"Those Who Will Not Reason," by W.H. Auden

A Painter Reads a Poem About Painters

One of my favorite poems to teach (not necessarily the students' favorite) is "Musee des Beaux Arts," by W.H. Auden, and yes, there needs to be an accent over one of those e's in Musee, but I've yet to discover how to include accents using the blog-machinery. The name of the poem is the name of a museum in Brussels, and the museum includes the main painting about which Auden writes, Breughel's "Icarus," which paints (literally) Icarus in a very unheroic, unmythical light. "About suffering," says Auden's poem, "they were never wrong,/The Old Masters." I like the poem because there are so many different things to do with it in class, including teaching it as an example of an ekphrastic poem--a poem about art, a kind of art different from poetry.

Here is a link to a nice video of painter Susan Hambleton discussing and reading the poem. The video was produced and directed by Louis Massiah and is part of the Favorite Poem Project.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlbFQ5ZtjVY&feature=user

W. H. Auden Site

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I recently ran across a site dedicated to W.H. Auden, master of lyric poems and long poems, genius at incorporating vocabulary and diction from a wide spectrum of sources into his poetry. His most anthologized poems include "Lullaby," "If I Could Tell You," "In Memoriam: W.B. Yeats," and "Musee des Beaux Arts." Collected Shorter Poems and Collected Longer Poems are both available from Random House/Vintage.

Here is a link to the site:

http://audensociety.org/

Lyric Craving

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Lyric Craving


Sometimes I crave a lyric poem
That springs like a clear creek,
A regulated rush of words
To zap a weary week.

A yellow butterfly in air,
A jet-trail frozen high:
Such images are welcome, too.
They fill the lyric eye.

In Housman and in Dickinson;
In Langston; Auden, too.
There's often something sharp and quick.
The words are right and few.

I'll go read these, and others, too:
The Spare Ones, let us say.
I'll sip the water from the creek
And slake the thirst today.

Copryight 2009 Hans Ostrom

Auden After the News

(image: W.H. Auden)











I listened to and watched some news tonight on television. Staunch Republican Frank Gaffney is still claiming that Saddam Hussein consorted with those responsible for attacking the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon and that, therefore, the invasion of Iraq was the right thing to do. Then I learned that respected (if controversial) reporter Sy Hersh, speaking at a forum in the Midwest, explained that the Bush administration included an assassination-squad that reported directly to the Vice President and operated independently--traveling to other countries, not even bothering to communicate with the CIA, and killing people named on a list. The book containing Hersh's reporting is not due out for 18 months or so; we'll have to wait on the evidence for a while, but perhaps others will dig into the story now to see if it will hold up. Fortunately (or, in this case, unfortunately) Hersh almost always gets things right.

Having had enoughof the news, I turned to W.H. Auden's Collected Shorter Poems 1927-1957 (New York: Vintage 1975) and read "A Walk After Dark," which ends this way:


For the present stalks abroad
Like the past, and its wronged again
Whimper and are ignored,
And the truth cannot be hid;
Somebody chose their pain,
What needn't have happened did.

Occurring this very night
By no established rule,
Some event may already have hurled
Its first little No at the right
Of the laws we accept to school
Our post-diluvian world.

But the stars burn on overhead,
Unconscious of final ends,
As I walk home to bed,
Asking what judgment waits
My person, all my friends
And these Unitd States.

(pp. 232-233)

Old-School Brits

(image: Gerard Manley Hopkins)






In my first or second year of graduate school, the university's daily newspaper interviewed an English professor, Elliot Gilbert, whom I ended up taking 2-3 seminars from. He was a Victorianist but also published on detective fiction and other topics. The reporter wanted to know either what Gilbert's favorite authors were or maybe favorite novels. I can't quite remember. Anyway, Gilbert refused to answer and called the inquiry "a TV question." He was right. On the other hand, it's a TV question that is sometimes amusing and pleasantly frustrating to answer.

On facebook, I made a list of my 100 most recommended novels. In a few instances, I bowed to pressure and included books just because they're so widely valued. Lolita is a good example. I don't like it as much as most people seem to, but it's hard to question its status. Otherwise, I listed books that I thought were great. I left off The Scarlet Letter and Moby Dick (among others) and caught grief for it the next day, as I should have, I suppose. With listing comes responsibility.

Last night I decided to invent a much more difficult task for myself: to list my favorite 10 Old School British poets--in order of my preference. By Old School, I think I mean, oh, pre-1950, and I included Ireland in the mix, just because, poetically speaking, it is usually in the mix when people put anthologies together; otherwise, no offense intended.

How on Earth did I rank them--by what criteria? Good question. I think the answer is . . . some combination of achievement in the genre (poetry), influence on later poets, and my own personal appreciation. But the percentages change in each case. Anway, here goes:

1. W. H. Auden (the tops)
2. Gerard Manley Hopkins
3. William Shakespeare
4. William Blake
5. William Butler Yeats
6. Robert Browning
7. Samuel Taylor Coleridge
8. Stevie Smith
9. A.E. Housman
10. John Keats

Auden's achievement seems as various as any poet I can think of, and he was enormously influential. Also, it's just great to read his poetry, no matter what day or year it is. Hoplins is there because of his genuinely unique contribution, and also because when I first read him, the experience was something close to revolutionary. You can do that with poetry? I remember thinking.

Shakespeare's there because of the indelible achievement in sonnets, Blake because of the originality and daring, Yeats, I think, because he was just a fine poet. In some of those poems, his way with language is perfect. A lot of his views are just too weird to bear, and the thing with Maude Gonne and daughter got silly real fast. But as for some of the poems: hard to know what more he could have done. Browning is there, I think, because some of his poems are so precociously modern. Of the Victorians, he's the best psychological poet, in my opinion. Coleridge is on the list because, although his batting average wasn't that great, when he did "hit the ball," he hit it to the moon. Stevie Smith's vision and phrasing are just so independent, quirky, and fresh that I find her work irresistible. I can imagine lots of argument for keeping her off the list. Housman's there because of craft. Keats made it on there because of 5-10 fabulous poems.

Wordsworth almost made it on there because of the achievement in some of those lyrics--and parats of the Prelude. I've been re-reading a lot of Wordsworth lately, and the charm is definitely gone. I almost wrote a dissertation on him, and I've taught a whole course on him. He wrote a lot of bad poetry, however, and the self-absorption is unyielding. Nonetheless, some of those poems early on are superb.

If the list were a house, Wordsworth would be banging on the door wanting in. I can hear him out there. The same goes for Pope, Byron, Tennyson, E.B. Browning (Aurora Leigh is pretty great), and George Crabbe. Marvell and Donne are in the crowd, and so is Spenser--and so is Spender, although I can't imagine his banging on the door. Lots of other poets wanted in, but I had to keep the list to 10, just for the agony of it.

I also realized the extent to which I haven't kept up with post-1960/1970 British poetry in the way I have with American poetry from the same period. Part of this has to do with my getting interested in African Amerian poetry, but part of it is also a lack of discipline. I need to do some reading. The same applies to African poetry and Canadian poetry. Oy, so much poetry to read.

After you've railed in disgust at my list, please do make your own. I want to share the agony of choosing just 10--and ranking them. Good listing to you.

Yo, Poe

Thanks to the incalcuable effort, energy, and imagination of some colleagues, the college at which I teach is about to host "SymPOEsyium," celebrating Edgar's 200th birthday, which actually occurred about a month ago, but after 200 years, well--close enough. The celebration will feature lectures, informal discussions, a parody-contest, performances, screenings of films, the serious, the campy, and the in-between. And Lord knows Edgar was in between--serious writer; writer for pay; "Southern Gentleman"; impoverished, feckless roustabout; considered by some to be an indelibly influential writer and critic; considered by others to be juvenile and excessive. Poe was most American, perhaps, in his desperate need for acceptance, in his attempt to try on different identities, in is manic drive, and in his raging inventiveness.
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The poetry captivated me for a brief "moment" when I was in my early teens, and "The Raven" is still quite a performance, a grand entertainment. Poe also had a way with lyricism. Like Auden, he liked to play with words.
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Many of the stories still work for me. They aren't especially subtle (ya think?), but that trait mostly springs from Poe's idea of what a story (and, indeed, a poem) should do: go for that one effect. In many instances, the stories achieve multiple effects, and the personae that narrate many of the tales fascinate, are more complex than one might first realize.
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It's great to watch a writer essentially invent sub-genres that we now call "horror," "thriller," and "detective story." It's fun to watch a writer have fun. Poe's pleasure in entertaining comes through especially, I think, in "The Cask of Amontillado." (Unfortunately, my having worked as a stone-mason's assistant almost ruins the story for me because I know how long it takes to mix mortar, build a wall, etc. Poe glides over the details; more power to him.) "The Fall of the House of Usher" still holds great appeal, and Poe achieved so much in such a small space (so to speak) in "Murders in the Rue Morgue": genius-detective (half-amateur, half-pro); wacky crime; grisly crime-scene; the "locked-room" puzzle; the flummoxed police; the surprise ending.

Writers and readers should probably not underestimate how well Poe tended to start his stories. Some great openers.
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In college I read and studied The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. A wild book, and not a bad novel, really.
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For SymPOEsium, I'm going to get off my duff and, with a colleague, talk about "The Philosophy of Composition" and the famous review of Hawthorne's tales. I'll be giving Edgar an imaginary fist-bump. I hope his spirit takes it in the right spirit and doesn't try to brick me up in the catacombs. Yo, Poe: Happy Birthday.

Foggy Couplets

Couplets in the Fog


Fog's a species of weather--
gray, like a pigeon's feather.
Auden once wrote, "Thank you, fog."
Sandburg thought of cat, not dog.
Fog's in Eliot's Unreal City--
yellow fog, what a pity.
Call it mist, call it fog:
Still you tripped over that log.
If you can, take off work.
No sense traveling in that murk.
Anything you try to say
will come out mumbled, foggy gray.
The fog is subtler than the snow.
And so it's the more dangerous foe.



Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Poet + Museum = Poem

(image: interior of Hagia Sophia)

I did write a post concerning "homeopathic treatments for writer's block" once, but otherwise I don't recall posting anything like "an English assignment," chiefly because it seems like such a nerdy, English-professory, assignmentish thing to do.

However, one of the few readers of this blog recently asked, "Where do you find your creativity?" and a) I haven't answered that question, b) I'm not sure how to answer it, but c) one way to answer it is very specifically: by suggesting a task for anyone (including oneself), any poet, in the unlikely event that person needs a task to spark the writing or the "creativity."


Before I give the task, I should probably answer the question more generally.
I like how the question is phrased, first of all--using "where" as oppposed to "how." Poets or any artists can find stuff (now there's a precise term) to interest them anywhere. So I guess one answer to the question is, "Almost everywhere." Places, situations, language (especially odd overheard phrases), conditions, new places, familiar places, strange places, work-spaces, and so on.

Another answer is that I don't feel especially more creative than other people. I think I've always just liked to write, especially poetry, and if you enjoy "doing" some kind of art, then the creativity usually arrives in a steady flow, a trickle, at least. I don't enjoy writing fiction nearly as much as poetry, so when I'm writing that, I'm aware that sometimes the creativity is running a bit low. So I guess the answer is that one finds the creativity in the making itself.


Now that that paragraph is, thankfully, done with, here is an assignment I give poetry classes. It entails visiting a gallery or a museum, although one could just as easily pick up an art- or photograph-book of some kind and go from there.

But as I almost suggested earlier, posting an "assignment" may be taken as an insult, especially by those who know quite well what they want to write about, thank-you-very-much. If you count yourself in that number, you have my apology. Then there are people who recoil from the very idea of "assigning" a poem, although I think this assignment is so loose that it almost avoids the stigma of being an assignment. Almost. Anway, if you're in the anti-assignment group, you, too, have my apology. In the unlikely event you are a poet or are wanting to write a poem and might like something new or unexpected to write about, here 'tis:


An “ekphrastic” poem is one that is in some way inspired by a work of art, usually a work from a non-literary art. W.H. Auden’s “Museé des Beaux Arts” is one of the best known examples from 20th century poetry. In the poem, Auden argues that paintings by Old Masters such as Brueghel reflected a particular view of suffering. Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium” is another example; it focuses on the art in a church called Hagia Sophia in Constantinople/Istanbul. That poem seems to express a desire to live permanently in an ideal world of art. Our field-trip today takes us to [ ] Gallery, which features two exhibits, The Island and Juxtaposition, which hold especially rich possibilities for poetry. Look at the exhibits and then find a space on the floor, have a seat, and write either notes toward a poem or a poem or both. The poem might react specifically to one piece in one exhibit; or it may embody an overall reaction to the exhibit; or it may concern a topic triggered by the exhibit. The references to the art-work might be strong and obvious, subtle, or ultimately even non-existent. That is, the poem will begin as something that plays off the exhibits or a piece in the exhibits, but its real subject might be something else that springs from your memory and/or the process of writing itself.

The Trouble With Nouns

The first book my former teacher, Karl Shapiro, published was called Person, Place, and Thing--the old-fashioned definition of a noun. (He may have self-published a book before this one appeared.) I still think it's a heck of a title for a book of poems. It suggested that Shapiro was writing more or less in the vein of William Carlos Williams and other Imagists ("no ideas but in things," as Williams writes in Paterson), although Shapiro's poems tend to be robust, full figured, not spare and spidery like those of H.D. (for example) or Amy Lowell. To some degree, the poetry of Shapiro is where the poetry of Williams and Auden meet--an American view of things (sometimes literally things) combined with a British sense of language, irony, and poetic form.

Aside from "show, don't tell," the other most ubiguitous piece of advice people like to hurl at new writers is "use active verbs." (Forms of the verb "to be" are not considered active.) Verbs, verbs, and more verbs--that's the advice. One must look with suspicion of not disdain on adjectives and adverbs. One must be unimpressed even with nouns, allegedly. Occasionally, such advice (however well meant and possibly even useful) brings out the contrarian in me. Hence the following poem:

The Trouble With Nouns

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"The trouble with nouns," the man said,

"is that they just sit there, doing nothing."

I didn't know why he viewed this situation

as problematic. I like entering a cafe (for

instance) full of nouns that are just sitting there.

I don't want them to get up and accost me. I

like it when nouns keep to themselves, don't

open fire, don't start arguments or act out

an impulse to create conflict, as if

the Nounville Cafe were the scene of a one-act

play or the setting of a short story. I sit amongst

nouns with a kind of noun-like lassitude.

Someone enters the establishment, stares.

We stare back, we nouns. The look on

the newcomer's face suggests the nouns

and I appear to be menacing, although or

because we just sit there in our nounish diffidence.

Some people think nouns are trouble.

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Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

Concerning That Good Night

In class we briefly discussed the villanelle, that most difficult form, in which the poet has to repeat whole lines, use only two rhyming sounds, stick to iambic pentameter, and, incidentally, make sense. As I've noted in earlier posts, Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night," Theodore Roethke's "The Waking," and W.H. Auden's "If Could Tell You" are among the most venerable villanelles; however, we also studied one by Jay Parini about the event now known as "Nine-Eleven," and most of the students liked it.

We talked about some moves a poet can make to negotiate the form. We noted that many villanelles are light on imagery and rely on statements, on a kind of conversational discourse. We discussed the possibility of using half-rhymes and of altering the repeated lines slightly--turning a statement into a question, for example, or changing one word.

One student said she found the form difficult to read because of the repetition, which can indeed begin to sound like "nagging."

As great as Dylan Thomas's poem is--and it is, indisputably, a tour de force--I've always felt uneasy about the advice the poem offers, simply because I think people should be able to die with the attitude they choose--assuming, of course, that they are even able to choose the attitude with which they approach death. I had a very close older relative who died of heart failure but also, indirectly, of dementia, so she was not able to approach death--mentally or spiritually--in the way she might have chosen. So if I or anyone had advised her not to go gentle into that good night, it would have been pointless, at best. But this takes nothing away from Thomas's indelible villanelle.

Still, I finally decided to write a wee response-villanelle with D.T.'s poem in mind, although I confess the main task here is just to get a bit of a workout. Villanelles offer good aerobic poetic training, even if they don't turn out perfect or fall far short of perfect.


Go As You Wish Into That Good Night


Go as you wish into that good night.
It's not a night, of course. It's death.
To tell you how to die? I have no right.

Besides, death often hides nearby, plain sight--
Then someone's gone, as quickly as a breath.
Go as you wish into that good night,

Assuming you're allowed your wish. I might
Not even be around, to tell the truth.
To tell you how to die? I have no right.

I've not yet died, have not yet faced the fright
Of certain death, so here's my guess:
Go as you wish into that good night.

I sympathize with D.T.'s rage. That sight
Of one who's dear about to die: Damned death!
But still: go as you wish into death's night.
To tell you how to die--I have no right.

Hans Ostrom

Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

A September Poem by Auden

Here is one of W.H. Auden's more famous poems, "September 1, 1939." It's famous in part because it responds to Germany's invasion of Poland and what people knew would be the beginning of a European war. It's also known for being a poem that Auden himself came not to like. He went so far as to remove it from collections, alleging that he didn't like the line "we must love each other or die," asserting that whether we love each other or not, we die--but I think even he knew that that wasn't the original rhetorical point in the line. I especially appreciate how the poem replicates a complicated, multifaceted response to an event of terrible global impact, and how it demonstrates Auden's comfort with many different levels and sources of diction and vocabulary.



The poem appears on the Academy of American Poets site.




September 1, 1939


by W. H. Auden



I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.


Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.


Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.


Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.
Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.


The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.


From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
"I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,"
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?


All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.


Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

Extremely Narrow Sonnets

Some poets like to write in traditional forms, some like to write in free verse, some like to do both, and some like to monkey with traditional forms. Some poets like to do all four things, and I am one of them, and I am also a person who likes to use "monkey" as a verb, an idiomatic move I permanently borrowed from my parents' generation.

Sherman Alexie monkeyed with the sonnet-form by writing fourteen rather large prose-poetry paragraphs. Instead of fourteen lines in a metered, rhyming scheme, there are fourteen large chunks of writing, much of which concern American history and American Indians (or Native Americans--although I gather the former term is back in use). I like Alexie's poem, and I like what he does with the sonnet, which in my view he treats as an old-fashioned constricting form--a figurative reservation, if you will, from which Alexie wants to escape. He explodes the form, to good effect, in my opinion.

My present aims are much more modest and, arguably, whimsical. I wanted to write the narrowest sonnet possible. I'd already written a sonnet that rhymed on its left side. That is, I used the Shakespearian-sonnet rhyme-scheme and the usual iambic pentameter, but the rhyming words occurred at the beginning of each line, not at the end, so of course the rhyming-effect is completely different. I just thought it needed to be done--done, but not repeated.

A traditional sonnet is ten syllables wide and fourteen lines high. As my late friend Wendy Bishop noted, it is a 14X10 poem. Wendy was extraordinarily imaginative, but she had a great practical side, too. She also thought of the sonnet as a poem that could fit on a postcard. I think she even had her students literally write sonnets on (onto) postcards.

I supposed, then, that the narrowest possible sonnet would be composed of 14 letters that formed words vertically. Here is an example:

Wafer-Thin Sonnet

I
l
o
v
e
y
o
u,
m
y
d
e
a
r.

I like this because it fulfills the 14-line criterion, and its theme is the same as 57. 5% of all sonnets, based on no research and a blind guess. But you do have to figure that tens of thousands of sonnets have had a thesis-statement similar to "I love you, my dear," don't you?

But then I thought that I'd gone too far (or not far enough) because the rhyming had disappeared. So I decided to write an extremely narrow sonnet that still rhymed, and here it is:

Extremely Narrow Sonnet

How 'bout
If we
Went out
To see
What you
And I
Might do
And why?
Let's set
A date
And let
Our fate
Unfurl--
Or curl.

So I kept the basic rhyme scheme of a Shakespearian or English sonnet: ababcdcdefefgg. And in the interests of narrowness, I used one iambic foot per line. An even narrower sonnet would keep the rhyme scheme but just use one word per line; that would be tough. Take a whack at it, if you like.

The purpose of such foolishness? Partly, it's foolishness for its own sake. And, well, as W.H. Auden said, of his poetic vocation, "I like to play with words." He did not say "I like only to play with words," and his poems demonstrate just how much more he liked to do with poetry. But playing fanciful, whimsical games with form is not a bad thing to do after one has been hitting the serious poetry-writing hard for a while, and I think a playful connection to venerable forms actually complements a conventional connection to them. It's good training--discipline, if you will--to try to write a genuine Shakespearian sonnet--but in a contemporary idiom. It's also good to explode the sonnet, as Alexie did. It's good to "stab" the sonnet, as Shapiro claimed to do. And it's good to monkey with the sonnet. All are ways of living with words, as musicians live with sounds and rhythms, strictures and improvisations, the old and the fresh.

I invite you to attempt to monkey with villanelles, sestinas, and sonnets--ballads, too, perhaps. Venerable, venerated forms can withstand whimsy and deconstruction. Sonnet 18 by the Shakemeister General isn't going anywhere.

Auden, Cavafy, and Poetry in Translation

In his introduction to C.P. Cavafy's Complete Poems, W.H. Auden admits that if he hadn't read Cavafy's work (in translation from the modern Greek), he would have written many of his own poems differently--Cavafy's work influenced him that much. He goes on to say that this circumstance distresses him because he has "always believed the essential difference between poetry and prose to be that prose can be translated into another tongue but poetry cannot" (vii).

He then performs surgery on his own assumption. He grants that it's impossible to translate homophones and gives this example, by Hilaire Belloc:

When I am dead, I hope it may be said:
'His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.'

That is, the joke, combined with the rhyme, works only in English. The simple example is a place-holder for all sorts of untranslatable elements of language in poetry.

Auden further asserts that when a poet is more of a singer or lyricist than a speaker, the more difficult it becomes to translate his or her work. He cites the work of Campion. I might cite that of Tennyson or Burns--or Hopkins. My goodness, how impossible it must seem for any translator to render Hopkins' idiosyncratic "sprung rhythm" in another language!

Auden goes on to write, however, that we can appreciate technical devices in poems from languages we may not know well or even at all. He asserts, for example, that one can hear the effect of technical devices used in Welsh poetry and that hearing these may influence one's own work.

And he asserts that imagery, similes, and metaphors can usually survive translation, and I think he's absolutely right about that. I'd add only that I think much rhetoric--statements, claims, arguments, opinions--can survive translation, although this is point is chiefly just an amplification, so to speak, of Auden's distinction between "singing" and "speaking."

Auden implies that Cavafy's homosexuality influenced his (Auden's) own work, although, in the introduction, Auden doesn't discuss his own homosexuality. (Although almost everyone who knew Auden seems to have known he was, in our phraseology, "gay," his poetry is certainly "pre-Stonewall" and in effect closeted.) He praises Cavafy's ability to bear witness with regard to sexuality, noting that Cavafy "neither bowdlerizes nor glamourizes nor giggles" when he writes about sex (ix).

Although Cavafy's poetry must undoubtedly be aurally pleasing in its native modern Greek, Cavafy is, in Auden's terms, more of a "speaker" than a "singer," and he is often plain-spoken, as in the beginning of the poem, "On Painting":

I attend to my work and I love it.
But today the languor of composition disheartens me.
The day has affected me. Its face
is deepening dark.

Such a direct voice runs through most of the poems and is, I think, part of Cavafy's appeal, regardless of what the poems concern--and they often concern the past, are set in ancient Egypt or Greece, for example, and imagine the lives of historical figures. Cavafy also has a great sense of irony, and of self irony. Auden observes, "Cavafy is intrigued by the comic possibilities created by the indirect relation of poets to the world" (xi).

In his introduction, Auden wishes he had learned to read modern Greek, and I feel the same way after I read Cavafy, but nonetheless, having the poems in translation is a great gift. I regard the translated poems of Neruda, Lorca, and Machado similarly, even though I know some Spanish. Much of Neruda's "music" may be lost when his poems go into English, but his exuberance, his liberating, earthy surrealism, and his undomesticated imagination cross the divide of translation easily.

The edition of the complete poems by Cavafy (1863-1933) I'm reading is a paperback from Harcourt Brace in 1961. I highly recommend it. It's one of those collections I circle back to regularly, it seems.

Genitive Wednesday

Today I'm giving a poetry reading in a colleague's class and then fielding questions. Often students ask about where I or poets in general (like these students) "get ideas" for poems. Another way of asking this questions is "What is it that drives poets" (when it's not a taxi-cab driver, har har)?

My friend Kevin Clark tells great stories about having taken a workshop from the famous Southern bad-boy poet and novelist (Deliverance) James Dickey, known for archery, boozing, and fighting--a schtick associated with Norman Mailer and Ernest Hemingway and countless others, of course, even if the particulars differ. Apparently Dickey roared into the classroom wearing a hat that Burt Reynolds had given him during the filming of Deliverance. The roar of the poet, the smell of machismo!

To open up the workshop, Dickey asked the graduate students what, fundamentally, poets like to do in their art. Of course, trying to get on the good side of the Great Poet, the students were tempted to say that poets like to depict real gritty life, or to be the "unacknowledged legislators" of the world, or to "express the inexpressible," or to get carried away by inspiration, or to devote their lives to art. (As Seinfeld might say: Yadda, yadda.)

Kevin smelled a rat, however, and remembered that W.H. Auden's famous anticlimactic answer to the question was simply this: "Poets like to play with words." Of course, Auden was being a bit coy, and Auden did much more than play with words. But that was, in fact, the answer Dickey was looking for, and Kevin gave it to him, and we'll simply slide past the several ironies of Dickey's and Auden's having agreed with one another.

What Auden meant, I think, is that words constitute the medium of poetry, not ideas, inspiration, life, or love. Words are to poetry what paint is to--well, painting. By saying "Poets like to play with words," Auden was implying, perhaps, that poets shouldn't lose sight of the medium itself even when they're trying to write "about" something. Often the so-called "idea" for a poem comes simply from playing around with (or working with, if that phrase seems more respectable) language, even if the poem, when finished, seems to be "about" something else, such as a red wheel barrow or having your heart broken.

It's true that readers usually want more from a poem than simply the poet's having played around with language, and who can blame them?! To some degree, I ignored that consideration in the following poem, which plays around with a) words I enjoy, as words, b) rhythms of phrases and c) the grammatical/linguistic notion of "the genitive case," which in Latin refers to words whose endings change so as to signal that they are being used to suggest ownership (the bird's beak, or the beak "of" the bird), description (the field-lilies or the lilies "of" the field), or location (the farm tools, or tools associated with or tools "of" the farm). I think you get the idea that the genitive case in English is often signaled not by a changed word-ending (English is mostly different from Latin in that respect) but by bringing in the word "of" for assistance. I think Gore Vidal said one of the thorns in a novelist's side (he probably didn't use this analogy) was trying to avoid the double genitive: "Speaking of the King of Sweden, the Norwegian laughed." The repetition of "of" can seem awkward/awkward.

In any event, playing with words, rhythms, and the genitive case, and unafraid to repeat "of," I decided--many years ago--to write a poem that played with words, more or less for the fun of playing with words. Whether readers consider it fun is highly debatable, one reason I kept the poem relatively short. I won't read this poem today to the students, but I will encourage them not to forget to play with words, seriously--to work with words, that is. The poem:

Genitive Case

Of eucalyptus, of acacia,
of rhododendron, tubers,
and pubescence, essence and
viola. Of pulse, of frond,
of pool and cool, of breeze,
arrest, and musculature. Of
hush and curvature. Of rush.
of whisper, moan, variety,
shoulders, piety, also variegation.
Of ripe, of lip, of full. Gladiola,
of. Form, firm, fern, tongue, smell:
of these of course. Of you. Of to doze and of
to languish. Of liquids, tubas, lobes,
and drums. Of cheek, chin, choice.
Of moist. Of measure for measure,
for olives of all, of grape and fig,
laze and sprawl, days and quirks.
Of sycamore and buttocks, of
cedar, water, smoke. Of willing
and of waiting, salt and wit.
Of grin. Of sum.

Math and I

Mathematics and I were good friends up through geometry in high school. I'm not bad at arithmetic, I loved geometry (I think because I could visualize it), and I did fairly well at basic algebra. When I ran into trigonometry in high school, I had a bad teacher, but in truth, a good teacher would not have helped me much. It all seemed like gibberish to me, and I had this sneaking suspicion that "they" were simply making things up. None of the silly marks on the pages seemed to correspond to any world I knew. Of course, I was wrong. I was probably walking across bridges and riding in cars, the design of which had been affected by trigonometry.

Here is what one poet (me) does with math (the last line refers, rather too obviously, to one of my favorite poems, W.H. Auden's "Musee des Beaux Arts," and there needs to be an accent over Musee, but I don't know how to make the blog-program cooperate):

Equation

by Hans Ostrom

Let mathematics represent mathematicians.
If algebra stands for their desire to operate
on the world from a goodly distance,
then geometry enacts a will to map turf,
stylize hearth, fortify cave, codify material
units. Arithmetic equals
greed, larceny, accumulation, gambling, and boredom
divided by

revenge, obligation, display, and patience.
Trigonometry cosignifies rational madness,
which can be expressed as
Icarus
leaving body, soil, pragmatism, and parentage
behind for rare atmosphere and rush
of Platonic calculation—his mind finally
off and liberated from short distances
between mediocre points within the Labyrinth,
itching for a hit of Apollonian insight, yearning
to glimpse God’s system of accounting tersely for
everything.

And let Daedalus occupy a point
on plain and solid ground, having already
calculated the rate of his son’s descent,
impact imposed by physical laws,
interval required to reach the body,
which will have, he reckons,
washed ashore right about . . . there.
About suffering, some Old Masters did the
math.

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom

"Spirit-Wine, A Way of Happening, A Mouth"

Paul Laurence Dunbar was arguably the first Modern African American poet, and it's generally agreed that he was the first African American poet to gain national prominence, partly through poems written in "dialect, " Lyrics of Lowly Life, but also through such excellent non-dialect poems as "We Wear The Mask," which tends to be the one most anthologized now, and deservedly so. It's a terrific poem. In the following poem (far less well known than "We Wear the Mask"), "The Choice," Dunbar (1872-1906) expresses a poet's (guilty?) pleasure over liking "songs"--or the play of words--better than solemn verses that have something to teach, something worth learning:



The Choice



by Paul Laurence Dunbar



THEY please me not--these solemn songs

That hint of sermons covered up.

'Tis true the world should heed its wrongs,

But in a poem let me sup,



Not simples brewed to cure or ease

Humanity's confessed disease,

But the spirit-wine of a singing line,

Or a dew-drop in a honey cup!



I really like the move of turning "simple" into a noun and making it plural--and inducing it to refer to sententious bits of wisdom, bromides. I also like the way he sticks with iambic tetrameter meter up until line six, when he shifts to the more "danceable," so to speak, anapestic (more or less) meter; at any rate, the poem breaks loose in a little dance there at the end.



W.H. Auden, who in poetry played with language in what seems like innumerable ways, came at the issue of what poetry is, does, or is able to do from a different angle in his elegy, "In Memory of W.B. Yeats." Auden writes,



[...]For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives

In the valley of its making where executives

Would never want to tamper, flows on south

From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,

Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,

A way of happening, a mouth.





Poetry for Auden is, momentarily at least, "a mouth," one that drinks what Dunbar calls "the spirit-wine of a singing line," and spirit-wine of a singing line is just such a line, the kind one likes to savor, say, and hear. Poetry makes poetry happen; that's about all we know for sure about poetry, even if we think we know other things about it, even if we expect more from it, and even if we imagine that it can make something (besides itself) happen.

Poems and Paintings; Mirrors in Bars

One of the most famous poems based on painting is W.H. Auden's "Musee des Beaux Arts" (and the first word needs an accent, but I'm not sure how to add it using the blog-program), which argues that the old [European] masters knew how to represent suffering in their paintings. The poem alludes to several paintings but most obviously refers to Breughel's paiting, "Icarus," which hangs in a Belgian museum that lends the poem its title. You've no doubt seen the painting. If by some chance you haven't, it's easily found on the Internet. You'll see immediately that Icarus isn't existly the center of attention.

I've tried to write a few poems that respond to paintings. Addressing one art by means of another seems like a great idea, but it's often more difficult to do well than one might imagine. Painters try to tell stories; composers write "tone poems"; poets try to have a poem embody a painting somehow; and so on.

I wrote the following poem quite some time ago, after being mesmerized by a reprint of a painting by Edouard Manet, "A Bar at the Folies-Bergère," which depicts a scene from the famous nightclub, of the same name, that thrived in Paris toward the end of the 19th century, at the turn of the 19th/20th centuries, and even into the 1920s. Maybe it was the place that made the dance, "the Can-Can," famous--I'm not sure. The renowned American icon Josephine Baker danced there. Allegedly, the nightclub was based on one called the Alhambra in London; one always imagines the British imitating the French in these sorts of things, but in this instance, the reverse seems to have been true. Apparently this painting by Manet (1882) is considered his last masterpiece. From my point of view, it focuses a lot on mirrors and glass, especially on the double-image of the woman in the painting, who appears to look at "us," but whose back we can see in the mirror. --A side-note: I wonder when bars and nightclubs started using mirrors and why. I wonder if the main reason was practical: the bartender could keep his eyes on the customers when he or she turned his or her back. From the customer's perspective, is the mirror-behind-the-bar a good idea? I guess much depends on how much you like looking at yourself. If you've had a tough day, followed by a few drinks, are you really that interested in looking at yourself? Of course, there are types of bars that try to create an atmosphere full of light, so mirrors assist that project. Then there are bars that announce themselve as dark. I suspect that serious drinkers prefer the latter kind, but that's just a guess. The poem:



A Bar at the Folies-Bergère

(Manet)


If you’re interested, the mirror
will show a flat, brilliant image
of our lustrous clutter, of much
white flesh draped in black, of
green bottles, brown bottles, other
mirrors, crystal, lanterns, jewels—
glass and gems we’ve arranged
as a barricade against dawn.

The woman behind the bar lets
her gaze wander until you express
your pleasure. She wears black
velvet trimmed in lace, a brooch
depended on a black ribbon,
a golden bracelet on her arm.

After you order, your gaze wanders
to the mirror behind her. There her
back looks earnest and endearing.
There’s our society, too—busy,
cramped, posing, political, small.
Your gaze prefers the solitary woman.
Nonetheless you take it and your drink,
and you join the tables, and sense
someone gazing at you, too.

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom

Blank Verse for Karl Shapiro

I took classes from the poet and professor Karl Shapiro, at U.C. Davis, in the late 1970s. Karl won the Pulitzer Prize for V-Letter and Other Poems; he went on to publish many volumes of poems; he edited Poetry, the most prestigious poetry magazine in the United States; he wrote a novel and books of essays; and, with Robert Beum, he wrote a splendid book on prosody--the study of verse: The Prosody Handbook: a Guide to Poetic Form. I've always wanted to use the book in a class, but it had never come out in paperback, and it even went out of print for a while, but then Dover Publications brought it out in paperback form, so I'm using it in a poetry class this term, at long last. It was first published 1965 but holds up extremely well. Shapiro himself wrote masterfully in verse-forms before shifting to free verse and, in The Bourgeois Poet, to prose-poems.



So when I decided to write an homage-poem "for" Karl, after he died in 2000, I knew I wanted to use some kind of traditional form, so I chose blank verse: unrhymed iambic pentamter. On page 141 of The Prosody Handbook, Shapiro and Beum write, " Blank verse is undoubtedly the easiest kind of verse to write. One does not have to search for rhymes or move them into the right places, and one does not have to worry about the confines of a stanza. To juxtapose words so that every other syllable receives a stress is not much of a problem. But because it is so easy, and because it is such a spare form, it is one of the hardest to master. The absence of rhyme and stanza form invites prolixity and diffuseness--so easy is it to wander on an on. And blank verse has to be handled in a skillful, ever-attentive way to compensate for such qualities as the musical, architectural, and emphatic properties of rhyme; for the sense of direction one feels within a well-turned stanza; and for the rests that come in stanzas. There are no helps. It is like going into a thick woods in unfamiliar acres."



So I ventured, without "helps," into unfamiliar acres with the following poem:



Karl Shapiro

(1913-2000)


Shapiro was by nature Luddite and
Iconoclast--ironic then that he
So liked to frame his poetry with lines
Laid out like rows of bricks, with stanzas of
Fixed persons, places, things. He played a lot
At saying No but never thunderously—
The Beats embarrassed him. He rather liked
The post-War comforts brought to us by Ike
And Coke and IBM. Mischievously conform—
That’s what he did. A solidarity of one
Appealed to him—bad bourgeois white-haired boy
Who’d hurt a fly but little else, and then
Only with imagery of snot and rage
That scanned. He was a little bored by fame,
By his own poetry, by life on land-
Grant campuses, where doe-eyed kids would turn
In heart-felt free-verse stuff to him.
One hopes that Wystan Hugh was waiting when
Shapiro entered Afterlife’s Drugstore.
Perhaps the two every so often cruise
In a Corvair, smoke cigarettes, quote Yeats
And Keats, mock Eliot, admit they’re glad
That lust for beaus and belles belongs now to
That other life; and prosodize until
Nebraska cows come home—Imperial Wys,
Old Karl Jay, the blue-eyed brightest Beep
From Baltimore. Of course they need not love
Each other, and they died already, so
What’s left is love of words and irony;
Satiric tendencies;--oh, and Eternity.

--Hans Ostrom © 2006 from The Coast Starlight: Collected Poems 1976-2006 (Indianapolis: Dog Ear Publishing, 2006).



In The Prosody Handbook, Shapiro and Beum say that variations on iambic pentameter are expected in blank verse. Such variations include an "inversion"; for example, the line that begins with "Only" starts with a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed one [ON-ly], so the iamb is inverted. And sometimes it's kosher to let a line run long; for example, in the line with Coke and IBM, I have one extra foot or unit of iambic pentameter, so it's actually hexameter.



Some allusions: One of Shapiro's poems, "The Dome of Sunday," mentions "row-houses and row-lives"--a reference to the sameness of suburbia. . . .One of Shapiro's early volumes was called Person, Place, and Thing [the definition of a noun]--what a great title for a book of poems. . . . ."No, in thunder," comes from a piece of writing by Melville--a letter, I believe. . . . . In class once, Shapiro talked about having met and talked with the famous Beat poet Alan Ginsberg, and it was clear that Karl thought Alan was a little bit "out there.". . . . Shapiro enjoyed the ironies of being what he called "a bourgeois poet," and he shortened the term to The Beep. . . . . One of his most famous, most widely anthologized poems is "Drugstore"--the kind of drugstore that had a "soda-fountain." It was a poem about American youth in the 1950s. . . . . One of Karl's later volumes was called White-Haired Lover; his thick hair had gone all white fairly early. . . . ."Land-grant campuses" refers to the University of Nebraska and the University of California, Davis, two places at which Karl taught. He edited Prairie Schooner at the U. of N. . . ..Karl smoked cigarettes, but at one point, he tried to switch to smoking a pipe. He'd bring the pipe to class, but he wasn't very good at keeping it lit, so sometimes he'd strike match after match. We students used to laugh about it after class. . . . . Shapiro was acquainted with Eliot, but Eliot's somewhat reactionary politics, his pretentiousness, his religious conservatism, and the occasional hint of anti-Semitism made Karl uneasy. . . . Auden was Shapiro's favorite poet. In a poem titled "September 1939," Auden wrote, "We must love each other or die," but he later revised the line out of the poem, saying that we die whether we love each other or not, but of course he was willfully misinterpreting the line, and I think he thought it was just too sentimental. . . .Karl also admired Keats's achievement in formal verse, as well as Yeats's, although I seem to remember Karl's having referred to Yeats's beliefs (the gyres and all that) as "goofy." . . . Karl's full name was Karl Jay Shapiro, and he grew up in Baltimore. . . . . Even after Ralph Nader had attacked the Chevrolet Corvair, Karl kept his and kept driving it around Davis; it was just like Karl to be stubborn--or oblivious?--in that way. The color of the car was silver. Davis was a very small town at that time, so occasionally you'd see Karl parking the thing in the lot next to the big grocery store near campus.



In the 1970s and 1980s, the English Department at U.C. Davis was housed in Sproul Hall, a nine-story office-building revealing no architectural imagination. Karl's poem "Humanities Building," published in the New Yorker, describes that building, which in the poem he calls a "plinth." Nice word, plinth.



So there we have it, some blank verse for an expert on prosody, an independent thinker, and a fine poet, Karl Shapiro.