… is the title of my latest Inside Higher Ed post. It’s about the British poet Peter Porter, who has died.

A poem about the spring, by Robert Louis Stevenson.

Flower God, God of the Spring

Flower god, god of the spring, beautiful, bountiful,
Cold-dyed shield in the sky, lover of versicles,
Here I wander in April
Cold, grey-headed; and still to my
Heart, Spring comes with a bound, Spring the deliverer,
Spring, song-leader in woods, chorally resonant;
Spring, flower-planter in meadows,
Child-conductor in willowy
Fields deep dotted with bloom, daisies and crocuses:
Here that child from his heart drinks of eternity:
O child, happy are children!
She still smiles on their innocence,
She, dear mother in God, fostering violets,
Fills earth full of her scents, voices and violins:
Thus one cunning in music
Wakes old chords in the memory:
Thus fair earth in the Spring leads her performances.
One more touch of the bow, smell of the virginal
Green – one more, and my bosom
Feels new life with an ecstasy.

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

Flower god, god of the spring, beautiful, bountiful,
Cold-dyed shield in the sky, lover of versicles,

I thought at first this was vesicles, and was all ready to find a reason why a “small membrane-enclosed sac that can store or transport substances” made perfect sense in a poem praising the spring… But no – a versicle is a sort of prayer-leader. It’s the first line, usually uttered by a priest, of a call-and-response bit of prayer.

Priest: O Lord, open thou our lips:
People: And our mouth shall shew forth thy praise.
Priest: O God, make speed to save us:
People: O Lord, make haste to help us.
Priest: Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost.
People: As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.
Priest: Praise ye the Lord.
People: The Lord’s name be praised.

Like that. The whole idea of the poem is that spring initiates life, and calls us back into life, after the winter. It’s a heavenly versicle that draws from us a very intense response. The flower god reveals itself now in the blue sky shielding us from winter.

Here I wander in April
Cold, grey-headed; and still to my
Heart, Spring comes with a bound, Spring the deliverer,

When I get to Heart, vesicle becomes versicle becomes ventricle … and as I wander in my head, I find icicle and canticle are there too — icicle because the poet has repeated “cold,” and canticle because once I know what versicle means, I’m thinking of song… But anyway, the poet, who walks in a spring wood, feels himself to be unspringlike — old, sad; yet the power of spring is so great that even he feels delivered from age and sorrow by it, brought from gray into a colorful world by it.

Spring, song-leader in woods, chorally resonant;
Spring, flower-planter in meadows,

The poet widens out the versicle idea. Spring is indeed a song-leader, making the trees and wind resound, respond to its leading voice.

Child-conductor in willowy
Fields deep dotted with bloom, daisies and crocuses:

The poet continues to play out his musical metaphor. Leader, conductor of music; and conductor of the children through the woods. Even dotted has musical resonance.

Here that child from his heart drinks of eternity:
O child, happy are children!
She still smiles on their innocence,
She, dear mother in God, fostering violets,
Fills earth full of her scents, voices and violins:

Far from grey-headed, the poet now, under the influence of spring, is a child again, having been led back to a state of eternal youth. Violets, voices, and violins – nature, humanity, and music all quicken under the flower god.

Thus one cunning in music
Wakes old chords in the memory:
Thus fair earth in the Spring leads her performances.
One more touch of the bow, smell of the virginal
Green – one more, and my bosom
Feels new life with an ecstasy.

Subtle, cunning, what the earth sings — a warble, swaying branches, a brook in motion. There are choral resonances to all of these sounds together, but they also form personal memory chords. Spring, the poet repeats, leads the earth-performance, the song of the earth, to get Mahlerian about it… And then the poet ends with images that complete his metaphor so beautifully and subtly: All it takes is a touch, a scent, of spring, and the poet feels reborn. The bow of the violin is also the bough of the tree that taps him; the smell of virginal grass is also music from the virginal, a kind of harpsichord.

Oh. Whoops. Too late. You were supposed to read this post while listening to this. Written for virginal.

… everyone’s quoting.

Buttons

Only the buttons did not yield
Witness of crime that survived death
They come from depths upon the surface
The only tribute on their graves

Only the buttons did not yield
Powerful voice of silenced choirs
Only the buttons did not yield
Buttons from coats and uniforms

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

The Katyn forest smokes with fog again.

I got the translation of “Buttons” from an anonymous commenter on a thread about the Polish crash in Smolensk. The third stanza appears here, on the Polish government’s page about the president:

…przeleciał ptak przepływa obłok
upada liść kiełkuje ślaz
i cisza jest na wysokościach
i dymi mgłą katyński las…

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

Zbigniew Herbert is a ding an sich, cast a cold eye kind of guy. Many of his poems have him reckoning with objects – buttons… or pebbles:

Pebble

— Pebbles cannot be tamed
to the end they will look at us
with a calm and very clear eye

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

Herbert’s one of many poets attracted to the impassive enduring thingness of the world; our childish passions do us in; they need tempering by the earth.

And yet, in words very similar to Camus’ (“[O]ne must keep intact in oneself a freshness, a cool wellspring of joy, love the day that escapes injustice.”), Herbert also writes:

beware of dryness of heart love the morning spring
the bird with an unknown name the winter oak
light on a wall the splendour of the sky
they don’t need your warm breath
they are there to say: no one will console you

The pebble doesn’t need your warmth; nature doesn’t need your warmth. Nature’s not going to reach out and touch you…

Somehow you have to toughen yourself up to something approaching a pebble … a pebble with a heart in it… Keep a calm clear and cold eye. A dry eye. But not a dry heart.

Or, as Flaubert said, we should be “equal to our destiny, that’s to say, impassive like it.” Even with a beating heart.

Keep your mind in hell, and despair not.

… English Masterpieces series of books
that came out in the ‘sixties.
She used them when was she was an
undergraduate at Northwestern;
and her sister-in-law, Joanna, used
them as an undergraduate at Boston
University. UD found
on the shelves in Shady Hill Square
(she’s just back from Cambridge for
Easter) this volume:

It includes a great poem by Archibald
MacLeish that she’d never seen before.

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

Eleven

And summer mornings the mute child, rebellious,
Stupid, hating the words, the meanings, hating
The Think now, Think, the Oh but Think! would leave
On tiptoe the three chairs on the verandah
And crossing tree by tree the empty lawn
Push back the shed door and upon the sill
Stand pressing out the sunlight from his eyes
And enter and with outstretched fingers feel
The grindstone and behind it the bare wall
And turn and in the corner on the cool
Hard earth sit listening. And one by one,
Out of the dazzled shadow in the room
The shapes would gather, the brown plowshare, spades,
Mattocks, the polished helves of picks, a scythe
Hung from the rafters, shovels, slender tines
Glinting across the curve of sickles—shapes
Older than men were, the wise tools, the iron
Friendly with earth. And sit there quiet, breathing
The harsh dry smell of withered bulbs, the faint
Odor of dung, the silence. And outside
Beyond the half-shut door the blind leaves
And the corn moving. And at noon would come,
Up from the garden, his hard crooked hands
Gentle with earth, his knees still earth-stained, smelling
Of sun, of summer, the old gardener, like
A priest, like an interpreter, and bend
Over his baskets.

And they would not speak:
They would say nothing. And the child would sit there
Happy as though he had no name, as though
He had been no one: like a leaf, a stem,
Like a root growing—

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

And is a great poetic word. And death shall have no dominion, etc., etc. You first meet it maybe in the Bible. And God spoke… and… and… See how every sentence in this poem starts with and? And why?

Why? Because the poet wants to convey the spontaneous, stream of consciousness, sudden memory trace feel of the mental and emotional moment the poem captures. It’s how we narrate, isn’t it? I remember I’d run from the porch and my books and my schoolwork and I’d run across the part of the yard that only had trees in it and I’d flee all that emptiness and abstraction for the bracing reality of the objects in the shed and I loved the way they slowly emerged from the darkness of the shed, and the way my summer-saturated eyes had to adjust to the darkness… And the way they rose from the dark world and took on a kind of super-existence… I remember that…

These were the wise tools, earth-friendly; not like my effortful cerebral exercises, my noisy verbal efforts to make the world mean something. They just were, sustaining silently on their surfaces the old truths of life. The gardener, adept in the soil and the soil’s tools, was the priest of the real world, interpreting its meanings with his gestures. I felt the real world inside myself as I sat there silently with him, felt my own plantlike stirrings and vibrancies. My sheer life – needing no name, and, like the leaves, happily blind to the convolutions of the human realm – began to twine upward into the real sunlight in that shed.

Robert Penn Warren was born there, in Guthrie, Kentucky, and the state has just put up signs on the highway north of the town telling people about it.

… “Only one person has won the Pulitzer Prize in both fiction and poetry,” the governor said of Warren [at the ceremony].

Warren was also deemed the first Poet Laureate of the United States.

“Robert Penn Warren reflected his pride of where he lived in his writing,” said Beshear. “Robert Penn Warren was proud of the place where he lived and the sign is to show him we’re proud of him.”…

Everyone knows his novel, All the King’s Men; his poetry, somewhat less known, is a series of strenuous spiritual nature lyrics. UD, though not immensely keen on Warren’s poetry, has always admired his lines’ unembarrassed intensity of emotion, their unreconstructed romanticism. Here’s a poem of his I just discovered. It has a surprising word in it.

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

The Nature of a Mirror

The sky has murder in the eye, and I
Have murder in the heart, for I
Am only human.
We look at each other, the sky and I.
We understand each other, for

Is the mirror into which you stare.

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

The sky has murder in the eye, and I
Have murder in the heart, for I
Am only human.

[I’ll die. I know that. The sky will survive me; the nature the sky’s part of will in fact kill me — I’m only human, only a fragile artifact of the natural world.]

We look at each other, the sky and I.
We understand each other, for

For the solstice of summer has sagged.

[The long sunlit days of summer are ending; the sky and the poet know that the poet’s days also shorten, darken.]

I stand
And wait. Virtue is rewarded, that
Is the nightmare,

[Like the blind Milton, the poet serves God even if he only stands and waits. But there’s a darker reading. The poet is full of rage when he considers how his light is spent; his impending death is night – a nightmare – and nothing else.]

and I must tell you

That soon now, even before
The change from Daylight Savings Time, the sun,
Beyond the western ridge of black-burnt pine stubs like
A snaggery of rotten shark teeth, sinks
Lower, larger, more blank, and redder than
A mother’s rage,

[Nightmare, from the Middle English, is a female demon disturbing the sleep; here, the nightmare takes shape as a burnt and rotten Mother Nature raging murderously after the poet. More blank. Nothingness gradually prevails.]

as though
F.D.R. had never run for office even, or the first vagina
Had not had the texture of dream.

[A bit of whimsy, a bit of wistfulness. The poet thinks, amid the big nothing, of the big somethings in his life: F.D.R.; his amazing initial encounter with the inside of a woman. The nothingness he feels in the face of the sky and the setting sun turns those things into nothings too. As though they never existed. What does Leopold Bloom say at his lowest? No one is anything.]

Time

Is the mirror into which you stare.

… is (who knew?) the house and garden and gravesite of Edna Saint Vincent Millay. It’s now open to the public, and UD, who will be in New York for most of August, will visit. And write about it here, on University Diaries.

As a kind of counterpoint to the terrible theme, lately, of university student suicides, there’s the following Millay poem.

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

God’s World

O world, I cannot hold thee close enough!
Thy winds, thy wide grey skies!
Thy mists that roll and rise!
Thy woods, this autumn day, that ache and sag
And all but cry with colour! That gaunt crag
To crush! To lift the lean of that black bluff!
World, World, I cannot get thee close enough!
Long have I known a glory in it all,
But never knew I this;
Here such a passion is
As stretcheth me apart. Lord, I do fear
Thou’st made the world too beautiful this year.
My soul is all but out of me, let fall
No burning leaf; prithee, let no bird call.

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

Too much beauty. Must be the hills of upstate she’s looking at, height of autumn. The passion the too-candescent world makes her feel stretches her apart; she’s about to burst. Her soul is all but out of her.

She asks God to knock it off – no more orange leaves, no more birdsongs – or she’ll perish of bliss.

… soon to be installed in honor of Ted Hughes, UD looks at one of his poems.

September

We sit late, watching the dark slowly unfold:
No clock counts this.
When kisses are repeated and the arms hold
There is no telling where time is.

It is midsummer: the leaves hang big and still:
Behind the eye a star,
Under the silk of the wrist a sea, tell
Time is nowhere.

We stand; leaves have not timed the summer.
No clock now needs
Tell we have only what we remember:
Minutes uproaring with our heads

Like an unfortunate King’s and his Queen’s
When the senseless mob rules;
And quietly the trees casting their crowns
Into the pools.

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

Let’s look more closely.

September

[A funny month, neither here nor there. Summer still, but there are suggestions of fall. The poet locates his poem in this emotionally vulnerable season, its warmth and light and profuse life slowly being undone by something darker and colder. Transitional states make us, of course, think of time and its slow but unstoppable motion.]

We sit late, watching the dark slowly unfold:
No clock counts this.

[Lovers sit in a windowed room, embracing passionately and watching night come up. Engrossed in one another and in the soft gradual rhythms of the natural world, they don’t feel the passage of time. A perfect moment of infinite bliss. Yet the  word “late,” meaning not merely late at night but late in the summer season, already signals trouble.]

When kisses are repeated and the arms hold
There is no telling where time is.

[A repetition, or a deepening, of the first two lines, with the very nice formulation “arms hold.” We do not merely hold one another in a steady embrace; our arms, like some mechanical object we’ve successfully repaired, “hold.”  There’s a sense already of the tentative, jerry-built nature of this “hold.” Note also the linguistic care taken here, with variations of the soft s and the short i throughout – sit, this, kisses, is, is… Makes for a lulling feel which fits the lovers as they sit in a timeless trance.]

It is midsummer: the leaves hang big and still:

[See how he’s still doing it? It, is, mid, still…]

Behind the eye a star,
Under the silk of the wrist a sea, tell

[Infinity of light in the eye; oceanic endlessness in the body — This is love, which transcends time, which creates its own glorious world of permanence amid a world of impermanence.]

Time is nowhere.

We stand; leaves have not timed the summer.

[Now, in full night, the lovers get up to go to bed. Their passionate embraces are over. The poem is about to make a significant shift in mood and theme.]

No clock now needs
Tell we have only what we remember:

[From the idea of their needing no clock because their love triumphs over time, we move, with their standing up, to the idea of their needing no clock because they are so aware of their transience that they need no clock to remind them of it.]

Minutes uproaring with our heads

[Not only are they aware that they are slaves to time and not the eternal lovers they felt themselves to be before;  they positively scream with the painful awareness of their own brevity. Each minute uproars within their heads as they break away from their bliss into the world of time.]

Like an unfortunate King’s and his Queen’s
When the senseless mob rules;

[Off with their heads!  When the arms no longer hold, the head gets all mobbed up with the senseless, brutal world outside the beloved’s embrace.]

And quietly the trees casting their crowns
Into the pools.

[From an entire sea under the silk of the wrist we end in sad little pools into which the life of the lovers – their late summer leaves, their crowned heads, their crowning moment – is cast.]

A Valentine’s Day poem, short and sweet.

By Marvin Bell.

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

MARS BEING RED

Being red is the color of a white sun where it lingers
on an arm. Color of time lost in sparks, of space lost
inside dance. Red of walks by the railroad in the flush
of youth, while our steps released the squeaks
of shoots reaching for the light. Scarlet of sin, crimson
of fresh blood, ruby and garnet of the jewel bed,
early sunshine, vestiges of the late sun as it turns
green and disappears. Be calm. Do not give in
to the rabid red throat of age. In a red world, imprint
the valentine and blush of romance for the dark.
It has come. You will not be this quick-to-redden
forever. You will be green again, again and again.

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

The poet considers various symbolic values of the color red. He begins with his title – Mars, the planet named for the god of war, is red; and warlike rage makes us red – we become crimson with rage, etc. So red isn’t merely the color of hearts and love; it’s the color of hate. The poem will play among the symbolic values of red, and it will urge one sort of redness upon us.

Being red is the color of a white sun where it lingers
on an arm. Color of time lost in sparks, of space lost
inside dance.

Red is our burning, our brightening; it is our flushed and feverish sensual dance, whose intensity makes us lose all sense of time.

Red of walks by the railroad in the flush
of youth, while our steps released the squeaks
of shoots reaching for the light.

Red is the shade of our most vivid memories of passionate youth, our very steps animating the natural world. (Notice the assonance here: youth/shoots; released/squeaks/reaching.)

Scarlet of sin, crimson
of fresh blood, ruby and garnet of the jewel bed,
early sunshine, vestiges of the late sun as it turns
green and disappears.

[Red is the color of sex, the jewel bed, one’s early years of erotic bliss. You barely register, from that ruby bed, the sun turning the world from amazing red to ordinary green as it sets.]

Be calm. Do not give in
to the rabid red throat of age.

[Here the lover turns to his beloved with his urgent imperative: Reject the martial red, the red of screaming rage and conflict. Be calm, not warlike. Have the passion of youth, not the aggression of age.]

In a red world, imprint
the valentine and blush of romance for the dark.

[In a dark red bloody world of wars, keep always in your mind and heart the light red blush of lovers’ bliss. This will lighten the darkness of warlike red.]

It has come. You will not be this quick-to-redden
forever. You will be green again, again and again

[At this very moment, Valentine, another one of our fires of passion has kindled. Our various forms of reddening (the poem leaves nothing to the imagination here) will not unfold so quickly forever. We’re going to get old and green, like the late sun. Read your Andrew Marvell! Calmly but determinedly, it’s time for us to blight the world of hate, and light the world of love.]

Okay, here’s the rest of Roethke’s The Far Field. I’m going to mess it up with my comments, but you’ll find it nice and neat here.

Scroll down to the previous post for part one of Snow Poems.

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

II

At the field’s end, in the corner missed by the mower,

[We’re done with the dream in section one. Now the poet recollects his rural youth, and the way encounters with dead animals taught him not about death, but about the eternal. This seems paradoxical.]

Where the turf drops off into a grass-hidden culvert,
Haunt of the cat-bird, nesting-place of the field-mouse,
Not too far away from the ever-changing flower-dump,
Among the tin cans, tires, rusted pipes, broken machinery, –
One learned of the eternal;
And in the shrunken face of a dead rat, eaten by rain and ground-beetles
(I found in lying among the rubble of an old coal bin)
And the tom-cat, caught near the pheasant-run,
Its entrails strewn over the half-grown flowers,
Blasted to death by the night watchman.

[Marvelous detail, marvelous assonance (learned/eternal; among/rubble.]

I suffered for young birds, for young rabbits caught in the mower,
My grief was not excessive.
For to come upon warblers in early May
Was to forget time and death:

[A child of visceral responses, the poet mourned the deaths of the animals he saw; yet the spectacle of the natural world coming back to vibrant life in the spring made him euphoric. He easily forgot the scenes he’s described of death and rot.]

How they filled the oriole’s elm, a twittering restless cloud, all one morning,
And I watched and watched till my eyes blurred from the bird shapes, –
Cape May, Blackburnian, Cerulean, –
Moving, elusive as fish, fearless,
Hanging, bunched like young fruit, bending the end branches,
Still for a moment,
Then pitching away in half-flight,
Lighter than finches,
While the wrens bickered and sang in the half-green hedgerows,
And the flicker drummed from his dead tree in the chicken-yard.

[Ever-renewed natural life is a form of eternity; it asserts itself endlessly against the pressure of all that death.]

– Or to lie naked in sand,
In the silted shallows of a slow river,
Fingering a shell,

[The poet turns his memories this way and that. Now he thinks of lying once on a sandy riverbank considering a shell.]

Thinking:
Once I was something like this, mindless,
Or perhaps with another mind, less peculiar;

[What was I in a previous life? A previous incarnation? Maybe an inanimate object, or maybe a person, but one not so strange as I.]

Or to sink down to the hips in a mossy quagmire;
Or, with skinny knees, to sit astride a wet log,
Believing:
I’ll return again,
As a snake or a raucous bird,
Or, with luck, as a lion.

[Previous lives; and also afterlives. This is the eternity about which nature has taught the poet.]

I learned not to fear infinity,
The far field, the windy cliffs of forever,
The dying of time in the white light of tomorrow,
The wheel turning away from itself,
The sprawl of the wave,
The on-coming water.

[The dying of time in the white light of tomorrow. Tomorrow’s white light is the snowy pall from the dream in section one. We’re back in the car, I think… And not just not fearing infinity, but, as the dream suggests, being drawn again and again toward it, toward the far field at the end of the peninsula, and then toward the oncoming water after the peninsula.]

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

III

The river turns on itself,
The tree retreats into its own shadow.
I feel a weightless change, a moving forward
As of water quickening before a narrowing channel
When banks converge, and the wide river whitens;

[From the description of a recurrent dream, to a set of memories of the natural world, to the present. Section three is set now, with the mature poet describing a strange temporal/spiritual experience he’s undergoing. The experience in a sense mirrors the experience of his dream: Both experiences have a dual nature: They are both physical narrowings – the world converging in on itself, things getting smaller and darker – and temporal advancements, quickenings, implying the impending end of the poet’s life.]

Or when two rivers combine, the blue glacial torrent
And the yellowish-green from the mountainy upland, —
At first a swift rippling between rocks,
Then a long running over flat stones
Before descending to the alluvial plane,
To the clay banks, and the wild grapes hanging from the elmtrees.
The slightly trembling water
Dropping a fine yellow silt where the sun stays;
And the crabs bask near the edge,
The weedy edge, alive with small snakes and bloodsuckers, —

[Again, an experience akin to the convergence of different waterways as they meet and plummet to the plain, becalmed.]

I have come to a still, but not a deep center,
A point outside the glittering current;

[I too, in my many-streamed complexity, have arrived at a becalmed place, outside the rush of daily reality.]

My eyes stare at the bottom of a river,
At the irregular stones, iridescent sandgrains,

[Earlier, the poet wrote I watched and watched til my eyes blurred. He was talking about birds; now he stares at another manifestation of bejeweled nature: iridescent sandgrains. In the perpetual glory of nature the rapt poet finds his religion.]

My mind moves in more than one place,
In a country half-land, half-water.

I am renewed by death, thought of my death,
The dry scent of a dying garden in September,
The wind fanning the ash of a low fire.
What I love is near at hand,
Always, in earth and air.

[The dead animals renewed him, made him not fear infinity; and he repeats the idea here, with two beautiful images of near-death: the September garden and the faint red ash of a weak fire. A lover of the earth, the poet finds transcendent bliss near at hand.]

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

IV

The lost self changes,
Turning toward the sea,
A sea-shape turning around, —
An old man with his feet before the fire,
In robes of green, in garments of adieu.

[Again he revisits the initial death-dream. Dying, what used to be you drives toward the sea, toward the infinite. Your robes are green – the dress of nature – as you return to nature, converge with it, narrow into it.]

A man faced with his own immensity
Wakes all the waves, all their loose wandering fire.
The murmur of the absolute, the why
Of being born falls on his naked ears.

[Death concentrates the mind wonderfully. Thoughts of death – and allied thoughts of the oddness of our having been born at all – empty the comforting phenomenal world and make us naked – without psychological defenses.]

His spirit moves like monumental wind
That gentles on a sunny blue plateau.
He is the end of things, the final man.

[In death your spirit converges with nature.]

All finite things reveal infinitude:

[In those dead animals the child saw the immensity, saw the infinite life of the earth.]

The mountain with its singular bright shade
Like the blue shine on freshly frozen snow,
The after-light upon ice-burdened pines;

[The September garden, the faint red in the ash; and now the after-light — the after-life — created after the pines have been coffined in ice; and a certain shade paradoxically, at singular moments, bright; and also the pale snow vividly blue… The poem brims with images of unexpected, supplemental vivacity, with evidence of a sort of permanent imprint made on the world by virtue of each particular person having been here. The rest of the poem will list this poet’s particularities, his memories, his imprints.]

Odor of basswood on a mountain-slope,
A scent beloved of bees;
Silence of water above a sunken tree :
The pure serene of memory in one man, —
A ripple widening from a single stone
Winding around the waters of the world.

[The tree is sunken; the self has died. But the tree’s sunkenness creates the silence of the water above it, lends the water the mysterious beauty of its placidity. One man’s consciousness, having lived, having gathered memories, survives him, ripples out from his singular mind to all the waters of the world. Frozen his body may be, in the car that drove to the end of earthly life; but his spirit continues into the water beyond the land, part of ever-regenerating nature.]

Cream of crab soup
Salt and pepper calimari
How I survived The Blizzard of 2010

Yes, I could offer many haiku detailing UD‘s snowed-in week here at the Legacy Hotel in ‘thesda (She was just interviewed by the George Washington University newspaper, The Hatchet, which is doing a feature on “stranded professors.”), but I think I’ll stop with one, and turn instead to the consideration of a very fine poem about snow, Theodore Roethke’s The Far Field. It’s a bit long, so let’s take it section by section.

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

I

I dream of journeys repeatedly:
Of flying like a bat deep into a narrowing tunnel
Of driving alone, without luggage, out a long peninsula,
The road lined with snow-laden second growth,
A fine dry snow ticking the windshield,
Alternate snow and sleet, no on-coming traffic,
And no lights behind, in the blurred side-mirror,
The road changing from glazed tarface to a rubble of stone,
Ending at last in a hopeless sand-rut,
Where the car stalls,
Churning in a snowdrift
Until the headlights darken.

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

The initial stanza tells us we’ve got a lyric poem, autobiographical — I, I dream. The poet describes a recurrent dream of his in which he drives alone in the snow, no other traffic, himself carrying nothing of his life (without luggage) out to the end of a long peninsula; and when he gets to the point at which he can drive no further, he sits in his car while its stalled engine churns until everything shuts down — the headlights darken.

Such a dream, recurrent, seems suicidal, the poet drawn to an eerie narrative of a more and more narrowing world in which his mind – headlights – finally stalls and shuts off. Snow is all over this dream as the pall of coffined earth, covering the dying poet more and more as he moves forward.

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

II

At the field’s end, in the corner missed by the mower,
Where the turf drops off into a grass-hidden culvert,
Haunt of the cat-bird, nesting-place of the field-mouse,
Not too far away from the ever-changing flower-dump,
Among the tin cans, tires, rusted pipes, broken machinery, —
One learned of the eternal;
And in the shrunken face of a dead rat, eaten by rain and ground-beetles
(I found in lying among the rubble of an old coal bin)
And the tom-cat, caught near the pheasant-run,
Its entrails strewn over the half-grown flowers,
Blasted to death by the night watchman.

I suffered for young birds, for young rabbits caught in the mower,
My grief was not excessive.
For to come upon warblers in early May
Was to forget time and death:
How they filled the oriole’s elm, a twittering restless cloud, all one morning,
And I watched and watched till my eyes blurred from the bird shapes, —
Cape May, Blackburnian, Cerulean, —
Moving, elusive as fish, fearless,
Hanging, bunched like young fruit, bending the end branches,
Still for a moment,
Then pitching away in half-flight,
Lighter than finches,
While the wrens bickered and sang in the half-green hedgerows,
And the flicker drummed from his dead tree in the chicken-yard.

— Or to lie naked in sand,
In the silted shallows of a slow river,
Fingering a shell,
Thinking:
Once I was something like this, mindless,
Or perhaps with another mind, less peculiar;
Or to sink down to the hips in a mossy quagmire;
Or, with skinny knees, to sit astride a wet log,
Believing:
I’ll return again,
As a snake or a raucous bird,
Or, with luck, as a lion.

I learned not to fear infinity,
The far field, the windy cliffs of forever,
The dying of time in the white light of tomorrow,
The wheel turning away from itself,
The sprawl of the wave,
The on-coming water.

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

Wait – I’ll post what I have so far. What with all the interruptions (along with the Hatchet reporter, La Kid called wanting to talk about Pride and Prejudice, and Mr UD called), I haven’t been able to concentrate on the poem’s second section.

I think Mr UD misses me. He said: “You are like Formula One racing. Maybe not so great for one’s longevity, but very exciting.”

So here we go again – D.A. Powell’s poem.

My first post about this poem is directly below this entry.

Click on the link over Powell’s name – or look at the post below – for the poem unhampered by UD‘s commentary.

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

coal of this unquickened world

[We’ve already talked about the source of this title in Philip Larkin’s poem, Night-Music. But while Larkin’s focus is mainly on the natural world, with subtly gathering implications for humanity, Powell’s will turn out to be very personal. The coal is himself, his mind, his spirit, a dead, dull, blackened substance unable to lend itself the least bit of brightness. This is a poem about depression.]

midnight slips obsidian: an arrowhead in my hand

[Midnight gradually establishes itself as total blackness. The poet, let us say, sadly holds his head in his hand as one would hold an obsidian arrowhead. His bleak thoughts – painful, sharp glass is what an obsidian arrowhead amounts to – wound him.]

pointed roofs against the backdrop, black and blacker
three kinds of ink, each more india than the last

[Notice how the word india is almost embedded in the word obsidian – the poet plays with words, with near rhymes.]

must be going blind: eyes two pitted olives on a cracker
a draft of bitter ale, a kind of saturated past
poppy seeds: black holes large as my head. my head

[The poet tries this and that metaphor to convey his reduction to a burned-out deadhead; his olive eyes are empty (pitted) and share the shiny inexpressive blackness of the obsidian arrowheads. His past is pitted – saturated – with black holes. These holes designate the memory hole of bitter recollections.]

dirty as a dishrag, crudely drawn imp, a charcoaled dove
disappearing down alleys with a pail from the chimney

[The self-hatred of the depressive. My worthless mind, once innocent as a dove and now filthy with bad thoughts and motives, blackens itself.]

this carbon: no graphite or diamond it’s ordinary soot

[I’m nothing. Nothing special. No diamond in the rough. I’m plain old soot, animated dirt. Carbon of the lowest form.]

dress it up: say “buckminsterfullerene” or carbon 60
but it’s just common, the color of a boot

[“A fullerene is any molecule composed entirely of carbon, in the form of a hollow sphere, ellipsoid, or tube. … The first fullerene to be discovered, and the family’s namesake, was buckminsterfullerene C60 … The name was an homage to Richard Buckminster Fuller, whose geodesic domes it resembles.”]

a slate on the ground. a petroleum bubble above

smothering in the walrus suit,

[He describes himself as a bubble of crude covered in a walrus suit — a ridiculous, but also catastrophic image, since – I suppose – once the bubble bursts, the oil spill will destroy the walrus. This is a very endangered, on the edge, person.]

the cloud of smoke
the shroud and the deathmask. blitzkrieg black sun choke

[Well, there you go. The bubble bursts in a cloud of smoke, and the black liquid chokes the poet to death. He’s blitzed.]

Notice a couple of fascinating things about Powell’s style here. Though you don’t really register it, this is an exceedingly formal poem, a fourteen-line sort of sonnet complete with end rhymes and a final couplet. You don’t register this formality because of the very loose graphic style of the poem, which plays against the tightness of its rhyme scheme. There’s no capitalization, little punctuation, and sometimes there’s just guttering unrelated words: blitzkrieg black sun choke.

These final words suggest a concluding explosive chaos, everything blown to bits; yet the hyper-controlled structure of the poem works against total disintegration…. In other words, there’s an exciting tension in a poem like this one between a content which conveys flat-out clinical melancholia, and a form which shows the creative mind working at full capacity.

… is the author of

Tea, D.A. Powell.

From the New York Times Arts, Briefly blog:

In its continuing unofficial mission to prove that a poetry career need not condemn an author to a life of destitution, Claremont Graduate University has announced the winners of its highly lucrative Kingsley and Kate Tufts poetry awards. The Kingsley Tufts Award, which comes with a prize of $100,000, will go to D. A. Powell for his [latest] collection “Chronic” (Graywolf Press), the university said in a news release. Mr. Powell, a poet from the San Francisco Bay Area, is a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s poetry award, also for “Chronic”; his previous collection “Cocktails,” was also a finalist for that honor….

Let’s look up close at one of Powell’s poems from Chronic, coal of this unquickened world.

Powell got his title from Philip Larkin.

In 1944, early in his writing life, Larkin wrote this poem.

Night-Music

At one the wind rose,
And with it the noise
Of the black poplars.

Long since had the living
By a thin twine
Been led into their dreams
Where lanterns shine
Under a still veil
Of falling streams;
Long since had the dead
Become untroubled
In the light soil.
There were no mouths
To drink of the wind,
Nor any eyes
To sharpen on the stars’
Wide heaven-holding,
Only the sound
Long sibilant-muscled trees
Were lifting up, the black poplars.

And in their blazing solitude
The stars sang in their sockets through the night:
`Blow bright, blow bright
The coal of this unquickened world.’

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

Powell will hyper-literalize Larkin’s coal and turn out, as we’ll see in a moment, quite an amazing poem – a poem without the sad formal measure Larkin gets with his TS Eliotish short, short lines (Wallace Stevens gets an effect like Larkin’s here, in Domination of Black.)

Larkin’s pulled back lines let him express the pulled back midnight world, very silent except for the sound the sibilant poplars make in the wind. The poplars are green of course when it’s day; at night, they become, like everything but the stars, black.

It’s a wiped-out world. No one’s awake, except the poet recording the silent world with its bit of song from the trees. Everyone’s asleep, ushered out of consciousness into the weakly-lit theater of dreams. The world of the dead too is meager, thin. They lie “untroubled / in the light soil.” No eyes are open to “sharpen on the stars’ / Wide heaven-holding.” (In After Greece, James Merrill’s ancestors are “anxious to know / What holds up heaven nowadays.”)

Larkin in many of his poems loves to record the ghostly insinuating life of the world that goes on without us, while we’re sleeping or while we’re dead. His most famous rendition of this weird activity appears in An Arundel Tomb. “Pre-baroque” lovers are buried beneath a stone sculpture of the two them lying side by side, hand in hand. The poet imagines the long centuries during which the world’s life has revolved around their motionlessness:

Snow fell, undated. Light
Each summer thronged the glass. A bright
Litter of birdcalls strewed the same
Bone-littered ground

Thronged is wonderful.

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

Back to Night-Music, and the way Larkin conveys with all of his images the perilous delicacy, the fragile contingency, of earthly existence.

We have no eyes, but the stars have eyes; the song they sing “in their sockets through the night” is a magical invocation to the wind to wake us and our world up again:

`Blow bright, blow bright
The coal of this unquickened world.’

This black cinder globe with yet a bit of fire in its ash — blow on it, bring it back to life, quicken it. Our time here is brief and perilous, but, pray, make our cheeks ruddy…

Those three hard k sounds are gorgeous – coal, unquickened – but it’s more than this that drew Powell to the line. Here’s his poem.

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

D.A. Powell

coal of this unquickened world

midnight slips obsidian: an arrowhead in my hand
pointed roofs against the backdrop, black and blacker
three kinds of ink, each more india than the last

must be going blind: eyes two pitted olives on a cracker
a draft of bitter ale, a kind of saturated past
poppy seeds: black holes large as my head. my head

dirty as a dishrag, crudely drawn imp, a charcoaled dove
disappearing down alleys with a pail from the chimney
this carbon: no graphite or diamond it’s ordinary soot

dress it up: say “buckminsterfullerene” or carbon 60
but it’s just common, the color of a boot
a slate on the ground. a petroleum bubble above

smothering in the walrus suit, the cloud of smoke
the shroud and the deathmask. blitzkrieg black sun choke

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

Let me take a break from this post and then return to talk about Powell’s poem.

Action Poetry strikes again.

When [Ruth Padel] was [a poet in residence] at Somerset House, [she] plastered poems — “other people’s, not mine” she stresses — in the loos, the cafés, everywhere, so that passers-by could be “enticed or disturbed, hooked, emotionally drawn in”.

In case you missed me.

At four AM, all the electricity in the house – in the town – went out.

PEPCO said it’d be back on at eleven this morning. It’s still out.

I spent the day waiting for electricity and reading To the Lighthouse for my independent study group on postmodern fiction tomorrow (we’re starting with a modernist novel for comparison). I’ve read this novel many times – taught it often – and enjoyed it. This time, however, I found it tiresome, mannered, and depressing. Go figure.

When not reading the novel, I played happy Haydn pieces on my just-tuned piano, and went around and around my acre picking up twigs and branches from last night’s windstorm.

A rather frustrating day. I did get a poem out of it.

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

At Four a Windstorm Blew the Lights

At four a windstorm blew the lights.
I slid a door and hauled out of night
Florida air that purpled the sky
And made the dark house stand by

For some fireworks. Death flared!
I scanned the ceiling, scared:
Streamers of nothingness!
Infinite means measureless

I said. Measureless to man, like Xanadu.
So take the measure of infinitude
Just as it is, unsparked and uncandescent,
Unelectric charge inside the head, incessant.

The sparklers drifted and arc’d,
Their spectacular bursts unmarked
By carillon, spinet, or choir.
The only holies in that unholy fire

Were human faces.
Firing up the cosmic spaces.

I heard about it on the metro. I was on my way to Foggy Bottom in the morning, and a group of cultured retired people – probably on their way to a Smithsonian museum – sat near me.

One of them said, “Did you see that poetry thing in the Post? The Bernie Sanders guy who’s an English professor? Who sends poetry to Senate staff members? It renews your faith…”

Everybody nodded; they’d all read it and they all approved.

So here’s the article. Sanders, a senator from Vermont, has a chief of staff who in real life is an English professor.

[Hank Gutman lobs] poems into the e-mail inboxes of every chief of staff in the Senate. Each note offers escape through verse. Meaty, challenging, thought-provoking lines, accompanied by pages and pages of Gutman’s analysis. Poetry that has nothing to do with cloture votes or amendments or motions to recommit. Poetry intended to get his BlackBerry-addicted, tunnel-visioned, life-as-a-treadmill colleagues to think about the “huge dimensions of life that get shortchanged” in the grinder that is Capitol Hill.

Gutman’s engaged in Action Poetry, whose Wikipedia page says this:

Action Poetry is the active use of poetry, often spreading in a community. It might include painting poetry on murals, or distributing poetry. It can also involve the encouragement of live poetry recitings and distribution of free poetry.

External link:

“Action Poetry as an Empowering Art: A Manifesto for Didaction in Arts Education” by Francois Victor Tochon, University of Wisconsin-Madison, International Journal of Education & the Arts, Volume 1 Number 2, May 15, 2000

UD loves empowering didactions. She herself is a one-woman empowering didaction machine. Nonetheless, there are ethical questions worth posing about the act of lobbing (the Post‘s word) unasked-for poetry plus reams of your own analysis of that poetry (Here’s a sample of Gutman’s prose.) into the email of people who work in the same building you do.

The Post article about Gutman is full of insults about people with jobs on the Hill. BlackBerry addicts, tunnel-visioned… It goes on and on like that. These people are soulless… mere fragments… robots rather than humans…

Gutman is there to make them whole:

Despite the myriad interactions of government process, Washington often undermines deep human connection; poetry is his attempt to make the fractional city whole.

You can sort of see the Post writer thrashing about here, can’t you, since this sentence makes no effing sense whatsoever.

But my larger point is that when Garrison Keillor comes on the radio to recite the same inescapable lyric Gutman recites in the Post article —

“It is difficult/to get the news from poems,” Gutman says. “Yet men die miserably every day/for lack/of what is found there.”

— we can turn off the radio. We can recall August Kleinzahler’s definitive take on these lines:

A pretty sentiment, to be sure, but simply untrue, as anyone who has been to the supermarket or ballpark recently will concede. Ninety percent of adult Americans can pass through this life tolerably well, if not content, eating, defecating, copulating, shopping, working, catching the latest Disney blockbuster, without having a poem read to them by Garrison Keillor or anyone else.

We can turn off the radio, but it’s harder to absorb the repeated impact of poetry lobbed into our email by a colleague. It’s demoralizing to feel that you’ve got to read the shit or he’ll ask you about it and you won’t know what he’s talking about and you need his guy’s vote on some piece of legislation, etc. So you automatically forward the you’re-a-tool-who-needs-me-to-explain-poetry-to-you emails to your assistant, some intern from George Washington University, and she forwards it to her English professor, and…

You get the idea.