Banjo52

"In a Dark Time" by Theodore Roethke

2012-01-24T19:12:00.004-05:00

In a Dark Time by Theodore Roethke : The Poetry Foundation

I think I’ve heard that Theodore Roethke’s “In a Dark Time”is one of his more admired poems, but I'm not sure how to think about it. Ithink I’d use that handy reviewer word, “uneven,” to describe it. I find someof the lines gorgeous:

Ihear my echo in the echoing wood—

Alord of nature weeping to a tree.

Ilive between the heron and the wren . . .

Or provocative:

What’smadness but nobility of soul

Atodds with circumstance?

Or personalized, unique, and convincing images of nightmareand desperation:

Myshadow pinned against a sweating wall.

Thatplace among the rocks . . .

Theedge is what I have.

Anight flowing with birds, a ragged moon . . .

I also like the fact the final line leaves some ambiguityabout just how much of a

solution this union of the human mind and God might be, aswe find it “free” only to

exist in a “tearing wind.” How comforting is that? How completeis that salvation?

There’s a realism in that uncertainty that works wellagainst a facile cure-all for

closure.

However, some of Roethke’s lines and images feel a bithyperbolic and histrionic, or

pat and predictable. The images can be rather non-specific,as if collected from a

psychology text, a formula, rather than testaments of thisparticular speaker’s

individual, personalized imagery of being on the brink:

Theday’s on fire!

Iknow the purity of pure despair,

Andin broad day the midnight come again!

Allnatural shapes blazing unnatural light.

Dark,dark my light,

I hear more rhapsody than agony in those lines. Even thepoem’s title, “In a Dark Time” strikes me as a rather generic summation ofangst. To say “a dark time” is to speak something a lot of folks might haveuttered. Is it wrong to expect from a major poet a higher percentage oforiginal images and thoughts about psychological chaos? It’s not that those areabsent here, but aren’t they a bit inconstant?

Let me know if the subject interests you. If it does, I’lltry to post one or two of G.M.

Hopkins’ “terrible sonnets” where the themes are similar,but the imagery seems to me more consistently stunning and creative, eventhough Hopkins is almost a century older than Roethke.

In a Dark Time by Theodore Roethke : The Poetry Foundation

Chase Twichell Again: "Self-Portrait"

2012-01-19T15:58:00.001-05:00

Self-Portrait by Chase Twichell : Poetry Magazine

I've read that Chase Twichell is serious about and learned in Buddhism. I don't know much about it, but I wonder if "Self-Portrait" reveals a somewhat Buddhist dialogue within a self.

The big old Anhinga, also known as the snake bird or water turkey, is quite a sight. I think this one's in dialogue with himself, as he dries his wings in the sun.

Chase Twichell, "A Negative of Snow"

2012-01-17T17:46:00.002-05:00


White Pelicans--very rare, I'm told

A Negative of Snow by Chase Twichell : The Poetry Foundation

Chase Twichell's "A Negative of Snow" is a brutally honest poem about a daughter's father-love. The first verse paragraph is a superb set-up for the shift to a somewhat different subject at the poem's center. In that opening, I especially love this (note that Ms. Twichell's reading somehow, oddly omits the first verse paragraph):

     It was my job to carry the birds.
     I’d have them all plucked
     by the time we got back to the car.
     On the walk out I’d look
     for puddles I’d missed
     and break them.

These lines prepare us both beautifully and awfully for the tough facts to come. The daughter can
pluck birds efficiently, probably better than any boy, and she makes sure she fractures
every iced puddle she comes across. She is no softie; she knows anger. And that dramatizes, by
contrast, her softer filial affections as the rest of the poem develops, adding one cold complication
to another.

The season, of course, is winter; it almost has to be. So I've added Florida shore birds as balance.


Roseate Spoonbill, flanked by White Ibises, in Synchronized Flea Biting [Blogspot is again fighting me on formatting above, after the quotation. Hope you can ignore it].

A Negative of Snow by Chase Twichell : The Poetry Foundation

Anne Marie Macari. More on Bishop's "Filling Station."

2012-01-13T11:33:00.000-05:00

This is another occasion when readers’ comments on the lastpost were just too good for a cursory response from me.

For those who came here seeking a new poem today, here isAnne Marie Macari’s short, but probably not simple “From the Plane.” From the Plane byAnne Marie Macari : American Life in Poetry Feel free to comment on it, of course, or to say more about “FillingStation.” I hope to look at more of Macari’s work in the future.

Now, back to your comments on “Filling Station.” (By theway, note the possible word play: it’s not a gas station or service station, but a place where things getfilled).

Barbaro, I thought I'd offered the poem before, then couldn'tfind it (still can’t), so I went ahead and posted it. Clearly you did hear the tone that was troubling me. Maybeyou heard it even louder. Whether or not others agree with you, your strong, fine commentwould be hard to dismiss.

Among all the visitors’ comments last time, there are severalfascinating beginnings. Beginning with Birdman, the issue of life vs. the art arose again, sohere’s a quick link to Wikipedia’s bio of Elizabeth Bishop. I’ll let each readerdecide how entitled her life seems.

Elizabeth Bishop -Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

We need to pay attention to Pasadena Adjacent's point about the"hidden female" in the poem. Is that what the poem is about? Is itabove all else a feminist poem?

Also, we musn’t gloss over PA’s point that our reactions tothe poem (any poem?) say more about us than they say about the poem. The ideais so huge and complicated that I wonder if we could somehow make it astipulation in all criticism about literature and art: who are you, Mr./Ms. Commentator. Wheredo you come from, in the largest senses of those words, and why have you come here?

Or is that so huge and complicated that it becomes, bydefault, a defense of The New Criticism’s elimination of all factors other thanthe art object itself. We must ignore the lives of the commentators just as weignore the lives of the writers and artists.

I’m interested in Gothpunkuncle's thought that the poem’s potentiallyoffending tone might result from a strategy by Bishop: make us feel our ownclassism by feeling the speaker’s. And certainly that last line could be a stepback from what was gentle mockery: “Somebody loves us all,” even among thegrease. Or it could be the most mocking line of all.

Brenda, although Bishop did some teaching, it's indeedinteresting to wonder what she thought about teachers, students, and theprocess. Do teachers fill gas tanks and spill things, make messes, live andwork in some kind of metaphorical grease?

Stickup Artist, I have the same soft spot. In a town I knew in the 1950sand 1960s, Cap Johnson's Sohio station on the town square was a standard placefor a Coke if the day was hot, or if we were too sweaty for a drugstore Cokeafter an afternoon of pickup basketball in Arnie Snider’s driveway. I recall absolutely no sense of classdistinction among us, toward ourselves or our elders’ ways ofmaking a living. If Cap told us not to do that, we stopped. It was understoodthat he spoke for our parents, as well as every other merchant on the square,plus the sheriff, whose jail was two doors away, just this side of The Roxy. And don’t even ask about Woody Renrock’s shoe repair shop;the smell of that leather was better than any pipe tobacco--yes, even Kentucky Club.

Maybe Hillary Clinton created or exploited the aphorism, “Ittakes a village,” but the idea is very old. It's not all sweetness and light, but it's worth a long, hard look.

On the other hand, there were adults there in my MayberryJunior who . . . thought they were somebody, as the saying goes. We knew whothose folks were, and what we thought of them. At least in childhood, snobberywas bad for business, and maybe we developed good noses for it. We’d go somewhere else for our Cokesor even splurge on a milkshake there, just to make a point.

I wonder if we’d havechosen to buy anything from this Elizabeth Bishop lady.

Elizabeth Bishop - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

From the Plane by Anne Marie Macari : American Life in Poetry

*

"Filling Station" by Elizabeth Bishop

2012-01-11T21:57:00.001-05:00

Filling Station by Elizabeth Bishop : The Poetry Foundation

Elizabeth Bishop's attitude and tone in "Filling Station" strike me as at least a bit condescending, patronizing. It's hard for me to accept that a mind as sharp as hers would settle for a superficial take on her subject, so I keep coming back to the poem every few weeks or months. That nagging feeling persists. Is it just me? Or would you argue that the filling station people deserve condescension from a major poet?

Filling Station by Elizabeth Bishop : The Poetry Foundation

*

Macbeth Again, Further Thoughts

2012-01-08T22:59:00.001-05:00

Here again is Macbeth’s soliloquy, one of Shakespeare’s mostfamous:

            To-morrow,and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
            Creepsin this petty pace from day to day,
            Tothe last syllable of recorded time;
            Andall our yesterdays have lighted fools
            Theway to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
            Life'sbut a walking shadow, a poor player,
            Thatstruts and frets his hour upon the stage,
            Andthen is heard no more. It is a tale
            Toldby an idiot, full of sound and fury,
            Signifyingnothing.

(5.5.19-28)

Macbeth knows his ill-gotten tenure on the Scottish throne won't last muchlonger, and now his wife’s gone mad and killed herself. Because Macbeth’s lifeseems a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing, he projects that everyone’slife is like that. Shakespeare know, whether or not his character does, that weall have felt that way at times.

But Macbeth’s life is a tale told not so muchby an idiot as by an ambitious, hen-pecked, anxiety-ridden, speechifyingcriminal whose ambition leads him to kill a king who trusted, loved, andrespected him. Oh yes, and his good friend Banquo (too bad the kid gotaway). Oh yes, and the wife andchild of Macduff. Yes, we’veall had days or months like Macbeth’s, haven’t we. And instead of aspirin or Xanax, here we go off to slaughtera few humans, the closer to us they thought they were, the better. There’s noblood like familiar blood, especially the children’s.

I’ve never understood why Shakespeare considered Macbeth atragedy, which by definition details the fall of a great character. What’sgreat about Macbeth beyond his skill as a warrior and a few elegant speeches?

One of these days I'm going to read some psychoanalyticcriticism on Macbeth. So much about him is pure psychopath. But in spite of hismurders, he seems at times to have a conscience, seems beset by guilt, unlikehis cold wife.

Then again, even she goes through some ritual hand washingtoward the end ("a little water clears us of this deed"). As for her madness and suicide, doesshe hate herself for her deeds? Does she feel genuine guilt, or even shame, ordoes she just see her ill-gotten gains coming to an end? Better to off herself than let the riffraff do her in?

I’ve also wondered whether the Tomorrow and Tomorrow speechis Macbeth’s point of recognition, his awareness of himself, his flaw and hismistakes, his wisdom achieved through his suffering? Or is it this one, twoscenes earlier?--in which the term “mouth-honor” gives me chills, though not onbehalf of Macbeth, who doesn’t deserve even the hollow echo of mouth-honor.

Ihave lived long enough. My way of life

Isfall’n into the sere, the yellow leaf.

Andthat which should accompany old age,

Ashonor, love, obedience, troops of friends,

Imust not look to have, but in their stead

Curses,not loud but deep, mouth-honor, breath

            Whichthe poor heart would fain deny and dare not.
                                                                                    (5.3.26-32)

How many people do you know who would settle for mouth-honor, or who wouldn't know the difference between that and more meaningful honors bestowed by peers or superiors, from their hearts and minds?

Do Little Leaguers who get a trophy just for showing up know, at some level, that that's insulting, patronizing mouth-honor?

Methinks we got some honor-inflation goin' on the last two or three decades.

Robert Frost's "Out, Out--" and Macbeth's Soliloquy

2012-01-05T22:03:00.000-05:00

And they, since they

Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.

‘Out, Out—’ by Robert Frost : The Poetry Foundation

Frost's title is an allusion to Macbeth's famous speech upon the occasion of the death of Lady Macbeth:

Macbeth:
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Macbeth Act 5, scene 5,19–28

Lisel Mueller and William Carlos Williams: What's New?

2012-01-01T15:35:00.000-05:00

Blogspot was singularly unfriendly yesterday, so here is a revision of that post.

Sometimes, When the Light by Lisel Mueller : The Poetry Foundation

I'm just starting to look at Lisel Mueller's poems with some attention to overall patterns, but in the two I've linked to here (today and November 16), my question is, "Is this enough?"

In November by Lisel Mueller : The Poetry Foundation

Some may respond, "Typical English major type. If it's accessible and has a hint of pleasantness, he says it's shallow."

But with literature, and I assume with other art, we need to ask, where's the beef? Where's the resonance, the impact, the intensity? What's new here? Is it new with a purpose or just new in some flashy, superficial way? Conversely, if it's conventional or traditional, is there something new and distinctive within those bounds? Is the bird in the cage singing or dying? And in any case, why should I care?

William Carlos Williams comes to mind as one who sometimes gets the most and best echo from what may seem a flat plainness of diction. Here is his famous "The Red Wheelbarrow":

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

Can a poet write what seems to be prose broken whimsically into lines and still achieve emotional or intellectual impact? Does some poet do it better than Mueller or Williams?

Based on only a poem or two apiece, the question, I agree, is absurd, and the whole notion of making poetry competitive is open to challenge. But it's what we do with all art, whether or not we like to admit it and whether or not the system is fair.

Besides, this is just a blog, not world peace, not even a New York Times headline, so I'm asking the questions anyway. Maybe it will cause someone to look at more work by each poet, and others, in which case, just take me out back and shoot me.

Oh, yeah, Happy New Year.

Sometimes, When the Light by Lisel Mueller : The Poetry Foundation

"A Hole In The Floor," by Richard Wilbur. Dana Gioia and Randall Jarrell

2011-12-22T08:45:00.000-05:00

A Hole In The Floor by Richard Wilbur

In case anyone has become interested in Richard Wilbur as a result of my last post, I’ll add some biographical info I’ve just stumbled onto. It’s written by Dana Gioia (JOY-uh), who, like Wilbur is a poet, teacher, translator, music scholar, and promoter of the arts.

Some specifics relevant to previous posts on Banjo52:

1. As a formalist poet, a graduate of Amherst and Harvard and teacher at Wesleyan, a translator of Moliere and composer of librettos, Wilbur might be thought an east coast elitist. In fact, his parents were of fairly modest (though somewhat intellectual) backgrounds.

2. During his college years, Wilbur spent two summers as a boxcar hobo.

3. Wilbur was in some major combat in World War II, partly because his leftist politics in college made him suspicious to superiors and got him transferred out of Army Intelligence into the infantry.

4. His work (and his own bias?) made him compatible with the New Criticism, which favors formalist, brainy poetry.

5. He had a long friendship with Robert Frost.

I remain partial to New Critical thinking about the limited role, if any, in reading authors’ lives into their writing. I don’t think any of Gioia’s information is essential to understanding or appreciating or critiquing Wilbur’s poetry; a writer’s life can be interesting in its own right, without our insisting upon reading it into the work.

As for the poetry itself, here is a 1962 take on Wilbur by eminent critic and important minor poet, Randall Jarrell, who often writes more colorful generalizations than he has time to support or illustrate completely. In that way, and in sparking us toward thought, whether in agreement or enraged disagreement, Jarrell reminds me of William Logan, though Jarrell might be less vitriolic, at least on Wilbur:

“Petronius spoke of the 'studied felicity' of Horace’s poetry, and I can never read one of Richard Wilbur’s books without thinking of this phrase. His impersonal, exactly accomplished, faintly sententious skill produces poems that, ordinarily, compose themselves into a little too regular a beauty – there is no eminent beauty without a certain strangeness in the proportion; and yet 'A Baroque Wall-Fountain in the Villa Sciarra' is one of the most marvelously beautiful, one of the most nearly perfect poems any American has written, and poems like 'A Black November Turkey' and 'A Hole in the Floor' are the little differentiated, complete-in-themselves universes that (sic) true works of art. Wilbur’s lyric calling-to-life of the things of this world – the things, rather than the processes or people – specializes in both true and false happy endings, not by choice but by necessity; he obsessively sees, and shows, the bright underside of every dark thing.”

(http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/s_z/wilbur/bio.htm)

But you probably came here for a poem, not just commentary. So here again is “A Hole in the Floor." Notice the way Wilbur begins with rhyme and half-rhyme, then loses it in the middle stanzas. (But be on the lookout for rhyme and other sound play that's internal, rather than coming only at ends of lines).

A Hole In The Floor by Richard Wilbur

I think that struggle to find rhyme implies and echoes the dangerous chaos and darkness Wilbur sees just below the level where we think we live. Yet the return to exact, rather conspicuous rhyme in the final stanza might well suggest the kind of happy ending Jarrell refers to.

Richard Wilbur's "The House": Elegy and Sensibility

2011-12-19T08:22:00.000-05:00

At the risk ofsounding hyperbolic, I think anyone working on an elegy for a deceased lover canstop now. Go watch TV; eat some potato chips. Richard Wilbur’s “The House” hasbeen written.

The House- Poets.org - Poetry, Poems, Bios & More

Less extravagantly, Isuggest again that fixed form adds elegance to a poem only if the poet has theear, the intelligence, and the will to control it. In “The House” the verysubject matter screams, “Load medown with sentiment; weep, wail, keen, wallow in grief!” Instead, Wilbur givesus calm and dignity, along with the sense that the speaker genuinely knows thedead wife, her dreams, her longings, her sense of where peace is. He knows hermind and cares enough about her to offer some details; there’s no need forshouting.

A white house? Awhite gatepost? A rock-lined shore with pines? Won’t someone argue that wife orspeaker or both are lovers in a postcard cliché? For all I know,someone has already said that, but I hardly feel a hint of it. Or maybe I meanthat Richard Wilbur walks right up to that line of sentimentality, excess andtriteness, then spits in its eye. It’s as if someone’s dared him to over-write;he’s accepted the challenge and triumphed.

Wilbur honors hissubject by quietly, thoroughly knowing it, by showing how intimately and completelyhe has understood the now absent bride. He achieves this by gracing her withhis restraint in language and emotion, which are more powerful and more beautifulbecause they are restrained.

At the end of “Fern Hill,” Dylan Thomas writes abouttime, mortality, and aging. He concludes, “I sang in my chains like the sea.”

At the end of Act IIof King Lear, in a different kind of mourning, the aged, deeply flawed, and evenmore deeply betrayed king tries to grit his teeth:

Youthink I'll weep;

No, I'll not weep:

Ihave full cause of weeping; but this heart

(Storm and Tempest.)

Shallbreak into a hundred thousand flaws,

Orere I'll weep. O, Fool! I shall go mad!

(II,ii,285-289)

In a way, that’s how I hear “The House,” though it’s even more subduedthan Dylan Thomas or King Lear. This is a time in America when intimacy, formost, means sex—how many orgasms? how intense? on a scale of one to ten? howmany inches? is less really more? what positions? how creative? after how manydates? Surely Playboy's advice column has vanished?—everything those editors might offer is nowrevealed in TV sit-coms and Comedy Channel stand-up performances, and it's all about math, measurement, and seismographs, not intimacy, that quaint old notion. Or vulnerability. Or loss. Or shared pleasure, shared secrets, good company, conversation or silence on a two-lane road or a boat.

Richard Wilbur—whohas always written from a perspective of elegant restraint, high above suchcasino, whorehouse stuff—gives us this poem about love. Probably he’s just sharing, grievingaloud, which is one of the purposes of poetry and song. Or maybe he thinks weneed a reminder about other kinds of intimacy, kinds of grace, or even adefinition of love, and all the ways of knowing another person.

The House- Poets.org - Poetry, Poems, Bios & More

"End of Summer" by Stanley Kunitz

2011-12-13T18:59:00.001-05:00

End of Summer by Stanley Kunitz : The Poetry Foundation

Although Stanley Kunitz’s poem is technically about the end of summer, it feels to me more like late autumn or early

winter—maybe just because that’s where we are now. The poem is probably accessible enough without help or opining from me, but I do want to mention a few marvels I think it offers.

First, I like the modest personification of “the disenchanted field.” However, I’m wild about “a small worm lisped to me.” It’s not merely a talking worm, but also a worm with a minor speech peculiarity. The comic resonance of the image grows when we remember that a worm might have phallic suggestions. This is the kind of wonder that can happen in summer, can become “The song of my marrow-bones.”

But it’s no sooner said than summer images mysteriously begin to break up and suggest fall and coldness. A hawk that “broke” might have been an especially ominous predator, but a blazing silo roof definitely signals peril.

Finally, I find something special in one straightforward, simple, non-figurative, non-ironic, relentlessly honest statement: “I knew/That part of my life was over.” It has the kind of earned straightforwardness I hear in James Wright’s “I have wasted my life.”

On a certain Tuesday or Thursday, there are things we suddenly know, whether they are epiphanies, with their undertones of religion and usefulness, or simply brute knowledge. These cannot be faked or softened by the adornment of metaphor and other tricks of language and technique. Only the quick, cold stab of a dagger will do.

That in turn makes me wonder if Kunitz's last line is a bit of overkill. Opinions welcome.

End of Summer by Stanley Kunitz : The Poetry Foundation

"Lines for Winter" by Mark Strand

2011-12-11T18:13:00.003-05:00

Lines for Winter by Mark Strand : The Poetry Foundation

We talked a bit about Mark Strand's poem last January, but it deserves more than one look.

Also, almost a year later, "Lines for Winter" is reminding me of a question I try to put to myself every once in awhile, regarding honesty: if I weren't going to tell anyone I did this, would I still be doing it? Do I really want to go to the Bach concert, or do I want to be able to say I was there?

I'm pretty sure we're all guilty, maybe once per decade, of undeserved self-congratulation, self-promotion, self-aggrandizement. Maybe it's like tobacco, and we should cut back on it.

Isn't Strand's poem about that, at least a bit, maybe a little sideways? In any case, I welcome comments on "Lines for Winter" or other, related ideas.

Last January, Barbaro wrote here in visitor comments: "You and your poems keep trying to make me hate winter, but I won't do it. So desperately do I love it that I got mildly depressed today because I did notice afternoons clawing their way back, which means those beautiful dark white days near the solstice are behind us for a whole other year. For all its intensity of cold and snow and impatience, Februrary can't touch that sweet spot in late December."

As I walked yesterday and visualized it again today, I realize I failed to endorse that view with sufficient enthusiasm. Hence these photos.

Mary Oliver, William Logan: Tenderness, Meanness, and How Much Is Enough

2011-12-07T08:12:00.002-05:00

White-Eyes by Mary Oliver : Poetry Magazine

NEW CRITERION, December 2008

Shock & Awe

by William Logan

One of my problems with poet and critic William Logan—the Don Rickles or Simon Cowell of the poetry world—is that his wicked humor so often has a legitimate target, and I often, guiltily agree with him. Sometimes I feel as if he and I are the last two people on the planet who believe poetry is a pure, tight, sacred thing that examines objects, thoughts, feelings with the incisive care and intuition they deserve—often gentle curiosity, occasionally blunt force trauma.

But it’s usually with some shame and regret that I find myself in Logan’s camp because his words are often mean. I cannot believe that the poets he tries to marginalize or vaporize are so . . . professional? or aloof, detached, clinical? . . . that they are immune to his mockery. He seems to want to hurt poets who offend him, and I struggle to find that okay, even as I grin at his jokes.

In speaking perceptively or provocatively, how acerbic is one allowed to be before the words turn back on their speaker and say more about her or him than the intended subject?

Here is William Logan on Mary Oliver’s 2008 book of poems Red Bird:

Mary Oliver is the poet laureate of the self-help biz and the human potential movement. She has stripped down the poetry in Red Bird until it is nothing but a naked set of values: that the human spirit is indomitable, that the animal spirit is indomitable, that she loves birds very much, that she loves flowers very much, that even her dog loves flowers very much.[1] . . . If we trust the landscape of her poems, Oliver lives in a vast nature preserve she polices like a docent, strolling from bush to bush from beast to beast (I’m told the wildlife of Cape Cod have asked for a restraining order against her).

Let’s not deny it: that's funny stuff, that's awfully clever satire. And those who know poetry can see where Logan is coming from, whether or not they entirely approve of his content or his tone. But is he squashing an ant with an avalanche (or however that boulder-to-bug analogy goes)?

Logan concludes his review of Red Bird by tossing Sharon Olds, Ted Kooser, and Billy Collins into the Mary Oliver mold (onto the poet funeral pyre?), as he suggests that Oliver and, by implication, the others write the way they do for the money: “The worship of simplicities is not a mean thing; but it is made mean when conducted with such hand wringing, such urgent tears, such Victorian sentiment. Those tears are shed all the way to the bank.”

I find it hard to believe that anyone would choose verse as an avenue toward riches, but I don’t have an insider's knowledge of how such business goes. Are those four writers and others really raking in millions from their verse and their readings?

Even if they are, does it mean they write the way they do—call it populist verse—in order to get rich or stay rich? Or do they write that way because that’s their mind and voice—the only mind and voice they have? That’s the way they see the world, and those are the words and sentences they use to talk about what they see. Even if some of us (occasionally? always?) find it inferior—shallow, simplistic—shall we take those putative wannabes downtown and lock them in the Poetryville stocks? And ditto their readers? Lock them up too, for aiding and abetting?

In any case, does it matter? Those poets’ poems are there, on the market, and they offer additional ways to think about poetry. Quite possibly they are only enacting Wordsworth's dictum about the language of the common man. Moreover, they’ve brought tens of thousands of people to the reading of poems, which I like to think makes tens of thousands more observant, thoughtful, less aggressive humans. Maybe a handful will one day migrate to poems even William Logan can respect.

In the meantime, I'll probably keep reading the man. But not at bedtime--my squirming would keep me awake.

White-Eyes by Mary Oliver : Poetry Magazine

NEW CRITERION, December 2008

Shock & Awe

by William Logan

BROWNING’S “MY LAST DUCHESS” (with “JANET WAKING”)

2011-11-26T12:36:00.024-05:00

At the risk of obsessing about John Crowe Ransom’s “Janet Waking” (11/20/11), I still wonder if I'm hearing the poem accurately. While I sense some compassion in the speaker, his dismissiveness overrides it, at least for me. The poem seems to have gotten away from Ransom; I don't think he hears himself as well as he needs to.

Speaking of dismissiveness and other sins . . . many of you have been with family for Thanksgiving and thus subjected to a panorama of human flaws and grievous affronts, perhaps including dismissiveness.

So, in the context of your families and John Crowe Ransom’s “Janet Waking,” today I offer a classic poem, Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess” in which the author is clearly not the speaker, and it’s hard to imagine a speaker who is better controlled by his author, his creator.

This might take a little more effort than the typical Banjo52 poem and commentary, but I hope you’ll take your time, explore slowly, and find it enjoyable, as you encounter one of the most intriguing situations and most interesting villains in the history of human interaction.

My Last Duchess

by Robert Browning in 1842

FERRARA

That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,

Looking as if she were alive. I call

That piece a wonder, now; Fra Pandolf’s hands

Worked busily a day, and there she stands.

Will’t please you sit and look at her? I said

“Fra Pandolf” by design, for never read

Strangers like you that pictured countenance,

The depth and passion of its earnest glance,

But to myself they turned (since none puts by

The curtain I have drawn for you, but I)

And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst,

How such a glance came there; so, not the first

Are you to turn and ask thus. Sir, ’twas not

Her husband’s presence only, called that spot

Of joy into the Duchess’ cheek; perhaps

Fra Pandolf chanced to say, “Her mantle laps

Over my lady’s wrist too much,” or “Paint

Must never hope to reproduce the faint

Half-flush that dies along her throat.” Such stuff

Was courtesy, she thought, and cause enough

For calling up that spot of joy. She had

A heart—how shall I say?— too soon made glad,

Too easily impressed; she liked whate’er

She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.

Sir, ’twas all one! My favour at her breast,

The dropping of the daylight in the West,

The bough of cherries some officious fool

Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule

She rode with round the terrace—all and each

Would draw from her alike the approving speech,

Or blush, at least. She thanked men—good! but thanked

Somehow—I know not how—as if she ranked

My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name

With anybody’s gift. Who’d stoop to blame

This sort of trifling? Even had you skill

In speech—which I have not—to make your will

Quite clear to such an one, and say, “Just this

Or that in you disgusts me; here you miss,

Or there exceed the mark”—and if she let

Herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set

Her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse—

E’en then would be some stooping; and I choose

Never to stoop. Oh, sir, she smiled, no doubt,

Whene’er I passed her; but who passed without

Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;

Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands

As if alive. Will’t please you rise? We’ll meet

The company below, then. I repeat,

The Count your master’s known munificence

Is ample warrant that no just pretense

Of mine for dowry will be disallowed;

Though his fair daughter’s self, as I avowed

At starting, is my object. Nay, we’ll go

Together down, sir. Notice Neptune, though,

Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity,

Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me!

* * *

Was this guy at your Thanksgiving table? Forgive me if I doubt it. Few people are this interesting, and I suspect few of us do justice to the importance of being interesting as we size up people we know.

Browning’s speaker is probably Italy’s fifth Duke of Ferrara (1533–1598), and he has had his last wife (My Last Duchess) murdered: “This grew. I gave commands./And all smiles stopped together.”

Why did he do this? Because she shared her happy disposition with everyone and everything, from servants to sunsets and white mules. Our duke saw her behavior as a kind of betrayal, or even a kind of promiscuity:

. . . She had

A heart—how shall I say?— too soon made glad,

Too easily impressed; she liked whate’er

She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.

Sir, ’twas all one! My favour at her breast,

The dropping of the daylight in the West,

The bough of cherries some officious fool

Broke in the orchard for her . . . .

Now, how might such a speaker be charming? How might the poem cause us to withhold our moral judgment of the duke, at least for a moment, and even—horrors!—find him appealing?

One answer is that he's intelligent, bold, decisive, shrewd, and menacing. He is simply too fascinating to be dismissed with simplistic moral judgment. He is Jesse James and Al Capone, but much brighter, much more articulate, cunning—and in some ways enviable. Somebody piss you off? Have ‘em killed. (Don’t dirty your hands by doing it yourself, of course; that’s for common rogues and peasants).

We all want to be the duke, but we’re townsfolk in an old western. So we want the next best thing: to be on the duke’s team. It sounds like a much bigger adventure than the grocer's team, the plumber's team, the farmer's team. Our secret selves wish we could speak one of the greatest lines in all of literature, with the absolute confidence (and honesty!) of our duke: “I choose/Never to stoop.” But we’re all talk; we suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune—and unpleasant dinner guests. We suffer fools gladly, while the duke simply has them killed.

We beg for work and call it dignity. We seek social standing and call it prestige, or even honor. But this duke is dignity, is prestige. And as for honor, why, that’s just a serf’s notion of virtue and importance.

The only thing the duke fakes is a democratic oneness with his companion. Up on a grand stairway, looking at art, among which the last and dead duchess is one painting, one of several art objects, the count’s emissary has probably made some obligatory, empty gesture, like, “After You, My Lord,”—to which our duke replies: “Nay, we’ll go/Together down, sir.”

Can’t you see the duke smirking? When your favorite nasty athlete talks smack about his opponent, you don’t give a damn about your idol’s honor or morality. You can’t wait till Sunday when he buries his opponent’s face in the mud. (Yes, Casper, once upon a time, football was played in mud). And you like it because you’re unable to do that to your own opponents.

Remember, the listener in the poem is an emissary from a count who is considering an offer of his daughter in marriage to our duke. Arrangements must be made, dowries negotiated, all things need to be understood, cards on the table.

In this context, our duke wants his prospective father-in-law to know the score: when folks don’t please him, he has them killed. To the poem’s listener, the duke is saying, “Be sure to tell your boss that my last wife was an air-headed cheerleader, apple-cheeked and well-liked, but in the end a happy bumpkin, not a woman who appreciated the nine-hundred-years-old name who was buttering her bread and therefore deserved and required all her attention. Tell your boss to tell his daughter what is meant by loyalty here in Ferrara.”

A common reading of the poem says that we are drawn to this, in spite of ourselves, in spite of all our moral abhorrence. Maybe it’s what we call swag these days. And cojones. Muchos cajones. The duke has put a new spin on honesty: “You want honesty? I’ll give you honesty.” I hear Nicolson in A Few Good Men: “You can’t handle the truth.” But maybe the duke says it better: “I choose/Never to stoop.”

So I ask again, was there a Duke of Ferrara at your holiday table? Or was it a crowd of obedient clucking sheep, hissing about this and that offense by every so-and-so in their lives? You heard me, clucking sheep. They hiss.

In addition to what you like or hate about the poem, it might be fun to hear about the dukes and duchesses from your own experience (maybe with the roles reversed?).

(For some basic historical info related to the poem, I suggest starting with good ol’ Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Last_Duchess )

Hopkins' "Spring and Fall" with Ransom's "Janet Waking": Children, Mortality, Wisdom

2011-11-20T21:22:00.002-05:00

G.M. Hopkins’ deservedly famous autumn poem, “Spring and Fall to a Young Child,” raises a question for me: how critically may an adult speak of the limitations in a child’s awareness of life’s largest issues and crises, especially mortality? I’ve posted it before, but here it is again:

Spring and Fall by Gerard Manley Hopkins : The Poetry Foundation

John Crowe Ransom’s “Janet Waking” takes that question to another, higher (or lower?), questionable level. Doesn’t it?
Janet Waking by John Crowe Ransom

In what might be seen as an anti-Thanksgiving poem (I know, I know, it’s a chicken, not a turkey), Ransom seems engaged in a competition with himself: whom shall I mock more, a bee-wounded, dead hen, or the little girl who named her Chucky and loved her? To whom do I feel more superior, dead chicken or grieving child?

In the first six stanzas, I hear avuncular amusement from the speaker as he portrays little Janet in her distress. If there’s been any doubt about the presence of humor, surely “transmogrifying bee” decides the matter. And that’s soon followed by:

            purply did the knot
            Swell with the venom and communicate
            Its rigour! Now the poor comb stood up straight
            But Chucky did not.

Maybe the speaker doesn’t want us to think he is taking the whole scene too seriously, so he uses preposterous, pompous diction for humor and emotional distance.

But I hear it as snotty. And if I weren’t sure, the ever so scholarly, condescending conclusion clinches it for me. Little Janet "would not be instructed in how deep/Was the forgetful kingdom of death."

I'll go this far with the speaker: little Janet will probably grow up about death someday, become a little hardened, philosophical, religious. But now? At her age? Minutes after she’s discovered her dead pet? In what way is it right or reasonable to mock her grief? Can we like or respect a mature man who speaks this way about childhood trauma?

Yes, I might feel as he does toward a hysterical child, but aren’t there things you don’t say, even as one adult to another? How important is honesty? In each and every situation? If he showed more empathy and respect for Janet, would we find him foolish?

Moreover, if those last two, didactic lines are all he has to offer in the ways of Solomon, about death, just how wise is he?

If we could feel that the author had invited us to criticize the speaker’s bombast, the ironic disparity between writer and speaker could be a major portion of the poem’s purpose: look how insensitive and supercilious an adult can be in responding to a child’s hysteria. In that case, we'd sense a wise, compassionate author presenting a speaker who shows no effort at empathy, at remembering how limited his own understanding of death was when he was a child.

However, I don’t feel any of this from Ransom. I don’t feel him critiquing the speaker’s condescension; I only hear a speaker looking down at the child, and he sounds cold and mean.

Is that what you hear? If so, is it a problem with the poem?

Janet Waking by John Crowe Ransom

Spring and Fall by Gerard Manley Hopkins : The Poetry Foundation

"Love Song" by William Carlos Williams

2011-11-17T21:20:00.003-05:00

Nov. 1, 2011

Amy Lowell, here’s another view of the color yellow, and it’s not entirely different from your take, posted here the other day. There’s too much of yellow; it eats things.

Ladies, damsels, women, broads, chicklets, has your beloved recently called you a stain? An excess? A smear? A saffron spoiler of all the colors of the world? If your rake and rambling man, your very own hunkadoobie did call you such things—accused you—did you dig it? Would this poem work for you? On you?

Nov. 16, 201

Wannabe poets, have you tried writing a three line poem interrupted by a 14-line parenthesis of emphasis, a bracket of great force, vigor, torque? Did it work?

William Carlos Williams, how does one decided when a fairly ordinary word, like “heavily,” deserves to be its own line?

Love Song by William Carlos Williams : The Poetry Foundation

Nov. 16, 2011

Love Song by William Carlos Williams : The Poetry Foundation

"In November" by Lisel Mueller

2011-11-16T18:35:00.000-05:00

Willow, Mid-November

Here is a quiet and positive poem, which suits the season.

In November by Lisel Mueller : The Poetry Foundation

AMY LOWELL, SOME FOLLOW UP

2011-11-13T21:19:00.005-05:00

"Autumn" remains my favorite of the dozen or so Amy Lowell poems I've read in the last few days, but here is another with merit:

The Garden by Moonlight by Amy Lowell : The Poetry Foundation

I’ve also found some information about Amy Lowell. Most of it is at this website, along with a selection of her poems, including “Autumn,” which we discussed a little here November 9.

Isle of Lesbos: Poetry of Anna Seward

For those who don't read the article, I must mention two points of information I came across. First, Amy Lowell was such an admirer of Keats that she wrote a long, unfinished biography of him. So my placing the two writers side by side last post, based only their autumn poems, was a stroke of luck.

Secondly, Amy Lowell suffered from a glandular problem that caused her to grow more and more overweight as she aged (she died at 51). When she tried to learn more about Imagism from Ezra Pound, generally considered brilliant as a critic and insane as a human, he thought she was trying to preempt his exalted status as Lord of Imagism and attacked her verbally, including the epithet “hippo-poetess.”

For those who like to read biographical backgrounds into poems, Lowell’s lesbianism might be, or seem, a clarification of the puzzling “They” and “You,” who have “taken . . . / All I once possessed” in the closing of “Autumn.” As always, however, I resist reading biography into literature any more than is absolutely necessary, and I don’t think we are required to see this poem’s “They” as friends or relatives who betrayed her because of her sexual orientation (Of course, I’m betting such things did happen; they happen still, a hundred years later).

So the identity of the person(s) giving her the dahlia is relatively, or completely, unimportant. Nor do I think “They” or “You” must be an offending lover. “You” could be, but it's the season of autumn that the poem is trying to see as the offender, a bright, bold flower whose vitality betrays, wounds and offends the “barren” speaker.

The poem centers instead on the emotional effects of the flower in its unlikely, startling embodiment of the colorful fall season; the folks who brought it are secondary. Granted, the undisclosed identity and motives of those people might amount to a tease, an elephant in the room; but if so, I suggest it's a problem in the design, completeness, and artistry of the poem, rather than a biographical puzzle that readers should spend time trying to solve.

Isle of Lesbos: Poetry of Anna Seward

The Garden by Moonlight by Amy Lowell : The Poetry Foundation

John Keats and Amy Lowell, Day Two: Yellow, Yellow, Yellow

2011-11-09T12:31:00.006-05:00

To keep the comparison in mind, here again are both poems from yesterday:

To Autumn

by John Keats (1795-1821)

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;

To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,

And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

And still more, later flowers for the bees,

Until they think warm days will never cease,

For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?

Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find

Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,

Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;

Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,

Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook

Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:

And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep

Steady thy laden head across a brook;

Or by a cider-press, with patient look,

Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?

Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,--

While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,

And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn

Among the river sallows, borne aloft

Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;

And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;

Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft

The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft,

And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

Autumn

by Amy Lowell (1874 – 1925)

They brought me a quilled, yellow dahlia, Opulent, flaunting.

Round gold

Flung out of a pale green stalk.

Round, ripe gold

Of maturity,

Meticulously frilled and flaming,

A fire-ball of proclamation:

Fecundity decked in staring yellow

For all the world to see.

They brought a quilled, yellow dahlia,

To me who am barren

Shall I send it to you,

You who have taken with you

All I once possessed?

So Amy Lowell’s “Autumn” is at the other end of the spectrum from Keats. I’ll begin by mentioning that I don’t know who Lowell's “They” might be, and I wonder briefly if the poem should make that clear. But by then, the scene has made me understand that the “round gold/ Flung out of a pale green stalk”--“frilled,” “flaming” and fecund--brings hurt and rage to a woman who sees herself as the empty opposite of female fertility and beauty.

Surely we have all known autumn days, or entire seasons, that seemed offensive, an intrusion of golden glory,

when our day or season was grey, full of sterile, hollow routine, or was downright sad, as in actual grieving. And just as we were deciding we could cope with all that, some rosy-cheeked, Halloween-loving, cheerleader type comes along, sticks a pom-pom in our face, and demands we say rah-rah for the pretty leaves.

So, with Amy Lowell, we say to the amber season and to Them That Brought It Whoever They Are, take your yellow ball and go down the road. How dare you plop that thing on my table, you with your calm guarantee of death just around the bend.

Can a season be an affront, feel like a personal insult, a mockery of who and what we are? There’s not a doubt in my mind.

I hear you, Amy Lowell. I still hear Keats, but for me there’s a new kid on the block. Her story isn’t gorgeous like young Keats’; after all, he was gorgeous about most things. In fact, Lowell presents The Boldly Anti-Gorgeous. It hates all that luxuriating, in love with itself and everything, converting earth to a sumptuous woman, the breeze in her hair, sitting in hippie contemplation over there on the granary floor.

Lowell’s flinty argument is as plausible as Keats’ adoration, and I’m listening to both.

Again, I hope visitors will talk about which poem, or which parts of poems, they like more, as opposed to what they admire more in terms of poetic achievement. The experiment is skewed by the different times and circumstances of the two poets. But we're not going for world peace here; we're just saying what we like and what we admire, recognizing that there might be a difference. Sometimes I think of the incredible skill I see in some musicians, yet the actual music they produce can be, to me, little more than a frantic tangle of notes.

John Keats, "To Autumn," and Amy Lowell "Autumn," Part One

2011-11-08T17:57:00.001-05:00

To Autumn

by John Keats (1795-1821)

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;

To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,

And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

And still more, later flowers for the bees,

Until they think warm days will never cease,

For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?

Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find

Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,

Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;

Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,

Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook

Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:

And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep

Steady thy laden head across a brook;

Or by a cider-press, with patient look,

Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?

Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,--

While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,

And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn

Among the river sallows, borne aloft

Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;

And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;

Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft

The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft,

And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

Keats’ “To Autumn” is about as famous as a poem can get, and deservedly so, especially for the sumptuousness of its imagery and the way it reiterates Shakespeare’s theme in the sonnet last week: “To love that well which thou must leave ere long.”

Like everything, however, perfect language is only a virgin once. No matter how much I enjoy and admire the poem’s focus on sensuous details, fleeting fullness in autumn’s plants and animals as they’re about to leave us, no matter how often that poem and I have gone warmly to bed together, no matter how gracefully it has declined to preach tidy morals, even as closure, the fact is, we’ve been there many times.

So as I browsed for additional autumn poems, look what jumped out at me. Amy Lowell’s “Autumn” isn’t necessarily a better poem than Keats’ “To Autumn,” but the force of its bold, boastful yellow, its “fire-ball” of a dahlia and the insult of that fertility as it’s presented to a “barren” and now furious, hurt woman—all that creates another, legitimate image of what autumn can mean. Compared to the familiar beauty of Keats’ season, Lowell’s portrait of autumn as a wound has a fierce vigor that slaps me awake.

Autumn by Amy Lowell

They brought me a quilled, yellow dahlia, Opulent, flaunting.

Round gold

Flung out of a pale green stalk.

Round, ripe gold

Of maturity,

Meticulously frilled and flaming,

A fire-ball of proclamation:

Fecundity decked in staring yellow

For all the world to see.

They brought a quilled, yellow dahlia,

To me who am barren

Shall I send it to you,

You who have taken with you

All I once possessed?

Keats’ speaker regards autumn as a filling of things that promises the passing of things; he bestows upon it dignity, elegance and admiration. He doesn’t find autumn cute or cause for a sappy greeting card, the way so many of us do. But as I hear Keats’ ode, he’s much more observant of the luxuriant plenty of what's gorgeous, the climax and afterglow, than the darker fact of its mortality.

That’s more than enough for one day. Part Two will come in a day or two, with more emphasis on Amy Lowell’s poem.

Responding to Readers Responding to Ted Kooser

2011-11-06T16:54:00.002-05:00

Reader visits on the October 31 Shakespeare-Ted Kooser comparison here have probably offered the best, most thoughtful, conversational, perceptive comments and interchange among visitors in the three-year life of this blog. Thank you! The majority of you prefer Kooser to Shakespeare, which was the opposite of my leaning. So I’ve sent myself back for an additional experience with “A Letter in October,” and that’s been enlightening and rewarding. Thank you!

Before I go on, let me quickly mention that I like the poem’s title. In what way and to whom might this be a letter? I can’t answer that, but I think the possibilities enrich the poem.

Now, here again is “A Letter in October”:

A Letter in October by Ted Kooser : The Poetry Foundation

Ted Kooser is often so quiet it’s easy to write him off, and until this morning, I wrongly did.

By the way, his (apparent) plainspokenness might connect—tenuously—to an issue I’ve brought up before regarding American (or all?) poets: Are you in the Walt Whitman or the Emily Dickinson tradition? Yes, that oversimplifies; yes, there’s a vast middle ground. But I still think there’s significant, if incomplete truth in those two columns of tradition, of psyche and style—the loose, casual, and rambling vs. the muscular, tight, and careful.

At first, the Kooser poem was flat for me, but upon a couple of re-readings, I’ve come to like it, starting with the personification of dawn as he watches the light “walk down the hill,” and continues with the light’s placing “a doe there” and stepping upon the pond, which “sows” a “garden” of “reflections.”

That goes well beyond a literal, prosaic way of seeing things. Yet it’s not just decorative; it really imagines, re-creates, and maybe transforms the scene, giving it a new way of being, more interesting and exotic than its prosaic existence, yet a character that’s entirely plausible and appealing.

The continued personification of “Night in its thick winter jacket” doesn’t strike me as charmingly, but maybe that’s just my problem. Communication in metaphorical thinking is subjective like that; it’s rarely a true-false test.

I’m also not sure I like turning the water garden under, though it should work. It extends the metaphor logically, as the poem moves from lightness, delight, strangeness, fantasy, and mystery to less pleasant, more onerous activities involving labor, darkness, and eventually the challenge of introspection.

The “bridle” of leaves on the doe as well as night’s black horse and creaky harness make me feel that Kooser is straining too hard at those figures, forcing them, whereas the earlier images of light felt natural as well as accurate, even necessary and inevitable. I feel I should have seen light creating a deer, and so on; it was there and needed only Ted Kooser to discover it. But I don’t feel that way about the turned garden, or the deer bridle, or the horse; I feel as if I can hear Kooser searching for extended metaphors.

Once I’m clear that the darkness in the poem’s conclusion is early morning and not a continuation of the night, I like what happens. Wanting to look outward at the world’s marvels is a virtue, as well as a pleasure, and it ought to be permitted, given freely as a blessing. And looking inward ought to be a virtue; I’m often wishing people would do more of that. But it’s a burden. Inward lies trickery. Darkness. Complexity. Fear. All of this, I think, makes an extremely good complication and turn on which to end the poem and deepen the ballet of its opening.

The language of the speaker’s sighting of himself as “Pale and odd,” wouldn’t seem to be especially surprising or effective, yet to me that description is aptly haunting. Thinkers who see the world as he does—or see in the world what he does—probably tend to be “pale and odd” indeed, as they enlarge the world for the rest of us.

How did I miss some of this in my first couple of readings? Shame on me. Thanks, visitors.

Kensington Metropark

2011-11-05T21:59:00.004-04:00

Tufted Titmouse

For early November, this was a fine sunny day in the 50s at Kensington Metropark, a 4,486 acre nature and recreation preserve about 30 miles west-northwest of Detroit, almost halfway to Lansing on I-96.

Here’s what their publicity says, and it seems accurate to me (somebody had a vision, and the rest of us benefit):

A scenic recreational facility that provides year-round fun for all ages. Its wooded hilly terrain surrounds beautiful Kent Lake. Attractions include the Splash 'n' Blast which offers two 240-foot twisted water slides and a water sprayground, Island Queen excursion boat, swimming, picnicking, canoeing, scenic drives, ice skating, a nature center with nature trails, a farm center, disc golf course and a 6,378 yard challenging 18 hole par 71 public golf course. Kensington is an official Michigan Wildlife Viewing Area.

I had the same experience at Kensington just about a year ago, including the birds. (Banjo52, November 28, 2010).


Chickadee

The titmice and chickadees don’t think twice about feeding from human hands, but the shy gold finches stayed in the treetops—so high, in fact, that I wasn’t sure what they were until I got home and cropped the photo for identification.


Gold Finches

Shakespeare's "That Time of Year" and Kooser's "A Letter in October"

2011-10-31T16:17:00.019-04:00

Blogspot is fighting me; please ignore the odd spacing. Besides, it's easier on the eyes, I guess.

Here are two poems in which the authors see autumn as a way of, and a cause for, looking inward. Please don’t be overly swayed in by the fact that Shakespeare wrote the older poem, a sonnet. The other writer, Ted Kooser, was the U.S. poet laureate in 2004-2006, so some important people think he can sling some verbal hash in his own right. Here’s the new twist. I want people to vote for the poem they prefer. Wait! There’s more. You need to vote twice.

1. Which poem do you like better?

2. Which poem do you respect more? That is, which is the better poem, whether or not you prefer it?

Your answers to 1 and 2 may be the same, or not. If you’re a good person in the best of all worlds, including cyberspace, you’ll also talk a bit about why you answered as you did. And if you don’t, you flunk.

Sonnet LXXIII: That Time of Year thou mayst in me Behold by William Shakespeare : The Poetry Foundation

A Letter in October by Ted Kooser : The Poetry Foundation

Robert Graves' "A Boy in Church" and Emily Dickinson's "Some Keep the Sabbath"

2011-10-26T17:45:00.002-04:00

But a dumb blast sets the trees swaying

With furious zeal like madmen praying.

I hardly hear the tuneful babble,

Not knowing nor much caring whether

The text is praise or exhortation

A Boy in Church by Robert Graves : The Poetry Foundation

Some keep the Sabbath going to Church – (236) by Emily Dickinson : The Poetry Foundation

Robert Graves' "A Boy in Church" and Emily Dickinson's "Some Keep the Sabbath" are both a bit on the obvious side, but they nicely raise the question of where one finds church.

Also, a lot of churches, at least as physical structures, present their own beauty, which might inspire as well as nature does.

But such a lot of what goes on inside the buildings is troublesome that the contradictions have been fodder for writers for centuries. One might wonder why, with all those religions out there, more of them can't do better, more consistently--or at least "do no harm."

Maybe if we could just enter, alone, hear our own choice of music, rest and be silent for awhile, and leave . . . . I suppose the Quakers were on the right track, but even they have to listen to each other as they try to arrive at one painstaking consensus after another.

Now I'm being as obvious as Graves and Dickinson are. We can have our cake and eat it too: church buildings, music, and nature, the whole enchilada (double cheese). So off I go, to The Church of the Holy Enchilada.

A Boy in Church by Robert Graves : The Poetry Foundation

Some keep the Sabbath going to Church – (236) by Emily Dickinson : The Poetry Foundation

The July 25, 2010 Banjo52 touches on similar subject matter, Yeats' "Lake Isle of Innisfree":
http://http://banjo52.blogspot.com/search?q=lake+isle+of+innisfree

*

"Thoughts on One’s Head" by William Meredith: Brain and Heart in Poetry and Politics

2011-10-24T18:08:00.006-04:00

Indiana University

Thoughts on One’s Head by William Meredith : The Poetry Foundation

Today it may seem I’m reversing myself on the feel-good Oct. 22 post, but I don’t think so. On my team, I want Michaela Terrien, John Prine and William Meredith.

But first, from Wikipedia, a couple of terms that were new to me:

“The central sulcus is a fold in the cerebral cortex of brains in vertebrates. Also called the central fissure, it was originally called the fissure of Rolando or the Rolandic fissure, after Luigi Rolando.”

And, “Trireme: . . . probably of Phoenician origin . . . as a ship it was fast and agile, and became the dominant warship in the Mediterranean from the 7th to the 4th centuries BC.”

With benevolent calm and wit, William Meredith’s poem, “Thoughts on One’s Head,” proposes that the human head, center of reason, carefulness, and correctness, and the home of the soul, ultimately dislikes itself. In the end, and for the sake of self-esteem and pleasure, or even ecstasy, one’s head would prefer beauty and passion to reason and judgment, which amount to the ability to measure.

Indiana University

In the timeless war between heart and head, the head is the responsible force that takes care of daily matters, which are necessary but unlovely, dispassionate, heartless, void of pleasure. One of my favorite lines is: “Judgment is in the head somewhere; it keeps sums . . . .” Some readers may have trouble seeing that as a bad thing; sums must be kept, after all, or one ends up trillions of dollars in debt. But what do you want written on your gravestone? “He was responsible”? “He kept sums”? And “sums” of what? Pleasure and pain, Meredith offers. Do you want your pleasure and pain measured out carefully as a sum?

The speaker was “ taught to read and write, make love and money, /Operate cars and airplanes, teach in a college . . . ”? Making love is on par with profits, driving cars and airplanes. It’s all taught. We may, for a second, ask what’s wrong with a little technique from a textbook? That’s not so bad. And driving is fun. Why not making love like driving a hot car--you know, down-shifting, double-clutching, peeling out? Well, then, how about teaching in college? Should that be the same kind of operation as making love?

The site of this careful rationality is the speaker’s head, “the place the soul calls home just now.” So if one ends up wondering why the speaker “dislikes” his “seat of Me,” one only need think about the old, old conflict between reason and passion. I think we tend to like ourselves better if we can believe we are rascals and outlaws who operate by passion. Robin Hood. Jesse James. We fancy ourselves reckless and romantic; we say all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy--and William Meredith too. Ask any good Nazi: in the short term, success is all about the appeal to passion. If it feels good, it's irrational.

It’s easy—and I mean easy—to go weak-kneed over the likes of e.e. cummings, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, or their ancestor Walt Whitman. It can be a labor to follow the lines of Elizabeth Bishop’s thought—or Richard Wilbur’s.

People's Park, Bloomington, Indiana


Are You Sure about That?

Sit-ins feel good, but they don’t accomplish much until some leaders—who can use their left brains to strategize, as William Meredith does in his poem—come to the rescue and form a plan that might actually accomplish something. What a shame that, consciously or otherwise, we think of those pragmatists as dull. We’d rather swoon to emotional oratory than sit down and crunch the numbers. The fact is, we need it all, though it makes for a drier insurrection, or a drier poem.

Thoughts on One’s Head by William Meredith : The Poetry Foundation

"In Spite of Ourselves," John Prine, Iris DeMent, Steve McClain, and Michaela Terrien of Iowa

2011-10-22T21:48:00.002-04:00

Over the years, a few friends, knowing my musical tastes, have asked about John Prine. Were we soulmates? Fact is, I never fully connected with the guy and didn't know why. I did respect his work at a distance.

That just changed. In scouting Iris DeMent for the last post, I came across her duet with Prine, on his goofy, charming, witty, touching, offbeat love song, "In Spite of Ourselves." Left Brain tells me not to take it too seriously, while Right Brain tells me it's brilliant and I can't take it seriously enough. If Prine's good-natured, teasing, self-effacing words don't capture what love is, including the heart's hyperbole for young and old, well, it's what love ought to be.

John Prine & Iris DeMent - In Spite of Ourselves - YouTube

And here is a young couple from Iowa, performing the song, inhabiting it, as we like to say in show biz. These two are the perfect picture of young love. That's not just a rhetorical gesture. They are ideal. These two, including her reserved, reluctant, Iowa adoration of him, and his slightly dumb pretense of control and dominance . . . these two are young love, though they're old enough to take seriously.

If you disagree, Take your jaded absence of soul down to the crick and noodle a big greasy catfish. I hope he bites you, stings you, fries up bad in your pan, stinks up your kitchen till the cows come home. No, stink forever.

So just be good. Listen, watch now, and fall down in worship:

In Spite of Ourselves - John Prine & Iris DeMent cover - 2010 Heart of Country - YouTube

Iris DeMent: In the Spirit of Hopkins?

2011-10-21T12:20:00.012-04:00

Some say that they're comin' back in a garden, bunch of carrots and little sweet peas.
I think I'll just let the mystery be.

Let The Mystery Be - Iris DeMent H.Q. - YouTube

Hurrahing in Harvest by Gerard Manley Hopkins

The First Stanza:

Summer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty the stooks rise
Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behaviour
Of silk-sack clouds! has wilder, wilful-wavier
Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies?

The Closure:

These things, these things were here and but the beholder
Wanting; which two when they once meet,
The heart rears wings bold and bolder
And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet.

Everybody's wonderin' what and where they all came from.
Everybody's worryin' 'bout where they're gonna go when the whole thing's done.
But no one knows for certain and so it's all the same to me.
I think I'll just let the mystery be.

Some say once you're gone you're gone forever, and some say you're gonna come back.
Some say you rest in the arms of the Saviour if in sinful ways you lack.
Some say that they're comin' back in a garden, bunch of carrots and little sweet peas.
I think I'll just let the mystery be.

Let The Mystery Be - Iris DeMent H.Q. - YouTube

**

"Lying in a Hammock at William Duffys Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota" by James Wright

2011-10-19T13:42:00.002-04:00

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota by James Wright : The Poetry Foundation

Off Indiana Rt. 1, near Angola

Here's a revised version of an earlier post about James Wright's "Lying in a Hammock." Several works about fall, directly or indirectly, are just too good not to post twice, or more.

After I read the poem for the first time, I threw the book across the room and stayed away from Wright for over a year. How dare he spring that last line out of nowhere. Yes, a poem is a journey, a discovery, for the poet, or at least his speaker; but there's discovery and there's snake oil.

On the other hand, does that last line come out of nowhere?

Peer pressure—in the form of anthologies that insisted on including the poem—kept me going back to it. Finally, I used it in a class to see what would happen. Of course, some students are all too happy to hate any poem, especially work that seems dishonest, interested in tricking a reader or leaving him in the dust for no reason better than illustrating the poet's intellectual superiority.

Off Indiana Rt. 1, near Angola

But soon enough students and I began to see the earlier lines more or less prepping for the final boom (or is it a thud? a whimper? a flash?).

“Lying in a Hammock . . . “ is now among my favorites, and in my most reckless moments of outrageous bravado, I exclaim that no work better illustrates the nature of epiphany. Take that, James Joyce.

My experience with "Lying in a Hammock" also illustrates a great line from E.M. Forester, who said, “How do I know what I think till I see what I say?”

Near Jonesville, Michigan

When I risked sharing "Lying in a Hammock" with students before I was sure what I thought about it myself, I had to say things and let them say things that eventually led us as individuals and groups to what we thought about a significant poem with a compelling idea (or a few) at its core.

No, we did not all agree about every part or the whole; some conversations and some individuals were animated, yet we didn't kill each other and no one shouted, "You lie!" (I was glad I'd kept my book-throwing to myself).

Off Indiana Rt. 1, near Angola

Pedagogy: experiences like those class discussions amount to one more reason I blast off about rigid adherence to rigid lesson plans, which lead to rigid, stultifying classes, aimed at mere coverage, not inspiration, discovery, pleasure, or meaningful interaction with others. Clocks and calendars must bend; coverage has to happen, but we don't need to be its whipping post.

I propose that calendars and clocks and A.P. exams and admission to any of the several Harvards out there must take a back seat to enjoyment of learning, which includes polite but frank discussion and debate, in which "You lie!" is not an acceptable comment, and "Let me re-think that" or "Maybe I was wrong" are essential statements that every student and every teacher (and Congressman) must learn to embrace.

I've probably already bitten off too much for one post, but let me add this link to a Warren Buffet idea about Congress, which connects to my point about honesty informed by civility:

https://www.facebook.com/kellyannejulinforrester/posts/2508974365521

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota by James Wright : The Poetry Foundation

**

"Hurrahing in Harvest" by Gerard Manley Hopkins

2011-10-15T09:23:00.020-04:00

Hurrahing in Harvest by Gerard Manley Hopkins

In previous autumns, I've not posted "Hurrahing in Harvest" because some readers might be put off by Hopkins' use of natural beauty an excuse to extol a Christian God. It seems obvious to me that one can easily substitute for that deity whatever source of inspiration one prefers, and that includes the possibility of not going beyond the beauties and ecstasy provided by the world of matter. Maybe joy can be explained physiologically. So what? It's still joy. It still feels good.

No, by definition, joy and ecstasy are more than feeling vaguely good. The issue gets into psychological territory that's difficult to articulate. It's hard to be logical about rapture, which is probably the reason that so many find it an avenue to religiosity.

The natural, material world leads Hopkins to Jesus. If it leads you to the Lord of Happy Barley, so what? The fact remains that nature--in this case autumn--can (should?) provide an explosion of intense sensuous delight if one is honestly looking. Witnessing.

One time when I was naively enthusing about southern Ohio hills, my more cynical college roommate argued that nature was full of mosquitoes and predation, and I needed to wake up to that. Well, yes. And there's the charming story of some politician's wife who remarked, "Nature is so pretty--what a shame it has to be outdoors."

But if one does not see and hear and smell nature's majesty as well as its quieter splendors, along with its pain and murders, one is needlessly eliminating a major source of both the calming and the dramatic varieties of joy. Humans seem to like Either-Or, Black-and-White in a world that's full of grey shades of contradiction. Why not rise to the grey occasion in which we find ourselves?

So I encourage everyone to read all of Hopkins' nature poetry with such things in mind. Nature, among other forces, led Hopkins to Catholicism (he converted and became a Jesuit priest). At least once in awhile, the same scenes can also lead to Happy Barley. Wallow in it. Call it magic.

(The photos are from a spot on a dirt road near Rt. 12 and the village of Jonesville in south-central Michigan).

Hurrahing in Harvest by Gerard Manley Hopkins

"Portrait of an Old Woman on the College Tavern Wall" by Anne Sexton

2011-10-12T17:19:00.003-04:00

Portrait of an Old Woman on the College Tavern Wall by Anne Sexton : The Poetry Foundation

The Campus on the Hill by W. D. Snodgrass : The Poetry Foundation

Recently I visited once again the University of Indiana in Bloomington, one of my very top choices for most beautiful campus and most pleasant college town in the United States. Almost every campus building is grandly made of local limestone, so there’s an architectural harmony that I’ve found unusual in large state universities. In the midst of those acres of lofty academic structures is a small woods.

For a large school, the campus is well-defined relative to the town. A half-mile of shops, restaurants and bars connects the university to the town square, its courthouse dominating from on high. (Majestic courthouses seem to be an Indiana tradition).

To this outsider, the strained town-gown relationships portrayed in Breaking Away, the famous bicycling movie, are not immediately apparent, but what non-resident knows that real scoop?

As I walked around, I felt like photographing every stone and student. All those stories . . . . Then there's my tendency toward sentimentality about campuses and the college life in general; it led me once again to look for new poems that were related to scenes I'd witnessed. I couldn’t have gotten luckier, thanks again to Poetry Foundation. What a luxury, to wander so easily and casually through all kinds of verse and commentary.

At least for now, I love Anne Sexton’s “Portrait of an Old Woman on the College Tavern Wall.” If it weren’t so new to me, I’d say it’s as powerful and important as W.D. Snodgrass’s “Campus on the Hill,” posted here September 9, 2010. We'll see how Sexton's poem holds up, with its haunting interplay of different voices.

"The Campus on the Hill" by W. D. Snodgrass. What Is College?

Portrait of an Old Woman on the College Tavern Wall by Anne Sexton : The Poetry Foundation

The Campus on the Hill by W. D. Snodgrass : The Poetry Foundation

If anyone wants to revisit the discussion of the college experience, I'm all ears.

By the way, I've just learned that yesterday's poet, Dean Young, earned his MFA at Indiana.

"Son of Fog" by Dean Young: Is Fog a Gas?

2011-10-11T20:15:00.012-04:00

You science people, is fog a gas? Are you sure? In Tipton, Indiana, you can refill your tank at the Sherrill place, a combination diner and filling station. But in both pit stops and poetry, watch out for double meanings.

In Dean Young's fine and perhaps startling poem about fog, you'll find, among other lines, these winners:

Like dead flies on the sill of an abandoned
nursery, we too are seeds in the rattle
of mortality. A foglike baby god
picks it up, shakes it, laughs insanely
then goes back to playing with her feet.

Or this, toward the end:

   What a mess. We stand at the edge
    of a drop that doesn't answer back,
   fog our only friend although it's hell
    on shrimpboats.

But don't take my word for it; read it all.

Son of Fog by Dean Young : Poetry Magazine

**

"Silence" by Billy Collins

2011-10-06T20:03:00.002-04:00

Silence by Billy Collins : Poetry Magazine

Jean Valentine, W.S. Merwin: Bees in Poems and Show, Don't Tell

2011-10-04T18:35:00.043-04:00

Go, Tigers!

Moreover, in my latest chats with bees, they have seemed healthy and busy, unlike that alarming experience a month ago (September 6, 2011). Naturally that's led me to look again for poems involving bees.

One of the most common maxims about writing poetry (and fiction, for that matter) is, "Show, Don't Tell." Don't summarize, generalize or preach to readers; create an experience and let readers draw their own conclusions.

I've been thinking about that in relation to these two rather different poems by long-established American poets Jean Valentine and W.S. Merwin (Merwin was U.S. Poet Laureate until Phillip Levine took over recently). I'm interested in your responses, whether or not they are specifically connected to the issue of Show, Don't Tell.

Bees by Jean Valentine : The Poetry Foundation

The River of Bees by W. S. Merwin : The Poetry Foundation

MOVIE REVIEWS: MONEYBALL and DRIVE

2011-09-30T15:18:00.004-04:00

The GPAs: Drive 3.8 Moneyball 3.6

Ryan Gosling and Carey Mulligan: Animal Attraction

Carey Mulligan Prepares Soup for Her Driver

It’s the weekend, so here are some infallible Banjo tips on movies.

Don’t think of Drive as one more high-action shoot-em-up. It is that, but it’s much more. There are holes in the plot a Hummer could drive through, yet the otherwise fresh writing (Hossein Amini) and inventive direction (Nicolas Refn) stopped me from caring too much about plausibility. There’s something going on here that’s bigger than plot.

That something is primarily Ryan Gosling’s unnamed, untamed protagonist in a fascinating study of character, or in a way, the lack of it. A stunt driver, getaway driver, and mechanic supreme, Gosling's character makes Gary Cooper look like a chatterbox. It’s likely that the controlling idea in the movie is the question of what goes on inside the skull and heart of a man who might as well never have learned to talk. Is he an animal? A saint? Can he love? Is this what love looks like, stripped of words to perfume it? Do all of us contain something of the driver's oddly honorable possibilities?

Gosling’s Driver-Mechanic might be every bit the psychopath that Hannibal Lector is, but probably not—if he's savage, he is so with a purpose. He cares deeply, even obsessively and sacrificially, for Carey Mulligan’s angelic, down-on-her-luck young mom, who might as well be single. Our nonverbal Driver-Mechanic is also a capable surrogate dad for Mulligan’s little boy. I’m not sure that’s convincing, but it’s appealing.

Ryan Gosling Looks Out for Bad Guys

Bryan Cranston and Albert Brooks are excellent in supporting roles. I knew a bit about Cranston’s range, but I’d never have guessed that Brooks could be so convincing as a crime boss.

Oscar Isaac, as Carey Mulligan’s convict husband, and Ron Perlman, as Brooks’ subordinate, animalistic thug, are chillingly effective. I’ve rarely been so convinced about the badness of the bad guys, the hollow in the middle of so many of them. And in the case of Isaac’s role as father, husband, and thief, I’ve rarely been made to imagine that I understand and sympathize with such a character, pawn and victim that he is, at least to a considerable extent.

And Sure Enough, Here Come the Bad Guys

The violent scenes are fairly extreme, but they feel realistic and relevant to character and theme. Also, they are not constant; there's more to the movie than bone crunching and blood.

Drive offers a fresh take on crime movies, without losing its intensity for the sake of its art.

******

Based on the true story of the 2002 Oakland A's baseball team, Moneyball is a more conventional movie. Brad Pitt is credible as Billy Beane, Oakland's hard-driving general manager, a man with a vision. Jonah Hill shows some range in his portrayal of Billy’s Number Two Man, a mathematics, economics, and baseball nerd who offers a new strategy for winning games without losing money.

Although I did not remember the fascinating story of these Oakland Athletics and only recently became aware of Billy Beane and real-life moneyball, I am something of sports fan—mostly football and baseball—and it’s hard for me to imagine a non-fan’s response to Moneyball. My best guess is that the characters and plot are more than interesting enough for viewers of all stripes. The movie is about the business end of baseball and its personal stories; it's not just one action shot after another—though there are plenty of those too.

In terms of characterization and ideas, this a story of driven men, the trials of all new kids on any professional block, people with ground-breaking ideas, the trenchant and macho sense of superiority in a circle of men who are not at all superior, and the infamous plantation mentality that hovers at the edges (or centers) of all big-time sports. This might quiet some of the shouting about the high salaries of athletes, who, in their short careers, are bought and sold like chairs, often at the whim of rich old men.

Brad Pitt does as well as he can, given his fame, to be somebody else, to present Billy Beane as a man we might be more tempted to judge than like. He has a cold side, sharp edges, and the question of whether he can rise above that creates much of the movie’s substance. (I thank the real Billy Beane for permitting this multidimensional portrait of him).

For those who are baseball fans, this is probably a must-see flick, even if you’ve read the book. I think anyone who follows sports wonders what goes on behind the scenes in The Show, whether it’s baseball, football, or curling. Moneyball offers a convincing portrait of locker rooms, front office deals, and on-field scenes. It’s a pleasant and educational two hours.

Jane Hirshfield, "Tree," Red-bellied Woodpecker

2011-09-29T13:32:00.002-04:00

Once again, the bird did it. I've been led to Jane Hirshfield's "Tree" by a woodpecker that caught my ear, then my eye, the other day. I searched for woodpecker poems at Poetry Foundation and found instead Hirshfield's poem with the tapping of a redwood, rather than a woodpecker.

Tree by Jane Hirshfield : The Poetry Foundation

Once again, this is my first experience with the poem I'm offering. So far I like it. I applaud its ambition in posing huge questions without becoming a pretentious tease. How small can a poem be, or seem, when its subject is gigantic? And how large or abstract can a poem's subject be before it wanders into the realm of philosophy rather than verse? How philosophical can a poem be without falling into fortune-cookie-think? How can we ask such questions and expect reasonable answers? How can we fail to ask such questions?

In "Tree," I love the idea that a humongous idea or question can take the form of tapping. Literally, it's tree branches, but why not toss in a Red-bellied Woodpecker as well. Either can suggest something larger than itself and small as a human self. Tap tap.

Ironically, the last time I offered a Jane Hirshfield poem (January 15-16, 2011), it was also related to a woodpecker. In case you're interested:

http://banjo52.blogspot.com/2011/01/woodpecker-keeps-returning-by-jane.html

Tree by Jane Hirshfield : The Poetry Foundation

Robert Penn Warren, "Evening Hawk"

2011-09-27T17:41:00.006-04:00

Evening Hawk- Poets.org - Poetry, Poems, Bios & More

To my ear, eye, and mind, the last two stanzas of Robert Penn Warren’s “Evening Hawk” save the poem. I want to share Warren’s exuberant reverence for the bird—the soaring predator and his landscape—but Warren gets a bit grandiose for me.

Here are just a few examples: “the peak’s black angularity,” “last tumultuous avalanche of/Light,” “the guttural gorge,” “His wing/Scythes down another day,” “Look! Look! he is climbing the last light.”

And so forth. Any one of these images could be wonderful, a bold stroke; but as a whole, they feel well over the top to me.

So does this: “The head of each stalk is heavy with the gold of our error.”

Warren thinks this line is grand enough to be its own stanza (I’m tempted to say its own religious text).

I too find hawks thrilling, perhaps because I don’t see many of them, perhaps because of their size and grace, or because of their vision, or because of their skill at killing, or the height of their perspective and the ideas we have about height. But to see them as some kind of celestial judge or marker of time (make that Time, capitalized) strikes me as a bit loud, excessive.

In the last two stanzas, however, I yield. Even if I think the images and ideas might be grandiose, they are so thought-provoking and original that I cannot resist them. Behold:

“The last thrush is still,” the last bat flies in “sharp hieroglyphics” and in “ancient wisdom.” The star is “like Plato, over the mountain.”

And then, finally, there we are, we small humans: "If there were no wind we might, we think, hear . . ."

But there is wind, so we don’t hear. What we think is wrong or irrelevant, for we hear little or nothing of what we need to absorb. Maybe because it’s too large to seem relevant, or too frightening to accept, we fail to hear

The earth grind on its axis, or history
Drip in darkness like a leaking pipe in the cellar.

I’m awed that Warren has had not only the perceptiveness and creativity to see hawk, earth, and humans in these unusual ways, but also the courage to say so. Or is it just arrogance? In any case, he had to know that when it comes to elegant restraint, he was pushing the limit, if not pulverizing it. Apparently he feels he must—must—go on and say what he’s seen, what he believes, and everything in between.

Evening Hawk- Poets.org - Poetry, Poems, Bios & More

Meghan O'Rourke, "Inventing a Horse": Imagination and Creativity Re-Examined

2011-09-23T08:33:00.004-04:00

Inventing a Horse by Meghan O'Rourke : The Poetry Foundation

From the first line to the last of “Inventing a Horse,” Meghan O’Rourke is hinting at something larger than mammalian horses. She offers no rationale for inventing a horse; the act arrives out of the blue, suddenly and mysteriously. We could pass it off as a child’s fantasy—“Buy me a pony, Daddy”—but it’s also in the first line, from the get-go, that we we’re talking about pretending in larger terms. We’re not buying a pony, but inventing a horse, and that “is not easy.”

Immediately, the inventor (the dreamer? the creator?) finds that there would be many additional duties, all of which imply something much more adult and weighty than a child’s desire to ride. We could pass it all off as the parent reminding the child that caring for an animal takes time and effort. But in that case, would he make ominous statements such as ”live with humans like you?” Or “accustom him to the harness?” And would even the most formal, distant father speak these lines to a daughter about the horse she desires?

and not to grow thin in the city,

where at some point you will have to live;

and one must imagine the absence of money.
Most of all though: the living weight,
the sound of his feet on the needles,
and, since he is heavy, and real . . .

No, I think Meghan O’Rourke is very skillfully playing a rhetorical game. She gives us a whiff of the specifics that might concern a father, but from the first line, the poet has loaded the situation with overtones that are dark, difficult, pragmatic, economic, philosophical, psychoanalytic.

O’Rourke is having her cake and eating it too, playing at a childhood situation while driving at something adult and complex. So, by the time we get to the more obviously daunting questions, we’ve been prepared for them:

and, since he is heavy, and real,

. . . one must imagine love
in the mind that does not know love,

an animal mind, a love that does not depend
on your image of it,
your understanding of it;

I find those lines chilling, haunting, almost Gothic, the creation of a Frankenstein—or is it Hannibal Lector whose mind "does not know love?"

So what is this scary metaphor for or symbol of a horse? I suspect it’s poetry—or art in general. Once “invented,” art, like a half-pretend, half-material horse, is full of considerations that are, if I may quote myself, dark, difficult, pragmatic, economic, philosophical, psychoanalytic.

Like O’Rourke’s symbolic horse, a poem or painting is indifferent to the nutrients for a literal horse, because the work of art is an invention, not a palpable, hungry, breathing, and above all, not a loving presence. So it is:

indifferent to all that it lacks:

a muzzle and two black eyes
looking the day away, a field empty
of everything but witch grass, fluent trees,
and some piles of hay.

Like the Mona Lisa of the 1950s song, this invented horse is just a cold and lonely, lovely piece of art. Yet I do not mean to diminish the scope or sophistication of the poem by comparing it to something in pop culture as well as a child's imagining. By offering this notion of a poem, Meghan O'Rourke is able to conjure all the romance, gallantry, nobility, and simply all the pleasure of a horse. In a modern culture where horses are not a primary or practical means of transportation or labor, all those characteristics amount to a child's enjoyment of riding; it’s a fanciful, pretend world. So O’Rourke tries to give us the weightier aspects of invention as well.

s She has taken an enormous chance here—the chance of sounding foolish. A poem as a child’s horse might even seem to degrade, or at least challenge, every traditional, loftier notion we have about the nature of artistic creation. But Meghan O’Rourke sees that the experience of writing is all that—a child’s infatuation, a romantic gambol, but also a gallop into awareness of darker matters. She makes every piece of the puzzle fit, and gives us a fresh consideration of creativity. It's an intriguing, provocative ride.

Inventing a Horse by Meghan O'Rourke : The Poetry Foundation

Cedar Waxwings, "Psyche and Eros in Florida" by Debora Greger

2011-09-19T18:41:00.005-04:00

Saturday I caught this cedar waxwing in a treetop. I didn’t know what it was—maybe “just another” cardinal, I thought--a female. But with digital photography, your chances cost nothing, so I fired away, without much hope. I’m especially happy to have caught her with crest raised. (Why “her”? I guess it's the lingering notion of female cardinal. Otherwise, I have no idea.).

At the same site a week earlier, I tried to catch some cedar waxwings, casual but flitting among berries. They seemed to be posing, and I thought I had at least a couple of fine shots. But here, sadly, is the best of them:

I looked for a poem specifically about cedar waxwings and found this one by Debora Greger, who has published eight books of poetry. She is the life partner of poet and critic William Logan, who’s been discussed here a few times in the last few months. Both writers teach at the University of Florida.

Psyche and Eros in Florida by Debora Greger : Poetry Magazine

Once again, this is my first experience with a poem, and I'm not sure how all the parts fit together. However, I like some of it very much:

They devour the fruit no local bird wants.
Unswerving, they swerve through clotheslines.
Let their whispery cries be mine.
Their whisper of wings is yours.

The drop of wax that fell on your bare shoulder.
Why didn’t you want me to see you?

what of the traitorous, languorous body?
It lies down. It begs.

Henry Reed and Yusef Komunyakaa on War

2011-09-16T13:58:00.006-04:00

Yusef Komunyakaa’s “Facing It” is an excellent companion to the Henry Reed war poems discussed here Sept. 6 and 8. Here are all three poems:

Facing It by Yusef Komunyakaa : The Poetry Foundation

"Judging Distances" by Henry Reed

"Naming of Parts" by Henry Reed

In the literal, primary, temporal moment of "Facing It," the speaker is a black Vietnam vet standing at the Vietnam Veterans’ memorial wall in Washington, D.C. But his images morph as he becomes more and more involved in the names and memories he sees etched in stone. The mind of Komunyakaa’s speaker slides in and out of past and present settings, in and out of reality, whatever that might be--there are mirages.

This shape-shifting forces us out of the comfort of our own selves, out of our of linear rationality, and into the consciousness of the speaker. We experience his psyche as it absorbs scenes and images, without clear, neat transitions. Staying tuned to that channel, or mix of channels, might require at least a second reading, but of course that’s true of any poem that’s worth much.

In each of Henry Reed’s poems, there are actual changes of speakers, without clear notation by word or punctuation; but I think most readers will see what’s going on if they give it a second, slower effort. Even though the young speakers are not presently under fire, Reed’s two recruits are stunned, dazed, and more or less brutalized by the mechanization in military thinking.

Both of Reed’s poems present training for war as the enemy of beauty, sensitivity, sensuousness, love, and a sense of belonging. Flowers, bees, and human sexuality are presented as the opposites of war—and they are war’s victims, before a shot is ever fired. The drill sergeant’s instructions might be clear; they might even seem rational compared to the recruit’s daydreaming. But the sergeants' words are also as cold and hard as the machinery they describe.

Similarly, Komunyakaa’s speaker is adrift, mesmerized by the surreal contrast between a cold, stone monument and the human flesh, the life stories, the monument tries to honor. So it’s fitting that we readers are dragged into the speaker’s daze if we are to move even an inch toward understanding his experience with the monument. Komunyakaa makes us participate in a state of mind that is perhaps beyond our capacity for empathy.

The three poems present complex psychological situations, so it makes sense that confusion might be part of our reading experience. Preparing for or participating in combat, or trying to make sense of a connection between actual war and a stone memorial—those are complex experiences that we should hope to understand as much as any bystander can.

"Messengers" by Louise Glück : Trouble in Paradise

2011-09-13T17:01:00.003-04:00

Messengers by Louise Glück : The Poetry Foundation

Sometimes I’ve found Louise Gluck's poems to be prosy and didactic, belaboring the obvious. However, when I looked for a poem about deer (so I could post my latest photo "captures"), the trustworthy Poetry Foundation offered Gluck's "Messengers." I don't recall ever seeing the poem, and I like it a lot. It might begin in, or near, the mindset of a typical pastoral idyll. Beautiful Nature’s gorgeous messengers will find us; we “have only to wait.” Everything is serenely sublime and sublimely serene.

Unless the little clause, “they will find you,” has ominous possibilities as well as comfort. Maybe we need to think harder about who “they” might be. And what about that “black water”? Black isn’t necessarily inaccurate or impossible as a choice of color for water, but in an idyll, why choose black if the “messengers” are happy critters bearing only good news and sanguine feelings?

In the second stanza, the deer are noteworthy for their (predictable) beauty, including the “drift” of their nimble, graceful bodies in “bronze panels” of sunlight. Might that bronzing imply statues and immortality? Of course, that also means death. We only have immortality because we have mortality. Also, what creates “panels” of sunlight if not boundaries of darkness and limitation? If you're picturing ideal worlds, why bring up—if only glancingly—the less happy note of other bodies that do impede the animal that wears them? Are we thinking of the human animal?

So by the time we get to the third stanza, where “. . . their cages rust,/the shrubs shiver in the wind,/squat and leafless,” we’ve been prepared, perhaps unconsciously, for a portrait of nature that is not simple-mindedly, childishly, one-dimensionally wonderful. Things rust and shiver; things are squat and leafless. Time and mortality are here after all; they were here all along, from the first stanza, even though the deer were pretty.

This tension between perfect beauty and realistic earthly limits intensifies in the fourth and fifth stanzas, until the lovely messengers are bearing a message entirely different from what we wanted to and tried to expect at the beginning. The lovely geese, deer, and other creatures come before us in the end “like dead things, saddled with flesh.” And we humans are positioned “above them, wounded and dominant.” Why? How?

I’m not confident about this, but I think stanza four’s mysterious cry, which is, or which says, “release” means that we are releasing ourselves from delusions of immortality or perfection on earth and in time. Our attempt to find earthly creatures and scenes more beautiful and more graceful than ourselves is futile. In some kind of epiphany, we are released into that awareness, or even acceptance, of time and transience. We are released from seeking impossible permanence.

Of course, such a backward-feeling release would feel like a great gut “wrenching.” The moon—our romantic sphere of light and a symbol of love (as well as lunacy)—is ripped from the earth we know and rises in a circle of arrows. Literally, the “circle of arrows” is, for me, an impenetrable image. But figuratively, it's probably an allusion to the virginal Diana with her quiver of arrows, Roman goddess of the hunt, the woodlands, and the moon.

So the animals we hunt (as well as romanticize) are in the end merely creatures “saddled with flesh.” In “saddled” there is the suggestion that they are ridden. They are beasts of burden, and we, the hunters, stand “above them, wounded and dominant.” We are “wounded” by our knowledge of mortality and imperfection, which we cannot escape or avoid even if we try; our illusory moon of delusions is “wrenched” from us. (Clearly, I like that word, “wrenched”). We are left once again, where we always were, on and of the earth.

Louise Gluck has written a poem that is very impressive in playing an idealized world against the reality we all know, at some level, we must return to. We are buffeted by the conflict between what we wish were true and what we know to be true. In our knowledge, we are dominant, but our knowledge and dominance have wounded us with sadness.

Messengers by Louise Glück : The Poetry Foundation

Henry Reed, "Judging Distances"

2011-09-08T15:50:00.000-04:00

Here is Henry Reed's companion poem to "Naming of Parts," which was posted last time. Once again there are two speakers, but the changes between Speaker A and Speaker B are not as regular as they were in "Naming of Parts." And once again, the requirements for the military way of seeing--of judging distance--is necessarily different from what the recruit is used to.

"Judging Distances" by Henry Reed

Is it fair to paraphrase that in order to destroy efficiently humans and their buildings, one must measure distance differently?

Henry Reed's "Naming of Parts" and the Importance of Bees

2011-09-06T11:53:00.002-04:00

"Naming of Parts" by Henry Reed

Yesterday I came across some bees. It happened because they were sluggish. Or dying. They were barely moving on these flowers that camouflaged them so well. What do I know about bees? Maybe they just sit, barely moving, on a flower, for some reason only naturalists know. Maybe this is the bees’ lazy cycle. Nap time for bees. Other animals do it.

So I googled some phrase like “lazy bees”—actually, I think it was “bees in September”—which took me to the link you find here. I’d heard about bees being in trouble a couple of years ago, then it slipped from my attention.

Bees Dying at Alarming Rates - CBS News Video

Another question arises. What do bees have to do with poetry? Then I remembered “Naming of Parts,” by Henry Reed (British, 1914-1986). I’ve been away from the poem for several years, but I still find it brutally subtle (oxymoron intended), at least compared to most anti-war poems, which lay the message on thick. Less really is More, most of the time.

In the fog of memory, I think “Naming of Parts” worked well at showing students how kinds of language can be so different, can convey character and different ways of being in the world.

Here are two speakers, a military instructor and a newbie at some stage of rifle training. His thoughts drift in response to the spoken words of the instructor, who apparently has no sense that his words are numbingly rote and cold at the denotative level, but also vaguely sexual in their connotations.

If this poem doesn’t illustrate that how we say things is as important as what we say, then maybe we’ll never get beyond shouts versus whispers. I guess I’d describe the difference as the cold, mechanical language of business, war, and old-fashioned, lecture-based classrooms. On the other hand, we hear the recruit’s lyrical, sumptuous language of daydreams, poetry, love, and longing. Each language embodies and conveys a way of being in the world, and the two ways are anathema to each other.

In the recruit's way of being, the widespread death of bees would matter, on aesthetic grounds, long before the bee apocalypse affected his food supply. One could almost wonder if seeing and preserving beauty are matters of survival.

"Naming of Parts" by Henry Reed

Bees Dying at Alarming Rates - CBS News Video

TRAGEDY IN LITERATURE AND FILM

2011-09-01T17:28:00.003-04:00

The photos: Lake Huron from the little town of St. Ignace, in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, at the north end of the Mackinac Bridge. So, yes, I'm looking east at sunset, which doesn't quite amount to a tragic choice, does it?

I’ve often told students that there are only three works in Western culture that live up to Aristotle’s description of tragedy: King Lear, The Great Gatsby, and the movie version of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Although my primary purpose was to provoke discussion, I think I believed it then and I think I still do.

The key is the issue of tragic greatness. The tragic hero must begin at, or rise to, a height of magnificence from which to fall. It is not enough that the character fit other ingredients laid out in Aristotle’s Poetics—such as being a fundamentally virtuous person in spite of the tragic flaw, which causes terrible mistakes. Many characters in literature (and now film) go through falls from grace or good fortune, and for many we can locate Aristotelian elements, such as a point of reversal or recognition. But the character’s enduring those experiences does not define him as tragic. He and his situation might be sad. He and his mistakes might cause the destruction of innocent bystanders (tragic waste). He can be more good than not, and he might be important in sociopolitical terms. But if he lacks greatness, his story is merely sad or pathetic, not tragic.

Somewhere along the line, I came to understand tragic greatness as largeness of character, a magnitude of personality, as trivializing as the word “personality” might sound. A protagonist achieves the status of tragedy because he is extraordinary, qualitatively different from the other characters, some of whom might have been more virtuous, but none of whom is as grand. When the hero is on stage, others are dwarfed, even if they’re nice folks.

So who’s in the competition? Macbeth? That eloquent, hen-pecked sociopath? Hamlet? One more speechifier who thinks himself out of action? Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire? The narcissistic phony, who contaminates everything she touches? None of these.

Willie Loman in Death of a Salesman? His flaw and his sins are obvious, but where is his virtue, much less his greatness? No. Loud, clueless, self-centered, manipulative, self-pitying Willie Loman is, at best, a pathetic Low-Man.

More interesting cases are Alan Strang (not Strange, or is he?) and his psychiatrist, Martin Dysart, in Peter Shaffer’s riveting play, Equus. Can a pair of characters become one tragic hero? That’s a problem. Also, Alan might have the great passion of a tragic character, but I stumble at the prospect that pathological lust, rage, and mutilation amount to a tragic greatness of passion. His doctor, Martin Dysart, is a candidate for tragic status, but isn’t he merely sad, as he stands there, contemplating and half-envying Alan’s great passion? Is it evasive for me to offer that the play presents a tragedy, even though it lacks a tragic hero?

Troy Maxon in August Wilson’s Fences is another modern candidate for tragic status, but it’s difficult to accept Troy‘s bluster and rationalizations as noble passion. Like Macbeth and Hamlet, perhaps, his brand of verbal eloquence creates heat, not light; it poisons and confines Troy rather liberating him or his son.

As a genuine victim of American racism, Troy is perhaps more sympathetic than Willie Loman or Blanche DuBois, but he’s closer to their kind of plight than Lear’s or Gatsby’s. He wants to limit his son to a cage of anger like his own, rather than freeing him, sending him through newly, slightly opened doors on a path away from American racism. I’d also argue that his wife, Rose, surpasses him in both virtue and greatness, but she is decidedly a supporting character, not a protagonist.

That’s more than enough for now. In responding to all this, please don’t feel limited to the works I’ve mentioned. Think of a literary or film character who falls from a greatness defined by his own largeness of personality, as well as his having the famous “tragic flaw” and thus producing mistakes as large and grand as he is. He’s also a character who experiences a point of recognition (think “epiphany”; think Aha moment—“That's where I blew it!”) before he falls—not necessarily dying, but falling from his original greatness, beauty, and magnitude, his stage-seizing presence.

Some Thoughts about Literary Criticism. The Guard: a Short Movie Review. Elite Eleven on ESPN.

2011-08-26T16:56:00.006-04:00

Professor One

As I may have said before here, I often find good critical writing superior to what’s passing for good poetry and fiction. At least it can be more interesting. For example, in The New York Times Book Review, most reviewers are zesty stylists, getting me all fired up to read this or that novel or book of poems, only to have the so-called creative work disappoint me.

So from time to time here, I think I’ll offer some sentences from fairly academic nonfiction that strike me as interesting and finely wrought, touching on the whole nature of arts and letters—and life.

I’ve already praised William Logan’s criticism as intelligent, provocative, entertaining, and full of good insights, all of which helps to wash down Logan’s sometimes excessive cruelty. I’ll probably return to him here. Northrop Frye, Robert Langbaum, Harold Bloom and Helen Vendler are other scholars and critics who deserve attention (though they receive plenty without my help).


ProfessorTwo

Going further back in the twentieth century, Randall Jarrell and John Crowe Ransom are perhaps more acclaimed as critics than they are as poets. Maybe we’ll have a look at them one day too. I’ve read some Jarrell more recently than Ransom and found him more full of zesty opinion that his supporting examples justified.


Professor Three

So here, today, to kick off a shallow, fun-filled weekend, are remarks from William H. Pritchard in his Lives of the Modern Poets. My admiration for Wallace Stevens is growing, and Pritchard is one of the scholars who’s helping me along. Pritchard's style can be turgid, but I find the payoffs well worth my effort.

About Stevens, Pritchard says: “He had, instead, an idea, and with beauty, eloquence, and gravity, he proceeded to set down the great humanist truth he was possessed by for much of his life: that we are the measure of all things, and that we know how to measure because we know we will die.” (212)

In Stanza V of “Sunday Morning,” Stevens writes, “Death is the mother of beauty” (210). In trying to summarize Stevens' thinking, Pritchard goes on to say “. . . how vital is the imagination . . . we must transform reality yet not transform it too much.” (212)

Happy Weekend--speaking of which, I found the movie The Guard disappointing, despite good acting from everyone, including Brendan Gleason and Don Cheadle. The plot drags, there’s not a lot character development, its efforts at humor are brief and mediocre, and yet it lacks serious heft as well. Also, a lot of the lines were lost on this American as the director and actors go for authenticity of dialect, it seems, in the West of Ireland.

But all's well because high school football begins today, followed soon enough by college and pro games. On one of the ESPN stations (ESPN U? ESPN 2) there's a three-part series titled Elite Eleven, about highly touted high school quarterbacks at a camp run by Trent Dilfer, former NFL QB, and his staff. The show could be completely scripted, rehearsed, and edited, but it felt real enough tome. If you're a fan, you might give it a look. I was hooked.

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Sammi Smith, "Help Me Make It Through The Night"

2011-08-25T20:42:00.005-04:00

I came across my Sammi Smith C.D. today and loved this all over again. The young need to remember some of these names. Don't ask me how it all lives up to "elegant restraint."

Sammi Smith -- Help Me Make It Through The Night - YouTube

I'm pretty sure younguns placed the doll couple at the edge of this pond.

Sammi Smith -- Help Me Make It Through The Night - YouTube

Behind the dolls is this 20-foot waterfall. Younguns. Gotta love their goofy carcasses.

Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Elegant Restraint.

2011-08-24T17:38:00.006-04:00

Lake Superior at Marquette, Michigan

Lake Superior Morning


Seney, Michigan, Rts. 28 and 77. Great Cheeseburgers here.

As I was looking for an easy link to the last post about Frost’s “The Draft Horse,” I came across an intriguing comment in 2007 by “Greg,” a blogger, I guess—at any rate someone unknown to me. In an effort at proper attribution, I’ll offer the website as well:

http://www.leonardcohenforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=8135#p78762

I like Greg’s comparison between good poetry and a boxing match. And maybe his closing statement about aesthetics applies to the characters in "The Draft Horse" or even to Frost's work as a whole. You don't throw a punch if you don't have to; know when to walk away.

Here's Greg:

The single most important thing
that qualifies a poem as being great is:
~vividness~

And the other single most important thing
that makes a great poem great is that it has
infinite rEsOnAnCeS.

And the 3rd single most important requirement
that a poem be great is...well...
-- you remember the Ali-Foreman fight in Zaire in '74?

While Foreman was going down in the 8th round,
Muhammad was prepared to hit him again,
as he went down. But he chose not to.

And it was either Mailler or Plimpton who pointed out
that Ali's decision not to follow up with that one more,
superfluous punch, was an aesthetic choice.

Besides the beauty of the restraint,
and besides the possibility that Ali just
might not have connected with it (--which
would of course have spoiled the whole fight,)
there is also the fact that by not hitting Foreman
at that point Ali was in fact hitting him harder
than any purely physical blow could deliver.

Because that is what showed the world that Ali
was still in complete control of himself,
while Foreman was kissing the canvas good-night.

Universally: The single most attractive part
of any human being or poem,
is its self-control, and restraint.

****

I don't know how thoroughly I agree with Greg, or how completely boxing can be compared to poetry or the human personality. But in this world of extremes, I might be more than halfway to finding elegance where Greg does. In poetry, however, I might still be partial to touches of Romantic excess, if that's what it is, compared to Neoclassical restraint, which tends to include supercilious wit, symmetry, stiffness, coldness, and a host of topical allusions, which implies that "our" time in history, whether Augustan England or 21st century America, is so important that readers ought to recognize and care about its specific names and places. As much as I admire Yeats, he's guilty of that. Still, I'll take him, Hopkins, Dickinson, and Frost, for example, over Pope and Dryden.

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