… 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.”

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

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:

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

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.

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

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.

Here are a few words about the just-named Literature Nobel recipient, Tomas Transtromer.

Two ideas about human beings recur in his poetry:

One, we are mentally and physically fragile beings, for whom existence itself is an immense, constant struggle. Just surviving in the world – the obdurate, difficult, indifferent world – is an incredible struggle. Periodically, we lose ourselves. Our very identities – so contingent, so frail – actually vanish, and in those long moments of not even knowing who we are and where we are, we discover our true underlying condition, our non-being (our being-toward-death, if you like) amid the baffles and brazens of personality. A certain discipline toward, a certain respect for, reality involves accepting, and thinking about those amnesiac moments as they disclose metaphysical truths, not just about our defensive, patched-up social being, but about the nothingness that preceded, and will succeed, us.

The Name is one among many Transtromer poems that make the point. I found it quoted here, in a review essay by Bill Coyle.

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

In an unpublished essay titled Come as You Are, Eve Sedgwick quotes the following passage – strikingly similar to the Transtromer poem – from The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. She remarks that its description of amnesia “filled me with a comical sense of recognition.”

Imagine a person who suddenly wakes up in a hospital after a road accident to find she is suffering from total amnesia. Outwardly, everything is intact: she has the same face and form, her senses and mind are there, but she doesn’t have any idea or any trace of a memory of who she really is. In exactly the same way, we cannot remember our true identity, our original nature. Frantically, and in real dread, we cast around and improvise another identity, one we clutch onto with all the desperation of someone falling continually into an abyss. This false and ignorantly assumed identity is “ego.”

So ego, then, is the absence of true knowledge of who we really are, together with its result: a doomed clutching on, at all costs, to a cobbled together and makeshift image of ourselves, an inevitably chameleon charlatan self that keeps changing us and has to, to keep alive the fiction of its existence. In Tibetan ego is called dak dzin, which means “grasping at a self.” . . . . The fact that we need to grasp at all and go on and on grasping shows that in the depths of our being we know that the self does not inherently exist. From this secret, unnerving knowledge spring all our fundamental insecurities and fear. (116-17)

It’s a more radical idea than Transtromer’s, which at least has us returning – amid the indifferent grinding on of the nearby car lights – to a sense of I – I – I. And of course for the Buddhist this sense of self-loss isn’t “hell” — it’s simply the reality that “the self does not inherently exist.” For Buddhists, the choice isn’t between feeling you’ve been reduced to a panicky animal – “a cat in a sack” – and feeling fully and comfortably affirmed as a rosy rounded ego. But despite these differences, both writers evoke the basic fact of our shaky, constantly-needing-to-be-elaborated, selfhood…

The second idea predominant in Transtromer’s work is related to the first one. Contingent and slippery we may be, but one capacious and reliable thing we do have is interiority. Our consciousness, our memory, our imagination, enables our movement – such as it is – through the world. A cultivation of those vast inner spaces which are all ours can make existence easier. Here’s part of “Romanesque Arches”:

and inside each of them vault opened behind vault endlessly.

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

Here’s another evocation of our precious vaults.

The Indoors is Endless

It’s spring in 1827, Beethoven
hoists his death-mask and sails off.

The gentle downward slope gets steeper
and imperceptibly becomes an abyss.

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

Heavy breathing, staggering, rowing against the current: There’s the first idea, the immense difficulty of life — all aspects of life. But then, imagining a long-dead relative imagining him, the poet says that “all the surface action turns inwards… the future opens” to the present. Erik – the long-dead relative – uses his vast vault of imagination (“the indoors is endless”) to see the living poet walking today around Washington DC, where life isn’t difficult – where “only / every second column bears weight.”

Yet even here, in the white weightless contemporary city, “the dream of the poor turns to ash,” and the same abyss that threatens Erik, with his “bullet through the soul,” threatens his descendant.

Dylan’s the front-runner for the literature Nobel at the moment.

… David Kosofsky — she’s writing a eulogy for him, and wants to quote some things – UD discovers a poem she forgot she wrote.

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

SONATA FOR UNPLAYED PIANOS

That put even the spinnets to sleep,
Those thin inoffensive standup numbers,
Happy to do vaudeville or other light patter –
Anything to keep
From tonal slumber.
Chopsticks, for that matter.

… into being,” writes Elaine Scarry in Beauty and Being Just.

Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem, Spring and Fall, keeps doing that – spinning off songs and films inspired by it, more than a century after it was written.

Not copies. Scarry didn’t mean exact copies. Aesthetic ripples, echoes.

As in the just-released film, Margaret, which features “an English class recitation of [this] stirring and enigmatic Victorian poem addressed to a young girl of that name.” Spring and Fall is a very morbid poem, and the film has a morbid theme — a kind of coming of age via coming to grips with death theme — that fits the Hopkins poem nicely. When you’re young, you cry over dead things in a babyish visceral way, but you don’t really understand death yet. You’re a kind of mindless sentimentalist, a kitsch-meister. When you’re older, you get it – you understand precisely what death is, and why you’re crying over it. It’s the same fact of death generating the same grief when you’re eight and when you’re eighty, but you have to get significantly past eight to realize this, to feel the reality of death. Apparently the film Margaret is all about the main character’s passage from innocence to experience in this regard.

Hopkins takes this process of death-realization one step further at the very end of the poem:

It is Margaret you mourn for.

Our profoundest death-haunting is of course our intimation of our own mortality, so a third phase in this eerie maturation involves a movement somewhat away from despair over other people’s annihilation and toward anticipatory pity for ourselves — toward a sense of our own fragility, our implication in the common fate. The slightly wobbly, slow, vulnerable, meditative, confiding, whispery setting of the Hopkins lines that Natalie Merchant wrote and performed – with a simple melancholy guitar along for the ride – seems to UD quite a good capture of the poem. Here’s the poem.

Spring and Fall

So, you’re crying because the leaves are falling, and all the golden colors are vanishing. Fine. Cry. Your pure emotions make you feel for everything. You feel as much for one dead leaf as you do for human beings, which is pretty strange, but goes to your indiscriminate, innocent, open, heart, unacquainted with the night.

Once you’ve gotten your share of human suffering and death, massive piles of leaves will leave you unmoved. Maturation means losing cosmic, undifferentiated feeling, and directing things like grief where they belong: toward the people you love and lose. Weeping isn’t just acting out now, a visceral reaction to random loss-tableaux; now you will weep and know why.

It doesn’t matter that you don’t yet realize your grief, that you think of your tears as exclusively about the leaves. You’re young. Enjoy it while you can. But even though you can’t articulate the truer, later grief, you probably, even now, intuit it. Probably even now some ghostly soulful understanding in you guesses what underlies childish tears: Grief for all of blighted humankind.

And even more deeply underlying: Grief for your own blightedness.

… MacArthur recipient, writes a hell of a poem. Look at her elaborate rhyme scheme here. Quite something.

Sublunary

Mid-sentence, we remembered the eclipse,
Arguing home through our scant patch of park
Still warm with barrel wine, when none too soon
We checked the hour by glancing at the moon,
Unphased at first by that old ruined marble
Looming like a monument over the hill,
So brimmed with light it seemed about to spill,

In the penumbra of a tree. At last
We rose and strolled at a reflective pace
Past the taverna crammed with light and smoke
And people drinking, laughing at a joke,
Unaware that anything had passed
Outside in the night where we delayed
Sheltering in the shadow we had made.

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Source: Poetry (June 2008).
Reprinted here.

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So… it’s a narrative, describing a couple walking home from a dinner out (they had wine; maybe they’re a little tipsy), under the moon … The poem’s title, the word sublunary, refers to anything that occurs on earth, beneath the moon … anything earth-bound, really, as opposed to heavenly. In John Donne’s A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning, the speaker rather disdainfully refers to “dull sublunary lovers” whose love isn’t true love because it lacks the transcendent quality of the speaker’s. So to be sublunary is not only to be resident on the earth; it can also imply that you are a little dull, grubby, material, stuck in the thinginess of things … incapable of reaching the heights of passion and clarity.

And indeed this couple, arguing, hot with wine, unprettily earthbound in a scant patch of park, feels sublunary enough.

They suddenly remember there’s a lunar eclipse tonight, and they look up at the moon, which is so far as “unphased” as they.

The poet means unfazed – undisturbed, calm – but she packs the phases of the moon into the word unfazed and comes up with this remarkable neologism. The moon hasn’t eclipsed; and the couple hasn’t changed from its sublunary dullness.

In the eventual darkening of the moon the couple sees their own darkness, their daily confused sublunary struggle (we are here as on a darkling plain, as another moony poem has it). Their disturbance at this sudden perception is mirrored in the disturbance the eclipse generates in the world around them: dogs bark, confused and disbelieving birds and crickets complain. The world is out of sorts; in the absence of the moon there’s not even the understanding of oneself as sublunary, not even the stability derived from a sense of one’s place in the universe.

And then the moon was gone, and in its place,
A dim red planet hung just out of reach,
As real as a bitter orange or ripened peach

In the penumbra of a tree.

The cold hard clarity of the moon – shedding at least some light on our lives, and offering at least an icon of transcendence toward which to aspire – now gives way to the bitter reality of our hopeless and confused embroilment on the earth, our

old chaos of the sun,
Or … old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free…

Ah love! Let us be true to one another! says Arnold, and so says Stallings; the oblivious world of the taverna misses this eclipse of all light, but, having ourselves seen it, we of course cling to one another:

we delayed
Sheltering in the shadow we had made.

It’s like the end of another poem set in Greece – James Merrill’s Santorini: Stopping the Leak. At the end of his walk, the speaker finds himself ready for a “tavern in the shade,” a place to shelter from the too-harsh sunlight and moonlight of an untranscendent world.

The only thing that can “eclipse” the pain of our all-too-humanness is love ((Reaching for each other’s fingertips)); the only true sheltering shade from this harshness is the shade we create for ourselves, together.

And that tour de force of a rhyme scheme, with its sly unexpected recurrences – eclipse only eventually finding fingertips, marble, long-since forgotten by the reader, returning as warble? It conveys both our continued (modest) mastery of a world we might be tempted to give up on as an object of understanding; and in its snaky sneaky gorgeousness it helps accustom us, in any case, to the penumbra.

… it’s time to look at a chilled-to-perfection poem. Auden’s Brussels in Winter puts you inside how it feels when the world switches on what Stephen Dedalus, in Portrait, calls the refrigerating apparatus. What the poet describes is already (to him) an unknown world – the city of Brussels – and when this world freezes over, its mystery hardens into absolute darkness. In Brussels in Winter, each charter’d street evaporates, and the desperately lost poet desperately seeks his bearings. Or any bearings.

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

Brussels in Winter

A look contains the history of man,
And fifty francs will earn a stranger right
To take the shuddering city in his arms.

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

Look at how much poetry Auden packs in, how much implication, mood, and philosophy he cooks up in his few abbreviated rhymed lines… Look at his vanful of similes and metaphors as they speed by your eyes…

But slow it down. Take it little by little. See how a poem does what a poem can do.

Wandering through cold streets tangled like old string,
Coming on fountains rigid in the frost,
Its formula escapes you; it has lost
The certainty that constitutes a thing.

There’s an unclarity of agency here. Who is wandering? Not its formula escapes me; its formula escapes you. The poem is written in an insinuating second-person, in which the poet assumes that the condition of existential lostness and self-alienation he’s about to evoke is certainly not his own alone, but is shared by his reader. He assumes that however grounded you may feel at this or that moment, you easily understand – because you’ve experienced it – the eerie dépaysement that occurs when you lose the formula of existence, the certainty that constitutes your life on earth as a thing, an object of familiarity and recognition.

As for style: cold streets/old string has the assonance, balance, and the near-rhymey feel that make that odd transition – from streets to tangled string – feel plausible. The linguistic proximity suggests a conceptual kinship.

The stopped flow of the fountains has an abrupt feel to it, instantly (along with the poet’s insinuating you) locating you alongside the poet in the same suddenly arrested cityscape.

And here’s another unclarity: Its. Its formula escapes you. It has lost. We don’t yet know to what it refers, which keeps us in the same confusion as the poet. Gradually it becomes clear that it is Brussels, the city.

Only the old, the hungry and the humbled
Keep at this temperature a sense of place,
And in their misery are all assembled;
The winter holds them like an Opera-House.

Only if you’re trapped in some operatic theater of despair can you keep your bearings here. Frozen into place, you take your background part in a chorus of human misery. The reader hears the plaintive calls of the chorus throughout this stanza, with all its long O‘s and A‘s. It sings.

Ridges of rich apartments loom to-night
Where isolated windows glow like farms,
A phrase goes packed with meaning like a van,

How odd the world is; and to carry that oddness the poet finds odd figures. City apartments look like sudden outcroppings of the natural world – the world of bearings, groundings… Of course the desperate poet sees them in this way, as distant objects of desire – rich ridges, glowing farms. Warm things, glowing with the fire of their unstoppable being, their autonomous radiance as living, meaning-rich things-in-themselves.

And now the poet picks up a bit of language as it passes him on the street. French? Dutch? His effort to recapture his lost sense of existing has him grasping onto it as definitive in significance, if only he can understand it. But it drives on.

A look contains the history of man,
And fifty francs will earn a stranger right
To take the shuddering city in his arms.

Again the poet’s desperation finds the very history of humanity in the expression of a random face… a face also quickly lost in the old, hungry, and humbled winter crowd.

A look contains the history of man, and a body – any random streetwalker’s body – is the embodiment of the shivering city itself. This body carries the frozen city’s pathos, its wispy uncertain half-thereness; and, in the way of humanity, the poet, suffering horribly from his estrangement, comforts himself with the thought that through the streetwalker’s body he can rather cheaply purchase at least a momentary sense of possessing an otherwise tangled and elusive reality.

… UD prepares for her first day of teaching.

With power restored to Garrett Park, Les UDs left their hotel yesterday afternoon. They spent the early evening hours raking leaves and dragging limbs off the lawn.

The fox was at the top of UD‘s half acre exploring a mass of branches that fell across the open green near the deer and mourning dove encampments. Moving the branches will take some doing, and UD‘s not ready for the task.

The task of thought – dark, poetic thought – is like the elegant wary predatory movement of a fox… Now here, now here, and now here in the dark head, thought like a nocturnal animal’s body feels out what’s hidden there amid vast silent clearings. This twig, that leaf. The poetic body comes about its own business, brings sly hot perception to its own cold mental darkness, and the poem – like the dark snow under the fox’s paw – is printed.

… Day.

UD offers this poem, composed of Antrel Rolle’s comments about his friend Nevin Shapiro.

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WHAT’S TRUE AND WHAT’S NOT TRUE

To me it doesn’t matter
What’s true and what’s not true.