… 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.

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

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.

An article in the Guardian about “strong calls for a proper memorial to [Sylvia Plath’s] life and work” prompts UD to consider just why she’s such a fine poet.

Readers tend to think of the spiky violent famous poems (Daddy, Lady Lazarus), but for UD it’s mainly about small moody works which are able, like many of Elizabeth Bishop’s poems, to make the natural world somehow broadcast the poet’s inner extremity.

They threaten
To let me through to a heaven
Starless and fatherless, a dark water.

The unsettling unclarity of this poem — the sense that the perceptual sense of the speaker is strangely and movingly messed up — signals a spiritual condition of urgent existential threat. A depressive person gradually loses her sense of the physical world around her in these few lines, and the final lines of the poem confirm that as the perceptual world dissolves, an entire world of death supercedes it.

Plath’s ability to establish this imperiled mood quickly, and sustain it through mere sequences of sketchy images, goes to the very heart of what makes lyrical poetry great: condensation, image, and the intense evocation through condensation and image of a particular state of consciousness.

The poem’s title is a painting’s title, naming what the artist will (we assume) describe — here, the way white sheep on a foggy hillside merge with the fog and become a sort of nothingness. The larger point of course will be the way in which the poet’s entire world is losing sharpness, definition, meaning, legibility.

She starts with personification:

The hills step off into whiteness.

Not merely the sheep step off, white into white, but rather the hills themselves, along with the entire natural world, undergo a white-out.

People or stars
Regard me sadly, I disappoint them.

This strikingly perceptual poem includes not merely the poet’s perceived world, but the poet perceived by the world; and since in her affectless state the distinction human/natural doesn’t really apply, she feels herself equally surveyed by stars and people. Or is it that she can’t tell the difference? Between the face of a star and the face of a person? Between a white sheep and a white hillside? In any case, in a reflection of her self-hatred, her despair reads all apprehensions of her as disappointed.

A brilliant and packed objective correlative here, the train carrying, as it were, the weight of her self- and world-annihilating misery. Her own final breath is anticipated in the trace of breath the train leaves behind; her mental and physical lassitude expresses itself in the poetic O slow; her sense of her rusted-out life appears in the color of the train – the train compared to a horse, with, again, a weird melding of the natural and the human-made… And note how carefully she’s worked the repeated O sounds in this stanza: O, slow, colour, hooves, dolorous. It amounts to a lament: O, O, O, O. Color and dolor make a rhyme, part of the odd incantatory feel of this lyric.

From white to black here – from the sheep, and the steam, and the foggy hills, all white, to the immediate reality of her inner experience: the blackness of sorrow. The world moves O slowly; but her depressed day moves swiftly, blackening by the hour as a flower left out will quickly blacken. Her repetition of morning, in the context of blackness, hints at mourning.

Her frantic mind moves her toward death; she feels herself as a physical being already dead: her bones hold a stillness. Her feelings, though, are most acute: From her infinitely pulled-back perspective, the far fields, the fields dissolving into obscurity and meaninglessness as she withdraws from life, break her heart, for they are the avatars of her oncoming reduction to nothingness.

See how she returns to stars at the end of the poem; liberated into death, the poet no longer suffers the disappointed face of stars (notice also all of the near-rhymes here, which deepen the poem’s mystical, chanting feel: threaten/heaven, star/dark, father/water, a feel conveyed throughout in any case merely by the radical shortness of each line). Her paradoxical heaven looks like hell – it’s pure death, after all, dark and starless. But heaven nonetheless, because it removes her from an agonizingly inchoate and uncomprehending world.

… a great love poet, has died.

UD finds this YouTube of Scots reciting some of his poems beautiful and moving.

Our local news radio describes a city under flood warning as the rain pours in this morning.

A moment ago the water let up a little, and I walked my half acre, dragging green-speckled limbs off the lawn and into the woods.

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

Rain – the poet’s metaphor for sexual passion, for renewal after spiritual dryness, for letting go.

Also, in its aspect of gray and fog and subdual, just the opposite — life shut in, repression, imperception.

But in a new landscape, a postmodern one, rain seems to mean something else. It plays differently.

As in a poem like The Center for Atmospheric Research by Bin Ramke.

Like Don DeLillo, Ramke notices how pleasantly, and disturbingly, our smooth affluent American lives seem to be arranged for us. Everything’s prettied up, turned into pleasant, managed, mini-experience. Maybe pseudo-experience. In a small moment in The Names, Don DeLillo’s narrator, James Axton, describes heading to bed with his family, “our bodies arranged for dreaming in loose-fitting clothes.” Arranged. Some invisible benevolent life-manager has chosen those clothes carefully for us, has arranged even our unconscious experience for us. Into even our dreams, our most wild and hidden and personal aspect, some sedating, neutralizing stage manager has intruded.

Ramke’s poem — a surreal stroll through a postmodern weatherscape — extends this idea of the managed life, the managed consciousness, closely escorted through a pretty, though unsettlingly shrunken and simulacral world.

The poet is visiting an I.M. Pei designed lab for the study of the weather.

Pei designed the building with views,
smooth masonry, and the mountains aligned
for a photo opportunity; inside are files
sufficient for forever, for fine tuning weather.

The elaborately designed building, aligning the mountains (we align them; we bring nature into our design, our arrangement, thereby making nature feel unnatural); the files that fine tune the weather — from the outset, the theme is this DeLilloesque sense of a world entirely tamed and patterned by us.

Great Spangled Fritillary, the watcher vaguely recalls
from Teach Yourself Lepidoptery, a book.
He wanted to live in a land of appropriate weather
with views of mountains and with music constant.

And, you know, why not? Who wouldn’t want to live in a climate-controlled universe? Weather always appropriate, soft carefully chosen elevator music in the background… See how far we are from the Romantic notion of weather as the power outside and greater than we, the power that makes a mockery of our efforts to control the world. Now we control – interiorize, in the Center – even the power of weather.

He wants to tell a story but no one would listen,
like opera: Black women clean the floors
and shine the walls like silver nightly.
Computers whir Platonic as nuns. Nothing

escapes naming; storms arranged in teacups
like anyone’s collection, like rows of butterflies
pinned and satisfactory: this is the new landscape.

Let me tell you how being in this place feels to me. The telling will be surreal, and you won’t listen, becalmed inside your own version of climate control. But this weird technological world around me is almost spiritual in its hushed perfection, in the way the setting creates an autonomous and satisfying and ordered world whose power and tranquility make me never want to leave it. Everything is named here, arranged. No mystery, no anxious unknowing.

Also, though, dead. Pinned. The new landscape.

Now, as the poet continues his walk through the atmospheric exhibits, his thoughts take a bizarre turn.

Or there is a lewd father among the shrubbery

watching daughters in weather; he breathes heavily
and the wet wisdom begins, the storm gathering
to spill across the ridge, longed for.
Daughters must be warned against sincerity

of frantic violins: “He was a man of sympathetic
tendencies,” read the official report. “He was
smaller than he looked and tended to lick chocolate
from his fingers in a lascivious manner.”

He tried his wife’s patience, it is true,
and lived alone through the marriage, kept
his own counsel. With such petty symbols as
weather, he kept his own counsel.

So, the poet begins to imagine a narrative, in some way inspired by what he’s seeing, a kind of louche fairy tale in which an infantile voyeur masturbates while watching his own daughters as they stand out in an approaching rainstorm. The storm gathering… longed for… This is a perverse and pathetic endpoint for the sweeping Romantic narrative, the great thunderous sublime which ignited the lovers’ passion. Here bracing weather generates merely wet spill from a childish, solitary, small, and petty man.

A butterfly like weather; the climate like
laughter, the movement of small air. Clouds, too,
have names. Clouds leave home to find themselves.
Good money after bad, the fathers say, and close

the door called Nature against their coming back.
The funny little ways children have of making
the world the color they always wanted. Sunset.
Birds.

Again this theme of our infantile desire to condense and control the world, to shut nature out so that the unclarity and uncontrollability of clouds no longer threatens us. The clouds inside the Center are pseudo-clouds, named, pinned, like the butterflies. Like children, we make the world whatever color we want.

The poem concludes:

The mathematics of memory begin

to swirl like cookie dough, like chocolate with egg
and sugar and vanilla and butter. A bowl to lick,
dangerous with delight, as ultraviolet. Home again!
begs the mother and soon the sorry child walks

that long allée as rain begins to pour. Past
such petty symbols the boy returns through architecture,
a silly gauntlet: the butterfly, the mother, the fit
signatures of loveliness. His parents at the door,

the little cottage in the woods, Hansel home again
at last, the shining path. A little like a dream.
Ours is not a simple age, and things are what they seem
happily ever after in the malicious tiny rain.

Like the malsain father, the poet now recalls his similarly infantile childhood – sickly sweet, with much licking of chocolate icing, everything sweet comfort food, like this lab which reduces everything dangerous in the world to sweet comfort food. Indeed the lab’s unnatural infantility has prompted these infantile memories…

But now the poet admonishes himself – or rather his mother admonishes him – to leave the petty indoor weather world, to return to reality, to grow up, to go home.

Sorry to leave it, the child walks home, as “the rain begins to pour.” So this finally feels like reality — this is real rain falling, the real, grown-up, confused, out of control business of being an actual person in the actual world. As he walks back out through the lab, the poet again registers “the fit / signatures of loveliness,” the appropriate, arranged, satisfactory landscape of postmodern dreaming in which he’s been delighting.

And now home again for Hansel, lost but now found, back on the real path… It was all a dream…

Yet note the last two lines (note too that the poem does not rhyme except for this last stanza, which suddenly has exact rhyme):

Ours is not a simple age, and things are what they seem
happily ever after in the malicious tiny rain.

Despite its seeming infantility, our new postmodern landscape is not at all simple. It only looks simple, and benign. In fact, the cute little pseudo-rains inside the lab, all those adorably controlled exhibits we enjoy as we stroll by them in the science museum, seduce us into a very perilous ease about things. Outside the pretend rain, under the massive pelting of the actual, we’re shaken awake.

… has a post up which distinguishes the responses of atheists and Christians when fear-and-trembling-and-sickness-unto-death starts up.

Like many commentators, Linker is moved and meditative at the spectacle of Christopher Hitchens talking with his characteristic candor about death.

Linker cautions us to expect no deathbed conversions from a confirmed atheist like Hitchens. When immediately threatened with suffering and extinction, atheists might be tempted, as Primo Levi once was, at Auschwitz, to beg for divine intervention; but Linker quotes Levi writing that if he had given in to this, he would have felt ashamed. It would have been a betrayal of the truth.

For the religious, Linker suggests, moments of deep anguish are precious epiphanic events that transport us to the truth of our fragile humanity, and our related dependence on God to grant meaning and transcendence to an otherwise pointless, debilitated, and unredeemed existence. For non-believers, on the other hand:

… [A] person’s capacity to determine the truth depends on his or her ability to think calmly, coolly, dispassionately. It depends on the capacity to bracket aspects of one’s subjectivity (like intense emotions, including fear of imminent death) that might distort one’s judgment or obstruct the effort to achieve an unbiased, objective view of the world in itself.

Religious people tend to believe that “human beings are truest to themselves — most authentic — when they are most vulnerable.” For “the champion of rational enlightenment, the secular intellectual and social critic,” on the other hand, episodes of naked vulnerability represent reversions to the animal incomprehension and fear ever at work beneath our efforts toward understanding.

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While this seems to me broadly speaking a useful distinction, it overlooks some important things. It presents too stark an either/or. If you consider secular intellectuals and artists like Hitchens, Richard Rorty, and Vladimir Nabokov, say, you discover that they seem impelled as much by a profound Romanticism as by reason.

On the edge of his own death, Rorty wrote that “reason can only follow paths that the imagination has first broken.”

Family members, Rorty reports, have asked him if, at this moment of greatest vulnerability, he has felt the pull of religious faith.

No. Neither philosophy nor religion seems to provide ballast.

…[N]either the philosophy I had written nor that which I had read seemed to have any particular bearing on my situation. I had no quarrel with Epicurus’s argument that it is irrational to fear death, nor with Heidegger’s suggestion that ontotheology originates in an attempt to evade our mortality. But neither ataraxia (freedom from disturbance) nor Sein zum Tode (being toward death) seemed in point.

Only poetry comforts and clarifies. Rorty repeatedly recites certain lines to himself:

Nature I loved, and next to Nature, Art;
I warmed both hands before the fire of life,
It sinks, and I am ready to depart.

Calming but wholly human mantras, these, that take one intimately to what Hitchens in his autobiography calls “the fragility of love.” They pull us back from the precipice, at least emotionally, and strengthen us in the anticipation of our descent.

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Hitchens recently quoted — somewhat misquoted, but who cares — E.M. Forster: “Get on with your own work, and behave as if you were immortal.”

When you can’t get away with doing that anymore, it’s time to gather in to yourself your essential identity, an identity you share with many other people whose “temple,” Forster also writes (quoting him correctly here), “is the holiness of the Heart’s affections, and [whose] kingdom, though they never possess it, is the wide-open world.”

UD leaves tomorrow for her house in upstate New York. I’m not kidding when I tell you that this house is back of beyond. No internet connection, for instance.

I will therefore probably post every other day. Maybe more often, but probably around every other day.

Means of connection: Mr UD and I will drive down a series of steep dirt roads to a hot spot in Cobleskill, the closest town.

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Meanwhile, as we say farewell to Garrett Park, here’s a poem about what we’re leaving. A poem about a typical morning around these parts, late summer.

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AUGUST, ‘THESDA

Morning starts with the sound of a train.
I open my bedside laptop to see
If, after last night’s stupendous rain,
We’ve been reconnected to electricity.

Yes! New comments, new mail…
I glance beyond the sliding doors
To gauge how badly the gale
Has shaken the trees. More
Branches, limbs, and twigs to gather.

I sigh, get up, let out the dog, and go
To the kitchen to microwave a rather
Agèd cup of tea, and also
A plate of olive oil.
I toast tandoori naan
And dip it, soft and hot, into the oil.

Now I catch sight of a white-spotted fawn
Which stares at me and seems to linger.

I give it the finger.

I

The outcome of Palmer and Figes
Lacks even a hint of surprigese:
He who seeks to defame
Plays a dangerous game
And may have to pay multiple high fees.

II

As to the campaign of McInnis:
Finis.

… in here, but UD‘s nowhere near a good enough poet to write it.

I think we need Walt Whitman for this one. Can’t think, at the moment, of a contemporary poet up to the task.

… has never done much for UD. Many of his poems seem to her mere statements, and rather self-righteous ones at that. No humor, no wit, no surprising emotions. Wholesome poetry for right-thinking people.

I think William Logan’s appraisal is more or less right: Dreary, a village explainer.

[H]is poems are a species of prose … In his poems the writing is … wordy and lifeless … This run-on, the-sentence-is-everything-that-is-the-case style (like Molly Bloom on Prozac) is an aesthetic decision, not mere laziness. It just looks like laziness.

Merwin and Wendell Berry (about whose withdrawal of his papers from the University of Kentucky I’ve written here) are often written of together as ecopoets, and it’s true that they do a similar sort of agrarian nattering. Berry is a fine prose stylist, but his poetry, if you ask UD, doesn’t come across….

Here’s a Merwin poem dedicated to Berry.

Bread

to find themselves alone
before a wheat field
raising its radiance to the moon

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This seems to UD a very sketchy sort of narrative, a little pit stop at Epiphany. Its main emotion is condescension toward people who can’t transcend a life of physicality, can’t lift themselves up to the radiance of the wheat field. They just stand there clutching a piece of bread.

They’ve lost touch with their own depths, with the source of their bread. They’ve abandoned the rigors of the search for the sacred.

Perhaps the dark mysteries of spiritual life frighten them. Perhaps they’re conformists, more comfortable in the crowd than in the challenging aloneness of the radiance.