… I go looking for a good poem. A poem with rain in it. Here’s one, by B. Nurkse. A very good one.

The Simulacra

They were driving into the mountains, suddenly married,
sometimes touching each other’s cheek with a fingernail
gingerly: the radio played ecstatic static: certain roads
marked with blue enamel numbers led to cloud banks,
or basalt screes, or dim hotels with padlocked verandas.
Sometimes they quarreled, sometimes they grew old,
the wind was constant in their eyes, it was their own wind,
they made it. Small towns flew past, Rodez, Albi,
limestone quarries, pear orchards, children racing
after hoops, wobbling when their shadows wavered,
infants crying for fine rain, old women on stoops
darning gray veils — and who were we, watching?
Doubles, ghosts, the ones who would tell of the field
where they pulled over, bluish tinge of the elms, steepness
of the other’s eyes, glowworm hidden in its own glint,
how the rain was twilight and now is darkness.

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

This shows the best of what a lyric poem can do, a poem concentrated in a few beautifully written lines of implication conveying truth. This is a dreamy spin into mountains, or merely into a dream, or memory. All of its images involve vagueness, disintegration: screes, clouds, shadows, veils, twilight, tinge, hiddenness, padlockedness, dimness. A flickering scene seen while sleeping, or seen at the cinema, or knitted (darned) from fragments of one’s past, or fragments of one’s fantasies.

the wind was constant in their eyes, it was their own wind,
they made it

Just married – suddenly, passionately, acutely married, they begin with a fragile but sharp clarity, those fingernails against each other’s cheeks. Driving their passionate lives forward into the heights of feeling and understanding, they hear the ecstatic radio… But it’s not music – it’s just sound, just static; and already the idea of unclarity and paralysis appears. The rest of the poem will play this out, this idea of life as at best twilight, life as having nothing to do with true light, illumination, invigoration.

More later. Must do a few errands before the rain and the darkness.

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

They’ve put their own static, their own barriers to clarity, in front of their own eyes: they made the raveling wind. Something in them made a world always halfway there, always speeding past in images unable to accumulate meaning. See how these great lines amass enigmas:

certain roads
marked with blue enamel numbers led to cloud banks,
or basalt screes, or dim hotels with padlocked verandas.

All these gorgeous surreal dead-ends! The way from the word certain he has us in uncertainty, each magical turn in the road a journey into clouds (the road’s hard numbering is just a directional come-on), or onto volcanic shards, or (an image out of Nabokov) toward the locked porches of shadowy inns. The liquidity of all the Ls in these lines lulls the scene to sleep: blue, enamel, led, cloud, basalt, hotels, padlocked. Lala land.

We’re not getting anywhere, in other words. We set out, suddenly married, bolt upright, ready for Event, and then before you know it life with its inchoate windy strangeness intervenes and things erode into screes before our eyes.

infants crying for fine rain, old women on stoops
darning gray veils — and who were we, watching?
Doubles, ghosts, the ones who would tell of the field
where they pulled over, bluish tinge of the elms, steepness
of the other’s eyes, glowworm hidden in its own glint,
how the rain was twilight and now is darkness.

Crying for milk, that is – for the O thou lord of life, send my roots rain sustenance that will set them up for Life; but the old women know better, and darn gray veils to keep us from our own failure. To pull off of this mountain road and try instead truly to encounter the “steepness” that is another person’s unreachable mystery is to re-tell the old tale of a whole life lived in partial darkness (twilight) and then resolving into darkness itself.

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

Update: Rereading Erich Heller’s little book on Kafka (UD took all of Heller’s courses at Northwestern University when she was a college kid), UD finds this passage:

Deeply problematical though Kafka’s love [for Felice Bauer] was, it was not more so than his attitude toward his writing; and this is why the true executor of his “will” – the will that decreed the destruction of his manuscripts – would have had to be a magician, the producer of a sequence of mythical scenes where Kafka’s works, after being burned, would rise again from the ashes purified, in unheard-of beauty and perfection, consisting of nothing but “sheer light, sheer freedom, sheer power, no shadow, no barrier.” Another absolutist in the history of German literature once described in this way his highest poetic aspiration; to attain to it, Schiller said, he would gladly spend all the spiritual strength of his nature even if the effort “were to consume me entirely.” And Kafka, after completing his story “A Country Doctor” in September 1917, confided to his diary that writing such stories could still give him “passing satisfaction,” but happiness he would know only if he succeeded in “raising the world into the pure, the true, the immutable.”

… all lit up this weekend.

This poem by Jane Kenyon, titled “Alone for a Week,” demonstrates the weird, affecting, tightly-packed emotional power of the short, subtly rhymed, lyric. Read the poem intact here; I pick it apart below. (For another example of the suggestive power of the well-conceived short lyric, go here.)

I washed a load of clothes
and hung them out to dry.
Then I went up to town
and busied myself all day.

[Load/clothes. Dry/day. There’s a simple, almost singsongy feel to these opening lines. But the rhyme and assonance are subtle; and perhaps the almost entirely monosyllabic words have more to do with sadness and emptiness – an inability to say much under the circumstances – than with simple songs.]

The sleeve of your best shirt
rose ceremonious
when I drove in; our night-
clothes twined and untwined in
a little gust of wind.

[Rose/drove/clothes/ceremonious: She’s working that lamenting open O. As she returns from town she looks at the clothesline on which the clothes are bouncing in the wind. The sleeve of her absent husband’s shirt rises to greet her. His best shirt; he puts on his best to greet his beloved wife. At least she sees things this way – a way of conveying how strongly she misses him, her imagination and yearning animating his clothing, willing him somehow to be there. our night- / clothes twined and untwined… A passionate couple, a passionate image. She moves from his solitary ceremonious greeting to the two of them entwined.]

For me it was getting late;
for you, where you were, not.
The harvest moon was full
but sparse clouds made its light
not quite reliable.

See the delicate scheme of almost rhymes? The way so many of these lines end on a light, tentative T? Late/not/light. Tentative T, its recurrence somehow carrying a sense of her fragility, her condition of sensitive waiting, of gingerly moving in the world, of trying to busy herself in the absence of her lover. Even the condition of being in different time zones seems to her full of pathos, mystery, and a touch of the grotesque: How can we, so close, be so astronomically apart? That full harvest moon will carry the real freight of her fright (harvest/sparse; light/quite — still working the rhyme and assonance), because here in the countryside it should cast a full rounded light, a species of reassurance, the two of them a passionate fullness. But under the clouds it’s unreliable; and so she feels uncertain in her life, separate, unsteady on her feet.

And now for her wonderful final lines, as she moves inside and tries to go to sleep.

The bed on your side seemed
as wide and flat as Kansas;
your pillow plump, cool,
and allegorical…

Allegorical! Talk about ending on a great word.

Let’s see: First off, notice all of those Ls: flat/pillow/plump/cool, and then allegorical, all plumped with Ls. The move from T to L makes all kinds of sense as she stops trying to tap out a busy moment-to-moment life and sinks into la-la land, languor, lullaby land, Lethe, the land of liquid Ls. Flat and Kansas (how long and dull the distances between us!) will do for assonance; and we have a full final rhyme, cool/allegorical. The pillow unflattened and unwarmed by his head, but so rich with his having been on it, with his not being on it, lies beside her madly transmitting meanings – madly allegorical as in say the allegory of the cave in which she subsists, darkly, her fantasy willing the cloudy inanimate world to materialize her lover…

… the American poet, has died at 89. UD recently wrote about one of his poems here. Simpson’s sensibility was odd, original; the language of his poetry is less interesting than its moods, the things his eye notices. As in his poem titled There Is.

Nice title, There Is. It strips the propositional, look at this, feel of poetry right down. The poet writes that there is this, and there is that; the poet names things… Yet in this particular poem (I’m reprinting most but not all of the stanzas), the poet can’t get it together to say there is anything. He’s in one of those moods… the city’s getting to him…

Look! From my window there’s a view
of city streets
where only lives as dry as tortoises
can crawl — the Gallapagos of desire.

Look! There is… an island of dry hardbacked tortoises crawling about. The dynamic city’s gone — at least I don’t see it. I see aridity, paralysis.

There is the day of Negroes with red hair
and the day of insane women on the subway;
there is the day of the word Trieste
and the night of the blind man with the electric guitar.

It’s a city, full of charged, fraught moments. All these there ises I need to tell you about: the red hair, the insane women, the day I encountered and was haunted by the word Trieste, and what about that blind musician… These things mean something, add up to something…

But I have no profession. Like a spy
I read the papers — Situations Wanted.
Surely there is a secret
which, if I knew it, would change everything!

A silent flaneur, the poet ranges the city, reads the paper, looking for the situation, the secret, the word (Trieste?), that will crystallize into a there is worthy of our attention – a scenery of meaning.

I have the poor man’s nerve-tic, irony.
I see through the illusions of the age!
The bell tolls, and the hearse advances,
and the mourners follow, for my entertainment.

The problem seems to be self-consciousness, sophistication, cynicism; even the serious essentials – death, for instance – seem mere entertainments.

I tread the burning pavement,
the streets where drunkards stretch
like photographs of civil death
and trumpets strangle in electric shelves.

The mannequins stare at me scornfully.
I know they are pretending
all day to be in earnest.
And can it be that love is an illusion?

The flaneur poet walks the arid tortoise street in search of inspiration, waiting for the real to come at him and cut through irony. But like the red-heads and the insane women and the blind man with the guitar, the surreal, poignant, belligerent city visions he now experiences (drunkards, trumpets) instantly become photographs, shelved silences. The guitar was electric; the trumpets strangle in electric shelves; actual suffering human beings on the streets are mechanical snaps — Part of the problem is the alienating and distancing technology of the modern city, and the way our embroilment in that technology makes us see things as pictures, as already-aesthetically-messed-with elements. Which leaves the poet with nothing to do.

O businessmen like ruins,
bankers who are Bastilles,
widows, sadder than the shores of lakes,
then you were happy, when you still could tremble!

All locked up now, the city dwellers, like the poet, once had an erotic past (“the air is filled with Eros” at night on the streets), an innocent and avid receptivity to the wonder of being. Out of this trembling life might come the poetic inspiration the poet – arid, ironic, disillusioned – lacks.

But all night long my window
sheds tears of light.
I seek the word. The word is not forthcoming.
O syllables of light … O dark cathedral …

God knows the world still expresses itself, still beckons the poet to his window so that he can see it. This light that comes through is the sorrow of the world, a word for which he seeks. But the word is not forthcoming. Trieste is nice – so close to triste. But Trieste was another day, and he’s lost it. All he can do is listen to the syllables as they strike his window, as they murmur from the dark cathedral where irony is forever silenced.

… Journalists are punning about a long-ago-stolen and now-recovered sculpture of Robert Frost.

… is here. (Registration required.)

I now have over a thousand students.

The lecture is about T.S. Eliot’s poem, “Virginia” —

Red river, red river,
Slow flow heat is silence
No will is still as a river
Still. Will heat move
Only through the mocking-bird
Heard once? Still hills
Wait. Gates wait. Purple trees,
White trees, wait, wait,
Delay, decay. Living, living,
Never moving. Ever moving
Iron thoughts came with me
And go with me:
Red river, river, river.

Yesterday afternoon, I rested a pair of scissors on top of one of my split rail fence posts while I was mulching. When I reached for it later, my hand fell on a cicada shell.

The screaming coming off the trees for the last week, I now realized, was late-summer cicadas.

I looked for a cicada poem, and here it is.

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

Cicada

I want to tell him what it is to crave darkness,
to want to crawl headfirst into a dirt-warm womb
to sleep, to wait seventeen years,
to emerge again.

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

These are the seventeen-year ones, not this summer’s smaller emergence, and the poet uses their long underground life and the way, once they emerge, their wail can sound like a warning siren, to make a point about human life.

He begins with his memory of a younger brother who, having gestated for seventeen years, suddenly left home forever with a bang.

The “warning wail of insects” tells us that “repudiation is fast like a whirlwind.”

Meaning?

Meaning it’s pretty easy and exciting to ditch it all and with the fervor and disdain of youth do your own fine full life. When you’re that young you don’t see that “all you live is leaving.” Life is something we have to leave, and most of life – whether we dramatically repudiate or undramatically persist in it – is departure of one sort or another, the loss of this, the erosion of that.

Our experience of the passage of time deepens our tendency to be borne back ceaselessly into the past, since adult life moves toward deterioration and makes our youth seem an icon of wholeness.

The brother’s repudiation is therefore both “arrant” and “orphic” – extreme (plus, given the closeness of “errant,” in error), and mysterious, unaccountable.

Even obviously future-oriented thoughts – provoked, say, by looking at your pregnant wife – are “still so much like trying to find something / once lost.” Pregnant to bursting with his own future, the brother has broken through the door into – illusion, dissolution (things falls apart), the immutable truth of all lives. The drone of the cicada tolls this immutability: that we slow down, undone as much by the pull of mortality as by the impulse to disbelieve it.

So listen to the cicada; consider its incredibly patient rhythms, its relationship to darkness and light; hear it tell our fast fragile passage through existence. Seeing as “we are all so helpless,” adopt pity rather than disdain. Pity for everyone, including yourself.

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

The poem reminds me of Philip Larkin’s Poetry of Departures.

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

Sometimes you hear, fifth-hand,
As epitaph:
He chucked up everything
And just cleared off,
And always the voice will sound
Certain you approve
This audacious, purifying,
Elemental move.

Yes, swagger the nut-strewn roads,
Crouch in the fo’c’sle
Stubbly with goodness, if
It weren’t so artificial,
Such a deliberate step backwards
To create an object:
Books; china; a life
Reprehensibly perfect.

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

UD thanks John Blair for permission to reprint the poem, which appears in The Green Girls (LSU Press, 2003). His most recent book of poems is The Occasions of Paradise.

… my latest lecture for the MOOC I’m giving appears. Here it is.

It’s a reading of Charles Wright’s poem, Black Zodiac.

My MOOC on poetry is almost up to nine hundred. If you want to check it out, go here.

Read it here.

And here, as I sit in an air conditioned bedroom in Arlington, Massachusetts, is my take on the poem.

Morningside Heights, July

By William Matthews

The title, like the name of a painting, merely sets place and time, which makes sense, since the poem will be a quick impressionistic sketch of a few moments that pass on a hot city street in the summer. The quick-cut, free verse, sheerly descriptive technique makes sense for the evocation of an urban setting, an urban consciousness. Here, bits and pieces of conversation and action rush by in a blur, a blur thickened by layers of superheated air. But this poem will rise from mere description into meaning by subtly elaborating a connection between the feverish confused setting and the speaker’s inability to make emotional sense of his life.

Haze. Three student violists boarding
a bus. A clatter of jackhammers.
Granular light. A film of sweat for primer
and the heat for a coat of paint.

A rill of chill air
in the leaves. A car alarm. Hail.

On an intensely hot day, a rill of chill air — the speaker, let us say, suddenly shivers with a sense of his non-existence, his death, or deathliness amid this horribly teeming life. The car alarm announces the full expression of the pending disaster, and sure enough hail now falls. Hail here also has the dark suggestion of a twisted welcoming – he hails and greets the official arrival of the storm.

Martin Amis says:

History has speeded up in the last generation, and that is antithetical to poetry. What a poem does, what a lyric poem does, is stop the clock and say we’re going to examine this moment. Shh! Stop the clock. And people are too hyper for that now. They don’t like to stop the clock. The clock is running too fast for them.

And also, a huge part of poetry is self-communion. When you read a poem, you’re communing with yourself in a deep way. People don’t like that. Why do you think they’re on their phones all the time? They don’t like being alone. They’re like children; they get all frantic if they’re alone, they feel lost. So people go around mumbling to their associates. And it’s not an introspective culture. They talk about dumbing down, but there’s also such a thing as numbing down. They don’t want to be sensitive.

If he’s right, summer would be the most poetic season, with winter coming in second, and autumn and spring tied for last. Summer’s the quietest, most becalmed, most stop-clocked of seasons – and thus the likeliest to prompt in poet and reader the hushed arrested introspective examination that generates the lyric. As in:

The House Was Quiet And The World Was Calm

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

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

Wallace Stevens never gets any verbal liftoff at all here. The poem’s a few repeated monosyllabic words, a few repeated phrases. A reader in a house becomes lost in her book – became the book – became, with its echo of calm, becalmed; the distance from became to book is not all that great… book is the first syllable of became.

Not just summer – that’s not quiet and calm enough – summer night. Even calmer, quieter. As James Agee writes:

High summer holds the earth.

So introspective, so private is the setting that not only the reader’s self falls away, but also the physical pages and binding of the book itself, so that its expressive being, its entire meaning, floats out onto – becomes – the night air. The summer night / Was like the conscious being of the book.

The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

But the reader still wants to lean — the word is so close to learn that one almost reads it like that — over the book, wants the words to stay on the page and to be a thing that the reader can in a scholarly analytical way shape into Truth.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.

So here the summer night would be not the pure emanation of human expressivity, or let’s be even more ambitious and say the music of the spheres, but rather the perfected form of an unassailable philosophical truth the reader has gleaned from leaning over the book.

The reading, truth-seeking mind finds perfect outward conditions for the generation of perfect truth from the page: The world entirely quiets itself to allow truth to assume language. The profound silence of the summer night, from this point of view, would be the unanswerable “articulation” of the truth of being.

The reader, in other words, is someone who demands a verbally articulated Truth that she must lean over, glean, and learn, rather than someone who simply accepts a naturally, earthily articulated conscious being.

The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

The reader herself, as part of this calm world, is meaning – is the only meaning there is. The truth of this calm world is its pointless inarticulable pulsing being. The book has meaning, but the world only has being. The book, the reader of the book – these are meaning generators, meaning seekers. They project meaning into the world. But the world itself – which the utter silence and immobility of the summer night reveals – is meaningless.

… now has eight hundred students.

It’s part of Udemy’s Faculty Project, and can be found here. (Remember: You need to register.)

Analysis Terminable

My love, the dead rearise in our dreams.
Even you, ease-seeker. A summer camp,
Fifties era, background volleyball teams,
Was the setting where my sleeping headlamp
Found you. Through clear and warming August air
I watched you raise your arms and approach me
In a gesture loving and, in life, rare.

Rare because direct, without subtlety,
Nothing to interpret or erase
With universal solvent intellect.

Don’t you see why you put me in that place?
He was there … My poor son… His summer wrecked…

My love, your voice still rises in my ear;
Still misses, with analytic skill,
The obvious, preanalytical embrace.

I Dreamed That in a City Dark as Paris

The violence of waking life disrupts
The order of our death. Strange dreams occur,
For dreams are licensed as they never were.

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

Many poems and songs recount dreams – I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls, I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine, I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill, I Dreamed that I Was Old – and this poem about remembering and forgetting wars also casts itself as a dream. How else really to reach the war dead? If you are, like the poet, a war veteran, you will make contact with those dead in subconscious, flickering, tumbling, wandering moments…

I mean, UD has always loved Siegfried Sassoon’s Prelude: The Troops – especially its last verse, which pretty reliably makes her cry:

O my brave brown companions, when your souls
Flock silently away, and the eyeless dead
Shame the wild beast of battle on the ridge,
Death will stand grieving in that field of war
Since your unvanquished hardihood is spent.
And through some mooned Valhalla there will pass
Battalions and battalions, scarred from hell;
The unreturning army that was youth;
The legions who have suffered and are dust.

Yet this is direct, formal address, wide-awake sorrow and homage. Simpson’s night visitation feels more likely to be the way actual people make contact with the war dead, which is to say by being haunted by them.

Both poets use blank verse, with Simpson occasionally using end rhyme (unrest/crest; occur/were) but mainly featuring unrhymed lines (all of Sassoon’s lines are unrhymed); both poems derive from this form a stately hesitant gait, a queer little funeral march. The absolutely strict measure of Sassoon’s final two lines is at spectacular odds with the explosive rage and despair behind them, and this is what we typically expect in a poem, the poet asserting at least linguistic control over emotional and intellectual chaos, over outcomes too grotesque and vast really to be comprehended, much less assimilated.

Simpson’s poem is all subliminal, all, as he says, a strange dream, its strangeness extreme, but somehow licensed by the beyond-strange atrocities of our century (his poem’s speaker is – assuming he’s Simpson – a Second World War veteran communing with a soldier of the First World War). And as dream, it is free to invert and invent…

So its first line seems immediately all wrong. Isn’t Paris the city of light? A city dark as Paris… Paris during the war? War blasting even the city of enlightenment back to violet (the word one letter short of violent) night… Well, and it’s a dream after all with all the shifty inchoate imagery of the sleeping mind. Rumbling guns pump color – you hear the assonance, the repeated uh a vague menacing sound. And things are vague because the poet stands alone and a distance from them; there is the Front, and the poet is in the back, in the shadows, left behind. All he can see are the edges of war; and this is his mind struggling to get to the Front, to apprehend that reality directly. Restless, he stands alone in a Paris square, and finds himself – bizarrely – to be a poilu, a French World War One infantryman, an ordinary sort from the countryside.

I was the man…

reminds us of Walt Whitman’s line:

I am the man, I suffered, I was there.

Whitman celebrates here his powerful capacity to empathize, to feel exactly what are others – especially suffering others – are feeling; and Simpson is after something similar, his dreaming persona literally taking on the identity of “my confrere.” Yet as to really remembering: The wars are too great (there’s an echo here of course of The Great War), too vast, once again, for us to grasp; they become historical abstractions, like the ancient and vast Egyptian dynasties:

These wars have been so great, they are forgotten
Like the Egyptian dynasts. My confrere
In whose thick boots I stood, were you amazed
To wander through my brain four decades later
As I have wandered in a dream through yours?

I thought of you, that’s all; I didn’t really commemorate you, as Sassoon commemorates, or feel with you, as Whitman feels with you; it’s just that you, poilu, wandered through my brain at some point while I was awake; and then that wandering presence inhabited, solidified, stood stock still, in my dreaming mind — ghosts inhabit a house; this ghost inhabits the speaker’s mind.

The violence of waking life disrupts
The order of our death. Strange dreams occur,
For dreams are licensed as they never were.

Things are out of joint; our war-torn world upends everything, makes everything weird, so that my (dead; dreaming) life propels itself backwards to your still-living, still-dreaming being in the darkness of the eternal war zone. The new global world of conflict – a world in which any behavior is “licensed” – is so grotesque that it infects our dreams in unprecedented ways. We are losing orderly ways of commemoration; we risk flattening our wars into abstraction. Yet we remain open to inhabitation.

Farewell! my dear Psychosis Risk!
My Anxious, Mixed, Despair!
A cruel and barbèd whisk
Consigns you to the air.

Farewell! my Hyperactive love!
From now, mere asterisk!
What’s next, oh Lord above?
Tsk. Tsk. Tsk. Tsk. Tsk. Tsk.