… in a dry season.”

A real estate agency in England has had its agents take a poetry writing course, to buff up descriptive copy about sale houses.

After the course, one Regency £495,000 two-bedroom seafront flat, originally described prosaically as “spacious, high quality, and within short walking distance of local shops”, inspired the following ode from a staff member…

“The first thing you see is the sea meeting the sky; like old comrades they share a warm embrace. Coats of armour; the cornice lines up. Without feeling lonely, the room has an echo. Ornate surroundings, the fire begs a match.”

… Under the Greenwood Tree.

To dwellers in a wood almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature. At the passing of the breeze the fir-trees sob and moan no less distinctly than they rock; the holly whistles as it battles with itself; the ash hisses amid its quiverings; the beech rustles while its flat boughs rise and fall. And winter, which modifies the note of such trees as shed their leaves, does not destroy its individuality.

On a cold and starry Christmas-eve within living memory a man was passing up a lane towards Mellstock Cross in the darkness of a plantation that whispered thus distinctively to his intelligence. All the evidences of his nature were those afforded by the spirit of his footsteps, which succeeded each other lightly and quickly, and by the liveliness of his voice as he sang in a rural cadence:

“With the rose and the lily
And the daffodowndilly,
The lads and the lasses a-sheep-shearing go.”

Here’s the song he’s singing, It’s a Rosebud in June.

UD plays and sings it at the piano, using this book.

Vancouver’s Dead Poet’s Slam takes place tonight at the Cafe Deux Soleils.

All hallow’s eve is almost upon us so that means it’s time for the Dead Poet’s slam. Come dressed as your favorite dead poet. Read some Sylvia Plath with an oven on your head. Perform some Al Purdy or some Charles Bukowski with some beer in your hand. All dead poets are welcome. And as a feature we have–back from the dead–Janis Joplin.

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[First in a series of UD Halloween posts.]

From an interview with the poet laureate, W.S. Merwin:

Q: You write, in the poem “First Sight,” about “late blessings.” What are some that you appreciate?

Merwin: I love my wife, and I love my life here. I’m happy to be alive. I feel very lucky to be able to write sometimes and to work in the garden. That’s quite enough.

… Q: You seem continually astonished by nature, love, and words. What else astonishes you?

Merwin: What else is there?

… at 91.

Indomitable is one of those words, like poignant, that always seems to end up in a cliché; yet Spender was that sort of person, able always to rise up again from downfall.

Natasha Spender’s courage was never more severely tested than when, two months after her … book [in praise of the Spenders’ restored house and garden in France] came out, [the house, Mas St Jerome,] was completely destroyed in a forest fire. Luckily [friends] were staying with her at the time and woke up in time to rescue her and raise the alarm, or she would almost certainly have been killed. The fire not only destroyed the house and the garden but also Spender’s library, a loss his widow felt particularly keenly. But she remained philosophical and typically down-to earth. “I lived through the Blitz and this is remarkably similar,” she told an interviewer. “I must buy some secateurs … and start work cutting back in the garden.”

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I don’t know if this poem of Spender’s (my parents loved Spender, so I grew up reading his poems) was written for Natasha, but since they had a long and happy marriage, I wouldn’t be surprised:

The Trance

Our angel with our devil meets
In the atrocious dark nor do they part
But each forgives and greets,
And their mutual terrors heal
Within our married miracle.

[The separate trance somehow transfigures into a mutual terror, a true meeting place of selves stripped of disguise, their mortal agony unmasked. The eye of love sees even into this atrocious dark (note the origin of the word atrocious). Indeed love brings angelic light to it; and, in a specifically married miracle, frees, wakens, the loved one from nightmare.]

It’s Sunday. It’s autumn. Geese honk, the dogwood bronzes, the sun rises through rattling maple leaves.

Time for a sermon!

Our opening text is this YouTube, in which a wise woman reads Hornworm: Autumn Lamentation, by Stanley Kunitz. She weaves her life into her reading, recognizing in the doomed-to-grub worm her own earth-bound condition, and in the worm’s passive gestation of “parasitic flies” her sense of herself as a mere carrier of other beings’ vitality.

All her life she’s dreamt of uplift, transformation into a free, illuminated realm; but now she’s in her sixties, and she sees in the Kunitz poem a truth: “Maybe not.”

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

Stephen Dedalus transforms.

His heart trembled; his breath came faster and a wild spirit passed over his limbs as though he was soaring sunward. His heart trembled in an ecstasy of fear and his soul was in flight. His soul was soaring in an air beyond the world and the body he knew was purified in a breath and delivered of incertitude and made radiant and commingled with the element of the spirit. An ecstasy of flight made radiant his eyes and wild his breath and tremulous and wild and radiant his windswept limbs.

When we next encounter Dedalus, in Ulysses, he’s a worm again.

Does ripe fruit never fall? asks the woman in Sunday Morning.

Change me, change me! says The Woman at the Washington Zoo.

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

Primed for epiphany, we wait. We hate Philip Larkin’s dour, self-accepting useful to get that learnt. It’s Mr Ted Heathcliff Hughes who makes our heart race …

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

Why not conceive of epiphany more calmly? The terminus of our insistence on transformation is Mitchell Heisman’s Suicide Note, with its petulant rejection of a world that doesn’t soar with meaning. After nearly drinking himself to death, Stephen Dedalus begins to perceive, in Leopold Bloom, a modulated form of epiphany, a digging in to the world as it is that is not a wormy digging but a human one — having traits like the love of earthly beauty, a capacity to forgive, and pleasure from the play of the mind…

… looks at the much-discussed, recently-released Ted Hughes poem, written just after Sylvia Plath killed herself, in the cold clear light of reality.

When all the other stimulants fail.

… written immediately after Sylvia Plath’s suicide. It’s not published yet – it will be, tomorrow, in The New Statesman

You can hear it, though. Jonathan Pryce reads it, here.

… Britain’s Forward Prize for poetry.

This is from Singing School, a Wordsworthian account of his development as a poet.

6. Exposure

It is December in Wicklow:
Alders dripping, birches
Inheriting the last light,
The ash tree cold to look at.

[He somehow manages in these few words, these short lines, to establish a sad, depleted, inexpressive mood – winter, the wick of the candle low in the last light, the ashen ash tree… Even alders hints, in this context, at elders .]

A comet that was lost
Should be visible at sunset,
Those million tons of light
Like a glimmer of haws and rose-hips,

[Deepening the theme here of light – energy, creativity – dimmed. A comet that was lost… The poet hopes to see it this evening, its brilliant tail naturalized here as the way the bright red fruit of the hawthorne and rose-hip would look, bursting forth in the dark.]

And I sometimes see a falling star.
If I could come on meteorite!
Instead I walk through damp leaves,
Husks, the spent flukes of autumn,

[The theme of exhausted creative energy becomes yet clearer. Falling star – this, the poet, himself fading, will sometimes see… He’s trying to discover new resources for his art, new sharp illumination (If I could come on meteorite!), but instead, spent, he walks in a world of spent leaves.]

Imagining a hero
On some muddy compound,
His gift like a clingstone
Whirled for the desperate.

[Embarrassed, he confesses that he pretends he’s a heroic poet, offering the desperate world healing beauty.]

How did I end up like this?
I often think of my friends’
Beautiful prismatic counselling
And the anvil brains of some who hate me

As I sit weighing and weighing
My responsible tristia.
For what? For the ear? For the people?
For what is said behind-backs?

[Depressed, he poses the question directly: How did I lose my gift? Where did the fire of my poetry go? Why, for that matter, did I ever take up the pen? Why do I write again and again on the theme of my sense of exile from Ireland? Do I write merely to please myself with language (For the ear?), or for my fellow Irish (the people?)?]

Rain comes down through the alders,
Its low conducive voices
Mutter about let-downs and erosions
And yet each drop recalls

[The low of Wicklow is revisited in this stanza, with the muttering rain steadily eroding the poet’s flinty spark.]

The diamond absolutes.
I am neither internee nor informer;
An inner émigré, grown long-haired
And thoughtful; a wood-kerne

[Meteorite, diamond: The poet reminds himself of the brilliancy that still resides in the world, that he might still attain. Yet at this late season – December – he feels himself to have softened into a sort of intellectual withdrawal into himself, away from the world that is the source of inspiration.

In the seventeenth century, wood-kernes were Irish warriors who attacked British settlements.]

Escaped from the massacre,
Taking protective colouring
From bole and bark, feeling
Every wind that blows;

[He has left the scene of history and found protective cover in the natural world.]

Who, blowing up these sparks
For their meagre heat, have missed
The once-in-a-lifetime portent,
The comet’s pulsing rose.

[This longhair has tried to continue making art out of the shrinking, meagre world around him; he has tried to blow (see how Heaney plays throughout on low and blow) the few sparks the wind kicks up around him into the fire of poetry. (This is by the way the dominant image in Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind. Other poets use the image as well.) And meanwhile as he’s vainly huffing and puffing, that comet has flashed overhead, he has missed it, the real show, the real thing, the rare event about which the poet was born to write…

The pulsing rose here returns to the rose-hips in the first stanza — the brilliant natural flare of the world should draw the poet’s eye; he should look up from his depressive world and meet again, as he did in his youth, the hard brilliance of his world, his history.

Yet for me the real pathos of this poem is more general; it marks, as much as Auden’s more famous one does, the anguish of never really getting a grip on the actual, always being at a self-protective remove from it.]

He seems to be the front runner for the Nobel Prize in Literature, so let’s look at a Tomas Tranströmer poem — prose poem — so that if he does actually win we won’t be totally ignorant.

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Madrigal

I inherited a dark wood where I seldom go. But a day will come when the dead and the living trade places. The wood will be set in motion. We are not without hope. The most serious crimes will remain unsolved in spite of the efforts of many policemen. In the same way there is somewhere in our lives a great unsolved love. I inherited a dark wood, but today I’m walking in the other wood, the light one. All the living creatures that sing, wriggle, wag, and crawl! It’s spring and the air is very strong. I have graduated from the university of oblivion and am as empty-handed as the shirt on the clothesline.

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(Madrigal poems are “serious, brief, irregular lyrics.”)

This is a brief, allegorical, philosophical, spiritual expression; it feels Blakean in its flat declarative statements and packed, strange metaphors.

Here’s one possible unpacking.

We are born into mental chaos, into the dark mystery of existence. We all inherit this dark wood, and we spend our lives fleeing it. It’s frightening; its caverns are measureless to man. We hate the dark encroachment of that old catastrophe.

Yet as we die – on that green evening when our death begins – the dark wood will be set in motion, whether we like it or not. We’ll enter it again, as we did at our birth.

Human suffering (the most great crimes) we will never understand, and never significantly lighten, despite our best efforts. Yet along with the darkness we intuit a great unsolved love…

Meanwhile, though, we continue to live, in the bright light that we fashion for ourselves out of the horror of the darkness. We adore existence! It’s spring here; everything’s passionately alive…

Yet I’ve moved forward in time far enough to be unable, now, to remain oblivious to the dark wood. Even as I love the world and electrify it with my imagination, I know I’m ultimately nothing.

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This post’s title is from another Tranströmer poem, The Clearing.

It’s finally October, and it’s finally chilly.

Autumn-wise, UD‘s a gusty / Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights sort of person; but she gets how for a lot of people autumn is melancholy.

Maybe it’s because of all the doleful news stories lately about young, sensitive people wracked by the world, but UD finds herself pondering this autumn poem in particular. It’s by D.H. Lawrence.

Dolor of Autumn

At the same time I stand exposed
Here on the bush of the globe,
A newly-naked berry of flesh
For the stars to probe.

[The tear-trembling stars regard the tragedy of human life unsheathed, stripped of cover and consolation; the speaker fears everything, as he says in his first stanza, because now the earth is sheer animal life, the breathing of a beast, and our vulnerability is no match for its mindless animal power.]

Artificial Ovary Poem

The only rhyme for ovary
Is Emma, Madame Bovary.

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What name then should we take
To mean oocytian fake?

Fauxvary.

… after a few too many.

… are readers from Wesleyan University, opening University Diaries in hopes of finding further information about — maybe even finding a sort of explanation for — a student’s suicide by self-immolation on their campus this week.

At about this time two years ago — Halloween night, actually — a University of Rochester student went to the cemetery next to campus and immolated himself.

In April 2000, an MIT student burned herself to death in her dorm room.

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The cruelty to which you subject your body in this method is only one of its shocking features. There’s also the will to leave in a public or semi-public setting your charred corpse.

The reality is that we’re shocked senseless by self-immolation, especially when, as in these cases, it has no political or spiritual motive.

Without those motives we’re forced back on sheer vindictive rage — against oneself, against the world.

Madness, we say. Lunacy. Yet if we truly believed that, we wouldn’t keep circling the fire.

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University students are young, intense, in their physical prime. Their methods of suicide often reflect, bizarrely, their vigor. They race off of the Empire State Building. They leap over campus bridges. There’s a twisted vigor to self-immolation as well.

“When there’s nothing left to burn, you have to set yourself on fire,” were the words, from a Stars song, the Wesleyan student left on her Facebook as a final message.

Which is strange. If you listen to the song, that sentence seems to be about hyper-vitality, about fiercely illuminating the world with your passion, and when you’ve accomplished that, making your very being a beacon of life. The lyrics affirm a person’s survival of dashed passions; when the speaker encounters an old girlfriend, it’s nothing to him, because he’s put it away. Still impassioned, he moves forward into more life, unencumbered by the past.

You were what I wanted
I gave what I gave
I’m not sorry I met you
I’m not sorry it’s over

The song’s form — an insistent, dissonant, waltz — conveys the brittle nature of sexual passion even as it affirms its reliable recurrence. Broaden the idea out to life itself, and once more there’s the insistence on burning brightly without fear of scorching.

This scar is a fleck on my porcelain skin
Tried to reach deep but you couldn’t get in

Nora Miller took the lines literally. For her, having used up her life force, she could do nothing but direct what force was left against herself.

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Maybe. We can’t, as Donald Justice writes in his poem For the Suicides, know.

At the end of your shadow
There sat another, waiting,
Whose back was always to us.

What we can know, and what I think can help us think about and respond to suicides, is the other side of all of this — the particular incandescence of the not-at-all suicidal lives most of us live. Suicide wounds because it throws in our faces, forces a confrontation with, the foundation of our willingness to live. The question Why did they do it? can’t really be answered; but the question Why don’t we? can. It can be answered, and it should be posed.

As it is posed, again and again and again, in so much of the poetry that we love. Often poets simply want to convey what it feels like to exist, what we adore about the world, how the world comes at us and how we come at it, the mystery of our lives and the electrifying delight we take in them even as we understand almost nothing about the world and human existence.

That’s where I would go in the face of a suicide like this one, that shatters my sense of what life is — to the best poems about what life is. Because if Henry James is right that “Life is, in fact, a battle… [T]he world as it stands is no illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of a night; we wake up to it again for ever and ever; we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it,” then suicide should have us girding our loins.

Take a poem like James Schuyler’s ridiculously long Hymn to Life. It takes him over a half hour to read it! And what is it… It’s a tumbling riot of observation and feeling and meditation… The poem itself, in its luxuriance, is life overflowing, the poet bursting with things to say to us and to himself about … about everything. The seasons, love, God, cities, animals, illness…

… The truth is
That all these household tasks and daily work—up the street two men
Install an air conditioner—are beautiful.
… The days slide by and we feel we must
Stamp an impression on them. It is quite other. They stamp us, both
Time and season so that looking back there are wide unpeopled avenues
Blue-gray with cars on them…
Not
To know: what have these years of living and being lived taught us?
… Attune yourself to what is happening
Now, the little wet things, like washing up the lunch dishes. Bubbles
Rise, rinse and it is done. Let the dishes air dry, the way
You let your hair after a shampoo. All evaporates, water, time, the
Happy moment and—harder to believe—the unhappy. Time on a bus,
That passes, and the night with its burthen and gift of dreams.
… Life, it seems, explains nothing about itself.
… You
Suddenly sense: you don’t know what. An exhilaration that revives
Old views and surges of energy or the pure pleasure of
Simply looking.
… Art is as mysterious as nature, as life, of which it is
A flower.
… You see death shadowed out in another’s life. The threat
Is always there, even in balmy April sunshine. So what
If it is hard to believe in? Stopping in the city while the light
Is red, to think that all who stop with you too must stop…
… Life, I do not understand…

On and on it goes like that, a mind in motion, taking in existence, teaching itself to accept enigma, wondering why the person attached to this mind is so beautifully fitted to the world…

So. UD says: Burned by negation, turn back, full-hearted, to the world.