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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.

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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.

“What works of art testify to is the presence in this world of consciousness, consciousness of many extraordinary kinds,” [William Gass] writes in “The Literary Miracle.” But this is “not that of the artists themselves, for theirs are often much the same as any other person’s. . . . It is not the writer’s awareness I am speaking of but the awareness he or she makes. For that is what fine writing does: it creates a unique verbal consciousness.”

Or think of it this way: Dull confessional poetry is dull because it records the consciousness of the artists themselves – I feel this, I feel that, this scene makes me feel this way, that scene makes me feel that way… As Gass says, the artist’s consciousness is liable to be just like ours, so there’s no art, no surprise, nothing new, when she simply discloses it.

Poetry lifts us from propositional statements about what it’s like to have a particular human consciousness to a unique, fashioned, verbal, consciousness. This consciousness is not the poet’s – it’s not anybody’s. It’s the product of the poet’s transcendence of her measly consciousness via the act of writing the poem. If she’s a good writer, the words will push past the ego and its restless self-monitoring to a stately capture of broader truths. The poet will make an awareness, a verbal awareness.

And you want that from the poem, because you know damn well your measly consciousness traps you in triviality and anxiety. You want the doors of perception cleansed.

So Iris Murdoch says:

The chief enemy of excellence in morality (and also in art) is personal fantasy, the tissue of self-aggrandising and consoling wishes and dreams which prevents one from seeing what there is outside one. . . . This is not easy, and requires, in art or morals, a discipline. One might say here that art is an excellent analogy of morals or indeed that it is in this respect a case of morals.

Great poems are cleansed perceptions wordified. Somehow the discipline of ordering words in a certain way is the cleansing, an act of self-transcendence and true-world-invocation. For us, reading the poem, activating its verbal awareness once again is the discipline.

Meaning if you want to feel the truth of consciousness – not be informed about a particular state of consciousness being experienced at a particular time by a particular person – you could do worse than this sort of thing:

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.

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

Well, this Wallace Stevens poem is consciousness of – as Gass says – an extraordinary kind. Yet everyone has shared some aspect of it; everyone knows the truth here conveyed. It’s like – UD‘s here at the beach, at Rehoboth, and the water’s dark gray and the sky is gray and the sand just sits there.

Above the sea, the yet more shoreless day
Riddled by wind…

This is Philip Larkin, finding sure verbal footing in a shoreless world, creating a verbal awareness of there being nothing underfoot. As when, on a vacant cold beach day, the mind clears of everything, the air carries no implication, no mood, no memory. “The mind is not part of the weather.” Somehow the atmosphere overwhelms the mind’s effort to establish itself in the world, to interpret the world, to make the world human. We now have the conviction of our non-existence; the air “flows over us without meanings” because we are not there to lend meaning to the air, to arrest and shape its flow. In the recession of consciousness, the world becomes a “shallow spectacle,” mere sense without significance. It carries on its invisible life with with no heed of us.

Is this a horrible thing? Does the poem express misery, anxiety? No. It’s not even told from a first-person point of view — it’s about “us.” The mood is calm, accepting. We can’t reanimate the dead with our loving memories – so be it. We’ve faded to nothing; the world has won. Okay. This is pure awareness, no strings attached. And there is something euphoric, exhilarating about this purity; it makes a great poem. It infuses the delight of clarity into our consciousness as we read the poem. It is a peculiar sort of victory, after all, that one of us has found the words that capture a wordless feeling of nothingness.

… made a whirling world around our house this afternoon; and if the sky stays this clear, UD might be able to see an excellent meteor shower around three AM.

Longtime readers know that UD goes to her upstate New York house every August hoping to lie on the front field and see the perseid shower. She has seen a few of these, but sometimes the moon’s too full, the sky’s too cloudy, whatever.

Now here’s another shower – the Quads – due to appear in ‘thesda, and UD will be ready.

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Meteors tend to do what you’d think they’d do in poetry: They represent short bursts of brilliant life (as in, say, an elegy for Keats), or, more consolingly, they suggest a living universe of which we are somehow eternally a part. Even in way slangy pomo poetry – the contemporary form derived from modern poets like Frank O’Hara, the form UD calls the meta-maunder – you see the same symbolic value the Romantics gave the meteor.

Here, for instance, is a pomo maunder.

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Death, Is All

Which leads us into the shadow, di Prima.

Year’s end,
all corners
of this floating world, swept.

Off Yemen, in the Red Sea.

And yes, there’s a poem for that.

Island in the Works. James Merrill.

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

From air seen fathom-deep
But rising to a head –
Abscess of the abyss
Any old night letting rip
Its fires, yearlong,
As roundabout waves hiss –

(Unlike this page – no sooner
Brought to the pool than wafted
Out of reach, laid flat
Face-up on cool glares, ever
So lightly swayed, or swaying…
Now who did that?)

————————-

From air seen fathom-deep
But rising to a head –
Abscess of the abyss
Any old night letting rip
Its fires, yearlong,
As roundabout waves hiss –

(Unlike this page – no sooner
Brought to the pool than wafted
Out of reach, laid flat
Face-up on cool glares, ever
So lightly swayed, or swaying…
Now who did that?)

[Or not. The poet ends on a light note, throws cold water on his artistic flare-up. All that fire eventuates after all in just a thin page with fragile marks on it. The poet takes the page out to his pool and the wind wafts it out of reach and into the water, where it lies absolutely flat, with no chance of volcanic ascension. And whose ‘untold subversion’ was that? A malignant wind from the gods? Or did the poet subvert himself, bringing his flimsy page out to the windy pool?]

… by Minna Thomas Antrim.

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

Brew me a cup for a winter’s night.
For the wind howls loud and the furies fight;
Spice it with love and stir it with care,
And I’ll toast our bright eyes, my sweetheart fair.

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

UD‘s been handed many cups of mulled cider over the last few days. She likes to see the cloves in the cup, likes to blow on the cider and sip around the cloves and allspice and cinnamon.

The wee verse is charming, but we want something more substantial to mull.

A lively understandable spirit
Once entertained you.
It will come again.
Be still.
Wait.

[Who knows? These bright, glacial mysteries are beyond me. Best merely to sit tight and wait for the spring, when the world will become comprehensible again.]

… (here’s a somewhat eccentric version – there are many versions of this beautiful song on YouTube) is better known than his poem Now Winter Nights Enlarge.

But thinking as I am – as so many are – on Christopher Hitchens, it seems a good poem to dedicate to his memory.

As always I’ll interrupt its lines with my comments. Go to the link on its title to see (and hear) the poem without my messing about.

Now Winter Nights Enlarge

All do not all things well:
Some measures comely tread,
Some knotted riddles tell,
Some poems smoothly read.
The summer hath his joys,
And winter his delights;
Though love and all his pleasures are but toys
They shorten tedious nights.

[Not everyone’s good at everything – talents seems parceled out, with some able to dance, some to tell stories, some to recite poems… Yet the beauty of winter (the poem perhaps suggests) is the way it perforce throws us together around the warming fire, where our human capacities are communally, richly, displayed and shared. Winter is when we pleasure each other in an unusual display of generosity and disinhibition (think of the last scene of Babette’s Feast); this is its delight. At these concluding lines of the poem, we circle around to the original use of the word enlarge and explain it: winter’s hours enlarge by prompting us to shorten (nice poetic paradox there) for one another the tedium of a dull life.]

… which UD, marooned on the east coast, will not be able to see (she saw one last December), Sylvia Plath’s The Moon and the Yew Tree. Since I’m interrupting the poem with commentary, you might want to read it first unmolested, at the link in the sentence before this one.

The Moon and the Yew Tree

I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering
Blue and mystical over the face of the stars.
Inside the church, the saints will be all blue,
Floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews,
Their hands and faces stiff with holiness.
The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild.
And the message of the yew tree is blackness — blackness and silence.

[The poet, directly under the moon’s complete despair, is able to take the measure of her own depression’s depth. She tries, one last time, to animate the earth and the heavens with beauty and ultimate meaning: Clouds are like blue flowers softening the sharp harsh points of the stars, making the cosmos not cold and empty but mystically abundant… But no. Inside the church, the statues of saints come to life and drift, as the poet has been drifting, not among the yews, but among the pews, prayer seats formed from the trees, human objects derived from nature and fashioned into locations of rest and repair from our cold journeys outside under the moon.

And the moon couldn’t give a shit. She sees nothing of this – the poet’s anguish, the world’s efforts to warm itself by a god… The yew tree points upward at the moon to make a statement: This is your reality, both earthly and cosmic: A vast, empty blur, inside of which the mind moves with its empty, anguishing, meaningless thoughts.]

… enters Westminster Abbey; and on the occasion, here’s one of his poems, “The Harvest Moon.”

You can hear it recited here, at 3:35.

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

The Harvest Moon

Till the gold fields of stiff wheat
Cry `We are ripe, reap us!’ and the rivers
Sweat from the melting hills.

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

Note first the soft rolling sounds of the first three lines, not a hard letter among them, except for those three almost hidden little Ts: harvest, gently, vast. Ts hidden inside, or dropped lightly at the end, of their word. So the language will follow the smoothness of the moon as it softens the earth’s “stiff wheat” and petrified sheep, and melts the earth’s hills, making us ready for gathering up as if at “the end of the world.”

And how strange that we want to be taken – ‘We are ripe – reap us!’ We’ve kept “a kneeling vigil,” “a religious hush,” in front of the ravishing moon. Like the moon, we “sink upward,” melting into the earth in hope of transcendence. Our deep earth-drum resonates with the moon as it comes to cast a final calm over all of our laboring as it takes us.

she swells
Filling heaven, as if red hot, and sailing
Closer and closer like the end of the world.

So don’t watch this if you plan to see the film, but the final Wagnerian scene of Melancholia comes to mind here, the planet Melancholia sailing closer and closer and it is the end of the world…

But this is no disaster movie: For at least one of the characters, the heaven-filling swell of the planet Melancholia is a kind of fulfillment, something sought after as beautiful and true.