This year’s Nobelist in literature parallels ancient and contemporary life and thought in her best poetry; but she also publishes lesser work, thin slices of consciousness which offer whimsicality and absurdism in an effort to bring to the table what, in her case, turn out to be warmed over bits about the futility of existence.

Because the ‘why bother haha’ theme has been served up with great flair and substance by precursor Nobelists like Samuel Beckett and Joseph Brodsky, contemporary poets who want to add to the fruitlessness compote really need to bring something new. But a poem like Clive Song, despite its sweet urban aroma, falls flat.

The short autobiographical piece narrates a shared breakfast at a NYC cafe. Carson’s friend Clive is there, and they are joined by her husband, Currier. The poem’s beginning, middle, and end reference “the limits of human wisdom,” limits that change not at all from ancient (“early”) times to today, and this thrice-sounded phrase in a brief poem rather ham-handedly tells us, rather than evokes, the poem’s theme.

Clive’s decades-long but pretty much go-nowhere work on behalf of human rights at Guantanamo makes him both an object of admiration and pity for the poet:

Clive smiles

and goes up the street

in his saggy-butt pants,

looking not much like a high-powered lawyer…

In a witless postmodern world, indefatigable justice warriors like Clive should be a source of wisdom, and Carson approaches him in this spirit; she designates Clive our time’s sacred grove of oaks, a holy ground of the beautiful and true.

Invited to inspire us with the persistence of righteousness against incredibly steep odds, however, Clive stresses instead the Kafkan nonsense of his quest. His preference for chatting about absurdist humor troupes (The Goons; Monty Python) tells us that he seems to have settled for milking our quandary for laughs rather than seriously discussing the situation with Carson.

The absurd futilty deepens when Currier suggests introducing square dancing to Pakistan

Because the square dance is a “greeting dance

and we need more greeting! 

Carson’s poem points to desperate places like Pakistan and Gitmo largely to shrug or giggle; but the world of suffering isn’t so easily undercut or exploited as this poem would like it to be. The poem borrows a kind of seriousness with these mentions, rather than trying in some way to be adequate to them. It’s as if Kurt Vonnegut decided that repeated invocations of “Dresden” and “so it goes” could do the work of Slaughterhouse–Five.

To be sure, poetry condenses moral complexity/extremity through implication, repetition, linguistic richness, paradox, irony, etc. … I’m not saying Carson has to rewrite Yeats’s The Second Coming. We do live in different times. But the horrors of the world seem to me to put more pressure on the poet than we see reflected here.

— at the Georgetown Neighborhood Library this Saturday at 2:00. Here’s the poem.

Our original focus for Saturday was James Merrill’s “Santorini: Stopping the Leak,” and I’ll talk about that too.

Baa baa Bo French

They checked your DNA

How you look Euro

We really cannot say.

One side is Arab

A quarter’s Chinese

The rest is Texas incest

Please telephone police

Bewild’ring Beckettian Bo

Wants a third of the nation to go

And anyone Asian to boot.

Like Endgame his heaven is brute

Inhabited only by Bo

And a few Bo-like people he knows.

Orpheus with his loot made trees   
And the mountain tops that freeze   
  Bowed themselves when he did bring   
To massive plants and flowers   
Private jets and rotorcraft, as sun and showers 
  There had made a lasting spring.   
  
Everything was brought by crane  
E’en the baobabs of Barbary.
  We shook our heads and then lay by.   
In grasping music is such art, 
  Prompting care and grief of heart … 
  We fall silent, or hearing, die. 

https://poets.org/poem/orpheus-0

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/05/style/the-latest-wealth-flex-big-trees.html

… we lie on the grass and listen

To that which has no speech,

The voluble intentions of the symbols,

The ghostly celebrations of the picnic,

The secretions of insight.

… Elizabeth Bishop Day (she lived there for a few years and wrote some great poems about it), UD reads through her copy of The Complete Poems and gives Bishop a good think. The last lines of The Bight (my analysis of it is linked to up there, at great poems) became her epitaph —

— and it does rather capture her philosophy, not to mention her life, which was lived with background messiness (drunkenness, loneliness, depression) and foreground … if not cheeriness, at least with a pleasant public countenance. Many of her best, and best-known poems, meticulously observe an operable, operating, world (cargo ships coming and going at harbors, buses traveling Cape Breton), but it’s a lumbering, ultimately go-nowhere, always deteriorating, sort of thing… just like us…

Obviously the thought of life’s desuetude and apparent meaninglessness is awful, and some poems exist to prompt the thought; but what the poet mainly notes along the way is the cheerfulness – and even aestheticism! – we bring to existence nonetheless.

Reading a lot of Bishop’s poems in one sitting saddened me. No one says she has to be Whitman, but her buddies James Merrill and Malcolm Brinnin, let’s say, mixed the melancholy with – not superficial cheer, but merriment at the spectacle.

January 1, 2026


A cold hawklike sky scans the labyrinth
At the top of my property.  What gives?

The circles are meant to yield useful hints
About what it actually means to live.

But hasn't it been hundreds of years since
Padding around little pagan... ?  Forgive,

But surely you've read last century's black prince?
The Psychopathy of Everyday Life?

The title's wrong.  I simply can't convince
Myself to follow ideas that don't outlive

Their own time.  OTOH hellish pits
Remain impressively generative,

Though for me make nothing happen... Look, it's
Silly, okay, to turn about the glyphs

Expecting to score existential hits -
Thoughts to be cherished like the thought of heaven

To quote Stevens.  My paver walk permits
At best a chance to - with passion! - relive

The lives of people I've loved.  At best it
Is a chance to toast my dead convives.

The best of the rest is poetry, which understands that the world worlds (Larkin: ‘Outside, the wind’s incomplete unrest/ Builds and disperses clouds in the sky,/ And dark towns heap up on the horizon./None of this cares for us.’) (Stevens: ‘Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail/ Whistle about us their spontaneous cries; Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness…’) — it all goes on without us; and though we crave worlding’s unconscious endless essence, we generate some of our greatest poems out of our failure to satisfy that craving. We are human selves, not berries ripening in isolation – in total wilderness! – to fulfillment. We want of course to ripen, to live in transcendent fulfillment with our nature, but we are bound, human all too human, to the world, to a running commentary with the world. A running battle with it, really:

“Life is, in fact, a battle. Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting, but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly very apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great places, people of sense in small, and mankind generally unhappy. But the world as it stands is no narrow illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of the night; we wake up to it, forever and ever; and we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it.”

Our inescapable battle, observes Henry James, is with what humans have made of the world; there’s absolutely no chance we can abandon the battle in favor of some humongously seductive state of calm autonomous being. Only the world can world.

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

Or, I mean, we can do stupid shit like mainline heroin and all the other opiates the Sackler family so famously monetized. UD ain’t gonna stand here and deny the depth of that business … Not so much MAKE THE WORLD GO AWAY… STOP THE WORLD I WANT TO GET OFF as make me a sweet berry ripening in the oxysphere…

AFTER GREECE

James Merrill 1969

Light into the olive entered
And was oil. Rain made the huge, pale stones
Shine from within. The moon turned his hair white
Who next stepped from between the columns,
Shielding his eyes. All through
The countryside were old ideas
Found lying open to the elements.
Of the gods’ houses, only
A minor presence here and there
Would be balancing the heaven of fixed stars
Upon a Doric capital. The rest
Lay spilled, their fluted drums half sunk in cyclamen

Or deep in water’s biting clarity
Which just barely upheld me
The next week, when I sailed for home.
But where is home – these walls?
These limbs? The very spaniel underfoot
Races in sleep, toward what?
It is autumn. I did not invite
Those guests, windy and brittle, who drink my liquor.
Returning from a walk, I find
The bottles filled with spleen, my room itself
Smeared by reflection onto the far hemlocks.
I some days flee in dream
Back to the exposed porch of the maidens
Only to find my great-great-grandmothers
Erect there, peering
Into a globe of red Bohemian glass.

As it swells and sinks I call up
Graces, Furies, Fates, removed
To my country’s warm, lit halls, with rivets forced
Through drapery, and nothing left to bear.
They seem anxious to know
What holds up heaven nowadays.
I start explaining how in that vast fire
Were other irons – well, Art, Public Spirit,
Ignorance, Economics, Love of Self,
Hatred of Self, a hundred more,
Each burning to be felt, each dedicated
To sparing us the worst; how I distrust them
As I should have done those ladies; how I want
Essentials: salt, wine, olive, the light, the scream–
No! I have scarcely named you,
And look, in a flash you stand full-grown before me,

Row upon row, Essentials,
Dressed like your sister caryatids,
Or tombstone angels jealous of their dead,
With undulant coiffures, lips weathered, cracked by grime,
And faultless eyes gone blank beneath the immense
Zinc-and-gunmetal northern sky.
Stay then. Perhaps the system
Calls for spirits. This first glass I down
To the last time
I ate and drank in that old world. May I
Also survive its meanings, and my own.

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

Of course the system, such as it is, calls for spirits. You can imagine – you can forgive – Merrill hitting the bottle.

Answer: Frederick Seidel.

The Epstein story features not only an Epsteinian Harvard president; it features an Epsteinian poetry professor. ‘[Elisa] New discussed her personal projects at length with Epstein, soliciting thousands of dollars in funding from the child sex trafficker several times — years after Harvard said it had stopped taking contributions from Epstein.’ Indifferent, it seems, to his criminality, New excitedly praised and delighted in Epstein in her solicitation emails to him. She was happy – desperate, even – to take his money. She visited Pedo Island, as it was later known, on her honeymoon in 2005, traveling there with Ghislaine Maxwell.

One can only hope that among the poets New sought to tell her audience about was the man of the American Elites hour, Seidel, who rhapsodizes about – in the lilting alliterative words of New’s husband, Summers (in an email exchange with Epstein) – “life among the lucrative and louche.”

Maybe it seems difficult to you – poetizing the selfish lecherous arrogance of the obscenely rich one percent – but Seidel shows that it can be done. The muse of the money masturbators, the bard of the brackish, he versifies “his penchant for hand-built Ducati motorcycles, sex with much younger women, and expensive hotels.”

Let us consider one of his poems, “Widening Income Inequality.”

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

I live a life of appetite and, yes, that’s right,

I live a life of privilege in New York,

Eating buttered toast in bed with cunty fingers on Sunday morning.

Say that again?

I have a rule—

I never give to beggars in the street who hold their hands out.

I woke up this morning in my air-conditioning.

At the end of my legs were my feet.

Foot and foot stretched out outside the duvet looking for me!

Get up. Giddyup. Get going.

My feet were there on the far side of my legs.

Get up. Giddyup. Get going.

I don’t really think I am going to.

Obama is doing just fine.

I don’t think I’m going to.

Get up. Giddyup. Get going.

I can see out the window it isn’t raining.

So much for the endless forecasts, always wrong.

The poor are poorer than they ever were.

The rich are richer than the poor.

Is it true about the poor?

It’s always possible to be amusing.

I saw a rat down in the subway.

So what if you saw a rat.

I admire the poor profusely.

I want their autograph.

They make me shy.

I keep my distance.

I’m getting to the bottom of the island.

Lower Broadway comes to a boil and City Hall is boiling.

I’m half asleep but I’m awake.

At the other end of me are my feet

In shoes of considerable sophistication

Walking down Broadway in the heat.

I’m half asleep in the heat.

I’m, so to speak, wearing a hat.

I’m no Saint Francis.

I’m in one of my trances.

When I look in a mirror,

There’s an old man in a trance.

There’s a Gobi Desert,

And that’s poetry, or rather rhetoric.

You see what happens if you don’t make sense?

It only makes sense to not.

You feel the flicker of a hummingbird

It takes a second to find.

You hear a whirr.

It’s here. It’s there. It hovers, begging, hand out.

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

Abed, lazy, post-coital, airconditioned, the poet describes his constant trance-state, barely awake even when he eventually goes out to the hot city streets. Infantile, he contemplates at length his feet and their habit of being at the bottom of his legs, and though he tells them to giddyup, they just lie there. Why should he go anywhere? The president is running the country just fine, maintaining the poet’s life of privilege. He thinks maybe – who knows? who cares? – the poor are getting poorer, but for him they represent celebrities, dramatis personae in a play about poverty whose autographs he covets. They’re not real. He admires his fancy shoes as he walks.

He notes, laconically, that he’s no Saint Francis, who gave up his personal wealth to live among the poor; au contraire, he could care less. Nor does it bother him that he himself is a big fat nothing, a Gobi Desert, though maybe he could make something poetic of that comparison… yawn… wake me up when this poem’s over…

And as for nature. As for the beauty of the natural world… that’s all beggars again. A world of people and animals holding out their hands to you asking for food or money or whatever… Fuck them. I live a life of appetite too, but mine is satisfied.

Down, Net Worth, Down!

Down, net worth, down!  Have you no shame
That after all my worthy Gift-Acclaim,
My Virtue, presto! up you raise
A billion more, and stand at gaze?

Poor online shopping shares, sworn to reach
More billions, and effect a breach -
Indifferent what you storm or why,
So that in the breach you multiply!

UD loves found poetry, and this decasyllabic morsel, describing my magnolia, and confirming what I’ve noticed – that it’s a “favorite food of catbirds” – is a perfect example.

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

Haiku?

Seed pod of sweet-bay
Magnolia tree, trembling.
Not wind.  A cat bird.

… an old post of mine about one of his poems.

Most beach poems are sad. Most poems are sad. Most lives are sad. ‘The reason that there are so many depressed people,’ writes UD‘s guru, Adam Phillips, ‘is that life is so depressing for many people. It’s not a mystery.‘

After a morning reading lots of beach poems, UD finds herself charmed by this old-fashioned one – strict end rhyme and pretty strict meter, written in 1913 by a guy you’ve never heard of – Ridgely Torrence – and titled “Santa Barbara Beach.” It could have been any beach – Nungwi, Sarandë – cuz almost no beach poems are specific to the sand where the poet happens to have sunk his/her feet. Poetic beaches are beaches whose vast uncontrollable deathless sublimity catalyzes thoughts of human frailty, brevity, fatality. On a big beach under a bright sun we stand out in dramatic relief in all our littleness against the massive depth and breadth of the ocean, and this evokes thoughts of our sweetness and poignancy, to be sure – we are drawn to the ocean’s shore because we are drawn to beauty, might, heat, majesty, eternality, which is a very nice thing about us qua humans – but it mainly evokes thoughts of our brief befuddled plunge into being.

I’ll interrupt your reading of this poem with commentary. Read it without interruption here.

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

Santa Barbara Beach

by Ridgely Torrence

Now while the sunset offers,
Shall we not take our own:
The gems, the blazing coffers,
The seas, the shores, the throne?

[A spectacular sunset lights up a jeweled world of riches, possibilities, and the poet invites us to take our share. This feels like a world we own, and this is the moment to grasp it with joy.]

The sky-ships, radiant-masted,
Move out, bear low our way.
Oh, Life was dark while it lasted,
Now for enduring day.

[The rayed sinking sun is like a brilliantly lit ship, the rays the masts, and its lowness on the horizon feels like a generous bow toward us, the owners of the world, a bow that lights up our path along the strand. In an ironic reversal, the poet describes daylight life as dark, and sunset life as light — in the harsh light of typical day, we see and feel the paucity of our spiritual surroundings. But in the gleaming disseminated light of sunset, we feel our earth and ourselves emblazoned in a low enveloping flame, a flame that feels as though it will last forever.]

Now with the world far under,
To draw up drowning men
And show them lands of wonder
Where they may build again.

[Day is done, its world is subdued, and the spiritual light of sunset can now transport us from our “drowned” lives (We have lingered in the chambers of the sea/By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown/Till human voices wake us, and we drown.) to a higher world of new possibilities.]

There earthly sorrow falters,
There longing has its wage;
There gleam the ivory altars
Of our lost pilgrimage.

[This stanza elaborates upon the rich world of human and spiritual possibilities illuminated by the setting sun, a sun which puts the daylight world “under” and illuminates a new world of new life. Sorrow, longing, lostness – all that we feel in our daylight lives, vanishes in the brilliant promise of this moment.]

Swift flame—then shipwrecks only
Beach in the ruined light;
Above them reach up lonely
The headlands of the night.

[Sudden nasty transition here: Sunset’s mystic flame lasted only moments, and in its ruined light we see “what’s really always there” — the oncoming black of deathly night. Night is even darker, if you will, than day.]

A hurt bird cries and flutters
Her dabbled breast of brown;
The western wall unshutters
To fling one last rose down.

[These are images of beautiful natural things – the bird, the rose – in their last moments. The oncoming black wall at least lets one last petal down for us.]

A rose, a wild light after—
And life calls through the years,
“Who dreams my fountain’s laughter
Shall feed my wells with tears.”

[In life, we have epiphanies – moments of illumination, wild light, when in extreme beauty and meaning, the world calls to us.

But what does it say? We who love life and hear within it the laughter of joy and spirit, are doomed – post-sunset – to weep oceans of tears. The more we expect of existence, the more betrayed we will be.

“Poets in our youth begin in gladness; / But thereof in the end come despondency and madness.”]

“Tesla is in Freefall”

_____________________

Elon, are you grieving

Over Golden Tess unleaving?

Cars, like the things of man, you

With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?

Ah! as the DOGE grows older

We will come to such cars colder

By and by, nor spare a sigh

Though worlds of wood trim leafmeal lie;

And yet you will weep and know why.

Now no matter, Musk, the name:

Falling stocks are aflame.

Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed

What markets heard of, investors guessed:

It is the panic Tess was born for,

It is Elon you mourn for.