An extended search of the Japanese island Kuchino-erabu for traces of Craig Arnold had offered up hope the poet might be injured, but still alive, among one of the island’s many crevices.

That hope died Friday afternoon once a search team announced that a trail discovered the previous day showed signs that Arnold, 41, suffered a leg injury, then fell from a steep cliff to his death soon afterward.

Honiton poet Iris J Danning has penned some verses to welcome frozen food chain Iceland back to the town. Pensioner Mrs Danning says she was unable to purchase frozen onion for stews in Honiton for the three years Iceland was absent from the town centre.

“I wrote the poem to welcome Iceland back,” she said.

“I definitely think Iceland will be an asset to Honiton.”

Her poem was handed to Iceland manager Belinda Bodley on the store’s opening day, April 16.

Mrs Danning’s poem starts:

It’s just over three years since you moved away

We’ve all been looking forward to this big day

My fridge is empty, my freezer is bare

So I’m going to stock up with goodies to put in there.

There are sixteen.

Background here.

… for her blog at Inside Higher Education.

… has won the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.

UD would like to take as our text of the day some remarks Howe made ten years ago about poetry and bewilderment. Your University Diarist will weave them into Palimpsest, Gore Vidal’s memoir, which I found in my Key West house. And into other things.

As always, UD‘s comments appear parenthetically, in blue.

Howe titles her essay Bewilderment.

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

‘What I have been thinking about, lately, is bewilderment as a way of entering the day as much as the work. [Bewilderment doesn’t just inspire poems; it’s a way of being, a form of consciousness, every single day.]

Bewilderment as a poetics and an ethics. [If the condition of bewilderment is intrinsic to us, then our art must mark and convey it; but our morality too should evolve ways of thinking about good and bad bewilderment.]

I have learned about this state of mind from the characters in my fiction–women and children, and even the occasional man, who rushed backwards and forwards within an irreconcilable set of imperatives.

What sent them running was a double bind established in childhood, or a sudden confrontation with evil in the world–that is, in themselves–when they were older, yet unprepared. This is necessity at its worst.

These characters remained as uncertain in the end as they were in the beginning, though both author and reader could place them within a pattern of causalities. [There’s a necessity to our being the particular way each of us is, a necessity established long before we were aware of it. Our lives are a rushing back and forth between the necessity of this self and the attempt to exercise the freedom to be more than, or other than, this self. Although we always remain caught in this back and forth, and in the bewilderment that underlies it, we can understand this pattern itself, and the personal reasons for it.]

Within the book they were unable to handle the complexities of the world, or the shock of making a difference. In fact, to make a difference was to be inherently compromised. And for me the shape and form of their stories changed in response to the perplexities of their situations. [To step outside the authentic, private, bewildered self and attempt to change the public world in some way is to compromise, to falsely simplify, one’s complex inner truths, as well as the complexity of the world. Yet one wants that public engagement as much as one wants a sense of inner authenticity.]

Increasingly my stories joined my poems in their methods of sequencing and counting. I would have to say that something like the wave and the particle theories troubled the poetics of my pages: how can two people be in two places simultaneously and is there any relationship between imagination and character?

There is a Muslim prayer that says, “Lord, increase my bewilderment,” and this prayer is also mine and the strange Whoever who goes under the name of “I” in my poems–and under multiple names in my fiction–where error, errancy and bewilderment are the main forces that signal a story. [Ted Hughes writes this: “Almost all art is an attempt by someone unusually badly hit (but almost everybody is badly hit), who is also unusually ill-equipped to defend themselves internally against the wound, to improvise some sort of modus vivendi… in other words, all art is trying to become an anaesthetic and at the same time a healing session. [Poetry is] nothing more than a facility… for expressing that complicated process in which we locate, and attempt to heal, affliction… [T]he physical body, so to speak, of poetry is the treatment by which the poet tries to reconcile that pain with the world.“]

A signal does not necessarily mean that you want to be located or described. It can mean that you want to be known as Unlocatable and Hidden. This contradiction can drive the “I” in the lyrical poem into a series of techniques that are the reverse of the usual narrative movements around courage, discipline, conquest, and fame.

Weakness, fluidity, concealment, and solitude find their usual place in the dream world, where the sleeping witness finally feels safe enough to lie down in mystery. These qualities are not the stuff of stories of initiation and success. [Rilke in poetry, Proust in prose, but so many others — they lie down in mystery and convey in language the dream world from which we sometimes struggle to wake toward a certain form of comprehension. Think too of Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus and his artist’s ethos: silence, exile, and cunning.]

But it is to that model that I return as a writer involved in the problem of sequencing events and thoughts–because in the roundness of dreaming there is an acknowledgement of the beauty of plot, but a greater consciousness of randomness and uncertainty as the basic stock in which it is brewed. [“The urge to comprehend is so deep. … It would make little sense to live a life if you didn’t understand what you had done,” writes John Montague. Yet Howe reminds us that the accomplishment of a sense of one’s plot is a messy, fugitive affair. It’s certainly never linear, but can in the hands of the poet take on a roundness, a circular always-returning — rather than a neurotic, destructive back and forth rushing in a horrible double-bind. ]

There is literally no way to express actions occurring simultaneously.

If I, for instance, want to tell you that a man I loved, who died, said he loved me on a curbstone in the snow, but this occurred in time after he died, and before he died, and will occur again in the future, I can’t say it grammatically. [Our deepest emotional moments represent a complex, atemporal in-gathering of many moments. How to reconcile this reality with the narrative imperatives of written art? Writing about Joyce’s method in Ulysses, Hugh Kenner says this: ” Of what use, a Descartes might ask, is the senses’ sharp vividness, when minds may entertain clear ideas? And Joyce will let Stephen answer: Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past. The now, the here, are where I am. Reality is immediate experience, and in a book is the immediate experience of language, streaming through what Finnegans Wake will call ‘the eye of a noodle.’ … There are things [in this novel] we shall never know, and we think it meaningful to say we shall never know them, quite as though they were entities on the plane of the potentially knowable, forgetting that nothing exists between these covers after all but marks on paper … Joyce’s aesthetic of delay, producing the simplest facts by parallax, one element now, one later, and leaving large orders of fact to be assembled late or another time or never, in solving the problem of novels that go flat after we know ‘how it comes out’ also provides what fiction has never before really provided, an experience comparable to that of experiencing the haphazardly evidential quality of life; and, moreover, what art is supposed to offer that life can not, a permanence to be revisited at will but not exhausted.”]

You would think I was talking about a ghost, or a hallucination, or a dream, when in fact, I was trying to convey the experience of a certain event as scattered, and non-sequential.
I can keep UN-saying what I said, and amending it, but I can’t escape the given logic of the original proposition, the sentence which insists on tenses and words like “later” and “before”. [This is where Vidal’s palimpsest comes in. You see palimpsest literalized in the erasure-canvases of the great painter Cy Twombly. This is work which, again, does not express the uncomprehending, neurotic entrapment of back-and-forthing, but rather conveys both the temporal logic of a given proposition, the immovability of human facts, and our ability to play with that givenness, to half-create and half-perceive our own patterns. Here’s Vidal, at the end of his memoir: “I’ve… been reading through this memoir, adding, subtracting, writing over half-erased texts, ‘palimpsesting’ – all the while looking for clues not so much to me, the subject, if indeed I am the subject, as to what [my] first thirty-nine years were all about… [on] the small planet that each of us so briefly visits.” Recognizing that his patterns are all about an imperishable youthful love for a classmate killed at Iwo Jima, Vidal concludes his book in this way: “Finally, I seem to have written, for the first and last time, not the ghost story that I feared, but a love story, as circular in shape as desire (and its pursuit), ending with us whole at last in the shade of a copper beech.” Vidal will be buried near his lover.]

Bewilderment is an enchantment that follows a complete collapse of reference and reconcilability.

It cracks open the dialectic and sees myriads all at once.

The old debate over beauty–between absolute and relative–is ruined by this experience of being completely lost by choice! Between God and No-God, between Way Out Far and Way Inside–while they are vacillating wildly, there is no fixed position.

Bewilderment circumambulates, believing that at the center of errant or circular movement, is the axis of reality.

… Q–the Quidam, the unknown one–or I, is turning in a circle and keeps passing herself on her way around, her former self, her later self, and the trace of this passage is marked by a rhyme, a coded message for “I have been here before, I will return”.

The same sound splays the sound-waves into a polyvalence, a daisy. A bloom is not a parade. [A parade is sequence. Public sequence at that. We are talking here of a private aesthetic blossoming whose page may or may not find a small audience.]

A big error comes when you believe that a form, name or position in which the subject is viewed is the only way that the subject can be viewed. That is called “binding” and it leads directly to painful contradiction and clashes.

No monolithic answers that are not soon disproved are allowed into a bewildered poetry or life.

… In so many senses making these spiral, or serial poems, is very close to dream-construction, where we collect pieces of […] emotionally charged moments and see how they interact, outside of the usual story-like narrative.

But this is not a plan or an experiment. It is simply the way my poems come into existence and carry something out of my stories that is having a problem taking form there.

This is, I think, my experience of non-sequential, but intensely connected, time-periods and the way they impact on each other, but lead nowhere.

This is what gives them their spiraling effect within the serial form.

And ultimately I see the whole body of work as existing all but untitled and without beginning or end, an explosion of parts, the quotidian smeared.

In the meantime each little stanza expresses my infatuation with the sentence; and each stanza is a sentence where the parts and phrases are packed and shaped to bring out the best in them.

Like the disassociated stanzas in poems by Ibn Arabi, or Hafiz, I see my poems as being composed of queer sentences with lots of space, a dreamlike narrative, and a hidden meaning, so to speak, in that it is hidden from me. [I read this with Eve Sedgwick‘s death in the background, and the whole thing sounds like an elegy for her.]

The actual theological meaning of the word “salvation” is meaning.

To seek salvation is to seek a sense of meaning to the world, one’s life.

And so somehow the business of bringing these poems to light is part of a salvific urge.

Not gnostic–in the sense of seeing humanity as cast down, unwanted, unloved, duped, expelled, tested and misunderstood–and not fearing that only a few are chosen to be loved by God or history–I am a victim of constantly shifting positions, with every one of those positions stunned by bewilderment–is it here, is it here, is it there?–and by the desire to shuck the awful attributes of my own personality. To toss the dreck.

The illuminati used flagellation, levitation and starvation as a method of accounting for the power of the invisible world over their lives. Public suffering and scars gave the evidence of hidden miseries which had begun to require daylight.

The poet uses words to do the same. From the lashes of whip and ink the secrets become common, rather than signs of individual genius.

After all, the point of art is to show people that life is worth living by showing that it isn’t.’

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

Deborah Digges, a poet and Tufts University professor of English, jumped off the top of the University of Massachusetts stadium while the Temple University women’s lacrosse team was practicing there. The team noticed her, “in the upper reaches of the stadium,” but thought little of it, and then they found her body.

She was an accomplished writer. Much of her poetry and prose chronicles the despair behind her suicide. Disillusionment, every reflective person’s experience, undid her.

In a memoir about her troubled son she writes, “I have been a snob, a bohemian snob who believed that the arts, music, poetry were religion enough . . . and that somehow, above all the groups in culture – rich and poor alike – we were superior in our passionate pursuits.”

Reading her, you get the sense of a person extraordinarily bifurcated, unable to overcome the gap between the beliefs and passions upon which she set her life, and the failure of those beliefs and passions.

Here’s one of her strongest poems. Read it first here, without my commentary:

RUNE FOR THE PARABLE OF DESPAIR

Little left of me that year [The poet recalls a terrible year of despair, which almost did her in.]—I had a vision
I was strata, atmosphere. [Little left of her. Mere air.]
Or it was that the host entire coded in my blood
found voice and shrieked, for instance,
at what we now call roads
and I must maneuver freeways, bridges with these inside me
falling to their knees beating the ground howling. [The self-eviscerating despair was so great that her very reality as a self was taken over by a “host” of shrieking creatures.]
One might well ask why they’d come forward—
fugitives flushed from a burning house,
converts fed down the aisles, [Should this be “led” down the aisles? UD isn’t sure – thinks maybe this is a typo…]
bumping and blubbering their way into revival light,
light so eroding, the human face is aberration,
the upright stance a freak
with no means otherwise. [How do I even stay upright under this despair?]

Some things won’t translate backwards.
Some things can’t be undone,
though it takes years to learn this, years. [The pain of recognizing that you’ve made unalterable mistakes in your life.]
Such were the serial exhaustions of my beliefs, [One by one, the convictions on which I grounded my life wore out.]
whatever drug worn off that must belong to youth,
or to the feminine, or simply to the genes begun a wintering.
Then I knew the purest bitterness,
as if my heart were a wrecking ball,
my love for the man an iron bell used of the wind,
calling to task a population,
calling them in, as from these fields,
before the stone wheel became speech,
before fire dropped from the sky to be caged and carried into the caves. [The fire of youthful romantic passion transmutes into an embittering, imprisoning flame.]
And so they came to be with me,

whom I suspect was nothing more to them than shelter,
a ransomed hall, a shipwreck among dead trees,
the fallen branches lichen-studded,
which they dragged into my rooms. [The host again; the sense of her self taken over by morbid aggressive forces of misery.]
And when the lights burned out they wept,
and when the heat was gone they gathered my rugs around them. [Again, even the flame of bitterness burns out eventually, and one is left with cold emptiness.]
I’d never known how quickly a house
can be taken back, taken down,
nor will I grant myself the balm—
though it’s been centuries—
that I was “blessed” to see it turned inside out,
the furniture thrown through the windows, and the books
to lie face up, riffling, swelling, until the pages
emptied into a thousand seasons, [An honest person, she won’t console herself with the facile notion that the total destruction of everything you’ve stood for and the end of your love affair is somehow purgative, clarifying, an energizing challenge to begin anew. She knows better. No pathetic “revival light” for her.]

books that once possessed the magnet pull of stars!
In the end I let them keep the house
the way they wanted, wash from the toilet,
hang yew boughs from the eaves,
my sturdy doors fallen from the hinges,
even my hair commingling with theirs— [She gives herself over to despair, lets everything go. The hosts take her over.]
huge animal clumps a-swirl in the eddies
of spiders’ eggs and broken teeth and cemetery moss and pine needles— [Great list here. Note how good poets can toss together a set of images and have them carry a theme — here, the theme of the dessication of her youthful fertility.]
until not one ornament was left that said I lived,  [Preparing the Christmas theme with which she’ll end here.]
not even a drinking glass
I might have toasted with just as the clouds
shifted, my shadow disappeared,  [Again the ‘little left of me’ theme.]
O, drink from once before my leaving, leaving.
With any luck, I sang, I’ll be in hell by Christmas. [Sardonic final line, anticipating a holiday release of suicide.]

***********
The surprise of dusk come early is from her poem Lilacs.

… for Nicholas Hughes. It’s at my other blog, at Inside Higher Education.

Today, for UD, it’s been Edelweiss. Because she’s been reading about the death of Natasha Richardson.

She likes what Charles Isherwood says in today’s New York Times:

“Life is an easily breakable possession even for those who abide in the waiting room of immortality, which is to say celebrity. … The freakish nature of Ms. Richardson’s death has already inspired ghoulish tabloid commentary on the curses that seem to descend upon famous families in showbiz or politics. It’s absurd, of course. Not to get all Beckett on you, but life itself is a cursed thing, fated to end before all promise is fulfilled.”

So that was in my mind. That Beckett thought, plus Edelweiss. Also this poem by Roethke.

Elegy for Jane
(My student, thrown by a horse)

I remember the neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils;
And her quick look, a sidelong pickerel smile;
And how, once startled into talk, the light syllables leaped for her,
And she balanced in the delight of her thought,

A wren, happy, tail into the wind,
Her song trembling the twigs and small branches.
The shade sang with her;
The leaves, their whispers turned to kissing,
And the mould sang in the bleached valleys under the rose.

Oh, when she was sad, she cast herself down into such a pure depth,
Even a father could not find her:
Scraping her cheek against straw,
Stirring the clearest water.

My sparrow, you are not here,
Waiting like a fern, making a spiney shadow.
The sides of wet stones cannot console me,
Nor the moss, wound with the last light.

If only I could nudge you from this sleep,
My maimed darling, my skittery pigeon.
Over this damp grave I speak the words of my love:
I, with no rights in this matter,
Neither father nor lover.

Skittery pigeon. Pickerel. See how his avid language reanimates her, how the power of his love brings back her vibrancy. The poet’s modest self-appraisal – neither father nor lover – paradoxically makes his love seem more intense to us, since its groundlessness is a kind of purity.

Digestive CARE(TM), a medical group of 46 gastroenterologists in Broward and Palm Beach County, today launched the “Bottom Line Poetry Contest” in honor of National Colorectal Cancer Awareness Month (March 2009).

Digestive CARE(TM) is offering a $500 cash prize (or the option of a free colonoscopy) to the poet who submits the best new original poem about colonoscopies.

… Original poems about colonoscopies should be submitted directly to [email protected]. Please write “COLON POEM” in the subject line. The deadline for submission is April 30, 2009, the last day of National Poetry Month.

… Archibald MacLeish.

“Poetry is the art of understanding what it is to be alive…

You don’t write as a writer, you write as a man – a man with a certain hard-earned skill in the use of words, a particular, and particularly naked, consciousness of human life, of the human tragedy and triumph – a man who is moved by human life, who cannot take it for granted.

… I began to understand… by teaching a course in which I tried to find out for myself what poetry is, what it really is. I began to understand that it is a part of a process which extends beyond poetry but which is most apparent in poetry, of trying to see human experience, trying to see “the world.” The world being what a man feels about the world. … [Y]ou are laboring at your art not only to make works of art but to make sense of your life – those dark and bewildering moments of experience. And to make sense of it not only for yourself. [Works of art] are steps in an attempt to stop time in terms of time so that it may be seen… If you have succeeded at all you have become part … of the consciousness of your time.”

… let us consider one of her poems.

She was born 8 February 1911. Died in 1979.

She lived in and wrote about Key West, so that’s another reason for UD, who will soon move there, to write about her.

But the real reason to write about her is that she’s a spectacularly good poet. Very much in the way of UD‘s adored Philip Larkin. Compare this Larkin poem with the Bishop we’re about to consider.

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

Friday Night in the Royal Station Hotel

Light spreads darkly downwards from the high
Clusters of lights over empty chairs
That face each other, coloured differently.
Through open doors, the dining-room declares
A larger loneliness of knives and glass
And silence laid like carpet. A porter reads
An unsold evening paper. Hours pass,
And all the salesmen have gone back to Leeds,
Leaving full ashtrays in the Conference Room.

In shoeless corridors, the lights burn. How
Isolated, like a fort, it is –
The headed paper, made for writing home
(If home existed) letters of exile: Now
Night comes on. Waves fold behind villages.

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

If home existed. Bishop says almost the exact same thing in her poem Questions of Travel:

… “Continent, city, country, society:
the choice is never wide and never free.
And here, or there… No. Should we have stayed at home,
wherever that may be?”

We travel, she writes in Arrival at Santos, because of our “immodest demands for a different world, / and a better life, and complete comprehension / of both.”

Knowledge of the world before you leave it, and a perfectly clear understanding that you’ll gain very little knowledge before you leave it — it’s odd to UD that this shared pathos created in Bishop a restless traveler and in Larkin a stay-at-home. But then both of them seem to suggest that there isn’t any home anyway, that the world’s a bizarre mystery wherever you happen to plant your ass, so you don’t really need to travel. You’re always writing letters of exile. Poems are letters of exile.

In fact travel might backfire; it might rouse expectations destined to be disappointed. These expectations might involve the possibility of greater comprehension; they might also be about the possibility that you can make a new life — that having botched this one, you can make a good, new one by placing yourself in a different world. That’s the theme of this little Larkin ditty:

Poetry of Departures

Sometimes you hear, fifth-hand,
As epitaph:
He chucked up everything
And just cleared off,
And always the voice will sound
Certain you approve
This audacious, purifying,
Elemental move.

And they are right, I think.
We all hate home
And having to be there:
I detest my room,
It’s specially-chosen junk,
The good books, the good bed,
And my life, in perfect order:
So to hear it said

He walked out on the whole crowd
Leaves me flushed and stirred,
Like Then she undid her dress
Or Take that you bastard;
Surely I can, if he did?
And that helps me to stay
Sober and industrious.
But I’d go today,

Yes, swagger the nut-strewn roads,
Crouch in the fo’c’sle
Stubbly with goodness, if
It weren’t so artificial,
Such a deliberate step backwards
To create an object:
Books; china; a life
Reprehensibly perfect.

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

The ongoing struggle of our lives is the same struggle anywhere; to chuck it all is to pretend otherwise, to pretend that having, say, mucked up one life, you can do the next one right.

But anyway. What strikes UD most about these two poets is their almost Kafkaesque sense of how fundamentally strange life is, and their related disengagement from the human realm. Their world is the world of the Royal Station Hotel abandoned by human beings, though recently and incompletely colonized by them… I mean, Larkin and Bishop notice again and again traces of our efforts to inhabit and understand the world. They notice the way the obdurate world responds to these efforts with a maddening inhuman self-sufficiency. The world goes on living its worldly life and gives away almost nothing. This conundrum of ours produces – if you’re a literary genius – extremely eerie sets of lines, evoking not emptiness, but an absence weighted with the failed effort to be present.

Cape Breton

Out on the high “bird islands,” Ciboux and Hertford,
the razorbill auks and the silly-looking puffins all stand
with their backs to the mainland
in solemn, uneven lines along the cliff’s brown grass-frayed edge,
while the few sheep pastured there go “Baaa, baaa.”
(Sometimes, frightened by aeroplanes, they stampede
and fall over into the sea or onto the rocks.)
The silken water is weaving and weaving,
disappearing under the mist equally in all directions,
lifted and penetrated now and then
by one shag’s dripping serpent-neck,
and somewhere the mist incorporates the pulse,
rapid but unurgent, of a motor boat.

The same mist hangs in thin layers
among the valleys and gorges of the mainland
like rotting snow-ice sucked away
almost to spirit; the ghosts of glaciers drift
among those folds and folds of fir: spruce and hackmatack–
dull, dead, deep pea-cock colors,
each riser distinguished from the next
by an irregular nervous saw-tooth edge,
alike, but certain as a stereoscopic view.

The wild road clambers along the brink of the coast.
On it stand occasional small yellow bulldozers,
but without their drivers, because today is Sunday.
The little white churches have been dropped into the matted hills
like lost quartz arrowheads.
The road appears to have been abandoned.
Whatever the landscape had of meaning appears to have been abandoned,
unless the road is holding it back, in the interior,
where we cannot see,
where deep lakes are reputed to be,
and disused trails and mountains of rock
and miles of burnt forests, standing in gray scratches
like the admirable scriptures made on stones by stones–
and these regions now have little to say for themselves
except in thousands of light song-sparrow songs floating upward
freely, dispassionately, through the mist, and meshing
in brown-wet, fine torn fish-nets.

A small bus comes along, in up-and-down rushes,
packed with people, even to its step.
(On weekdays with groceries, spare automobile parts, and pump parts,
but today only two preachers extra, one carrying his frock coat on a
hanger.)
It passes the closed roadside stand, the closed schoolhouse,
where today no flag is flying
from the rough-adzed pole topped with a white china doorknob.
It stops, and a man carrying a baby gets off,
climbs over a stile, and goes down through a small steep meadow,
which establishes its poverty in a snowfall of daisies,
to his invisible house beside the water.

The birds keep on singing, a calf bawls, the bus starts.
The thin mist follows
the white mutations of its dream;
an ancient chill is rippling the dark brooks.

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

This is a shag, by the way.

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

So let me take a voyage around this poem. Here it is again:

Out on the high “bird islands,” Ciboux and Hertford,
the razorbill auks and the silly-looking puffins all stand
with their backs to the mainland
in solemn, uneven lines along the cliff’s brown grass-frayed edge,

[As with Larkin and the objects in the hotel, so with Bishop and the animal objects she’s considering, there’s a weird intentionality that the poet casts upon them; they’re almost human, seeming to mean and feel certain things — The birds are solemn; they’ve turned their backs to the mainland in some meaningful gesture of withdrawal or rejection… ]

while the few sheep pastured there go “Baaa, baaa.”
(Sometimes, frightened by aeroplanes, they stampede
and fall over into the sea or onto the rocks.)
The silken water is weaving and weaving,
disappearing under the mist equally in all directions,

[The water weaves silk as a weaver weaves. It doesn’t merely move; it disappears. It means to disappear in the same mysterious way the birds seem to mean their rejection of the mainland.]

lifted and penetrated now and then
by one shag’s dripping serpent-neck,
and somewhere the mist incorporates the pulse,
rapid but unurgent, of a motor boat.

[Incorporates. The great poet finds the word. Takes into its body somewhere. The world has a mind and the world has a body, and these things are powerful and have their reasons. We have little to no access to them, though we can mark some of their operations.

We can’t see the boat because of the mist — the mist that will stand throughout the poem for the haunted and undisclosed Kafka-world in which we move.]

The same mist hangs in thin layers
among the valleys and gorges of the mainland
like rotting snow-ice sucked away
almost to spirit; the ghosts of glaciers drift
among those folds and folds of fir: spruce and hackmatack–
dull, dead, deep pea-cock colors,
each riser distinguished from the next
by an irregular nervous saw-tooth edge,
alike, but certain as a stereoscopic view.

[Toto, I don’t think we’re in Romanticism anymore… Rotting, sucked away, dead, stereoscopic… Here, consciousness takes in the natural world as a rigid neurotic oddball with morbid tendencies. Which has nothing to do with us.]

The wild road clambers along the brink of the coast.

[Unlike the trees, the road is animate; but wildly, in a way that has nothing to do with us.]

On it stand occasional small yellow bulldozers,
but without their drivers, because today is Sunday.

[As with the Royal Hotel poem, it’s the world weighted with our failure to be present that compels Bishop. For her, every day is Sunday, because we never really enter into and interact with the world.

And yes – If you find yourself drifting glacially toward Wallace Stevens’ Sunday Morning – he also lived in Key West – that’s dandy.]

The little white churches have been dropped into the matted hills
like lost quartz arrowheads.

[Brilliant simile.]

The road appears to have been abandoned.
Whatever the landscape had of meaning appears to have been abandoned,
unless the road is holding it back, in the interior,
where we cannot see,
where deep lakes are reputed to be,
and disused trails and mountains of rock

[She’s getting into it now. Notice how great poems don’t assert much of anything; they calmly and expansively describe a world, and then, naturally as it were, generate implications.]

and miles of burnt forests, standing in gray scratches
like the admirable scriptures made on stones by stones–

[Hey! UD gets all excited when she reads these lines. Faithful readers know why.]

and these regions now have little to say for themselves
except in thousands of light song-sparrow songs floating upward
freely, dispassionately, through the mist, and meshing
in brown-wet, fine torn fish-nets.

A small bus comes along, in up-and-down rushes,
packed with people, even to its step.

[Notice how by now, having evoked an obscure and powerful natural/spiritual world, Bishop’s introduction of people makes them and their things — buses, bulldozers, churches — seem like toys, absurd powerless things dropped in, crawling about, barely existent.]

(On weekdays with groceries, spare automobile parts, and pump parts,
but today only two preachers extra, one carrying his frock coat on a
hanger.)
It passes the closed roadside stand, the closed schoolhouse,
where today no flag is flying

[Again, just like the Royal Hotel, the setting is that of a place usually inhabited but now not inhabited.]

from the rough-adzed pole topped with a white china doorknob.
It stops, and a man carrying a baby gets off,
climbs over a stile, and goes down through a small steep meadow,
which establishes its poverty in a snowfall of daisies,
to his invisible house beside the water.

[Notice too how the poet’s perspective moves in the poem from distant to closer and closer, from a long view of the islands to, by now, a specific view of a specific human being. Like a scientist, she is trying to understand, bringing the objects of her interest more and more to view.

And of course his house is invisible, holding back its meaning as much as any other thing on the island or the mainland holds back its meaning.]

The birds keep on singing, a calf bawls, the bus starts.
The thin mist follows
the white mutations of its dream;
an ancient chill is rippling the dark brooks.

[Frightening. We’re left, for all our mental exertions, with the same inscrutable soundings, and with a world that has a mind of its own — the thin mist propelled by its own dreams. The world is and always has been a cold place, despite our efforts to warm it. Cold and dark, with reminders of our brief battles here.]

Listen to Wallace Stevens read his poem The Idea of Order at Key West.

She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.

The sea was not a mask. No more was she.
The song and water were not medleyed sound
Even if what she sang was what she heard.
Since what she sang was uttered word by word.
It may be that in all her phrases stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard.

For she was the maker of the song she sang.
The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea
Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.
Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew
It was the spirit that we sought and knew
That we should ask this often as she sang.

If it was only the dark voice of the sea
That rose, or even colored by many waves;
If it was only the outer voice of sky
And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled,
However clear, it would have been deep air,
The heaving speech of air, a summer sound
Repeated in a summer without end
And sound alone. But it was more than that,
More even than her voice, and ours, among
The meaningless plungings of water and the wind,
Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped
On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres
Of sky and sea.
It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.
She measured to the hour its solitude.
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.

Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,
Why, when the singing ended and we turned
Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,
The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,
As night descended, tilting in the air,
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.

Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker’s rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.

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

Insanely slow. Slow poetry.

And why? So that we can attend to the world and what we make of it. Listen carefully. And remember my post about the Yvor Winters poem, The Slow Pacific Swell. Remember in particular this line:

The sea is but a sound.

This seems a theme of the Stevens poem too.

Listen. Listen because there’s something in the Stevens poem that isn’t in the Winters. And that thing is art itself. Winters is all about the mind struggling to impose order on the world. Our rationality, which seeks precision and stability, has to keep its distance from the enigmatic, undermining, powerful chaos that the sea represents. But Stevens introduces another element into our relationship with the world — one that enables us to remain close to sources of chaos and mystery. Listen.

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

The Idea of Order at Key West

She sang beyond the genius of the sea.

[The poet, walking along a beach, watches and listens to a woman also at the beach, singing. Her singing is brilliant – more brilliant than the singing of the sea.]

The water never formed to mind or voice,

[Why more brilliant? Because the sea is just a sound. It doesn’t have a mind, and it doesn’t have a voice. No words. Just sound. Same formless chaos Winters describes.]

Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves;

[The sea is merely its physical reality on the globe. It is a body of water, and when its arms wave to us — when the water moves — its gesture is empty, without content.]

and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.

[See how he calls it “tragic-gestured” a few lines down? Although it’s empty of content, we do intuit, in the sound of the sea, the sad futility of human existence. Matthew Arnold in Dover Beach describes it as “the turbid ebb and flow of human misery.” We hear, writes Stevens, a constant cry — emanating from the alien inhuman sea, but nonetheless in some sense our own, because we understand it in a certain way as mimicking the truth of our being.]

The sea was not a mask. No more was she.
The song and water were not medleyed sound
Even if what she sang was what she heard.
Since what she sang was uttered word by word.
It may be that in all her phrases stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard.

[Both human artist and inhuman sea, then, are authentic expressive realities. Yet they do not interact. Her song and the water do not, together, make a medley, even if the singer is trying to imitate the sound of the ocean with her voice. She’s using words, after all, and the ocean is speechless, empty gesture. Even if, in a fine low voice, she’s doing Elgar’s Sea Pictures, it’s the human artist we hear, not the ocean.]

For she was the maker of the song she sang.

[In the world of Winters, we are far less powerful than in the world of Stevens. With Stevens, the artist has dominion over the world — the world only has existence in the artist’s work, which shapes the world as something meaningful and beautiful. If we have any idea of order at all, we’ve gotten it from the artist.]

The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea
Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.

[He agrees with Winters that the sea is a permanent and unsettling mystery – ever-hooded – and that it signals to us — or rather we respond to it as signaling to us — the truth of our tragic condition. But it’s not the threatening mystery it is for Winters; for Stevens, the sea is “merely” a location, merely a physical attribute of the world. It needs us – our formal artistic expressivity – to be anything more, really, than a place-holder.]

Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew
It was the spirit that we sought and knew
That we should ask this often as she sang.

[To be human is to be unsatisfied with mere physicality. We seek meaning, beauty, spirit; and we seek it in art.]

If it was only the dark voice of the sea
That rose, or even colored by many waves;
If it was only the outer voice of sky
And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled,
However clear, it would have been deep air,
The heaving speech of air, a summer sound
Repeated in a summer without end
And sound alone.

[We’ve been contemplating the level sea so far; now our view takes in what’s above and below it — takes in all of the world. And even if we do include all of the non-human, non-aesthetic world, we merely deepen the sense of nothingness – deep air, the “speech” of mere air. And there’s another feature of this physical world. It does not move forward in time; it does not, like our lives, make a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end. Rather it is a “summer without end,” a droning constancy that is therefore inhuman, alien to us and our experience. Only the artist can both interact with this atemporal world of nature and convey our temporal humanness to us.]

But it was more than that,
More even than her voice, and ours, among
The meaningless plungings of water and the wind,
Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped
On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres
Of sky and sea.

[The poet walks with a companion. He notes that the artist transcends herself – her singing is more “even than her voice,” and more than whatever the poet and his companion, in their speech, add to her song. Now we get a few lines amplifying the idea that the natural world is merely physical, and that while it can gesture to us in ways we interpret as meaningful, it is only the artist who can take that interpretation as it were back to the world, and vivify and order the world aesthetically. Without her, the world remains meaningless, a stage set.]

It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.

[As day ends and a spectacular Key West sunset of bronzes emerges, we need the singer to sharpen and clarify and order that sunset.]

She measured to the hour its solitude.
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang.

[Again, the artist owns, lives inside, the temporality that makes the world something other than a grinding pointless redundancy. As she sings, she forms the world in which she sings.]

And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.

Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,
Why, when the singing ended and we turned
Toward the town,

[The poet turns to his companion to ask a question as they walk away from the beach and toward town at the end of the day and as the singer concludes her song.]

tell why the glassy lights,
The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,
As night descended, tilting in the air,
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,

[We make songs, but we make other things too. Those lights in the boats also represent a form of ordering the world. They aren’t charged with artistic brilliance, like the singer’s song, but they are another powerful form of human creation — the lighting up of the dark world — and they have a similar effect: They master the night. They portion out the sea. They make the world. And they order the world. So even when the singing ends, we remain in a beautiful humanized world.]

Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.

[Gorgeous writing. See how the word zone playfully inheres in the word that precedes it? We make of the otherwise undifferentiated world zones; we mark these zones with fiery poles, always arranging, deepening, clarifying darkness. This is a poem not merely about the triumphal powers of the artist; it is about the powers of all human makers.]

Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker’s rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.

[Our divine fever to be makers of a world whose vastest and most powerful attributes seem disorder — in this mania we discover that the “spirit” the poet sought in the singer is his own spirit, our collective human creativity. The world comes at us obliquely, fragrant with implicit meaning, dimly starred with significance. We are always, as with the boat’s lights, illuminating and setting in motion and speaking the dark mute lifeless stage set of the world. But aesthetic creation is the very best thing we do, for it confronts the sea, the sea that repels as much as it attracts Yvor Winters in his own slow poem.]

It came to me the other day:

Were I to die, no one would say,

‘Oh, what a shame! So young, so full

Of promise – depths unplumbable!

Instead, a shrug and tearless eyes

Will greet my overdue demise;

The wide response will be, I know,

‘I thought he died a while ago.’

For life’s a shabby subterfuge,

And death is real, and dark, and huge.

The shock of it will register

Nowhere but where it will occur.

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

A nice unexciting final piece, which reminded me, in its last lines, of Harold Brodkey’s last lines in This Wild Darkness, written also just before his death. These lines, though prose, are more poetic than Updike’s:

One may be tired of the world — tired of the prayer-makers, the poem-makers, whose rituals are distracting and human and pleasant but worse than irritating because they have no reality — while reality itself remains very dear. One wants glimpses of the real. God is an immensity, while this disease, this death, which is in me, this small, tightly defined pedestrian event, is merely and perfectly real, without miracle — or instruction. I am standing on an unmoored raft, a punt moving on the flexing, flowing face of a river. It is precarious. I don’t know what I am doing. The unknowing, the taut balance, the jolts and the instability spread in widening ripples through all my thoughts. Peace? There was never any in the world. But in the pliable water, under the sky, unmoored, I am traveling now and hearing myself laugh, at first with nerves and then with genuine amazement. It is all around me.

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

Life’s a shabby subterfuge. Reality remains very dear. One wants glimpses of the real.

Death is real and dark and huge, writes Updike. Yet these vague words don’t work as powerfully as the precision — the gorgeous, bizarre precision — of Brodkey’s fevered mind, which finds, even as it shuts down, a glorious image through which to convey the gradual fading away of physical integrity as one floats off into death.

Both writers evoke the shabby subterfuge of life, the noontime show of reassurance we make; and our sense, as day lengthens, of our self-deceit.

…. Mississippi State, UD looks at a poem.

Many people know Wordsworth’s happy poem about daffodils; fewer know this remarkable piece by Ted Hughes, one of his poems to Sylvia Plath in Birthday Letters.

Daffodils

Remember how we picked the daffodils?
Nobody else remembers, but I remember.
Your daughter came with her armfuls, eager and happy,
Helping the harvest. She has forgotten.
She cannot even remember you. And we sold them
It sounds like sacrilege, but we sold them.
Were we so poor? Old Stoneman, the grocer,
Boss-eyed, his blood-pressure purpling to beetroot
(It was his last chance,
He would die in the same great freeze as you),
He persuaded us. Every Spring
He always bought them, sevenpence a dozen,
‘A custom of the house’.

Besides, we still weren’t sure we wanted to own
Anything. Mainly we were hungry
To convert everything to profit.
Still nomads–still strangers
To our whole possession. The daffodils
Were incidental gilding of the deeds,
Treasure trove. They simply came,
And they kept on coming.
As if not from the sod but falling from heaven.
Our lives were still a raid on our own good luck.
We knew we’d live for ever. We had not learned
What a fleeting glance of the everlasting
Daffodils are. Never identified
The nuptial flight of the rarest ephemera –
Our own days!

We thought they were a windfall.
Never guessed they were a last blessing.
So we sold them. We worked at selling them
As if employed on somebody else’s
Flower-farm. You bent at it
In the rain of that April – your last April,
We bent there together, among the soft shrieks
Of their jostled stems, the wet shocks shaken
Of their girlish dance-frocks –
Fresh-opened dragonflies, wet and flimsy,
Opened too early.

We piled their frailty lights on a carpenter’s bench,
Distributed leaves among the dozens –
Buckling blade-leaves, limber, groping for air, zinc-silvered –
Propped their raw butts in bucket water,
Their oval, meaty butts,
And sold them, sevenpence a bunch –

Wind-wounds, spasms from the dark earth,
With their odourless metals,
A flamy purification of the deep grave’s stony cold
As if ice had a breath –

We sold them, to wither.
The crop thickened faster than we could thin it.
Finally, we were overwhelmed
And we lost our wedding-present scissors.

Every March since they have lifted again
Out of the same bulbs, the same
Baby-cries from the thaw,
Ballerinas too early for music, shiverers
In the draughty wings of the year.
On that same groundswell of memory, fluttering
They return to forget you stooping there
Behind the rainy curtains of a dark April,
Snipping their stems.

But somewhere your scissors remember. Wherever they are.
Here somewhere, blades wide open,
April by April
Sinking deeper
Through the sod – an anchor, a cross of rust.

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

That’s the poem. Let’s dig in, shall we?

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

Daffodils

Remember how we picked the daffodils?
Nobody else remembers, but I remember.

[All of the poems in the collection, written at the end of the poet’s life, directly address Plath. Note that the repetition in these opening lines seems appropriate, unlike the repetition in the recent inaugural poem, which seems merely to be trying to import some musicality to the verses.

Why does this repetition seem appropriate?

It captures the way the mind speaks to itself. The poet muses, thinks back, circles around events. It makes sense that he’d use the same word again and again. It comes across as very human — a little proud, a little irritable… Then too, to re-member is to put something that’s fallen apart together again, and there are two ways in which the poet can be said to be trying to do that: He’s trying to put the torn-apart daffodils together again, lamenting in the poem the way he and Plath tore them carelessly and prematurely out of the earth; and he’s also trying to put his broken life together again through the exercise of memory and the imposition of some order — if only an aesthetic one, through the writing of a poem — upon what just feels like pain and chaos.]

Your daughter came with her armfuls, eager and happy,
Helping the harvest. She has forgotten.
She cannot even remember you.

[She’s forgotten both the event, that is, and her mother.]

And we sold them
It sounds like sacrilege, but we sold them.
Were we so poor?

[The poet for a moment turns away from Plath and asks himself this question, with a certain wistful incredulity.]

Old Stoneman, the grocer,

[Note the OH sound that recurs – old, stoneman, grocer. Gives the memory a certain folkloric, Mother Goosy feel.]

Boss-eyed, his blood-pressure purpling to beetroot

[Note the strong alliteration, and the use of the natural metaphor – beetroot – for a poem about nature. Flowers shoot up out of the ground; our blood pressure shoots up as another sort of natural manifestation.]

(It was his last chance,
He would die in the same great freeze as you),
He persuaded us. Every Spring
He always bought them, sevenpence a dozen,
‘A custom of the house’.

Besides, we still weren’t sure we wanted to own
Anything.

[Evokes their confident bohemian youth.]

Mainly we were hungry
To convert everything to profit.
Still nomads–still strangers
To our whole possession.

[Here the key theme of the poem appears: We didn’t know what we had. We didn’t know how lucky we were to be alive, young, fertile. We flattered ourselves that we had a higher morality in regard to possession, but we were fools: We simply didn’t know how to value what we had because we thought – arrogantly – that we owned the world forever.]

The daffodils
Were incidental gilding of the deeds,
Treasure trove. They simply came,
And they kept on coming.

[Again, we took the earth’s gifts for granted. We didn’t think about the lower depths, the difficulties, out of which they struggled, and the fragility of their existence once they emerged.]

As if not from the sod but falling from heaven.

[The sod. Plath’s grave, and all the darker truths it contains, but also hides, will appear in this poem.]

Our lives were still a raid on our own good luck.
We knew we’d live for ever. We had not learned
What a fleeting glance of the everlasting
Daffodils are. Never identified
The nuptial flight of the rarest ephemera –

[Note the use again and again of the letter L. Lends the words a lightness — what a couple of ladeedas we were…]

Our own days!

[Their hasting-away marriage. Not that they see the end coming.]

We thought they were a windfall.

[See how the greatest poets find the greatest words? Windfall. Both a piece of luck from nowhere, and also, literally, what he has already described: the act of falling from heaven. The poet drives us back to the origins of words, the ground of things, when he discovers linguistic windfalls… After all, the word windfall, for all its positive connotations, has in it the word fall, and this is a poem about the sudden fall of a life into death.

And – not that I’m keen on Dylan Thomas – but note that he got there first in a poem with the very same theme as this one: Fern Hill, which includes the line “Down the rivers of the windfall light.”]

Never guessed they were a last blessing.

[Guess. Bless. Sly rhymes.]

So we sold them. We worked at selling them
As if employed on somebody else’s
Flower-farm. You bent at it
In the rain of that April – your last April,
We bent there together, among the soft shrieks
Of their jostled stems, the wet shocks shaken
Of their girlish dance-frocks –

[Soft, jostled, shocks, frocks — the language sings. But always in the service of its themes — the girlish prematurity of these lovers, and the whispering latency by which they begin to register their oncoming doom.]

Fresh-opened dragonflies, wet and flimsy,
Opened too early.

We piled their frailty lights on a carpenter’s bench,
Distributed leaves among the dozens –
Buckling blade-leaves, limber, groping for air, zinc-silvered –
Propped their raw butts in bucket water,
Their oval, meaty butts,
And sold them, sevenpence a bunch –

[Here note simply the microscopic attentiveness to details of the physical world. You’ve never looked at a wilting daffodil as carefully as Ted Hughes has.]

Wind-wounds, spasms from the dark earth,
With their odourless metals,
A flamy purification of the deep grave’s stony cold
As if ice had a breath –

[Into seriously Wuthering Heights territory here. The daffodils aren’t merely pretty flowers we’ll sell to the merchant for a little money; they’re messengers from deep in the earth, little flames distilled from dark underlying agonies.]

We sold them, to wither.

[Whither is fled the visionary dream? may also insinuate itself here.]

The crop thickened faster than we could thin it.
Finally, we were overwhelmed
And we lost our wedding-present scissors.

Every March since they have lifted again
Out of the same bulbs, the same
Baby-cries from the thaw,
Ballerinas too early for music, shiverers
In the draughty wings of the year.

[Wings as in things lifted like birds; but also stage wings, where unready dancers shiver anxiously.]

On that same groundswell of memory, fluttering

[Groundswell — a word as madly poetic as windfall. Great poems are true to the operations of consciousness — here, memories burst out of us, a groundswell of thought and feeling, and the poet captures this operation not by describing it as a psychologist might but by working it through obliquely, metaphorically, with the objects memory attaches itself to — those daffodils.]

They return to forget you stooping there
Behind the rainy curtains of a dark April,
Snipping their stems.

[An allusion here perhaps to their children — the daughter who happily harvests with no memory of her mother. Also an angry moment: Plath has cut short the childhood of her son and daughter by killing herself. They’ve been nipped in the bud.]

But somewhere your scissors remember. Wherever they are.
Here somewhere, blades wide open,
April by April
Sinking deeper
Through the sod – an anchor, a cross of rust.

[Blades wide open. The rage and pain of his morbid reflections. The hectic undiminished terrifying eros of them even today for the poet. Wide open in the month of April, your scissors, spasm, meaty butts, those too-eager girls, soft shriek, wet…]

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

A sort-of companion poem.
By Philip Larkin, a sort-of
friend of Ted Hughes.

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

Cut Grass

Cut grass lies frail:
Brief is the breath
Mown stalks exhale.
Long, long the death

It dies in the white hours
Of young-leafed June
With chestnut flowers,
With hedges snowlike strewn,

White lilac bowed,
Lost lanes of Queen Anne’s lace,
And that high-builded cloud
Moving at summer’s pace.

After you read UD‘s take on the inaugural poem, feel free to stick around for a longer visit with University Diaries.