An African Greeting and A Small Emily Dickinson Gem

Wood Storks, Northern Florida

Somewhere, years ago, I heard of a greeting that was common somewhere in Africa. Instead of settling for "Hello," the first human says, "I see you." And the other replies, "I am here."

"I see you."

"I am here."

I find something wonderful about that--what it says might be everything. But the exchange also calmly recognizes all that cannot be expressed.

Can anyone give me more information? Is it in fact an African greeting? Where in Africa? (I think I heard it was South African). Has there been a lot of commentary about it? It seems to me there might be, yet I haven't heard the words in more than a decade.

Southern Ontario

Loxahatchee NWR, Florida

Suburban Detroit park

Suburban Detroit park

And thanks once more to the Poetry Foundation, this time for its Dec. 31, 2013 daily poem, a brief Emily Dickinson gem. It's new to me and feels a bit like the tone and feeling in the African greeting. Doesn't it?  How would you explain the similarity? Or do you not agree there is one?

It's all I have to bring today-- 

This, and my heart beside-- 

This, and my heart, and all the fields-- 

And all the meadows wide-- 

Be sure you count--should I forget 

Some one the sum could tell-- 

This, and my heart, and all the Bees 

Which in the Clover dwell.

St. Augustine Beach, Florida


Happy New Year.

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

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

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Emily Dickinson, "There’s been a Death, in the Opposite House"

There’s been a Death, in the Opposite House by Emily Dickinson : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.


Photos: a country graveyard in southern Ohio. These aren't my relatives; it’s just that I was struck by the theme of anonymity on some of the stones.

In my scouting over the last few weeks, I’ve been hitting Emily Dickinson poems that didn’t wow me. Then at a Mom&Pop lunch today (Romira’s, a good sop of chicken stir fry), I once again stumbled onto the well-known “There’s been a Death, in the Opposite House.” I hadn’t read it for years, and it struck me as E.D. at her best.

It also seemed a natural follow-up to Hirsch’s poems about Christopher Smart—that lost, essentially anonymous man, except for his insanity, that man who’s been resurrected by poetry—his own work and that of others who have loved his gentle spirit. Upon his death, surely Christopher Smart’s neighbors might have made some of E.D.’s remarks about him.



Maybe “There’s been a Death” should have depressed me, but I was so dazzled by some of the skill with language that the poem did what poetry is supposed to do: triumph over death, even as it examined death’s aftermath.



I especially like these un-sentimental details:

The speaker would know the decedent’s name in a small town, but E.D. insists upon his anonymity. It’s only a “Death, in the Opposite House.” The distancing from him as a personality begins immediately.

“Such Houses” have a “numb look.” Numbness is important in these situations; it’s a time for vultures, not Hallmark cards.

“A Window opens like a Pod—“ Like a pod it opens. Who else would have seen that?

The pea that falls from the pod is the decedent’s mattress. It is flung out “mechanically,” and children passing by, getting some value-added education, as they “wonder if it died—on that—“

It died on that! Death neuters the corpse, de-humanizes it. The kids’ understanding leads them to impersonal pronouns to portray what they see. The corpse is reduced to an object. Whatever else death does, it reduces; it demands that we see ourselves as matter; even if angels will be swooping in soon, we are, for a time, mere matter, an it.

The speaker, who was a boy once, can speak for the children because “he” remembers noticing and wondering about such things, upon passing such a house. About the gender switch: did little girls in Amherst around 1860 not notice and wonder about such things? Was it just too grisly a matter for girls to speak about? Maybe little girls were too homebound to be out and about and observing death’s aftermath? Whatever the reasons, Dickinson’s sense that she needs to speak as a male is curious.

The minister goes “stiffly” in. Don’t all ministers go stiffly, lest they be perceived as having un-puritan pleasure? And this minister has “owned” both the house and the mourners at such a time; ministers own little boys too.

Death makes good business for the clergy, for milliners and morticians. One has to wonder if such enterprises might like death. In addressing what a society does in the face of death, any writer could have fallen into facile, overwrought social criticism; I find Dickinson’s restraint tough and effective.



“We’re not very good at death,” a friend of mine once said, meaning we don’t know how to deal with it. Without lambasting her culture for its awkwardness concerning death, Dickinson points out deftly and quickly three trades that might be glad we have death for their continued prosperity. It’s just a fact, worth exposing, but not worth a rant.

Also in “just a Country Town’’ one wouldn’t want to lay it on too heavily against some pillars of the community. They might be superiors, or they might be pals; if it were the 1950s, you might have coffee with them tomorrow at Smitty’s Drug Store or run into them at the Little League game Tuesday afternoon.

Finally, let me just quickly mention that Dickinson’s quirky dashes seem unusually effective in “There’s been a Death.” Each pause seems appropriately longer than a comma, even though it’s doubtful that’s what the poet had in mind.

Maybe I’ll find more cheerful topics soon, but it seemed like a sign to stumble onto E.D.’s poem just after a review of Christopher Smart’s portrait of “the country of the mad.”

There’s been a Death, in the Opposite House by Emily Dickinson : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.


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CORNY LITTLE SERMON, Part Three

My beef is that I’m sick of not understanding, not even imagining, a scenario that explains such hyper-focused, rapacious Me-ism. I’m sick of not getting it. TG&S!, I don’t want your moronic hoarded stuff; I want to know what makes you tick. Of course, what would I do with that information--go fall on my sword?

I guess I’m being downright quaint to wonder if a good passage of poetry or thirty minutes a day with Earl Scruggs or Beethoven or Buddha or film of the Packers' training camp, where it's more about skill than vanquishing . . . I'm peculiar to wonder if those might have been The Gift that slaked their thirst.

So what might have worked? 72 virgins? Hell, give ‘em 73. I’ll pay for that last one if it’ll make them retreat to their mansions, put away their guns, and shut up. But I don’t count on any of that—these guys need something they didn’t get, and they don't know what it is any more than I do, but it’s bigger than a virgin, bigger than a breadbox. There’s a hole in the middle of them, and they can’t fill it up.

So let’s return to the fact that much of our culture is rich with Gifts that weren’t stolen from Grandma’s pension. Banjos. Parks to walk in. Games to play or watch. Paintings and Poems? They might disturb us internally. In fact, they should; they cause troubling self-examination. But that means they challenge us to do better, too see both ecstasy and injustice better than we did-- and they comfort us in our failures. None of that has anything to do with exploiting others to gather more trinkets for our pile of stuff—unless you count our books.

So let’s go give ourselves some cheap, invaluable Gifts—gifts we can quote or hum or envision because somebody else has been better than we are at expression; somebody else has been exquisite here and there. Try to share this with those poor CheyneyBushRove boys down the street, for they are victims—someone ripped out the middle of them, and they want to rip back.

And don’t forget cuddly Rush and puffy Glen. They never intended to hate everyone and everything that doesn’t gleam like chrome, to sell fear and hatred like two flavors of popcycle. They just don’t know any better; the carny act is their only skill. They don’t understand grace or passion. If the goal is not acquisitive, they don’t get it; concepts like “Enough” are too lofty for a whole lot of people.

Therefore, some of them incline toward weeping. You know, if you cry a lot, you must be sad, and Sad is just the other side of Mad—even in Congress, even on TV.


Maybe I should compose country music about all this. And, imploring the hillbilly Muse, I could quote Wallace Stevens, for poems don’t plead for money and mansion. Instead they beg from gods in swamps: “in me, come flinging/Forms, flames, and the flakes of flames.”

When a song works, it blows off the top of your head. Emily Dickinson said so. Yet songs and poems are cheap, and you don’t need to beat up on anybody. You go there to be conquered.






Nomad Exquisite by Wallace Stevens : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.



Finis

KAY RYAN, "The Edges of Time"

Excerpt: 'The Best Of It' : NPR


Today I heard Kay Ryan read "The Edges of Time" and discuss poetry in general, and I'm back to being an acolyte. Ryan mentioned Emily Dickinson as one of her heroes (first Hopkins, she said--for exposing new ways to stretch language -- then Donne and Dickinson). Like Ryan, E.D. explores the far corners of the mind, with ususual curiosity and apparent accuracy, catching this or that shading or oddness in a psyche or a mental process. Those adventures within and about the human mind plus the shared penchant for precise, sharp language are the two most prominent features that Ryan and E.D. share.

Well, there is also their brevity. In an age when poets (as well as fiction writers) feel free to go on and on, Ryan and Dickinson seem to feel an honorable obligation to density, richness, and power of language--finding the word that is just right--precise, interesting, original, quirky, the word that throws a genuinely new, legitimate, and important light (or darkness) on a subject.

Feel free to look at the other two poems, of course, ("Home to Roost" has appeared here before); however "The Edges of Time" is my primary interest today.

Excerpt: 'The Best Of It' : NPR

Emily Dickinson, "Hope is the thing with feathers." Video, cardinal landing.

I'm not a Dickinson expert, but my sense is that "Hope Is the Thing with Feathers" is a favorite for many. I like the central metaphor of hope as a bird and the title's focus on feathers--maybe a bird's most fragile feature. However, E.D.'s development of that idea is a little sweet for my tastes, especially compared to the complexity of so many of her better poems.

On the other hand, I get sappy about birds, and cardinals in particular. I stumbled onto the video below while looking for images of cardinal chicks--I'm pretty sure I had one this morning, just after first light, with mom and dad at the platform feeder.

When I consider that chick, that plump grey ball, becoming Mr. Red adult--or Mrs. More Modest Red--one word that comes to mind is magic. Ditto the video's excellent close-ups of a cardinal's landings in some snow. Whatever else he might be, the cardinal as a metaphor for hope is a perfectly reasonable notion.

Hope is the thing with feathers

YouTube - Cardinal landing close up

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Why I Am Not a Painter by Frank O'Hara : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

Why I Am Not a Painter by Frank O'Hara : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.




A South Carolina guy, might be headed for the diner.




Today’s poem and comments began as a response to Barbaro’s recent response to my January 8 and 9 postings of Dickinson and Frost poems. Also, another regular, Gothpunkuncle, has in the past given me food for thought about the importance of context and culture compared to language (not that he’s choosing one over the other any more than I am). So after Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost, I turn to Frank O’Hara’s “lunch poems.”

It all began like this, my attempt to respond to Barbaro on January 9:

Barbaro, your sentence on simplicity is LARGE. I agree, though I feel as if I’ve seen a lot of poetry that falls flat in the name of simplicity—which illustrates your very point.

Ditto your sentence on saying things wrong, more or less as a definition of creativity or originality. Didn’t you make a similar point about Bach a few months ago?

I can live without E.D.’s dashes, but I agree, it’s not the same. (By the way, did you see Paula and Gothpunkuncle’s important January 8 comments about Dickinson’s life and times? They gave me pause, not that I ever thought she was having a party for one up there in her Amherst room).

Thanks for the technical info too, Barbaro. At least on this reading, I had not noticed the sonnet biz in "Acquainted with the Night."

Do you think the experimental stuff in today's poetry—the stuff that seems to be re-examining language and old structures—ignores the endless possibilities of traditional forms? How many ways can you stretch a sonnet? More than a couple.

As you know, I’m not at all a bigot against free verse, and you might know I believe in the old saw, “If it works, it works,” for all the dangers there. But until the recent (and still minority) tilt toward neo-formalism (if that’s what they call it), I guess I assumed that some of the edgier poetry, the wilder, hipper-yet-more-talky voices out there, would have sent me to the children’s play room if I’d asked why they were transmogrifying poems into chatty prose, the likes of which I can hear at most diners.

Not that there’s anything wrong with diners. Some of my favorite food is served at diners--and certainly some of my favorite experiences. I often meet friends at diners. Our conversations can get pretty good, pretty deep, even pretty close to the bone. But I’ve never called them poetry.

Why I Am Not a Painter by Frank O'Hara : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

Emily Dickinson, Poem 510, "It was not Death," PART TWO

It was not death, for I stood up by Emily Dickinson : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

I apologize for the ridiculous length and self-indulgence here today. But I might not get back to Banjo for a couple days, and all this textual stuff actually interests me. So, as if you need my permission to skim or skip, please skim or skip as you like.

Poem 510 tries to pin down an inexplicable gloom, an anxiety and sense of impending catastrophe, somewhat similar to the more famous “A Certain Slant of Light” (poem 320). Although 320’s magic word, “Despair,” reappears, Poem 510 explores a more complex and unnamable condition.

First a couple of notes about Dickinson's words: a sirocco is a warm desert wind. Is that too Saharan, too exotic for the overall texture of the poem?—especially a poem that winds down not with a sandstorm, but with images of a “beating” earth and a foundering sea vessel? Maybe Dickinson is trying to cover as many aspects of earth as possible, but for me, “sirocco” is a self-conscious stretch.

Also, in the final stanza’s second line, if anyone can argue with confidence and clarity which kind of “spar” the poem intends, I hope you will. A wooden pole on a ship seems the most apt of three possible but unsatisfying definitions (the others—a mineral like feldspar and “sparring” as a kind of boxing practice—seem completely irrelevant).

The pole (mast?) for a ship’s crow’s nest makes some kind of sense, since the speaker can be seen as a lost, floundering ship (or a person there), so far from land that “despair” is ineffective as a word to describe her great psychic drift or chaos.

Also, I can’t help but wonder if E.D. settled for “spar” for the sake of rhyming with “despair.” Like every stanza but the fifth, it’s only half-rhyme anyway, so I doubt that explanation; but her choices of rhyme must have been many, so "spar," in such a key position, troubles me.

However, what I’m coming to in my reading life is an appreciation for E.D.’s quirky diction, full of words that are simply more interesting than most writers would have chosen. Also, they can be uncannily precise, and this can create ideas and conditions that are as uniquely interesting, accurate, quirky and, again, as precise as the words that carry them.

Who else, in her despair, would think to verify that she’s alive simply by noting that she’s standing up? This simplicity is compelling and should make Descartes roll over in his grave, with that pretentious Cogito ergo sum jazz. Dude, were you standing up? Then you weren’t dead, Dude. Nobody gives a shit that you were thinking, and you might be the only one who cares that you exist.

I’m sure that logic won’t endure scrutiny, but it was fun.

Back to E.D.’s choices about words: who else thinks of bells having tongues? Therefore, like us, they make noise; so we know it’s not literally night, though our souls might be submerged in a night terror. In the third stanza, as if to follow up on "tongues" and to cover the five senses to determine just where she is and in what condition, Dickinson introduces the sense of taste: “it tasted like them all.” If that doesn’t make complete sense in rational terms, remember that we’re not in a rational place.

Many of us might compare such a state to midnight, so in the fourth stanza, Dickinson specifies that it’s only like “some” midnights, which is a more honest and restrained claim—and maybe therefore more alarming.

“. . . everything thing that ticked.” What ticks other than clocks? But Dickinson finds many ticking things, and all of them have stopped. What a way to intensify her sense of dread: turn the world into a stopped clock; the most horrific of midnights is now timeless. She’s magnifying without hyperbolizing—a paradox, an irrationality, a dark magic.

Then, as if she’d already established that the earth breathes and has a heartbeat (“beating ground”), she repeals it. You or I might think of the planet as a living, pulsing entity, but if we were to say it now feels dead, would we think of death as repealing that life? Isn’t it laws that we repeal. And aren't laws our attempts to be rational and ethical? Well, the “beating ground” is a kind of law here, and this other-worldly gloom is repealing it.

Dickinson is also messing with chronology (repealing a living earth before she births it), so the speaker finds one more way to suggest a lawless limbo; it’s not governed by time as we know it.

She seems to know that if she talks about time, she needs to include space, another major force upon us that’s supposed to make sense. But here, space and time “stare” at her and everything.

In this context, “Chaos” might be a predictable word, but “stopless” is not. It’s childlike, and what is the lost, threatened speaker if not a child, adrift in a “stopless” nightmare? Consider how much less effective “endless” would have been. I wonder if E.D. spent many hours in her attic considering synonyms for “endless.” If she had a thesaurus, I bet “stopless” was not in it; I bet she had to come to that on her own—in an instant or over days and weeks. (Hard core New Critics, forgive me that biographical and intentional fallacy).

In closing, Dickinson's tossed ship of self might feel lucky if it could settle on “despair” as the name and nature of its condition. To “justify” that, however, there must be, in this stormy sea, at least a “report,” a rumor, of land, which lies within sight of the “spar.”

Why we must have visible land to have despair, I’m not sure. I suppose that would be something like a rational universe: there’s land, security, life as I knew it, and I cannot get there. Therefore, my despair is justified.

But my location—a meaningless word and concept in this chaos—is so alien and so full of endless midnight that “despair” is a meaningless, trivial label for what I feel. Yet I have no other label; none is large or terrifying enough.

The other day, I posted Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.” It too makes ample use of paradox to convey a place and condition that are incomprehensible and unutterable in human terms. His place was a paradise; Dickinson’s is the opposite of that, and labels like living Hell and limbo are inadequate to convey it. So instead, she gives us analogies as a way of understanding something that all of us may have known. Or maybe we haven’t; maybe we got lucky.

It was not death, for I stood up by Emily Dickinson : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

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Emily Dickinson, Poem 510, "It was not Death"

I was delighted to hear Poetry Foundation say that Emily Dickinson is “a poet who took definition as her province.” I’ve been on the edge of thinking one of her major contributions is her effort to pin down psychological conditions that are too vague, too subtle, too large for definition or conventional thinking. Therefore, she creates analogies.

Poetry Foundation goes on to say her effort was “to make the abstract tangible, to define meaning without confining it, to inhabit a house that never became a prison, Dickinson created in her writing a distinctively elliptical language for expressing what was possible but not yet realized.”

“She saw poetry as a double-edged sword. While it liberated the individual, it as readily left him ungrounded.”

I’ll say more tomorrow, but for now, I think this is a large part of what’s going on in her Poem 510. She’s not sure what “it” is, so she defines by negation; she tells us what it is not.

It was not death, for I stood up by Emily Dickinson : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.