Gjertrud Schnackenberg, who just won the Griffin Poetry Prize for her long elegy, Heavenly Questions, considers in that collection of poems the very sketchy life of a seashell, and the very sketchy life of human beings.

As in Is That All There Is?

I mean, sure, she spends a lot of time, in this consideration of the life of a shell, “Fusiturricula Lullaby,” on the miracle of life, yadda yadda… And not just life, accomplishment!

…Underwater ink enlarges, blurs,
In violet-brown across a spiral shell:
A record of volutions fills a scroll
With wondrous deeds and great accomplishings,
A record of a summons not refused:

Itself the writing, and itself the scroll
The writing’s written on; and self-aware
With never-ever-to-be-verbalized
Awareness of awareness of awareness…

The elegy is about Schnackenberg’s husband, the Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick, and here, with the shell becoming a scroll of ideas, pearled not merely with wisdom but with the deep-lying, word-transcending convolutions of the philosopher’s self-consciousness, Nozick begins to appear.

And then disappears:

Fusiturricula slowly withdraws
Its being; self-enfolding; self-enclosed;
And all it toiled for turns out to be
No matter—nothing much—nothing at all—
Merely the realm where “being” was confined
And what was evanescent evanesced…

The historian Perez Zagorin was interviewed two years before his death about life with his wife, the artist Honoré Sharrers; and among the things he said about their existence together was this:

The greatest work of moral philosophy in the Western tradition and quite possibly of the literature the whole world is Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, and it begins with the theme that all men aim at happiness. But how do you – you don’t aim at happiness. Happiness is not a goal. Happiness is the byproduct of the things you do. And I could say, truly, I’ve had a happy life and I know Honoré’s had a happy life, and that was because we were all the time doing just what we wanted to be doing. Happiness emerged, it effervesced.

Emerged, effervesced, evanesced. These are the realms where being was confined and where it evanesced.

But – a shell. The poet undeniably chooses a shell, and this leaves open the possibility of life being a shell. Nothingness, emptiness, a shell game, a mere tantalizing taste of water on a tongue. Joan Didion writes about “the unending absence that follows” the death of her husband, “the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which [I] confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.”

Still, Schnackenberg’s final stanza consoles, with images of heaven.

All heaven and earth appear; and evanesce;
A self-engulfing spiral, ridge by ridge,
That disappears in waves that come and go
And all that could be done is done; and seven;
And six; and five; and four; and three; and two;
And one…and disappearing…far away…
Enraptured to the end, and all in play,
A spiral slowly turns itself in heaven.

Walking in the Stars

One still, clear night in Galilee
The stars dripped silver in a midnight sea.
He and his platoon went wading out
Far from shore so that they could shout
Loud among the stars and be heard by God.
He ends before he ends the story:
A sentence cut in half is his last word.
His exultant voice clamours to be heard:
‘I, walking in the stars, in great glory…’

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

Ian McDonald

… the DSK mess.

An earlier suggestion here.

Kenneth Turan reviews a Korean film whose main character, an aging woman, makes a

typically impulsive decision to take a poetry course at a local adult education center. Attracted by the hand-lettered sign that reads “You Can Be A Poet,” she finagles her way into the class and sits spellbound as the charismatic teacher tells the group “the most important thing in life is to see. Poetry is all about discovering true beauty in our everyday life.”

As she tries to write a poem, true ugliness intervenes.

[W]hat’s difficult [the character’s poetry teacher tells her] is not writing the poem but finding the heart to write one, and as Mija becomes aware of the corruption of the society she lives in, the intensity of her quest for purity and poetry increasingly impresses us.

The film’s trailer.

Love calls us to the things of this world, say Augustine and Wilbur.

Pablo Neruda says the same thing. Perhaps we would rather escape the earth or transcend it or ignore it. But (MacNeice this time) the earth compels.

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

Still Another Day: I

Pablo Neruda

Today is that day, the day that carried
a desperate light that since has died.
Don’t let the squatters know:
let’s keep it all between us,
day, between your bell
and my secret.

Today is dead winter in the forgotten land
that comes to visit me, with a cross on the map
and a volcano in the snow, to return to me,
to return again the water
fallen on the roof of my childhood.
Today when the sun began with its shafts
to tell the story, so clear, so old,
the slanting rain fell like a sword,
the rain my hard heart welcomes.

You, my love, still asleep in August,
my queen, my woman, my vastness, my geography
kiss of mud, the carbon-coated zither,
you, vestment of my persistent song,
today you are reborn again and with the sky’s
black water confuse me and compel me:
I must renew my bones in your kingdom,
I must still uncloud my earthly duties.

[trans. William O’Daly]

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

Neruda wrote only in green ink – color of earth’s plants – so we’ll do that too… Here you have a hard-hearted person, dead to the light of the world, estranged from his own memories, living under a dull pelting rain.  Let’s say he’s the poet himself, impervious to what used to be the sources of his aesthetic energy.

Confusingly and compellingly, however, the earth’s outburst on this day amounts to a kind of visitation: the bell-like rain now echoes with the remembered rain of the poet’s childhood, and this sets going a welcome, tentative, awakening in him.  As opposed to the old morning/noon/night story the sun begins each day to tell,  there’s a particular “slant” here, an edginess that’s the poet’s own.  Now can he live and write?

Not quite.  Kissed awake by the kiss of mud the rain kicks up, the poet concludes with a love song to the earth, mysterious origin of his physical and spiritual life.  But how to love this dark lady?  The sun’s old clarity might be a bore; but this deeper, truer, carbon-coated body, this muffled vehicle of song, frustrates and exhausts the muse.

So the muse simply has to keep at it.  The earth compels.  “I must still uncloud my earthly duties.”

Christopher Hitchens reviews Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica.

[Somehow from Larkin’s drab, resentful life he evolved] his own sour strain and syncopation of Words­worth’s “still, sad music of humanity.” And without [his personal] synthesis of gloom and angst, we could never have had his “Aubade,” a waking meditation on extinction that unstrenuously contrives a tense, brilliant counter­poise between the stoic philosophies of Lucretius and David Hume, and his own frank terror of oblivion.

Aubade.

The New York Times reviews David Orr’s book about the experience of really seriously loving poetry. The reviewer notes the universal opiate pull of Philip Larkin’s poetry …

Regular UD readers know that UD was hooked on Larkin decades ago… She likes both of his modes — the timid depressive realist, harshly self-appraising and defensively cynical; and the supremely sensitive lyricist, singing an insinuating cosmos.

Everybody can recite lines from the first mode (They fuck you up, your mum and dad…), but UD prefers the second — which is, in fact, quite druggy, since it’s about evoking haunted, depleted, distorted forms of consciousness… Consciousness trying and trying and failing to assimilate a fugitive, enigmatic world.

Out of a sheaf of life-is-but-a-dream poems by Larkin, look at two: Absences, and Friday Night in the Royal Station Hotel. Here’s the first:

Rain patters on a sea that tilts and sighs.
Fast-running floors, collapsing into hollows,
Tower suddenly, spray-haired. Contrariwise,
A wave drops like a wall: another follows,
Wilting and scrambling, tirelessly at play
Where there are no ships and no shallows.

Such attics cleared of me! Such absences!

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

A person stands on a beach on a rainy day and ponders the immensity of nothingness that is the earth, a nothingness whose most striking feature is its indifference, in its massive heedless workings, to the absence of the speaker. There are no ships, no shallows – there are no objects at all in this view. And yet there is a world, tirelessly at play in a kind of autistic redundancy. All of the play of the world goes on without me — all of it, and all I’ve got to say for myself is my consciousness of it.

My consciousness of the earth seems in itself a massive thing, though.

After all, it’s the only thing, for me. I may be insignificant like hell, but my human mind is a power, and a power that matters, since the world can’t be said to exist self-consciously, as it were, without my thinking self at work on it, giving it words, meanings, understandings…

The speaker shifts his perspective from the sea to the sky, and here things are even emptier. At least the ocean has a shore, a sandy point of definition, a boundary that offers a shape of some sort; up there, it’s a yet more shoreless day (there’s an echo of even less sure day).

Just as the water is chaotically tumbled by enigmatic forces, so enigmatic (riddled) forces tumble the day into chaos and disintegration. We can trace a certain narrative – of disintegration – by watching clouds which, like evaporating ships, reveal galleries, and then ribbing, and then nothing at all.

The ribbing evokes the body of the speaker as well – his at best skeletal presence in a churning, self-consuming, reconstituting drama.

Now the second poem.

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

Light spreads darkly downwards from the high
Clusters of lights over empty chairs
That face each other, coloured differently.
Through open doors, the dining-room declares
A larger loneliness of knives and glass
And silence laid like carpet. A porter reads
An unsold evening paper. Hours pass,
And all the salesmen have gone back to Leeds,
Leaving full ashtrays in the Conference Room.

In shoeless corridors, the lights burn. How
Isolated, like a fort, it is –
The headed paper, made for writing home
(If home existed) letters of exile: Now
Night comes on. Waves fold behind villages.

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

From her travels through Europe with her parents and siblings when she was eight, UD has retained an image eerily similar to this poem’s image. She recalls being in a large empty hotel in the evening. She recalls glancing into its empty dining room – many white clustered curtained tables, weak ceiling lights, a frightening and depressing atmosphere.

I suppose it’s the atmosphere, above all, that UD has retained with such emotional and even visceral clarity – the tense, hopeful, hopeless expectation of that room, its existence as an elaborated space meant to be filled. Forks meant to be lifted sat flat on linens. This place should have been filled with life, with people — not with the fraught waiting-for-something that now permeated it.

I suppose UD sensed the extraction of the human – such absences! – from that room… Maybe it was her first encounter with her irrelevance, even in some horrible sense her invisibility… The startle of nothing – I encountered this phrase in a poem ages ago. I’ve never been able to recall who wrote it. The phrase haunts me.

So in the Royal Station Hotel poem it’s not nature that prompts a sort of lucid dreaming about life as mere dream; it’s culture. The almost-extinguished traces of the human – ashes in the ashtrays – left in the abandoned hotel prompt the poet to feel our exile, our having-been, our occasional presence in the corridors of the world, but mainly our flickering transience in regard to it. We are elsewhere, exiled from fullness of being.

And always we are menaced by death (Waves fold behind villages…).

The poet confers a kind of life on the objects left in the dining room; they, not we, have solidity, agency, existence. The dining-room declares. The lights burn.

There’s much to like in this story of plagiarism in a British prison.

A prison source said lags took poetry ‘very seriously’ and were furious when poems were ripped off.

He said: “It wasn’t just the prison worker who complained, it was at least eight prisoners…”

Spring hopes eternal, as it were. So there are all these poems and songs about disappointment, as the world regenerates but you – despite your hopes – do not. Or not very much. College boys are writing sonnets… But I’m on the shelf…

From the many-petaled bouquet of disappointed spring poems, take this one, by Edna St. Vincent Millay.

SPRING

To what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough.
You can no longer quiet me with the redness
Of little leaves opening stickily.
I know what I know.
The sun is hot on my neck as I observe
The spikes of the crocus.
The smell of the earth is good.
It is apparent that there is no death.
But what does that signify?
Not only under ground are the brains of men
Eaten by maggots.
Life in itself
Is nothing,
An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

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

It is a tale told by an idiot, full of downs and fleuries, signifying nothing…

Rather bitter, aren’t we? Well, as the heart grows older, natural beauty in itself isn’t enough to subdue morbid thoughts. The post-romantic poet neutrally observes the crocus; she ain’t reveling in it. She notes the killing spikes, not the flowers.

The flowers probably aren’t out yet – it’s early spring…

Too early, as in the amazing Ted Hughes poem about the spring, in which he recalls gathering daffodils with Plath – to sell them – and the way the daffodils, like Plath and Hughes, were weirdly premature … or, better to say, immature. The whole poem regrets, abhors, the poets’ arrogant, oblivious immaturity, their belief that they inhabited a world of perpetual spring and daffodil windfalls.

We thought they were a windfall.
Never guessed they were a last blessing.
So we sold them. We worked at selling them
As if employed on somebody else’s
Flower-farm. You bent at it
In the rain of that April – your last April,
We bent there together, among the soft shrieks
Of their jostled stems, the wet shocks shaken
Of their girlish dance-frocks –
Fresh-opened dragonflies, wet and flimsy,
Opened too early.

Sure, says Millay, there’s no death – it’s apparent (as in observe, note her almost comically dry language) that the earth is ever-renewing. But since we’re not…

And actually the earth isn’t either:

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too…

That’s Philip Larkin, The Trees. He’s talking about trees bursting into life each April.

Not only under ground are the brains of men
Eaten by maggots.
Life in itself
Is nothing…

A tale told by an idiot, brain eaten by maggots. And then the poem shrinks to its smallest bit as the poet comes out with it: Life in itself / Is nothing… Like Leopold Bloom, soulsick at the futility of human existence as he surveys men in a pub stuffing their mouths: No-one is anything.

Only one thing interrupts our tidy step-by-step declension – ridiculous April, that idiot, babbling and strewing flowers. Babbling brooks, farcical flowers. A total jerk, Spring.

As I follow the unnerving news out of Fukushima, I think of James Merrill’s Prose of Departure, a late, morbid poem, describing a visit of his to Japan. (The poem isn’t available in its entirety online. Here’s another excerpt from it.)

Radiation – both remembered, from Hiroshima, and felt in every afternoon’s sun – is the black and blindingly white, the despairing and the appalling, correlative to the poet’s dread about friends back in the States who are dying.

The recognition of life’s “date line,” impending death, “comes flashing up” on the poet, like “the next six-foot wave in an epic poem.” He needs “a form of conscious evasion,” a “composure like the target a Zen archer sees through shut eyes.” Watching a Noh play, the poet embraces the evasion of art, in the form of an actor who “will relive moonlight, storm and battle, and withdraw, having danced himself to peace.”

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

Later that night, as he observes the moon cloud over, spiritual and aesthetic composure fail the poet; he cannot evade “A dark thought that fills the psyche, leaving a bare brilliant cuticle, then nothing, a sucked breath, a pall.”

The next day, at a shrine, when he “place[s] incense upon [a] brazier already full of warm, fragrant ash,” the poet

tries vainly
to hold back a queer
sob. Inhaling the holy
smoke, praying for dear

life —

Burning, the burning of the body and the soul, the holy smoke of what was once the holiness of a beloved friend – for the poet, there’s absolutely no evading this. From now on, each section of the poem will feature counterpoints between exotic immediacies and homeland premonitions. With brilliant wordplay, Merrill will twist his perception of a painting (in this instance, View of Fuji) to fit his fatal mood:

Syringe in bloom. Bud
drawn up through a stainless stem…

Not spring, but syringe; and syringe, with the proximity of bloom and bud, will have us read bud as blood… drawn up… a pipetting syringe… The stainless stem suggests not purity so much as hospital sterilization.

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

As the poem concludes, the poet makes explicit not only death, but the irradiating evisceration of our humanity:

The prevailing light in this “Hiroshima” of trivial symptoms and empty forebodings is neither sunrise nor moonglow but rays that promptly undo whatever enters their path. 

This killing radiation is the worst form of energy in existence; all of the Proustian nuance, the artful evasive beauty, we give life in order to give it life, is knocked out. The poet imagines the x-rays his friends are undergoing, rays which, “in their haste to photograph Truth… eat through” all of their cultural apparel, all of their existential theatricals. (“[B]eing enchanted by the magic of experience provides a reason to live. Rather than being an aid to survival, consciousness provides an essential incentive to survive. Enchantment is itself ‘the biological advantage of being awestruck.'”)

“What’s the story, Doc?”
— dark, cloud-chambered negatives
held to the light.

Prose of Departure ends in a kimono shop, with the poet and his lover enchanted by “the most fabulous kimono of all: dark, dark purple traversed by a winding, starry path.”

Dark and light again, then, with a benign and storied lightness applied, generated, made up, by the artist, as a kind of defiance of both radiation’s momentary flash and death’s permanent darkness.

Dyeing. A homophone deepens the trope. Surrendering to Earth’s colors, shall we not be Earth, before we know it? Venerated therefore is the skill which, prior to immersion, inflicts upon a sacrificial length of crêpe de Chine certain intricate knottings no hue can touch. So that one fine day, painstakingly unbound, this terminal gooseflesh, the fable’s whole eccentric

star-puckered moral —
white, never-to-blossom buds
of the mountain laurel —

may be read as having emerged triumphant from the vats of night.

… for the first time, at Dundee University, on March 19.

Audience members will be asked to recite the final lines of what many consider the world’s worst poem, William Topaz McGonagall’s Tay Bridge Disaster.

Sing it with me:

It must have been an awful sight,
To witness in the dusky moonlight,
While the Storm Fiend did laugh, and angry did bray,
Along the Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay,
Oh! ill-fated Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay,
I must now conclude my lay
By telling the world fearlessly without the least dismay,
That your central girders would not have given way,
At least many sensible men do say,
Had they been supported on each side with buttresses,
At least many sensible men confesses,
For the stronger we our houses do build,
The less chance we have of being killed.

He’s still writing poetry. We’ve already considered a couple of his poems on this blog, but let’s go ahead and do yet another to mark the big day.

JUNE LIGHT

Your voice, with clear location of June days,
Called me outside the window. You were there,
Light yet composed, as in the just soft stare
Of uncontested summer all things raise
Plainly their seeming into seamless air.

Then your love looked as simple and entire
As that picked pear you tossed me, and your face
As legible as pearskin’s fleck and trace,
Which promise always wine, by mottled fire
More fatal fleshed than ever human grace.

And your gay gift—Oh when I saw it fall
Into my hands, through all that naïve light,
It seemed as blessed with truth and new delight
As must have been the first great gift of all.

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

Your voice, with clear location of June days,

[Like James Merrill, Wilbur’s good at finding words that hint at other words, words that don’t so much radiate out with meaning, as generate an inner, meaning-mingled heat. So take location. He’s setting the poem’s place in time – afternoon, June – so location has that straightforward meaning. But he begins with a reference to his lover’s voice, so part of our mind may well be registering, say, locution – especially with that word “clear” in front of it.

The setting is about clarity, with objects bright and clear in the summer light; but it’s also about the clear locution of the lover’s voice as she calls the poet, who’s inside, to come outside to be with her.]

Called me outside the window. You were there,

[You were there. The poem’s already beginning to build the idea of the brilliant, enthralling, absolute thereness of the loved one, her glorious radiant presence, her intense and delighting being in the world. This is a love poem — to the loved one, and to the loved world, and to the way the loved one’s charismatic and adored way of being, her intensified self-ness, her sheer miraculous outrageously exceptional placement on the earth, astounds and delights the poet, lifting him to positively religious heights of ecstasy.]

Light yet composed, as in the just soft stare
Of uncontested summer all things raise
Plainly their seeming into seamless air.

[The poem’s called June Light, so on one level this reference to light intends to describe the peculiarly intense and at the same time tranquil nature of early summer light. This isn’t oppressive light that bleaches out the visible world; on the contrary, it’s light that’s composed – calm, but also ordered, yielding a beautifully clear and fitting world whose objects – like the lover – burst out of the dull background world with hyper-dramatic being.

The lover too has this combination of brilliance and calm, radiance and soundness. She’s both exciting and pacifying.

The soft stare of summer is “just” – right, appropriate, undeniable (uncontested) – which is to say that – let’s put it the way Gertrude Stein might – there’s a there there. The world obviously and incontrovertibly exists.

Does this seem trite? The world exists. My lover exists. Big deal. These things are obvious.

But they’re so not obvious. The narrator of Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein is sitting in Paris, on a gorgeous June day, on the balcony of a grand hotel, with a view of the most stunning part of the city, and he thinks:

The gloss the sun puts on the surroundings – the triumph of life, so to speak, the flourishing of everything makes me despair. I’ll never be able to keep up with all the massed hours of life-triumphant.

I mean here he is, having el major peak experience, and he despairs! He despairs because he doesn’t have whatever inside of himself to be adequate to it — yet the world is trying so hard to give him his Wordsworthian spot of time, his Sartreian perfect moment! What is the matter with him?

But everyone knows what the narrator means. “Slowly, out of every bending lane, in waves of color and sound, came tourists in striped sneakers, fanning themselves with postcards, the philhellenes, laboring uphill, vastly unhappy,” writes the narrator of Don DeLillo’s The Names. Vastly? Unhappy? It’s a brilliant Athens day, and they’re going to see the effing Acropolis! The American narrator refuses to visit the Acropolis at all, even though he lives in Athens. Something about how the place is “daunting.”

Okay so Wilbur is simply saying that the life force of the loved one represents a brilliance he can approach, a world-intensifying, clarifying force that doesn’t daunt. As a result, instead of joining the depressives in Bellow and DeLillo, for whom the sheer force of the physical and metaphysical world in its most beautiful, meaningful, and intense realizations is just too much, the poet revels in his access to that force. It is all thanks to the lover.

Seeming and seamless are nice too, eh? The quality of the light transforms the seeming, difficult to grasp world we live in most of the time, to a seamless, composed, real world.]

Then your love looked as simple and entire
As that picked pear you tossed me, and your face
As legible as pearskin’s fleck and trace,

[She wanted him to come outside because she wanted to toss him a pear she just picked. It’s beautiful, ripe, she wants him to see it and feel it. At this amazing moment of earthly and human clarity, when the world under its June light, and the lover under the influence of the June light, suddenly both take on absolute irrefutable acute being, what shines out most clearly is the fact of the lover’s love for the poet. The well-wrought, perfect ripeness and particularity of the pearfruit is the lover, in her fully manifest (legible) being, a higher being, if you will, brought into existence by virtue of her love for the poet.

In short, she’s happy to see him.

He can read who she is, what she’s feeling, from the lines of joy on her face, just as we can trace natural images on pearskin.

Sometimes the world, and the people we love, shine forth with entire vivacity and truth. As in the moment that ends Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It, a memory of his brother fishing that “remains in my mind as if fixed by some chemical bath.”

He never stopped to shake himself. He came charging up the bank, showering molecules of water and images of himself to show what was sticking out of his basket, and he dripped all over us … Large drops of water ran from under his hat onto his face and then into his lips when he smiled.

I can never get to the word lips in these lines without feeling the almost unbearable intensity of Maclean’s love for his brother.]

Which promise always wine, by mottled fire
More fatal fleshed than ever human grace.

[I’m not sure what these lines mean. I think they mean something like this: The gorgeous flesh of the pear will become pear wine; or will be burned away in order for the pearfruit to become pear wine. The pear is even more vulnerable to the processes of time and transformation than we (more fatal fleshed); but although we have a longer earthly run (human grace), the pear certainly reminds us of our vulnerability toward death, the shutting down of all this being.]

And your gay gift—Oh when I saw it fall
Into my hands, through all that naïve light,
It seemed as blessed with truth and new delight
As must have been the first great gift of all.

[Yes, blessed, and the first great gift of all, and grace — You can read religion into this poem if you’d like, though frankly it seems more on the pagan side to me … Maybe that’s just me…

But anyway. 99.9% of poems these days are falling over themselves to capture these moments, and you can get knockoffs quick and cheap from a poet like Ted Kooser. But why not get the real thing?]

VALENTINE

Listen – I love you in the most absolute sense possible.
— Iris Murdoch, letter to Raymond Queneau, 1952.

Listen! Of all the senses of love, the most absolute
Is this one, where I’m young and you’re older, married,
And we drift through cities foreign to us both,
Cities still ruined, and speak French,
And stand on bridges trembling over foul water.

The most absolute sense possible of love – listen –
Is this one. A charming ex-surrealist.
Une fille épatante. They climb the hills near
Innsbruck and talk about his psychoanalysis.
Irishwoman. A little bun. She loves Kierkegaard.

In the most absolute sense, listen, I love you.
Others can listen in after we’re dead and
Figure out what that means. Read all about it.
Letters journals novels memoirs.
Somewhere I say you have a very beautiful head.

I love you in the most absolute sense possible.
Are you listening? My heart, beating on a bridge
In Austria, and among all the questions in my head
This one is absolutely answered. I would do anything
For you… Come to you at any time or place…

After you die, I affect a calm farewell:
He was a natural, absolute philosopher…
Some statement of the sort was expected of me.
But listen. In the most absolute sense possible,
Love pulses and pulses and pulses.

UD takes sections of Judith Thurman’s marvelous 2008 New Yorker essay about paleolithic art caves, changes a word here and there, and makes a poem.

(There’s a new 3D Werner Herzog film about one of the caves.)

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

LETTER FROM SOUTHERN FRANCE

As the painters were learning
to crush hematite, and to sharpen
embers of Scotch pine for their charcoal
(red and black the primary colors),
the last Neanderthals were still living
on the vast steppe that was Europe.

The scratches made by a standing bear
have been overlaid with a palimpsest
of signs or drawings, and one has to wonder
if cave art didn’t begin with a recognition
that bear claws were an expressive tool
for engraving a record — poignant and indelible —
of a stressed creature’s passage through the dark.

“As we trailed the artists deeper and deeper,
noting where they’d broken off stalagmites
to mark their path, we found signs that seemed to say,
‘We’re sanctifying a finite space in an infinite universe.’ ”

Halfway home to the mortal world,
we paused and turned off our torches.
It takes the brain a few minutes to accept
the totality of the darkness — your sight
keeps grasping for a hold.
Whatever the art means, you understand,
at that moment, that its vessel is both a womb and a sepulchre.

On Elizabeth Bishop’s centennial, a reading of The Bight.

Go here for the poem uninterrupted by my commentary.

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

THE BIGHT

[A shallow bay. We’re in Key West, where Bishop lived for a number of years, and we’re looking at a harbor. The word bite, and the word blight (Bishop was fond of Gerard Manley Hopkins, author of Spring and Fall), should certainly be floating around in our heads while we read.]

On my birthday

At low tide like this how sheer the water is.

[this. is. low. how. A simple poetic balance, and a calm straightforward assertiveness, express themselves right away.  And consider how low we are:  Already we’re at a bight; and now the bight’s at low tide.  Already a sense of melancholy.  Yet she says the poem’s written on her birthday.  Not in a very celebratory mood, I think.]

White, crumbling ribs of marl protrude and glare
and the boats are dry, the pilings dry as matches.

[As if the fluidity and depth of water weren’t compromised enough by all that shallowness, there’s also morbid skeletal marl sticking up out of the bight; and the anchoring pilings seem sadly pointless, since there’s so little water.  Upright, gathered, like sticks, they resemble matches.… Note the assonance throughout: tide, like, white, dry, pilings, dry.]

Absorbing, rather than being absorbed,
the water in the bight doesn’t wet anything,
the color of the gas flame turned as low as possible.

[Low again.  And water like fire?  We’ve seen it before, in one of her most famous poems, At the Fishhouses:

If you should dip your hand in,
your wrist would ache immediately,
your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn
as if the water were a transmutation of fire
that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.]

One can smell it turning to gas; if one were Baudelaire
one could probably hear it turning to marimba music.

[Baudelaire could make it sizzle; I cannot.  For me, the sound of nature is turned way down low.]

The little ocher dredge at work off the end of the dock
already plays the dry perfectly off-beat claves.

[That’s my music: An arid percussive click rather than any tonality; something strange and off the beat rather than something harmonic and measured.  That’s what I hear when I look most deeply at earthly life, when I dredge down to the truth.]

The birds are outsize. Pelicans crash
into this peculiar gas unnecessarily hard,
it seems to me, like pickaxes,
rarely coming up with anything to show for it,

[You see how she’s – what’s Gioia’s word? – slyly awakening emotions in us?  Emotions having to do with what — depletion, futility, the contrast between our immense efforts to understand the depths of existence, to get the goods of life, and the paltry products of those efforts: rarely coming up with anything to show for it.]

and going off with humorous elbowings.
Black-and-white man-of-war birds soar
on impalpable drafts
and open their tails like scissors on the curves
or tense them like wishbones, till they tremble.

[An elaboration of the effort-and-futility idea: We struggle (man-of-war) toward meaning (transcendent rather than earthly here, on impalpable drafts) until the sheer effort of it makes us tremble.]

The frowsy sponge boats keep coming in
with the obliging air of retrievers,
bristling with jackstraw gaffs and hooks
and decorated with bobbles of sponges.

[There’s something annoyingly stupid and pathetically messy about the ongoingness of human existence.  Although the scene is junky and depleted, eagerly panting little boats still keep coming in, their crappy cargo hanging out of their mouths.]

There is a fence of chicken wire along the dock
where, glinting like little plowshares,
the blue-gray shark tails are hung up to dry
for the Chinese-restaurant trade.

[A sharp dry eat-or-be-eaten world.  No treasures here.]

Some of the little white boats are still piled up
against each other, or lie on their sides, stove in,

[Wonderful pun on stove – gas fire, but also the little boats crushed in any old way.]

and not yet salvaged, if they ever will be, from the last bad storm,
like torn-open, unanswered letters.

[Nothing to show for the boats, relics of the last, not-yet-overcome trauma.  There’s something vaguely guilt-inducing about their abandonment and open vulnerability, something of  O, I have ta’en / Too little care of this! This is everyone’s messy moral and emotional life, bursting with compromise and unfinished business.]

The bight is littered with old correspondences.

[Since Baudelaire’s been mentioned, we might think here of his most famous poem, Correspondences.  But there’s nothing in Bishop’s poem akin to the almost mystical “profound unity” between our subjectivity and the natural world that appears in Baudelaire. “The unnamed correspondences [in Bishop] are not ecstatic, Emersonian revelations of relationship; rather, they are almost wholly negative,” writes Brett Candlish Millier.]

Click. Click. Goes the dredge,
and brings up a dripping jawful of marl.

[The sharp bite of the dredge’s jaw unearths more white marl.  Same old shit.]

All the untidy activity continues,
awful but cheerful.

[We conclude how?  We conclude that, looked at with biting lucidity, the shabby contingency of life is simply awful.  A blight.  Yet, contemplating another birthday, another setting out into more life, we’re compelled to note also the sheer survivability of it all, the way most of us are in it and what the hell.]