Rap for the JAP, von Stuck for the Stuck Up, Beardsley for if you went to Brearley, Plath for the Upper Clath — Frederick Seidel’s suddenly much-talked-about poetry offers pilled-up and plastic-surgeoned Americans an insider’s view of their insides. Listen to his comic drawl as he recites tons of his poems here.

Frederick Seidel affords access to Bernard Madoff’s mentality, and we need that. But looked at from the point of view of literature, Seidel’s poems are barely poems. They’re one-offs. William Logan is correct to complain that “Seidel’s jet-set tastes and upmarket sinning get pretty tiresome.”

Sinning itself is of course far from tiresome. UD could sun herself under a sinning sky all day long. But the sky must speak to her; it must have poetry in it.

Seidel finds clever ways to express his hellcats-of-the-gravy world (“I want to date-rape life.”), but these are not poetic ways. His poems are bunches of what Logan calls “blunt phrasings.” He declaims. His recited poetry is riotous because he’s a performer. The poems are performances.

Superficiality is super and – as a take on twenty-first century Manhattan – illuminating; but the poems become tiresome because Seidel refuses depth of any kind, even as a sort of faintly recalled antiphony. There’s no Why am I what I am? There’s only This is what I am. The obsessive childish word pairings throughout Seidel’s work (china vagina), coupled with the crystal-shattering self-presentation, eventually makes you feel you are reading The Cat in the Hat, with Seidel as the Cat, Thing One, and Thing Two.

In an excellent appraisal of Seidel in The Nation, Ange Mlinko compares him to one of UD‘s favorite novelists. “Mostly I’m reminded of Michel Houellebecq, another quiet chap with a virulent literary persona and a thing about sex and Islamic fundamentalism.” I see her point, and yet there’s an important difference: Houellebecq actually does use language to explore the vile bodies and minds of his dissolutes. By the time his best-known novel, The Elementary Particles, is over, its main character, in a gesture toward seriousness, has decided to move to Ireland — a country that attracts him in part because, unlike France, it’s still seriously Catholic.

But hey. How about a poem. Nothing like talking about a poet without giving you a sample. Here goes.

ODE TO SPRING

I can only find words for.
And sometimes I can’t.
Here are these flowers that stand for.
I stand here on the sidewalk.

I can’t stand it, but yes of course I understand it.
Everything has to have a meaning.
Things have to stand for something.
I can’t take the time. Even skin-deep is too deep.

I say to the flower stand man:
Beautiful flowers at your flower stand, man.
I’ll take a dozen of the lilies.
I’m standing as it were on my knees

Before a little man up on a raised
Runway altar where his flowers are arrayed
Along the outside of the shop.
I take my flames and pay inside.

I go off and have sexual intercourse.
The woman is the woman I love.
The room displays thirteen lilies.
I stand on the surface.

Blake, D.H. Lawrence, Ted Hughes — our strongest poets make immediate experience present for us. They make language that makes the world right now, as we feel it and see it, alive in what Lawrence called its quivering momentaneity.

UD thought of this threesome while watching, with Mr. UD, from 5:30 to 6:30 this morning, a sunrise that started with blue rays over a dark sea and then proceeded to total cosmic pink.

Watching its changes, UD recalled this little Blake poem:

He who binds to himself a joy
Doth the winged life destroy.
He who kisses the joy as it flies,
Lives in eternity’s sunrise.

(John Tavener put this to music.)

It’s one of your nice neat paradoxes – try to stop the world and you’ll kill it; live life on the fly and you’ll live forever.

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

In a great essay about Hughes, Alice Oswald describes her discovery of him at a time in her life when she had a job as a gardener at the Royal Horticultural Society:

… I’d been up at dawn that morning, pruning apples all day. I was fed up with people floating past me using the word “idyllic” and I was fed up with reading about nature at one remove. I thought I’d rather hear a gardener’s or a farmer’s account of the landscape than any poet’s. Then I opened The Hawk in the Rain (Hughes’s first collection) and there was my worked-in world alive in all its freshness.

She mentions in particular a sunrise poem by Hughes, “The Horses.”

I climbed through woods in the hour-before-dawn dark.
Evil air, a frost-making stillness,

Not a leaf, not a bird –
A world cast in frost. I came out above the wood

Where my breath left tortuous statues in the iron light.
But the valleys were draining the darkness

Till the moorline – blackening dregs of the brightening grey –
Halved the sky ahead. And I saw the horses:

Huge in the dense grey – ten together –
Megalith-still. They breathed, making no move,

with draped manes and tilted hind-hooves,
Making no sound.

I passed: not one snorted or jerked its head.
Grey silent fragments

Of a grey silent world.

I listened in emptiness on the moor-ridge.
The curlew’s tear turned its edge on the silence.

Slowly detail leafed from the darkness. Then the sun
Orange, red, red erupted

Silently, and splitting to its core tore and flung cloud,
Shook the gulf open, showed blue,

And the big planets hanging –
I turned

Stumbling in the fever of a dream, down towards
The dark woods, from the kindling tops,

And came to the horses.
There, still they stood,
But now steaming and glistening under the flow of light,

Their draped stone manes, their tilted hind-hooves
Stirring under a thaw while all around them

The frost showed its fires. But still they made no sound.
Not one snorted or stamped,

Their hung heads patient as the horizons,
High over valleys in the red levelling rays –

In din of crowded streets, going among the years, the faces,
May I still meet my memory in so lonely a place

Between the streams and the red clouds, hearing the curlews,
Hearing the horizons endure.

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

Oswald comments:

This non-nostalgic way of writing is, to my mind, the only way of getting through to the animate part of nature, the soft growing tip. Hughes called it “the vital somewhat terrible spirit of natural life which is new in every second”. DH Lawrence, whose poems Hughes admired, called it “quivering momentaneity”. He spoke of the need for an “unrestful, ungraspable poetry of the sheer present”, which is a pretty good prediction of what Hughes was to write 50 or so years later.

It’s very strange to me, the way poems like this one by Hughes are in fact nostalgic, if you like — maybe very nostalgic. After all, the poem is remembering a transcendent moment in the speaker’s past, and remembering it not all that differently from the way Wordsworth, or Yeats – a later Romantic – would remember and render it … He tells it in the past tense, while a lot of contemporary poets would tell it in the present; and he ends his misty narrative with a prayer, for goodness sake:

May I still meet my memory in so lonely a place…

Or call it a hope, or whatever, but my point is that for a momentaneous poem, this one spends its time either in the past or anticipating the future.

And, I mean, a sunrise. What could be more Romantic? Romantic to the point – this poem being written in the twentieth century – of kitsch?

Well, but language matters. A world cast in frost. Every word snapped shut with a d or a t: world, cast, frost. Short shut lines. Frigid, tapping on the page like a frosty twig tapping on a window. Icy shivery words and lines that makes us feel, and shudder.

And this is no Romantic sunrise, with its blackening dregs of the brightening grey.

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

Megalith.

Breathe.

The sounds take us from the cold shut-in world to the exhaling horses — the world begins to make noise. Not language, but noise. The poet’s breath, the horses’ breath — breaths that conjure tortuous statues now coming to life in the sunlight. I listened in emptiness; and may I – he writes at the very end of the poem, continue hearing the horizons endure.

Sensory funny business here: You can’t listen in emptiness, and you can’t hear horizons. You listen in silence and you see horizons. Or so tightass literalist Scathing Online Schoolmarm would insist. Yet it’s precisely the weird momentous momentary sense of merging with the physical and metaphysical world, the experience of transcending your senses, that the poet recalls, brings back — by writing the poem, by explicitly asking in the poem that it be brought back, and by, perhaps, if you’re the right reader, like Alice Oswald, somehow conjuring it back — your version of it back — for you.

And NOT Dover Beach!

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

UD (to Mr. UD, who just this moment returned from sitting on the beach for two hours): Why are there no good beach poems?

Mr. UD: There are many good mountain poems.

UD: No there aren’t.

Mr. UD: Name a bad mountain poem.

UD: “The Mountain in Your Butt.”

Mr. UD: Our daughter is absolutely wonderful, but the day she taught you to end your sentences with in your butt was not a good day.

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

Rhode Island, by William Meredith, is the best I can do at the moment.

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

Here at the seashore they use the clouds over & over
again, like the rented animals in Aïda.
In the late morning the land breeze
turns and now the extras are driving
all the white elephants the other way.
What language are the children shouting in?
He is lying on the beach listening.

The sand knocks like glass, struck by bare heels.
He tries to remember snow noise.
Would powder snow ping like that?
But you don’t lie with your ear to powder snow.
Why doesn’t the girl who takes care
of the children, a Yale girl without flaw,
know the difference between lay and lie?

He tries to remember snow, his season.
The mind is in charge of things then.
Summer is for animals, the ocean is erotic,
all that openness and swaying.
No matter how often you make love
in August you’re always aware of genitalia,
your own and the half-naked others’.
Even with the gracefulest bathers
you’re aware of their kinship with porpoises,
mammals disporting themselves in a blue element,
smelling slightly of fish. Porpoise Hazard
watches himself awhile, like a blue movie.

In the other hemisphere now people
are standing up, at work at their easels.
There they think about love at night
when they take off their serious clothes
and go to bed sandlessly, under blankets.

Today the children, his own among them,
are apparently shouting fluently in Portuguese,
using the colonial dialect of Brazil.
It is just as well, they have all been changed
into small shrill marginal animals,
he would not want to understand them again
until after Labor Day. He just lays there.

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

Eh. I don’t say it’s great. Drifty thoughts of a middle-aged daddy lying, laying, lieing, alie, on the beach, his kids nearby. The bit about eroticism is sort of okay, all that openness and swaying. Gives you a sense of the guy’s orientation, summer for him being perturbingly messy and bestial, an out of joint season during which Yalies misspeak and his own kids sound Portuguese.

The speaker, Hazard, looks at his own, what, tenting little erection or something, “like a blue movie.”

He doesn’t like summer, in short. Can’t wait for Labor Day, when we go back to work. Summer creatures have morphed from sandless serious citizens to shrill marginal animals, and he doesn’t like it.

He ends with a joke which links him — drily, ironically — to the gibberish world around him: He just lays there.

Higgledy piggledy
Gloria Bachmann
When asked why she ghosted
Said “Shaddap you face!

I’ve made a big fortune
Postmenopausally
Find your own cashbox
And get off my case.”

Details on this verse form here.

The reopening of Keats’ house in London, and the release soon of a film about his love affair with Fanny Braun, has UD reopening a poem of his that she’s always found difficult.

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

Ode on Melancholy

No, no! go not to Lethe, neither twist
Wolf’s-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;
Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kist
By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine;
Make not your rosary of yew-berries,
Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be
Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl
A partner in your sorrow’s mysteries;
For shade to shade will come too drowsily,
And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.

But when the melancholy fit shall fall
Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
And hides the green hill in an April shroud;
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,
Or on the wealth of globèd peonies;
Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,
And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.

She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die;
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,
Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:
Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine;
His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung.

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

Three stanzas, three sentences, in praise of sadness. An ode, after all, a song of praise, directed to you, emphatically, from its first lines: NO. Don’t go killing yourself.

Fine, you are experiencing deep sorrow, yes; but suicide, or doping yourself into a living suicide, so that you don’t feel anything anymore, and therefore have rid yourself of the depression that seems to be killing you — this can’t be the answer. Don’t drown your soul’s anguish. That anguish is in fact wakeful; and you ought to attend to that wakefulness, and see what it’s about.

When depression descends, when it hits out of nowhere, and hits hard, go with it. As Charles Wright puts it in one of UD‘s favorite poems, let what’s taking you take you. Glut thy sorrow on a morning rose… on the wealth of globèd peonies.  Go to the natural world with it, and feel grief fully as it deepens, with wistfulness and poignancy, the beauty of the world.  Or if those soft emotions – wistfulness and all that – go by the wayside, and  your sorrow explodes into rage, go there too.  Let it rave; feed deep on it.

Sorrow lives with, lives in, beauty.  Death is the mother of beauty, writes Wallace Stevens.  And Keats: “In the very  temple of Delight / Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine.”  Our brevity, the brevity of the world, the brevity of love —  these brevities give beauty to our moments.  To experience our lives with the depth and often harsh clarity of this awareness is the only way to experience our lives fully, strongly: “whose strenuous tongue / Can burst Joy’s grape.”  This is, among other things, a sexual poem.  It evokes sensual power, the strength to

…tear our pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life.

After all, Marvell also writes, in To His Coy Mistress:

The grave’s a fine and private place
But none I think do there embrace.

To take the path sick sorrow took is to take the only path that matters — the path of the fully lived life, which tastes the sadness of her might.

“We just stood there and stared for a long
while, because what is there to say?’’

A Washington Post article quotes a
‘thesdan. She’s talking about fireflies
in her yard.

Brad Leithauser says the same thing in
“Hundreds of Fireflies” —

Merely
to watch, and say nothing,

gratefully,
is what is best…

The poem’s a mite precious for rough
and tumble UD, but it’s got its moments:

… three, four of them
lighten nightfall of all

solemnity; ten or twelve
and the eyes are led
endlessly astray;

and in deeper night
it’s twenty, fifty, more—a number
beyond simple reckoning—

and still they keep
coming.

I like eyes led endlessly astray.

That’s just what it was, last night, as I stood
at the bottom of my half acre wood looking up,
down, and all around at the spots on the
lawn, the trees, the sky. On my arms.

Each arhythmic light a trinket / to entice
some wayward mate. That’s good too.
Arhythmic, with trinket picking up on the
sound of arhythmic. Suggestive too of
the heart’s pulse as it watches fiery pulses
on the bushes. Night-blooming bugs.

For Souter’s departure today, much reciting of poetry, all of it written by Robert Frost. In his farewell letter to his colleagues, Souter describes the joy of his work at the court as he and his fellow justices contended over “those things that matter to decent people in civil society.”

He quotes from Frost’s poem Two Tramps in Mud Time — a poem, he writes, that expresses “the ideal of the life engaged, ‘…where love and need are one…’ … That phrase accounts for the finest moments of my life on this court…”

The poem describes the poet and his love of chopping wood. He both needs the wood for his fires, and loves in itself the act of chopping the wood:

The weight of an ax-head poised aloft,
The grip of earth on outspread feet,
The life of muscles rocking soft
And smooth and moist in vernal heat.

These are goods in themselves, the ideal here that of the human body deeply engaged, in zenlike self-transcendence, in an act. But beyond the engrossing physical pleasure of this natural movement lies something else:

My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future’s sakes.

The only really meaningful act has this double aspect of vocation — a job that must be done to satisfy a human need — and avocation — a playful gratuitous act of sheer joy. Iris Murdoch calls art “close dangerous play with unconscious forces.” It’s the same idea: Souter is evoking the serious play — often, indeed, at the court, with dangerous forces — that work as a justice has represented for him. Play for mortal stakes.

Longtime readers know that UD likes to make poems out of words and phrases in newspaper articles.

Here’s one. Article first.

Quiet please — Britain’s Queen Elizabeth is preparing to have her swans counted.

Buckingham Palace has announced that the annual Swan Upping, a tradition dating back to the 12th century which involves a census of the swan population on the River Thames, will be conducted by the queen’s official Swan Marker from July 20-24.

“With the assistance of the Queen’s Swan Warden, Professor Christopher Perrins of the University of Oxford, the swans and young cygnets are also assessed for any signs of injury or disease,” Buckingham Palace said in announcing the count.

The process involves the Swan Marker, David Barber, rowing up the Thames for five days with the Swan Warden in traditional skiffs while wearing special scarlet uniforms and counting, weighing and measuring swans and cygnets.

It may seem eccentric, but it is very important to the queen.

According to custom, Britain’s sovereign owns all unmarked, mute swans in open water, but the queen now exercises the right only on stretches of the Thames and its nearby tributaries.

In medieval times, the Swan Marker would not only travel up the river counting the swans, but would catch as many as possible as they were sought-after for banquets and feasts.

This year, the Swan Marker and the Swan Warden are particularly keen to discover how much damage is being caused to swans and cygnets by attacks from dogs and from discarded fishing tackle.

It is also an important year because Queen Elizabeth has decided to join her team of Swan Uppers for part of the census.

She will follow them up the river and visit a local school project on the whole subject of swans, cygnets and the Thames.

“Education and conservation are essential to the role of Swan Upping and the involvement of school children is always a rewarding experience,” Buckingham Palace said.
 

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

Swan Upping

Up the Thames the Marker rows,
Swans and cygnets counting.
Buckingham’s announcing
This year the sovereign follows.

Swan Warden, particular keen,
Eyes discarded tack,
And signs of dog attack,
On the mute unmarked of the queen.

Swan Uppers when medieval
Sought after fowl for feast.
Now they assess disease
On tributary travel.

Foggy. Weeks now of darkness and heavy rain and heavy thunder, and inside Garrett Park’s arboretum the world is a deeply dreaming green wall.

A wall, or a well — dark, deep, shaking with thunder and white at times with lightning.

Mourning doves coo inside invisible dogwoods. Thrushes sing misty.

So many foggy poems to choose among. This one, by David Mason, will do.

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

Fog Horns

Nothing was done then.
Nothing was ever
done. Then it was done.

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

These faint puffs of lines, these little brushstrokes, do the deed, make the mood. The haze so subdues the world that we can isolate, and hear, painfully, the wound of existence itself, bruises being born. When we’re out there, we’re vulnerable. We have to make our dim way through the world.

They’re too much for us, those hurts of sound that come blaring into the shut-in world in which we’ve made ourselves comfortable with a pot of tea.

We’re protected inside these small sunless days, inside the steamy fog of tea-time over and over again, where nothing ever happens. Nothing was ever done, says the poet. Comfortably numb.

But that’s its own hurt, because it will be done some day — Then it was done. — and we won’t have lived our lives.

… is a big-budget film about Allen Ginsberg, centering on the writing and then the scandal of his famous poem.

Here’s an excerpt from Howl that includes references to universities, the subject of this my blog. The “who” in the first line refers to friends of the poet and their various disturbing fates.

… who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky
Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys
or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or
Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the
daisychain or grave,
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hyp
notism & were left with their insanity & their
hands & a hung jury
who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism
and subsequently presented themselves on the
granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads
and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding in-
stantaneous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin
Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psycho-
therapy occupational therapy pingpong &
amnesia…

… of James Agee’s poetry is very portable — one of many good things about it, especially when you have to go to the Starbucks in Rockville Town Center for connectivity BECAUSE YOUR CONNECTIVITY AT HOME HAS COLLAPSED (we’re working on it). Mr UD sits beside me, drinking an iced coffee, holding Philip Selznick’s The Moral Commonwealth, and taking notes. That’s a big book, but the Agee is thin and light, and has paragraphs of very intelligent criticism from Andrew. Like this one:

The poems derive their energy from their own internal conflicts in trying to become American and to absorb their many influences; the journalism of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a failure in its own time, remains heavy with a self-absorption that approaches hysteria; the movie criticism never quite becomes a coherent whole; the screenplays, although brilliant, were produced only in part or not at all; the great novel is piercing, beautiful, and perhaps great, but was not actually completed; the superb letters for all their honesty and self-criticism don’t quite attain a transforming self-understanding. Yet Agee delivers in huge measure the pleasures – eminently Romantic – of the glittering fragment.

And it’s the glittering fragment from a poem called Description of Elysium that rivets me, because I sang it before I saw it in Hudgins:

Sure on this shining night
Of starmade shadows round,
Kindness must watch for me
This side the ground.

Sure on this shining night I weep for wonder wandering far alone
Of shadows on the stars.

Almost hysteria again, I guess — that wandering long line that breaks out of the concision of other lines as it weeps for wonder….

Eminently Romantic, overcome with the glory of life, the mystery of the universe, the perfect moment.

I’ve sung these lines for years. Samuel Barber put them to music. The piano accompaniment is difficult for me – damn modern music – but I manage. Barely.

Congratulations,
Mort.

Part-time Traverse City resident Mort Gallagher won a Florida contest for the best new poem about colonoscopies.

Gallagher submitted a limerick.

Prime Time

There once was a man in his prime
Who felt his life was sublime
He was told by his wife
Your health IS your life
And his polyp was caught just in time.

The Bottom Line Poetry Contest was organized by a gastroenterology group in Broward and Palm Beach counties. Gallagher spends part of the year in Jupiter, Fla.

The contest received 230 entries from 34 states and seven countries.

Not very Darwinian of the great-great-grand-daughter of Charles Darwin to have resigned, under pressure (she turns out to have written emails reminding people that her rival, Derek Walcott, had an accusation of sexual misconduct against him), from the Oxford University poetry chair she just won. 

Having done what she needed to do to triumph in the struggle for dominance, Ruth Padel caved to pressure from the pack.

UD makes a poem out of this article.

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

A LAPTOP COOLED WITH IONIC WIND

A laptop cooled with ionic wind
Wants less power. Silent and thin,
Taking heat better than a fan,

Spanish scientists have detected the presence of cocaine in the air of Madrid and Barcelona by using a new technique for the first time, a research institute said Wednesday.

The scientists looked for 17 components in five different types of illegal drugs — cocaine, amphetamines, opiates, cannabinoids and lysergic acid.

The results revealed cocaine is the predominant drug in the air of the two cities, the CSIC institute said.

It was found in concentrations of 29 to 850 picogrammes per cubic metre of air. A picogramme is one trillionth of a gramme.

The study is the result of the first use of a new method for the detection of drugs in the air, adapted specifically for the researchers, who are to publish their results in the review “Analytical Chemistry”.

“Heroin was also found in detectable levels in the samples taken in Madrid, but not in those from Barcelona,” the CSIC said.

This it explained by the fact that the area of Madrid where the sample was taken is close to a district where drug dealers are suspected of operating.

The scientists also reported a higher concentration of the components during the weekend, “suggesting higher consumption this time.”

But it said there was no reason for the public to be concerned.

“Even if we lived 1,000 years we would not consume the equivalent of a dose of cocaine through the air,” said one of the scientists, Miren Lopez de Alda.

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

Cocaine rains on the plains of Spain.
Candycaine grains stain trains and lanes.

The best brains fight the bane in vain:
“No pain, no gain… But this is insane!”

Children crane.
In their panes it wanes.