(The last section of John Logan’s The Bridge of Change.)

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Who can stand these juxtapositions of person and place and time? I walk across the Bridge of Change where I have so often watched by the towers of the Conciergerie. Now, water laves a little higher up the stair from the River to the Quay, hiding some of the steps from me. Boats nudge at the edge. I walk along the Boulevard past the great gold and blue corner clock, the ornate wrought-iron gate and fence of the Place of Justice (its name changed from the time of kings), past the shadow and spire of Sainte Chapelle. I cross the Bridge of Saint Michel into the Latin Quarter. But I do not look for the Street of the Cat Who Fishes or the Street of the Harp. I turn right, wandering a bit, and suddenly, as if by chance, find myself at this street, and here I will wait, for it is our street, Rue Gît le Coeur: Here Lies the Heart.

… New Year’s poems. She’ll start with this one. It’s in the form of a New Year’s letter to a friend.

Modern poets bring a number of intriguing ideas and feelings to New Year’s. I’m not saying these ideas and feelings necessarily add up to what UD (consult her taste, at length, here) calls a great poem. But they tell you something about us, in 20… uh… 14.

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Letter to GC has the slangy fragmented musing down in the dumps thing characteristic of many of our time’s poems. Although it begins

I say most sincerely and desperately, HAPPY NEW YEAR!

it really has little to do with the turn of the year. No references to the weather, to the passage of time, to resolutions, to change, to renewal, to failure to renew, which tend to be the established New Year’s themes. Rather, the poem has to do with the poet’s familiar, year-round, right on the edge of psychological menace, unhappiness. She writes desperately and is in a desperate place:

Having rowed a little farther away from the cliff
Which is my kind of religion
Adrift in the darkness but readying oars
How can there be too many stars and hands, I ask you

She starts her letter to her friend with the precise coordinates of her mental instability as the year begins, the good news being that she finds herself, at this turning point, a little farther from falling off of a cliff than she has been. Yet so unstable is her condition that she has made a kind of religion of staying afloat despite her fragile “adrift in the darkness” reality.

She needs a lot of help: stars to guide her in the dark, and helping hands from other rowers on the same “wide water, without sound” on which Sunday Morning‘s riser perilously floats.

The rest of the poem will discuss a major modern malaise: self-consciousness. The Romantics could write things like

Ah Sun-flower! weary of time

but we’re too cool, too hip for (as Dana Levin writes in her penultimate line) the drama of feeling. These days, feeling itself is a problem – a personal problem, and therefore also an aesthetic problem. We can’t write Blakeian poems anymore, but we’re still subject to the same intense emotions as the Romantics. How, then, to write? How to convey our emotions verbally?

We can convey our events; we can say in poetry what happened.

We are getting such lovely flourishes from our poets
Fathomless opportunities for turning literacy into event

We have much more trouble conveying our true feelings. The poet can say at the beginning of the poem that she sincerely wishes CG a happy new year; but that’s Hallmark sincerity. What presents itself to the poet as a problem is expressing her personal, deep, and authentic feelings in her poetry.

I would be disingenuous if I said “being understood” were not important to me
Between the ceiling of private dream and the floor of public speech

So here she assumes the voice of someone like John Ashbery – not lyrical but discursive… Even rather absurdly self-consciously over-discursive (those quotation marks around being understood which dissolve the possibility of being understood even as they write being understood). And note the tortured negative, and the tortured subjunctive, feel of the line… We’re very far from sincere direct address. Yet where, between inexpressible obscurantism and inauthentic social chatter, can the poet locate the language of emotional authenticity?

It is impossible to say just what I mean!

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

The imagination and its products so often rebuff purpose
And some of us don’t like it, and want to make it mean
I would never shoot you, even if you were the only meat around

This is the modern poet impatient with the obliqueness of the modern poem, the modern sensibility. She wants her poems to mean something, dammit, not just dance cleverly around things, the way she, in her religion, dances around that cliff. Why futz with fancy language no one’s going to understand? You wanna tell someone you love them, you say I love you so much that even if I were starving and you were meat I wouldn’t shoot you.

Humor… humor’s one way to go… A joke being, as Nietzsche said, an epigram on the death of a feeling …

Anyway, I empathize with your lower division semester (which sounds
kinda Dante, to me)

The poet commiserates with her professor friend’s upcoming teaching in a lower division (and as with the work of Charles Wright, she references Dante – true religion, if you will – in that skittish clever modern way she says she’s kinda trying to avoid); and she does confess, as her poem ends,

I want to be approved of, so much
Despite the image I’ve been savoring, the one of the self-stitching wound
Yes, I want to write that self-healing wound poem, the one with
cocoon closed up with thorns

It’d be great if she were, say, Andy Warhol; but actually she writes because she’s vulnerable and wants love and approval and understanding. She is very far from being a closed up cocoon.

So – a post-romantic lament at the turn of the year… These days, as she says… these special year-end days prompt thoughts of our current, particular, predicament.

Trying to keep going a fire which wants to hiss more than flame, UD turns from the hearth to her snowy windows and thinks There must be a poem for this. She thinks of Wallace Stevens – The Snow Man – but she has read and thought about that poem for a long time, and she wants a different poem, a newer poem, about the snow. Something after Stevens.

She finds this:

In Whose Unctions
By Greg Glazner

By now the snow is easing
the live nerves of the wire fence
and the firs,
softening the distances it falls through,
laying down a rightness,
as in the spackled whites,
the woodgrains of a room’s hush
before music,
before a lush legato in whose unctions
the excruciations ease,
as in the first
thick arrhythmics from the hardwoods
of the late quartets,
whose dense snow of emotion,
downdrifting,
formal,
whose violins and cellos,
desiring the exhilarations of changes,
turn loose an infusion
of wintry music, all sideslip and immense descent,
repetitions, evolutions
salving down into the still air,
the wound,
the listening.

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

The listener in the snow, in the Stevens poem, is “nothing himself,” and “beholds / Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” So this is a deathly white, a ghost’s stillness, in which even for the non-ghost the blank that underlies the living world exhibits itself when the world is blanketed.

In Glazner’s post-Stevens snow-listening, things are different.

Here rather than nihilism’s exhibitionist, the snow is a balm, an unction, a salving. The snow isn’t the fallen snow of Stevens; it’s snow still falling, making the world whir with motion rather than settling on and crusting the boughs of trees.

And even if this snow does settle, it’s an easing of jangled nerves, a softening, and a rightness, rather than a death revealed.

The poem now begins to explore its rich central simile: The snow is falling

as in the spackled whites,
the woodgrains of a room’s hush
before music,

From exterior to interior, we consider the white flakes inside the grained wood of a music room where a string quartet is about to perform. As the snow “rights” the world, the spackled – repaired – wood, the wood whose gaps have been closed by white spackles, “rights” the room, makes it beautiful, and softens it – diminuendos it – in preparation for the sound about to be made. The snow, like the softened grained wood, is a kind of preconditioning, a preparation of the world for life. The softened world of the music room exists to put into relief

a lush legato in whose unctions
the excruciations ease

The snow eases the

live nerves of the wire fence
and the firs

Our live-wire life, excruciatingly jangly, is soothed and righted by the gorgeous descents of snow and music.

as in the first
thick arrhythmics from the hardwoods
of the late quartets,

Clever, no? The wood of the musical instruments, part of the interior “wood” which is the music room, opens with a lush somewhat harsh sawing, if you will, of the opening notes of, say, Beethoven; though UD is made to think of Jacqueline Du Pre’s Elgar Concerto. The thick heavy profundo from the cello’s wood, not yet part, in these opening notes, of a detectable rhythm, changes us as we listen to it, breaks in a special way the silence of the room. This

dense snow of emotion,
downdrifting,
formal,
whose violins and cellos,
desiring the exhilarations of changes,
turn loose an infusion
of wintry music, [is] all sideslip and immense descent

Now we explicitly draw them together, the snow and the tones, the tones generating a thick, dense covering over of our ordinary jangliness with becalmed snows of emotion (or if you prefer, music hath charms to soothe the savage breast); but doing more than the literal snow because these tones are “formal,” allowing “the exhilarations of changes.” This beautiful sound is

salving down into the still air,
the wound,
the listening.

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

This poem reminds me that my favorite poetry collection title is James Merrill’s The Fire Screen, because that’s what art is – the thing we have in order not to perish of the truth, the thing that strategically protects us from the worst even as it finds ways to bring us the worst, or at least to make us feel the furnace blast of the worst. In the Stevens poem you get the truth without shading; in Glazner’s you have the snow screen, the art screen.

Now Autumn’s fire burns slowly along the woods,
And day by day the dead leaves fall and melt,
And night by night the monitory blast
Wails in the key-hold, telling how it pass’d
O’er empty fields, or upland solitudes,
Or grim wide wave; and now the power is felt
Of melancholy, tenderer in its moods
Than any joy indulgent summer dealt.
Dear friends, together in the glimmering eve,
Pensive and glad, with tones that recognise
The soft invisible dew in each one’s eyes,
It may be, somewhat thus we shall have leave
To walk with memory,–when distant lies
Poor Earth, where we were wont to live and grieve.

UD‘s poetry MOOC now has more than four thousand students. She’s thrilled. Not just by that number, but by the thoughtful questions and comments her students regularly add to the course’s main page.

… a clear October afternoon, and at one point a full sun was overhead and leaves were swirling down. I put down my rake and lay on the lawn to feel the sun and see the leaves swirling, and everything really was clear: the bright sky, each sharp leaf with red, green, and a bit of rot on its surface landing neatly on the lawn. You rake the leaves down to the street, and every few hours a green truck comes and carts them away, and this too is clear – a nice clear system of gathering and disposal.

Hyperclarified days are rare. This one made me think of Conrad Aiken’s poem, The Room.


Through that window — all else being extinct
Except itself and me — I saw the struggle
Of darkness against darkness. Within the room
It turned and turned, dived downward. Then I saw
How order might — if chaos wished — become:
And saw the darkness crush upon itself,
Contracting powerfully; it was as if
It killed itself: slowly: and with much pain.
Pain. The scene was pain, and nothing but pain.
What else, when chaos draws all forces inward
To shape a single leaf? . . .

Tree of trees!
Remember (when time comes) how chaos died
To shape the shining leaf. Then turn, have courage,
Wrap arms and roots together, be convulsed
With grief, and bring back chaos out of shape.
I will be watching then as I watch now.
I will praise darkness now, but then the leaf.

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

The mind, as it turns forward in time, struggles darkly with darkness. I was thinking, all afternoon, about the deaths of people I loved, or loved and hated, or whatever. But anyway diving downward into that chaos which is my own hopeless reckoning with darkness. Not “convulsed with grief” – not courageous enough for that, but certainly wrapping arms and roots together and watching my thoughts.

Watching through the mind’s window whose insistence on seeing it through, seeing through it, makes “all else… extinct.” The effort of drawing up out of chaos, says Aiken, is painful, but there it is, the completed multifarious leaf, shining its edges against the lawn. Ultimately there are cracked walls and burst windows – a painful, earth-altering awakening. Generative, enlightening, painful.

The one black root… the black root: This underlies the clarifying and there’s no denying it. Chaos resumes after the epiphanies; but “remember… how chaos died / To shape the shining leaf.” The one thing and then the other; darkness, light. As you enter into chaos again – the chaos of every vague and grieving life – remember the natural pattern at play, the contraction and expansion. Let the chaos be, live with it, and eventually once again the light will break. Praise both: the darkness and the leaf.

… Kofi Awoonor was killed in the terrorist attack in Kenya.

… about MOOCs.

My MOOC on poetry, by the way, now has 3,764 students. Feel free to give it a whirl.

Colm Tóibín remembers him.

UD writes about one of his poems here.

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Heaney’s charming translation of a ninth century Irish poem reminds UD of Auden’s translation of the poem, set to music by Samuel Barber.

… about MOOCs.

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More attention.

John Hollander, a clever poet who has died, at the age of 83, said this clever thing in a 1985 Paris Review interview.

Dartmouth boy stands at the foot of the bed,
Drops on a woman his little gold thread.
Hush! Hush! Stop him who dares!
Christopher Robin is saying his prayers.

Dartmouth boy stands at the foot of the bed,
Drops on a woman his little gold thread.
Hush! Hush! Stop him who dares!
Christopher Robin is saying his prayers.

For a warm, musing, quiet time, a time when things slow down or stop, a poem by Stanley Kunitz, full of quiet musing. UD stops the poem when she feels like it, thinking aloud about its form and its meanings.

The Abduction

Some things I do not profess
to understand, perhaps
not wanting to, including
whatever it was they did
with you or you with them
that timeless summer day
when you stumbled out of the wood,
distracted, with your white blouse torn
and a bloodstain on your skirt.

[This is a wispy, thin-lined, first-person account – directed to a man’s lover – of a memory involving her that continues to baffle and unnerve him. The thinness of his poetic line, and his opening admission of his inadequacy, create a mood of lassitude, vagueness, half-thereness. The poem will be a narrative – the story of the lover’s abduction – but it will be told in the sketchy thin-lined manner of a man in fact defended against the story’s meanings.

We are in a fog, in short, of the sort one knows from Kafka stories, or from novels like The Good Soldier. It’s the condition – the pathology – of not knowing that interests writers like these.

That summer day on which the abduction took place was “timeless,” which is to say it has made on the speaker (and presumably his lover) a permanent mark; they both return to it again and again in memory and in desire. Timeless too in the sense that the events the poet is about to recount seem mythic, unreal, out of time altogether, some miraculous break in the fabric of time. Think here of that unnerving Australian film, Picnic at Hanging Rock which also features virginal women in white dresses “taken” by an alien force, taken out of time.

Here the lover returns from her abduction, spilled sexual blood on her whiteness…]

“Do you believe?” you asked.

[Do you believe the transformation that has happened to me? Do you love me enough to believe the bizarre tale I’m about to unfold? To believe my way of knowing/not knowing what has happened to transform me from white to red? To love is to enter into the deepest, most wounded, most obscure mental world of the loved one, as in this poem, by Stephen Spender. Or this one, by Richard Wilbur. Are you willing to do that?]

Between us, through the years,
we pieced enough together
to make the story real:

[This is love: That together you give life and even plausibility to… hell, you honor the particular myths, repetition compulsions, odd ways of making sense of one’s destiny, that the loved one has generated out of her experience, her imagination, her – to anticipate the end of this poem – rapture and dread.]

how you encountered on the path
a pack of sleek, grey hounds,
trailed by a dumbshow retinue
in leather shrouds; and how
you were led, through leafy ways,
into the presence of a royal stag,
flaming in his chestnut coat,
who kneeled on a swale of moss
before you; and how you were borne
aloft in triumph through the green,
stretched on his rack of budding horn,
till suddenly you found yourself alone
in a trampled clearing.

[So here’s the medieval myth itself, the way-weird account of her torn and bloodied self she offers the lover. The hunting dogs first appear, and then what sounds like flagellants, and they all lead her to a major stag who stretches her on his “budding horn.” Here is her dream of her triumphant sex, her initiation into the power (“kneeled… before you”) of her own body.]

That was a long time ago,
almost another age, but even now,
when I hold you in my arms,
I wonder where you are.

[Same thing Spender and Wilbur wonder, gazing at their lovers. If these men are going to get anywhere near where these women are, they will indeed have to “believe,” have to enter lovingly into the far country that is the soul of any other human being. The poet feels his inability/unwillingness to enter the deepest, strangest, sources of this woman’s being; yet, loving her, he wonders.]

Sometimes I wake to hear
the engines of the night thrumming
outside the east bay window
on the lawn spreading to the rose garden.

[There is a world inside the world, as Don DeLillo has Lee Harvey Oswald repeat to himself throughout Libra; there is that realm of power, of being, that thrums through our existence, a constant dark engine pulsing through us, making us and making our lives, generating our stories. You can be upbeat about this, and suggest that eventually we can have access to these deep sources of ourselves and even others:

… then he thinks he knows
The hills where his life rose,
And the Sea where it goes.

Or you can be far less upbeat:

…in time,
We half-identify the blind impress
All our behavings bear, may trace it home.
But to confess,

On that green evening when our death begins,
Just what it was, is hardly satisfying,
Since it applied only to one man once,
And that one dying.]

You lie beside me in elegant repose,
a hint of transport hovering on your lips,

[A hint of transport hovering — always an allusion, in her repose, to that transformative mythic moment of transport which has nothing to do with her lover.]

indifferent to the harsh green flares
that swivel through the room,
searchlights controlled by unseen hands.

[Always, ecstatically, she returns to her primal triumph, and this in some sense protects her from the harsh temporal material world that seeks her out, seeks to awaken her to the end of power, eros, solace.]

Out there is a childhood country,
bleached faces peering in
with coals for eyes.
Our lives are spinning out
from world to world;
the shapes of things
are shifting in the wind.
What do we know
beyond the rapture and the dread?

[Outside their bedroom rages a world of monsters out of childhood; outside their haven of life intensified lies death (bleached faces… with coals for eyes), and even as she circles endlessly into her glorious scene of transformation, she – and he – are being otherwise transformed, spun out from the world of life into the world of death.

So this is where we are; this is all we know — the rapture of our death-defying embrace of existence, and the dread of our knowing/not wanting to know how this compulsively reiterated erotic fable will end.]

This afternoon Les UDs travel to a cottage on a sheep farm near Sugarloaf Mountain. Late this evening they will leave the cottage with two folding chairs. They will set the chairs out on a pasture, and, lying back, they will see what perseids they can see.

Is the farm far enough from city lights? Will there be too much cloud cover? No sense worrying the thing. Do not ask what is it? Let us go and make our visit.

And speaking of T.S Eliot, there’s this excerpt on the dark from East Coker:

O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,
The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,
The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,
The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,
Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,
Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark,
And dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha
And the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors,
And cold the sense and lost the motive of action.
And we all go with them, into the silent funeral,
Nobody’s funeral, for there is no one to bury.
I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,
The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed
With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness,
And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama
And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away
Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations
And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;
Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth.

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Dark is mental confusion, our brief weak being in the vastness. Dark is also our death, and dark is the apocalypse that will kill the earth forever; but meanwhile dark is consciousness – our living consciousness, but a consciousness that understands nothing. Darkness is where, unable to think, we do best to wait in the humility of not knowing. We do best to write poetry like this – poetry of still souls sitting in the stilly night, circling the same words — dark dark dark — to make a weak work of bricolage.

Or a frankly terrified work of bricolage, as in the Wallace Stevens poem, Domination of Black:

At night, by the fire,
The colors of the bushes
And of the fallen leaves,
Repeating themselves,
Turned in the room,
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
Yes: but the color of the heavy hemlocks
Came striding.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

Out of the window,
I saw how the planets gathered
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
I saw how the night came,
Came striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks
I felt afraid.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

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

Same redundancy on the words, our marooned awareness circling the thin evidentiary setting of our mind’s and the world’s dark nature. The brilliant colors of the peacocks’ tails – the brilliant words of the poet’s beautiful and exceptional consciousness? – might lighten all of this. But no.

The colors of their tails
Were like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
In the twilight wind.
They swept over the room,
Just as they flew from the boughs of the hemlocks
Down to the ground.

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

So again and again these repetitive bricolages are the poems of our climate, as in this contemporary one, by John Taggart:

Orange Berries Dark Green Leaves

We will not look up how they got their name in a book of names
we will not trace the name’s root conjecture its first murmuring
the root of the berries their leaves is succoured by darkness
darkness like a large block of stone hauled on a wooden sled
like stone formed and reformed by a dark sea rolling in turmoil.

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

Pure distilled Stevens: The list of negations, as in The Snow Man; multiple deflecting similes in place of any approach toward assertion; the absence of foundations, roots, meanings, and the presence only of a dark perennial unapprehended tumultuous process of existential forming and reforming; and of course the rolling repetitive style. We are here as on a darkling plain.

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

But here are meteors, light streaking across darkness, and we see our own light in them.

“They’re human souls,” I said, “tired of that dazzling dream,
Returning to the sweet, cool fields of earth.”

This line from a poem about watching the perseids is like Cathy’s dream in Wuthering Heights:

“Heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels grew so angry that they flung me out onto the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy.”

We see our imperishable earthly bliss in the meteors, as when Shelley saw Keats as “a dying meteor” that “stains a wreath / Of moonlight vapour.”

This is James Merrill, too, in Prose of Departure, contemplating, in a shop in Japan

… the most fabulous kimono of all: dark, dark purple traversed by a winding, starry path…

may be read as having emerged triumphant from the vats of night.

… just passed the three thousand students mark!

UD thanks her sister, without whose technical assistance, and enthusiasm for the project, she never could have done it.