… At the Fishhouses, is now available.

Or, if you’re just joining us, my Massive Open Online Course on poetry has just enrolled four hundred people from around the world.

Onward and upward. This Saturday, I’m recording a lecture on Elizabeth Bishop’s poem, At the Fishhouses.

… has died.

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

XVI

Across a city from you, I’m with you,
just as an August night
moony, inlet-warm, seabathed, I watched you sleep,
the scrubbed, sheenless wood of the dressing-table
cluttered with our brushes, books, vials in the moonlight —
or a salt-mist orchard, lying at your side
watching red sunset through the screendoor of the cabin,
G minor Mozart on the tape-recorder,
falling asleep to the music of the sea.
This island of Manhattan is wide enough
for both of us, and narrow:
I can hear your breath tonight, I know how your face
lies upturned, the halflight tracing
your generous, delicate mouth
where grief and laughter sleep together.

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

This is one of her series of love poems, Twenty-One Love Poems. I find it a truly powerful love poem, powered by the passion of Rich’s love for her lover — a passion, as the poem tells us, that transcends time and distance.

Across a city from you, I’m with you,

Miles away from each other in the big city, we’re nonetheless together, our closeness so close it’s metaphysical.

And then she remembers, so beautifully and delicately, a scene from their life together. We’re as close now as we were then, at that moment of intense closeness, intense perfection:

just as an August night
moony, inlet-warm, seabathed, I watched you sleep,
the scrubbed, sheenless wood of the dressing-table
cluttered with our brushes, books, vials in the moonlight —
or a salt-mist orchard, lying at your side
watching red sunset through the screendoor of the cabin,
G minor Mozart on the tape-recorder,
falling asleep to the music of the sea.

One night, during one of our summers at the sea, the weather was so warm, it felt as though we were wrapped in a private, protected inlet of warmth, a world entirely our own… How glorious to lie in that bed after a day of creative work together and see “the scrubbed, sheenless wood of the dressing-table” on which lay the instruments of our pursuits – brushes, books – with the clear well-used wood of that table conveying the authenticity and clarity of our summer lives. We’re just as close now as we were then, gazing at an orchard misted with seawater, listening to Mozart and to the music of the sea – beauty, natural and composed, all around us…

One of the great beauties, for UD, of this sort of modern poetry, is its strange and moving personal fabric which is not personal, because whether it’s Frank O’Hara or Adrienne Rich in this associative mood, writing this weave of place and time, UD‘s been there, listening to similar particular music over the music of the sea, watching the sunset through a screen door, and, like Rich, at once excited by the perfection of the moment, and about to fall asleep.

Great poets evoke these moments, these specific and fantastic atmospherics, generously; they make room for our own variations on them.

This island of Manhattan is wide enough
for both of us, and narrow:
I can hear your breath tonight, I know how your face
lies upturned, the halflight tracing
your generous, delicate mouth
where grief and laughter sleep together.

Wide and narrow; grief and laughter – all oppositions are resolved in love. And all distances overcome, as the disparate lovers are brought so close together that I can hear your breath.

… Distinguishing Between Good and Bad Poetry, has just been published. To watch it, go to the Faculty Project page, scroll down to Poetry, and enroll. It’s free. So far 112 people have signed up. Join the crowd.

… I’ve been recording my third lecture in my series on poetry for the Faculty Project. The lecture should be available this evening.

Back in 2007, on the advice of [T. Boone] Pickens, the [Oklahoma State University] Cowboys athletic department purchased policies for 27 of their very biggest fans. Most were donors and season ticket holders, and all were over the age of 65. Upon an insured donor’s death, Lincoln Financial would pay out $10 million to the sole beneficiary, the OSU athletic department. It was called the “Gift of a Lifetime” program, and it was a wager, like all life insurance, but presumably the actuarial tables were in the university’s favor.

Then, no one died.

… OSU sued Lincoln Financial, trying to recover their premiums… Last week, a federal judge in Dallas dismissed [that, and Lincoln’s countersuit], leaving Oklahoma State on the hook for that $33 mil, and forcing them to pay court costs…

OSU, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poor OSU, nor yet canst thou kill me.

Their livingness doth make you desperate men,
Who with death-lust and lawsuits dwell;
No charm sends donors down to hell
Nor gives them heart attack or stroke; why swell’st thou then?
One litigation past, you pay out millions,
And still death hies! OSU, thou shalt die.

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

UD thanks Dave.

“It is not a disease and it has no place in a book dedicated to listing mental disorders,” write two observers in Slate, as they anticipate (dread, really… dread is probably a billable disorder too… or will soon be…) the phenomenon of our grief at the loss of people we love entering the Diagnostic and Statistical pantheon. “The new diagnosis, spearheaded by two professors of psychiatry, Katherine Shear and Holly Prigerson, at Columbia and Harvard University,” will go after melancholic malingerers, sickos who stay sad beyond happiness’s due date.

So what are the downsides of treating grief as a disease? For one thing, more people will be prescribed antidepressants that can have adverse physical and psychological side effects, including increased risk of suicide and addiction and withdrawal problems. (To date, the research has consistently shown that grief counseling and medications do not alleviate grief; they seem most helpful in the cases of people who had pre-existing mental health issues.) It also means that more people will feel shame and embarrassment about not grieving “properly” or getting over their loss fast enough. And the very language of “symptoms” and “duration” seems only to further diminish the significant event that precipitated these feelings in the first place — the death of a beloved person who can’t be replaced.

On the other hand – America’s already crawling with millions of people who shouldn’t be on antidepressants – what’s a few more? C’mon in! Water’s fine!

And there’s so much money in it. Think of it! Convincing non-mourning people they’re depressed is tricky – you need wall-to-wall advertisements. Convincing mourning people? Piece of cake.

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

Once pill distribution begins, mentally disordered poems like this one will be a thing of the past:

The Eden of the Author of Sleep
By Brian Teare

for Jean

And sleep to grief as air is to the rain,
upon waking, no explanation, just blue

spoons of the eucalyptus measuring
and pouring torrents. A kind of winter.

As if what is real had been buried
and all sure surfaces blurred. Is it me

or the world, risen from beneath?
Mind refining ruin, or an outside

unseen hand, working—as if with
a small brush, for clarity—the details?

To open my eyes is the shape of a city
rising slowly through sand. Cloudy

quartz, my throat, cut unadorned
from the quarry, stone of city cemetery

and roads, to breathe is a mausoleum
breached. To think of Eden is speech

to fill a grave, tree in which knowledge
augurs only its limits, the word snake

a thought crawling in the shadow
of its body. Was it, Adam, like this

always, intellect in the mind’s small sty
miming confinement for meaning, sleep

to grief as air is to the rain, upon waking,
the world’s own weapons turned against it—

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

I mean, just look at this guy, luxuriating in it (how long has it been since his dedicatee died, I wonder?), wallowing in his misery instead of getting over it!

The Eden of the Author of Sleep

By Brian Teare

for Jean

And sleep to grief as air is to the rain,

[Lost in vaporous air. Disturbing symptom right off the bat. Sleep disturbance.]

upon waking, no explanation, just blue

spoons of the eucalyptus measuring
and pouring torrents. [Describes himself as permanently under a rainstorm. Classic sign of depression. Nice assonance on the u‘s of blue, spoons, eucalyptus, by the way.] A kind of winter.

As if what is real had been buried
and all sure surfaces blurred. [Diminished sense of reality. Pre-psychotic.] Is it me

or the world, risen from beneath? [It’s you. Consult your doctor.]
Mind refining ruin, or an outside

unseen hand, working — is if with
a small brush, for clarity — the details? [Mentally going over and over the details of the lost loved person, life before, whatever. ]

To open my eyes is the shape of a city
rising slowly through sand. [Slowed thoughts – Depression 101.] Cloudy

quartz, my throat, cut unadorned
from the quarry, stone of city cemetery [Strikingly morbid poem.]

and roads, to breathe is a mausoleum
breached. [Reports feeling that every breath he takes is an approach to the loved one’s grave. Abnormal.] To think of Eden is speech

to fill a grave, tree in which knowledge
augurs only its limits, the word snake

a thought crawling in the shadow
of its body. [Hopelessness. Words seem meaningless, understanding impossible.] Was it, Adam, like this

always, intellect in the mind’s small sty
miming confinement for meaning, [Seems to feel he can only function by becoming a mental midget.] sleep

to grief as air is to the rain, [Note the recurrence of this phrase. Circular thinking.] upon waking,
the world’s own weapons turned against it— [Clear cry for help here.]

… her second Udemy Faculty Project lecture, Poetry and Difficulty, this morning. She’s now waiting for it to upload. Should be published shortly.

♦♦♦♦♦♦

Update:  The lecture is now available, though for the moment it’s Lecture 10.  So you need to scroll down.

Or you can go there directly via this link.

…. up and running. Scroll down. Enroll!

As the beautiful toy that was Risperdal begins, gently, to tarnish, UD offers this valedictory.

RISPERDAL

Opus 1, No. 1
Margaret Soltan
ca. 2012
Tune: Mollys Abschied, Beethoven
(Play Sample to sing along.)

Risperdal! How sore my heart is aching!
Thoughts of the past
Upon my soul are breaking.
See the children laugh and play!
Blessings on you, J&J!
Whither have they fled, those joyous off-label days?

Biederman! Return from your long journey!
Save Risperdal
From federal attorneys!
Tell them of the joy and pleasure
Children felt beyond all measure!
Whither have they fled, those joyous off-label days?

It’s by Jack Gilbert. In this poem, he’s mourning the death of his wife – a lot of the poems in his book The Great Fires are about her, Michiko Nogami, a sculptor who died young.

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

I imagine the gods saying, We will
make it up to you. We will give you
three wishes, they say. Let me see
the squirrels again, I tell them.
Let me eat some of the great hog
stuffed and roasted on its giant spit
and put out, steaming, into the winter
of my neighborhood when I was usually
too broke to afford even the hundred grams
I ate so happily walking up the cobbles,
past the Street of the Moon
and the Street of the Birdcage-Makers,
the Street of Silence and the Street
of the Little Pissing. We can give you
wisdom, they say in their rich voices.
Let me go at last to Hugette, I say,
the Algerian student with her huge eyes
who timidly invited me to her room
when I was too young and bewildered
that first year in Paris.
Let me at least fail at my life.
Think, they say patiently, we could
make you famous again. Let me fall
in love one last time, I beg them.
Teach me mortality, frighten me
into the present. Help me to find
the heft of these days. That the nights
will be full enough and my heart feral.

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

The poem is a small dialogue with the gods who, given the anguish they put him through with Nogami’s death, have by way of compensation offered to grant the poet three wishes. The gods seem to think he’ll want the obvious ones – fame, wisdom – but he wants absurdly tiny and trivial ones. I want to see squirrels again (the poet lives on a Greek island and doesn’t, I guess, see them); I want that feeling of happiness I had years ago when, although practically broke, I was able to afford to eat a little of a delicious roasted hog… His wishes point to part of Gilbert’s philosophy: happiness lies in the little things. The big things will break you. You don’t want to bite off too much of the great hog Life; you want just a little, as in Little Pissing Street. Or in the happy-making Street of the Bird-Cage Makers (a not terribly important but possibly beauty-making activity, like poetry). Or the Street of Silence – words being another thing you don’t want to overdo. (Gilbert has produced very few books of poetry.)

Or let’s see… Gilbert tries on various other wishes he might like granted. They’re very particular things. It’s always bothered him that when he was very young he was afraid to take up the timid sexual invitation of a beautiful woman in Paris. Let that thing have happened; let me have gone into her room. Maybe I would have been a flop in bed, but “let me at least fail at my life.” Let me have tried; let me have pursued the plot of my life here, good or bad.

You can see developing a sort of theme here which involves wanting above all reality – tactile, emotional actuality. Wisdom and fame are abstractions; what the poet wants granted is the conviction of fully existing here and now. So here’s the Valentine’s Day thing:

Let me fall
in love one last time, I beg them.
Teach me mortality, frighten me
into the present. Help me to find
the heft of these days. That the nights
will be full enough and my heart feral.

Grieving, he’s disengaged from the real and now, floating above his own pain. So his real wish is to love again so that he can reassume his position in the human story. Only through love do you learn – do you feel – mortality – here understood as the glorious truths of embodied existence and as the end of embodiment. Frighten me into the present – make me love another person so that I can feel, instead of this affectless suffering, the real ground of human being, suffering and bliss and all. Only then will the days become weighty again with the heft of an actual life, and the nights wild with visceral passion.

What a pleasure for UD, on this quiet Sunday (in bed, recovering from bronchitis), to follow, in the wake of Dorothea Tanning’s death, her life. What a pleasure, having just returned from that same landscape, to bask in photographs of Tanning and her husband Max Ernst in surrealistic Sedona.

The iconic artist’s life – how strong its pull. How one wants to be there – in the house they built beside the hills, or in the squatter’s shack on the British Columbia coast where Malcolm Lowry lived with his wife and wrote Under the Volcano…

Creative intensity and beauty and freedom – it’s all there in the photographs: the ocean, and the hills like white elephants, shining in the background.

Tanning lived for more than a century and had time to reflect on the artist’s life.

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

Sequestrienne

Don’t look at me
for answers. Who am I but
a sobriquet,
a teeth-grinder,
grinder of color,
and vanishing point?

If it isn’t too late
let me waste one day away
from my history.
Let me see without
looking inside
at broken glass.

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

The brilliant portmanteau title – sequestrienne. The famous artist’s semi-famous widow is sought after in her elderly semi-sequestered life, consulted for her wisdom about iconic times. She rides – an equestrienne – those times, rides them in memory, mounts them, relives them for herself and for those who come to her and want her to cover that territory again. But she begins her poem with a warning:

Don’t look at me
for answers. Who am I but
a sobriquet,
a teeth-grinder,
grinder of color,
and vanishing point?

I’m just wife-of, after all. Just an old woman who grinds her teeth at night and grinds her paints as she still tries to paint, even as her life vanishes. Why assume I have any wisdom? I’m still caught up, in my very latter days, in the daily grind, the ongoing anxious business of trying to understand, and trying to create.

There was a time
of middle distance, unforgettable,
a sort of lace-cut
flame-green filament
to ravish my
skin-tight eyes.

What I can tell you is that there was this past, this undeniable, authentic stretch of time during which I was alive in every conceivable way: erotically, aesthetically. That sharp green incandescent stem – it was actually there, the force that through the green fuse drives the flower, as one of Tanning’s Sedona guests put it. It ravished me, and I saw the world as one great true thing, not as fragments.

I take that back—
it was forgettable but not
entirely if you
consider my
heavenly bodies . . .
I loved them so.

My love keeps that sense of fulfillment – full-filament – from disintegrating entirely; I’ve tried to keep the bodies of my loved ones aloft in the heavens.

Heaven’s motes sift
to salt-white — paint is ground
to silence; and I,
I am bound, unquiet,
a shade of blue
in the studio.

Yet everything reduces and sifts down and fragments. My beloved becomes a mote, fading to the salt-white of death, just as our paintings eventually withdraw into silence. Only I, still alive, remain in the studio, restless, anxious, earthly blue, sadly blue.

If it isn’t too late
let me waste one day away
from my history.
Let me see without
looking inside
at broken glass.

Let me sequester myself away, let me ride away, from history, from the temporal realm with its incoherences and failures and anxieties, and yes, from its mystifications, with which you come to me, wife-of, expecting wisdom. Let me lose this self-consciousness, this always looking inside, this play with fragments. Give me a clear day and no memories.

A Clear Day and No Memories

Today the air is clear of everything.
It has no knowledge except of nothingness
And it flows over us without meanings,
As if none of us had ever been here before
And are not now: in this shallow spectacle,
This invisible activity, this sense.

… sue my alma mater,” Strauss says.

[Sung to the tune (roughly) of I am the very model of a modern major general.]

I thought I’d face the world with quite enormous wealth and hauteur
I’d supper out at Sotheby’s and breed Italian Trotters
But now my only clients are malodorous old trottoirs
It’s with a heavy heart that I sue my alma mater.

(Yes with a heavy heart does he sue his alma mater.)

… Dove, and now Hill v. Duffy. In both dust-ups, a defender of poetry as beautiful, difficult, indirect statement attacks a defender of poetry as common language, easily accessible, direct statement. Poetry, says Hill, is “lines in depth designed to be seen in relation or in deliberate disrelation to lines above and below.” This is the approach of the American New Critics: the poem is an autonomous object, a well-wrought urn, which needs to be understood in its own terms. Its lines don’t necessarily – or don’t in obvious ways – engage with the world outside the poem – they engage with the lines above and below them. Carol Ann Duffy is about poetry as outreach, as a way to educate people, to make them more politically alive and astute. Hill, like Vendler, aligns with people like Harold Bloom and George Steiner, for whom reading poetry is more than anything about deepening and complicating one’s interiority, one’s most private consciousness. Rita Dove and Carol Ann Duffy regard poetry as more than anything about public, social discourse – by excavating the way people really feel, poetry draws readers into a community of like-feeling and in this way deepens social awareness and action.

If Wallace Stevens’ Sunday Morning is a twentieth century religious poem, Charles Wright’s Black Zodiac is a twenty-first. Stevens uses blank verse, Wright free. In Stevens the absence of faith is felt as anguish, and much of his poem attempts to ease the anguish by reconciling us to earthly life.

Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measure destined for her soul.

In Wright, the black stars, the stars without divinity, are felt differently. His loose free poetic line already suggests that the sadness hunched in each careful, fraught, emotionally withheld, Stevens line – each measured line – has shaken out into something else entirely. The imperative now is not so much to infuse earthly life with the human divine as it is merely to produce descriptions of the world abandoned by the spirit. Black Zodiac records the contemporary poet recording, finding words adequate to the reality of the world. Rather than the ordinary mind in existential conversation with itself, Wright’s poem features the writer’s mind in conversation with its “masters” – great precursor poets of the cosmos, like Dante.

Darkened by time, the masters, like our memories, mix
And mismatch,
and settle about our lawn furniture, like air
Without a meaning, like air in its clear nothingness.
What can we say to either of them?
How can they be so dark and so clear at the same time?
They ruffle our hair,
they ruffle the leaves of the August trees.
Then stop, abruptly as wind.

You do it too, says Dante; you write the great poetry of the heavens and the earth. He ruffles the poet’s hair like a fond father: You can do it, kid. It’s your turn now. Yet at this late date the grand religious narratives have gotten all mixed up to the point of meaninglessness, leaving us with writer’s block.

Those who look for the Lord will cry out in praise of him.
Perhaps. And perhaps not—
dust and ashes though we are,
Some will go wordlessly…

And maybe those who go wordlessly are the lucky ones. Without their own language, they never really existed, never accepted their embodiment, never felt the weight of the masters’ expectations on them:

… speaking in fear and tongues,
Hating their garments splotched by the flesh.
These are the lucky ones, the shelved ones, the twice-erased.

Dante and John Chrysostom
Might find this afternoon a sidereal roadmap,
A pilgrim’s way …
You might too
Under the prejaundiced outline of the quarter moon,
Clouds sculling downsky like a narrative for whatever comes,
What hasn’t happened to happen yet
Still lurking behind the stars,
31 August 1995 …
The afterlife of insects, space graffiti, white holes
In the landscape,
such things, such avenues, lead to dust
And handle our hurt with ease.
Sky blue, blue of infinity, blue
waters above the earth:
Why do the great stories always exist in the past?

For our masters, any random summer afternoon can tell the heavenly story; for us too, perhaps, the signs of the world – an early moon, contrails, clouds in motion – can generate spiritual narrative… But no. “Such things, such avenues, lead to dust.”

Unanswerable questions, small talk,
Unprovable theorems, long-abandoned arguments—
You’ve got to write it all down.
Landscape or waterscape, light-length on evergreen, dark sidebar
Of evening,
you’ve got to write it down.
Memory’s handkerchief, death’s dream and automobile,
God’s sleep,
you’ve still got to write it down,
Moon half-empty, moon half-full,
Night starless and egoless, night blood-black and prayer-black…

The cosmic scheme might have collapsed, God might have nodded off forever, but you’ve still got to write it down, still got to find words for a silent world without transcendence:

We go to our graves with secondary affections,
Second-hand satisfaction, half-souled,
star charts demagnetized.

These are charming and moving lines; they describe the pathos of spiritually unfulfilled lives, the souls we only, in our short, confused, time, half-fashion, our places in the zodiac simply ripped off the wall when we die. Only our poets can redeem such lives. But how?

Calligraphers of the disembodied, God’s word-wards,
What letters will we illuminate?
Above us, the atmosphere,
The nothing that’s nowhere, signs on, and waits for our beck and call.
Above us, the great constellations sidle and wince,
The letters undarken and come forth,
Your X and my X.
The letters undarken and they come forth.

Our poets script what we were; like monks, they illuminate our lives. Our expressive world waits for them to interpret its expressiveness, “waits for our beck and call.”

Eluders of memory, nocturnal sleep of the greenhouse,
Spirit of slides and silences,
Invisible Hand,
Witness and walk on.

Here the poet directly addresses the masters, telling them to beat it. Walk on. Nothing to see here. The light of the stars has gone black, and if the poet’s going to record that blackness, he’ll need to do it unburdened by those precursors and their expectations. Instead he invokes the smaller, unmasterful spirits of his small world:

Lords of the discontinuous, lords of the little gestures,
Succor my shift and save me …
All afternoon the rain has rained down in the mind,
And in the gardens and dwarf orchard.
All afternoon
The lexicon of late summer has turned its pages
Under the rain,
abstracting the necessary word.
Autumn’s upon us.
The rain fills our narrow beds.
Description’s an element, like air or water.
That’s the word.

My shift: This is my turn, my time and place as a poet, and I’ve got to write it down. The magnificent theologians are of no help to me here in the dwarf orchard; only the lords of little gestures and discontinuous moments will be of use. The precursor poets who matter now are people precisely like Wallace Stevens (the line about description as an element is taken from a Stevens poem), adepts of contingency. Necessity now is about finding the necessary word, abstracting it from the seasons of an always-immanent world, and writing it down.

The final line of Wright’s poem – “That’s the word.” – echoes the Liturgy of the Word at mass, when the New Testament reading concludes: The word of the Lord.