“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.

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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.

… tampering with visual stuff in metro stations and cars. She doesn’t seem to mind just a little tampering on occasion. Not all-out defacement! But – you know – say you take out your black pen and fill in just one of a big smiling set of teeth. Is that so horrible?

So a couple of college students in New York, depressed by a poem prominently installed in a subway tunnel (it was meant stay up there for a year, but never got taken down) climbed a ladder last week and rewrote it. They didn’t write a whole new poem; with great care, they used the poem as written, but tweaked it to be upbeat.

Here’s the original poem. A draggy little ditty about the miserable working life of the commuter. A major downer inside a derelict subway tunnel. Makes the Russians look giddy.

Is it so horrible that these two felt moved to subvert its words? UD applauds their literary ingenuity, and she notes that the new poem, as of this writing, remains on the wall.

The poet first remembers attending the wedding of a passionate woman with whom he’d once had a passionate affair. Out of fear and conventionality, she’s marrying a dull steady man. The poet’s contribution to the event is the buying and strewing of a thousand red and white roses — a parting gesture of ardor for a woman consigning herself to passionlessness.

Now, much older, the poet considers his own younger life.

There is no feast but energy. All men
know — have known and will remember
again and again — what food that is
for the running young wolf of the rare days
when shapes fall from the air
and may be had for the leaping.
Clean in the mouth of joy. Flat and dusty.
And how they are instantly nothing —
a commotion in the air and in the blood.
— And how they are endlessly all.

———————————

The thanksgiving feast honors the gift of spiritedness — sheer visceral delight in the world, an adequacy to the world’s challenge to us to be full of life, as the world is full of life. Vibrancy comes at us and we, especially when young, leap up to it, tear at it for sustenance. Yet these passionate fulfillments “are instantly nothing – / A commotion in the air and in the blood.” They come and go, overwhelming us and vanishing; and as we age the possibility of vibrancy lessens.

Still, if they are in the instant nothing, they are also “endlessly all.” We hoard these moments, drawing from our store of them a sort of second-level vibrancy that also sustains us.

… I remember the feasts of my life,
their every flowing. I remember
the wolf all men remember in his blood.
I remember the air become
a feast of flowers.

The poet gives thanks, then, for the leap, and for the after-leap; for the enlivening memory of the original flowering.

… It is the words starve us, the act that feeds.
The air trembling with the white wicks
of its falling encloses us. To be
perfect, I suppose, we must be brief.
The long thing is to remember
imperfectly, dirtying with gratitude
the grave of abundance. O flower-banked,
air-dazzling, and abundant woman,
though the young wolf is dead, all men
know — have known and must remember —
You.

The poet begins with typical ambivalence about his vocation: Words are a kind of enervation; what you want is the leaping. Act now, live all you can, because the flame of life will be drawn out of us as fire is drawn up and out of a candle. To be sure, any life’s perfect moments of bliss will be brief; but the way to play out the rest of your existence is with fidelity to those moments, always remembering and always being grateful for them. The grave of abundance is polished, quiet, sealed; to it you must bring your grateful “dirtying” – your messy, foggily recalled, erotically insistent, earthily alive tribute to the vibrancy that was.

And why?

Because it’s one of those ur poems, one of those echt poems, one of those poems that simply does what a poem can do, and does it beautifully. Everyone loves Adelstrop because it isn’t showy and it isn’t sentimental and it isn’t welcome to my psyche. Art arrests life, wrote someone or other, and Adelstrop artfully describes life suddenly arrested so you can see it pure. Pure – what do I mean by pure… I mean life for most people contains these very occasional epiphanic moments when the sheer flow and contingency of event breaks and you see – quoting Wallace Stevens here, in his poem Snowman:

Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

The poet’s poet – Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop – is almost always doing Adelstrop, variations of Adelstrop. These poets evoke a consciousness able for a moment to perceive the true silent steadfast life of the world – call it Gaia, if you’d like – as it breathes its being behind our daily agitations. Meditation, prayer – there are disciplines that can take you to a similar place. But the most powerful poetry represents a body of writing that inaugurates you into this condition of calmed and clarified consciousness, this state of full receptivity to the song of the earth, simply by making you feel what someone feeling the receptivity feels.

Yes. I remember Adlestrop —
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.

And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

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

The life train suddenly and inexplicably puts on the brakes; we have no idea where we are. No motion, and a silent empty platform, and letters that don’t refer to anything. ADELSTROP means to designate a place, but designates instead the nothing that is. Its very absurdity eases the poet into nothingness in a way Portsmouth – a name with meanings in it – wouldn’t.

There’s hardly any sound – hissing steam, a throat cleared – and everyone’s abandoned the midday June heat for the shade. But for the poet in the passenger car, the full summer sun can now burn into the human void and shed absolute radiance on the world of natural objects, objects commonly obscured by humanity. He lists each thing he sees as if playing a children’s game, reconstituting the world out of nothingness … I spy with my little eye… Each of these objects hits him with the same newness, the same sense of having burst fresh and alone from the earth’s body, that objects seem to have to children playing pointing games in the semi-dark. Grass. Haycocks. Meadowsweet.

The name, the objects: all seem

No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

As his eye lifts to the clouds, the poet realizes that while each of these singular objects claims radiant independent life, each is also part of a mysterious multiplicity. The willow has a kinship with the cloud – both are infused with powerful and beautiful being, and together with all the natural objects of the world they make the world, the world whose life, again, always seems mere backdrop to our human drama.

So for this minute the world discloses itself to the poet. He sees its singularity and multiplicity. For him for this minute it pulls itself into singing unison, allowing him to hear all the birds of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

And just like The Snowman, and just like Virginia, this poem, which wants to give verbal life to the staggered accretion of life-awareness, will compose itself out of small lines and small words – new to this newly disclosed form of life, we bring to it a child’s gathering recognitions.

… Philip Levine.

[W]hat scenario could you imagine that would [scandalously] end your … term [as laureate]?

I’m 83 years old. I don’t think there’s any intern with the patience to be seduced by me.

… I wonder if you agree with John Barr, the president of the Poetry Foundation, who, with the help of a $200 million endowment, has been trying to popularize poetry by encouraging poets to write more upbeat poems.

Hell, no. I can’t believe this guy Barr is a poet, because I don’t think a real poet would think in that way. When a poem comes to you, you’re not going to say, “Oh, no, this goddamned poem is just too mean-spirited.”

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Levine’s poetry?

UD is not a Philip Levine fan. He is chatty, drifty, message-bearing, without style. But – si t’insiste – here’s a Levine poem.

Gospel

The new grass rising in the hills,
the cows loitering in the morning chill,
a dozen or more old browns hidden
in the shadows of the cottonwoods
beside the streambed. I go higher
to where the road gives up and there’s
only a faint path strewn with lupine
between the mountain oaks. I don’t
ask myself what I’m looking for.
I didn’t come for answers
to a place like this, I came to walk
on the earth, still cold, still silent.
Still ungiving, I’ve said to myself,
although it greets me with last year’s
dead thistles and this year’s
hard spines, early blooming
wild onions, the curling remains
of spider’s cloth. What did I bring
to the dance? In my back pocket
a crushed letter from a woman
I’ve never met bearing bad news
I can do nothing about. So I wander
these woods half sightless while
a west wind picks up in the trees
clustered above. The pines make
a music like no other, rising and
falling like a distant surf at night
that calms the darkness before
first light. “Soughing” we call it, from
Old English, no less. How weightless
words are when nothing will do.

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

The new grass rising in the hills,
the cows loitering in the morning chill,
a dozen or more old browns hidden
in the shadows of the cottonwoods
beside the streambed.

We start with some nature imagery. Begins optimistically, especially given the title, “Gospel.” Good news, the world is born again each morning, each day, each season, the new grass not growing but rising. Yet the use of overused, not descriptively acute words like loitering suggests that although the world described might be new, the poem is unlikely to be anything we haven’t sort of seen before. True, we’ve got some nice alliteration going – l sounds in the first two lines, d sounds in the three that follow – but there’s no sensibility here. Plain homespun description.

I go higher
to where the road gives up and there’s
only a faint path strewn with lupine
between the mountain oaks.

A man walks in the woods, pondering as he goes. The calm, plainspoken feel here is very Robert Frosty. Also the sense of an affinity between the poet and the natural world: the grass rises, the poet goes higher. All this rising, plus the poem’s title, puts us in a spiritual mood.

I guess he wants the u assonance of lupine and strewn, but like loitering, strewn is a sort of obvious choice – we want the poet to go higher stylistically. You can be plainspoken and stylish at the same time (see Whitman).

I don’t
ask myself what I’m looking for.
I didn’t come for answers
to a place like this, I came to walk
on the earth, still cold, still silent.

The fresh morning ground, still cold, still silent, calls the poet; he wants to pace a pristine earth. To clear his head? He’s not sure, and neither are we.

Still ungiving, I’ve said to myself,
although it greets me with last year’s
dead thistles and this year’s
hard spines, early blooming
wild onions, the curling remains
of spider’s cloth.

The earth is beautiful and new, but gives no answers; we can pace it season after season and it will remain spiritually unforthcoming. It seems friendly enough though, setting out for us its rich mix of live and dead growth… The phrases here –

dead thistles and this year’s / hard spines, early blooming / wild onions, the curling remains / of spider’s cloth

– are very nice indeed, and begin to give things a little symbolic traction having to do with the ceaseless mysterious round of death and life and death and life. In terms of sound, early and curling work beautifully and subtly together… I mean, the subtlety throughout these lines involves a kind of menacing morbidness (dead, hard spines, remains) alongside a perky evocation of new life. So life and death mixed (the poet is surrounded by the dead remains of the last season and bursting-forth shoots of the new), and maybe there’s a lesson somewhere in here for the poet.

What did I bring
to the dance? In my back pocket
a crushed letter from a woman
I’ve never met bearing bad news
I can do nothing about.

Something has very much upset the poet; he has, on reading it, crushed the bad-news-bearing letter and (rather than throwing it away) stuck it in his back pocket. This letter is what he has brought to the nature dancing and dying all around him. He doesn’t tell us what the deal is, but the main thing is that it’s very bad news, and the poet is powerless by way of responding to it.

So I wander
these woods half sightless while
a west wind picks up in the trees
clustered above. The pines make
a music like no other, rising and
falling like a distant surf at night
that calms the darkness before
first light.

In response to whatever anguish this letter has prompted, the poet walks the mountains – maybe to calm himself, maybe – despite the silence of nature – to find some answers. Don’t forget the poem’s title, obviously at odds with the idea that nature is silent. The gospel proclaims not only the truth but the gospel truth of our redemption, our eventual transcendence of earthly anguish and confusion. Meanwhile, the poet is so upset that he’s not even fully seeing the world – half sightless, he keeps walking; and now the wind comes up, and that sound will carry the meaning of the poem. The calming effect of the wind, we take it, calms the poet’s tormented thoughts, calms his darkness as the day breaks, so that he can return to the world of people able to bear his bad news.

“Soughing” we call it, from
Old English, no less. How weightless
words are when nothing will do.

That’s pronounced sao-ing – a word for the soft sound of the wind the poet’s been hearing. The poet is maybe initially pleased, as a writer would be, to find this elegant word, with its deep (heavy) roots in Old English; yet the poem ends with the sad observation that, far from gospel weight, our words, under the impact of insoluble human burdens, bear nothing at all – they’re merely sounds, as the wind is merely a sound.

In short, the poem records an agonized poet turning to those two hardies – nature and art – for consolation and clarity. To no one’s surprise, both fail, and having read the poem it’s clear the title is ironic. Bitter. Our gospel is writ in water, writ on the wind, on violently crushed letters, etc.

I have the same problem with this working out of a familiar human circumstance and dilemma that I have with much of Robert Frost, who seems to be walking a few paces behind this pacing poet. Or in front of. This poem’s tag line is disappointing, since it’s too easy, as if the poet felt compelled to formalize his experience, round it out, stick on a moral, rather than conclude the poem with the full measure of anger and inconclusiveness the speaker no doubt feels.

Levine calls John Berryman his biggest influence. Berryman would have done something other than end with the limp-wristed How weightless business.

There’s Michael D. Higgins – not a very good poet, but good at so many other things (like getting elected President at age seventy) that we will praise him here.

There’s W.S. Merwin (age eighty-four), who tells an interviewer that

I still find myself reciting for pleasure, as I have ever since I was 18, [Yeats’] “Sailing to Byzantium” and hearing something in one of the lines that I didn’t hear before. You go on learning. What a great poem teaches you, and it’s not intellectual at all, is the resonance in the language that’s heard there. This goes back to the very origins of poetry and to the very origins of language. I think poetry is as old as language, and both come out of the same thing — an effort to try to express something that is inexpressible. If something can’t be said, what do you do? You scream. You make some terrible noise of pain or anguish or anger or something like that. You make a sound, an animal-like sound which, with time and society trying to calm you down, begins to take shape into something.

Merwin’s just like Higgins; he has, the interviewer notes, “no intention of slowing down.”

And of course Merwin cites restless old Yeats, who wrote “Sailing to Byzantium” in his sixties, because Merwin wants to make a statement about resonance — about living long enough to make and hear sounds that resound very deeply.

Sailing to Byzantium

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

Expressing the inexpressible, the poem is a scream calmed, shaped; but you still want the resonance of the scream, the vibrant memory, coming off the sensual music the words make, of the outburst.

Yeats begins not resonantly, because his first stanza wants merely to describe the always-dying song of mindless physical beings. Happy in their summer of full heedless life – who wouldn’t be? – the young ignore their coming paltriness, and so remain in place, feeling none of the old poet’s spiritual restlessness.

In the next stanza, when he evokes old age, the poet spits out simple, often monosyllabic words, which convey both anger and the personal meagerness prompting the anger:

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick

baBAHbaBAHbaBAHbaBAH BAH!

The anger’s sharpened with all those loud hard letters: t, p, k. Then, with unless, the soft sibilant esses begin, the soft confiding whisper of poetic voice to poetic soul begins:

unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

The holy buzz of Byzantium whispers to the poet that the only way he’s going to sustain his own being is through transcending it into art, into being the art to which he has so far given only sensual music. Now he must study, in Byzantium, an aesthetic that doesn’t, like the poet, die. He must learn what it means to be immortal.

As brave as Dimitrov, as wise as Stalin.

You’re a Gaelic poet and a Stalinist. You remain a Stalinist way past the degenerate stage (invasion of Hungary). While a Stalinist you write and publish a poem with the above line. (A Bulgarian communist, Dimitrov was head of the Comintern from ’34 to ’43. Although all traces of him have been removed from Bulgaria, “A massive painted statue of Dimitrov survives in the centre of Place Bulgarie in Cotonou, Republic of Benin, two decades after the country abandoned Marxism-Leninism and the colossal statue of Vladimir Lenin was removed from Place Lenine. Few Beninois are aware of the history of the statue or its subject.”) You edit the lines out of the poem much later – for a 1989 collection – but now – on the centenary of your birth – a big collection of your work comes out which restores the original passage. You died in 1996, and so have nothing to say about the restoration.

The editors explain that “it is perhaps time to remind people that there is more to [Sorley] MacLean’s work than what he presented himself back in 1989.” Another Gaelic poet comments, “MacLean’s self-shaped ‘biographical legend’ might not stand up to scrutiny in the way he intended, but his status as a major European poet is never in doubt.”

It’s an intriguing moral question. To what extent should editors honor only the poet’s approved versions of much-redacted poems? Especially when the poet has arguably airbrushed his own political history?

… a past winner, 1987’s Joseph Brodsky.

A Russian poet tossed out of Russia for being a poet as well as a Jew, he lived in the States for many years until his early death (heart attack; he was a prodigious chain smoker) at 55. He loved the English language, and used it beautifully, but wrote most of his poems in Russian — and then turned around and translated many of them into English. He’s famous not just for his great poems and essays, but for the sass he gave a Soviet judge (“Who decided you’re a poet?” “Nobody. Who put me in the ranks of mankind?”).

In a review of a memoir about Susan Sontag, the reviewer cites a Brodsky anecdote:

[Joseph] Brodsky could outdo [Susan] Sontag both in heedless self-absorption and European-style imperturbability – though of course Brodsky, a Russian, was hardly more European than his paramour [Sontag]. Late in the book, [its author] reflects on something he had said over dinner: “You know in the end, none of it matters, what happens to you in your life. Not suffering. Not happiness or unhappiness. Not illness. Not prison. Nothing.”

So we can start here, with Brodsky’s nihilism (“I was a normal Soviet boy,” [Brodsky once] said. “I could have become a man of the system. But something turned me upside down: [Fyodor Dostoevsky’s] Notes from the Underground. I realized what I am. That I am bad.”), which of course wasn’t nihilism, or wasn’t thoroughgoing every blessed day nihilism… He’d been through enough horror and absurdity in his life to feel the pointless degradation of being human — at least in the corporate sense (“I think the world is capable of only one thing basically — proliferating its evils.”). Yet he insisted in his Nobel address that

Regardless of whether one is a writer or a reader, one’s task consists first of all in mastering a life that is one’s own, not imposed or prescribed from without, no matter how noble its appearance may be. For each of us is issued but one life, and we know full well how it all ends. It would be regrettable to squander this one chance on someone else’s appearance, someone else’s experience…

Personal salvation, if you will, was indeed possible, through the mutual misanthropy, the consciousness-equality, of aesthetic experience:

A novel or a poem is not a monologue, but the conversation of a writer with a reader, a conversation, I repeat, that is very private, excluding all others – if you will, mutually misanthropic. And in the moment of this conversation a writer is equal to a reader, as well as the other way around, regardless of whether the writer is a great one or not. This equality is the equality of consciousness. It remains with a person for the rest of his life in the form of memory, foggy or distinct; and, sooner or later, appropriately or not, it conditions a person’s conduct. [A] novel or a poem is the product of mutual loneliness – of a writer or a reader.

Take his poem, Seaward:

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Seaward

Darling, you think it’s love, it’s just a midnight journey.
Best are the dales and rivers removed by force,
as from the next compartment throttles “Oh, stop it, Bernie,”
yet the rhythm of those paroxysms is exactly yours.
Hook to the meat! Brush to the red-brick dentures,
alias cigars, smokeless like a driven nail!
Here the works are fewer than monkey wrenches,
and the phones are whining, dwarfed by to-no-avail.
Bark, then, with joy at Clancy, Fitzgibbon, Miller.
Dogs and block letters care how misfortune spells.
Still, you can tell yourself in the john by the spat-at mirror,
slamming the flush and emerging with clean lapels.
Only the liquid furniture cradles the dwindling figure.
Man shouldn’t grow in size once he’s been portrayed.
Look: what’s been left behind is about as meager
as what remains ahead. Hence the horizon’s blade.

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A man takes a train journey, with his lover, to the coast. He reprimands her for her romanticism. Nothing like traveling on a swaying train late at night, the windows dark, muffled voices from other compartments, the natural world blurred by the force of the train’s onward rush… Or so you think, love. Really, we’re just traveling from Point A to Point B. The lovers in the next compartment? They’re as ridiculous as we are when we go at it.

The world of the train is in fact cramped and pitifully reduced to basic human needs, a place of hooks for the bags of food we’re carrying, and little toothbrushes for our smoke-stained teeth. Hook to this, and brush to that — the setting is ridiculously like a military camp, full of machines that want to be of service but are “dwarfed” by a sense of futility.

Be happy, then, for the busy, legible, utilitarian world that will reveal itself outside all this, when the sun comes up. We prefer that richly elaborated world, because losing ourselves in it means losing our sense of pointlessness.

Only trapped inside of places like trains, where our essential reduction reveals itself, do we recognize the truth. Only negotiating the narrow bathroom recalls us to our degraded condition.

In other words: Want to see yourself? Look at your piss dwindling in the flushed toilet bowl.

Man shouldn’t grow in size once he’s been portrayed.
Look: what’s been left behind is about as meager
as what remains ahead. Hence the horizon’s blade.

Not really in a holiday mood, is he? She thought they’d steal away for a romantic weekend at the shore; he’s brooding over the stinky, sicko, Toy World we all agree to live in… Only thing to do is be honest about it. Let’s not give ourselves airs. We’re just as stupid and embarrassing in our pretensions to a higher passion as the people in the next compartment. The cramped toy world of wrenches and nails hasn’t been left behind when we go to the majestic shore. On the contrary, the horizon over the ocean is just another machine — a blade — which makes clear, with infinite precision, the chopped up, meager nature of the earth.

The technique here is the same as Auden’s (a major influence on Brodsky) and the same as Elizabeth Bishop’s:

What interests me is [Auden’s] symptomatic technique of description. He never gives you the real . . . ulcer . . . he talks about its symptoms, ya? He keeps his eye all the time on civilization, on the human condition. But he doesn’t give you the direct description of it, he gives you the oblique way. …[I]f you really want your poem to work, the usage of adjectives should be minimal; but you should stuff it as much as you can with nouns — even the verbs should suffer. If you cast over a poem a certain magic veil that removes adjectives and verbs, when you remove the veil the paper still should be dark with nouns.

Language, using language in a certain way, turns out to be, for Brodsky, the one reliable non-nihilism:

A person sets out to write a poem for a variety of reasons: to win the heart of his beloved; to express his attitude toward the reality surrounding him, be it a landscape or a state; to capture his state of mind at a given instant; to leave – as he thinks at that moment – a trace on the earth. He resorts to this form – the poem – most likely for unconsciously mimetic reasons: the black vertical clot of words on the white sheet of paper presumably reminds him of his own situation in the world, of the balance between space and his body. … The one who writes a poem writes it above all because verse writing is an extraordinary accelerator of conscience, of thinking, of comprehending the universe. Having experienced this acceleration once, one is no longer capable of abandoning the chance to repeat this experience…

The train is a pathetic, jerry-built interior accelerating extraordinarily through an immense outer darkness. To this train the poet brings his train of thought, his wordkit. However dark the manifest content he derives from the meeting of mind and machine, consciousness and world, the poet will in fact be celebrating, scrunched up in his little compartment, his writing pad on his knees. For he has felt the ecstasy of comprehension. And that’s the ticket.