… the T.S. Eliot Prize.
The poem made me think of another poem, by James Merrill, probably because they’re both about art and air. Let’s take a look.
First, Philip Gross, this year’s winner.
Opera Bouffe
The count of cappuccino,
the marquise of meringue,
all the little cantuccini…
and what was the song they sang?
Oh, the best of us is nothing
but a sweetening of the air,
a tryst between the teeth and tongue:
we meet and no one’s there
though the café’s always crowded
as society arrives
and light glints to and fro between
the eyes and rings and knives.
We’ll slip away together,
perfect ghosts of appetite,
the balancing of ash on fire
and whim—the mating flight
of amaretti papers,
my petite montgolfiere,
our lit cage rising weightless
up the lift shaft of the air.
So the count of cappuccino,
the marquise of not much more,
consumed each other’s hunger.
Then the crash. And then the war.
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Next, Merrill.
Farewell Performance
for DK
Art. It cures affliction. As lights go down and
Maestro lifts his wand, the unfailing sea change
starts within us. Limber alembics once more
make of the common
Lot a pure, brief gold. At the end our bravos
call them back, sweat-soldered and leotarded,
back, again back – anything not to face the
fact that it’s over.
You are gone. You’d caught like a cold their airy
lust for essence. Now, in the furnace parched to
ten or twelve light handfuls, a mortal gravel
sifted through fingers,
Coarse yet grayly glimmering sublimate of
palace days, Strauss, Sidney, the lover’s plaintive
Can’t we just be friends? which your breakfast phone call
Clothed in amusement,
This is what we paddled a neighbor’s dinghy
out to scatter – Peter who grasped the buoy,
I who held the box underwater, freeing
all it contained. Past
Sunny, fluent soundings that gruel of selfhood
taking manlike shape for one last jeté on
ghostly – wait, ah! – point into darkness vanished.
High up, a gull’s wings
Clapped. The house lights (always supposing, caro,
Earth remains your house) at their brightest set the
scene for good: true colors, the sun-warm hand to
cover my wet one …
Back they come. How you would have loved it. We in
turn have risen. Pity and terror done with,
programs furled, lips parted, we jostle forward
eager to hail them,
More, to join the troupe – will a friend enroll us
one fine day? Strange, though. For up close their magic
self-destructs. Pale, dripping, with downcast eyes they’ve
seen where it led you.
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Both poets are getting at something having to do with the separation between art and life; both poets notice our immense pull toward fantasy, beauty, intensity, toward the distillation of real experience into imaginative perfection. Both caution us about the danger of that pull.
In the Gross poem, the frothy delicious escapism of light opera, light-as-air opera, sweetens the actual air, sweetens our lives. It’s adorable, yummy, we eat it up, this spectacle of counts and marquises warbling in bustling, brightly lit cafes.
But it’s all pretend, of course: we meet and no one’s there. The performers are ghosts of appetite, apparitions carrying in flight a reflection of their audience’s hunger for art to be life.
When the play’s over, when the performers float away in their absurd confectionery balloon, reality resumes in all its dark heft. Perhaps there’s the suggestion here that our addiction to fantasy weakens our capacity to survive reality.
The simple exact end rhyme, the Mother Goosey feel of the thing, lends a clever contradiction to the Gross poem. Its surface is as light as light opera, a happy sing-songy lilt; yet its content’s increasingly bleak – ghosts, ash, and then the final crash and burn. The contradiction captures our denialist draw toward art as escape. We don’t want to see what’s beneath these happy lines.
Merrill’s is an elegy; it’s written in memory of a friend of his. The poem has three acts, as it were: an opening act describing a dance company performance the poet attends not long after his friend’s death; a middle act recalling the poet and other people taking a boat out to scatter his friend’s ashes into the water of a sound (the word ‘sound’ allows the poet lovely pun-latitude); and a final return to the performance as the dancers take their bows.
As in the Gross poem, art both “cures affliction” and causes it — “You’d caught like a cold their airy / lust for essence.” Art changes us; its transformative alembics spin our lives into gold, and we desperately don’t want its magic to end, don’t want dismissal into the painful chaos of real life.
So the poet’s friend tried to import art to his life, to lead the life of an aesthete — “palace days, Strauss, Sidney…”
We too want to “join the troupe,” though truly living that airy essence exacts a toll – it “self-destructs.”
will a friend enroll us / one fine day?
Will our sublimate too be rolled out onto the water some sunny afternoon?
UD admires T.S. Eliot. She recently, on this blog, discussed a short poem of his.
As UD prepares to teach – next week – a course on modernism, she checks to make sure Eliot’s cultural centrality numbers are as high as ever.
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Here’s her first hit on Google News for T.S. Eliot, from the Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette:
“Not with a bang but a whimper.”
T.S. Eliot was talking about the end of the world, not the power-charged Pontiac, proud maker of Firebirds, GTOs and other muscle cars.
You could probably have gotten a good deal on a Pontiac this week – such as a discount and 0 percent financing – with GM phasing out the brand at year’s end ..
The Waste Land is the Eliot poem everyone knows about, of course, but The Hollow Men — its last lines anticipating the death of the GTO — has also worked its way into the popular mind.
***********************************
Two items of interest about The Waste Land convey how powerful that work remains.
The beach shelter at Margate, where Eliot went for a few weeks in 1921 to recover from a mental breakdown, and where he wrote an early draft of the poem (“On Margate Sands / I can connect / Nothing with nothing.”), has been designated a protected Special Architectural or Historic Interest site. “To anyone that cares about poetry, the shelter is a shrine, a temple, a small monument to a great genius,” comments Andrew Motion, a recent poet laureate.
Plus there’s a current production of The Waste Land on a London stage. Excerpts from the show, and some conversation about it, here.
… [Missouri] Gov. Jay Nixon doesn’t appear to be interested in choosing a new poet laureate who comes with controversy. His application for the post includes questions asking an applicant whether there’s anything in his or her background that could embarrass the governor.
Nixon’s spokesman, Sam Murphey, said the questions are standard for anyone seeking appointment to a state board or commission.
He did not return follow-up phone calls, nor did he respond to e-mailed questions asking for specific examples of what might embarrass the governor.
Application forms for poets laureate in other states do not ask similar questions.
Walter Bargen, the outgoing poet laureate who was appointed by former Gov. Matt Blunt, said he did not have to fill out an application, but he and his wife did agree to a Missouri State Highway Patrol background check. Blunt’s staff also asked whether there was anything they should know about. Bargen told them, “I grew up in the ’60s,” and that he once used the word “nipple” in a poem…
… at the turn of the year.
I’ll consider one of her poems later this afternoon.
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At around this time last year, when I lived in Rehoboth Beach, I featured a poem by Sarah Hannah, who had killed herself.
Rachel Wetzsteon was a friend of hers, and wrote the afterword to her posthumous volume.
Wetzsteon herself “had apparently been in the grips of a deep depression for the past year.”
**************************
Here are two poems by Wetzsteon. They are similar, I think, because they both notice how one’s particular mind works, and how one can’t really change the ways of the mind.
UD will, as usual, break up these poems whenever she feels like it in order to talk about what’s going on in them.
Read each poem without interruption by clicking on its title.
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At the Zen Mountain Monastery
A double line of meditators sits
on mats, each one a human triangle.
[Starts by setting the scene. The poet’s at a zen sitting. The Zen Mountain Monastery is not far from UD‘s Catskill house.]
Evacuate your mind of clutter now.
I do my best, squeezing the static and
the agony into a straight flat line,
but soon it soars and dips until my mind’s
activity looks (you can take the girl…)
uncannily like the Manhattan skyline.
[Line, triangle, line, skyline… She thinks of the exercise as involving a kind of stark geometrical flatness imposed on the soaring, dipping activity of thought; as, let’s say, a silent Asian minimalism hopelessly foreign to her noisy Manhattan dynamism.
Note that the poet likes repetition and rhyme — she not only repeats variants of line a lot, for instance; she also drops exact end rhymes here and there throughout the poem.
In this essay, she endorses T.S. Eliot’s argument that ‘ “Vers libre does not exist….And as the so-called vers libre which is good is anything but ‘free,’ it can better be defended under some other label.” What keeps memorable free verse from being free, Eliot suggests, is its constant vacillation between adherence to, and departure from, rhyme and regular meter. “It is this contrast between fixity and flux…which is the very life of verse…” ‘]
Observe your thoughts, then gently let them go.
I’m watching them all right, unruly dots
I not only can’t part from but can’t help
transforming into restless bodies — they’re
no sooner being thought than sprouting limbs,
no longer motionless but striding proudly,
beautiful mental jukeboxes that play
their litanies of joy and woe each day
beneath the shadow of enormous buildings.
[Slightly muddy move here from thoughts as bodies to thoughts as jukeboxes; but anyway — a nicely jazzy evocation of her permanent, deep, urbanism, the music of her thought which plays always rather darkly under the skyscrapers.]
Desires are your jailers; set them free
and roam the hills, smiling archaically.
It’s not a pretty picture, me amid
high alpine regions in my urban black,
huffing and puffing in the mountain air
and saying to myself, I’m trying but
it’s hopeless;
[Funny, self-aware, charmingly self-deprecating, the poet is Maria von Trapp with emphysema.]
though the tortures of the damned
make waking difficult, they are my tortures;
[Enlightenment may not be in the cards for me, since I can’t make my mind be still; but, after all, this is who I am. These thoughts are my thoughts, my anguishes.
One of Wetzsteon’s major inspirations, as in Blue Octavo Haiku, is Franz Kafka.]
I want them raucous and I want them near,
like howling pets I nonetheless adore
and holler adamant instructions to —
sprint, mad ambition! scavenge, hopeless love
that begs requital! — on our evening stroll
down Broadway and up West End Avenue.
The poet dismisses calm self-transcendence. She attaches to its leash her restless ambition and panting passion and strides New York with it.
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The second poem also describes the way the poet thinks. It’s much less celebratory. She details the tortures.
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And This Time I Mean It
All over the city, people are crying
crocodile tears that dry up before the cause
of weeping crosses the street; interns say great things
about the men who got them their jobs,
then roll their eyes when the coast is clear. Appearing
as a way of keeping foes and bosses happy
the habit fastens and takes hold
until it starts occurring
even among friends, so that only
with effort can the banter be decoded:
“I’ll be there” means “Never will I budge,”
“No” is a subtle way of saying “Sure.”
[The poet describes the ironic, self-protective, and in various other ways strategic, emotional distancing of the urban sensibility. Maybe this clever form of lying began as a way of managing a complicated professional and personal life, but over time it’s become, the poet complains, a habit, so that sincere feeling and utterance become almost impossible.]
Raised in a place where the worst that can happen
Happens every day, I also had a habit
of opening a gap between the mind thinking
and the mouth expressing; only by throwing
intricate veils over what I meant
could I reach the nearest corner
without crying out for merciful armfuls
of coins, seeing-eye dogs, golden syringes dropped
from the sky.
[The city, locus of human pain, is hard to navigate without this habitual hardening, or, as the poet calls it, veiling. Take off the veils and you’re simply, rawly, needy; your desperate sense of inner poverty and anguish and confusion will make a mad beggar of you.]
Soon, though, I wondered whether
there were two of me living in one house:
one who did the breathing
and one, all smirks and eyebrows, who cracked the jokes.
[Right, and this is exactly the sort of thing zen practice addresses; this sense of inner division, and of distance from one’s own sources of feeling.]
Now I suffer from other problems
But this one’s gone for good.
[The poet’s no longer divided, which is a good thing. Unfortunately, her new unity presents problems of its own.]
Before we met
I hovered above my feelings
like a singer above a low and difficult note,
or a dandy suspended in a balloon
over a plague-ridden village.
[She addresses her lover. Before I fell in love with you, I was able to maintain this problematic but workable self-division. I could see the pain of the city — the low and difficult notes, the plague-ridden village — without being destroyed by it.]
But if my old friends
waved to me on my armored cloud
a handshake with a new one took me
down, toward the street’s precise rough music,
down toward terror and truth.
[So, you’ve cured me of self-alienation, of the unseemly safety of the friendly wave’s abstraction; but in its place you’ve afflicted me with the terrors of physical immediacy, of actual closeness with an unironically loved human being.]
… has died, age 94. She came from the immensely wealthy Eli Lilly family.
… [In 2002] she pledged a gift, largely in stock, to Poetry, a monthly magazine with a staff of four, a circulation of 12,000 or so and an annual budget of less than $700,000. The gift was estimated, at the time, at $100 million. (Its current value may be twice that.)
… “The gift is the essence of bad philanthropy — an overblown act of generosity that undermines its own possible efficacy,” the editor and poet Meghan O’Rourke wrote in the online magazine Slate…
LAMENT OF THE BLOGGER
AT THE TURN OF THE YEAR
The New Year’s traffic is down.
All of it: Summary, Location, Who’s On.
Dreadful the trends of Traffic Prediction.
Referral Logs list a few Unknowns.
Tweets until lately had grown,
But now birdsong shrinks to a few lone
Twitters ‘mid the worthless Google hits.
Of course I tell myself It’s
The end of December! Keep your wits
About you! Wish your readers well!
Ring out wild bells!
(But my poor stats. Hell.)
By Gerard Manley Hopkins.
The times are nightfall, look, their light grows less
The times are nightfall, look, their light grows less;
The times are winter, watch, a world undone:
They waste, they wither worse; they as they run
Or bring more or more blazon man’s distress.
And I not help. Nor word now of success:
All is from wreck, here, there, to rescue one—
Work which to see scarce so much as begun
Makes welcome death, does dear forgetfulness.
Or what is else? There is your world within.
There rid the dragons, root out there the sin.
Your will is law in that small commonweal…
***********************************************
Some poets – Hopkins… Emily Dickinson comes to mind – have an insane concision and obliqueness, a madly packed brevity. Many of their poems have the compression of black hole events. The reader stands at the tongue of the event, leaning over gingerly, having a bit of a look, afraid of the pull.
Sometimes vagueness is euphemism, designed to keep things innocuous; here, the big abstractions – time, light, world – attach themselves to an unsettling sensibility and feel treacherous.
The times are nightfall, look, their light grows less;
The times are winter, watch, a world undone:
Not This particular winter season, with the days growing shorter, I find myself thinking of death. Rather a general proposition about reality: The times ARE nightfall. The condition of life generally is that of motion toward darkness, a cosmic wintering that undoes all the life in the world. Look; watch. The monosyllabic imperatives in each line aren’t just the poet talking to himself — they gather you into the blackening. You are invited to see and feel it too.
They waste, they wither worse; they as they run
Or bring more or more blazon man’s distress.
The passage of time is itself pernicious; it creates a darkness against which our disintegration stands out — is blazoned — with frightening clarity.
And I not help.
There’s something infantile about this sentence without a verb, or with so suppressed a verb it seems verbless. The times don’t help me? Is that what it means to say? And I myself am without help in the killing night?
The poem will indeed go on to wonder what might help the poet, and the reader, navigate and survive darkness:
Nor word now of success:
All is from wreck, here, there, to rescue one—
Work which to see scarce so much as begun
Makes welcome death, does dear forgetfulness.
Hopkins is famous for his wordplay, and here you see it — the subtle transformations from word to wreck to rescue to work — all words somehow linguistically as well as psychically related, all somehow fated to follow one another down the line of the poet’s sad, raveled, thought. The weird convolution of the language conveys the weird blocked consciousness of the poet, able only to pace round and round his particular black hole. He dreams of work completed, not scarce so much as begun, and wonders, given how little he’s been able to do with his life, given how paltry his efforts to evade nothingness have been, whether suicide wouldn’t make sense.
Or what is else? There is your world within.
There rid the dragons, root out there the sin.
Your will is law in that small commonweal…
He ends with a ray of hope. There is one option: the same mind that torments you might, if able to marshal its forces, rid the dragons (a nice companion to blazon) from it. We are powerless against the blizzards outside, against the cold climate of the times, but we do rule the hearth of our own minds. Or we can rule it — the poet in these final lines seems to encourage himself toward self-rule. The sudden break with the poem’s tight rhyme scheme – that small commonweal rhymes with nothing that came before it – seems a gesture toward willfulness, toward independence of mind.
Frank O’Hara’s one of the few poets UD recalls reading for the very first time. She was a teenager grazing some poetry anthology, and when she got to O’Hara’s happy meanderings she laughed out loud. She wanted to be walking with him in Manhattan, noticing what he noticed, being hip and funny like him.
O’Hara never got terminally hip, like John Ashbery; his poetry always has heart.
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SLEEPING ON THE WING
Perhaps it is to avoid some great sadness,
as in a Restoration tragedy the hero cries “Sleep!
O for a long sound sleep and so forget it!”
that one flies, soaring above the shoreless city,
veering upward from the pavement as a pigeon
does when a car honks or a door slams, the door
of dreams, life perpetuated in parti-colored loves
and beautiful lies all in different languages.
Fear drops away too, like the cement, and you
are over the Atlantic. Where is Spain? where is
who? The Civil War was fought to free the slaves,
was it? A sudden down-draught reminds you of gravity
and your position in respect to human love. But
here is where the gods are, speculating, bemused.
Once you are helpless, you are free, can you believe
that? Never to waken to the sad struggle of a face?
to travel always over some impersonal vastness,
to be out of, forever, neither in nor for!
The eyes roll asleep as if turned by the wind
and the lids flutter open slightly like a wing.
The world is an iceberg, so much is invisible!
and was and is, and yet the form, it may be sleeping
too. Those features etched in the ice of someone
loved who died, you are a sculptor dreaming of space
and speed, your hand alone could have done this.
Curiosity, the passionate hand of desire. Dead,
or sleeping? Is there speed enough? And, swooping,
you relinquish all that you have made your own,
the kingdom of your self sailing, for you must awake
and breathe your warmth in this beloved image
whether it’s dead or merely disappearing,
as space is disappearing and your singularity.
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[We take a closer look, ja?]
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SLEEPING ON THE WING
[He’s on an airplane, leaving New York for Europe I guess. Heading out over the Atlantic. He’s gradually falling asleep, and this poem is simply his thoughts as he nods off. Seems to be sleeping right over a wing — sleeping on the wing as he renders it in his title. But the title also suggests – on the wing – catching a quick nap in the midst of a busy life. And sleeping while flying — while thoughts, images, bits of dreams fly through your half-awake mind.]
Perhaps it is to avoid some great sadness,
as in a Restoration tragedy the hero cries “Sleep!
O for a long sound sleep and so forget it!”
that one flies, soaring above the shoreless city,
[and so forget it! O’Hara puts New York slang in the mouth of a Restoration actor because that’s what comes to the New York poet as he sits in his seat. He doesn’t remember the exact line; this is his streetwise rendering of it. Flight is escape, escape from the grounded tragedies of our lives into a special sort of sleep. Soaring and shoreless have a nice assonance to them, but there’s also the idea that the city, looked at from above at this moment, has no borders, no seashores visible, whereas, metaphorically, the tragedy of our lives is how constantly bounded they are by death.]
veering upward from the pavement as a pigeon
does when a car honks or a door slams, the door
of dreams, life perpetuated in parti-colored loves
and beautiful lies all in different languages.
[Jolted upward and away from our painful lives, from the failure of our efforts to perpetuate our lives through lots of different love affairs with their beautiful lies about, say, fidelity, we escape to the air.]
Fear drops away too, like the cement, and you
are over the Atlantic.
[The writer speaks to himself in the second person, with its odd distances and ironies.]
Where is Spain? where is
who? The Civil War was fought to free the slaves,
was it?
[A wonderful capture of the vague stupid material that floats in and and out of the floating mind…]
A sudden down-draught reminds you of gravity
and your position in respect to human love.
[You fall in love; and you will continue, in these thoughts, to ponder the treacherous nature of love.]
But here is where the gods are, speculating, bemused.
Once you are helpless, you are free, can you believe
that? Never to waken to the sad struggle of a face?
to travel always over some impersonal vastness,
to be out of, forever, neither in nor for!
[A deepening of the idea of escape from earthly sorrow, struggle. You’re up in the clouds with the gods, which means you’re above all daily human struggle, free, impersonal, untethered to tragic bounded sublunary life. But to have that condition be permanent, you’d have to be dead.]
The eyes roll asleep as if turned by the wind
and the lids flutter open slightly like a wing.
[Lovely simile, the eyes fluttering open a bit like the ailerons. The poet is not quite awake, not quite asleep.]
The world is an iceberg, so much is invisible!
[We see only the tip of things; the depth of ourselves and others and existence is invisible to us.]
and was and is,
[Always was. Always will be.]
and yet the form, it may be sleeping
too.
[It’s possible we can to some extent melt or sculpt the ice and create/perceive more depth than we have so far. If icy depth is asleep, maybe we can warm and shape it through imagination, through art.]
Those features etched in the ice of someone
loved who died, you are a sculptor dreaming of space
and speed, your hand alone could have done this.
[Even those we love the most are icebergs. We understand very little of them. Yet as we think of them, as we bring their images to mind, as we reanimate them through our specific passionate remembrance after their death, we become godlike sculptors.]
Curiosity, the passionate hand of desire. Dead,
or sleeping?
[Is the loved one dead or merely, like the speaker, asleep, or half-asleep? Maybe one way to understand love is to say that it is the power of reanimation, the power to make the loved one and oneself truly live.]
Is there speed enough?
[Can I keep going? Can this plane keep going? Can I – do I want to – keep my life airborne and godly, or should I head back to earth?]
And, swooping,
you relinquish all that you have made your own,
the kingdom of your self sailing,
[The plane swoops down; maybe we’re about to land. Returning to earth, in any case, is the only way. The only way to proceed. You have to give up your fantasies of godlike creation, solipsistic control of everything.]
for you must awake
and breathe your warmth in this beloved image
whether it’s dead or merely disappearing,
as space is disappearing and your singularity.
[Eyes open now. Flight of fancy over. The extremity and abstraction of the high-altitude cosmic iceberg gives way to the temperate specificity of this one self in need of the beloved for the breath of life. Landing, perhaps preparing to greet the loved one at the airport, the poet returns by way of conclusion to the anguish of time’s arrow, the always-transitional moment in which we find ourselves. The chill, absolute space up there now gives way. What also gives way is the poet’s spacy conviction, which he had when he was suspended mid-air (rather than rushing through a terminal crowd), of his singular omnipotent being. Restored to himself, the poet ends the restoration tragedy.]
Poets have long, long noticed that the moon’s a nice figure for the sense we sometimes have, ‘neath the frenzy of daily life, of obdurate nothingness.
Here’s a seasonal poem, by Jacob Polley, that freshens up the old girl.
October
Although a tide turns in the trees
the moon doesn’t turn the leaves,
though chimneys smoke and blue concedes
to bluer home-time dark.
Though restless leaves submerge the park
in yellow shallows, ankle-deep,
and through each tree the moon shows, halved
or quartered or complete,
the moon’s no fruit and has no seed,
and turns no tide of leaves on paths
that still persist but do not lead
where they did before dark.
Although the moonstruck pond stares hard
the moon looks elsewhere. Manholes breathe.
Each mind’s a different, distant world
this same moon will not leave.
Such a packed, elegant evocation of human isolation, of our conviction, at times, of the impossibility of understanding one another at all! Each mind, like the moon, seems a cold, distant, different world from each other mind.
Although a tide turns in the trees
the moon doesn’t turn the leaves,
though chimneys smoke and blue concedes
to bluer home-time dark.
Some natural tide turns the trees different colors in autumn; their leaves turn yellow, orange, red, then fall off and die. But though the enormous moon shines in the sky above the leaves as day becomes “bluer home-time dark,” it has nothing to do with them. It is not that tide. The moon makes nothing happen.
Though restless leaves submerge the park
in yellow shallows, ankle-deep,
and through each tree the moon shows, halved
or quartered or complete,
The moon’s everywhere; we see it, as we walk the dark leafy park, in all its stages — halved, quartered, complete — and again we feel as though its power and presence must have something to do with us, our earth, the seasonal tides… Indeed, we know that there are watery lunar tides; but the moon’s gravity seems uninterested in the leaves.
Yellow shallows is nice as a kind of near-rhyme in itself; and it reminds us of the water, of the lunar pull on water.
the moon’s no fruit and has no seed,
and turns no tide of leaves on paths
that still persist but do not lead
where they did before dark.
We halve and quarter grapefruit, melon; yet the moon’s halving and quartering are illusions. There’s no fruit, no life, within the moon, and the moon has nothing to do with the color and fall of the leaves.
Now a new idea enters: We are lost in the October dark. The paths beneath our feet are still there, but invisible, and we lose our way. Bluer home-time dark sounds pleasantly domestic; we are on our way home. But the paths home are obscure. The disconnected moon, and the dark, and the buried paths, create a world of confusion; we are, like the moon, disconnected.
Although the moonstruck pond stares hard
the moon looks elsewhere. Manholes breathe.
Each mind’s a different, distant world
this same moon will not leave.
The eye of that pond, lit by the moon, insists that there must be a connection between the world and the heavens. Yet the autistic moon averts its eyes; it has nothing to do with us.
Meanwhile, as we breathe out of our mouths, as our mechanical, lifeless manholes exhale in the cold air, the poem concludes its morbid meditation:
We are all to one another as the moon is to us; each of us is a mystery, so distant in our private meanings from one another… But then how can it be that we’re so powerfully influential upon one another? How can we be cold isolates, frigid enigmas, when we cast such powerful spells back and forth? We love one another! Passionately! All that heat – what is it? Nothing?
Each mind’s a distant, different world / This same moon will not leave.
We end with a pun; the moon will not depart; we are stuck to the end of life with what we are; there’s no tidal turning, no seasonal coloring; we’re stuck in the mind and the body of the human being we were born into.
But also — The moon will not leaf, not turn into anything, not produce foliage. Like us, it’s sterile, becalmed, an ashen skull, a darkly orbiting mind that cannot overcome distance and difference to touch another mind.
Here’s the same idea, also poetically impressive.
Bloomberg’s Middle East correspondent visits the Cavafy Museum in Alexandria, Egypt:
… Much … has disappeared from Alexandria: the taverns where Cavafy’s illicit liaisons took place, the exotic interaction of a diverse population and a tolerance that inspired the late Egyptian filmmaker Youssef Chahine and the novelist Ibrahim Abdel-Meguid.
… In Cavafy’s era, the Mediterranean port city was a mix of Greek, Italian, Armenian, Syrian, Maltese, British and other nationalities adding to the majority Arab-Egyptian population, all lured there by trade in cotton and wheat.
The city, and Egypt as a whole, grew more homogenized after the ouster of the monarchy in 1952, the rise of Arab nationalism and the confiscation of private property by Egyptian leader Gamal Abdul Nasser.
In the past two decades, the emergence of Islam as a prime source of identity among many Egyptians made Cavafy’s sensuous subject matter unfashionable. By all accounts, Alexandria is a stronghold of the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s biggest opposition party. The brotherhood wants Egypt ruled under Islamic law. Alexandria was once a place where women strolled in sun dresses, not headscarves and caftans, and where religion was a matter of personal choice …
After visiting the museum, I discuss Cavafy at the office of Sobhi Saleh, a Muslim Brotherhood member of parliament. Saleh says Islamic law precludes publishing Cavafy’s poetry.
“Cavafy was a one-time event in Alexandria,” he says. “His poems are sinful.” …
Cavafy wouldn’t be surprised. Long ago he wrote a poem, Walls, about the failure to pay attention to the killers of cities, the builders of burqas.
Without consideration, without pity, without shame
they have built great and high walls around me.
And now I sit here and despair.
I think of nothing else: this fate gnaws at my mind;
for I had many things to do outside.
Ah why did I not pay attention when they were building the walls.
But I never heard any noise or sound of builders.
Imperceptibly they shut me from the outside world.
T.S. Eliot has won a BBC-sponsored vote on England’s favorite poet.
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VIRGINIA
Red river, red river,
Slow flow heat is silence
No will is still as a river
Still. Will heat move
Only through the mocking-bird
Heard once? Still hills
Wait. Gates wait. Purple trees,
White trees, wait, wait,
Delay, decay. Living, living,
Never moving. Ever moving
Iron thoughts came with me
And go with me:
Red river, river, river.
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On the page the poem looks like a river, its banked lines holding the poet’s fluency as it moves down the white of the page — or, now, the screen. But the words don’t really move on the page, just as the river which the poet observes seems not to move.
His feelings as he faces the water’s impassive lines flow in the direction of the river’s paradox: Visually unmoving, it nonetheless, he knows, moves massively along to some mouth.
Slow flow heat is silence
The poet’s consciousness, his emotions, are aflame in the face of the river’s beauty and power; but his is a silent intensity — the first of many paradoxes to come in this impossibly compact poetic utterance. He crackles, but only within.
No will is still as a river
Still.
Willfulness suggests forward motion; yet the powerful will of the river is still. The second still carries another meaning: The river endures in a way the poet will not. The river’s will is still there; will always be there. And perhaps the secret of its longevity is precisely its self-stilled, silent trick – its way of being both powerful and impassive.
Will heat move
Only through the mocking-bird
Heard once?
Slow/flow, will/still, bird/heard — Within his narrow simple lines the poet’s wordplay is almost silly, almost infantile in its obviousness. The feel is that of a litany, a sort of chant or prayer, from a simple consciousness, or from a consciousness in search of a certain simple purity of call and response. Then too, like the river, the poem seems to progress; the rhymes aren’t static rhymes, they’re language moving forward by small substitutions of letters, small increments, to gather up more and more meaning as it goes, the way the river gathers up limbs and leaves and carries more and more of them forward as it goes. Content is beginning to accumulate so subtly, so slowly, that we barely register it.
As to a paraphrase of the poet’s question about the mocking-bird: Am I right to feel anxious and sad that my poetic inspiration seems so random and fleeting a thing – the mocking-bird heard only once? Does the earth offer me more enduring forms of bliss? Why does my experience of my life feel so mockingly brief and stingy?
Still hills
Wait. Gates wait.
Purple trees,
White trees, wait, wait,
Delay, decay.
How shall we read this? Shall we say that the poet speaks to himself here, reminds himself that despite the apparent tumbling contingency of his world the deeper reality is that the beauty of the world awaits him, holding open for him its gates that disclose lovely purple and white trees and a vast patient landscape of creative richness? Shall we say the poet anticipates heaven’s gates, heaven which awaits him and is beauty’s only permanent place? Shall we read this instead as a kind of demand — Wait! Don’t change! Delay the decay (Again the river poem’s curious movement forward via one small new letter.) that moves, unnoticed but undeniable, within me; let me live longer in this world. Let me learn the river’s secret of endurance — a certain self-calming, self-quieting, self-slowing, underneath which persists the heat of life.
Living, living,
Never moving. Ever moving
Iron thoughts came with me
And go with me:
Red river, river, river.
Final paradoxes: The deepest form of life never moves; it lacks, let us say, the agitation of the poet, the agitation of the human being. The human being who comes at the world with anxiety and restlessness, with questions and insistences, with an absurd headstrong commitment to unnaturally rapid motion through the world… This is the wrong form of will, a will that has not grasped the enigma of stilled power. Ever moving iron thoughts… Iron’s the toughest word in this poem, the most obdurate and mysterious. The powerful hot flow of creative blood through the poet – inspired for a moment by the mocking-bird – is iron now: cold, unflowing. The poet ends the poem with a deathly final thought – my thoughts will die with me. They will never move, like a river, beyond me.
Yet iron is precisely why the river’s red, perhaps; iron in nearby rocks will redden a river’s water. So the purity of the river in comparison with the impurity of the poet isn’t quite what it seems. Both poet and river are stained by the world, stained into existence… The poet’s thoughts enter fully here into the paradox of the natural world: Their very redness — readness? — constitutes their ever-moving endurance.
Stain, taint
Of the world
Is on them.
… about Tony Harrison, is now up.
… about the British poet Tony Harrison, first recipient of the PEN/Pinter prize. I’ll let you know when it’s up on the site.
Matthew Zapruder, Los Angeles Times:
Form is the literary expression of our need to be consoled by some kind of order. This is why funerals have rituals and procedures, so we can keep it at least a little bit together in times of great grief and disruption. It is also why, right after Sept. 11 — when sitting together silently would have been too difficult and weird and sad — people read poems, more often than not ones that had meter and rhyme, such as W.H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939.”
There is a great satisfaction in hearing rhyme, either in poetry or song, and knowing the world is at least for a moment orderable, that the seemingly disconnected elements can be convincingly fitted together. But while rhyme can be funny or witty, or a lovely, even essential consolation, it is obviously not necessary for poetry: Too many great poets have written free verse for the past 150 years for that to be the case.
Indeed, nowadays there’s simply no way to rhyme and not sound a bit out of time. Our world is too wary and conscious of the different space rhyme and meter create. This doesn’t mean great formal poetry can’t be written today. But because rhyme and meter are not essential, formal poetry is by its nature a subcategory of poetry as a whole.
Poetry at its most basic level is about the movement of the mind. This is why it is translatable, even from a language such as Chinese, which has very little in common with English. What can be translated is the leap from one thought to another: what I call the associative movement particular to poetry. That leap, that movement, is what makes poetry poetry.
When I look at the poems I wrote in my early 20s, I realize they are bad not because they are written in forms, but because they are essentially fake. Whatever moments are true and good in them exist despite the formal elements. Poems in rhyme and meter don’t suit my mind or the way it needs to move. It’s like style: It might seem cool every once in a while to wear a vintage suit, but the fact of the matter is it just doesn’t work for me.
One thing I do notice about my poems is that, though they might not have overt formal elements, there is always a rhythm that develops, subtly, in the voice of the speaker. Maybe something more like a cadence. Most poetry is “formal” in that way.
And I think, secretly, that my poems actually do rhyme. It’s just that the rhyme is what I would call “conceptual,” that is, not made of sounds, but of ideas that accomplish what the sounds do in formal poetry: to connect elements that one wouldn’t have expected, and to make the reader or listener, even if just for a moment, feel the complexity and disorder of life, and at the same time what Wallace Stevens called the “obscurity of an order, a whole.”
… never thought seriously for a moment, about ending University Diaries. But the cruel university events I’ve been compelled to follow lately, so early in the new school year, have certainly brought me back to this Philip Larkin poem.
**************************
Forget What Did
Stopping the diary
Was a stun to memory,
Was a blank starting,
One no longer cicatrized
By such words, such actions
As bleakened waking.
l wanted them over,
Hurried to burial
And looked back on
Like the wars and winters
Missing behind the windows
Of an opaque childhood.
And the empty pages?
Should they ever be filled
Let it be with observed
Celestial recurrences,
The day the flowers come,
And when the birds go.