And no more turn aside and brood
Upon law's bitter cruelty;
For cash still rules the Ivy Leagues, 
And rules the schools almost as good; 
It rules the fate of our dim babes
And all rich dishevelled wandering spawn.

The Denial of Death in Shenandoah National Park

Cold air, barred owls, and the smell of smoke:

Only a little data here, to evoke

The August woods off the balcony.

Woods that always prompt philosophy.

As when I read, in Becker, a phrase like

“Immunity bath,’ meaning cultic rites

That cleanse the cultist of the dread of death

(Page 12) and sometimes even of its sight.

Or anti-vaxers who, with dying breath,

Admit they thought their breath would never end.

“Consciousness of death is the primary

Repression, not sexuality.” Mend

Your dread by bacchanal, or by fairy

Story, and you’ll still get badly scarred.

A death-accepter, say Kierkegaard,

Knows this is merely where the fun begins:

The wisest owls unbarred spin and spin

Out of smoke mythic immortality.

Take, among those I love, N., P., and D.

N. strode in to save Detroit, then broke down

At the vastness of it. P. circles round

The earth’s atrocities, repairing souls.

D., who must perceive the very world, stole

His life through abstraction. Hard led

By dread, N. is struggling, D. dead.

From the balcony again the smell of smoke —

Of our own ashy end an easy token.

The world chants in the trees

And I fall asleep

Looking at fireflies

YOU LIKE TO THINK THE STARS ARE DRIPPING

You like to think the stars are dripping while
You sleep.  You like to think you'll snap awake
And step out on the deck, and in a while,
Your eyes ready, clusters will constellate
And then start dripping, just over the oak:
A weathered black and white Jackson Pollock
Whose silvers slap the cosmic curtain.


Like to think?  No - you're actually certain
That when you're not looking the universe
Loses its straight face and gets to mugging
Peeing its pants giggling and shrugging...
Stable?  Who said stable?  Metastable
Maybe and that's only maybe. Unstable
Is just as likely. Don't sleep too lightly.











-- 

… a set of thoughts on the British poet laureate’s poem about Prince Philip. As in: It is the responsibility of laureate-induced poems to be forgotten. Compelled into existence by one’s acceptance of a public position, compelled to praise the high-born to a large audience, these are so unlikely to be non-piffle. Yet – as with Philip’s surprisingly moving brief funeral – this particular poem is surprisingly good. I’m not going to argue it’s all that good, but as an example of its type, it’s way better than it should have been.

The tone throughout is non-heroic, casually musing; the poet avoids grandiosity for a man who, while physically imposing and genetically way royal (his DNA was used to verify that remains found in a Russian forest belonged to the slaughtered Romanovs), seems in fact to have had a spartan and self-effacing disposition. The poem will feature little direct reference to Philip; rather, in a series of natural metaphors, it will evoke his wartime generation.

The weather in the window this morning
is snow, unseasonal singular flakes,
a slow winter’s final shiver.

He has died in April, and his singularity as the sovereign’s husband will, as the poem begins, be evoked through the singularity of the unseasonal snow. His long life and long physical decline is nicely captured in a slow winter’s final shiver.

On such an occasion
to presume to eulogise one man is to pipe up
for a whole generation – that crew whose survival
was always the stuff of minor miracle,
who came ashore in orange-crate coracles,
fought ingenious wars, finagled triumphs at sea
with flaming decoy boats, and side-stepped torpedoes.

Unusually self-referential, this official eulogy will ask questions about eulogies for the sort of person Philip was. So marked for life was he by his wartime experience, it makes more sense to remember him in his collective military identity than in his singularity. His funeral ritual (designed by Philip himself) was overwhelmingly a military affair.

Indeed looked at in its entirety, Philip’s survival, much less his longevity, does seem a minor miracle – smuggled out of Greece (in an orange crate!) during the Greco-Turkish War when he was eighteen months old, he went on to “finagle” (to use the poet’s wonderfully non-heroic word) modes of survival under punishing battle conditions.

Husbands to duty, they unrolled their plans
across billiard tables and vehicle bonnets,
regrouped at breakfast. What their secrets were
was everyone’s guess and nobody’s business.
Great-grandfathers from birth, in time they became
both inner core and outer case
in a family heirloom of nesting dolls.
Like evidence of early man their boot-prints stand
in the hardened earth of rose-beds and borders.

There’s a nice subtle evocation here of the soft touchy feely world we’ve become, in which only faint ancient traces of “hardened” boot-prints indicate the bygone, born old (great-grandfathers from birth), men among whom Philip belonged; the patriarchs (this is the poem’s title) who kept their thoughts and feelings to themselves and (in the phrase everyone attaches to Philip) just got on with it.

They were sons of a zodiac out of sync
with the solar year, but turned their minds
to the day’s big science and heavy questions.
To study their hands at rest was to picture maps
showing hachured valleys and indigo streams, schemes
of old campaigns and reconnaissance missions.
Last of the great avuncular magicians
they kept their best tricks for the grand finale:
Disproving Immortality and Disappearing Entirely.

Relentlessly and ingeniously pragmatic, men like Philip spent their post-crate lives fashioning further escapes, further solutions to a world always perilously out of sync, until the very veins in their hands became strategic maps of (to use Graham Greene’s title) ways of escape. Their final Houdini maneuver, of course, was the whole slipping the surly bonds of earth thing.

The major oaks in the wood start tuning up
and skies to come will deliver their tributes.
But for now, a cold April’s closing moments
parachute slowly home, so by mid-afternoon
snow is recast as seed heads and thistledown.

The poem concludes with a return to the present, to a continued observation of a singular April day in which enormous sturdy old trees (this one in particular) whistle their elegy, to be joined in time by tears of rain. Enormous sturdy old Philip, Duke of Edinburgh (thus the poet’s thistle-homage – thistle being the Scottish national emblem) has done his final magic trick, leaving a world “recast” for the better by his having been here — winter turns to spring, the world regenerates itself, and the prickly thistle (Philip was notoriously prickly) is now thistledown, the feathery white top of the thistle, which will disperse in the wind and scatter its seeds.

Really, take whatever position you want on patriarchs, royalty, Philip, blahblah – this is on its own terms a more than respectable poem, a clever finagled triumph.

******************

Found it! The rule for the dead is that they should be forgotten. Ravelstein.

Double, double toil and trouble
Ginsburg was a body double
Rothschild did a fire make
Parkland massacre’s a fake
Spawn of Newt and and scourge of Hogg
Neo-fascist demagogue
Vampire bat with blind-worm’s sting
Not a human but a thing
Ginsburg was a body double
Double, double toil and trouble.

Of course DJT hasn’t written an inaugural letter, to be read by his successor. This is one of many departures from tradition for which DJT will fail to be remembered.

Already a Chicago Tribune writer has tried his hand at a satirical inaugural letter. UD offers a letter in the form of a poem – a poem in which DJT shows remarkable literary culture.

***********************

LETTER TO MY SUCCESSOR, BY DONALD J. TRUMP

They say you’re giving the place a deep clean.

Good call.  I wish I could explain how I

Soiled the great gift of the presidency.

Didn’t want to! I swear I didn’t mean

To leave it like this: a moral pigsty.

But of course I know you don’t believe me.

Consider, though, how human beings lean

Toward self-destruction.  Don’t believe me?  Try

Kafka.  Cioran.  Freud.  Dostoevsky.

From a review of an odd film I’ve seen:

“The film focuses on psycho-bi-

ological forces that make you your own enemy.

The lust for chaos; the lust to demean …

To demean yourself!  You self-glorify,

But in a sick way.  But only outwardly.

The hunger for colossal failure in

The drive for success; and for death in any

Vigilant and violent hypochondry.”

Raskolnikov skulks away; the final scene

A shabby nothing as I hiss goodbye.

Some day you’ll find a way to pity me.

*********************************

UPDATE: He did write a letter after all.

Probably a lot like the one I wrote.

Sing along.

You’re as cold as ice!
Suckers.
You sacrifice
When you’re asked.
You always heed advice
You always pay the price,
I know.

I’ve skipped out before
It happens all the time. I’m closing the door
To leave the cold behind. I’m warm in St Bart
But posting each day
Fake Canadian tweets
Makes you think I stayed.

You’re as cold as ice!
But peons must sacrifice. 
I’m in paradise
And your taxes pay the price
Ho ho.

… an uplifting New Year poem full of wholesome wisdom.

Nah. Google New Year and you’ll get a zillion pages of those. No one with half a brain comes to University Diaries in search of uplift. Here’s this year’s year-end poem, which appeared in 2002.

NEW YEAR’S EVE, IN HOSPITAL

By Philip Levine

*****************

You can hate the sea as it floods

the shingle, draws back, swims up,

again; it goes on night and day

all your life, and when your life

is over it’s still going. A young priest

sat by my bed and asked, did I know

what Cardinal Newman said

about the sea. This merry little chap

with his round pink hands entwined

told me I should change my life.

“I like my life,” I said. “Holidays

are stressful in my line of work,” he said.

Within the week he was going off

to Carmel to watch the sea come on

and on and on as Newman wrote.

“I hate the sea,” I said, and I did

at that moment, the way the waves

go on and on without a care.

In silence we watched the night

Spread from the corners of the room.

“You should change your life,”

he repeated. I asked had he been

reading Rilke. The man in the next bed,

a retired landscaper from Chowchilla,

let out a great groan and rolled over

to face the blank wall. I felt bad

for the little priest: both of us

he called “my sons” were failing

him, slipping gracelessly from our lives

to abandon him to face eternity

as it came on and on and on.

***************************

So a little anecdote, a wee life narrative, from Philip Levine, a Jewish guy who spent some life-endangered time in a shared hospital room entered into one early evening by a cheer-spreading (but not really) priest. Those of us who know Matthew Arnold’s famous Dover Beach may read Levine’s first lines as a kind of modern affectless highly concentrated summary of that angsty Victorian verse. Both poets consider the seeming pointlessness of life, nicely visually captured by the eternal in and out of ocean waves expiring on the shore:

[T]he grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin…

Every day a little death; then, for no particular reason, even maybe stupidly, a gulp of air and another plunge back to the brine, only to dissolve yet again. One More New Botched Beginning. Levine even takes the word shingles from Arnold, who laments

the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Naked because these fragile piles of sea stones have been abandoned again and again on the shore by the always-retreating, always-betraying waves of “new” existence. In Levine, you hate the sea as it “floods the shingle,” dousing it with possibility, and then – (Lucy: football; Sisphyus: rock; etc. etc. etc. ) – stranding it. And then the ultimate insult: Not enough that life is drear; there’s the insult of life – even crappy life – “still going” when “your life is over.”

So with that general statement done, Levine proceeds to his story. The visiting priest asks Levine (this seems an autobiographical poem) if he knows what Arnold’s fellow Victorian, the great Catholic poet John Henry Cardinal Newman said about the sea. The poem never says exactly what that was, but take it that the priest might have had this in mind:

[My conversion] was like coming into port after a rough sea; and my happiness on that score remains to this day without interruption.

But Newman spoke too soon; he experienced very serious depressions in his later years, and wrote one of the most-cited poems about that condition. And here’s a sample of his late-in-life prose.

I have so depressing a feeling that I have done nothing through my long life, and especially that now I am doing nothing at all. … What am I? my time is out. I am passé. I may have done something in my day—but I can do nothing now. It is the turn of others. … It is enough for me to prepare for death, for, as it would appear, nothing else awaits me—there is nothing else to do.

The merry priest tells Levine to change his life – consider conversion, one imagines, in order to be happier, and situated in a meaningful deathless world – but Levine replies that he likes his life, bitter existential betrayal and all. The priest then complains that holidays like New Year’s Eve are “stressful” for priests – presumably because everyone’s miserably reflecting on their lives the way Levine (who has the double whammy of illness and end of year to get him going) is. So the priest himself ain’t so jolly, having to gad about from drear hospital room to drear hospital room attempting to spread cheer. In fact he needs a break and is off to the biblically and californically rich “Carmel” to decompress.

The priest is now silent; together he and Levine watch the night “spread from the corners of the room.” They are being engulfed by metaphysical darkness… The priest can only repeat himself: The poet should change his life. “I asked had he been reading Rilke,” Levine sardonically responds. Rilke’s famous sonnet, Archaic Torso of Apollo, ends with that imperative: You must change your life. But it seems unlikely that the priest would be quoting Rilke’s erotic, non-religious, hyper-aesthetic poem; it seems likely that Levine is having a little fun with the little priest.

Not that we’ve ever left it, but the poem ends with a big thudding return to godless modernity, with the retired landscaper in the next bed (he’s given up trying to alter the earth), who hails from a town with a random unartful name, groaning with emptiness (“blank wall”) and defeat. And who does the poet feel bad for? The priest, with his absurd “my sons” designation (he’s much younger, one presumes, than either of these old sick men) and his disappointment that these two sinners seem to be failing big time at eternal life. Not only are they dying without grace (“gracelessly”); they are, more problematically, robbing the priest of his much-needed certainty of their salvation – hence his need to retreat to Carmel and deal with his stress.

Darkest of all is the priest’s own peculiar metaphysical fate, meted out in the last two lines: Salvific eternity itself may present to our sublunary minds as another hideous Sisyphean tableau, the chilling endlessness of … endlessness.

Complainancies of the loseur, and late

Burgers and Diet Coke in a baby chair,

And a gold eagle with its wings outspread

Upon a rug mingle to dissipate

The violent rush of avenging hatred.

He dreams a little, and he feels the dark

Encroachment of this new catastrophe,

As a calm darkens among water-lights.

His rooms of opulence and fine bright blings

Seem things in some procession of the dead
Winding across wide water, without sound.
The day is like wide water, without sound,
Stilled for the passing of his dreaming feet
Over the seas, to silent Bedminster,
Dominion of the trap and fairway bunker.

************************************

Why should he give his country to the Dems?
What is autocracy if it can fail
After they hold free and fair elections?
Shall he not find in motions of the court,
In pungent tweets and chicken wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of winning?
Malignity must live within himself:
Passions of rage, or moods in falling polls;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Vexations when the Bidens come; nasty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
No pleasures and all pains, remembering
The past of glory and the present doom.
These are the measures destined for his soul.

LINES WRITTEN IN DEJECTION, JANUARY 19, 2021.

The tweets are calm tonight.

The vote is bull, and so unfair

And full of hate.  On coastal elites the light

Gleams.  So wrong … The cliffs of Alabama stand

Glimmering and vast, ready to vote another day.

Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!

Only, from the long line of fake

Media, where scum weave their grand

Conspiracies against me …

Listen! You hear the grating roar

Of traitors, which a red wave will draw back, and fling,

In 2024, into the desert sand.

O sorrow cease!  And then again begin

With tremulous cadence slow, to bring

A future dawn of gladness in.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

… gets the Lit Nobel. I’ll look at one of her poems after my Instacart shopper and I conclude our brief affair.

And put an umlaut over her U, dammit.

**********************

Since Halloween is close, here’s “All Hallows.”

Even now this landscape is assembling.
The hills darken. The oxen
sleep in their blue yoke,
the fields having been
picked clean, the sheaves
bound evenly and piled at the roadside
among cinquefoil, as the toothed moon rises:

This is the barrenness
of harvest or pestilence.
And the wife leaning out the window
with her hand extended, as in payment,
and the seeds
distinct, gold, calling
Come here
Come here, little one

And the soul creeps out of the tree.

****************

So Glück writes brief lyrics in the key of longing. She’d prefer a world infused with religious spirit (one where cinquefoil is not merely a plant but – remember? – a common decorative motif in churches), but will take, with a sigh, the secular modern one she was handed. All Hallows is typical of this attitude, evoking an all-hollowed-out landscape – but hollowed almost in a gesture of propitiation: I’ve assembled a pure world of new possibility for you, oh hallowed ones: Come!

Or: Once you see precisely how nakedly dispirited this world is, you’re going to be compelled to respiritualize it!

And one of the saints does: a soul creeps out of a tree — ready, with the turn of the season, to respond to the imminent reseeding of the world.

The farmer in other words stages the landscape in order (holding treats in her hand) to coax the dubious soul-kitten out of the tree.

It’s all very Veni Creator Spiritus, in other words. If you’d prefer a more… ample version of this come-hither, go here.

UD returned to her Garrett Park garden from a week at the beach to discover, on a long curved strand of one of her grasses, the white husk left by a dethroned monarch. A facsimile is on the far right of this image; and

She found a very good poem with the word chrysalis in it; in the first line! It’s by John Unterecker. Title: …Within, Into, Inside, Under, Within…

UD will interrupt each of its five parts (each word of its five-word title corresponds to a form of movement in each part) to comment in brackets.

I

Beginnings: a chrysalis improvisation
in the wings, roles
taking on flesh before a role begins…

as light begins in the elm,
pushing the long elm branches into night,
a ghost light pressing sky…

or actors, swollen with strange selves,
distended to the edges of tight skin,
a brightness under moth-wing fingertips.

White arms stretch out toward truth.
The stage is full of light.
Your brightness gloves my skin.

[Soooo – Here you have a poet considering the mysterious elasticity of identity — in particular, the way an actor can become, can embody, an entirely other identity from her own. A bizarre human metamorphosis, getting inside another skin, goes on, and no one, including the actor, has much of an idea how it’s accomplished. She waits in the wing (wonderful pun!), improvising this new role before she even steps on the stage to perform it. And it’s like – how does the tree become rooted and become a tree and grow into a full-bodied elm under the influence of the sun? How does that start, that ghost light casting existence on something that’s still nothing? … Grappling here, in other words, with nothing less than the mystery of creation as well as the mystery of multiple identities — the question of why and how there’s something rather than nothing, how a ghost takes from the light in some way and stops being a ghost and assumes not merely existence, but several forms and attributes of existence.

How? Haven’t a ghost of an idea. As in a more famous formulation of this problem —

O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?

(Unterecker wrote a guide to Yeats.)

But – yes – we do have a ghost of an idea, which somehow in Unterecker’s poem successfully becomes a fully formed idea. This poem has an idea. An idea which, as the poem proceeds, branches out like an enormous elm.

In embodying that new role, that new identity, the actor conveys to the audience the mystery and excitement and illumination of being and becoming: Your brightness gloves my skin.]

II

Alice, grown huge, swollen to fit of the tunnels,
tiny, unable to reach a gold key,
knew what gardens were for—

yet never knelt in tunnels of rough sunlight
to will flamboyance from green buds.
The swollen poppy twists within its cap,

a pink invention wrestling light.
How often I think of tunneling roots,
curtains of roots, white ropes

that stroked our hair when we entered tunnels.
Here, we are rubbed on gold.
This wedge of pink beginnings troubles gardens.

[Well, he would think of Alice, wouldn’t he? Her surreal metamorphoses in wonderland amplify in vivid dream the dreams of all of us — to be human is to sleep and watch oneself in dream contort to the dimensions of various spectral tunnels and rooms and lakes and caves and bridges. A reassuring exercise, perhaps, in the business of possibility, enterprise, strategy, reincarnation, foxiness. Alice understands that gardens stage the impossible overabundance of being, and she floats around in them throughout the adventures; the poet, however, is a material, sublunary sort who gets his knees dirty as he plants pink poppy seeds in a mood of desperate hope that these lowly tiny dark nothings will somehow morph into flamboyant color, insanely infused being. Let’s make this happen, people!

And now a tendril of Roethke appears as the poet goes deeper, recalling the creepy/delightful feel of dangling roots against your skin in the dark, in tunnels (UD, a snorkeler, thinks of the skin-crawling/fantastic feel of seagrass) — all that dark life suddenly welling up out of the dark and fingering you.]

III

A robin listens to darkness.
I think of worms, grubs, moles,
the slow ballet of rootlets twisting down,

of cave fish, blacksnakes,
and, asleep at Nieux, the great black bulls
that thunder on dark walls.

When we wear another self,
do our souls darken? On a bright stage,
do we enter darkest places?

[Robins feed by listening for worms underground; UD watches them do this every day. So an expansion of the poet’s theme – life lurks, crawls, twists, unaccountably begins, in darkness, and we listen for it. A beautiful line occurs in this part of the poem:

the slow ballet of rootlets twisting down

All those L‘s – their gentle insinuating liquidity – somehow enact the strange grace (ballet) of organic processes… Yet the poet is after not merely passive, natural, coming to life; the reference to ballet reminds us that he’s keeping going at the same time a meditation on art as the active, deliberate, human instance of this earthy alchemy. Think of the palaeolithic caves at Niaux (the poet has incorrectly rendered the town Nieux). You can burrow down there and think you’re simply getting deeper into the earth; but we’ve taken our animating and transformative energies even there, and made of dead walls immortal, thundering art.

So is the actor who assumes new being in fact consorting with – listening like the robin to – these deeply rooted, mysterious, even insidious places? The question, for those who think about the incomparable, enigmatic, transformative power of art, welling up from our depths, answers itself.]

IV

There is darkness clinging to the undersides of leaves.

For we are entering darkness. It skuffs along cave walls,
stumbling and skuffing fingertips.
At Mycenae, it is a heavy must,
a musty heavy breath in the hundred-step cistern.

They wait, dark passageways in old houses, their worn
silence frayed under a blur
of footsteps. Our stretched-out hands
manipulate evasive cellar shadows.

Within the garden, silence darkens windblown leaves.

[The eggs of the butterfly cling to the undersides of leaves. We can’t see them, they rest in darkness, but they live a vivid life in that shade. So too the long-resting-in-darkness ruins at Mycenae, whose deep cistern the poet visits, thinking as he moves along its walls of all the life – the generations of human breath – hidden in it. See here, also, this poem; and this one.]


V

Oh I think of Alice gone down, down
under groundcover dreams,
a man’s tunneled night.

Who are these actors? On dream stages, I forget
lines. My tongue-tied
silence foundering…     Stage props
mumble rigidities.        The audience…

I think of silences at Nieux,
at Mycenae, the tourists
gone, guides returned
to wives, houses….

And those silences of capricious light.
The calex splits, an abrupt pink flame.
Orpheus’ torch descends and still descends through
    arias of reddest blossom.

[And how does the poet conclude? He brings all his images and allusions together (Alice, dream, theater, ancient caves with paintings of bulls in them, the Mycenae cistern, the poppy) and gets personal, takes us into his own not at all Carrollian dreamlife, where his all-too-human, pre-aesthetic reality is just a blurry mess: Who are these people I’m seeing in this dream? What was I supposed to say in this dream? Why are the objects around me silent and dead rather than expressive and figurative?

Hopeless. Niaux and Mycenae, left to themselves alone, are also silent…

Yet even abandoned by tourists and guides, they breathe the bright aura of all those artists and audiences along the walls; the dark poppy’s calyx suddenly falls off and out flashes bright pink… And yes, art is the torch that takes us down there, Orpheus in the underworld scoping out amid the dreadful chaos high-builded arias.]

[Goldie Hawn] took to Instagram to share a photo of Ken [Robinson], which had been edited with one of his inspirational quotes. It read: “Every day, everywhere, our children spread their dreams under our feet. We should tread softly because we tread on their dreams. – Sir Ken Robinson.”

******************************

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

… the memoir about UD’s Northwestern University professor, Erich Heller. I’ll have more to say today about the book and the memories it stirred, but the nonsense poems inspired me to try one of my own.

**********************

Every black pit bull speaks some Lithuanian. 
If you try to engage them in Lett, or Ukrainian 
They’ll look at you rudely, as if you’re insanian. 

The custom’s quite different among Pomeranians: 
With them it is Latvian during their trainian. 
Polish? Or German? They claim it’s arcanian. 

With lhasas it’s loopy because they’re Lacanian. 
They’ll mirror your speech act whatever you’re sayingin – 
A curious feature too hard to explainian. 

Whatever the tongue of your canine campanian 
Conversing with them will transcend entertainingian 
And move straight to the realm of the supermundanian.