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Carolyn Kizer, whose poetry UD has always found a little too “stated” —

… no, not too understated, and not too overstated… Just too stated, too much (like Robert Frost’s) assertively out there… Carolyn Kizer has died, and UD has as a result been reading through her poems with more attention than she’s ever before given them.

Here’s a good one, with a way sly rhyme scheme and a solid, not too stated, point of view. As always, UD will mess up the poem with her comments, so if you want to see it unmessed with, go here:

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What the Bones Know 

[There are fundamental truths you know in your bones, not in your mind. There are truths of the body, not the soul; you learn these truths by having a body and enjoying it, as we’ll see as we read the poem.]

Remembering the past
And gloating at it now,

[In particular, remembering the great sex she had. See in this connection – since Yeats is prominently mentioned in this poem – a poem like his A Last Confession, number nine of the poems listed here.]


I know the frozen brow
And shaking sides of lust
Will dog me at my death
To catch my ghostly breath.

[She knows her body; she knows that even as she’s dying – especially as she’s dying? – she will feel sexual desire, because her commitment to life is so intense that she will fight its cessation by drawing upon whatever she has left in her of lust. The vital passions within her will try, in a last desperate effort, to “catch” her becoming-a-ghost breath before death stills it.]

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.

[Note how cleverly Kizer will deploy her death/breath rhyme throughout the poem. This pair’s first appearance will be in tandem – one line after another. Their next appearance has them divided by one line – the line ending in undone.

Glance down to the two final stanzas. Death and breath are divided by two, and then three, lines. Breath gets the final word, and has therefore it seems gradually shooed death away, kept it at a greater and greater distance.

And note the argument here: Even if I die tonight, I’ll have lived a life in which I fully loved, and so I’ll enjoy a sort of immortality.]

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.

[Boo Proust and all sex-in-the-head mentalists. Not only are they wrong that we’re twisted enervated creatures who need all sorts of perverse inducements to get it up and keep it up; they mess with our simple natural ins and outs. The poet breathes; Proust can only wheeze.]

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.

[The heart of the argument lies here: My thoughts are hot and cold. Hot and cold. Sex and death. Frozen brow and shaking sides. Yeats didn’t want us to think of sex and death like the Proustian mentalists; he wanted us to be mindful of both always, unafraid of the realm of both always, running our passions full blast hot and cold. Here’s Yeats:

[T]hough it loved in misery
Close and cling so tight,
There’s not a bird of day that dare
Extinguish that delight.
]

Margaret Soltan, October 12, 2014 9:44PM
Posted in: poem

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