Edward Hirsch, "Wild Gratitude"

I cannot find Edward Hirsch's "Christopher Smart" on line, which is very puzzling. Here instead is "Wild Gratitude," the title work of Hirsch's second collection of poems; it's no paltry thing in its own right, and it sustains Hirsch's interest in the poet Christopher Smart, who struggled with kindness and madness.

Wild Gratitude- Poets.org - Poetry, Poems, Bios & More

And here are a few lines I feel legally entitled to quote from "Christopher Smart," a poem I admire for its images and cadences, its called-for repetitions, its beautiful nightmare music. I find it a convincing portrait of what it must be like to be mentally and physically alone, un-right with the world. From Christopher Smart himself, these lines are the poem's epigraph:

"For they work me with their harping irons,
which is a barbarous instrument, because
I am more unguarded than others."

And from Edward Hirsch, speaking as Christopher Smart, here is the opening:

I am a wild ass galloping through the streets
Trailing the dog star, the mad gull. I am
A white raven spilling light through the skies
Like a colorful beacon, trailing the wild ass,
The laden bull. I am the hooves and the wings

Of the mule clattering through the streets

And here are some additional lines:

. . . There
are buzzards shuddering in the vacant branches.
There is a holy ram swallowing its tongue
At the mirage of a watering hole.

It's snowing. The moon is taking off her garments
Like an unruly queen; the desert prophet
Has swallowed his tongue.

The bull is weeping, and mother,

I am naked now; I am wondrous nude.
And it is still snowing.

The clouds are peeling away like the skin
Of a dead man's body. I am fleeing
Into the desert on a wild ass
Trailing a dog star. And believe me,
The ass is dead.

The night is fierce; the desert winds are
Scraping along the ground. The moon is flecked
With the blood of hooves. And it's snowing.
It is always snowing in the country of the mad.

I hope that's enough at least to suggest, movingly, the pictures and music of Christopher Smart's mind, as filtered by Edward Hirsch in his first book, For the Sleepwalkers.

As always, I'll be interested in responses.

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Christopher Smart, "Jubilate Agno"

The Clown, Georges Rouault, around 1907, D.I.A.





Jubilate Agno, Fragment B, [For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry]- Poets.org - Poetry, Poems, Bios & More

I'm posting this today only to set up Edward Hirsch's fine poem about Christopher Smart tomorrow or soon. I hope you'll also read or at least skim the biographical note on Smart, as well as the poem.

Remember, Charlie Sheen started all this. It would never be my fault . . . . I do hope some readers admire the sympathetic but candid portrait of madness in Hirsch's "Christopher Smart," coming soon.

Edward Hirsch, "Edward Hopper and The House by the Railroad"

Hirsch, "Edward Hopper and the House by the Railroad"

I like Edward Hirsch's poem "The House by the Railroad" because it dares to question the temperament of an artist who creates bleakness, again and again. I also like Edward Hopper, but his view of humanity is no warm fuzzy, and maybe I too wonder how Hopper arrived at it. Of course, one can argue for such a perspective; in fact, it's easier than optimism or faith or joy and such soft notions. But therefore it's also refreshing to hear a poet say, "What entitles you to your grimness? Is there an emptiness in you that you should not presume to govern all of us?"

I wonder why Hirsch specifies Hopper's "underwater," "gawky," "desperate" house as a specifically American construction. And would the painter, the creator, also be reduced to a disappearing late afternoon shadow if he were in Europe or some other part of the world? Don't those places usually produce darker literature than American writers do?

Hirsch, "Edward Hopper and the House by the Railroad"

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Edward Hirsch, "For the Sleepwalkers" and Theodore Roethke, "The Waking"

Here's more Edward Hirsch, the title poem of his first collection, which won the Yale Younger Poets prize. I wonder if we might see "For the Sleepwalkers" as a secular poem about faith, mystery, and compassion.

What a shame that organized religions so drift so far from simple statements like this about the desire to bridge the empirical and the spiritual. People really do sleepwalk; that much can be verified. But the poem sidesteps dogma, prescription, or formulas about the precise ways sleepwalking is or isn't a religious event. Mystery and mysticism inform the poem, but Hirsch is wise and kind enough to avoid creeds over which we should judge or hate or go to war.

So I hope "For the Sleepwalkers" offers one more way to think about experience that seems to transcend the rational and to be entirely good.

(There's a typo in this, the only online version I found, where two of the three-line stanzas [tercets] got jammed together in the poem's middle. Also, two stanzas toward the end are italicized, which you may not have noticed in this font).

For the Sleepwalkers -- Edward Hirsch

I hear "For the Sleepwalkers" as a companion piece to Theodore Roethke's magnificent villanelle, "The Waking," another poem about un-dogmatic faith.

The Waking by Theodore Roethke : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

Surely you hear in everyday chit chat, as I do, the notion that literature and art offer themselves as alternatives to religion as we normally define and think about it. If that seems odd, you might revisit these poems, along with other writing and art that's beyond your power to explain, illustrating why the whole is, yea verily, more than the sum of its parts.

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Edward Hirsch, "Fast Break"

Left: Dunking


I don't want to rush anyone away from the Addonizio and Stevens discussions; we can keep that going indefinitely.

But Final Four weekend in college hoops is approaching, and with it comes the question, again, of whether there can be important literature that centers on sport. If so, the writing has to be about larger issues than people playing games, doesn't it? Some might remember that this came up regarding James Wright's football poem, "Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio." (Banjo52, Sept. 23, 2009), and I think of Joyce Carol Oates writing on boxing or Hemingway on bullfighting.

Since the mid-1980s, I've wondered how Edward Hirsch's "Fast Break" fits into the discussion. The fact that Hirsch's poem is dedicated to a man who died young encourages me to see see something more than the literal, more than a basketball poem, yet not abandoning or cheating on basketball as a worthwhile subject. Why and how does one write a basketball poem that serves as an elegy for a deceased friend? Doesn't Hirsch risk trivializing both the game and the friend?

I think the poem does succeed in both purposes, but I'm baffled as to how to explain it.

Fast Break by Edward Hirsch : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio by James Wright : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

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