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.
… 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.
************************************
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.
********************************************
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.
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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.”
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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…
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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.]