doing, all of them divided in two rows and facing each other, all of them, arms raised, they are linking fingers, all of them: an architrave through which 
I celebrate, marching like I am the bridegroom, grinning like I am the bride

Are these different people, different Waynes, who (unlike the unknowns in the Boruch poem) have in common only their name? Or does the name indicate the many people who exist within the same Wayne, fat and skinny, male and female, Wanye and Waynehouse, so that the speaker—like Boruch’s—turns multiple? Maybe so: toward the end, Holloway-Smith repeats “all of them” three times, emphasizing not only the quantity of Waynes but also their unity.

This poetic “box of tricks” concludes by celebrating oppositions. In festive formation, the Waynes divide in two, and so does Wayne himself. Then, at once bridegroom and bride, Wayne weds Wayne. What might this mean? In order to “marry” ourselves—to feel unified—do we first need to identify our inconsistencies?

Daisy Fried’s “No God in Us but Song” is, like Holloway-Smith’s, rife with copies and conflict:

Bored in the balcony reading your novel
hoping it will keep me awake — 
religion was always a blind spot — 
with my Sunday headache waiting for the service
to finish so I can retrieve my little chorister,
no god in us but song

Just as Boruch’s speaker sees herself within an artwork, we might see ourselves in this reluctant churchgoer, who—like us—is reading. And later we might see her in her daughter: when the mother was younger, we learn, she too was in a chorus, and now she notes “No god in us but song,” inviting us to see this poem as a kind of song.

Meanwhile, a less pleasant chorister, “pale important teenage Sophia,” delights in bossing around other children and in “leading them expressionless / in paired rows,” as though they were mere duplicates of each other (and of her). The girl is also a mother figure herself,

leaving Sophia alone striving with their robes,
sighing out her burdens in a way
she could only have learned from a mom.

While the poem brims with choruses, it’s also filled with solitary women: Sophia, the speaker, the single mother of a childhood friend. Alone in church, watching her daughter from afar, the speaker worries that she may lose her husband, who is 30 years older, and become a single mother too. “If I kept singing maybe I could keep you here,” Fried writes, and then: “If I kept singing I could keep you here.” But what would it mean to keep him there? To keep him alive? Or merely to keep him in the poem, even as death takes him away—to keep his likeness, in this poem full of likenesses?

Mortality lingers over the poem’s final scene:

and lonely Sophia in the shadowy indoors, unsnapping
the ruff of a straggling treble chorister,
stroking it neat, gently folding it away
as her tired mother nags hurry, hurry up please.

Tired Sophia, who could only have learned her attitude from her mother, is now subject to her mother’s weariness. “Hurry up please” brings to mind “HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME,” the closing call at pubs that appears—with an air of impending doom—in The Waste Land, and as the title of a similarly desolate Anne Sexton poem. Time is exactly what the fearful speaker must contend with. Meanwhile Sophia works slowly, gently, as if to make time, as if time were not rushing on.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/articles/detail/91017


Essay
Forever Words
A new book collects the unpublished poems of Johnny Cash.
By Paul Muldoon


The great artist has a finger on the pulse of his time; he also quickens that pulse. In the case of Johnny Cash, his music seems to well up directly from the poverty and deprivation of country life in the Great Depression, through the uncertainty of World War II, the Cold War, Korea, and Vietnam, to the victories of adulation and the vicissitudes of addiction. We might guess, even if we didn’t know, that Cash’s classic “Five Feet High and Rising” is an account of the flooding with which he was all too familiar from his 1930s achildhood in the cotton fields of Arkansas:

How high’s the water, mama?
Five feet high and risin’

How high’s the water, papa?
Five feet high and risin’

His song “Man in Black” is a deft and dexterous comment on Vietnam, a subject on which so many others were heavy-handed:

And I wear it for the thousands who have died,
Believin’ that the Lord was on their side

I wear it for another hundred thousand who have died,
Believin’ that we all were on their side

The relationship between the amphitheater and amphetamines, meanwhile, is rather neatly delineated in a piece collected here called “Going, Going, Gone”:

Liquid, tablet, capsule, powder
Fumes and smoke and vapor
The payoff is the same in the end
Liquid, tablet, capsule, powder
Fumes and smoke and vapor
Convenient ways to get the poison in

So ingrained in our collective unconscious is the voice of Johnny Cash that we can all but hear the boom-chicka boom-chicka of his guitar accompaniment, at once reassuring and disquieting in its very familiarity.

The defining characteristic of an effective lyric—even the greatest of them—is that it doesn’t quite hold up to the scrutiny we might bring to bear on a poem, that only something along the lines of that missing boom-chicka will allow it to be completely what it most may be. In the case of work that is previously unpublished, or hitherto overlooked, this intrinsic lack is thrown into even greater relief. Is it possible that Cash himself chose not to round out, never mind record, some or all of these pieces? Are we doing him and his memory a disservice in allowing them out of the attic and into the wider world? Writers of the stature of Elizabeth Bishop, T. S. Eliot, and Philip Larkin are among those whose reputations have suffered at least a dent from the indiscriminate publication of their second- or third-rate efforts. And the fact is that even great artists not only nod, like Homer, but also produce nonstarters and no-nos.

Such considerations weighed heavily on the team—John Carter Cash and Steve Berkowitz—most immediately involved in the collection and collation of the copious raw material from which I was able to make the selection for Forever Words. It was with an initial sense of relief, then an increasingly rapturous glee, that I realized there is so much here that will indeed broaden and deepen our perception of Johnny Cash and his legacy.

Before thinking about Johnny Cash’s legacy, though, I’d like to appeal to a passage from T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” which I continue to find particularly instructive in this matter:

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it.

The veracity of Eliot’s last profound observation may be seen in a piece like “The Dogs Are in the Woods”:

The dogs are in the woods
And the huntin’s lookin’ good
And the raccoons on the hill
I can hear them trailing still

These dogs are calling out to some of their not-too-distant relatives, the hunting hounds poisoned by Lord Randall’s dissed girlfriend, as reported by Lord Randall to his mother in the traditional Scotch-Irish folksong “Lord Randall”:

“What became of your bloodhounds, Lord Randall my son?
What became of your bloodhounds, my handsome young man?”
“O they swelled and they died: mother, make my bed soon,
for I’m weary wi’ hunting, and fain wald lie down.”

We’ve already seen the dialogue format of the “Lord Randall” ballad repurposed in “Five Feet High and Rising.” The “Muscadine Wine” we find in this collection is an offshoot of the same vine that gave us the blood-red wine in the Scottish standard “The Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens”:

The King sits in Dunfermline town,
Drinking the blood-red wine;
“O where shall I get a skeely skipper
To sail this ship or mine?”

Then up and spake an eldern knight,
Sat at the King’s right knee:
“Sir Patrick Spens is the best sailor
That ever sailed the sea.”

The King has written a broad letter,
And sealed it with his hand,
And sent it to Sir Patrick Spens,
Was walking on the strand.

It’s no accident that the tradition of the Scots ballad, along with its transmogrified versions in North America, is one in which Johnny Cash should be so at ease, given that the first recorded instance of the name Cash—that of Roger Cass—is found in, of all things, the Registrum de Dunfermelyn. The entry is dated 1130, during the reign of King David I of Scotland (r. 1124–1153). “The Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens” is set in Dunfermline a mere hundred sixty years later, in 1290.

We may also see the influence of the Scotch-Irish tradition in the use of the tag phrase at the end of each verse (a device we’ve come to associate with the work of Bob Dylan), in a piece like “Slumgullion”:

Every day’s a brand-new mountain
Don’t drink long at any fountain
You’ll be turned into slumgullion

“Slumgullion” is a word that means several things, including a watery stew, the watery waste left after the rendering of whale blubber, and the slurry associated with a mine. It is generally believed to be derived from “slum,” an old word for “slime,” and “gullion,” an English dialect term for “mud” or “cesspool.” “Gullion” may actually be a corruption of the Gaelic word góilín, “pit” or “pool.” The earliest recorded usage of “slumgullion,” in Mark Twain’s Roughing It (1872), refers to a drink:

Then he poured for us a beverage which he called “Slum gullion,” and it is hard to think he was not inspired when he named it. It really pretended to be tea, but there was too much dish-rag, and sand, and old bacon-rind in it to deceive the intelligent traveler.

The Scotch-Irish song tradition has a strong humorous component that may be detected in “Jellico Coal Man,” a song about life in a Tennessee mining town that could easily have been called Slumgullion had it not already been named after the wild angelica (Angelica sylvestris) that grows there in abundance:

It will warm your baby in the winter time
It comes direct from the Jellico mine
When the sun comes up that’s the time I start
You will see me comin’ with my two-wheel cart

There’s a not too-far-from-the-surface eroticism about this coal-mining man that straddles not only the ballad tradition but also the bawdiness of certain old blues songs. We recognize it in “Hey, Baby, Wake Up,” with its assertion that “I need my biscuit buttered, Babe.” We have detected it in “Who’s Gonna Grease My Skillet?” when he says “Who’s gonna squeeze my juice if you should go,” with a nod and wink in the direction of Robert Johnson’s “Squeeze my lemon.”

In addition to conjuring up the naughty nickname attached to, say, Jelly Roll Morton, “Jellico Coal Man” brings to mind the city of Jericho, the walls of which succumbed to the power of music when the Israelite priests sounded their ram’s-horn trumpets. (In one of those fascinating coincidences that many of us enjoy, Jellico was the childhood home of Homer Rodeheaver, the famous evangelist and trombonist.) The iconography of the Bible is a constant in Johnny Cash’s work, rarely so powerful as in a piece like “Job,” with its recalibration of Job as cattle baron:

Job was a wealthy man
He had a lot of kids and a lot of land
He had cattle on a thousand hills
He lived every day to do God’s will

On a technical note, there exist a number of versions of the “Job” text in Cash’s hand. As with several other pieces included here, I drew on these multiple manuscript sources to make a plausible “finished” version. An attentive reader may therefore remark on discrepancies and disconnects, variations and vagaries, between the printed texts and the facsimile material with which they’re so artfully interspersed. That reader may also notice the rationalization of stanza breaks and the generally normative tendencies of grammar, punctuation, and spelling. Cash’s occasional misspellings need be perpetuated no more than Yeats’s, and that includes the humorous humdinger “Caddilac.”

There’s another humorous strand running through a number of these lyrics that draws on the cowboy tradition, be it the Lone Ranger mounted on Silver, referred to in “Spirit Rider” (“I will mount my Hi-Yo and I will ride off, ma’am”), or the singing cowboy Roy Rogers in “Hey, Baby, Wake Up”:

Hey, Baby, wake up
Did you hear the latest news
The man said Roy and Dale split up
And Dale got Trigger, too
Yeah, I hear your sweet feet on the f loor
I knew that’d get through to you

That humor extends to the litany of exhortations in “Don’t Make a Movie About Me” that reflect Cash’s own ambivalence about celebrity and the associated tabloid slobbering:

Don't let 'em drag old Hickory Lake
For my telephones and bottles and roller skates . . .
Out a hundred yards from my lakeside house
Weighted down with a rock is a skirt and blouse
A dozen pair of boots that made a dozen corns
Trombones, trumpets, harmonicas and horns
And the tapes that I threw from the lakeside door
Silverstein, and Kristofferson from years before

This was the selfsame Shel Silverstein who won the Grammy Award for Best Country Song of 1969 for “A Boy Named Sue.” He was friendly with David Allan Coe, also mentioned in “Don’t Make a Movie About Me,” who had the distinction of embarking on his music career in Nashville while living in a hearse parked outside Ryman Auditorium, a macabre touch that would surely have ap- pealed to Cash. The song continues:

If they’re hot on a book called Man in Black Tell
’em I’ve got the rights and won’t give back If
you don’t know my tune you can’t get it right I
don’t talk about me in Man in White

As it turns out, Man in White is the title of Cash’s historical novel about the life of Saint Paul before and after his conversion. We’re reminded, of course, that Johnny Cash as the “Man in Black” is less gunslinger than psalm-singing preacher, the unapologetic nature of his Christian faith shining through in “He Bore It All for Me,” a piece that takes as its text Matthew 11:28, “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” A faith in the sense that there is a world beyond this one must at least partly inform the sentiments of “Forever”:

But the trees that I planted
Still are young
The songs I sang
Will still be sung

•

In addition to the sense that it functions within time, the great work of art brings with it a profound sense of timelessness. There’s a sense of immortality and inevitability that suggests (1) that it has always existed and (2) that it was always meant to exist in this form and this form only. Johnny Cash’s quiet insistence that his songs “will still be sung” might easily be read as self-regarding but is more accurately perceived as a manifestation of the humility that is an absolute prerequisite in art-making: it has less to do with his name and fame being bruited about in Dubai or Decatur or Dunfermline itself than with his achieving a kind of beautiful anonymity. It’s a claim to deathlessness that may be made only by someone who has taken into account that, like “The Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens,” Johnny Cash’s brilliant “California Poem” was written by everyone and no one:

The lights are on past midnite
The curtains closed all day
There’s trouble on the mountain
The valley people say


From FOREVER WORDS: The Unknown Poems by Johnny Cash, published by Blue Rider Press, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Foreword copyright © 2016 by John Carter Cash.

Originally Published: October 12th, 2016

Cash, was and will always be a hero to me, despite his personal faults/(demons)...
A country boy(like me), he retained most of his upbringing and championed the common man in song and poem.
Born and raised close to my hometown- he was my mother's favorite country singer, edging out Hank Williams SR.
BY JUST A TAD--SHE WOULD SAY.
AS LONG AS I CAN REMEMBER , HE WAS A GREAT AND TRUE POET TO ME...
His songs were poetry set to music..... -TYR

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/detail/90643


Prose from Poetry Magazine
Your Thorns Are the Best Part of You
Marianne Moore’s Observations and Stevie Smith’s All the Poems
By Vidyan Ravinthiran

Observations, by Marianne Moore.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $16.00.

Linda Leavell, whose biography of Marianne Moore was published three years ago, introduces this reissue of the poet’s 1924 debut, Observations:

There is no such thing as a definitive edition of Moore’s poems, 
for she revised her work throughout her life, continually 
asserting her authority in an ongoing dialogue with her 
reader.... Published on her eightieth birthday, The Complete Poems presents her final intentions but not necessarily her most compelling ones. Moore was not the same poet at eighty that she had been at thirty-seven, when Observations was published, nor was her readership the same. Twenty-first-century readers deserve to know the innovative poems that so excited H.D., Eliot, Williams, Pound, and Stevens and that were an “eye-opener in more ways than one” to the young Elizabeth Bishop. And they deserve to discover the emotional urgency of this socially engaged poet, whose views about multicultural tolerance, biodiversity, heroic open-mindedness, democracy, and individual liberty we are only now beginning to appreciate.

In Moore’s verse, snippets of borrowed speech or writing are recognized as such — they wear, quite without shame, their quotation marks — but her first impulse wasn’t to attribute, to include notes directing her readers to the original sources; this happened only at the prompting of Scofield Thayer, editor of The Dial. Moore’s “Note on the Notes” in the Complete Poems acknowledges contrary responses: “some readers suggest that quotation-marks are disruptive of pleasant progress; others, that notes to what should be complete are a pedantry or evidence of an insufficiently realized task.” Since she has “not yet been able to outgrow this hybrid method of composition, acknowledgements seem only honest.” So we have the poet apologizing to some people for including the voices of other people in her verse, in a possibly distracting way — alliteratively pleading: “Perhaps those who are annoyed by provisos, detainments, and postscripts could be persuaded to take probity on faith and disregard the notes.”

As Leavell comes to argue the contemporary relevance of Observations, another voice emerges. This isn’t the scholar analyzing and explaining the work, or the biographer documenting the life. It’s the salesperson talking, and uneasily, because aware always of their script, yet unwilling to entirely commit to its banalities. Academics are leaned on to speak this way, by publishers, funding bodies. Sometimes the voice, unhappily internalized, rises up from within, becomes fused with our real ambitions (I have been there, I understand and sympathize). But the strain shows, as “emotional urgency” comes together, earnestly, with “socially engaged” — we couldn’t have our poets any other way! — and the next clause hesitates as to whether Moore simply has opinions (“views about    ...    
heroic open-mindedness?”) or whether she has, let us say, the right opinions. Do we read poets for their “views”; and if we are “beginning to appreciate” Moore’s, is this because they agree with ours? 
I don’t mean to harp on about one sentence in a dedicated scholar’s introduction — written, no doubt, to time and word limits, as well as responsive to the current publishing (ugh) climate, but I do think the question must be asked, and that in such matters we should express ourselves precisely. For example, racists also have “views about 
multicultural tolerance,” strong ones, which they periodically communicate to me with an unvariegated stridency surely appalling to Moore, typically out of fast-moving cars.

I’m not saying that Moore wasn’t forward-looking and sensitive, or that these qualities haven’t been neglected, or passed over because camouflaged by the knottiness of her musical meanings, the lovely and tedious divagations which result from her refusal to ever not nuance. But I am saying that I wouldn’t go to Moore to have my “views” confirmed — that’s not what she’s for — and when she is prissy, or illiberal (she worried to Bishop that an unnamed acquaintance was “in the clutches of a sodomite”!) her verse remains intimate with me. In fact, the tendentious cavilling of her poems around the prospect of intimacy, their concern to assert views that can be shared, and a perpetual spiky awareness of their own off-putting behaviors — this is why I read her. Moore writes about self-protective animals, their often beautiful armor, and her poems don their polished plate, and occasionally take it off, with marvelous ceremony. “Black Earth,” 
excluded from the Complete Poems and happily included here, appears to self-describe with unusual openness:

Openly, yes,
with the naturalness
of the hippopotamus or the alligator
when it climbs out on the bank to experience the

sun, I do these
things which I do, which please
no one but myself. Now I breathe and now I am sub-
merged; the blemishes stand up and shout when the object

in view was a
renaissance; shall I say
the contrary?

The poet evokes in creatures and landscapes qualities she would like to possess. In this she is rather like the critic in the business of transforming her, Marianne Moore, into an ideal citizen. Yet as the third stanza reveals, there is always a turn; the recognition of a difficulty; a complication, which reveals the power of assertion as proceeding from an injury (those “blemishes stand up and shout”). Is Moore tolerant, open-minded? Sometimes. There are things one shouldn’t be tolerant of (she is not afraid, as we are, of the position of judgment; is in no danger of   becoming tolerant of intolerance), and openness of mind is periodic — you couldn’t live that way all the time, the fontanel must close if we are to survive. (The motives of publishing and publicity are not always good, in turning social injustices, and our injustices to nature, into buzzwords to be included if a book is to be picked up and sold.) And maybe the opening of the mind is not its own achievement, but a gift from outside us, unpredictable and to be anticipated, if never presumed.

Moore knows this, and it relates to her alternation between aphorism and incomprehensibility. Between self and other she discerns — can’t help but recognize, and crabbily adorn — countless 
barriers. Some of these wink in and out of existence, are playful, like those of a pinball machine, or the antic obstacles the player leaps and slides between in a platform video game; others, of long standing, thaw ominously, like Arctic sea ice decimated by black carbon. 
So I can’t see her as a cultural spokeswoman, not because Moore doesn’t worry where, and how, we worry, but since her poems simply 
don’t communicate that way. (Does our insistence on the politics which can be extracted from them manifest a remaining anxiety about the readability of her verse?) In her poems, someone speaks, would assert, and other voices protrude — rarely solely to confirm what has been said, or bully the reader. If there is a simple message, it never quite reaches us, but is, like Zeno’s arrow, paralyzed at every point of its arc through the air.

If Moore’s borrowings allow for the characterization of her as a modern collage artist, a devil-may-care dialogic experimenter, Elizabeth Bishop had quite a different view. Helping Moore with her translations of La Fontaine, she comes to a sadly astonished awareness of her mentor’s difference from other people, linked to her inability to hear or write verse in conventional ways. It seems that Moore “was possessed of a unique, involuntary sense of rhythm, therefore of meter”; what else would one expect, given that “she looked like no one else” and “talked like no one else,” and that “her poems showed a mind not much like anyone else’s”? The younger poet wonders of the older whether her deep-down oddity is helpless or chosen — it could be that her poetry emerged at a modernist threshold, that she was set free to experiment? — and is finally led to “realize more than I ever had the rarity of true originality, and also the sort of alienation it might involve.” When Bishop helps her out with simple rhymes, or turns her drafts iambic, Moore is astonished by what, to others, would be quite obvious emendations, or normalizations. It’s like those quotations in her verse — someone else arrives to lend a hand, to say what the poet is herself unable to, where she is prevented by abiding and mysterious impediments. Because a lack is remedied by it, a pedestrian encounter takes on the aspect of grace: “Marianne would exclaim, ‘Elizabeth, thank you, you have saved my life!’”

There are in Observations slight poems Moore was right to exclude from the Complete Poems, with its mighty epigraph: “Omissions are not accidents.” These are short lyrics, stingy rather than pointed — 
there’s a run of several at the start of the book. But we might consider “Reticence and Volubility” a rejoinder to the sales-voice looking to package Marianne Moore for the twenty-first century:

“When I am dead,”
The wizard said,
“I’ll look upon the narrow way
And this Dante,
And know that he was right
And he’ll delight
In my remorse,
Of course.”
“When I am dead,”
The student said,
“I shall have grown so tolerant,
I’ll find I can’t
Laugh at your sorry plight
Or take delight
In your chagrin,
Merlin.”

This was first published in the May 1915 issue of Poetry, as “The Wizard in Words.” Tolerance doesn’t mean to this poem what it means to us. (Nor does the concept of offensiveness, when it appears in conjunction, in “Injudicious Gardening”: “The sense of privacy /
 In what you did — deflects from your estate / Offending eyes, and will not tolerate / Effrontery.”) Matthew 7:14: “Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.” Moore is concerned, like the apostle, and Dante, with ethics, though a coherent theology is replaced here by misunderstanding encounters. The wizard and the poet discover a stance toward each other, but the student, “grown so tolerant” — a word placed under ironic scrutiny — can’t respond to the wizard either with laughter or approval at the moral “remorse” she understands, instead, as “chagrin.” I can’t pretend to understand the poem wholly, but I recognize Moore’s interest in failed relationships, and the limitations of retrospective judgement — the “delights” of moralizing. We wish to draw connections between ourselves and others, but to do so simplistically is a form of arrogance. Moore returns over and over again to this problem, and sometimes her poems don’t work because they do no more than utter a stalemate. All the poetry, for instance, of “To Be Liked by You Would Be a Calamity” is in the title. Which can’t be said of “Roses Only”:

You would, minus thorns,
look like a what-is-this, a mere
peculiarity. They are not proof against a worm, the elements, or mildew
but what about the predatory hand? What is brilliance without co-ordination? Guarding the
infinitesimal pieces of your mind, compelling audience to
the remark that it is better to be forgotten than to be remembered 
too violently,
your thorns are the best part of you.

The reader, the critic, seeking to turn Moore into someone entirely like themselves, will come up against those thorns. Her personality is indelible, and refuses “to be remembered too violently.” I delight less in the content of her opinions than the scrollwork of their framing; a defensiveness admitting of ebullience, and heartfelt pleasure, as she quests for the large, the liveable statement, through fields of digression.

Observations contains several of Moore’s large and small masterpieces, unweatherable poems which everybody should read. “To a Snail” is here; two versions of “Poetry” — more on this later — as well as “Critics and Connoisseurs,” “When I Buy Pictures,” “A Grave,” “Snakes, Mongooses, Snake-Charmers, and the Like,” “Silence,” and “Marriage.” Those familiar with the Complete Poems will notice changes — typically she cuts the flab, and swaps in clarifying punctuation; the later versions are the better ones. This is also true when she relineates: “The Fish” is printed here in a six-line stanza, rather than, as eventually transpired, a five; Moore must have realized there was no need for an intervening line containing only one word. Observations mentions “chaff” a few times, and separating the wheat from it is precisely what she editorially accomplished. Leavell observes that these changes represent not only a response to free verse, an including of its strategies, but also an assertion of Moore’s authority. The changes she makes are part of the difficult conversation this rather bizarre and, as Bishop has it, alienated person 
is trying to have, throughout her career, with her growing audience. If she moves to accommodate the reader, she also insists on her own predilections — the technical preferences of the poet about the tiniest quirks of sound and meaning. Moore’s self-editing extends what’s going on in the poems themselves, whose processes of assembly, whether consciously stilted or magically all-at-once and deft, are part of the spectacle.

Leavell describes Moore as a poet of “precision,” and it’s curious to note that in the original version of “Bowls,” a key line reads: “I learn that we are precisians”; Moore’s revision was to “precisionists.” For her, finding the right word is a moral duty, and “Picking and Choosing,” about literature and literary criticism, is improved when she picks and chooses what she wishes to keep in it. Trimming the verbiage, she has her poem speak with the clarity it praises in others. Yet the original does score a couple of points over its superior successor:

Literature is a phase of life: if
one is afraid of it, the situation is irremediable; if
one approaches it familiarly,
what one says of it is worthless. Words are constructive
when they are true; the opaque allusion — the simulated flight

upward — accomplishes nothing. Why cloud the fact
that Shaw is selfconscious in the field of sentiment but is otherwise re-
warding? that James is all that has been
said of him, if feeling is profound?
— From Observations

Literature is a phase of life. If one is afraid of it,
the situation is irremediable; if one approaches it familiarly,
what one says of it is worthless.
The opaque allusion, the simulated flight upward,
accomplishes nothing. Why cloud the fact
that Shaw is self-conscious in the field of sentiment
but is otherwise rewarding; that James
is all that has been said of him.
— From Complete Poems

In the later version, Moore is unafraid to speak (relatively) clearly; she removes what “accomplishes nothing,” and has learned how not to cloud the facts. The line break has us dwell a moment on the name of  Henry James — the shift to free verse has made possible a different 
inflection, capturing rather than displacing of the authority Moore describes and would emulate. Previously, the dead matter about words being “constructive / when they are true” arrived to rhyme with “if”; it’s no great loss. Yet the connection between “if” and “life” is more clearly felt in Observations. And it is a pity to lose the shift in the first two lines from a colon to a semicolon — Moore’s attentiveness 
to how these gently unlike forms of punctuation, and the repetition, alternatively color that hinging word. Rereading these poems, I was struck by her feeling for the semicolon as the grammar of tact. Moore takes this, I think, from her studies in prose style: “You were the jewelry of sense; / Of sense, not license”; ‘“I should like to be alone”; / to which the visitor replies, / “I should like to be alone; / why not be alone together?”’; “The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence; / not in silence, but restraint.”

“An Octopus,” that masterful ecopoem, a gigantically reader-resisting bio-mass of collateral quotation — evocative of Mount Rainier and its glacier — contains in Observations a full page of extra description. I quote some, not all:

Inimical to “bristling, puny, swearing men
equipped with saws and axes,”
this treacherous glass mountain
admires gentians, ladyslippers, harebells, mountain dryads,
and “Calypso, the goat flower — 
that greenish orchid fond of snow” — 
anomalously nourished upon shelving glacial ledges
where climbers have not gone or have gone timidly,
“the one resting his nerves while the other advanced,”
on this volcano with the bluejay, her principal companion.

The first quotation is from Clifton Johnson’s What to See in America, the others from government pamphlets Moore consulted in her research. (Notes on the lines that follow mention a “comment 
overheard at the circus,” and Anthony Trollope.) Mount Rainier’s complexity is twinned with its value — this is why the poet must be unobvious in her approach — and she won’t just have the reader take her word for it, but confects a masala of appreciative utterance. The “treacherous glass mountain” is said, itself, to possess the power of admiring; this is an extension of Moore’s own spreading admiration for multiple phenomena, including the orchid. This “anomalously nourished” flower (I love that haughtily appreciative, that scientifically cherishing adverb, it is Moore through and through) is feminized, 
and forms a partnership with the blue jay positioned as male. Rather like the climbers taking it in turns to ascend the mountain, one 
subject hands on the baton to the next — the glacier gives way to the snow-fed goat flower, which is in turn replaced by the bird.

Moore writes inclusively: she pastes in what others say, how different plants and animals behave. This means she’s unavoidably in the business of turning all this otherness into herself, or wishing to become closer to it. But these edits reveal the dangers. It was hard to know when to stop, and the question of what or who to mention next, to move the poem on, is one Moore struggled to solve. Leavell includes both the 1924 and the 1925 versions of “Poetry”; a third, radically shortened, appears in the Complete Poems. The 1925 poem is only transitional — a genuinely intriguing misstep:

I too, dislike it:
there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.
The bat, upside down; the elephant pushing,
a tireless wolf under a tree,
the base-ball fan, the statistician — 
“business documents and schoolbooks” — 
these phenomena are pleasing,
but when they have been fashioned
into that which is unknowable,
we are not entertained.
It may be said of all of us
that we do not admire what we cannot understand;
enigmas are not poetry.

The listed items are not sensuously imagined, and contribute only the theme of endurance (the elephant “pushing,” the “tireless wolf”). The movement from “I too, dislike it” — is this actually shocking, or only humorous, for the poet to say this about poetry? — to the social hedging of what “may be said of all of us” is, unbelievably for Moore, a smidge cowardly. Yet — to return to Leavell’s introduction — if “twenty-first-century readers deserve to know the innovative poems” of Observations as they originally appeared, Moore does suggest here, contrarily, that in these poems data is “fashioned / into that which is unknowable.”

What we “know” is not a secure possession in “The Labors of Hercules.” Here Moore immortalizes the words of, according to the note, “The Reverend J.W. Darr” — in arguing

that it is one thing to change one’s mind,
another to eradicate it — that one keeps on knowing
“that the Negro is not brutal.
that the Jew is not greedy,
that the Oriental is not immoral,
that the German is not a Hun.”

Here are the social “views” we are glad to acclaim; but the careful reader will require no such assurance that Moore is on the side of the angels. It’s good to have the first line and a half, cut by Moore in the Complete Poems, given its acidulous querying of the cliché, to change one’s mind: “eradicate” suggests racial cleansing. Moore is alert both to what we can know, and should keep on knowing, and what we can’t. Her revisions remind me of Wittgenstein: “what we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.” For “unknowable” appears in neither of the other versions of “Poetry.” The first, longer, messier, quotes Yeats on poets as “literalists of the imagination,” and is famous for going one better and defining poems as “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.” But Moore would finally shun all evasive talk, and canonize a majestic snippet. In the Complete Poems, she states what she believes. She no longer provides evidence to support her case, or nervously talks around the subject, for the reader must make up her own mind. About poetry, that is, and about Marianne Moore:

I, too, dislike it.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one 
discovers in
it, after all, a place for the genuine.


All the Poems, by Stevie Smith.

New Directions. $39.95.

There is a strand of English poetry, written by women, skeptical about the need of men to take themselves seriously. (Gender is fluid, cultural; yet the target exists, and these poems hit it, they’re both funny and clever.) Take Wendy Cope, who in “A Policeman’s Lot” pokes fun at Ted Hughes, who says the “progress of any writer is marked by those moments when he manages to outwit his own inner police system.” To be read to the strains of Gilbert and Sullivan:

No, the imagination of a writer (of a writer)
Is not the sort of  beat a chap would choose (chap would choose)
And they’ve assigned me a prolific blighter (’lific blighter) — 
I’m patrolling the unconscious of   Ted Hughes.

In Jo Shapcott’s “Religion for Boys,” “the little stone figure in the porch” of the temple of Mithras — a goddess in her own right — is amused by the devotees entering where no women are allowed to go:

She chuckles. These boys do such hard graft,
big tests where they’re sat hard against the fire
torturing themselves through seven grades towards
perfection.

Shapcott’s isn’t “light verse,” but Cope has been tarred with this brush, and then we have Stevie Smith. Her poems (despite an excellent monograph by Will May, the editor of this collection, and notable essays by Christopher Ricks and Philip Larkin, among others) still, perhaps, haven’t been appreciated in all their fine, textured seriousness. This may be because they poke fun at the kinds of seriousness we’ve inherited — and would suggest something better.

I say “we”: do I mean men, again? “Thoughts about the Person from Porlock” may have been the model for Cope’s poem, for it confronts the Major Male Poet, specifically Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who famously blamed the incompletion of “Kubla Khan” on an interrupting visitor. Though isn’t Smith more alive than Cope, to the motivations behind the poet’s language of (self-)confrontation? Pomposity is not so much deflated, here, as psychologically 
re-explained:

Coleridge received the Person from Porlock
And ever after called him a curse
Then why did he hurry to let him in? — 
He could have hid in the house.

It was not right of Coleridge in fact it was wrong
(But often we all do wrong)
As the truth is I think he was already stuck
With Kubla Khan.

Smith’s perceptiveness, her generosity (that parenthesis), requires of the reader more than a second glance. The social contact of the “Person from Porlock” was, it turns out, crucial to Coleridge, as both an excuse and an escape; for “he was already stuck” — with his poem? He had writer’s block? — no, he was “stuck / With Kubla Khan,” a personified aspect of himself he’d rather elude.

Smith is especially unsparing of   bullying men, like the eponymous “Major Macroo,” who lords it over the wife he neglects:

Such men as these, such selfish cruel men
Hurting what most they love what most loves them,
Never make a mistake when it comes to choosing a woman
To cherish them and be neglected and not think it inhuman.

Yet once again she doesn’t terminate with blame, but presses beyond, to cultural explanations. Macroo and his wife are perfectly suited — in a bad way. A malfunctory society produced them, the pair of them, even if the power is entirely in his hands. “How Cruel is the Story of Eve,” says Smith, designed to “give blame to women most / And most punishment”; this “is the meaning of a legend that colours / All human thought; it is not found among animals.” (Just one smack, of many, at repressive Christianity.) For Smith, as for D.H. Lawrence — or Hughes — animals, when they aren’t abominably tamed, provide an alternative to a sick culture; it’s good to see this discourse strapped to a feminist argument, instead of boosting a male writer’s self-esteem. But in both of these poems, Smith goes a little further, in asking what we really mean by “human”; and the slant-rhyme linking this word, or its negative, with “woman” (one of Smith’s best) reappears in “Girls!” from Mother, What Is Man?:

Girls! although I am a woman
I always try to appear human

Unlike Miss So-and-So whose greatest pride
Is to remain always in the VI Form and not let down the side

Do not sell the pass dear, don’t let down the side
This is what this woman said and a lot of  balsy stuff beside
(Oh the awful balsy nonsense that this woman cried.)

Balsy, not ballsy. But we shouldn’t reduce this poem to a joke — at least, not before it does this to itself. Smith’s rhymes, and slant-rhymes, are analytic, exhortatory, they sing with corrective spite. In the space between “girl” and “woman” she locates a deep uncertainty, 
and while she is evidently scornful of those, like Macroo, who consider women less than “human,” she is also alert to the need to keep up appearances, how tough it is “to appear,” to oneself and to the world, as a being coherent and complete. How miserably inevitable it is, that valuing oneself (as a woman, a particularly “human” woman) is accomplished at the expense of someone else — who must be judged wanting, if one is to be found, in contrast, acceptable.

“Miss So-and-So” corresponds to Major Macroo in her military language — these are the dying strains of the British Empire, reduced to team-calls in assemblies for sixth-formers — and we see here how Smith doesn’t stop at unworthy men, but also gleefully attacks over-refined, or vicious, or class- or race-conscious women, and (it’s the title of this next poem) their “Parents”:

Oh beautiful brave mother, the wife of the colonel,
How could you allow your young daughter to become aware of the scheming?
If  you had not, it might have stayed a mere dreaming
Of palaces and princes, girlish at worst.
Oh to become sensible about social advance at seventeen is to be lost.

If the first couplet of “Girls!” has the immediacy and punch of a Beyoncé lyric, this is closer to the songs of the Oompa Loompas in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Smith repeats herself — there are things she cares about, which more than get her goat, she demands change — but she’s also capable of many species of poem. Here’s a short one — a comic’s one-liner, really, though it’s a couplet:

This Englishwoman is so refined
She has no bosom and no behind.
— This Englishwoman

May’s helpful note directs us to Edmund Waller’s poem “On a Girdle”: “That which her slender waist confin’d, / Shall now my joyful temples bind,” he writes, and also — “A narrow compass, and yet there / Dwelt all that’s good, and all that’s fair.” In Smith’s poem, “refined” means — the irony is strong — sophisticated, but it also describes the Englishwoman as a creature, like one of the ludicrously 
effete dogs at Crufts, bred by specialists into what they consider a pure and pleasing shape. She is asexual, the victim of a mutilation — it’s as if the toffs, desperate to be rid of the urges which 
associate them with animals (and the lower classes), were the subject of Lamarckian evolution. The energies each generation neglects — 
the life not lived — affect the very stature of the next.

As this poem suggests, Smith’s true target is — again, this is one of her titles — “The English”:

Many of the English, 
The intelligent English,
Of the Arts, the Professions and the Upper Middle Classes,
Are under-cover men,
But what is under the cover 
(That was original)
Died; now they are corpse-carriers.

Her verse comes with pen-sketches attached: whimsical, piercing depictions of the characters in the poems, or the speakers of them, vibrating with irregular life. “This Englishwoman” appears wearing a hat with flowers on it, her pointed face the shape of the base of an iron (she’s smiling, smugly, the tiny lines of her eyebrows are cruel), protecting herself not from the rain, but the sun, with an umbrella. I’m reminded once more of D.H. Lawrence:

Man fixes some wonderful erection of his own between himself and the wild chaos, and gradually goes bleached and stifled 
under his parasol. Then comes a poet, enemy of convention, and makes a slit in the umbrella; and lo! the glimpse of chaos is a vision, a window to the sun.

Smith, too, is more than — a dead word — unconventional; she is an avowed “enemy of convention,” and would let in the sun that her Englishwoman shirks. Like Lawrence, she is a writer who would turn on its head the great English project of disapproval — really turn it against itself: “There is far too much of the suburban classes / 
Spiritually not geographically speaking. They’re asses.” She would disapprove of the disapprovers; the snobs, the sexists, the repressed.

Some explanation may be necessary here. Humans are status-conscious, and this is a fact of multiple cultures, and subcultures — Smith is particularly savvy about the tribalism of the literary world, “picking inferiorly with grafted eyes,” in which “So-and-so must be the driven out one, this the pet”; the familiar tale of “Miss Snooks, Poetess,” who never wrote a poem “that was not really awfully nice / And fitted to a woman,” and so “made no enemies / And gave no sad surprises / But went on being awfully nice / And took a lot of prizes.” Yet to be English is to enter into a special relationship with disapproval, an ineffaceable class-consciousness that persists today (it’s not the same as the division between rich and poor), however ironized (a common excuse) or deferred, or disguised, the compulsion to affront may be. Sometimes this urge to degrade is redirected towards the minorities of the moment — it isn’t a good time, in England, to be Eastern European. But the accents of disapproval are the same, they are recognizable. The English, compelled to revisit and renew, in so many details of their private lives, the distinction between working-class and middle-class lifestyles (those who’ve crossed this border, even a generation back, are petrified of being deported) have found ways of continuing this conversation into the twenty-first century, even while turning it into a joke, or changing the terms. The problem is that, as Smith tells us in “The English,” these people are infectious. Once you start to disapprove of them, to become intolerant of their intolerance, you’re at risk of playing their game. So Lawrence tries to counter the murderous force of class disapproval, taking as the guarantor of his convictions the permanent scandal of our sexuality, which he deploys as a deeper, a more convincing authority, than the snobbishness of the repressive bore. In doing so, he risks becoming a bore himself, a perfervid sermonizer. What Smith does is less obvious and easy to miss. She counter-accuses, but also places the voice of accusation itself under scrutiny.

On first approaching a publisher with her poems, Smith was told to “go away and write a novel.” Despite the more announced vitality, the love-addled bursting oomph, of its reader-buttonholing protagonist Pompey Casmilus, Novel on Yellow Paper does resemble Marianne Moore in its humorous digressive capturing of multiple voices. But Smith quotes, often, as critique. Not to summon viewpoints to her aid, but to shred them irreversibly. Here are some “nice little quotations for your scrap book. Or if you have no scrap book you can shoot them at your friends at your high-class parties”:

Should I Marry a Foreigner?    ...    You do not say, dear, if he is a man of colour. Even if it is only a faint tea rose — don’t. I know what it will mean to you to give him up but funny things happen with colour, it often slips over, and sometimes darkens from year to year and it is so difficult to match up. White always looks well at weddings and will wash and wear and if you like to write to me again, enclosing stamped addressed envelope, I will give you the name of a special soap I always use it myself do not stretch or wring but hang to dry in a cool oven.

Advice from an agony aunt — but the no-color of the newspaper-voice has started to run, has become crazily creative in its paranoia about race, decorum, wedding-wear, the housewife’s proper domesticities. (“Colours are what drive me most strongly,” says Smith; also that there “is no very strong division between what is poetry and what is prose”: like Moore, she’s intrigued by prose, has an ear for its borrowable forms, and clearly relishes, in this passage, the sonic bounce from “envelope” to “soap.”)

“I cannot play this game of quotations one minute longer. I get bored. But I am far too quickly bored. Reader, are you? Do you know how I think of you? I’ll tell you.” That’s Pompey, breaking off to speak to the reader in a voice that is deliciously vivid. Smith’s poems have this quality too, and this is why it’s hard to separate them from the institution she has become; the singing “disenchanted gentility” (Heaney) of her reading voice; the film, Stevie, about her life; and even those significant sketches she sticks next to the verse. But what I’d stress is how carefully written, how intelligently stylish, how deep-diving the words on the page can be; for I do think this is the best way to appreciate Smith, as a poet’s poet, whose printed voice can be both intimately hers and wryly denatured in its ventriloquisms. Yes, some of her poems are jokes. Others are consciously archaic, or exercises; the longer ones can be dull, in which the blurting looseness allows for the evaporation of the reader’s interest. She is interested in how far her voice, and that of others, can carry — how cogent our utterances really are; her verse is undecided on this subject, and so she risks superficiality. But she also writes works of undeniable art. Poems to read, and reread.

We might compare, for example, the woman-on-woman violence of “Girls!,” “Parents,” and “This Englishwoman” with “Everything is Swimming,” from The Frog Prince and Other Poems:

Everything is swimming in a wonderful wisdom
She said everything was swimming in a wonderful wisdom
Silly ass
What a silly woman
Perhaps she is drunk
No I think it is mescalin
Silly woman
What a silly woman
Yes perhaps it is mescalin
It must be something
Her father, they say    ...    
And that funny man William    ...    
Silly ass
What a silly woman

Elle continua de rire comme une hyène.

The quotation is from a short story by Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, whose title in the 1900 translation, Weird Women, is “At a Dinner of Atheists.” This group “composed exclusively of men” indulges — as the author says every all-male group does — in “abuse” of the opposite sex, being “disgusted with females — as they cynically called women.” (More disapproval of disapproval!) The story is told of Major Ydow and his wife Rosalba, who sleeps with the narrator, Mesnilgrand (he mentions “those beautiful arms I had so often 
bitten”; Smith is much taken with biting, it appears a few times in her verse) and becomes pregnant. The child — Ydow’s certain it is his — dies. One day Mesnilgrand must hide when the Major arrives and abuses Rosalba. She says she has never loved him, that the child was not his, but Mesnilgrand’s; she is portrayed as “insolent, ironical, laughing with the hysterical laughter of hate, at the most acute paroxysms of his wrath.” Ydow responds by smashing the vase in which he has, absurdly, embalmed his son’s heart; he attempts to rape her with his sabre-pommel covered in hot wax — with the idea of “sealing his wife” as she had sealed her letters to lovers. Mesnilgrand finally acts. He leaps out, kills Ydow, calls for a surgeon in case “the beautiful mutilated body” is still alive, and visits a church graveyard to bury the heart of the child that might have been his.

This ghastly tale may, d’Aurevilly suggests, have shattered the 
cynicism of its audience — we return to the hideous metaphor of “sealing”: “A silence, more expressive than any words, sealed the mouths of all.” I summarize the story to reveal the importance of Smith’s allusion. It positions her poem as a critique of the misogyny which, beginning with remarks at a party (as hostile in atmosphere as the dinner of atheists), is nevertheless continuous with real violence against women. If other Smith poems accuse other women, 
intolerant of their intolerance, here, that disapproving voice is itself revealed as eventually tyrannous. A woman’s effusiveness is mocked by the partygoers, attributed to alcohol, drugs, or a man — the doings of her father, or “that funny man William” — while the ellipses catch perfectly the tone of the behind-the-hand-whispered, snide aside. The French, in its italics, suggests a superior perspective, and confirms Smith’s target as the gossipers, not the woman herself. Whose laughter continues — but how impervious is it, to humiliation?

The verse shifts, without clarifying quotation marks, from what the woman says — briefly, her voice is that of the poem — to the framing of her remark by an incredulous auditor: “Everything is swimming in a wonderful wisdom / She said everything was swimming in a wonderful wisdom / Silly ass.” With that switch from “is” to “was,” Smith’s apparently immediate, incautious style contrives with intelligence a collision of different voices; a testing, as in Moore, of the power of assertion. I’d never thought about the absence from one of her most famous poems, “Not Waving but Drowning,” of what Joyce referred to as “perverted commas” — until I read, in this edition, May’s note:

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he’s dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.

According to May’s note, the version published in December 1956, in the essay “Too Tired for Words,” places

lines 3–4, 9, 11–12 in speech marks, and reduces second stanza to three lines with breaks after “dead” and “way”; the first two lines of this revised stanza are also in speech marks. A typed draft shows an illustration of a man being pulled from the 
water in place of the deliberately disjunctive female figure in published versions.

Smith writes about world-weariness, melancholia, and depression better than anybody, with cauterizing humor, and an awareness of how feeling is always, happily and horribly, prior to thought. This is a wonderful example of a masterpiece receiving the editorial attention it deserves — our experience of the poem is enriched by May’s intervention. Smith is indeed “deliberately disjunctive,” in multiple senses. 
“Moaning” isn’t obviously a speech-verb, so, even if the colon is there as a pointer, “I was much further out than you thought” is laid harshly 
bare. It isn’t speech cooled and hardened and situated within a larger utterance — it touches the reader directly. We then have what “they” say — again, the speech isn’t framed as speech, until revealed as the opinion of the misunderstanding “meelyoo” — Smith’s lovely mocking spelling, elsewhere — represented by that cold pronoun. The dead man has passed beyond understanding, and must speak from beyond the grave to explain himself to those with no ear for his torment. In “A Dream of Comparison,” Eve, who wishes only for a “cessation of consciousness,” argues with Mary:

Mary laughed: ‘I love Life,
I would fight to the death for it,
That’s a feeling you say? I will find
A reason for it.’

They walked by the estuary,
Eve and the Virgin Mary,
And they talked until nightfall,
But the difference between them was radical.

Ricks observes a superbly disjunctive final rhyme. (I think of  Moore’s “I May, I Might, I Must”: “If you will tell me why the fen / appears impassable, I then / will tell you why I think that I / can get across it if I try.”) Smith is preoccupied with the incommunicativeness between, as Wittgenstein has it, the world of the happy and the world of the unhappy; and the endlessly, perversely creative ways in which we fail to understand each other, in a war zone of cross talk, as our differences 
become radical. Yet she also asserts the possibility of connection, and is fascinated in particular by the complexities of friendship.

Two “war poems,” the first, again, famous; Smith referred to it as a mere steal from Still the Joy of It, by Littleton Powys, although her verse adds a lot — this isn’t a found poem:

It was my bridal night I remember,
An old man of seventy-three
I lay with my young bride in my arms,
A girl with t.b.
It was wartime, and overhead
The Germans were making a particularly heavy raid on Hampstead.
What rendered the confusion worse, perversely
Our bombers had chosen that moment to set out for Germany.
Harry, do they ever collide?
I do not think it has ever happened,
Oh my bride, my bride.
— From I Remember

Basil never spoke of the trenches, but I
Saw them always, saw the mud, heard the guns, saw the duckboards,
Saw the men and the horses slipping in the great mud, saw
The rain falling and never stop, saw the gaunt
Trees and the rusty frame
Of the abandoned gun carriages. Because it was the same
As the poem “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came”
I was reading at school.
— From A Soldier Dear to Us

In the second poem, a child understands more of  the sweet-mannered 
veteran than he knows. In the first, will the old man and his young bride truly coincide, or merely “collide,” as those bombers don’t, in the air? The speech is given, once again, without quotation marks, as if the poem spoke for each, and both; in “A Soldier Dear to Us,” there is no need to speak of what is known by other means. In “Dear Karl,” written to a German boyfriend, Smith sends him Walt Whitman’s poems, and seeks to preempt the “indignation” with which we ward off the emotional claims of others — “‘How dilettante,’ I hear you observe, ‘I hate these selections / Arbitrarily made to meet a need that is not mine and a taste / Utterly antagonistic.’” Summoning Yeats as well as the American poet, she insists on spreading the cloths of 
heaven under her lover’s feet:

For I, I myself, I have no Leaves of Grass
But only Walt Whitman in a sixpenny book,
Taste’s, blend’s, essence’s, multum-in-parvo’s Walt Whitman.
And now sending it to you I say:
Fare out, Karl, on an afternoon’s excursion, on a sixpenny 
unexplored uncharted road.

But Smith does have a joyous expansiveness, her riskily unprotected prolongations of self toward other, to give. What is caustic and comically summative in her verse is countered by this sweetness. I read “How do you see?” where her long argufying lines quiz, are sardonic and potent:

Oh Christianity, Christianity,
That has grown kinder now, as in the political world
The colonial system grows kinder before it vanishes, are you vanishing?
Is it not time for you to vanish?

 — and it seems to me she is that impossibility, not to be predicted (or taken lightly, or taken for granted): an English Whitman.

Originally Published: October 3rd, 2016

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.netessays.net/viewpaper/129425.html

Reading and Writing Poetry in the Classroom

November 2014


In an article called "Importance of Poetry in Middle and High School,"� it's explained that throughout history, poets have used language to express their thoughts, feelings, ideas and perspectives. By using rhyme, meter and line breaks, poets have addressed everything from nature of love or beauty of a spring day complex social issues. According to Dr. Jeanette Hughes research report for the Literacy and Numeracy of Ontario, poetry can increase students' literacy and linguistic awareness because it is important for students to be able to read and write or construct texts in multiple genres. Moving beyond pen and paper and using a variety of representing strategies (including visual arts or drama, for example) provide students opportunities to express themselves and demonstrate their understanding in alternate ways. A focus on oral language development through the reading and performing of poetry acknowledges that sound is meaning. When we hear the sound of the words in a poem read aloud, we gain a better understanding of the meaning of the writing. We can involve students in the dramatic exploration of poems in a variety of ways, including choral reading, readers' theatre, dance drama, shared reading, or role-play.
This stylistic flexibility can be freeing for unsure writers as it makes them more aware of the various ways language can be used and combined to create stories, images, and rhythms. Even if students don't understand each word or the meaning of a poem, exposure to new words, word combinations, and sounds is still healthy for the mind and inspires students to experiment with their own variations. Poetry is meant to be lifted from the printed page and explored in multimodal ways (visually, gutturally, and aurally). The use of new digital media for reading, writing, and representing poetry encourages an exploration of the relationship between text and image and how images sound might be used to mediate meaning-making. New med...

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/articles/detail/91088

Interview
Late Happiness
W.S. Merwin on his long career and trying to enjoy his luck.
By Alex Dueben
Photo © Matt Valentine

W.S. Merwin has been writing and publishing poetry for more than 60 years, since W.H. Auden selected Merwin’s first book for the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 1952. He’s collected awards ever since, especially in recent years: he was awarded the National Book Award in 2005 and the Pulitzer Prize in 2009, and in 2010, he was appointed the 17th poet laureate of the United States. Merwin also became the second living poet to have work published by the Library of America, in two volumes totaling more than 1,500 pages.

Last month, Merwin celebrated his 89th birthday and the publication of a new book of poetry, Garden Time. While writing some of the best work of his career, he has recently faced health challenges, including losing his eyesight. He spoke to the Poetry Foundation from his home in Hawaii about his dismay over the state of the environment, not living for others’ expectations, and trying to enjoy his luck. The following interview was condensed and edited.


I know you’ve been losing your eyesight over the last few years. How has that changed the process of writing for you?

It depends on what I’m writing. Poetry always has been a matter of being taken by surprise–sometimes in the middle of the night. My table in my study here is cluttered with little pieces of paper with a few words on each. They’re the beginning of something that might be a poem.

It’s been five years since I was able to read. My left eye is completely gone, and my right one has macular degeneration, which is getting worse all the time. That’s just the condition one lives with. I’ve been pretty well assured by my eye doctor that although my eyesight will be poor in my right eye, I won’t go blind. That’s nice because we live in a very beautiful place here.

Do you dictate everything now or do you still scribble on pieces of paper?

I try to write it down on a clipboard, and I give it to one of the people who comes to read to me. They are singularly good people. They’re all volunteers, and they’re very capable, very helpful. A great deal of Garden Time was done that way. I don’t know what people imagine the title means, but I was thinking of Blake: “The hours of folly are measur’d by the clock, / but of wisdom: no clock can measure.” The hours of wisdom are where you simply forget about time. For me, that’s the garden—this wonderful garden of palm trees around us. There are 900 species of palms here. I go for a walk in the morning, and I just love being here. I feel extremely lucky living here with my wife, my only love, and I’m able to see enough to wander around in the garden. It’s just a joy.

One of my favorite poems in your new book is “After the Dragonflies,” which beautifully describes these once-so-common creatures. “Now there are grown-ups hurrying / who never saw one / and do not know what they / are not seeing,” you write, which makes the issues of climate change and the sixth great extinction so very real and personal. How conscious are you of addressing conservation and environmental concerns in your work?

To my great astonishment, people got very excited about that poem. I’m delighted that they did. I have a biologist friend who works at the great biology department at the University of Oregon. Some years ago I was there, and he said, we’re losing a species a week. I was shocked, of course. The last time I saw him, he said, we’re losing a species every few seconds. We’re doing it. We’re using poison in the environment as though it didn’t matter. People use poison in the grass in front of their houses; they use poison along the roadsides. We’re poisoning the whole place. A number of species of birds have just disappeared from here in the last five years. I don’t know whether they’re completely gone or if we’ll ever see them again. We know that we lost a species just this year. People ask, how did you get interested in conservation, and I say if you’re interested in the world it’s not a matter of conservation, it’s a matter of reality.

People ask, what led you to live in the country? Well, this is the real world. The real world is not the red light down at the corner—it’s right here. It’s the thrush waking in the morning. We’ve allowed ourselves to get very far out of touch with it. It’s not bad just for the world; it’s very bad for us. I’m very sorry to see it happening. E.O. Wilson, the great biologist, said there’s a great division between the people who think the world is a city and then a whole lot of nothing and then another city, and the people who think the world is the forest and the grass and then a city and then the forest and the grass and then a city. One being the real world and the other one being something less than that.

Many of your poems have a fairly bleak vision of where things are going. But you also have poems that are more personal and celebrate nature, celebrate moments of joy.

It’s strange there are so many poems in world literature about unhappiness and that so few poems have been written about happiness. I think I’m so lucky because I’m relatively happy. Among the bits of luck is to have a temperament that is not gloomy. I may sound very gloomy in what I write, but I think we have a chance to be happy here. I don’t feel selfish about it. I think that the only right thing to do with good fortune like that—if one has the rare luck to have it—is to enjoy it, if one can.

Poems such as “December Morning,” with its first line, “How did I come to this late happiness,” definitely do that. Do you have any advice for the rest of us, besides being lucky? Is there something you did or a way that you approached life that you credit?

I’ve never relied on money. People asked, what are you going to do when you grow up? I said, well, I’m already a poet, but when they said, that’s not enough to make a living, I would say, what do you call a living? I don’t want any more than I need. I’ve always felt that way. I’ve never had any money unless I had a grant for a year or something like that. I say to young people, trust your luck and see how far it can take you. If you want to settle down and have a nice good American middle-class life and raise children, that’s one thing. If you don’t want to, that used to be considered rather shocking. There’s a wonderful line of Ibsen from The Lady from the Sea about being overridden by other people’s expectations. When I first got to Princeton, I thought, this is what I want. I wanted freedom and the ability to find out a little about who I am. I’ve been unbelievably lucky. I don’t know why. One never knows why one’s lucky. Some of it is skill, but most of it’s luck.

Garden Time moves between these beautiful passing moments and more haunting complex poems, as we’ve been talking about, and you close the book with “The Present,” which begins “As they were leaving the garden / one of the angels bent down to them and whispered / I am to give you this.” Could you talk a little about the poem? Because it’s about a moment of transition and coping and finding a new way forward.

It’s about the myth of the Garden of Eden. I think it’s a fascinating myth. There were the great angels behind Adam and Eve. As they’re leaving the garden, one of the angels bends down and says, I was told to give you this. I don’t know what it is, but it’s something that will apparently be of use to you. What it is, is laughter.

Real laughter is a great boon to our species, I think. We can find the world so remarkable that it makes us laugh. My sister said, you were that way as a child. You found everything, you just delighted in everything. I can remember watching sparrows on the wire along the street and spending a long time just watching the sparrows. I love the world. That’s what the angel is giving them—something they don’t have in the garden. There’s no laughter in the Garden of Eden. Why would they laugh? They’re in the Garden of Eden. But now you’re outside and here; you can know how to laugh. The moment their hands touch, they laugh. That’s what the poem is about.

Outside the garden–outside “garden time,” if you will—laughter is one of the things that sustains us.

Yes, I think so.

Could you talk a little about the Merwin Conservancy and the work you’ve been doing in Hawaii? You have 18 acres on the island of Maui with hundreds of varieties of palm trees.

I was living a few miles from here and a woman said there’s a piece of land for sale right out near the coast. I came over to see, and the land was very cheap. My parents had just died, so I had a little bit of money. There was nothing growing on it except down in the streambed. It was bleached, and it was listed in the county books as ruined land. I thought, I don’t believe nothing will grow here. I’d like to buy it and see about this. I think there are ways it can be brought back to life. It’s hard for people to come now and realize that was ever said about this land because it’s covered with trees. We welcome groups of schoolchildren and other people to come and be guided through the garden because fewer and fewer people get to even see places like this. It makes them happy. That’s the extraordinary thing. It does make them happy.

There are lot of mysterious things about trees we’re just learning all the time—communications among the root systems and communications among the leaf systems. The green world is very mysterious. It’s absolutely fascinating, and without it we wouldn’t exist. People talk about the environment as though it were something you could be interested in, like having a stamp collection or something. It’s not so. If there’s no environment, there’s no us.

In the past 12 years, you’ve been awarded the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, you were named poet laureate, and you became one of two living poets published by the Library of America. I’m not sure any other writer has had such a decade.

I can assure you it had nothing to do with politics on my part. [laughs] I don’t know why it happened. I don’t know how any of those things were chosen. They’d offered poet laureate to me several times, and I’d said no. It seemed to me that I would be tied to a reputation, and I felt that that was a limitation on my own freedom. It was important to be free. I had this very severe upbringing, and I wanted to find out who the hell I was. It’s taken me the rest of my life to find out who I was. I realized that so much of the modern world is based on people having to follow other people’s expectations. I wanted to avoid other people’s expectations. My upbringing was this strict Calvinism and I thought, throw it all out and see what’s really there. At the other end of my life, I’m still doing that.

I live just down the hill from the astronomers who get all the information from the telescopes over on the Big Island. They found 1,200 unknown planets in the Milky Way. I called up one of the astronomers, a friend of mine, Jeff, and I said, that was exciting! Was it exciting for you? He said, sure, we knew they were there, we just had never seen them on the screen, and then we saw them. He said, every time something like that happens I realize it could happen again and again.

The universe is a great unknown wonderful place, and we know nothing, really, to speak of about it. I think that either depresses and frightens one or is exhilarating. We are very important, and we’re not important in quite the way we think we are. Each one of us is unique, and we can find out a whole lot just by examining ourselves. I think that’s the essential thing. Not paying attention to how you’re going to make money, just paying attention to whatever is around you. Each one of those seconds is your only chance. It’s your life. And it’s wonderful. The more attention that we pay to our ordinary lives leads to a real elation that we’re here at all.

Originally Published: October 18th, 2016

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetrysoup.com/article/the_poetry_of_elizabeth_barrett_browning-1626

The Poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Written by: Arthur Christopher Benson

IT is a matter of regret that there is no adequate biography of one of the very few women who have achieved real eminence in literature. Mrs. Richmond Ritchie has indeed written an article in the Dictionary of National Biography, but this from the nature of things could not be much more than a record. In the series of Eminent Women, Mr. Ingram has attempted to supply the want, and after reading his book through more than once we are bound to say that we regret that he has been first in the field. However, as Mrs. Browning herself says, "we get no good by being ungenerous, even to a book."

When Horne in the New Spirit of the Age gave some biographical particulars about Miss Barrett to the public, she wrote to him as follows:—"My dear Mr. Horne, the public do not care for me enough to care at all for my biography. If you say anything of me (and I am not affected enough to pretend to wish you to be absolutely silent, if you see any occasion to speak) it must be as a writer of rhymes, and not as the heroine of a biography. And then as to stories, my story amounts to the knife-grinder's, with nothing at all for a catastrophe. A bird in a cagecould have as good a story. Most of my events, and nearly all my intense pleasures, have passed in thoughts." And again later, when the paper had appeared:—"You are my friend I hope, but you do not on that account lose the faculty of judging me or the right of judging me frankly. I do loathe the whole system of personal compliment as a consequence of personal interest.... I set more price on your sincerity than on your praise, and consider it more closely connected with the quality called kindness.... I want kindness, the rarest of all nearly—which is truth."

Those are Mrs. Browning's own deliberate views, written it is true in early life, as to her own biography. That a biography need not be critical has been amply proved by Boswell; on the other hand, this only applies to a biography written by a contemporary friend, and even then it must be absolutely faithful. Boswell, it is true, admired too deeply to criticise. If he ever thought his subject ungenerous, ungenial, tyrannical, he does not say so; but at least he does not shrink from recording experiences which might suggest those qualities to readers who did not admire as he did. But any one who sits down to trace the history of one with whom he had no personal acquaintance, when that life is closed by death and rounded by the past, is bound to make some effort to discriminate. In Mr. Ingram's book the quality of discrimination is conspicuously wanting. He has evidently conceived an ideal and done his best to transmit it to others. That he has not altogether succeeded in disguising his heroine is no fault of his; as Miss Barrett complains in another sentence of the letter from which we have been quoting—"he has rouged her up to the eyes."

We must only touch upon two or three of the most salient points of Mrs. Browning's biography. Her life was uneventful enough, as far as events go, and its outlines are sufficiently well known. The impression which it leaves upon a reader is strangely mixed. The intellect with which we are brought into contact is profoundly impressive; the spectacle of a life so vivid and untiring, so hopeful and ardent, lived under the pressure of constant physical suffering, and the still more marked presence of morbidity both of thought and feeling, is inspiring and moving. But there is a want of wholesomeness about a great deal of it; there is a sense of failure somewhere. This reveals itself in its concrete form perhaps most clearly in the fact that with all the presence of high and animating thoughts, with the resolve of self-dedication to the poetic office, with the assiduous and systematic labour to cultivate the art of expression, yet obscurity seems to haunt so many efforts, and the instinct of discrimination so frequently appears to slumber. Mrs. Browning as a letter-writer is disappointing; again and again there is a touch of true feeling, a noble thought, but with all this there is a want of incisiveness, a wearisome seriousness, which of all qualities is the one that ought not to obtrude itself, a strange lack of humour, a certain strain—a scraping of the soul, as Tourgenieff has it. And this may, we think, be best expressed by the pathetic words that fall from her in the letter already quoted: her history was that of a bird in a cage. Not only from the physical fact that she was for many years of her life an invalid—but mentally and morally also she was caged, by imaginary social fictions, by certain ingrained habits of thought; and, last of all, as a passionate idealist, she saw with painful persistence and in horrible contrast the infinite possibilities of human nature and the limitations of low realities.

It is a curious fact which meets us at the very threshold of her life, that the author of "The Cry of the Children," the passionate partisan of the Abolitionist cause in America and of freedom in Italy, came from generations of slave-owners. In fact the Jamaica Emancipation Act cost her the loss of her Herefordshire home, by resulting in a large decrease in her father's fortune. It seems indeed typical of her sentiment, typical of the limitations and impersonality of her feelings that, among all her bitter reveries and passionate revolts against human tyrannies, it never (so far as we can judge from her correspondence) seems to have occurred to her that the wealth and comfort with which she was surrounded, the very dower of books that made life possible, was actually wrung from generations of slave-labour, the forced toil of hundreds of impotent lives. No one would ask for, or even hint at expecting, even from the most fantastic idealist, a renunciation of luxury thus acquired; but it is strange that the idea seems never to have entered her head.

She spent a happy though precocious childhood, but by the age of fifteen was already condemned to that bitter isolation of invalid life which, when it falls on a strong and vivid personality, has, fortunately for human nature, a purifying and ennobling effect. Intellectual effort became first the anodyne of physical evil, then the earnest aim of her life.

She never seems to have doubted as to the form that her impulsive need for expression was to take. "You," she writes to her father in the dedication of her second volume of poems, "you are a witness how if this art of poetry had been a less earnest object to me, it must have fallen from exhausted hands before this day." And again in the preface: "Poetry has been as serious a thing to me as life itself, and life has been a very serious thing; there has been no playing at skittles for me in either. I never mistook pleasure for the final cause of poetry, nor leisure for the hour of the poet. I have done my work, so far, as work—not as mere hand and head work, apart from the personal being—but as the completest expression of that being to which I could attain."

There is something very impressive about the earnestness of this. Its fault is perhaps that it is a little too outspoken: and, from a human point of view, we cannot help regretting that she did not a little more fall into that error which she so indignantly repudiates: if she had mistaken pleasure a little more, not perhaps for the final cause, but for one of the primary causes of poetry, we cannot help feeling that she might have done, if not such earnest, at least more artistic work.

One of the things that one expects to find in the biography of a poet is a detailed account of methods of composition. It is interesting to know whether morning or evening hours were devoted to writing; whether the act of composition was slow or quick; whether the poem was worked out in the mind before it was transmitted to paper; what proportion finished compositions bear to unfinished; whether incomplete work was ever resumed; whether the observation of language was systematised in any way. All these things one is particularly anxious to hear in the case of a poetess whose work bears at once traces of hasty and elaborate workmanship, whose vocabulary is so extraordinarily eclectic, whose rhymes are so peculiar, and often—may we say?—so unsatisfactory. Mr. Ingram's biography, abounding as it does in details of what we may call the interviewer's type, is almost entirely silent on these points. We hear indeed incidentally that the solid morning hours were Mrs. Browning's habitual hours of work; and a curious correspondence has been made public between herself and Horne, which shows that her rhymes, according to herself, were deliberately and painfully selected, principally in the case of dissyllabic rhymes (even, we fear, such pairs as Goethe and duty, Bettine andbetween ye) because she held that English composers, though the language was rich in these rhythmical combinations, had been instinctively slow in applying them to serious poetry. If Elizabeth Browning's, or indeed Robert Browning's, dissyllabic rhymes are the best defence that can be urged for this position, we must affirm that the general instinct on the whole has been right: such rhymes give a sense of fantastic elaborateness, and tend to concentrate the reader's attention too closely upon the technique of the composition. This is, however, a minor point. But it is interesting to observe that this very detail, which constitutes a blemish in the eyes of even indulgent critics, was a subject upon which Mrs. Browning had not only definite ideas, but enthusiastic convictions.

One other thing may be noted. It is alleged, though without certainty, that "Lady Geraldine's Courtship," a poem consisting of over four hundred lines, was actually composed within twelve consecutive hours. If that is so, it is a marvellous tour de force. The poem is one which, in spite of obvious faults, has an immense outburst of lyrical power and magnificent feeling; it contains many lines which linger in the memory; and every one who has had any experience of composition will recognise at once that, if this tradition about its origin be true, it is easy to understand why the poem was allowed to remain as it does. Besides the repugnance which most writers (and especially, we are inclined to think, Mrs. Browning) have felt for the limæ labor, the painful excision and chiselling of a work of any kind, there is a special distaste for meddling with a work which springs to life as it were in a moment; such work grows to have, even in the course of a few hours, a sentient individuality of its own which almost defies mutilation.

Mrs. Browning's best lyrical work was all done before her marriage; but the stirring of the truest depths of her emotional nature took voice in the collection of sonnets entitled "From the Portuguese"—strung, in Omar's words, like pearls upon the string of circumstance. In these sonnets (which it is hardly necessary to say are not translations) she speaks the universal language; to her other graces had now been added that which she had somewhat lacked before, the grace of content; and for these probably she will be longest and most gratefully admired. Any one who steps for the first time through the door into which he has seen so many enter, and finds that poets and lovers and married folk, in their well-worn commonplaces, have exaggerated nothing, will love these sonnets as one of the sweetest and most natural records of a thing which will never lose its absorbing fascination for humanity. To those that are without, except for the sustained melody of expression, the poetess almost seems to have passed on to a lower level, to have lost originality—like the celebrated lady whose friends said that till she wrote to announce her engagement she had never written a commonplace letter. Their fervour indeed rises from the resolute virginity of a heart to whom love had been scarcely a dream, never a hope. We must think of the isolation, sublime it may have been, but yet desolate, from which her marriage was to rescue her—coming not as only the satisfaction of imperious human needs, but to meet and crown her whole nature with a fulness of which few can dream. As she was afterwards to write:

How dreary 'tis for women to sit still
On winter nights by solitary fires
And hear the nations praising them far off.

And again:

To sit alone
And think, for comfort, how that very night
Affianced lovers, leaning face to face,
With sweet half-listenings for each other's breath
Are reading haply from some page of ours
To pause with a thrill, as if their cheeks had touched
When such a stanza level to their mood
Seems floating their own thoughts out—"So I feel
For thee"—"And I for thee: this poet knows
What everlasting love is."
To have our books
Appraised by love, associated with love
While we sit loveless.

Such a heart deserved all the love it could get.

The latter years of Mrs. Browning's life have a certain shadowiness for English readers. The "Casa Guidi," if we were not painfully haunted by the English in which interviewers have given their impressions of it, is a memory to linger over. The high dusty passage that gave access to the tall, gloomy house; the huge cool rooms, with little Pennini, so called in contrast to the colossal statue Apennino, "slender, fragile, spirit-like" flitting about from stair to stair: the faint sounds of music breathing about the huge corridors; the scent, the stillness,—such a home as only two poets could create, and two lovers inhabit.

Nathaniel Hawthorne gives, among some rather affected writing about a visit of his there, a few characteristic touches. "Mrs. Browning met us at the door of the drawing-room—a pale, small person, scarcely embodied at all; at any rate only substantial enough to put forth her slender fingers to be grasped, and to speak with a shrill yet sweet tenuity of voice. Really I do not see how Mr. Browning can suppose that he has an earthly wife any more than an earthly child; both are of the elfin race, and will flit away from him some day when he least thinks of it. She is a good and kind fairy, however, and sweetly disposed towards the human race, although only remotely akin to it. It is wonderful to see how small she is, how pale her cheek, how bright and dark her eyes. There is not such another figure in the world." "The boy," he says elsewhere, "was born in Florence, and prides himself upon being a Florentine, and is indeed as un-English a production as if he were a native of another planet."

This touch perhaps will explain why it is that we rather lose hold of Mrs. Browning after her marriage; England was connected in her mind with all the old trials of life which seemed to have fallen away with her new existence; ill-health, and mental struggle, bereavement and pain—even though it was pain triumphed over. With marriage and Italy a new life began. It became her adopted country—

And now I come, my Italy,
My own hills! Are you 'ware of me, my hills,
How I burn to you? Do you feel to-night
The urgency and yearning of my soul.

And there the English reader is at fault. He cannot call Italy his own in any genuine sense; much as his yearnings may go out towards her, in days when his own ungenial climate is wrapping the hedge-rows and hill-farms in mist and driving sleet, much as he may long for a moment after her sun and warmth, her transparent skies and sleepy seas, yet he knows his home is here. Even when he finds himself among her vines, when the lizards dart powdered with green jewels from stone to stone, and the dust puffs up white in the road beside the bay, he finds himself murmuring in his heart Mr. Browning's own words.

Oh! to be in England now that April's there,
And whoever wakes in England sees some morning unaware,
That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough—
In England now!

That is what he really feels; and however much he loves to think as a picture of the poet and poetess transplanted into the warm lands, his heart does not go out to them, as it would have done had they stayed at home. And so it comes to pass that some of the lines into which Mrs. Browning threw her most passionate emphasis, "Casa Guidi Windows," the words that burn with an alien patriotism—alien, but sunk so deep, that her disappointed hopes made havoc of her life—reach him like murmuring music over water, sweet but fantastic—touching the ear a little and the heart a little, but bringing neither glow nor tears.

They say that the Treaty of Villa Franca snapped the cord; that the bitter disappointment of what had become a passion rather than a dream broke the struggling spirit. It may be so—"With her golden verse linking Italy to England," wrote the grateful Florentines upon her monument. But England to Italy? No—"Italy," she wrote herself, "is one thing, England one." We feel that she passed into a strange land, and in its sweetness somewhat forgot her own: the heart is more with her when she writes:

I saw
Fog only, the great tawny weltering fog
Involve the passive city, strangle it
Alive, and draw it off into the void,
Spires, bridges, streets, and squares, as if a sponge
Had wiped out London.

Or:

A ripple of land: such little hills, the sky
Can stoop to tenderly, and the wheatfields climb.
Such nooks of valleys lined by orchises,
Fed full of noises by invisible streams
And open pastures, where you scarcely tell
White daisies from white dew—at intervals
The mythic oaks and elm trees standing out
Self-poised upon their prodigy of shade;
I thought my father's land was worthy too
Of being Shakespeare's.

II

"Mr. Kenyon," wrote Miss Barrett, "was with me yesterday.... he accused me of writing a certain paper in the Athenæum, and convicted me against my will; and when I could no longer deny and began to explain and pique myself upon my diplomacy, he threw himself back in his chair and laughed me to scorn as the least diplomatic of his acquaintance, 'You diplomatic!'"

Mr. Kenyon, without perhaps intending it, gave expression to a feeling which rises again and again half unconsciously in the mind even of the most sympathetic reader of Mrs. Browning's poetry: there is no diplomacy about it. The diplomatist achieves his successes not only by saying what he has to say in the most lucid possible manner—that is not enough—but by a discreet reticence, by implying possibilities rather than stating them, by guarded admissions, by suggestive silence.

There is a well-known rhetorical device, upon which Mrs. Browning in her classical studies must have not unfrequently stumbled, called the Aposiopesis—in plain English, the art of breaking-off. Classical writers are often hastily accused by young learners of having framed their writings with a view to introducing perplexing forms and intolerable constructions, so as unnecessarily to obscure the sense. But it is a matter of regret that Mrs. Browning did not employ this particular construction with greater frequency,—to use a colloquial expression—that she did not let you off a good deal. Many of her poems are weighted with a dragging moral; many of them fly with a broken wing, stopping and rising again, dispersing and returning with a kind of purposeless persistency, as if they were incapable of deciding where to have done. Poems with passage after passage of extraordinary depth of thought and amazing felicity of expression, every now and then droop and crawl like the rain on a November day, which will not fall in a drenching shower nor quite desist, but keeps dropping, dropping from the sky out of mere weakness or idleness.

To secure an audience a poet must be diplomatic; he must know whose ear he intends to catch. It is mere cant to say that the best poetry cannot be popular; that it should be read is its first requisite. When Gray wrote φων?ντα συνετο?σιν on his Odes he meant that there would be many people to whom they would not appeal; but it is ridiculous to say that the merit of poetry is in proportion to the paucity of its admirers. If Mrs. Browning aimed at any particular class it was perhaps at intellectual sentimentalists. As the two characteristics are rarely found united, in fact are liable to exclude one another, it may perhaps be the reason why she is so little appreciated in her entirety: she is perhaps too learned for women and too emotional for men.

Let us consider for a moment where her intellectual training came from. Roughly speaking, the basis of it was Greek from first to last; at nine years old she measured her life by the years of the siege of Troy, and carved a figure out of the turf in her garden to represent a recumbent warrior, naming it Hector. Then came her version of the "Prometheus Vinctus"; her long studious mornings over Plato and Theocritus with the blind scholar, Mr. Boyd, whom she commemorates in "Wine of Cyprus," when she read, as she writes, "the Greek poets, with Plato, from end to end"; her dolorous excursion with the Fathers; and at last, in the Casa Guidi, the little row of miniature classics, annotated in her own hand, standing within easy reach of her couch. Of course she was an omnivorous reader besides. She speaks of reading the Hebrew Bible, "from Genesis to Malachi,—never stopped by the Chaldean,—and the flood of all possible and impossible British and foreign novels and romances, with slices of metaphysics laid thick between the sorrows of the multitudinous Celestinas." But it was evidently in Greek, in the philosophical poetry of Euripides and the poetical philosophy of Plato, that she found her deepest satisfaction.

At the same time she was not in the true sense learned, though possessing learning far greater than commonly falls to a woman's lot to possess. Her education in Greek must have been unsystematic and unscholarly; her classical allusions, which fall so thick in letters and poems have seldom quite the genuine ring; we do not mean that she did not get nearer the heart of the Greek writers and appreciate their spirit more intimately than many a far more erudite scholar; that was to be expected, for she brought enthusiasm and insight and genius to the task; but her learning is not an animated part of her; it is sometimes almost an incubus. The character of her allusions too is often remote and fanciful. They fall, it is true, from a teeming brain, but they are not the simple direct comparisons which would occur to a man who had made Greek literature his own, but rather the unexpected, modern turns which so often surprise a student, like the red bunches of valerian which thrust out of the sand-stone frieze of a Sicilian temple—such comparisons, for instance, as the celebrated one in Aurora Leigh of the peasant who might have been gathering brushwood in the ear of a colossus had Xerxes carried out his design of carving Athos into the likeness of a man. Her characterization of the classical poets in "The Poet's Vow" will also illustrate this; now so extraordinarily felicitous and clear-sighted, as for instance in the case of Shakespeare and Ossian, and now so alien to the true spirit of the men described.

Sophocles
With that king's-look which down the trees
Followed the dark effigies

Of the lost Theban. Hesiod old,
Who, somewhat blind and deaf and cold,
Cared most for gods and bulls.

The fact was that she read the Greeks as a woman of genius was sure to do; she passed by their majestic grace, amazed at their solemn profundity, and yet unaware that she was projecting into them a feeling, a sentimental outlook which they did not possess, attributing directly to them a deliberate power which was merely the effect of their unconscious, antique, and limited vision upon the emotional child of a later age.

The strangest thing is that a woman of such complex and sensitive faculties should have given in her allegiance to such models. Never was there a writer in whom the best characteristics of the Greeks were more conspicuously absent. Their balance, their solidity, their calm, their gloomy acquiescence in the bitter side of life, have surely little in common with the passionate spirit that beat so wildly against the bars, and asked the stars and hills so eagerly for their secrets. Such a passage as the following, grand as is the central idea, is surely enough to show the utter incompatibility which existed between them: "I thought that had Æschylus lived after the incarnation and crucifixion of our Lord Jesus Christ, he might have turned, if not in moral and intellectual, yet in poetic faith, from the solitude of Caucasus to the deeper desertness of that crowded Jerusalem, where none had any pity,—from the faded white flower of a Titanic brow to the withered grass of a heart trampled on by its own beloved—from the glorying of him who gloried that he could not die, to the sublime meekness of the Taster of death for every man: from the taunt stung into being by the torment, to his more awful silence, when the agony stood dumb before the love." ... It was characteristic of a woman to bring the two personalities together, to dwell on what might have been; but this is not Greek.

The two poems which are the best instances of the classical mood, are the two of which Pan, the spirit of the solitary country, half beast, half god, is the hero. In these Mrs. Browning appears in her strength and in her weakness. In "The Dead Pan," in spite of its solemn refrain, the lengthy disordered mode of thought is seen to the worst advantage: the progression of ideas is obscure, the workmanship is not hurried, but deliberately distressing; the rhymes, owing to that unfortunate fancy for double rhyming, being positively terrific; the brief fury of the lyric mood passing into the utterances of a digressive moralist. But when we turn to the other, "A Musical Instrument," what a relief we experience. "What was he doing, the great god Pan, down in the reeds by the river?" The splendid shock of the rhythm, like the solid plunge of a cataract into a mountain-pool, captivates, for all its roughness, the metrical ear. There is not a word or a thought too much: the scene shapes itself, striking straight out into the thought; the waste and horror that encircle the birth of the poet in the man; the brutish elements out of which such divinity is compounded—these are flung down in simple, delicate outlines: such a lyric is an eternal possession of the English language.

As a natural result of a certain discursiveness of mind, there is hardly any kind of writing unrepresented in Mrs. Browning's poems. She had at one time a fancy for pure romantic writing, since developed to such perfection by Rossetti. There is a peculiar charm about such composition. In such works we seem to breathe a freer air, separated as we are from special limitations of time and place; the play of passion is more simple and direct, and the passion itself is of a less complex and restrained character. Besides, there is a certain element of horror and mystery, which the modern spirit excludes, while it still hungers for it, but is not unnatural when mediævalized. Nothing in Mrs. Browning can bear comparison with "Sister Helen" or "The Beryl Stone"; but "The Romaunt of the Page" and the "Rhyme of the Duchess May" stand among her most successful pieces.

The latter opens with a simple solemnity:

To the belfry, one by one, went the ringers from the sun,
Toll slowly.
And the oldest ringer said, "Ours is music for the dead,
When the rebecks are all done."
Six abeles i' the churchyard grow on the north side in a row,
Toll slowly.
And the shadow of their tops rock across the little slopes
Of the grassy graves below.
On the south side and the west a small river runs in haste,
Toll slowly.
And between the river flowing and the fair green trees agrowing,
Do the dead lie at their rest.
On the east I sat that day, up against a willow grey:
Toll slowly.
Through the rain of willow-branches I could see the low hill ranges,
And the river on its way.

This is like the direct opening notes of the overture of a dirge. Whatever may be said about such writing we feel at once that it comes from a master's hand. So the poem opens, but alas for the close! Some chord seems to snap; it is no longer the spirit of the ancient rhymer, but Miss Mitford's friend who catches up the lyre and will have her last word. The poem passes, still in the same metre, out of the definite materialism, the ghastly excitements of the story into a species of pious churchyard meditation; and the pity of it is that we cannot say that this is not characteristic.

Then closely connected with the last comes a class of poems, of so-called modern life, of which "Lady Geraldine's Courtship" shall stand for an example. This is a poem of nineteenth-century adventure, which is as impossible in design and as fantastic in detail as a poem may well be. The reader does not know whether to be most amazed at the fire and glow of the whole story, or at the hopeless ignorance of the world betrayed by it. The impossible Earls with their immeasurable pride and intolerable pomposities; the fashionable ladies with their delicate exteriors and callous hearts,—these are like the creations of Charlotte Brontë, and recall Blanche and Baroness Ingram of Ingram Park. And at the same time, when we have said all this, we read the poem and we can forgive all or nearly all—the spirit is so high, the passion is so fierce and glowing, the poetry that bursts out, stanza after stanza, contrives to involve even these dolorous mistakes in such a glamour, that we can only admire the genius that could contend against such visionary errors.

But we must turn to what after all is Mrs. Browning's most important and most characteristic work, Aurora Leigh. Unfortunately its length alone, were there not any other reasons, would prevent its ever being popular. Ten thousand lines of blank verse is a serious thing. The fact that the poem is to a great extent autobiographical, combined with the comparative mystery in which the authoress was shrouded and the romance belonging to a marriage of poets—these elements are enough to account for the general enthusiasm with which the poem was received. Landor said that it made him drunk with poetry,—that was the kind of expression that its admirers allowed themselves to make use of with respect to it. And yet in spite of these credentials, the fact remains that it is a difficult volume to work through. It is the kind of book that one begins to read for the first time with intense enjoyment, congratulating oneself after the first hundred pages that there are still three-hundred to come. Then the mood gradually changes; it becomes difficult to read without a marker; and at last it goes back to the shelf with the marker about three-fourths of the way through. As she herself wrote,

The prospects were too far and indistinct.
'Tis true my critics said "A fine view that."
The public scarcely cared to climb my book
For even the finest;—and the public's right.

Now what is the reason of this? In the first place it is a romance with a rather intricate plot, and a romance requires continuous reading and cannot be laid aside for a few days with impunity. Secondly, it requires hard and continuous study; there is hardly a page without two or three splendid thoughts, and several weighty expressions; it is a perfect mine of felicitous though somewhat lengthy quotations upon almost every question of art and life, yet it is sententious without being exactly epigrammatic. Thirdly, it is very digressive, distressingly so when you are once interested in the story. Lastly, it is not dramatic; whoever is speaking, Lord Howe, Aurora, Romney Leigh, Marian Earle, they all express themselves in a precisely similar way; it is even sometimes necessary to reckon back the speeches in a dialogue to see who has got the ball. In fact it is not they who speak, but Mrs. Browning. To sum up, it is the attempted union of the dramatic and meditative elements that is fatal to the work from an artistic point of view.

Perhaps, if we are to try and disentangle the motive of the whole piece, to lay our finger on the main idea, we may say that it lies in the contrast between the solidity and unity of the artistic life, as opposed to the tinkering philanthropy of the Sociologist. Aurora Leigh is an attempt from an artistic point of view to realise in concrete form the truth that the way to attack the bewildering problem of the nineteenth century, the moral elevation of the democracy, is not by attempting to cure in detail the material evils, which are after all nothing but the symptoms of a huge moral disease expressing itself in concrete fact, but by infusing a spirit which shall raise them from within. To attack it from its material side is like picking off the outer covering of a bud to assist it to blow, rather than by watering the plant to increase its vitality and its own power of internal action; in fact, as our clergy are so fond of saying, a spiritual solution is the only possible one, with this difference, that in Aurora Leigh this attempt is made not so much from the side of dogmatic religion as of pure and more general enthusiasms. The insoluble enigma is unfortunately, whether, under the pressure of the present material surroundings, there is any hope of eliciting such an instinct at all; whether it is not actually annihilated by want and woe and the diseased transmission of hereditary sin.

It is of course totally impossible to give any idea of a poem of this kind by quotations, partly, too, because as with most meditative poetry, the extracts are often more impressive by themselves than in their context, owing to the fact that the run of the poem is interfered with rather than assisted by them. But we may give a few specimens of various kinds. "I," she says,

Will write my story for my better self,
As when you paint your portrait for a friend
Who keeps it in a drawer, and looks at it
Long after he has ceased to love you, just
To hold together what he was and is.

And this is one of those mysterious, sudden images that take the fancy; she is describing the high edge of a chalk down:

You might see
In apparition in the golden sky
... the sheep run
Along the fine clear outline, small as mice
That run along a witch's scarlet thread.

And this is a wonderful rendering of the effect, which never fails to impress the thought, of the mountains of a strange land rising into sight over the sea's rim:

I felt the wind soft from the land of souls:
The old miraculous mountain heaved in sight
One straining past another along the shore
The way of grand, tall Odyssean ghosts,
Athirst to drink the cool blue wine of seas
And stare on voyagers.

We may conclude with this enchanting picture of an Italian evening:

Fire-flies that suspire
In short soft lapses of transported flame
Across the tingling dark, while overhead
The constant and inviolable stars
Outrun those lights-of-love: melodious owls
(If music had but one note and was sad,
'Twould sound just so): and all the silent swirl
Of bats that seem to follow in the air
Some grand circumference of a shadowy dome
To which we are blind; and then the nightingales
Which pluck our heart across a garden-wall,
(When walking in the town) and carry it
So high into the bowery almond-trees
We tremble and are afraid, and feel as if
The golden flood of moonlight unaware
Dissolved the pillars of the steady earth,
And made it less substantial.

It would seem in studying Mrs. Browning's work as though either she herself or her advisers did not appreciate her special gift. The longest of her poems are the work of her later years, whereas her strength did not lie so much in sustained narrative effort, in philosophical construction, or patriotic sentiment, as in the true lyrical gift. It seems more and more clear as time goes on that the poems by which she will be best remembered are some of her shortest—the expression of a single overruling mood—the parable without the explanation—the burst of irrepressible feeling.

I should be inclined, if I had to make a small selection out of the poems, to name seven lyrics as forming the truest and most characteristic work she ever produced—characteristic that is of her strength, and showing the fewest signs of her weakness. These are: "Loved Once," "The Romance of the Swan's Nest," "Catarina to Camoens," "Cowper's Grave," "The Cry of the Children," "The Mask," and lastly "Confessions," which seems to me one of the stormiest and most pathetic poems in the language. A few words of critical examination may be given to each.

The first fact that strikes a reader is that all of these, with one exception, depend to a certain extent upon the use of a refrain. Of course the refrain is a species of metrical trick; but there is no possibility of denying, that, if properly used, it gives a peculiar satisfaction to that special sense—whatever it be, for there is no defining it—to which metre and rhyme both appeal. At the same time there is one condition attached to this device, that it should not be prolonged into monotony. At what precise moment this lapse into monotony takes place, or by what other devices it may be modified, must be left to the sensitive taste of the writer, but if the writer does not discover when it becomes monotonous the reader will do so; and this is certainly the case in "The Dead Pan," though the refrain is there varied.

To a certain extent too it must be confessed that this same monotony affects two of the poems which we have mentioned: "Loved Once," and "Catarina to Camoens." The former of these deals with the permanence of a worthy love; and the refrain, "Loved Once," is dismissed as being the mere treasonous utterance of those who have never understood what love is. The poem gains, too, a pathetic interest from the fact that it records the great estrangement of Mrs. Browning's life.

"Catarina to Camoens" is the dying woman's answer to her lover's sonnet in which he recorded the wonder of her gaze. But alas! of these lines we may say with the author of Ionica, "I bless them for the good I feel; but yet I bless them with a sigh." The poem is vitiated by the unusually large proportion of faulty and fantastic rhymes that it contains.

"The Swan's Nest," the story of a childish dream and its disappointment, is an admirable illustration of the artistic principle that the element of pathos depends upon minuteness of detail and triviality of situation rather than upon intensity of feeling.

"The Mask" is not a poem that appears to have been highly praised. But it will appeal to any one who has any knowledge of that most miserable of human experiences—the necessity of dissembling suffering:

I have a smiling face, she said,
I have a jest for all I meet,
I have a garland for my head,
And all its flowers are sweet—
And so you call me gay, she said.

Behind no prison-grate, she said,
Which slurs the sunshine half-a-mile,
Live captives so uncomforted
As souls behind a smile.
God's pity let us pray, she said.

If I dared leave this smile, she said,
And take a moan upon my mouth,
And twine a cypress round my head,
And let my tears run smooth,
It were the happier way, she said.

And since that must not be, she said,
I fain your bitter world would leave.
How calmly, calmly, smile the dead,
Who do not, therefore, grieve!
The yea of Heaven is yea, she said.

It is not necessary to quote from either "Cowper's Grave" or "The Cry of the Children." The former is the true Elegiac; the latter—critics may say what they will—goes straight to the heart and brings tears to the eyes. We do not believe that any man or woman of moderate sensibility could read it aloud without breaking down. It has faults of language, structure, metre; but its emotional poignancy gives it an artistic value which it would be fastidious to deny, and which we may expect it to maintain.

Lastly, "Confessions" is the story of passionate love, lavished by a soul so exclusively and so prodigally on men that it has, in the jealous priestly judgment, sucked away and sapped the natural love for the Father of men. The poor human soul under the weight of this accusation clings only to the thought of how utterly it has loved the brothers that it has seen. "And how," comes the terrible question, "have they requited it? God's love, you have rejected it—what have you got in its stead from man?"

I saw God sitting above me, but I ... I sate among men,
And I have loved these.
The least touch of their hands in the morning, I keep it by
day and by night;
Their least step on the stair, at the door, still throbs through
me, if ever so light:
Their least gift, which they left to my childhood, far off in
the long-ago years,
Is turned from a toy to a relic, and seen through the crystal of
tears.
"Dig the snow," she said,
"For my churchyard bed,
Yet I, as I sleep, shall not fear to freeze,
If one only of these my beloveds, shall love me with heart-warm
tears
As I have loved these!"

"Go," I cried, "thou hast chosen the Human, and left the
Divine!
Then, at least, have the Human shared with thee their wild
berry wine?
Have they loved back thy love, and when strangers approached
thee with blame
Have they covered thy fault with their kisses, and loved thee
the same?"
But she shrunk and said,
"God, over my head,
Must sweep in the wrath of His judgment-seas,
If He shall deal with me sinning, but only indeed the same
And no gentler than these."

We have been dealing with a poet as a poet; but we must not forget that she was a woman too. From Sappho and Sulpicia (whose reputations must be allowed to rest upon somewhat negative proof) to Eliza Cook and Joanna Baillie, and even Mrs. Hemans, sweet singer as she was—how Mrs. Browning distances them all! There was something after all in the quaint proposal of the Athenæum, upon the death of Wordsworth, that the Laureateship should be offered to Mrs. Browning, as typical of the realisation of a new possibility for women. That alone is something of an achievement, though in itself we do not rate it very high. But the truth is that we cannot do without our poets; the nation is even now pining for a new one, and every soul that comes among us bringing the divinæ particulam auræ, who finds his way to expression, is a possession to congratulate ourselves upon. If there is that shadowy something in a writer's work, coming we know not whence and going we know not whither, unseen, intangible, but making its presence felt and heard, we must welcome it and guard it and give it room to move. "My own best poets," writes Mrs. Browning, "am I one with you?"

Does all this smell of thyme about my feet
Conclude my visit to your holy hill
In personal presence, or but testify
The rustling of your vesture through my dreams
With influent odours?

We need not doubt it; she is worthy to be counted among these,

The only teachers who instruct mankind
From just a shadow on a charnel-wall
To find man's veritable stature out
Erect, sublime—the measure of a man—
And that's the measure of an angel, says
The apostle.
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We have been dealing with a poet as a poet; but we must not forget that she was a woman too. From Sappho and Sulpicia (whose reputations must be allowed to rest upon somewhat negative proof) to Eliza Cook and Joanna Baillie, and even Mrs. Hemans, sweet singer as she was—how Mrs. Browning distances them all! There was something after all in the quaint proposal of the Athenæum, upon the death of Wordsworth, that the Laureateship should be offered to Mrs. Browning, as typical of the realisation of a new possibility for women. That alone is something of an achievement, though in itself we do not rate it very high. But the truth is that we cannot do without our poets; the nation is even now pining for a new one, and every soul that comes among us bringing the divinæ particulam auræ, who finds his way to expression, is a possession to congratulate ourselves upon. If there is that shadowy something in a writer's work, coming we know not whence and going we know not whither, unseen, intangible, but making its presence felt and heard, we must welcome it and guard it and give it room to move. "My own best poets," writes Mrs. Browning, "am I one with you?"
^^^^^^^COULD NOT HAVE BEEN BETTER SAID IMHO. AS THE MEASURE OF ANY POET IS QUALITY, DEPTH AND HEART OF THAT POET'S BODY OF WORK-- HAS NOT A DAMN THING TO DO WITH THE POET'S GENDER!
FEMALE POETS ARE STILL TO THIS DAY GETTING SHAFTED IN REGARDS TO FAME, APPRECIATION, RECOGNITION AND PROPER , WELL DESERVED PRAISE FOR THEIR WORKS.-TYR

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/detail/70312


Prose from Poetry Magazine
On Ghosts and the Overplus
Magic, metaphor, and dealings with the dead.
By Christina Pugh



Tonight I saw myself in the dark window as
the image of my father, whose life
was spent like this,
thinking of death, to the exclusion
of other sensual matters,
so in the end that life
was easy to give up, since
it contained nothing.
— From Mirror Image, by Louise Glück

You can spend your whole life thinking of death. Or soaring from it. My father was the opposite of Glück’s — steeped instead in the earthly, the decimal point, and the profit margin. Eight years into leukemia and he still had no time for death — no truck with it, as people used to say. He was a retired businessman still chairing company committees. He was a master gardener, devising ever new 
systems for labeling squash and trellising tomatoes. He was industrious, in the best sense. Frost might have said that his vocation and avocation had successfully united, as two eyes do in sight. Hospice was the roadblock. His own mortality was the real shock.

Hospice broke his heart.

This is the story I’m telling right now. I believe it to be true. Or might there have been another, different truth — some truth beyond a living 
person’s need to understand? I’d like to imagine a veiled waterway, hidden even from himself, that led him to a place beyond his conscious will and power. Could some internal stream have soothed the pain of his body’s betrayal? I’m guaranteed never to know. But I can still wish.

Can poetry reside in the recess of that mystery?



•



There used to be no house, hardly a room, in which someone had not once died.
— From Illuminations, by Walter Benjamin

Some years ago, a friend was talking to an owl at an artists’ colony near the Bighorns. Every morning before sunrise, she went out to greet the owl, and the owl spoke back. I understood that some profound content had been exchanged between the two of them — though it was also, perhaps predictably, hard to pin down in English. So 
I didn’t press her too hard for details.

What stayed with me instead was the euphoria of address — what Roman Jakobson called the conative function in language, or “orientation toward the addressee.” I like to think of it this way: the conversation’s subject isn’t really so important; the thrill is that the conversation happens at all. The linguistic rush of  face to face. Or in French, conversation is tête à tête: literally “head to head,” or putting two heads together.

This is what it feels like to fall in love.

Still, wouldn’t you be skeptical about the owl story?

A few years later, during my own stay at a colony, I myself   became the surprised target of a “visitation” — a ghost. It was said that a person, or persons, had died in the house where I was staying. One of them followed me up the staircase and spoke in my dark bedroom. Tripped the electrical circuit’s “light fantastic.” And made my keyboarding fingers type the initials “BS” — in a succinct (and, yes, 
hilarious) pan of everything I’d written that day.

The other residents there didn’t find my experience unusual. They had their own, similar stories. One of them told me not to worry.

To me, it had felt terrifying and then a little silly. A good agnostic, and a good empiricist, is not supposed to be visited like this, even if she’s also a poet. I couldn’t square that ghost — but I couldn’t deny its existence, either. It had all really happened. So I tried to redefine it as a local artifact. Or put it in the zoo. I told myself, Ghosts are part of the discourse here.

That sentence is a paradox: discourse sparks the intellect while ghost flouts its every rule. The sentence is also a diplomat — it brings reason and inexplicability to the same table. Most of all, though, it muzzles the ghost. Discourse routs the uncontainable. The uncountable. I fenced that ghost in language.

Since poetry is made of words — as Mallarmé told Degas — it’s 
capable of doing this, too. But a poem is also something else. Poetry is what lets the ghost reply, Don’t fence me in.



•



You have told me you gave it all away
then, sold the house, keeping only the confirmation
cross she wore, her name in cursive chased
on the gold underside, your ring in the same

box, those photographs you still avoid,
and the quilt you spread on your borrowed bed — 
small things. Months after we met, you told me she had
made it, after we had slept already beneath its loft
and thinning, raveled pattern, as though beneath
her shadow, moving with us, that dark, that soft.
— From Artifact, by Claudia Emerson

Look at the smallest, most ephemeral things around you. How many fingers have touched them? Do you know whose?

In Claudia Emerson’s sequence “Late Wife: Letters to Kent,” a newly remarried woman encounters her husband’s first wife, dead of cancer, in precisely those sorts of things. There is the quilt the late wife made, and one stray “driving glove” in the car. The late wife also made a video of her then-husband Kent coming home to their adorably excitable dog.

When she watches this home video, Emerson realizes that its erstwhile camerawoman and “director” is now, impossibly, directing 
her: “as though she directs / me to notice the motion of her chest / in the rise and fall of the frame.” Kent — the “you” in this passage from “Homecoming” — is unwittingly complicit in the strategy:

Then, at last, you come home
to look into the camera she holds,
and past her into me — invisible, unimagined
other who joins her in seeing through our
transience the lasting of desire.

The “you,” the “me,” and the “she.” Three pronouns that don’t 
always go well together. But this particular triangle is full of generosity. Emerson becomes the late wife’s coconspirator, confidante, 
receptor, continuation. Kent is the natural bridge: love for him has brought two strangers together, one posthumously, in these poems’ “unimagined” scenes. A single wife is not enough; two marriages combine in time to serve an idea, or “the lasting of desire.”

I don’t know how “true” these poems are, nor do I need to know. In other words, I don’t know whether, or to what degree, Emerson actually experienced the late wife as I did the ghost at the colony. Regardless, I see her poems as an act of radical empathy and eros — one that reimagined and loosened the outlines of a single self, or of a couple. It was an act that redefined triangulation not as tension or obstacle — the way it has been since time immemorial, or at least since Jane Eyre — but as the perfecting of each couple’s love, moving forward and backward in time.

I didn’t know Claudia Emerson. She died in 2014, also from cancer, at the young age of fifty-seven. When I read the news, my mind flew to Late Wife. It was all I could think about. At first, I felt it all had to be a mistake: that Late Wife made Emerson’s early death impossible. As if the book itself should have been a prophylactic. Then I wondered if the opposite were true.

I wondered, that is, if the poems were talismanic. They didn’t foretell Emerson’s death, but they narrated what had, in a sense, already happened: she herself was in the process of  becoming the “late wife” that the poems so lovingly inhabited.

In a sense, every poem becomes a site of askesis, or self-evacuation — since we don’t write literally with blood, but with black marks on paper, or their electronic equivalents. As we learn in our first workshops, our bodies (and explanations, and justifications) can’t follow our poems around in the world. But Emerson’s askesis seems different, as if she exchanged her very life for a rapt concentration on the dead. The danger of that statement, of course, is that it sounds a lot like magical thinking. It sounds like an aesthetic justification for a death that occurred too soon.

And maybe it is. But consider this: elsewhere in the poem I just quoted, Emerson calls the late wife’s video “scripted.” In the course of writing these poems, had Emerson tapped into something more powerful than poetry, or even than her life? In this case, the rhetorical term is prolepsis — meaning that, in some sense, we are always 
living with a future that has already happened.

What role can poetry play in such a life-script? Here are the first wife’s X-rays, as her doctors described them to Kent:

By the time they saw what they were looking at
it was already risen into the bones
of her chest. They could show you then the lungs
were white with it; they said it was like salt
in water — that hard to see as separate — 
and would be that hard to remove. Like moonlight
dissolved in fog, in the dense web
of vessels.
— From The X-Rays

Like the disease in the lungs, metaphor is everywhere. It’s ineluctable, even in the doctors’ diagnosis. The first wife’s illness becomes beautiful as an ocean or as moonlight dissolved in fog. It seems to me there is always a risk in lyricizing pathology, but I also sense that this is the perfect accommodation — the hand-in-driving-glove, if you will — between the ghost of the late wife and the poet who will become her successor. Like salt in water, the two of them had already grown so very hard to see as separate.

Maybe metaphor incites such eerie inevitability, which became the achievement of Emerson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book. Yet the poet’s biography shows that the poems themselves are not the end. It calls us beyond the poems, into the script.

This is what made Emerson’s death the hardest-hitting for me, despite our recent and staggering losses of giants like Seamus Heaney, Philip Levine, and Mark Strand. Strand who, in one of his last talks at the Poetry Foundation, discussed “the inevitability of surprise” in poems. He said that current poetry fashion had lost the taste for it.

Though she was alive when he spoke it, Strand’s phrase also describes Emerson’s demise.



•



All I know is a door into the dark.
— From The Forge, by Seamus Heaney

The history of the novel has a discrete historical place for the Gothic and its revenants. In poetry, though, the ghost can’t be confined to a single era. Claudia Emerson had so many ancestors. There was Coleridge and “Christabel.” Hardy’s final ghost poems. Rilke “transcribing” the sonnets to Orpheus, inspired by the dead Vera Knoop. Yeats writing A Vision. Merrill and his Ouija board. And so on.

Why do so many of these ghosts seep into the lives and deaths of poets? All I know is that the more I write poetry, the surer and less sure I become. The more deeply I listen to both the inflections and innuendoes of language, to paraphrase Wallace Stevens, the more astute and also superstitious I seem to be. The more densely I describe the textures of the world around me, the more of it I realize I am missing. The negatives of Matthew Brady’s Civil War photographs, built into greenhouse glass and described by Linda Bierds in The Profile Makers, make lovely analogues for this. Of course, it’s a short journey from photographic negatives to Keatsian negative capability, or the valuation of doubt and mystery that animates so many poets.

For me, poetry proliferates and flourishes in the intellect’s blind spot. But you have to have the intellect first; you can’t skip that step. I find intelligence to be most interesting when it’s tested — not when it’s challenged, but when we restrain it from being the default mode by which we apprehend the phenomena around us. Can strategies in the martial arts speak to this?

By the same token, the way of mind that attends the supernatural or numinous is hardly compelling without a formidable and even mutually exclusive foil. Ratiocination. This is where poetry inserts itself, again with Stevens, as what “must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully.”



•



My Ben!
Or come again,
Or send to us
Thy wit’s great overplus.
— From An Ode to Ben Jonson, by Robert Herrick


The dead have no ears, no answering machines
that we know of, still we call.
— From Leave a Message, by Bob Hicok


The “O” of apostrophe. The vocative, in Latin — and for   Jakobson, too. 
For the critic Barbara Johnson, apostrophe was what made lyric poetry itself; its long history could have been distilled into a single cry. Robert Herrick’s apostrophe transformed his dead friend, the bon vivant Ben Jonson, into “Saint Ben.” We cry to the dead, and we imagine that they answer us. The weirdness in me wants to say they sometimes even do.

Herrick was right, too, about the dead’s “overplus.” This is the uncanny excess that can’t be contained by empirical limits — even if it’s sheathed in Jonson’s wit or my own ghost’s “BS.” If Herrick’s term sounds mathematical, so much the better. Think of the late wife’s doctors and their metaphors.

Can we greet overplus without relinquishing our skepticism? Poetry keeps asking the impossible.

My father died two years ago today, in my childhood home that had become, for six short and endless hours, Hospice. His pain ripped him, even with morphine. To the end, I think, he was battling death, his legs still muscled enough to fight.

When it was over, the funeral home attendants zipped up his body and wheeled it away, leaving a silk rose behind.

Later that night, I startled awake and sat up. He was lying next to me, as if still in his hospital bed. But his eyes were peacefully closed, the way they hadn’t been in death. His face and body were calm — as if conflict and even muscularity had flown, or floated down a river. 
I leaned over and reached for his hand, then realized I was clawing my own bedsheet.

He was there. Or not. How would I ever know?

In poetry, perhaps more than anywhere else, we can try.

The answers won’t be there. Still we call.

Originally Published: February 26th, 2016


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Christina Pugh
Poet Details

Christina Pugh is the author of four full-length books of poems: Perception (Four Way Books, forthcoming 2017); Grains of the Voice (Northwestern University Press, 2013); Restoration (TriQuarterly Books, 2008); and Rotary (Word Press, 2004); and the chapbook Gardening at Dusk (Wells College Press, 2002). Her poems have appeared in journals such as the Atlantic Monthly, Poetry magazine, TriQuarterly, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, and in anthologies such as Poetry 180 (2003).

Pugh earned a PhD in comparative literature from Harvard University, where she was awarded a Whiting Foundation dissertation fellowship. She continues to publish criticism as well as poetry, with scholarly interests centering on the poetics of ekphrasis, poetic form and meter, the lyric poem as a genre, and manuscript scholarship treating the work of Emily Dickinson. Her articles have appeared in the Emily Dickinson Journal, Literary Imagination, and The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry Post-1945 (2013), among others. Her book reviews have appeared in Poetry magazine, Verse, Ploughshares, and Harvard Review.

Pugh has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Word Press First Book Prize (for Rotary), the Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship, the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, an individual artist fellowship in poetry from the Illinois Arts Council, the Associated Writing Programs’ Intro Journals Award, and the Grolier Poetry Prize. She has been granted residencies at the Bogliasco Foundation, Ragdale, Ucross, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. At the University of Illinois at Chicago, Pugh received a faculty fellowship from the Institute for the Humanities, a Graduate Mentoring Award for outstanding mentoring of graduate students, a Teaching Recognition Program award, and a Dean’s Award for Faculty Research in the Humanities.


Pugh is consulting editor for Poetry and a professor in the Program for Writers (the PhD program in creative writing) at the University of Illinois at Chicago

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

Comment on Article
Robert Herrick: A True Cavalier
Written by: William J. Long
Robert Herrick (1591-1674). Herrick is the true Cavalier, happy, devil-may-care in disposition, but by some freak of fate a clergyman of Dean Prior, in South Devon, a county made famous by him and Blackmore. Here, in a country parish, he lived discontentedly, longing for the joys of London and the Mermaid Tavern, his bachelor establishment consisting of an old housekeeper, a cat, a dog, a goose, a tame lamb, one hen,--for which he thanked God in poetry because she laid an egg every day,--and a pet pig that drank beer with Herrick out of a tankard. With admirable good nature, Herrick made the best of these uncongenial surroundings. He watched with sympathy the country life about him and caught its spirit in many lyrics, a few of which, like "Corinna's Maying," "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may," and "To Daffodils," are among the best known in our language. His poems cover a wide range, from trivial love songs, pagan in spirit, to hymns of deep religious feeling. Only the best of his poems should be read; and these are remarkable for their exquisite sentiment and their graceful, melodious expression. The rest, since they reflect something of the coarseness of his audience, may be passed over in silence. Late in life Herrick published his one book, Hesperides and Noble Numbers (1648). The latter half contains his religious poems, and one has only to read there the remarkable "Litany" to see how the religious terror that finds expression in Bunyan's Grace Abounding could master even the most careless of Cavalier singers.

Content from PoetrySoup.com. Read more at: http://www.poetrysoup.com/article/robert_herrick_a_true_cavalier-1633
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[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/detail/90935


Prose from Poetry Magazine
Charms, Prayers, and Curses
By Beverley Bie Brahic

How Poems Think, by Reginald Gibbons.

University of Chicago Press. $25.00.

Do poems think?

Big question, one that has nagged people at least since Plato was grumbling about the dangerously loose thinking of poets in contrast to the rigor of philosophers. “There’s an old quarrel between philosophy and poetry,” he said in the Republic — but what exactly that quarrel was is moot — not least because Plato’s use of dramatic dialogue to make his case was itself poetical.

Much rides, no doubt, on one’s definition of thinking. Reginald Gibbons’s How Poems Think casts the net wide, assuming that poems think in all kinds of ways (abstractly, concretely, etymologically, metaphorically, sonically    ...    ), even poems with the limited attention span of — let me quote, for the fun of it, the beginning of Karen Solie’s neck-snapping “The Road In Is Not the Same Road Out”:

The perspective is unfamiliar.
We hadn’t looked back, driving in,
and lingered too long
at the viewpoint. It was a prime-of-life
experience. Many things we know
by their effects: void in the rock
that the river may advance, void
in the river that the fish may advance,
helicopter in the canyon
like a fly in a jar, a mote in the eye,
a wandering cause. It grew dark ...

“Sentences in unpredictable but deep sequence in unpredictable but braced lines,” Michael Hofmann says of Solie, who keeps a dozen balls in the air at once and lands them with no-stress aplomb. Here is Gibbons on another poet’s comparable flash and dazzle: “[His] poetic thinking moves very fast from one image or allusion to the next    ...    in what may seem non sequiturs rather than a ‘logic’ of syntax, line, narrative, setting, or argument.” Ashbery? No. Gérard de Nerval.

How Poems Think, however, rests its argument in a quieter place, walking us through a (by now) altogether more user-friendly snippet of  William Carlos Williams’s 1923 sequence Spring and All:

Pink confused with white
flowers and flowers reversed
take and spill the shaded flame
darting it back
into the lamp’s horn ...    

Gibbons points to the poem’s grace, its doublings, its darting movements, its phoneme repetitions and historical precedents, and to how its words, magically, poetically, seductively, coalesce to produce thought and feeling:

In his poem, Williams is giving the mere transience of the light from a lamp on a short-lived flowering potted plant its immortal moment, and its    ...    immortal    ...    articulation in a poem.... In rescuing the humble potted plant from oblivion, Williams performs an ancient poetic role, rescuing for a moment those of us who look at the potted plant with him.

•

Williams’s poem is the exclamation point of a book that digs into poetry’s rich, layered meaning-making humus. The oldest poems, it 
recalls, were oral: religious or magical contraptions — charms, prayers, curses — before they became tales of the tribe to be recited and embellished and handed down, eventually in writing, as exemplars (pop wisdom that irked Plato). Gibbons is “fascinated by the antiquity of poetry, or rather, of poetic thinking.... I mean the present-day practice of devices and structures of poetic thinking that were used long ago”; and his book is packed with poetry’s teeming underground life, here decaying, there sending up tender shoots. A little word like cumin gathers a jarful of observations: “The most ancient version of the word cumin was not very different in form and sound from our word.... The spell I might have chanted while holding my little cumin-seed sack would have been a kind of verbal apotropaic amulet ... pushing away  ... a disturbing or dispiriting thought.”

Not much breath is wasted exhuming poetry’s fall-back mode, the rhetoric of persuasion (consider that diminutive debate, the sonnet, 
taking its Petrarchan turn or thumping its Shakespearean couplet on the table; or Andrew Marvell’s deviously cogent “To His Coy Mistress,” or, for that matter, any number of homely but witty poems by our contemporary, Carl Dennis). Gibbons is happiest sifting through the Mallarméan echo chamber of British modernist Mina Loy,

Onyx-eyed Odalisques
and ornithologists
observe
the flight
of Eros obsolete
—From Lunar Baedeker

or Basil Bunting’s to-and-fro-ing between Anglo-Saxon and Latin root words. Poems, Gibbons wants us to know, have more ways of thinking than culture-bound readers might dream of, and he lays out his goods for us to contemplate: antiquity’s feminine weaving songs, Russian rhymes (that lead, rather than follow or merely ornament thought), nineteenth-century French and twentieth-century English-language poems that glide from sound to sound or, like Russian dolls, nest small words inside bigger ones — “ox” inside “onyx,” say. There is a secondary text here, too, about working against the grain — one’s own or the assumptions of one’s culture — to enlarge one’s poetic practice and mode of thinking — something Gibbons set out as a young poet to do:

In California around 1970, when in my early twenties I was living about fifteen miles inland from the shore of that “peaceful ocean” that was both a body of water and an idea, I was often trying to imagine how to write a poem that would be better, more interesting, than what I had written so far.

How Poems Think’s first chapter, part memoir — I’d have welcomed more of this narrative/discursive mode — recounts a formative 
encounter with Donald Davie, a contemporary of Philip Larkin who came to teach in the US. Davie, Gibbons tells us, deplored the American confessional: “In lyric poetry ... what you are doing is making the personal impersonal. This is different from making the private public.” Later, Davie would confess his own struggles:

It is true that I am not a poet by nature, only by inclination; for my mind moves most easily and happily among abstractions, it relates ideas far more readily than it relates experiences. I have little appetite, only profound admiration, for sensuous fullness and immediacy; I have not the poet’s need of concreteness. I have resisted this admission for so long, chiefly because a natural poet was above all what I wanted to be.    

“Just as the twig is bent the tree’s inclined”? No, says Davie. A true poem can be written by a mind “not naturally poetic”

by the inhuman labor of thwarting at every point the natural grain and bent. This working against the grain does not damage the mind, nor is it foolish; on the contrary, only by doing this does each true poem as it is written become an authentic widening of experience — a truth won from life against all odds.    

Gibbons also cites the French poet Yves Bonnefoy on the challenges and rewards of translation as a means of enlarging one’s understanding of how poems — and languages — work: “Opposing metaphysics [ ... ] govern and, sometimes, tyrannize the French and English languages. [ ... ] English concerns itself naturally with tangible aspects,” whereas French poetry is “a place apart, where the bewildering diversity of the real can be forgotten, and also the very existence of time, everyday life and death.” The English language, Bonnefoy has said, in his preface to Emily Grosholz’s translation of Beginning and End of the Snow, is “so much more aptly fashioned than my own for the observation of concrete detail at a specific place and time, otherwise put, for the expression of the events of a particular existence.”

Thus a French writer appreciates the earthiness of Shakespeare or Keats. And English poets — Eliot, Ashbery — absorb French wit, abstraction, and stream of consciousness. How Poems Think struck me as particularly illuminating on how the associative thinking of nineteenth-century French poets trickled down into English poetry, 
shifting it “from representing lived experience, reason, and the world and toward creating an imaginative experience unique to the poem, by means of evocation, ellipsis, allusion, mood, impressionistically presented feeling, and so on.” Today, Gibbons speculates,

perhaps mood too has been discarded in favor of a kind of 
unmistakable poem-ness ... that has no referent or purpose beyond providing the reader with an experience of a particular way of suggesting a meaning that cannot be thought, or of not being meaningful at all in any expected way.

A beautiful line of verse is all the more beautiful as it means absolutely nothing, a literary friend told Marcel in Swann’s Way — and Marcel blushed to think that he in his innocence expected of poetry “nothing less than the revelation of truth itself.” Rimbaud, whose 
kaleidoscopic, not-meaningful-in-any-expected-way Illuminations John Ashbery not so long ago translated, is described by Thom Gunn (in “Shit”) as having

Coursed after meaning, meaning of course to trick it,
Across the lush green meadows of his youth,
To the edge of the unintelligible thicket
Where truth becomes the same place as untruth.   

Making it new? Not necessarily, as Pound, translator of the Tang and the troubadours, knew: some of the new is the old stripped, painted new colors. Poking into cobwebby corners, weaving narrative into discourse, using assemblage, How Poems Think is a trove. I read it with a pencil — until I saw that underlining everything was the same as underlining nothing.


The Bonniest Companie, by Kathleen Jamie.

Picador. £9.99.

Reading the Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie and Baudelaire in tandem last autumn I happened on an uncharacteristic landscape poem by Baudelaire and its germ, a poem he composed in his youth, and was struck by how well — if unexpectedly — the sentiment in them corresponded to Jamie’s achievement in her new book, The Bonniest Companie, as well as in her previous collection, The Overhaul. The closing stanzas of Baudelaire’s “Elevation” (my stab at a translation):

Behind the anguish and the vast chagrin
Whose heaviness fills and weighs our lives down,
Happy he who with a robust stroke can
Rise towards fields luminous and serene;

The person whose thoughts, like skylarks singing,
Climb freely each morning towards the sky
— Who hovers over life, and effortlessly
Knows the language of flowers and mute things.

Jamie, like John Clare, one of her touchstone poets, is someone comfortable with the language of mute things, who turns readily for 
inspiration to what, oversimplifying (“everything that is is natural” as A.E. Stallings says), we call “nature.” People are less Jamie’s thing; they tend to potter about in the wings, gestured to now and then as a “we” or a “you.” Her poems are more, however, than felicitous snapshots of epiphanic moments involving deer, birds, or trees. Balanced between descriptions of objective reality and the expression of her own inner life, “The Shrew” (the small mammal) opens the new collection and illustrates Jamie’s complexity:

Take me to the river, but not right now,
not in this cauld blast, this easterly
striding up from the sea
like a bitter shepherd — 

and as for you, you Arctic-hatched, comfy-looking geese
occupying our fields,
you needn’t head back north anytime soon — 

snow on the mountains, frozen ploughed clods — 
weeks of this now, enough’s enough

 — but when my hour comes,
let me go like the shrew
right here on the path: spindrift on her midget fur,
caught mid-thought, mid-dash

Precision, understatement, and humor — the sharp-tongued, sardonic 
kind also native to the Canadian Anne Carson, perhaps to Calvinist societies in general — are key. Constitutionally modest, Jamie is quick to pull the rug out from under herself: “take me to the river, but not right now”; “enough’s enough.” One hears the parental voice half-humorously taking the child down a notch until taking oneself down a notch becomes second nature. Jamie’s language is as plain as her “cairn of old stones” (“Glacial”) but it bristles with perceptual and emotional intensity, with the tones and customs of harsh places.

How does Jamie pack so much into her laconic lines? I ask (mindful of Gibbons’s How Poems Think), and come up with some tentative responses: 1) by no-comment juxtaposing of alternate realities: here, ultimate things (the sacred river, death), there, sensuous pleasure in the moment’s “frozen ploughed clods” and spindrift on fur; 2) by linking herself to a humble creature (“let me go like the shrew”); 3) by peppering poems with feminine signs and diction (“comfy-looking”; that shrew, again, co-opted from its traditional role as a scold: “a bad-tempered or aggressively assertive woman,” says my unreformed dictionary); 4) by the sounds and rhythms of   her words — what Gibbons, 
probing historical parallels between poems and weaving, calls “sonic texture” (the nubbly “you Arctic-hatched, comfy-looking geese”); and 5) by gesturing towards pain (“when my hour comes”) without making a big deal of it. Much is implicit in Jamie’s reticent lyrics and, naturally, all the mute things are thingy — they are — but also metaphorical and moral. Some of Jamie’s critics speak of her wild creatures as mysterious others, akin to Ted Hughes’s roe deer, who “happened into my dimension.” I prefer to view them as part of a continuum of life forms, all of them — including, perhaps most of all, the human beings — largely inscrutable. Jamie’s realms, as she herself hints in “The Shrew,” overlap: the wind “striding    ...    / like a bitter shepherd”; the geese “occupy” like demonstrators or invaders; the shrew is “caught mid-thought, mid-dash” — a traditional female stance, but one whose ordinariness is relatively new to the lyric (the poem performs this state of between-ness by ending without punctuation). Bitterness and comfort, “The Shrew” commonsensically implies, are two sides of life. One senses that Jamie, a philosopher by training, would make a good Stoic.

Kathleen Jamie was born in 1962 in the west of Scotland. The Bonniest Companie is her seventh collection. Like The Overhaul, The Bonniest Companie’s poems are palm-sized: pebbles good for pocketing. Forget Les Murray’s “quality of sprawl.” This is an Arte Povera — like the sixties’ minimalists who made art of scrappy 
objects, Jamie is subversive in her use of domestic, often feminine, materials; in her stripped-to-the-bare-wood diction and organic forms, as well as in her incorporation of Scots vernacular to mark cultural confidence. The Bonniest Companie was written, she tells us in the notes, week by week over the year of the Scottish Independence Referendum. “23/9/14” was composed shortly after voting day:

So here we are,
dingit doon and weary,
happed in tattered hopes
(an honest poverty).
.................................................. ...................
On wir feet.
Today we begin again.

There is also a translation into Scots “eftir Hölderlin” (easy to read along with Michael Hamburger’s English translation) and an overtly political/ecological poem punningly called “Wings Over Scotland” (“Glenogil Estate: poisoned buzzard (Carbofuran). / No prosecution”) that appropriates media materials.

Honored for her depictions of wild places and creatures that, indirectly, have a fair amount to say about people, Jamie can, when she likes, evoke human tensions more forthrightly, as in two poems, “Moon” from The Overhaul:

Moon,
I said, we’re both scarred now.

Are they quite beyond you,
the simple words of love? Say them.
You are not my mother;
with my mother, I waited unto death.

and “Another You” from The Bonniest Companie, in which a sixties tune on the radio reminds Jamie of “Dad’s chair” and her mother:

your knitting bag, all
needles and pins ...
 ........................
... I never
could explain myself, never
could explain....
.....................
... It’s seven years
since you died, and suddenly I know
what the singers say is true — 
that seek as I might, I’ll never
find another you. But that’s alright.

“Change, change — that’s what the terns scream /    ...    / everything else is provisional, / us and all our works” (“Fianuis”). Rugged and sensuous, Jamie’s lyrics belong to and enrich a European tradition that runs alongside the postmodernists, borrowing their techniques — 
voices like Philippe Jaccottet (Swiss-French) and Tomas Tranströmer (Sweden). Jamie has said that poetry for her is “about listening and the art of listening, listening with attention. I don’t just mean with the ear; bringing the quality of attention to the world. The writers 
I like best are those who attend    ...    Seamus Heaney, Elizabeth Bishop, John Clare.” A group into which Jamie’s quietly intense poems fit well.


Prodigal: New and Selected Poems 1976–2014, by Linda Gregerson.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $16.95.

Linda Gregerson writes long, shapely poems that often come in parts, requiring assemblage. She will begin with an X, jump to a Y, swerve to Z, but eventually the whole shebang falls into place — as associatively-thinking poems do not always do — because Gregerson is good at making connections that might be a stretch for less well-exercised minds: her arguments, however deviously constructed, are sturdy — once you put it all together you can sit down in it. If there are — and there are — strong feelings in these poems, they are governed by an equally fierce intellect. Nothing leaves this workshop that has not been subjected to quality control.

A reader unfamiliar with Gregerson’s work might want to start with the selections from her more overtly personal collections, The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep or Waterborne. Gregerson, storyteller that she is, will often ground austere, impersonal poems with 
allusions to something prima facie autobiographical (“When my daughters / were little and played in their bath”). Still, the reader who starts with the new poems, where the question of authorial distance can be problematic, risks skating over layers of thought and experience that the reader familiar with the earlier poems will intuit. “The Wrath of Juno (the house of Cadmus),” one of the ten new poems, sits as boldly on the page as a bibelot by Marianne Moore, the voices in its faceted quatrains rarely easy to identify:

It’s the children nail your heart
to the planet, so that’s
how you nail them back.
Alcmena in labor

for seven days. Think of the man
who thought up the goddess
who thought of that.
And pregnant

Semele, stupid with pride, consumed
by the flames she had the gall
to ask for, though
I ought to have known

that wouldn’t be the end of it. Who’ll
rid me of the turbulent mess that comes
attached to a womb?

Based on episodes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, “The Wrath of Juno” has elements of dramatic monologue, soliloquy, and rant. The speaker 
rages — to herself? to a listener? — about a long, chaotic experience of the world. On another level she is our contemporary: a woman of a certain age who has learned to be skeptical, not to say cynical, about others (“Semele, stupid with pride,”) and the state of marriage, family, the polis, the planet. Gregerson’s range (rage) is immense; it encompasses history and literature, an ancient or the latest atrocity, wallpaper, and URLs. Mortgage payments chew the fat with 
“serotonin uptake” and “geometricians.” But when the somewhat autobiographical, if still seven-league-booted ironist dives underground the “I,” the “you,” and “the girl” become slippery, generalized, 
universal:

The planets make us what we are,
which means
in turn

the parts I learned in Tunis and at Delphi must
be surface
agitations on a deeper pool.

Talk to me, won’t you,
what was it like
in your other life?
— From Pythagorean

One of my favorite earlier poems in Prodigal’s selection is “With Emma at the Ladies-Only Swimming Pond on Hampstead Heath” from The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep. “With Emma” is a wry exploration of mother-daughter relations that exposes the resistances and vulnerabilities of both with (I would guess, hard-won) equanimity:

In payment for those mornings at the mirror while,
at her
expense, I’d started my late learning in Applied

French Braids, for all
the mornings afterward of Hush
and Just stand still,   
...........................................
I did as I was told for once,
............................................
She’s eight now. She will rather

die than do this in a year or two
and lobbies,
even as we swim, to be allowed to cut

her hair.    

A great deal happens in and between the lines of these plaited tercets. 
I admire — oh how I admire — the way the poem meanders reflectively and narratively (“shall we climb / on the raft / for a while?”) but ultimately ties all the ends up with a bow. I note the rich metaphoric content — of, say, braids and the word “cut,” and the 
celebration implied by the poem’s penultimate adjective, “honey-
colored.” Gregerson has a vast reservoir of pity. She also has a 
reservoir of anger one could drown in. “For the Taking” is a poem about the sexual abuse of a child by a family member: “and we / who could have saved her, who knew //     ...     // we would be somewhere mowing the lawn // or basting the spareribs    ...     //    ...     we // were deaf and blind.” “Failures of attention,” as “Good News,” another poem in the collection, concludes, loom large in Gregerson.

If Gregerson’s poems, especially the newer ones, feel highly-processed, the more one reads backwards in time, the rawer they turn out to be, in their guilts, obsessions, hurts, sorrow, anger. Her multi-stranded patterns are suited to her anxious, thinky meanderings. They test life from different points along the way, like Proust’s shifting views of the Martinville spires; they worry at common human experiences in an attempt to get to the bottom of what Gregerson would probably acknowledge is bottomless, abyssal. The poems in Prodigal should be read slowly; if at first they seem to be (as they are) the product of restless, honest, exceptionally well-furnished and 
rational mind, they are also, it transpires, stuffed with explosives.

Originally Published: November 1st, 2016

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/articles/detail/91088


Interview
Late Happiness
W.S. Merwin on his long career and trying to enjoy his luck.
By Alex Dueben
Photo © Matt Valentine

W.S. Merwin has been writing and publishing poetry for more than 60 years, since W.H. Auden selected Merwin’s first book for the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 1952. He’s collected awards ever since, especially in recent years: he was awarded the National Book Award in 2005 and the Pulitzer Prize in 2009, and in 2010, he was appointed the 17th poet laureate of the United States. Merwin also became the second living poet to have work published by the Library of America, in two volumes totaling more than 1,500 pages.

Last month, Merwin celebrated his 89th birthday and the publication of a new book of poetry, Garden Time. While writing some of the best work of his career, he has recently faced health challenges, including losing his eyesight. He spoke to the Poetry Foundation from his home in Hawaii about his dismay over the state of the environment, not living for others’ expectations, and trying to enjoy his luck. The following interview was condensed and edited.


I know you’ve been losing your eyesight over the last few years. How has that changed the process of writing for you?

It depends on what I’m writing. Poetry always has been a matter of being taken by surprise–sometimes in the middle of the night. My table in my study here is cluttered with little pieces of paper with a few words on each. They’re the beginning of something that might be a poem.

It’s been five years since I was able to read. My left eye is completely gone, and my right one has macular degeneration, which is getting worse all the time. That’s just the condition one lives with. I’ve been pretty well assured by my eye doctor that although my eyesight will be poor in my right eye, I won’t go blind. That’s nice because we live in a very beautiful place here.

Do you dictate everything now or do you still scribble on pieces of paper?

I try to write it down on a clipboard, and I give it to one of the people who comes to read to me. They are singularly good people. They’re all volunteers, and they’re very capable, very helpful. A great deal of Garden Time was done that way. I don’t know what people imagine the title means, but I was thinking of Blake: “The hours of folly are measur’d by the clock, / but of wisdom: no clock can measure.” The hours of wisdom are where you simply forget about time. For me, that’s the garden—this wonderful garden of palm trees around us. There are 900 species of palms here. I go for a walk in the morning, and I just love being here. I feel extremely lucky living here with my wife, my only love, and I’m able to see enough to wander around in the garden. It’s just a joy.

One of my favorite poems in your new book is “After the Dragonflies,” which beautifully describes these once-so-common creatures. “Now there are grown-ups hurrying / who never saw one / and do not know what they / are not seeing,” you write, which makes the issues of climate change and the sixth great extinction so very real and personal. How conscious are you of addressing conservation and environmental concerns in your work?

To my great astonishment, people got very excited about that poem. I’m delighted that they did. I have a biologist friend who works at the great biology department at the University of Oregon. Some years ago I was there, and he said, we’re losing a species a week. I was shocked, of course. The last time I saw him, he said, we’re losing a species every few seconds. We’re doing it. We’re using poison in the environment as though it didn’t matter. People use poison in the grass in front of their houses; they use poison along the roadsides. We’re poisoning the whole place. A number of species of birds have just disappeared from here in the last five years. I don’t know whether they’re completely gone or if we’ll ever see them again. We know that we lost a species just this year. People ask, how did you get interested in conservation, and I say if you’re interested in the world it’s not a matter of conservation, it’s a matter of reality.

People ask, what led you to live in the country? Well, this is the real world. The real world is not the red light down at the corner—it’s right here. It’s the thrush waking in the morning. We’ve allowed ourselves to get very far out of touch with it. It’s not bad just for the world; it’s very bad for us. I’m very sorry to see it happening. E.O. Wilson, the great biologist, said there’s a great division between the people who think the world is a city and then a whole lot of nothing and then another city, and the people who think the world is the forest and the grass and then a city and then the forest and the grass and then a city. One being the real world and the other one being something less than that.

Many of your poems have a fairly bleak vision of where things are going. But you also have poems that are more personal and celebrate nature, celebrate moments of joy.

It’s strange there are so many poems in world literature about unhappiness and that so few poems have been written about happiness. I think I’m so lucky because I’m relatively happy. Among the bits of luck is to have a temperament that is not gloomy. I may sound very gloomy in what I write, but I think we have a chance to be happy here. I don’t feel selfish about it. I think that the only right thing to do with good fortune like that—if one has the rare luck to have it—is to enjoy it, if one can.

Poems such as “December Morning,” with its first line, “How did I come to this late happiness,” definitely do that. Do you have any advice for the rest of us, besides being lucky? Is there something you did or a way that you approached life that you credit?

I’ve never relied on money. People asked, what are you going to do when you grow up? I said, well, I’m already a poet, but when they said, that’s not enough to make a living, I would say, what do you call a living? I don’t want any more than I need. I’ve always felt that way. I’ve never had any money unless I had a grant for a year or something like that. I say to young people, trust your luck and see how far it can take you. If you want to settle down and have a nice good American middle-class life and raise children, that’s one thing. If you don’t want to, that used to be considered rather shocking. There’s a wonderful line of Ibsen from The Lady from the Sea about being overridden by other people’s expectations. When I first got to Princeton, I thought, this is what I want. I wanted freedom and the ability to find out a little about who I am. I’ve been unbelievably lucky. I don’t know why. One never knows why one’s lucky. Some of it is skill, but most of it’s luck.

Garden Time moves between these beautiful passing moments and more haunting complex poems, as we’ve been talking about, and you close the book with “The Present,” which begins “As they were leaving the garden / one of the angels bent down to them and whispered / I am to give you this.” Could you talk a little about the poem? Because it’s about a moment of transition and coping and finding a new way forward.

It’s about the myth of the Garden of Eden. I think it’s a fascinating myth. There were the great angels behind Adam and Eve. As they’re leaving the garden, one of the angels bends down and says, I was told to give you this. I don’t know what it is, but it’s something that will apparently be of use to you. What it is, is laughter.

Real laughter is a great boon to our species, I think. We can find the world so remarkable that it makes us laugh. My sister said, you were that way as a child. You found everything, you just delighted in everything. I can remember watching sparrows on the wire along the street and spending a long time just watching the sparrows. I love the world. That’s what the angel is giving them—something they don’t have in the garden. There’s no laughter in the Garden of Eden. Why would they laugh? They’re in the Garden of Eden. But now you’re outside and here; you can know how to laugh. The moment their hands touch, they laugh. That’s what the poem is about.

Outside the garden–outside “garden time,” if you will—laughter is one of the things that sustains us.

Yes, I think so.

Could you talk a little about the Merwin Conservancy and the work you’ve been doing in Hawaii? You have 18 acres on the island of Maui with hundreds of varieties of palm trees.

I was living a few miles from here and a woman said there’s a piece of land for sale right out near the coast. I came over to see, and the land was very cheap. My parents had just died, so I had a little bit of money. There was nothing growing on it except down in the streambed. It was bleached, and it was listed in the county books as ruined land. I thought, I don’t believe nothing will grow here. I’d like to buy it and see about this. I think there are ways it can be brought back to life. It’s hard for people to come now and realize that was ever said about this land because it’s covered with trees. We welcome groups of schoolchildren and other people to come and be guided through the garden because fewer and fewer people get to even see places like this. It makes them happy. That’s the extraordinary thing. It does make them happy.

There are lot of mysterious things about trees we’re just learning all the time—communications among the root systems and communications among the leaf systems. The green world is very mysterious. It’s absolutely fascinating, and without it we wouldn’t exist. People talk about the environment as though it were something you could be interested in, like having a stamp collection or something. It’s not so. If there’s no environment, there’s no us.

In the past 12 years, you’ve been awarded the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, you were named poet laureate, and you became one of two living poets published by the Library of America. I’m not sure any other writer has had such a decade.

I can assure you it had nothing to do with politics on my part. [laughs] I don’t know why it happened. I don’t know how any of those things were chosen. They’d offered poet laureate to me several times, and I’d said no. It seemed to me that I would be tied to a reputation, and I felt that that was a limitation on my own freedom. It was important to be free. I had this very severe upbringing, and I wanted to find out who the hell I was. It’s taken me the rest of my life to find out who I was. I realized that so much of the modern world is based on people having to follow other people’s expectations. I wanted to avoid other people’s expectations. My upbringing was this strict Calvinism and I thought, throw it all out and see what’s really there. At the other end of my life, I’m still doing that.

I live just down the hill from the astronomers who get all the information from the telescopes over on the Big Island. They found 1,200 unknown planets in the Milky Way. I called up one of the astronomers, a friend of mine, Jeff, and I said, that was exciting! Was it exciting for you? He said, sure, we knew they were there, we just had never seen them on the screen, and then we saw them. He said, every time something like that happens I realize it could happen again and again.

The universe is a great unknown wonderful place, and we know nothing, really, to speak of about it. I think that either depresses and frightens one or is exhilarating. We are very important, and we’re not important in quite the way we think we are. Each one of us is unique, and we can find out a whole lot just by examining ourselves. I think that’s the essential thing. Not paying attention to how you’re going to make money, just paying attention to whatever is around you. Each one of those seconds is your only chance. It’s your life. And it’s wonderful. The more attention that we pay to our ordinary lives leads to a real elation that we’re here at all.

Originally Published: October 18th, 2016

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/articles/detail/70306

Interview
Worthy of Her Words
Why Lola Ridge is ripe for rediscovery.
By Kathleen Rooney
Lola Ridge, photograph by Marjorie Content, 1935. Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College

The early-20th-century radical poet and feminist Lola Ridge, a popular poet during her lifetime but little known today, was a woman whose adventures might strain credulity in fiction. Born Rose Emily Ridge in Ireland, she came of age in the mining towns of New Zealand and trained as an artist in Australia, married at 21, left her husband several years later, and eventually headed to the United States, where she gave herself a new name, took a decade off her age, and reinvented herself as a poet.

In Anything That Burns You, the first biography of Ridge, Terese Svoboda vividly renders Ridge’s life and seeks to revive her legacy. The author of 14 previous books in a variety of genres, Svoboda moves beyond biography to create a textured portrait of a colorful milieu: the anarchist and intellectual left of the first half of the 20th century, full of hobo poets, high-dollar literary contests, painters and their models, and salons and soirées. Dedicated to the cause of social justice, Ridge crossed paths with a veritable who’s who of political and artistic figures, including Emma Goldman, Mabel Dodge, Margaret Sanger, Eugene O’Neill, Hart Crane, and Marianne Moore. The Poetry Foundation spoke with Svoboda about why, 75 years after her death, Ridge and her work are due for a revival. The following exchange was edited and condensed.

Lola Ridge is something of a lost feminist icon, so how did you happen to “find” her, and how did you end up writing an entire biography?

I was an avid fan of Robert Pinsky's Slate column, and in 2011, he wrote eloquently on Lola Ridge. I'm not exactly sure, however, what excited me so much about the piece—it doesn't include the poems I now consider her most riveting—except that her first book concerned the Lower East Side, where I have lived for the last 25 years. It was inexplicably love at first sight. I remember practically shaking when I left something inane in the comments section. I put all that newfound enthusiasm into a presentation at Poets House and a piece for American Poet about her. Tim Schaffner, my agent 30-odd years ago, read the article and contacted me. As the grandson of H.D., he knew the territory well. He sensed that between my enthusiasm and her amazing work, there could be a book, and as he is now a small publisher, he offered me a contract.

Why, do you think, does Ridge remain relatively obscure today?

Despite the New York Times declaring Ridge one of the leading contemporary American poets at her death in 1941, she was subsequently neglected, and her neglect is partially explained by her stubborn faith in freedom. Ridge's poems exemplified this stance; passionate and open to experiment, she wrote in both avant-garde and traditional forms, which made it hard for critics to classify her.

McCarthyism was on the rise, making her radical past and her work suspect. The New Critics, John Crowe Ransom and his cohorts, were also busy denigrating women poets in general and Edna St. Vincent Millay in particular. The suppression of free verse, the left, and women poets persisted until the mid-sixties. It didn't help that her last two books are as unreadable as a lot of Crane's Collected. Because her work was not unearthed during the seventies, when Muriel Rukeyser and Mina Loy and many other women of her time were reevaluated, Ridge lost a generation of possible supporters, which in turn greatly diminished her chances of revival in a later anthology or reprint.

Luckily, she’s been slowly making her way back into the literary consciousness; Quale Press, for instance, reissued some of her poetry as Light in Hand: Selected Early Poems of Lola Ridge in 2007. Why now, in 2016, should readers (re)discover her?

The Occupy Generation, especially those interested in literary activism, should be particularly excited by Ridge's rediscovery. As Emerson said, “You can no more keep out of politics than you can keep out of the frost,” and politics is definitely part of the poetics at last. In the face of the contemporary crisis in race and immigration—Syrians swimming to Greece or the slaughter of black men this year in nearly every major city in America—Ridge shows that effective writing about such subjects can and has been done. Her emphasis on the life of immigrants in The Ghetto and Other Poems, her first book, celebrates the “otherness” of the teeming ghetto of the Lower East Side, anticipating the multiethnic world of the 21st century. She also found ways to write about America's “Red Summer” of 1919, with its lynchings and race riots in more than 30 cities, and the subsequent closing down of citizens' rights during the first Red Scare, which parallels our experience with domestic unrest and Homeland Security. Her essay about the androgyny of creativity, “Woman and Creative Will,” written ten years before Virginia Woolf's “A Room of One’s Own” is, alas, just as important today as it was in 1919. In addition, her second book, Sun-Up and Other Poems, particularly the title poem, is exquisitely timely, with its “bad girl” pose and bisexual revelations. Her insistence on freedom in all things is also refreshingly contemporary: the freedom to create, not destroy, to reinvent the idea of the individual when corporations have co-opted the entire notion of individuality.

Your portrait of Ridge and her individualism seems markedly affectionate but not uncritical. Did you find yourself struggling to be impartial?

I began the book in a white heat, determined to reveal a woman worthy of her words. Not very far along, I realized that Ridge had constructed a mask, hiding so much about her life that in effect she presented herself as someone else. You don’t drop off your son at an orphanage; change your name, your age, and your nationality; and become a bigamist to be as free as possible and not suffer the effects, at least subconsciously. [Editor’s note: Ridge left her eight-year-old son at a California orphanage in 1908. She never divorced her first husband, a manager of a New Zealand gold mine, and married a fellow radical, David Lawson, in 1919.] Because a myth about her saintliness surrounded her, I began using a working title laden with sarcasm: Saint Lola: The Biography of Lola Ridge. Still, I was extremely disappointed when I discovered that drugs undermined her talent, with crippling hubris as a side effect. But at the end of her life, she wrote a diary that showed her still raging for freedom, the whole point of all that subterfuge, and I came to realize that subterfuge and rage, its flip side, was necessary, given her time and place. The biggest challenge then was to show her less-than-pleasant choices sympathetically, as one of many strategies women artists used to find a way to express themselves against a society that didn't acknowledge that they had anything to say. There are now solutions to many of the obstacles in women's lives that we now take for granted, just as the generation after me takes for granted all that has been resolved for them.

The biography is an engrossing read, but it’s 627 pages long, and the notes start on page 463. That’s 164 pages of notes. How did you handle such a wealth of material without becoming overwhelmed?

What? Not overwhelmed? Of course I was overwhelmed. I am not very organized. After all, I am a poet and novelist. For most writers, academic or otherwise, researching is the most dangerous part of the adventure. It's a passive activity, and every bibliography opens to a long corridor with endless twists and turns that contain more enticing and potentially important material. Because no one had written Lola's life before, I felt it had to be told straightforwardly, so I had chronology to cling to. I tried to keep material sorted by date and then assembled the chapters as they came up. Tried. Along with the not-so-thrilling deciphering of hundreds of letters written in terrible handwriting (and later painstakingly photographed), I have to confess that I frequently used Google books or the Amazon “search this book” button for difficult-to-access material. Finally, after three years of ad hoc footnotes, I spent my tiny advance and more on a brave and brilliant new graduate of Oberlin, Simon Turkel, who tamed my thousands of notes most stylishly.

Much of the work Ridge did seems to have been even more ephemeral than her poetry itself, including her work as an editor on such little magazines as Broom and the salons she held and the parties she threw. Can you speak to the ways in which Ridge’s career as a literary citizen is instructive for contemporary poets and writers?

Ridge figured out that as an unknown poet from abroad, she would have to bang on a can all her life. She didn't have William Rose Benét, the editor of the Saturday Review of Literature, as a friend of her brother's, the way Moore did. She didn't meet Pound as a classmate, the way Williams did, or at a Halloween party in Pennsylvania, as did H.D. Even if penniless, Crane, Wylie, and Loy came from wealthy, well-connected families. Only Millay climbed to the first rank of poets with nothing but her talent, but at least she was American. Ridge parlayed her management of the anarchist Ferrer Center into a literary editorship of the Birth Control Review [edited by Margaret Sanger]. She then wrote five reviews in eight months for the New Republic before her first book came out, threw parties regularly for at least seven years, saved two magazines from going under, and, along with writing her next four books, wrote more reviews. Ridge was doing the work of keeping her name and her work in front of her peers; she was extremely well known at the time. She did it for the camaraderie, the prestige, and the control—she was the one who invited the guests, the one to know. She steered the conversation and delivered the critique. Ridge was branding.

I think what Ridge really wanted most was to be immersed in the world of poetry as deeply as possible. She had great ambition and analyzed what would propel her to the center of that world. She loved America, land of freedom, where even such a liberal endeavor as proletariat modernism could blossom and thrive.

Originally Published: January 12th, 2016

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/resources/learning/essays/detail/69385


Essay on Poetic Theory
from Biographia Literaria, Chapter XIV (1817)
By Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Introduction

Philosopher, poet, and religious and political theorist Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in Devonshire, England, and attended the University of Cambridge. In 1795 Coleridge met poet William Wordsworth, with whom he was to work closely. Under Wordsworth’s influence, Coleridge’s poetry shifted to a more conversational voice and began to find inspiration in daily life. In 1796 Coleridge published his first poetry collection, Poems on Various Subjects, and from 1797 to 1798 he lived close to Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy in Somersetshire.

Coleridge and Wordsworth collaboratively published Lyrical Ballads in 1798, marking the rise of the British Romantic movement. According to Coleridge, in their collaborative plans it was agreed Coleridge would compose a series of lyrical poems exploring the Romantic and supernatural, and seeking there to earn a readers’ “poetic faith,” while Wordsworth planned to use the self and the everyday as his subject in poems that would replace a sense of familiarity with an air of the supernatural. Pairing these two approaches, the poets hoped, might bring into harmony “the two cardinal points of poetry, the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colors of imagination.”

Coleridge contributed his well-known poem, “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” while Wordsworth ultimately composed the bulk of the collection. After the publication of Lyrical Ballads, the pair traveled throughout Europe. Afterwards, Coleridge lectured and traveled extensively, and, while battling an opium addiction, moved in with physician James Gillman in 1816. The following year Biographia Literaria, a fusion of autobiography, literary criticism, and religious and philosophical theory, was published.

While consistently praising Wordsworth’s creative work, Coleridge was unhappy that when the second edition of the book was published, Wordsworth added a preface containing a statement of poetics emphasizing the “language of ordinary life,” which Coleridge considered to be a significant departure from the collaborative impulse that shaped the work.

In this rebuttal, Coleridge considers the elements of a poem—sound and meter, communication, pleasure, and emotional affect—as they function together. On attempts to shape a work into meter, or consciously add any of these elements to a poem, Coleridge notes, “nothing can permanently please, which does not contain in itself the reason why it is so, and not otherwise.” Emphasizing the harmony of these elements as what sustains a poem, Coleridge describes the reader’s path through such a poem as “like the motion of a serpent . . . or like the path of sound through the air; at every step he pauses and half recedes, and from the retrogressive movement collects the force which again carries him onward.”

Occasion of the Lyrical Ballads, and the objects originally proposed—Preface to the second edition—The ensuing controversy, its causes and acrimony—Philosophic definitions of a poem and poetry with scholia. During the first year that Mr. Wordsworth and I were neighbors, our conversations turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry, the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colors of imagination. The sudden charm, which accidents of light and shade, which moon-light or sun-set diffused over a known and familiar landscape, appeared to represent the practicability of combining both. These are the poetry of nature. The thought suggested itself (to which of us I do not recollect) that a series of poems might be composed of two sorts. In the one, the incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural; and the excellence aimed at was to consist in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions as would naturally accompany such situations, supposing them real. And real in this sense they have been to every human being who, from whatever source of delusion, has at any time believed himself under supernatural agency. For the second class, subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life; the characters and incidents were to be such, as will be found in every village and its vicinity, where there is a meditative and feeling mind to seek after them, or to notice them, when they present themselves.

In this idea originated the plan of the “Lyrical Ballads”: in which it was agreed, that my endeavors should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. Mr. Wordsworth on the other hand was to propose to himself as his object, to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind’s attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.

With this view I wrote the “Ancient Mariner,” and was preparing among other poems, the “Dark Ladie,” and the “Christabel,” in which I should have more nearly realized my ideal, than I had done in my first attempt. But Mr. Wordsworth’s industry had proved so much more successful, and the number of his poems so much greater, that my compositions, instead of forming a balance, appeared rather an interpolation of heterogeneous matter. Mr. Wordsworth added two or three poems written in his own character, in the impassioned, lofty, and sustained diction, which is characteristic of his genius. In this form the “Lyrical Ballads” were published; and were presented by him as an experiment, whether subjects, which from their nature rejected the usual ornaments and extra-colloquial style of poems in general, might not be so managed in the language of ordinary life as to produce the pleasurable interest, which it is the peculiar business of poetry to impart. To the second edition he added a preface of considerable length; in which notwithstanding some passages of apparently a contrary import, he was understood to contend for the extension of this style to poetry of all kinds, and to reject as vicious and indefensible all phrases and forms of style that were not included in what he (unfortunately, I think, adopting an equivocal expression) called the language of real life. From this preface, prefixed to poems in which it was impossible to deny the presence of original genius, however mistaken its direction might be deemed, arose the whole long continued controversy. For from the conjunction of perceived power with supposed heresy I explain the inveteracy and in some instances, I grieve to say, the acrimonious passions, with which the controversy has been conducted by the assailants.

Had Mr. Wordsworth’s poems been the silly, the childish things, which they were for a long time described as being; had they been really distinguished from the compositions of other poets merely by meanness of language and inanity of thought; had they indeed contained nothing more than what is found in the parodies and pretended imitations of them; they must have sunk at once, a dead weight, into the slough of oblivion, and have dragged the preface along with them. But year after year increased the number of Mr. Wordsworth’s admirers. They were found too not in the lower classes of the reading public, but chiefly among young men of strong ability and meditative minds; and their admiration (inflamed perhaps in some degree by opposition) was distinguished by its intensity, I might almost say, by its religious fervor. These facts, and the intellectual energy of the author, which was more or less consciously felt, where it was outwardly and even boisterously denied, meeting with sentiments of aversion to his opinions, and of alarm at their consequences, produced an eddy of criticism, which would of itself have borne up the poems by the violence, with which it whirled them round and round. With many parts of this preface in the sense attributed to them and which the words undoubtedly seem to authorize, I never concurred; but on the contrary objected to them as erroneous in principle, and as contradictory (in appearance at least) both to other parts of the same preface, and to the author’s own practice in the greater number of the poems themselves. Mr. Wordsworth in his recent collection has, I find, degraded this prefatory disquisition to the end of his second volume, to be read or not at the reader’s choice. But he has not, as far as I can discover, announced any change in his poetic creed. At all events, considering it as the source of a controversy, in which I have been honored more than I deserve by the frequent conjunction of my name with his I think it expedient to declare once for all, in what points I coincide with his opinions, and in what points I altogether differ. But in order to render myself intelligible I must previously, in as few words as possible, explain my ideas, first, of a POEM; and secondly, of POETRY itself, in kind, and in essence.

The office of philosophical disquisition consists in just distinction; while it is the privilege of the philosopher to preserve himself constantly aware, that distinction is not division. In order to obtain adequate notions of any truth, we must intellectually separate its distinguishable parts; and this is the technical process of philosophy. But having so done, we must then restore them in our conceptions to the unity, in which they actually co-exist; and this is the result of philosophy. A poem contains the same elements as a prose composition; the difference therefore must consist in a different combination of them, in consequence of a different object proposed. According to the difference of the object will be the difference of the combination. It is possible, that the object may be merely to facilitate the recollection of any given facts or observations by artificial arrangement; and the composition will be a poem, merely because it is distinguished from composition in prose by metre, or by rhyme, or by both conjointly. In this, the lowest sense, a man might attribute the name of a poem to the well-known enumeration of the days in the several months;

Thirty days hath September,

April, June, and November, &c.

and others of the same class and purpose. And as a particular pleasure is found in anticipating the recurrence of sounds and quantities, all compositions that have this charm superadded, whatever be their contents, may be entitled poems.

So much for the superficial form. A difference of object and contents supplies an additional ground of distinction. The immediate purpose may be the communication of truths; either of truth absolute and demonstrable, as in works of science; or of facts experienced and recorded, as in history. Pleasure, and that of the highest and most permanent kind, may result from the attainment of the end; but it is not itself the immediate end. In other works the communication of pleasure may be the immediate purpose—and thought truth either moral or intellectual, ought to be the ultimate end, yet this will distinguish the character of the author, not the class to which the work belongs. Blessed indeed is that state of society, in which the immediate purpose would be baffled by the perversion of the proper ultimate end; in which no charm of diction or imagery could exempt the Bathyllus even of an Anacreon, or the Alexis of Virgil, from disgust and aversion!

But the communication of pleasure may be the immediate object of a work not metrically composed; and that object may have been in a high degree attained, as in novels and romances. Would then the mere superaddition of metre, with or without rhyme, entitle these to the name of poems? The answer is, that nothing can permanently please, which does not contain in itself the reason why it is so, and not otherwise. If metre be superadded, all other parts must be made consonant with it. They must be such, as to justify the perpetual and distinct attention to each part, which an exact correspondent recurrence of accent and sound are calculated to excite. The final definition then so deduced, may be thus worded. A poem is that species of composition, which is opposed to works of science, by proposing for its immediate object pleasure; not truth; and from all other species (having this object in common with it) it is discriminated by proposing to itself such delight from the whole, as is compatible with a distinct ratification from each component part.

Controversy is not seldom excited in consequence of the disputants attaching each a different meaning to the same word; and in few instances has this been more striking, than in disputes concerning the present subject. If a man chooses to call every composition a poem, which is rhyme, or measure, or both, I must leave his opinion uncontroverted. The distinction is at least competent to characterize the writer’s intention. If it were subjoined, that the whole is likewise entertaining or affecting, as a tale, or as a series of interesting reflections, I of course admit this as another fit ingredient of a poem, and an additional merit. But if the definition sought for be that of a legitimate poem, I answer, it must be one, the parts of which mutually support and explain each other; all in their proportion harmonizing with, and supporting the purpose and known influences of metrical arrangement. The philosophic critics of all ages coincide with the ultimate judgment of all countries, in equally denying the praises of a just poem, on the one hand, to a series of striking lines or distichs, each of which absorbing the whole attention of the reader to itself disjoins it from its context, and makes it a separate whole, instead of an harmonizing part; and on the other hand, to an unsustained composition, from which the reader collects rapidly the general result unattracted by the component parts. The reader should be carried forward, not merely or chiefly by the mechanical impulse of curiosity, or by a restless desire to arrive at the final solution; but by the pleasurable activity of mind excited by the attractions of the journey itself. Like the motion of a serpent, which the Egyptians made the emblem of intellectual power; or like the path of sound through the air; at every step he pauses and half recedes, and from the retrogressive movement collects the force which again carries him onward. Precipitandus est liber spiritus [the free spirit must be hurried onward—ed.], says Petronius Arbiter most happily. The epithet, liber, here balances the preceding verb; and it is not easy to conceive more meaning condensed in fewer words.

But if this should be admitted as a satisfactory character of a poem, we have still to seek for a definition of poetry. The writings of PLATO, and Bishop TAYLOR, and the Theoria Sacra of BURNET, furnish undeniable proofs that poetry of the highest kind may exist without metre and even without the contradistinguishing objects of a poem. The first chapter of Isaiah (indeed a very large proportion of the whole book) is poetry in the most emphatic sense, yet it would be not less irrational than strange to assert, that pleasure, and not truth, was the immediate object of the prophet. In short, whatever specific import we attach to the word, poetry, there, will be found involved in it, as a necessary consequence, that a poem of any length neither can be, or ought to be, all poetry. Yet if an harmonious whole is to be produced, the remaining parts must be preserved in keeping with the poetry; and this can be no otherwise effected than by such a studied selection and artificial arrangement, as will partake of one, though not a peculiar, property of poetry. And this again can be no other than the property of exciting a more continuous and equal attention, than the language of prose aims at, whether colloquial or written.

My own conclusions on the nature of poetry, in the strictest use of the word, have been in part anticipated in the preceding disquisition on the fancy and imagination. What is poetry? is so nearly the same question with, what is a poem? that the answer to the one is involved in the solution of the other. For it is a distinction resulting from the poetic genius itself, which sustains and modifies the images, thoughts, and emotions of the poet’s own mind. A poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other, according to their relative worth and dignity. He diffuses a tone, and spirit of unity, that blends, and (as it were) fuses, each into each, by that synthetic and magical power, to which we have exclusively appropriated the name of imagination. This power, first put in action by the will and understanding, and retained under their irremissive, though gentle and unnoticed, control (laxis effertur habenis [it is carried onwards with loose reins—ed.]) reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities: of sameness, with difference; of the general, with the concrete; the idea, with the image; the individual, with the representative; the sense of novelty and freshness, with old and familiar objects; a more than usual state of emotion, with more than usual order; judgment ever awake and steady self-possession, with enthusiasm and feeling profound or vehement; and while it blends and harmonizes the natural and the artificial, still subordinates art to nature; the manner to the matter; and our admiration of the poet to our sympathy with the poetry. “Doubtless,” as Sir John Davies observes of the soul (and his words may with slight alteration be applied, and even more appropriately to the poetic IMAGINATION)

Doubtless this could not be, but that she turns
Bodies to spirit by sublimation strange,
As fire converts to fire the things it burns,
As we our food into our nature change.
From their gross matter she abstracts their forms,
And draws a kind of quintessence from things,
Which to her proper nature she transforms
To bear them light, on her celestial wings.
Thus does she, when from individual states
She doth abstract the universal kinds;
Which then re-clothed in divers names and fates
Steal access through our senses to our minds.

Finally, GOOD SENSE is the BODY of poetic genius, FANCY its DRAPERY, MOTION its LIFE, and IMAGINATION the SOUL that is everywhere, and in each; and forms all into one graceful and intelligent whole.

Originally Published: October 13th, 2009

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/detail/89028



Prose from Poetry Magazine
Australian Poetry Now
By Bronwyn Lea

Once asked what poets can do for Australia, A.D. Hope replied: “They can justify its existence.” Such has been the charge of Australian poets, from Hope himself to Kenneth Slessor, Judith Wright to Les Murray, Anthony Lawrence to Judith Beveridge: to articulate the Australian experience so that it might live in the imagination of its people. While the presence and potency of the Australian landscape remains an abiding interest, a great deal of Australian poetry has been innovative and experimental, with poets such as Robert Adamson, Michael Dransfield, Vicki Viidikas, John Forbes, Gig Ryan,   J.S. Harry, and Jennifer Maiden leading the way. The richness, strength, and vitality of Australian poetry is marked by a prodigious diversity that makes it as exhilarating to survey as it is challenging to encapsulate.

While the most convincing justification for the existence of Australia might come from its indigenous poets, Aboriginal poetry in Australia has been particularly overlooked, both its historical traditions and the innovative work being written today. Australian Aboriginal culture is thought to date back over forty thousand years, making it the oldest continuous culture on the planet. Of the 250 indigenous languages in circulation before European settlement in 1788, fewer than 150 survived the advance of English, and the numbers are dwindling. Fortunately, linguists have managed to transcribe and translate at least some of the rich and diverse Aboriginal oral traditions before they are lost. According to R.D. Wood, T.G.H. Strehlow’s Songs of Central Australia is “the most majestic, complete, and important” contribution to Aboriginal oral poetry called “songpoetry,” for the linguistic artistry of the lyrics. While frequently ceremonial or ritualistic in nature, some songpoems take an interest in quotidian matters, such as love, hunting, flora, fauna, settlement, and local history. The eponymous songpoem in Martin Duwell and R.M.W. Dixon’s Little Eva at Moonlight Creek, for instance, recalls the December 1942 crash of a US B–24 heavy bomber, “Little Eva,” in the Gulf of Carpentaria from the perspective of the Aboriginal stockmen who took part in the search for survivors.

The most recent contribution to Aboriginal songpoetry publications is Stuart Cooke’s translation of George Dyuŋgayan’s Bulu Line: A West Kimberley Song Cycle, which narrates the dreams of Dyuŋgayan, a twentieth-century Nyigina lawman from the Roebuck Plains in Western Australia, in which he is visited by his late father’s spirit and given the seventeen verses of the Bulu Line. Every age demands its own translation, it is said, and as such Cooke’s translation of Dyuŋgayan draws on various tropes found in contemporary Anglophone poetry — repetition, fragmentation, variations in typeface, and so on — to create a mesmerizing, multivocal text. For example, in “Verse 2” of Bulu Line Cooke spins Dyuŋgayan’s rhyming tercet — “guwararrirarri yinanydina / dyidi yarrabanydyina / nanbalinblai yinanydina” — into twenty lines describing the courtship flight of snipes, whose feather vibrations in the slipstream produce a throbbing sound known as “drumming,” as in this sample:

a flock of snipes
flying toward us
wait! they’re rai
fast approaching
we nearly collide
their bellies like birds’
wait they’re flying
belly-up
becoming rai
racing through sky

Aboriginal poetry written in English, a more recent development, frequently engages the politics of race, ecology, and Aboriginal land rights. Oodgeroo Noonuccal’s We Are Going holds the distinction of being both the first book of poems published by an Aboriginal poet and one of Australia’s bestselling poetry titles. Kargun, Lionel G. Fogarty’s debut collection of poems appeared in 1980 and, along with the rest of his oeuvre, has helped to reformulate the role of poetic discourse in both black and white communities. Born in 1958 on Wakka Wakka land in South Western Queensland, Fogarty’s poetry deploys language in innovative and disruptive ways and has 
pioneered a new space of Aboriginal writing: “I see words beyond any acceptable meaning,” he explains, “this is how I express my dreaming.” His poem “Am I,” for example, concludes with the cry of a kangaroo that presages the collapse of boundaries between self and other:

I heard a roo cry
Am I hearing attendants
to my hearts
Am we lovin’ in these days
Am I sadden these nights
Forever it possess you man
something must tell
Am I me or you am us.

There is less crisis, perhaps, but not less bite in the poetry of Samuel Wagan Watson, the most prominent of the younger generation of Aboriginal poets. Watson’s recent collection, Love Poems and Death Threats, presents the particulars of his urban, contemporary life: the Dreaming and Aboriginal mistreatment — past and present — but also the war in Afghanistan, Hollywood, manga comics, the Beat poets, love, divorce, and the international poetry circuit he frequents. Watson’s language is loose, refusing economy and structure, but his eye is sharp. In the poem “Road Fire,” heat-haze is a “working ghost” on a highway in Mununjali country, where a “red-belly-black serpent / animates the bitumen” to remind us of what we too often forget: “venom is always ahead” but “some paths need to be crossed.”

The verse novel has enjoyed curious prominence in Australian poetry publishing for the past forty years, with many of the country’s established poets attempting at least one at some point in their career: Les Murray, Alan Wearne, Dorothy Porter, Philip Hodgins, Geoff Page, John Tranter, John A. Scott, John Jenkins, Ken Bolton, and Judy Johnson, to name some. For some poets, interest in the hybrid genre is a pivot away from the dominant lyrical mode toward the dramatic possibilities of voice, vernacular, temporality, and character beyond the persona of the poet. One apparent ambition of the Australian verse novel, Christopher Polnitz points out, “is to synthesize all narrative genres and medias, from opera to sacred allegory, radio drama to film.” For other poets, the reclamation of narrative is an honest attempt to recapture poetry audiences lost to fiction and film in the twentieth century.

One of the earliest Australian verse novels is Murray’s The Boys Who Stole the Funeral: A Novel Sequence, which Peter F. Alexander credits as “root and origin of   both Australian and American developments of the genre.” Wearne followed up with The Nightmarkets, a novel written in sixteen-line sonnets that came out the same year that Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate appeared across the Pacific. Both Murray and Wearne went on to contribute more ambitious works to the genre: Murray’s epic Fredy Neptune tackled the horror of twentieth-century genocide in loosely-rhymed, eight-line stanzas while Wearne’s momentous verse novel The Lovemakers arranged three decades of Australian suburbia into 750 pages of couplets, quatrains, and sestinas. Dorothy Porter, the author of nine (including two posthumous) collections of lyric poetry, wrote five verse novels in the space of fifteen years and is credited for popularizing the verse novel with fiction audiences in the nineties. Porter’s bestselling The Monkey’s Mask, a lesbian crime thriller written in punchy free-verse lyrics, was adapted for radio, stage, and eventually the screen. Verse novels for young-adult audiences also emerged around this time, proving a commercial success for authors such as Steven Herrick, Catherine Bateson, Margaret Wild, Libby Hathorn, and Michelle Taylor.

The Australian verse novel, young adult notwithstanding, has lost some momentum in recent years but a handful continue to turn up each year. The historical verse novel is proving to be a popular subgenre; Aboriginal poet Ali Cobby Eckermann’s second verse novel, Ruby Moonlight, is set in the nineteenth century and tells the story of a young Aboriginal woman whose tribe has been massacred by a party of European settlers. But the verse novel that has grabbed most attention in recent years is indubitably contemporary: Here Come the Dogs by Malaysian-Australian rapper and slam poet Omar Musa. Shadowing the lives of three young men through clubs and hip-hop gigs, tattoo parlors and greyhound tracks, Musa moves easily between prose and poetry to create an innovative middle genre. The verse novel’s gritty milieu, along with its lexicon of phonetic profanity, captured the attention of Irvine Welsh, who applauded its 
“swaggering exuberance.” In a late poem entitled “The end,” Musa offers an apocalyptic vision of a man and woman — their “beautiful, dumb love” about to end — leaving a nightclub at dawn. They laugh at a blackened sky, like farmers seeing the first rain in years:

But it is not rain.

It is ash,
the finest black powder
falling onto our collars and shoulders,
drifting around us, falling down
like soot from the grate of heaven.

Having long considered itself a southern-hemisphere outpost of Europe, Australia has recently awakened to the fact of its geography and discovered itself to be a part of Asia — a circumstance reflected in its shifting demographics. According to a 2010 report, Australia is second only to Luxembourg as the most multicultural country in the world. Recent census figures reveal more than eight percent of Australians identify as being of Asian descent (in contrast to only five percent of Americans), with Chinese, Vietnamese, Filipino, and Indian being the predominant backgrounds. Of course the European roots of Anglophone Australian poetry remain stout and deep, but the pivot in perspective from Europe to Asia is opening up new possibilities for poetic engagement in the region beyond the ubiquitous borrowing of various Asian poetic forms.

Australian poets with Asian heritage include Adam Aitken, Paul Dawson, Jaya Savige, and James Stuart, to name just a few; other poets, such as Ee Tiang Hong, Ouyang Yu, Shen, and Ivy Alvarez, were born in an Asian country and migrated to Australia later in life. While Britain has long been the orthodox address for Australian 
expatriate poets — Peter Porter and Clive James of the older generation, or Jaya Savige and Emma Jones of the younger — an increasing number of Australian poets are taking up residence in Asia, often with the support of a university posting: Kit Kelen teaches at the University of Macau, Dan Disney at Sogang University in Seoul, and Michael Brennan teaches at Chuo University in Tokyo. Benefited by technology, these poets have managed to maintain a presence in Australian poetry publishing while building new networks in Asia. Brennan continues to run Vagabond Press from his base in Japan and Paul Hardacre publishes the soi 3 modern poets imprint of Papertiger Media, among his other publishing endeavors, from Bangkok and Chiang Mai.

Several important Asian-focused publications have appeared in recent years. Windchimes: Asia in Australian Poetry, edited by Noel Rowe and Vivian Smith, presents a selection of Asian-themed poems by Australian poets in chronological order, allowing it to be read, as Geoff Page notes, “as an index to our changing attitudes towards Asia and its peoples.” Opening with a handful of Sinophobic poems published in The Bulletin in the early twentieth century, the anthology moves towards more contemporary works — such as Judith Beveridge’s striking poem sequence “Between the Palace and the Bodhi Tree” — in which the source cultures are deeply admired and internalized. The anthology concludes with the ironic poem “Noodles” by Malaysian-born poet Shen, which uses humor to destabilize stereotypes within the Asian community:

“Eating noodles,” mother says,
putting down her coffee cup.
“    ...    the only thing Chinese about you.”
I look up from the steaming
bowl of noodles, eyes half-slit
at dawn. Too tired to argue,
I slip into old habits;
an inscrutable smile
and a filial, obedient nod.

Poet Michelle Cahill, who describes her heritage as Goan-Anglo-Indian, has been instrumental in foregrounding the work of Asian poets in Australia. In 2007 she founded Mascara Literary Review, a biannual online journal with a brief to publish migrant, indigenous, and Asian Australian writing. Along with Adam Aitken and Kim Cheng Boey, she coedited the excellent anthology Contemporary Asian Australian Poets. Featuring poets who “are either first-generation migrants from Asia or Australian-born poets who can trace their roots to Asia,” the poems ruminate on home, travel, diaspora, identity, myth, empire, and language. One standout is Pakistani-Australian poet Misbah Khokhar. The solution to war, Khokhar proposes, is to dispense with borders: “Someone must rub out the demarcation lines that have been painted over valleys and mountains. Or,” she suggests matter-of-factly, “let both sides shoot it out until there is no one left to fire a gun.” The poet then turns to women, the hitherto invisible, and advocates for their sexual agency: “Women should refuse to have sex and build a fort on top of a hill and take-up arms to defend their liberty.” The poet concludes with an imagined frontier in which borders are as permeable as its inhabitants uninhibited: “They should hang their veils as flags,” she writes, “let their hair catch in the wind.”

The idea that “Australian poetry” exists is not a foregone conclusion, nor yet that a nation — Australia or otherwise — can be 
justified. Certainly, in the age of Wi-Fi, linguistic traditions based on geography, ethnicity, and political allegiances are contestable and 
increasingly difficult to discern. To speak of what might be distinctive, however faint, in Australian poetry is not to argue that these aspects are exclusive, representative, or permanent fixtures in the literary tradition. The number of ways into the imagination is, after all, infinite. Rather it is simply to notice when instances rise and temporarily collect like leaves blown against a wall.

Originally Published: May 2nd, 2016

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/articles/detail/69699

INTERIEW


Always in Disguise
2011 Ruth Lilly Prize winner David Ferry on writing, translation, and everything in between.
By David Ferry interviewed by Tess Taylor (David Ferry and Tess Taylor)

David Ferry was born in Orange, N.J., in 1924 and attended Amherst College, where he studied first with Reuben Brower and then, after a stint in the army during World War II, with César Lombardi Barber. Though he knew early on that he wanted to study and teach literature, Ferry writes, “I didn't start writing poems till graduate school.” After getting his PhD at Harvard, he published two scholarly books on Wordsworth. Then, in 1960, his first book of poems, On the Way to the Island, was published. Ferry was 36. His next full-length book, Strangers, would not appear until 1983.

Of the nearly 25 years between his first two books, Ferry says, “Until I started doing a lot of translating, I don’t think I wrote more than three times a year, and I tended to revise a poem over 10 years or so. That’s less true now; some of the poems now seem to come out of the life experience of working on these poems and translations together. They speak to each other.” Indeed, his book Dwelling Places: Poems and Translations appeared in 1993, and his selected poems, Of No Country I Know, in 1999. Both comprise roughly equal numbers of translations and original poems, arranged in ways that reverberate against one another.

Ferry has been forging elegant and unsettling conversations between past and present for his whole writing life. During his years of writing poems that are “his own,” Ferry has also translated from German, Italian, ancient Babylonian, and French as well as become widely known for his translations of Latin texts by Virgil and Horace. But while his complete volumes of Odes or Georgics seem to inhabit Virgil’s voice or Horace’s, it’s key to notice how his collections of poems and translations mosaic the voices of “self” and “other,” cunningly mixing the two. In Ferry’s forthcoming Bewilderment, a translation by Cavafy about unhappiness over the loss of a homosexual lover is followed by a passage from the Aeneid about “unhappy Dido.” The two speakers, each tormented by sexual deprivation, echo one another. They also frame other bereavements in the book, among them Ferry’s own recent loss of his wife.

But what is it to have anything—or any loss—be one’s own? Ferry does write his own poems–and his translations—in his “own” voice, but by the time they arrive in a collection, Ferry has unsettled any easy notion of autobiography. In fact, his presence in a book resembles the old classical figure whereby a Leonardo or Michelangelo might paint his own face as one among the gathered apostles. He, like they, reminds us that the artist is always in disguise.

Ultimately, Ferry’s poems both use and scramble tradition, refresh and estrange it. They are, as he writes in his own poem “The Birds,” “like the birds that gather in Virgil’s lines / In the park at evening, sitting among the branches / Not knowing who it is they’re sitting among. . . .” The poet himself, like these birds, reflects:

I don’t know who it is I am sitting next to

I can hear some notes tried out about the song
That they are trying to sing, but I don’t know
What song it is, it’s not exactly mine.

•

Tess Taylor: You’ve published a number of books of translations—the Odes and Epistles of Horace, the Eclogues and Georgics of Virgil—and it’s said you’re now working on a translation of the Aeneid. Each of your books of poems also contains a number of other translations. What would you say about your experience of working as a translator and your experience writing poems of your own?

David Ferry: In the early 1980s, not having read much Horace, I translated one ode of Horace’s, “I.4 To Sestius,” and a friend of mine at BU, Donald Carne-Ross, a wonderful scholar of the classics, liked it, and liked my poems, and he began to assign other poems to me. I got hooked. I worked on them all, I loved them so.

Another friend, at Harvard, William Moran, a great scholar of ancient languages, liked my poems, and he asked me to make verses out of his scholarly, word-for-word English translation of two passages in the Gilgamesh epic. I responded, and then he guided me through other word-for-word texts, and I fell for the Gilgamesh and my rendering of it. I fell in love with Virgil too—I'm not a classicist or a Latinist—at first through the way Horace in The Odes showed his reading of Virgil, and so it went.

But I certainly didn’t start out with an ambition to become a translator. Sort of accidental, but also kind of a love story. The other thing to say right away is that I’m not very clear that “translator” and “poet” are separate categories. In both activities, my continuous experience is the experience of writing lines, trying to make those lines work as well as they can, to be as pleasing as they can be, to be as understanding of the text they’re working with as they can be. In the case of, say, the Aeneid, which I am working on now, the text must be understood, and the understanding demonstrated, as fully and responsively as possible, in the “new poem” which is the “translation.” Every talk about translation that I’ve ever given has had the title “Not Getting It Right,” and of course that’s always true, because of the obvious differences in talent but also because it’s a different language written in a different culture at a different time, and so forth. But any translation is a poem of its own and should be judged as such. It is the work of a poet writing lines. Anyone who translates must discover this.

TT: What languages have you studied, and when?

DF: French, both in high school and college; three years of Latin in high school, one in graduate school, and none other. I’m not a classicist and not bilingual in any language. Working with the other language, whatever it is, on a particular task, I know it very well as I work on it. When I finish a particular passage, say, of the Aeneid, I know the language of that passage well, but then I have to start my whole life over. Of course I consult with my classicist mentors: Wendell Clausen when he was alive, Richard Thomas, Donald Carne-Ross when he was alive, Michael Putnam. I’d never read any of these works before I started translating them. They emerge as a surprise!

I do have a good knowledge of how these poems, or passages from them, have become implicated in English and the other modern languages.

TT: When did you first come to poetry? Were there specific professors or other teachers who impressed you early on?

DF: At Amherst, reading Frost, Pope, and Stevens with Reuben Brower; Hopkins with G. Armour Craig; Shakespeare with Cesar Lombardi Barber and Theodore Baird. I can almost say, and I mean it seriously, that my whole life as a teacher and, though I didn’t know it at the time, as a poet, was determined on the days when I heard what happened metrically in the third foot of the third line of Frost’s “Spring Pools,” “And like the flowers beside them chill and shiver.” It was the acting out of the early cold spring wind—and also in Frost’s “Once by the Pacific,” in the third foot of the line “The shore was lucky in being backed by cliff.” The panic in it. It blew the top of my head off.

TT: I’ve been impressed by the scholarship of your wife, Anne Ferry, who wrote a great book about Milton, compiled a terrific anthology, and then wrote a meditation on the work of making anthologies. She seems to have been a wonderful person to think about poetry with. Would you care to share something about your lives together?

DF: The love poems in my books do share something about our lives together. Just to speak of the work, though: yes, I agree with you about Milton’s Epic Voice (and her book about Milton and Dryden), and the on-target anthology she did with Reuben Brower and David Kalstone. Her edited book on anthologies was not at all a “survey” of the subject but a series of subtle and amazingly original essays that seize the opportunity of the book’s “topic” to say profoundly important things about the nature of reading. Her great and celebrated book The Title to the Poem uses the subject of titling with amazing originality. After her death, Stanford published her last book, By Design: Intention in Poetry. That amply shows that she was indeed “a wonderful person to think about poetry with.” For her readers, for her students, for me.

TT: You published your first book of poems, On the Way to the Island, in the mid-1960s, when you were in your 30s. Then there’s a gap of 23 years until the appearance of your next book, Strangers. Would you tell us something about your life during those years?

DF: Simplest answer: slow writer, two or three poems a year, 20 years means a book—trying to make the book have some sort of coherence; teaching; committees; bone-lazy.

TT: Strangers begins with two notable poems—“A Tomb at Tarquinia” and “A Bus Stop; Eurydice”—which both have the conjoined and unsettling affect of suburbanizing the classics, while simultaneously drawing the classical world in closer proximity to us than we may often think of it. Do you feel as though the classics are with you as you write your own poems? If so, and when they are with you, how do you see their fit in relation to modern life?

DF: “A Tomb at Tarquinia” has to do with the wonderful sculpture of an Etruscan couple in the Villa Giulia in Rome, and its relation to marriage, and, yes, also to my own marriage: sheltered, beautiful, vulnerable. And of course, the other one refers to the basic Orpheus-Eurydice story, which I knew at that time mainly from Monteverdi and Glück.

TT: Many of the titles of your books of poems—I think here of Dwelling Places, Of No Country I Know, and Strangers—reference either inhabitation or the place where we fail to inhabit, and in fact become strange to ourselves. I wonder if this is considered? Does this trope of belonging versus not belonging help us understand how you think about poems and poetry?

DF: Anne gave me the titles of all those books. But I’d have to give an unsatisfactory answer. It just sort of keeps coming up. I do notice that there is a lot of stuff about displaced figures. I don’t look at myself that way except in the way that everyone does. And everyone does. We happen to own a print of Watteau dressed up as a figure of a shepherd for the Fêtes Vénitiennes. I put him in a poem called “Civilization and Its Discontents.” He’s a sad brave playing a pathetic little musette—very different from the lords and ladies dancing around him. What with my long happy marriage and my marvelous children, I don’t think this aloneness, in this case or any other in my poems, has some expressly autobiographical correlation, but it may be something in the way one feels and observes, all of us.

TT: To put this a different way: As I read your work through, I noticed a great many poems about mad or semi-unstable people, people who are on life’s margins socially, physically, or mentally. What thoughts do you have about why you might be drawn to these people as subjects for poems?

DF: Some of the poems that are like this started from observations of men and women who have come to a supper for people who need it, at a church in Boston—I work at the suppers at the Church of the Advent on Beacon Hill—and Anne and I worked at this for years: I still do. I guess consequentially, for it had an effect on my books Dwelling Places and Of No Country I Know, and it will be true of a few poems in my next book, Bewilderment. . . . [Other influences may be] reading we did about “wild men,” especially in 13th-century depictions, but also in the Bible and elsewhere.

I seemed to find a kind of joint project about street people and these old figures of the medieval wild man, so my poems really gathered a shared vocabulary. My rendering of the Gilgamesh story also has had an effect—I guess these scenes derive partly from my experience at the suppers but also, and maybe mainly, from this reading and from the activity of writing such poems.

I think a lot, too, about Thom Gunn’s great, perfect, heartbreaking book The Man with Night Sweats—how to give form to displacement and distress.

TT: How do you see your work as a translator in relationship to your work as a poet?

DF: It’s tempting to think of “original poems” as if there is no text they’re translating. But I suppose again, if every translation must become a poem, every poem has a central source it must be rendering. Even if a poem is about an event, a situation, a happening, that event is experienced as having its own vocabulary, however inchoate, which the poem must understand or render, as best it can, and do so in lines. And in many (I’m tempted to say in most) cases, that “experiential text” must also include the experience of other poems, which are, in one way or another, translated into the new poem.

Reading “a life experience” isn’t categorically so different from reading a passage from the Aeneid or the Odes of Horace or Gilgamesh. This comes full circle—in the end you’re stuck with the fact that you’re kind of reading your own poem.

TT: Indeed! Your books are often collages. If you are translating one poem rather than, say, the whole Georgics, how do you decide what to translate and why? Are you simply drawn to certain poems?

DF: Almost all the big translations have been assignments. The Odes came through Donald Carne-Ross. Gilgamesh came through William Moran, a great Babylonian honcho at Harvard. But then I keep coming across things. It helps to have been helped by classicists.

TT: When you compose a book for its coherence—the coherence you’ve waited sometimes 20 years for—how do you see your translations fitting within the scheme of work that is “your own”? Is the relationship compositional or thematic?

DF: In Bewilderment there are a lot of poems about unrealizable love or sexual deprivation, bereavement. Some of them just came up. For instance, the Cavafy came in part out of liking what Robert Pinsky has done, wonderfully, with one poem of Cavafy’s. Then I knew the Dido from the Aeneid. It’s all about happenstance, but then it also happens to connect up. The things that happen to you seem to happen by accident but, because you’re you, they seem to connect to other things.

I guess another way to say this is this: the book Bewilderment is about bereavement. But it’s also essentially about reading.

TT: And when you translate multiple authors, as well as putting in your own poems, how do you see the question of voice carrying between the various poets you assemble into “your book”?

DF: Some of the poems are referential to other references—in one poem I quote Virgil quoting himself—or to lines where it seems that Frost is actually quoting Virgil. Another way to say this is that I think about “the voice” by not thinking about it. If there’s going to be a transaction between the thing being translated and your own voice—it has to be there—you have to still write in your own voice. Your own voice has its own characteristics, and if you’re translating something old and great, you still have to have your own voice.

But at the same point you’re also stealing other voices. Like I steal Wyatt’s voice. In my poem “That Now Were Wild,” which appears in Bewilderment, I’ve placed the poem next to a fragment of the Aeneid about shades in the riverbank waiting to get across. I wanted the language of the Virgil poem to cast some light into my own poem, but I’m also deliberately quoting a poem. I’m using that quote to tell people that someone dying, that someone loved departing, is actually a kind of sexual betrayal. It’s opportunistic. Wyatt’s voice is heartbreakingly wonderful, and I just wanted to use it.

TT: We’ve talked about these longer conversations across time, like with Wyatt. Who more modern do you read?

DF: I think I want to focus here on who that’s not living. The biggest for me, the poets who have had the most effect on my life and work, are Wordsworth, Frost, and Stevens. In college, I wrote Stevens a letter and he wrote a letter back. Thrill of my life! His handling of the line is amazing. And Williams. And the best poems of James Merrill. Of course, if we get out of the near present, there’s Wordsworth because of the way his verse-line sounds. In graduate school I just fell for him, and wrote a book about him.

Later I came to Horace and Virgil without having previously read them. Something just comes into my life and takes off, and it really comes as a surprise. But Wordsworth’s Prelude is, well, it’s just it. I don’t know how to say it any other way. I think the passage in The Prelude in which he says that he has a dream, but earlier it seems that it’s Coleridge dream, but then he says it is his—and he’s carrying a stone and a shell … and the stone is Euclid’s and the shell is poetry, tokens of all that is valuable, and the waters of the earth are gathering upon them—I’d say that might well be the best passage in English poetry.

TT: So here you are writing about grief but also about reading. It strikes me that this idea of poems not belonging to anyone—but happening perhaps by being read through other poems—reminds me a little of the idea of not belonging to any one place or home, which you keep circling about in the content of some of the poems we mentioned earlier. The problem of Dwelling Places. Do you think there’s something there?

DF: You know, I hadn’t thought of it that way, but now that you mention it, it seems you could be right. You could be right. We read to find a place to dwell on, and even in, for a time; it’s of no country I know. There are many strangers in it, including myself. My Anne knew that about my poems when she gave those titles to my books. If she were alive now, I bet she’d have given my new book the title I give it: Bewilderment.

Originally Published: May 18th, 2011

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Biography

David Ferry is an acclaimed American poet and translator. Ferry’s translations, which include some of the world's major works of poetry including The Odes of Horace, and both The Eclogues and Georgics of Virgil, are known for their fluency and grace. In addition to his lauded translations, Ferry is also...
Continue reading this biography
Biography
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Tess Taylor, the 2010-2011 Amy Clampitt Resident, has received writing fellowships from Amherst College, the American Antiquarian Society, the Headlands Center for the Arts, and the MacDowell Colony. Her chapbook, The Misremembered World, was published by the Poetry Society of America, and her work has appeared in the Atlantic Monthly,...




TT: So here you are writing about grief but also about reading. It strikes me that this idea of poems not belonging to anyone—but happening perhaps by being read through other poems—reminds me a little of the idea of not belonging to any one place or home, which you keep circling about in the content of some of the poems we mentioned earlier. The problem of Dwelling Places. Do you think there’s something there?

POETRY TO ME IS ITS OWN HOME, APART FROM MAN'S FRAILTY, VICES AND DAILY BOREDOM(if one so desires and can accomplish such)....
One can create and change as one desires.
Only limits are the ones self-imposed..-Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/articles/detail/69750

Essay
When You’re Strange
Should we consider Jim Morrison, rock’s Bozo Dionysus, a real poet?
By Daniel Nester
Illustration: Jason Novak

There are two kinds of people in this world: those who think the Doors are a hokey caricature of male rock stardom and those who think they’re, you know, shamans. The Doors, who took their name from a line in William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (“If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite”), combined jazz chord changes and Latin rhythms with flamenco, surf, raga, blues, and psychedelia, all in one ’60s rock band, often in one song: “Light My Fire,” “The End,” “Roadhouse Blues,” and “People Are Strange,” just to name a few. The power of the Doors’ music is that it is so unabashedly arty that it begs to be made fun of, especially by older people or those who went through Doors periods themselves and are now into Steely Dan or Animal Collective or some other less embarrassing musical endeavor.

And why embarrassing? Because the Doors reflect a conflict many of us have with artists we think we have outgrown. For those with a youthful bent, sustained naïveté, or a poetical inclination, the combination of the Doors’ music and Jim Morrison’s lyrics can be transformative. In Just Kids, Patti Smith’s memoir depicting her early days in New York and friendship with artist Robert Mapplethorpe, the singer neatly encapsulates how she, and many others, “felt both kinship and contempt for [Morrison]” while watching him perform for the first time. “I observed his every move in a state of cold hyperawareness. I remember this feeling much more clearly than the concert. I felt, watching Jim Morrison, that I could do that.”

But for those same people a few years on, the Morrison mythology of a rock-singer-slash-poet whose lyrics reflect influences from the Romantics, French Symbolists, and Beats feels, at best, silly, and so he becomes one of the better punch lines to any number of poetry jokes.

But the Lizard King is not dead.

Although it may not shock that Doors music is still popular, what might surprise is that Jim Morrison’s poetry still has an audience. As I write this, the remastered CD of An American Prayer, a Jim Morrison spoken-word album posthumously released in 1978, sits at number one on Amazon’s “Music > Miscellaneous > Poetry, Spoken Word & Interviews” chart, ahead of Jim Carroll and Alcoholics Anonymous and neck-and-neck with Tom Waits. Morrison’s collections of poetry continue to sell, too. Two of his three poetry titles reside semipermanently on Amazon’s poetry best-seller list—Wilderness: The Lost Writings of Jim Morrison, Volume 1 (#26) and The Lords and the New Creatures (#40)—sitting alongside Allen Ginsberg, Mary Oliver, and Tupac Shakur, and ahead of Eliot, Frost, Poe, and Bishop.

This is irritating to serious poetry people. But maybe there is something to Morrison’s poetry beyond the laughs. Maybe it’s time we considered him to be something beyond the “Bozo Dionysus” Lester Bangs saw him as. Maybe it’s time we accepted him as a bona fide American poet.

*

Back when I was in eighth grade, a man with an acoustic guitar came to our class at Our Lady of Perpetual Help School in Maple Shade, New Jersey, to sing songs about drugs. About not doing drugs, I mean. He used to do a lot of drugs, he said, and lived the whole rock-and-roll lifestyle. His was a death-style, he said, and now that he didn’t do any drugs, he loved his life and was closer to God. A couple kids raised their hands to tell stories about uncles or older siblings who did drugs and how bad drugs were. It was relatively moving.

Just when he was going to sing his last drugs-are-bad song, our visitor spotted a copy of No One Here Gets Out Alive, Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman’s 1980 best-selling biography of Jim Morrison, on a girl’s desk. He picked it up.

“I’ll give you five dollars not to read this book,” he said. The book glorifies drugs, he said, and would lead her down the “wrong path.” He took a bill out of his pocket and slapped it down.

“He was a poet,” our visitor sagely said. “I’ll give you that.”

I remember the girl took the money and the guy took the book. I also remember everyone thinking we had to find out who this Jim Morrison poet guy was.

I biked over to Peaches, a record store owned by Moonies, and bought a copy of An American Prayer, the Jim Morrison spoken-word album released in 1978 with other Doors adding posthumous musical flourishes. I sat in my room with headphones and put the record on.

It was, as best as I can recall, the first time I listened to a poet speak.

*

As I write this, the annual chatter about whether Bob Dylan might win the Nobel Prize for literature sends giggles through the commentariat. Although the poetry world loves hyphenates and slashes (Post-Avant! Fifth-Generation-New-York-School! Poet/Collagist! Poessay!), adding Rock Singer/Poet to the list of accepted terms is where most draw the line. While I’m not terribly interested in the interminable debate over whether rock lyrics qualify as “real” poetry, it turns out one can’t avoid it entirely when we speak of Jim Morrison, Gateway Poet, as a serious writer. It is mostly a losing proposition, I know. It is absurd. And yet I’m not willing to completely disregard what the eighth-grade me found so moving.

*

One rainy afternoon this summer, I took out my vinyl copy of An American Prayer, which I have dragged from apartment to apartment for a quarter century; put it on the turntable; and asked my 2,500-plus closest friends on Facebook if anyone was a fan, or used to be a fan, of Jim Morrison’s poetry.

There were, of course, snarky responses. One suspected I was “trying to punk them or out people for their guilty pleasure,” while another joked that I should rephrase the question as whether anyone out there “had been a 13-year-old girl.” Poet Tim Suermondt told me he’d respond “as soon as I get back from my walk on Love Street.”

Yes. Haha. But, surprisingly, most responses I got were heartfelt rather than dismissive.

“Morrison was the first human I connected to living poetry (as opposed to dead poetry),” poet and memoirist Peter Conners wrote. “When I looked at his pics, I never thought Rock Star. I thought Poet . . . and then I thought Dangerous Poet. As a teenager getting intrigued by words, that was an important leap for me.”

Todd Colby, a poet and himself a former rock singer (of Drunken Boat), quoted lines from “Ghost Song,” a track from An American Prayer: “‎Choose now, they croon / Beneath the moon / Beside an ancient lake.” Mike McCann, a friend from college I hadn’t spoken to in many years, quoted from “When the Music’s Over”: “Persian Night! See the Light! Save Us! Jesus! Save Us!”

“Wilderness was the first book of poems I ever owned,” Ginger Heather, another poet, wrote. “A friend gave it to me for my 16th birthday. Our high school was a trade school, so I’m not sure I would have been introduced to anything like contemporary poetry otherwise.”

*

“I’m hung up on the art game, you know?” Morrison said in an interview with CBC Radio. “My great joy is to give form to reality. Music is a great release, a great enjoyment to me. Eventually I’d like to write something of great importance. That’s my ambition—to write something worthwhile.”

Just how seriously Jim Morrison can be taken as a poet depends on whom you ask, but there’s no question that he regarded himself as the real deal. Starting with No One Here Gets Out Alive and each subsequent biography, Morrison is portrayed as carrying Arthur Rimbaud’s poetry books in his pocket or quoting from Nietzsche, all by way of suggesting the singer should be taken seriously as a poet, without many other reasons why. Like many real poets, Morrison self-published his work. The Lords: Notes on Vision appeared as single vellum pages with “© James Douglas Morrison 1969 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED” on the bottom of each page, housed inside a blue portfolio folder. He made 100 copies and gave them out to friends. Then came The New Creatures, a slim hardcover edition of 100 copies, privately printed in 1969. An Ode to LA while Thinking of Brian Jones, Deceased, a broadside or pamphlet, was handed out at concerts after the death of the Rolling Stones guitarist, and An American Prayer was printed in an edition of 500 in 1970.

“Despite the high prices from dealers, they can’t always command them,” Ernest Hilbert, a poet who works as an antiquarian book dealer for Philadelphia’s Bauman’s Rare Books, tells me in an email. Hilbert mentioned the story of a dealer who failed to sell a copy of The New Creatures to a “very famous music mogul” for around $6,000. A copy of The Lords is on sale now for about $10,000. “They’re very rare signed because they came after his public life shut down and not long before his total life did.”

In 1970, Simon & Schuster published The Lords and The New Creatures, which combined his first two books. Other than San Francisco poet and Morrison friend Michael McClure, who urged him to self-publish his work and pursue his writing, no one from the serious poetry world seemed to pay much attention. Despite this, the book is currently in its 50th printing. But clearly sales alone can’t transform one into a serious poet. That takes academia.

*

According my college library’s databases, a 1992 article, “Wild Child: Jim Morrison’s Poetic Journeys,” was the first academic work to address the notion that Morrison’s writing should be taken seriously as poetry. Written by Tony Magistrale, now chair of the English department at the University of Vermont, the study, published in the Journal of Popular Culture, first addresses the “glaring omission” in what has been written about the Doors: namely, the failure “to analyze Morrison’s contributions as a poet,” which starts with “separat[ing] commercial myth from poetic legacy.”

Morrison, Magistrale writes, “is as much a product of the Romantic poetic vein as William Blake, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson and the French Symbolists were a century before him.” Many of these writers were also obsessed with poetry as a means of vision and illumination, of “breaking through to the other side” to “discover what possible realms existed beyond the immediate and the material.” Morrison’s best works, Magistrale asserts, “defy quick dismissal.”

Two decades later, Magistrale is still enthusiastic about Jim Morrison and the Doors. “I think the real poetry is in the songs,” he tells me on the phone. “That’s when Morrison’s poetry is at its most coherent and poetic.”

People still contact Magistrale about his article, asking for comment or to reprint it, he says. Still, 40 years after the singer’s death, “We’ve got this ‘Morrison Hole,’ people who are writing crap about his poetics, that hasn’t been filled. You’ve got people out there writing about him who are not trained to read it.”

Which is a shame, he says. “This guy still has something to say to us.”

“And I would not hesitate for a minute to call lyrics like ‘Five to One’ real poetry,” he tells me. “‘Trading your hours for a handful of dimes’? That could come from ‘Prufrock’ or ‘The Waste Land.’ Or ‘I woke up this morning and I got myself a beer / The future’s uncertain, the end is always near.’ It might be his addiction or it might be nihilism, but what better description or encapsulation of the existential dilemma? This could be right out of Camus or Sartre. These monetary solutions are only going to take you so far, Morrison says. And no one really talks about that with his lyrics.”

“‘Moonlight Drive,’” he tells me, is a “wonderful lyrical ballad” that “really dispels the notion of Jim Morrison as a misogynist.”

“All that said,” Magistrale points out, there is “a lot of poetry that Jim Morrison wrote that is shit, pap—stuff he wrote when he was drunk, high on drugs, not capable of putting words into coherent sentences, much less rendering it poetically.”

Magistrale first sent his article to The New Yorker. Its editor, David Remnick, wrote him back personally. “He wrote, ‘I’ve been wrestling with this essay for the last week. It’s the best thing I’ve ever read about Jim Morrison, and I don’t believe a word of it.’ That’s what I got back. I should have framed that fucking rejection.”

*

“The lyrics Jim Morrison wrote for the Doors are wonderful and chilling and moving,” David Lehman writes to me. Poet, critic, and series editor of The Best American Poetry, Lehman knows about song lyrics. His most recent book, A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs, is a wide-ranging study of American standards. Morrison “brilliantly communicated states of extreme emotion,” he writes: “the rage of lust (‘Light My Fire’), a gentler desire (‘Touch Me’), paranoia, fear, sheer darkness.”

Lehman’s answers remind me that, although Morrison regularly name-checked his favorite writers—in one interview he rattled off “Rimbaud, Apollinaire, Breton, Cendrars, Max Ernst, Céline, Burroughs,” and was still characterized by the journalist as “rambling”—his favorite singer late in life was the one and only standards master, Frank Sinatra. The thought of Francis Albert Sinatra singing James Douglas Morrison’s lyrics compels me to look up Ol’ Blue Eyes’ discography. Did he ever sing “Touch Me”? No dice, baby.

“I think ‘People Are Strange,’ for example, is an outstanding rock lyric, very haunting, with artful use of repetition and a beautiful emphasis on that major-league word, strange,” Lehman writes. “He uses ‘stranger’ more in the manner of Camus than of Orson Welles, and it connects with ‘you’ the speaker as well as ‘you’ the listener: the existential ‘you.’” Lehman likes especially how Morrison interchanges “look” and “seem” with “are,” which suggest that “‘your’ state of mind is what’s at stake.” Lehman types out the lyrics in his email to “show how rhetorically balanced the first stanza is, each line divided into two clauses conjoined by ‘when.’”

*

But maybe, suggests Robert Pattison, professor of English at Long Island University and author of The Triumph of Vulgarity: Rock Music in the Mirror of Romanticism, “acceptance” would just be a way to kill off Morrison’s sales.

“A fair number of rockers have convinced themselves that they are not in fact vulgar mutants of the 19th-century poets but their modern reincarnations,” Pattison writes in Triumph.

I couldn’t help but ask Pattison: But what about Jim, man? What would be added to Morrison’s reputation if he were hailed as a poet? Should we put a couple of his poems on the Poetry Foundation website? Wouldn’t that be cool?

“I’m not sure there’s any prestige in a rock lyricist also claiming the title of poet,” Pattison writes. “My guess is that the prestige runs the other way.”

Pattison’s credo boils down to this: excellent rock songs, boring poems. “Why are slim volumes of deep thought superior to young rants? I think Morrison would be getting a demotion to be moved to the Poetry Foundation website.

“Yes,” Pattison continues, “I think the fact the words are written for rock makes a difference. Try comparing Kurt Cobain’s lyrics with the poems he scribbled down. Millions justifiably remember the former; the latter are trite and embarrassing. There are so many good rock lyrics that I think they would swamp any poetry website. The works of Alex Chilton alone would drive out much of the competition. But the whole Internet is really a rock website, since you can summon up whole songs from fragments of lyrics or watch 15 different performances of any particular number. I’m not sure any more formal arrangement is necessary.”

*

Years after first seeing them in concert, Patti Smith spots a billboard for the Doors’ latest album, L.A. Woman, and overhears the band’s new single, “Riders on the Storm,” coming from a passing car.

“I felt remorse that I had almost forgotten what an important influence Jim Morrison had been,” Smith writes. “He had led me on the path of merging poetry into rock and roll.”

In a recent article in The New Yorker, critic Daniel Mendelsohn writes that “the chances that Rimbaud will become the bible of your life are inversely proportional to the age at which you first discover him.” The same applies for Morrison, who elicits the same types of “extraordinarily conflicted feelings of admiration and dismay.” Rimbaud is credited with being a student of poetry while he made his way rebelling against the world. Morrison, the American, is perennially cast as the wild man from the desert, bottle of Jack in hand. Both called for a “derangement of all the senses.” Both are examples of the poète maudit who lives outside normal conventions.

A couple nights ago I sat at a table in Dirty Frank’s, my favorite Philadelphia bar, with two old friends, one from college and one from my hometown. Over pitchers of Yuengling and a walk around the block to smoke a bowl of pot I bought off another guy in my father’s group, I told them I was writing about Jim Morrison. As usual, it felt like a confession. Both smiled and told their Doors stories. Dan, the college friend, is a rock photographer who worshiped Sonic Youth as a teenager. He’s “still all about” “When the Music’s Over.” “Cancel my subscription to the resurrection!” he sang and lifted a mug. I once saw Tom, my hometown friend, who’s now a professor, make a classic rock DJ’s head explode at a party when he told him the band XTC “transcends the Beatles.” I thought he hated the Doors, but he confessed that he loves “Twentieth Century Fox,” a light track off their first album. “It’s Morrison’s version of ‘The Lady Is a Tramp,’” I offered. Once we got our giggles out, I realized we’d all gone through Morrison periods, as part of that rite of passage for some teenagers when they first encounter someone unembarrassed to be an artist. We all read Morrison’s poetry when we were younger. Just talking about Jim Morrison, I daresay, makes us old men feel young and free again. Others qualify for this spot as well—Plath, Ginsberg, Bukowski, Kerouac, Salinger, Lady Gaga, Rimbaud, Patti Smith. What is it about these artists that compels us to make fun of them later in life? We want the world and we want it now!

“Listen, real poetry doesn’t say anything,” Morrison writes in Wilderness’s prologue. “It just ticks off possibilities.” When I first set out to write this essay, I hoped it would be a brilliant exegesis of Jim Morrison, Real Poet. In the back of my mind, I envisioned a couple of his poems featured as a sidebar, maybe a sequence of prose-poem aphorisms from The Lords to drive home how relevant and "now" he could be. But I have stopped worrying whether James Douglas Morrison—The Last Holy Fool, Sex God, Black Priest of the Great Society—can join the tenuous tribe of poets. He’s been showing up for the meetings for so long now, there’s no sense in throwing him out.

Originally Published: October 19th, 2011

Yes, lets not throw Morrison out, since he put far more heart, soul and deep messages into his lyrics than many famous poets did their poems!
Yet today the elitist poetry critics seem to think that heart, soul and deep messages delivered in inspired verses are old news, to be banished into the dustbins of archaic goobly-gook. Presented as they still worship Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound!
Which proves its they in their massive hypocrisy , telling we mere mortals how we are too stupid to see, hear or read greatness in poetry unless its sanction to be so by-THEM..

baa, humbug....-Tyr

[Black Diamond]

Yes, lets not throw Morrison out, since he put far more heart, soul and deep messages into his lyrics than many famous poets did their poems!
Yet today the elitist poetry critics seem to think that heart, soul and deep messages delivered in inspired verses are old news, to be banished into the dustbins of archaic goobly-gook. Presented as they still worship Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound!
Which proves its they in their massive hypocrisy , telling we mere mortals how we are too stupid to see, hear or read greatness in poetry unless its sanction to be so by-THEM..

baa, humbug....-Tyr
I own all the doors albums. Passion and genius.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetrysoup.com/article/daphnis_inventor_of_bucolic_poetry-1610

Daphnis: Inventor of Bucolic Poetry
Written by: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition

DAPHNIS, the legendary hero of the shepherds of Sicily, and reputed inventor of bucolic poetry. The chief authorities for his story are Diodorus Siculus, Aelian and Theocritus. According to his countryman Diodorus (iv. 84), and Aelian (Var. Hist., x. 18), Daphnis was the son of Hermes (in his character of the shepherd-god) and a Sicilian nymph, and was born or exposed and found by shepherds in a grove of laurels (whence his name.) He was brought up by the nymphs, or by shepherds, and became the owner of flocks and herds, which he tended while playing on the syrinx. When in the first bloom of youth, he won the affection of a nymph, who made him promise to love none but her, threatening that, if he proved unfaithful, he would lose his eyesight. He failed to keep his promise and was smitten with blindness. Daphnis, who endeavoured to console himself by playing the flute and singing shepherds’ songs, soon afterwards died. He fell from a cliff, or was changed into a rock, or was taken up to heaven by his father Hermes, who caused a spring of water to gush out from the spot where his son had been carried off. Ever afterwards the Sicilians offered sacrifices at this spring as an expiatory offering for the youth’s early death. There is little doubt that Aelian in his account follows Stesichorus (q.v.) of Himera, who in like manner had been blinded by the vengeance of a woman (Helen) and probably sang of the sufferings of Daphnis in his recantation. Nothing is said of Daphnis’s blindness by Theocritus, who dwells on his amour with Naïs; his victory over Menalcas in a poetical competition; his love for Xenea brought about by the wrath of Aphrodite; his wanderings through the woods while suffering the torments of unrequited love; his death just at the moment when Aphrodite, moved by compassion, endeavours (but too late) to save him; the deep sorrow, shared by nature and all created things, for his untimely end (Theocritus i. vii. viii.). A later form of the legend identifies Daphnis with a Phrygian hero, and makes him the teacher of Marsyas. The legend of Daphnis and his early death may be compared with those of Narcissus, Linus and Adonis—all beautiful youths cut off in their prime, typical of the luxuriant growth of vegetation in the spring, and its sudden withering away beneath the scorching summer sun.

See F. G. Welcker, Kleine Schriften zur griechischen Litteraturgeschichte, i. (1844); C. F. Hermann, De Daphnide Theocriti (1853); R. H. Klausen, Aeneas und die Penaten, i. (1840); R. Reitzenstein, Epigramm und Skolion (1893); H. W. Prescott in Harvard Studies, x. (1899); H. W. Stoll in Roscher’s Lexikon der Mythologie; and G. Knaack in Pauly-Wissowa’s Realencyclopädie.

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http://www.poetrysoup.com/article/thoughts_on_anton_pavlovich_chekhov-1443


Thoughts on Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
Written by: J. Middleton Murry

We do not know if the stories collected in this volume[7] stand together in the Russian edition of Tchehov's works, or if the selection is due to Mrs Constance Garnett. It is also possible that the juxtaposition is fortuitous. But the stories are united by a similarity of material. Whereas in the former volumes of this admirable series Tchehov is shown as preoccupied chiefly with the life of the intelligentsia, here he finds his subjects in priests and peasants, or (in the story Uprooted) in the half-educated.

[Footnote 7: The Bishop; and Other Stories. By Anton Tchehov.
Translated by Constance Garnett. (Chatto & Windus.)]
Such a distinction is, indeed, irrelevant. As Tchehov presents them to our minds, the life of the country and the life of the town produce the same final impression, arouse in us an awareness of an identical quality; and thus, the distinction, by its very irrelevance, points us the more quickly to what is essential in Tchehov. It is that his attitude, to which he persuades us, is complete, not partial. His comprehension radiates from a steady centre, and is not capriciously kindled by a thousand accidental contacts. In other words, Tchehov is not what he is so often assumed to be, an impressionist. Consciously or unconsciously he had taken the step—the veritable salto mortale—by which the great literary artist moves out of the ranks of the minor writers. He had slowly shifted his angle of vision until he could discern a unity in multiplicity. Unity of this rare kind cannot be imposed as, for instance, Zola attempted to impose it. It is an emanation from life which can be distinguished only by the most sensitive contemplation.

The problem is to define this unity in the case of each great writer in whom it appears. To apprehend it is not so difficult. The mere sense of unity is so singular and compelling that it leaves room for few hesitations. The majority of writers, however excellent in their peculiar virtues, are not concerned with it: at one moment they represent, at another they may philosophise, but the two activities have no organic connection, and their work, if it displays any evolution at all, displays it only in the minor accidents of the craft, such as style in the narrower and technical sense, or the obvious economy of construction. There is no danger of mistaking these for great writers. Nor, in the more peculiar case of writers who attempt to impose the illusion of unity, is the danger serious. The apparatus is always visible; they cannot afford to do without the paraphernalia of argument which supplies the place of what is lacking in their presentation. The obvious instance of this legerdemain is Zola; a less obvious, and therefore more interesting example is Balzac.

To attempt the more difficult problem. What is most peculiar to Tchehov's unity is that it is far more nakedly æsthetic than that of most of the great writers before him. Other writers of a rank equal to his—and there are not so very many—have felt the need to shift their angle of vision until they could perceive an all-embracing unity; but they were not satisfied with this. They felt, and obeyed, the further need of taking an attitude towards the unity they saw They approved or disapproved, accepted or rejected it. It would be perhaps more accurate to say that they gave or refused their endorsement. They appealed to some other element than their own sense of beauty for the final verdict on their discovery; they asked whether it was just or good.

The distinguishing mark of Tchehov is that he is satisfied with the unity he discovers. Its uniqueness is sufficient for him. It does not occur to him to demand that it should be otherwise or better. The act of comprehension is accompanied by an instantaneous act of acceptance. He is like a man who contemplates a perfect work of art; but the work of creation has been his, and has consisted in the gradual adjustment of his vision until he could see the frustration of human destinies and the arbitrary infliction of pain as processes no less inevitable, natural, and beautiful than the flowering of a plant. Not that Tchehov is a greater artist than any of his great predecessors; he is merely more wholly an artist, which is a very different thing. There is in him less admixture of preoccupations that are not purely æsthetic, and probably for this reason he has less creative vigour than any other artist of equal rank. It seems as though artists, like cattle and fruit trees, need a good deal of crossing with substantial foreign elements, in order to be very vigorous and very fruitful. Tchehov has the virtues and the shortcomings of the pure case.

I do not wish to be understood as saying that Tchehov is a manifestation of l'art pour l'art, because in any commonly accepted sense of that phrase, he is not. Still, he might be considered as an exemplification of what the phrase might be made to mean. But instead of being diverted into a barren dispute over terminologies, one may endeavour to bring into prominence an aspect of Tchehov which has an immediate interest—his modernity. Again, the word is awkward. It suggests that he is fashionable, or up to date. Tchehov is, in fact, a good many phases in advance of all that is habitually described as modern in the art of literature. The artistic problem which he faced and solved is one that is, at most, partially present to the consciousness of the modern writer—to reconcile the greatest possible diversity of content with the greatest possible unity of æsthetic impression. Diversity of content we are beginning to find in profusion—Miss May Sinclair's latest experiment shows how this need is beginning to trouble a writer with a settled manner and a fixed reputation—but how rarely do we see even a glimmering recognition of the necessity of a unified æsthetic impression! The modern method is to assume that all that is, or has been, present to consciousness is ipso facto unified æsthetically. The result of such an assumption is an obvious disintegration both of language and artistic effort, a mere retrogression from the classical method.

The classical method consisted, essentially, in achieving æsthetic unity by a process of rigorous exclusion of all that was not germane to an arbitrary (because non-æsthetic) argument. This argument was let down like a string into the saturated solution of the consciousness until a unified crystalline structure congregated about it. Of all great artists of the past Shakespeare is the richest in his departures from this method. How much deliberate artistic purpose there was in his employment of songs and madmen and fools (an employment fundamentally different from that made by his contemporaries) is a subject far too big for a parenthesis. But he, too, is at bottom a classic artist. The modern problem—it has not yet been sufficiently solved for us to speak of a modern method—arises from a sense that the classical method produces over-simplification. It does not permit of a sufficient sense of multiplicity. One can think of a dozen semi-treatments of the problem from Balzac to Dostoevsky, but they were all on the old lines. They might be called Shakespearean modifications of the classical method.

Tchehov, we believe, attempted a treatment radically new. To make use again of our former image in his maturer writing, he chose a different string to let down into the saturated solution of consciousness. In a sense he began at the other end. He had decided on the quality of æsthetic impression he wished to produce, not by an arbitrary decision, but by one which followed naturally from the contemplative unity of life which he had achieved. The essential quality he discerned and desired to represent was his argument, his string. Everything that heightened and completed this quality accumulated about it, quite independently of whether it would have been repelled by the old criterion of plot and argument. There is a magnificent example of his method in the longest story in this volume, 'The Steppe.' The quality is dominant throughout, and by some strange compulsion it makes heterogeneous things one; it is reinforced by the incident. Tiny events—the peasant who eats minnows alive, the Jewish inn-keeper's brother who burned his six thousand roubles—take on a character of portent, except that the word is too harsh for so delicate a distortion of normal vision; rather it is a sense of incalculability that haunts us. The emphases have all been slightly shifted, but shifted according to a valid scheme. It is not while we are reading, but afterwards that we wonder how so much significance could attach to a little boy's questions in a remote village shop:—

'"How much are these cakes?'

'"Two for a farthing.'

'Yegorushka took out of his pocket the cake given him the day before by the Jewess and asked him:—

'"And how much do you charge for cakes like this?'

'The shopman took the cake in his hands, looked at it from all sides, and raised one eyebrow.

'"Like that?' he asked.

'Then he raised the other eyebrow, thought a minute, and answered:—

'"Two for three farthings…."'

It is foolish to quote it. It is like a golden pebble from the bed of a stream. The stream that flows over Tchehov's innumerable pebbles, infinitely diverse and heterogeneous, is the stream of a deliberately sublimated quality. The figure is inexact, as figures are. Not every pebble could be thus transmuted. But how they are chosen, what is the real nature of the relation which unites them, as we feel it does, is a secret which modern English writers need to explore. Till they have explored and mastered it Tchehov will remain a master in advance of them.

[AUGUST, 1919.

* * * * *

The case of Tchehov is one to be investigated again and again because he is the only great modern artist in prose. Tolstoy was living throughout Tchehov's life, as Hardy has lived throughout our own, and these are great among the greatest. But they are not modern. It is an essential part of their greatness that they could not be; they have a simplicity and scope that manifestly belongs to all time rather than to this. Tchehov looked towards Tolstoy as we to Hardy. He saw in him a Colossus, one whose achievement was of another and a greater kind than his own.

'I am afraid of Tolstoy's death. If he were to die there would be a big empty place in my life. To begin with, because I have never loved any man as much as him…. Secondly, while Tolstoy is in literature it is easy and pleasant to be a literary man; even recognising that one has done nothing and never will do anything is not so dreadful, since Tolstoy will do enough for all. His work is the justification of the enthusiasms and expectations built upon literature. Thirdly, Tolstoy takes a firm stand; he has an immense authority, and so long as he is alive, bad tastes in literature, vulgarity of every kind, insolent and lachrymose, all the bristling, exasperated vanities will be in the far background, in the shade….'—(January, 1900.)

Tchehov was aware of the gulf that separated him from the great men before him, and he knew that it yawned so deep that it could not be crossed. He belonged to a new generation, and he alone perhaps was fully conscious of it. 'We are lemonade,' he wrote in 1892.

'Tell me honestly who of my contemporaries—that is, men between thirty and forty-five—have given the world one single drop of alcohol?… Science and technical knowledge are passing through a great period now, but for our sort it is a flabby, stale, dull time…. The causes of this are not to be found in our stupidity, our lack of talent, or our insolence, but in a disease which for the artist is worse than syphilis or sexual exhaustion. We lack "something," that is true, and that means that, lift the robe of our muse, and you will find within an empty void. Let me remind you that the writers who we say are for all time or are simply good, and who intoxicate us, have one common and very important characteristic: they are going towards something and are summoning you towards it, too, and you feel, not with your mind but with your whole being, that they have some object, just like the ghost of Hamlet's father, who did not come and disturb the imagination for nothing…. And we? We! We paint life as it is, but beyond that—nothing at all…. Flog us and we can do more! We have neither immediate nor remote aims, and in our soul there is a great empty space. We have no politics, we do not believe in revolution, we have no God, we are not afraid of ghosts, and I personally am not afraid even of death and blindness. One who wants nothing, hopes for nothing, and fears nothing cannot be an artist….

'… You think I am clever. Yes, I am at least so far clever as not to conceal from myself my disease and not to deceive myself, and not to cover up my own emptiness with other people's rags, such as the ideas of the 'sixties and so on.'

That was written in 1892. When we remember all the strange literary effort gathered round about that year in the West—Symbolism, the Yellow Book, Art for Art's sake—and the limbo into which it has been thrust by now, we may realise how great a precursor and, in his own despite, a leader, Anton Tchehov was. When Western literature was plunging with enthusiasm into one cul de sac after another, incapable of diagnosing its own disease, Tchehov in Russia, unknown to the West, had achieved a clear vision and a sense of perspective.

To-day we begin to feel how intimately Tchehov belongs to us; to-morrow we may feel how infinitely he is still in advance of us. A genius will always be in advance of a talent, and in so far as we are concerned with the genius of Tchehov we must accept the inevitable. We must analyse and seek to understand it; we must, above all, make up our minds that since Tchehov has written and his writings have been made accessible to us, a vast amount of our modern literary production is simply unpardonable. Writers who would be modern and ignore Tchehov's achievement are, however much they may persuade themselves that they are devoted artists, merely engaged in satisfying their vanity or in the exercise of a profession like any other; for Tchehov is a standard by which modern literary effort must be measured, and the writer of prose or poetry who is not sufficiently single-minded to apply the standard to himself is of no particular account.

Though Tchehov's genius is, strictly speaking, inimitable, it deserves a much exacter study than it has yet received. The publication of this volume of his letters[8] hardly affords the occasion for that; but it does afford an opportunity for the examination of some of the chief constituents of his perfect art. These touch us nearly because—we insist again—the supreme interest of Tchehov is that he is the only great modern artist in prose. He belongs, as we have said, to us. If he is great, then he is great not least in virtue of qualities which we may aspire to possess; if he is an ideal, he is an ideal to which we can refer ourselves, He had been saturated in all the disillusions which we regard as peculiarly our own, and every quality which is distinctive of the epoch of consciousness in which we are living now is reflected in him—and yet, miracle of miracles, he was a great artist. He did not rub his cheeks to produce a spurious colour of health; he did not profess beliefs which he could not maintain; he did not seek a reputation for universal wisdom, nor indulge himself in self-gratifying dreams of a millennium which he alone had the ability to control. He was and wanted to be nothing in particular, and yet, as we read these letters of his, we feel gradually form within ourselves the conviction that he was a hero—more than that, the hero of our time.

[Footnote 8: Letters of Anton Tchehov. Translated by Constance
Garnett (Chatto & Windus).]

It is significant that, in reading Tchehov's letters, we do not consider him under the aspect of an artist. We are inevitably fascinated by his character as a man, one who, by efforts which we have most frequently to divine for ourselves from his reticences, worked on the infinitely complex material of the modern mind and soul, and made it in himself a definite, positive, and most lovable thing. He did not throw in his hand in face of his manifold bewilderments; he did not fly for refuge to institutions in which he did not believe; he risked everything, in Russia, by having no particular faith in revolution and saying so. In every conjuncture of his life that we can trace in his letters he behaved squarely by himself and, since he is our great exemplar, by us. He refused to march under any political banner—a thing, let it be remembered, of almost inconceivable courage in his country; he submitted to savagely hostile attacks for his political indifference; yet he spent more of his life and energy in doing active good to his neighbour than all the high-souled professors of liberalism and social reform. He undertook an almost superhuman journey to Sahalin in 1890 to investigate the condition of the prisoners there; in 1892 he spent the best part of a year as a doctor devising preventive measures against the cholera in the country district where he lived, and, although he had no time for the writing on which his living depended, he refused the government pay in order to preserve his own independence of action; in another year he was the leading spirit in organising practical measures of famine relief about Nizhni-Novgorod. From his childhood to his death, moreover, he was the sole support of his family. Measured by the standards of Christian morality, Tchehov was wholly a saint. His self-devotion was boundless.

Yet we know he was speaking nothing less than the truth of himself when he wrote: 'It is essential to be indifferent.' Tchehov was indifferent; but his indifference, as a mere catalogue of his secret philanthropies will show, was of a curious kind. He made of it, as it were, an axiomatic basis of his own self-discipline. Since life is what it is and men are what they are, he seems to have argued, everything depends upon the individual. The stars are hostile, but love is kind, and love is within the compass of any man if he will work to attain it. In one of his earliest letters he defines true culture for the benefit of his brother Nikolay, who lacked it. Cultivated persons, he said, respect human personality; they have sympathy not for beggars and cats only; they respect the property of others, and therefore pay their debts; they are sincere and dread lying like fire; they do not disparage themselves to arouse compassion; they have no shallow vanity; if they have a talent they respect it; they develop the æsthetic feeling in themselves … they seek as far as possible to restrain and ennoble the sexual instinct. The letter from which these chief points are taken is tremulous with sympathy and wit. Tchehov was twenty-six when he wrote it. He concludes with the words: 'What is needed is constant work day and night, constant reading, study, will. Every hour is precious for it.'

In that letter are given all the elements of Tchehov the man. He set himself to achieve a new humanity, and he achieved it. The indifference upon which Tchehov's humanity was built was not therefore a moral indifference; it was, in the main, the recognition and acceptance of the fact that life itself is indifferent. To that he held fast to the end. But the conclusion which he drew from it was not that it made no particular difference what any one did, but that the attitude and character of the individual were all-important. There was, indeed, no panacea, political or religious, for the ills of humanity; but there could be a mitigation in men's souls. But the new asceticism must not be negative. It must not cast away the goods of civilisation because civilisation is largely a sham.

'Alas! I shall never be a Tolstoyan. In women I love beauty above all things, and in the history of mankind, culture expressed in carpets, carriages with springs, and keenness of wit. Ach! To make haste and become an old man and sit at a big table!'

Not that there is a trace of the hedonist in Tchehov, who voluntarily endured every imaginable hardship if he thought he could be of service to his fellow-men, but, as he wrote elsewhere, 'we are concerned with pluses alone.' Since life is what it is, its amenities are doubly precious. Only they must be amenities without humbug.

'Pharisaism, stupidity, and despotism reign not in bourgeois houses and prisons alone. I see them in science, in literature, in the younger generation…. That is why I have no preference either for gendarmes, or for butchers, or for scientists, or for writers, or for the younger generation. I regard trade marks and labels as a superstition. My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent inspiration, love, and the most absolute freedom—freedom from violence and lying, whatever forms they make take. This is the programme I would follow if I were a great artist.'

What 'the most absolute freedom' meant to Tchehov his whole life is witness. It was a liberty of a purely moral kind, a liberty, that is, achieved at the cost of a great effort in self-discipline and self-refinement. In one letter he says he is going to write a story about the son of a serf—Tchehov was the son of a serf—who 'squeezed the slave out of himself.' Whether the story was ever written we do not know, but the process is one to which Tchehov applied himself all his life long. He waged a war of extermination against the lie in the soul in himself, and by necessary implication in others also.

He was, thus, in all things a humanist. He faced the universe, but he did not deny his own soul. There could be for him no antagonism between science and literature, or science and humanity. They were all pluses; it was men who quarrelled among themselves. If men would only develop a little more loving-kindness, things would be better. The first duty of the artist was to be a decent man.

'Solidarity among young writers is impossible and unnecessary…. We cannot feel and think in the same way, our aims are different, or we have no aims whatever, we know each other little or not at all, and so there is nothing on to which this solidarity could be securely hooked…. And is there any need for it? No, in order to help a colleague, to respect his personality and work, to refrain from gossiping about him, envying him, telling him lies and being hypocritical, one does not need so much to be a young writer as simply a man…. Let us be ordinary people, let us treat everybody alike, and then we shall not need any artificially worked-up solidarity.'

It seems a simple discipline, this moral and intellectual honesty of Tchehov's, yet in these days of conceit and coterie his letters strike us as more than strange. One predominant impression remains: it is that of Tchehov's candour of soul. Somehow he has achieved with open eyes the mystery of pureness of heart; and in that, though we dare not analyse it further, lies the secret of his greatness as a writer and of his present importance to ourselves.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetrysoup.com/article/on_the_nature_of_virtue-551


On the Nature of Virtue
Written by: Percy Bysshe Shelley
CHAPTER I

SECT. 1. General View of the Nature and Objects of Virtue.—2. The Origin and Basis of Virtue, as founded on the Elementary Principles of Mind.—3. The Laws which flow from the nature of Mind regulating the application of those principles to human actions;—4. Virtue, a possible attribute of man.

We exist in the midst of a multitude of beings like ourselves, upon whose happiness most of our actions exert some obvious and decisive influence.


The regulation of this influence is the object of moral science. We know that we are susceptible of receiving painful or pleasurable impressions of greater or less intensity and duration. That is called good which produces pleasure; that is called evil which produces pain. These are general names, applicable to every class of causes, from which an overbalance of pain or pleasure may result. But when a human being is the active instrument of generating or diffusing happiness, the principle through which it is most effectually instrumental to that purpose, is called virtue. And benevolence, or the desire to be the author of good, united with justice, or an apprehension of the manner in which that good is to be done, constitutes virtue.

But wherefore should a man be benevolent and just? The immediate emotions of his nature, especially in its most inartificial state, prompt him to inflict pain, and to arrogate dominion. He desires to heap superfluities to his own store, although others perish with famine. He is propelled to guard against the smallest invasion of his own liberty, though he reduces others to a condition of the most pitiless servitude. He is revengeful, proud and selfish. Wherefore should he curb these propensities?

It is inquired, for what reason a human being should engage in procuring the happiness, or refrain from producing the pain of another? When a reason is required to prove the necessity of adopting any system of conduct, what is it that the objector demands? He requires proof of that system of conduct being such as will most effectually promote the happiness of mankind. To demonstrate this, is to render a moral reason. Such is the object of virtue.

A common sophism, which, like many others, depends on the abuse of a metaphorical expression to a literal purpose, has produced much of the confusion which has involved the theory of morals. It is said that no person is bound to be just or kind, if, on his neglect, he should fail to incur some penalty. Duty is obligation. There can be no obligation without an obliger. Virtue is a law, to which it is the will of the lawgiver that we should conform; which will we should in no manner be bound to obey, unless some dreadful punishment were attached to disobedience. This is the philosophy of slavery and superstition.

In fact, no person can be BOUND or OBLIGED, without some power preceding to bind and oblige. If I observe a man bound hand and foot, I know that some one bound him. But if I observe him returning self-satisfied from the performance of some action, by which he has been the willing author of extensive benefit, I do not infer that the anticipation of hellish agonies, or the hope of heavenly reward, has constrained him to such an act.

. . . . . . .

It remains to be stated in what manner the sensations which constitute the basis of virtue originate in the human mind; what are the laws which it receives there; how far the principles of mind allow it to be an attribute of a human being; and, lastly, what is the probability of persuading mankind to adopt it as a universal and systematic motive of conduct.
BENEVOLENCE

There is a class of emotions which we instinctively avoid. A human being, such as is man considered in his origin, a child a month old, has a very imperfect consciousness of the existence of other natures resembling itself. All the energies of its being are directed to the extinction of the pains with which it is perpetually assailed. At length it discovers that it is surrounded by natures susceptible of sensations similar to its own. It is very late before children attain to this knowledge. If a child observes, without emotion, its nurse or its mother suffering acute pain, it is attributable rather to ignorance than insensibility. So soon as the accents and gestures, significant of pain, are referred to the feelings which they express, they awaken in the mind of the beholder a desire that they should cease. Pain is thus apprehended to be evil for its own sake, without any other necessary reference to the mind by which its existence is perceived, than such as is indispensable to its perception. The tendencies of our original sensations, indeed, all have for their object the preservation of our individual being. But these are passive and unconscious. In proportion as the mind acquires an active power, the empire of these tendencies becomes limited. Thus an infant, a savage, and a solitary beast, is selfish, because its mind is incapable of receiving an accurate intimation of the nature of pain as existing in beings resembling itself. The inhabitant of a highly civilized community will more acutely sympathize with the sufferings and enjoyments of others, than the inhabitant of a society of a less degree of civilization. He who shall have cultivated his intellectual powers by familiarity with the highest specimens of poetry and philosophy, will usually sympathize more than one engaged in the less refined functions of manual labour. Every one has experience of the fact, that to sympathize with the sufferings of another, is to enjoy a transitory oblivion of his own.

The mind thus acquires, by exercise, a habit, as it were, of perceiving and abhorring evil, however remote from the immediate sphere of sensations with which that individual mind is conversant. Imagination or mind employed in prophetically imaging forth its objects, is that faculty of human nature on which every gradation of its progress, nay, every, the minutest, change, depends. Pain or pleasure, if subtly analysed, will be found to consist entirely in prospect. The only distinction between the selfish man and the virtuous man is, that the imagination of the former is confined within a narrow limit, whilst that of the latter embraces a comprehensive circumference. In this sense, wisdom and virtue may be said to be inseparable, and criteria of each other. Selfishness is the offspring of ignorance and mistake; it is the portion of unreflecting infancy, and savage solitude, or of those whom toil or evil occupations have blunted or rendered torpid; disinterested benevolence is the product of a cultivated imagination, and has an intimate connexion with all the arts which add ornament, or dignity, or power, or stability to the social state of man. Virtue is thus entirely a refinement of civilized life; a creation of the human mind; or, rather, a combination which it has made, according to elementary rules contained within itself, of the feelings suggested by the relations established between man and man.

All the theories which have refined and exalted humanity, or those which have been devised as alleviations of its mistakes and evils, have been based upon the elementary emotions of disinterestedness, which we feel to constitute the majesty of our nature. Patriotism, as it existed in the ancient republics, was never, as has been supposed, a calculation of personal advantages. When Mutius Scaevola thrust his hand into the burning coals, and Regulus returned to Carthage, and Epicharis sustained the rack silently, in the torments of which she knew that she would speedily perish, rather than betray the conspirators to the tyrant [Footnote: Tacitus.]; these illustrious persons certainly made a small estimate of their private interest. If it be said that they sought posthumous fame; instances are not wanting in history which prove that men have even defied infamy for the sake of good. But there is a great error in the world with respect to the selfishness of fame. It is certainly possible that a person should seek distinction as a medium of personal gratification. But the love of fame is frequently no more than a desire that the feelings of others should confirm, illustrate, and sympathize with, our own. In this respect it is allied with all that draws us out of ourselves. It is the 'last infirmity of noble minds'. Chivalry was likewise founded on the theory of self-sacrifice. Love possesses so extraordinary a power over the human heart, only because disinterestedness is united with the natural propensities. These propensities themselves are comparatively impotent in cases where the imagination of pleasure to be given, as well as to be received, does not enter into the account. Let it not be objected that patriotism, and chivalry, and sentimental love, have been the fountains of enormous mischief. They are cited only to establish the proposition that, according to the elementary principles of mind, man is capable of desiring and pursuing good for its own sake.
JUSTICE

The benevolent propensities are thus inherent in the human mind. We are impelled to seek the happiness of others. We experience a satisfaction in being the authors of that happiness. Everything that lives is open to impressions or pleasure and pain. We are led by our benevolent propensities to regard every human being indifferently with whom we come in contact. They have preference only with respect to those who offer themselves most obviously to our notice. Human beings are indiscriminating and blind; they will avoid inflicting pain, though that pain should be attended with eventual benefit; they will seek to confer pleasure without calculating the mischief that may result. They benefit one at the expense of many.

There is a sentiment in the human mind that regulates benevolence in its application as a principle of action. This is the sense of justice. Justice, as well as benevolence, is an elementary law of human nature. It is through this principle that men are impelled to distribute any means of pleasure which benevolence may suggest the communication of to others, in equal portions among an equal number of applicants. If ten men are shipwrecked on a desert island, they distribute whatever subsistence may remain to them, into equal portions among themselves. If six of them conspire to deprive the remaining four of their share, their conduct is termed unjust.

The existence of pain has been shown to be a circumstance which the human mind regards with dissatisfaction, and of which it desires the cessation. It is equally according to its nature to desire that the advantages to be enjoyed by a limited number of persons should be enjoyed equally by all. This proposition is supported by the evidence of indisputable facts. Tell some ungarbled tale of a number of persons being made the victims of the enjoyments of one, and he who would appeal in favour of any system which might produce such an evil to the primary emotions of our nature, would have nothing to reply. Let two persons, equally strangers, make application for some benefit in the possession of a third to bestow, and to which he feels that they have an equal claim. They are both sensitive beings; pleasure and pain affect them alike.







CHAPTER II

It is foreign to the general scope of this little treatise to encumber a simple argument by controverting any of the trite objections of habit or fanaticism. But there are two; the first, the basis of all political mistake, and the second, the prolific cause and effect of religious error, which it seems useful to refute.

First, it is inquired, 'Wherefore should a man be benevolent and just?' The answer has been given in the preceding chapter.

If a man persists to inquire why he ought to promote the happiness of mankind, he demands a mathematical or metaphysical reason for a moral action. The absurdity of this scepticism is more apparent, but not less real than the exacting a moral reason for a mathematical or metaphysical fact. If any person should refuse to admit that all the radii of a circle are of equal length, or that human actions are necessarily determined by motives, until it could be proved that these radii and these actions uniformly tended to the production of the greatest general good, who would not wonder at the unreasonable and capricious association of his ideas?

The writer of a philosophical treatise may, I imagine, at this advanced era of human intellect, be held excused from entering into a controversy with those reasoners, if such there are, who would claim an exemption from its decrees in favour of any one among those diversified systems of obscure opinion respecting morals, which, under the name of religions, have in various ages and countries prevailed among mankind. Besides that if, as these reasoners have pretended, eternal torture or happiness will ensue as the consequence of certain actions, we should be no nearer the possession of a standard to determine what actions were right and wrong, even if this pretended revelation, which is by no means the case, had furnished us with a complete catalogue of them. The character of actions as virtuous or vicious would by no means be determined alone by the personal advantage or disadvantage of each moral agent individually considered. Indeed, an action is often virtuous in proportion to the greatness of the personal calamity which the author willingly draws upon himself by daring to perform it. It is because an action produces an overbalance of pleasure or pain to the greatest number of sentient beings, and not merely because its consequences are beneficial or injurious to the author of that action, that it is good or evil. Nay, this latter consideration has a tendency to pollute the purity of virtue, inasmuch as it consists in the motive rather than in the consequences of an action. A person who should labour for the happiness of mankind lest he should be tormented eternally in Hell, would, with reference to that motive, possess as little claim to the epithet of virtuous, as he who should torture, imprison, and burn them alive, a more usual and natural consequence of such principles, for the sake of the enjoyments of Heaven.

My neighbour, presuming on his strength, may direct me to perform or to refrain from a particular action; indicating a certain arbitrary penalty in the event of disobedience within power to inflict. My action, if modified by his menaces, can no degree participate in virtue. He has afforded me no criterion as to what is right or wrong. A king, or an assembly of men, may publish a proclamation affixing any penalty to any particular action, but that is not immoral because such penalty is affixed. Nothing is more evident than that the epithet of virtue is inapplicable to the refraining from that action on account of the evil arbitrarily attached to it. If the action is in itself beneficial, virtue would rather consist in not refraining from it, but in firmly defying the personal consequences attached to its performance.

Some usurper of supernatural energy might subdue the whole globe to his power; he might possess new and unheard-of resources for enduing his punishments with the most terrible attributes or pain. The torments of his victims might be intense in their degree, and protracted to an infinite duration. Still the 'will of the lawgiver' would afford no surer criterion as to what actions were right or wrong. It would only increase the possible virtue of those who refuse to become the instruments of his tyranny.

II—MORAL SCIENCE CONSISTS IN CONSIDERING THE DIFFERENCE, NOT THE RESEMBLANCE, OF PERSONS

The internal influence, derived from the constitution of the mind from which they flow, produces that peculiar modification of actions, which makes them intrinsically good or evil.

To attain an apprehension of the importance of this distinction, let us visit, in imagination, the proceedings of some metropolis. Consider the multitude of human beings who inhabit it, and survey, in thought, the actions of the several classes into which they are divided. Their obvious actions are apparently uniform: the stability of human society seems to be maintained sufficiently by the uniformity of the conduct of its members, both with regard to themselves, and with regard to others. The labourer arises at a certain hour, and applies himself to the task enjoined him. The functionaries of government and law are regularly employed in their offices and courts. The trader holds a train of conduct from which he never deviates. The ministers of religion employ an accustomed language, and maintain a decent and equable regard. The army is drawn forth, the motions of every soldier are such as they were expected to be; the general commands, and his words are echoed from troop to troop. The domestic actions of men are, for the most part, undistinguishable one from the other, at a superficial glance. The actions which are classed under the general appellation of marriage, education, friendship, &c., are perpetually going on, and to a superficial glance, are similar one to the other.

But, if we would see the truth of things, they must be stripped of this fallacious appearance of uniformity. In truth, no one action has, when considered in its whole extent, any essential resemblance with any other. Each individual, who composes the vast multitude which we have been contemplating, has a peculiar frame of mind, which, whilst the features of the great mass of his actions remain uniform, impresses the minuter lineaments with its peculiar hues. Thus, whilst his life, as a whole, is like the lives of other men, in detail, it is most unlike; and the more subdivided the actions become; that is, the more they enter into that class which have a vital influence on the happiness of others and his own, so much the more are they distinct from those of other men.

Those little, nameless, unremembered acts Of kindness and of love,

as well as those deadly outrages which are inflicted by a look, a word—or less—the very refraining from some faint and most evanescent expression of countenance; these flow from a profounder source than the series of our habitual conduct, which, it has been already said, derives its origin from without. These are the actions, and such as these, which make human life what it is, and are the fountains of all the good and evil with which its entire surface is so widely and impartially overspread; and though they are called minute, they are called so in compliance with the blindness of those who cannot estimate their importance. It is in the due appreciating the general effects of their peculiarities, and in cultivating the habit of acquiring decisive knowledge respecting the tendencies arising out of them in particular cases, that the most important part of moral science consists. The deepest abyss of these vast and multitudinous caverns, it is necessary that we should visit.

This is the difference between social and individual man. Not that this distinction is to be considered definite, or characteristic of one human being as compared with another; it denotes rather two classes of agency, common in a degree to every human being. None is exempt, indeed, from that species of influence which affects, as it were, the surface of his being, and gives the specific outline to his conduct. Almost all that is ostensible submits to that legislature created by the general representation of the past feelings of mankind—imperfect as it is from a variety of causes, as it exists in the government, the religion, and domestic habits. Those who do not nominally, yet actually, submit to the same power. The external features of their conduct, indeed, can no more escape it, than the clouds can escape from the stream of the wind; and his opinion, which he often hopes he has dispassionately secured from all contagion of prejudice and vulgarity, would be found, on examination, to be the inevitable excrescence of the very usages from which he vehemently dissents. Internally all is conducted otherwise; the efficiency, the essence, the vitality of actions, derives its colour from what is no ways contributed to from any external source. Like the plant which while it derives the accident of its size and shape from the soil in which it springs, and is cankered, or distorted, or inflated, yet retains those qualities which essentially divide it from all others; so that hemlock continues to be poison, and the violet does not cease to emit its odour in whatever soil it may grow.

We consider our own nature too superficially. We look on all that in ourselves with which we can discover a resemblance in others; and consider those resemblances as the materials of moral knowledge. It is in the differences that it actually consists.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/articles/detail/91383

Essay
Light & Darkness
How Sharon Olds brought me back to writing.
By Maggie Smith


When my first child was born eight years ago, I stopped writing. I didn’t write a poem for the first year of her life. I was exhausted and anxious, and I held and bounced and swayed a colicky newborn all day. Who had time for poems? But even when my daughter began sleeping and I had some pockets of time, I was stuck. My life had changed completely, and I felt that the poems wanted to change—needed to change—but how?

I remember feeling that the very temperature of my life had risen. There was nothing “cool” about motherhood. It was hot and raw. It was full of blood and shit and milk and tears. It was equal parts light and darkness. I didn’t know how to write that. I was wary of writing what might be dismissed as “mommy poems,” wary of sentimentality.

I had a model for how to mother—I was lucky that way—but I needed poet models to show me how I might write the experience. I found them in Carrie Fountain, Brenda Shaughnessy, Rita Dove, Deborah Garrison, Beth Ann Fennelly, Arielle Greenberg, and Rachel Zucker. And, just when I needed her work the most, I rediscovered Sharon Olds.

“Prayer During a Time My Son Is Having Seizures” was published in Poetry in September 1983. It’s a poem I could have encountered in high school, in college, or in graduate school, long before becoming a mother. And perhaps if I’d read it before having my daughter, I wouldn’t have felt so paralyzed as a poet when she was born.

“Finally, I just lean on the door-frame, a / woman without belief, praying,” the poem begins. “Please don’t let anything happen to him.” From the first word, finally, we have a sense of what the mother-speaker and the son have already been through up to the moment of this utterance: the speaker, helpless and overwhelmed, prays despite her lack of faith. She prays because there’s nothing else to be done and because—as we say, hedging our bets—“it can’t hurt.”

I have been that woman. Who am I kidding? I am that woman. I now have two small children, both with asthma, and one whose fevers easily shoot past 105 degrees Fahrenheit when he’s fighting a virus. I’ve slept on the floor beside a crib or bed so I can hear their breathing. I’ve needed to believe in a god who could help, even though needing to believe is not the same as actually believing.

In “Prayer During a Time My Son Is Having Seizures,” as in my experience as a mother, the helplessness is doubled. The son, too, is helpless—falling again and again, sliding, drooling. I admire the momentum Olds generates in this poem, as the speaker names her darkest fears for the child, and I admire the different kinds of metaphors allowed to share space. First we have body and landscape—the jaw, the mountain, the bluff, the brain—but the natural imagery transitions to a suburban street, then to the circus, both play spaces for children. The violence grows from image to image:

Don’t let him stand there and his gold
jaw lock while he watches the burning
mountain falling slowly through his mind and
no word comes to him.



… Don’t hurt him, I cry out. …
don’t go up to his small dazzling
brain in spangles on the high wire
and push it off. There is no net.

Given the seizures, the motif of light and darkness makes perfect sense. We see it throughout: “his gold jaw,” the “burning mountain,” the “tiny amber cones already darkening,” the “dazzling brain in spangles,” the “dark holes” in the cereal, “the avenues of light.” Olds braids these threads together in the end of the poem, a terrible, beautiful moment that devastates me every time I read it:

I’ll change his dark radiant diapers, I’ll
scrape the blue mold that collects in the creases of his elbows,
I will sit with him in his room for the rest of my days,
I will have him on any terms.

What I attach to most in this poem isn’t its imagery or even its content; it’s how the poem is structured to give a sense of order in the face of chaos. The repetition of don’t—“don’t let him,” “don’t leave him,” “don’t hurt him”—ends with the shift “And yet.” Here the bargaining and pleading are over, replaced with the repetition of I’ll and I will, as we turn from what the speaker doesn’t want to have happen—but is helpless to stop—to what she is committed to do: “I will have him on any terms.” There is a sense of resignation but also resolve.


After not writing for the first year of my daughter’s life, I began again. But I did not write about motherhood directly—not right away. As I wrote the poems that would become my second book, The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison, I did not consider that perhaps I was using myth and persona and third-person narratives to hold that very raw material at arm’s length. By writing poems steeped in fairy tales and traditional folktales, I wrote about the anxieties of motherhood—and the dangers of childhood—without writing about my own personal experiences.

Turning to Sharon Olds, to poems such as “Prayer During a Time My Son Is Having Seizures,” gave me the permission and the courage to write my most intimate, vulnerable, and direct work yet. My recent poems, such as “Good Bones,” “At Your Age, I Wore a Darkness,” and “Stitches,” deal directly with my experience as a mother, from childbirth to child raising. These poems are full of milk and tears, light and darkness. For this I owe a debt to Sharon Olds.

Originally Published: November 28th, 2016

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/articles/detail/69841
Essay
100 Years of Poetry: May Swenson and the Life of Publication
Can visionary poetry be edited?
By Ange Mlinko

In December 1964, May Swenson wrote to the editor at Poetry, Henry Rago, with corrections to the proofs of her long, experimental poem “Gods. Children.” “I feel this to be quite an important poem for me. ...” the celebrated 51-year-old poet wrote. “... so I’m anxious for it to be right.” Swenson’s To Mix with Time: New and Selected Poems had just come out from Scribner’s the year before; she was a successful mid-career poet, known for formally adventurous lyricism, who knew she had to continue pushing boundaries. Swenson had appeared in Poetry reliably for 13 years, but this was to be her most ambitious poem to date in the magazine. When the poem appeared in print the following month, it was the oddest and most interesting work in the issue. The poem was a theogony, a vision of the birth of the cosmos, hinging on a grammatical uncertainty: “They ... ‘Are God’s…children.’ ... Are gods children?” Swinging between the Christian idiom and a pagan mishearing, Swenson imagines that a new Genesis unfolds every time a new human life comes to pass:

Worlds are their heads;
oceans infants’ serene eyes.

Blue and green they invented.

Leaves did not grow,
or the wind blow
until their spine
lifted like a tendril,
their tongue curled,
their hand made a sign.

The language mixes semantic fields ecstatically. References range from biology (“on the brain’s map fixed / a junction, Infinity”) to physics (“And made Measure, / and the dance of the Particles”). Humans are at once gods and children, who tragically cannot fly and yet must heroically name themselves. The poem teeters on a fulcrum of doubt and indeterminacy, expressed in the caesura between two possible readings of its title.

What did Henry Rago make of it? He does not say much. “Dear May, It is good to see some new poetry from you, especially a poem we like as much as GODS. CHILDREN. I enclose our official acceptance-notice.” He goes on to suggest a number of books she might consider for review.

May Swenson had a long career with Poetry magazine, stretching from 1951 to her death in 1989, and the tone of her correspondence with her editors changed with the mores of each era. In the early to mid- ’60s, she and Rago stood on ceremony with each other. Each letter danced politely between invitation and bargaining: Will you consider these poems? By the way—congratulations on your new book. Thank you for your recent poems; we will take two and also, might you review for us? Henry Rago took over the editorship of Poetry in 1955 and would stay at the helm until his death in 1969. Swenson’s later correspondence with editors Daryl Hine and John Frederick Nims trades jokes and gossip, but arguably she published her most ambitious poems in Poetry under the stewardship of Henry Rago, who maintained a splendidly distant courtesy. Perhaps it was because these poems were ambitious in their attempt to marry science and theology. Rago himself was a poet of theological ambitions, whose later teaching at the University of Chicago would cover the nexus between poetry and religion. Rago—who also published Black Mountain, New York School, and Deep Image poets during the era of so-called “poetry wars” between traditionalists and avant-gardes—gave Swenson freedom. Perhaps we should speak of poetry curating rather than poetry editing: Rago seemed to trust Swenson's mind.

When Swenson returned her proof of “Gods. Children.” she submitted some corrections to the punctuation, simultaneously deferential and faintly chiding: “I’m glad that you are finally finding space for it. This poem has been with you so long (since March ’64) that I have meanwhile given it some revision—chiefly in the punctuation—and have indicated this on the proof. If you must charge me for these small changes, do so.” At the end of the letter, she writes, “Incidentally, was your latest book published in 1964? If so, I am going to ask to read it for the National Book Award....”

Was this added question meant to soften her the tone of her complaint? He begins his next letter by thanking her for her interest in his book, then goes on to the meat of the matter:

Alas, Poetry has to charge for author’s revisions, once a poem is set in galley. It would be wrong of me to interfere with a financial policy so long established. ... (The interval since March 23, by the way, is not unduly long. Our acceptance-notices, possibly the one you received, used to say that the usual time between acceptance and publication was at least eight months. ...) All my best greetings to you as ever, especially for your Christmas.

These delicate rhetorical moves surrounding the public emergence of “Gods. Children.” seem incongruous with the primal energies of the poem itself, a poem that defies the rules of rational discourse. Rago’s discretion can look on the one hand like matter-of-fact professionalism, or it could be a sign of deference to poetry's authentic source in inspiration. Swenson's more vatic poems seemed to attest to a higher power—not God but a demiurgical power of making that lay with the poet entirely.

This power isn't rule-based—such poems can take any number of forms. “His Suicide,” another visionary poem Swenson sent to Rago in 1966, took a radical turn between submission and publication. “Are you interested in any of these five poems on ‘timely topics’?” she wrote, with her usual lack of preliminaries. “As you see, I am moving into areas rather far from the tight lyric—for ‘The Times they are A-Changing.’…”

In the first version of “His Suicide,” a dying man’s story is parceled out in neat tercets with lines of even length, while the published version, which sprawls across the page in lines and stanzas of wildly differing lengths. The difference in attitude is tremendous. The unpublished version of the poem looks too conventional for the violence its language is trying to contain:

He looked down at his withering body
and saw a hair near his navel, swaying,
And now he saw his other hairs rise up.

He felt a hectic current in his veins.
Looking within, he saw the bubbling
of his blood. He cursed his fever,

saying: “It is the chemistry of prayer.
It increases in frequency, seeding
panic to all my being. My cells swell

with the liquid of guilt they fabricate,
juices of hatred eat my belly, my
corpuscles make war in me as they devour

each other. My head heats in the
combustion of anxiety, I am polluted
by the secretions of my soul's decay,

while my brain wears away with the
scratching night and day on the
encephalograph of prayer. I grow

monstrous with the leukemia of the world.”

And here it is in its published form. Note that this version has all of the same words in the same order as the original, but the line breaks and stanza breaks have changed dramatically:

He looked down at his withering body and saw a hair
near his navel, swaying.

And now he saw his other hairs rise up.

He felt a hectic current in his veins.
Looking within, he saw the bubbling of his blood.

He cursed his fever, saying:
“It is the chemistry of prayer.
It increases in frequency,
seeding panic to all my being.
My cells swell with the liquid of guilt they fabricate,
juices of hatred eat my belly,
my corpuscles make war in me as they devour each other.
My head heats in the combustion of anxiety,
I am polluted by the secretions of my soul's decay,
while my brain wears away
with the scratching night and day
on the encephalograph of prayer.
I grow monstrous with the leukemia of the world.”

Swenson’s obvious struggle with form in “His Suicide” casts light on why many poets think free verse is the most difficult kind to write well. At first, the visionary and dramatic nature of Swenson’s poem may have prompted a reflex to fit the poem into tercets.

But the tercets were seemingly imposed by fiat rather than naturally flowing. Violent enjambments in the original version (such as “my / corpuscles” and “with the / scratching night”), enacting the violence of the suicide, break the rules for good tercets. In other words, this was a modern poem (“the times they are a-changing”) badly fitted into overly formal attire. Swenson dropped the pattern, allowing the lines to flow according to colloquial rhythms and natural syntactic pauses with the occasional manipulation (as in the decay/away/day rhyme) to quicken the emotion. Given the visionary quality, even difficulty, of its subject, the reading experience is enhanced by this looseness: metaphors such as “while my brain wears away with the / scratching night and day on the / encephalograph of prayer” become the central focus.

The novelty of such a metaphor must have been as jarring in 1966 as Eliot's evening “like a patient etherized upon a table” in 1915. Perhaps encouraged by Rago's acceptance of these strange, vatic science poems, Swenson continued in this vein and two years later wrote to her editor: “Under a Rockefeller grant I have been working on a series of poems with subjects from science, and the enclosed are a few of the results.” Among them was the 92-line “The DNA Molecule,” possibly the best poem she published in her whole career with Poetry. It begins with a meditation on Marcel Duchamp’s cubist painting “Nude Descending a Staircase”: while Duchamp dissects the motion of a woman either ascending or descending spiral steps, Swenson dissects the figure of a double helix with its four amino acids, suggesting that a model of the double helix as tall as the Empire State Building might help us ascertain the enormity of the meaning this molecule has for us. She pictures herself as the nude ascending and descending this superstructure, and taking on its power:

The Nude has “the capacity for replication
and transcription” of all genesis.

She ingests and regurgitates
the genetic material it being

the material of her own cell-self.
From single she becomes double and

from double single.

Swenson creates a kind of self-portrait as artist-goddess: it is herself she describes, the maker of worlds, doubling herself and becoming single again, bringing the heights of Modernist achievement in art and science into her vortex.

Finally the poem makes another leap, from the poet’s head, where she is like Wallace Stevens in his Tea at the Palaz of Hoon (“I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw / Or heard or felt came not but from myself”), to a world apart from the author in which she witnesses a butterfly hatching. As Swenson ecstatically, yet precisely, describes the tiny event, the principle of recycled life links modernity with our ancient religious past:

On each wing I saw a large blue eye

open forever in the expression of resurrection.
The new Nude released the flanges of her wings

stretching herself to touch
at all points the outermost rim of the noõsphere.

I saw that for her body from which the wings expanded
she had retained the worm.

Astonishingly, Swenson manages to see the Empire State Building in the tiniest nude butterfly “stretching herself to touch/ at all points the outermost rim” like a skyscraper. And for “she had retained the worm,” we can also read a triumphant “she had retained the form.” “Worm”is an ancient figure for the poetic line (even in French, the word for worm, ver, is homonymous with vers, verse). For Swenson, the fact that we retain our worm/form through the metamorphoses of history is a basic expression of our immortality—and a cause for optimism and joy.

Henry Rago wrote to Swenson: “I’ve been much interested in this new packet and have enjoyed such a rich choice. Two that we like especially on every reading are ‘Earth Will Not Let Go’ and ‘The DNA Molecule.’ I am keeping them for POETRY. Our more formal acceptance-notice is enclosed.”

Swenson would continue to publish with Poetry after Rago’s untimely death by heart attack in 1969, at the age of 53. But something about the tenor of her work changed over the next few decades. Some might say she loosened up. In a 1979 letter to then-editor John Frederick Nims, she joked familiarly, “Thanks for the warning that The Pope will follow in my footsteps Oct. 4-5-6 in Chicago. I might have mistaken the crowds for fans of mine otherwise.” A year earlier, she had published the playfully casual “Fashion in the 70s”:

Like, everyone wants to look black
in New York these days.
Faces with black lenses, black
frames around the eyes,
faces framed in black
beards. Afros on all the blacks—
beautiful. But like,
everyone looks puff-headed.

If this social commentary bears little relation to Swenson’s existential, intense early work, it does point in the direction her later work was to take: more conversational, more mundane, and more humorous. One of her last books, In Other Words (1987), showcases this late style. It is still concerned with nature and wonder, as were her first books, but the tone is down-to-earth, engaged, and warm; the typographic experiments have given way to chatty blank verse. Perhaps this bears out the influence of Swenson’s friend Elizabeth Bishop, for whom Swenson wrote the elegy “In the Bodies of Words”:

Sky is clearest blue because so cold. Birds drop down
in the dappled yard: white breast of nuthatch, slate
catbird, cardinal the color of blood.

The emphasis throughout is, as in many of Bishop’s poems, on what the eye can see rather than what the inner eye beholds. Swenson’s former striving to integrate natural science and the poet’s insights are a thing of the past, a relic of a time where utopian optimism was at its height, and authority could be conceded to a visionary who wrote “Science and poetry are alike, or allied, it seems to me, in their largest and main target—to investigate any and all phenomena of experience beyond the flat surface of appearances.” (Made with Words, 96) In the spring of 2013, as the 100th anniversary of Swenson’s birth approaches, the Library of America will publish a long-awaited May Swenson: Collected Poems. As her oeuvre comes into clearer focus, it will be interesting to see whether the period coinciding with “Gods. Children.” and “The DNA Molecule” represents her most idiosyncratic and compelling contribution to American poetry. If so, her editorial relationship with Henry Rago, whose theological orientation made him a sympathetic audience for her demiurgic ambitions, will merit a closer look.


______________

The published and unpublished versions of Swenson’s “His Suicide” are reprinted with permission of the Literary Estate of May Swenson. All rights reserved. Letters of May Swenson and Henry Rago courtesy, the Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. Permission to quote from the letters of May Swenson courtesy oftThe Literary Estate of May Swenson. Permission to quote from the letters of Henry Rago courtesy of the Literary Estate of Henry Rago.

Originally Published: September 11th, 2012

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/articles/detail/68441

Essay
“If You Read, You'll Judge”
In the world of poetry, "best" is a fighting word.
By Joshua Weiner
Introduction
What makes a poem one of the best? Anthologists have been arguing that question since 60 B.C. Can the latest round in the fight—a polite brawl between Garrison Keillor in one corner, August Kleinzahler in the other, with heavyweight champ Harold Bloom looking on—provide any answers? Joshua Weiner reports from ringside.

Some of the most interesting items in Kurt Cobain’s journals are the lists he compiled of the bands, albums, and individual songs he considered the best. Making lists was a consistent preoccupation of Cobain’s, one that complemented his work on the songs for Nirvana that even the most casual listener to popular music in the 1990s would recognize. The lists comprise a kind of table of contents to a personal anthology of music, compelling for what it suggests about Cobain, naturally, but also for the musical map it makes both of Cobain's own moment and of the reachable past, with which he felt a strong continuity. “If you read / you’ll judge,” he wrote on the cover of one of his spiral notebooks—the extremity of the confessional content, one imagines; but it also points to the lists: history mediated by taste, taste determined by history. If you read, you’ll judge. It’s a phrase suitable as epigraph to any serious poetry anthology published in the last 45 years.

When we read a list, on what do we pass judgment? On the list maker, to be sure, as Cobain foresaw (Blue Oyster Cult’s “Kick Out the Jams,” but no MC5? What’s wrong with you!); also ourselves (What don’t I know? Am I just a receptacle of received opinion?). And what are we judging in the list maker and, by extension, in ourselves? Two things, I think—personal taste and perception of history. We all have our personal lists of what we like best (taste) because we think it an example of the best of its kind (history). When a list goes public with the intention of establishing claims on our attention and gaining our approval, we become participants in the struggle of forming canons. And in the world of poetry, such struggles are ongoing, strange, and sometimes fierce.

Canons, of course, imply an orthodoxy, which indicates consensus and scriptural immunity. Yet because they exist historically, and because history is a dynamic process, canons do change, however slowly: the Torah changes through Talmudic debate; the U.S. Constitution gains amendments, which are later interpreted and reinterpreted. Canon formation is conservative by nature because consensus takes time; once consensus is established, however, change takes place only through some kind of radical force. In a democratic culture, literary canons are formed and radically challenged within generations. Such is modernity.

One thinks, for example, of how T.S. Eliot and his disciples reinserted Renaissance poets of metaphysical wit into the canon of English poetry; then, how a later generation of scholars reacted against Eliot by reclaiming the Romantics from his disparagement; how a generation of aesthetically radical poets including Robert Creeley and Robert Duncan held onto fascist, elitist Ezra Pound despite his growing disfavor in the academy; and how poets, scholars, publishers, and readers who came of age in the 1950s and '60s opened the canon to include more women and minorities. It didn’t just happen; people fought it out in the public arena of ideas—sometimes in a magazine such as Partisan Review, sometimes in a salon, sometimes in a saloon.

It’s an argument that’s been going on for decades, even centuries, perhaps as early as 90 B.C., around the time that Meleager of Gadara gathered up bouquets of poetry by Archilochus and others to weave his Garland; certainly as early as 1861, when Francis Palgrave published his Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language. The latest such controversy has swirled around the April 2004 issue of Poetry magazine, with its positive/negative tag-team review by Dana Gioia and August Kleinzahler, respectively, of Garrison Keillor’s anthology, Good Poems (Viking, 2002). While Gioia considers the anthology surprisingly good for its modest claims, and, due to Keillor’s influence as a media personality, an effective vehicle for introducing readers to poetry, Kleinzahler deems it hardly good enough, and worse. While Kleinzahler acknowledges that the book contains good poems (by familiars such as Whitman, Dickinson, and Burns, as well as contemporaries such as C.K. Williams and Anne Porter), he objects to the predominance of poetry written in a generic free verse driven by anecdote and steeped in a wistful tone.

Kleinzahler hates the cultural church, ministered by Keillor, that promotes poetry as a kind of blessing, valuable because it “is of use,” in Keillor’s belief, “it gives value.” Kleinzahler finds such sentimentality obnoxious, a kind of boosterism that results in bad art. “Are we not yet adult enough as a culture to acknowledge that the arts are not for everyone, and that bad art is worse than no art at all; and that good or bad, art’s exclusive function is to entertain, not to improve or nourish or console, simply to entertain.”

So what are the best poems? One can gain a sense of how loaded that question is by tracking the evasive maneuvers of each guest editor of Best American Poetry (Scribner), an annual publication edited by David Lehman and his chosen collaborator for that year. Since the series’ inauguration in 1988, its changing editorial cast has consistently ducked out from under the explicit claim announced in the series’ title. Not the best, we’re told, but among the better ones; or representing the best (in a kind of curious synecdoche); or indicating the various modes in which the best poems currently are written. Evaluative judgments of the contemporary appear particularly fraught, because the best poems in the language are those that most readers of poetry share with each other most often (that’s how the canon is formed over time), and the newest poems have seen the fewest opportunities for such sharing.

Not even Harold Bloom, so sure of his judgments regarding “the aesthetic,” stakes sure ground in his culling of the decade, The Best of the Best American Poetry 1988-1998. “There are still authentic poems being written in the United States,” claims Bloom, and, he suggests, maybe some of them are even in this book. This rhetorical circling of the aesthetic wagons, Bloom admits, was provoked by Adrienne Rich’s 1996 edition of the same series, a volume he claims, “of a badness not to be believed, because it follows the criteria now operative: what matters most are the race, gender, sexual orientation, ethnic origin, and political purpose of the would-be-poet.” In making this point Bloom ignores that the argument over what’s best often has as much to do with who gets to choose, and whom the editor believes is listening.

In editing Best American Poetry 1996, Rich was listening, herself, she writes, “for poetry that could rouse me from fatigue, stir me from grief, poetry that was redemptive in the sense of offering a kind of deliverance or rescue of the imagination, and poetry that awoke delight—lip-to-lip, spark-to-spark, pleasure in recognition, pleasure in strangeness.” Rich’s echoing of Bloom’s desire for authenticity suggests that Bloom is misreading her, yet it is also true that Rich’s aesthetic value in poetry expresses her interest “in any poet’s acknowledgement of the social and political loomings of this time-space—that history goes on and we are in it.” Would Bloom's beloved Blake, and Rich's for that matter, disagree that such poems are necessary?

And so, one is left, as one is always left, with the enduring question, “Which be those?” and the corresponding rejoinder, “Sez who?” (One hears, too, an incisive voice speaking up from the back, to ask “Best for whom, and for what purposes?”) Backing away from the contemporary scene, Bloom’s answer is available and explicit; one finds it in his anthology, The Best Poems of the English Language (HarperCollins, 2004).

Bloom’s argument for what constitutes “the best” is richly suggestive and audaciously self-serving. For Bloom, figurative language, a turning from the literal, is the essential element of poetry. Figuration creates meaning—meaning, in fact, could not exist without it—and, in great poetry, an overflow of meaning creates a condition of newness. Upon encountering such a creation of newness, a reader becomes possessed by it, which we feel as a desire for deep identification with the poem. This excessive overflowing element is the sublime in poetry, according to Bloom. “Greatness in poetry,” he writes, “depends upon splendor of figurative language and on cognitive power, or what Emerson termed ‘meter-making argument.’” Such poetic power “so fuses thinking and remembering that we cannot separate the two processes.” In addition to figuration, great poetry is highly allusive, according to Bloom, and great poems are in a continual correspondence with the literary past. The logic, then, is clear: if the best poems are allusive, then not only reading them but even being able to recognize them requires that a reader become familiar with the literary past. And what better way to become familiar with that past than to read Bloom’s anthology?

It would be wrong, though, to view the implications of Bloom’s logic too cynically: there are certainly other ways to encounter the literary past, but they all involve the same activity, reading and rereading; and there’s no better place to start, or to continue, than Bloom’s big book. Bloom is on an educational mission, but his temple of poetry is closer to Kleinzahler’s fun house than Keillor’s cultural church or, for that matter, Billy Collins’s adequate high school that he envisions in Poetry 180 (Random House, 2003). For Bloom, as for Kleinzahler, poetry is one of the fine arts; it’s demanding on the reader, but its rigors are joyful.

The poems that he finds most joyful are those that make the most enormous demands on him, the particular demands of “an absolute cognitive music.” He hears such music in, for example, Hart Crane’s “minstrel galleons of Carib fire” that “bequeath us to no neatly shore until/Is answered in the vortex of our grave/The seal’s wide spindrift gaze toward paradise” ("Voyages II"). From such music, one encounters a strangeness, “the true mode of expanding consciousness.” Valuing a poem for making the world strange stands against Keillor’s homely interest in poems that return to the reader “clear pictures of the familiar.” Bloom delights in this Romantic paradox—that in making the world unfamiliar, a poem leads a reader to a dwelling place, a site of recognition, where (he quotes Stevens) “I found myself more truly and more strange.”

Among the champion anthology battles, Bloom’s towers in the ring, fit competition for a classroom killer such as the Norton Anthology of Poetry, as well as superseding old sluggers such as Oscar Williams’s Immortal Poems (Simon & Schuster, 1952). But if Bloom stays fit and trim in his choices by cutting the uncertain calories and capricious fat of contemporary poetry altogether, it comes at a cost: any poet born in the 20th century.

Curiously, Bloom’s toughest competition is hardly the exercise of an individual sensibility: William Harmon’s The Top 500 Poems (Columbia, 1992). Where Bloom makes choices, Harmon counts statistics, presenting the poems most often included by 400 contemporary editors in their own anthologies. The list, drawn from the Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry, establishes its authority by virtue of its collective anonymity: these are the poems a variety of professionals have shared with a reading public, as indicated through the bibliographic science of indexing. Between Bloom’s 372 poems and Harmon’s 500 lies a common set of 120 poems, a kind of ultimate anthology, the bestest of the best, although it’s difficult to imagine any reader of poetry not wanting the other 632. While Bloom may have the heights on this territory, Harmon clearly has the numbers; yet both are facing the same direction of history despite the 18 poets Harmon includes born between 1902 (Langston Hughes) and 1932 (Sylvia Plath).

That’s a crucial 30 year period, however, one that alters the map of gained territory for poetry in the twentieth century. Two recent anthologies attempt to address this historical achievement: one—Joseph Parisi’s 100 Essential Modern Poems (Ivan R. Dee, 2005)—by restricting contents to English language poems; and the other—Mark Strand’s 100 Great Poems of the Twentieth Century (Norton, 2005)—by including translations from a dozen other languages. Of the two, Strand’s selections are the more personal and eclectic, and thus the more interesting, though his argument for them slides by on a sheet of vague: “They are poems that I have continued to feel strongly about over the years and that for one reason or another will not allow themselves to be forgotten or pushed aside by more recent poems . . . In vastly different ways, they provide us with what experiencing that century was like.” Strand is bland, but fair enough. His criteria pass because of his status as a notable contemporary poet: we are interested in the collection not just for what it maps out, but, as with Kurt Cobain’s lists, for who’s drawing up the charts. If Strand’s taste, his perception of history, is poorly reasoned, it is also sharply intuited. And his anthology skirts some sink holes that Parisi’s book hits: by claiming his choices “great” (as opposed to “essential”), Strand signals that he’s harvesting from a wide field; by defining his historical period in the most straightforward manner, he avoids the abysmal difficulty of defining “modernism” per se, and whatever you choose to call the period following it. At the same time, Strand suggests a significant aspect of aesthetic modernism, generally—its internationalism—and by doing so introduces and returns readers to a broad set of influences on English language poetry all too easily lost sight of. (Anna Akhmatova, Yehuda Amichai, Borges, Aimé Césaire, Robert Desnos, Nazim Hikmet, Jorge de Lima, Eugenio Montale, Dan Pagis, Octavio Paz, George Seferis, and Tomas Tranströmer, among others).

Parisi, on the other hand, plucks the historical string of the “essential” in his title, only to retune it in his introduction, writing that his choice of 100 poems “may be justly called essential in that they deal with the most fundamental issues everyone eventually faces.” As a definition, this will do no better, one feels, than Parisi’s wish to view the poems as “modern, in the broadest sense.” One appreciates the predicament of working with such terms, though it seems to confuse the purpose of a smart and serviceable gathering; why announce that you’ll present poems essentially modern and essential to understanding the modern, if you’re going to sidestep both critical issues? If Parisi’s claims are more specific than Strand’s, they are not more persuasive. Between them, though, you’ll find some great poems, such as A. R. Ammons’s “The City Limits,” Marianne Moore’s “The Fish,” Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill,” and W.D. Snodgrass’s “April Inventory.” Where Strand picks Auden’s “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” one of the great modern elegies in English, Parisi picks, among others, “Musée des Beaux Arts,” one of the more memorable poems in the language on the occasion of looking at a painting. Where Strand picks Elizabeth Bishop’s “In the Waiting Room,” a great memory poem about self-recognition in childhood, Parisi picks the disarming villanelle, “One Art,” a poem of mature self-reflection, self-reproach, and urgency. Where Strand picks Wallace Stevens’ “Postcard from the Volcano,” Parisi picks the more anthologized chestnuts, “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” “Sunday Morning,” and “Anecdote of the Jar.” In such choices, however, Parisi suggests that his sense of “the essential” in fact corresponds more closely to a perception of the canon, that his “essential” poems are not essential simply for addressing essentially common human concerns: Stevens is a canonical modern poet, and Parisi’s picks are in keeping with a general consensus among anthologists regarding individual titles. Likewise, Parisi’s inclusion of Frank O’Hara’s “The Day Lady Died” and “Why I Am Not a Painter” appear closer to the center of consensus than Strand’s choice, “To the Film Industry in Crisis,” also by O’Hara.

Between Parisi’s 100 “essential modern” poems and Bloom’s “best” 97 “modern” poems, there are only ten poets common to both; and within that set, one finds in common only five poems (Yeats’s “The Second Coming,” Stevens’s “Sunday Morning,” William Carlos Williams’s “Spring and All,” Crane’s “To Brooklyn Bridge,” and Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”). "Prufrock," in fact, turns out to be the best, most essential, great, top, favorite poem in English of the twentieth century, appearing in Bloom’s Best, both Harmon’s Top 500 Poems and his follow-up, The Classic Hundred Poems (Columbia, 1998), Robert Pinsky and Maggie Dietz’s America’s Favorite Poems (Norton, 2000), the American Poetry & Literacy Project’s 101 Great American Poems (Dover, 1998) and The Nation’s Favourite Poems (BBC, 1996). If anecdotal evidence serves, I routinely teach undergraduates who, given the choice of memorizing any poem of any length in the monumental Norton Anthology, roll up their trousers and dare to commit to memory 131 lines of an ironized, enervated, solipsistic love song, a love song which nonetheless speaks to them powerfully, even hypnotically, of their own indecision, jadedness, and abject inability “to say just what I mean!” Fortunately for my students, they’ve paid no attention to John Hollander’s Committed to Memory (Riverhead, 1997), which recommends many fine poems to memorize, but which does not list “Prufrock” among them. One notes, too, “Prufrock’s” conspicuous absence from Bartletts’ Poems for Occasions (Little, Brown, 2004), edited by Geoffrey O’Brien, which claims to collect “the world’s greatest poems, organized for every occasion, public and private, from birth to death and everything in between.” Apparently, “Prufrock” is not a good poem to recite at birthday or retirement parties. Coffee? Peach?

Originally Published: February 27th, 2006

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/etel-adnan

Biography Poems, Articles & More
Discover this author’s context.


Etel Adnan
Poet Details
b. 1925
Poet, essayist, and painter Etel Adnan was born in Beirut, Lebanon. The daughter of a Greek Christian mother and a Syrian Muslim father, she spoke both Greek and Arabic with her parents, but French became her primary language upon enrolling in a French Lebanese Catholic school at the age of five. While working for the French Information Bureau, she attended at the Ecole Supérieure de Lettres de Beyrouth, where she composed her first poems. Adnan also studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, the University of California at Berkeley, and Harvard University.

Adnan taught philosophy at San Rafael’s Dominican College from 1958 to 1972, where, in connection with the ongoing Algerian war of independence, she began to resist the political implications of writing in French. To address this conflict, she shifted the focus of her creative expression to visual art and began making abstract oil paintings. In response to the Vietnam War, Adnan began to write poems again, though in English rather than French. She moved back to Lebanon to become the cultural editor of the new French-language newspaper Al-Safa. After the Lebanese civil war began, Adnan moved to Paris, where she wrote the novel Sitt Marie Rose (1977), which won the France-Pays Arabes Award. Composed in French and since translated into several languages, the novel examines the intersection of gender and politics. In 1979 Adnan returned to California.

Influenced by Rimbaud, Lyn Hejinian, and Jalal Toufic, Adnan’s poetry incorporates surrealist imagery and powerful metaphorical leaps with language-based and formal experimentation, using unexpected and experimental techniques to address the nature of exile and political, social, and gender-based injustice. Adnan is the author of numerous books of prose and poetry, and is also a painter, sculptor, and weaver whose art has been exhibited internationally. Her collections of poetry include Seasons (2008); There: In the Light and the Darkness of the Self and the Other (1997); The Spring Flowers Own & Manifestations of the Voyage (1990); The Indian Never Had a Horse (1985); and Moonshots (1966).

In addition to Sitt Marie Rose, Adnan’s prose includes Of Cities and Women (Letters to Fawwaz) (1993), a series of letters on feminism that Adnan wrote to exiled Arab intellectual Fawwaz Traboulsi; Paris, When It’s Naked (1993); and Master of the Eclipse (2009), winner of the Arab American Book Award.

The cultural and critical context of Adnan’s work is discussed in Etel Adnan: Critical Essays on the Arab-American Writer and Artist (2002, edited by Lisa Suhair Majaj and Amal Amireh). Women Playwrights International honors Adnan with its annual Etel Adnan Award for Women Playwrights.

Adnan has been the president of RAWI: Radius of Arab-American Writers Incorporated. She lives in Sausalito and Paris with her partner, the artist and writer Simone Fattal, who first translated Sitt Marie Rose into English.


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Poems, Articles & More
Discover this poet's context and related poetry, articles, and media.
Poems by Etel Adnan
from The Manifestations of the Voyage
from The Spring Flowers Own: “The morning after / my death”
from The Spring Flowers Own: “This unfinished business of my / childhood”
XLIV from The Arab Apocalypse
XXXIX from The Arab Apocalypse

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https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/53851

from The Spring Flowers Own: “The morning after / my death”

By Etel Adnan

The morning after
my death
we will sit in cafés
but I will not
be there
I will not be


*


There was the great death of birds
the moon was consumed with
fire
the stars were visible
until noon.


Green was the forest drenched
with shadows
the roads were serpentine


A redwood tree stood
alone
with its lean and lit body
unable to follow the
cars that went by with
frenzy
a tree is always an immutable
traveller.


The moon darkened at dawn
the mountain quivered
with anticipation
and the ocean was double-shaded:
the blue of its surface with the
blue of flowers
mingled in horizontal water trails
there was a breeze to
witness the hour


*


The sun darkened at the
fifth hour of the
day
the beach was covered with
conversations
pebbles started to pour into holes
and waves came in like
horses.


*


The moon darkened on Christmas eve
angels ate lemons
in illuminated churches
there was a blue rug
planted with stars
above our heads
lemonade and war news
competed for our attention
our breath was warmer than
the hills.


*


There was a great slaughter of
rocks of spring leaves
of creeks
the stars showed fully
the last king of the Mountain
gave battle
and got killed.


We lay on the grass
covered dried blood with our
bodies
green blades swayed between
our teeth.


*


We went out to sea
a bank of whales was heading
South
a young man among us a hero
tried to straddle one of the
sea creatures
his body emerged as a muddy pool
as mud
we waved goodbye to his remnants
happy not to have to bury
him in the early hours of the day


We got drunk in a barroom
the small town of Fairfax
had just gone to bed
cherry trees were bending under the
weight of their flowers:
they were involved in a ceremonial
dance to which no one
had ever been invited.


*


I know flowers to be funeral companions
they make poisons and venoms
and eat abandoned stone walls


I know flowers shine stronger
than the sun
their eclipse means the end of
times


but I love flowers for their treachery
their fragile bodies
grace my imagination’s avenues


without their presence
my mind would be an unmarked
grave.


*


We met a great storm at sea
looked back at the
rocking cliffs
the sand was going under
black birds were
leaving
the storm ate friends and foes
alike
water turned into salt for
my wounds.


*


Flowers end in frozen patterns
artificial gardens cover
the floors
we get up close to midnight
search with powerful lights
the tiniest shrubs on the
meadows
A stream desperately is running to
the ocean
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http://therumpus.net/2014/09/to-look-at-the-sea-is-to-become-what-one-is-by-etel-adnan/

To look at the sea is to become what one is by Etel Adnan

Reviewed By Patrick James Dunagan

September 10th, 2014

I’m always surprised by the freshness of perspective to be found in Etel Adnan’s work. Born in 1925, she’s approaching her ninetieth year yet her writing continually experiences rebirth by way of ever new juxtaposition of idea and image. She relentlessly pursues a truth that isn’t over delineated by any set expectation or otherwise predetermined endpoint. It is instead set by the perception of the immediate act of writing itself. Her work remains explorative in nature: asking questions rather than representing any fixed display of talent or skill. She probes the means and measures of our common understanding, testing the bounds of what’s real. To read her work is to take part in a constant process of discovery that is at once beautifully startling, if at times also unsettling.

While the speaker(s) in Adnan’s work often appear autobiographical in nature this is not always strictly the case. Rather she intuitively immerses herself into the experience of the writing at hand, assuming whatever perspective is called for, whether that be man, woman, rock, or body of water and air. Adnan unselfishly pursues the exact environmental layering of consciousness required for addressing the immediate concerns of the work. Elements of this tendency are identifiably present in her earliest of writing included here.

Body of space swelling as woman after death
body of space beaten opened up in tracks in wounds
dripping with clouds

(from “A Funeral March for the First Cosmonaut”)

Whether events depicted are actual or imagined—is there a difference? Adnan’s work often seems suggest there is not—matters little. There’s a direct correlation of the senses, a transferal of what’s happening in the moment of perception resulting in a self-identifying between reader, text, and experience. As a poet of the senses she would but learn what the processes occurring around her have to offer.

The universe is my obsession:
the sea and the sun are
forever mating.
(from “An Alley of Linden Trees, and Lighting …”)

All of Adnan’s writings situate the reader within an interaction between the viewing subject and her surroundings, noting the interaction of thought and being, the physical language of things intruding through the depiction of the setting described.

Here I am, fallen from high into a yellowish excavation under a greyish sky. It doesn’t lead to happiness. Paris is a snare. We’re no foxes or rabbits: if we were, we would have escaped, or died. We do neither. Our dying is imperceptible. All people in buses are dying organisms. Some have reproduced themselves, some have not, like pigeons, fat and dark, birds of no good tidings. The weather is stormy. Something will burst. We’re moving towards something which does not exist. The voyage is infinite. The passenger is not.
(from Paris When It’s Naked)

Included here, after the short introduction by editors Thom Donovan and Brandon Shimoda, is Ammiel Alcalay’s “‘A Dance of Freedom’: In the Worlds of Etel Adnan” which in part charts the biographical course of Adnan’s life travels, intimating the correspondence existing between them and the hybrid nature of her work which keeps a sense of geographical place at its center.

For Adnan, the journey to understanding alienation and locating the body’s revolution would be long and intricate, leading from the Middle East and Europe to the Far West of the United States, and back and forth between these poles, in place, language, and form.

Adnan has lived many lives it seems. She’s moved between languages and cultures and loves and spent an equal amount of time traveling back through each again. It is in part through her roving exile she’s found her identity as poet. As she states in “To Write in a Foreign Language”:


Do I feel exiled? Yes I do. But it goes back so far, it lasted so long, that it became my own nature, and I can’t say I suffer too often from it. There are moments when I am even happy about it. A poet is, above all, human nature at its purest. That’s why a poet is as human as a cat is a cat or a cherry tree is a cherry tree. Everything else comes “after.” Everything else matters, but also sometimes does not matter. Poets are deeply rooted in language and they transcend language.

Her writing moves as readily amongst geographies as between standard representations of prose and poetry, mixing discourses from the philosophical to the literary to the journalistic. In the same manner, her visual artwork mirrors her writing, indeed at points the two are found to frequently intersect.

A central text in this regard is Journey to Mount Tamalpais where Adnan’s watercolors of Tamalpais appear beside meditative prose entries. In addition to these water colorings she has reeled off dozens of paintings of the Bay Area landmark over the years. Her Tamalpais prose reveals a self-interrogation regarding the nature of what draws her to the subject.

I make paintings and watercolors of Tamalpais. Again and again. Why do I insist? Am I trying to hold some image, to capture some meaning, to assert its presence, to measure myself to its timelessness, to fight, or to accept?

I think often of Cezanne and Hokusai, of their relation to their mountain, and of mind. I know by experience, by now, that no subject matter, after a while, remains just a subject matter, but becomes a matter of life and death, our sanity resolved by visual means. Sanity is our power of perception kept focused. And it is an open ended endeavor.

But I can ever understand what Cezanne says in Mont Sainte-Victoire, and Hokusai in Mount Fuji, if, after thirty years, I don’t know what Tamalpais means to me beyond the sketches, paintings and writings that involved me with her. I know that the process of painting and writing gives me the implicit certitude, carries the implicit certitude of what the Mountain is and of what I see: I perceive a nature proper to her while I work.

Tamalpais has an autonomy of being. So does a drawing of it. But they are mysteriously related.

Elsewhere in her tribute to the small mountain she asks, “So who can paint the weather?” As might equally be asked, who can write it? Yet Adnan certainly comes close in a number of her poems, including in lines from Fog such as these:

There’s malady in
the air
the waters are temporarily
exalting
the
world

Adnan is continually questioning the ineffable qualities of the relationship between tactile sense and intellectual understanding, between thought and feeling, experience and the reflection upon that experience. Her writing is self-generative more often than not leading her to compose works which of their own necessity are book-length in nature. There is no containing what needs to be expressed in fewer lines, or less pages, the writing simply requires considerable length to significantly enough sound out all the ground it must cover.

There are numerous occasions within Adnan’s writing where political lines are drawn. She’s on the side of the displaced, the bombed out, those scattered across the diaspora: the ones left behind and ground down by oppressive, larger-than-life forces of power. Whether it be as expressed in the voice of a Viet Cong soldier in “The Enemy’s Testament” written during the Vietnam Era: “I sent my brain to your center for research / so they could see what made me fight” and “I sent my eyes to your President / so they can look him in the face” Or in these fiercely defiant accusatory lines found in “The Beirut-Hell Express”: “the dead are coming back in order to fight again / because the living are cowards!” Adnan’s writing is dedicated to refusing allow a whitewashing of history’s transgressions against the powerless or weak.

The inclusion of five articles from her time working as journalist in Lebanon for the paper Al Safa provides opportunity to witness her approaching these matters just as effectively from outside the poetic lens. For instance, “In Honor of the Algerian Revolution November 1, 1972” provides example of her bitingly accurate use of dark-tinged humor: “One could say that revolutions end up in either cocktails or betrayals: after all, the Nixon-Mao Zedong handshake is the Hitler-Stalin one—with a few, rather minimal, differences.” As well as her resolute desire for a different future from an ever present, painfully tragic endured reality:

The revolution is the idea of an Arabian awakening: the idea that Arabs can neither fight, nor self-organize, is no longer valid. One million Algerians died so that one hundred million Arabs would feel less ashamed of having missed the train of History, and so that they might dare to hope catch up to it even, and jump on board.

etel_c_geordie_martinez_2008Adnan is driven by writing’s revolutionary potential to realize actualities on the page which reverberate well beyond the appearance of any singularly isolated text. Reading her work is an education in consciousness-raising which never berates or chides. It simply encourages necessary resilience.

Cole Swensen’s afterword “Etel Adnan: The Word In and By Exile” contains a revealing insight into Adnan’s poetic practice. Swensen describes the unusual balancing Adnan accomplishes of what would be for most other poets unavoidably opposing approaches, divided along lines of poems being driven by either form or content. Adnan merges extremes of each in a surprisingly complementary manner.

It’s the edge both of content and form, which, at this limit, often cannot be distinguished, but if they were to be, we’d find her content right at the edge of political safety, often overstepping it, and her form balancing right on the edge of grammatical and syntactical incomprehensibility. Adnan often seems to separate them, riding each edge separately in order to better address two actually quite different cultural and political concerns: content comes to the fore in relation to political crises, such as the Lebanese Civil War or the ongoing Palestinian deracination, and in such cases, she often employs a powerful, strongly visual, direct language, while at the other end of the continuum, when form is foregrounded, when she’s addressing the machine of language, refining and upgrading it, she operates at a level of grammar and syntax, disrupting, dismembering, and thereby working it toward a more flexible, more nuanced mode of expression, yet the separation is not as clean as it appears, for even at the extremes of linguistic reconstruction, her manipulation and dismemberment of language echo the social and political dismemberment that she faithfully and tirelessly records.

Compare the previously quoted lines from poems and articles in Al Safa to some stanzas from Adnan’s The Arab Apocalypse:

the sun’s tentacles Africa on fire STOP Arabs and Blacks are stabbed HOU !

an Apocalyptic sun explodes I hear the cracking of bones
a mercenary sun in love with the Jungle warms the snakes
blue bath blood is pouring over the BUSH like a nocturnal Opera

SUNFLOWERS ARE SPINNING IN A SOLAR YARD STOP

the sun is an opera STOP morbid singers are climbing down the stairs
a sun yellow and soft. the sun is bald like a hot afternoon

POT-BELLIED MERCENARY AGING FEMALE THAT’S THE SUN

defeated androgyne androgynous sun clear androgyne
they’re biting their swords to rip children and immigrants

I MADE LOVE TO A GUN UNDER THE SHADOW OF THE LAST THE PALM

Impossible to reproduce here are the frequent sun icons hand drawn (a second time for their appearance in this collection) which appear with great frequency throughout lines of the poem. Every line an urgent message full of fury, confusion, surreal vision, and abundant passion directed outwards at a not so unrealizable world. The sentiments, values, and experience attested are so vividly imminent it as if the ink were scored out upon the page, gouging its way into the eyes of the reader.

Adnan has written the majority of her published work from her forties onward. As to look at the sea is to become what is: An Etel Adnan Reader attests, she’s enjoyed a blossoming as a poet of first rank much later in life than most. I’ve read Adnan’s work for many years and heard her read in person on one or two occasions but the weight of this biographical fact concerning her output somehow never struck me until looking through this gathering. The trajectory of her writing across the span of her life climbs in complete contradiction to the popular perception of “the poet’s arc”. There is no youthful voice, no breakthrough moment. No single major work. There are simply a series of major works which are all reproduced here in whole. Adnan’s writing embodies equally significant milestones illuminatingly fresh in both spiritual (bodily) and aesthetic (intellectual) realms. This collection contains nearly if not all of her essential work to date, it is without doubt a groundbreaking roll call stridently feminist and anti-war to its core. If you want an intercultural poet hero look no further.

Patrick James Dunagan lives in San Francisco and works at Gleeson Library for the University of San Francisco. His essays and book reviews appear frequently with a wide number of both online and print publications. His most recent books include: "There are people who think that painters shouldn't talk": A Gustonbook (Post Apollo), Das Gedichtete (Ugly Duckling), and from Book of Kings (Bird and Beckett Books). Drops of Rain / Drops of Rain is forthcoming from Spuyten Duyvil. More from this author →

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/articles/detail/70309


Essay
Immortal Beloved
On the missing persons of love poetry.
By Austin Allen


Immortalizing the beloved is supposed to be one of the poet’s supreme powers. What journal-toting teenager hasn’t tried to wield it? Shakespeare himself claims in his sonnets:

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. (XVIII)

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme;
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone, besmear’d with sluttish time. (LV)

There’s no disputing these lines as boasts of literary prowess. The sonnets are monuments; they’ll outlast us all. But are they truly personalized? Who is “thee”?

Scholars have never identified the “Fair Youth” Shakespeare celebrated; he may have been a lover, friend, patron, or fantasy. Two earls, William Herbert and Henry Wriothesley, are leading suspects, but no one has clinched the case for either, and both are unknown outside of English departments.

Of course, the sonnets promise to keep alive a spirit, not a name. But who is the Youth in spirit? We learn little about his temperament, his quirks, the mind behind the handsome face. Despite all the flattering tributes, he eludes us—as does that other specter of the sonnets, the “Dark Lady.” In what sense, then, does the poet give them life? More convincing is the claim, in Sonnet LV, that “your praise shall still find room / Even in the eyes of all posterity”—emphasis mine, praise Shakespeare’s.

Like so many love poems before and since, the sonnets whisper, “I’m gonna make you a star, kid.” So why do we remember only the starmaker? Whose fame are we really talking about here?

•

“How I envy the novelist!” Sylvia Plath wrote in her 1962 essay “A Comparison,” without mentioning that she was turning into one herself. The previous summer, she had finished her first, headlong draft of The Bell Jar, which she would publish (under the alter ego Victoria Lucas) in the winter of ’63. The private agonies she poured into that novel are well known, but her essay reveals the artistic impulse behind her foray into fiction. Casting the novelist as a spoiled rival, she exclaims:

To her, this fortunate one, what is there that isn’t relevant! [In a novel] old shoes can be used, doorknobs, air letters, flannel nightgowns, cathedrals, nail varnish, jet planes, rose arbors and budgerigars; little mannerisms … any weird or warty or fine or despicable thing. Not to mention emotions, motivations—those rumbling, thunderous shapes.

The surprise comes in that last sentence. Yes, novels accommodate more lavish variety and miscellaneous detail, but aren’t emotions just as “relevant” to poems? Plath seems to mean that poets can’t depict emotion with the novel’s sprawling complexity; working on smaller canvases, they’re confined to fewer and proportionately broader brushstrokes.

Emotions, motivations, accessories, “little mannerisms”—these are the things characters are made of. One of Plath’s implicit fears is that poetry lacks what E. M. Forster called “round characters”: three-dimensional human presences. Where the novel gives people “leisure to grow and alter before our eyes,” poems restrict them to stagy lyric moments, discarding much of their everyday baggage in the process. Plath confesses with regret: “I have never put a toothbrush in a poem.”

In fact, these general distinctions have stark, specific relevance to Plath’s own work. In Ariel, emotions are not just broad but operatic. People are more than types; they’re mythic heroes and monsters. Her father is a Fascist; her mother is Medusa; Ted Hughes, her wayward husband and fellow poet, is a vampire (in “Daddy”); she herself is the avenging “Lady Lazarus.” It’s brilliant psychodrama, but it helps explain why Plath sought refuge in the novel. As the poems’ hellish atmosphere thickens, it kills off large tracts of normal human experience. Vampires don’t even use toothbrushes. Neither do resurrected spirits who “eat men like air.”

Hughes’s own portrayal of the marriage, the 1998 collection Birthday Letters, demonstrates Plath’s point from another angle. The best Hughes poems are as efficiently compact as a naturalist’s rucksack, but Hughes fills this late volume with so many “poetical toothbrushes”—so much descriptive trivia, labored psychologizing, and embroidery on Plath’s myths—that it bulges and drags. (Do we need to know the prices of both the “walnut desk” and the “Victorian chair” in the home he shared with Plath? Does having her stamp on her father’s coffin “like Rumpelstiltskin” add anything to the original image in “Daddy”?) For all his earnest effort, Hughes never evokes Plath as sharply as he’d described a hawk some forty years earlier: “There is no sophistry in my body, / My manners are tearing off heads.”

And so this great literary power couple—in life, a notoriously charismatic pair—leaves us feeling that their poems never quite captured each other. To view their marriage in three dimensions we need to consult Plath’s overflowing journals, or the endless biographies for which their fans continue to thirst. Partly this is due to their particular sensibilities and Plath’s early death. But I’m tempted, like Plath, to seek part of the reason in poetry itself.

•

There are always motives for discretion in writing about a lover. Sometimes, too, there’s a coy thrill in opening the curtain only halfway. When Robert Browning, at the end of Men and Women, drops his dramatis personae and addresses his poet-wife directly, he delights in the true selves they’ve concealed from the reading public:

God be thanked, the meanest of His creatures
Boasts two soul-sides, one to face the world with,
One to show a woman when he loves her.

… but think of you, Love!
This to you—yourself my moon of poets!
Ah, but that’s the world’s side, there’s the wonder,
Thus they see you, praise you, think they know you!

But coyness isn’t the exclusive province of poets, and discretion isn’t the heart of the Shakespearean promise. The promise is to “give life to thee.” Why, then, does poetry so rarely capture a lover in three dimensions?

Plath would blame space constraints (“so little room! So little time!”), but these can’t be the whole story. Average poem length aside, nothing prevents a poetry collection from covering as much ground as a novel.

A likelier culprit is the lyric genre, which has dominated English poetry at least since the Romantics. More than narrative, lyric encourages a fixed inward gaze. Critic Heather Dubrow sums up the usual divide in The Challenges of Orpheus: “lyric is static and narrative committed to change, lyric is internalized whereas narrative evokes an externally realized situation, lyric attempts to impede the forward thrust of narrative, and so on.” This chimes with Plath’s point about people “grow[ing] and alter[ing]” in novels but not in poems. Dubrow goes on to argue, however, that these distinctions are flimsy and that Modernism made a virtue of ignoring them.

If Joyce and Woolf could import lyric techniques wholesale into the novel, nothing prevents poets from accomplishing the reverse. And, in fact, recent decades have seen a minor vogue for “verse novels,” including such distinguished love-and-heartbreak sagas as Robert Lowell’s The Dolphin, Rita Dove’s Thomas and Beulah, Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red and The Beauty of the Husband, and Louise Glück’s Meadowlands. Each of these books offers an original fusion of narrative and lyric. Their other merits aside, those that venture farthest outside the lyric “I”—especially Thomas and Beulah and Autobiography—seem to me most successful in creating full-fledged characters. (Dove’s chronicle of a marriage, loosely based on her grandparents’, has been staged as an opera; Carson’s Geryon and Herakles won enough fans that she revived them in a sort of sequel.) By contrast, Lowell’s deeply personal Dolphin, which caused a scandal by quoting from his ex-wife’s letters, seems to chafe against the lyric’s limits in representing others’ perspectives. (I suspect Lowell shared Plath’s novelist envy: “The ideal modern form seems to be the novel,” he once mused.)

In any case, projects like these remain anomalies. If I started listing novels that plumb the depths of their authors’ marriages, I could fill this whole essay. Yet when you look at the great sequences of English love poetry, you find that they overwhelmingly portray wanting or missing, not shared experience. In other words, they thrive on isolation.

The “wanting” group, of which Sappho is the godmother, includes everything from Petrarch’s and Shakespeare’s sonnets to Dickinson’s lovelorn ballads to Yeats’s lifelong poetic courtship of Maud Gonne. The “missing” group includes breakup sequences (as in Ariel) and countless studies in grief: I think immediately of Thomas Hardy’s elegies for his wife Emma, Jack Gilbert’s for Michiko Nogami, Donald Hall’s for Jane Kenyon (Without, The Painted Bed), and Gjertrud Schnackenberg’s for Robert Nozick (Heavenly Questions). Karen Green’s recent Bough Down (a collection of prose poems centered on the suicide of her husband, David Foster Wallace) falls into the same category, as does that Victorian epic of sorrow, Tennyson’s In Memoriam A.H.H.

These disparate works share a tendency to foreground the poet’s emotions while lending the beloved—the distant or departed one—a tinge of unreality. David Foster Wallace’s famous claim that “every love story is a ghost story” seems to me even truer of poetry than fiction. Petrarch projects his fantasies onto a woman he barely knows. Dickinson’s “Master” goes virtually undescribed and remains unidentified (candidates include her sister-in-law, a minister, and God). Yeats’s love poems are one of the great literary labors ever devoted to a single person; they’re also a profound evasion. His Gonne is Helen of Troy, the spirit of Ireland, an embodiment of radicalism, or simply the Unattainable—but rarely the busy, idealistic woman we meet in her correspondence.

Elegiac sequences are even more apt to turn lovers into phantoms, conjured only through a few devastating details: Arthur Hallam’s “hand that can be clasp’d no more” (In Memoriam), Emma Hardy’s “original air-blue dress” (“The Voice”), the long black hair Gilbert finds in the dirt (“Married”). Hall weaves the voice of his late wife, Jane Kenyon, in with his own, but his most powerful tributes to her, such as “Kill the Day,” are terrifyingly lonely:

When she died, at first an outline of absence defined
the presence that disappeared. He yowled for the body
he could no longer reach out to touch in bed on waking.
He yowled for her silver thimble. He yowled when the dog
brought him a white slipper that smelled of her still.
In the second summer, her pheromones diminished.
The negative space of her body dwindled as she receded…

And yet these visceral traces, however “diminished,” announce what Hall’s insistent negations ironically affirm: the staying power of the departed.

In his prose “Appreciation” of Hall, Louis Begley says of the short, erotic poems mixed into the Kenyon cycle: “They are not about Kenyon, which magnifies their effect.” I see what he means, but I can’t quite agree with the first half of this, just as I’d hesitate to claim full-stop that the elegies are about her. So much of their impact derives from trapping us inside Hall’s mind, where Kenyon is both constant absence and constant presence. The love lyric is diabolically good at springing traps like these.

•

Temperament might be a factor: poetry is a solitary art, and its icons have inspired jokes about self-absorption since Wordsworth and the “egotistical sublime.” But even a “people poet” like Frank O’Hara—famed for gregariousness, loyalty, and warmth—turns love on the page into an oddly one-sided affair.

How much do we learn about the exalted “You” in “Having a Coke With You”? Comically little: he’s wearing an orange shirt, and he likes yogurt. As for his chemistry with O’Hara,

in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth
between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles

Like a tree breathing through its spectacles, this clears nothing up. So it goes with O’Hara: he fills his poems with friends, lovers, love interests—the roles blur together—yet he rarely enters their heads or describes them to the point where they upstage him. (“You” was the dancer Vincent Warren, who also inspired numerous other O’Hara love lyrics; but this fact tends to get lost in the poems’ giddy jumble of names, sights, and happenings.)

Look closely at O’Hara’s definition of “Personism,” the movement that started as a joke with Amiri Baraka but that is now beloved in its own right: “It does not have to do with personality or intimacy, far from it! ... It puts the poem squarely between the poet and the person, Lucky Pierre style, and the poem is correspondingly gratified. The poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages.” The poem gets the best of this three-way; it’s a close intermediary, not closeness itself.

Still, “intimacy” isn’t really banished: “persons” are vital to the action, and the fun. For O’Hara, just getting someone on the page is a joyous gesture, a benediction to be conferred far and wide. In that sense, most of his Lunch Poems are authentic love poems. And knowing how hard it is—how exposing—to write anything at all about our close attachments, we might bring some of his generosity to our judgments of love poetry in general. We might even turn Plath’s envy of novelists on its ear.

•

When you want or miss someone badly, the world contracts. Everything that isn’t the loved one irritates you with its irrelevance. The plot arc of your life coils into a vicious loop. Here is Hall again:

There is nothing so selfish as misery nor so boring,
and depression is devoted only to its own practice.
Mourning resembles melancholia precisely except 

that melancholy adds self-loathing to stuporous sorrow. …


The grim truth of these lines contains one saving glimmer of contradiction. Hall’s “selfish” misery has found an outlet: poetry. True, it’s a small and tightly focused outlet—but at this stage of grief, anything more would seem almost profane.

For writers struggling in these waters, even the handiest narrative tools—plot, setting, characterization—can feel like dead weight. The lyric allows us to grab them only as needed, or ditch them altogether. Along with relief there can be a purity to this unburdening.

In “Left Behind,” her fine essay on the poetry of grief, Joy Katz celebrates poems that “open up the isolating process of mourning” by “translat[ing] sorrow through poetic form.” She means primarily that such poems refuse false epiphanies and closure, but she also touches on the way they resist fully characterizing the dead. She praises, for example, a Mary Szybist poem in which a ghostly girl “hovers in the uncomfortable place between metaphor and reality.”

This description fits nearly all the lovers, living and dead, in the sequences I’ve mentioned. In another Anne Carson book, her critical study Eros the Bittersweet, she proposes that “Eros… folds the beloved object out of sight into a mystery, into a blind point where it can float known and unknown.” Death enforces a more extreme version of the same separation. The lyric reflects this—and reflects the mystery back onto the lyric “I.”

The sonnets may seem like the closest thing we have to unfiltered Shakespeare, but they’re maddeningly short on autobiographical specifics. No one has ever disproved the theory that they’re all an artifice, another masquerade to join his suite of plays. Similarly, Dickinson mythologizes herself along with the “You” she “cannot live with,” spinning a Calvinist, yet blasphemous narrative of savior and saved. Hall in “Kill the Day” distances himself into a case study, recording his psychological flux with unbearable precision while noting biography only in shorthand. In Section LXIX of In Memoriam, Tennyson dreams an allegorical angel who may or may not be the transformed Arthur Hallam:

… I found an angel of the night;

The voice was low, the look was bright;

He look’d upon my crown and smiled:



He reach’d the glory of a hand,

That seem’d to touch it into leaf:

The voice was not the voice of grief,

The words were hard to understand.

Notice that the visitation turns Tennyson himself into a crowned, prophetic witness.

Such guises might wear out over the course of a realist novel, but in the lyric they open a broad space for reader projection. (What lover has ever struggled to “identify with” a Shakespearean sonnet?) They also capture the self-estrangement of infatuation and grief—the sense that all of this is happening to someone else; that the dead will soon return or the desired accept us, relieving us of the burdens of role-playing. At the same time, they provide their authors a brief respite from the burden of the self. (Recall T. S. Eliot’s line in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” about art as an escape from “personality and emotions”—at least for those who “know what it means to want to escape from these things.”)

The resulting poems may not eliminate pain, but they can, in a real sense, transcend it. Despite my nagging curiosity, I’m satisfied in the end by the way Shakespeare’s sonnets anonymize their subjects—by the way they float free of any context at all. Scholars aren’t sure Shakespeare ever intended them to be published, let alone dedicated to a particular lover. Forged in the full heat of want, they became the most casual of monuments.

Originally Published: January 26th, 2016

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/resources/children/articles/detail/70282


Essay on Children's Poetry
Fears, Truths, and Waking Life
On the teaching of Kenneth Koch
By Jordan Davis
Photo used by permission of Teachers & Writers Collaborative.

To use Kenneth Koch’s work with children as a model for your own teach*ing, you have to take children seriously—their feelings, their ideas of beauty, their ways of using language.

First, this means not talking down to them. You can’t give a child a story about what you’re teaching that’s categorically different from what you would give an adult. Children understand when you’re not telling the whole story. You do have to communicate your story clearly, which requires choosing direct words, stating the idea once, and find*ing instantly understandable examples of what you’re talking about. Everyone in the room deserves for you to get through to them.

Second, this means responding sincerely and compassionately. When you praise student work, it has to be clear what you’re praising, why it’s worth calling attention to, and how anyone in the room could have come up with something like it, or, better, could use one child’s discov*ery to make something of his or her own. When the students are going in a direction where you see nothing to praise, stop and start over. It’s not the children’s fault they found nothing inspiring in the suggestions you’ve made. Just as you can’t falsely praise work that is trivial or lifeless or mean-spirited, you also can’t criticize children for giving back what you’ve asked from them.

Third, because you’re the teacher, the one who’s supposed to know, the one the children will be looking to, it’s crucial that you take yourself seriously and know your own feelings, ideas of beauty, and ways of using the language. If a writing idea isn’t one that you can use yourself, you’re not going to have an easy time showing nine-year-olds how to make it work. This doesn’t mean you need to think and write like a nine-year-old, but it does mean, for example, that if you were happier reading Richie Rich and Casper comics than DC and Marvel, you’re not going to have much to say on the subject of superheroes’ origin myths and hard-earned grudges. But you may be able to use what all comics have in common—the wish to identify one’s own special power—to suggest that the children write poems in which they try on several different kinds of magic or abil*ity: to fly, to be invisible, to be able to create anything instantly, to go anywhere in space or time, to stop bullets or airplanes or bombs, to talk to the dead, to heal, to make people believe anything.

Likewise, if you don’t particularly care for writing that pulls lots of dif*ferent examples together in one small space but prefer to read and write narratives that work from a single premise or situation and feel their way through setbacks and conflicts to satisfying conclusions, you may have trouble suggesting that the children write list poems with different ani*mals, colors, and places in each line. If it’s not your idea of beauty, it’s a lot trickier to make it work.

You may be able to adapt what worked for Koch into something better suited to your tastes. There are, of course, some preexisting limits you’ll have to consider—the forty- to fifty-minute class periods, the difficulty of engaging twenty or thirty children on a single topic, the kinds of sto*ries children are told and will think they are supposed to tell—knowing that even the most accomplished teachers struggle with them from time to time.

The best introduction to Koch’s ideas about teaching poetry writing to children—and while I am using superlatives, the best work there is on the subject—is his 1970 book Wishes, Lies, and Dreams. Used correctly, it can help inspire children to write poems of strong feelings and lively images almost instantly. Opinion over the years on the correct use of Koch’s methods has not been unanimous. There are purists and there are critics. I had the good luck to work with Koch for several years, and it seemed to me it might be useful to teachers and poets, or at any rate not too distracting or misleading, if I shared some of what he told me.

I worked as Kenneth’s assistant from 1990 until his death in 2002. I began as a replacement for his graduate assistant (I was an undergradu*ate), responsible for mailing his bills and retyping his drafts. I remember thinking my duties would include library research—Kenneth’s riffs on Tadeusz Kantor, Fernand Braudel, and Ludwig Wittgenstein in One Thousand Avant-Garde Plays had come out a couple years earlier—but learned gradually that self-conscious erudition was not Kenneth’s default mode; friendly competition was.

I had been dating his previous research assistant, and as her graduate exams drew closer, she told Kenneth she needed to stop assisting (and me she needed to stop dating) and start focusing on studying for her comps. And she told him that I knew Kenneth’s poems as well as or bet*ter than anybody, including Kenneth himself. This was a stretch, but in any case I’d read all of his poems and plays, and as he had told me, I was probably one of twenty people who’d read through both his novel The Med Robins and the play of the same name. I had also looked at one or two of his books on teaching. I got the job.

One of the main texts Kenneth taught from was Mayakovsky’s How Are Verses Made? He quoted to students Mayakovsky’s rule that the most important thing for a poet is to have a clean copy of what you’ve written when it’s time to revise. What he did not tell his students is that he had assistants to make these clean copies for him, which he would then mark up in pencil, grease pencil, highlighter, ballpoint, and felt-tip, then cut up and tape, rearrange, and hand back to be turned into new clean copy. Kenneth’s industriousness was not unlike a factory’s. There were days when he generated forty or fifty pages of these drafts.

I was not the first assistant to make these clean copies using a per*sonal computer with a dot matrix printer or laser printer, but judging from Kenneth’s archives, I was probably among the first three or four, and he was pleased and surprised that I returned his work to him while it was still fresh in his mind. It was fortunate that I could do so because I resented the bill-mailing part of the job to the point of incompetence, with treachery lying just beyond. Dozens of young scholars, poets, and artists must have worked in a similar capacity for Kenneth over the almost forty years he taught at Columbia University. One of my first tasks was to accompany him to a rug dealer to find a carpet to furnish his office on the fourth floor of Hamilton Hall. Kenneth was very good at using his allocation of the English department budget.

A few months into the job, at the start of a long weekend break from school, I received from Kenneth a fifty-page draft of a poem in the form of fake book reviews, à la Gilbert Sorrentino’s Mulligan Stew. I didn’t know at the time that Kenneth had been let go by his editor, that he’d had a cancer scare, that the woman he considered the muse of the thousand plays had left him, or, for that matter, that book reviews were in those pre-Amazon days the main way authors could tell how they were doing. All I saw, as I read Kenneth’s parody of the Times Literary Supplement’s wonderful but obscure miscellany on the train home, was that it was not a good poem. The reviews were mean-spirited, the books were implau*sible, the jokes were flat. I didn’t want to type it. Sunday came around, and it remained untyped. My parents, sensing that I was even more out of sorts than usual, counseled me just to tell him that the piece wasn’t up to his standards and that I didn’t want to take his money to do work he wouldn’t use.

“You’re fired!” he said, taking the poem from me. It wasn’t the first time he’d said it, but it felt definitive. I walked down the long hallway from his living room, where he wrote, to the front door. There was an enormous Red Grooms canvas along that hallway, a backdrop from the stage production of The Red Robins, showing a plaza in Guadalajara with at least one man in a sombrero, shoulders hunched, caught mid-stride I took a good last look at it as I walked, to memorize details to put in a short story about my brief time as a writer’s assistant. I was at the front door when I heard Kenneth again.

“Fucko! Come back here.” I walked back. “You’re right. It’s no good.” There was a pause. “Why don’t we try something different,” he said. From then on, I was to listen to Kenneth read his drafts aloud, let him know which works were promising and which were not likely to work out. I was flattered and daunted by the increased responsibility. It took me a while to understand that I was actually being hired as a sparring partner.

A few years later, I was about to start my first residency through the Teachers & Writers Collaborative. One evening, after having discussed several long and short poems on diverse subjects and a play about a man who shows up for a duel in a giant bird costume, I changed the subject to ask for some advice on teaching. Kenneth paused, then reminded me that he’d written a few books on the subject. I allowed that I had read them several times and in fact had shipped off several orders for them that day as part of my job at T&W. “What I was hoping for,” I said, “were some gen*eral instructions.” Kenneth paused again, then smiled. “Some General Instructions” is the title of a poem he’d written at the height of interest in his work teaching children. (If you ever need a favor from a poet, it some*times works to quote the poet’s work casually in conversation.)

Shortly after Wishes, Lies, and Dreams was published, around when I was born, the poems of Kenneth’s elementary-school students at P.S. 61 in the Lower East Side made a splash. The children read on David Frost’s TV show, and Barbara Walters interviewed Kenneth. The book was reviewed widely. And Kenneth found himself speaking frequently to groups of educators around the country. Sales of the book were good, and Kenneth proposed a sequel. Rose, Where Did You Get That Red? picked up a promising lead left undeveloped in Wishes: how to use great poetry—Blake, Lorca, Shakespeare—to teach elementary-school children to write poems.

Kenneth enjoyed success. The sixties had begun extremely well for him: a tenure-track position at Columbia, his first poetry book reviewed in Time magazine with more books of plays and poems following quickly upon it, collaborations with major artists and composers, and every sign suggesting he and his friends were finally being heard. By the end of the decade, though, his first marriage had fallen apart, his closest friend in poetryland, Frank O’Hara, had been killed in an accident, and poems, which had always come easily to him, were proving more and more dif*ficult to write. The enthusiastic reception of work in one area of his life suggested an opportunity, and through trial and error, he found a way to use in his poems what was working so well with teachers and students.

In The Art of Love, published within a couple years of Rose, Kenneth pursued the thought experiment of addressing several subjects in poetry, beginning in roughly the same tone he used in his prose about teaching, leaving the restrictions of the schoolroom behind while taking his cho*sen subjects—love, beauty, poetry—as seriously as possible, which is to say, entirely seriously and with a little silliness. (He told me once that, regarding being silly, he took courage from Maud Gonne’s referring to Yeats as “silly Willie,” paraphrased by Auden.) He referred to these as his “instructional poems.” One success led to another. Inspired in part by the increasingly adventurous all-inclusiveness of the work of his friend and rival John Ashbery, Kenneth decided to try an instructional poem about life itself. The following are lines from “Some General Instructions,” the poem I mentioned earlier:

Be attentive to your dreams. They are usually about sex,
But they deal with other things as well in an indirect fashion
And contain information that you should have.
You should also read poetry. Do not eat too many bananas.
In the springtime, plant. In the autumn, harvest.
In the summer and winter, exercise. Do not put
Your finger inside a clam shell or
It may be snapped off by the living clam. Do not wear a shirt
More than two times without sending it to the laundry.

Though the instructional poems derive their tone from Kenneth’s work among schoolchildren, there’s an important difference between them and the books about teaching. In his prose he’s careful not to tell teachers what to do but describes what worked for him and how he found it, stays in the first person and the past tense, and sticks to specific classrooms and the obstacles he overcame in them. In the context of the constant explosive change of the poems and plays he had published up to this point, the coherent narratives of the introductions to the teaching books mark a change. The introductions to his books on teaching can be read as one thing after another, and reread as complex explanations of how to identify and remove problems in order to create ideal conditions for spontaneous discovery and collaboration. In his introductions, Kenneth takes the teachers in his audience as seriously as he does the children in his classrooms: all appearances to the contrary, he doesn’t tell any adults what to do; he simply explains his goals, what difficulties he found, how he and the students found ways around them, and what they accom*plished together.

I’d read the introductions. Young and foolish, I preferred the absurd certainty of the instructional poems to the pragmatism of the teaching books. I wanted an executive summary of the introductions, and I thought I had figured out how to get it. “Well now, very funny, White Fang,” Kenneth said, in response to my having quoted him. (Kenneth’s instant nicknames tended to fall away like sticky notes on corduroy.) He proceeded to quiz me on my knowledge of Wishes and Rose, both the introductions and what others refer to as “writing prompts” but he preferred to call lessons, assign*ments, or poetry ideas. And satisfied, I suppose, that he could emphasize certain points in what he had written without sacrificing the sense of the work as a whole, he gave me a few suggestions. They are below.

When teaching poetry to children, it’s important to start with a poem written in collaboration with the whole class. Write five or six lines from different students on the chalkboard so that everyone sees that everyone can do what is being asked and so there can be ideas to work from on the board.

Wishes are good to start with because they encourage children to con*nect writing with expressing what they’re excited about and also because they allow children to feel comfortable sharing feelings and ideas in a friendly, competitive way. There will be wishes for world peace and a bil*lion dollars; it may be useful to accept each of these wishes once and then ask what else the students wish. If the prevailing mood in the room is too far in the direction of trying to please you by saying what they think you want, make up a bunch of completely different kinds of wishes to relieve the pressure of having to say the “right” thing. It may not hap*pen as much with children these days, but it can be scary to be told to say what your wishes are; wishes and fears are famously connected. You really don’t have to tell the children that, though. The important thing in the first few lessons is to interest and excite them and to keep adding to what they can do in a poem.

Once the children have become familiar with the idea of putting a wish in every line, you can increase the difficulty modestly by asking them for a wish and one other thing in every line, such as a color or place. The formal requirement is a slight distraction that can give access to sur*prising changes of association: What color are the leaves on the tree you want to be sitting under instead of at your desk, for example? What color do you make the invisible car when you need to see it to find it? What’s something else that has that exact color? You’ll know it’s working if the poems are lively and surprising.

If you have weeks and weeks and the students are responding well, you can cover comparisons, colors, and noises one class at a time for each, but you may find that by bringing synesthesia into the classroom from the beginning, you can cover them all at once. Ask the children to close their eyes and keep them closed; then jingle your keys or ring the teacher’s bell or pull open a shade and ask them what color they saw when they heard the sound. Some won’t have seen any color, but some will. Ask them to name something else that has that exact color; if they say something general, help them be more specific. Then write a line based on what they’ve said and put it on the board: “The sound of keys is purple-silver like the little flowers by the blacktop.” One thing that can work well is to compare the sound of a word in different languages—for example, which is darker, night or noche? Green or vert? Five or fünf?

Lies. There’s a lot in the book to make it clear that writing in the class*room is a special situation in which giving children permission to do what comes naturally can be put to socially acceptable ends. The power of saying “put a lie in every line” is undeniably exciting; if it looks as though it might get out of hand, you can revise and have them put some*thing crazy or unusual in every line, but it’s not as good. What is always good, when the students seem stuck, is to encourage them to make their lines as real or as crazy as they feel right then.

The “Swan of Bees” exercise is a good fourth or fifth class. A spelling mistake in a poem a third grader was writing suggested this idea, as did that phrase in Frank O’Hara’s poem “Easter”: “the roses of Pennsylvania.”

The idea is to put together unexpected combinations using the word of in the middle of them. You can also have them use is alongside of to connect apparently unlike things. It helps to suggest that students make the two things they connect have only one part in common: “a road of strawber*ries” would make sense because pavement is usually slightly bumpy like a strawberry, but “the forest is coats” may be too obvious. “The woods are a hallway of cubbies” might be a better example, where the spaces between the trees are like the cubbies of absent students.

If you try having students write to music, the examples mentioned in Wishes, Lies, and Dreams are all by classical composers, but jazz can work, as can songs in other languages. Songs in languages the students know can be a little distracting from the purpose, which, like the “sounds and colors” poems, is to have them write what the music suggests to them, to be aware of how it makes them feel and what that reminds them of. Different kinds of music lead to different feelings, from Wagner to Louis Armstrong to Gregorian plainsong.

Work on dreams after you’ve been in the classroom a few times. It may be good to prepare students for the next class by asking them to pay attention to their dreams. If they want, they can take notes when they wake up each morning so they remember, but it isn’t necessary or required homework.

Having the students combine poetry ideas, once they’re familiar with some of them, can be exciting, as can poems that encourage feelings of mastery and change. The “I used to, but now” poetry idea is good for that; having them begin one line with I used to and the next with but now, lets kids talk about memories and things they miss (and don’t miss), as well as mistakes they’ve made and ideas they’ve outgrown.

It’s almost always better to suggest that students write as if they are the things they want to talk about or as if they’re talking to, rather than just describing, them.

Eat a good breakfast and drink some (not too much!) coffee before class. Wear nice, brightly colored clothes, show up on time, smile, and have writing paper ready to hand out to everyone.

Wishes, Lies, and Dreams and Rose, Where Did You Get That Red? include several student examples for each of these ideas and others, and if it seems as though the ideas aren’t getting through, it may help to read from the examples. The best examples will usually be the freshest ones, though—yours, and those of the students in the room.

In my work as Kenneth’s assistant, I was comfortable letting him know when I agreed and disagreed with his ideas about poetry and when I thought specific lines and entire poems were working or not. As a stu*dent of his teaching, though, it hasn’t occurred to me to argue with his methods, which I’ve found produce remarkably consistent results in classroom after classroom. I’m aware that that consistency itself is, for some critics, a sign that the poetry ideas wash over children without being integrated into their thinking and practice, that the ideas just give back what Kenneth put into them. I’ve also heard the criticism that the children’s poems included in Kenneth’s books on teaching writing don’t live up to the claims Kenneth made for them. I could not disagree more. The analogy I keep thinking of is to gym class or sports camp. The exer*cises suggested in Wishes, Lies, and Dreams develop some basic skills that much contemporary writing fails to demonstrate, writing that would be improved by a stronger sense of form, a greater variety of imagery, sensuousness, spontaneity, and deep feeling.

Teachers who have already applied Kenneth’s methods will recognize that much of his advice to me in his general instructions derives from the introductions to his books. He did restate and repeat certain principles and ideas many times in his college classroom and in his writings. I think I heard him quote Paul Valery’s line that “a poem is never finished, only abandoned” about a hundred times. My own advice to writers and teachers coming to these ideas for the first time is to read the introductions to Kenneth’s books a dozen times. They are at once brimful instruction manuals and breezy narratives. It is very easy to mistake a necessary ingredient for a passing remark. And then, having read and reread his texts, try anything and everything that comes to mind as a poetry idea for the classroom, as long as it feels exciting and surprising and leads to lines of your own that you can look at coolly and find life in.

This essay was originally published in Open the Door: How to Excite Young People about Poetry (2013), a co-publication of the Poetry Foundation and McSweeney's Publishing, edited by Dorothea Lasky, Dominic Luxford, and Jesse Nathan.
Originally Published: November 24th, 2015

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/articles/detail/91864

Essay
No Ideas But in Non-Digital Things
Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson tackles poetry, New Jersey, and the Internet.
By Virginia Heffernan
Adam Driver and Golshifteh Farahani in PATERSON. Image Courtesy of Mary Cybulski/Amazon Studios & Bleecker Street

A smartphone is a leash. This deadpan conviction of a bus driver-poet called Paterson (Adam Driver) sharpens Paterson, a new film by Jim Jarmusch that chronicles a week of stifled epiphanies in Paterson’s life. In its quietude and devotion to the modern lyric, the movie suddenly seems almost a revenge piece—a flat rejection of digital culture and the imperative to make placeless films, light on dialogue, to play across the polyglot Internet. Jarmusch’s film instead is narrowly circumscribed in time, place, and idiom, and emerges as an anti-postmodern poem about American poetry.

It’s supremely groovy ars poetica, then, involving two old souls, Paterson and his wife, Laura (Golshifteh Farahani), in an unassuming industrial town whose name means poetry to just about 250 living people.

And that’s the beauty of it; it’s vitally here. Paterson sets itself hard in Paterson, New Jersey, the valley under the mighty Great Falls of the Passaic River that inspired to verse the likes of Allen Ginsberg and the pediatrician-poet William Carlos Williams, whose epic about the city is an animating spirit of the film.

Jarmusch didn’t want to make a film about poetry without a poet on hand, and fortunately he knew a good one: Ron Padgett. “Jim told me he was thinking of doing a movie that would involve poetry and New Jersey,” Padgett told me, and Jarmusch asked Padgett to be his “poetry adviser.”

Who could refuse? “I just act important, spout off opinions, and go on my merry way,” Padgett thought. But that’s not how it worked out. Jarmusch asked, nonchalantly, to use some of Padgett’s existing poems for the film’s central character—Padgett agreed—and then wondered if his pal might write something new for the film. Padgett didn’t want to write on command, but somehow he couldn’t resist the call: he composed the poems “The Run” and “The Line.” This recent work, which appears in the movie alongside four of Padgett’s oldies, is stunning—or rather, as Padgett puts, it is “not embarrassing.”

In the film are no ideas but in things. Those things, lovingly longed for by Jarmusch’s nostalgic if digital camera, include 20th-century totems such as matchbooks, lunchboxes, and dog leashes. Smartphones here are presumably things too—but things sorely short on ideas. Or maybe they are things so closely allied with ideas that they’ve lost their mineral integrity.

The movie is also about a devilish English bulldog named Marvin. In his rounds, Paterson leashes, walks, and also despises Marvin, who represents boisterous competition for the affections of his beautiful wife. But Paterson is a steadfast man of his place, who does his duty by his wife, his bus, and even his rival.

The Guardian cited the runic film for its “almost miraculous innocence,” but I suspect the film knows, and even holds in non-innocent contempt, more than it’s telling. We are given to understand that out of the frame humans as dogs are leashed by their phones, slaves to an Internet overlord. Only here, in a shire unmolested by digitization, are they free. This whole film, in fact, may be as the sassafras leaves are to Williams in “Waiting”—the pure joy against which ordinary life seems to crush the spirit.

Ron Padgett’s poetry in Paterson—together with Eileen Myles’s work for Transparent—sets a high-water mark for the representation of poetry in TV and film. (Amazon Studios, which created Transparent, is also a producer of Paterson; it’s worth recognizing Amazon’s stealth commitment to poetry.) What’s more, Padgett’s simple lyrics are powerful tonic in an age of poltergeist Twitter dialect and sweetie-pie Instagram filters. Consider “Love Poem,” which is anchored around the line “We have plenty of matches in our house.” Padgett says the idea for that came in hearing himself say those words, and thinking “What? I’m half-moron to say that! Well, I'll just write this poem as though I'm a moron. And it evolved into a sincere and passionate love poem.”

Just as modernist no longer designates the contemporary, colloquial language may no longer be the actual demotic. (For that, see texts and Twitter.) But colloquial is what Padgett’s work here is, sturdy and wholesome, and then, in a sly flash, magnificent. Padgett’s broader opus has less Williams to it than it does, well, Padgett. Still, he told me, when he discovered Williams in high school in the 1950s, “I was very attracted to the fact that he could write in such simple, direct, immediate language—without rhyme, without metaphor—and I still thought it was poetry.”

In 1964, Padgett even found himself in Paterson, when he and a few friends—including the poets Joseph Ceravolo and Ted and Sandy Berrigan—realized there would be a wait for dinner at Ceravolo’s Bloomfield house and took off on a joyride to see the Falls and look for Williams’s house in Rutherford. They spied it and sent Sandy, who was fearless, to scout it out. Williams had been dead a year or so then.

At the house, they met Williams’s widow, Flossie, who gave the eager gang a tour of everything, pointing out a secretary desk lined with shelves that held some of the great man’s favorite books. On the way out, Padgett told me, “I looked down the driveway in the back of the house. And I saw a red wheelbarrow. Huh? Really? It was quite thrilling.”

The poem Padgett wrote about the visit remains unpublished—it “didn’t get through the turnstile,” as he put it—but at my insistence, he dug it up from cold storage. (It’s a delight, but by order of the poet, it’s for my eyes only.)

“Love Poem,” which unspools across the screen as Paterson, in the bus-driver’s seat, scribbles in his notebook, is perhaps the most Williamsian poem by Padgett in the movie. One passage is gloriously thingy:

... we discovered Ohio Blue Tip matches.
They are excellently packaged, sturdy
little boxes with dark and light blue and white labels
with words lettered in the shape of a megaphone,
as if to say even louder to the world,
“Here is the most beautiful match in the world...

Dying things, such as flames and the matches they consume, and the body of a young wife, are the most beautiful things in Jarmusch’s Paterson sanctuary. But, being poor, real things, made of ash and clay, they don’t ascend to the Cloud. This is the surprise turn of the film; Paterson’s unleashedness to the Internet also leaves him with no cellphone in a bus emergency. And, when the dog Marvin shreds his notebook, he has no other copies of his poems, no duplicates, much less Google Docs. Suddenly, even this humble, Wi-Fi-non-enabled bus driver longs for immortality, for proper ambition, for the poet’s eternal life. (Marvin: Yeah, well, he’s not getting it.)

Paterson goes to sit solemnly by the roaring Great Falls. Maybe in his head are his—that is, Ron Padgett’s—ace verses about jealous love or human bodies in space, as in “The Run”:

I go through
trillions of molecules
that move aside
to make way for me
while on both sides
trillions more
stay where they are.

Or maybe, as happens to so many of us who have lost data to busted silicon or the family dog, Paterson can’t remember a damned thing. But paper is cheap, and he’s given some by a Japanese pilgrim to Williams’s mecca. As writers discover, the next pass, once the first is a ghost, is sometimes better. “Say it, no ideas but in things—“ Williams wrote:

nothing but the blank faces of the houses
and cylindrical trees
bent, forked by preconception and accident—
split, furrowed, creased, mottled, stained—
secret—into the body of the light!

Paterson still has his pen. In view of those loud waters, that kid is truly unleashed and starts to write again.





Originally Published: December 20th, 2016

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://poems.com/special_features/prose/essay_vardaman.php


Defamiliarize Yourself
by Wendy Vardaman

The Halo Rule, Teresa Leo
Sister, Nickole Brown
Ordinary Beans, Gwyn McVay
Bonneville, Jenny Mueller
The Gravity Soundtrack, Erin Keane

from Women's Review of Books, January / February 2009

Women's Review of BooksThe poetic voices emerging out of the collapsed dualism of deliberately obscure Modernism and deliberately transparent, but often plain and unadorned verse demonstrate a dynamic fluidity of thought. Oppositions—such as narrative and lyric, transcendent and transient, poetry and fiction, formal and free, personal and impersonal, human and nonhuman—coexist, inform each other, and often make for a far more gratifying reading experience than the poet-centered verse of the recent past. No matter how personal, on the one hand, or resistant to narrative and coherence, on the other, each of the five first collections of poetry considered here puts story at its center. And each tells its story in lines that reach for lyrical heights, embracing beauty and artful language and rhetoric, even when—or perhaps especially when—the story is anything but beautiful. All five also make interesting use of genre—chick lit, melodrama, science fiction, romance, memoir, adolescent and children's lit, and pop song—and despite the authors' formidable academic credentials, all are clearly written with the reader in mind, though they don't mind challenging those readers either.

Both The Halo Rule, by Teresa Leo, and Sister, by Nickole Brown, tell a single, unified story through individual poems, one about the breakup of a relationship, the other about a devastating childhood and its consequences. These two books resemble memoir, with dashes of melodrama and chick lit, and both, especially Brown's, also resemble the increasingly popular "verse novels" for adolescents in their focus on a life problem and in their use of plot, although to say that is to be reductive with respect to their language and lyricism.

The Halo Rule zigzags between carefully crafted free verse and free formalism, incorporating rhyme and rhythm in unexpected places. (There is even the occasional sonnet.) "Suite for the Possessed," for example, a free-verse poem about a kiss, ends with a heavily alliterated and dramatically effective line of metered verse:

When the doors open at 16, he pulls back (mal occhio),
the bright heart a passage (jettatura),

then dread. I know the lateral and play it, that hand:
first felony, last flight, no fold, this floor.

"Engagement Sonnet," an unmetered, unrhymed, and thus rule-breaking poem whose metaphors reference love and sports (as frequently happens in this collection) likewise moves between the supposedly opposite goals of "free" and "formal" verse. Throughout this collection, Leo's imagery erupts with the brutality of love and of conflict. In the powerful poem, "Storm Door," the lover "throws drinks at the wall / the way Ali threw punches, hard, without warning, / / roped dopes and blinding jabs. / With us, it's always more rock than paper." She reinvents Narcissus as a sociopath bent on sexual conquest in a series of persona poems that break up but inform the main narrative.

The last half of the collection becomes more predictable than the first, as it excavates the narrator's past with sexual coming-of-age poems and poems about ethnic and class identity. One of the final poems, "Love at the End of the 20th Century," uses the language of combat against itself, and suggests that The Halo Rule itself isn't, finally, about romance, but rather about the way the language of romance positions us to encounter each either and the world:

I loved like an army,
at the brink of war—all battle plans, camouflage,

shoot-to-kill, seizures. The romance,
first tear gas, then morphine, nights

of white heat, sutures, slash-and-burn, shock.
But then, right at the end of the 20th century,

in the year of the hostage, as if dropped by
chopper,
a bomb that didn't explode—you,

conscientious objector, accident, rapture,
and me, auto aim and rapid fire.

Then the words I'll carry to the other side changed:
mercy, surrender, standdown, light.

Women's Review of BooksLike The Halo Rule, Brown's Sister straddles the poetry / memoir / fiction fence. Brown's website calls the book a "novel-in-poems," though the term "novel" appears nowhere in the book itself. It's hard to know whether this story about sexual abuse, violence, and the possibility of redemption would be more difficult to accept as truth or as fiction. Interestingly, the problem of authenticity that has made splashy headlines in the world of fiction and memoir has not yet publicly arrived in the poetry world, although poets ponder it among themselves.

Regardless of its classification, however, Sister tells a powerful female coming-of-age story with many familiar autobiographical elements—class, sexuality, powerlessness, and a growing command of language that finally frees the narrator, at least to the extent that any of us is free. Less familiar is the subject matter of pedophilia, especially treated poetically, and the attempt to humanize the pedophile. But sexual abuse is only part of the story in these often densely beautiful poems addressed to the narrator's younger sister. The narrator feels she has sinned against her sister by not speaking out, by not offering protection, by leaving and, worst of all, by not loving her. Confessing those sins as she simultaneously exposes her stepfather's crimes, the narrator attempts to understand the brutality in each of us, which begins with acts of not caring for the helpless.

As with Leo, violent imagery abounds in many of Brown's poems, which explore ugliness in language that often defies that ugliness, lifts off, then collapses back on itself—as in these lines from "What I Did, V":

When you were five, I took a
thing that was yours, a jar
of fireflies you spent all night
plucking from the gloam, and while
you hollered from the locked side
of my bedroom, music and smoke curling
under the door at your feet,

I set the bugs loose in the dark...

Against the plot's brutality runs a traditional chronicle of the narrator's growing command of language, as in the poem "Speak & Spell," in which she instructs her sister how to spell pedophile: "Who knew there was a word for it, much less a right way to write it down? / Pick up that crayon again, show me what you've learned, / make this into a word, make it a note left behind."

Although Sister seems aimed at female readers, anyone would appreciate the beautiful and carefully chosen language Brown uses to tell her story, particularly as it contrasts with the harshness of its events and enacts a choice between ugliness and beauty, as in this passage from "How She Conceived," in which the narrator imagines her own conception:

Count nine months back.
Find June,

find the foxfire summer,
find mama's fifteenth year,
a dark undergrowth
of fern and fertile knots of water
moccasin down at the creek,
high, green, and indifferent

to the trying of her new
softness in a concrete slick
basement where cave crickets
fiddled in the moldy dark,
or on a rooftop where shingles
gripped her, black grit catch
on her tender bare—

Women's Review of BooksAlthough the remaining collections do not have unified narratives, they are still very much interested in stories, readers, and fictional devices. Gwyn McVay's Ordinary Beans, the most deliberately detached of these books, is also the least troubled and most gentle. It often veers humorously into fantasy and spiritualism. The opening poem, "The Demoness," is a surreal account of an adventure-loving female devil's advice to the poet. "Her Superpowers" tells about a superhero-in-training who needs a little coaxing to believe in herself:

"I think you're ready," the guide said. "You know you're off-balance. Pull up your mittens, kitten. Listen: blood-red cherries."

She straightened her neck. "Blood-red cherries," she repeated. This was the signal at which she must act to become no longer a slave.

McVay doesn't limit her persona poems to human or even fantasy characters; others include "Song of the Pretty Sweater," "Gorilla Face in Crumpled Underwear," "The Griefs of Private Objects," and "Bulletin from Fantasy," in which Decay is considered:

Herself, the Right Grand Corvidess,
First Feather of the Second Arrow,
Significant Watcher at the Concrete Gate,
picks trash.

Not all of McVay's poems involve coherent stories; some gather a collage of quasi-narrative events t



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http://poems.com/special_features/prose/essay_vardaman.php

Consider, for example, "Peninsula," which mixes images of landscape with those from film, so that the experience of nature is not firsthand but rather mediated by the camera:

The water
played in a tape loop. Behind, the park hissed
like the park in Blow-Up, a tape
hiss—the pines started ringing
like glass. We'll want
to return here: we'll want
to play back. In the chilly hotel,
to have breakfast in fur.

Darling the campgrounds
are sodden abandoned, their sites
bitten in and the paths
steeped in cold,
chemical soak.
An etching, a darkroom
developing. We come in and flick on
a switch, find ourselves
in a circle of Technicolor mosses.

Likewise, the poem "Sundowning" takes the standard romantic/lyric devices of attributing human characteristics and transcendent power to Nature, and makes something creepy and menacing, rather than sentimental or safe, from them:

The crickets start praying to the porch lights.
Their chant overtakes the god.
Where, my darling, are your eyes?

Called back
into the grass,
your eyes at first sent down as spies.

Many of Mueller's poems work this way, but with slight variations: "The Donna Party," the title a play on the infamously cannibalistic Donner Party expedition, mixes the natural with the disturbed; "Northumbria" flows in and out of panicked fragments about getting a trapped bat out of the house and references to the Venerable Bede; and "Memorandum" describes a glass high-tech workplace on the Edens expressway: "The lobby holds a tortoise / a lion a horse and a lamb, / and a white stag roams unmolested." In an interesting bit of commentary on her own enterprise, "Lyric," addressed to that mode itself, asks what it has left for poets:

To look at the sky and beg wine,
to barter the cardinal's neck
for cocaine, this is a human's
animal hell, and from what can I sing to you there?
Better a false song about you?
What will the world be
when you give me nothing to say?

Women's Review of BooksErin Keane's The Gravity Soundtrack is, paradoxically, the most irreverent of the books considered here, as well as the most concerned with spirituality. Simultaneously playful and careful, her poems move, like Mueller's and Leo's, among free verse, form, and the appearance of form, with stanzas of the same number of lines, occasional syllabics ("Where the Wild Things Are"), numerous unrhymed sonnets, and a terrific, barely recognizable villanelle, "Science Fiction." As with the other authors, there's cross-pollination among Keane's poetry and other genres, most notably science fiction, children's lit, and popular music. The dominant mode of the collection, however, is the persona poem. The Gravity Soundtrack is peopled by Johnny Cash, Orpheus, Aphrodite, Aunt Molly, and a legion of characters from children's books.

Funny and dark, Keane takes on some of the same subject matter as the other authors, such as the brutality of childhood, which she captures especially wen in the sequence "Never-Ending Stories." These poems reinvent the histories of the main characters in classic children's books, a method familiar from feminist poetry and fiction, where it is used to show how traditional narratives exploit women. Keane cleverly turns the method toward children, whose narrative oppression is less familiar. Each of her virtuous heroes or heroines becomes a broken and exploited creature, and the narrator's persona through the sequence is cynical about belief and virtues—as are the characters themselves and the inscribed reader. Thus, at the end of "The Secret Garden," "it is Easter, but as we all know, / there's no big miracle, no empty tomb, only / your shovel, your mud, your marbles, your worms." "Little Women" imagines a Beth who has sex with Laurie when she knows Amy will see, then runs off to New Orleans. "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" is written from the point of view of a "bad kid" who mocks Charlie and the virtues he represents. There's humor here and pathos, as well as variety; the poems entertain while raising serious questions about the exploitation of children who, like the children'ssbook character Madeline, lack good parental care.

Although the other three parts of The Gravity Soundtrack do not cohere as tightly as this sequence, they possess a similar sensibility and return with biting humor to recurrent questions about the transcendent and the transient. The titles of each of Keane's sections imply that contradictory sensibility—"Eternal Playback," "The Express Line to Heaven," "Never-Ending Stories," and "Something Like Prayer"—in a poetic landscape where pop songs provide the liturgical music, a record store clerk is both a miracle worker and a bum, and technology will be the means through which we're brought to judgment, our sins displayed on electronic billboards in "The Jumbotron Nightmare." "The Laff Box" likewise posits an unlikely relationship between technology and spirituality, both of which come under attack in this funny but pointed poem:

Bury me
with my Laff Box, so I can keep on chuckling
right into the Afterlife—an endless marathon
of reruns, my classic episodes, the "Applause"
sign always lit, seasoned with just the right
timbre of giggle to encourage my decomposing
audience and the voracious, easily pleased worms.

It's the back and forth between these jarringly different registers that makes The Gravity Soundtrack unsettling and entertaining, intense and lightweight, all at the same time. As the title poem says, writing of a rise that suggests rebirth but isn't:

We were

scared, fatherless kids who couldn't
name the men we loved .... We wanted to
see how long we could hold our breath,
waiting, waiting, for spots in our eyes,
the burn in our bellies, for the slow
false rise from the floor, the lifting,
the dizziness that felt like floating.

Ultimately Keane's poems try to jolt us out of seeing God as something tidy and suburban. Think of him instead as "A Divine Infestation": "We're not even supposed to be talking about / him. We are afraid of betraying nonbeliefs. Still, / he dazzles."

Sometimes it's just hard to get out of your own sensibility—Hindu or Catholic, narrative or lyric, formal or free verse, academic or pop, East or West, human or nonhuman. As Keane's poem "Science Fiction" suggests: "How carbon-based we are, / hair, some bone, mostly water." These five poets work hard to create both a de-familiarization in our thinking and a realignment along more tolerant and sustainable lines, eclectically mixing the modes available to them, dwelling less on themselves than on the significance of their subjects, recognizing the reader's presence and challenging her to respond.

About the Author
Wendy Vardaman holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Pennsylvania. Her poems, reviews, and interviews have appeared in a variety of anthologies and journals; a poetry collection, Obstructed View, is forthcoming in 2009

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/resources/learning/essays/detail/69568

Essay on Poetic Theory
Cracks in the Oracle Bone: Teaching Certain Contemporary Poems (2006)
By Brenda Hillman
Introduction

In 2006, poet Brenda Hillman delivered the lecture “Cracks in the Oracle Bone: Teaching Certain Contemporary Poems” at the University of California at Berkeley as part of the Judith Lee Stronach Memorial Lecture Series. Hillman—whose own poetry often brings together narrative fragments, language-led lyricism, ideas steeped in social activism and Gnosticism, and a deeply personal voice—here examines the role of complexity in contemporary poetry and the benefits that engaging such complexity can offer readers.

As an advocate of poems that some readers might regard as difficult and therefore intimidating or off-putting, Hillman offers close readings of several such works by tracking their syntactic, tonal, and imagistic shifts. Contemporary poetry, Hillman notes, “favors process over destination,” and her readings model a way to enter, rather than paraphrase, these poems.

While her students have often praised what they call “flow,” Hillman examines inventive or disruptive grammar as a means of indicating where “the yes of a brush stroke meets the maybe of a thought.” She notes that contemporary poetry should be read in its historical context, in the wake of Modernism, which challenged and redefined our relationship to the world as well as made room for disjunction and fragmentation in the arts.

Hillman organizes her lecture according to the four main ways in which she believes poetry can serve contemporary readers. First, she argues, poetry helps us see ourselves in the context of a range of environments, and thus to find our place in the world. Secondly, poetry displays the breadth of language’s power and potential. Thirdly, truly engaging with the matter of a poem can offer a reader a means by which to process emotion. Finally, poetry can help a reader tap into the precise beauty and strangeness of our days.

Hillman’s lecture draws on her experience as a teacher of poetry as well as her own poetry’s engagement with difficulty and complexity.

I’m thrilled to be presenting a lecture honoring Judith Stronach to many colleagues and friends, and I’m grateful to Ray for publishing this series of lectures by poets—I feel fortunate to be among such illustrious company.

When I began to work on this lecture some time ago, I had just received an email saying that former Attorney General John Ashcroft, having retired from the Cabinet, was seriously hoping to be selected as Poet Laureate of the United States. Ashcroft’s best-known poem, “Let the Eagle Soar,” was used at President Bush’s swearing-in ceremony:

Let the eagle soar,
Like she’s never soared before.
From rocky coast to golden shore,
Let the mighty eagle soar.
Soar with healing in her wings,
As the land beneath her sings:
“Only God, no other kings.”
This country’s far too young to die.
We’ve still got a lot of climbing to do,
And we can make it if we try.
Built by toils and struggles
God has led us through.

I don’t want to spend too much time analyzing this poem. It makes a straightforward patriotic statement based on an image of a bird; it rhymes. The problem here isn’t straightforwardness, or rhyming, or birds; Dickinson, Hopkins, and Frost all employ those things. The problem is that Mr. Ashcroft has not used his imagination in his poem. He needs to sign up for my introductory creative writing class at Saint Mary’s, where we could help him begin his poetry studies in just two weeks. The fact that Ashcroft wants to represent American poetry officially and to be its servant is frightening. His poem reminds me of the 21-year old pipe-bomber planting his bombs all over the Kansas countryside in the shape of a gigantic smiley face. The world quite literally suffers from a lack of imagination.

Here is a poem with imagination, written by Lisa Fishman, It’s called “Note”:

Was wintered in
unmade of stone and what-
not

This compact poem, like the inverse of a dreamed place, invites a sense of uncertainty and of safety. Its three-line form suggests haiku, but it is not haiku. The lines hold an unbalanced number of stresses: 2-3-1. The poem has neither noun nor pronoun for its subject; who is speaking? It begins mid-thought: someone or something has been entrapped by winter. The second line, after an implied comma, seems an extension of the first thought; the someone or something being “unmade of stone” is either being released from a previous condition of being “made” of stone, or the “unmade” means “not yet made.” The third thought-perception is the colloquial, but not current, “what-/not,” broken in half by a hyphen and a new line: “what-not” points to the tentative quality of the initial perceptions. To live without expectation seems a particular terror and amazement in this brief structure.

Could the same thought have been expressed in any way other than in these nine words? A poem cannot be paraphrased. But it can be described, its effects analyzed to heighten appreciation for how such a delicate mechanism plays itself out. In poems, the meanings coincide with the rhythms of someone thinking them; they are the subjects of their own making.

My argument for this talk stems from the idea that it is all right for poetry to have made it into the twentieth century and beyond, and that it is a healthy thing for us that poetry engages with complexity, that this complexity is practical and aesthetically pleasing in ways that offer beginning and advanced readers more reality. Complexity and simplicity are not mutually exclusive. The paradoxical inevitability and openness of poetic expression make it both satisfying and mysteriously difficult to teach. To engage the mysterious or the difficult is not such a bad thing. It is mysterious and difficult to be alive and to express why. For lovers of poetry, there is disequilibrium between ourselves and the world that nothing restores to balance but poetry. The Stronach Lectures are meant to address issues of teaching poetry for audiences that have both scholarly and non-scholarly interests in the subject. I want to approach the topic in a fairly intuitive and jargon-free manner, and to present four survival tools for contemporary culture that poetry is especially good at providing: (1) the sense of who we are in our historical, cultural and—for want of a better term—natural (but I really mean “not man-made”) environments; (2) a sense of the power of language, of each word and phrase; (3) the ability to think through emotion on many levels—literal, abstract, concrete, metaphysical, figurative; and (4) an awareness of how particular and odd everything is, especially in moments of compressed thought captured in time. Taking delight in this four-fold toolkit provides my primary pedagogical energy. I think about these things when composing my own poetry and when teaching at all levels. Poetry is the most powerful method I’ve found for expressing the particular and extreme states life has to offer.

The idea for this talk came from hearing hundreds of questions over several decades—not only in the classroom, but also in conversations with friends and strangers—about the challenges of current poetry. “I can’t say I read much poetry; it really kinda loses me,” someone will say. “Why can’t they just say it normally?” or “Am I supposed to feel stupid when I read it?” as a friend recently asked.

The challenges of reading contemporary poetry also came up in a stimulating lunchtime conversation I had with Judith Stronach in the late nineties. We discussed stylistic difficulties of poetry in relation to states of mental suffering. Judith was troubled by a struggle she was having understanding a particular poem, and asked me whether poetry might not have a special obligation to present directly what might seem inexpressible. I said I thought poetry has the obligation to try to express what cannot be expressed, but that it could not always be done in direct ways. We talked about how the confusion of daily life, the impossibilities, the unredeemed moments of spiritual darkness, as well as massive social and political injustices, could all find shapes in poetry. I know Judith wrestled with these things, and I thought of this lecture as a way of continuing that conversation with her. Thinking about stylistic difficulty and the ineffable in poetry resonates in other types of hermeneutical reading I’ve done for decades—including literary theory, gnostic and occult writings of the second century, spam sent by pharmaceutical companies, and instructions for various pieces of technology. I would say all of these require considerably more interpretation than poetry!

A while back, my husband showed me a thrilling article in the magazine Representations by David Keightley, a Berkeley scholar, about the origins of writing in ancient China. I will try to summarize a few of the main points. Keightley discusses divination by fire (pyromancy), and the development of writing in neolithic Chinese culture. In the Shang dynasty (that’s 1200–1050 B.C.E.—around the time of the expulsion of the Jews from Egypt and of the Trojan Wars), the bones of ancestors and animals were used for this sort of pyromancy, often exhumed from burial grounds, and then reburied and exhumed again, and then burned for the purposes of divination. After the diviners interpreted the messages from the stress-cracks resulting from fire, they uttered sounds as they “read” the cracks, and the sounds of their spoken prophecies were carved deeply into the bones and emphasized with ink. It is in part from these painted carvings that the written Chinese language evolved. Keightley notes that these rituals of divination and writing were open only to a few, and that their interpretation remained a specialized field. He demonstrates that this form of Chinese writing kept the power of knowledge specific to the scholar classes over the centuries. It seems these individual logographic signs were different from the alphabetic or syllabilary scripts in other cultures (Microsoft did not recognize “syllabilary” and tried to suggest “salability” in my laptop)—for instance, those in Mesopotamia—that combined syllables or signs to make meaning. Nor were they pictographic. Each sign came with a single sound and a prediction, with its own meaning. When Bob and I were in Paris last summer we visited the Asian Museum and saw some of these amazing bones and turtle shells and my breath was taken away by the beauty of the markings—like the tracks of small animals surrounding their own absence.

The ability to produce and to interpret the cracks, to utter the sounds from the dead, and to carve the encoded signs became the most valued form of literacy. The signs produced in this manner were more stylized and abstract than those of ordinary writing. Because they came directly from the ancestors whose power was considered to be of an abstract and collective nature (unlike the Egyptian and Greek idea of the particularized soul existing after death), these writings had a powerfully generalized aesthetic function in the culture. I am intrigued by this idea of purely abstract, sound-based script—the signals from the ancestors. The value of these markings lay in their very mystery and abstraction, and in the fact that the accompanying sacred sounds had a social function. This oracle bone script exists between words and music.

A few weeks ago, a poet-friend, Lauren Levato, gave me an article about the development of nüshu, an encoded secret script developed more recently by women in the mountains of southern China for the purpose of sending secret messages men couldn’t read. It is thought that this script derived from the oracle bone tradition. The figures are graceful and stylized—even more so than the bone scratches—bird prints, chevrons, spiked angles. Both these scripts seem like modernist practices in the twentieth century. As Robert Kaufman reminds us that Theodor Adorno reminds us, the vast expressiveness of the abstract and the lyric—as in Kandinsky paintings—help aesthetic culture reconceive its social function. The oracle bone signs and nüshu script both remind me of Mandelstam’s poems criticizing Stalin in secret metaphors, and of reports that servicemen in Iraq are doing highly encoded rap and hip-hop in order to express criticism of the military hierarchy and of the presence of multinational corporations benefiting from their labors.

One of the big jobs of a teacher is to convince students that any effort whatsoever is worth it. In the remarks that follow I’m thinking mostly of introductory poetry classes, but the students might be of any age. Some of my students, especially those new to reading poetry, become afraid when they think they are supposed to understand contemporary poems and can’t. Slant or oblique styles of poetry make them feel stupid, even if the very same techniques are used in music videos. Panicked that they will produce the wrong response, students may grow impatient in an increasingly impatient culture, believing that if poetry does not have an immediate appeal, it is undemocratic and ungenerous. Even some grown-up, famous poets put forth these opinions—arguing that poetry should be easy, should give a quick story, should never make them feel as if a highbrow or academic trick is being played on them. My goal as a teacher is to bring students closer to the initiating impulses of the poem, so that what might have evoked a hostile response can move them to a sense of accomplishment, to the deep pleasures of finding multiple interpretations for what may have seemed obscure.

The fearful student and the equally fearful famous poet might need a small review of the basics of twentieth-century modernism, which redefined the nature of art in several important ways: (1) in light of—or in the dark of—the First World War, modernism broke from the past—but also brought a new consciousness of cultural history—think art deco with its Egyptian motifs; (2) modernism brought an interest—through Freud, but not only Freud—in the mind’s psychological processes, which inspired artists to incorporate images reflecting mental process; (3) modernism defined creativity in new ways (by redefining god and nature); and finally, (4) modernism recognized that the modern city—people living together as alienated beings—was as important to the subject matter of aesthetic expression as rural scenes had been to pastoral traditions. (Readers might want to take a look at Charles Altieri’s The Art of 20th Century American Poetry.)

To most of you this will seem basic, but I wanted to remind the reader that a little background goes a long way. These redefinitions—what we are, what art is, what nature/god is, what we are in cities in relation to our mental lives—and the fact that dramatically new forms of art can include the threadlike, the fragmentary, the unfinished, that objects can point to their own synthetic qualities—all these are concepts worth reminding students of—even if “make it new” is by now one hundred years old. Much contemporary poetry that readers find mysterious makes use of modernist modes, tones, types, levels, styles that we take for granted in other aspects of our lives. It doesn’t take more than half a day to present this summary to students, though it might take them many years to absorb the art itself. Not having arrived at the twentieth century is, incidentally, one of the many problems in Mr. Ashcroft’s poem.

The fact that art comes from other art as well as from non-art, that it should be current, that the dilemmas of our present poetry come from unresolved arguments about representation and expression in the nineteenth century should not dismay us—it is a good thing. As romantic emotion, symbolist moody alienation, surrealist wild irrationality or Russian formalist philosophy make their way into contemporary poetry, we can remind students that originality in art, as in the human genome, resides in the way things are reconfigured, not in some god-given attribute (though I personally talk to rocks, plants, birds and the piece of paper when composing my own poetry, and thus do not want to put down people who think an actual muse still exists). Oracle bones of ancient China speak metaphorically through their ancestors’ recirculating messages. An overwhelmed, busy, depressed, confused or mystified contemporary reader can depend on the poet to make expressive signs, to give meaning to—or even to undermine meaning in—the sounds of her time.

I want to go through the four-fold toolkit I mentioned earlier: the sense of who we are in our environments; the understanding that every word and phrase matters and can be of interest; the idea that meaning circulates on many levels; and the conviction that the strange mystery of our existence can be represented. To proceed inductively, I thought about some poems I have taught in the last few years, and recalled some of the pedagogical challenges they present.

I. The sense of who we are in our environments

Contemporary poetry has a huge range of approaches to this question of who we are. What we find in nineteenth-century poetry—Wordsworth’s hopeful meditations, Coleridge’s depressed intimate ones, the symbolist Baudelaire’s haunted outsider descriptions, Rimbaud’s hallucinatory narratives, Whitman’s capacious sweep, Dickinson’s uncanny metaphysical puzzles—provided twentieth century poetry with a satura—“satura” being a food medley, what the word “satire” comes from—of mental states. In that mix, for example, Stevens’s speakers are both Keatsian and très français; Eliot and Pound offer collage fragments of literature, polyphonies of urban, pastoral, medieval and Renaissance voices; Gertrude Stein assembles human thought patterns in abstract, cubist fashion; HD introduces vatic and oracular lyricism, while Williams uses concrete, everyday American speech, and so on.

Often the persona in poetry is assumed to be that of the poet recounting an experience, or series of thoughts, about an experience in narrative or meditative form. That this became the main mode in the twentieth century is probably because personal accounts have, and well continue to have, a particular appeal. When students first come to poetry, they are excited that it can address their own states of feeling, their questions: Who am I? What is my problem? The lyric poem is still going steady with the turbulent heart that loves its own turbulence. The basic desire for emotional identification, and the lack of it, brings most people to poetry in the first place. No poet forgets the power of emotion. My introductory students have often been drawn to Sylvia Plath’s poetry despite—or perhaps because of—the perilous nature of her metaphors. Here is one of her poems:

Morning Song

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your foot-soles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.

Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.
In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.

I’m no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind’s hand.

All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.

One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat’s. The window square

Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.

Many students can enter this poem relatively easily. It seems to have a “single speaker,” and though Plath deploys wildly contradictory metaphors, her persona is a familiar figure—that of an exhausted new mother. The style is one of apparent realism: this could “really happen.” The poem depicts feelings and a setting most students, even if they don’t have children, recognize. The new parent in the poem feels alienated from her new baby. Students can follow how Plath builds her personal myth: the baby is an “arrival” in a museum, the mother a rather detached figure who moves between feeling like a cloud and like a cow. The images show the progress and irony of her condition as they range from surreal—moth-breath, a window swallowing stars—to a more hopeful, easier simile: vowels like balloons. When students are first studying poetry, they are often told it is bad to “mix metaphors,” but Plath, like Dickinson, wildly mixes metaphors in search of the transformation into a different realm. It’s good to question prejudices about inconsistency. In addition, I wanted to present this as an example of a poem with difficult metaphorical language that is relatively easy to teach.

It’s more challenging to teach poetry that confuses the issue of “who is speaking.” I’ve often taught a book-length poem, Muse and Drudge, by Harryette Mullen, of whom Sandra Cisneros has written, “Hip hyperbole, thy queen is Ms. Mullen.” The book, a lyric meditation which shakes up the question of “speaker” and “speakingness,” uses the style of a collage-voice, a composite of many types of utterance. Its playfulness ceaselessly undermines our expectations of poetic procedure, mixing common aphorisms, song lyrics, cultural truisms, mottos, clichés, asides. Written in unpunctuated quatrains, every page of this eighty-page book can be taken as a separate work. You can read each page by itself, each quatrain by itself; even each line can stand as a separate poem. The opening of the book, like any epic, invokes the muse figure—in this case Sapphire, punning on lyric poet Sappho with her lyre/liar:

Sapphire’s lyre styles
plucked eyebrows
bow lips and legs
whose lives are lonely too

my last nerve’s lucid music
sure chewed up the juicy fruit
you must don’t like my peaches
there’s some left on the tree

you’ve had my thrills
a reefer a tub of gin
don’t mess with me I’m evil
I’m in your sin

clipped bird eclipsed moon
soon no memory of you
no drive or desire survives
you flutter invisible still

In response to this poem, one student noted: “You know who is talking, but it’s confusing to know what she’s saying.” Another said: “You don’t know who is talking, but she has a really particular style of talking.” Not being certain of who is speaking in a poem isn’t always appealing to a junior English major endeavoring to “find herself” through poetry, to identify with a group, to find the money to buy a sweatshirt with a hood, or to believe someone will love only her. Poetry without an identifiable speaker or a single emotional register may be a hard sell. It is nonetheless inappropriate at every level to say to a student that it doesn’t matter whether she finds herself in poetry or not; it is also inappropriate not to include many alternative strategies for self-discovery—such as Mullen’s kind of poetry.

Mullen’s stanzas present multiple possibilities rather than assertions of bold certainty of what we are. Each line pursues its own logic in paratactic relation to others. The lines and phrases interact, and all interaction becomes the “who is speaking.” When students discuss the speaker issue here, the word polyvocal comes up—how the character in the poem pursues her cultural, sexual, ethnic critiques, taking references from jazz, literature from the Renaissance to the present, from mo ........................................

much more at link, great article but tis, very, very long..-Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

Essay on Poetic Theory
Cracks in the Oracle Bone: Teaching Certain Contemporary Poems (2006)
By Brenda Hillman
Introduction

In 2006, poet Brenda Hillman delivered the lecture “Cracks in the Oracle Bone: Teaching Certain Contemporary Poems” at the University of California at Berkeley as part of the Judith Lee Stronach Memorial Lecture Series. Hillman—whose own poetry often brings together narrative fragments, language-led lyricism, ideas steeped in social activism and Gnosticism, and a deeply personal voice—here examines the role of complexity in contemporary poetry and the benefits that engaging such complexity can offer readers.

As an advocate of poems that some readers might regard as difficult and therefore intimidating or off-putting, Hillman offers close readings of several such works by tracking their syntactic, tonal, and imagistic shifts. Contemporary poetry, Hillman notes, “favors process over destination,” and her readings model a way to enter, rather than paraphrase, these poems.

While her students have often praised what they call “flow,” Hillman examines inventive or disruptive grammar as a means of indicating where “the yes of a brush stroke meets the maybe of a thought.” She notes that contemporary poetry should be read in its historical context, in the wake of Modernism, which challenged and redefined our relationship to the world as well as made room for disjunction and fragmentation in the arts.

Hillman organizes her lecture according to the four main ways in which she believes poetry can serve contemporary readers. First, she argues, poetry helps us see ourselves in the context of a range of environments, and thus to find our place in the world. Secondly, poetry displays the breadth of language’s power and potential. Thirdly, truly engaging with the matter of a poem can offer a reader a means by which to process emotion. Finally, poetry can help a reader tap into the precise beauty and strangeness of our days.

Hillman’s lecture draws on her experience as a teacher of poetry as well as her own poetry’s engagement with difficulty and complexity.

I’m thrilled to be presenting a lecture honoring Judith Stronach to many colleagues and friends, and I’m grateful to Ray for publishing this series of lectures by poets—I feel fortunate to be among such illustrious company.

When I began to work on this lecture some time ago, I had just received an email saying that former Attorney General John Ashcroft, having retired from the Cabinet, was seriously hoping to be selected as Poet Laureate of the United States. Ashcroft’s best-known poem, “Let the Eagle Soar,” was used at President Bush’s swearing-in ceremony:

Let the eagle soar,
Like she’s never soared before.
From rocky coast to golden shore,
Let the mighty eagle soar.
Soar with healing in her wings,
As the land beneath her sings:
“Only God, no other kings.”
This country’s far too young to die.
We’ve still got a lot of climbing to do,
And we can make it if we try.
Built by toils and struggles
God has led us through.

I don’t want to spend too much time analyzing this poem. It makes a straightforward patriotic statement based on an image of a bird; it rhymes. The problem here isn’t straightforwardness, or rhyming, or birds; Dickinson, Hopkins, and Frost all employ those things. The problem is that Mr. Ashcroft has not used his imagination in his poem. He needs to sign up for my introductory creative writing class at Saint Mary’s, where we could help him begin his poetry studies in just two weeks. The fact that Ashcroft wants to represent American poetry officially and to be its servant is frightening. His poem reminds me of the 21-year old pipe-bomber planting his bombs all over the Kansas countryside in the shape of a gigantic smiley face. The world quite literally suffers from a lack of imagination.

Here is a poem with imagination, written by Lisa Fishman, It’s called “Note”:

Was wintered in
unmade of stone and what-
not

This compact poem, like the inverse of a dreamed place, invites a sense of uncertainty and of safety. Its three-line form suggests haiku, but it is not haiku. The lines hold an unbalanced number of stresses: 2-3-1. The poem has neither noun nor pronoun for its subject; who is speaking? It begins mid-thought: someone or something has been entrapped by winter. The second line, after an implied comma, seems an extension of the first thought; the someone or something being “unmade of stone” is either being released from a previous condition of being “made” of stone, or the “unmade” means “not yet made.” The third thought-perception is the colloquial, but not current, “what-/not,” broken in half by a hyphen and a new line: “what-not” points to the tentative quality of the initial perceptions. To live without expectation seems a particular terror and amazement in this brief structure.

Could the same thought have been expressed in any way other than in these nine words? A poem cannot be paraphrased. But it can be described, its effects analyzed to heighten appreciation for how such a delicate mechanism plays itself out. In poems, the meanings coincide with the rhythms of someone thinking them; they are the subjects of their own making.

My argument for this talk stems from the idea that it is all right for poetry to have made it into the twentieth century and beyond, and that it is a healthy thing for us that poetry engages with complexity, that this complexity is practical and aesthetically pleasing in ways that offer beginning and advanced readers more reality. Complexity and simplicity are not mutually exclusive. The paradoxical inevitability and openness of poetic expression make it both satisfying and mysteriously difficult to teach. To engage the mysterious or the difficult is not such a bad thing. It is mysterious and difficult to be alive and to express why. For lovers of poetry, there is disequilibrium between ourselves and the world that nothing restores to balance but poetry. The Stronach Lectures are meant to address issues of teaching poetry for audiences that have both scholarly and non-scholarly interests in the subject. I want to approach the topic in a fairly intuitive and jargon-free manner, and to present four survival tools for contemporary culture that poetry is especially good at providing: (1) the sense of who we are in our historical, cultural and—for want of a better term—natural (but I really mean “not man-made”) environments; (2) a sense of the power of language, of each word and phrase; (3) the ability to think through emotion on many levels—literal, abstract, concrete, metaphysical, figurative; and (4) an awareness of how particular and odd everything is, especially in moments of compressed thought captured in time. Taking delight in this four-fold toolkit provides my primary pedagogical energy. I think about these things when composing my own poetry and when teaching at all levels. Poetry is the most powerful method I’ve found for expressing the particular and extreme states life has to offer.

The idea for this talk came from hearing hundreds of questions over several decades—not only in the classroom, but also in conversations with friends and strangers—about the challenges of current poetry. “I can’t say I read much poetry; it really kinda loses me,” someone will say. “Why can’t they just say it normally?” or “Am I supposed to feel stupid when I read it?” as a friend recently asked.

The challenges of reading contemporary poetry also came up in a stimulating lunchtime conversation I had with Judith Stronach in the late nineties. We discussed stylistic difficulties of poetry in relation to states of mental suffering. Judith was troubled by a struggle she was having understanding a particular poem, and asked me whether poetry might not have a special obligation to present directly what might seem inexpressible. I said I thought poetry has the obligation to try to express what cannot be expressed, but that it could not always be done in direct ways. We talked about how the confusion of daily life, the impossibilities, the unredeemed moments of spiritual darkness, as well as massive social and political injustices, could all find shapes in poetry. I know Judith wrestled with these things, and I thought of this lecture as a way of continuing that conversation with her. Thinking about stylistic difficulty and the ineffable in poetry resonates in other types of hermeneutical reading I’ve done for decades—including literary theory, gnostic and occult writings of the second century, spam sent by pharmaceutical companies, and instructions for various pieces of technology. I would say all of these require considerably more interpretation than poetry!

A while back, my husband showed me a thrilling article in the magazine Representations by David Keightley, a Berkeley scholar, about the origins of writing in ancient China. I will try to summarize a few of the main points. Keightley discusses divination by fire (pyromancy), and the development of writing in neolithic Chinese culture. In the Shang dynasty (that’s 1200–1050 B.C.E.—around the time of the expulsion of the Jews from Egypt and of the Trojan Wars), the bones of ancestors and animals were used for this sort of pyromancy, often exhumed from burial grounds, and then reburied and exhumed again, and then burned for the purposes of divination. After the diviners interpreted the messages from the stress-cracks resulting from fire, they uttered sounds as they “read” the cracks, and the sounds of their spoken prophecies were carved deeply into the bones and emphasized with ink. It is in part from these painted carvings that the written Chinese language evolved. Keightley notes that these rituals of divination and writing were open only to a few, and that their interpretation remained a specialized field. He demonstrates that this form of Chinese writing kept the power of knowledge specific to the scholar classes over the centuries. It seems these individual logographic signs were different from the alphabetic or syllabilary scripts in other cultures (Microsoft did not recognize “syllabilary” and tried to suggest “salability” in my laptop)—for instance, those in Mesopotamia—that combined syllables or signs to make meaning. Nor were they pictographic. Each sign came with a single sound and a prediction, with its own meaning. When Bob and I were in Paris last summer we visited the Asian Museum and saw some of these amazing bones and turtle shells and my breath was taken away by the beauty of the markings—like the tracks of small animals surrounding their own absence.

The ability to produce and to interpret the cracks, to utter the sounds from the dead, and to carve the encoded signs became the most valued form of literacy. The signs produced in this manner were more stylized and abstract than those of ordinary writing. Because they came directly from the ancestors whose power was considered to be of an abstract and collective nature (unlike the Egyptian and Greek idea of the particularized soul existing after death), these writings had a powerfully generalized aesthetic function in the culture. I am intrigued by this idea of purely abstract, sound-based script—the signals from the ancestors. The value of these markings lay in their very mystery and abstraction, and in the fact that the accompanying sacred sounds had a social function. This oracle bone script exists between words and music.

A few weeks ago, a poet-friend, Lauren Levato, gave me an article about the development of nüshu, an encoded secret script developed more recently by women in the mountains of southern China for the purpose of sending secret messages men couldn’t read. It is thought that this script derived from the oracle bone tradition. The figures are graceful and stylized—even more so than the bone scratches—bird prints, chevrons, spiked angles. Both these scripts seem like modernist practices in the twentieth century. As Robert Kaufman reminds us that Theodor Adorno reminds us, the vast expressiveness of the abstract and the lyric—as in Kandinsky paintings—help aesthetic culture reconceive its social function. The oracle bone signs and nüshu script both remind me of Mandelstam’s poems criticizing Stalin in secret metaphors, and of reports that servicemen in Iraq are doing highly encoded rap and hip-hop in order to express criticism of the military hierarchy and of the presence of multinational corporations benefiting from their labors.

One of the big jobs of a teacher is to convince students that any effort whatsoever is worth it. In the remarks that follow I’m thinking mostly of introductory poetry classes, but the students might be of any age. Some of my students, especially those new to reading poetry, become afraid when they think they are supposed to understand contemporary poems and can’t. Slant or oblique styles of poetry make them feel stupid, even if the very same techniques are used in music videos. Panicked that they will produce the wrong response, students may grow impatient in an increasingly impatient culture, believing that if poetry does not have an immediate appeal, it is undemocratic and ungenerous. Even some grown-up, famous poets put forth these opinions—arguing that poetry should be easy, should give a quick story, should never make them feel as if a highbrow or academic trick is being played on them. My goal as a teacher is to bring students closer to the initiating impulses of the poem, so that what might have evoked a hostile response can move them to a sense of accomplishment, to the deep pleasures of finding multiple interpretations for what may have seemed obscure.

The fearful student and the equally fearful famous poet might need a small review of the basics of twentieth-century modernism, which redefined the nature of art in several important ways: (1) in light of—or in the dark of—the First World War, modernism broke from the past—but also brought a new consciousness of cultural history—think art deco with its Egyptian motifs; (2) modernism brought an interest—through Freud, but not only Freud—in the mind’s psychological processes, which inspired artists to incorporate images reflecting mental process; (3) modernism defined creativity in new ways (by redefining god and nature); and finally, (4) modernism recognized that the modern city—people living together as alienated beings—was as important to the subject matter of aesthetic expression as rural scenes had been to pastoral traditions. (Readers might want to take a look at Charles Altieri’s The Art of 20th Century American Poetry.)

To most of you this will seem basic, but I wanted to remind the reader that a little background goes a long way. These redefinitions—what we are, what art is, what nature/god is, what we are in cities in relation to our mental lives—and the fact that dramatically new forms of art can include the threadlike, the fragmentary, the unfinished, that objects can point to their own synthetic qualities—all these are concepts worth reminding students of—even if “make it new” is by now one hundred years old. Much contemporary poetry that readers find mysterious makes use of modernist modes, tones, types, levels, styles that we take for granted in other aspects of our lives. It doesn’t take more than half a day to present this summary to students, though it might take them many years to absorb the art itself. Not having arrived at the twentieth century is, incidentally, one of the many problems in Mr. Ashcroft’s poem.

The fact that art comes from other art as well as from non-art, that it should be current, that the dilemmas of our present poetry come from unresolved arguments about representation and expression in the nineteenth century should not dismay us—it is a good thing. As romantic emotion, symbolist moody alienation, surrealist wild irrationality or Russian formalist philosophy make their way into contemporary poetry, we can remind students that originality in art, as in the human genome, resides in the way things are reconfigured, not in some god-given attribute (though I personally talk to rocks, plants, birds and the piece of paper when composing my own poetry, and thus do not want to put down people who think an actual muse still exists). Oracle bones of ancient China speak metaphorically through their ancestors’ recirculating messages. An overwhelmed, busy, depressed, confused or mystified contemporary reader can depend on the poet to make expressive signs, to give meaning to—or even to undermine meaning in—the sounds of her time.

I want to go through the four-fold toolkit I mentioned earlier: the sense of who we are in our environments; the understanding that every word and phrase matters and can be of interest; the idea that meaning circulates on many levels; and the conviction that the strange mystery of our existence can be represented. To proceed inductively, I thought about some poems I have taught in the last few years, and recalled some of the pedagogical challenges they present.

I. The sense of who we are in our environments

Contemporary poetry has a huge range of approaches to this question of who we are. What we find in nineteenth-century poetry—Wordsworth’s hopeful meditations, Coleridge’s depressed intimate ones, the symbolist Baudelaire’s haunted outsider descriptions, Rimbaud’s hallucinatory narratives, Whitman’s capacious sweep, Dickinson’s uncanny metaphysical puzzles—provided twentieth century poetry with a satura—“satura” being a food medley, what the word “satire” comes from—of mental states. In that mix, for example, Stevens’s speakers are both Keatsian and très français; Eliot and Pound offer collage fragments of literature, polyphonies of urban, pastoral, medieval and Renaissance voices; Gertrude Stein assembles human thought patterns in abstract, cubist fashion; HD introduces vatic and oracular lyricism, while Williams uses concrete, everyday American speech, and so on.

Often the persona in poetry is assumed to be that of the poet recounting an experience, or series of thoughts, about an experience in narrative or meditative form. That this became the main mode in the twentieth century is probably because personal accounts have, and well continue to have, a particular appeal. When students first come to poetry, they are excited that it can address their own states of feeling, their questions: Who am I? What is my problem? The lyric poem is still going steady with the turbulent heart that loves its own turbulence. The basic desire for emotional identification, and the lack of it, brings most people to poetry in the first place. No poet forgets the power of emotion. My introductory students have often been drawn to Sylvia Plath’s poetry despite—or perhaps because of—the perilous nature of her metaphors. Here is one of her poems:

Morning Song

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your foot-soles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.

Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.
In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.

I’m no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind’s hand.

All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.

One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat’s. The window square

Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.

Many students can enter this poem relatively easily. It seems to have a “single speaker,” and though Plath deploys wildly contradictory metaphors, her persona is a familiar figure—that of an exhausted new mother. The style is one of apparent realism: this could “really happen.” The poem depicts feelings and a setting most students, even if they don’t have children, recognize. The new parent in the poem feels alienated from her new baby. Students can follow how Plath builds her personal myth: the baby is an “arrival” in a museum, the mother a rather detached figure who moves between feeling like a cloud and like a cow. The images show the progress and irony of her condition as they range from surreal—moth-breath, a window swallowing stars—to a more hopeful, easier simile: vowels like balloons. When students are first studying poetry, they are often told it is bad to “mix metaphors,” but Plath, like Dickinson, wildly mixes metaphors in search of the transformation into a different realm. It’s good to question prejudices about inconsistency. In addition, I wanted to present this as an example of a poem with difficult metaphorical language that is relatively easy to teach.

It’s more challenging to teach poetry that confuses the issue of “who is speaking.” I’ve often taught a book-length poem, Muse and Drudge, by Harryette Mullen, of whom Sandra Cisneros has written, “Hip hyperbole, thy queen is Ms. Mullen.” The book, a lyric meditation which shakes up the question of “speaker” and “speakingness,” uses the style of a collage-voice, a composite of many types of utterance. Its playfulness ceaselessly undermines our expectations of poetic procedure, mixing common aphorisms, song lyrics, cultural truisms, mottos, clichés, asides. Written in unpunctuated quatrains, every page of this eighty-page book can be taken as a separate work. You can read each page by itself, each quatrain by itself; even each line can stand as a separate poem. The opening of the book, like any epic, invokes the muse figure—in this case Sapphire, punning on lyric poet Sappho with her lyre/liar:

Sapphire’s lyre styles
plucked eyebrows
bow lips and legs
whose lives are lonely too

my last nerve’s lucid music
sure chewed up the juicy fruit
you must don’t like my peaches
there’s some left on the tree

you’ve had my thrills
a reefer a tub of gin
don’t mess with me I’m evil
I’m in your sin

clipped bird eclipsed moon
soon no memory of you
no drive or desire survives
you flutter invisible still

In response to this poem, one student noted: “You know who is talking, but it’s confusing to know what she’s saying.” Another said: “You don’t know who is talking, but she has a really particular style of talking.” Not being certain of who is speaking in a poem isn’t always appealing to a junior English major endeavoring to “find herself” through poetry, to identify with a group, to find the money to buy a sweatshirt with a hood, or to believe someone will love only her. Poetry without an identifiable speaker or a single emotional register may be a hard sell. It is nonetheless inappropriate at every level to say to a student that it doesn’t matter whether she finds herself in poetry or not; it is also inappropriate not to include many alternative strategies for self-discovery—such as Mullen’s kind of poetry.

Mullen’s stanzas present multiple possibilities rather than assertions of bold certainty of what we are. Each line pursues its own logic in paratactic relation to others. The lines and phrases interact, and all interaction becomes the “who is speaking.” When students discuss the speaker issue here, the word polyvocal comes up—how the character in the poem pursues her cultural, sexual, ethnic critiques, taking references from jazz, literature from the Renaissance to the present, from mo ........................................

much more at link, great article but tis, very, very long..-Tyr


Folks, sometimes these articles present views I strongly disagree with and often that is about this new course , modern poetry takes.
Yet one must read and try to understand a thing if its to be countered or commented on with any true wisdom, depth and authority.
I hold that man should ever seek both truth and increased knowledge.
For within that path wisdom lays hidden gems used to attach itself to the human mind.-Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/articles/detail/70201

Essay
Keats and King Lear
For the poet, Sundays were not for church, but for Shakespeare.
By Adam Plunkett
Cordelia in the Court of King Lear (1873) by Sir John-Gilbert.

Early in the winter of 1818, in December, John Keats wrote to his brother George about their younger brother, who had died two weeks before. “The last days of poor Tom were of the most distressing nature”—Tom, the boy whom Keats had nursed through his tuberculosis in Hampstead after George had left with his wife for Kentucky. John and Tom had kept to the house that fall while John worked on his second epic poem and read Shakespeare, writing “Sunday evening, Oct. 4, 1818” next to the phrase “poor Tom” in his folio edition of King Lear. He himself would live just two more years .

“I have scarce a doubt of immortality of some nature o[r] other,” wrote Keats in his letter to George. “[N]either had Tom.” Keats imagined an afterlife with “direct communication of spirit” like that which he felt as he wrote to George and felt he could begin to approach by their reading “a passage of Shakespeare every Sunday at ten o’clock” on either side of the Atlantic. “And we shall be as near each other as blind bodies can be in the same room.” Sundays, not for church, were for Shakespeare.

He wrote a long letter to George the next spring about his ideas of salvation. “The whole appears to resolve into this; that Man is originally ‘a poor forked creature’ subject to the same mischances as the beasts of the forest.” Man could be saved by forming an identity in the face of hardship, through the world’s “vale of Soul-making” and not through any Christian otherworldly “vale of tears.” As Lionel Trilling points out, this is also the story of King Lear, “the history of the definition of a soul by circumstance.” This “tragic salvation” was “the only salvation that Keats found it possible to conceive”: “the soul accepting the fate that defines it.” And as it happens, Keats had introduced his “system of salvation” by slightly misquoting a line of Lear’s in which the king calls Edgar, disguised as poor Tom, a “poor bare, forked animal,” a scene before Edgar says, “The foul fiend haunts poor Tom in the voice of a nightingale.” Keats wrote “Ode to a Nightingale” early that May, shortly after his letter to George.

There are any number of ways to take this unfolding of genius. The stories of Keats’s life all burn brightest as they try to make sense of how his years of studying and suffering and hope found form that spring and summer and fall in the poems by which he is remembered for greatness, the best of the odes and “The Fall of Hyperion.” If the tropes that his story gets told with—tragic suffering, artistic immortality—seem to fit the material without letting it calcify into pious cliché, it’s because Keats thought in these terms with a perfect earnestness that let them shape his world. When he wrote, “Give me new Phoenix wings to fly at my desire” at the end of his “prologue” of a sonnet on King Lear, it was less as a rhetorical device than as a prayer, inseparable from his faith in the “gradual ripening of the intellectual powers … for the purposes of great productions,” with which he prefaced the poem in a letter to his brothers in January 1818.

The rub is that other cliché, inspiration. How much can we hope to explain it, how much to trace the lines of influence onto his work, before we end up drawing all over the poems that we tried to explain? I always want to know where impressions end and genius begins, which is hard to see for Keats because his mind transformed so much matter so fully and quickly. But we can get some sense of his creative flame by tracing the thread of King Lear into the tapestry of his genius and specifically into the poems in which the play asserts itself most vigorously, “Ode to a Nightingale” and its double, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” written later that May.

The second poem’s debt to the first is well known, as is that of the poems to the play and even the play’s to that other tragedy of the potential for salvation, the Book of Job. But if the fact of influence is clear, its texture and shape are obscure. The problem, I think, is that scholars and critics have tended to look for allusions that fit with the play as we know it, with the order and literalness of detached understanding, instead of trying to see the play as Keats saw it. He didn’t study Shakespeare: he lived it. Shakespeare was scripture for him, and the scriptures were not; Keats knew them but didn’t revere them. He cited Shakespeare as his highest authority all the time, with the remarkable depth and flagrant inaccuracy of associative and not literal memory. He recalled lines not by and for themselves but as they embodied perspectives, scenes, and whole plots, and recalled all of that as something like revealed truth as spoken by Shakespeare the “Presider,” whom he imagined hovering over him, as he wrote in his letters. I have found dozens of echoes of lines from the play in the poems, from which we can make out a pattern.

The poems are Keats’s version of Tragedy and, taken together, are a version of Shakespeare’s Tragedy. They form a version of the play’s doubled plot, with lines that trace the arc of one half of the plot, the story of Lear and Cordelia, in “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” and the other half, that of Edgar and Gloucester, in “Ode to a Nightingale.” The odes transfigure the characters’ conflicts into the inner conflicts of lyric poetry. They take on the drama’s problems in the abstract. As Lear, the fallen king, despairs over a world “unaccommodated” to him, and Gloucester, fallen gentry, despairs of accommodating himself to the world, “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is about the ways that the world will never accommodate us and “Ode to a Nightingale” about the ways that we try to escape the world and fail, the drugs and arts and other enchantments that leave mortality as it was and always will be. They take us through Keats’s vision of tragic salvation. “Examine King Lear,” he wrote to his brothers a couple of weeks before he sent them his sonnet, pointing out the play’s “Beauty & Truth.”

•

The Tragedy of King Lear is the story of trust betrayed and reestablished in two families. Cordelia loses the trust of her father when she doesn’t overstate her love for him as her sisters do, and Gloucester, an earl in Lear’s kingdom, comes to mistrust his good son (Edgar) after his wicked son (Edmund) convinces Gloucester that Edgar plans to kill him. As Lear and Gloucester turn some of their children against them out of not malice but unreflective selfishness, Lear’s stemming from vanity and Gloucester’s from shame, they suffer from forms of selfishness according to their ranks—the narcissism of a king and the complacency of minor nobility, egotism and ingenuousness, jealousy and envy. It follows that they respond differently when their betrayals cast them into the wilderness—Lear enraged that the world cannot accommodate him, Gloucester despairing that he cannot reconcile himself to the world. The former is the fall of egotism, the fall of a self that expects and demands too much of the world, whereas the latter is the call for the compromised and compromising self demanded by the world. Edgar takes up the construction of a self for his father, even if what the world demands is deception, while Lear’s concern is what in the world to trust if the beauty on which he had depended could prove to be false.

The odes take on these problems in the abstract, as they concern mortality, the lack of an afterlife, and the human capacity to fall. As in Gloucester and Edgar’s conflict, “Ode to a Nightingale” considers how to adapt oneself to the world, honestly or dishonestly. Its speaker wonders what forms of enchantment could help him to cope with “[t]he weariness, the fever, and the fret” of the human condition—alcohol, poetry, myth. There is no first person in “Ode on a Grecian Urn” but a speaker evaluating a world, albeit one in the condition of a static work of art, immortal and stuck. The question is whether the ideals it evokes are beautiful and true, whether to trust them.

“The foul fiend haunts poor Tom in the voice of a nightingale”: Edgar is acting when he says this, but the madness he feigns (or thinks he feigns) betrays his emotions precisely. He has had to shuffle off his habitual calm to react to his reversal of fortune, and this dissonance between the pain of his situation and his accustomed ease would plausibly haunt him in the way that Keats’s wretchedness infects the beautiful voice of the nightingale, Edgar’s new pain in the voice of his old self. One can see “Ode to a Nightingale” as a kind of monologue of that haunting, with the speaker in his heartache trying to become like the “immortal bird” whose song he listens to. If the visceral experience of reading the poem is of rapture, this shouldn’t obscure the pain that makes the speaker long for rapture in the first place. The speaker even dissembles like haunted Edgar—“’Tis not through envy of thy happy lot / But being too happy in thine happiness,” he says to the nightingale, unable to admit (or to see) any vice in himself—and dwells on the emotions that stoked Edmund’s resentment of Edgar, the “envy” of his “ease” of being legitimate and the “eldest child.”

To get a sense of how the echoes of the play in the odes trace the tragic arcs of the plot—the fathers’ separations from their good children, their reconciliations, their deaths—consider some parallels.

In the soliloquy in which Edgar decides to disguise himself as “poor Tom,” a kind of archetypal woodland beggar and madman, he becomes “of the trees” like the “light-wingèd Dryad of the trees” that Keats describes in the first stanza of “Ode to a Nightingale.” (Edgar escapes in “the happy hollow of a tree”—happy like the “happy lot” of the unseen nightingale—and plans to adopt the “numb’d and mortified bare arms” of “Bedlam beggars”—numb and subdued like the “drowsy numbness” that opens the ode.) When Edgar later finds Gloucester blind and wandering in the forest, Edgar, as Tom, leads Gloucester to what he pretends is the edge of a cliff that overlooks “the murmuring surge, / That on the unnumber'd idle pebbles chafes”—“murmuring” like the “murmurous haunt of flies” in the ode and “unnumber’d” like the “shadows numberless” of the nightingale’s grove. As Gloucester vividly imagines a scene he cannot see, he is in the position of Keats when he “cannot see what flowers are at [his] feet” but unseeingly guesses at a number of them. Keats contemplates suicide after that stanza—“Now more than ever seems it rich to die”—like Gloucester, who despairingly leans over the edge of the cliff he supposes is there.

For all the echoes of Keats’s ode in the pivotal scenes between Edgar and Gloucester, it is when Edgar, feigning madness still, meets mad Lear in the forest that we hear “the foul fiend haunts poor Tom in the voice of a nightingale.” Edgar also mentions in his mock-babble the “hawthorn” and “corn” that appear in the ode and asks—it is unclear who—“Sleepest or wakest thou, jolly shepherd?,” recalling the question that famously ends the ode, “Do I wake or sleep?”

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” the famous phrase near the end of the other ode, likewise has an echo in King Lear, whose first scene is a counterexample. The beautiful flatteries by his wicked daughters are false, but Lear trusts only them. “So young and so untender?” he asks Cordelia. “Tender is the night” in “Ode to a Nightingale,” and the night is treacherous like Cordelia’s sisters, whereas she is, in her own “plain” words, “[s]o young, my lord, and true,” although her father can’t understand her.

Lear’s speeches before Cordelia’s death express the depth of his misunderstanding of her. He imagines the two of them playing as though she’s a child, and imagines their living indefinitely, able to think of her youth and her innocence only in terms of her being a child. He cannot understand the nuance of innocence; he sees her as through a glass, brightly. Likewise, the speaker in “Ode on a Grecian Urn” attempts to make sense of characters about whom his point of view makes it hard for him to know much of anything, since he is aging and mortal and the urn’s figures are timeless. They have the permanent youth Lear imagines and, although it is romantic instead of familial, the endless possessive infatuation. If the ode is a vision of Lear’s wish for himself and Cordelia, of a world in which it would be possible, it also shows the dark side of Lear’s desire: a world that is neither possible nor desirable.

There is an exquisite sadness to the ode’s movement away from its enchantment with the world of the urn, the world of art. After three stanzas largely of rapture, it turns to a sacrifice:

Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?

The image is startling in part because of the contrast of brutality and ornateness, in part because the heifer does not “understand the festivities,” as Robert Hass points out. She has “no terror in the eyes,” and in her incomprehension is like Lear and Cordelia on their way to the “sacrifice” that Lear mentions but has no suspicion will actually end in Cordelia’s death. Unlike the rest of the stasis—lovers who will never kiss, maidens ever struggling to escape their pursuers—the death provokes the speaker’s judgment, because the urn has permanently robbed the “little town” of its inhabitants. Without the progression of time, no one can go through pain or tell a story about it. It’s a tragedy of no Tragedy.

Having no one who could tell your story is a way to lose the immortality that art can afford, and this sense of mortality causes the emotional fall of “Ode to a Nightingale,” too. The poet’s enchantments—“Darkling I listen, and for many a time / I have been half in love with easeful Death”—begin to give way when he considers that he won’t hear the bird’s timeless song when he dies: “Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain— / To thy high requiem become a sod.” Only in life can he feel these enchantments, only with the potential for suffering. The poet says, “Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!” although the poet was.
Originally Published: February 11th, 2015

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2016/12/the-beetle-runs-into-the-future/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+HarrietTheBlog+%28Harriet%3A+ The+Blog%29


‘The beetle runs into the future’
By Oli Hazzard

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It’s been a terrible year, so I’m going to spend the last day of it by just writing about a few things that brought me joy, and challenged how I think, in the hope that they do the same for someone who reads this. I’ve never told anyone about R.F. Langley who hasn’t been grateful for the tip, so I’ll start with him. A poet often associated with the Cambridge School, Langley, who died in 2011, published relatively few works in his lifetime, and many of these with small or independent presses. These have been definitively collected in his Complete Poems (Carcanet, 2015), edited by Jeremy Noel-Tod. It’s a book which, as with the complete Bishop and Larkin, derives a curious authority from its smallness. I’ve been reading it habitually over the past year, as a reminder of the possibilities and rewards of precision in seeing and describing. It’s his later lyrics that I love the most, poems which are so exact the language they employ seems to warp and ripple under the pressure of the attention which drives them. His “Blues for Titania,” one of my favourite poems, is one of his most intricate and agile syntactical performances, and it bears comparison with the best work of Marianne Moore. Its 11-syllable lines seem on first glance deliberately imbalanced, one syllable too long or short—but one of Langley’s gifts is to endow the awkward or the hobbled with grace and fitness. Curiously truncated fragments and winding, reticulated sentences, passages of electric alacrity and of pooling, languid slowness, are all integrated in poems which have an eerie, almost charmed consistency of tone and effect. And running through them is an unfailingly inventive and surprising music. Just listen to this opening:

The beetle runs into the future. He takes
to his heels in an action so frantic its
flicker seems to possess the slowness of deep
water. He has been green. He will be so yet.
His memory ripples emeralds. The wasp
takes it easy. She unpicks her fabric of
yellow and black, which slips from her fingers to
land in the past, loop-holed, lacy, tossed off on
the wing. The beetle is needled right through on
one string.

The whole poem can be read, and Langley’s recording of it heard, at the Poetry Archive.

Another wonderful book I’ve been returning to is Mark Ford’s Nairobi, 1963, a pamphlet published by the newly-formed Periplum Press based at Plymouth University, who have also put out works by Peter Gizzi and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin. Ford’s poetic output has been as tantalisingly slow as those poets mentioned above—roughly a book a decade—so each new publication is something of an event. Since his hilarious first book, Landlocked, each volume has signalled a radical change in approach and tone. In Ford’s new work, the strenuously exact descriptive passages, fragmentary translations, dreams, memories and zany quips from which his patchworks are assembled are increasingly likely to fray at the seams, as signalled by the frequent ellipses:

Ay de mi – a pin-
prick of blood, scarcely
more than a pore
flaunting its friendship
with a vein; bright
as the flower
of the flame tree that stained
our drive, our lawn, and the roof
and bonnet of our white
Ford Taunus
red … in piercing, heat-
hazed dreams Tina
the Turkey, fattening for Christmas in the dust
of Kano, interrupts
her pecking to fix
me with a beady eye, to puff
her breast and shake
at me her scarlet
beak and wattles. ‘The worse
it is, the better,’ she cluck-clucks, sotto
voce, from somewhere
deep
inside the labyrinth
of my skull . . .

I find this poetry so light and fresh and crisp and witty, and even a little jaunty; I love the way the language skips and hops effortlessly down these perilously narrow, jagged lines, like one of those Nubian ibexes featured on Planet Earth II (another of this year’s joys). But then there are these sudden vents of feeling that catch with a whooosh and take the breath away. The pamphlet also features a series of beautiful miniatures—elliptically drawn memories from Ford’s past in Nairobi, Oxford, Lagos, Hong Kong, and New York—which become somehow both odder and plainer the more they are examined, like absent-mindedly assembled napkin swans. “Chicago, 1969” sets out an irresistible stall for this irreducibly strange and singular poet:

America developed my commercial streak: I sold
Kool-Aid on our street corner, describing it
to neighbours and passers-by as ‘indescribably delicious’.

I moved to Scotland this year, and commute between Edinburgh and St. Andrews a few times a week on the train, which runs along the Fife Coast. When I’ve not been looking out of the window I’ve often been reading Denise Riley’s new book, Say Something Back. After prolonged exposure to these poems the landscape has begun to conduct itself in a distinctly Riley-esque idiom. I can see very clearly the unintended sea through the window of this passage:

Suspended in unsparing light
The sloping gull arrests its curl
The glassy sea is hardened waves
Its waters lean through shining air
Yet never crash but hold their arc
Hung rigidly in glaucous ropes
Muscled and gleaming.

Riley’s book takes its title from a passage from W.S. Graham’s poem “Implements in their Places,” which also serves as the book’s epigraph: “Do not think you have to say / Anything back. But you do / Say something back which I / Hear by the way I speak to you.” This is a devastating formulation of Say Something Back’s central purpose, which is, to put it awkwardly, to experience an ongoing dialogue with the dead through the continuation of a monologue shaped by their imagined presence. (Though with an important modulation: in Riley’s hands, Graham’s assertion seems more like a plea.) The central, celebrated poem of the collection, “A Part Song,” is an elegy for Riley’s son, who died in 2008. This poem is remarkable for many reasons, not least of which is the wit and skill with which many voices from poetic history are arranged in unique configuration. Through its foregrounding of that synthetic process, the poem makes me preternaturally alert to my own responsiveness to it, and I get the weird feeling that the poem has somehow anticipated that future responsiveness and is already speaking back to it. I feel like I’m more in my body, more who I am, more situated in time, when I read her poems. These great lines from “Late March” do it:

This charged air has a keen and whitish feel
that stings a little, but has gaiety. So, human you,
I’ll hand you back to your own camouflage.

Finally, two books I brought back from a month in New York during the summer. Maureen N. McLane’s Mz N: the serial retains the intricate sonic patterning, punning slapstick and intimate address of her earlier work, but, in this verse-novel-memoir-sequence-I-don’t-know-what-it-is, she allows herself space to wander, ruminate and caustically scrutinise an array of spots of time, as well the woes of the present moment. This is conducted in a dazzling range of registers and rhythms, and packaged in some amazing visual forms: the long, billowy column that makes up “Mz N History of Philosophy,” for example, looks like it’s breathing. There is so much I would like to quote—including a wholly convincing manifesto for a return to both sonnets and bonnets (“Mz N embarks one day upon a sonnet / attracted by the knowledge that it’s dead / extinct like dinosaur dodo or bonnet / long replaced by baseball caps on heads”)—but it’s these lines, which seem to float upwards out of the white space that surrounds them, that I’ve been going back to:

Having reached a floating state
of grace, surprised

by joy
she wants to die
life
can only get worse
the mountain
receding below them as they climb

Ali Power’s A Poem for Record Keepers (Argos Books, 2016) is a long poem made up of short fragments, a journal or daybook with all dates and times removed, and one of the loneliest books I’ve ever read. Each of its forty-nine, seven-line sections has a kind of optional vertical density, but can also be skimmed lightly and semi-distractedly, since, to quote Edwin Denby (a figure these poems bring to mind) “Actual events are obscure / Though the observers appear clear.” The unusual, striking formal feature of the work is that each line is end-stopped. This starts out as rhythmically disruptive, and has odd effects on the inner ear as the lines are processed—each is given the chance to resonate, deeply or awkwardly or comically—but what’s really interesting is how frustrating, and eventually exhausting, this becomes. I find myself longing for the fluidity of a run-on line, for the stretching feeling of extended syntax, for something to break out of the pattern, to escape the terrible solitude of the enclosure. (I also start to feel the absence of the other, unanswering half of these semi-sonnets.) The lines act like they don’t know each other, even when they form part of a potentially continuous sentence; it’s like they’re sharing a commuter train. The cumulative pressure of each failed attempt to begin a dialogue drives the poem to ever more outlandish ice-breakers—in fact, it feels like a poem made up only of ice-breakers, or only of hurried sign-offs, and there’s never quite enough in each to fill the time you want to fill. It sometimes reminds me of reading the backs of cereal boxes, sometimes of Beckett. I’ll finish this last blog with one of these sections, which for me encapsulates some of the feelings and textures of this year. It’s bleak, hallucinatory, paranoid and sardonic, and at the last suddenly and precariously tender:

Was it curiosity or boredom that brought us here?
I ask because it’s summer.
And we’re always reorganizing our dreams.
A glistening ecosystem of Dairy Queens.
Taut cones.
Not all women age so gracefully.
Hurry home.

Tags: Ali Power, Denise Riley, Edwin Denby, Mark Ford, Maureen N. Mclane, R.F. Langley, W.S. Graham
Posted in Featured Blogger on Saturday, December 31st, 2016 by Oli Hazzard.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/articles/detail/70003


Essay
Nurseries of Verse
The only way to grow poetry is to make it a habit.
By J. Patrick Lewis

In the halcyon amplitude of their mother’s lap, two children were once weaned on outsized, hoary orange gospels known as the Childcraft series. One of those eager tots was me; the other was my twin brother. Among Aesop’s treasures and the Grimm boys’ delights lay the verse creations of two dab hands who went by the names Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll. No children’s poets writing since have achieved such an impressive body of consistently eloquent nonsense as Lear and Carroll. Marvelous word turners, past or present—N.M. Bodecker, Charles and Guy Carryl, Charles Causley, John Ciardi, X.J. Kennedy, David McCord, Ogden Nash, Shel Silverstein—would readily admit that they stand on the shoulders of Lear and Carroll.

But a specter haunts children’s poetry—or verse—and the specter is mediocrity. Dana Gioia described it best more than 20 years ago when he referred, fleetingly, to “the cultural demimonde of light verse and children’s poetry.” Leave aside the arguments for the health or infirmity of adult poetry. The democratization of children’s verse, the notion that “everyone is a poet”—seen most clearly in the proliferation of blogs and the digitalization of treacle—is a view so entrenched that it is scarcely worth mentioning. Gorillas might enjoy a good laugh when one day they observe humans speed writing poetry with their thumbs.

What has all this meant for schoolchildren? First, like most bloggers, children are not poets any more than those who first climb up on a piano stool are pianists. Adults do children a great disservice by asking them to believe otherwise. They are, or should be, in it for the practice!

Second, in the teaching community, a rupture in the fault line has set “the choir,” that small band of true believers in the care and nurture of quality children’s poetry, sailing off to a quaint, remote island. But as a veteran of piping down elementary-school valleys wild (more than 500 of them), I am more often met by the mainlanders, those teachers who believe that poetry ought to be ladled out to the young in “units,” according to state-dictated standards, for two or three days out of the school year at most, the gods be thanked. (As Paul Verlaine once said about the word concept, when you hear standard, get up [at once] and leave the room.) To encapsulate the mainlander attitude, this quatrain will do as well as any.

The poetry unit is normally
a pinch of Frost and Emily,
a tickle of Jack Prelutsky, Shel,
and … “Goodness, there’s the bell.”

Who can blame teachers? In their own college courses, pain trumped pleasure as they followed instructions to field-strip poems as though they were intractable M14s. Why should teachers project their own unpleasant experiences on children?

The trouble, of course, is that teachers who disdain poetry know nothing about it. For them, anything that rhymes is a poem. Incapable of winnowing wheat from the considerable chaff and unaware of the wealth that exists beyond the arts and literature, they would never think to look for poems in science and technology, biography, history, or even nature.

Begin with one ineluctable maxim: children will not gravitate to poetry. It must be brought to them. Here’s a modest proposal: give the most important room in the school—the library—a poetry-focused edge. As David Foster Wallace once wrote, “I do things like get in a taxi and say, ‘The library, and step on it.’” The bite of the library bug never heals.

The only way to grow poetry is to make it a habit, and the library can be its hothouse, a permanent nursery of verse. I have seen scores of schools in which librarians and teachers have done the heavy lifting, searching out classic work. In these schools, poetry becomes, as it should, a part of every child’s everyday experience.

Establish a poets’ corner where students come to read or listen to readings. Apart from the puerile doggerel that thrives on barf and boogers (the less said about it, the better), “let a hundred flowers blossom” with books of verse from every school imaginable.

Photocopy well-known poems, hide them in books throughout the library, and “reward” students with laminated bookmarks or some other largesse of the librarian’s creation.

Post a poem on a SMART Board every other day, and ask kids if they can find the poem in a library book. The first to unearth it might get a free book of children’s verse or young adult poetry.

Get rid of all poetry contests in schools. Writing verse is not a competition but its own reward. Usually, the winner composed a ditty merely to satisfy a requirement, a motivation that is unlikely to encourage the habit.

Let children discover in poems those “ah-ha” moments, their faces set in a rictus of wonder, when words become frosted fire, and young readers realize that they have never thought of a thing in quite that way before.

Open a poetry café. Invite parents to after-school readings but only if they are prepared to let ingenious, even devious, machinations become the purview of wily librarians and teachers devoted to rescuing poetry from the nurse’s office and sending it to the head of the class.

No one believes that poetry can become “the great flywheel of society,” as William James defined habit; most people have not read a book of poems in their lifetimes. That poetry is far from the American national pastime is hardly a reason to deny children the opportunity to go on the magical mystery tour that is their own language.

EDITOR'S NOTE: This essay was commissioned as a part of the Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute's project to collect ideas for getting children interested in poetry. For more ideas, download a free copy of the book Open the Door: How to Excite Young People about Poetry.

Originally Published: April 22nd, 2013

A very enlightening and informative article..-Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/detail/91656


Prose from Poetry Magazine
Losing It
By Roxane Gay

When I was nineteen I wrote a poem called “Tears,” which should tell you everything you need to know about the quality of that work — overwrought, melodramatic, and sublimely tragic. I was mourning a breakup, of course. Poetry, I knew, was the language of love. I had read Elizabeth Barrett Browning: “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.” And so poetry would also be the language of the end of love. I cringe when I think of that poem now. It was so terrible, so artless. I decided to stick with prose and I have never regretted that decision.

Because I am a writer and I teach writing, people expect me to know things about poetry. In truth, I know very little about poetry even though I read a great deal. I am vaguely familiar with various forms — sestina, sonnet, cinquain, ghazal. I am very unfamiliar with the craft of poetics — line break, rhyme, meter, image.

What I do know is that when I read poetry, good poetry, I forget to breathe and my body is suffused with something unnamable — a combination of awe and astonishment and the purest of pleasures. Reading poetry is such a thrill that I often feel like I am getting away with something.

I will never understand why more people don’t appreciate poetry. 
Even when I am confounded by a poem, my world is changed in some way. Poetry makes me think more carefully about the lyricism and the language I use in my prose. It helps give shape to my writing, helps me bring the reader to the heart of what I want to say. Poetry gives me the strength of conviction to take chances in my writing, to allow myself to be vulnerable.

Take the poem “Trespassing” by Lisa Mecham, a poem about the night wanderings of teenagers: “Then on the plywood floor, it’s just a boy pounding away / and a girl, her quiet cries turning stars into doves inside.” There is so much captured in that moment — we are given a scene, all too familiar, that is uniquely rendered, haunting, aching, gorgeous.

Or “Cattails” by Nikky Finney, a prose poem, a rush of words, a story of love and distance, a whole world, and the exquisite phrase, “she is reminded of what falling in love, without permission, smells like.”

Or xTx, the poem, “Do You Have a Place for Me”: “I will collect your hair / with my mouth / Use the strands / to sew the slices / in my heart.” This was a poem I originally published in a magazine I edited. It was a poem I loved so much that I wrote a story with the same title so I could carry that poem with me forever.

Or Jericho Brown, on the violence black men and women experience at the hands of cops: “I promise that if you hear / Of me dead anywhere near / A cop, then that cop killed me.” I heard Brown read this poem live and found myself on the edge of my seat, my fingers curled into tight, sweaty fists as I tried to absorb the pain wrapped in the intense beauty of his words.

Or Eduardo C. Corral, who rocks as he reads his poetry before an audience, who blends English and Spanish and demands that we, as his readers, keep up. He writes of borders, erasing and challenging those that exist while erecting new ones. And then, there is a poem like “Ceremonial,” full of hunger and sorrow and eroticism: “His thumbnail / a flake // of sugar /   he would not / allow me to swallow.”

Or Aimee Nezhukumatathil, who often uses poetry to write of the wonders of the natural world, who writes about being brown in white America, who writes of being a daughter, of being a wife, of being a mother, of  being a woman making sense of  her own skin. Her poem, “Small Murders,” telling of Antony and Cleopatra, Napoleon and Josephine, how smells were woven through their loves, and a new suitor, admiring her perfume given by another, “by evening’s end, I let him have it: twenty-seven kisses // on my neck, twenty-
seven small murders of you.” The poem ends with such an elegant twist of a very sharp knife.

I could write of the poets and poems that reach into my mind, my body, and never run out of words. There is no shortage of excellent poetry in the world. As I sit here, I am surrounded by books by Jonterri Gadson, Solmaz Sharif, Warsan Shire, and Danez Smith. 
I can’t wait to lose myself in their poetry, to become suffused.

Originally Published: December 29th, 2016

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/articles/detail/69734


Essay
Things, Boundlessly
Is it finally time for Louis Zukofsky's “A”?
By Justin Taylor
Illustration: Jason Novak

Hugh Kenner said it was the most hermetic poem in the English language. Robert Creeley called it “art . . . without equal.” My friend Jared White, a poet and a bookseller, calls it the Book Group Killer. James Laughlin, the founding publisher of New Directions Press, called it “a great poem really rolling in all its power and splendor of language”—and yet he declined to publish it. I’m talking, of course, about “A,” Louis Zukofsky’s erstwhile pillar of American Modernist poetry, in and out of print for years but recently reissued by New Directions. The NDP edition is a paperback original with a fine and thorough introduction by the Zukofsky scholar Barry Ahearn. It is the first edition of the full poem to be published by a non-university press (the two previous editions were from the University of California Press in 1978 and Johns Hopkins University Press in 1993) and has a yellowed white cover that seems to say, “This is how discolored with age this book would be if we had published it when we should have.” It is not a handsome look, but it does neatly sum up the problem of approaching “A,” and perhaps Zukofsky in general: how to foment the re-discovery of something that never quite had a proper heyday in the first place?

Neither Zukofsky nor “A” has any real claim on the public imagination. Even among poets he doesn’t seem to be much read, discussed, or taught, except by a handful of deeply entrenched partisans. I started to investigate whether—and why—this might be the case, but then I realized that I was squandering a huge opportunity. The question of whether Zukofsky is truly neglected (and of whether said neglect has been just) is far less interesting than the simple fact that one can approach Zukofsky with a readerly freshness—an innocence, if you will—that is perilously hard to come by for such art without equal. This is in starkest contrast to Pound’s Cantos, which has never fully emerged from its author’s divisive personal reputation (and probably never will). “A” is perhaps the last major work of American Modernism to feel like uncharted territory.

“A” is a book-length poem divided into 24 sections, one for each hour in the day. Begun in 1927 and completed in 1974, “A” is self-consciously the major work of its author’s life, but it also seeks to present that life in something like real time. In a 1930 letter to Pound, Zukofsky explains that “A” will attempt “the objective evaluation of my own experience, an indigenous emotion controlling a versification which would (possibly) by my own and a natural ability (or perverseness) for wrenching English so that (again, possibly) it might attain a diction of distinction not you, or [T.S.] Eliot, or Bill [Carlos Williams] or anyone before me.” This is Zukofsky’s way of saying that he feels comfortable writing about himself. (In today’s world Zukofsky might have been a world-class blogger or Twitterer. On the other hand, “A” is 826 pages long—so maybe not.)

The earliest sections of “A” are very much enamored of Objectivism, the literary “movement” Zukofsky invented at the urging of Poetry magazine’s Harriet Monroe. It adhered strongly to Pound’s dictum that “the natural object is always the adequate symbol,” and it became the theory through which most scholars have looked in on Zukofsky’s poetry. But what lends distinction to what might otherwise seem like Pound-apprentice work is Zukofsky’s insistence on the primacy of the personal. “A”-1, for example, opens with “A / Round of fiddles playing Bach” because Zukofsky is attending a performance of St. Matthew’s Passion:

Composed seventeen twenty-nine,
Rendered at Carnegie Hall,
Nineteen twenty-eight,
Thursday evening, the fifth of April.

From Carnegie Hall it’s a short trip down to the Lower East Side, where Zukofsky—the child of Orthodox Jews who immigrated from Eastern Europe—grew up, and where the multitude of languages and nationalities and politics inspired him to try and draw “the song out of the voices,” as he puts it in the concluding line of “A”-2. Music, it quickly becomes clear, is the art Zukofsky admires most. He takes seriously Walter Pater’s assertion that “all art aspires to the condition of music,” but his view of the problem is technical rather than metaphorical. In “A”-6, he asks, “Can / The design / Of the fugue / Be transferred / To poetry?”, and though he’s clearly posing the question to himself, he is not asking it rhetorically. “A” itself is his answer.

In her book The Senses of Nonsense, Alison Rieke writes that Zukofsky arranged words “as if they were musical notes that have been sounded previous to his own use.” Ahearn elaborates:

If we find ourselves lost in segments of “A” where meaning utterly escapes us, the fault lies not with the poem, but with our constrained definition of meaning. When we attend to the poem’s sounds, another dimension of the poem flowers.”

This in turn reminded me of a piece of advice I once got from Paul Violi, my teacher when I was an MFA student at the New School, and one of the smartest readers of poetry I have ever known. (He died earlier this year, and is never more sorely missed than when I’m working on things like this and cannot appeal to him for aid.) I had e-mailed Paul because I was struggling with the Cantos, finding Pound to be at certain times riveting in a way I’d hardly experienced before, and at other times exasperatingly obtuse or else just boring. Paul’s suggestion was to “[t]ake on the passages as if you were a musician playing a piece for the first time—you wouldn't expect to master it at first sight, right?”

This is wonderful advice for reading poetry of any kind, and greatly enhanced my theretofore fitful experience with the Cantos. It also didn’t hurt that in another e-mail, Paul validated my frustrations with Pound and shared some of his own. He bemoaned Pound's “impatience with the world” and said the poet was often “in too much of a rush, his mind leaping way ahead of his readers, a genius tripping over his own feet.”

The Cantos, for all of their moments of brilliance (and there are many), are nonetheless read primarily for their value as part of Pound’s case history. G.K. Chesterton once wrote that “the lunatic is the man who lives in a small world but thinks it is a large one.” If I can modify Chesterton slightly—Pound believed that the world was exactly the size of his fury with it, and therefore enormous. Zukofsky, in many ways Pound’s antithesis, knew that the world was large just because it was. His 24-section poem finds vastness in each hour of the day, but he also knows that his life’s work ultimately represents one single rotation of a planet so small in the universe it might as well not even exist.

This dual consciousness of the infinite and the infinitesimal both humbled and freed Zukofsky. A passage in “A”-13 seems to underscore Zukofsky’s own awareness of the fact:

I won’t say that “the world”
Grows more attaching—
The universe simply does;

The luxury, the magnificent waste
Of thought fed, fed, consecrated
Impingements on things, boundlessly

Elsewhere in “A”-13 and “A”-14 we find Zukofsky attempting to reproduce in English the flow of a certain kind of Japanese calligraphy. Pound has a cameo as a clue in the Times crossword puzzle. There’s some relineated Milton. “A”-16 consists of four words (“An / inequality / wind flower”) arranged on a single page. Then things start to get really weird. “A”-17 through “A”-23 contain a coronal, a play, and plenty of Hugh Kenner’s vaunted hermeticism. Ahearn’s and Rieke’s and Violi’s words of wisdom notwithstanding, I struggled with the later sections of “A.” Reading them felt as if the Hubble telescope of poetry was transmitting images of the cosmic soup that birthed the Language galaxy. If that sounds interesting to you, then run, don’t walk. Otherwise, take your time.

The final movement of the poem, “A”-24, takes up over a quarter of the book’s total page count and is—appropriately, perhaps inevitably—a musical score. But it’s not by Zukofsky. His wife, Celia, working in secret, chose passages from all across Zukofsky’s prodigious catalog of writings (poetry, prose, criticism, plays) and set her selections to music by Handel. She called the arrangement L.Z. Masque, and gave it to her husband as a gift in 1968. He liked it so much that he decided to make it the capstone of his life’s work.

It should go without saying that “A”-24 returned me once again to Paul Violi’s advice to approach a poem as a piece of music. What I found, though, is that the value of the metaphor was compromised by my attempt to literalize it. (This is not Paul’s fault, of course. Metaphors are agents of imagination; if they could be translated into nonmetaphorical terms, we wouldn’t need them in the first place.) Imagining myself as a musician hard at work on my craft lent dignity to the struggle to master difficult poetry, which in turn encouraged perseverance in the enterprise. Being confronted with an actual musical score, however, just reminded me that I can’t read music or play an instrument. I also have to admit that I wondered whether there ever existed a reader so dutiful that she would sight-read 200-plus pages of Handel even if she could. But perhaps I was missing the point. Celia Zukofsky, after all, had no expectation that her L.Z. Masque might be included in “A.” She was an accomplished musician who often set pieces of her husband’s work to music and performed them. There is little reason to think that Zukofsky lost sight of this when he added the Masque to “A.” Indeed, he probably regarded “A”-24 as the closest he could get to realizing the condition of music in poetry: the essential condition of music is the fact that it must be performed. As Ahearn notes, “‘A’ commences at a performance, but it ends as a performance,” one that is also a collaboration: not just between the Zukofskys and a two-centuries-dead composer, but also with anybody else who might decide someday to perform it again, anew.

At the Zukofsky page at the University of Pennsylvania's PennSound Archive, you can hear two performances of “A”-24, from June and November 1978. (The performances commemorate, respectively, Zukofsky’s death in May at age 74, and the publication of the University of California Press edition of “A”.) Bob Perelman plays the score on the piano while Lyn Hejinian and “an ensemble of Bay Area poets” talk over each other as the voices of Thought, Drama, Story, and Poem (a headnote emphasizes that “the words are NEVER SUNG to the music”). If you want to know how these voices relate to the characters (Cousin, Nurse, Father, and so on) or exactly what happens over the course of the piece’s two acts, you’ll have to ask Lyn Hejinian. The ensemble’s barroom exuberance is a welcome counterweight to the cryptic tumult of the text, but that in itself wasn’t enough to keep me listening for 77 minutes. It seems I’m just not that into “A”-24—indeed, I could do without at least a third of what’s in “A”—and I’m okay with that. “A” by turns yielded delight and frustration, edification and confusion, pleasure and boredom. Other readers will have those same responses but match them to different sections than I did. I’m sure something I glossed over (or that glazed my eyes over) strikes someone else as the glorious best that “A” has to offer. So be it. An 826-page poem is not a Facebook post, to be “liked” or else ignored. I feel free to say that I prefer “A”-13 to, say, “A”-20 in the same way I feel free to say that I prefer Brooklyn to Miami, or Hong Kong to Macau. “A” is like a big, strange country that for a long time was hard to get a visa to visit. That it is suddenly more accessible is cause for celebration in and of itself, irrespective of whether you ever decide to make the trip. For whatever it’s worth to you, I’m glad I went.

Originally Published: August 24th, 2011

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/guides/detail/91655


Strange Meetings
Attraction and Defection in the January 2017 Poetry

Despite its diminutive name, “Microliths”—a collection of Paul Celan prose fragments featured in the January 2017 issue of Poetry—offers some grandly resonant ideas about poetry. “The poem,” Celan writes, “puts up with the shared cognizance of the one who ‘produces’ it only as long as is necessary for its coming into existence.” Rhyme is similarly touch-and-go:

a chance meeting at a place in language-time nobody can foresee, it lets this word coincide with that other one—for how long? For a limited time: the poet, who wants to stay true to that principle of freedom that announces itself in the rhyme, now has to turn his back to the rhyme.
—Translated by Pierre Joris

Meeting, leave-taking, even alienation: for Celan, poetry embodies all of those phenomena.

Often enough, it describes them, too. This issue is full of strange meetings, of attractions and repulsions, doublings and rupturings. Take, for instance, Caroline Bird’s “Megan Married Herself.” Conventional marriages bond two people into a single couple, but Megan’s splits one person into two:

She arrived at the country mansion in a silver limousine.
She’d sent out invitations and everything:
her name written twice with “&” in the middle,
the calligraphy of coupling.

Similarly, before kissing a mirror, she offers a mirrored vow—“I do. I do”—that suggests she consists of two “I”s, two selves. Bird shifts her pronoun use, affirming the transition:

Not a soul questioned their devotion.
You only had to look at them. Hand cupped in hand.
Smiling out of the same eyes. You could sense
their secret language, bone-deep, blended blood.

From “she” to “they”: this marriage at once joins and sunders, or joins what was already sundered. (For doesn’t marriage to oneself suggest—along with a perfectly matched union—the existence of two divergent selves housed within a single person?) Bird’s language is familiar from descriptions of wedding scenes, though usually terms like “same eyes” and “blended blood” function metaphorically. What’s the effect of their literal use here? Might it point to our impossibly high expectations of identification within a couple—expectations satisfied only if you marry someone unfeasibly similar to you?

While the bride celebrates, another mirror image of her—in the person of a man named Derek—eyes his wife and remembers his old proposal to himself: “I’m the only one who will ever truly understand you. / Marry me, Derek. I love you. Marry me.”

“Is it too late for us to try?” Derek whispered
to no one, as the bride glided herself onto the dance floor,
taking turns first to lead then follow.

As earlier in the poem, Bird uses conventional language to describe an unconventional situation. A married man watches a newly married woman and whispers his longing—but he isn’t longing for her, he’s longing for himself. Or is he? He whispers his plea “to no one”—a reminder that this bride’s plan hints not just at her multiplicity but also at her singularity, her solitude.

Multiplicity and singularity are also at play in Hieu Minh Nguyen’s “Changeling,” another study of identification and difference. The speaker is a mirror image of his mother, who is (fittingly) gazing into a mirror:

Standing in front of a mirror, my mother tells me she is ugly
says the medication is making her fat. I laugh & walk her
back to the bed. My mother tells me she is ugly in the same voice
she used to say no woman could love you & I watch her
pull at her body & it is mine. My heavy breast.
My disappointing shape.

One thinks of Bird’s term “blended blood”: this mother and son blur thoroughly. The mother used to insult her son as easily as she now insults herself, and as he watches, her body turns into his (in an echo, perhaps, of his birth). He mentions his “heavy breast”—a peculiarly maternal description of his form—and by the next line, he’s insulting himself, Mom-style, citing his “disappointing shape.”

Toward the end of the poem, Nguyen provides a “mirror-image” sentence: “I tell my mother she is still beautiful & she laughs.” It’s an inversion of what happens earlier in the poem: rather than insult, he praises; rather than his laughter, hers. And then something stranger happens: “The room fills / with flies. They gather in the shape of a small boy. They lead her / back to the mirror, but my reflection is still there.” Nguyen is playing with the tradition of the “changeling” child—the magical child once believed, in certain traditions, to be substituted by fairies in place of the real one. Here, a swarm of flies—symbol of disease, and thus a fitting match for this sickbed scene—is taking on his youthful shape.

The theme of change (if not of changelings) runs through the whole poem: the mother’s aging and illness; her anxiety about growing fat; her body’s transformation into his and his attitude into hers. Yet after flies adopt his childish form and lead his mother to the mirror, his reflection has stayed as it was before, beaming back at his mother, as if to assert that son and parent are, after all, one and the same.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/54569

Poem Related Content
Discover this poem's context and related poetry.



What the Bones Know
Related Poem Content Details
By Carolyn Kizer


Remembering the past
And gloating at it now,
I know the frozen brow
And shaking sides of lust
Will dog me at my death
To catch my ghostly breath.

I think that Yeats was right,
That lust and love are one.
The body of this night
May beggar me to death,
But we are not undone
Who love with all our breath.

I know that Proust was wrong,
His wheeze: love, to survive,
Needs jealousy, and death
And lust, to make it strong
Or goose it back alive.
Proust took away my breath.

The later Yeats was right
To think of sex and death
And nothing else. Why wait
Till we are turning old?
My thoughts are hot and cold.
I do not waste my breath.

Carolyn Kizer, "What the Bones Know" from Cool, Calm & Collected: Poems 1960-2000. Copyright © 2001 by Carolyn Kizer. Reprinted by permission of Copper Canyon Press, P. O. Box 271, Port Townsend, WA 98368-0271, www.coppercanyonpress.org.
Source: Cool, Calm & Collected: Poems 1960-2000 (Copper Canyon Press, 2001)




The later Yeats was right
To think of sex and death
And nothing else. Why wait
Till we are turning old?
My thoughts are hot and cold.
I do not waste my breath.
---Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2017/01/a-certain-poetic-history-peter-gizzis-archeophonics/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+HarrietTheBlog+%28Harriet%3A+ The+Blog%29


Poetry News
A Certain Poetic History: Peter Gizzi’s Archeophonics
By Harriet Staff

Peter Gizzi’s Archeophonics (Wesleyan, 2016) is reviewed by Martha Ronk at Constant Critic this month. “The book directly raises questions of how one is to go about the writing of poetry given the collapse of language and the self, as in an initiating quotation from Rimbaud: ‘For today’s tourist, orientation is impossible.’” More:

The songs that make up the book utilize the metaphor of “air,” an early word for song, and frequently turn to the air itself for inspiration, as Romantic poets often did and as others influenced by them (for example, Wallace Stevens) have done: “Looking out over the day, the pale performing day. / I always consult the air before composing air.” I am reminded of Coleridge’s “Aeolian Harp” or Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” and Gizzi’s own “Wind Instrument”: “Was that a cathedral bell / or the air conditioner? / Crisp air coming in.” Here “air” is also a voice talking as the air of the world moves into the speaking poet: “you do all the talking, / you do all the talking / and forget the world.” In thinking about this and Gizzi’s adoption of a specific tradition, I returned to M.H. Abrams’s suggestive “The Correspondent Breeze: a Romantic Metaphor”:

“Breathing” is only one aspect of a more general component in Romantic poetry. This is air-in-motion, whether it occurs as breeze or breath, wind or respiration—whether the air is compelled into motion by natural forces or by the action of the human lungs. That the poetry of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron should be so thoroughly ventilated is itself noteworthy; but the surprising thing is how often, in the major poems, the wind is not only a literal attribute of the landscape, but also a metaphor for a change in the poet’s mind.

Thus the book takes a long view of the role of poetry both echoing poetry of the past and looking to the round of seasons and the future, adopting a generalized vocabulary and nature metaphors for the possibilities of revision. Two voices, it seems to me, characterize Archeophonics, the speaker-as-Poet placing himself in and defending Poetry and another that reads as specifically personal: “I hate that, when syntax / connects me to the rich” or “Next year my body will be 57; it was human, it was American, it was a piece of big data.” The representative “voice” of the book’s argument remains the significant, which is perhaps risky in the contemporary world of more political poetry, more specific lexicons, more fury. It posits an argument for a certain poetic history, for a range of different poetic projects, and for the ways in which poets can revitalize the so-called “old,” here represented by a familiar struggle between death and life, and by particular metaphors and vocabulary. In one poem, risk is acknowledged as a solo flight “back / into the old language.”

The full review can be found at Constant Critic.

Tags: Constant Critic, Martha Ronk, Peter Gizzi, Wesleyan University Press
Posted in Poetry News on Friday, January 20th, 2017 by Harriet Staff.




Thus the book takes a long view of the role of poetry both echoing poetry of the past and looking to the round of seasons and the future, adopting a generalized vocabulary and nature metaphors for the possibilities of revision. Two voices, it seems to me, characterize Archeophonics, the speaker-as-Poet placing himself in and defending Poetry and another that reads as specifically personal: “I hate that, when syntax / connects me to the rich” or “Next year my body will be 57; it was human, it was American, it was a piece of big data.” The representative “voice” of the book’s argument remains the significant, which is perhaps risky in the contemporary world of more political poetry, more specific lexicons, more fury. It posits an argument for a certain poetic history, for a range of different poetic projects, and for the ways in which poets can revitalize the so-called “old,” here represented by a familiar struggle between death and life, and by particular metaphors and vocabulary. In one poem, risk is acknowledged as a solo flight “back / into the old language.”


Yes, I have found the elitism, snobbery and new age faithful intolerance of poems being written with deeper meaning and in rhyme and not as free verse/chaotic ramblings to be dominate at most internet poetry sites.
Modern poetry(those whose influence govern whats lauded and promoted) wants no part(or else very little ) of deeper, more solid poems that present clear and/or moral messages to the readers!
Sad and indicative of not only great error but arrogance, elitism and liberal politics invading to destroy the more solid forms of poetry IMHO.--Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/articles/detail/88714

Essay
Advanced Sentiment
On Eileen Myles and the transparency of fame.
By Arielle Greenberg

“Fame is merely advanced sentiment.”

Eileen Myles wrote that line. If you follow contemporary American poetry, you probably heard of her years ago: she is the author of 19 books, has been a central player in the poetry community of downtown New York City for decades, is a lesbian literature superstar, writes about and collaborates with renowned avant-garde artists in other mediums, and has toured and taught all over the world. That said, she’s a poet, and even famous poets are rarely household names. Lately, though, she’s hard to miss: last fall, two Myles books were published: a reissue of one of her most famous titles, the 1994 novel Chelsea Girls, and a volume of new and selected poems, I Must Be Living Twice. She’s become a media darling, profiled everywhere from the Paris Review to New York Magazine and featured in not one but two articles in the same recent issue of the Sunday New York Times.

One of Myles’s earliest influences was Andy Warhol, so it makes sense that she seems to be approaching the sudden spike in her celebrity with a mixture of bemusement, scholarly curiosity, giddy enthusiasm, and Zen detachment. It is not lost on her that as a poet who has often written about fame, she is now as famous as a poet can get, and that this role is fraught. Famous people are of course the repositories for the hopes, dreams, and shames of the non-famous. Through depictions of their lives and choices—no matter how manufactured or one-dimensional the versions we receive might be—we see our own.

This is also perhaps the purpose of autobiographical literature: the Confessional poem, the memoir, the fictionalized account of a life we recognize as the author’s own, all of which are genres and styles Myles has played with over the years. Sometimes the reception of such a literary work generates fame for the author, and thus both the life-depicting work and the life itself are altered ever after by celebrity so that the art and the image are indistinguishable. This is the hall of mirrors in which Myles finds herself in now.

For example, Myles pops up in a recent New Yorker profile of television-show creator Jill Soloway, her current romantic partner. In the kind of meet-cute that usually happens only on sitcoms, Soloway had never met Myles until she began researching her as the basis for a lesbian poet-academic character, Leslie Mackinaw, for Soloway’s hit TV show, Transparent. The research led to a virtual crush, and after the two appeared on a panel together in Los Angeles, an actual relationship began. Although the New Yorker piece is about Soloway, not Myles, Myles has the last word in the piece: There is “the fiction of being alive,” she said, how with “every step, you’re making up who you are.”

In a conversation with Adam Fitzgerald for (Warhol’s) Interview magazine, Myles talked about Warhol’s impact on her generation of artists. “There were all these constructed identities, made-up selves. And even though my fake persona was my literal persona, I was constructing it. I got to New York in the seventies, and I remember looking at Patti Smith and Bruce Springsteen—these are working-class kids from New Jersey—and I thought, ‘I'll be a working-class kid from Boston.’ Well, I was a working-class kid from Boston. … So it’s somewhere between constructing and believing, and I’ve been living that construction for as long as I can remember. But even before I was a poet, who hasn't been making up a self?”

It’s true, of course: we all make up a self. We invent and perform multiple selves. But writers—especially writers who choose an autobiographical first person, as Myles does—have a particularly bizarre relationship to that invented self because the construction is also the basis for the art. Then the art generates further ideas about the invented self, and sometimes the maker gets a bit famous, and now which is which? Is the constructed self the writer? Is the writer the work? Is the work the image, the fame? Is the image or fame the same as the life? There it is: the hall of mirrors.

•

I can distinctly remember being a young poet—nose ring, vintage dress, combat boots—browsing through the experimental literature section at Tower Books on Astor Place in New York’s East Village in the mid-nineties and stumbling across the distinctive, ribbed-matte-paper texture of a book from Black Sparrow. The book was Myles’s Chelsea Girls: in episodic chapters; a lesbian poet named Eileen Myles alternately recalls her childhood and gets into and out of all kinds of grown-up, sexy trouble—fights with cops, a momentary hippie experiment at Woodstock, drunken affairs with junkies. It’s rambling, graphic, direct, deliciously gossipy, and rife with badassery and insightful self-awareness: “I guess I was about 18 and I was driving in a car down the Southeast Expressway toward Cape Cod,” the Popponesset chapter begins:

I had a tall can of beer in my hand and it seems I see me in profile. How strange. I was riding in Louise’s car, a black Mustang. She was a short athletic constantly tanned girl. I had a strange feeling of excitement around Louise which compelled me to fulfill her idea of me.

Chelsea Girls is billed as a novel, but it reads more like a memoir in anecdotes. Or a tell-all of a certain moment in the American poetry scene, with the names changed to semi-protect the innocent. Myles herself calls it a “fuck you to the notion of genre.”

Chelsea Girls wasn’t the first time I’d heard of Myles. I was fresh out of undergraduate school, and my knowledge of contemporary American poetry wasn’t particularly deep, but I already knew Myles’s name and something of her reputation: I knew she was a lesbian who wrote about that, openly and proudly. I knew that although Chelsea Girls was prose, Myles mostly wrote poems, in a style associated with the second generation New York School style that I loved: casual, deceptively plainspoken, somewhat surrealistically discursive, intimately conversational, as in the opening of her early poem “Romantic Pain”:

And in the first bar
the woman next to me said, “
How would you like to be introduced
to a couple of muscle-bound …”
Then she talked about when she
had been chef, “Moist juicy
salad with russian dressing”
I gulped my bourbon & walked
out the door.
The second bar was all women.
Bartender, a chubby Diane Keaton.

I knew she wrote short lines in long columns, like Robert Creeley, as in this excerpt from her long poem “Merk,” from 1997’s School of Fish:

I am the daughter
of substitution
my father fell
instead of the dresser
it was the family
joke, his death
not a suicide
but a joke

I knew she wrote in messy, manic long lines, like Allen Ginsberg, as in this excerpt from another long poem, “Whax ‘n Wayne,” from 1982’s Sappho’s Boat:

It’s the new god, the one that doesn’t know about me at all,
who misses me in movies, restaurants, who doesn’t count my
wheels spinning—who could count silence? that’s the one I love.

And I knew she was cool.

In 1994, Myles was cool by definition and by association: because I was a mildly punk rock (indie, we said then) riot grrl writer, most things queer were cool, and most things poetry were cool, and most things that referred to Andy Warhol were cool, and most things on St. Mark’s Place (including the Poetry Project, for which Myles served as director in the mid-eighties) and in the East Village (where Myles lives) were cool. She had studied with Alice Notley and Ted Berrigan, two of the most admired, most out-there poets of the countercultural New York literary scene. In a recent interview in the Guardian, Myles says of this time, “you just rolled in on Friday night with your beer and Alice Notley was teaching a workshop. You brought drugs.” She had worked as an assistant to James Schuyler, one of the original New York School poets. She may have come from a working-class family in Massachusetts, but if what impresses you are the avant-garde and renegade circles of New York City poetics, Myles’s pedigree is second to none.

At the time, in the mid-nineties, SoHo was becoming a high-end shopping mall: many newly arrived artists I knew were nostalgic for a downtown we’d never gotten to experience, the grittier version from the late seventies and the eighties that Myles wrote about and still represented. I remember attending a screening of experimental films and hearing that one of the impressive young directors was Myles’s girlfriend and that Myles herself was in the audience. This was presented as juicy, insider information. In the small world of innovative poets and artists, Myles was already universally acknowledged to be the height of cool.

•

Myles herself knows (I assume) that she was and is cool because she knows what it means to be cool: coolness is often the subject of the work and a word she uses often in her writing (including in the title of her novel Cool for You). In I Must Be Living Twice, the very first poem included from her very first book—The Irony of the Leash (1978)—begins “Oh, Hello. C’mon in. / You know I was just thinking about how you’ve / Always thought I was cool …” In many of her poems, Myles takes sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll as subjects. She writes about cigarettes and bourbon and romantic love. She writes about living in the city. She writes about her dog and about the devil. She writes quite a bit about Joan of Arc, a figure who has come to be deployed in 21st-century Western culture as almost a cliché of renegade feminist cool. (Myles has written that she “loves clichés.”)

Of course, if it were all a veneer, all an act of coolness, Myles wouldn’t be cool at all. What makes Myles’s poems so resonant is, in fact, their reverence: she writes with swagger but also with honesty and vulnerability, a lesbian James Dean. They are urbane and fresh; they radiate energy and humanity. She writes about the time when she “had a small hole / in the shoulder of my white shirt, and another on / the back” and how she looked “just beautiful” (from her poem “Holes”). Her poem “The Honey Bear” begins with a typically louche scene: the speaker is listening to Billie Holliday and “standing in the kitchen / smoking my cigarette of this / pack I plan to finish tonight / last night of smoking youth.” But what follows are a series of admissions of frailty: rather than drinking whiskey, the speaker “made a cup of this funny / kind of tea I’ve had hanging / around.” And even though the tea’s “[a] little too sweet,” her “only impulse / was to make it sweeter.” Later she tells us, “I’m standing by the tub / feeling a little older” and yet “I’m not a bad looking woman / I suppose.” I think it’s this mixture of bravado and doubt, shamelessness and anxiety, that so endears Myles to her readers.

•

I find it wild how much of the recent media coverage of Myles’s newfound, larger-scale fame—her “retrospective moment” or “ascension into the mainstream,” as a host of big-name publications have recently deemed it—is about that fame itself and about the problems thereof.

Of course, it is weird for a poet to be famous, and no one feels this weirdness more deeply than poets themselves. It’s even more weird for a poet to be newly more famous—genuinely, glossy-magazine famous—in her mid-sixties, after writing 19 books, after being famous within that smaller world for many years prior.

So now Myles is famous in part for having been famous on that micro level for so long and stepping through the invisible boundary that keeps poetry celebrity from actual, A-list, American celebrity. Myles was once the kind of literary star who sits in a dark corner of a seedy downtown bar while the fellow poets gathered to talk excitedly to her. Now she’s the kind of star whose face or words show up on television or at the local Cineplex.

•

Even when the work is about the Self, we want and expect that others will weigh in on it, critically, as art. But many poets—especially, I wager, queer, feminist, marginalized, and young poets—read a Myles poem and see, beyond the work as literature, a vision of the self we would like to enact in the world: brash, confident, living large. This was true in the seventies and the nineties and is still true today: the colloquial language and loose-limbed structure of her poems, from the earliest to the most current, feel vibrant and risk taking and wild.

So, in a sort of fangirl way, I feel awkward writing about Eileen Myles the celebrity, the poetry rock star. Because, of course, she is also still Eileen Myles the actual person and the actual poet. (Like many people in the poetry community, she and I are generally acquainted—she wrote a blurb for an anthology I edited—but I do not know her well.)

Another reason I feel awkward writing this piece is that Myles is a living writer, completely capable of formulating and disseminating her own ideas about her reputation and her fame. She’s been doing just that with typical introspection and wit. For WIFEY, the feminist media site Soloway co-runs, Myles wrote a piece of lyric prose called “Copy, Copy” about her involvement with Transparent:

later on I was engaged in some emails with the wardrobe people about what such a character might wear and of course there are these ideas about lesbian academics or poets that they dress in sort of baggy masculine clothes so I suggested that such a character might wear tighter shirts and not such loose jeans. A vest they asked. Well maybe.

Later in the piece, she writes of the actor Cherry Jones, who plays Leslie Mackinaw, the character based on Myles on Transparent: “Slowly I’m thinking at least for now she might be a better copy of me than myself.” She writes about playing a cameo part as a friend of Leslie’s, which is to say she plays her own sidekick.

Myles also weighs in on how, in a climactic episode in Transparent’s second season, Leslie Mackinaw reads poetry at a fictionalized version of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. The poem she reads, “School of Fish,” is an actual Myles poem. Thus we have an alternate television reality, a (semi-transparent) palimpsest in which the poem that exists in our world is turned into a slightly tweaked version of itself at a slightly tweaked version of a real event. Of this Myles writes, “Just as Cherry Jones can play a poet Leslie Mackinaw based somewhat on an actual poet, Eileen Myles, so can a poem, this one called ‘School of Fish’ be pawned off as a poem written by someone else, the fictional poet Leslie Mackinaw. … The poem was on stage in Cherry’s mouth (kind of weird) cause now she had my poem and my clothes.”

Is there a need for me to write these thoughts about fame and coolness if Myles’s work has been about these very issues all along?

•

In a recent piece for New York Magazine about Myles, Rachel Monroe interviewed director Paul Weitz about the poet, whose lines are used as an epigraph to open his film Grandma. Lily Tomlin plays Elle, an aging lesbian poet, who, unlike Myles, has not seen her success build over her later years. She is currently down on her luck and has a grandchild. Explaining why he chose to evoke Myles, Weitz calls her a badass, an ass-kicker. “She’s incredibly literate, with an aspect of punk rock,” Weitz says. “That’s what I was hoping to capture with Lily Tomlin’s character—that somebody in their sixties can be more edgy than somebody in their teens.”

But what are the financial implications of “edginess”? There are maybe only two economic categories for the contemporary image of the Poet: glamorously broke, in a bohemian sort of way (garret apartment, getting by on charm alone), or glamorously rich, in a bohemian sort of way (louche attire, frequent travel, fabulous parties around a built-in stone fire ring). The Tomlin character in Grandma, Elle Reid, of the cut-up credit card sculptures and the broken-down vintage car, occupies the former category. The Cherry Jones character on Transparent, Leslie Mackinaw, of the outdoor hot tub and impressive feminist art collection in the Los Angeles hills, occupies the latter.

In real life, though, Myles is somewhere between: she keeps a sparsely furnished, rent-stabilized apartment in Manhattan and recently bought a house in the artsy rural town of Marfa, Texas. She has no graduate degree and has mostly worked part-time teaching gigs and pieced together literary awards and fellowships. Like most people from working- and middle-class backgrounds, Myles knows there’s no appeal in being actually poor. She has said, “Money is much dirtier than sex ever was. That’s why I write about it.”

In conversation with Ben Lerner for the Paris Review, Myles further attempts to explode the myth of the too-cool-for-school, cavalier, non-working poet. She says, “There’s a faux vernacular, as though the ambition must be hidden at all times, to be more, I don’t know, attractive? It’s the loafer posture, the veneer of ‘I don’t really need this.’… There’s a whole female industry engaged in materially supporting the illusion that the artist doesn’t work directly on his legacy, his immediate success. He’s just a beautiful stoner boy or an intellectual.” In opposition to this, and on political principle, Myles is honest about her “sense of preservation,” as she calls it in the poem “Life,” the fact that she is smart and hardworking. She tells Lerner, “I like turning that illusion [of not working] inside out. And making the work be literally about the field and the failures and even the practice.” That more nuanced reality—of getting by, of putting in the hours, of living on very little, of tireless self-promotion—is harder to translate into a depiction of coolness.

•

Part of the ongoing outsider appeal of Myles’s work is that the multiple invented and performed selves she embodies revolve around gender and/or sexuality. For many of us, these are crucial components to the way we understand ourselves in the world. On Transparent, a few of the most interesting (and heartbreaking) scenes depict generational tensions within the queer community on this very notion. Young queers and trans people were raised with a discourse around the notions of fluidity and gender as a construction; there can be disconnect with elders who came up viewing sexuality and gender expression and identity in more binary or fixed categories, often informed by political climates that made such hard lines feel like a necessity. For example, the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival famously had an “intention” that all attendees must be “womyn who were born female, raised as girls and who continue to identify as womyn,” thereby excluding trans women and other gender-nonconforming folks, which eventually made the event controversial among its own radical audience. This controversy is depicted on Transparent, through conversations between previous generations—Leslie and her older lesbian friends—and younger, differently politicized queers.

In the real world version of this generational chasm, Myles has been something of a poster dyke and as such has been chastised for making comments viewed as transphobic by some in the media. Others have questioned her statements that, had she been born decades later, she may have chosen to identify as genderqueer or to have transitioned. The truth is no doubt more complicated than any of those sound bites can relay: like many LGBTQ people, Myles has long invented her own rules around her relationship to sexuality and gender because the standard narrative never applied. A chapter from 1994’s Chelsea Girls holds this internal monologue, in the voice of a middle-school Eileen:

I was Mary’s boyfriend. I had always wanted to be a boy. To have women love me, to have extra rooms to go into, to be free. There on the soft couch in the Dolan’s parlor as we lifted our tall metal cups of Hawaiian Punch to our lips, the moment I was male and I was loved.

As always seems to be the case, in terms of deconstructing her own image, Myles got there first and wrote it better.

•

Why is the media so obsessed with Myles’s ascent into mainstream celebrity? I think a host of reasons are at play: the way Americans try to get “cultured” by osmosis so that stylish articles about poetry make us feel more intellectual, the “bootstraps” nature of Myles’s story, the novelty of someone who ran for president as a piece of performance art getting photographed for glossy magazines. I find myself thinking about a term used a lot in my circles in the early 1990s: co-opting. Back then, it seemed that everything authentic and revolutionary and vital—the riot grrl movement, grunge music, hip-hop—was quickly gobbled up by the establishment and spat back out in clean, shiny packages for mass consumption. I worry that the hoopla over Myles is an attempt by the media to take everything underground about her and her work and use it to make itself look cool.

Myles, however, seems to be thus far walking through the gauntlet of attention with her signature urban cowboy stride. Of the recognition, she told Lerner in the Paris Review, “Everything will ruin you; why not this?” and added, “It’s really creepy to be addicted to yourself or the performance of yourself. Like looking at your phone too much.”

So let’s let Myles think about her actual and constructed selves, and we can think about her image and her writing. The distinction between them all may get blurry, but so be it. As Myles said in the Los Angeles Times, the publication of poems drawn from lived experience is a kind of success in triplicate: first there’s the meaning derived from living through the experience itself, and then there’s the jolt of joy that comes from making a decent poem from the experience, and then there’s the publication and subsequent readership of the experience via poem, which, in the end, simply “makes a thing out of something that was always true.”

Originally Published: March 17th, 2016

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Interesting read on modern poetry and what is believed to be great .....
I'VE NEVER HEARD OF THIS MYLES, BUT THEN AGAIN , I AM A PRODUCT OF THE OLD-SCHOOL POETS THAT BELIEVE IN RHYME AND MESSAGE OVER ALL ELSE...

So shoot me for thinking that legendary poets of old , are legendary for a damn good reason!---Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/resources/learning/articles/detail/70283

Article for Teachers and Students

The Sonnet as a Silver Marrow Spoon
Finding pleasure and insight where it lies hidden, using in a fixed poetic form
By Adam O'Riordan

A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
Better go down upon your marrow-bones
And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones ...
—William Butler Yeats, “Adam’s Curse”

There is a restaurant in London that advertises “nose-to-tail eating,” and it prides itself that no part of an animal is left unused. I had a friend who when eating there would invariably order the bone marrow on toast. The dish came with a small implement, no bigger than a little finger, which the diner used to extract the marrow, a silver marrow spoon, perfectly engineered to slide inside the baked bone and remove its contents.

Perhaps it was the marrow and its Yeatsian echo that pushed my mind into a literary mode, but this elegant, antiquated tool always struck me as a metaphor for the sonnet: probing, incisive, finding pleasure and insight where it lies hidden, a form that allows poets to make use of what might ordinarily be overlooked or discarded.

As an eighteen-year-old undergraduate, I struggled for a long time to write a sonnet. It seemed like the correct form, the form I should be writing in. But I would become snagged in the intricacies of the meter and struggle for rhymes only to find that they felt forced.

I was at the same time aware of poems on both sides of the Atlantic influenced by the New Formalist school of poets: each iamb weighed, each volta perfectly placed, the rhymes fulsome and plangent but the sum of the whole, on second or third reading, saying very little whatsoever.

So I would strip the sonnet down to its simplest form: an idea or a story that, somewhere around the eighth or ninth line, is nudged or diverted slightly in its path so that it turns and says something else.

The thing I would like to put to a class of seniors is the sonnet in its loosest, least restrictive form. (In fact, some of my favorite sonnets are not sonnets at all. Richard Wilbur’s masterly sequence “This Pleasing Anxious Being” in Mayflies seems to me to do everything a sonnet should but over a more leisurely eighteen to twenty lines per section.)

Seamus Heaney’s sonnets in the sequence “Clearances,” from his collection The Haw Lantern, show how something as simple as a memory of peeling potatoes can be substance enough for a poem:

When all the others were away at Mass
I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.
They broke the silence, let fall one by one
Like solder weeping off the soldering iron:
Cold comforts set between us, things to share
Gleaming in a bucket of clean water.
And again let fall. Little pleasant splashes
From each other’s work would bring us to our senses.

So while the parish priest at her bedside
Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying
And some were responding and some crying
I remembered her head bent towards my head,
Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives—
Never closer the whole rest of our lives.

Begin by directing students to the narratives, the secrets, the unshared, the family myths or legends. Have them think back to half-remembered episodes, stories or confidences older brothers or sisters or cousins or uncles might have shared with them, casually, unthinkingly, in passing, as such stories are often shared.

Ask them to tell a story as they remember it for the first eight or nine lines and then allow themselves to comment on it from their present vantage point. What do they know now that they did not know then? What light does the present cast back onto that particular story?

The sonnet’s volta is its turn, the point at which it shifts. We see this vividly in Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 18” with its declaration in the ninth line: “But thy eternal summer shall not fade”—the addressee of the poem has so far been compared to a summer day, but at that line things change. I’ve added a space here to indicate the shift:

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.

The turn in a sonnet allows the poet to interrogate and cast new light on the previous eight lines. In the case of the above exercise, in which the students are relating some sort of narrative, the turn allows reassessment; it’s a chance to comment upon what came before or to include a twist.

Remind students that people carry these narratives around for a long time, and so when we gaze at them through the vehicle of the sonnet, there are things about them we will discover that we did not know we knew: twists, turns, reinterpretations of that intimate cache of stories and tales that accrue over the course of childhood. These seniors on the edge of adulthood might now want to reassess, or comment upon, these stories from childhood.

If students find the story pulling away from the truth, that’s OK. You might remind them that they’re serving the poem, not the story, which is simply the impetus, the fuel for the piece of art they find themselves making. You might remind them here of the old adage: “Trust the poem, not the poet.”

And that’s it, really. Show young writers the sonnet in its simplest, most stripped-back form. Direct them to the stories from their past. Let the sonnet, memory’s own silver marrow spoon, with its turn, its volta, generate within them comments on the stories they are telling. The writing of the sonnet—as with any poem—should be a form of discovery, a digging down into the self, like that dish in the London restaurant that most of us might balk at if it were placed before us: intimate and strange upon the tongue.

This essay was originally published in Open the Door: How to Excite Young People about Poetry (2013), a co-publication of the Poetry Foundation and McSweeney's Publishing, edited by Dorothea Lasky, Dominic Luxford, and Jesse Nathan.
Originally Published: December 14th, 2015

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Perhaps it was the marrow and its Yeatsian echo that pushed my mind into a literary mode, but this elegant, antiquated tool always struck me as a metaphor for the sonnet: probing, incisive, finding pleasure and insight where it lies hidden, a form that allows poets to make use of what might ordinarily be overlooked or discarded.


Exceptional article and very informative. Sonnets to me are the greatest poetry form.
Their brevity(14 verses maximum) and purpose make sonnets the hardest poetry form to write, as in -- to write truly well/great/deep..
I do try to break a few rules with some of my sonnets ,such as increasing syllable count from ten, all the way up to 15.
However, on the whole, majority of the time I try to write in ten syllable verses... -Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/articles/detail/70210


Essay
First Loves
A formative moment, fixed in poets’ minds.
By Lynn Melnick and Brett Fletcher Lauer
boy girl bench ice by allthecolor

The Goodwill near Hollywood in the late ’80s was filled with outdated lampshades, corny figurines, and myriad mugs. It was also where, for 50 cents each, one of us—Lynn, to be specific—purchased The American Poetry Anthology, edited by Daniel Halpern, and Dancing on the Grave of a Son of a Bitch, by Diane Wakoski. As for Brett, he didn’t have to search the used-book bins; when he began writing poetry as a teenager, his older brother sent home volumes from college: Sharon Olds’s Satan Says, Mark Strand’s Selected Poems, and the poetry anthology Walk on the Wild Side.

Years later, when the two of us were talking about our early discoveries, it became apparent how much these collections had provided a gateway for us into the world of contemporary poetry. It was with the hope of providing a similarly exhilarating experience to emerging readers and poets that we compiled our anthology Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poets for the Next Generation.

In editing, we felt it was important not just to bring contemporary poems to a younger audience but to bring contemporary poets to a younger audience. So much of the poetry taught in schools is written by long-dead poets, and we wanted the readers to get to know the poets as real people, with real, 21st-century lives.

To that end, we sent a questionnaire to all 100 poets included in the anthology, and we included excerpts of their answers in the biographical notes of the book. (You can view them in their entirety here.) We asked the poets questions such as “What is your favorite word?” and “What is the natural talent you would most like to have?” (One-third of the poets listed “singing.”)

For us, though, the most compelling answers were to the question “What was the first poem you read and loved?” For poets, this question seems to recall other first questions they might find themselves asked by a friend: Do you remember your first kiss, or the first concert you attended? It is a formative moment, fixed in poets’ minds, and each tells a story.

We realized that the poets’ answers to this question created a persuasive list for further reading, what we began to call a “shadow anthology.” The following is an edited selection of the responses we received on first-poetry loves, from what we consider to be some of the most exciting poets writing today.


Srikanth Reddy
I probably read a lot of poems before I ever fell in love with one—you’ve got to kiss a lot of frogs, as they say—but I do remember the first poem that rocked my world: “Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock” by Wallace Stevens. I’ll never forget that drunk and dreaming sailor at the end.

Jennifer Chang
One of the first poems I found and loved was in a book my grandfather left behind in our house, The World’s Best Poems, edited by Mark Van Doren, which I now keep on my office bookshelves. I was a gloomy little girl of about 11 or 12 and, upon reading that old book, went just crazy for Heinrich Heine, particularly the last stanza of “Mein Kind, Wir Waren Kinder”: “The children’s games are over, / The rest is over with youth— / The world, the good games, the good times, / The belief, and the love, and the truth.” I swooned over this gloomiest of poems and underlined those particular lines repeatedly, as if that would make the words spring to life.

Timothy Donnelly
The first poems I remember loving were among the things I read in high school English class: poems by Dickinson, Keats, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (if that counts); Stevens’s “Sunday Morning” and Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and The Waste Land. Later on I read Baudelaire, Plath, Rimbaud, and Sexton on my own, as well as other Stevens poems, including “Jasmine’s Beautiful Thoughts Underneath the Willow,” the first poem whose hold on me was so powerful I felt like I must have written it myself.

Hafizah Geter
The first two books of poetry I ever owned were Been to Yesterdays: Poems of a Life, by Lee Bennett Hopkins, and a collection of Langston Hughes’s poems for children, Don’t You Turn Back. My mother was always reading Langston Hughes to my sister and me, and she would assign us poems from that book to memorize. At six I was reciting “My People,” and my sister, “Mother to Son,” for family friends. Been to Yesterdays was the first book of poems I ever picked out for myself. I remember staying up late at night and reading it under the covers with a flashlight. The experience of those two books is where I began as a writer. They’ve come with me on every move and are two of my most important possessions.

Dorothea Lasky
Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. I know it is technically a work of fiction, but it reads like a poem to me. I remember staying up one night when I was 10 to read it for the first time and feeling very proud by the time the morning sun arrived that I had finished. The images have stuck with me all my life. Then, years later, at age 15, I first read Sylvia Plath’s “Fever 103°” and I thought: “I want to write poems like this!”

Mark Bibbins
When I was 12 or 13 I saw some E.E. Cummings poems and that was that—their weirdness was something that has sustained and challenged me ever since.

Erika L. Sanchez
I first became enamored with poetry when my sixth-grade teacher had us read Edgar Allan Poe. I was a fairly lonely and depressed 12-year-old, so Poe’s dark and gloomy poems really spoke to me. I specifically remember reading the poem “Alone,” and my first thought was something like “Wow! This creepy guy really understands me!”

Shane Book
The first poems I remember reading were “Alligator Pie” by Dennis Lee and Robert Service’s “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” though perhaps it was actually my father who read them to me while I stared at the black marks on the pages, saying the words a half-second after he did, a little echo curled into him on the couch. I do recall spending every spare waking moment for what seemed like a week but could have been a month, reading Homer’s Iliad and somewhere near the end of the book being stoked to find out there was a sequel and that it was called The Odyssey. Lying on my bed, in this two-minute break between ending one book-length epic poem and starting another I was seized by a feeling, a strange mixture of anxiety and adrenaline.

Adrian Matejka
Other than almost everything in Where the Sidewalk Ends, the first poem I loved was Etheridge Knight’s “Feeling Fucked Up.” I didn’t know poetry permitted cursing. More than that, it was the first time I felt like I got a poem.

Ben Lerner
My mom taught me “The Purple Cow” when I was very little. I loved it and the tragic story of the poet who could never outrun the fame of his nonsense verse, no matter how seriously he wanted to be taken.

CAConrad
I grew up in rural America, where everyone worked in factories and didn’t read much. As a result books, especially poetry books, were hard to come by, but Emily Dickinson was on our local library’s shelf. I fell in love with her poems, and remain in love with them. Don’t listen to any of the stories you will hear about Dickinson being a sad, wilting lily hiding in her Amherst house writing her sad poems. She was courageous! It’s simply not possible to have centuries of poetry come up to your doorstep and reject it all and write something new, and not be absolutely courageous. Emily Dickinson is my American hero.

Metta Sáma
My dad had about a thousand pens imprinted with the last two lines of “Invictus” by the poet William Ernest Henley: “I am the master of my fate; / I am the captain of my soul.” My memory tells me that he added the phrase “By God’s grace,” but that could be a false memory, something to do with having so much of my young life in and about church. Those lines have followed me around my entire life; it was the only poetry (or snippet of poetry) we had in our house, and I both loved and hated the lines. Loved them because, of course, they inspire us to be individual, to control as much of our destiny as we can. Somehow, having the words trapped on pens, particularly those pens with the eraser tops, the heavy tip, the heavier ink, that stayed stored in my father’s drawer, made me question what, exactly, “fate” and “soul” were, for my father, for myself, for this writer whose name I did not know, but whose words my father, beyond the pens, said to us. It was the first time in my (very very young) life that I understood the true nature of words: they are stored in our blood, scratched into our bones; our taste buds are words; fingerprints, words.

Originally Published: March 11th, 2015

Very, very interesting essay..-Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2017/01/im-trying-to-wreck-your-mind-thats-all/

I’m Trying to Wreck Your Mind, That’s All
By Stacy Szymaszek

A few people have recently suggested that I write about my poetic evolution. In a poetry community it’s funny how a few can feel like a horde, a clamoring. “A few people read my book and said it was important to them.” I’m not being cute. It feels big. I am motivated to think about the subject, perhaps because my books are seemingly so distinct from each other. Why I value that might be interesting.

“Evolution” suggests an origin. There are multiple nodes in this origin story as it is seems to be continually originating. And “evolution” also supposes a suspicious linear development. And aren’t my poetics really my poems? Here I am already doing what I want to let into my work, trying to wreck my own mind, to paraphrase a line from the great poet Philip Whalen.

*

The only poem I remember having to read in high school is Beowulf, and besides feeling sad when Grendel got his arm ripped off, I was emotionally unengaged. I was prone to lingering in my English teacher’s classroom, desperate for tutelage (and to be recognized, then loved)—at least she was kind to me. One day I started perusing a bookshelf in the back of the classroom and found a Norton anthology of poetry, and that was when I found Emily Dickinson’s “This is my letter to the world / That never wrote to me.” I had an orange that I hadn’t eaten at lunch, which I inexplicably picked up and hurled at the wall “as if the top of my head were taken off.” The world had definitely not been writing to me, not a word. While Dickinson was more contemporary than Beowulf, I still didn’t know that living people were writing poetry—maybe I was about to become one of them. In the Paris Review interview where Elizabeth Bishop says the often quoted line that there is nothing more embarrassing than being a poet, she goes on to say a more interesting thing: “…I think no matter how modest you think you feel or how minor you think you are, there must be an awful core of ego somewhere for you to set yourself up to write poetry.” A stubborn kid who survived by being silent and observant, I knew that I had the core of ego for it as I hurled the orange.

*

When my young dog attacked and shredded a folder of poems I wrote in college I was relieved, yet I picked up the shreds and shoved them in a box which I haven’t opened since. Maybe someday I’ll try to tape the pieces together but I doubt it. My creative writing teacher told my class that none of us would be writing poetry in five years. Another one said that poetry was irrelevant. Were they of the Flannery O’Connor “try to stifle them” school? Or were they really embarrassed? Fortunately, all of the poetry I was discovering in and out of the classroom (most notably Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde) showed me how to come to grips with disaster without becoming one, and how to live in an unjust world, and in a culture that loves to “not get” poetry, without becoming bitter.

*

For ten years I wrote bad poems, submitted them to magazines, and kept track of the rejections in a notebook. I lived on Kate Millett’s farm for a summer and met no other poets. I moved to Philadelphia, then Chicago, and nowhere did I meet other poets. “It’s complicated.” When I looked back at one of my notebooks I found a note, “find Gil Ott.” Who told me that? I never found him. I had left Milwaukee in a cloud of Oldsmobile exhaust, burning rubber. In the late 90s I returned in a sad state to collect myself. My friend got a job at a place called Woodland Pattern Book Center, maybe a mile away from where I went to college, yet I had never heard of it. After years of working at bookstores, I was a prep cook for a catering company. All I remember is poaching pots and pots of chicken. I told my friend I wanted to work at Woodland Pattern, and I waited. First, I cleaned for them on Mondays when they were closed, then I got a part-time job, then I got a full-time job, and then the owners Anne and Karl let me create a new job and title for myself. At that point, I had read at least 250 books that lived on their shelves, after I dusted them.

*

It was a humid night, I was reading on the porch of my apartment near Lake Michigan in Bay View, Wisconsin, going back and forth between two books—one by Louis Zukofsky (the exact poem was “29 Songs,” To my wash-stand/in which I wash/my left hand/and my right hand) and the other, Susan Howe’s Singularities. As I said, I had been writing for about a decade and didn’t have a poem I liked. That night I was overcome by revelatory joy, a state of active knowing. I didn’t know Whalen’s work then but now I would use another of his lines; I saw my mind moving and that my writing could be a graph of that extraordinary motion. At the time, as I was sweating over these two books, I knew in my body that the line is a unit of breath. And what Zukofsky refers to as the “range of pleasure poetry affords as sight, sound and intellection.” The moment I realized that I wanted my poems to provide visual and sonic (and I would add physical) pleasure via the line, the transformation was instant. It seemed so simple. How did I not get it. THE LINE.

The combination of close and passionate reading of poetry I didn’t even know existed, a dream job, starting to meet and be in conversation with other poets… this was the start of my public life as a poet and a cultural worker. I did what a lot of poets were doing in the early 2000’s by starting editorial projects. First, I coedited Traverse with Drew Kunz and ran a corresponding reading series at the Jody Monroe Gallery. Then, in 2003, I started GAM: A Survey of Great Lakes Writing on my own. The word comes from Moby Dick, and means a meeting of two or more whale ships. The idea had some genesis after watching the insidious events of the November 2000 election unfold with a group of friends. The states of the upper Midwest, touching the Great Lakes, with the exception of Indiana, went to the Democrats. I started to become interested in Wisconsin’s progressive political and poetry history (particularly Eugene Debs and Lorine Niedecker), and connecting it to the unprecedented vitality I was experiencing as a WE, a literary/artistic community, that seemed to have created itself overnight. I have never experienced anything like what happened in Milwaukee between the years of 2001-2004 before or since. I wrote a short essay called “GAM as an Experiment in Gift Exchange” for WILD ORCHIDS, which you can read as a PDF below (after issue 2, I dispensed with cost in favor of the gift model). Over a decade later, the name clusters on the covers and the work assembled now seems evermore unusual and exciting to me. A good example is issue 2/Spring 2004, which included work by John Latta, James Wagner, William Sylvester, Mike Hauser, Paul Dutton, Steve Timm, Laura Sims, Trish Salah, and Rosa Alcalá. Why I asked each of them for work seems like a whole other post, but I’ll just say, thank you to Woodland Pattern for once having a Canadian poetry section.

GAM_szymaszek

In my own writing, in addition to the line, I was thinking about SPACE (the page, of course after reading OLSON) and GENDER and PRONOUNS. The first poem I wrote that I liked was a long poem called “Some Mariners,” and it’s about the line. The line tells a story of a trans sailor named James who survives a disaster and is restored in a sonic landscape. That’s it. Every time I wanted to write “I,” I wrote “James.” In Pasolini Poems, every time I wanted to write “I,” I was Pasolini. In Hyperglossia “I” was a formerly female dead spirit who came back as a panther and then a young man named Eustace. In hart island, also about the line, I make my first appearance as a documentary reference point. I moved to New York City to work at The Poetry Project, adding PLACE to my list of concerns. I spend a lot of time walking the streets of the largest city in the U.S. and find it so compelling all of my books since living here have been about what I see. I have said I’ve dispensed with persona, but I actually think I let the Stacy in Journal of Ugly Sites revel in abjection more than I ever can or do. As Rebecca Wolff once said of the book, “you will be tempted to think you know her after you read this.” The poem is still a place of wild imaginings, still a way of leaving the self behind—what if I could be this ugly all of the time?

Who remembers the Ron Silliman blog post about poet brand equity back in 2004? I was still living in Milwaukee and loved that I was on his radar. My first book wasn’t even out yet but we gave an epic reading together in Chicago. He wrote “One year ago, I had no clue who Stacy Szymaszek was. Today, that name conjures up an aesthetic, a poetics so clearly defined one can almost taste them, a sense of subject – in her case, the sea –…”. He goes on to talk about how I’ve acquired brand equity as a poet. My response was literally, oh shit, as I knew that I was not “a Midwest mariner” devoted to “Objectivist minimalism” and that I would never write about the sea again. And I could have surmised that my work would formally never be so spare again. I’ve never forgotten this post made at the beginning of my life as a public poet as it made me realize that there was a liability factor in being unpredictable (i.e. even more unmarketable). It was a good thing to think about at such a threshold moment.

I saw the Agnes Martin show at the Guggenheim right after I started writing this piece. I used to pin images of her paintings to my wall, along with images of drawings by Eva Hesse—the circles and grid drawings. I wrote on a ream of light green graph paper from American Science and Surplus. Martin said “I can look into my mind and see it empty.” I’ve never had this experience, but I did try to write a book about perfection only to have to accept (as Martin also accepted) that the work is not perfect, is slightly off. Yet it does retain something of the “aboutness” of perfection. You can tell I wanted to be perfect. Now I think more about messiness, watching the “continuous nerve movie” (another Whalen line), often with anxiety provoking plot lines, which I see when I look into my mind. I want to make work that wrecks my own mind, which to me means, how can I keep seeing (I think to really see avoids replication), and how can I wreck your mind through creating uncustomary experiences? “That’s all.”

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/91726


In a Word, a World
By C. D. Wright
I love them all.

I love that a handful, a mouthful, gets you by, a satchelful can land you a job, a
well-chosen clutch of them could get you laid, and that a solitary word can initiate
a stampede, and therefore can be formally outlawed—even by a liberal court
bent on defending a constitution guaranteeing unimpeded utterance. I love that
the Argentine gaucho has over two hundred words for the coloration of horses
and the Sami language of Scandinavia has over a thousand words for reindeer
based on age, sex, appearance—e.g., a busat has big balls or only one big ball.
More than the pristine, I love the filthy ones for their descriptive talent as well as
transgressive nature. I love the dirty ones more than the minced, in that I respect
extravagant expression more than reserved. I admire reserve, especially when
taken to an ascetic nth. I love the particular lexicons of particular occupations.
The substrate of those activities. The nomenclatures within nomenclatures. I am
of the unaccredited school that believes animals did not exist until Adam assigned
them names. My relationship to the word is anything but scientific; it is a matter
of faith on my part, that the word endows material substance, by setting the thing
named apart from all else. Horse, then, unhorses what is not horse.


C. D. Wright, "In a Word, a World" from The Poet, the Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, a Wedding in St. Roch, the Big Box Store, the Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All. Copyright © 2016 by C. D. Wright. Reprinted by permission of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org.
Source: The Poet, the Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, a Wedding in St. Roch, the Big Box Store, the Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All (Copper Canyon Press, 2016)

I agree to a certain level.
Perhaps each poet or even every poet, should consider this and understand its implication in the well being of this Art--- Poetry, IMHO..
As a single word can either make or break a poem, IMHO....
AND THAT IS NOT TO BE JUDGED BY THE POEM'S READERS BUT INSTEAD BY THE AUTHOR, THE POET WRITER HIMSELF, IMHO....--Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

C. D. Wright
Poet Details
1949–2016
Blue Flower Arts

C.D. Wright was born in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas, the daughter of a judge and a court reporter. She published over a dozen books, including ShallCross (2016); The Poet, The Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, A Wedding in St. Roch, The Big Box Store, The Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All (2016); One With Others (2011), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was nominated for a National Book Award; Rising, Falling, Hovering (2008); Like Something Flying Backwards: New and Selected Poems (2007); and Tremble (1996). She also provided the text to two book collaborations with photographer Deborah Luster: One Big Self: An Investigation (2003), which documents Louisiana inmates; and The Lost Road Project (1994), a walk-in exhibit of Arkansas. She also published several book-length poems, including the critically acclaimed Deepstep Come Shining(1998).

Wright’s writing has been described as experimental, Southern, socially conscious, and elliptical; as a volume of selected poems, Steal Away demonstrates how Wright has not cleaved to any one voice or form but continues to evolve her style. As poet and critic Joel Brouwer asserts, “Wright belongs to a school of exactly one,” and Wright herself pointed out the contradictions inherent in her work: “I’m country but sophisticated. I’m particular and concrete, but I’m probing another plane. ... There are many times when I want to hammer the head. Other times I want to sleep on the hammer.”

Though her work is deeply connected to the Ozarks, Wright spent significant periods in New York and San Francisco before moving in 1983 to Rhode Island, where she taught at Brown University. With her husband, poet Forrest Gander, she founded and ran Lost Roads Press for over 20 years. Among her honors are a MacArthur Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, a Robert Creeley Award, and membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2013, she was elected as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

“Poetry is a necessity of life,” Wright said. “It is a function of poetry to locate those zones inside us that would be free, and declare them so.”

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Poems, Articles & More
Discover this poet's context and related poetry, articles, and media.
Poems by C. D. Wright
Alla Breve Loving
Approximately Forever
Everything Good between Men and Women
Flame
Floating Trees

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/detail/92025


Prose from Poetry Magazine
Their Smiles Intact: A Canon’s Afterlife
By Donald Revell

In memory of Geoffrey Hill

Le Paradis n’est pas artificiel
States of mind are inexplicable to us.
— Ezra Pound


I find myself not wanting to explain, but still to articulate. My present state is a quietness lacking neither voices nor music, though often wordless. Or I could say I’m standing still to listen within a single protracted word, within a pause to be articulated as the land to which I go. This word appears where canon ends. Instead of explanations, then, questions arise. What sort of poetry, what sort of poet, continues here? To be themselves, poems must own ground: their local 
habitation and proper names. Always, to my mind, flowers are the borders of that ground and therefore of the questions. Flowers blazon images, first emblems of affirmation. Shelley, in Pisa (“le paradis n’est pas artificiel”) and on the borders of a quietness all his own, gave his mind over to one Matilda gathering flowers and the instance of her nearly wordless flower-song: Dante’s Purgatorio, Canto XXVIII. I likewise, almost originally, find myself precisely, fixedly there. I cannot read it enough. The canto is the brink of Paradise, a pause without dimensions whose only explanation is itself: a word foreshadowed by a garden.

Only the imparadised can comprehend intensity and continuity as leisures. Yet at the beginning of Purgatorio XXVIII, in sight of  Eden, Dante stands near enough to Paradise to glimpse as much. He explores the new motion, finding it the perfect embodiment of dense and greeny stillness. In Allen Mandelbaum’s peerless contemporary English — 

Now keen to search within, to search around
that forest — dense, alive with green, divine — 
which tempered the new day before my eyes,
without delay, I left behind the rise
and took the plain, advancing slowly, slowly
across the ground where every part was fragrant.

Finding myself not wanting to explain, but still to articulate, I am searching for the slower words and the densest lines, not to be difficult, but to be engrossed within a state that is the edge of finale. 
I want to speak the intensity of almost nothing left to say. After such a long and difficult arising, Dante finds a level plane. It is dense and alive, in every part fragrant. Its continuity requires no effort at all, even as the poet’s senses brook no delay. Dante is at the end of  himself, to the extent that his self  has been a canon, piloted by Virgil, later joined by Statius, moving. In Pisa, near the end of himself, Shelley chose to translate these same lines as simulacra of  his own flamboyant edge.

And earnest to explore within — around — 
The divine wood, whose thick green living woof
Tempered the young day to the sight — I wound

Up the green slope, beneath the forest’s roof,
With slow, soft steps leaving the mountain’s steep,
And sought those inmost labyrinths, motion-proof

Against the air, that in that stillness deep
And solemn, struck upon my forehead bare,
The slow, soft stroke of a continuous    ...    
 — From Matilda Gathering Flowers

The word “around,” coupled with “within,” profuses a density soon confirmed by “inmost labyrinths.” And twice Shelley, like Dante (“lento, lento”) emphasizes the slowness with which poetry now approaches and savors this finale. (Justly, inevitably it would seem, Shelley’s very last verses — the fragments of “The Triumph of Life” — would be written in Dante’s measure and according to a Dantesque scenario.) Canon closes in. In Canto XXVIII, although he does not know it, Dante has taken a step beyond the limits of Statius and Virgil. Although he does not know it, they have nothing more to say. Richard Holmes, Shelley’s finest biographer, describes his subject’s crisis days in Pisa as showing “Shelley’s need to draw support and stimulation from more purely literary sources.” Hence his decision to begin translating Dante, and his most telling decision to begin with Purgatorio XXVIII: the brink of an ending. Support, needfully, withdraws in the moment of most need. At its limits, canon becomes most dense, most intense. Words slow. Lines profuse 
inwards. There are nearly too many flowers to be named.

I cannot explain my state of mind, but my peculiar canon — a lifetime’s reading, a life as reading — leans towards me lovingly, and on a breath of something paradisal (poems, flowers) it whispers articulation. I think of Shelley in the last years of his writing life because he was the poet who figured most forcefully at the beginning of my own. His Ariel image was possibility, and his line was a perfect animal leaping. In graduate school, I owned two copies of the Holmes biography, so as never to be far. The fact that, in his last years, Shelley turned to Dante as I have lately turned with an almost exclusive passion, helps me and schools me, shedding light whose explanation, as always, is itself. That Shelley should have turned specifically to Purgatorio XXVIII, translating the fragment that Mary Shelley later named “Matilda Gathering Flowers,” heartens me more than I can say. But Shelley tried to say, and Dante did. Here is where my canon leans very close. Coming to the end of poetry as he has loved and understood it, Dante, on the margin of Eden, sees across waters a woman gathering flowers. She sings a song whose words are purely sounds to him — lovely sounds. It is a pivot moment, and a vast, slow pause: hence the leisure of “around” and “within” and the “inmost labyrinths, motion-proof.” I feel my state of mind as a lavish enigma prior to departure, a conclusion prior to an end. The poetry I want is an afterword to the poems I have made. Matilda’s flowers and her wordless, enchanting vocables put the case perfectly. In Purgatorio XXVIII, forecast from my beginnings by Shelley’s end, Dante articulates the state of canons advancing upon farewell “across the ground where every part was fragrant.”

These intensities of fragrance and of music, in their deep affiliation to the ends of canon, are foregrounded before Dante ever hears Matilda sing. Throughout the Commedia, poetry is a filial matter, an autobiographical vow expressed as cosmos. In his epic’s quest for a continuing city, Virgil fathered his Florentine successor; now he guides him towards the Civitas Dei a pagan cannot know but may sometimes approach as the shadowy backward of a Christian’s ravishment. Continuity is leisure, yes, but there is an eternity of difference between Virgil’s leisure among the virtuous pagans and the dense engrossment of his pilgrim ephebe in Paradise. One is resignation; the other is bliss. In Purgatorio, the foregrounding nears completion in Canto XXI with the appearance of Statius. He is a spirit bridge, a Latin poet and a Christian; his filial piety inclines backwards towards his beloved master, maker of the Aeneid, even as it leans, joyously, into imminent salvation and the City of God. To have been a contemporary of Virgil, Statius avows, he would gladly spend another year on the mount of Purgatory. But only the one year. Canon is canon. Bliss is elsewhere. Yet one love bridges both. And it is this love that impels the journey only perfect love can end. At the close of Canto XXI, in a moment of sublime tenderness and rigor, canon discloses its limits and also the final virtue of imperfection. Statius bows down to kiss his master’s feet — 

but Virgil told him: “Brother, there’s no need — 
you are a shade, a shade is what you see.”
And rising, he: “Now you can understand
how much love burns in me for you, when I
forget our insubstantiality,
treating the shades as one treats solid things.”
 — Tr. by Allen Mandelbaum

Within the posture of a true piety, canon exchanges a gaze with itself, inmost labyrinth to inmost labyrinth (as Shelley might have said). These poets, impeccable as they are, have no words for the farther music.

My state of mind is now wholly inclined towards the farther music, but having few if any suitable words of my own just yet, I hesitate even as I feel a deepening conviction that Purgatorio XXVIII foreshadows, in flowers and in sounds, matters I must learn. It is from Dante, after all, that poetry first took fire with the impersonal vernacular as pure autobiography. Autobiography is all my concern now that the end of my writing life is in sight. It’s not so much a matter of putting my affairs in order as it is of parsing the vast pause I, and most likely everyone, inhabit where the canon of each of us comes to a close. I go back to the late appearance of Statius for Dante’s good reason: company. It is so moving that, even as he begins to sense the limits of canon, Dante calls the shades of repentant poets towards him: Statius, Guinizelli, Arnaut Daniel. He wants a density of allusion even as the usefulness of allusion reaches its limits. In recent months, I am almost giddy with allusion — keen for its use, keen for its familiar company. I must be practicing the obscurity of candor, i.e. an uttermost vernacular. In any case, I will postpone Canto XXVIII a little while longer, wishing for clarity as the substance of delay.

On the brink of Eden’s earthly paradise, language enjoys a final say before giving way to keener sounds — wind in the trees, small birds calling from the branches, Matilda’s singing wordlessly among riverside flowers. Canto XXVII ends with Dante waking from a dream.

the shadows fled upon all sides; my sleep
fled with them; and at this, I woke and saw
that the great teachers had already risen.
 — Tr. by Allen Mandelbaum

The “great teachers” (Statius and Virgil) keep, for one last time, the vigil of precedent. Statius is silent. Canon has no foresight beyond the speech and gestures by which it knows itself. What Dante is about to experience is wisdom freed from inwardness — vision plain. Virgil’s has been a reflected light, a reflective wisdom. His guidance has only a farewell to say, in accents of abdication. Words give place to Word and lights to Light.

from now on, let your pleasure be your guide;
you’re past the steep and past the narrow paths.
Look at the sun that shines upon your brow;
look at the grasses, flowers, and the shrubs
born here, spontaneously, of the earth.
Among them, you can rest or walk until
the coming of the glad and lovely eyes —
those eyes that, weeping, sent me to your side.
Await no further word or sign from me    …
— Tr. by Allen Mandelbaum

Ratio abdicates in favor of pleasure. The sole imperative is “look.” Summoned to a greater leisure in the garden where to rest and to walk articulate a single, inviolable pause (i.e. Eden), Dante becomes all eyes in sight of “the glad and lovely eyes” of his eventual Beatrice. Her word will be her name, not a text. Her image will be a sight, not a sign. Where the poets leave off, continuity foresees rest and motion united. The farther poem engrosses just this measureless singularity.

And yet, for the moment, singularity is a solitude unspeakably intense, albeit pregnant with reunion. In my present state of mind, I feel it exactly so. Any poem I currently imagine crowds itself into single words, isolate in their density and aching, not for the next word, but for the image of a name. I cannot say it. That task falls to a farther smile: “Ben son, ben son Beatrice.” Having made his translation of the opening tercets of Purgatorio XXVIII, Shelley transposed Dante’s intensity into an agon of his own. As Richard Holmes explains, Shelley took “Matilda Gathering Flowers” and “developed it into the completed poem ‘The Question,’ with its ornate and exquisitely assembled description of a nosegay of ‘visionary flowers.’” The flowers are sudden and unprecedented — “Bare Winter suddenly was changed to Spring” — as sudden, surely, as Virgil’s silence and then Matilda’s wordless song were to Dante. The flowers are, Shelley declares, “visionary” — as visionary, say, as those in Eliot’s “Little Gidding”: “a bloom more sudden / Than that of summer, neither budding nor fading, / Not in the scheme of generation.” And yet, lacking the image of the eventual paradisal name, the plain utterance of which explains everything, the flowers embody only isolation and then the ache of it. Shelley concludes

Methought that of these visionary flowers
I made a nosegay, bound in such a way
That the same hues, which in their natural bowers
Were mingled or opposed, the like array
Kept these imprisoned children of the Hours
Within my hand, — and then, elate and gay,
I hastened to the spot whence I had come,
That I might there present it! — Oh! to whom?

There is no present without a name, and the name is not yet. Canon ends in a question canons cannot answer. Or perhaps I should say that canon’s answer is not the answer for which, in a pause without dimension, my poetry aches.

In Denise Levertov’s early poem “The Ache of Marriage” there is a passage I’ve had in mind nearly every day for the past forty years and more: “two by two in the ark of / the ache of it.” It occurs to me now that Levertov, early and alone of the poets in my life, there anticipates the location and nearly wordless threshold circumstance inside of which I write this. The passage indicates an enclosed space, an “ark” of certain but as yet featureless covenant. Marriage, like the finale I feel, is a canon of no text, an empty enclosure leaning forward, a discontinuity promising to prove a singular and everlasting continuum. Marriage, like the finale I feel, breaks with the past on behalf of outcome. At the end of canon comes a break which is canon’s true posterity. Virgil speaks no more. And so, to begin, at last 
I come to Purgatorio XXVIII. The opening, in both the Mandelbaum and Shelley translations cited above, signals a wholly new and different line. Time is tempered to a slower motion, a stillness ambient 
and overwhelmed by sense and pleasure. Stevens had it wrong in “Sunday Morning.” There is a “change of death in paradise.” The change, however, is in itself intensely changeless. (A phrase from Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” comes keenly to mind: “Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone.”) The lines of poetry I want anymore are slow, dense with fragrance and significance and aspects of eternity aching to marry each word to the next in unforeseeable reunion. The lines, like Dante’s first motions of Eden, would cover the ark of a featureless covenant. Their music would sustain a vernal pageantry time out of mind.

My state of mind is all the mind I have. As Rousseau opined near the end of  his life, in Reveries of a Solitary Walker, “my ideas are now almost nothing but sensations.” And it is, albeit briefly unaware, as a new-crowned, solitary Dante steps toward Eden in Purgatorio XXVIII. All around him, new sensations crowd their meanings upon a mind made all of sense. (Exactly as words might crowd the lines of poetry I’m hoping still to write.) It is a morning mind, datum upon datum of  joys.

birds welcomed those
first hours of the morning  joyously,
and leaves supplied the burden to their rhymes — 
— Tr. by Allen Mandelbaum

Meaning is here indistinguishable from location and circumstance — which is to say that the burden of meaning is no burden. The branching lines support whispering leaves and the singing birds too. Green with it all, the branches mean exactly as they are. In such a state, in such a mind, all words rhyme. I look forward to poems of such a moment. A density that is no burden would be a continuing leisure, ambient and all-inclusive.

Now, though my steps were slow, I’d gone so far
into the ancient forest that I could
no longer see where I had made my entry.
— Tr. by Allen Mandelbaum

Dante’s early pleasures in the earthly paradise comprehend a limit and leave-taking of canon. The poet finds himself in a grove older than time and illumined. Eden is not the selva oscura where his pilgrimage began. Showing no point of entry, here is a place made wholly of entrances and original permissions. Means of arrival (other poets, other poems) simply do not signify. From this point on, mere being is a present statement, fixed and expansive: lines stretching to eternity.

Slow as they are (a pace, a measure as appropriate to intensity as to leisure), the poet’s steps take him to a river’s edge. On the near shore of Lethe, Dante propounds a double vision. And he does so merely by standing where he stands. At the waters of Lethe, forgetfulness and self-knowledge are one and the same. Purification and transgression are one and the same. Immersion models ascension. Cleansed of remembrance, memory becomes original once again. This double vision is everything I want for any future lines of poetry. I want them cleanly, undistracted in their entirety. Only then, in full accord with the via negativa of the classicist, might they bear witness to transcendence: a pause without dimensions. And I want them imaged to the allusive intensity of numberless flowers. Only then, in happy accord with the via affirmativa of the Romantic, will they delight in immanence: a garden never sown.

All of the purest waters here on earth,
when matched against that stream, would seem to be
touched by impurity; it hides no thing — 
that stream — although it moves, dark, dark, beneath
the never-ending shadows.    
— Tr. by Allen Mandelbaum

In a darkness where nothing is hidden, in a motion fixed upon the margins of Eden, canon makes no argument. And without argument, canon is a solitary text. Reconciled, austerity and plenitude constitute a peerless singularity. Here is a strong-lined river at the edge of an ending.

It begins. Upon the far side of the river, strong in measure (the unintelligible sweetness of   her song), dense in motif (the numberless flowers at her feet and in her arms), Matilda glides into view. Let us have Shelley’s version. He is bold to emphasize the giddy sensorium that revels at canon’s end.

even as a thing
That suddenly, for blank astonishment,
Charms every sense, and makes all thought take wing, —  

A solitary woman! and she went
Singing and gathering flower after flower,
With which her way was painted and besprent.

Dante is a blank of present statement — a blank all suddenly inscribed with sense. He occupies a ground not of thought, but of 
attention. Upon the departure of thought (and I honor Shelley for parsing it this way), exclamation takes the living form of singularity and vision: “A solitary woman!” Here is a Beatrice immediately prior to Beatrice. She is not a “screen lady” as was the woman in the Vita Nuova. Rather she is the vivid precondition of a further poetry, audible just the other side of Lethe. It is art (“painted”) and abundance (“besprent”), which is to say “pageant,” that genre which succeeds canon by proving sufficient unto itself. Beauty knows its own. Virgil explained. Matilda embodies. Virgil led. Matilda summons. One step into the waters of forgetfulness and the future life of memory is assured. (“Dove sta memora,” as Cavalcanti would have it.) Dante’s present statement — joy without comprehension, fulfillment without possession — articulates the locus of his dearest wish: that seeing might interleave the volume of  belief with loves. Flowers are the brackets and ground of his wish, and in Eden, the Purgatory’s earthly paradise, they are crowns of forgetfulness and of the dense motifs, poems without pretext.

Shelley breaks off at just the moment when Matilda turns her face towards Dante. Her gesture gives immediate and entire pleasure. The music becomes articulate. Fioretti show their simple colors.

So did she turn, upon the little red
and yellow flowers, to me, no differently
than would a virgin, lowering chaste eyes.
I had beseeched, and I was satisfied,
for she approached so close that the sweet sound
that reached me then became intelligible.
— Tr. by Allen Mandelbaum

There is more to this turn than a simple verso. So very few steps away from canon, Dante already comes face-to-face with meaning of a new sort and instance. Eden’s primitive is prime. The transformations accomplished by Matilda’s turn are spontaneous, not sequential: 
suddenly reds and yellows; suddenly intelligible song. What elsewhere might require a ritual and rhetoric, acknowledgments and decorum, here springs forth in singular gesture. Cause and effect, beseeching and satisfaction breathe unitary being. Hue and melody 
blazon the sense of color and song, and Dante understands them. This is more than the Symbolists’ dream of pure poetry. Theirs was an idea without a concept, an occult. For my part, and in the name of happiness, I want a poetry gotten of lines prior and subsequent to purity, something prime. Its durations would signify the instance of its meanings. Its density would be self-evident, not opaque, but imaged as a leisure continuing with as well as into the next lines. Lethe promises no less.

At the end of canon, Eden shows a panoramic smile, siting an 
epoch upon duration. Its primitive — a first age, a first utterance — 
profuses inward as the garden, becoming a surround. Matilda begins:

You are new here and may — because I smile
in this place, chosen to be mankind’s nest — 
wonder, perplexed, unable to detect
the cause.
— Tr. by Allen Mandelbaum

Dante’s perplexity, as we shall see, is soon relieved. For the moment, he simply cannot understand how it is that, in Eden, breeze and freshet arise without apparent purpose or cause. Earlier in the poem, Statius (for “Statius” read “canon”) had explained to Dante that no changes of weather were possible beyond the entrance to Purgatory. But canon cannot compass origin. It hasn’t the syntax. In Canto XXVIII, climate proves to be indwelling, and indwelling confounds sequential tradition. The garden flourishes within a cause. The courses of air and water change within the changeless purpose: “this place, chosen to be mankind’s nest.” Matilda explains a nature that is new to Dante, an atmosphere “within a circle, moved by the first circling,” and thus originary prior and subsequent to any shock or surety of the New. It is almost as though Prospero and Miranda had exchanged advantages. The bittersweet irony of Shakespeare’s magus (“’Tis new to thee”) disappears when Miranda’s “O brave new world” rings true. And the Commedia allows for no denying Matilda’s truth. I like to anticipate, as any likely new line of mine, such a nest as this, where Matilda gathers flowers. She avows:

If  what I’ve said were known, you would not need
to be amazed on earth when growing things
take root but have no seed that can be seen.
— Tr. by Allen Mandelbaum

The newness of such a line would be supple and self-evident. It would be strong to avow the changes of the lines around it, rooted with them, but neither seeded nor seeding. It would forego that syntax, being (to take a phrase from Ashbery’s “Some Trees,” a poem beginning “These are amazing”) distinctly one amidst a “chorus of smiles.”

Edenic nature, as Matilda explains, is the inexhaustible fullness of an each and of an every: “the holy plain    ...    / is full of every seed.” Difference self-replicates, and so a changeless originality sustains variety, remains prolific, all the while fixed within its garden state. The pure products of the place “cannot be gathered”; their proper use is wholly reserved in evidence. And here my wish for poetry comes in sight of home. Lines various but inwardly profused; original statements whose meanings extend not into rhetoric but into the continuing evidence of themselves in concert. Articulateness without the gather-some burden of explanation. George Herbert once forecast, “The land of spices; something understood” (“Prayer (I)”). Hart Crane recollected momently from a future he could not span, “Whispers antiphonal in azure swing” (“Atlantis”). Such lines neither seek nor constitute a canon. They might, however, anticipate an afterlife, a pause vastly articulate upon the land to which we go. Of each, it may be said, as Matilda says of the rivers of Eden,

It issues from a pure and changeless fountain,
which by the will of God regains as much
as, on two sides, it pours and it divides.
— Tr. by Allen Mandelbaum

“My word I poured,” Hart Crane avowed in his last poem, “The Broken Tower.” The line I have in mind divides without diminishing. Neither is it emptied into stanza or paraphrase. It ends and never fails.

The waters are twinned in Eden, distinct but inseparable both in purpose and in proof. To my mind, they are clear lines (“pure and changeless”) in a flawless passage. And sure enough, Dante’s passage 
over the twin rivers Lethe and Eunoe marks the path of perfection: early steps beyond the earthly paradise towards Paradise itself. Bathed in forgetfulness, Dante remembers his and everyone’s original souls, born adepts of Eden. Crossing Eunoe then, and bathed there in memory of the Good (“dove sta memora”), original being is competent to affirm the intensity and continuity of Heaven’s leisure. Here I am bound to cite a dictum of Geoffrey Hill’s: “if we are to 
allow ‘intensity’ we must also press for ‘density.’” Is it wrong to imagine — which is to say “image” — perfection? Is it hapless to imagine thus in contrapuntal adumbration of eternity, “Whispers antiphonal in azure swing”? If there is still another poem of mine to make, I see it dense with affirmation. The first caesura comprises a forgetting, and the next one gladly recalls imagery setting a task. Every line is the axis of a smile, every stanza the broad and easy way from negation to “the land of spices; something understood.”

States of mind are inexplicable, but given world enough (our books are worlds, as we learned in childhood) and given words that flourish inwardness like emblems, they flower. Canons end in the continuity they cannot compass. And that is their happiness.

Then I turned round completely, and I faced
my poets; I could see that they had heard
with smiles this final corollary spoken;
that done, my eyes returned to the fair woman.
— Tr. by Allen Mandelbaum

Purgatorio XXVIII ends beyond any words of Statius’s or of Virgil’s, and the poets are glad. Their company, their guidance, sound and sense instance a valedictory smile. Dante turns away from all that, returning to origin. The further Commedia is pageantry. I love to learn it. Haste vanishes in rapture. The intensity of nothing more to say becomes immensity. There will be poetry in its prime.

Originally Published: February 1st, 2017
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[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

Presented below is about one-third of the article. Click link if interested in read the remainder. I decided not to skip to the ending-although it in the last 7 paragraphs impressed me the most. -Tyr





http://www.jack-adellefoley.com/autobiography

Jack & Adelle Foley

Biography


I continue my reading of cheap novels. It satisfies...my taste for imposture, my taste for the sham, which could very well make me write on my visiting cards: “Jean Genet, bogus Count of Tillancourt.”

*

I learned only in bits and pieces of that wonderful blossoming of dark and lovely flowers: one was revealed to me by a scrap of newspaper; another was casually alluded to by my lawyer; another was mentioned, almost sung, by the prisoners—their song became fantastic and funereal....

Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers





What is a life but stories—stories we tell ourselves, stories we tell others, stories others tell about us? Out of these stories we fashion—what? I am writer, husband, father, poet, teacher, friend, “radio personality,” occasional cook, householder, amateur guitarist, sometime tap dancer, jobless person, performer, student, any number of other things. And now, biographer. How was “he” as a poet? you may ask. How was “he” as a lover? Was his cooking all right? Who is “he” when “I” see “myself” from the objective point of view? Who is doing the seeing? Where did “he” get his lamentable habit of putting words in quotation marks and italics? What are these words anyway? Will they tell me anything real about “him”? —Adrift, to use the title of one of his/my books. But what did “he” mean by that?

A year ago I was told by my doctor that I had diabetes. The doctor told me to read up on the subject but if I saw any references to “blindness, impotence, and death,” not to worry, that wasn’t the kind of diabetes I had. Appropriately enough, my earliest memory is of being fed candy. My mother and I are lying on a bed. I believe we are in a hotel room in
Port Chester, New York

, a city in the southeastern part of the state, on Long Island Sound, population approximately 25,000. We have recently moved to Port Chester from
Philadelphia

. My father is not there. My mother is, if I'm not mistaken, weeping. I am being given candies which were actually named “Chocolate Babies” but which my mother and others regularly referred to offensively as “Nigger Babies.” My mother is making an effort to shut me up. I am probably about three years old and I am “eating babies.” My mother perhaps wishes that real babies could disappear as easily as these babies can. If I remember correctly from later experience, the candies are delicious, but at this moment they are not quite doing the job. My mother is trying to prevent me from asking a question which tears her apart. Where is Daddy? Is Daddy coming back? She doesn’t know, though at some level, I think, she realizes that he will come back. She knows but she does not know, and the uncertainty is tearing her apart. The uncertainty is tearing me apart too, and so I keep asking. I am like an awful witness to the failure of her life.

After that, nothing. I don't know how the story turned out. Perhaps my father walked through the door the next moment and reassured everyone. Certainly we were able at times to maintain the fiction of being a happy family as, here, we were maintaining the fiction of being an unhappy one. Perhaps this is a “screen memory,” standing as an emblem for many individual events. When the pressure of circumstances became too much for him, my father would simply disappear: later I learned that he would go on “binges.” But he would always come back. Perhaps I was reminded of these disappearances when I heard stories of a Christian god who also disappears—disappears for centuries—but who also promises to come back. That god too is frequently represented as a baby, and, under certain circumstances, like the Chocolate Babies, he is “eaten.”



*



The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.

L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between





Much of what I’m writing here is ancient history, stories which people who know me now don’t know. My pattern, in more ways than one, has been that of the shape-shifter: I am fifty-five years old; if you saw a photograph of me at eighteen you would have trouble recognizing me.

My father, John Harold Aloysius (“Jack”) Foley: 1895-1967. Slightly taller than I, thin, jet-black hair (my hair is brown), with a touch of the dandy. People would say, “He reminds me of Fred Astaire.” My mother, Joanna Teriolo (later shortened to Terio): 1898-1964. She hated the name “Joanna” and so called herself “Juana,” shortened to “Juan,” which she pronounced “Ju-an,” with two syllables. Plump, dark, with intense, piercing eyes. He was Irish. She was Italian, with perhaps some Spanish blood. I was their only child: born August 9, 1940 (a Leo),
Fitkin


Hospital

,
Neptune

,
New Jersey

, outside of
Asbury Park

, where my parents were living. A war baby. The Dick Tracy comic strip for that day features an attempt to arrest “Yogee Yamma,” an exotic-looking man wearing a turban. My father, forty-five years old, was working at
Fort Monmouth

as a telegrapher. I was christened “John Wayne Foley.” Later, the confirmation name “Harold” was added. (My father claimed not to be able to spell his own confirmation name, “Aloysius.”) The naming had nothing to do with the popular movie actor, John Wayne. My father wanted to name me after his brother, but the parish priest convinced him that
Wayne

was no proper saint’s name, so I was named John after my father with
Wayne

as my middle name.

The name was a rare gesture on my father’s part towards his family. There were several Foley children. “We were fairmers”—*farmers—my father told me. They were living in
Elmira, NY

. He was, I believe, the youngest, “the baby of the family,” his sister said. His brother, Wayne, somehow learned to tap dance. He taught the art to my father and helped him to enter the dazzling world of show business. My father performed in vaudeville as well as in one of the last minstrel companies, presided over by George “Honeyboy” Evans. My father’s sister Goldie was part of that world too. She was a Ziegfeld Follies girl, a spectacular beauty, and perhaps in some sense the love of my father's life. “We’d go everywhere together,” he told me, reminiscing. "Everybody thought we were sweethearts." Pause. “But we weren't.” He was hardly a sophisticate. He used to tell the story of being in the subway as a young man and seeing a sign saying “Smoking Prohibited.” He was with a friend who wanted to smoke. My father told his friend the sign meant “you could go ahead and smoke.” He also told me of being with the songwriter Jimmy McHugh. They were passing the poetry section of a library when McHugh turned to my father and, pointing to the section, said, “Jack, it's all in there.” In general my father didn’t tell stories about our family. He told stories about his friends in show business. Later I realized that the friends were almost always Irish. The people he knew in show business became his real family. He married one of them—Laura, one of the dancing Wood Sisters. Evidently, that marriage (about which I knew nothing as a child) was short and disastrous. The lyrics to one of the songs my father wrote go:



They all love my wife

They all love my wife

She makes all of them fall

When I go to bed she's at a dance

When I wake up she’s in a trance

Oh, what a home sweet home I’ve got it!



Or, more poignantly:



Passing my window faces I see

Most of them smiling none smile for me

None know I’m lonely or that I’m alone

Since you have left me home isn’t home

Why weren’t you satisfied



Goldie was the only one of my father’s siblings I actually met, and by the time I met her, her beauty had gone. There was another sister, May, for whom my father wrote a song, and perhaps others. I don't know what became of them. Both my father and Wayne served in World War I, but
Wayne

died young as a result of the mustard gas he had inhaled. He called for my father on his deathbed but my father couldn't summon the courage to go to him. Naming me after
Wayne

was a late—and no doubt rather guilt-ridden—fraternal gesture.

As my father grew older he grew bitter about women. “Put a man in all that make-up, fix his hair, and he’d be just as attractive as any woman.” He was not advocating drag. Women baffled him and, finally, frightened him. He wished at last to keep his distance. Another lyric goes, “I did all I could to make you happy, but still you chose to grow cold and forget. / My pillow’s wet every night, praying you’ll write, goodness only knows why.”

My father left show business when vaudeville, which was his primary bread and butter, gave way to the movies and died. In addition, his great mentor and occasional employer, George M. Cohan, lost interest in musicals and made an ill-fated attempt to establish himself as a “straight” playwright. My father opened a dance studio. He received a telegram from Cohan wishing him luck and tendering “kindest personal regards.” The venture failed. He turned to Postal Union—where he had worked as a telegrapher during the summers—and then to Western Union, which eventually made him manager of the
Port Chester

branch. He claimed that the sound of the telegraph key reminded him of tap dancing. Recently I came upon a clipping, a review of one of his performances. It refers to him as a “great” dancer. Since childhood I have collected recordings of vaudevillians: Cohan, Harry Lauder, Nora Bayes and Jack Norworth, Gallagher and Shean, many others. All these recordings bring me closer to my father, whose performing days were long past when I knew him. “To Americans,” writes John E. Dimeglio in Vaudeville USA,






the vaudevillian...typified the spirit of liberty. Was he not utterly free? He travelled across the expanses of the great land, and did as he wished on the stage. In the most mobile of all nations, that nation’s most mobile citizen, the vaudevillian, represented something special. Vaudeville entertained the family, the sacred core of
America

’s strength. Yet the nation had been founded by daring adventurers who challenged the unknown. The average American had to remain close to home, but not the vaudevillian. He was heroic in this sense, meeting the challenges of one town after another, one audience after another, his very career at stake each time he mounted the stage. The theatergoer could share in all this. The destiny of the lone figure on stage was in his hands.






I think of my father in his suit, with his black hair slicked back, or in his underwear playing his nightly game of solitaire. “Your father,” one of his drinking companions told me after his death, “was a goodtimer.”

The story of my mother’s life seems to have been the story of the longing to go home. Her home town was
Perth Amboy, New Jersey

, where she met my father. He must have seemed like an embodiment of all the lights of Broadway. She maintained the hope that I would enter show business, and my father did indeed teach me to tap dance. Like my father, my mother came from a large family. When we visited
Perth Amboy

on Memorial Day there seemed to be relatives everywhere. Her brother Panny (“strong as a bull”) was once a wrestler and now called himself an “automobile beautician.” I remember her sister Maggie as immensely fat (“it’s her glands”) and barely able to walk. I was expected to hug Maggie and kiss her, which I did with little enthusiasm. I don’t think the people there liked me very much. I was too bookish, I had little interest in—or capacity for—sports. When I learned to play the guitar my mother would force me to bring it to
Perth Amboy

. Everyone would ask me to play. At first I would refuse. Finally, I would comply. Everyone was sitting around me in utter silence. You could hear a pin drop. The moment I began to play, everyone started to talk.

My maternal grandparents, whom I never knew, operated a store which featured delicious Italian cooking, my favorite kind of food. My relatives maintained the tradition of good cooking, but I disliked these trips to see people whom I scarcely knew and who scarcely knew—or wanted to know—me. Yet this was the place for which my mother yearned. Port Chester was quite similar to
Perth Amboy

. It too boasted a large Italian population. Yet my mother was never really able to make friends there. She would make a friend, there would be an intensity of communication, then there would be a fierce argument and that would be the end of that. There were fierce arguments at home, too, but that relationship went on. My parents made an attempt to make me happy, and at times I was. But I was also lonely, on my own a lot, given to imaginative play. There was a great mirror on my mother’s dresser. I would play in front of it, watching myself. We listened to the radio (this was “the golden age”) and we went to the movies. If I saw a movie in which I identified with the hero, I became the hero the next day. The “movie” became my image in the mirror. Thirty years later I raised the question, “Is the movie screen a window or a mirror? It appears to be a window, but it turns into a mirror.” I'm sure my childhood experience had something to do with that question, though I believe there is also something in the nature of movies which encourages one to think of mirrors. Criticism as secret—or, as Oscar Wilde said, the only civilized form of—autobiography.

I suspect that my mother would have preferred for me to have been a girl. There are stories of her dressing me in girl’s clothing—my girl ego was named “Geraldine”—but I remember little of this, and I have no temptation to cross dress at this point. When I was in my twenties, my father remarked, in as manly a voice as he could muster, “Well, I thought you were a little, you know, but I guess you're all right.” There’s a story here too. When I was in high school a male teacher took an interest in me. Like Deborah Kerr in the popular movie, he was planning to offer me a little more than “tea and sympathy.” He taught gym and English literature and was responsible for school plays. He knew of my interest in musicals and once hinted that he was planning to cast me in the lead in Carousel, but the production never materialized. I must have led him on unmercifully. He was very popular with “the guys,” and as far as I know no one ever suspected him. My mother in fact decided she wouldn’t believe me when I told her the truth. “Oh, you're lyin’.” He was Italian and rather handsome, so she must have fantasized about him.

The teacher invited me to accompany him to an excellent Broadway musical, The Music
Man.

He was very careful to ask my parents. He explained that he could take me all the way back to Port Chester, but it was a shorter drive to
Mamaroneck

, where he lived. I could spend the night with him and he could take me to school the next day. He really gave me every consideration. He said I could sleep on the couch or, if I preferred, “bunk in” with him. I chose to “bunk in.” He took me in his arms and kissed me. I still remember his voice as he said, “In a moment our eyes will get used to the light and we'll be able to see each other.” I felt nothing, no fear but no sexual excitement either. That was that. My experiment had come to its conclusion. I mumbled something about having a headache and rolled over to go to sleep. The next morning he was understandably a little panicky: “I hope nothing happened that bothered you....” I reassured him, “No, no.” It was certainly my fault as much as his. I had been experimenting, wondering about my sexuality. The fact that I felt nothing freed me a little. It only occurred to me recently that, had it been a different man, the results might have been different. Gay men have often figured in my responses to art: Noël Coward, Jess, Robert Duncan, James Broughton, Neeli Cherkovski. I hate the concept of the shadowy homosexual figure who haunts—and taunts—the good American hero in so many American films: the Penguin vs. Batman, for example. Yet my sexuality is finally not all that different from such heroes’. John Wayne once said, “I guess I've proven that I’m no pantywaist.” I don’t even know what a pantywaist is. But I suppose my encounter with that teacher was such proof for me. “Don’t knock it unless you’ve tried it,” the “gay” villain says to Clint Eastwood in one of his films. “What makes you think I haven’t,” Eastwood replies. Someone in the audience said “Whoa!” at that remark. I suppose my adventure with the teacher was a way of saying “Whoa” too, of putting the brakes on something. I have no idea what became of him. I hope he found someone better suited to him than I was. I wonder how many other people he may have taken to
New York

!

Though my high school never put on its production of Carousel,
Port Chester

did afford me two moments of stardom. The first of these involved my father. I have some talent for drawing. Since my father worked for
Western Union

, he had the addresses of various famous people. At his suggestion, I drew pictures of President Eisenhower and sports announcer Bill Stern. My father then sent the pictures to the people I had drawn, hoping that they would greet me as a young Picasso. I received a letter from Eisenhower’s press secretary and another from Stern himself. This was written up in the local paper, The Daily Item, as “Local Boy Receives Letter From President.” There was a photograph of me with my easel. I thought it strange that the reporter who wrote the story interviewed only my father, not me. The story rhapsodized, “Who would be next in a boy’s heart to the president—who but a figure from the world of sports?” Who indeed.

I wondered what that reporter would have made of my interest in Bernard Shaw (whose prefaces and plays were actively distancing me from Catholicism) and Noël Coward, whom I had seen with Mary Martin in an amazing television special, Together With Music (1955). I had a record album, Noël and Gertie, with Coward and Lawrence performing the balcony scene from Private Lives. Coward (like Burns and Allen or Lucy and Desi) was demonstrating that the unit was not necessarily the single performer, the “lone vaudevillian,” but the “team,” the man and the woman together. This team was not quite “the family.” It represented something different: the search for that mysterious other for whom one yearned and who arose out of one’s deepest feelings of loneliness. Indeed, the team suggested that the other could not only be found but even presented to the world. That the other was also oneself, something denied or broken off from one’s own psyche, only increased the yearning. Thinking of my poetry presentations—my wife and me reading chorally—James Broughton remarked that he thought I was producing an “androgenous form.” “King Amour,” a poem I wrote in 1986, attempts to deal with such desire:





How

is it possible to speak to you?

We stand

in different dimensions if we stand at all—you

in that darkness on the “other side” (flow into it!) What is it?

“The bareness of the mind the glitter of certain states”—

Dusk. What I can see of the sky is gray. Colors darkening. Everything failing.

Hope is inseparable from Delusion (Love)....



The second instance of stardom is when I appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show (then called The Talk of the Town) as a member of The Port Chester Senior High School Choir. This was in June, 1955. Sullivan had been involved somehow with Port Chester Senior High—he may have taught gym—and he decided to do his own biography on television, so he invited the high school choir to perform. We sang “Beyond The Blue Horizon” and “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” It was, as Sullivan used to say, “a rilly big shew,” with Bob Hope, Pearl Bailey, Smith and Dale (Neil Simon’s “Sunshine Boys”), and others. Everyone looked at least ten years older than they did on tv. I remember having to stand for a long time under the hot, bright lights. More recently (1991), my friend Ishmael Reed generously described me in Time magazine as a “literary luminary” of
California

. When Ishmael told me what he had done, I was so surprised—flabbergasted—that the only thing I could think of to say in reply was, “In 1955 I was on The Ed Sullivan Show.” Ishmael waited a beat and said, “You’ve topped it.”

It was part of my mother’s weirdness that, though she might take a cup of coffee, she would never eat off anyone else’s plates. No one was clean enough for her. Every day she scrubbed away at the house in an effort to keep it clean. Later, when she was ill with cancer, she wrote me telling me how exhausted she was, “and the house is dirty.” The “house” was in fact a three-room apartment on the top floor of an apartment house. The apartment house had been someone's mansion once, but now it was divided up into apartments. There was a marvelous front yard where we could play catch or even baseball. I never felt quite middle class in that situation. My middle-class friends had houses. They often had their own rooms. I had space in the apartment but not my own room. Middle-class people seemed to live a marvelous life. My mother’s urge to clean meant that the house was always in an uproar as she moved furniture around to get at any piece of dirt that might be hidden from her. The houses I visited seemed calm, orderly, like the houses I saw in situation comedies on television. There seemed to be people living the fifties’ version of the American Dream: a house, a television set, reliable plumbing. I just wasn’t one of them. Someone said to me recently, “You were a rebel even then.” But I wasn’t a rebel. I was an outsider. From my position I could watch people, but it was difficult for me to participate. I was in this respect very similar to a moviegoer. I don’t know at what point I began to believe that everything around me was fictional, that people’s lives were a constant invention. But from my outsider position that is the way it seemed. It wasn’t that their lives weren't real. For them, their lives were very real, and many times in my life people have told me their stories. My position as outsider has made me a good listener. But their lives were at a distance from mine. That poor teacher whom I led on—there was an entire drama going on for him. It just wasn't going on for me. Yet I could understand him. I was not “a camera” exactly (in Christopher Isherwood’s famous phrase), but I was a kind of sponge, even (in Shelley’s words) a “sensitive plant”—a nothing, a null space ready to be filled with someone else’s being. “Yah,” said my friend Larry Eigner to me, “Negative Capability.”

Like other women, my mother had been trained to take care of a baby by practicing on dolls. The result of this was not only that the doll “became” a baby; the baby also “became” a doll. My mother selected my clothes and combed my hair for my entire life through high school. I objected at times, but never very strongly. I knew that when I went away to college everything would change. I understood that I needed to please my mother. She was the person with whom I had most daily contact, and she was formidable. Her anger might erupt at any moment. When I was “bad” she would beat me with a special stick. Once, after I had grown and been away to college, she tried to “spank” me again: I grabbed the stick and broke it in front of her. This infuriated her, but it was the end of the spankings. Perhaps most terrifying was the phrase, “Wait till your father gets home,” though I soon learned that my father didn’t share her anger at such moments. I knew from Sunday school that it was a mortal sin to miss Mass on Sunday, but my mother never went to church. When I asked her about it she said, “Oh, I’ve got nothin’ to wear.” She seemed to feel genuine shame at her position in life. She would occasionally shoplift things. Once, she was caught and brought to the police station. My father had to rescue her. Her embarrassment was tremendous. She was superstitious and would “read cards” for people. I believe she would charge them for this. She would also buy more food than was necessary and sell the extra cans to her friends at a reduced price. It was a way of getting a little more pocket money. She believed she was fooling my father but I discovered that he was quite aware of it. She would say to me, “Someday you’ll know” and “Someday you’ll miss your mother” and “I wish you could always be little.” Any genital exploration by me was strictly “shameful.” Once when she felt I wasn’t being sufficiently sympathetic to her plight she waited till I was alone in the apartment and phoned me. Unfortunately for her, I recognized her voice. She said, “You know your mommy. I'm going to kill her!” I said, “Mommy, stop doing that,” and she hung up. The incident was never mentioned. When, in 1964, she was on her deathbed, groggy with sedatives, she seemed to believe that she was going to hell. It was horrifying. “I'm going down, down,” she muttered. I tried to reassure her, “You're going up, up,” but she would have none of it: “Not after what I’ve done.” I don’t know what terrible guilt was upon her. A few moments before she died, she sat bolt upright in the hospital bed, her eyes tightly closed. She began to whirl her arms in front of her, as if she were warding off some unseen enemy. I ran for the nurse. When we returned, the nurse went in ahead of me. She turned to me and said, “She's gone.”

My mother hoped by her advice, example and bullying to control my life. “Don't get married until you're forty.” (I married at 21.) But in fact I knew that my life was in my own hands. This was the message of the books I was reading. The only problem was that my life was also elsewhere. In
Port Chester

I was laying low. I would have to wait until I got away for my life, my true life, to begin.



Black rain falling

and the night endless—

Buddhashine

in the darkness—

I think of

the woman who bore me

and the effort her life was

(no one to answer for that)

Dust now she is

that powervoice

silent now—

only my memory

and that fading—

Did I love her

(love here indistinguishable from need)

her insane

orders

(she herself always

“on the edge”)

I lie in a hotel bed

in the city of
San Francisco

and there is no rain falling

but the words “black rain”

bring her to me—are conjure words—

her eyes

(beautiful, I realize now)

suddenly clear

and her vivid

smile







*






...at a distance life awoke, and there was a rattle of lean wheels, a slow clangor of shod hoofs. And he heard the whistle wail along the river.

Yet, as he stood for the last time by the angels of his father's porch, it seemed as if the Square already were far and lost; or, I should say, he was like a man who stands upon a hill above the town he has left, yet does not say "The town is near," but turns his eyes upon the distant soaring ranges.

Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel






Bios, the Greek word, means life, particularly human life, as opposed to Zoon, a living being, an animal. But we are both “humans” and “animals.” Perhaps I should be writing an autozoography as well as an autobiography: my history as an animal. What I am doing here is nothing but telling stories, often stories I have told friends over the years. How can one break through stories into something like the life I lived?

My father was surprised and delighted when I won scholarship money to go to college. One of the scholarships, the major one, came from
Western Union

. Western Union provided three prizes for children of its employees: first prize was a full scholarship to
Cornell


University

in
Ithaca, NY

. The other two scholarships were less money, but you could go to any school you wished. I won first prize. “Kid, I didn’t think you’d be able to go,” my father told me, “I didn’t have the money.” With a perhaps misplaced zeal I simply assumed I was going to college and that the money would somehow take care of itself. Amazingly, it did.

I had come to
Port Chester

in 1943. When I left in 1958 I understood myself to be a poet. My essay, “Home/Words,” in Exiles (1996) deals with the moment in 1955 at which I discovered poetry. “Someone—probably a teacher, perhaps Angela Kelley, who was Italian but who had married an Irishman—suggested that I read Thomas Gray’s 18th-Century poem, ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.’ I have no idea why the teacher thought the poem would appeal to me. I thought it very unlikely that I would have much interest in it, but I looked it up in the library and took it home...The poem seemed to me the most beautiful sound I had ever heard. [It] affected me so deeply that I wanted it to have come out of me, not out of Thomas Gray, and I immediately sat down and wrote my own Gray’s ‘Elegy,’ in the same stanzaic form and with the same rhyme scheme as the original:





I see the night—the restless, eager night

That spreads its shadow softly on the day,

And whispers to the sun’s red, burning light

To vanish like a dream and pass away.

I see the nigh--*the darkened mist of night—

And feel the velvet sorrows mem’ries bring;

September’s leaves have fallen, old and bright,

And autumn’s winds have blown the dust of spring.

I think of days long past, and gone, and dead,

Of all the ancient, withered hopes I’ve had....



“Etc. Unlike Gray, I took myself as the subject of my elegy. But its mournful tone—and words like ‘mem’ries’—was directly traceable to him. I understood the state of mind named in Gray’s ‘Elegy’ to be the state of mind of poetry itself; and in reacting so deeply to it, I understood myself to be a poet.

“It was by no means a simple state of mind. It had to do with the enormous power of words not merely to reflect but to create a ‘reality,’ a ‘mood’ which moved me away from the daylight world in which I ordinarily functioned and had identity: ‘I see the night....’ In some ways Gray’s lines hinted at sexuality—surely an issue for me at that time. His rose “blushes” and, virginal, “wastes its sweetness on the desert air”; he writes of “the dark, unfathomed caves.” Speaking the words aloud let me experience them physically, with my own breath, coming out of my own body. In this situation, mind and body seemed not to be at odds: Thought seemed sensuous, sensuality seemed thoughtful. Self and other were joined here too. Thomas Gray was a long-dead poet of the 18th Century. It was his mind that was being expressed in his elegy. Yet his poem seemed to be expressing my own inmost thoughts. It was almost as if Gray’s passionate words allowed him to be reincarnated in my body.

“There was of course a ‘real’ Thomas Gray, a man who actually existed and who did a number of things beside write poetry. The Gray I was experiencing was not that person but Gray the poet, the bard. Aspects of both our lives seemed suddenly to fall away, to be of little consequence. What did it matter who the man Thomas Gray was? What did it matter who I was—born in
New Jersey

, growing up in
New York

? My powerful reaction to Gray’s words allowed me to recognize not only who he was but who I was: I ‘was’ a poet. And to ‘be’ a poet meant to be transformed, to move away from the person who lived at 58 Prospect Street and who was 15 years old and who had a mother named Juana and a father named Jack. Poetry offered me another identity, that of the poet; and, in so doing, it offered me another ‘home’—that of words. The life I led ‘at home’—‘in my house’—was one thing; the life of words was another.

“But a person with two homes can be understood as an exile....” (Exiles)



When I arrived at Cornell, one of my poems had been published in my high school yearbook (“We shall return no more, no more, our days....”). Three short pieces had been selected for an anthology of high school poetry. Another poem had been published in a series called “Yale Penny Poets.” (Later I learned that Larry Eigner had a poem in that series as well.) I momentarily considered majoring in math, which I had enjoyed in high school. But I knew that my primary interests lay elsewhere, and I became an English major. My minor was French literature.

To my surprise, my freshman roommate, Richard Giustra, was both Catholic and a wrestler (the Church militant!). He was about my size and was trying to be nice. His brother had attended Cornell and so he knew the campus a little. He showed me around. But we were both a little nervous. When it came time to go to sleep I had some difficulty. Suddenly I heard a favorite piece, Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, beautifully played. At first I thought the music was coming from a radio, but in fact it was simply in my head. As I “listened” to it, I fell asleep. I have always been grateful to Gershwin for that moment:



There—on the edge

of sleep—

guiding me into it.

(“Chorus: Gershwin”)



Soon one of my dorm-mates tried to get me together with another English major, Ed Pechter. Ed and I eventually became good friends, but at this point we circled around each other warily. Noticing that it had begun to snow, he smiled and said, quoting Shelley’s “Ode To The West Wind,” “If Winter comes....” That settled the matter. The man was at the very least trivializing a great poem; at worst he was committing blasphemy. I recited the entire first stanza of the poem and then, without another word, turned and left. I thought I was punishing Ed for his loose tongue. Ed thought I was trying to impress him!

“After years of continence,” wrote Ezra Pound, “he hurled himself into a sea of six women” (“Moeurs Contemporaines”). That is exactly how I felt after
Port Chester

, though Cornell’s 3 to 1 ratio of men to women made finding the six women a little difficult. “I’m not oversexed,” I used to say, “I’m just undernourished.” In any case, Cornell offered me the opportunity to reinvent myself, and I went about doing that. I was a writer, a poet, no longer a “brain”—some sort of oddity—but an “intellectual,” something which (unlike a “brain”) might have a sex life. Here, writing poetry seemed actually to be an advantage. (I was so out of it in high school that when someone called me a “fag” I had no idea what they were saying. When I looked the word up in the dictionary all I could find was “Slang. A cigarette.” It was some time before I discovered the actual meaning of the word.)

I had brought my Gretsch “Ultra-Modern Twin-Pickup ‘Miracle Neck’ Electric Spanish Guitar” with me to Cornell, but I wasn't sure whether I'd have much occasion to play it. This changed when I met Lou Cataldo, another outsider. Lou was half Italian and half Puerto Rican and called himself a “Ginnyspik.” He called me a “Ginnymick.” He had been raised in
Greenwich Village

(of which he spoke with great authority), could play the saxophone and double on bongo drums. He used the word “crazy.” We decided that the best way to meet women was to have a band. (“Crazy!” said Cataldo.) We put up advertisements for a “girl singer” in the women’s dormitories and held auditions. We got a lot of names, addresses and phone numbers and—a girl singer. When I told this story to someone recently she asked, “Which of you had the affair with her?” I said, “He did,” which was true. On the other hand, Cataldo’s girlfriend from
Greenwich Village

arrived at Cornell and made a pass at me: “Oooo you didn't tell me he was so CUTE!” I made a few trips to
Greenwich Village

, and that was that.

At the end of freshman year, Cataldo “busted out” and the girl singer was on probation. Our band had been successful enough to make it necessary for me to join the Musicians’
Union

. Once we fronted for a showing of “stag movies” at an organization called Young Israel. They couldn’t advertise the movies but they could advertise us. Everyone just walked past us as we played. Eventually we stopped playing and went downstairs to watch the movies ourselves.

The psychological pressures of college life are considerable, and there isn’t space to deal with them here. Cornell had some interesting teachers—including, eventually, Paul de Man, who was a major influence on my understanding of criticism and on my view of Yeats. There was also an excellent course on Dante taught by Robert Durling, and I read James Joyce's Ulysses in Arthur Mizener’s course. I wrote considerably less poetry in college than I had in high school, partly because I was being asked to consider poetry critically, in ways that were not fully familiar to me. What exactly did you mean by that? Was that put in only for the sound? Robert Durling was my freshman English teacher, and I would show him my poetry. I remember his description of my early work as “mellifluous Yeatsian vapidity.” He smiled as he said it. But he said it. (I remember thinking that “Wolfian vapidity” might have been more accurate.)

For me the experience of poetry had been extraordinarily intense but utterly isolating. I had no way of knowing whether my work was any good, whether it “communicated.” I had no one whose opinion I could really trust. To make matters worse, the opinions of most of my professors seemed to reflect those of the then-fashionable New Critics. For the New Critics, Shelley was a terrible poet. For me he was something like a god. (Whenever leaves show up in my poetry, Shelley’s “Ode To The West Wind” is present.) One teacher—Robert Durling, I believe—said to me, “Why did Shelley write, ‘I die, I faint, I fail’ in that order? How can you faint and fail after you have died?” I had no way of answering the question, though much later the O.E.D.’s article on “die” provided me with an excellent response. I didn’t find out about the O.E.D., however, until long after I had left Cornell, when I came upon references to it in Robert Duncan’s work. In many subtle ways I was encouraged to write criticism rather than poetry at Cornell, and I discovered that I was good at writing criticism. Like most college programs, Cornell’s English Department tended to produce people who felt comfortable with analysis but uncomfortable with emotion—particularly with personal emotion.

I had hoped that Cornell would give me what I lacked in
Port Chester

, an intellectual community. It gave me something, but it didn’t give me that. In my sophomore year I took a great many English courses. I wanted to learn everything at once. What I discovered was that, no matter the period or the writer, Chaucer or T.S. Eliot, the same kinds of questions were being raised, questions of irony, paradox, etc. This discovery made me realize that I wasn’t in school to learn about literature. I was in school to learn a grid which could be applied to almost any piece of writing (though woe to the writer like Shelley to whom it didn’t apply). This was a useful thing to learn, but it lessened the authority of my instructors.

When I read Thomas Gray’s poem I believed (however inaccurately) that I had penetrated to the heart of poetry. I knew that Gray was a great writer because of the way he made me feel. I knew that Shelley was a great writer because of the way he made me feel. If my professors could not account for that feeling, their opinions didn’t have to be taken too seriously. At the same time, however, I knew of no work which could further what I had already done. The poets I was reading were ones my professors approved of—or might approve of: Yeats, Eliot and Pound; Dylan Thomas, W.H. Auden, Robert Graves, Robert Lowell. Also Alan Dugan, George Starbuck, Arthur Freeman. John Crowe Ransom gave a charming reading and I acquired his Selected Poems. I missed Charles Olson’s visit. The writers I was reading influenced my verse, surely, but they could not push me forward. I had no sense of direction. The closest I was able to come to such a sense was in something I wrote myself, a poem called “Orpheus” which was eventually published in The Beloit Poetry Journal in 1970, about eight years after it was written. The poem was influenced by Pound—particularly by “Moeurs Contemporaines” and “Mauberly,” with their fragmented sections. Except for the opening lines, written as part of an earlier poem, it came all of a sudden, in a burst. It was as if the original poem suddenly decided to change direction and take on a life of its own. The central sections, including the somewhat homophobic lines about Whitman, were a deliberate echo of Lorca’s Poet in New York and his “Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías”:





Walt Whitman walks on the harbor, watching

sea-gulls scatter, his beard full of lice.

There he goes, with his body electric,

chanting his chansons in the morning,

never shaving.



Walt eyes the sailors, with their bodies electric,

electric to him, Walt Whitman,

chanting his chants in the morning,

never shaving.





*





Garcia Lorca chants Walt Whitman*

Orpheus in the saddle,

his beautiful eyes are gleaming.

Never will there be an Andalusian

as handsome as he.



Now the worms eat him,

now the worms chew up Garcia Lorca



shot in the head for political reasons.



I realize now that the poem was telling me something about my own death and the death I sensed in my surroundings, but at the time I couldn’t read it.

Here are three more poems from that period: “On The Ultimate Failure of Religiosity,” “Love Song,” and “Before Leaving Atlantic City.” These three poems are more representative of what I was attempting than was “Orpheus.” The first suggests my uneasiness with both mother and mother church. The second suggests my sexual anxieties. (A woman had said to me, “I don’t know whether you know it or not, but you have an absolutely terrific line!”) I’ll discuss the third poem in the next section. These poems show various influences, and they point towards my sense of poetry as something “physical,” something dangerous and erotic.



ON THE ULTIMATE FAILURE OF RELIGIOSITY



The lineal direction of eternity

is not marked clearly.

Hansel-and-Gretel-like, I lose my way

and stumble into the wicked house

in the bewildering wood.

I had supposed that death was an accident,

a deviation from the usual path,

yet these sweet-toothed children

munching their gingerbread crumbs

in evident sensuality

are another matter.

They are content, untrue

to the fairy tale, awaiting

the inevitable movement

to the black pot stirred

by the old hag of the story,

and grateful for the compassionate act

of swift beaks snapping

umbilicus of usual bread.



*

LOVE SONG



This delicate piece of thread

proceeding by the longest possible route

from the point of my desire to your awareness—

had you postulated its existence,

I should have drawn it taut,

wound it easily on the spindle of

your acceptance,

but, as it is, must toss my line

hoping by some chance

you catch the baited inference.



Shall I remind you of its capacities?



Old tapestries,

diagrammatical pictures of the heart,

were woven by its ancestors,

and even the white surface of your indifference

might (with a bit of luck)

be rainbowed into passion by its working.



*



BEFORE LEAVING ATLANTIC CITY



The mother-sea exploded with a roar

before we put the lights out and it vanished.

Not even the ladies marching on the boardwalk

were storm enough to pull us down;

we rode out the daylight, dreaming

of drowsy islands where the water’s calm.

Night was our harbor, when the midwife, love,

folded us in with its impossibilities,

fished out our pieces till the game made sense.

Sweetheart, forgive the liars and the fools

who shipped us to this place: they thought it best.

Sleep will bear you into gentler water

where painted characters of kings and castles

glitter like islands, and I will close your ears

to the disarranged palaver of pawns and landlubbers.





*





If you catch me stealin’, please don’t tell on me.

Leadbelly song





The third poem quoted, “Before Leaving Atlantic City,” was written in December, 1961, as a love poem to my wife, Adelle. We had spent our honeymoon, at her parents’ expense, in
Atlantic City

. I met Adelle through a complicated series of events.

I mentioned earlier that the pressures of college life are considerable: academic pressures, social pressures, issues of identity, sexuality, self-assertion. One is suddenly, willy nilly, ready or not, an “adult.” In my case, I had never been away from home. I had never gone on a date. I had never received any instruction about sex. I remember my mother remarking to my father, “D”—short for Daddy, something from my infancy which stuck—“you ought to say something to him.” Understanding exactly what she meant, my father parried the attack: “Nah,” he said, “These days they tell them all about that in school.” Then, turning to me, he added: “Don’t they?” What could I say but “Yes”?

As a child I owned very few books (except for comic books, which were a great passion), and there were very few books in my house. If I wanted to read a book I got it out of the library. In my freshman English class at Cornell, I was assigned to do a report on Yeats’ A Vision. I went to the teacher to explain that the book had been taken out of the library and so I couldn’t do the report. He surprised me by saying, “Why don’t you just buy the book?” The possibility of buying a book—any book—hadn’t occurred to me. I bought the Yeats, did the report, and suddenly I was beginning to buy books. Unfortunately, my funds were extremely limited. Looking around me in a bookstore one day, I realized that it would be easy to steal a book. I reasoned that stealing a book or two was really harming no one, and, further, that I would use the books well, better than most of the people who had money to buy them. At that point I began to steal books in earnest, to set about building myself a library. Once, when a friend needed money, I stole a large law book from one book store and sold it at the other. Unfortunately, I didn’t get enough money for it and I had to go back and steal still another law book! My stealing was not only illegal but self-expressive, a mode of subversive self-assertion in a situation in which I was constantly under the scrutiny of authority figures. Friends whom I told about it expressed admiration, though they didn’t take up the trade themselves. Finally I stole books I didn’t really need, would never get around to reading.

Apparently, I was not alone in this activity. There were articles in the Cornell paper about the increase in book-stealing, and the bookstores began to install anti-theft devices. One of the stores featured a “plainclothes” guard, who was supposed to blend in with the students. He didn’t blend in. During one of my expeditions I realized that he was watching me. I decided to give him something to watch. I picked up more and more books and carried them around the store with me. I knew I could put these books on my credit account and get away. It would be expensive, but I wouldn’t be accused of stealing. I remember thinking that the guard was probably wondering whether I would do that. I walked over to the clerk as if I were going to pay for the books, chatted with him for a few moments, and then—walked out the door. As soon as my foot was outside, a hand was on my shoulder. I handed over the books and, later, a few others from my library. I argued that I had read about the increase in stealing and, since I had little money, thought I could steal a few books too. I was put on suspension for a year. Someone remarked, “You seem almost relieved.” Robert Langbaum, one of my teachers, said, “I hope you realize you've done a horrible thing.” “There was,” as the French Lieutenant’s Woman says to her ex-lover in both book and movie, “a wildness in me at that time.” The relief my friend noticed was real. Stealing books was a way of extricating myself from an increasingly unbearable situation, and of doing so without the pain of a direct confrontation. At a certain level, I was proud of it. Did I wish to stay in school? Was Cornell the right place for me? I needed time off but had no way to ask for it. Stealing deflected my attention from those difficult questions and, finally, provided me with time. When my parents learned of my suspension they rose to the occasion admirably—my mother had after all been caught doing the same thing—and I was welcomed home.

Several years earlier, my mother had sued, or threatened to sue, our landlord when I accidentally put my hand through a pane of glass on the front door to the apartment house. The result of the injury was a panicked trip to the hospital and a fairly obvious scar which still remains on my left arm. My mother argued that the scar might mar my career in show business (not that I had a career in show business), and the landlord gave her some money. This money had been put aside for me to use as I wished. I had recently gone to
Boston

to see a friend before he went home to
Italy

. I decided it might be nice to spend the summer of 1960 in
Cambridge

. I tried finding jobs in the
Boston

area but none of them worked out. Finally, at my mother’s suggestion, I took advantage of my savings. The money allowed me not only to live in
Cambridge

but to attend Harvard Summer School.

In
Cambridge

I acquired a whole new set of friends. Moreover, I discovered that it was not unfashionable to be a writer/thief. Jean Genet was at the height of his fame. So my petty thievery tended to work to my advantage. One of the people I met, Lewis H. Rubman, changed the course of my life. Rubman was amazing. He had a mustache, for one thing. For another, he had a car. Furthermore, he was extremely frank about sex—and he had some of those beautiful Henry Miller books published by the Olympia Press in
Paris

. His parents were well-off (he was an inhabitant of that middle class I both envied and disdained) and he had actually undergone some psychotherapy. He was, I believe, looking for a best friend, a best friend for life, and he sensed that in me. Neither of us was writing very much but there was always a good deal of intellectual excitement. One of the courses I was taking included the magnificent Brecht/Weill opera, Aufstieg Und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (Rise and Fall of the City of
Mahagonny

). I listened to the record over and over. Brecht’s play, with its self-conscious “bits,” suggested a new and, to me, astonishing direction for vaudeville. Later, I translated Brecht’s lyric, “Surabaya Johnny,” only to discover that the lyric was itself a free translation of Kipling’s poem, “Mary, Pity Women.” It was a marvelous summer.

When the summer wasover, Rubman (our habit was always to call each other by our last names) returned to
New York City

, where he was going to NYU. He had an apartment on
East 11th Street

. I went back to
Port Chester

. Arguments with my parents increased. My father was terrified that he would have to support me for life. Finally, over my parents’ fierce objections (my mother writhing on the floor, my father shouting, “You're killing that woman!”), I moved into a rooming house not far away from home. I got a job as a bank teller and, for the first time in my life, was able to support myself. I felt that if my parents were going to make my life miserable, there was no reason I had to stay with them. My bank teller job meant that my father didn’t have to give me any money. What did my parents have to give me if they could no longer give me money? My difficulties with my mother remained unresolved when she died in 1964. I walked out of the hospital and burst into tears. During our deathwatch over her, however, my father and I were able to feel close to one another again. When he died three years later, I felt that we had arrived at some sort of understanding.

Moving out of the house meant I could do what I liked with my time. Every second weekend I visited Rubman in
New York

. The other weekends he drove to
Goucher


College

in
Maryland

, where a woman he’d met in
Cambridge

was going to school. I accompanied him a few times. On one of these trips he introduced me to Adelle Abramowitz, whom he’d known in elementary school. He had been recently re-introduced to her by his girl friend, Ellen, and he'd been very impressed. “She’s read Finnegans Wake,” he told me. The grass is always greener, the ass is always keener, a friend once chanted. There was a Jewish family living in the apartment house where I’d grown up. The father spoke with an attractive, slight Yiddish accent. Their grown daughter seemed to me enormously beautiful, and was the object of one of those immense, all-consuming crushes which animate our childhood. Later, in high school, there was another woman, closer to my own age. Jews seemed attractive, witty, intelligent, and, in a way that I was not, successful. “You only like them,” a Jewish woman told me recently, “because you're not Jewish.” I admitted that that was possible, but I have often found very close friends among Jews. Adelle had not only read Finnegans Wake, she had lived abroad for a year; her French was better than mine. Since she was an economics major and good at math some friends wondered whether we could find anything to talk about. There were no problems.

As my relationship with my own family deteriorated, Adelle’s family welcomed me. I spent the next summer in New York City—my father was able to get me a job in a Western Union office in Bowling Green—and I saw a great deal of Adelle and her parents, Sam and Esther. Adelle and I were almost exactly the same age (I’m 6 days older) but she had skipped a grade, so she was a year ahead of me. After graduation from Goucher, she entered graduate school at Cornell. We lived together for a short time and were married in
Foley Square

in
New York City

on December 21, 1961. I curso............... much more at link .

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/articles/detail/90078


Essay
'Also a Poet'

50 years ago, at the time of his death, Frank O’Hara was better known as museum curator.
By Andrew Epstein

Fifty years ago, on July 25, 1966, Frank O’Hara died in a tragic accident on New York's Fire Island at the age of 40 when he was hit by a dune buggy on the beach in the dark, early hours of the morning. The following day, the New York Times ran an obituary under the headline “Frank O’Hara, 40, Museum Curator” followed by this subhead: “Exhibitions Aide at Modern Art Dies—Also a Poet.”

“Also a poet”? Strange as it may seem now, O’Hara was better known at the time of his death for his work in the art world than as a writer and one of the founders of the influential New York School of poetry. Indeed, before even turning to his work as poet, the Times obituary discusses O’Hara’s work on the painter Robert Motherwell and a controversial nude portrait of O’Hara painted by Larry Rivers. In 1966, O’Hara was considered a fixture of the Manhattan art scene and a “minor” poet of the avant-garde. Today, he is almost universally viewed as one the few major poets of the second half of the 20th century, beloved for the immediacy and intimacy of his unmistakable voice, for his charming chronicles of daily life, his refreshing embrace of culture both high and low, and his unique mix of insouciance and melancholy. O’Hara’s pervasive influence looms large over contemporary poetry and culture; as the poet Tony Hoagland recently declared, “Frank O’Hara has had the most widespread, infiltrating impact on the style and voice of American poetry in the last thirty years.”

I should be careful not to overstate the case: at the time of his death, O’Hara was hardly an unknown poet. O’Hara seemed to enjoy close friendships with a vast universe of now-famous people across the arts; had already been given a starring role in The New American Poetry, the groundbreaking anthology of “anti-academic,” experimental verse edited by Donald Allen in 1960; and had begun to accrue many admirers and followers. But only two relatively slender, full-length books of his poems were published in his lifetime, and the literary establishment often dismissed his work as too unconventional and lightweight. When The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, a hefty, 586-page gathering of his work, was published to great acclaim several years after his death and garnered a National Book Award in 1972, even his friends were shocked by the sheer volume of the poetry he had left behind. Marjorie Perloff’s 1977 book, Frank O’Hara: Poet Among Painters, did a great deal to legitimize O’Hara as a writer of significance and drew the attention of literary scholars to his poetry and its connections to painting. Over the following decades, O’Hara’s reputation soared and his place in the canon—measured out with Norton anthologies and course syllabi—became secure.

These days, however, O’Hara seems to be everywhere, popping up with regularity in popular culture, unlike many contemporaries who once overshadowed him. As the British poet Sean O’Brien put it in a recent review, O’Hara’s “presence is now as ubiquitous as weather.” This latest surge may have begun in 2008, when O’Hara’s work made an appearance at a climactic moment on the acclaimed TV show Mad Men. The well-heeled ad executive protagonist, Don Draper, encounters a hipster at a bar reading a volume of O’Hara’s poetry. Stung that this bohemian felt the book wouldn’t interest someone like him, Draper later buys a copy, and the audience watches as he reads an O’Hara poem to himself. Sales of O’Hara’s book Meditations in an Emergency shot up overnight, and the poem featured on the show, “Mayakovsky,” which had previously been rather obscure, suddenly became a favorite. As a result, these lines, which are intoned by Draper and serve as an apt encapsulation of his existential dilemmas, have become some of O’Hara’s best known—or at least most tweeted:

Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.

At the same time, O’Hara seems to have found particular resonance within the world of popular music, a development that led a staff writer for the music site Pitchfork to wonder on Twitter: “When did Frank O’Hara become the poet of indie rock?” Recent years have seen the perennially hip founder of Sonic Youth, Thurston Moore, release a song with his new band Chelsea Light Moving called “Frank O’Hara Hit,” with lyrics about O’Hara’s death. The young, critically acclaimed singer and songwriter Greta Kline (daughter of actors Kevin Kline and Phoebe Cates) was inspired to take the stage name Frankie Cosmos after falling for Frank O’Hara’s poetry as a teenager. The indie band Rilo Kiley alluded to O’Hara’s poem “Meditations in an Emergency” in its song “More Adventurous.” The Irish electronica artist New Jackson created an ambient track called “Having a Coke with You” centered around the audio clip of O’Hara reading the poem by that name, and an array of musicians, from David Bowie and Lou Reed to hipsters young enough to be their grandchildren, have name-checked O’Hara or cited his influence.

In recent years, O’Hara’s poetry has also found a warm welcome on the web, where certain lines and passages are posted with surprising frequency on social media. Nearly every day, someone on Twitter will excitedly post the video of O’Hara reading his delightful love poem “Having a Coke with You,” a piece which has had a renaissance of its own, thanks in part to its easy availability on YouTube. Almost as often, one can find these easy-to-adore closing lines of “Steps” being tweeted anew:

oh god it’s wonderful
to get out of bed
and drink too much coffee
and smoke too many cigarettes
and love you so much

One could grumble that the reduction of O’Hara’s poetry to such breezy social media sound bites reduces the complexity and depth of his work; as Helen Charman recently pointed out in an essay on O’Hara’s online popularity, “it’s easy to dismiss these ‘inspirational quotes’ posts, and it’s true that selective quotation often misses O’Hara’s ironic tone.” But, as Charman notes, something deeper seems to be going on with this recent resurgence of O’Hara’s work, and it is connected to his uncanny ability to seem continuously new and of the moment. From what I have seen online, in the classroom, and in many other corners of our culture, all this O’Hara buzz cannot be dismissed as just superficial; a new generation of readers, many of them not very well-versed in poetry, find O’Hara tremendously appealing, moving, and relevant to their lives, just as many poets across the wide spectrum of contemporary poetry continue to turn to O’Hara’s poetry for inspiration and permission to experiment.

Indeed, many commentators have argued that despite being more than a half-century old, O’Hara’s writing feels strangely au courant, a prescient soundtrack for the age of the smartphone, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. In a piece on the 50th-anniversary reissue of Lunch Poems for Poetry, Marjorie Perloff observed that although “much of the poetry of the sixties is dated; O’Hara’s, especially in this book, seems curiously up-to-date.” Dwight Garner sounded a similar note in his review of the book for the New York Times, in which he marveled at how “O’Hara speaks directly across the decades to our hopes and fears and especially our delights; his lines are as intimate as a telephone call. Few books of his era show less age.” In 2014, Jane Ciabattari noted for the BBC that O’Hara’s “poems manage to feel contemporary, no matter what the year.” Pondering why his work seems to “endure, inspire and remain fresh,” she turned to poet Adam Fitzgerald, who suggested that it may be because O’Hara’s “poems have the immediacy of a consciousness formed by the internet: fragmentation, collage, name-dropping, checking in, quotations, gossip, scandal, click bait and trends, laconic witticisms and gushy, full-breasted rants. Call him a prophet of the internet.”


With its unusual contemporaneity, O’Hara’s poetry is a good example of what Ezra Pound meant when he said “literature is news that STAYS news.” It’s not hard to imagine that O’Hara would have been thrilled by the unusual afterlife his poetry has enjoyed in the 50 years since his death. Despite his notoriously casual attitude toward collecting and publishing his work, O’Hara always had one eye on posterity. “How am I to become a legend, my dear?” he asks in “Meditations in an Emergency.” He was convinced that inferior work would eventually vanish—“It’ll slip into oblivion without my help,” he once said, explaining why he declined to bash poetry he didn’t like. At the same time, as one can see in poems such as “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island,” which eerily looks ahead to his poetry’s posthumous life, O’Hara felt that truly great art finds a way to survive as it reaches down through time, altering and being altered by successive generations of readers, the words of the dead forever being “modified in the guts of the living,” as Auden said in his elegy for Yeats.


O’Hara seems to hope for just this sort of legacy for his own work in the soaring, prophetic conclusion to his long poem “Ode to Michael Goldberg (’s Birth and other Births)” (1958). After depicting a scene of revolution and fresh beginnings—in which a ship full of slaves “who will soon turn upon their captors” arrive in the New World and “found a city riding there / of poverty and sweetness paralleled / among the races without time”—O’Hara imagines a heroic, exceptionally eloquent individual stepping forward:

and one alone will speak of being
born in pain
and he will be the wings of an extraordinary liberty

With this figure, a stand-in for the poet himself, O’Hara expressed a wish that his own work might live on, inspiring and even liberating those to come in his wake. In a very early poem, “The Critic,” O’Hara addressed “the assassin / of my orchards” as a threat to his survival and spelled out a powerful desire for artistic immortality: “Do not / frighten me more than you / have to! I must live forever.” Fifty years on, he seems to be off to a good start.

Originally Published: July 20th, 2016

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/articles/detail/70072


essay
left behind
can poetry comfort the grieving?
by joy katz
christian gottlieb kratzenstein, "orpheus and eurydice"

when my mother died, eight years ago, i stopped reading poetry. A strange thing for a poet to say, but it’s true. In fact, it wouldn’t be overstating it to say that i hated poetry after my mother died.

Poems felt false. I resisted, especially, the kind of piece whose impulse is to resolve. These poems, many of which were sent to me by well-meaning friends, reduced death to a salvo. It was unbearable to be confined to the limits of their “meanings” at a time when the territory of mourning was expanding before me, and it appeared to be infinite.

My discomfort with language spread from poetry to moment-to-moment thinking. People said that i would find a metaphor for where my mother was. I understand this often happens for grieving people. But when my mother died, i grew suspicious of metaphor. Metaphor insisted: Your mother might be the sea. I tried to imagine her as the sea. I tried to feel around in my soul for whether my mother could ever become the trees. But i couldn’t. Metaphor said: You are deficient, you have not found a place for her.

I could not imagine what form she might take partly because i had not settled for myself that she had “gone.” even today, i sometimes hesitate at the verb. Occasionally the people who wanted to comfort me in grief seemed discomforted themselves. Their faces were tense, as if anticipating an unreturnable emotional volley. I tried to find an expression that felt honest and, at the same time, safe to use after a casual “what’s new?” there wasn’t one.

I remember once, when i was 12, trying to reckon with the idea that my mother would one day not be here. I promised myself that when the time came, i would say “dead,” because it was the true word. I understood “passed away” as a pretend phrase adults use when speaking to children and the infirm. Decades later, when i came back to claim the truth, i discovered that “died” is only a syllable from the slipstream, useful for emails to one’s employer, but otherwise featureless as a light switch.

Poetry felt drained of its possibilities by the time i stood graveside. My disorientation with language was complete as my mother’s coffin was being lowered into the ground and the rabbi read out her name: Elaine.

Elaine. Something seemed off to me about this. A mistake. Maybe even a lie. I don’t know why, but i was absolutely certain of one thing: That is not her name anymore. It was as if someone had whispered this message into my ear. It did not have to do with anything poems had said, or anything people were saying after the funeral, as we were spooning egg salad and potato salad into bowls. “elaine is with tom now,” someone told me. And “elaine is in a better place.” not elaine, i thought to myself, as if it were an obvious error of fact that any proofreader would catch.

The next week, while going through my mother’s things, i found an old etiquette book. In the chapter on condolence, there was a drawing of a woman’s hands, narrow, graceful, cartoonish 1950s hands, holding a teacup. The grieving person, said the book, will forget to eat, but she may accept a cup of bouillon. Reading that, i felt, truly, like a pale gold light moved over me. I felt the weight i had been carrying ease just a bit. The etiquette book was not elegiac. It did not offer beauty, or a “message.” its author spoke from a time when people thought about grief and knew what to do when it happened, a time when grief was an ordinary household condition. The grieving person, the etiquette book explained, is ill. The assessment was as flat and serene as a sickroom tray. This language had possibility. The etiquette book offered a calm voice, recognition, an assurance that i wasn’t falling through space.

Several months later, i was sitting in a theater watching sarah ruhl’s play eurydice. After marrying orpheus, eurydice dies. In the underworld, there is a chorus of stones that addresses the audience.

Eurydice wants to speak to you.
But she can’t speak your language anymore.
She talks in the language of dead people now.

This was it. Further to the communiqué i had received at my mother’s grave, and to my problem with poetry while mourning.

The play said: Elegies are false. They think they can talk to the dead, but dead people speak in the language of the dead, and we can’t.

Eurydice is about the playwright’s own bereavement. After dying and traveling to the underworld, eurydice sees her father, but she does not recognize him. An ocean of sadness opened up in me as i watched. This play understood what the loss of a person means. I couldn’t speak to my mother not because i didn’t know where she was, and not because i had too little faith or imagination to envision where she was. I couldn’t speak to her because i could not recognize the her she had become.

For me, the vital part of grieving was not to try to “resolve” or cross this distance. It was the distance. Eurydice led me back to poetry because it is not an elegy. It is about being left behind.

I began to think there could be a poem about death that was as large as this distance. Or that a poem about death might enact a failure of language that seemed to me the truest part of my mother’s absence.

In the years since, i have found poems into which i can take my remnant grief. It took me a while to sense what kind of writing i could trust with it, because my relationship to poetry was shifting. Owing to my mother’s death, i had become uneasy with closure and impatient with poems that offer epiphanic “truths.” poems of sorrow, especially, needed to do something else.

The ones that sustain me, i find, have to do with living people, humans who mourn, rather than with the departed. These poems are not “like” grieving—they are not lamentations—but instead open up the isolating process of mourning. They translate sorrow through poetic form rather than confining it to a metaphor. Here are a few of them.

•

the narrator of ai’s “cuba, 1962” is a plantation hand who discovers his lover dead in the sugar cane. First he cuts off her feet with a machete—“what i take from the earth, i give back.” then he takes her body to market with the crop.

Whoever tastes my woman in his candy, his cake,
tastes something sweeter than this sugar cane;
it is grief.
If you eat too much of it, you want more,
you can never get enough.

I couldn’t have imagined there was anything surprising to say about death. But this poem surprises me by rhyming grief with greed. It shows me a stage of mourning i passed through without realizing: Punishing aboundingness. When my mother died, so many people brought cakes to the house, the soft, airy kind that always seem to be frosted a lip-staining blue. I ate and ate. The cakes made me sick, and they never satisfied. The person speaking in “cuba, 1962” is a laborer, but the labor in the poem is sorrow. Sorrowing is work, and it does not satisfy. At the end of each day i did not know how far i had come or when i would be done. Grief was infinite, and yet no amount was enough.

“cuba, 1962” feels true to me because the pain in it is not assuaged. The poem is brutal, and it is a love poem. It is almost a reproach of sympathy-verse. So often the “comfort” in grief poems seems like pretense. I feel easy around this poem; paradoxically, the way it forsakes comfort comforts me. It reminds me of the condolence card i got from my mother-in-law: Dear joy, she wrote, do you feel like you have a hole in your heart that nothing can fill? Her question held a mirror up to my pain. This twinning of grief was generosity itself, in the form of a question i was not obligated to answer. Do you feel this? Not death feels like _________.

Christina davis, in her incantatory poem “furthermore,” focuses on the body after the death of her father. I love the ancient sound of lines such as these:

[…] to have for a body

the going away of the body, to have for eyes
the going away of the eyes. And for hearing,

a silence, where once
were people.

What the poet has left of her father—what she gets to keep—is even less substantial than a memory. Her father has become an abstract process, the-going-away-of. And there is more transformation: The body is also the poet’s body. All she can see with her own eyes is the going away of his.

“furthermore” is the opposite of poems that make the site of mourning an object, such as an ocean or a tree. In those poems, an image becomes a reliquary, a stand-in for a person who was once able to see it. Images can be objects of faith: A poem can make a tree more real than a real tree (to misquote marianne moore). But in this poem, i find the lack of image more faithful to experience.

In a way, “furthermore” argues against the faith poems place in images. A passage in psalms, echoing this poem, explains: “eyes have they, but they see not; they have ears, but they hear not.” in the psalm, the jews are being instructed to reject idols. Instead of worshiping gold effigies, they are supposed to rely on a god whose presence is abstract. A process. Not wind or vapor, but the fact that wind and vapor are created.

How to turn, in need and sorrow, to a process, where so recently there was a living body? In return for my mother, i had going-awayness and, after a while, having-goneness. Davis’s acceptance of this transformation, in “furthermore,” strikes me as a strong act of faith.

Mary szybist’s “on wanting to tell [ ] about a girl eating fish eyes” questions poetry’s faith in metaphor, even as it is full of metaphors. “on wanting to tell” is really about a helpless way of seeing that happens in grief. Death creates an intensity of perception that causes objects of the world to change:

You died just hours ago.
Not suddenly, no. You'd been dying so long
nothing looked like itself: From your window,
fishermen swirled sequins;
fishnets entangled the moon.

“you’d been dying so long, nothing looked like itself.” in death’s slow approach, starlight became sequins. This is a romantic metaphor, spun of sweet sorrow. But “on wanting to tell” is not the kind of poem that turns starlight into sequins. It is not sweet, either. Death has come finally. Metaphor disappears.

Now the dark rain
looks like dark rain. Only the wine
shimmers with candlelight.

In mourning, it would have been a relief to find, even for a minute, that the world was just the world again, and nothing was “like” anything else. An ordinary minute in a universe where my mother wasn’t dead, and the rain was not charged with loss. But this moment, when the rain is simply the rain, is not a resolution. The world of this poem is not normal. We know this because in its first lines, before any mention of death, there is a little girl going around eating eyes.

—how her loose curls float
above each silver fish as she leans in
to pluck its eyes—

is a girl actually going around the room and pulling eyes out of fish and eating them? Is “eating eyes” a metaphor? It is unclear. All we can tell for sure is that the speaker of the poem is at a dinner party where she turned from an ordinary wine-drinking person into a person-who-is-still-alive. It is a very, very odd moment. She speaks to the dead person, but wishfully, not with any investment in communicating:

If only i could go to you, revive you.
You must be a little alive still.

At the end of the poem, the girl who has been helping herself, apparently from platters of eyes, is asked what they taste like. She responds: “they taste like eyes.” metaphor declined—no explanation, no truth revealed, no diversion from the weirdness.

Szybist’s voice throughout the poem is pacific, hypnotic. And there is tenderness (awful tenderness) in the description of the girl slipping eyes into her mouth with “soft,” “rosy,” chewed fingers. The creepy girl hovers in the uncomfortable place between metaphor and reality as the poem wonders about the border between still-alive and no-longer-alive.

Ted berrigan’s poem “people who died” does not want to set me up for philosophical understanding. It does not have flashy chops. It moves obviously, deliberately, like someone laying down a weapon in surrender. The poem, as the title announces, is simply a list.

Pat dugan……..my grandfather……..throat cancer……..1947.

Ed berrigan……..my dad……..heart attack……..1958.

The people who died are berrigan’s family and friends. The recitation is chronological, so it intermingles the legendary and the obscure:

Woody guthrie……dead of huntington’s chorea in 1968.

Neal……neal cassady……died of exposure, sleeping all night
in the rain by the rr tracks of mexico….1969.

Franny winston……just a girl….totalled her car on the detroit-ann arbor
freeway, returning from the dentist….sept. 1969.

Jack……jack kerouac……died of drink & angry sickness….in 1969.

It’s not that the poem refuses to confront death’s mystery or that the experience of grief is missing from “people who died.” quite the opposite. Grief is in the poem’s form. It is in how berrigan trips up, interrupting his list, pausing and then continuing, as though snapping out of a reverie. “jack……jack kerouac.” in the hesitation, i feel a tension. The poem doesn’t tell me how to interpret this pang—i am free to take it as sadness, or as an emotional double-take. The ellipsis could be a crack, just a flash of the infinite territory of sorrow. The details of their relationship aren’t important. The epic of kerouac’s life could have crushed this poem. “drink & angry sickness” compresses a life into a teaspoon of radioactive material. It satisfies the part of me that wanted adults to tell it straight.

The poem closes: My friends whose deaths have slowed my heart stay with me now. The pitch of the last line is not so different from the rest of the poem. It is a gesture of acceptance, not a reach for the lyrical sublime. It is a low-key observation.

Whose deaths have slowed my heart describes the cadence of this poem, calm as a resting heartbeat, or a train on a long nighttime stretch. My friends stay with me now limits the poem to saying something about berrigan. “people who died” makes no pronouncement about my relationship with my own people who died. But because the poem is so modest, i feel invited into its ongoingness, the train that carries all the dead and the living.

Originally published: October 30th, 2013


yes, it can.... To what extent depends on the person in need and his/her depth of loss/despair.-tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetrysoup.com/article/charles_baudelaire__french_poet-426

Charles Baudelaire - French Poet
Written by: Arthur Symons

Baudelaire is little known and much misunderstood in England. Only one English writer has ever done him justice, or said anything adequate about him. As long ago as 1862 Swinburne introduced Baudelaire to English readers: in the columns of the Spectator, it is amusing to remember. In 1868 he added a few more words of just and subtle praise in his book on Blake, and in the same year wrote the magnificent elegy on his death, Ave atque Vale. There have been occasional outbreaks of irrelevant abuse or contempt, and the name of Baudelaire (generally mis-spelled) is the journalist's handiest brickbat for hurling at random in the name of respectability. Does all this mean that we are waking up, over here, to the consciousness of one of the great literary forces of the age, a force which has been felt in every other country but ours?

[Pg 311]

It would be a useful influence for us. Baudelaire desired perfection, and we have never realized that perfection is a thing to aim at. He only did what he could do supremely well, and he was in poverty all his life, not because he would not work, but because he would work only at certain things, the things which he could hope to do to his own satisfaction. Of the men of letters of our age he was the most scrupulous. He spent his whole life in writing one book of verse (out of which all French poetry has come since his time), one book of prose in which prose becomes a fine art, some criticism which is the sanest, subtlest, and surest which his generation produced, and a translation which is better than a marvelous original. What would French poetry be to-day if Baudelaire had never existed? As different a thing from what it is as English poetry would be without Rossetti. Neither of them is quite among the greatest poets, but they are more fascinating than the greatest, they influence more minds. And Baudelaire was an equally great critic. He discovered Poe, Wagner, and Manet. Where even Sainte-Beuve, with his vast materials,[Pg 312] his vast general talent for criticism, went wrong in contemporary judgments, Baudelaire was infallibly right. He wrote neither verse nor prose with ease, but he would not permit himself to write either without inspiration. His work is without abundance, but it is without waste. It is made out of his whole intellect and all his nerves. Every poem is a train of thought and every essay is the record of sensation. This 'romantic' had something classic in his moderation, a moderation which becomes at times as terrifying as Poe's logic. To 'cultivate one's hysteria' so calmly, and to affront the reader (Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère) as a judge rather than as a penitent; to be a casuist in confession; to be so much a moralist, with so keen a sense of the ecstasy of evil: that has always bewildered the world, even in his own country, where the artist is allowed to live as experimentally as he writes. Baudelaire lived and died solitary, secret, a confessor of sins who has never told the whole truth, le mauvais moine of his own sonnet, an ascetic of passion, a hermit of the brothel.

To understand, not Baudelaire, but what we can of him, we must read, not only the[Pg 313] four volumes of his collected works, but every document in Crépet's Œuvres Posthumes, and, above all, the letters, and these have only now been collected into a volume, under the care of an editor who has done more for Baudelaire than any one since Crépet. Baudelaire put into his letters only what he cared to reveal of himself at a given moment: he has a different angle to distract the sight of every observer; and let no one think that he knows Baudelaire when he has read the letters to Poulet-Malassis, the friend and publisher, to whom he showed his business side, or the letters to la Présidente, the touchstone of his spleen et idéal, his chief experiment in the higher sentiments. Some of his carefully hidden virtues peep out at moments, it is true, but nothing that everybody has not long been aware of. We hear of his ill-luck with money, with proof-sheets, with his own health. The tragedy of the life which he chose, as he chose all things (poetry, Jeanne Duval, the 'artificial paradises') deliberately, is made a little clearer to us; we can moralise over it if we like. But the man remains baffling, and will probably never be discovered.

[Pg 314]

As it is, much of the value of the book consists in those glimpses into his mind and intentions which he allowed people now and then to see. Writing to Sainte-Beuve, to Flaubert, to Soulary, he sometimes lets out, through mere sensitiveness to an intelligence capable of understanding him, some little interesting secret. Thus it is to Sainte-Beuve that he defines and explains the origin and real meaning of the Petits Poèmes en Prose: Faire cent bagatelles laborieuses qui exigent une bonne humeur constante (bonne humeur nécessaire, même pour traiter des sujets tristes), une excitation bizarre qui a besoin de spectacles, de foules, de musiques, de réverbères même, voilà ce que j'ai voulu faire! And, writing to some obscure person, he will take the trouble to be even more explicit, as in this symbol of the sonnet: Avez-vous observé qu'un morceau de ciel aperçu par un soupirail, ou entre deux cheminées, deux rochers, ou par une arcade, donnait une idée plus profonde de l'infini que le grand panorama vu du haul d'une montagne? It is to another casual person that he speaks out still more intimately (and the occasion of his writing is some thrill of[Pg 315] gratitude towards one who had at last done 'a little justice,' not to himself, but to Manet): Eh bien! on m'accuse, moi, d'imiter Edgar Poe! Savez-vous pourquoi j'ai si patiemment traduit Poe? Parce qu'il me ressemblait. La première fois que j'ai ouvert un livre de lui, j'ai vu avec épouvante et ravissement, non seulement des sujets rêvés par moi, mais des phrases, pensées par moi, et écrites par lui, vingt ans auparavant. It is in such glimpses as these that we see something of Baudelaire in his letters.

1906.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/articles/detail/68408


Essay
Thousands of Poems Before I Sleep
Building an online poetry archive can be a messy business.
By D. H. Tracy
Introduction
Building a poetry archive can wear a person out. D.H. Tracy is the Poetry Foundation’s Archive Editor. Here he writes about the task of choosing what to include, and how sometimes it felt like he was constructing an unsteady monument.

Marvin Bell’s “An Introduction to My Anthology” plays on the Greek meaning of anthology as a flower-gathering or bouquet:

Such a book must contain—
it always does!—a disclaimer.
I make no such. For here
I have collected all the best—
the lily from the field among them,
forget-me-nots and mint weed,
a rose for whoever expected it,
and a buttercup for the children
to make their noses yellow.

Here is clover for the lucky
to roll in, and milkweed to clatter,
a daisy for one judgment,
and a violet for when he loves you
or if he loves you not and why not.
Those who sniff and say no,
These are the wrong ones (and
there always are such people!)—
let them go elsewhere, and quickly!

For you and I, who have made it this far,
are made happy by occasions
requiring orchids, or queenly arrangements
and even a bird-of-paradise,
but happier still by the flowers of
circumstance, cattails of our youth,
field grass and bulrush. I have included
the devil’s paintbrush
but only as a peacock among barn fowl.



This poem gives some idea of the purpose and scope of the Poetry Foundation’s new online archive. Our objective in starting this project was to assemble several thousand poems—some clover, some orchids, even some “cattails of our youth”—and present them on the Web, freely and legally, on the assumption that improving access to good poems lowers one barrier to their wider enjoyment. This collection would therefore square with the Foundation’s goal of expanding the audience for poetry, and of doing so without dumbing down the art. This collection would be broader than a print anthology but more winnowed than a library. It would be all things to all people, like a pool with a shallow end for novices and a deep end for experts. The reduced cost of online publishing would allow us to offer longer poems than are typically found in print anthologies, and to offer more poems by lesser-known authors, and more lesser-known poems by well-known authors, than, again, would be the case in print. Freedom from a calendar-bound publication cycle would allow us to add poems on the fly, and the accretion of poems over time would not occur at the expense of material already there.

We would select the poems to represent an author’s critical embroilments and passions, to sample the arc of his or her career, and with a mind to presenting both chestnuts (for newcomers) and lesser-known work (for old hands). Previous appearance in Poetry magazine would have no bearing on the selection process. We hoped these considerations would mitigate the idiosyncratic effects of taste on our part, but at the same time we didn’t want to remove these effects, and the sparkle of personality they bring, altogether. In practice, single readers (including Caitlin Kimball and Samantha Myers, who did yeoman’s duty in plowing through the work of hundreds of poets) have made all the selections for a given author, and these selections have subsequently been seconded and approved by other editors. So all selections are the acts of an individual sensibility, and no selection has been unilateral.

Broadly speaking, all of this has been executed as planned, although with more chaos than any of us might have guessed. Marvin Bell is right, in his poem—anthologists do have a habit of disclaiming and do like to point out how forces beyond their control conspire to undermine their vision. I have never listened to them when they say this, and I don’t expect you to listen to it now. A tornado of budgetary and legal wrangling cuts a swath through one’s precious flower arrangement; nevertheless one has to stand by the product, like a politician taking the blame or credit for the economy. Caitlin quipped that her job title was “anarchivist.” Rights holders may be skittish or completely unreachable. Fee structures for online use of copyrighted material can bear little relationship to the notoriety of the work in question. Poets themselves, reluctant to be cast in bronze, may renounce their widely appreciated earlier work and refuse its inclusion.

I mustn’t exaggerate the bad: the vast majority of the poets we had cause to deal with directly were highly enthusiastic about the project, and the major poetry publishers have been, all told, remarkably nimble and generous in coming to grips with the Web medium. (Deserving special mention in this regard are Copper Canyon Press, New Directions Publishing, Houghton Mifflin, BOA Editions, and Wesleyan University Press.) I think our greatest obstacle has been some fundamental mismatch between the public, businesslike aspirations of the archive and the stubbornly private or rarefied nature of the poetry in it. More than once it seemed to me that we were opening a restaurant and hoping for fast-food appeal with a gourmet menu. The clientele is expecting cheeseburgers; the ingredients in the kitchen are snails, frogs’ legs, and Belgian endive.

In the end I must put my hopes for the deliciousness of these poems in the multiplicity of them, and indeed in making these selections we were overcome by what Louis MacNeice calls “The drunkenness of things being various.” Somewhere in this archive you can put on a slinky red dress, visit revolutionary Cuba, stand in a ditch, or get a vasectomy. You can turn thirty-five, turn forty, drive a Buick, or pay tribute to Gandhi. You can indulge a conspiracy theory, do your laundry, have a walk along the tracks, or get more involved in the emotional lives of your appliances. You can have an ice cream sundae, commit to social justice, engage in self-abuse, or relax at the villa. We hope you find something engaging in the archive’s “queenly arrangements,” as Marvin Bell puts it, as well as in its incidental felicities, its “flowers/of circumstance.”

At a time when many people I know are openly disparaging of the cultural achievements of the society they live in, the poems in here (I speak now especially of the ones drawn from the past hundred years or so) form a sturdy monument. That is already wrong—these poems were composed neither with collective intent nor with intent to glorify the culture of which they are a part. Nevertheless the poets of our time have found resources of praise and lament that answer forcefully to our extremes of experience, or at least they would answer forcefully if someone read them. In September of 2001, I was a student in a course of Derek Walcott’s and we were in class when news came of the attacks on the World Trade Center. The events of course colored our discussions for the rest of the semester. Frustrated with the republic’s incompetence at staging any kind of meaningful healing ritual (he especially ground his teeth at the sentimental benefit concerts that rock stars were then giving), Walcott asked us why, given the magnitude of the tragedy, no one would rise to the occasion. “You have great things,” he said. “Why does no one stand up and read Hart Crane?” I had no very good answer for him then, but we propose a solution now: here’s an excerpt from Hart Crane’s poem, “The Bridge.”

Originally Published: February 27th, 2006
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Biography

Poet, critic, and editor D.H. Tracy earned an MFA at Boston University. In his formally engaged poems, often infused with sly humor, he explores themes of intimacy, perception, and loss. His debut poetry collection, Janet’s Cottage (2012), won a New Criterion Poetry Prize, and his work is featured in The...
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[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/articles/detail/69332

Essay
Keats in Space
The Romantics fused poetry and science. Is there any hope for a revival?
By Molly Young
Introduction

Creative frenzy is one of those subjects that makes for perennially joyful reading, no matter what field or object it takes as its center. Our idea of the single-minded pursuit—feverish, purposeful, overwhelming—is a distinctly Romantic one, and it springs from the poets of the era: Byron, Wordsworth, Blake, Coleridge, Shelley. —Molly Young discusses The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes.
The Age of Wonder. Illustration by Paul Killebrew /><br /> <div style=Original illustration by Paul Killebrew

Creative frenzy is one of those subjects that makes for perennially joyful reading, no matter what field or object it takes as its center. Our idea of the single-minded pursuit—feverish, purposeful, overwhelming—is a distinctly Romantic one, and it springs from the poets of the era: Byron, Wordsworth, Blake, Coleridge, Shelley. In his new book, The Age of Wonder, Richard Holmes studies the archetype from a different angle or, rather, offers up a new cast of models from whom the Romantic figure might have emerged. These are the scientists of the era, the astronomers, explorers, chemists, and botanists who launched hot air balloons, built 40-foot reflector telescopes, taught themselves Mandingo, and experimented with nitrous oxide. Holmes is less interested in direct lines of influence and affiliation—from, say, Coleridge to Darwin—than he is in redefining the Romantic personality type to include these new explorers, and to explain that it wasn’t necessarily the scientists following the lead of the artists in compiling the Romantic type but something, perhaps, like the opposite.

Romanticism as a cultural force, Holmes points out, is generally regarded as "hostile to science, its ideal of subjectivity eternally opposed to that of scientific objectivity." Yet both pursuits followed the same imaginative principles and notions of wonder that fueled their advancements, and it is Holmes’s contention that a Romantic science exists in the same sense as a Romantic poetry, and both flourished during what he calls the Age of Wonder.

The period begins with Captain Cook’s voyage to Tahiti in 1768 and stretches into the 1830s, during which time science retooled its commitments toward educating the general public—“popular science” was until then unheard of—rather than reserving its practice for the Latin-proficient educated elite. The stars of Homes’s era are Captain Cook, Sir Joseph Banks, Humphry Davy, Mungo Park, and William and Caroline Herschel, and their narratives constitute his evidence for a Romantic science. It’s worth mentioning that Holmes’s working conception of Romanticism is vaporous and broad, and his use of the term less taxonomic than it is evocative. This, however, is not a bad thing. If not quite crystal-cut, his definition makes more intuitive sense than a strict delineation might.
Poems from the Age of Wonder
John Keats:
On First Looking into Chapman's Homer

Percy Bysshe Shelley:
from Epipsychidion

Percy Bysshe Shelley:
Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude

Percy Bysshe Shelley:
Mont Blanc: Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni

Samuel Taylor Coleridge:
Fragment 6: The Moon, how definite its orb!

Lord Byron:
Darkness

William Wordsworth:
The Tables Turned

Erasmus Darwin:
Economy of Vegetation: Canto I

Sir Joseph Banks provides the founding myth of the Romantic explorer, and he proves as engaging a character as Byron or Trelawny. A botanist and diplomat by trade, Banks sailed to Tahiti in 1768 with Cook and kept careful logs of his trip. The diaries include lists of vocabulary, recipes for roasted dog, and an account of a young Tahitian woman having her buttocks tattooed. Most striking in Banks’s journals is the intensity of his curiosity and its mingling with affection and concern for the objects of study. The tenor of the young botanist’s study is not disinterested; it is yearning, and he cuts an appealing figure. It is no surprise that William Cowper cast Banks as an intrepid bee in his poem The Task.

William Herschel was the second figure to fit the new mold. An astronomer of “acute unconventional intelligence” with a “quick, boyish enthusiasm, that betrayed intense and almost unnerving passion,” Herschel was an accomplished professional musician (in his spare time composed an oratorio based on Paradise Lost). He was once thrown from his horse only to somersault and land upright still holding a book in his hand. He considered the episode a perfect demonstration of Newton’s law of circular motion. The age of Romantic science was full of such endearing figures: men and women who devised spectacular plans, ignored common sense, nursed frivolous whims, and devoted themselves with unhealthy enthusiasm to their work.

If the scientists of the era seem so far to bear none but a temperamental relation to the poets, consider a few facts. For one thing, the arts and sciences were more closely intermingled in the 18th century than they are today. A popular astronomy book contained illustrative poetry from Milton and Dryden; Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles) recorded one of Herschel’s discoveries in his 1791 poem The Botanic Garden and produced the best-selling long English poem of the decade. Herschel himself acknowledged that “Seeing is in some respects an art, which must be learnt.” A young Samuel Coleridge was taken out into the fields nightly by his father to be shown the sky, and cosmological imagery figures richly in his early poetry.

If this seems a far cry from our contemporary era of antiseptic specialization, well, it is.

Providing a material link between poetry and science in the Age of Wonder is the chemist Humphry Davy. A “small, volatile, bright-eyed” man “bursting with energy and talk,” Davy wrote verse when he wasn’t measuring the cubic capacity of his own lungs or investigating the strange pleasures of nitrous oxide, to which he introduced both Robert Southey and Coleridge. Davy likened scientific lecturing to poetry in his own mind; both were opportunities to devise narratives with potential to hold an audience captive. Coleridge became a great admirer of Davy and a subsequent defender of science, noting that “being necessarily performed with the passion of Hope, [science] was poetical.” Davy usually conducted his experiments independently, outside of institutions that might question his peculiar methods. Throughout his career he continued to produce verse—some published and some private—including one sketch that described the dead Lord Byron riding a comet around the universe.

The literary current ran both ways: Byron wrote Davy into the first canto of “Don Juan”; Shelley planted Davy’s ideas in 1812’s “Queen Mab” and, eight years later, in “Prometheus Unbound”; Keats’s “Lamia” is full of chemical imagery, and Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” echoes Banks’s voyage to Tahiti in its depiction of an irrecoverable and hallowed distant place. Keats’s sonnet “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” (1816), written after a night poring over translations by the scholar George Chapman, is a particularly keen example of entangled scientific and poetic sensibilities. Although the poem does not name William Herschel, it heralds the astronomer’s discovery of Uranus as the embodiment of wonder, exploration, and epiphany (“Then felt I like some watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his ken”). The sonnet compares a reader’s moment of transcendence with that of a scientist; both are “watchers” whose metaphysical transformation hinges on a visual experience.

The consensus on either side was that both science and poetry had not only an intellectual magnificence but a spiritual, emotional, and philosophical magnificence as well. It was the shared habit of Romantic scientists and poets both to put as much stock in the process of discovery as in discovery itself, and it is this particular fever that is Holmes’s fascination.

The fever itself was short-lived. Davy, Banks, and Herschel were all dead by 1830, and their passing clearly signaled the end of an era. Thomas Carlyle announced the end of Romanticism in his 1829 tract Signs of the Times, and Charles Babbage nailed the coffin shut with 1830’s Reflections on the Decline of Science in England. Thus began the era of Victorian Science, with its increased specialization and institutionalizing of what had once been a messy and boundless study. The mood of the field was no longer one of rapidity and ambition; intellectual pursuits were permanently fractured. There was no one left to define brilliance, as Coleridge did, as a form of cultivated wonder.

In this respect, Holmes’s book is an odd thing to behold. It is equal parts passionate history and head-shaking elegy—a recovery of a golden era and a subsequent burial of it. Gaining access to a bygone world of cosmic thinkers is startling and revelatory for the average reader; necessarily, then, the account of their decline feels like an unbearable loss.

If the book closes with an elegy, it contains, at least, the promise of regeneration. What Holmes has given us with this account of the Romantic scientists is, curiously enough, a thrilling new way to interpret the poets of the era. To bring new light to such a widely read group—and from the angle least expected, that of rigorous scientific study—is Holmes’s considerable gift.

Originally Published: August 12th, 2009