Many people first encounter poetry in kindergarten or grade school, of course, but their first adolescent or early adult encounter with it may occur when they dip into an anthology, as opposed to a volume by one author. Opinions vary about anthologies, which can seem like cemetaries, full of familiar headstones (famous poems) underneath which lie famous dead writers. They can also seem like beasts--enormous, expensive creatures full of undigested verse. The Norton Anthology of Poetry, for example, is now huge, heavy, and expensive. In the U.S., at least, it is the most famous anthology, representing "the canon" of Anglo-American verse, and therefore it may also be the most infamous. Anthologies can also help to reform canons, however; they can be revolutionary, revisionary, path-breaking. James Weldon Johnson's anthologies of African American poetry worked that way. So have a variety of avante-garde anthologies, anthologies of anti-war poetry, and collections representing specific schools or movements in poetry, such as the Beats, the Black Arts Movement, or the Black Mountain School. Sometimes anthologies are accompanied by manifestos or statements, often full of fervor.
I still like to pick up an anthology I first encountered as an undergraduate. It's A Little Treasury of Modern Poetry, third college edition, edited by Oscar Williams and published in hardback by Scribners in 1970 (but first in 1946). I still like the physical "feel" of the book. It's compact, with a nice cloth binding and black spine. I can't be sure, but I think it's the first place I encountered the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, A.E. Housman, Wilfred Owen, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Karl Shapiro, and Randall Jarrell, so when I pick it up, I feel as if I'm walking past a cafe where I first met old so-and-so. It has some great black-and-white photographs of the poets in the back, all looking very craggy and serious. Out of 40-some poets photographed, only Vassar Miller, Marianne Moore, James Dickey, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Dylan Thomas are smiling, although there are some mild grins, including T.S. Eliot's. There are many deliberate frowns, and many poets refuse to look at the camera. The anthology is, of course, dominated by the work of white men. The work of LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Brooks, Countee Cullen, and Langston Hughes is included. Unless I'm mistaken, there are no Latino/Latina, American Indian, or Asian American poets represented, so the book is typical of that post-World War II-to-late-Sixties era. Of course, almost all of the poets represented are read now only in colleges, if at all, and there are several who aren't even read in colleges: John Drinkwater, Charles Causley, Gene Derwood, Anne Ridler, and Peter Viereck, for example (Viereck won the Pulitzer Prize, I believe).
It's nice having any anthology like this on a shelf nearby, just in case you're looking for one of the old chestnuts: "The Windhover," "God's Grandeur," "To An Athlete Dying Young," "Sailing to Byzantium," "Richard Cory" (once set to music by Simon and Garfunkel; it must be on the Internet somewhere--if you find it, let me know), the famous ones by Frost and Stevens and Williams, "Snake" (Lawrence), "Shine, Perishing Republic," our friend Prufrock, and so on. . . . .
Oscar Williams, a famous editor of anthologies, was a poet himself, and he included poems by himself, something I always found rather charming. One of them is "A Praying Mantis with a Penthouse." Oscar died in 1964, so either someone else helped with the 1970 edition, or Oscar worked from the Other Side.
I was the kind of student and of a generation that tended not to sell books back, so books like A Little Treasury of Modern Poetry became keepsakes, valued for their tactile quality and for the little scribbles in them, made by a version of oneself one can hardly remember.
I think most of my students sell almost all of their books back, and I don't begrudge them that. Times are hard, money is tight, and education is expensive. I do hope a few hang on to poetry-anthologies, however. They may or may not read the poetry later, but they may see the book on a shelf, pick it up, and be transported years or decades back. The anthology will look funny. It will have little scars. It will probably feel good there, resting in the hands. The choices the editor made will seem odd. A poem the student liked "back then" will not seem particularly good "now." But the book, the artifcat itself, will carry its own cryptic meaning, almost like a poem. . . . Thanks to Oscar (R.I.P.) for editing A Little Treasury of Modern Poetry, warts and all, and thanks to my professor Elmo Daley, for inducing me to purchase the book.
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
Thursday, April 5, 2007
Poetry Readings
I exhumed an old notebook/journal that listed poets whose readings I had attended in the 1970s, mostly at U.C. Davis:
Gary Snyder (multiple), Galway Kinnell, Karl Shapiro (I took several classes from him, but he gave only one reading when I was at Davis), Gwendolyn Brooks (she insisted that her husband read, too; he seemed reticent to do so); Stephen Spender; William Everson (multiple); William Stafford, Josephine Miles; Kenneth Rexroth; Kenneth Koch; Philip Levine; Richard Eberhart; Robert Bly; Donald Davie; Robert Duncan; Mark Strand; Charles Bukowski; Robert Sward. I also attended a "lecture" by Norman Mailer. What an evening that was. Mailer was promoting his book on Marilyn Monroe. It was all bluster and crude jokes, and people seemed amused. After the lecture, Mailer adjourned to a classroom (this hadn't been planned) and spoke with about 20 of us.
In almost every poetry reading, the poetry comes alive to such a degree that you return to the printed version of it with a significantly different sense of what you are reading, and you recall once again that even poetry that isn't explicitly "spoken word" poetry is a vocal, aural art. I found this circumstance to be the case especially with Snyder, whose poetry I appreciated when I read it on the page but whose poetry seemed a bit flat and clumsy at times. When he read his poems, he brought out rhythms and nuances I had overlooked. Spender's reading was remarkable, in part because of Spender's wit and stateliness, but also because of his memories of Auden and Eliot. He joked that when Eliot was a young man, Eliot wrote middle-aged poems; when middle-aged, he wrote old-man poems; and when old he wrote posthumous poems. A person in the audience wanted to quarrel about the issue of Pound's having edited Eliot's The Waste Land considerably. The person asked, "If a man impregnates my wife, in what sense is the child mine?" [meaning, isn't The Waste Land really Pound's poem?] Spender said, "I can't really speak to your personal difficulties with your wife, but The Waste Land was Eliot's poem, and Pound simply made suggestions, the way an editor does." Spender also demystified The Waste Land by saying that it can be read as a series of satirical sketches about urban life. Such a statement cuts through so much cant and nonsense written about that poem. A couple years later, coincidentally, a poem of mine won a national contest sponsored by the University of Houston--and judged by Stephen Spender. The poem is "Spider Killing," and he wrote a very kind letter to me about the poem.
Bly, of course, is an over-the-top performer, complete with lyre and poncho--but he's a great reader, not only of his own poetry but of others'. He has a great rendition, if that's the word, of W. C. Williams' "This is just to say." Stafford and Levine were both great: unpretentious. Duncan was okay, but I never really "got" his poetry. Brooks was wonderful. Rexroth was full of himself, of course. He packed the house. He was smart and well read, but he also seemed intent upon reminding everyone that he was smart and well read: that classic Poundian, American insecurity: rather the opposite of Spender. Everson wore buckskins and a bear-tooth necklace, paced silently for minutes before he started, stared at people. In later readings he trembled because of Parkinson's. His rendition of "Canticle for the Water Birds" was one for the ages. After one reading, I met him at a friend's house, at a small reception. We got to talking about the movie, "The Rose," in which Bette Midler plays a version of Joplin. I said I that loved Joplin's music but that I thought, technically, Midler had the better voice, and Everson got furious and said that a kind of pure soul poured out of Joplin. I wasn't about to press the issue. I always thought Joplin was a very good blues singer but by no means a goddess of the blues. Oh, well: I was sorry to have ticked off the famous Beat poet. Shapiro always liked to tell of the time in 1969 (?) when, as Brother Antoninus, Everson literally defrocked himself at a reading in Davis. Right in the middle of the reading, he removed his lay-brother's robes, and had some difficulty with the microphone-cord to which it and he were attached. A wonderful spectacle, remembered wryly by Shapiro, who later wrote an homage-poem for Everson.
Miles was almost completely disabled, by rheumatoid arthritis, I think, so an assistant literally carried her around, laying her in a chair for the reception after the reading. But she was bright, witty, and quick in conversation, so much so that you were almost shocked to see that her body was disabled. She seemed to have great reserves of mental toughness, with no bitterness or sarcasm. Mailer was promoting his book on Marilyn Monroe. He pontificated, told dirty jokes, dropped names. One crude joke was about a woman's worn-out c--t, about which her husband complains, only to have her reply, "My boyfriend likes it because he's well endowed enough to get past the worn-out part." Mailer as middle-school boy, in other words. The lecture went on and on, and then some 20 of us adjourned to another room on campus, where he kept talking to/at us. He struck me as a terribly insecure man--the kind of physically small man who feels he must act tough: I'd seen the type in the small mountain town I was raised in. It was very easy to see through his bluster and arrogance to a certain vulnerability. How strange that his very best book ended up being the nonfiction, The Executioner's Song. Bizarrely, I read it and Styron's Sophie's Choice in the same week in Germany when I was teaching there. .. .I wrote Styron a fan letter, and he wrote back on a card, dated Christmas Day 1980: very kind of him. Enough of the aimless recollections.....
Gary Snyder (multiple), Galway Kinnell, Karl Shapiro (I took several classes from him, but he gave only one reading when I was at Davis), Gwendolyn Brooks (she insisted that her husband read, too; he seemed reticent to do so); Stephen Spender; William Everson (multiple); William Stafford, Josephine Miles; Kenneth Rexroth; Kenneth Koch; Philip Levine; Richard Eberhart; Robert Bly; Donald Davie; Robert Duncan; Mark Strand; Charles Bukowski; Robert Sward. I also attended a "lecture" by Norman Mailer. What an evening that was. Mailer was promoting his book on Marilyn Monroe. It was all bluster and crude jokes, and people seemed amused. After the lecture, Mailer adjourned to a classroom (this hadn't been planned) and spoke with about 20 of us.
In almost every poetry reading, the poetry comes alive to such a degree that you return to the printed version of it with a significantly different sense of what you are reading, and you recall once again that even poetry that isn't explicitly "spoken word" poetry is a vocal, aural art. I found this circumstance to be the case especially with Snyder, whose poetry I appreciated when I read it on the page but whose poetry seemed a bit flat and clumsy at times. When he read his poems, he brought out rhythms and nuances I had overlooked. Spender's reading was remarkable, in part because of Spender's wit and stateliness, but also because of his memories of Auden and Eliot. He joked that when Eliot was a young man, Eliot wrote middle-aged poems; when middle-aged, he wrote old-man poems; and when old he wrote posthumous poems. A person in the audience wanted to quarrel about the issue of Pound's having edited Eliot's The Waste Land considerably. The person asked, "If a man impregnates my wife, in what sense is the child mine?" [meaning, isn't The Waste Land really Pound's poem?] Spender said, "I can't really speak to your personal difficulties with your wife, but The Waste Land was Eliot's poem, and Pound simply made suggestions, the way an editor does." Spender also demystified The Waste Land by saying that it can be read as a series of satirical sketches about urban life. Such a statement cuts through so much cant and nonsense written about that poem. A couple years later, coincidentally, a poem of mine won a national contest sponsored by the University of Houston--and judged by Stephen Spender. The poem is "Spider Killing," and he wrote a very kind letter to me about the poem.
Bly, of course, is an over-the-top performer, complete with lyre and poncho--but he's a great reader, not only of his own poetry but of others'. He has a great rendition, if that's the word, of W. C. Williams' "This is just to say." Stafford and Levine were both great: unpretentious. Duncan was okay, but I never really "got" his poetry. Brooks was wonderful. Rexroth was full of himself, of course. He packed the house. He was smart and well read, but he also seemed intent upon reminding everyone that he was smart and well read: that classic Poundian, American insecurity: rather the opposite of Spender. Everson wore buckskins and a bear-tooth necklace, paced silently for minutes before he started, stared at people. In later readings he trembled because of Parkinson's. His rendition of "Canticle for the Water Birds" was one for the ages. After one reading, I met him at a friend's house, at a small reception. We got to talking about the movie, "The Rose," in which Bette Midler plays a version of Joplin. I said I that loved Joplin's music but that I thought, technically, Midler had the better voice, and Everson got furious and said that a kind of pure soul poured out of Joplin. I wasn't about to press the issue. I always thought Joplin was a very good blues singer but by no means a goddess of the blues. Oh, well: I was sorry to have ticked off the famous Beat poet. Shapiro always liked to tell of the time in 1969 (?) when, as Brother Antoninus, Everson literally defrocked himself at a reading in Davis. Right in the middle of the reading, he removed his lay-brother's robes, and had some difficulty with the microphone-cord to which it and he were attached. A wonderful spectacle, remembered wryly by Shapiro, who later wrote an homage-poem for Everson.
Miles was almost completely disabled, by rheumatoid arthritis, I think, so an assistant literally carried her around, laying her in a chair for the reception after the reading. But she was bright, witty, and quick in conversation, so much so that you were almost shocked to see that her body was disabled. She seemed to have great reserves of mental toughness, with no bitterness or sarcasm. Mailer was promoting his book on Marilyn Monroe. He pontificated, told dirty jokes, dropped names. One crude joke was about a woman's worn-out c--t, about which her husband complains, only to have her reply, "My boyfriend likes it because he's well endowed enough to get past the worn-out part." Mailer as middle-school boy, in other words. The lecture went on and on, and then some 20 of us adjourned to another room on campus, where he kept talking to/at us. He struck me as a terribly insecure man--the kind of physically small man who feels he must act tough: I'd seen the type in the small mountain town I was raised in. It was very easy to see through his bluster and arrogance to a certain vulnerability. How strange that his very best book ended up being the nonfiction, The Executioner's Song. Bizarrely, I read it and Styron's Sophie's Choice in the same week in Germany when I was teaching there. .. .I wrote Styron a fan letter, and he wrote back on a card, dated Christmas Day 1980: very kind of him. Enough of the aimless recollections.....
Image or Sound?
A colleague invited me to guest-teach in her class the other day. The course is our department's introduction to the English major, so it focuses chiefly on essential elements like the close reading of literature, writing essays about literature, and getting familiar with the terminology of literary criticism. Our major has an emphasis in creative writing, however, so the course also touches on some aspects of writing "literature," not just reading it. So that day I was there to talk about writing poetry. I told the students that one big question all poets implicitly or explicitly take a stand on is whether poetry is essentially an art of image or an art of sound. I also told them (at least I hope I did) that this was, of course a false dichotomy. The language of poetry, even when it is read silently, makes sounds in the reader's mind; the language of poetry, even though it is almost always black letters on a white page, also creates images that are viewed in the mind of the reader. My friend, the poet and teacher Kevin Clark, is squarely in the image camp. Of course, he takes great care with how his poems sound, but he is an Image First poet. I suspect Dylan Thomas was a Sound First poet, judging by the lush, overwhelming (in a good way) sounds of his grand poems. Hopkins? Sound First. William Carlos Williams? Well, Image First, of course--ah, but we can't be completely sure; his poems are so carefully constructed in terms of the sound of the words, the shape of syntax. Robert Bly and Company stress "the deep image," an image or cluster of surrealistic images that seem to strike deep into the Jungian subconscious mind.
In any event, I had the students read Dickinson's poem about a snake, the "Narrow Fellow" in the grass. I told them to set aside their preconceived notions about Dickinson, resist the urge to hunt for symbols, and refuse to be distracted by her poetic eccentricities, such as the dashes and the capitalizations. This is an observational poem, I told them. This poem springs directly from a person who enjoyed going out in the fields and woods and looking at things and creatures. The poem captures her careful observation of snakes. It does so in a wonderful way; the images and metaphors are superb. She nails the ending of the poem Great stuff. But also basic stuff. By basic I don't mean simple or simplistic. I mean grounded--literally grounded: a creature crawling on the dirt. She observed, and she gave us the images. The snake is not from the Garden of Eden or from Freud 101. It's from a field or a marsh near Amherst.
I then asked the students to brainstorm a list of creatures they had seen. Their impulse was to list creatures they thought were "poetic," I think: elephants, toucans. I was surprised. I said, "Actually, I was looking for the ordinary stuff we see and really look at, especially as kids--you know, bugs, spiders." Eventually we got around to things like squirrels and foxes, at least.
"Poetry" brings so much baggage with it. To a much greater extent than short stories and novels, it is a literary form that requires demystification. It is somehow supposed to be grandiose, profound, difficult, cryptic, mysterious. I'm all for poems that may exhibit one or more of these qualities, but first of all, I think, a poem has to be grounded--and often grounded in what might seem at first to be mundane reality. You take a walk, you see a snake. A poet's job, of course, is to re-see the mundane for himself or herself and, if the poem works out okay, to re-see and re-present the mundane thing for the reader, in a way that's both fresh and believable. I mean, you can do all sorts of fancy, outlandish things with a snake that would be, in a way, fresh, but they might not be believable. And you can do all sorts of believable things with a snake in your poem, but they might not be fresh. They might be factual and dull, although the factual isn't necessarily dull and the dull isn't necessarily factual.
On that particular day, anyway, I was in the Image First camp. If you're a poet, I was suggesting, start by looking carefully--at anything. The thing looked at does not have to be Poetic. Then write precisely and freshly about what you see, about the seeing, and maybe about what the seeing means or meant--but don't get Profound. In this particular approach to poetry, a poet is like a still-life painter. Of course, the main thing a painter does is play with paint ("play" in the sense of improvise, work with), and the main thing a poet does is play with his or her medium, words. Beyond that, a poet and a painter work at seeing, at looking. Really looking. Then, when the snake goes through the grass, the grass parts as if it were hair being combed. According to Emily Dickinson, who saw.
In any event, I had the students read Dickinson's poem about a snake, the "Narrow Fellow" in the grass. I told them to set aside their preconceived notions about Dickinson, resist the urge to hunt for symbols, and refuse to be distracted by her poetic eccentricities, such as the dashes and the capitalizations. This is an observational poem, I told them. This poem springs directly from a person who enjoyed going out in the fields and woods and looking at things and creatures. The poem captures her careful observation of snakes. It does so in a wonderful way; the images and metaphors are superb. She nails the ending of the poem Great stuff. But also basic stuff. By basic I don't mean simple or simplistic. I mean grounded--literally grounded: a creature crawling on the dirt. She observed, and she gave us the images. The snake is not from the Garden of Eden or from Freud 101. It's from a field or a marsh near Amherst.
I then asked the students to brainstorm a list of creatures they had seen. Their impulse was to list creatures they thought were "poetic," I think: elephants, toucans. I was surprised. I said, "Actually, I was looking for the ordinary stuff we see and really look at, especially as kids--you know, bugs, spiders." Eventually we got around to things like squirrels and foxes, at least.
"Poetry" brings so much baggage with it. To a much greater extent than short stories and novels, it is a literary form that requires demystification. It is somehow supposed to be grandiose, profound, difficult, cryptic, mysterious. I'm all for poems that may exhibit one or more of these qualities, but first of all, I think, a poem has to be grounded--and often grounded in what might seem at first to be mundane reality. You take a walk, you see a snake. A poet's job, of course, is to re-see the mundane for himself or herself and, if the poem works out okay, to re-see and re-present the mundane thing for the reader, in a way that's both fresh and believable. I mean, you can do all sorts of fancy, outlandish things with a snake that would be, in a way, fresh, but they might not be believable. And you can do all sorts of believable things with a snake in your poem, but they might not be fresh. They might be factual and dull, although the factual isn't necessarily dull and the dull isn't necessarily factual.
On that particular day, anyway, I was in the Image First camp. If you're a poet, I was suggesting, start by looking carefully--at anything. The thing looked at does not have to be Poetic. Then write precisely and freshly about what you see, about the seeing, and maybe about what the seeing means or meant--but don't get Profound. In this particular approach to poetry, a poet is like a still-life painter. Of course, the main thing a painter does is play with paint ("play" in the sense of improvise, work with), and the main thing a poet does is play with his or her medium, words. Beyond that, a poet and a painter work at seeing, at looking. Really looking. Then, when the snake goes through the grass, the grass parts as if it were hair being combed. According to Emily Dickinson, who saw.
Idleness
To begin by belaboring the obvious: life never turns out the way we thought it would. Occasionaly one hears a person say something like "As far back as I can remember, I wanted to be a musician," and if that person is a musician, we may briefly be tempted to think that his or her particular life turned out the way he or she thought it would, and we're mightily impressed, perhaps envious. But of course the precise nature of being-a-musician no doubt was not what the person imagined, and being-a-musician is only one part of that whole life. So even in rare cases where plans and dreams turn out just the way they were supposed to, they really didn't, on closer inspection. How could they?
One of my favorite Henry James stories (I am not a huge James fan, no offense to those who are) is "The Beast in the Jungle." (If you haven't read it and think you might one day read it, know that I'm about to expose the basic twist of the story.) The main character spends his life waiting for the big thing that he feels will happen in his life to happen, and ultimately the big thing turns out to be the revelation that he has wasted his life waiting for this big thing to happen. Oops. I hate when that sort of thing happens; it's so ironic.
Americans, of course, are among those humans most obsessed with plans and executing plans, dreams and making dreams "come true." The ambition-syndrome and the idea that one can be self-made are injected into our psyches early. That's not necessarily an utterly bad thing. Hope is a good thing. Also, if one is completely without ambition, one is likely to create an awful lot of work for other people. Nonetheless, "idleness" seems to make Americans nervous, even though our greatest secular holiday is Super Bowl Day, when a vast percentage of the population sits or lies down for several hours, looking at a screen, drinking a brain-numbing beverage, and shoveling food in the pie-hole. Of course, in the minds of those who are watching the Super Bowl, they are being active, not idle. They are watching the Super Bowl! . . .
And idleness is supposed to be the devil's workshop. More likely candidates for the devil's workshop, I think, are dictatorships, political parties, Hollywood, cutely decorated bed-and-breakfasts, the industry known as lobbying, the industry known as "fashion," racism, the military-industrial complex which that known radical, President Dwight Eisenhower, feared, and the Home Shopping Network--to name just a few.
Circuitously, that is to say, idly, I have sauntered to my point, assuming I had one: praise for Robert Bridges' little poem, "The Idle Life I Lead." Bridges is best known now not for anything he wrote but for having championed the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Bridges is known among students of prosody for having written in syllabics, even though syllabics (counting syllables in a line, regardless of stresses) seem to work better with Latin poetry than with stress-heavy English. In any event, here is the poem, which is written not in syllabics but in iambic meter:
The Idle Life I Lead
The idle life I lead
Is like a pleasant sleep,
Wherein I rest and heed
The dreams that by me sweep.
And still of all my dreams
In turn so swiftly past,
Each in its fancy seems
A nobler than the last.
And every eve I say,
Noting my step in bliss,
That I have known no day
In all my life like this.
I love this poem because it celebrates idelness without making a big deal about celebrating idleness. It doesn't imply "Look how unorthodox I am by celebrating idleness!" There is a Zen-like quality to the poem, more palpable and genuine than it would have been if Bridges had set out to write a Zen poem. I suppose that if someone sets out to write a Zen poem, he or she has made the fatal first mistake (setting out), and will thereby have pre-rendered the poem un-Zen-like. I also see--or perhaps I am merely reading this into the poem--a certain lovely humility in Bridges' verses here. The speaker of this poem is not in charge of his fate, has not ambitiously chosen not to be ambitious. Instead he seems simply to take note of the fact that he knows no day in all his life like any day that has come before. That is the way this thing called experience, given to us by who knows what or whom, is actually experienced. Each day comes to us, including the last day. At some fundamental level, the most ambitious, accomplished, famous, driven, powerful, and influential of humans are idle. (Of course, I wish that people like Adolf Hitler and Joseph McCarthy had been even more idle.) I love the way Bridges' poem illuminates "idleness" in a new way. Idleness is not laziness. Idleness is being. If you're like me, just-being makes you anxious. You feel as if you should be doing something. Bridges' poem seems to suggest that ideless is doing something. I promise, however, that if someone asks me to take out the garbage (for instance), I won't try to get out of doing so by saying, "I can't because I'm doing something--I'm busy here in a state of idleness, and if you don't believe me, read this poem." Robert Bridges was born in 1844 and died in 1930.
One of my favorite Henry James stories (I am not a huge James fan, no offense to those who are) is "The Beast in the Jungle." (If you haven't read it and think you might one day read it, know that I'm about to expose the basic twist of the story.) The main character spends his life waiting for the big thing that he feels will happen in his life to happen, and ultimately the big thing turns out to be the revelation that he has wasted his life waiting for this big thing to happen. Oops. I hate when that sort of thing happens; it's so ironic.
Americans, of course, are among those humans most obsessed with plans and executing plans, dreams and making dreams "come true." The ambition-syndrome and the idea that one can be self-made are injected into our psyches early. That's not necessarily an utterly bad thing. Hope is a good thing. Also, if one is completely without ambition, one is likely to create an awful lot of work for other people. Nonetheless, "idleness" seems to make Americans nervous, even though our greatest secular holiday is Super Bowl Day, when a vast percentage of the population sits or lies down for several hours, looking at a screen, drinking a brain-numbing beverage, and shoveling food in the pie-hole. Of course, in the minds of those who are watching the Super Bowl, they are being active, not idle. They are watching the Super Bowl! . . .
And idleness is supposed to be the devil's workshop. More likely candidates for the devil's workshop, I think, are dictatorships, political parties, Hollywood, cutely decorated bed-and-breakfasts, the industry known as lobbying, the industry known as "fashion," racism, the military-industrial complex which that known radical, President Dwight Eisenhower, feared, and the Home Shopping Network--to name just a few.
Circuitously, that is to say, idly, I have sauntered to my point, assuming I had one: praise for Robert Bridges' little poem, "The Idle Life I Lead." Bridges is best known now not for anything he wrote but for having championed the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Bridges is known among students of prosody for having written in syllabics, even though syllabics (counting syllables in a line, regardless of stresses) seem to work better with Latin poetry than with stress-heavy English. In any event, here is the poem, which is written not in syllabics but in iambic meter:
The Idle Life I Lead
The idle life I lead
Is like a pleasant sleep,
Wherein I rest and heed
The dreams that by me sweep.
And still of all my dreams
In turn so swiftly past,
Each in its fancy seems
A nobler than the last.
And every eve I say,
Noting my step in bliss,
That I have known no day
In all my life like this.
I love this poem because it celebrates idelness without making a big deal about celebrating idleness. It doesn't imply "Look how unorthodox I am by celebrating idleness!" There is a Zen-like quality to the poem, more palpable and genuine than it would have been if Bridges had set out to write a Zen poem. I suppose that if someone sets out to write a Zen poem, he or she has made the fatal first mistake (setting out), and will thereby have pre-rendered the poem un-Zen-like. I also see--or perhaps I am merely reading this into the poem--a certain lovely humility in Bridges' verses here. The speaker of this poem is not in charge of his fate, has not ambitiously chosen not to be ambitious. Instead he seems simply to take note of the fact that he knows no day in all his life like any day that has come before. That is the way this thing called experience, given to us by who knows what or whom, is actually experienced. Each day comes to us, including the last day. At some fundamental level, the most ambitious, accomplished, famous, driven, powerful, and influential of humans are idle. (Of course, I wish that people like Adolf Hitler and Joseph McCarthy had been even more idle.) I love the way Bridges' poem illuminates "idleness" in a new way. Idleness is not laziness. Idleness is being. If you're like me, just-being makes you anxious. You feel as if you should be doing something. Bridges' poem seems to suggest that ideless is doing something. I promise, however, that if someone asks me to take out the garbage (for instance), I won't try to get out of doing so by saying, "I can't because I'm doing something--I'm busy here in a state of idleness, and if you don't believe me, read this poem." Robert Bridges was born in 1844 and died in 1930.
Ultra-Talk
Mark Halliday read his poetry on campus here the other evening, and it was a great reading. Halliday is known as the "ultra-talk" poet because many of his poems are discursive and conversational--rhetorically rich monologues. The label can be misleading, however, because his poems are exceptionally well crafted and, without being preciously self-conscious, are often self-reflective, and they are extremely subtle in the ways they move and the ways they end. The poems are often relentless in their pursuit of the implications flowing from the premise with which they begin or from which they (apparently) sprang. Many of the poems are sardonic, satiric, and downright funny: qualities one thirsts for in poetry from any era. His poetry is not altogether dissimilar to that of Kenneth Koch. (I wish I had asked him directly about that comparison; maybe he doesn't like Koch's poetry.)
Halliday's books include Little Star, Selfwolf, and Jab, and he has also published a book on the work of Wallace Stevens. Halliday teaches at the University of Ohio.
During his reading, as he was introducing a poem that was, to some extent, a miniature novel, he said there were 11 reasons why he couldn't be a novelist and, by implication, why had to be a poet. He didn't specify what the 11 reasons were, but I hope to hear them some day. I am sympathetic to his difficulty with fiction. I've written and published stories, published one novel, and written other novels--but I find fiction-writing almost immeasurably harder than writing poetry. Writing novels is "labor" in a way that writing poetry does not seem to be, even as writing and revising poetry are no vacation. I tend to get distracted from plot, characterization, and scenes by . . . . well, by almost anything. One word can throw me off the track. In the forest of writing-fiction, poets often behave like bad hunting-dogs; when they're supposed to be moving forward on the track of that plot, they wander off to look at a bird, sniff something arcane, bark at the moon, lie down, scratch themselves, or hunt an animal in which the hunter has no interest. Unfortunately, and fortunately, poets are interested in everything. To them the demotic is rare.
Please find and read Mark Halliday's poetry.
Halliday's books include Little Star, Selfwolf, and Jab, and he has also published a book on the work of Wallace Stevens. Halliday teaches at the University of Ohio.
During his reading, as he was introducing a poem that was, to some extent, a miniature novel, he said there were 11 reasons why he couldn't be a novelist and, by implication, why had to be a poet. He didn't specify what the 11 reasons were, but I hope to hear them some day. I am sympathetic to his difficulty with fiction. I've written and published stories, published one novel, and written other novels--but I find fiction-writing almost immeasurably harder than writing poetry. Writing novels is "labor" in a way that writing poetry does not seem to be, even as writing and revising poetry are no vacation. I tend to get distracted from plot, characterization, and scenes by . . . . well, by almost anything. One word can throw me off the track. In the forest of writing-fiction, poets often behave like bad hunting-dogs; when they're supposed to be moving forward on the track of that plot, they wander off to look at a bird, sniff something arcane, bark at the moon, lie down, scratch themselves, or hunt an animal in which the hunter has no interest. Unfortunately, and fortunately, poets are interested in everything. To them the demotic is rare.
Please find and read Mark Halliday's poetry.
Friday, March 23, 2007
Lent, Easter, Poetry
After approximately four decades of living as some combination of pagan, atheist, and agnostic, I became a Catholic in 2000. It was an interesting process, and remains so, some seven years later. I never have a good answer for people who ask we why I converted; the changes in my particular case were several. They came as a result of illness, aging, reading, and observing; and not least of all, also as a result of mystery. I've written a few religious poems over the years, although I use "religious" here loosely. The Lenten and Easter seasons may be the most appealing, difficult, and mysterious ones for poets who are Christians, or Christians who are poets. Here is a very famous Easter poem by the 17th Century English poet George Herbert:
Easter Wings
Lord, who createdst man in wealth and store,
Though foolishly he lost the same,
Decaying more and more,
Till he became
With thee
O let me rise
As larks, harmoniously,
And sing this day thy victories:
My tender age in sorrow did beginne
And still with sicknesses and shame.
Thou didst so punish sinne,
That I became
Most thinne.
With thee
Let me combine,
Affliction shall advance the flight in me.
Here is an immeasurably less famous poem related to Easter. If memory serves, I wrote it about three years ago:
Broken, Amazing, Awful
Everything is broken.
Everything is amazing.
A lot of it is awful.
Among others, Jesus,
who certainly put himself
among others, had a fine
sense, one senses, of
broken, amazing, and awful.
Lawfully wedded to a human
condition, he performed
his rendition of grace. It was
amazing. They broke him.
That was awful.
© 2007
| an in wealth and store, | |
| Though foolishly he lost the same, | |
| Decaying more and more, | |
| Till he became | |
| Most poore: | 5 |
| With thee | |
| O let me rise | |
| As larks, harmoniously, | |
| And sing this day thy victories: | |
| Then shall the fall further the flight in me. | 10 |
| My tender age in sorrow did beginne: | |
| And still with sicknesses and shame | |
| Thou didst so punish sinne, | |
| That I became | |
| Most thinne. | 15 |
| With thee | |
| Let me combine, | |
| And feel this day thy victorie: | |
| For, if I imp my wing on thine, | |
| Affliction shall advance the flight in me. | 20 |
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
War Poetry?
It's awfully tempting to write "war poetry," although only those who have been to war can probably write effective poetry that is literally about war. Those who haven't been to war will write poems at least once-removed from war--but that is not to say such poetry is necessarily less potentially good or important. Randall Jarrell wasn't able to become a pilot in World War II, but he did serve, he did observe, and he did write the unique war poem of six lines, "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner." Robert Bly opposed the Viet Nam War and combined surrealism and protest to produce some remarkable poems. A whole website devoted to "poets against the war" sprang up after Bush started the war in Iraq. Not long after the U.S. invaded Iraq, I wrote the following poem, which I wanted to be anything but grandiose, partly because I really had to wonder how effectual or even pertinent a poem could be at that point.
Invasion and Birds
On that particular day, USA was invading
a country again. I didn’t know anything
to think that would change USA. Maybe
I was wrong to observe birds. When
the nation claiming you invades another
nation, all actions, including a glance
at birds, seem either right or wrong but
never neutral. A constellation of starlings
took off from a muddy field. Totality
of beating wings made a single, heavy
sound. One robin was left in the field—
a bird dressed like an old professor:
orange sweater-vest, gray jacket. On
a walkway, two juncos flitted,
plump gray nodes of energy. Observing
birds, I knew for sure USA had taken
a wrong turn. I felt myself to be
sad and politically useless
like a weary angle of lost geese,
jet engines coming their way.
Monday, March 19, 2007
Bird Poems
Like love, death, and sunsets, birds seem to almost every poet to require yet one more poem. And like love, death, and sunsets, birds tempt the unsuspecting poet to write something sentimental, or to personify birds, as I just did when I wrote “birds tempt.” Actually, of course, poets tempt themselves to write sentimentally about birds, who have more important things to consider than poets. As with the rest of poetry and the subjects of poetry, a chief rule for bird poems is this: there are no rules. However, before writing a bird-poem, a poet might want to do what a bird-watcher does: observe; and then observe some more. That is, as long as the poet doesn’t rush to the writing with stock images of and prefabricated ideas about the bird in question, things should go all right.
The ultra-famous bird-poems include, of course, Poe’s “The Raven,” Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Stevens’ “13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” and Hopkins’ “The Windhover.”
Over the years, I’ve noticed that a fair percentage of students react negatively to “The Windhover,” partly because Hopkins’ sprung rhythm and heavy alliteration create some difficulty, but also perhaps because of the epigraph, “To Christ Our Lord.” Obviously, the poem does have its religious dimensions, but mainly it’s about that hawk up there, gliding, pausing, diving. It's also about the explosiveness of language itself. Even when I was only 17, I took easily to this poem and Hopkins’ work, for some reason. I think I simply sensed that Hopkins was doing in verse what jazz musicians do in music, and so I just found myself enjoying everything he was doing with words and lines, stresses and alliteration. It was pleasurable to me, even on the first reading. I also liked what he was doing with the hawk in the poem. I felt he really was trying to see the bird and to help us see the bird as the bird is. So although I don't try to argue students out of their resistance to the poem, I don't entirely understand the resistance.
Other fine bird poems include William Everson’s “Canticle of the Water Birds,” which I heard/saw Everson read several times; Robinson Jeffers’ “Hurt Hawks"; Emily Dickinson’s poem about the sparrow and the twig; and Ted Hughes’s book-length work, Crow. Dickinson also has the one that begins “A bird came down my walk.”
Karl Shapiro wrote an interesting poem in which he depicted a bird counter-intuitively in terms of a mechanism, a machine, and he wrote another one about having been attacked by a crow in Chicago. They’re both in his Collected Poems from Random House, published in the late 1970s.
At the risk of committing literary heresy, I'll admit that I believe Yeats's "Leda and the Swan" to be a hugely over-rated poem--and a problematic one, insofar as it glorifies rape, but also insofar as it's a bit silly. I know geese and swans can get mean, hiss, and bite, but if one really attacked a woman like Leda, I think Leda would simply wring its neck or kick it. The whole scene has always seemed a bit unintentionally comic to me. If Zeus appeared in the form of a lion, that would we one thing--but appearing as a large bird, but not even an eagle or a vulture? I mean, really. And finally, the question, "Did she put on his knowledge with his power?" seems not terribly pressing, and I've always wanted to answer, "Who cares? The woman was raped by a bird!" A more basic question might be, "Can a swan really have sex with a human?" Or: "Who does this lousy bird think he is--Zeus?!" It's one of those myths that I wouldn't mind a parodist like Mel Brooks retelling on film. . . .
. . . . In an homage to Dickinson, whom I regard as one of the great literary observers of nature, I played off “A bird came down my walk”:
Homage to Emily Dickinson
A bird came up
My mental walk.
It pinched a Dickinson
Scholar in half.
In my scrappy hometown,
I knew weirdos like you,
Liked them. They
Lived their lives,
And just their lives.
How rare that is
I began to know
Even at age six.
Your poems are prim
Graffiti scratched
On the back of Piety’s pew.
Good old you.
Your poems know more
Than ever they let on,
Were postcards sent
From privacy, anon.
© 2007
I also wrote a poem not just about a wren--but a Bewick’s wren (now that's specialization):
Wren
A Bewick’s wren landed on a fence-rail,
presented its image to my surprised view.
All of natural history had contributed
to this bird’s mere form, gray-brown
finish, up-slashed tail, and quick
departure into an atmosphere that is
no longer visible to us. When I saw
a Bewick’s wren today, I sensed
spirits nearby smiling wryly
at my mere thimbleful of awe.
© 2007
And here’s a link to “An E-Anthology of Avian Poems”:
Happy birding.
Sunday, March 18, 2007
Words and Land, Land and Water
Rita Dove has a wonderful poem titled simply "Ö." The title of my poem below seems elaborate by comparison: "Őland." Poets are notoriously imperfect at interpreting their own poems, so with that caveat, I'll just note that I think the writing of this one came from a seam or crevice that many if not most poets explore, where the mysterious connections between land and language (and "land" is language) seem to reside.
On a more basic but still poetic topic, I'll mention that, to English-speakers, the Swedes refer to the commercial trip from Sweden to Őland as "the booze cruise," a nice rhyme.
The people who live on these island consider themselves, culturally, to be and, linguistically, are Swedish. When Russia "annexed" Finnland, it grabbed Åland, too, and when Finnland became independent again, Őland stayed with Finnland, at least officially.
* * *
Őland
(the group of island east of Sweden)
We sail past rocks. Glaciers rubbed
them round, so the story goes—round
heads of old monks, slick heads of seals
sleeping on black boulder-islands.
We’re sailing to a land that belongs
to water, a semi-nation of Swedes
governed by Finns, its very-own flag
whipped by unconquered winds.
Three old Swedish men, drinking beer
this early morning, mutter
stories of boats, ships, water, and things
that go wrong. “Panama,” they say.
And “Gävle.” “Titta,” they say: Look,
and we pass the rocks past Őland.
The rocks pass us, looking. Things can’t
go wrong with rocks but can go
wrong on them. White swans
fly by. Earth never stops whirling—
so the story goes. “Ibland,” the men
say. Sometimes.
Å is oh, and oh is water. In Waterland, land
becomes a sought-after afterthought:
“Oh. . . . Land.” Ibland. Åland. Őland.
Thursday, March 15, 2007
Stood Up
Stood Up
The fiction and poetry of British writer Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) often projects a bleak, dour attitude toward experience, not unlike the attitudes represented in the works of A.E. Housman and Robinson Jeffers. Of course, those who favor a Hardy/Housman/Jeffers worldview might quibble with the word “bleak” and suggest replacing it with “accurate.” Even so, “dour” seems an especially good word to situate near Hardy, partly because it apparently shares etymological DNA with “duress” and “endure.”
Hardy could be a delicate writer, too—delicate in the way a jeweler, or a diplomatic envoy during a crisis, is paid to be. Consider the love poem, of sorts, “A Broken Appointment”:
A Broken Appointment
You did not come,
And marching Time drew on, and wore me numb.
Yet less for loss of your dear presence there
Than that I thus found lacking in your make
That high compassion which can overbear
Reluctance for pure lovingkindness’ sake
Grieved I, when, as the hope-hour stroked its sum,
You did not come.
You love not me,
And love alone can lend you loyalty;
--I know and knew it. But, unto the store
Of human deeds divine in all but name,
Was it not worth a little hour or more
To add yet this: Once you, a woman, came
To soothe a time-torn man; even though it be
You love not me?
(The first and last lines of each stanza are supposed to be indented and centered in relation to the rest of their stanzas, but the blog won't let me save the text that way.)
I find so much to like in this poem. Uncommonly, it explores a common experience, that of waiting for someone we care about and whom we want to believe cares about us, only to realize the person has chosen not to show up.
I admit the syntax in stanza one is front-loaded; that is, we must wait quite a while for that verb, “grieved.” Why did he grieve, however? The answer is delicate, discerning. He grieved not because he longed for the person, or because he was wounded by rudeness or abandonment, but because he realized the person’s character ("make," as in "makeup" or "constitution") lacked “high compassion.” The person lacks something that Hardy attempts to capture in a word that welds together two words: “lovingkindness”; the person’s character seems not to include a crucial type of kindness.
Delicately, Hardy writes “You love not me,” instead of “You love me not.” I take “You love me not” to place the emphasis on the speaker’s not being loved. “You love not me” is more detached, less self-centered; it states that the person expected at that appointed hour does not love the one waiting but no doubt loves another or others. In this chosen phrasing, I hear an echo of "that's the way it goes," of "c'est la vie." The phrasing also suggests that this situation is not a surprise to the one waiting. Incidentally, after we have waited for 13 lines, we learn for sure the person is “a woman.”
The poem appears to conclude with a rhetorical question, a kind of question we often ask when we are hurt or angry. A well worn example is, “What were you thinking?!” The one in the poem is more delicate. Indeed, I’m not sure if it expresses, rhetorically, disappointment and anger, or whether, in fact, it may not be entirely rhetorical. That is, perhaps the speaker actually wants to know whether the woman may not have found some worth in showing up and soothing him, the worth one finds in doing the right thing. That the question might function dually pleases me.
The speaker seems not to have expected an expression of love or an indication of loyalty. Basically, he just wanted her to show up, bringing with her a kind word.
I need not but will point out the deftly handled form: iambic pentameter, book-ended in both stanzas by iambic dimeter; an intricate scheme of rhyming; a tone of voice—at least insofar as I interpret the tone—that is, certainly, formal but also conversational. But who talks like that? That’s a fair question. A person who has worked out an elaborate but firm notion of good character may talk like that, and perhaps also an educated person born in 1840 and still alive a decade after the Great War.
Finally, I must mention "the hope-hour," from the penultimate line in stanza one. Haven't we all experienced "the hope-hour," in which, like the people stuck in Casablanca, we "wait . . . and wait. . . and wait"?
Tuesday, March 13, 2007
When A Love Poem Isn't
When A Love Poem Isn’t
In Anglo-American culture, William Shakespeare’s sonnets are conventionally thought to represent the best in love poetry. Sometimes a love poem isn’t a love poem, however, and sometimes its not being a love poem makes it, paradoxically, a better love poem, or at least a more surprising one. Consider Shakespeare’s Sonnet #18:
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometimes declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimmed;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives live to thee.
You have to like almost any poem that begins with a simple question. Rhetorically, the question opens the poem like a well-made key.
The speaker of the poem doesn’t answer the question directly, however. Implicitly, he answers, “Yes and No.” Yes, I’ll go through the exercise of comparing you, or at least contrasting you, to summer—which he does in lines 2 through 8. But implicitly he also answers, No. That is, he can make the comparison, but the comparison turns out to be no good, because summer has its flaws and doesn’t measure up to “thee”—the woman or man about whom the poem is written. The convention of love poetry is to compare the lover in a way that works. Shakespeare deliberately offers a comparison that falls short. He’s having fun with the convention of comparing; it’s a very jazzy thing to do. One imagines a jazz musician playing and gently mocking a melodic line, both at once. Lines 1 through 8, then, feature the poet flexing poetic muscles—making a comparison and showing the inadequacy of the comparison simultaneously.
“But thy eternal summer shall not fade.” That sounds like a nice compliment to pay a lover, there in line 9. Lines 10 through 14 demonstrate that the speaker is not really complimenting the lover, however. He’s complimenting himself. He’s arguing that the lover’s “eternal summer” and her or his “fairness” (beauty) will last precisely as long as Sonnet #18 shall last, and the prediction is that Sonnet # 18 will last as long as men can breathe, or eyes can see: a very long time, asthma and cataracts notwithstanding.
The speaker of the poem must, we may conclude, like this person very much, perhaps even love her or him. But the poem is mainly self-admiring. First, it shows off ("watch me compare thee to summer and then critique the comparison"). Then it predicts a long life for itself, and it predicts that it this long-lived poem, a kind of monument to the person (thee) will have been built.
Of course, this all makes Sonnet #18 a better love poem, at least a less conventional one, than we might have expected. It’s about love of language and poetry, and it’s about liking someone so much that you’ll set out to write a magnificent poem about her or him. But a straight-up “I love you” poem it isn’t. So much the better. “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” Well, yes and no, my dear . . . .
And how many poets can predict a long life for their poetry—and turn out to be right? Nicely done, Bill.
A Poem About Eggplant, a.k.a aubergine
I never developed a taste for eggplant, but I always liked the name, "eggplant," and I like the alternate name even more: aubergine. I also like the color, the external texture, and the mystery of eggplant. So I wrote a poem about this vegetable--or is it a fruit? My apologies to fans of eggplant Parmesan. No offense intended. My homage to aubergine:
Aubergine
Eggplant, the bruise-fruit, heals
in a darkroom as photographs
of contusions develop.
Gathered in a farmer’s truck,
eggplants appear ready to travel
into outer space, there to visit
purple planets in our galaxy.
The mayor has disappeared.
He was last seen getting into
a taxicab near the produce-market.
He was accompanied by an eggplant,
which he carried in a burgundy valise.
Shiny, soft, and smooth,
eggplants suggest patent-leather
shoes worn by a species whose feet
differ from ours in certain respects.
Although I dislike eating
its slippery flesh, I pay
aubergine certain respects.
There is eggplant. There
it is—a pliable stone
sitting in purple patience
waiting for us to go away.
© 2006
Why Do We Like the Poems We Like?
Why Do We Like the Poems We Like?
In grade-school, I encountered the poems customarily encountered by my generation: Emerson’s Concord hymn, Frost’s “Stopping By Woods” (which we had to memorize), Kilmer’s “Trees,” and parts of Hiawatha. There was a mixture of the patriotic, the safe, the conventional, and the pleasing (Hiawatha is fun to listen to, especially for children).
In high school, things got more complicated, but not much. English teachers preferred short stories (“Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge”), novels (Lord of the Flies), and plays (Romeo and Juliet; Julius Caesar). When I got to college, I finally encountered poems that bowled me over, such as Randall Jarrell’s “Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” and Karl Shapiro’s “Auto Wreck.” I liked these poems because they surprised me. In a way, they didn’t give me a choice. They insisted that I like them. They presented images of and provided a new language for war, death, and terrible commonplaces like car-wrecks; they did things with poetry I didn’t know, until then, could be done.
I think we pretend to or agree to like some poems because we are supposed to. I think we like others because they remind us of a certain time in life or a certain moment; they help mark a memory. And I think we like others because, when we read them, they strike quickly, they pierce, and they satisfy by surprising. I also believe poetry pierces in ways that novels and plays can’t—even though novels and plays are equally powerful, in their own ways. Nowadays, people—even people who study literature, I might add—don’t like poetry, fear or dread poetry, or otherwise just avoid it. But that’s a different question, one I might take up later.
For now I’ll end by offering this opinion: the poet whose opus is most full of piercing surprises is Emily Dickinson, who may be the most misunderstood or mis-characterized poet ever. I still cherish her wonderfully observed poem, [“A Narrow Fellow in the Grass”].
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