The Poetic Quotidian

Some treasures from my recent reading

2007-06-11T01:09:00.000-04:00

The Open Window [excerpt: one poem from a series]

Such doors.

The window falls

below the knee and rises higher than the raised hand.

Wittgenstein, determined to find
the window's perfect proportion, decided on ten to one,
height to width

but like a coastline,
a window is infinite, its perimeter
increasing forever without ever surpassing its frame

has everything to do with sight as exceeding. For centuries
they thought light

was something that flew out from the eye, the reaching child

for centuries thought light

had everything to do
with a windowsill on which sits a shell.

(Cole Swensen, from The Glass Age)

***

From the Vacuum Tube

Toward the painting Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump by Joseph Wright of Derby, 1768

In a carnival tent, near a village square,
on planks purpled by beef blood and a swirl
of velvet show cloths, a crystal tube shimmers,
long as a chimneysweep's leg. At its top, a coin
and feather wait, their brass clip catching the light
as a crowd gathers. And then they are falling together —
the guinea, the feather — through the airlessness,
through the vacuum space the silent crowd
seems almost to increase, each stunned breath sucked
in, in. When they land together on the tube's
glass floor — the feather, the coin — when they settle
simultaneously, someone curses the devil, someone
bites the coin, someone clips it again
in the tube's slim throat, and the falling
continues, guinea and feather, through the seconds
and days, through the decades,
until Wright of Derby pockets the coin, plumps

the feather to a white bird. He has painted
the glass — more bowl than tube —
and the slender pump, the solemn crowd,
one moon at the window, one moon
in the breast of the dying bird, slumped
on the bowl's glass floor. A girl hides her head
in a candlelit hand. A man looks up to an opening wing,
imagines the lifeless weight of the bird
falling on through the airlessness. No papery sway,
no tumble, just head and breast and tail and wing
falling together simultaneously — a movement so still
in its turbulence, he can find in his world no
correspondent: not the wavering journeys of snow
or sound, not the half-steps of dust or moonlight —
and the bird not beauty, the movement not fear,
although there in the candle's copper light, both
fall equally across his upturned face.

(Linda Bierds, from The Seconds)

***

All the Ghosts

Their dream decelerates our spinning planet
one millimeter-per-second per century
until they have matched velocity with us
and can stride into our lives and live again —

a matter of eons, nothing to them, so patient,
since the massed wish of all the dead
is only the slide of a hem across a floor,
or the difference on your face of milder air.

It is their fate, they murmur. It is anyway their way
to shun the theatrical or gothic gesture.
They would not rattle chains if chains could hold them.
It is the wind, so much stronger, that slams doors.

They are heard, if ever, in the dramas of your dreams
where you cannot tell still voices from your own,
intervening, if at all, in the neural substrate,
shunting a lone election Maybe or Maybe not.

Theirs are evasive and oblique persuasions,
stone by stream, for example, snows on outer planets,
undetected constants haunting physicists,
eddies where time runs sidelong or remembers.

Their delight is yielding, wind within the wind,
to faint velleities or fainter chances,
for they find among death's consolations, few enough,
the greatest is, to be mistaken for what happens.

When your eyes widen, they are surging to observe
the evening's trend to mauve, and all you have chosen
so slowly you are unaware of choosing.
And you may feel them feel, amused or touched

(history has not been long enough to decide which)
when your blunt patience emulates their own,
when you sense, like them, all fate might well be focused
in the exact glint of a right front hoof uplifted,

when you wait, as they must, for that crisis of precision
when it will make all the difference in the world
whether a particular petal's side-slipping fall
hushes the rim of a glass, or misses.

(James Richardson, from The Best American Poetry 2005)

***

Burlap Sack

A person is full of sorrow
the way a burlap sack is full of stones or sand.
We say, "Hand me the sack,"
but we get the weight.
Heavier if left out in the rain.
To think that the stones or sand are the self is an error.
To think that grief is the self is an error.
Self carries grief as a pack mule carries the side bags,
being careful between the trees to leave extra room.
The mule is not the load of ropes and nails and axes.
The self is not the miner nor builder nor driver.
What would it be to take the bride
and leave behind the heavy dowry?
To let the thin-ribbed mule browse in tall grasses,
its long ears waggling like the tails of two happy dogs?

(Jane Hirshfield, from The Best American Poetry 2005)

***

Elayne

Some things the book doesn't mention —
the way she would walk the walls daily
and compass the horizon, Brittany

beyond it, and beyond that, island upon
island to the edge of the world walled
like a garden. Or how she'd woken

that night, to hear his breathing turn
like a change in the weather, swell
of a slack sail, the first whisper of rime

on a ripened fruit's skin, and saw him
adrift in the sheets, straight and naked
as a needle. And saw the shape of his

dreams, something like a ship's bow-wave
going on ahead, and saw, because love
was different then, how he'd think of her,

if at all, as the catch and drag of her skirt,
life's element of resistance: the skin
of an apple to the teeth, frostbitten grass

to the feet, a horse's straw-sweet breath
in air, or hawk in crewel work: like
the thing he lacked. And how she'd be

the heavier for it, but for all that, how
they'd have twinned, his idea and hers,
like sail and wind, wind and wing,

if life had been different then. Or still
like tapestry and needle: the turning
under, and the stitching in.

(Jane Griffiths, from Icarus on Earth)

***

And one old one of mine, since Paul Muldoon particularly liked it:

Phoenix House

I. Community

I’d wanted to build it of aspen—
one wide wood united, like fungi,
interlinked by mingling roots—
a single whole, that would enclose and frame
our future home. But each trunk, taken alone
was too slender, too lithe to be planed.
We had to go with oak. I decided
better to dwell in than on it.

II. Commutative

The fire devoured all. Like any frame
of primitive joints and untempered beams
it was just a matter of time, the blaze
insatiable, its decadent, dancing tongues—
there was an ecstasy in it, some phantom glimmer
even as we watched all we’d ever owned
dissociate into memories and drifting smoke.
In the end, nothing was left
but a stone Buddha, seated amid the ashes,
that canny smile on his lips.

III. Communion

Building again, I’m coming to believe
that all our dreams and constructs are
is a reusing of materials. I think
I may have felt this way before.
The burns have healed, leaving
their crimson imprint, an autumnal birthmark
the shape of a pressed leaf.
Waking in the middle of life, I imagine
a half-birthed sloth, somewhere
high up in the vaulted canopy—
by magnificent instinct, pulling itself
into the amazing world.

Stephen Dunn, "Five Roses in the Morning"

2007-05-28T01:00:00.000-04:00

March 16, 2003

On TV the showbiz of war,
so I turn it off
wishing I could turn it off,
and glance at the five white roses
in front of the mirror on the mantel,
looking like ten.
That they were purchased out of love
and are not bloody red
won't change a goddamned thing—
goddamned things, it seems, multiplying
every day. Last night
the roses numbered six, but she chose
to wear one in her hair,
and she was more beautiful
because she believed she was.
It changed the night a little.
For us, I mean.

~

I've moved into a new apartment, and now having achieved a new home, I've started looking beyond the present to the future once again. Part of that has been MFA programs, and part of looking at those has been embarking on some more varied reading. Feeling more studious in reponse to this, I've decided to revive TPQ once again, if only for sporadic updates.
I came across this poem in The Best American Poetry 2005, edited by Paul Muldoon (aha, now you see why I was curious!). In his introduction, Muldoon calls attention to the ethical responses in poetry post 9/11 and amidst the Iraq War. "Five Roses in the Morning" is humanely poised at the crossroads of outrage and exasperation, despair and solipsism, inconsequence and solace. As such, it seems to be a very honest working through - of the need for a small refuge in love and beauty, against the knowledge that personal acts of love, or the act of a poem, even if meaningful as a redemption of our humanity against the inhumanity taking place in the world, still only provide refuge for those already safe, may provide an illusional amelioration, but make no practical difference. The poem plays with both multiplying - of the "goddamned things" and the reflected roses - and casualties - "not bloody red" and the sacrifice of the sixth rose. Throughout, the value of these gains and losses is uncertain: the one rose sacrificed to make beauty - or rather, believed beauty - left the five roses, but these appear as ten. Added to natural human subjectivity and self-concern is the enabling skew of technology and global distance, the "TV ... showbiz of war" which can simply be turned off (though ghost images still haunt this speaker). The conclusion is an odd, yet authentic alloy of redemptive hope and the perspective of conscience which trebly qualifies such redemption: "because she believed she was. / It changed the night a little. / For us, I mean." One might argue that the union of these two scenes - exasperation at the war and a small moment of transcendence - implicitly evokes a sense of the tragedy of war being a tragedy of the exclusion of poetry, an exclusion of beauty, for those within the meaningless circus of ugliness as well as those watching, hands and feet tied, within the stands.

Philip Larkin, "Aubade"

2007-03-02T01:47:00.000-04:00

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what's really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
- The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused - nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear - no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can't escape,
Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

James Merrill, "Farewell Performance"

2007-03-01T00:01:00.000-04:00

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 jete 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.

~

I don't have my Collected Merrill, so I can't post the source for this poem; and, since I got it from the internet, I believe it's missing a dedication - "For DK" if I remember, Merrill's friend David Kalstone. I don't know that I have much more to say about this outstanding elegy - the tone is delicately pitched, the language and imagery both surprising and fittingly dignified, even haunting. The poem is written in the Sapphic stanza, after the ancient Greek poet Sappho; it is dominated by trochees (long-short / stressed-unstressed) with certain optional spondees (long-long / stressed-stressed), giving the verse a falling rhythm (as opposed to the more typical iamb) which has been claimed as appropriate to mournful verse.

Medbh McGuckian, "She Which Is Not, He Which Is"

2007-02-28T00:38:00.000-04:00

An elm box without any shape inscribed
Like a tool in the closed vessel of the world;
I will be flat like a dream on both sides,
Or a road that makes one want to walk.

My words will be without words
Like a net hidden in a lake,
Their pale individual moisture
My eyes will not be the eyes of a poet
Whose voice is beyond death;
This face, these clothes, will be a field in autumn
And the following autumn, will be two sounds,
The second of which is deeper.

The sky for me on any one night
Will be the successive skies over the course
Of a year, for time that I love
Will have cut up and entered my body;
Time will have gathered the roots
Of my last spring, floating rather
Than anchored, and thrust them between
The two planes of my cheek and brow.

Even now, his lips are becoming
Narrower and bloodless, ever-searching,
Razor-like; unforgettable time,
During which I forget time, a new sort
Of time that descends so far down
Into me and still stays pure.

I imagine his house as a possible setting
For the harmony between one drop of water
And another, one wave and another wave,
Where the light accustoms one to light
And each occurrence is a touch.

When we pass through some darkness,
The waiting has pulled us.
Without the help of words, words take place.

Compared with this absence, weighed,
Diluted in time presence is abandonment,
Absence his manner of appearing,
As though one received from outside
The energy to accept the swept room
As much as the sweeping.

Though each instant of light
Wipes away a little of it
We shall not lose the way
In which things receive it:

Carry me who am death
Like a bowl of water
Filled to the brim
From one place to another.

~

From Marconi's Cottage (1991)

I can't say for certain that this poem should qualify as an elegy, much as I can't say 'for certain' what many of Medbh McGuckian's poems are 'about'. Certainly her father's impending and actual death was a major force in this collection and the one after it; I considered choosing a number of other poems that arguably are more clearly elegies. What I love about this one, however, is its very puzzling nature - the final stanza seems to imply death as a character, perhaps even (one of) the poem's speaker(s) - is death then the "She Which Is Not"? Or, since the poem interrogates both time and absenve vs. presence, it seems that the dead could be "He Which Is" most present in the vacant life of the mourning titular "She". McGuckian's style is particularly suited to interrogating such issues - the limits of life, being, sense - for at a formal level they push the limits of syntax, sense, meaning, perception. In contrast to Muldoon's "Incantata"'s equivocation, McGuckian's verse seeks to talk about death, and what it means to the living, by a new way of saying.

Paul Muldoon, "Incantata"

2007-02-27T00:52:00.000-04:00

In memory of Mary Farl Powers

I thought of you tonight, a leanbh, lying there in your long barrow
colder and dumber than a fish by Francisco de Herrera,
as I X-Actoed from a spud the Inca
glyph for a mouth: thought of that first time I saw your pink
spotted torso, distant-near as a nautilus,
when you undid your portfolio, yes indeedy,
and held the print of what looked like a cankered potato
at arm's length—your arms being longer, it seemed, than Lugh's.

Even Lugh of the Long (sometimes the Silver) Arm
would have wanted some distance between himself and the army-worms
that so clouded the sky over St Cloud you'd have to seal
the doors and windows and steel
yourself against their nightmarish déjeuner sur l'herbe:
try as you might to run a foil
across their tracks, it was to no avail;
the army-worms shinnied down the stove-pipe on an army-worm rope.

I can hardly believe that, when we met, my idea of 'R and R'
was to get smashed, almost every night, on sickly-sweet Demarara
rum and Coke: as well as leaving you a grass widow
(remember how Krapp looks up 'viduity'?),
after eight or ten or twelve of those dark rums
it might be eight or ten or twelve o'clock before I'd land
back home in Landseer Street, deaf and blind
to the fact that not only was I all at sea, but in the doldrums.

Again and again you'd hold forth on your own version of Thomism,
your own Summa
Theologiae that in everything there is an order,
that the things of the world sing out in a great oratorio:
it was Thomism, though, tempered by La Nausée,
by His Nibs Sam Bethicket,
and by that Dublin thing, that an artist must walk down Baggott
Street wearing a hair-shirt under the shirt of Nessus.

'D'éirigh me ar maidin,' I sang, 'a tharraingt chun aoinigh mhóir':
our first night, you just had to let slip that your secret amour
for a friend of mine was such
that you'd ended up lying with him in a ditch
under a bit of whin, or gorse, or furze,
somewhere on the border of Leitrim, perhaps, or Roscommon:
'gamine,' I wanted to say, 'kimono';
even then it was clear I'd never be at the centre of your universe.

Nor should I have been, since you were there already, your own Ding
an sich, no less likely to take wing
than the Christ you drew for a Christmas card as a pupa
in swaddling clothes: and how resolutely you would pooh-pooh
the idea I shared with Vladimir and Estragon,
with whom I'd been having a couple of jars,
that this image of the Christ-child swaddled and laid in the manger
could be traced directly to those army-worm dragoons.

I thought of the night Vladimir was explaining to all and sundry
the difference between geantrai and suantrai
and you remarked on how you used to have a crush
on Burt Lancaster as Elmer Gantry, and Vladimir went to brush
the ash off his sleeve with a legerdemain
that meant only one thing—'Why does he put up with this crap?'—
and you weighed in with 'To live in a dustbin, eating scrap,
seemed to Nagg and Nell a most eminent domain.'

How little you were exercised by those tiresome literary intrigues,
how you urged me to have no more truck
than the Thane of Calder,
with a fourth estate that professes itself to be 'égalitaire'
but wants only blood on the sand: yet, irony of ironies,
you were the one who, in the end,
got yourself up as a retiarius and, armed with net and trident,
marched from Mount Street to the Merrion Square arena.

In the end, you were the one who went forth to beard the lion,
you who took the DART line
every day from Jane's flat in Dun Laoghaire, or Dalkey,
dreaming your dream that the subterranean Dodder and Tolka
might again be heard above the hoi polloi
for whom Irish 'art' means a High Cross at Carndonagh or Corofin
and The Book of Kells: not until the lion cried craven
would the poor Tolka and the poor Dodder again sing out for joy.

I saw you again tonight, in your jump-suit, thin as a rake,
your hand moving in such a deliberate arc
as you ground a lithographic stone
that your hand and the stone blurred to one
and your face blurred into the face of your mother, Betty Wahl,
who took your failing, ink-stained hand
in her failing, ink-stained hand
and together you ground down that stone by sheer force of willl.

I remember you pooh-poohing, as we sat there on the Enterprise,
my theory that if your name is Powers
you grow into it or, at least,
are less inclined to tremble before the likes of this bomb-blast
further up the track: I myself was shaking like a leaf
as we wondered whether the I.R.A. or the Red
Hand Commandos or even the Red
Bridages had brough us to a standstill worthy of Hamm and Clov.

Hamm and Clov; Nagg and Nell; Watt and Knott;
the fact is that we'd been at a standstill long before the night
things came to a head,
long before we'd sat for half the day in the sweltering heat
somewhere just south of Killnasaggart
and I let slip a name—her name—off my tongue
and you turned away (I see it now) the better to deliver the sting
in your own tail, to let slip your own little secret.

I thought of you again tonight, thin as a rake, as you bent
over the copper plate of 'Emblements',
its tidal wave of army-worms into which you all but disappeared:
I wanted to catch something of its spirit
and yours, to body out your disembodied vox
clamantis in deserto, to let this all-too-cumbersomen device
of a potato-mouth in a potato-face
speak out, unencumbered, from its long, low, mould-filled box.

I wanted it to speak to what seems always true of the truly great,
that you had a winningly inaccurate
sense of your own worth, that you would second-guess
yourself too readily by far, that you would rally to any cause
before your own, mine even,
though you detected in me a tendency to put
on too much artificiality, both as man and poet,
which is why you called me 'Polyester' or 'Polyurethane'.

That last time in Dublin, I copied with a quill dipped in oak-gall
onto a sheet of vellum, or maybe a human caul,
a poem for The Great Book of Ireland: as I watched the low
swoop over the lawn today of a swallow
I thought of your animated talk of Camille Pissarro
and André Derain's The Turning Road, L'Estaque:
when I saw in that swallow's nest a face in a mud-pack
from that muddy road I was filled again with a profound sorrow.

You must have known already, as we moved from the 'Hurly Burly'
to McDaid's or Riley's,
that something was amiss: I think you even mentioned a homeopath
as you showed off the great new acid-bath
in the Graphic Studio, and again undid your portfolio
to lay out your latest works; I try to imagine the strain
you must have been under, pretending to be as right as rain
while hearing the bells of a church from some long-flooded valley.

From the Quabbin reservoir, maybe, where the banks and bakeries
of a dozen little submerged Pompeii reliquaries
still do a roaring trade: as clearly as I saw your death-mask
in that swallow's nest, you must have heard the music
rise from the muddy ground between
your breasts as a nocturne, maybe, by John Field;
to think that you thought yourself so invulnerable, so inviolate,
that a little cancer could be beaten.

You must have known, as we walked through the ankle-deep clabber
with Katherine and Jean annd the long-winded Quintus Calaber,
that cancer had already made such a breach
that you would almost surely perish:
you must have thought, as we walked through the woods
along the edge of the Quabbin,
that rather than let some doctor cut you open
you'd rely on sufusions of hardock, hemlock, all the idle weeds.

I thought again of how art may be made, as it was by André Derain,
of nothing more than a turn
in the road where a swallow dips into the mire
or plucks a strand of bloody wool from a strand of barbed wire
in the aftermath of Chickamauga or Culloden
and builds from pain, from misery, from a deep-seated hurt,
a monument to the human heart
that shines like a golden dome among roofs rain-glazed and leaden.

I wanted the mouth in this potato-cut
to be heard far beyond the leaden, rain-glazed roofs of Quito,
to be heard all the way from the southern hemisphere
to Clontarf or Clondalkin, to wherever your sweet-sever
spirit might still find a toe-hold
in this world: it struck me then how you would be aghast
at the thought of my thinking you were some kind of ghost
who might still roam the earth in search of an earthly delight.

You'd be aghast at the idea of your spirit hanging over this vale
of tears like a jump-suited jump-jet whose vapour-trail
unravels a sky: for there's nothing, you'd say nothing over
and above the sky itself, nothing but cloud-cover
reflected in the housand lakes; it seems that Minne-
sota itself means 'sky-tinted water', that the sky is a great slab
of granite or iron ore that might at any moment slip
back into the work-out sky-quarry, into the worked-out sky-mines.

To use the word 'might' is to betray you once too often, to betray
your notion that nothing's random, nothing arbitrary:
the gelignite weeps, the hands fly by on the alarm clock,
the 'Enterprise' goes clackety-clack
as they all must; even the car hijacked that morning in the Cross,
that was preordained, its owner spread on the bonnet
before being gagged and bound or bound
and gagged, that was fixed like the stars in the Southern Cross.

The fact that you were determined to cut yourself off in your prime
because it was pre-determined has my eyes abrim:
I crouch with Belacqua
and Lucky and Pozzo in the Acacacac-
ademy of Anthropopopometry, trying to make sense of the 'quaquaqua'
of that potato-mouth; that mouth as prim
and proper as it's full of self-opprobrium,
with its 'quaquaqua', with its 'Quoiquoiquoiquoiquoiquoiquoiq'.

That's all that's left of the voice of Enrico Caruso
from all that's left of an opera-house somewhere in Matto Grosso,
all that's left of the bogweed and horehound and cuckoo-pint,
of the eighteen soldiers dead at Warrenpoint,
of the Black Church clique and the Graphic Studio claque,
of the many moons of glasses on a tray,
of the brewer-carts drawn by moon-booted drays,
of those jump-suits worn under your bottle-green worsted cloak.

Of the great big dishes of chicken lo mein and beef chow mein,
of what's mine is yours and what's yours mine,
of the oxlips and cowslips
on the banks of the Liffey at Leixlip
where the salmon breaks through the either/or neither/nor nether
reaches despite the temple-veil
of itself being rent and the penny left out overnight on the rail
is a sheet of copper when the mail-train has passed over.

Of the bride carried over the threshold, hey, only to alight
on the limestone slab of another threshold,
of the swarm, the cast,
the colt, the spew of bees hanging like a bottle of Lucozade
from a branch the groom must sever,
of Emily Post's ruling, in Etiquette,
on how best to deal with the butler being in chaoots
with the cook when they're both in cahoots with the chauffeur.

Of that poplar-flanked stretch of road between Leiden
and The Hague, of the road between Rathmullen and Ramelton,
where we looked so long and hard
for some trace of Spinoza or Amelia Earhart,
both of them going down with their engines on fire:
of the stretch of road somewhere near Urney
where Orpheus was again overwhelmed by that urge to turn
back and lost not only Eurydice but his steel-strung lyre.

Of the sparrows and finches in their bell of suet,
of the bitter-sweet
bottle of Calvados we felt obliged to open
somewhere near Falaise, so as to toast our new-found copains,
of the priest of the parish
who came enquiring about our 'status', of the hedge-clippers
I somehow had to hand, of him running like the clappers
up Landseer Street, of my subsequent self-reproach.

Of the remnants of Airey Neave, of the remnants of Mountbatten,
of the famous andouilles, of the famous boudins
noirs et blancs, of the barrel-vault
of the Cathedral at Rouen, of the flashlight, fat and roll of felt
on each of their sledges, of the music
of Joseph Beuy's pack of huskies, of that baldy little bugger
mushing them all the way from Berncastel through Bacarrat
to Belfast, his head stuck with honey and gold-leaf like a mosque.

Of Benjamin Britten's Lachrymae, with its gut-wrenching viola,
of Vivaldi's Four Seasons, of Frankie Valli's,
of Braque's great painting The Shower of Rain,
of the fizzy, lemon or sherbet-green Rana
temporaria plonked down in Trinity like a little Naugahyde pouffe,
of eighteen soldiers dead in Oriel,
of the weakness for a little fol-de-rol-de-rolly
suggested by the gap between the front teeth of the Wife of Bath.

Of A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, of Seurat's
piling of tesserae upon tesserae
to give us a monkey arching its back
and the smoke arching out from a smoke-stack,
of Sunday afternoons in the Botanic Gardens, going with the flow
of the burghers of Sandy Row and Donegal
Pass and Andersonstown and Rathcoole,
of the army Landrover flaunt-flouncing by with its heavy furbelow.

Of Marlborough Park, of Notting Hill, of the Fitzroy Avenue
immortalized by Van 'His real name's Ivan'
Morrison, 'and him the dead spit
of Padraic Fiacc', of John Hewitt, the famous expat,
in whose memory they offer every year six of their best milch cows,
of the Bard of Ballymacarrett,
of every ungodly poet in his or her godly garret,
of Medhbh and Michael and Frank and Ciaran and 'wee' John Qughes.

Of the Belfast school, so called, of the school of hard knocks,
of your fervent eschewal of stockings and socks
as you set out to hunt down your foes
as implacably as the tóraidheacht through the Fews
of Redmond O'Hanlon, of how that 'd' and that 'c' aspirate
in tóraidheacht make it sound like a last gasp in an oxygen-tent,
of your refusal to open a vent
but to breathe in spirit of salt, the mordant salt-spirit.

Of how mordantly hydrochloric acid must have scored and scarred,
of the claim that boiled skirrets
can cure the spitting of blood, of that dank
flat somewhere off Morehampton Road, of the unbelievable stink
of valerian or feverfew simmering over a low heat,
of your sitting there, pale and gaunt,
with that great prescriber of boiled skirrets, Dr John Arbuthnot,
your face in a bowl of feverfew, a towel over your head.

Of the great roll of paper like a bolt of cloth
running out again and again like a road at the edge of a cliff,
of how you called a Red Admiral a Red
Admirable, of how you were never in the red
on either the first or the last
of the month, of your habit of loosing the drawstring of your purse
and finding one scrunched-up, obstreperous
note and smoothing it out and holding it up, pristine and pellucid.

Of how you spent your whole life with your back to the wall,
of your generosity when all the while
you yourself lived from hand
to mouth, of Joseph Beuy's pack of hounds
crying out from their felt and fat 'Atone, atone, atone',
of Watt remembering the 'Krak! Krek! Krik!'
of those three frogs' karaoke
like the still, sad basso continuo of the great quotidian.

Of a ground bass of sadness, yes, but also a sennet of hautboys
as the fat and felt hounds of Beuys O'Beuys
bayed at the moon over a caravan
in Dunmore East, I'm pretty sure it was, or Dungarvan:
of my guest appearance in your self-portrait not as a hidalgo
from a long line
of hidalgos but a hound-dog, a leanbh,
a dog that skulks in the background, a dog that skulks and stalks.

Of that self-portrait, of the self-portraits by Rembrandt van Rijn,
of all that's revelation, all that's rune,
of all that's composed, all composed of odds and ends,
of that daft urge to make amends
when it's far too late, too late even to make sense of the clutter
of false trails and reversed horseshoe tracks
and the aniseed we took it in turn to drag
across each other's scents, when only a fish is dumber and colder.

Of your avoidance of canned goods, in the main,
on account of the exceeeeeeeeeeeeeeeedingly high risk of ptomaine,
of corned beef in particular being full of crap,
of your delight, so, in eating a banana as ceremoniously as Krapp
but flinging the skin over your shoulder like a thrush
flinging off a shell from which it's only just managed to disinter
a snail, like a stone-faced, twelfth-century
FitzKrapp eating his banana by the yellow light of a rush.

Of the 'Yes, let's go' spoken by Monsieur Tarragon,
of the early-ripening jargonelle, the tumorous jardon, the jargon
of jays, the jars
of tomato relish and the jars
of Victoria plums, absolutely de rigeur for a passable plum baba,
of the drawers full of balls of twine and butcher's string,
of Dire Straits playing 'The Sultans of Swing',
of the horse's hock suddenly erupting in those boils and buboes.

Of the Greek figurine of a pig, of the pig on a terracotta frieze,
of the sow dropping dead from some mysterious virus,
of your predilection for gammon
served with a sauce of coriander or cumin,
of the slippery elm, or the hornbeam or witch-, or even wych-,
hazel that's good for stopping a haemor-
rhage in mid-flow, of the merest of mere
hints of elderberry curing everything from sciatica to a stitch.

Of the decree condemnator, the decree absolvitor, the decree nisi,
of Aosdána, of an chraobh cnuais,
of the fields of buckwheat
taken over by garget, inkberry, scoke—all names for pokeweed—
of Mother Courage, of Arturo Ui,
of those Sunday mornings spent picking at sesame
noodles and all sorts and conditions of dim sum,
of tea and ham sandwiches in the Nesbitt Arms Hotel in Ardara.

Of the day your father came to call, of your leaving your sick-room
in what can only have been a state of delirium,
of how you simply wouldn't relent
from your vision of a blind
watch-maker, of your fatal belief that fate
governs everything from the honey-rust of your father's terrier's
eyebrows to the horse that rusts and rears
in the furrow, of the furrows from which we can no more deviate

than they can from themselves, no more than the map of Europe
can be redrawn, than that Hermes might make a harp from his harpe,
than that we must live in a vale
of tears on the banks of the Lagan or the Foyle,
than that what we have is a done deal,
than that the Irish Hermes,
Lugh, might have leafed through his vast herbarium
for the leaf that had it within it, Mary, to anoint and anneal,

than that Lugh of the Long Arm might have found in the midst of lus
na leac or lus na treatha or Frannc-lus,
in the midst of eyebright, or speedwell, or tansy, an antidote,
than that this Incantata
might have you look up from your plate of copper or zinc
on which you've etched the row upon row
of army-worms, than that you might reach out, arrah,
and take in your ink-stained hands my own hands stained with ink.

~

From The Annals of Chile (1994)

You must excuse my taking a second poem for this week of elegies from Paul Muldoon—I did write a 60 page study of the matter. I've chosen "Incantata" as a counterpoint to "Ma": whereas yesterday's poem was a study in compression and obliqueness, implicating all that had been lost and the overwhelming emotion by a necessary silence, today's poem is an overflow of emotion and detail. It takes as its central trope of elegy, where a poem, in describing the lost beloved, creates a monument of presence to replace the absence that causes grief. "Incantata" enumerates all the things that have been lost, serving as a monumental record of the portion of life shared by the poet and his former lover. It does indeed culminate by imagining her presence, achieving some catharsis in that imagination.
The poem itself, of course, is insistent that such an achieved resurrection is imposible; all the time that it is incanting the details of their shared life, it also asserts the loss of that life, repeating "that's all that's left of...." Just before the poem's midpoint, the speaker explicitly states the impossibility of his project, even imagining that the lost beloved would be "aghast / at the thought of my thinking you were some kind of ghost".
Instead, Powers exhibits a steadfast belief in fate, such that she eschewed conventional treatment for her cancer, trusting instead in "all the idle weeds." The speaker is troubled by this stubborn notion, considering it likely to blame for the beloved's early death. This conflict is further dramatized by the poem's form: Muldoon follows a consistent rhyme scheme; and yet, his incredible ingenuity with rhyme allows for the widest range of reference imaginable within the space of each stanza and the poem as a whole. Even more, the poem's rhyme-sounds themselves have actually been imported from another poem—"Yarrow"—an elegy for Muldoon's mother which appears in the same volume. "Incantata" follows the rhyme-sounds in the exact same order (which cycles similar to a sestina until at the mid-point it is repeated in reverse order) as they appeared in "Yarrow", except that this time they are used within the aabbcddc stanza form. This arbitrary constraint seems a perfect analogue for fate; and yet, it does not confine the poet, but spurs him on to greater creativity and ingenuity.
In confronting the limits of death, the poem also confronts the limits of free will, at one level, and of poetic efficacy, at a more narrow level. The poem itself is equivocal: the beloved and all that went with her is lost, and yet they are present through the poem; that loss is irremedial, "a deep-seated hurt", and yet through art some solace is created. The fact that the final reconciliation is, and can only be, imaginary does not diminish its emotional impact and value. It is via the artistic medium of "ink" that the mourning poet and the lost beloved are linked.

Paul Muldoon, "Ma"

2007-02-26T00:01:00.001-04:00

Old photographs would have her bookish, sitting
Under a willow. I take that to be a croquet
Lawn. She reads aloud, no doubt from Rupert Brooke.
The month is always May or June.

Or with the stranger on the motor-bike.
Not my father, no. This one's all crew-cut
And polished brass buttons.
An American soldier, perhaps.
_______________________And the full moon
Swaying over Keenaghan, the orchards and the cannery,
Thins to a last yellow-hammer, and goes.
The neighbours gather, all Keenaghan and Collegelands.
There is story-telling. Old miners at Coalisland
Going into the ground. Swinging, for fear of the gas,
The soft flame of a canary.

~

From Mules (1977)

This week we take a few of my favorite examples of one of my favorite forms—the elegy. I've decided to put TPQ on indefinite hiatus—though I love doing it, it takes up rather a large portion of time and energy which I feel the need of for the furthering of my own reading and the pursuit of my own writing. I'll probably still post a little something from time to time, and maybe take up regular updates when I go back to a student's schedule in another year or two... but, for now, a week of poems on death to sing the current incarnation of TPQ to a close.
To start this week (and to continue it, as you'll see tomorrow) I've chosen this poem by Paul Muldoon, his first certifiable parental elegy, arguably one of the major genres in his body of work. Here we have an example of an oblique approach to elegy: Muldoon's lost mother is hardly mentioned, her death only implied. The first eight lines of the sonnet portray the lost beloved's presence-in-absence, invoking objects that provoke memories, but in doing so fall short of the real life of the lost. The fact that the time 'recalled' here is in fact from before the speaker's own life and context—he can hardly say who she was before she was his mother—further dramatizes the objective separation of the other from the subject, as irretrievable as the past itself, or some idealized, impossible place out of time, that "is always May or June."
The sonnet's sestet shifts to enacting the beloved's disappearance through a delicate modulation of images that resonate with traditional tropes of death. First there is the diminishing of the waning moon. Muldoon then alludes to communal traditions of commemoration of the dead: "There is story-telling" and the poem stretches from the Irish parish of Coalisland to the Classical underworld of Hades, though at the same time implicitly referencing burial: "Old miners ... / Going into the ground." The final image of the canary-flame unites the diminishing light of the moon, the Classical movement underground of the miners, and an oblique allusion to death in the practical use miners made of the canary. In this case, the mother becomes a tender protector once more, as the first to cross over into death, a soft comfort lighting the way, a way which all must follow. This transformation is likewise embodied in the transformation-by-metaphor of the physical canary into the immaterial flame. At the same time, the the poem's pararhymes, approaching but never reaching a perfect chime, undercut any sense of closure, reflecting the way that possession of the dead beloved continually and inevitably escapes the elegist's attempts to make her present through the poem.

W. H. Auden, "A Lullaby"

2007-02-23T00:01:00.001-04:00

The din of work is subdued,
another day has westered
and mantling darkness arrived.
Peace! Peace! Devoid your portrait
of its vexations and rest.
Your daily round is done with,
you've gotten the garbage out,
answered some tiresome letters
and paid a bill by return,
all frettolosamente.
Now you have licence to lie,
naked, curled like a shrimplet,
jacent in bed, and enjoy
its cosy micro-climate:
Sing, Big Baby, sing lullay.

The old Greeks got it all wrong:
Narcissus is an oldie,
tamed by time, released at last
from lust for other bodies,
rational and reconciled.
For many years you envied
the hirsute, the he-man type.
No longer: now you fondle
your almost feminine flesh
with mettled satisfaction,
imagining that you are
sinless and all-sufficient,
snug in the den of yourself,
Madonna and Bambino:
Sing, Big Baby, sing lullay.

Let your last thinks all be thanks:
praise your parents who gave you
a Super-Ego of strength
that saves you so much bother,
digit friends and dear them all,
then pay fair attribution
to your age, to having been
born when you were. In boyhood
you were permitted to meet
beautiful old contraptions,
soon to be banished from earth,
saddle-tank loks, beam-engines
and over-shot waterwheels.
Yes, love, you have been lucky:
Sing, Big Baby, sing lullay.

Now for oblivion: let
the belly-mind take over
down below the diaphragm,
the domain of the Mothers,
They who guard the Sacred Gates,
without whose wordless warnings
soon the verbalising I
becomes a vicious despot,
lewd, incapable of love,
disdainful, status-hungry.
Should dreams haunt you, heed them not,
for all, both sweet and horrid,
are jokes in dubious taste,
too jejune to have truck with.
Sleep, Big Baby, sleep your fill.

~

(1973)

To end the week, one of Auden's last poems, this delicate self-elegy. My choices were dominated by the Auden of the hawk's eye view, of great truths of humanity and history. The truths here are no less great, nor certainly less humane, but this example serves to show the other end of the spectrum of Auden's voice - intimate, personal, profoundly compassionate while retaining a wise, deprecating irony. One can't but be charmed and warmed by the coddling description "naked, curled like a shrimplet" and the winning "Let your last thinks all be thanks ... digit friends and dear them all" (how utterly opposite in tone to Yeats' "Think where man's glory most begins and ends / And say my glory was I had such friends."). This compassionate nature clearly underpins all of Auden's work, but it is of moral value and effect that we encounter in his work not only a VOICE: incl. Man's Compassion for Man, but also simply the voice of a compassionate man.

W. H. Auden, "In Memory of W. B. Yeats"

2007-02-22T00:01:00.001-04:00

(d. January 1939)

I

He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instrument we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergree forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fasionable queys;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections;
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.

But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom;
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.

What instrument we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

II

You were silly like us: your gift survived it all;
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its saying where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw town that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

III

Earth, receive an honoured guest;
William Yeats is laid to rest;
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.

Time that is intolerant
Of the brave and innocent,
And indifferent in a week
To a beatiful physique,

Worships language and forgives
Everyone by whom it lives;
Pardons cowardice, conceit,
Lays its honours at their feet.

Time that with this strange excuse
Pardoned Kipling and his views,
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons him for writing well.

In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

~

(1939)

This is, quite simply, one of the great elegies of English literature, and one of the most significant poems in the twentieth century. It gives an utterly original, riveting, and convincing account of the dissolution of an individual into the matter of history; at the same time, it gives a gloss of how history shapes and gives impetus to the individual. It sets the argument of the place of this individual as a poet, of poetry within history, the ambivalently qualified contention "poetry makes nothing happen...." It also pays homage to the courage of Yeats and poetry, whether they do good or not, or are foolish or not, in their steadfast vision of darkness as well as dedication to crafting some fruit out of darkness. Each of us, "In the prison of his days," is at the mercy of both time, history, and other forces scarcely understood by us, which rightly scare us. Those who struggle to pierce that dark by the burning of their own passion indeed deserve our praise.

W. H. Auden, "First Things First" / E K, "Second Thoughts"

2007-02-21T00:01:00.001-04:00

To celebrate Auden's birthday - February 21, 1907 - I'm posting a tribute/imitation/response I wrote a few years ago while studying his poetry in Oxford (where, of course, Auden himself went).

~

First Things First

Woken, I lay in the arms of my own warmth and listened
To a storm enjoying its storminess in the winter dark
Till my ear, as it can when half-asleep or half-sober,
Set to work to unscramble that interjectory uproar,
Construing its airy vowels and watery consonants
Into a love-speech indicative of a Proper Name.

Scarcely the tongue I should have chosen, yet, as well
As harshness and clumsiness would allow, it spoke in your praise,
Kenning you a god-child of the Moon and the West Wind
With power to tame both real and imaginary monsters,
Likening your poise of being to an upland county,
Here green on purpose, there pure blue for luck.

Loud though it was, alone as it certainly found me,
It reconstructed a day of peculiar silence
When a sneeze could be heard a mile off, and had me walking
On a headland of lava beside you, the occasion as ageless
As the stare of any rose, your presence exactly
So once, so valuable, so very now.

This, moreover, at an hour when only to often
A smirking devil annoys me in beautiful English,
Predicting a world where every sacred location
Is a sand-buried site all cultured Texans do,
Misinformed and thoroughly fleeced by their guides,
And gentle hearts are extinct like Hegelian Bishops.

Grateful, I slept till a morning that would not say
How much it believed of what I said the storm had said
But quetly drew my attention to what had been done
—So many cubic metres the more in my cistern
Against a leonine summer—, putting first things first:
Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.

~

Second Thoughts

Awake, I lay trying to ball up my blanket warmth,
Listening to the idle patter of snow forming drifts
Till some pattern began to resolve in the static,
My mind a receptive fallow field or mine
Culling infinite variables from the precipitate white,
A chart of past and present, my frozen Zodiac.

Not the path I want to choose, but the prints remain,
The plow only drawing its scraping edge
To write roads familiarly traveled. I venture
That your ghost is the real occlusion of memory,
Tears forming a cataract towards the future,
A double-blindness, sullen grey and squinting white.

Expansive though it was, alone as it truly discovered me,
It re-formed a place of compact intimacy
Where the slightest budge need be shared, and, holding still
Your undulous province, bordering my frontier,
I silented an invocation of timeless peace
Written in the contour of our bodies together.

This, in a season where I routinely despaired
Of a writ of love beyond the rites of lust,
Entrapped by the air-castle, reciprocal appreciation
My ego gladly chartered, providing a flattering script,
Self-seduced in a pituitary pitfall
Deducing justice of dialectic by hormonal logic.

Troubled, I laid till a time for action
In other matters pushed these thoughts aside
And the sun turned my eyes away from their accumulation
—The drifts become deep enough to cover a man
But for the banks' high, stoic walls—second thoughts:
Water in winter is no use, without the heat to thaw.

W. H. Auden, "Musée des Beaux Arts"

2007-02-20T00:55:00.000-04:00

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

~

1939

This poem shows Auden's voice shading into something more intimate, or at least spanning between the hawkeye-view of the world and time and close-ups on specific scenes and individual suffering - the contrast between the two being the theme. It also shows the heavy irony that is at play in much of his work, his deadpan capturing of mundane, bathetic detail, as in the pitch-perfect "doggy life" and the torturer's horse's "innocent behind". I've also always loved the deft parenthesis enacted by the breaks of the final three lines, and the mimetic syntax of the final line, providing alternative purpose and then carrying on with action.

(Other paintings alluded to: Brueghel's The Numbering at Bethlehem, Winter Landscape with Skaters and a Bird Trap, and The Massacre of the Innocents.)

W. H. Auden, "Spain"

2007-02-19T00:07:00.000-04:00

Yesterday all the past. The language of size
Spreading to China along the trade-routes; the diffusion
Of the counting-frame and the cromlech;
Yesterday the shadow-reckoning in the sunny climates.

Yesterday the assessment of insurance by cards,
The divination of water; yesterday the invention
Of cartwheels and clocks, the taming of
Horses. Yesterday the bustling world of the navigators.

Yesterday the abolition of fairies and giants,
the fortress like a motionless eagle eyeing the valley,
the chapel built in the forest;
Yesterday the carving of angels and alarming gargoyles;

The trial of heretics among the columns of stone;
Yesterday the theological feuds in the taverns
And the miraculous cure at the fountain;
Yesterday the Sabbath of witches; but to-day the struggle

Yesterday the installation of dynamos and turbines,
The construction of railways in the colonial desert;
Yesterday the classic lecture
On the origin of Mankind. But to-day the struggle.

Yesterday the belief in the absolute value of Greek,
The fall of the curtain upon the death of a hero;
Yesterday the prayer to the sunset
And the adoration of madmen. but to-day the struggle.

As the poet whispers, startled among the pines,
Or where the loose waterfall sings compact, or upright
On the crag by the leaning tower:
"O my vision. O send me the luck of the sailor."

And the investigator peers through his instruments
At the inhuman provinces, the virile bacillus
Or enormous Jupiter finished:
"But the lives of my friends. I inquire. I inquire."

And the poor in their fireless lodgings, dropping the sheets
Of the evening paper: "Our day is our loss. O show us
History the operator, the
Organiser. Time the refreshing river."

And the nations combine each cry, invoking the life
That shapes the individual belly and orders
The private nocturnal terror:
"Did you not found the city state of the sponge,

"Raise the vast military empires of the shark
And the tiger, establish the robin's plucky canton?
Intervene. O descend as a dove or
A furious papa or a mild engineer, but descend."

And the life, if it answers at all, replied from the heart
And the eyes and the lungs, from the shops and squares of the city
"O no, I am not the mover;
Not to-day; not to you. To you, I'm the

"Yes-man, the bar-companion, the easily-duped;
I am whatever you do. I am your vow to be
Good, your humorous story.
I am your business voice. I am your marriage.

"What's your proposal? To build the just city? I will.
I agree. Or is it the suicide pact, the romantic
Death? Very well, I accept, for
I am your choice, your decision. Yes, I am Spain."

Many have heard it on remote peninsulas,
On sleepy plains, in the aberrant fishermen's islands
Or the corrupt heart of the city.
Have heard and migrated like gulls or the seeds of a flower.

They clung like burrs to the long expresses that lurch
Through the unjust lands, through the night, through the alpine tunnel;
They floated over the oceans;
They walked the passes. All presented their lives.

On that arid square, that fragment nipped off from hot
Africa, soldered so crudely to inventive Europe;
On that tableland scored by rivers,
Our thoughts have bodies; the menacing shapes of our fever

Are precise and alive. For the fears which made us respond
To the medicine ad, and the brochure of winter cruises
Have become invading battalions;
And our faces, the institute-face, the chain-store, the ruin

Are projecting their greed as the firing squad and the bomb.
Madrid is the heart. Our moments of tenderness blossom
As the ambulance and the sandbag;
Our hours of friendship into a people's army.

To-morrow, perhaps the future. The research on fatigue
And the movements of packers; the gradual exploring of all the
Octaves of radiation;
To-morrow the enlarging of consciousness by diet and breathing.

To-morrow the rediscovery of romantic love,
the photographing of ravens; all the fun under
Liberty's masterful shadow;
To-morrow the hour of the pageant-master and the musician,

The beautiful roar of the chorus under the dome;
To-morrow the exchanging of tips on the breeding of terriers,
The eager election of chairmen
By the sudden forest of hands. But to-day the struggle.

To-morrow for the young the poets exploding like bombs,
The walks by the lake, the weeks of perfect communion;
To-morrow the bicycle races
Through the suburbs on summer evenings. But to-day the struggle.

To-day the deliberate increase in the chances of death,
The consious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder;
To-day the expending of powers
On the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting.

To-day the makeshift consolations: the shared cigarette,
The cards in the candlelit barn, and the scraping concert,
The masculine jokes; to-day the
Fumbled and unsatisfactory embrace before hurting.

The stars are dead. The animals will not look.
We are left alone with our day, and the time is short, and
History to the defeated
May say Alas but cannot help nor pardon.

~

(1937)

To celebrate the centennary of his birth, this week TPQ pays tribute to the great W. H. Auden (1907-1973). I unfortunately don't have a collection of Auden handy, but the selection in my anthology at hand has more than enough first-rate examples to fill out the whole week. I'm also no Auden scholar, so my comments will be brief. This first poem, "Spain", exemplifies Auden's political commitment and engagement with contemporary political and social issues, in his energetic response to the Spanish Civil War, as well as his conscience - in later life the poem was dropped from publication in collections of his work, in part for the line "The consious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder". The poem also exemplifies one end of the great range of Auden's voice - here he is beyond prophetic, canvassing History and Society from one end to another. This 'hawkeye view' is ingeniously structured in the incantations of "Yesterday" "Tomorrow" and "To-day" as a frame for the catalogue of all things temporal. The speaker pronounces upon all with a voice that is steadfast, impersonal yet filled with human conviction.

Richard Wilbur, "For C."

2007-02-16T00:01:00.000-04:00

After the clash of elevator gates
And the long sinking, she emerges where,
A slight thing in the morning's crosstown glare,
She looks up toward the window where he waits,
Then in a fleeting taxi joins the rest
Of the huge traffic bound forever west.

On such grand scale do lovers say good-bye—
Even this other pair whose high romance
Had only the duration of a dance,
And who, now taking leave with stricken eye,
See each in each a whole new life forgone.
For them, above the darkling clubhouse lawn,

Bright Perseids flash and crumble; while for these
Who part now on the dock, weighed down by grief
And baggage, yet with something like relief,
It takes three thousand miles of knitting seas
To cancel out their crossing, and unmake
the amorous rough and tumble of their wake.

We are denied, my love, their fine tristesse
And bittersweet regrets, and cannot share
The frequent vistas of their large despair,
Where love and all are swept to noghtingness;
Still, there's a certain scope in that long love
Which constant spirits are the keepers of,

And which, though taken to be tame and staid,
Is a wild sostenuto of the hear,
A passion joined to courtesy and art
Which has the quality of something made,
Like a good fiddle, like the rose's scent,
Like a rose window or the firmament.

~

From Mayflies (2000)

Paul Muldoon, "Long Finish"

2007-02-15T00:01:00.000-04:00

Ten years since we were married, sine we stood
under a chuppah of pine boughs
in the middle of a little pinewood
and exchanged our wedding vows.
Save me, good thou,
a piece of marhpane, while I fill your glass with Simi
Chardonnay as high as decency allows,
and then some.

Bear with me now as I myself must bear
the scrutiny of a bottle of wine
that boasts of hints of plum and pear,
its muscadine
tempered by an oak backbone. I myself have designs
on the willow-boss
of your breast, on all your waist confines
between longling and loss.

The wonder is that we somehow have withstood
the soars and slumps in the Dow
of ten years of marriage and parenthood,
its summits and its sloughs—
that we've somehow
managed to withstand an almond-blossomy
five years of bitter rapture, five of blissful rows
(and then some

if we count the one or two to spare
when we've been firmly on cloud nine).
Even now, as you turn away from me with your one bare
shoulder, the veer of your neckline,
I glimpse the all-but-cleared-up eczema patch on your spine
and it brings to mind not the Schloss
that stands, transitory, tra la, Triestine,
between longing and loss

but a crude
hip trench in a field, covered with pine boughs,
in which two men in masks and hoods
who have themselves taken vows
wait for a farmer to break a bale for his cows
before opening fire with semi-
automatics, cutting him off slightly above the eyebrows,
and then some.

It brings to mind another, driving out to care
for six white-faced kine
finishing on heather and mountain air,
another who'll shortly divine
the precise whereabouts of a land mine
on the road between Beragh and Sixmilecross,
who'll shortly know what it is to have breasted the line
between longing and loss.

Such forbearance in the face of vicissitude
also brings to mind the little "there, theres" and "now, nows"
of two sisters whose sleeves are imbued
with the constant douse and souse
of salt water through their salt house
in Matsukaze (or Pining Wind), by Zeami,
the salt house through which the wind soughs and soughs,
and then some

of the wind's little "now, nows" and "there, theres"
seem to intertwine
with those of Pining Wind and Autumn Rain, who must forbear
the dolor of their lives of boiling down brine.
For the double meaning of "pine"
is much the same in Japanese as English, coming across
both in the sense of "tree" and the sense we assign
between "longing" and "loss"

as when the ghost of Yukihira, the poet-courteir who wooed
both sisters, appears as a ghostly pine, pining among pine boughs.
Barely have Autumn Rain and Pining Wind renewed
their vows
than you turn back toward me, and your blouse,
while it covers the all-but-cleared-up patch of eczema,
falls as low as decency allows,
and then some.

Princess of Accutane, let's no more try to refine
the pure drop from the dross
than distinguish, good thou, between mine and thine,
between longing and loss,
but rouse
ourselves each dawn, here on the shore at Suma,
with such force and fervor as spouses may yet espouse,
and then some.

~

From Hay (1998)

(Listen to Muldoon read this poem here: http://www.paulmuldoon.net/audio/LongFinish.mp3)

Theodore Roethke, "I Knew a Woman"

2007-02-14T00:01:00.000-04:00

I knew a woman, lovely in her bones,
When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them;
Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one:
The shapes a bright container can contain!
Of her choice virtues only gods should speak,
Or English poets who grew up on Greek
(I'd have them sing in chorus, cheek to cheek).

How well her wishes went! She stroked my chin,
She taught me Turn, and Counter-turn, and Stand;
She taught me Touch, that undulant white skin;
I nibbled meekly from her proffered hand;
She was the sickle; I, poor I, the rake,
Coming behind her for her pretty sake
(But what prodigious mowing we did make).

Love likes a gander, and adores a goose:
Her full lips pursed, the errant note to seize;
She played it quick, she played it light and loose;
My eyes, they dazzled at her flowing knees;
Her several parts could keep a pure repose,
Or one hip quiver with a mobile nose
(She moved in circles, and those circles moved).

Let seed be grass, and grass turn into hay:
I'm martyr to a motion not my own;
What's freedom for? To know eternity.
I swear she cast a shadow white as stone.
But who would count eternity in days?
These old bones live to learn her wanton ways:
(I measure time by how a body sways).

~

From Words for the Wind (1958)

The mode of today's love poem might best be described as 'adoration.' I had thought of posting something by Neruda, in the mode of 'passion', but I don't have access to a volume of Neruda. Anyway, perhaps better to stick to favorites in the English tongue, though it would be fitting to quote from a Romance language. Perhaps others will provide a few choice examples from that Spanish master of love poetry.
A bit like Cummings, Roethke sometimes verges on nonsense, his language rarely operating as literal reference. At the same time, he echoes traditional tropes of romantic devotion - enumerating his lover's exceptional qualities, boasting of the fervor of their passion - but the content of these tropes is something more evocative than referential or even hyperbolic description. Roethke's statements participate in a rarefied, almost fairy-tale world - the other plane which is the realm of love. Such sweet musing is supported by the sing-song cadences and rhymes. The poem expresses a love that has gone deeper than particulars of appearance or personality, to manifest the metaphysical influence the being of the other person has on the speaker: "(She moved in circles, and those circles moved)"; "I'm martyr to a motion not my own".

(More about Roethke here: www.poets.org/troet)

e. e. cummings double feature

2007-02-13T00:01:00.000-04:00

my girl's tall with hard long eyes
as she stands, with her long hard hands keeping
silence on her dress, good for sleeping
is her long hard body filled with surprise
like a white shocking wire, when she smiles
a hard long smile it sometimes makes
gaily go clean through me tickling aches,
and the weak noise of her eyes easily files
my impatience to an edge—my girl's tall
and taut, with thin legs just like a vine
that's spent all of its life on a garden-wall,
and is going to die. When we grimly go to bed
with these legs she begins to heave and twine
about me, and to kiss my face and head.

~

i like my body when it is with your
body. It is quite new a thing.
Muscles better and nerves more.
i like your body. i like what it does,
i like its hows. i like to feel the spine
of your body and its bones, and the trembling
-firm-smooth ness and which i will
again and again and again
kiss, i like kissing this and that of you,
i like, slowly stroking the, shocking fuzz
of your electric fur, and what-is-it comes
over parting flesh . . . . And eyes big love-crumbs,

and possibly i like the thrill

of under me you so quite new

~

From & [and] (1925)

The erotic contribution to TPQ's week of love poetry comes in the form of two poems by e.e. cummings, which appear next to each other in the Selected Poems I have, and which I couldn't choose between. Cummings is well know for his re-structuring of syntax, parts of speech, and punctuation, but does tend to be known as well for his erotic verse as he should. As shown above, I believe, his style allows him to write about sensuality and sex without being, on the one hand, flowery, cliché, or saccharine, or on the other ribald, explicit, or merely clever in his implications. His language is full of energy, jostling against itself, stripped of pretense or conventions, coming to new, stimulating arrangements. It displays experimental brinksmanship, the needful thrust towards the death of sense to articulate that experience which goes beyond language.

Post your favorite erotic verse below!

(More on e.e. cummings here: www.poets.org/eecum)

John Donne, "Elegy: To his Mistress Going to Bed"

2007-02-12T00:01:00.000-04:00

Come, Madam, come, all rest my powers defy,
Until I labour, I in labour lie.
The foe oft-times, having the foe in sight,
Is tired with standing though they never fight.
Off with that girdle, like heaven's zone glistering,
But a far fairer world encompassing.
Unpin that spangled breastplate, which you wear
That th' eyes of busy fools may be stopped there:
Unlace yourself, for that harmonious chime
Tells me from you that now 'tis your bed-time.
Off with that happy busk, which I envy,
That still can be, and still can stand so nigh.
Your gown going off, such beatueous state reveals,
As when from flowery meads th' hill's shadow steals.
Off with your wiry coronet and show
The hairy diadem which on you doth grow.
Off with those shoes: and then safely tread
In this love's hallowed temple, this soft bed.
In such white robes heaven's angels used to be
Received by men; thou angel bring'st with thee
A heaven like Mahomet's paradise; and though
Ill spirits walk in white, we easily know
By this these agnels from an evil sprite,
They set our hairs, but these our flesh upright.
Licence my roving hands, and let them go
Behind, before, above, between, below.
O my America, my new found land,
My kingdom, safeliest when with one man manned,
My mine of precious stones, my empery,
How blessed am I in this discovering thee.
To enter in these bonds is to be free,
Then where my hand is set my seal shall be.
Full nakedness, all joys are due to thee.
As souls unbodied, bodies unclothed must be,
To taste whole joys. Gems which you women use
Are like Atlanta's balls, cast in men's views,
That when a fool's eye lighteth on a gem
His earthly soul may covet theirs, not them.
Like pictures, or like books' gay coverings made
For laymen, are all women thus arrayed;
Themselves are mystic books, which only we
Whom their imputed grace will dignify
Must see revealed. Then since I may know,
As liberally as to a midwife show
Thyself; cast all, yea this white linen hence,
Here is no penance, much less innocence.
To teach thee, I am naked first: why then
What needst thou have more covering than a man?

~

John Donne (1572-1631). Poem first published 1654.

To lead off this love-themed week in honor of Valentine's Day, a poem of seduction by the Metaphysical master of libidinal logic: John Donne. Donne is one of the great treasures of the English canon, one of the best poets not only on seduction and love, but also on spirituality and religion. Once you get accustomed to the manners of his phrasing (which are no more difficult than modernist or some contemporary writers) his work, though written 400 years ago, is energetic and utterly relevant.
"To his Mistress Going to Bed" is, for my money, one of the sexiest poems in English. In order to seduce his mistress, the speaker narrates such a seduction, praising her various attributes while also explaining how reasonable and right it is for her to be so liberal. His argument changes tactics several times, always with utter conviction, though the fact that the need to double-back shows that progress is not actually being made. The poem is always double-leveled, a narrated success (also of two levels thanks to the smattering of puns and double entendre) proven to be fictional by the use of its own fiction as a means of pursuing such success. The final couplet serves as an epigrammatic culmination for his cunning linguistic coercion. And yet, though all this saucy cleverness is delightful, I think the finest lines are the coyest, the direct object of his lust implied by the string of prepositions: "Licence my roving hands, and let them go / Behind, before, above, between, below."

Post your own favorite poems of seduction below!

(Read more about Donne: www.poets.org/jdonn
http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/donne/)

Philip Larkin, "First Sight"

2007-02-02T14:19:00.000-04:00

Lambs that learn to walk in snow
When their bleating clouds the air
Meet a vast unwelcome, know
Nothing but a sunless glare.
Newly stumbling to and fro
All they find, outside the fold,
Is a wretched width of cold.

As they wait beside the ewe,
Her fleeces wetly caked, there lies
Hidden round them, waiting too,
Earth's immeasurable surprise.
They could not grasp it if they knew,
What so soon will wake and grow
Utterly unlike the snow.

~

From The Whitsun Weddings (1964)

Shifting from thoughts of suffering and death, we end the week on birth and hope. Such sentiments are uncharacteristic for Larkin, who tends to keep a steady and ironic eye on the petty miseries and shortcomings of life. Here, however, he portrays such a state as being not necessarily permanent - that the world itself may hold a revelation in store. Despite the literal appropriateness of 'revelation' and the reverence in which this transformation is held, the paradise Larkin heralds is not heavenly, but here on Earth. Furthermore, it is not something awaited, but something that exists currently and is merely under cover. What is hoped for is a new means of perception, the melting away of one's cloak of sorrows, so that one is reaquainted with the sustaining beauty that waited all along.

(Read more about Philip Larkin: www.poets.org/plark
www.philiplarkin.com/biog.htm)

Derek Mahon, "The Snow Party"

2007-02-01T16:32:00.000-04:00

(for Louis Asekoff)

Basho, coming
To the city of Nagoya,
Is asked to a snow party.

There is a tinkling of china
And tea into china;
There are introductions.

Then everyone
Crowds to the window
To watch the falling snow.

Snow is falling on Nagoya
And farther south
On the tiles of Kyoto;

Eastward, beyond Irago,
It is falling
Like leaves on the cold sea.

Elsewhere they are burning
Witches and heretics
In the boiling squares,

Thousands have died since dawn
In the service
Of barbarous kings;

But there is silence
In the houses of Nagoya
And the hills of Ise.

~

From The Snow Party (1975)

This poem provides a counterpoint to Wilbur. The mention of "barbarous" acts being perpetrated against humanity "Elsewhere" implicitly critiques the 'civilized' aestheticism of the snow party and the "silence" of poets who turn away from the ugliness of the world, ignoring it in preference for beauty. Ironically, this poem participates in such a bias as well, focusing on the aesthetic realm, its implicit ethical comment a form of "silence" as well. Choosing the poet Basho for a protagonist, Mahon seems to express a sympathy, or at least empathy, with the desire to use poetry for escape from the darkness of the world. But he remains concerned about the cost of the escape, about what ends poetry can serve. The poem itself is obviously far more subtle and delicately ambivalent than my clumsy explication.

(More about Derek Mahon: www.poets.org/dmaho
www.gallerypress.com/Authors/Dmahon/dmahon.html
www.irishwriters-online.com/derekmahon.html)

Richard Wilbur, "First Snow in Alsace"

2007-01-31T01:04:00.000-04:00

The snow came down last night like moths
Burned on the moon; it fell till dawn,
Covered the town with simple cloths.

Absolute snow lies rumpled on
What shellbursts scattered and deranged,
Entangled railings, crevassed lawn.

As if it did not know they'd changed,
Snow smoothly clasps the roofs of homes
Fear-gutted, trustless and estranged.

The ration stacks are milky domes;
Across the ammunition pile
The snow has climbed in sparkling combs.

You think: beyond the town a mile
Or two, this snowfall fills the eyes
Of soldiers dead a little while.

Persons and persons in disguise,
Walking the new air white and fine,
Trade glances quick with shared surprise.

At children's windows, heaped, benign,
As always, winter shines the most,
And frost makes marvelous designs.

The night guard coming from his post,
Ten first-snows back in thought, walks slow
And warms him with a boyish boast:

He was the first to see the snow.

~

From The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems (1947)

An offered gloss: Even within the most unnatural destruction and fear of war, beauty may blossom naturally, our recognition and appreciation of it a force of life and showing forth of our humanity. At the same time, these initial instincts might be seen to contain seeds of hubris, or to display an ignorance of the obliviating power of beauty, the way such transformation may be a form of elision, covering up, or death. Beauty is like snow, is a balm which ambivalently may both conceal and heal.

(More about Richard Wilbur, including audio: www.poets.org/rwilb/)
(More poems by Richard Wilbur: http://www.ibiblio.org/ipa/wilbur.php)

Robert Frost, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening"

2007-01-30T00:27:00.000-04:00

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
the darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

~

From New Hampshire (1923)

It might seem an oversight to take up the theme of snow without mentioning Frost, especially this well-known poem. It's become commonplace that the poem expresses the speaker's temptation towards death; however, such a gloss often separates us from the poem rather than helping us to know it more intimately. For example, let us look again at the imagery used for death here. Yes, dark woods with the threat of being buried in snow; but the terms Frost actually uses convey a much more positive disposition towards death. In the first stanza, death is aligned with passivity and time passing in inaction ("stopping ... To watch"). The third stanza gives a description of ultimate calm and tranquility, approaching nothingness in a Buddhist negation of the self: "The only other sound's the sweep / Of easy wind and downy flake." The steady iambic tetrameter rhythm and smooth sound repetitions throughout create the effect of a lullaby (culminating in the repetition of the final lines) ... death is not the terrifying black unknown but idealized as the perfect sleep, "lovely, dark, and deep". The speaker does not grudge being pulled back into the world by "promises"; though desiring relief (the poem does not depict suffering; it is only implied), he is resigned to life as well as death, knowing that the end will come in due course.

(More about Frost here: www.poets.org/rfros)

Louis MacNeice, "Snow"

2007-01-29T23:55:00.000-04:00

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes –
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one's hands –
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.

~

From Poems (1935)

Last night was the first snow in New York for this winter, so I thought it would be appropriate to take such as this week's theme, beginning with what is likely MacNeice's best known poem. On the one hand, this poem can be taken as illustrating a certain metaphysical sensibility that we observed in "Train to Dublin" during TPQ's first week – MacNeice's embrace of the particulars of sense experience, "The drunkenness of things being various." His masterful control of diction and syntax is also on display here: such pairings as "collateral and incompatible" and "peel and portion"; the repetition of "World", itself made immediate by the absence of an article "the" or "this" etc.; and the excelling exuberance of the non-punctuated "On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one's hands". The paradoxical independence and interrelation "collateral and incompatible" is consummated in the final line's "between", meaning both shared connection and separating division, reinforced by the mention not only of "glass" (with implicit immaterial reflections) but an unspecific "more" as well.
MacNeice's poem has a significant socio-political valence as well. Its imagery of division, difference and incompatability relate to the divisions within (Northern) Ireland. The mention of roses links back to the English Civil Wars of the Roses between the House of Lancaster and the House of York, represented respectively by a red and a (snow-)white rose. This allusion is channeled in part through Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (if I remember correctly) where the houses and their emblems are used to represent opposing groupings of students at Stephen's boarding school; Stephen who decides to reject his obligation to the Nationalist cause of Ireland. Snow, on the other hand, is the concluding image of the concluding story, "The Dead", in Joyce's Dubliners. In the Irish tradition more generally, of course, the rose is a Nationalist emblem of Ireland, as it remains the term of feminine representations ("an Irish rose"). Within this context, the latent violence within some of the imagery may become apparent: the snow and roses as explosions outside the window, with fire inside as well. MacNeice's poem has continued to be a significant reference point in subsequent Irish writing - see, for instance, Muldoon's "History" or Carson's "Snow".

(More about Louis MacNeice [1907-1963]: www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/755)

Rihaku (Li Po / Li Bai), "Exile's Letter", translated by Ezra Pound

2007-01-26T01:46:00.000-04:00

To So-Kin of Rakuyo, ancient friend, Chancellor of Gen.
Now I remember that you built me a special tavern
By the south side of the bridge at Ten-Shin.
With yellow gold and white jewels, we paid for songs and laughter
And we were drunk for month on month, forgetting the kinds and princes.
Intelligent men came drifting in from the sea and from the west border,
And with them, and with you especially
There was nothing at cross purpose,
And they made nothing of sea-crossing or of mountain-crossing,
If only they could be of that fellowship,
And we all spoke out our hearts and minds, and without regret.
And then I was sent off to South Wei,
smothered in laurel groves,
And you to the north of Raku-hoku,
till we had nothing but thoughts and memories in common.
And then, when separation had come to its worst,
We met, and travelled into Sen-Go,
through all the thirty-six folds of the turning and twisting waters,
Into a valley of the thousand bright flowers,
That was the first valley;
And into ten thousand alleys full of voices and pine-winds.
And with silver harness and reins of gold,
Out came the East of Kan foreman and his company.
And there came also the 'True man' of Shi-yo to meet me,
Playing on a jewelled mouth-organ.
In the storied houses of San-Ko they gave us more Sennin music,
Many instruments, like the sound of young phoenix broods.
The foreman of Kan Chu, drunk, danced
because his long sleeves wouldn't keep still
With that music playing,
And I, wrapped in brocade, went to sleep with my head on his lap,
And my spirit so high it was all over the heavens,
And before the end of the day we were scattered like stars, or rain.
I had to be off to So, far away over the waters,
You back to your river-bridge.
And your father, who was rave as a leopard,
Was governor in Hei-Shu, and put down the barbarian rabble.
And one May he had you send for me,
despite the long distance.
And what with broken wheels and so on, I won't say it wasn't hard going,
Over roads twisted like sheep's guts.
And I was still going, late in the year,
in the cutting wind from the North,
And thinking how little you cared for the cost,
and you caring enough to pay it.
And what a reception:
Red jade cups, food well set on a blue jewelled table,
And I was drunk, and had no thought of returning.
And you would walk out with me to the western corner of the castle,
To the dynastic temple, with water about it clear as blue jade,
With boats floating, and the sound of mouth-organs and drums,
with ripples like dragon-scales, going glass green on the water,
Pleasure lasting, with courtezans, going and coming without hindrance,
With the willow flakes falling like snow,
and the vermilioned girls getting drunk about sunset,
And the water, a hundred feet deep, reflecting green eyebrows
—Eyebrows painted green are a fine sight in young moonlight,
Gracefully painted—
And the girls singing back at each other,
Dancing in transparent brocade,
And the wind lifting the song, and interrupting it,
Tossing it up under the clouds.
And all this comes to an end.
And is not again to be met with.
I went up to the court for examination,
Tried Layu's luck, offered the Choyo song,
And got no promotion,
and went back to the East Mountains
White-headed.
And once again, later, we met at the South bridgehead.
And then the crowd broke up, you went north to San palace,
And if you ask how I regret that parting:
It is like the flowers falling at Spring's end
Confused, whirled in a tangle.
What is the use of talking, and there is no end of talking,
There is no end of things in the heart.
I call in the boy,
Have him sit on his knees here
To seal this,
And send it a thousand miles, thinking.

~

From Cathay (1915)

It would perhaps be an oversight not to include a poem that is itself foreign to the language in this week on travel. Like venturing abroad, translation allows a glimpse into another land, culture, and poetics. Pound's translations from the Chinese are among his finest work, Chinese ideograms being a main inspiration for Pound's own imagism - an attempt to create poetry by the arrangement of images carefully sculpted in words, involving a structure that is more pictorial / juxtapositional than narrative. After all, while travel is in once sense a journey, it is also an experience of distances and an overlaying of cultures. While "Exile's Letter" does present a story, its emotional effect is largely a function of the imagery and scenes presented—the regret of parting is expressed "like the flowers falling at Spring's end / Confused, whirled in a tangle." In this week's earlier poems, it was typically foreign scenes that would incite certain feelings and reflections in the speaker; here, however, it is more that the imagery and travel are invoked to express the speaker's feelings and fortunes. The exile that carries through the poem is not the distance from home, but distance from a friend. One need not travel the world to understand such a poem.

(More about Ezra Pound: www.poets.org/epoun)

Sinéad Morrissey, from "China"

2007-01-25T18:58:00.000-04:00

1

Take up a screen before dawn and ready the inks.
There is a country which does not exist and which must be shown.
Steady the ingredients.

2

A tunnel of trees. My brother and I on the top
of an empty double-decker in Derbyshire.
the absence-from-home of summer
becoming a scab to be picked over. The bus pulled up

by a pub, as the greenery scratching
at the window ended and we were given a field
with a horse and a dog and a red child
in it, waving.

Sunlight was there like a wall
and halved everything. In my head I was singing
This is Happening This is Happening This is Happening.
A boy bounced his way down the aisle

and started smoking, when time
opened. Or stopped. Or almost stalled
and the boy and my brother and the bus and the world
disappeared on the prick of a needle – pop! – and I

sat sideways avoiding the gap.
And then I saw I was enormous
and in another kind of tunnel. That I was lost.
That there was no going back.

3

Conjure the Yangtze and the Yellow River
And bring them a matter of hours together
On the same train line and both of them seen
Through semi-darkness on a flickering screen
Which is and is not a window. Blow
Over the waters to buckle them. Add snow.

5

Evening. Beijing. And farewell to Mao's mausoleum
through the glass, ablaze in the nerves of the Square of Heaven
like everlasting Christmas. The bus forces us on:
another station, another train, another city, another season.
Advertising flickers in the waiting room. That night I dive like a child –
borne aloft by the train's engine, or like one born again in its mild
motion, the shunt and click of the carriages over the sidings
the soporific tenderness of a language I do not recognise –
and re-surface at nine, an hour beyond breakfast time.
The mine wheels, factories, fish farms, and allotments
battling for space between slack-blackened tenements
have receded now into the north. here the sky is unfolding the blue
cloth of itself on a new country, or on a country which never grew
old to begin with. Spinach, pak choi, cabbage greens, lettuce,
geese sunning themselves among shiny brown cowls of the lotus
and an echo-less emptiness, a sense of perspective too wide
and too high for the eye to take in. Two crows collide
in a rice field, then are flung backwards out of their war
as the train pushes on. We loiter like Oliver in the dining car.
Brunch comes as simmering bowls of noodles, under a film
of oil, and we sit watching the landscape unfurl like a newsreel
into history. By noon, foothills, are banking to the south.
By two, we're approaching a network of tunnels blasted out
of the Xi'an Qin Mountains. Blackness falls clean as a guillotine
on the children in pairs by the trackside, and then again
on the man and his son who will walk all afternoon into evening
before they are home. We enter Sichuan without rupturing
any visible line of division, though dinner at five is brimming with chillies:
dried and diced and fried with the seeds inside, while the extraordinary
Sichuan pepper balloons into flavour under our tongues. And all along
darkness is gathering itself in. i see a boy and a woman
lit up by the flare of a crop fire, but can no longer believe in them.
Windows have turned into mirrors the length of the train.
Hours pass, and there is only my white face, strained
in its hopelessness, my failure to catch the day in my hands like a fish
and have it always. The train descends from the soil terraces.
Electricity switches the world back on: town after coal-dusted town
streams by in the rain, revealing its backdoor self, its backyard frown,
until all converge in a dayglo glare at the end of the line and we merge
with our destination. We have been dropped to the bottom of somewhere
blurred and industrial, where the yellow of the Yangtze meets the green
of its tributary, the city with a name like the din of a smithy: Chongqing.

8

Ever been washed
by a crowd? My mother dragging me
to the cold water tap and
jamming my finger under it
the day I brushed it across

the cooker-top to see
if it was on, to numb it,
she said, but it wasn't
like that
at all. It was

winter, we were
baking in the kitchen and
I could still smell a scrap
of skin frying in the back-
ground when the cold

hit home – prodding
the length of my arm in a surge
of pain, an ironic
remedy of extremes.
And it was oddly

uplifting to be suspended
there with your body peeled
back to the nerve all
over again in a matter
of seconds, so disarmingly

alive. In four train stations within
fourteen days I turned my head
to a conundrum. After a night
and a day and a night of being carried
along in a capsule –

a bed, a quilt, a pillow, a night-
light, a table, tea, a window, a
radio – I'd uncurl onto
the platform, grey and
exhausted, as though I'd walked

the hours that divided us
from our origin. We were alone
the whole time, moving like
automatons from compartment to
dining car, then back

again, with only the fruit-
man to disturb our corridor
with his casual calling. The train's nose
under the station awning would steam
with exertion; we'd be cracking

our wrists, or avoiding
the press, or yawning, and then,
imperceptibly, finally noticing
the river of people, disgorged from a mile
of doors and flooding towards

the exit sign. There must have been
thousands of them, our shadow-
travellers, and we'd been marooned
in the midst of them. They'd have sat
upright all day and

all night on benches as hard
as amazonite, pressed five
to a row and room somehow for
rice pots and rucksacks and armfuls
of jackets, flasks,

blankets. Thirty hours
at a stretch and seeming as fresh
as if they'd just stepped out
of a ten-hour sleep
on a cloud —

and with somewhere to get to
fast: time to stare back
at me the way I was staring
at them, an extravagance.
I stayed to one side, watching

them flow like an out-
going tide into the maw of each
city, and saw myself
caught in the pulse of their
striding, my greenish skin hurled

under water and hammering I am
here you are real this
is happening it is
redeemable – as though touching
them might be possible.

9

One day, China met China in the marketplace.
'How are you, China?' asked China, 'we haven't talked in so long.'
China answered: 'This things we have to say one another,
laid end to end, and side to side,
would connect the Great wall with the Three Gorges Valley
and stretch nine miles up towards the sun.'
'It's true,' replied China. 'We have a lot to catch up on.'

~

From The State of the Prisons (2005)

In contrast to Bishop's question-posing, Szymborska's impossibility-enumerating, and Longley's captured vision, Morrissey's sequence struggles through multiple approaches to processing her experience on the Writer's Train across China in 2003. In 1, 3, and 9, for example, we find a mythic approach that seems to sympathize with the magical empire on its own terms, as well as its strangeness for the speaker. 2 opts for an analogue from past personal experience, using the more understood example of something closer to home as an avenue or template for understanding the new experience - a narrative structure of comparison and synthesis which is central to part 8. The focus on the subjective experience of travel through a foreign land (which exceeds what we have seen so far this week) is balanced by the more journalistic cataloguing of 5. The sequence's compound of strategies together conveys the bewilderment of trying to give some account of China in its entirety - as 9 implies, something which is impossible for China itself, as much as for the foreign traveller.

(More about Sinéad Morrissey: http://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?owner_id=511)

Michael Longley, "Leaving Inishmore"

2007-01-24T00:28:00.000-04:00

Rain and sunlight and the boat between them
Shifted whole hillsides through the afternoon –
Quiet variations on an urgent theme
Reminding me now that we left too soon
The island awash in wave and anthem.

Miles from the brimming enclave of the bay
I hear again the Atlantic's voices,
the gulls above us as we pulled away –
So munificent their final noises
These are the broadcasts from our holiday.

Oh, the crooked walkers on that tilting floor!
And the girls singing on the upper deck
Whose hair took the light like a downpour –
Interim nor change of scene shall shipwreck
Those folk on the move between shore and shore.
Summer and solstice as the seasons turn
Anchor our boat in a perfect standstill,
The harbour wall of Inishmore astern
Where the Atlantic waters overspill –
I shall name this the point of no return

Lest that excursion out of light and heat
Take on a January idiom –
Our ocean icebound when the year is hurt,
Wintertime past cure - the curriculum
Vitae of sailors and the sick at heart.

~

From No Continuing City (1968)

Being that I my library has not managed to join me on this coast yet, I was bound to choose a travel poem about Ireland. My first choice would probably have been MacNeice's "Train to Dublin", but I've already written on that, so I've chosen instead this Michael Longley poem, with its rapturous image - "And the girls singing on the upper deck / Whose hair took the light like a downpour" – which I used to remember as having been by MacNeice. This poem gives a less explicit take on travel than those we've seen thus far; the speaker's own subjectivity takes a back seat to displaying the majesty of the scenery. Implicit in the beauty - here so dependent on transient effects of light and season - is the sense of insufficiency or loss; inevitably, the poem is of leaving, itself recording "the point of no return" for imaginative return, this scrupulously crafted memory a small flame to warm in the "Wintertime past cure" of our chronic human travels. We all live the lives of sailors, and to behold transient beauty, while transient ourselves, is to be "sick at heart."

(More about Michael Longley, including audio:
http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoet.do?poetId=3150
http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth199)

Wislawa Szymborska, "Travel Elegy"

2007-01-23T23:53:00.000-04:00

Everything's mine though just on loan,
nothing for the memory to hold,
though mine as long as I look.

Memories come to mind like excavated statues
that have misplaced their heads.

From the town of Samokov, only rain
and more rain.

Paris from Louvre to fingernail
grows web-eyed by the moment.

Boulevard Saint-MartinL some stairs
leading into a fadeout.

Only a bridge and a half
from Leningrad of the bridges.

Poor Uppsala, reduced to a splinter
of its mighty cathedral.

Sofia's hapless dancer,
a form without a face.

Then separately, his face without eyes;
separately again, his eyes with no pupils,
and, finally, the pupils of a cat.

A Caucasian eagle soars
over the reproduction of a canyon,
the fool's gold of the sun,
the phony stones.

Everything's mine but just on loan,
nothing for the memory to hold,
though mine as long as I look.

Inexhaustible, unembracable,
but particular to the smallest fiber,
grain of sand, drop of water—
landscapes.

I won't retain one blade of grass
as it's truly seen.

Salutation and farewell
in a single glance.

For surplus and absence alike,
a single motion of the neck.

~

From Salt (1962)

This poem treats at greater length, and more directly, one of the questions of travel posed by Bishop in yesterday's poem: what I refered to as the insolubility of the foreign and objective, here the impossibility of incorporating sense experience into the self via memory. Szymborska's poetry often obsesses over inaccessibility and the impossible (see, for example, "Conversation with a Stone"). Here she strikes a typical note of combined nobility and tragedy, hubris and resignation to the shortcomings of the human condition, "surplus and absence alike". Such a feeling seems as common to poetic inspiration as to the experience of travel—a sense that the wonders of the world outpaces all attempts to capture them, but that one is compelled to try to do so by that very awe.

(More about Szymborska: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1996/szymborska-bio.html
www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/340)

Elizabeth Bishop, "Questions of Travel"

2007-01-22T00:30:00.000-04:00

There are too many waterfalls here; the crowded streams
hurry too rapidly down to the sea,
and the pressure of so many clouds on the mountaintops
makes them spill over the sides in soft slow-motion,
turning to waterfalls under our very eyes.
—For if those streaks, those mile-long, shiny, tearstains,
aren't waterfalls yet,
in a quick age or so, as ages go here,
they probably will be.
But if the streams and clouds keep travelling, travelling,
the mountains look like the hulls of capsized ships,
slime=hung and barnacled.

Think of the long trip home.
Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?
Where should we be today?
Is it right to be watching strangers in a play
in this strangest of theatres?
What childishness is it that while there's a breath of life
in our bodies, we are determined to rush
to see the sun the other way around?
The tiniest green hummingbird in the world?
To stare at some inexplicable old stonework,
inexplicable and impenetrable,
at any view,
instangly seen and always, always delightful?
Oh, must we dream our dreams
and have them, too?
And have we room
for one more folded sunset, still quite warm?

But surely it would have been a pity
not to have seen the trees along this road,
really exaggerated in their beauty,
not to have seen them gesturing
like noble pantomimists, robed in pink.
—Not to have had to stop for gas and heard
the sad, two-noted, wooden tune
of disparate wooden clogs
carelessly clacking over
a grease-stained filling-station floor.
(In another country the clogs would all be tested.
Each pair there would have identical pitch.)
—A pity not to have heard
the other, less primitive music of the fat brown bird
who sings above the broken gasoline pump
in a bamboo church of Jesuit baroque:
three towers, five silver crosses.
—Yes, a pity not to have pondered,
blurr-dly and inconclusively,
on what connection can exist for centuries
between the crudest wooden footwear
and, careful and finicky,
the whittled fantasies of wooden cages.
—Never to have studied history in
the weak calligraphy of songbirds' cages.
—And never to have had to listen to rain
so much like politicians' speeches:
two hour os unrelenting oratory
and then a sudden golden silence
in which the traveller takes a notebook, writes:

"Is it lack of imagination that makes us come
to imagined places, not just stay at home?
Or could Pascal have been entirely right
about just sitting quietly in one's room?

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?"

~

From Questions of Travel (1965)

A lot of Bishop of late, in part thanks to my guest writer Liz, and in part because of the centrality of travel to her work. Returning from Egypt and struggling to process the experience, I thought it would be good to take travel as this week's theme. Bishop's poem appropriately starts us off with questions, both relativistic questions – of how to judge or merely react to and interact with that which is foreign to us – and questions regarding the purpose of seeking such novelty, and the implications our relation to it has to our relation towards 'home'. I have often found travel to be a state of wonderous stimulation, a state of easy happiness, because the only purpose while traveling is to observe and enjoy. But then what does one do with that observation and enjoyment? How is it to be incorporated into one's 'native' identity? The purity of such experience qua experience, the suspension of self-concern that it involves, and its unincorporable otherness, threaten to overwhelm identity - both poetic, as imagination, and personal, as the syntax and vocabulary of home. Bishop typically evades putting forward a position on these questions, instead enumerating and illustrating the questions themselves, at once utterly casual and serious.

(More on Bishop: www.poets.org/ebish)

Sylvia Plath, "The Times are Tidy"

2007-01-19T14:52:00.000-04:00

Unlucky the hero born
In this province of the stuck record
Where the most watchful cooks go jobless
And the mayor's rotisserie turns
Round of its own accord.

There's no career in the venture
Of riding against the lizard,
Himself withered these latter-days
To leaf-size from lack of action:
History's beaten the hazard.

The last crone got burnt up
More than eight decades back
With the love-hot herb, the talking cat,
But the children are better for it,
The cow milks cream an inch thick.

(1958)

I'm writing as a guest -- not only to The Poetic Quotidian but in many ways to poetry itself ('up the novel!' says this prose girl). I own Sylvia Plath's collected works (I nearly wrote 'woks', which would actually be a far more impressive and unique Plath collection to own) but never spend extended time reading poem after poem. I dip infrequently and see what's to be found. The title of this one caught me first, and the rest of the poem mirrors its timeless and yet neatly specific feel: Reading it gave me whiffs of the Salem witch trials, Guantanamo Bay, a nameless fairy-tale kingdom, the unemployment line in Los Angeles ... Her line breaks are punchy without feeling contrived, especially in the first stanza. Her imagery throughout is vivid without being specific -- rich, sensual moments (rotisserie, leaf-size lizard, cream, love-hot herb) could be allegories for any number of things, or nothing. Whether or not the poem is read as political (the ennui of a would-be revolutionary?) it has a deftness and obliqueness that appeals more than anything with a finer point on it. The blunted references and pictorial sensibility remind me a lot of Wallace Stevens' "The Emperor of Ice-cream". Both poems share a compactness and confidence that hit hard and bolt-clear.

Elizabeth Bishop, "The Shampoo"

2007-01-15T17:16:00.000-04:00

The still explosions on the rocks,
the lichens, grow
by spreading, gray, concentric shocks.
They have arranged
to meet the rings around the moon, although
within our memories they have not changed.

And since the heavens will attend
as long on us,
you've been, dear friend,
precipitate and pragmatical;
and look what happens. For Time is
nothing if not amenable.

The shooting stars in your black hair
in bright formation
are flocking where,
so straight, so soon?
-- Come, let me wash it in this big tin basin,
battered and shiny like the moon.

~from A Cold Spring, 1955

This is, I guess, the first guest post of The Poetic Quotidian (while TPQ roams Egypt); you can usually find me over at A Room Full of Books. I don't think it will come as a surprise to anyone who knows me that I've picked an Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) poem. I have a particular fondness for this one, because it displays a more open, less complicated affection than her other love poems. It has other Bishop hallmarks, like the way she makes rhyme and formal structure seem so easy, and the way the symbols echo to each other: "shocks" is a word usually used to describe hair, but it's used instead for lichens. The pair of "precipitate and pragmatical" is wonderful, too--opposite meanings, similar sounds. What I like most, though, I have to say, is the idea: time can't be stopped, and death can't be averted, but a simple act of physical affection can stave them off for a moment. Those are just my thoughts, of course. There's probably more I could say, but I'll keep it to a paragraph here.

H.D., from "Helen in Egypt"

2007-01-12T01:04:00.000-04:00

LEUKÉ

(L'isle blanche)

Book One

[1]

Why Leduké? Because here, Achilles is said to have married Helen who bore him a son, Euphorion. helen in Egypt did not taste of Lethe, forgetfulness, on the other hand; she was in an ecstatic or semi-trance state. Though she says, "I am awake, no trance," yet she confesses, "I move as one in a dream." Now, it is as if momentarily, at any rate, the dream is over. Remembrance is taking its place. She immediately reminds us of her "first rebellion" and the so far suppressed memory and unspoken name — Paris.

I am not nor mean to be
the Daemon they made of me;
going forward, my will was the wind,

(or the will of Aphrodite
filled the sail, as the story told
of my first rebellion;

the sail, they said,
was the veil of Aphrodite),
and I am tired of the memory of battle,

I remember a dream that was real;
let them sing Helena for a thousand years,
let them name and re-name Helen,

I can not endure the weight of eternity,
they will never understand
how, a second time, I am free;

he was banished, as his mother dreamed
that he (Paris) would cause war,
and war came.

...

[5]

But Thetis? She has summoned Helen out of Egypt with "Achilles waits." But Helen is back in time, in memory. While "Achilles waits," she reconstructs the early story of — "Eros? Eris?"

What is Achilles without war?
it was Thetis, his mother,
who planned this (bridal and rest),

but even the gods' plans
are shaped by another —
Eros? Eris?

...

Book Five

[1]

Helen must be re-born, that is, her soul must return wholly to her body. Her emotional experience has been "too great a suspense to endure." Theseus recalls names from his own past, Ariadne, Phaedra, Hippolyta, as if to balance or match Helen's menelaus, Paris, Achilles "with bones or stones for counters." But "of the many, many in-between?" he asks. "The memory of breath-taking encounters with those half-seen" must balance and compensate for the too intense primary experience.

There was always another and another and another,
shall we match them like knuckle-players
with bones or stones for counters,

the fatality of numbers?
the first? the last?
and of the many, many in-between,

importunate, breath-taking encounters
with those half-seen,
the wind billowing a sail

and the sail fluttering
and on half-balanced,
drawing the sail taut,

and then the sail is lost,
and we have only guessed
or half-guessed

at the turn of a head,
whose was the ensign (painted on the prow)
of one whose name, even will be

an eternal enigma;
who was it? who did I see?
was this the embodiment of the host,

the lost, Ariadne, Phaedra, Hippolyta?
or was it Helen on the way to Egypt,
or was it Helen returning,

or was it Helen on the sea-road,
nearing Troy? was it one of these
or all three? reflections...

and a head half-turned to watch
a reeling tern, a sleeve,
a garment's fold, no word, no whisper,

nor glance even...or was it a gull
she watched, a heron or raven
or plover? the eclipsed pillar

with the shadow showing darker,
for the white gleam above,
of sun-lit marble,

a certain sheen of cloth,
a certain ankle,
a strap over a shoulder?

remember these small reliques,
as on a beach, you search
for a pearl, a bead,

a comb, a cup, a bowl
half-filled with sand,
after a wreck.

...

[5]

And all this time, Helen has apparently been seated before the glowing coals. "Take this low chair," Thesues had said, and now, "shall I draw out the low couch, nearer the brazier?" he will cover her with fleece or if that is too heavy, with "soft woven wool," so that she ("my Psyche") may "disappear into the web, the shell, re-integrate." She is safe, she need not be afraid "to recall the shock of the iron-Ram, the break in the Wall," or equally, she is free to forget everything. But Helen's only answer to that is "never...Achilles."

Rest here; shall I draw out
the low couch, nearer the braier,
or will you lie there,

against the folds of purple
by the wall? you tremble,
can you stand? walk then,

O, sleep-walker; is this fleece
too heavy? here is soft woven wool;
wrapped in this shawl, my butterfly,

my Psyche, disappear into the web,
the shell, re-integrate,
nor fear to recall

the shock of the iron-Ram,
the break in the Wall,
the flaming Towers,

shouting and desecration
of the altars; you are safe here;
remember if you wish to remember,

or forget..."never, never,"
you breathe, half in a trance...
"Achilles."

...

Book Six

[3]

So "Eros? Eris?" are again balanced in the mind of Helen, or Eros and Death.

Is there another stronger than Love's mother?
is there one other, Discordia, Strife?
Eris is sister of Ares,

his unconquerable child is Eros;
did Ares bequeath his arrows
alike to Eros, to Eris?

O flame-tipped, O searing, O tearing
burning, destructible fury
of the challenge to the fairest;

O flame-tipped, O searing,
destroying arrow of Eros;
o bliss of the end,

Lethe, Death and forgetfulness,
O bliss of the final
unquestioned nuptial kiss.

...

Book Seven

[3]

Achilles is "a sword-blade drawn from fire..." Menelaus, Paris had not yet been "tempered." Helen seems to ask, how can I compromise? My soul or my spirit was snatched from its body, or even more miraculously, with its body, by this "gerfalcon." All she asks now is "time to remember."

Helen — Hades —
do you know his face?
it is not dark but clear,

a sword-blade drawn from fire,
tempered, beaten till it grows cold,
cold, cold, colder

than the pole-star;
do you know his eyes?
they are not dark caves,

as the priests tell,
they are sea-gray, they are the sea,
crept from under an ice-floe,

they are not frozen, no,
but they keep the gray sheen of the sea;
do you know his hands?

(was he with you on the Argo?)
they are powerful but thin;
too fine for strength?

have you seen a gerfalcon
fall on his prey?
so my throat knew that day,

his fingers' remorseless steel,
when I had strength only to pray
Thetis, let me go out, let me forget,

let me be lost...
could another touch you
after the Absolute?

hate? no; love? no;
nothingness? no, not nothingness
but an ever widening flight...

but I would not go yet,
I must have time to remember
Dis, Hades, Achilles.

~

From Helen in Egypt (1961)

For the final selection from our Egyptian/African week, I couldn't help but make a selection from H.D.'s book-length poem Helen in Egypt. The poem imagines what is supposed to be a bit of apocryphal mythology, that Helen was replaced by a sort of living doll in Troy when the city was burned, and the real Helen was spirited away to live in Egypt. There she meets and falls in love with Achilles (or his ghost), and is also visited by Theseus and Paris. It's hard to get any sense of the narrative from just selections - and, to be frank, it's not exactly easy if you read the entire book.
Rather than a narrative, the poem is structured as a series of lyric episodes, spoken by Helen, an omniscient muse/narrator, or the other players in the story. H.D. links these lyric moments with a prose commentary, which itself mixes narration, chorus-like commentary, and suggestive or speculative criticism of the issues and themes. The lyrics often function according to H.D. imagist beginnings, using a structured juxtaposition of images to convey meaning in the form of relationships between symbols, tones, emotions, icons, ideas, rather than by 'telling' through narrative or statement. Book Five [1] above is a compelling example of this technique; the context of the whole poem does not allow one to paraphrase what it 'means', but multiplies the resonance of the references and images, the way sunlight makes stained glass more brilliant and compelling, or the way a beautiful face is more expressive and endearing when owned by someone you know and love.
One can trace certain key themes developing through the book, as exemplified in the echo-connection between Eros, love/sexuality, and Eris, strife/discord. The destruction of Troy is largely taken as a war spawned by beauty, or by lust, once again implicating the codependence of sexuality and violence. Freud's thinking and interest in myth of significant influences on H.D. during this period - Eros and Thanatos certainly deserve reference, and there are also subtle allusions to the Oedipal structure.
But H.D. also questions the assignment of blame to Helen. The poem examines war as a homoerotic passion, the warrior as the masculinist ideal, where Helen, the feminine ideal, is just an excuse for men to engage with each other and admire each other (see the earlier post, Michael Longley's "Ceasefire"). The question is put whether Helen and/or Achilles and/or Paris can only experience love if they are dead, thus having forgotten about the Trojan War and moved beyond the passions it involved.

(Read more about H.D. and listen to her read from "Helen in Egypt": http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/234)

Paul Muldoon, "The Turn"

2007-01-11T21:26:00.000-04:00

In those days when the sands
might shift at any moment, when his mother might at any moment lay
into him, he thought nothing of getting up half-way through a story about the Sahara,
the one about the tribesman following the scent
of water to a water hole, thought nothing of getting up and going out
while he was still half-way through a sentence, going out and taking a turn

about the house, sometimes not bothering to return
for an hour, two hours, a week, a year perhaps, perhaps not until the sands
of time had run out,
not until his favorite guinea hen had brought herself to lay
a double-yolked egg, or the double scent
of the sand-pile and the dunghill made a Sahara

of the yard through which Ned Skinner had moaned 'Saahaara, Saahaara',
the yard in which, after seeing The Four Feathers, he'd taken it upon himself to turn
a stack of pear boxes still redolent of the scent
of pears into a bolster-humped camel that carried him across the endless sands
to where Harry Feversham and himself lay
in wait in a gully for the last of those out-and-out

cowards and scoundrels, the yard in which he'd not only learned to spout
most, if not all, of the main languages of the Sahara
but had such a grasp of the lay
of the land, every twist and turn
of the ergs and regs which looked for all the world like featureless sands,
had so mastered following the scent

of water to a water hole, shielding his eyes from the hen house's flourescent
strip of light, under which he could make out a couple making out
in a featureless room in the old Sands,
or a featureless room in the Sahara,
a light by which he could make out every twist and turn
in what would have seemed to a lay

person a featureless hotel room, a room which offered him an instant replay
of the old bolster and pear-box scent
rising from the camel under him, a scent powerful enough to turn
him around, reminding him that he'd already been out
for an hour, two hours, a week, a year perhaps, having him turn back through the Sahara
in which so many had perished, back through the sands

on which lay the bones of thousands
of his countrymen, through the sand-pile that was not at all reminiscent of the Sahara,
having him turn back inside to pick up his own sentence, to hear himself out.

~

From Moy Sand and Gravel (2002)

I've heard tell that Muldoon, who teaches creative writing at Princeton, gave the sestina as the class' assignment for one of his workshops and, the next week, this was his own contribution. Of course, that story may be apocryphal, or its events a misleading feint, as Muldoon has also talked about working for years to get a poem to seem as if it was written in five minutes. "The Turn" certainly does strike one, in many ways, as a "workshop poem," in that its whole point seems to be to meet the demands of the form. Muldoon, of course, also plays with those demands — this is a one sentence sestina. It also provides meta-commentary on its form, specifically repetition. One of the narratives I find in this poem is a consideration of cyclic violence, which Muldoon, having lived through the Troubles in Northern Ireland, was very well acquainted with. There are allusions to his abusive and oppressive mother, to the necessary violence of farming (Ned Skinner castrates a litter of swine in a much earlier poem), the connections between sex and violence, and also violence from The Arabian Nights to the British and other imperial campaigns in Africa. Apropos of The Ceasefire Agreement in Northern Ireland, perhaps, the envoi imagines the possibility of escape from these cycles, the chance, as another poem in the volume puts it, of "parley", and understanding.

(Paul Muldoon homepage, including a recording of him reading "The Turn": http://www.paulmuldoon.net)

Dan Chiasson, "The Elephant (III)"

2007-01-10T01:32:00.000-04:00

When he hit me square on the head I said Better to die
this way than in obscurity, on the empty plain.

A heron and a hawk, a monkey carrying a monkey skull,
a lion on fire and a pack of eyeless wolves

were what I feared, my rib cage rocking to and fro
in the sun, in the wind, all day and night, a dinghy

anchored in rough seas. Not this: my body a sack of
garbage, hooves bound, the world turned upside down.

This is a beautiful country, said John Brown on his way
to the gallows, I have not cast my eyes o’er it before –

that is, in this direction. And I said, What a beautiful banquet,
I am honored to contribute. They cleaned my skull

with pulverized mica for their cornucopia: those were
my eye sockets overflowing with black grapes, herrings

lying in piles of their own, jewel-like, dewlike roe
made the the crown of my head, and the bride was beautiful.

~

From Natural History (2005)

Another slight cheat, as "The Elephant (II)" suggests that this poem is set in Ethiopia - but Africa nonetheless.

(More on Dan Chiasson: http://www.randomhouse.com/author/results.pperl?authorid=67498)

Flavien Ranaivo, "Song of a Common Lover"

2007-01-09T01:08:00.000-04:00

Don't love me, my sweet,
like your shadow
for shadows fade at evening
and I want to keep you
right up at cockcrow;
nor like pepper
which makes the belly hot
for then I couldn't take you
when I'm hungry;
nor like a pillow
for we'd be together in the hours of sleep
but scarcely meet by day;
nor like rice
for once swallowed you think no more of it;
nor like soft speeches
for they quickly vanish;
nor like honey,
sweet indeed but too common.
Love me like a beautiful dream,
your life in the night,
my hope in the day;
like a piece of money,
ever with me on earth,
and for the great journey
a grateful comrade;
like a calabash,
intact, for drawing water;
in pieces, bridges for my guitar.

~

(1963)

Tonight I asked my roomate if she knew any poems about Egypt, and she threw a Modern Poetry from Africa anthology in my direction. I picked this poem, because it was the first one I picked from the table of contents, because of its intriguing & amusing title - a lover who's average, or a lover who's held in common? Anyway, it turned out to be pretty decent (though also entertainingly indecent - though I wonder what of the double entendres exists in the original French) so I figured I would include it, since I don't know that many poems that feature Egypt, and unfortunately don't have quite the time or resources to be looking them up at the moment. Technically, I failed anyway - Ranaivo is from Madagascar. Oh well.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Ozymandias"

2007-01-08T01:31:00.000-04:00

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

~

(1818)

In honor of my impending trip to Egypt, this weeks theme is - Egypt! Here we have quite probably the most famous poem in the canon associated with Egypt, Shelley's timeless "Ozymandias". It provides a moral theme of the hubris of pride, symbolized by the literally ruined monument to the Ozymandias, generally considered to be the Greek transliteration of a title for the Pharoah Ramesses the Great (Ramesses II), who did indeed have many great monuments erected to himself. Though some vestige of these monuments may remain, the man himself is long gone - likewise the power which he used to create awe and on which the poem takes his pride to be based. This moral theme - of the impermanence of all power and glory, and the inevitability of decay and dissipation - is made to seem all the more objective by being displaced as the wisdom of the anonymous traveler, rather than the opinion of the speaker himself.

(Read more about Percy Bysshe Shelley here: www.poets.org/pshel)

Patrick Kavanagh, "A Christmas Childhood"

2006-12-25T12:01:00.000-04:00

I

One side of the potato-pits was white with frost —
How wonderful that was, how wonderful!
And when we put our ears to the paling-post
The music that came out was magical.

The light between the ricks of hay and straw
Was a hole in Heaven's gable. An apple tree
With its December-glinting fruit we saw —
O you, Eve, were the world that tempted me

To eat the knowledge that grew in clay
And death the germ within it! Now and then
I can remember something of the gay
Garden that was childhood's. Again

The tracks of cattle to a drinking-place,
A green stone lying sideways in a ditch,
Or any common sight, the transfigured face
Of a beauty that the world did not touch.

II

My father played the melodion
Outside at our gate;
There were stars in the morning east
And they danced to his music.

Across the wild bogs his melodion called
To Lennons and Callans.
As I pulled on my trousers in a hurry
I knew some strange thing had happened.

Outside in the cow-house my mother
Made the music of milking;
The light of her stable-lamp was a star
And the frost of Bethlehem made it twinkle.

A water-hen screeched in the bog,
Mass-going feet
Crunched the wafer-ice on the pot-holes,
Somebody wistfully twisted the bellows wheel.

My child poet picked out the letters
On the grey stone,
In silver the wonder of a Christmas townland,
The winking glitter of a frosty dawn.

Cassiopeia was over
Cassidy's hanging hill,
I looked and three whin bushes rode across
The horizon — the Three Wise Kings.

And old man passing said:
'Can't he make it talk —
The melodion.' I hid in the doorway
And tightened the belt of my box-pleated coat.

I nicked six nicks on the door-post
With my penknife's big blade —
there was a little one for cutting tobacco.
And I was six Christmases of age.

My father played the melodion,
My mother milked the cows,
And I had a prayer like a white rose pinned
On the Virgin Mary's blouse.

~

From A Soul for Sale (1947)

In honor of the 'holiday season', as it's called, this week brings some holiday-themed selections. In honor of being on vacation, though, I think I'm going to take the week off from commentary for the most part. Here, in association with Christmas, which might at root be taken as a celebration of the miracle of birth and the hope-filled potential that is childhood, Kavanagh provides a magical vision of innocence. In parallel with both the Garden of Eden and the birth of Christ, the young child's surroundings are depicted as an incarnation of this innocence. This personification/idealization of rural Ireland has a strong presence in Irish literature - not always in a naive way, as Kavanagh's own masterpiece "The Great Hunger" illustrates.

Greg Williamson, "Binocular Diplopia"

2006-12-22T11:07:00.000-04:00

I've tried, Lord knows,
To keep from seeing double....
-James Merrill

Life was a blur. Or so he thought. The thing
Was, he'd been diagnosed with a small-time
Astigmatism. Why think otherwise?
But when the doctor told him, "Read the chart,"
And he replied, "Which one?" even the smart
Young nurse said, "Uh oh." As for him, his eyes
Were opened and he saw, for the first time,
That he was seeing two of everything.

This would explain a lot. In stereoscopic
Hindsight he reviewed old patterns of
Mistakes: missed shots, a lifetime of misreading,
Mixed signals (this as the nurse was double-knitting
Her cute brows), false moves, smashed thumbs from hitting
The wrong nail on the head, all finally leading
To how the woman he first fell in love
With turned to myth. But that's another topic.

Meanwhile, the long walk home. Or rather two.
A second one appeared to levitate,
Illusive, epiphanic, and oblique—
Like dual reflections in a double pane
Of glass, or some self-referential strain
Of allegory. Which one, so to speak,
Was true? If seeing's believing, not the great
Sam Johnson could refute it: Both were true.

Twinned like a postcard's double-stamped cachet,
The phone lines added up to musical staves,
With a score of birds; Shell's logo seemed to shine
Like a big con; and everywhere he turned,
His second nature brazenly returned
Equivocations in the plainest sign,
From the pecuniary, JESUS SAVES
To the unwittingly blunt SLOW CHILDREN AT PLAY,

As if the world were, after all, a text,
"A book in folio," a hieroglyph.
Here was the uncorrected proof. The elder's
Two thick volumes of belated leaves
And, spiraling in double helices,
Its legendary keys all seemed to tell,
Beside themselves, another tale, as if
These traces were the cryptic analects

Of some long-lost original. (Or flim-
flam! Now get real. this is pure grandstanding.
Look in thy heart, etc.) Double trouble.
Even close introspection was abased.
With two left feet, twin-featured and two-faced,
He saw, head down, foreshortened in a puddle,
Under a critical sign that said, NO STANDING,
Me. (When was it I turned into him?)

So that was that. And he (we'll say) set out
Again, flung open the double doors to find
Her smiling faces, whom he'd fancied for
So long as muse, and girl back home, and quest,
And so much more. Closing his eyes to rest
He saw her image turn from metaphor
To perfect vision, singular, clear, defined,
The one thing he had always dreamt about.

~

From Errors in the Script (2001)

And here we find a final quasi-riddle poem to end our round=up week. In one sense, the title begins as a riddle (unless you look it up or happen to be an opthamologist), which is then revealed to be the answer to the riddle of the poem. But Williamson [b. 1964] continues to cast his lines further out in multiple directions, exploring other metaphorical resonances for double vision - which might be taken as revision, hindsight, or the way of looking anew I discussed in the first weeks - often with humorous results. As throughout his work, Williamson here is a clever and witty poet, but I believe one whose poetic manner has substance to it, as expressing a cheerful, engaging vision of life's failures and felicities, our shortcomings and the new possibilities and viewpoints which can grow out of them.

(More on Greg Williamson: http://web.jhu.edu/writingseminars/faculty/williamson/)

Dan Chiasson, "Which Species On Earth Is Saddest?"

2006-12-21T23:52:00.000-04:00

When we wake up in our bodies, first we weep.
We weep because the air is thick as honey.

Even the air is a body. Ours is the bottommost
and newest body, nested inside other, older ones

(though the mother’s body is repairing itself now;
there’s no trace of us anywhere on her;

why are we part of every body but our mother’s?)
Die as soon as possible, the Scriptures say.

And many do — or soon enough, as in the tales of
a swollen boy, now years ago, in farthest Africa,

who filled a grove of cherry trees with tears, then
vanished into the grove. He hides behind trees.

That’s death for you. Grief is a cherry grove.
Don’t be born at all. My friend is on fast-forward now

to reach the scene where they erase her childlessness.
She knows she hid that kid somewhere inside of her,

but where? We know nothing else except by learning:
not walking, not eating. Only to cry comes naturally.

~

From Natural History (2005)

Another variation on the title/riddle poem - here the title poses a question, for which the final lines provide an oblique answer. I think the opening and closing of this poem are wonderfully pitched, with a slow pacing reflecting the layers of honey, the sense of inevitability of the tragic blanket of accruing experience. I'm currently suffering from the slow, honey-like congestion (nasal and mental) of a cold, and need to be getting under covers myself - so I'll have to leave it at that.

(More on Dan Chiasson: http://www.randomhouse.com/author/results.pperl?authorid=67498)

James Merrill, "b o d y"

2006-12-18T03:06:00.000-04:00

Look closely at the letters. Can you see,
entering (stage right), then floating full,
then heading off—so soon—
how like a little kohl-rimmed moon
o plots her course from b to d

—as y, unanswered, knocks at the stage door?
Looked at too long, words fail,
phase out. Ask, now that body shines
no longer, by what light you learn these lines
and what the b and d stood for.

~

From A Scattering of Salts (1995)

Today's poem is a sort of double-layered riddle poem. On one level it is a dramatization of the positioning and shape of the letters in its title, "b o d y". On another, it is a meditation on human life - the span from b birth to d death - and the body's decay during that time. Merrill (1926-1995) was very much occupied with this subject at the time of writing this, his final collection, as he was ailing due to the AIDS virus. The meanings of "o" and "y" remain enigmatic - in parallel with birth and death, they might suggest old age and youth, but that does not seem to fit the use in the poem. "Y", at least, seems to be in part a suggestion of the question "why?" - "unanswered", which lies beyond d/death. If anyone else has ideas of what these might signify, please share.

(More on Merrill here: www.poets.org/jmerr/)

John Ashbery, "Paradoxes and Oxymorons"

2006-12-17T13:24:00.000-04:00

This poem is concerned with language on a very plain level.
Look at it talking to you. You look out a window
Or pretend to fidget. You have it but you don't have it.
You miss it, it misses you. You miss each other.

The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot.
What's a plain level? It is that and other things,
Bringing a system of them into play. Play?
Well, actually, yes, but I consider play to be

A deeper outside thing, a dreamed role-pattern,
As in the division of grace these long August days
Without proof. Open-ended. And before you know
It gets lost in the steam and chatter of typewriters.

It has been played once more. I think you exist only
To tease me into doing it, on your level, and then you aren't there
Or have adopted a different attitude. And the poem
Has set me softly down beside you. The poem is you.

~

From Shadow Train (1981)

This poem was considered for both the ars poetica and title weeks, but it didn't quite fit for either. If (and, most likely, when) I do a "meta" or postmodern week (though a lot of the poetry I've been picking already has been about poetry to one degree or anotherm due to this being, you know, a blog about poetry) it would be in there. But it's here now, so, um rejoice! I don't know Ashbery's work that well, but he is renowned as kind of the father of contemporary poetry in the meta/pomo vein (such that quite a bit of contemporary stuff is derided as being inferior imitations of Ashbery [b. 1927]). But leaving contemporary poetic politics aside, his work is quite interesting for its play with lyric conventions. Here, he toys with the common address of a 'you' assumed to be a real person existing external from the poem (especially a person in some romantic relation to the speaker). The poem also questions whether the 'plain level' of such conventional, 'transparent' language. Instead, Ashbery is in favor of 'play', which is not to be taken as something trivial, but as a serious interrogation of our naive assumptions about the world, and so is "A deeper outside thing". The poem returns in the end to a conventional lyric movement, but where the content of its gestures continues to evade our expectations of poetic meaning. The combination of familiarity and strangeness makes the poem both appealing and challenging, helping and pushing the reader to venture beyond his former patterns of thought.

(Read more on John Ashbery: http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/238
http://www.harpercollins.com/authors/15135/John_Ashbery/index.aspx?authorID=15135)

Conor O'Callaghan, from "'Hello'"

2006-12-17T12:37:00.000-04:00

1 Antediluvian

Those where the days
when Gladstone and Disraeli
were locked on the hustings,
and the Pianola
was all the rage,
and Wild Bill Hickock
was outdrawing the gallows,
and impressions of Mr Longfellow's
The Song of Hiawatha
were selling like hot cakes,
and a fellow's cell number
was a different affair.

Up until that point
our shipshape antecedents
graded the mornings,
the evenings, the afternoons,
'good' heedless of the day
in question, the season,
and were kind enough
to say so, hail or snow,
if only in herringbone tweeds,
in furs, as a matter
of courtesy or course,
if only in passing.

2 It's for You

Blame the blower,
since some kind of formula
for an opening exchange
had to be agreed upon
to get the ball rolling.
And not only for the ears
of polite society,
its upper echelons,
but to trip as readily
from the lips of gigolos
and babes and heathens
and saints and regular Joes.
So, think of the host
of suggested possibilities
grown yellow around the gills
that were dusted down
and duly given the elbow,
that might just as well
have been Hebrew
to the likes of you and me.
Then, think of the 'hillo'
Hamlet shares
with Horatio,
and you're in the general area.
Think of the huntsmaster,
think of the hounds
and a hare's breath,
and you're there or thereabouts.
Think of the troubadour 'hola',
the Huguenot 'salut',
and you're in the same ballpark.
Think of yola as if barked
by the hoodlums of Hanley,
the zealots of Sacramento,
and you're on the right track.
And think also
of Tristram Shandy's "Hollo! Ho!—
the whole world's asleep!—
bring out the horses—',
and you're getting warmer.

4 And the Winner Is...

The finale
failed to draw
enough hoopla
or more-than-usual hullabaloo
to overshadow,
say, the annual grudge match
of Eton and Harrow.
What would follow
the trawl high and low
as good as amounted
to a classless straw poll
whereby it feel to,
laughably, the hillfolk,
the phoneless hoi polloi,
to swallow a winner.
And the word? Oh, you know...
A brace of syllables,
phatic and simple,
like the mating call
of your average hoopoe,
although originally
aspirated as if with an ah
that wasn't just plummy
but ever so.
Imagine inasmuch
as imagination will allow
something as holy
and wholly empty
as any halo,
a halfway house between
a hiccup and a holler,
an alloy
of the heavy-hearted
'halloo, halloo'
Poor Tom howls at the Fool
and an old-fashioned
Honolulu aloha,
a domesticated version
of the hallowed Hallelujah,
only secular and ringing hollow.

~

From Fiction (2005)

This week's theme: Leftovers Round-up, or, Titles the Second. I'm traveling a bit, and won't have access to even the decimated current version of my library, so rather than pick a theme that would require such resources, I thought I'd start a precedent of ending this month at TPQ with a hodge-podge week of poems considered for previous weeks but which, for whatever reason, didn't make the cut. This time, they mostly come from last week's title theme - for the other weeks I had alternative poems by the same poets which I had considered using, but I've decided that I won't repeat a poet within four weeks, so that excluded those.
A couple months ago I went to a reading at NYU by Conor O'Callaghan and his wife Vona Groarke, and it was today's poem that won me over. I love the acrobatic rhyming circling around the titular 'hello' - O'Callaghan said that the H section of his dictionary was well-thumbed by the end of working on it. It could also fit in the first week's category, being a study on one of our most daily words, re-enchanting it through imaginative attention to its anthropological backstory, and by being clever good fun. If you have access to a library or bookstore that would stock such things (unlikely, unfortunately) I highly recommend checking out the rest of the eight sections.

(More on Conor O'Callaghan: http://www.bloomsbury.com/authors/microsite.asp?id=707§ion=1
http://www.wfu.edu/wfupress/catalog/ocallaghan-conor.html
http://www.gallerypress.ie/Authors/COcallaghan/cocallagh.html
three poems: http://www.poems.com/threeoca.htm)

Patrick Kavanagh, "Epic"

2006-12-15T01:18:00.000-04:00

I have lived in important places, times
When great events were decided: who owned
That half a rood of rock, a no-man's land
Surrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims.
I heard the Duffys shouting 'Damn your soul'
And old McCabe, stripped to the waist, seen
Step the plot defying blue cast-steel –
'Here is the march along these iron stones'.
That was the year of the Munich bother. Which
Was most important? I inclined
To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin
Till Homer's ghost came whispering to my mind.
He said: I made the Iliad from such
A local row. Gods make their own importance.

~

From Come Dance with Kitty Stobling and Other Poems (1960)

Once again, today's poem serves as a counterpoint to yesterday's. Here the catapulting, millenia-spanning title is half ironic, half self-justifying; another juxtaposition of Northern Ireland and the Trojan War, "Epic" also throws in World War II for good measure. Rather than deem the similarities implicit, however, the poem questions the significance of any of the events, as part of Kavanagh's examination of the local vs. the universal, his interest in the parish as a microcosm for the world. While the issue of subjectivity versus true import remains in the air, the place of art is asserted as authoritative - just like titling a mere fourteen-line sonnet "Epic".

(More about Patrick Kavanagh [1904-1967]: http://www.nortonpoets.com/kavanaghp.htm
http://www.irishwriters-online.com/patrickkavanagh.html)

Michael Longley, "Ceasefire"

2006-12-14T00:39:00.000-04:00

I
Put in mind of his own father and moved to tears
Achilles took him by the hand and pushed the old king
Gently away, but Priam curled up at his feet and
Wept with him until their sadness filled the buidling.

II
Taking Hector's corpse into his own hands Achilles
Made sure it was washed and, for the old king's sake,
Laid out in uniform, ready for Priam to carry
Wrapped like a present home to Troy at daybreak.

III
When they had eaten together, it pleased them both
To stare at each other's beauty as lovers might,
Achilles built like a god, Priam good-looking still
And full of conversation, who earlier had sighed:

IV
'I get down on my knees and do what must be done
And kiss Achilles' hand, the killer of my son.'

[Hear Longley read this poem: http://www.poetryarchive.co.uk/poetryarchive/singlePoem.do?poemId=3160]

~

From The Ghost Orchid (1995)

This poem illustrates another alternative for the relation between title and poem. Unlike the poems earlier in the week, this one has no riddling quality - as Longley (b. 1939) describes it, it is his rendering of certain lyrically intense moments plucked from the narrative of Homer's Iliad. Though the moments are spaced out and in a different order in the original, the reader is not confused as to the situation, provided a minimal familiarity with the events of the Trojan War (during which the Greek Achilles killed the Trojan Hector, beloved son of Priam, King of Troy).
The title, however, catapults these events - of parley, empathy, respect, admiration, and concession - into a contemporary context. Longley wrote the poem in 1994, during rumours of a possible ceasefire in Northern Ireland, and it was published in The Irish Times just days after such a ceasefire was announced. The poem seems to urge conciliation and empathy, the sense that one's enemies' past tragedies are the same as one's own. It tactfully condemns neither side - indeed, it shows reverence towards the figures, though perhaps also implicating the sense of glory and idealization of the warrior which feeds into violence. It even pays witness to a certain grudging attitude, though in so doing it valorizes Priam's courage to "do what must be done", an act of responsibility to one's kin, which is met with equal humanity; the final couplet is resolutely noble. The temporal jump between the poem's and title's two references - a span of millenia - suggests both the timeless and timely potential of poetry.

(More about Michael Longley, including audio:
http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoet.do?poetId=3150
http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth199)

Medbh McGuckian, "On Her Second Birthday"

2006-12-13T00:05:00.000-04:00

for Emer Mary Charlotte Rose

In the beginning I was no more
Than a rising and falling mist
You could see through without seeing.

A flame burnt up the paper
On which my gold was written,
The wind like a soul
Seeking to be born
Carried off half
Of what I was able to say.

It seems as though
To explain the shape of the world
We must fall apart,
Throw ourselves upon the world,
Slip away from ourselves
Through the world's inner road,
Whose atoms make us weary.

Suddenly ever more lost
Between the trees
I saw the edge of the forest
Which had no end,
Which I came dangerously close
To accepting for my life,

And followed with my eye a shadow
Floating from hotizon to horizon
Which I mistook for my own.
It grew greater while I grew less,
Gliding like a world, a tapestry
One looks at from the back.

The more it changed
The more it changed me into itself,
Till I regarded it as more real
Than all else, more ardent
Than love. Higher than the air
Of a dream,
A field in which I ripened
From an unmoving, continually nascent
Light into pure light.

My contours can still
Just be made out, in the areas of fragrance
Of its power over me.
A slight tremor betrays
The imperfection of the union
In its first surface.

But I flow outwards till I am something
Belonging to it and flower again
More perfectly everywhere present in it.
It believes in me,
It cannot do without me,
I know its name:
One day it will pass my mind into its body.

~

From Marconi's Cottage (1991)

In contrast to yesterday, today's poem's title announces the solution to its riddle - without it, one might suspect this was a pregnancy poem, but it would be hard to be certain, given McGuckian's fiercely challenging metaphors. That accessibility makes this among the better introductions to McGuckian (b. 1950), whose strange syntax and imagery demands and seduces an agility and plasticity of readerly response that goes far beyond more mainstream lyric practice. Whereas Plath's metaphors were striking for their application - easily intelligible, though they challenged conventional positive views of motherhood - the entire universe of McGuckian's poetry seems, in one way, alien to the prose of everyday life. But though it is strange, it is also an evocatively convincing articulation of the metaphysical experience of pregnancy and motherhood. The first several stanzas suggest an obscure, as-yet-unrealized potential being formed, the imagery echoing gestation, the womb, the accreting fetus, the interdependent connection building towards schism. The poem also expresses the mother's sense of how her life has changed, her sense of investment in and dedication to the life of her daughter, the shift of the center to that other life. This goes beyond just sentiment to a metaphysical sense of identification with that other life, a sense of living through it, in a dual selfhood, the dependency of the child being at the same time a dependency of the mother, which will culminate in transfer: "One day it will pass my mind into its body."

(More about Medbh McGuckian: http://www.gallerypress.com/Authors/Mmcguckian/mmcguck.html
http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth02D9P274512627448
http://www.wfu.edu/wfupress/catalog/mcguckian-medbh.html)

Sylvia Plath, "Metaphors"

2006-12-12T01:12:00.000-04:00

I'm a riddle in nine syllables,
An elephant, a ponderous house,
A melon strolling on two tendrils.
O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!
This loaf's big with its yeasty rising.
Money's new-minted in this fat purse.
I'm a means, a stage, a cow in calf.
I've eaten a bag of green apples,
Boarded the train there's no getting off.

~

From The Colossus (1960)

This poem moves us into the riddle territory of this week's theme; in fact, its title does not provide a clue so much point to the fact that its various images take the place of something else. The solution to the riddle is 'a pregnant woman' - the metaphors being a mix of inventive images and figures 'pregnant' with meaning. In case you hadn't noticed, the first line refers to the number of syllables (9) in each of the poem's nine lines, reflecting the nine months of pregnancy. Not also other subtle (or not so subtle) hints - a house is something that a person lives in (like a womb); the red fruit is also like the womb; the fifth line's coy allusion to having 'a bun in the oven'. While some of this cleverness is slightly cloying, that effect reinforces the muted grotesquerie of many of the images, as the pregnancy is almost something monstrous, as it is also mixed with the potential for sickness and rotting ("a bag of green apples") and an undercurrent of doom ("the train there's no getting off").
At the same time, the title suggests another level, playing off the traditional trope of comparing writing and giving birth. Metaphors are indeed a way of giving birth to new meaning; and if it's not going to far, I'd like to point out the conceptual similarity, the root "meta" meaning "beyond", and that a metaphor involves two parts, the imaginative potential of one being dependent on the concreteness of the other.
Plath's poems often draw upon the dark, traumatic, violent, even sado-masochistic - so it seems appropriate that her metaphoric pregnancy of creation would be conceived as something gortesque, sinister, perhaps uncontrollable.

(More about Sylvia Plath [1932-1963], including a few additional poems: www.poets.org/splat/)

Ted Hughes, "The Thought-Fox"

2006-12-11T01:31:00.000-04:00

I imagine this midnight moment's forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock's loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.

Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:

Cold, delicately as the dark snow
A fox's nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now

Sets neat prints into the snow
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come

Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business

Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox,
It enters the dark hole of the head.
The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
The page is printed.

~

From The Hawk in the Rain (1957)

This week's theme: titles. That is, poems whose titles play a particularly prominent role, where the lack of the title would leave the reader comparatively adrift. Some may be riddle poems, where the title is necessary for understanding. In others, such as "The Thought-Fox", it may be that the poem is easy enough to follow, but where the title lends an achieved clarity to the whole meaning - sums it up. Or it may be that a title, by implication, catapults a poem from one context to another.
"The Thought-Fox" carries us forward from last week's theme, the ars poetica, as in the conclusion it is made clear that the poem narrates the imaginative experience of its own composition. As such, it might also bear comparison with the Frank O'Hara poem of the first week, both being poems of the present tense, though in highly contrasting voices.
Hughes' poem is remarkable for the union of the ideal (imagination, "Thought", poetry) and the real in the figure of "The Thought-Fox" - the title's very hyphenation a sign of its hybridity. The description of the appearance of the thought/fox, from something dark and obscure to something vivid, immediate, confrontational, is deftly controlled, Hughes pacing the revelation ("that now / And again now, and now, and now") and at the same time keeping the reader's attention rapt with sensory details ("a lame / Shadow lags by stump"). The final stanza is a superb climax and denoument: the vivid sense-words of the first line are reinforced by the clustering of stresses and consonants: "sudden sharp hot stink of fox" - the fox's sudden, physical appearance - which is immediately inscribed in a mental, but no less striking, realm - "the dark hole of the head." The final two lines then take a step back, revealing the narrative to have been a vision, during which time nothing in the "real" world happened, except for the writing of the poem.
The term "cinematic" is sometimes used to describe such effects. Indeed, Hughes controls our vision the same way a director/cinematographer controls our gaze through careful selection of shots. But we should be wary of implying that poetry is imitating film, when tropes similar to a pan or zoom or close-up or establishing shot have been part of poetic form for millenia.

(More about Ted Hughes [1930-1998]: www.poets.org/thugh/
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Hughes)

Sinéad Morrissey, "Reading the Greats"

2006-12-08T01:20:00.000-04:00

Is it for their failures that I love them?
Ignoring the regulation of Selected Poems,
with everything in that should be in —
all belted & buttoned & shining —
I opt instead for omnivorous Completes.
For their froth. Their spite. For avoidable mistakes:
Larkin on Empire, say, or Plath on Aunts.

The thrill of when they dip, trip up, run out
of things to write about before they start,
is the consolation of watching
a seascape suddenly drained and stinking
of flies & fishheads & bladderwrack.
And the tide impossibly distant. And no way back.
Yes, I love them for that.

~

From The State of the Prisons (2005)

To end this week considering the nature of poetry, its purpose, and the proper role of the poet, something a little lighter to keep things in perspective. Sinéad Morrissey (b. 1972) is an excellent poet from Norther Ireland who I got to see read and meet while in Belfast (she has been associated with the Queen's English department for a few years now). Though I would not class this as one of her exemplary poems, it does express a feeling I share, of the 'rewards' of reading Complete Works rather than Selected volumes - the chance to see that even 'the greats' are at times not-so-great. For those who write, it's encouragement to keep trying; for others as well, I think, a reminder that are heroes are really normal people, just like us, who sometimes fall short of the mark, just like us, and that, contrapositively, we are capable of reaching great heights, just like them. Whether in success or failure, poetry is a testament to our shared humanity - and hopefully inspiring, for all that.

(More about Sinéad Morrissey: http://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?owner_id=511)

Seamus Heaney, "Digging"

2006-12-07T00:13:00.000-04:00

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner's bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I've no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.

~

From Death of a Naturalist (1966)

This poem mines a similar vein to yesterday's - that of the poet's personal conception of his own poetic activity, with implications of how that poet and activity are related to society. Throughout his work, Seamus Heaney (b. 1939) exhibits an interest in the characteristic (Northern) Irish obsessions with "rootedness", lineage, and tradition in a general sense. Here these common threads are particularized using Heaney's own rural experience, made vivid by his evocation of the sense and deft crafting of sound - "the squelch and slap / Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge / Through living roots awaken in my head." As with Neruda, a history of political oppression and unrest lurks behind the poem (though it was written before the beginning of the late-twentieth-century Troubles in 1969), as well as a question of value of poetry compared to the productive labor of farm work - these matters of course highlighted in the bookending first and last stanzas. In [his own] defense {of poetry}, the poet suggests it as a force of connection with his lineage and tradition, as in other poems in the next couple collections he will "dig up" history. A more critical reading, however, might begin by noticing the acknowledgment of the break, the sense that Heaney is not following in his fathers' work, that for all the "rootedness" of the poem's imagery, the roots in the penultimate stanza are cut. The gender valence of the poem also begs mention - not just the patrilineal conception of lineage and tradition, but phallic and sexual nature of the pen/gun/shovel, and the question of whether such activity may be a violence upon the land.
These readings certainly complicate the assured authority of the voice and the position professed. What the final judgment is - of the poem's "meaning", what we ought to think of it, or what we ought to think of Heaney for writing it - I can't tell you. I guess reading poetry is also a bit like digging - we uncover many layers in our work, but each only tells part of the story of the land and what might grow from it.

(More about Seamus Heaney:
www.poets.org/shean/
http://www.faber.co.uk/author_detail.html?auid=1996
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1995/heaney-bio.html
http://www.ibiblio.org/ipa/heaney.php
http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoet.do?poetId=1392 - audio)

Pablo Neruda, "Deber del Poeta" / "The Poet's Obligation"

2006-12-06T04:01:00.000-04:00

A quien no escucha el mar en este viernes
por la mañana, quien adentro de algo,
casa, oficina, fábrica or mujer,
o calle o mina o seco calabozo:
a éste yo acudo y sin hablar ni ver
leego y abro la puerta del encierro
y un sin fin se oye vago en la insistencia,
un largo trueno roto se encadena
al peso del planeta y de la espuma,
surgen los ríos roncos del océano,
vibra veloz en su rosal la estrella
y el mar palpita, muere y continúa.

Así por el destino conducido
debo sin tregua oír y conservar
el lamento marino en mi conciencia,
debo sentir el golpe de agua dura
y recogerlo en una taza eterna
para que donde esté el encarcelado,
donde sufra el castigo del otoño
yo esté presente con una ola errante,
yo circule a través de las ventanas
y al oírme levante la mirada
diciendo: cómo me acercaré al océano?
Y yo transmitiré de la ola,
un quebranto de espuma y arenales,
un susurro de sal que se retira,
el grito gris del ave de la costa.

Y así, por mí, la libertad y el mar
responderán al corazón oscuro.

/

To whoever is not listening to the sea
this Friday morning, to whoever is cooped up
in house or office, factory or woman
or street or mine or dry prison cell,
to him I come, and without speaking or looking
I arrive and open the door of his prison,
and a vibration starts up, vague and insistent,
a long rumble of thunder adds itself
to the weight of the planet and the foam,
the groaning rivers of the ocean rise,
the star vibrates quickly in its corona
and the sea beats, dies, and goes on beating.

So, drawn on by my destiny,
I ceaselessly must listen to and keep
the sea's lamenting in my consciousness,
I must feel the crash of the hard water
and gather it up in a perpetual cup
so that, wherever those in prison may be,
wherever they suffer the sentence of the autumn,
I may be present with an errant wave,
I may move in and out of windows,
and hearing me, eyes may lift themselves,
asking "How can I reach the sea?"
And I will pass to them, saying nothing,
the starry echoes of the wave,
a breaking up of foam and quicksand,
a rustling of salt withdrawing itself,
the grey cry of seabirds on the coast.

So, through me, freedom and the sea
will call in answer to the shrouded heart.

(Translation by Alastair Reid)

~

From Plenos Poderes / Fully Empowered (1962)

Today we move part way from a critical and metaphysical consideration of poetry to something more social and personal. Wallace Stevens' ideas verge in a way on solipsism - not that he would think our mental experience is all there is of reality, but perhaps that it is all there is of my or your reality anyway. Neruda (1904-1973) was staunchly opposed to such a position, at least in terms of a theory of poetry and the role of the poet. During large portions of his career, Neruda was a fiercely political poet, writing entire books about the Spanish Civil War, the colonization of South America, and the struggles of Communism ... he was even a senator and diplomat for his native Chile. But Neruda was also a very personal lyric poet - he is perhaps best known for his first book Veinte Poemas de Amor y un Canción Desesperada / Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair and for his many odes to the simple, "elemental" things in life, such as an artichoke, a pair of socks, a lemon, or a suit.
I selected "The Poet's Obligation" as a mid-point between these two relations to poetry. On the one hand, the sense of social responsibility and a public role for poetry - as expounded in poems such as "The Invisible Man" - is evident in the titular "Obligation" or 'duty', and in the references to work - the office and factory - as well as imprisonment. Poetry is depicted as being a liberating force - but in this case that liberation is not strictly political, but more metaphysical, being symbolized as a reconnection with the elements.
One the other hand, this is not a discussion of poetry in the abstract, but of the poet's relationship with it - something explored more explicitly in poems such as "Poetry" and "Bread-Poetry" - poetry is a mode of communication that mediates between him, his experience, and the world, as well as between him and society, and between society and the world. But throughout there is the clear presence of the personal "I" of the poet, so that in the final it is the poet himself, and only implicitly poetry, which mediates between "freedom and the sea" and "the shrouded heart."
Though the stance taken here may seem authoritative, to the point that Neruda can come off as arrogant, he struggled with the issue of the poet's obligation throughout his life. His Communist impulses made this all the worse - or, perhaps, it was his sense of duty that disposed him towards Communism - as he had trouble reconciling poetry with the value of physical/industrial labor or political action. In one poem (I do not have it to hand at the moment) he questions whether his life would have be to more purpose had he made just one broom rather than his many hundreds of poems.

(More about Pablo Neruda:
www.poets.org/pneru/
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1971/neruda-bio.html)

Wallace Stevens, from "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven"

2006-12-05T04:01:00.000-04:00

XII

The poem is the cry of its occasion,
Part of the res itself and not about it.
The poet speaks the poem as it is,

Not as it was: part of the reverberation
Of a windy night as it is, when the marble statues
Are like newspapers blown by the wind. He speaks

By sight and insight as they are. There is no
Tomorrow for him. The wind will have passed by,
The statues will have gone back to be things about.

The mobile and immobile flickering
In the area between is and was are leaves,
Leaves burnished in autumnal burnished trees

And leaves in whirlings in the gutters, whirlings
Around and away, resembiling the presence of thought
Resembling the presences of thoughts, as if,

In the end, in the whole psychology, the self,
the town, the weather, in a casual litter,
Together, said words of the world are the life of the world.

...

XXVIII

If it should be true that reality exists
In the mind: the tin plate, the loaf of bread on it,
The long-bladed knife, the little to drink and her

Misericordia, it follows that
Real and unreal are two in one: New Haven
Before and after one arrives or, say,

Bergamo on a postcard, Rome after dark,
Sweden described, Salzburg with shaded eyes
Or Paris in conversation at a café.

This endlessly elaborating poem
Displays the theory of poetry,
As the life of poetry. A more severe,

More harassing master would extemporize
Subtler, more urgent proof that the theory
Of poetry is the theory of life,

As it is, in the intricate evasions of as,
In things seen and unseen, created from nothingness,
The heavens, the hells, the worlds, the longed-for lands.

~

From The Auroras of Autumn (1950)

One could hardly talk about the theme of ars poetica without quoting Wallace Stevens (1879-1955). Arguably, the entirety of Stevens' writing is about poetry itself - or, more widely, about the relationship between the imagination and reality. I could have picked any of a hundred poems from his collected works, as you can tell simply from the titles of some of the other major contenders: "The Idea of Order at Key West", "Poetry is a Destructive Force", "The Poems of Our Climate", "Of Modern Poetry", "Men Made Out of Words", "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction", "The Solitude of Cataracts", "The Ultimate Poem Is Abstract", "A Primitive like an Orb", "The Plain Sense of Things", "The Planet on the Table", "Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself" etc. etc. etc. But I chose these sections because his later, meditative mode is often undervalued, and certainly less anthologized than his earlier works.
This later moder finds Stevens pursuing the style and form of, as he calls it in "Of Modern Poetry", "The poem of the act of the mind." Not only is the poem not paraphrasable, but it is also not seperable from the experiences of composition - this is a poetry of process, the very process of the mind encountering "reality," which is to say all that we can know: "Part of the res itself and not about it," "words of the world are the life of the world." Perception, rather than being unreal, is reality for Stevens: "reality exists / In the mind ... Real and unreal are two in one". Poetry, then, being perception/imagination/the mind in process, is not an imitation of reality, but is real experience itself: "the theory / Of poetry is the theory of life, // As it is, in the intricate evasions of as, / In things seen and unseen, created from nothingness, / The heavens, the hells, the worlds, the longed-for lands"—not mere physical "reality," but life in its lived fullness.

(More about Wallace Stevens, including audio: www.poets.org/wstev/)

Archibald MacLeish, "Ars Poetica"

2006-12-04T04:01:00.000-04:00

A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit,

Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb,

Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown—

A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds.

*

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs,

Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,

Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,
Memory by memory the mind—

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs.

*

A poem should be equal to:
Not true.

For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf.

For love
the leaning grasses and two lights above the sea—

A poem should not mean
But be.

~

This poem takes its Latin title from a treatise by the poet Horace, and gives us our theme for the week: "The art of poetry." It seemed appropriate that, before we got going in earnest reading poems, we take a look at the whole business of what a poem is and what it's for.
MacLeish's poem, though purporting to state directly what a poem should be, in fact takes upon itself a demonstration of the indirect means that are central to the mode of poetry; as Robert Frost put it, "All the fun's in how you say a thing." The thesis here is given in the pithy, memorable final stanza: "A poem should not mean / But be." To be textbook about it, MacLeish (1892-1982) is asserting the proverbial inequality between a poem and a paraphrase of its content - beyond that, there's the connotation of a metaphysical distinction between language that is merely a tool for conveying some message or accomplishing some end, and a special arrangment of language that has some being and life of its own, as Heidegger might have it. One way of thinking about it might be as the difference between, say, the icon of an orange in a supermarket (a sign telling you "oranges here") and an impressive painting of an orange (which makes you really attend to the nature of an orange) - or even, perhaps, an orange itself. A poem is a thing rich in qualities deserving of attention and appreciation, not a mere expression of "meaning."
The first section cleverly uses paradox to get at this point, casting the poem as "mute", "dumb", and even "wordless" to mitigate the significance of statement. Instead, it suggests the significance of form, aligning the poem with "palpable" objects and also motion: "the flight of birds." The section section takes the emphasis on form to the next level, suspending the normal syntax of statement and using repetition to create stasis. The final section suggests the metaphorical way of meaning through imagery as well as form; the poem does not mean x by statement y, is not "equal to", but works by substitution of one thing for another thing; thus, I read those middle couplets as glosses of symbols, whose significance is expansive, multiple, and manifest, as opposed to the denotational signs of simple words.
These matters are at the heart of the challenges and joys of reading poetry. Much teaching of poetry, along with a good bit of human nature, makes us seek for a bottom line: 'what does it mean.' But the meaning, the content, is inseperable from the form, so we must attend to the way the thing is said. Which requires a great deal of attention, which is difficult. But this is also the reason why poetry is so powerful, why it can be so rewarding. A poem is not a puzzle whose only pleasure is the picture that appears when all the pieces fall in place; it is more like a garden, full of beauty and stimulation at all levels, from the dew on a petal to the graceful line of an entire vista - and it is right that one attend to the details around one before trying to take in the entire expanse. A poem should be appreciated not just for what it might mean, but for all it can be.

(More about Archibald MacLeish: www.poets.org/amacl)

Richard Wilbur, "The Beautiful Changes"

2006-12-01T22:27:00.000-04:00

One wading a Fall meadow finds on all sides
The Queen Anne's Lace lying like lilies
On water; it glides
So from the walker, it turns
Dry grass to a lake, as the slightest shade of you
Valleys my mind in fabulous blue Lucernes.

The beautiful changes as the forest is changed
By a chameleon's tuning his skin to it;
As a mantis, arranged
On a green leaf, grows
Into it, makes the leaf leafier, and proves
Any greenness is deeper than anyone knows.

Your hands hold roses always in a way that says
They are not only yours; the beautiful changes
In such kind ways,
Wishing ever to sunder
Things and things' selves for a second finding, to lose
For a moment all that it touches back to wonder.

~

From: The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems (1947)

To conclude the week, this delicate poem by the eminent Richard Wilbur (b. March 1 - we share the same birthday! - 1921), whose work has been criticized by some (I believe unfairly) for being too positive, as well as too formally deft. Last year I wrote an essay partly on Wilbur's (and, in comparison, Wallace Stevens') sense of the vitality of imaginative transformation. This may serve as a segue into next week's theme: the Ars Poetica, or a poem dealing with the art and purpose of poetry (Wilbur's own extended meditation on the subject, the masterpiece "Lying", may make an appearance ... we'll see!).
In this poem the composition subtly reinforces the sense of transformation - as Blake wrote, "The eye altering, alters all" - from the "turns" of the line-breaks in the first stanza, to the unconventional use of select nouns and verbs throughout: "the slightest shade of you / Valleys my mind", "a mantis, arranged / On a green leaf", and, of course, "The beatiful changes". Though Wilbur would generally not be taken to use modernist defamiliarization, his work and this poem perhaps reveal the wide applicability of such notions as that expressed by Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky: "Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life, it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony." For Wilbur, such "a second finding" is one of "wonder." Such wonder is a transcendent potential, always present in everyday "things" ... "The beautiful" that changes - when we engage with the world, or when we read poetry - is at once our perception and ourselves.

(More about Richard Wilbur, including audio: www.poets.org/rwilb/)
(More poems by Richard Wilbur: http://www.ibiblio.org/ipa/wilbur.php)

Louis MacNeice, "Train to Dublin"

2006-11-30T23:21:00.000-04:00

Our half-thought thoughts divide in sifted wisps
Against the basic facts repatterned without pause,
I can no more gather my mind up in my fist
Than the shadow of the smoke of this train upon the grass -
This is the way that animals' lives pass.

The train's rhythm never relents, the telephone posts
Go striding backwards like the legs of time to where
In a Georgian house you turn at the carpet's edge
Turning a sentence while, outside my window here,
The smoke makes broken queries in the air.

The train keeps moving and the rain holds off,
I count the buttons on the seat, I hear a shell
Held hollow to the ear, the mere
Reiteration of integers, the bell
That tolls and tolls, the monotony of fear.

At times we are doctrinaire, at times we are frivolous,
Plastering over the cracks, a gesture making good,
But the strength of us does not come out of us.
It is we, I think, are the idols and it is God
Has set us up as men who are painted wood,

And the trains carry us about. But not consistently so,
For during a tiny portion of our lives we are not in trains,
The idol living for a moment, not muscle-bound
But walking freely through the slanting rain,
Its ankles wet, its grimace relaxed again.

All over the world people are toasting the King,
Red lozenges of light as each one lifts his glass,
But I will not give you any idol or idea, creed or king,
I give you the incidental things which pass
Outward through space exactly as each was.

I give you the disproportion between labour spent
And joy at random; the laughter of the Galway sea
Juggling with spars and bones irresponsibly,
I give you the toy Liffey and the vast gulls,
I give you fuchsia hedges and whitewashed walls.

I give you the smell of Norman stone, the squelch
Of bog beneath your boots, the red bog-grass,
The vivid chequer of the Antrim hills, the trough of dark
Golden water for the cart-horses, the brass
Belt of serene sun upon the lough.

And I give you the faces, not the permanent masks,
But the faces balanced in the toppling wave -
His glint of joy in cunning as the farmer asks
Twenty per cent too much, or a girl's, forgetting to be suave,
A tiro choosing stuffs, preferring mauve.

And I give you the sea and yet again the sea's
Tumultuous marble,
With Thor's thunder or taking his ease akimbo,
Lumbering torso, but finger-tips a marvel
Of surgeon's accuracy.

I would like to give you more but I cannot hold
This stuff within my hands and the train goes on;
I know that there are further syntheses to which,
As you have perhaps, people at last attain
And find that they are rich and breathing gold.

~

From: Poems (1935)

Thursday finds us getting rather deep into the thick of things. "Train to Dublin" meditates on all the themes that we have found explored in the week so far - O'Hara's antipathy towards stasis and enthusiastic search for a mode of art adequate for the vibrancy of the passing now, Muldoon's energetic naming of things, ranging among the cosmopolitan variety of the modern everyday, and Levine's confrontation and acceptance of the darker side of life, the challenges and frustrations that are as essential as joy, and the melancholic vitality of the insatiability of our hunger for life.
I find many of the lines of this poem simply exquisite. There's the interplay of the rhythms, consonant repetitions, and syntax in the opening stanzas dealing with the train. There's the passivity and artifice of the idols in the train in contrast to "living for a moment, not muscle-bound / But walking freely through the slanting rain, / Its ankles wet, its grimace relaxed again." Then there's the generosity of the voice in the repeated "I give you"'s of the second half of the poem, reminiscent of Levine's "Eat" in the ambivalence that carries through. "And I give you the sea and yet again the sea's / Tumultuous marble" is for me one of the finest things anyone has ever written about the ocean - it has become the gloss or kind of mantra in my own life, often recited to myself when thinking of or visiting the sea. And, finally, the final stanza - how perfectly it expresses the in a meditative mode the manic lust for life. The aching desire to experience everything in the entire world, and the sincere gratitude, even in the failure to do so, for that portion we have experienced.

(More about Louis MacNeice [1907-1963]: www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/755)

Philip Levine, "The Simple Truth"

2006-11-29T01:12:00.000-04:00

I bought a dollar and a half's worth of small red potatoes,
took them home, boiled them in their jackets
and ate them for dinner with a little butter and salt.
Then I walked through the dried fields
on the edge of town. In middle June the light
hung on in the dark furrows at my feet,
and in the mountain oaks overhead the birds
were gathering for the night, the jays and mockers
squawking back and forth, the finches still darting
into the dusty light. The woman who sold me
the potatoes was from Poland; she was someone
out of my childhood in a pink spangled sweater and sunglasses
praising the perfection of all her fruits and vegetables
at the road-side stand and urging me to taste
even the pale, raw sweet corn trucked all the way,
she swore, from New Jersey. "Eat," she said,
"even if you don't I'll say you did."
Some things
you know all your life. They are so simple and true
they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme,
they must be laid on the table beside the salt shaker,
the glass of water, the absence of light gathering
in the shadows of picture frames, they must be
naked and alone, they must stand for themselves.
My friend Henri and I arrived at this together in 1965
before I went away, before he began to kill himself,
and the two of us to betray our love. Can you taste
what I'm saying? It is onions or potatoes, a pinch
of simple salt, the wealth of melting butter, it is obvious,
it stays in the back of your throat like a truth
you never uttered because the time was always wrong,
it stays there for the rest of your life, unspoken,
made of that dirt we call earth, the metal we call salt,
in a form we have no words for, and you live on it.

~

From: The Simple Truth (1994)

I'm afraid I had a hard time picking today's poem. I'd decided to extrapolate this week's theme from Monday's poem, without giving what would come afterwards any forethought; and, to make matters worse, I only have the small, Belfast portion of my library currently lodging with me (so you must also forgive a potential Irish bias in the weeks to come). I'd thought of what I wanted for Thursday and Friday, but it took a while to come to this poem. Also, because I haven't thought about it in a few years, I just found a copy on-line, and it's late, I don't have much in the way of considered commentary to provide, but here goes.
"The Simple Truth" offers a slightly darker, grittier approach to the vitality of the everyday. Beginning by savoring the simple things in life, there is an ominous undercurrent ("boiled them in their jackets", "dried fields", "dark furrows", etc.) of the difficulties that also attend our lives. Though it exalts the immediacy of sensory experience and of certain essential human concerns - food, love, truth, death - there is also a sense in the poem of such things being overwhelming, too much to be eaten raw, too raw to be assuaged through expression. To experience the world in all its naked immediacy is to face both these sides of life, that both choke and sustain us. Every day of our lives is a struggle to meet this experience, to be true to it, accepting and savoring its mix of sweetness and bitterness.

(More about Philip Levine [b. 1928], including audio: www.poets.org/plevi/)
(More poems by Philip Levine: http://www.ibiblio.org/ipa/levine.php)

Paul Muldoon, [Untitled]

2006-11-28T00:05:00.000-04:00

As we zoomed past Loyola and Tulane
I could think only of my nephew, Dillon,
born two days ago in Canada.
‘Let him,’ I heard, ‘let him be one ignited by the quaint

in this new quotidian: a mound
of coffee beans in the ‘Café du Monde’;
the New Orleans School of Cookery’s
okra-

monious gumbo; a dirigible of Paul Prudhomme
floating above the Superdome;
let the Prince of the Quotidian lead an alligator

along the banquette of Decatur
yet let him not, with Alejandro O’Reilly,
forget the cries of the bittern and the curlew.’

~

From: The Prince of the Quotidian (1994)

Continuing this first week's theme of embracing the vitality of the quotidian, this poem is an ode and mimetic invocation of cosmopolitan variety: our globalized marketplace, the ‘Café du Monde’. It comes from a collection titled The Prince of the Quotidian, which documents the one-month success of a New Year's Resolution to write a poem a day. It is not among his best poems (those will no doubt come eventually), but the eccentric, daring rhymes, along with the loose use of the sonnet form, is characteristic Muldoon (b. 1951). The vibrant language reflects the dazzling array of objects that are part of everyday modern life; t the same time, the poem does its best to fit that abundance into the order of the rhyme scheme. "Quotidian", though meaning 'everyday' and 'mundane,' in its polysyllabic latinate excellence reflects the world of objects at once common and exotic. The final couplet offers a turn, exhorting this international (Irish-Canadian) child born unto plenty not to forget his heritage (the bittern and curlew are birds that figure prominently in Irish literature) - in the same way, the poem itself has incorporated a world of references while remaining (marginally) faithful to the traditional sonnet form.

(Paul Muldoon homepage, with audio: http://www.paulmuldoon.net)

Frank O'Hara, "Having A Coke With You"

2006-11-27T00:01:00.000-04:00

is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne
or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona
partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian
partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt
partly because of the fluoresent orange tulips around the birches
partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary
it is hard to believe when I'm with you that there can be anything as still
as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it
in the warm New York 4 o'clock light we are drifting back and forth
between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles

and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint
you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them
I look
at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world
except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it's in the Frick
which thank heavens you haven't gone to yet so we can go together the first time
and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism
just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or
at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me
and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them
when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank
or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn't pick the rider as carefully
as the horse
it seems they were all cheated of some marvellous experience
which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I am telling you about it

~

From: Love Poems (Tentative Title) (1965)

I've picked this as the first poem of The Poetic Quotidian, partly because of my having recently moved to New York, partly because of its vitality, and partly because it anecdotally illustrates the everyday and social aspects of poetry to which this site is dedicated.
Frank O'Hara (1926-1966) is a champion of spontaneity in poetry. Many of his poems were dashed off as notes to friends or, as in his collection Lunch Poems, were written during his lunch hour (he worked for many years at the Museum of Modern Art), incorporating whatever he saw and did and felt.
This particular poem was introduced to me by my friend (and fellow poet) Lewis. It's still Lewis' voice that I hear when I read the poem. Read it to someone else, and perhaps it will be your voice that will forever speak the words of O'Hara in their head!
I don't see how anyone can help but be won over by the manic enthusiasm of this oddball profession of love: "partly because of my love of you, partly because of your love of yoghurt". I also find the poem exceptionally vivid, both utterly original and true in its engagement with the world: "the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary" ... "as still / as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary".
As when one is in love, he sees the details of the world afresh - I've often since encountered "a tree breathing through its spectacles". The poem is a frenzied exaltation of the vitality of love, of living things, in juxtaposition with the static stoniness of statuary and perhaps even art - the poet himself frenetic in trying to capture something that is antithetical to being captured: "some marvelous experience / which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I am telling you about it". Poetry is much like love - it causes us to see the wonder of the everyday world, and we feel compelled to share it.

(More on Frank O'Hara:
www.poets.org/fohar/
http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/ohara/
http://www.frankohara.org/ - with audio)