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.
Jump to the poem’s last word and you see that the poet has begun with one word – haze – and ended with one word – hail. He has sandwiched his poem between these two words, as if to underline the fact that he intends here only to capture one strictly limited set of moments – those moments that occur between (the curtain rises) heat and (the curtain falls) hail, between the hot build-up to a storm and the outbreak of the storm on a summer afternoon in New York. The words are monosyllabic, four letters, starting with h. This simplicity deepens our sense of the speaker as someone stunned by the weather into almost trance-like invocation, a kind of passive registering rather than active responding. And stunned by something else.
A man and a woman on a bench:
she tells him he must be psychic,
for how else could he sense, even before she knew,
that she’d need to call it off?
Let us say that the speaker of the poem is the man who, amid this hot and crowded urban scene, is being dumped by his lover. The poem is not just a recording consciousness; it is a wounded and perplexed consciousness, for whom the oppressive weather and the random action are a rough equivalent of his depressed awareness and his sense of the wounding contingency of life events.
A bicyclist
fumes by with a coach’s whistle clamped
hard between his teeth, shrilling like a teakettle
on the boil.
Heat. The metaphor is nicely extended via the boiling teakettle whistle on the bicyclist; but we can also read this as an objective correlative of the fevered rage within the poem’s speaker as his lover dismisses him.
I never meant, she says.
But I thought, he replies. Two cabs almost
collide; someone yells fuck in Farsi.
Life as mischance, as accident, misunderstanding, almost-thereness, near-misses, miscomprehension … The theme is clear enough in relation to the lovers (But I thought…); it is amplified in the larger setting of almost-collisions and obscure, aggressive use of language.
I’m sorry, she says. The comforts
of loneliness fall in like a bad platoon.
This is a slovenly, random world, inside and out, so that when the speaker finally understands what has happened to him – he has been deserted, and will now be lonely – he feels the impact of that wound as one more undisciplined, hazy, thick, painted over thing in his world.
The sky blurs — there’s a storm coming
up or down. A lank cat slinks liquidly
around a corner.
Is his coming emotional storm going to be cathartic (up) or catastrophic (down)? Who knows? Everything is blurred. That meager, lank cat is the speaker, hollowed out by lovelessness, about to rise and slink through the next phase of his life.
How familiar
it feels to feel strange, hollower
than a bassoon.
So here the poet reveals himself fully. He indeed seems to have been not merely an observer of an urban scene in the summer but the devastated man on the bench who has been (the way one will as trauma is unfolding) looking at the world around him, his perceptions and descriptions of it marked, tinged, tainted, by his melancholy, anger, and shock. As with the wounded, confused, passive speaker in Prufrock, whose opening lines describe a hazy night in a city with lots of cats, the speaker here finds himself in an all too objectively correlative miasma of mystery and pain and foreboding. The speaker’s identity turns out to be too weak to compete with his complex, powerful, and painful world. He is simply hollowed out by it all – a hollow man. Recall the violists at the beginning of the poem – the poet is just the opposite of the ringing strings of that instrument.
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
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night
Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
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.
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.
And the world was calm. 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.
*******************************************
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.
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
By Louis Simpson
I dreamed that in a city dark as Paris
I stood alone in a deserted square.
The night was trembling with a violet
Expectancy. At the far edge it moved
And rumbled; on that flickering horizon
The guns were pumping color in the sky.
There was the Front. But I was lonely here,
Left behind, abandoned by the army.
The empty city and the empty square
Was my inhabitation, my unrest.
The helmet with its vestige of a crest,
The rifle in my hands, long out of date,
The belt I wore, the trailing overcoat
And hobnail boots, were those of a poilu.
I was the man, as awkward as a bear.
Over the rooftops where cathedrals loomed
In speaking majesty, two aeroplanes
Forlorn as birds, appeared. Then growing large,
The German Taube and the Nieuport Scout,
They chased each other tumbling through the sky,
Till one streamed down on fire to the earth.
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?
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.
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.
From Boone, whom all thy godhead be,
Much money; then from Him much more must flow,
And soon’st our best men die, He vow,
Rest of their bones, and team’s delivery.
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.