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.

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

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!

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.]

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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!

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

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.

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

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

… 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.

————————

[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.”

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

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.