The Worcester Telegram announces a birthday commemoration for the poet Elizabeth Bishop:

On Tuesday, Bishop’s 100th birthday, there will be a gravesite ceremony at Hope Cemetery in Worcester at 4:30 p.m. The gathering will include a reading of Bishop’s poem, “The Bight,” whose last lines provide the inscription of her tombstone: “All the untidy activity continues, awful but cheerful.”

(Here’s a charming film about Bishop’s grave, and its inscription.)

There will also be Tuesday readings here and here, and a birthday party at a Halifax restaurant.

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Bishop’s work is a villa of the mysteries; we feel her assuming the full weight of human life; we feel her somehow gently housing that weight in her poems. Because she brings experience under the control of language, because she shapes it poetically, we say she is a powerful poet. Yet she gathers power not through imposing any architecture of ideas or feelings upon reality, but rather simply through offering reality a roof for the night. Shelter here, in these lines. Let me lodge you, look at you.

“The more one reads a Bishop poem,” writes David Orr in the New York Times, “the greater the sense of huge forces being held barely but precisely in check … [One feels] the enormous patience and skill that allowed her to hold the volcanic feeling on exhibit here in the poised vessels of her finished poetry.”

A vessel poised above huge forces – this describes a good deal of the best art. Leonard Bernstein describes Mozart’s G Minor Symphony as “a work of utmost passion utterly controlled.” Brahm’s Fourth, says Roger Scruton, conveys a “tragic feeling that is nevertheless utterly controlled, and utterly in control.” The sublimity of Beethoven, Dmitri Tymoczko suggests, lies not in strident statement and emotion, but instead in the way a passage like this one in the Tempest sonata (click on the image and then zoom in)

symbolizes both desire – in the form of the chromatically ascending chords – and limitation, as represented by the fixed upper note. It is as if Beethoven were suggesting that, while no amount of effort on his part would enable him to leap beyond the limits of his piano, his music demands that he try – as if the world of sticks and wires, the ordinary physical realm in which pianos exist, cannot be reconciled with the world of Beethoven’s aspiration. …[T]his coupling of an exhortation to transcendence (here heard as an inexorable chromatic chordal ascent) with a warning about the impossibility of success (the stubborn pedal point at the top of the piano) recalls Kant’s conception of sublimity. Like the Temple of Isis, the music seems to question its own adequacy, giving with one hand what it takes away with the other.

Passion and a strategic yielding to limitation – this combination gives Bishop’s poems their remarkable soundness, what Anne Stevenson calls “a kind of interior sense of rightness and excellence.” “We see the place, the person or the thing [in her poems] as if we were truly there, and we feel emotions that the author doesn’t state overtly but slyly awakens inside us,” writes Dana Gioia.

When the Trees Spoke

So the trees spoke, finally, under the weight of wet snow.
The townsfolk had waited forever. They wanted to know
Everything: How the oak could grow so early, so late,
Though smoked and shivered under waves of great
Weather. How the chokeberry bush evaded its fate
And breathed, both petal and stem unbroke.
What kept the dogwood off the lightning stroke
And kept the wavering willow immaculate?

The trees sighed, a condescension. How to evoke
For these yokels the specific, sickening freight
Of nature? Creak. Crack. Croak. Our branches hate
The cold you fancy a long white cloak…
The joy our limbs are given to know
Is to give out, under the weight of snow,
And fall to a ground without climate.

… plies the steel
That questions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer’s art
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.

T.S. Eliot’s morbid poem says “The whole earth is our hospital.”

The wounded surgeon is the subject of a new study.

Surgeons “who practiced in an academic medical center” showed lower rates of suicidal ideation.

See Part One, here.

Prompted by the recital of part of Matthew Arnold’s poem, The Buried Life, at a memorial event for Richard Holbrooke, I wrote earlier about one way of defining a meaningful life. A meaningful life would be one you’ve made meaningful, in your own way; and one you’ve understood in terms of the coherence of those self-generated meanings.

Although Arnold’s poem begins as the speaker’s plea to his lover to stop, for a time, their fond but empty chatter, and get serious –

Give me thy hand, and hush awhile,
And turn those limpid eyes on mine,
And let me read there, love! thy inmost soul.

– it’s really his own inmost soul the speaker’s after. The rest of the poem traces the poet’s frustrated attempts to unearth his own “hidden self,” his “soul’s subterranean depth,” so that he can know the truth of his being, and thus know the motive and shape of his life.

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But what’s the profit? Philip Larkin poses this question in one of his most famous poems, “Continuing to Live.” So you’ve been able, with stupendous effort, to uproot your deepest self. You finally, as the days wane, perceive who you are, and why your life was the way it was. You’ve illuminated, for yourself, your particular character and fate story. So what?

… [O]nce you have walked the length of your mind, what

On that green evening when our death begins,
Just what it was, is hardly satisfying,
Since it applied only to one man once,
And that one dying.

We’re at the place Wallace Stevens called the palm at the end of the mind, the place you get to when you’ve walked the full length of yourself; or, in Arnold’s metaphor, when you’ve dug down to the very bottom. But you’ve disinterred a purely contingent object, applying only to one man once, and that one dying.

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Richard Rorty thinks Larkin has made a fundamental mistake:

[Larkin’s mistake is to want a] ‘blind impress’ which applie[s] not only to ‘one man once,’ but, rather, to all human beings. Think of finding such an impress as being the discovery of the universal conditions of human existence, the great continuities, the permanent, ahistorical context of human life … [These conditions would be] necessary, essential, telic, constitutive of what it is to be a human. [If they exist, they will] give us a goal, the only possible goal, namely, the full recognition of that very necessity…

Traditional philosophers, Rorty writes, were “going to explain to us the ultimate locus of power, the nature of reality, the conditions of the possibility of experience. They would thereby inform us what we really are, what we are compelled to be by powers not ourselves. [The point of our lives would be] the … self-consciousness of our essence.”

Rorty goes on to say that philosophers in the wake of Nietzsche have seen “self-knowledge as self-creation…. [A] human life [is] triumphant just insofar as it escapes from inherited descriptions of the contingencies of its existence and finds new descriptions.” Larkin’s churlish conclusion, then, derives from his demand that there be universal and established, rather than contingent and new, truths.

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As to the value of those contingent truths to a larger world of human beings, here’s what Alexander Nehamas, writing about the centrality of the experience of beauty for the creation of a self and a life, argues:

[I]ndividuality and distinctiveness presuppose coherence and unity; without them, nothing can stand on its own as an object either of admiration or of contempt. If there are discernable in my aesthetical choices, in what I have found beautiful, in what I have in turn found of beauty in it, in the various groups to which my choices have led me, in what I received from them, and what I in turn had to give them – if my choices both fit with one another and also stand out from the rest, then I have managed to put things together in my own manner and form. I have established, through the things I loved, a new way of looking at the world, and left it richer than I first found it.

Winter Labyrinth on the Night of a Lunar Eclipse

What Yeats called the labyrinth of another’s being
Has nothing in common with this mythic path’s release,
The pith-and-substance aftermath, the freeing –
Once you’ve circled the maze – into peace.

When she was seventeen she thought she was seeing,
In his twisty allure, a mystery-lover’s feast,
Enigma variations for beginners, a pebbled circuit of meaning…
Even now she loves him; but she’s come ’round, at least,

To the true geometry of her own heart’s weaving:
How the coiling and coiling then was her own bully-beast,
Wanting him to be the mechanism of her freeing.

Mysterious, how the love never ceased.

… the poet and translator Richard Wilbur, who’s chugging along nicely at 89, with Anterooms, a new book of poems and translations. The Amherst Bulletin has a terrific article about him; it includes this poem, from the new collection, written in memory of Wilbur’s wife.

The House

Sometimes, on waking, she would close her eyes
For a last look at that white house she knew
In sleep alone, and held no title to,
And had not entered yet, for all her sighs.

What did she tell me of that house of hers?
White gatepost; terrace; fanlight of the door;
A widow’s walk above the bouldered shore;
Salt winds that ruffle the surrounding firs.

Is she now there, wherever there may be?
Only a foolish man would hope to find
That haven fashioned by her dreaming mind.
Night after night, my love, I put to sea.

There’s something about these poems of the long-married… Like this similar one by Stephen Spender... These poems can feature a peculiar intimacy with the unconscious of the much-loved, much-lived-with person. The lover intuits the loved-one’s dreams from what the beloved speaks in sleep; or from what she tells him about her dreams on waking.

And these dreams clearly represent a profoundly privileged territory, a deep-lying region of the truest personal truths, the purest contingencies of one particular person. It’s no surprise that Wilbur, seeking a sort of contact with his dead wife, will go here, to the realm he alone was able to perceive while she lived, that he would constantly “put to sea” in search of the most rooted place her mind inhabited, her islanded house inside life’s flow.

Think of Matthew Arnold’s To Marguerite: Continued, in which another separated pair of lovers laments their separation:

For surely once, they feel, we were
Parts of a single continent!
Now round us spreads the watery plain —
Oh might our marges meet again!

Meanwhile, there’s “the unplumb’d, salt, estranging sea,” the same sea Wilbur sails over night after night, his own dreams trying to become hers, trying to be her dreaming mind, in order to find her, transcended, finally at home.

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Widow’s walk. Salt. There’s no idealizing here; it is the grave, the salt salt sea, the white hotel of D.M. Thomas’s novel, the strange infinity of our ceasing, whose reality we allow ourselves to feel in dream-image.

We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.

This is the conclusion of Sunday Morning by Wallace Stevens. This is the way you make love when the person you love has died: you set out as wisely and foolishly as you can on that wide water, and keep looking.

So applaud these University of Manchester students for having read all of Milton’s Paradise Lost aloud. Proceeds will go to the Royal National Institute of Blind People.

Here’s more information.

Half Full

Halfway up my back half-acre, I see a fox,
Beautifully camouflaged in the forest,
Winding through trunks in morning fog.

Send half-notes to half-there dog-
Woods. The fox is at his farthest.
He leaves the world as white as chalk.

The Requiem is Always in Style is a UDism. It is a thing UD says… and she… hold on… yes. She invented the saying. No one else says it. I mean, Google doesn’t show anything like the sentence The Requiem is Always in Style.

The requiem UD has in mind is Mozart’s, and the idea she has in mind is that since someone’s always dying, the requiem is always in style… In fact, veteran readers of University Diaries know that UD has a tradition of hitting the baby grand and belting out one or another number from this piece when someone who meant something to her dies.

And so tonight she played and sang through Number 3, Tuba mirum, in memory of Elizabeth Edwards, who, you might or might not know, was not only an English major at Chapel Hill, but also did a bit of grad school in English there, before switching to law school. She eloquently quotes Emily Dickinson – among other poets – in her book about her son’s death.

Poetry, you know, is a very strange thing, and very few people quote it or read it or love it. Poetry is very morbid, most of it. Here’s a poem, by Charles Baxter. Appeared in this month’s Poetry magazine.

Please Marry Me

Has been dead for over thirty years, but in wonderment
Over what quality this dream-woman must have owned
To have pleased my mother so that she,
My late mother, would have said, despite her ban
On ordinary pleasantries, that she had liked someone,
Anyone, who might have cared for me, and as I lie
In bed I think of the last movement of Mahler’s Ninth
When the melodic lines go quiet for minute after minute
In a prolonged farewell to music and to life,
Which my mother would attend to in her bathrobe
Late at night, the stereo turned up, blended whiskey
In her highball glass mixed with milk as a disguise,
Leaning back, hand over eyes, silent-movie style
Like Norma Desmond listening as Von Stroheim plays
The organ wearing his white gloves. No, it wasn’t
Mahler, it was Schoenberg, Verklärte Nacht,
Moon-drunk music, mad and inconsolable.

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So some guy remembers a dream he had; he was happy in the dream though he’s basically a sad person — all the dismal issues… Prominent among his dismal issues is the bewildering, unassimilable emotional legacy left by his alcoholic mother.

He was happy in the dream because he’d sort of reanimated her by interfusing her music, her Mahler, with his dream. In the dream his suffering bewilderment about his mother’s life becomes lucid joy:

the late symphonies of Gustav Mahler
Are more lucid if you’re sitting close to, and above,
The orchestra, so that you can see the contrapuntal
Lines moving from strings to woodwinds
And then back again

If you sit up smartly and peer closely at a bewildering thing, you can see how it works! You can see the particular mix that makes that thing that thing…

In his second stanza he peers closely at the bewildering mix that was his mother – her blended whiskey, and then the whiskey blended again, with milk, mother’s milk, to confuse her onlooker, her son. Her obscure contrapuntal liquid, her milky witchery, her alcoholic alchemy…

Yet the dream’s given him this wonderful epiphany: So that’s what she was about! I see it now! I see how the sections worked together to create her counterpoint!

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Or do I? Sentimentally, he evokes the famous last section of Mahler’s Ninth:

When the melodic lines go quiet for minute after minute
In a prolonged farewell to music and to life,

Quiet. His mother sits in a silent movie, her drink milky white, the organist wearing white gloves…

Pretty picture; but he’s idealizing. He’s idealizing his mother’s despair as a form of acceptance, a Mahlerian dissolving, a slow, slow, delicate movement toward peace.

And his now wide-awake consciousness won’t let him get away with it:

No, it wasn’t
Mahler, it was Schoenberg, Verklärte Nacht,
Moon-drunk music, mad and inconsolable.

For World AIDS Day:

UD has long been haunted by the song Fairy Book Lines, words by Charles Barber, music, Donald St. Pierre.

You can hear a bit of the song here, on the Amazon page for the AIDS Quilt Songbook (scroll down for music samples).

For me, the drifty music and drifty words capture the bitter business of dying. They capture the peculiar process by which the body, in a modern world of medicine, returns to earth.

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Death be nimble –
life was quick
Efficiency’s a modern trope
To be expected
with impatience
Not less
when bearing death
Or a low-burning illness
slow as memory.

The slow-covering growth,
so like nature,
Slowly returning the body to earth,
adrift in underground.

A vault in Nanterre
Is the location where
They’re keeping a bunch of Picassos.

Monsieur Le Guennec?
The master’s vieux mec?
I fear that his asso is grasso.

Frost at midnight is silent and full of sky, and the sky is full of galactic clouds. You stand on a rickety bridge over a brook and look at satellites and stars.

Around you are flat dark fields grazed in the morning by deer who come in from the hills that circle the fields. You’re standing in a bowl of dry grains circled by the hills.

Early this morning I put on my black alpaca coat and my black winter hat and black gloves and walked the circuit of the farm, starting with the deer on the fields near Route 92. Cows lowed from a neighboring farm. I moved on to the goats, who clattered out of the barn when they heard me; and then to the llamas.

Now I walked the labyrinth on the far side of the house, along the brook. I walked its stony turns slowly… Frost performed its secret ministry. I took up abstruser musings. Strange and extreme silentness.

It can pull you into a consciousness more intensely than even the most intense stream of consciousness in a novel.

It’s brief, a poem of the sort I have in mind– a sharp and even shocking awakening, for the reader, into the condition of being another human being.

If it’s highly organized, well-wrought as formal art, this sort of poem can stagger you with the way the poet somehow takes unkempt suffering and tugs it as tightly into coherence as the edges of an army recruit’s bed.

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Here’s an example of what I have in mind: Black Mare, by Lynda Hull.

Lynda Hull’s friend Mark Doty wrote about her life and early death, after years of self-destruction, in his memoir, Heaven’s Coast.

Hull took, in life, “a position from which one might understand the vulnerability and porosity of the self, the power of its costuming gestures.” A poem is a costuming gesture, the “transubstantiation of pain into style.”

A lot of art is like that. Art of the sort Hull produced makes life bearable because the fact that the poem has been accomplished at all — given the writer’s sufferings — affirms volition, lucidity, and love.

Go here for her poem, Black Mare, unaccosted by my observations about it.

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Black Mare

[The title, one supposes, refers to a horse… But my mind goes to mare, Italian for sea, and imagines a black watery expanse. Also night-mare — a thing appearing in the blackness of night.]

It snakes behind me, this invisible chain gang—
the aliases, your many faces peopling

that vast hotel, the past.

[The poet summons her memories, all of them housed in the immense and somehow disreputable comings and goings of her thoughts.  She thinks of her thoughts as a chain gang, a set of imprisoned – immovable? uninterpretable? – links.

Her poem already exhibits tight yet not obvious structure; she will use exact rhymes, though not end rhymes, throughout  (vast/past).  Note also the assonance of long A‘s:  snakes/chain/aliases/faces.]

What did we learn?
Every twenty minutes the elevated train,

[A near-rhyme here, learn/train.  Train continues the chain.  Also:  we.  This will be a sort of love poem, addressed – in a mode of wistful inquiry – to the man with whom the poet shared a certain time in her life.]

the world shuddering beyond
the pane.

[Train/pane.  Shuddering adds a suggestion of pain to pane.  Plus, already, we have a sense of world of pain outside the perception of the writer as she was at that time.  She was inside the pane,  where she saw, but didn’t feel, the shuddering world.]

It was never warm enough in winter.

The walls peeled, the color of corsages
ruined in the air. Sweeping the floor,

[warm/color/corsages/floor – Assonance again.  And warm/winter/walls/ruined/sweeping — You see it there too.]

my black wig on the chair.  [Air/chair.] I never meant
to leave you in that hotel [The metaphorical hotel of memory becomes the literal hotel in which the poet lived with her lover.] where the voices

of patrons long gone seemed to echo in the halls,
a scent of spoiled orchids. But this was never

an elegant hotel. The iron fretwork of the El
held each room in a deep corrosive bloom.

[Corsages, orchids, bloom:  All spoiled, ruined, corroded. And yet the flowers convey an odd beauty, the beauty of ruins.]

[Hotel/El/Held]

[And fretwork:  A great choice of word, conveying along with pane, fret.]

This was the bankrupt’s last chance, the place
the gambler waits to learn his black mare’s

leg snapped as she hurtled towards the finish line.

[People in Memory Hotel bet their last dollar on a fragile hope.  Hopeless.]

* * *

How did we live? Your face over my shoulder
was the shade of mahogany in the speckled

[Again the peculiar undeniable intensity at this point of my merging with the poet’s remembering, suffering, arch consciousness.  Its particularity excites me; in its particularity lies the originality of this poem.  This is an accomplished consciousness, in any sense of the word accomplished you would like.  I move more and more deeply into it because its peculiar realization and beauty beckon me.]

mirror bolted to the wall. It was never warm.

[The poem’s organization bases itself upon repeated phrases, motifs:  Here It was never warm.  The cheap hotel was badly heated; but there’s also the writer’s failure to find comfort…  The repeated phrases do two things:  They express the futile circling of the poet’s thoughts as she remembers and tries to learn what her past means.  And the phrases contribute to the musicality of the poem; they are a kind of chorus.]

You arrived through a forest of needles,

the white mist of morphine, names for sleep
that never came.

[She recalls the lover, another addict, like her.  Restless, unable to feel comfort; yet temporarily calmed and warmed and kept from pain by the fog of drugs, they lay abed, gazing out of their dirty windows, into their speckled mirror…  Look at her lovely delicate druggy artistry:  the white mist of morphine…  the white cliffs of Dover…]

My black wig unfurled

across the battered chair. Your arms circled me
when I stood by the window. Downstairs

the clerk who read our palms broke the seal
on another deck of cards. She said you’re my fate,

my sweet annihilating angel, every naked hotel room
I’ve ever checked out of.

[What’ve we got here, a Bob Dylany lilt, coming up from sorrow just slightly for air:

…They stopped into a strange hotel with a neon burning bright
He felt the heat of the night hit him like a freight train
Moving with a simple twist of fate…

He woke up the room was bare
He didn’t see her anywhere
He told himself he didn’t care pushed the window open wide
Felt an emptiness inside to which he just could not relate
Brought on by a simple twist of fate.]

There’s nothing

left of that, but even now when night pulls up
like a limousine, sea-blue, and I’m climbing the stairs,

[Spectacular simile, night pulling up like a sea-blue limousine… urban, surreal…  The softness of the word, limousine, liquid, misty, druggy… All alkaloids end in -ine: nicotine, morphine… limousine…]

keys in hand, I’ll reach the landing and
you’re there—the one lesson I never get right.

Trains hurtled by, extinguished somewhere
past the bend of midnight. [Stop the world.  If it doesn’t stop, if it keeps hurtling away, extinguishing itself always like each successive train, each drug hit wearing off, I can’t get hold of it…] The shuddering world.  [It was never warm.]

Your arms around my waist. I never meant to leave.

* * *

Of all that, there’s nothing left but a grid
of shadows the El tracks throw over the street,

the empty lot. Gone, the blistered sills,
voices that rilled across each wall. Gone,

the naked bulb swinging from the ceiling,
that chicanery of light that made your face

a brief eclipse over mine. [What a beautiful and disturbing way to evoke their sex, also a mutual escape, also a synthetic effort – like the drugs – at pain-erasure.] How did we live?
The mare broke down. I was your fate, that

yellow train, the plot of sleet, through dust
crusted on the pane. [The cold, cutting world, glimpsed from within the corrosive bloom, the inverted eden, of that hotel room; seen at a safe drugged remove.] It wasn’t warm enough.

What did we learn? All I have left of you
is this burnt place on my arm. [Needle tracks.] So, I won’t

forget you even when I’m nothing but
small change in the desk clerk’s palm, nothing

but the pawn ticket crumpled in your pocket,
the one you’ll never redeem. Whatever I meant

to say loses itself in the bend of winter
towards extinction, [Extinguished somewhere past the bend of midnight…The poem eerily conveys what it feels like to be unable to experience continuity in one’s life; to have everything appear and then disappear so that you can’t learn any lessons and are constantly buffeted by a cruel world.  The poet is like the character Rhoda, in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves.]

this passion of shadows falling

like black orchids through the air. I never meant
to leave you there by the pane, that

terminal hotel, the world shuddering with trains. [The hotel sat alongside a train terminal; but also of course it’s a place of death, where the mare on whom you had placed such hopes collapses, unable to run the race.]

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I’m thoroughly pulled into the bluesy moody musing consciousness of this beautiful poem which has condensed into itself so many of the elements of the speaker’s undoing.

And that is what a really strong poem can do.  It can make an extinguished poet revenant, make her a voice that rills through me.

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UD thanks the University of Iowa Press for permission to reprint.

… and on the morning after a dinner party with old friends, UD records this poem by Robert Louis Stevenson, with commentary.

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Envoy

Go, little book, and wish to all
Flowers in the garden, meat in the hall,
A bin of wine, a spice of wit,
A house with lawns enclosing it,
A living river by the door,
A nightingale in the sycamore!

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The poet sends his book of verse to the world with best wishes.

Let’s see:

Flowers in the garden.

A few white flowers remain on one of my potted geraniums on the deck. Some of the hydrangea out front still seem flowery, though strictly speaking they’re not. Do pyracantha berries count? No.

Meat in the hall.

Karyna, a gourmet cook, prepared a meaty Argentine stew for the evening. All I had to do was heat it on my stove.

A bin of wine.

“Get a good Rioja,” Karyna said, so Mr UD bought a Campellares Rioja.

A spice of wit.

The night was heavily spiced.

One of the guests recounted how, when she was a little girl, “old men were always coming up to me and saying dirty things. To this day I don’t know why I attracted so many. It happened all the time.”

This encouraged UD to recall how, decades ago, she and her mother were taken up Mt. Vesuvius by a guide, an old peasant. At one point the man directed UD‘s attention out to some distant hills, and as she gazed, he felt her up.

Another guest said that when he was young and beautiful, a drunk old guy on the subway tried to hump him.

Okay, none is this is what Stevenson meant by wit.

A house with lawns enclosing it.

Here I’m on extremely solid ground. Faithful readers know of UD‘s small Garrett Park house entirely surrounded by – at the moment – leaf-strewn lawns.

A living river by the door.

River of leaves? Leaves lie along the edges of the street by UD‘s door… And when it rains hard, a living river of water pours down the Rokeby Avenue hill… And if you’re willing to stretch things quite a bit, Rock Creek lies a quarter mile or so behind UD‘s house…

A nightingale in the sycamore.

An owl in the maple.

The death of a poet of whom UD had never heard – Viola Fischerová – has UD grazing among her few online, translated poems (she was Czech). A series of excerpts from a collection of poems about being an old woman and mourning the death of passion is surprisingly and beautifully frank.

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A couple of days ago the buds burst
now the swollen tips of branches
gush down the avenue
Bared into nakedness
childhood reeks in the sun
of powder and urine
A heavy slow stream
falls
into the furrow of water and foams
Bodies hate
the rights they once had