Poem du Jour

The Last Poem du Jour

2008-12-09T09:52:00.000-08:00

Good friends:

This will be the last entry in this blog. I've run through all 99 surviving emails (yes! this one is Old Hundredth!) and while I would be perfectly content to go on writing light prose about good poems forever, it simply wouldn't be the responsible thing to do. I have a living to make and literary immortality to earn. So I can't afford to indulge myself.

As a farewell, however, I thought I'd break with precedent and write an original letter covering something that wasn't discussed in any of the emails to Sean and his friends. Here it is, and a great poem, too. It's from William Shakespeare's The Tempest:

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

Lovely stuff, innit? The play becomes life, the world becomes the Globe, and in a handful of words Shakespeare renders the essential tragedy of human life beautiful. It's yet another poem that I'm tempted to simply put before your eyes and then silently step back from without comment.

But the formula for this series of letters has been simple: The poem is presented in a non-threatening way. The reader is encouraged to simply read it and let the words wash over him or her, without getting too analytical about it. And then I drop in some easy tid-bit of insight into the poem which any English major would know already, but is worth hearing nonetheless. Followed, sometimes, by a light observation taken from my own life, and then something not entirely dissimilar to a moral.

Here's the tid-bit: The poem doesn't exist in the above form in the play itself. It's part of a speech which in its entirety goes:

PROSPERO.
You do look, my son, in a mov'd sort,
As if you were dismay'd: be cheerful, sir:
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.--Sir, I am vex'd:
Bear with my weakness; my old brain is troubled.
Be not disturb'd with my infirmity.
If you be pleas'd, retire into my cell
And there repose: a turn or two I'll walk,
To still my beating mind.

Wait! Wait! you say. Do I mean to say that the first excerpt isn't really a poem? Not a bit of it. Shakespeare was a poet and so he would write poems and then place them into the speeches and dialogue of his lowbrow hackwork. (What you and I would call the immortal and divinely inspired blah blah blah. Shakespeare wrote plays because he needed to earn a living. Given an independent income, he probably would have stuck entirely to verse.)

And here's the autobiographical bit: I swiped the poem and dumped it whole into the end of my novel Bones of the Earth, to make explicit what I was doing there. Which is to say I was using the poem for my own practical purposes, exactly as Shakespeare did when he included it in The Tempest.

Finally, here's the lesson I want you to take from this: Poems are useful things. They can give you courage. They can make you look witty. They can help you punch up a monologue in your lastest play. Pick one up the way your Australopithecine ancestors might have picked up a stick or a rock. Then use it as a tool. To what purpose is entirely up to you.

Now I take my bow.

Good night,
Michael

A Poet of Rags and Tatters

2008-12-06T08:14:00.000-08:00

Dear Everybody:

We return today to that poet of rags and tatters, Archilochos, once as famous as you can get, and now... Well, be honest now. Had you ever heard of him? Me neither.

But is he useful, you ask? Divorce the poems of his history and what remains? For one...

To His Soul
by Archilochos

Soul, my soul, don't let them break you,
all these troubles. Never yield:
though their force is overwhelming,
up! attack them shield to shield,

nor victorious rise exalted,
vaunting you can never fall,
nor defeated lie in endless
grieving, as if loss were all.

Take the joy and bear the sorrow,
looking past your hopes and fears:
learn to recognize the measured
dance that orders all our years.

Okay, you probably had a little trouble with the poetic diction (i.e., speech which sounds like nothing you’ve ever heard come out of a real person’s mouth) in the middle. Easily resolved. Vaunting means boasting. So he’s saying, “Nor, when things are going your way brag that you can’t be defeated. And when you are defeated, for Chrissake, don’t wallow in it!”

So... useful? You betcha. Next time you’ve really screwed up, and things are looking bleak, try murmuring it to yourself. “Soul, my soul, don’t let them break you...” All the way to that end that recognizes that sorrow and joy are recurrent in our lives and that if you take the long view it all looks like a dance.

Or, in other words: Courage.

Your friend,
Michael

Archilochos? Who He?

2008-12-04T07:19:00.000-08:00

Dear Everyone:

If you were an ancient Greek, in need of entertainment, and a wandering rhapsode came to town, you'd of course want to hear something by one of the Big Two, the monsters of verse, the Snoop Doggy Doggs of their age – either Homer or Archilochos.

Archilochos?

Yep. Archilochos came the Aegean island of Paros. He left there after a citizen named Lycambes went back on his promise to give his daughter Neobule in marriage to Archilochos. Who did what any poet would do, and vented his wounded feelings in satiric verse. So scathing was his poem that Lycambes and all his daughters hung themselves.

Which is why he had to leave town, go to Thasos, and become a professional soldier. Here's what he wrote about the glorious battle he fought against the Saians:

Some Saian mountaineer
Struts today with my shield.
I threw it down by a bush and ran
When the fighting got hot.
Life seemed somehow more precious.
It was a beautiful shield.
I know where I can buy another
Exactly like it, just as round.

After leaving Thasos, he is said to have visited Sparta, but to have been immediately once banished for his cowardice and the smutty character of his poetry. Eventually, he made his way back home to Paros, where he was slain by a soldier named Corax, who was for this excommunicated by the Oracle for having slain a servant of the Muses.

Of his works only 500 lines remain, as of a week ago.

Did you catch the qualifier? Yes, thanks to the scholars at Oxford, the Oxyrhynchus Papyri have been decoded (really a fascinating story there; you know how to use Google), and we now have 30 more lines of his poetry!

In celebration of which, tomorrow you'll get another poem by him.

All best,
Michael

Plain, Simple, Hard to Figure OUt

2008-12-02T07:28:00.000-08:00

Hey, Everyone!

Today we've got a poem that goes right to the heart of what we're trying to do here. Which is to get everybody comfortable enough and familiar enough with poetry to understand it.

Paradoxes and Oxymorons
by John Ashbery

This poem is concerned with language on a very plain level.
Look at it talking to you. You look out a window
Or pretend to fidget. You have it but you don't have it.
You miss it, it misses you. You miss each other.

[Rest of poem removed because it’s probably still in copyright]

Okay, so a poem walks into a bar, right? It strikes up a conversation with you. Only you don't get it. It's hard to figure out. Maybe the poem assumes you know things and have done things that you haven't. It's nobody's fault. It's as much the poem's fault as yours.

The poem's sad. Being understood is its raison d'etre, its reason for existing.

And here's where the poem gets difficult to follow. That's an oxymoron (terrific word; it literally means "bright dim," signifying something that's self-contradictory). Because the poem's about clarity and simplicity of language. But when you're talking about language, its descriptions get very complicated very fast.

So Ashbery says that he considers poetry to be a form of play. Which is true. But that he considers that form of play to be an immensely serious thing. This playfulness can easily be lost in the "chatter of typewriters." Which means it's a tough thing to do.

But Ashbery has done it again! In this poem! And it makes him wonder (playfully) if you, the reader, only exist in order to coax this poem out of him. But then the "you" that he imagined doesn't exist, does it? And, completed, the poem doesn't distinguish between you and him. He's just another reader now.

Finally, he says "The poem is you." Or "you." He's never met you, after all. The person he addresses really exists only within the poem. The person he's addressing is not you, is not the reader, is the poem. And thus, paradoxically, if you "get" the poem, you are the poem.

That's only one interpretation, of course. You can roll your own if you like.

So is the poem any good? Sure it is. How good? That's up to you to decide.

All best,
Michael

The Courageous Stride, the Ridiculous Slippers

2008-11-30T20:00:00.000-08:00

Hi, All:

Okay, it's been more than a day. But here's your second poem on the subject:

Courage
by Anne Sexton

It is in the small things we see it.
The child’s first step,
as awesome as an earthquake.

[Rest of poem removed because it’s probably still in copyright]

You all noticed, of course, that the poem contains a lifetime. That it begins with a child's first steps and proceeds chronologically to end with old age and death. And Sexton tells you up front that it's about courage.

Courage is an everyday thing, Sexton says. Imagine the courage it took for you to stand up and walk for the first time, an event "as awesome as an earthquake." And I'm sure you can still remember the courage it took to endure schoolyard taunts. Nobody ever forgets them.

The next stanza moves courage into the arena of war, and refers specifically to the Korean War. "Waitaminute," you say. "Women weren't allowed in the war arena back then." Absolutely right. But your teachers misled you when they said that poetry was about self-expression. Sexton is speaking about the world and she's speaking for everyone.

Herein is the most subversive aspect of the poem: She converts the act of a buddy dying to save you from the martial rhetoric of Homer and the USMC to a quotidian (that means "everyday") reality. It's as simple as "shaving soap." Simultaneously here, she has undone the glory of the act while elevating it to the status of love.

So it goes, for two more stanzas. At the end of life, Sexton says, we are the most courageous of all. And when at last you can't stave off death for even an instant longer, "you'll put on your carpet slippers and stride out." Picture that in your mind: The courageous stride, the ridiculous carpet slippers. Fools on the outside, but heroes within. This is the human condition glorified.

Life is tough business, Sexton says. It's not for sissies. We're not sissies, you and I. We're human beings.

All best,
Michael

P.S. So why shaving soap and not hand soap? To defend herself from the charge that she's trying to "feminize" men. She's just trying to reflect on the way things really are.

Should We Kill Kipling?

2008-11-26T06:22:00.000-08:00

Dear Everyone:

Today I offer one of the most popular and sneered-at poems every written. There's much to be said on both sides. But to begin with, read the poem with an open and sympathetic mind. Try your best to hear and appreciate it exactly as Kipling meant you to:

If
by Rudyard Kipling

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
But make allowance for their doubting too,
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream–and not make dreams your master,
If you can think–and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings–nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much,
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And–which is more–you'll be a Man, my son!

So... what do you think? Moving? Ripe? Both? These are all valid reactions. The two most common reasons for disliking this poem are 1) overexposure, and 2) a dislike for people who offer advice at length. For the first, there is no cure – people do pass this around too much, and once you've heard "In A Gadda Da Vida" five hundred times, you'll never want to hear it again. But for the second, it helps to remember that Kipling is trying to be helpful. He's offering the distilled wisdom that a lifetime of being knocked down and getting right back up again has taught him.

The big criticism of Kipling, though, is that he was the mouthpiece of the British Empire, the jingoistic sloganeer, the man who perceived and embodied the Victorian spirit in all its brave, foolish, world-conquering bulletheadedness. When applied to his best (and usually early) work, this is cruelly unfair. But there's no getting around the fact that success turned him into the guy who wrote "The White Man's Burden" and such lines as, "Oh, it's Tommy this and Tommy that, And shove ‘im out, the brute. But it's savior of ‘is nation, When the guns begin to shoot."

And certainly, in this poem, you can see the distilled essence of the shared values and attitudes that allowed the British to conquer half the world in, as one historian put it, "a fit of absent-mindedness." There's a story of a seven-year-old Victorian English girl in India who fell out of a tree while playing and broke her arm, but went on playing for another half-hour because she knew she was expected to not show weakness before the natives. If you read George MacDonald Fraser's wonderfully comic Flashman novels, you'll see that exact same attitude examined by somebody who finds it kind of weird and creepy.

On the positive side, the poem is clear and lucid – and isn't that a relief after some of the stuff we've plowed through? We know exactly what Kipling was trying to tell us. And his formal command of the language is astounding. The rhyme scheme (ABAB, repeated endlessly) ought to make the poem sound singsong and yet it doesn't. How did he do that?

There are lots of cunning bits of craft hidden in the poem so openly that you probably missed them entirely. To mention just one: The fact that the poem is addressed to the narrator's son isn't revealed until the very final word. Which, since the reader has been receiving the poem as a direct admonition directed at him, turns him into the poet's son, and Kipling into his father. A very powerful relationship has thus been imposed, and absolutely without resistance on the reader's part!

But the key question is, does the poem work? That is, is it of actual help in the messy business of living? And the answer is, I think, on balance, yes. Not as a self-improvement program -- it contains a near-infinite number of goals and no advice on how to reach them -- but as a way of making the reader brave. I'm sure there have been any number of times when somebody faced adversity and defeat and drew strength from these lines in the form of a determination to be THAT kind of man, one who can force his "heart and nerve and sinew" to act hopeful, courageous, and strong, long after hope, courage, and strength have left him.

Yes, it's a hokey poem. Yeah, if you successfully internalize it, you'll be a massively repressed Type-A personality. But anything that helps you when times are hard is to be cherished. And, even at its worst, it's like the parson's egg – parts of it are excellent.

So, on balance, I think we'll let Kipling live.

Tomorrow, a rather different poem on the subject of courage

All best,

Michael

Cat! Poem (What Could Be More Commercial?)

2008-11-25T08:10:00.000-08:00

Dear Everybody:

I having been away so long, at various times in Australia, in my own thoughts, and in fluenza, I'm getting you back into the swing of poetic things easily with:

To a Cat
by Jorge Luis Borges

Mirrors are not more silent
nor the creeping dawn more secretive;
in the moonlight, you are that panther
we catch sight of from afar.

[Rest of poem removed because it’s probably still in copyright]

Borges is respected as a poet, but revered as a writer of prose. (He's the guy who wrote about an infinite library containing not only every book written but every book possible; a man who forgets nothing and another who sets out to write Cervantes' Don Quixote four hundred years after Cervantes; the Alef, which contains within it all things; the Lottery of Babel, which is indistinguishable from life itself; and many, many other intellectual mind-benders.) So his poetry is more cleverly-constructed than profoundly-felt.

Note here how the cat is a thing of absences, defined by negatives ("not more silent nor... more secretive), never seen or described, identified with mirrors, the dawn, a long-forgotten time, the Ganges, a setting sun, a dream. All of which are absolutely unlike the physical thing that is a cat. In fact, what Borges has evoked here is a day, from sunup to sundown and sleep, and a world, through at least two continents. No furs, no claws, no eyes. Only, in fact, a "haunch" pushing up against "the love of a distrustful hand."

"You know my methods," as Sherlock Holmes said to Dr. Watson. What am I getting at here?
Two things: The poem is in the second person, so the poet is addressing a cat. The haunch and the hand place the cat in the poet's lap. Borges is feeling contemplative, dreamish. That's one. The other is that "distrustful" hand. The word leaps out at the reader. You'd expect "distrusted." But no, that word reveals that the poem is not about the cat at all. It's about the poet himself, the member of the race that distrusted the cat's wild ancestors, and somehow, so long ago the facts are forgotten, tamed it anyway.

So the poem's not really about a cat at all. It's about how the poet feels about cats. It's about the idea of a cat.

That's all for today. But we'll have more soon.

Best,
Michael

Fat, Gay, Jewish -- and Way Cool

2008-11-22T20:43:00.000-08:00

Dear Everyone:

Today a not at all bad poem by a guy who was fat, gay, Jewish, and one of the coolest people on the face of the earth. Neat trick, eh?

Allen Ginsberg got his start in the 1950s, hanging around with Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady and William S. Burroughs, became world famous with the publication of “Howl,” was ubiquitous in the Sixties and Seventies (a couple of times a year I’d see him in my college’s public cafeteria, hanging out with anybody who wanted to sit at his table; a couple of hours after the solar eclipse of – I’m guessing – 1973, a couple of my friends went into a diner and there he was; “Did you see the eclipse?” he asked. “Oh, it was mad – mad!”) Then, long before it was cool to do so, he traded in the hippie drag for a suit and tie, trimmed his beard, and went back to looking like an ordinarily respectable Jewish guy, someone who might be in rugs or small appliances. Apparently he’d lost patience with the guru role, and all the luggage that went with it. But he kept on traveling, writing poetry, keeping things churned. He died a few years ago, leaving behind such an enormous body of work that nobody’s yet sorted through it to determine what’s great, what’s not quite, and what’s hardly worth the trouble.

The problem with Allen Ginsberg is that his best poems are enormously long, immersive experiences. But wonderful. Consider “Howl”:

It begins, I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

And continues, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

and goes on, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night

Oh, man. That’s on beyond cool. Try reading those lines out loud. You guys should go to the library and check out a copy. It’s an astonishing poem. It maintains that level of energy all the way to the end.

Today, however, we have something simpler, with a self-explanatory title:

New Stanzas for Amazing Grace
by Allen Ginsberg

I dreamed I dwelled in a homeless place
Where I was lost alone
Folk looked right through me into space
And passed with eyes of stone

[Rest of poem removed because it’s probably still in copyright]

Yes, it’s meant to be sung. What I want you guys to admire in it is its simplicity. It takes a lot of hard work and experience to write something that simple without looking silly.

Not that simplicity is everything. Consider “Howl.” Not at all simple. Immeasurably better.

All best,
Michael

The Arrow, the Song, Will Not Stay Us Long

2008-11-20T10:04:00.001-08:00

Hi, everybody!

Today’s poem is another ripe one from Longfellow. So why do I think you should read it? Well, for one thing, you know its first lines already.

Behold:

The Arrow and the Song
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I shot an arrow into the air,
It fell to earth, I knew not where;
For, so swiftly it flew, the sight
Could not follow it in its flight.

I breathed a song into the air,
It fell to earth, I knew not where;
For who has sight so keen and strong,
That it can follow the flight of song?

Long, long afterward, in an oak
I found the arrow, still unbroke;
And the song, from beginning to end,
I found again in the heart of a friend.

So there it is, the poem that launched a thousand parodies. (“...it hit my teacher’s derriere” to note but one.) Now you know the point of those lines.

In a footnote to the poem (useful things, footnotes) I discovered an entry from Longfellow’s diary: "October 16, 1845. Before church, wrote The Arrow and the Song, which came into my mind as I stood with my back to the fire, and glanced on to the paper with arrow's speed. Literally an improvisation." So now we know a second thing, which is that the poem did not take up a great deal of Longfellow’s time.

Nor need it ours.

Best,
Michael

Sing "Wreck of the Hesperus" Today!

2008-11-19T06:22:00.000-08:00

Dear Everyone:

We’ve got a ripe one today! For your sins, I’ve been reading a volume of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. But as Nietzsche said, “That which does not kill us, makes us stronger.”

In which spirit, I urge you to read the following before my commentary:

Wreck Of The Hesperus
By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

It was the schooner Hesperus,
That sailed the wintery sea;
And the skipper had taken his little daughter,
To bear him company.

Blue were her eyes as the fairy flax,
Her cheeks like the dawn of day,
And her bosom white as the hawthorn buds,
That ope in the month of May.

The Skipper he stood beside the helm,
His pipe was in his mouth,
And he watched how the veering flaw did blow
The smoke now West, now South.

Then up and spake an old Sailor,
Had sailed the Spanish Main,
"I pray thee, put into yonder port,
for I fear a hurricane.

"Last night the moon had a golden ring,
And to-night no moon we see!"
The skipper, he blew whiff from his pipe,
And a scornful laugh laughed he.

Colder and louder blew the wind,
A gale from the Northeast,
The snow fell hissing in the brine,
And the billows frothed like yeast.

Down came the storm, and smote amain
The vessel in its strength;
She shuddered and paused, like a frighted steed,
Then leaped her cable's length.

"Come hither! come hither! my little daughter,
And do not tremble so;
For I can weather the roughest gale
That ever wind did blow."

He wrapped her warm in his seaman's coat
Against the stinging blast;
He cut a rope from a broken spar,
And bound her to the mast.

"O father! I hear the church bells ring,
Oh, say, what may it be?"
"Tis a fog-bell on a rock bound coast!" –
And he steered for the open sea.

"O father! I hear the sound of guns;
Oh, say, what may it be?"
Some ship in distress, that cannot live
In such an angry sea!"

"O father! I see a gleaming light.
Oh say, what may it be?"
But the father answered never a word,
A frozen corpse was he.

Lashed to the helm, all stiff and stark,
With his face turned to the skies,
The lantern gleamed through the gleaming snow
On his fixed and glassy eyes.

Then the maiden clasped her hands and prayed
That saved she might be;
And she thought of Christ, who stilled the wave,
On the Lake of Galilee.

And fast through the midnight dark and drear,
Through the whistling sleet and snow,
Like a sheeted ghost, the vessel swept
Tow'rds the reef of Norman's Woe.

And ever the fitful gusts between
A sound came from the land;
It was the sound of the trampling surf,
On the rocks and hard sea-sand.

The breakers were right beneath her bows,
She drifted a dreary wreck,
And a whooping billow swept the crew
Like icicles from her deck.

She struck where the white and fleecy waves
Looked soft as carded wool,
But the cruel rocks, they gored her side
Like the horns of an angry bull.

Her rattling shrouds, all sheathed in ice,
With the masts went by the board;
Like a vessel of glass, she stove and sank,
Ho! ho! the breakers roared!

At daybreak, on the bleak sea-beach,
A fisherman stood aghast,
To see the form of a maiden fair,
Lashed close to a drifting mast.

The salt sea was frozen on her breast,
The salt tears in her eyes;
And he saw her hair, like the brown sea-weed,
On the billows fall and rise.

Such was the wreck of the Hesperus,
In the midnight and the snow!
Christ save us all from a death like this,
On the reef of Norman's Woe!

I have two things to say about this poem. First, that you shouldn’t be overly scornful of the sentiment. Longfellow died in 1882, before a lot of the improvements in medicine that we take for granted. Back then, the average reader – you – would have lost at least one sister or brother in his or her infancy. So that line about the little daughter with eyes “blue ... as the fairy flax” would have been a shot right to the heart. It would have touched undying pain.

The other is that this poem can be sung to the tune of the theme from “Gilligan’s Isle.” Some of the verses (the first one most notably), you have to scrunch the second line together to make fit. But most work just fine. Try it right now:

"O father! I see a gleaming light.
Oh say, what may it be?"
But the father answered never a word,
A frozen corpse was he.

(Don’t forget the refrain: “... frozen corpse was he.”)

So now you know why modern poets abandoned rhyme!

All best,
Michael

Cultured Literary Doodling

2008-11-15T07:21:00.000-08:00

Dear Everyone:

Your teachers, no doubt, emphasized emotion when they taught poetry. Yet, considering how much of it is rhyme and scansion, wouldn’t logic be a better emphasis? And doesn’t it stand to reason that mathematicians would make particularly good poets?

So the following, by Professor Charles Luttwidge Dodgson, who wrote two well-regarded children’s books under a pseudonym, is nothing more than you’d expect, right?

(Epilogue to Through the Looking Glass)
by Lewis Carroll

A boat, beneath a sunny sky
Lingering onward dreamily
In an evening of July –

Children three that nestle near,
Eager eye and willing ear
Pleased a simple tale to hear –

Long has paled that sunny sky:
Echoes fade and memories die:
Autumn frosts have slain July.

Still she haunts me, phantomwise
Alice moving under skies
Never seen by waking eyes.

Children yet, the tale to hear,
Eager eye and willing ear,
Lovingly shall nestle near.

In a Wonderland they lie,
Dreaming as the days go by,
Dreaming as the summers die:

Ever drifting down the stream –
Lingering in the golden gleam –
Life what is it but a dream?

Good poem. But did you get it?

No, I don’t mean the fact that it was written about going boating with Alice Pleasance Liddell and her sisters on those golden afternoons when he made up the stories that became Alice in Wonderland. That’s pretty obvious by the fact that the poem first appeared at the very end of that exact same book. Did you get the secret he hid in the poem?

Nor do I mean anything dark and sexual either. Though many people do think that Dodgson was a natural pederast who managed to stifle his impulses. (Then again, the case is not proved; a recent biographer claimed that the man’s dark secret was that he was attracted to adult women, and hung around with little girls because being pre-sexual they were safe.)

Here’s a clue: The poem was cast in triplets of lines in order to draw the eye away from the hidden secret. Which is that it’s an acrostic poem. Look at the first letter of each line. Read straight down. The poem contains its own dedication to the girl who inspired Alice.

Acrostic poems were not at all uncommon in an age when any educated gentleman might be expected to dash off an occasional verse or two. So it wasn’t a terribly big secret – you were expected to get it sooner or later. The trick was to make the poem itself good enough that the acrostic came as a surprise.

All best,
Michael

Three Metafictionally Blind Recursive Mice

2008-11-13T12:50:00.000-08:00

Dear Everybody:

One of our favorite poets, Billy Collins, seems to have a thing about mice. As witness:

I Chop Some Parsley While Listening to Art Blakey's Version of "Three Blind Mice"
by Billy Collins

And I start wondering how they came to be blind.
If it was congenital, they could be brothers and sister,
and I think of the poor mother
brooding over her sightless young triplets.

[Rest of poem removed because it’s still in copyright]

So what’s it about? I bet you can’t readily say. Good. Collins is, you’ll remember, the guy who complained that rather than lean back and experience a poem, his students want to tie it to a chair and beat it with a rubber hose until it tells them what it means. So if you enjoyed the poem, if it felt right to you, then you got it, exactly the same way you might get a really good jazz riff. What does it mean? Who knows? Sounds good, though.

Me, I’d say the poem was about the pleasure of experiencing things: Chopping parsley, listening to music, thinking about mice, getting sentimental. All that good stuff that makes life worth living, even though nobody can tell us what it “means.”

Oh, and it’s a metafictional commentary on poetry, too, since “Three Blind Mice” is a poem. Which also makes the whole thing recursive as well, doesn’t it? But enough of that.

All best,
Michael

No! No! Not a Filthy Poem at All!

2008-11-12T06:32:00.000-08:00

Hey, Everybody!

Today we’ve got our longest poem ever. But don’t despair. It’s easy, easy, easy to read. And according to some, myself included, it’s saturated with sex.

Decide for yourself:

Goblin Market
by Christina Rossetti

MORNING and evening
Maids heard the goblins cry:
"Come buy our orchard fruits,
Come buy, come buy:
Apples and quinces,
Lemons and oranges,
Plump unpecked cherries-
Melons and raspberries,
Bloom-down-cheeked peaches,
Swart-headed mulberries,
Wild free-born cranberries,
Crab-apples, dewberries,
Pine-apples, blackberries,
Apricots, strawberries–
All ripe together
In summer weather–
Morns that pass by,
Fair eves that fly;
Come buy, come buy;
Our grapes fresh from the vine,
Pomegranates full and fine,
Dates and sharp bullaces,
Rare pears and greengages,
Damsons and bilberries,
Taste them and try:
Currants and gooseberries,
Bright-fire-like barberries,
Figs to fill your mouth,
Citrons from the South,
Sweet to tongue and sound to eye,
Come buy, come buy."

Evening by evening
Among the brookside rushes,
Laura bowed her head to hear,
Lizzie veiled her blushes:
Crouching close together
In the cooling weather,
With clasping arms and cautioning lips,
With tingling cheeks and finger-tips.
"Lie close," Laura said,
Pricking up her golden head:
We must not look at goblin men,
We must not buy their fruits:
Who knows upon what soil they fed
Their hungry thirsty roots?"
"Come buy," call the goblins
Hobbling down the glen.

"O! cried Lizzie, Laura, Laura,
You should not peep at goblin men."
Lizzie covered up her eyes
Covered close lest they should look;
Laura reared her glossy head,
And whispered like the restless brook:
"Look, Lizzie, look, Lizzie,
Down the glen tramp little men.
One hauls a basket,
One bears a plate,
One lugs a golden dish
Of many pounds' weight.
How fair the vine must grow
Whose grapes are so luscious;
How warm the wind must blow
Through those fruit bushes."
"No," said Lizzie, "no, no, no;
Their offers should not charm us,
Their evil gifts would harm us."
She thrust a dimpled finger
In each ear, shut eyes and ran:
Curious Laura chose to linger
Wondering at each merchant man.
One had a cat's face,
One whisked a tail,
One tramped at a rat's pace,
One crawled like a snail,
One like a wombat prowled obtuse and furry,
One like a ratel tumbled hurry-scurry.
Lizzie heard a voice like voice of doves
Cooing all together:
They sounded kind and full of loves
In the pleasant weather.

Laura stretched her gleaming neck
Like a rush-imbedded swan,
Like a lily from the beck,
Like a moonlit poplar branch,
Like a vessel at the launch
When its last restraint is gone.

Backwards up the mossy glen
Turned and trooped the goblin men,
With their shrill repeated cry,
"Come buy, come buy."
When they reached where Laura was
They stood stock still upon the moss,
Leering at each other,
Brother with queer brother;
Signalling each other,
Brother with sly brother.
One set his basket down,
One reared his plate;
One began to weave a crown
Of tendrils, leaves, and rough nuts brown
(Men sell not such in any town);
One heaved the golden weight
Of dish and fruit to offer her:
"Come buy, come buy," was still their cry.
Laura stared but did not stir,
Longed but had no money:
The whisk-tailed merchant bade her taste
In tones as smooth as honey,
The cat-faced purr'd,
The rat-paced spoke a word
Of welcome, and the snail-paced even was heard;
One parrot-voiced and jolly
Cried "Pretty Goblin" still for "Pretty Polly";
One whistled like a bird.

But sweet-tooth Laura spoke in haste:
"Good folk, I have no coin;
To take were to purloin:
I have no copper in my purse,
I have no silver either,
And all my gold is on the furze
That shakes in windy weather
Above the rusty heather."
"You have much gold upon your head,"
They answered altogether:
"Buy from us with a golden curl."
She clipped a precious golden lock,
She dropped a tear more rare than pearl,
Then sucked their fruit globes fair or red:
Sweeter than honey from the rock,
Stronger than man-rejoicing wine,
Clearer than water flowed that juice;
She never tasted such before,
How should it cloy with length of use?
She sucked and sucked and sucked the more
Fruits which that unknown orchard bore,
She sucked until her lips were sore;
Then flung the emptied rinds away,
But gathered up one kernel stone,
And knew not was it night or day
As she turned home alone.

Lizzie met her at the gate
Full of wise upbraidings:
"Dear, you should not stay so late,
Twilight is not good for maidens;
Should not loiter in the glen
In the haunts of goblin men.
Do you not remember Jeanie,
How she met them in the moonlight,
Took their gifts both choice and many,
Ate their fruits and wore their flowers
Plucked from bowers
Where summer ripens at all hours?
But ever in the moonlight
She pined and pined away;
Sought them by night and day,
Found them no more, but dwindled and grew gray;
Then fell with the first snow,
While to this day no grass will grow
Where she lies low:
I planted daisies there a year ago
That never blow.
You should not loiter so."
"Nay hush," said Laura.
"Nay hush, my sister:
I ate and ate my fill,
Yet my mouth waters still;
To-morrow night I will
Buy more," and kissed her.
"Have done with sorrow;
I'll bring you plums to-morrow
Fresh on their mother twigs,
Cherries worth getting;
You cannot think what figs
My teeth have met in,
What melons, icy-cold
Piled on a dish of gold
Too huge for me to hold,
What peaches with a velvet nap,
Pellucid grapes without one seed:
Odorous indeed must be the mead
Whereon they grow, and pure the wave they drink,
With lilies at the brink,
And sugar-sweet their sap."

Golden head by golden head,
Like two pigeons in one nest
Folded in each other's wings,
They lay down, in their curtained bed:
Like two blossoms on one stem,
Like two flakes of new-fallen snow,
Like two wands of ivory
Tipped with gold for awful kings.
Moon and stars beamed in at them,
Wind sang to them lullaby,
Lumbering owls forbore to fly,
Not a bat flapped to and fro
Round their rest:
Cheek to cheek and breast to breast
Locked together in one nest.

Early in the morning
When the first cock crowed his warning,
Neat like bees, as sweet and busy,
Laura rose with Lizzie:
Fetched in honey, milked the cows,
Aired and set to rights the house,
Kneaded cakes of whitest wheat,
Cakes for dainty mouths to eat,
Next churned butter, whipped up cream,
Fed their poultry, sat and sewed;
Talked as modest maidens should
Lizzie with an open heart,
Laura in an absent dream,
One content, one sick in part;
One warbling for the mere bright day's delight,
One longing for the night.

At length slow evening came–
They went with pitchers to the reedy brook;
Lizzie most placid in her look,
Laura most like a leaping flame.
They drew the gurgling water from its deep
Lizzie plucked purple and rich golden flags,
Then turning homeward said: "The sunset flushes
Those furthest loftiest crags;
Come, Laura, not another maiden lags,
No wilful squirrel wags,
The beasts and birds are fast asleep."
But Laura loitered still among the rushes
And said the bank was steep.

And said the hour was early still,
The dew not fallen, the wind not chill:
Listening ever, but not catching
The customary cry,
"Come buy, come buy,"
With its iterated jingle
Of sugar-baited words:
Not for all her watching
Once discerning even one goblin
Racing, whisking, tumbling, hobbling;
Let alone the herds
That used to tramp along the glen,
In groups or single,
Of brisk fruit-merchant men.

Till Lizzie urged, "O Laura, come,
I hear the fruit-call, but I dare not look:
You should not loiter longer at this brook:
Come with me home.
The stars rise, the moon bends her arc,
Each glow-worm winks her spark,
Let us get home before the night grows dark;
For clouds may gather even
Though this is summer weather,
Put out the lights and drench us through;
Then if we lost our way what should we do?"

Laura turned cold as stone
To find her sister heard that cry alone,
That goblin cry,
"Come buy our fruits, come buy."
Must she then buy no more such dainty fruit?
Must she no more such succous pasture find,
Gone deaf and blind?
Her tree of life drooped from the root:
She said not one word in her heart's sore ache;
But peering thro' the dimness, naught discerning,
Trudged home, her pitcher dripping all the way;
So crept to bed, and lay
Silent 'til Lizzie slept;
Then sat up in a passionate yearning,
And gnashed her teeth for balked desire, and wept
As if her heart would break.

Day after day, night after night,
Laura kept watch in vain,
In sullen silence of exceeding pain.
She never caught again the goblin cry:
"Come buy, come buy,"
She never spied the goblin men
Hawking their fruits along the glen:
But when the noon waxed bright
Her hair grew thin and gray;
She dwindled, as the fair full moon doth turn
To swift decay, and burn
Her fire away.

One day remembering her kernel-stone
She set it by a wall that faced the south;
Dewed it with tears, hoped for a root,
Watched for a waxing shoot,
But there came none;
It never saw the sun,
It never felt the trickling moisture run:
While with sunk eyes and faded mouth
She dreamed of melons, as a traveller sees
False waves in desert drouth
With shade of leaf-crowned trees,
And burns the thirstier in the sandful breeze.

She no more swept the house,
Tended the fowls or cows,
Fetched honey, kneaded cakes of wheat,
Brought water from the brook:
But sat down listless in the chimney-nook
And would not eat.

Tender Lizzie could not bear
To watch her sister's cankerous care,
Yet not to share.
She night and morning
Caught the goblins' cry:
"Come buy our orchard fruits,
Come buy, come buy."
Beside the brook, along the glen
She heard the tramp of goblin men,
The voice and stir
Poor Laura could not hear;
Longed to buy fruit to comfort her,
But feared to pay too dear,
She thought of Jeanie in her grave,
Who should have been a bride;
But who for joys brides hope to have
Fell sick and died
In her gay prime,
In earliest winter-time,
With the first glazing rime,
With the first snow-fall of crisp winter-time.

Till Laura, dwindling,
Seemed knocking at Death's door:
Then Lizzie weighed no more
Better and worse,
But put a silver penny in her purse,
Kissed Laura, crossed the heath with clumps of furze
At twilight, halted by the brook,
And for the first time in her life
Began to listen and look.

Laughed every goblin
When they spied her peeping:
Came towards her hobbling,
Flying, running, leaping,
Puffing and blowing,
Chuckling, clapping, crowing,
Clucking and gobbling,
Mopping and mowing,
Full of airs and graces,
Pulling wry faces,
Demure grimaces,
Cat-like and rat-like,
Ratel and wombat-like,
Snail-paced in a hurry,
Parrot-voiced and whistler,
Helter-skelter, hurry-skurry,
Chattering like magpies,
Fluttering like pigeons,
Gliding like fishes, –
Hugged her and kissed her;
Squeezed and caressed her;
Stretched up their dishes,
Panniers and plates:
"Look at our apples
Russet and dun,
Bob at our cherries
Bite at our peaches,
Citrons and dates,
Grapes for the asking,
Pears red with basking
Out in the sun,
Plums on their twigs;
Pluck them and suck them,
Pomegranates, figs."

"Good folk," said Lizzie,
Mindful of Jeanie,
"Give me much and many"; –
Held out her apron,
Tossed them her penny.
"Nay, take a seat with us,
Honor and eat with us,"
They answered grinning;
"Our feast is but beginning.
Night yet is early,
Warm and dew-pearly,
Wakeful and starry:
Such fruits as these
No man can carry;
Half their bloom would fly,
Half their dew would dry,
Half their flavor would pass by.
Sit down and feast with us,
Be welcome guest with us,
Cheer you and rest with us."
"Thank you," said Lizzie; "but one waits
At home alone for me:
So, without further parleying,
If you will not sell me any
Of your fruits though much and many,
Give me back my silver penny
I tossed you for a fee."
They began to scratch their pates,
No longer wagging, purring,
But visibly demurring,
Grunting and snarling.
One called her proud,
Cross-grained, uncivil;
Their tones waxed loud,
Their looks were evil.
Lashing their tails
They trod and hustled her,
Elbowed and jostled her,
Clawed with their nails,
Barking, mewing, hissing, mocking,
Tore her gown and soiled her stocking,
Twitched her hair out by the roots,
Stamped upon her tender feet,
Held her hands and squeezed their fruits
Against her mouth to make her eat.

White and golden Lizzie stood,
Like a lily in a flood,
Like a rock of blue-veined stone
Lashed by tides obstreperously, –
Like a beacon left alone
In a hoary roaring sea,
Sending up a golden fire, –
Like a fruit-crowned orange-tree
White with blossoms honey-sweet
Sore beset by wasp and bee, –
Like a royal virgin town
Topped with gilded dome and spire
Close beleaguered by a fleet
Mad to tear her standard down.

One may lead a horse to water,
Twenty cannot make him drink.
Though the goblins cuffed and caught her,
Coaxed and fought her,
Bullied and besought her,
Scratched her, pinched her black as ink,
Kicked and knocked her,
Mauled and mocked her,
Lizzie uttered not a word;
Would not open lip from lip
Lest they should cram a mouthful in;
But laughed in heart to feel the drip
Of juice that syruped all her face,
And lodged in dimples of her chin,
And streaked her neck which quaked like curd.
At last the evil people,
Worn out by her resistance,
Flung back her penny, kicked their fruit
Along whichever road they took,
Not leaving root or stone or shoot.
Some writhed into the ground,
Some dived into the brook
With ring and ripple.
Some scudded on the gale without a sound,
Some vanished in the distance.

In a smart, ache, tingle,
Lizzie went her way;
Knew not was it night or day;
Sprang up the bank, tore through the furze,
Threaded copse and dingle,
And heard her penny jingle
Bouncing in her purse, –
Its bounce was music to her ear.
She ran and ran
As if she feared some goblin man
Dogged her with gibe or curse
Or something worse:
But not one goblin skurried after,
Nor was she pricked by fear;
The kind heart made her windy-paced
That urged her home quite out of breath with haste
And inward laughter.

She cried "Laura," up the garden,
"Did you miss me ?
Come and kiss me.
Never mind my bruises,
Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices
Squeezed from goblin fruits for you,
Goblin pulp and goblin dew.
Eat me, drink me, love me;
Laura, make much of me:
For your sake I have braved the glen
And had to do with goblin merchant men."

Laura started from her chair,
Flung her arms up in the air,
Clutched her hair:
"Lizzie, Lizzie, have you tasted
For my sake the fruit forbidden?
Must your light like mine be hidden,
Your young life like mine be wasted,
Undone in mine undoing,
And ruined in my ruin;
Thirsty, cankered, goblin-ridden?"
She clung about her sister,
Kissed and kissed and kissed her:
Tears once again
Refreshed her shrunken eyes,
Dropping like rain
After long sultry drouth;
Shaking with aguish fear, and pain,
She kissed and kissed her with a hungry mouth.

Her lips began to scorch,
That juice was wormwood to her tongue,
She loathed the feast:
Writhing as one possessed she leaped and sung,
Rent all her robe, and wrung
Her hands in lamentable haste,
And beat her breast.
Her locks streamed like the torch
Borne by a racer at full speed,
Or like the mane of horses in their flight,
Or like an eagle when she stems the light
Straight toward the sun,
Or like a caged thing freed,
Or like a flying flag when armies run.

Swift fire spread through her veins, knocked at her heart,
Met the fire smouldering there
And overbore its lesser flame,
She gorged on bitterness without a name:
Ah! fool, to choose such part
Of soul-consuming care!
Sense failed in the mortal strife:
Like the watch-tower of a town
Which an earthquake shatters down,
Like a lightning-stricken mast,
Like a wind-uprooted tree
Spun about,
Like a foam-topped water-spout
Cast down headlong in the sea,
She fell at last;
Pleasure past and anguish past,
Is it death or is it life ?

Life out of death.
That night long Lizzie watched by her,
Counted her pulse's flagging stir,
Felt for her breath,
Held water to her lips, and cooled her face
With tears and fanning leaves:
But when the first birds chirped about their eaves,
And early reapers plodded to the place
Of golden sheaves,
And dew-wet grass
Bowed in the morning winds so brisk to pass,
And new buds with new day
Opened of cup-like lilies on the stream,
Laura awoke as from a dream,
Laughed in the innocent old way,
Hugged Lizzie but not twice or thrice;
Her gleaming locks showed not one thread of gray,
Her breath was sweet as May,
And light danced in her eyes.

Days, weeks, months,years
Afterwards, when both were wives
With children of their own;
Their mother-hearts beset with fears,
Their lives bound up in tender lives;
Laura would call the little ones
And tell them of her early prime,
Those pleasant days long gone
Of not-returning time:
Would talk about the haunted glen,
The wicked, quaint fruit-merchant men,
Their fruits like honey to the throat,
But poison in the blood;
(Men sell not such in any town;)
Would tell them how her sister stood
In deadly peril to do her good,
And win the fiery antidote:
Then joining hands to little hands
Would bid them cling together,
"For there is no friend like a sister,
In calm or stormy weather,
To cheer one on the tedious way,
To fetch one if one goes astray,
To lift one if one totters down,
To strengthen whilst one stands."

Aaaaand... we’re done! You’ll be surprised to learn that Ms Rossetti was quite indignant when people said they could detect a sexual subtext in her poem. It seems inescapable to us, dunnit? I like to recite the lines: "Did you miss me ? Come and kiss me. Never mind my bruises, Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices... Eat me, drink me, love me; Laura, make much of me...” At which point I have to mop my brow with a handkerchief.

But Christina wasn’t kidding when she said that people who thought those lines was anything but innocent simply had filthy minds. She really didn’t intend the jolly lesbian incest that seems so inescapable to us.

So what happened? Sigmund Freud. His insights into unconscious impulses and sexual imagery are so pervasive we don’t even realize today that they came from him. We think they’re simply obvious. But there was a time when a cigar was just a cigar, and a girl might kiss and kiss her sister “with hungry mouth” and suck her juices too, with nobody thinking the less of her.

Ah, but then Freud came along, and now the thought of goblin juice syruping a young girl’s face has made us turn red with embarrassment. The mind, it turns out, doesn’t work the way he hypothesized. But our literature has never been the same since.

All best,
Michael

No!

2008-11-09T14:23:00.000-08:00

Dear Everybody:

Brevity is the soul of wit. So said Shakespeare, or, rather, his character Polonius in Hamlet. To be specific, he said:

This business is well ended. –
My liege, and madam, –to expostulate
What majesty should be, what duty is,
Why day is day, night is night, and time is time.
Were nothing but to waste night, day, and time.
Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit,
And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes,
I will be brief: –your noble son is mad:
Mad call I it; for to define true madness,
What is't but to be nothing else but mad?
But let that go.

That's pretty funny! Those windy gushes of words smacking up against an austere "But let that go." And you gotta admire how deftly Willy proved the aphorism by negative example.

Now today's poem:

November
By Thomas Hood

No sun – no moon!
No morn – no noon –
No dawn – no dusk – no proper time of day.
No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,
No comfortable feel in any member –
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds! –
November!

Great grouse, huh? Try reading it aloud. Terrific stuff when it's November and you're feeling curmudgeonly about it.

But, alas, I told you a lie. The poem is not titled "November" but "No!" And it's almost three times longer than the above version. Common usage has curtailed the verbiage and re-named it. Well, that's posterity for you – a stern editor with a good eye.
Here's the original:

No!
By Thomas Hood

No sun – no moon!
No morn – no noon –
No dawn – no dusk – no proper time of day – No sky – no earthly view –
No distance looking blue –
No road – no street – no "t' other side the way" –
No end to any Row –
No indications where the Crescents go –
No top to any steeple –
No recognitions of familiar people –
No courtesies for showing 'em –
No knowing 'em!
To traveling at all – no locomotion,
No inkling of the way – no notion –
No go – by land or ocean –
No mail – no post –
No news from any foreign coas t–
No park–no ring–no afternoon gentility –
No company – no nobility –
No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,
No comfortable feel in any member –
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees.
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds.
November!

So didja read it? No, you didn't. You skimmed over it. Thus proving my point: Brevity is the soul of wit.

All best,

Michael

For Those In Sorrow . . .

2008-11-06T06:44:00.000-08:00

Contemporary Note: Honesty and the opening line compel me to mention that I wrote this four years ago. But if you're a conservative and in mourning, then this applies as surely to you now as it did to me then. I wish you -- and the Republic -- all the best.

Dear All:

Because you are intelligent men, I reckon the odds are good that your candidate lost in yesterday’s election. So how do you cope? Well, the mature respond, despite everything you were told as children, with bitterness and self-pity. And how better to wallow in bitterness and self-pity than with poetry?

Today’s poem was penned by Miss Neurosis of 1886, the Belle of Amherst and favorite poet of high-school girls everywhere (but we must forgive her that), Emily Dickinson. As follows.

Success is Counted Sweetest
by Emily Dickinson

Success is counted sweetest
By those who ne’er succeed.
To comprehend a nectar
Requires sorest need.

Not one of all the purple host
Who took the flag to-day
Can tell the definition,
So clear, of victory,

As he, defeated, dying,
On whose forbidden ear
The distant strains of triumph
Break, agonized and clear.

And the primary virtue of this poem, class? That’s right. Clarity. Followed shortly by concision. It’s short enough to memorize and if you do, you can someday throw it in the face of some gloating bastard and make him feel like the subhuman toad he is.

Not that I would I encourage such uncivil behavior, mind you.

All best,
Michael

"Please to see the king"

2008-11-04T05:40:00.000-08:00

Hey, guys. I'm as busy as you are, so I'll make this short and sweet. A bit of traditional verse, with explication lifted from a Web page:

The old English custom of hunting the wren on this day [December 26] may be the remnant of an ancient midwinter sacrifice. The official explanation given is that wrens are hunted on St Stephen's Day because their chattering in the bushes gave away the saint's hiding place, leading to his martyrdom. The usually sacred and protected bird was ceremonially hunted and its decorated corpse carried about to bring luck.

The custom still survives in Ireland and the Isle of Man where the bird's corpse is replaced by a potato stuck with feathers.

And here's the poem:

The Wren, the Wren, the King of all Birds
St. Stephen's Day was caught in the furze
Although he be little, his honor is great
Therefore, good people, give us a treat.

So, okay. You guessed this day of slaughter was not really a Christian tradition. In fact, on St. Stephen's Day (the day after Christmas), children would go out hunting until they caught a wren (or, depending on location, some other animal) and kill it. Then they'd hang it from a stick and go door-to-door with the greeting, "Please to see the king." And people would have to give them sweets, food, even small coins.

Much like Halloween, only with real (but small) corpses.

Ah, the good old days! We made our own amusements, then. Not like you young folks, with your video games and rubber balls.

All best,
Michael

A Dainty Touch of Caramelization

2008-11-01T08:02:00.000-07:00

Hail, fellow devotees of the arts!

Yesterday’s poem came to umpety-ump lines and however many words, and I challenged you to cut it down to three and twenty-four. Well, here’s how Marianne did that very thing:

Poetry
by Marianne Moore

[Vastly shorter poem removed because it’s still in copyright. But you should be able to find it on the Web with no trouble.]

That’s a tour de force, for sure. And it gains a lot in compactness and immediacy.

But it loses something as well. Specifically, it loses “real toads in imaginary gardens.” You can argue that this version has a real toad (useful insight) in an imaginary garden (the poem), but it doesn’t have those words: real toads in imaginary gardens. Those are good words. I know because I must have heard or read them quoted a dozen times before I finally encountered the poem.

Now let’s take a second look at yesterday’s poem: No rhymes, no poetic meter ... why this stuff is just cadenced prose! (Remember what Moore said about business correspondence and school-books.) She’s stripped away all the “poetic” stuff, the prettiness, the quaintness, the iambic pentameter in order to look at what a poem really is.

But there’s a lot of hidden craft there too. Moore refers to poetry as “all this fiddle” (nonsense), but a fiddle is also an instrument for making music. And if you count the syllables in each line (but why would you?) you’ll see that the first line of each stanza has exactly nineteen syllables, the fourth and fifth lines have five and eight, or eight and five syllables, and four of the five last lines have thirteen syllables.

What does all this structure mean to you? Not a lot. That’s why I rarely touch upon it. But the ear hears it and the subconscious appreciates it in the same way that the tongue tastes and the stomach appreciates a particularly subtle culinary concoction. When you’re in a restaurant, you rarely say, “Hey! I’ll bet this has been cooked eighty degrees hotter than usual – the surface has dainty touch of caramelization that can’t be achieved otherwise.” But when you say, “Hey, this is really good!” that factors in there.

All best,
Michael

Mr. Toad's Imaginary Garden

2008-10-30T10:40:00.000-07:00

Okay, Guys:

Here’s a poem with explication that I put together months ago, left unfinished on my computer and completely forgot. Just ran across it today, and here it is:

Poetry
by Marianne Moore

I too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers that there is in
it after all, a place for the genuine.

[Rest of poem removed because it’s probably still in copyright]

Wow! Okay, we’ve got a defense of poetry here that begins by conceding the case to those who hate poetry. I don’t like it either, says the illustrious poet. There are things far more important than fiddling around with words. Even so, you have to admit that we should value our hands, eyes, and hair -- not for any esoteric reason that has to be explained in class, but because they’re useful. So, too, with poems. If they’re just imitations of other poems, they become incomprehensible, and if we can’t understand them, what use are they?

That business about "business documents and school-books," though... what’s that all about? Well, Moore is playing a more esoteric game here than she lets on. Under that aw-shucks folksiness, she’s engaged in a deep argument about poetry with her great predecessors. Tolstoy wrote in his diary, “Where the boundary between prose and poetry lies, I shall never be able to understand. The question is raised in manuals of style, yet the answer to it lies beyond me. Poetry is verse: prose is not verse. Or else poetry is everything with the exception of business documents and school books,” and Moore had been impressed by the passage. (How do I know all this? I read a footnote.) Moore’s reply: Let’s not deny the possibility that a business document or school-book might be poetry without actually looking at it.

Similarly, “the literalists of the imagination” came from something Yeats wrote about Blake. (Another footnote.) But let’s ignore that. Back to Ms Moore! She concludes with another backhand slap at “half poets” (they’re not even bad poets!) and concludes that what makes for good poetry is “real toads in imaginary gardens.” Within the artifice of the poem, the poet has to say something real.

Anybody here disagree with that? I didn’t think so.

Your assignment, class is to cut the poem down to three lines, for a total of no more than two dozen words. Can you do that? Well, don’t bother. Marianne Moore has already done it for you.
That poem tomorrow.

All best,
Michael

A Useful Vintage

2008-10-27T07:26:00.000-07:00

This should have gone up Saturday. My apologies. I was out of town.

Dear Everyone:

Today, a few words of wisdom from Dick Lovelace:

The Vintage To The Dungeon
Richard Lovelace

Sing out, pent souls, sing cheerfully!
Care shackles you in liberty:
Mirth frees you in captivity.
Would you double fetters add?
Else why so sad?

Besides your pinion'd arms you'll find
Grief too can manacle the mind.

Live then, pris'ners, uncontrol'd;
Drink oth' strong, the rich, the old,
Till wine too hath your wits in hold;
Then if still your jollity
And throats are free—

Triumph in your bonds and pains,
And dance to the music of your chains.

Okay, so this is metaphoric, right? Prisoners are used as a metaphor for all mankind – because we're all prisoners of something, if only of infinite space. There are, alas, limitations. I am not allowed to walk on the surface of the sun, nor to live forever. And don't think it doesn't grinch me!

But Lovelace says... well, you know what he says. It's right there in black and white. "And dance to the music of your chains." A guy who spent hard time told me how one day he'd dropped acid in prison. He spread his arms wide and said ecstatically, "And I was free!" He meant it. So did Lovelace.

Note that in the title the poet refers not to "wine" but to "the vintage." This is a figure of speech called synecdoche, wherein a part represents the whole. As in "a fleet of fifty sail," when "fifty ships" is meant, or "We polled the best brains in the business" when "most intelligent people" is meant. The wine/vintage usage is a slightly rarer usage in which the whole (the year's totality of wine) represents the part (the specific wine brought into the prison). That's synecdoche too, as is the representation of the specific for the general or the general for the specific, as in, "He was a Croesus" for "He was a rich man." This example being...? Let's not all raise our hands at once. That's right: the specific for the general.

Useful word, synecdoche. Impresses the hell out of people. But if you're going to use it in speech, I recommend you look up how it's pronounced. Not the way its spelling would have you suspect.

All best,
Michael

War! And Baseball! And War

2008-10-22T17:44:00.000-07:00

This, a little early, is Thursday's Poem du Jour. I leave at five a. m. tomorrow for an asteroid deflection symposium, so I won't have time tomorrow. And tonight? I'm giving up the very beginning of the World Series. That's how seriously I take this thing.

I know you'll understand. Because all intelligent people appreciate baseball and poetry. Sometimes they're the same thing.

But not today! Here's the post:

Dear Everybody:

Two poems today! But fear not – they’re easy.

First, from Siegfried Sassoon:

Song-Books Of The War
by Siegfried Sassoon

In fifty years, when peace outshines
Remembrance of the battle lines,
Adventurous lads will sigh and cast
Proud looks upon the plundered past.
On summer morn or winter's night,
Their hearts will kindle for the fight,
Reading a snatch of soldier-song,
Savage and jaunty, fierce and strong;
And through the angry marching rhymes
Of blind regret and haggard mirth,
They'll envy us the dazzling times
When sacrifice absolved our earth.

Some ancient man with silver locks
Will lift his weary face to say:
"War was a fiend who stopped our clocks
Although we met him grim and gay."
And then he'll speak of Haig's last drive,
Marvelling that any came alive
Out of the shambles that men built
And smashed, to cleanse the world of guilt.
But the boys, with grin and sidelong glance,
Will think, "Poor grandad's day is done."
And dream of those who fought in France
And lived in time to share the fun.

No explication needed here, eh? Except for the fact that he was dead wrong. This poem was published in 1918, so it was about WWI (then known as the Great War or, rhetorically, the “war to end all wars,” meaning that many expected it to be the last one ever), which was so grim and desperate that even today nobody fantasizes about fighting in it. His point is still valid, though. There are WWII re-enactors today, and lots of people who fantasize about it. My father was in that war. He never talked about it. He was a farm kid who owned guns and hunted. He never fired a gun again in his life. Draw your own conclusions.

The second poem is as follows:

The Butchers At Prayer

Each nation as it draws the sword
And flings its standard to the air
Petitions piously the Lord—
Vexing the void abyss with prayer.

O irony too deep for mirth!
O posturing apes that rant, and dare
This antic attitude! O Earth,
With your wild jest of wicked prayer!

I dare not laugh . . . a rising swell
Of laughter breaks in shrieks somewhere—
No doubt they relish it in Hell,
This cosmic jest of Earth at prayer!

Not exactly subtle. You’ve noticed I left off the poet’s name. Well, it was Don Marquis. Wait... you say. That sounds familiar. Yep. He was the guy who wrote Archy and Mehitabel, the lighthearted stories about an alley cat and a vers libre cockroach. Funny man. Bitter poem. Draw your own conclusions.

All best,
Michael

A Day Without Poetry

2008-10-21T07:50:00.000-07:00

Hi, guys!

No poem today. I almost clipped you one, though. [NAME WITHHELD] posted an "editor's choice" poem and I was going to send it out to remind you guys of what bad poetry looked like. I was thinking about [NAME WITHHELD], who was a serious poet before she turned to writing science fiction, looked pained when I asked her opinion of science fiction poetry and said, "It's rather like the Special Olympics, isn't it?" I had a rhetorical point to make.

But after fourteen lines, I said to myself, "Life is too short," and also, "These guys were in high school. They know from bad poetry."

So today we skip the poem entirely and go straight to the rhetorical point. Which is to posit one of those questions we all should ask at the beginning of an enterprise but somehow never do. Usually because we're too polite.

First, the answer. In Kurt Vonnegut's Bluebeard (which, incidentally, you can skip with a clean conscience; it has moments, but it's not very good; if you want to try Vonnegut, start with Slaughterhouse Five; best thing he ever wrote, and short to boot), the protagonist, an abstract painter, says something like, "People ask me how I can tell a good abstract painting from a bad one. I tell them to go out and look at ten thousand paintings. Then they'll never be fooled! Never!"

So, too, here. Even the poems you don't like teach you things about your own taste. And who knows? Decades hence you might find some of the stuff you thought was crap are actually great. Happened to me.

Oh, and the question: "Why should we bother reading all these poems you send us? What's the point?" A rude question, but a good one. You get an A-plus for asking it.

All best,
Michael

Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff

2008-10-20T06:46:00.000-07:00

Good friends:

Today’s poem is clarity itself in all matters but one, and that one I will clear up right now. “Terence” herein refers not to the Roman playwright Publius Terentius Afer, as you might easily assume if you hit up a one-volume deskside encyclopedia, but to Housman himself. He always called himself Terence in his poems. Dunno why.

Here’s the thing itself:

Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff
by A. E. Housman

"Terence, this is stupid stuff:
You eat your victuals fast enough;
There can't be much amiss, 'tis clear,
To see the rate you drink your beer.
But oh, good Lord, the verse you make,
It gives a chap the belly-ache.
The cow, the old cow, she is dead;
It sleeps well, the horned head:
We poor lads, 'tis our turn now
To hear such tunes as killed the cow.
Pretty friendship 'tis to rhyme
Your friends to death before their time
Moping melancholy mad:
Come, pipe a tune to dance to, lad."

Why, if 'tis dancing you would be
There's brisker pipes than poetry.
Say, for what were hop-yards meant,
Or why was Burton built on Trent?
Oh, many a peer of England brews
Livelier liquor than the Muse,
And malt does more than Milton can
To justify God's ways to man.
Ale, man, ale's the stuff to drink
For fellows whom it hurts to think:
Look into the pewter pot
To see the world as the world's not.
And faith, 'tis pleasant till 'tis past:
The mischief is that 'twill not last.
Oh I have been to Ludlow fair
And left my necktie god knows where,
And carried half-way home, or near,
Pints and quarts of Ludlow beer:
Then the world seemed none so bad,
And I myself a sterling lad;
And down in lovely muck I've lain,
Happy till I woke again.
Then I saw the morning sky:
Heigho, the tale was all a lie;
The world, it was the old world yet,
I was I, my things were wet,
And nothing now remained to do
But begin the game anew.

Therefore, since the world has still
Much good, but much less good than ill,
And while the sun and moon endure
Luck's a chance, but trouble's sure,
I'd face it as a wise man would,
And train for ill and not for good.
'Tis true, the stuff I bring for sale
Is not so brisk a brew as ale:
Out of a stem that scored the hand
I wrung it in a weary land.
But take it: if the smack is sour,
The better for the embittered hour;
It should do good to heart and head
When your soul is in my soul's stead;
And I will friend you, if I may,
In the dark and cloudy day.

There was a king reigned in the East:
There, when kings will sit to feast,
They get their fill before they think
With poisoned meat and poisoned drink.
He gathered all that springs to birth
From the many-venomed earth;
First a little, thence to more,
He sampled all her killing store;
And easy, smiling, seasoned sound,
Sate the king when healths went round.
They put arsenic in his meat
And stared aghast to watch him eat;
They poured strychnine in his cup
And shook to see him drink it up:
They shook, they stared as white's their shirt:
Them it was their poison hurt
- I tell the tale that I heard told.
Mithridates, he died old.

So. A defense of depressing poetry. I was gonna synopsize it (beginning, “In the first stanza, the poet’s friend says, ‘Fred, your poems are such major gloom-cookies...’”) but let’s be honest, you read it, you got it, you bought the t-shirt, you went home and puked on the rug. Let’s not flog a dead horse. Or cow, as the case may be.

But here’s the major irony of the poem: It’s remembered chiefly not for its laborious observation that great poetry is, like nasty medicine, unpleasant but good for you, but for a throwaway couplet early on, “And malt does more than Milton can/To justify God's ways to man.” Which must be quoted by literate sots literally every day of the year with the first word lopped off:

Malt does more than Milton can
To justify God's ways to man.

Note the literate reference to the line early on in Paradise Lost stating Milton’s major theme. By breaking it out of Housman’s gloom-cookie, a million anonymous but well-read boozers have created a work of found-poetry. It states a major truth in an absolute minimum of words. And it rhymes too!

Just keep in mind the wisdom of our major advertisers and Don’t Drink to Excess. Housman lies when he says it cheers you up, but he wasn’t kidding about lying down in the muck.

Your pal,
Michael

Andrew the Marvellous

2008-10-16T07:03:00.000-07:00

Dear Everyone:

Okay, you guys signed onto this because you were feeling uncultured? Well, today we make a quick jaunt into the heartland of our culture. Here, painlessly, you get to feel superior to your post-slacker Gen Borg buddies, and get a valuable lead to a major epic poem you might want to look into someday!

Let's set the stage. Clipped from the Web, a bit about Marvell:

Andrew Marvell (1621–1678) was a close friend of Milton's and his associate (after Milton lost his vision) in the office of Latin Secretary in Cromwell's Protectorate. Marvell's poem was the first important criticism of Paradise Lost, published along with a Latin tribute by Samuel Barrow in the second edition of the epic (1674). It is interesting to note how Marvell characterizes his early doubts about Milton's project and just what he later comes to value in Milton's achievement.

And now the poem:

On Mr.Milton's Paradise lost
by Andrew Marvell

When I beheld the Poet blind, yet bold,
In slender Book his vast Design unfold,
Messiah Crown'd, Gods Reconcil'd Decree,
Rebelling Angels, the Forbidden Tree,
Heav'n, Hell, Earth, Chaos, All; the Argument
Held me a while misdoubting his Intent,
That he would ruine (for I saw him strong)
The sacred Truths to Fable and old Song,
(So Sampson groap'd the Temples Posts in spight)
The World o'rewhelming to revenge his Sight.
Yet as I read, soon growing less severe,
I lik'd his Project, the success did fear;
Through that wide Field how he his way should find
O're which lame Faith leads Understanding blind;
Lest he perplext the things he would explain,
And what was easie he should render vain.
Or if a Work so infinite he spann'd,
Jealous I was that some less skilful hand
(Such as disquiet alwayes what is well,
And by ill imitating would excell)
Might hence presume the whole Creations day
To change in Scenes, and show it in a Play.
Pardon me, Mighty Poet, nor despise
My causeless, yet not impious, surmise.
But I am now convinc'd, and none will dare
Within thy Labours to pretend a Share.
Thou hast not miss'd one thought that could be fit,
And all that was improper dost omit:
So that no room is here for Writers left,
But to detect their Ignorance or Theft.
That Majesty which through thy Work doth Reign
Draws the Devout, deterring the Profane.
And things divine thou treats of in such state
As them preserves, and Thee in violate.
At once delight and horrour on us seize,
Thou singst with so much gravity and ease;
And above humane flight dost soar aloft,
With Plume so strong, so equal, and so soft.
The Bird nam'd from that Paradise you sing
So never Flags, but alwaies keeps on Wing.
Where couldst thou Words of such a compass find?
Whence furnish such a vast expense of Mind?
Just Heav'n Thee, like Tiresias, to requite,
Rewards with Prophesie thy loss of Sight.
Well might thou scorn thy Readers to allure
With tinkling Rhime, of thy own Sense secure;
While the Town-Bays writes all the while and spells,
And like a Pack-Horse tires without his Bells.
Their Fancies like our bushy Points appear,
The Poets tag them; we for fashion wear.
I too transported by the Mode offend,
And while I meant to Praise thee, must Commend.
Thy verse created like thy Theme sublime,
In Number, Weight, and Measure, needs not Rhime.

What we've got here (it is obvious to me, who's written so many of them) is a foreword, one of those brief praise-essays you find at the beginnings of books, written by somebody with enough celebrity to be familiar to the book-buying public, hinting at personal intimacy and providing a little helpful spin to put the reader in a receptive frame of mind for what's coming.

And what a great intro! Andy really knew his business. He sat down and figured out what Joe Public's knee-jerk negative reactions to the poem were going to be, and addressed ‘em. "Wait... you've written something more ambitious than the Bible? Not possible, man," and "This sucker doesn't even rhyme!" are answered smoothly and with assurance. If you go into the poem with a bad attitude after reading this introduction, then there's something personal going on. Maybe Milton shot your dog.

And the poem itself, Milton's great Paradise Lost – what's that like? Well, here I have a confession to make. I haven't read it yet. Plan to someday. But, like you, I've been busy, and it looks long and daunting, and I just haven't gotten around to it yet.

But here's the very opening:

OF Man's First Disobedience, and the Fruit
Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste
Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat,
Sing Heav'nly Muse, that on the secret top
Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire
That Shepherd, who first taught the chosen Seed,
In the Beginning how the Heav'ns and Earth
Rose out of Chaos. Or if Sion Hill
Delight thee more, and Siloa's Brook that flow'd
Fast by the Oracle of God; I thence
Invoke thy aid to my adventurous Song,
That with no middle flight intends to soar
Above th' Aonian Mount, while it pursues
Things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhyme.
And chiefly Thou O Spirit, that dost prefer
Before all Temples th' upright heart and pure,
Instruct me, for Thou know'st; Thou from the first
Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread
Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss
And mad'st it pregnant: What in me is dark
Illumine, what is low raise and support;
That to the height of this great Argument
I may assert th' Eternal Providence,
And justify the ways of God to men.

Ignore the difficulties here, and listen to that voice: deep, resonant, authoritative, trustworthy. In radio, they call this "the voice of God." By his phrasing, Milton assumes a gravitas and authority second only to the Bible itself.

There's a lot more stuff to be said about even this small passage than you could tolerate today. I'll content myself with one brief observation, one brief anecdote, and a teaser for tomorrow's poem.

The observation: Note how at the beginning Milton invokes the Muse. This is a Classical piety; most long Greek poems began this way. Milton, however, was writing a specifically Christian poem, and so the lines "Thou from the first/Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread/ Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss/And mad'st it pregnant" identify the Muse as the Holy Spirit. Note how he pops in "Dove-like" for those Christians who are rather dimmer than most (but still go to church where the Holy Spirit is always painted as dove), so that they'll get it. Craftily done!

The anecdote: The early parts of the poem dealt with Lucifer's rebellion against God and his banishment to the Infernal depths, where he famously declared, "Better to reign in hell than serve in heav'n." Many feel that Lucifer is the true hero of the poem. As Blake observed, "The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it."

The teaser: That final line, "And justify the ways of God to men" neatly encapsulates Milton's great theme. Tomorrow we hear from the other side.

Fiendishly yours,
Michael

The Babe Ruth of Poetry

2008-10-14T05:35:00.000-07:00

Dear Everyone:

Today, echoing the line in yesterday’s poem that Robert Hass was so taken by, we have a poem by the all-time heavyweight champion of English literature, Big Will himself!

Let’s set the scene: Macbeth, after an inglorious reign that begins with a regicide and goes rapidly downhill from there, is on the castle walls, under siege by his enemies. He’s outnumbered, outclassed, and he knows he’s not going to survive this one. Things can hardly get worse. Then they do. A cry is heard from within the castle, and Macbeth learns that his wife has just killed herself. In a bleak way, it’s almost a Zen moment: He becomes fully enlightened as to the futility of human life.

Here it is, from Macbeth, act five, scene five:

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow
by William Shakespeare

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.

Great speech! And a great poem, too. It’s written in blank verse (technically speaking, unrhymed iambic pentameter) which is a form that the second-greatest playwright of Elizabethan times, Christopher Marlowe (but his buddies get to call him Kit Marlowe) adapted to playwriting. Then Shakespeare took what Ben Jonson, himself no slouch as a playwright, called “Marlowe’s mighty line” and ran with it.

Blank verse is a very natural form for the English language. In the hands of a great poet, speech becomes poetry. Note how natural that speech sounds when read aloud. Note how poetic it looks on the page.

This is a terrific piece to memorize. When a friend is feeling down, you can recite it and annoy the hell out of him. But my favorite use of it was in a Hoppity Hooper cartoon. Hoppity Hooper was a naive young frog in a traveling medicine show made up of his uncle Waldo Wigglesworth, who was a fox, and Filmore, the Strongest Bear in Captivity, Wisconsin. Waldo Wigglesworth was obviously a former Shakespearean actor and at the beginning of one episode something Hoppity says causes Waldo to launch into the above soliloquy, at the end of which a solitary tear falls from his eye to the ground with a sharp clink. Which had absolutely nothing to do with the cartoon, of course. That’s what made it so funny.

Sean and his mother are absolutely convinced that I invented The Hoppity Hooper Show, simply because almost nobody else has ever seen it. Absolutely untrue. It was the creation of Jay Ward, who was also responsible for Crusader Rabbit and (more famously) Rocky and Bullwinkle. I had nothing to do with it at all.

Would I lie?

All best,
Michael

Sylvia By God Plath!

2008-10-12T18:09:00.000-07:00

Dear Everyone:

A guest commentator today, the poet Robert Hass. He knows this material better than I do. Well, as a former poet laureate of the United States he oughta. Still, he doesn't just jot these things down off the top of his head the way I do.

Here, from a sampling of his poetry column posted on the Web is:

A Poem by Sylvia Plath
By Robert Hass
"Poet's Choice," March 15, 1998

[Essay removed because it’s still in copyright; but Google it, and there it'll be.]

By Candlelight
By Sylvia Plath

This is winter, this is night, small love --
A sort of black horsehair,
A rough, dumb country stuff
Steeled with the sheen
Of what green stars can make it to our gate.

[Rest of poem removed because it’s probably still in copyright]

Michael here again. We’ll revisit that line tomorrow (or tomorrow or tomorrow, creeps). Right now I just wanted to say, as I am your friend, don’t pick up a copy of Birthday Letters. Worst poems Hughes ever wrote. Pick up his volume Crow instead. Or Plath’s Ariel. Either one of them will sear the little hairs off the backs of your hands.

All best,
Michael

An Incantation

2008-10-09T12:06:00.000-07:00

Hi, Everybody!

Today’s poem is by Octavio Paz:

Wind and Water and Stone
by Octavio Paz
The water hollowed the stone,
the wind dispersed the water,
the stone stopped the wind.
Water and wind and stone

.

[Rest of poem removed because it’s probably still in copyright]

Wow. Sounds like an incantation, doesn’t it? Well, check out the following:

He knew the arteries of fire, and the beat of the great heart. He knew what to do. It was in no tongue of man that he said, “Be quiet, be easy. There now, there. Hold fast. So, there. We can be easy.”

And he was easy, he was still, he held fast, rock in rock and earth in earth in the fiery dark of the mountain.

That’s from a story by Ursula K. Le Guin, and it’s a scene where a wizard steps into a mountain and gentles it, stopping an earthquake and (as it happens) imprisoning himself therein forever. When I reviewed the story, I wrote of that exact passage, “Here, at the story’s climax, the elegantly simple prose reaches through eloquence to become, for one sentence, incantatory.”

Tolkien once observed that once you could say, “The grass is green,” you had the power to work magic, to imagine things otherwise, to say, “The sun is green” or “The grass is orange.” So this connection between spells and poetry is very basic and goes right back to the roots.

All best,
Michael

Snob Time!

2008-10-07T08:29:00.000-07:00

Dear Everyone:

Okay, it’s snob time. Today we have a poem by Quintus Horatius Flaccus. Who he, you ask? Only one of the greatest lyric poets of all time is all. We know him simply as Horace.

Everybody’s heard of Horace. How many people do you know who’ve ever actually read anything by him? Invest a couple of minutes on the lines below and it’ll be you!

Let me set the scene. It’s a spring day in Italy 2,000 years ago, and Horace's friend Lucius Sestius is worried about money, his social position, and his love life. To which Horace replies:

To Sestius
by Horace

Now the hard winter is breaking up with the welcome coming
Of spring and the spring winds; some fishermen,
Under a sky that looks changed, are hauling their
caulked boats
Down to the water; in the winter stables the cattleAre restless; so is the farmer sitting in front of his fire;
They want to be out of doors in field or pasture;
The frost is gone from the meadow grass in the
early mornings.
Maybe, somewhere, the Nymphs and Graces are dancing,
Under the moon the goddess Venus and her dancers;
Somewhere far in the depth of a cloudless sky
Vulcan is getting ready the storms of the coming summer.
Now is the time to garland your shining hair
With myrtle or with the flowers the free-giving earth
has given;
Now is the right time to offer the kid or lamb
In sacrifice to Faunus in the firelit shadowy grove.
Revenant white-faced Death is walking not knowing whether
He's going to knock at a rich man's door or a poor man's.
O good-looking fortunate Sestius, don't put your hope
in the future;
The night is falling; the shades are gathering around;
The walls of Pluto's shadowy house are closing you in.
There who will be lord of the feast? What will it matter,
What will it matter there, whether you fell in love
with Lycidas,
This or that girl with him, or he with her?

Did you note the translator’s use of “revenant”? Cool word. It means “One who returns” or, more to the point, “One who returns as a spirit after death,” meaning, usually, a ghost. I looked it up for you. Alas, I cannot tell you what Latin word Horace used, but from the context it almost certainly translated roughly as “creepy-scary spirit.” The gamers among you may want to remember this word.

Here’s what poet Robert Hass had to say about Horace:

“He was born when Rome was emerging as a world power. He fought, as a young man in those turbulent years, in the wars that followed the assassination of Julius Caesar, and wrote most of his poems in the age of Augustus.

“With Catullus and Virgil and Ovid, he's one of the four great lyric poets of ancient Rome. For English poets from Shakespeare's time to the end of the 19th century, he was the man. Horace spent most of his life in retirement on a modest farm in the country outside Rome. He wrote immensely civilized, poised, exquisitely polished, and apparently casual poems about the countryside and the Roman seasons, about not living in the Augustan equivalents of the corridors of power and the feeding frenzies of the media and the fevers of the deal. His values were the gentleman farmer's ideals. Balance was what he admired, independence, privacy, friendship, a sensible prosperity, good wine, the fruits of the season.”

And now you’ve read him! Don’t you feel ever so cultured? Trust me, nothing makes you feel scornfully superior to your fellow man like reading the classics.

All best,
Michael

Do I Contradict Myself?

2008-10-06T06:51:00.000-07:00

Dear Everyone:

Here’s a companion piece to yesterday’s poem

A Poem for the End of the Century
by Czeslaw Milosz

When everything was fine
And the notion of sin had vanished
And the earth was ready
In universal peace
To consume and rejoice
Without creeds and utopias,

[Rest of poem removed because it’s probably still in copyright]

Okay, and rather than make my usual pontifications (great word! but you already know what it means, right?), I’m gonna give you the word straight from the Man himself. Here’s what Milosz had to say about yesterday’s and today’s poems. In that order:

The two poems placed here together contradict each other. The first renounces any dealing with problems which for centuries have been tormenting the minds of theologians and philosophers; it chooses a moment and the beauty of the earth as observed on one of the Caribbean islands. The second, just the opposite, voices anger because people do not want to remember, and live as if nothing happened, as if horror were not hiding just beneath the surface of their social arrangements.

I alone know that the assent to the world in the first poem masks much bitterness and that its serenity is perhaps more ironic than it seems. And the disagreement with the world in the second results from anger which is a stronger stimulus than an invitation to a philosophical dispute. But let it be, the two poems taken together testify to my contradictions, since the opinions voiced in one and the other are equally mine.

Or, as Walt Whitman put it: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.” (Great quote! Memorize it, use it on people who smugly tell you you’ve just contradicted themselves, and watch them squirm with annoyance. But don’t use it on English majors. They’ve heard it a million times.)

All best,
Michael

Conversation with Jeanne

2008-10-02T07:12:00.000-07:00

Dear Everyone:

I learned just the other day that Czeslaw Milosz had died. Admirable man. Anti-fascist, and then anti-Communist. Like so many Europeans he experienced the lash of history first-hand. Which is why he died in America.

An oeuvre is an artist’s entire body of work. Those of you who paint or draw or write (I think that’s everybody) already have an oeuvre. The rest of your life will be spent trying to make it larger and better. I’m not sure what la prune de Cythere (I’ve removed the accent from the penultimate – great word! look it up – e, because it so often gets scrambled by email programs) is exactly. Not mango. Maybe breadfruit. Some tropical fruit, anyway. Prune is French for plum.

Conversation with Jeanne
by Czeslaw Milosz

Let us not talk philosophy, drop it, Jeanne.
So many words, so much paper, who can stand it.
I told you the truth about my distancing myself.
I've stopped worrying about my misshapen life.
It was no better and no worse than the usual human tragedies.

[Rest of poem removed because it’s probably still in copyright]

So, okay, at first glance this looks to be your standard letting-go-of-the-world poem: I accept my own unimportance and the inevitability of death and so it makes me free. The sea’s gonna be here long after I’m gone.

Only that doesn’t work, does it? And deliberately so. The voice is too weary, too petulant. If Milosz were really trying to sell you the party line, he’d make it more convincing. Instead, he says right at the beginning, “drop it, Jeanne.” He’s drinking “rum with ice and syrup,” and the phrasing tells us that he’s not only self-medicating but that it’s joyless drinking. And it ends with death, the graveyard imagery of purple-black earth, and dwindling into an infinite ocean. Which I should not have to tell you is an off-the-rack symbol of death.

So what is he free of? Life.

What a downer. But that’s not the whole story. Stay tuned tomorrow.

All best,
Michael

A Good Joke

2008-09-30T07:00:00.000-07:00

Dear Everybody:

Easy one today! It’s Billy Collins again, with...

The Country
by Billy Collins

I wondered about you
when you told me never to leave
a box of wooden, strike-anywhere matches
lying around the house because the mice
might get into them and start a fire.

[Rest of poem removed because it’s still in copyright]

As I said, an easy poem. I don’t have to explain any of it to you, do I? But the workings are wonderful, the unexpected little twists (“little brown druid”), the economy of narration (note how “lit up in the blazing insulation” deftly skips over actually mentioning the house catching fire), the bits of visual magic (“the tiny looks of wonderment” is an instant frozen in time). And it’s an excellent example of how often a poem moves “from the specific to the general,” as the academic phrase goes. In a conventional poem, this consists of an organized group of specific observations (the characteristics of dried grass, say, or the workings of a clock) and then soars upward at the end to a generalized observation, usually an abstraction (we are all as mortal as the grass, God is a watchmaker and he expects to be paid for that Rolex). Here, the imagined doings of the Promethean mouse are so wonderfully specific that we get caught up in its tiny drama. Then, at the very end, the camera pulls back to reveal the general, the larger picture: Your house has just burned down.

Yes, it’s a joke. Good one. But there’s also a serious point there about how we can get caught up in the small and valid details of our lives and miss the larger drama as well.

Nifty little poem. I learned last weekend that our friend Gail has never read any Billy Collins. So I’m sending her one of his books later today.

All best,
Michael

p.s. Another Hugo! That makes five in six years. Marianne tells me I’m the first ever to have done that.

Introduction to Poetry

2008-09-27T07:34:00.000-07:00

Dear Everyone:

Today, another poem by one of our favorite poets, Billy Collins. And, as a special favor to Sean, it’s not one he heard two days before on A Prairie Home Companion!

Introduction to Poetry
by Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive

[Rest of poem removed because it’s probably still in copyright]

Ahem. I believe that today, mirabile dictu, I have nothing to add.

All best,
Michael

p.s. Marvelous useful Latin tag, mirabile dictu! Especially for those of you who like being ironic to someone’s face without (the standards of education today being what they are) being called on it. Look it up.

A Rather Better Poem by Carl Sandburg

2008-09-25T09:10:00.000-07:00

Dear Guys:

Today, a rather better poem by Carl Sandburg:

They Will Say
by Carl Sandburg

OF my city the worst that men will ever say is this:
You took little children away from the sun and the dew,
And the glimmers that played in the grass under the great sky,

[Rest of poem removed because it’s probably still in copyright]

This is a one-trick poem, but it’s a good trick and it’s a short poem. You don’t mind getting only the one thing when all you’ve paid in attention is a mere seven lines.

The trick is in the first line, in those words “the worst that men will ever say.” Coupled with the possessive in “my city,” it sets up the reader to expect a positive statement, an expression of love for Chicago, which is Sandburg’s city and which he did indeed love. So the anti-child-labor (and child labor was a hideous thing, as bad as and even worse than portrayed here) editorial slips right past the reader’s defenses. Reading it, you’re expecting a BUT... my city has this virtue or that, or else this terrific beauty arises from it.

Then the poem ends.

And because there’s that unresolved “worst that men will ever say,” your mind goes back over the words, thinks about them, and realizes that there is nothing worse to be said about the city because there is nothing worse that COULD be said about a city, this side of Hell.

To see such white-hot anger so cunningly employed is a humbling thing. The man really did know what he was doing.

All best,
Michael

Death Snips Proud Men

2008-09-23T07:33:00.000-07:00

Dear Everyone:

Here’s your folksy poem du jour. How folksy is it, you ask? It’s by Carl Sandburg

Death Snips Proud Men
by Carl Sandburg

DEATH is stronger than all the governments because
the governments are men and men die and then
death laughs: Now you see 'em, now you don't.

[Rest of poem removed because it’s probably still in copyright]

So you see Sandburg’s basic trick here? He starts out with serious diction, “Death is stronger than all proud men,” say, and follows it up with “Read ‘em and weep.” The latter is called (useful word!) demotic speech. “Demotic” means of or pertaining to the common man. The demotic, as we call it (eliding - another useful word! - the word “speech” entirely) is simply language as she are spoken, as opposed to book-language. Similarly but not identically, “demotic Greek” is the language spoken in Greece today, as opposed to the classic Greek of bygone millennia.

So does it work? Well, the language has shifted underfoot. You don’t hear people speaking like that anymore, though it was common back when the poem was written, and so it sounds to our ears kind of cornball. Because the only places we’ve encountered it before are in books and on television. And usually cornball books and TV.

This sentimental man-of-the-people thing is Sandburg’s Achilles heel. There’s a famous story that one time, when he was late for a panel with the notoriously surly Robert Frost and somebody wondered aloud where he could possibly be, Frost snarled, “He’s probably in the lavatory, combing his hair to look wind-blown.”

More soon.

Best,
Michael

Billy Collins Rides Again!

2008-09-22T08:42:00.000-07:00

Dear Everyone:

A cheerful and upbeat poem today, by (former, I think) American poet laureate Billy Collins. He read a poem whose first lines he liked, but not the way the poem developed. So he borrowed those lines, and restarted the poem. As follows:

Litany
by Billy Collins

You are the bread and the knife,
the crystal goblet and the wine.
You are the dew on the morning grass
and the burning wheel of the sun.
You are the white apron of the baker

[Rest of poem removed because it’s still in copyright]

Cool, huh? This poem (as if you needed to be told) is an exploration of metaphor. And what is the difference between simile and metaphor, boys and girls? Right. A simile is a metaphor using the words “like” or “as” and a metaphor is a direct comparison. So if you say that the president brays like a donkey, that’s a simile. If you say he is an ass, that’s a metaphor.

End of lesson.

Nonpolitically yours,
Michael

The Poem That Killed Ossip Mandelstam

2008-09-19T06:00:00.000-07:00

Hi, y'all!

I'm back from Russia, and I brought a souvenir: The poem that killed Osip Mandelstam. All you need to know is (1) that the poem is about Stalin, (2) that "Ossette" refers to a rumor that Stalin came from an ethnic group of Iranian blood living in Georgia, and (3) that the poem was untitled.

Or maybe all you needed to know was item (1).

Here's the poem:

Journey to Armenia
by Ossip Mandelstam

We live, deaf to the land beneath us,
Ten steps away no one hears our speeches,

[All but first couplet of the poem removed because it’s still in copyright]

So there I am in front of the Urals Heavy Machinery Plant ("Uralmash") with a group of friends, and they start pointing out that those buildings across the street were built by captured Germans after the war, and those other buildings by Russian labor, people denounced as spies by "friends" who wanted their apartment or their job or were maybe just snatched up from the street by underlings who had a quota to fill.

Then they tell me about this poem.

Osip Mandelstam was one of the great Russian poets of the Twentieth Century. In 1933 he wrote the above poem, which he was not foolish enough to publish, but distributed quietly, by hand, among his friends. Somebody talked. Stalin read the poem. Not long after, Mandelstam was sent to the gulags. He died there.

They told me that what really pissed Stalin off was being compared to a cockroach.

All best,
Michael

John Donne Conquers the Universe!

2008-09-16T09:15:00.000-07:00

Dear Everyone:

Well, I’m off to Russia, and won’t be able to provide you with poems for another two weeks. So I”m leaving y’all with John Donne, a good man with serious emotional and intellectual content alike. For your convenience, I’ve modernized the spelling a bit, so that, for example, “soules” and “goe” become “souls” and “go.” Cheap and modern of me, I know. But I don’t think it will hurt the poem much.

Enjoy!

A Valediction: forbidding mourning
by John Donne

As virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls, to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
The breath goes now, and some say, no:
So let us melt, and make no noise,
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move,
'Twere prophanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.
Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears,
Men reckon what it did and meant,
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.
Dull sublunary lovers love
(Whose soul is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
Those things which elemented it.
But we by a love, so much refin'd
That we ourselves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.
Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to airy thinness beat.
If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two,
Thy soul the fixed foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if the'other do.
And though it in the center sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans, and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as it comes home.
Such wilt thou be to me, who must
Like th'other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end, where I begun.

Here, ripp’d untimely from a website, is a quick gloss on the vocabulary of the poem:

Valediction - a farewell, but a stronger meaning than that: Valedictions for people are read at funerals, etc, and ties in with the first stanza.

Prophanation - sacreligious

Laity - common people.

Trepidation - Not fear, in this sense, but movement. It also implies (a) cautious, silent movement, and (b) an irregularity of movement.

Elemented - instigated, started, constructed.

And I hope you guys are familiar with compasses, despite not being allowed to bring them to school. If not, for Pete’s sake, look it up. Otherwise this poem will be incomprehensible to you.

So here’s a poem Donne wrote for his wife, when he had to go away on a trip. First he compares their parting to the death of a virtuous man. Quiet, without show of emotion because if one lover showed too much emotion that would upset the other. Also, like the man putting his faith in God, the separation is not really a tragedy.

When the Earth moves (he means earthquakes here), that’s bad; but when planets move, that’s natural and serene. We’re like the planets, celestial, above worldly cares.

“Dull sublunary lovers” (mundane or worldly, as opposed to spiritual; this world, existing beneath the lunar orbit, is made up of four elements - fire, air, water, earth - and the fifth spiritual element, the quintessence is not to be found sub lunae; there is neither sin nor pain in the heavens) are made miserable when they’re parted because their love is merely physical. True lovers, however, do not miss each other’s eyes, hands, touch, but their spirit, their essence.

You and I, he says, are like the two legs of a compass. The one wanders widely while the other barely moves. Yet they are never truly separated because ultimately they are one thing. Which being so, their coming together again is inevitable. When the circle is completed and he comes home (he does not even have to say), the two halves of the compass are joined together as close as two bodies can be.

You guys, being young, got the smutty bits, that one half of the compass grows erect as it approaches home, the praise of the other’s firmness. Donne was very explicitly appreciative of the physical joys of love. Here he joins them seamlessly with the spiritual joys. Which is easier to achieve in life than it is in words. He’s achieved an alchemical marriage, the union of opposites which in alchemy is the spiritual aspect of the Great Work, whose physical expression consists of turning lead into gold. Which is why he worked the beating of gold (which is both malleable and pure; so the beating, while painful, does it no harm) into the poem.

Got all that? It’s only a beginning. This is one complex word-machine. And a brilliant one. I could go on and on about this poem for days, without once wandering into dubious territory. I didn’t like it much when I was in high school, but I was wrong.

Oh, and did I mention that it’s emotionally true? You’ll learn.

All best,
Michael

An Extremely Rude Poem

2008-09-13T06:46:00.000-07:00

Dear Everyone:

Here it is, and rude as all get-out:

the way to hump a cow is not
by e. e. cummings

the way to hump a cow is not
to get yourself a stool
but draw a line around the spot
and call it beautifool

[The rest of the poem has been removed because it’s almost certainly still in copyright. But I doubt you’ll have any trouble finding it on the Web.]

Witty, eh? And half the wit comes from adhering to a strict rhyme scheme. Imagine the same poem rendered as free verse. More offensive, less funny. Something to think about, and it has analogous application to the work of those of you who are writers or artists.

All best,
Michael

Conger Chowder!!

2008-09-11T08:34:00.000-07:00

Dear Everybody:

Today we continue our discovery of Pablo Neruda with a poem from the same series as yesterday’s tomato poem:

Ode To Conger Chowder
by Pablo Neruda

In the storm-tossed
Chilean
sea
lives the rosy conger,
giant eel
of snowy flesh.
And in Chilean
stewpots,
along the coast,
was born the chowder,
thick and succulent,
a boon to man.

[The rest of the poem has been removed because it’s almost certainly still in copyright. But I doubt you’ll have any trouble finding it on the Web.]

The above poem is, you will note, perilously close to being a recipe. Yes, of course. What recipes and poems have in common is that they are both the reduction of a complicated thing to the least number of words. Anything more and it would be wordy and flabby. Anything less and it wouldn’t work.

All best,
Michael

Tomatoes!

2008-09-09T14:40:00.000-07:00

Dear All:

Today we continue our discovery of Pablo Neruda. This poem is particularly timely because local tomatoes are just coming into season. We ate the first one from our back yard a few days ago and there’s a second one almost ripe on its vine.

Ode To Tomatoes
by Pablo Neruda

The street
filled with tomatoes,
midday,
summer,
light is
halved
like
a
tomato,
its juice
runs
through the streets.

[The rest of the poem has been removed because it’s almost certainly still in copyright. But I doubt you’ll have any trouble finding it on the Web.]

Oh, man, it makes me want to eat a tomato right now! Not a store-bought tomato. Not one of those flavorless crunchy things that are bred for looks, the hardiness to withstand shipping, and the ability to finish ripening just as they hit the stores. No. A real tomato, plucked from the vine and sliced and eaten on the spot. Sun-warm, with the juice running down your chin.

You’ll note that there is no allegorical reading of this poem. The tomato stands for nothing but itself. That’s part of the poet’s job, too: To make you aware of what’s right in front of you. To help you celebrate the richness of the quotidian.

Great word, quotidian. Look it up.

All best,
Michael

Not the Poem Itself, But . . .

2008-09-06T07:36:00.000-07:00

Dear Everybody:

It’s Pablo Neruda’s birthday! Well, okay, he’s dead. But if he weren’t, he’d be one hundred years old today.

And who is Pablo Neruda when he’s at home, you ask? Well, according to Gabriel Garcia Marquez (a terrific writer! foremost of the magic realists, and the author of One Hundred Years of Solitude, which I urge you to take out of the library and read the first ten pages of; odds are strong you’ll read it all at a gallop), he was the greatest poet of the twentieth century.

Greater than Yeats? I can’t say. I don’t read Spanish. And, just against the possibility that neither do you, I’ve secured the following in English translation:

POETRY
by Pablo Neruda

And it was at that age ... Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don't know how or when,
no they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,

[The rest of the poem has been removed because it’s almost certainly still in copyright. But I doubt you’ll have any trouble finding it on the Web.]

So there’s our infinitesimal drunken poet, by all accounts a good guy. Of the poem itself, I will note only that this is not that poem. It’s a translation. Followers of Islam say that the Koran existed from the beginning of time and that it cannot be translated. So, I wondered, what are all these English-language books I see in the stores labeled “Koran”? A couple of years ago, I stumbled across the answer: They’re not translations, but books of commentary, explaining the Koran as best as possible to English speakers.

So here. Not the poem itself, but a very good commentary on it.

Tomorrow, if you’re good, I’ll tell you what Neruda had to say about tomatoes.

All best,
Michael

A History of the Night

2008-09-04T05:42:00.000-07:00

Dear Everybody:

Did you guys know that Jorge Luis Borges got his start as a poet? Okay, well, have you ever heard of Jorge Luis Borge?

Sigh. In very brief, this guy wrote very short, very intellectual stories. Everyone on this list would love ‘em. “The Library of Babel” describes an infinite library containing not only every written book but every possible book. “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” is about a man who spends his life writing the first chapter of Don Quixote – word for word identical to the one that Cervantes wrote. Oh, these are strange works. A man discovers that he’s only a dream, another finds all the world in a small copper coin. And his nonfiction essays are stunning. In fact, there are some pieces where you can’t determine if they’re fiction or essay.

Here’s one of his poems:

History Of The Night
by Jorge Luis Borges

Throughout the course of the generations
men constructed the night.
At first she was blindness;
thorns raking bare feet,
fear of wolves.

[The rest of the poem has been removed because it’s almost certainly still in copyright. But I doubt you’ll have any trouble finding it on the Web.]

Now is that a cool idea or what? A history of the night! Borges was brilliantly erudite, too. You can trust him to have gotten the facts right.

Did you notice the kicker? It exists in the last couplet. Borges was blind.

All best,
Michael

We Lucky Few . . .

2008-09-02T09:22:00.000-07:00

Dear Everybody:

Today I'm going to ask you to do something different. I want you to be absolutely sure to read through the entire poem before you read any commentary afterwards. Maybe you do normally. But if you don't, then this once make an exception:

What is So Rare As a Day in June
by James Russell Lowell

AND what is so rare as a day in June?
Then, if ever, come perfect days;
Then Heaven tries earth if it be in tune,
And over it softly her warm ear lays;
Whether we look, or whether we listen,
We hear life murmur, or see it glisten;
Every clod feels a stir of might,
An instinct within it that reaches and towers,
And, groping blindly above it for light,
Climbs to a soul in grass and flowers;
The flush of life may well be seen
Thrilling back over hills and valleys;
The cowslip startles in meadows green,
The buttercup catches the sun in its chalice,
And there's never a leaf nor a blade too mean
To be some happy creature's palace;
The little bird sits at his door in the sun,
Atilt like a blossom among the leaves,
And lets his illumined being o'errun
With the deluge of summer it receives;
His mate feels the eggs beneath her wings,
And the heart in her dumb breast flutters and sings;
He sings to the wide world, and she to her nest,
In the nice ear of Nature which song is the best?

Now is the high-tide of the year,
And whatever of life hath ebbed away
Comes flooding back with a ripply cheer,
Into every bare inlet and creek and bay;
Now the heart is so full that a drop overfills it,
We are happy now because God wills it;
No matter how barren the past may have been,
'Tis enough for us now that the leaves are green;
We sit in the warm shade and feel right well
How the sap creeps up and the blossoms swell;
We may shut our eyes but we cannot help knowing
That skies are clear and grass is growing;
The breeze comes whispering in our ear,
That dandelions are blossoming near,
That maize has sprouted, that streams are flowing,
That the river is bluer than the sky,
That the robin is plastering his house hard by;
And if the breeze kept the good news back,
For our couriers we should not lack;
We could guess it all by yon heifer's lowing,
And hark! How clear bold chanticleer,
Warmed with the new wine of the year,
Tells all in his lusty crowing!

Joy comes, grief goes, we know not how;
Everything is happy now,
Everything is upward striving;
'Tis as easy now for the heart to be true
As for grass to be green or skies to be blue,
'Tis for the natural way of living:
Who knows whither the clouds have fled?
In the unscarred heaven they leave not wake,
And the eyes forget the tears they have shed,
The heart forgets its sorrow and ache;
The soul partakes the season's youth,
And the sulphurous rifts of passion and woe
Lie deep 'neath a silence pure and smooth,
Like burnt-out craters healed with snow.

Phew! Done! Okay, now, congratulate yourselves. Most educated English-speaking humans know at least the title and can quote it on a day like some we've had recently. "What is so rare as a day in June?" they asked rhetorically, and stop. Because they're on vacation and who needs the mental work? It's time for hot dogs!

But now, we few, we brave band of brothers, have soldiered through the reversals of words, the hark!s and 'tises, the phrasing that looked so poetic when it was new and looks so poem-y now, and won to the final sulphurous rifts.

So what did you think of it? Liked it in spite of the poetic diction? Disliked it for the artifice of the thing? Yours is the judgment of posterity, after all, and as any artist can tell you, it's the only judgment that matters.

All best,
Michael

Try to Praise the Mutilated World

2008-09-01T11:11:00.000-07:00

My apologies for posting this two days late. I was at a family funeral and, contrary to expectations, could not find the time and the hot spot to post from the road. I really am sorry about this.

Dear Everybody:

Today we have a translation of a work from a poet about whom all I know is that he’s Polish.

Linguistically, Polish is quite a distance from English. Which makes the easy, unforced beauty of the following a small miracle:

Try To Praise The Mutilated World By Adam Zagajewski

Try to praise the mutilated world.
Remember June's long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of wine, the dew.

[The rest of the poem has been removed because it’s almost certainly still in copyright. But I doubt you’ll have any trouble finding it on the Web.]

Wow. What we have here is a poem of hope for people who have seen the worst, been through Soviet occupation, suffered wars and injustice. A poem that doesn’t deny the hurt and pain of the world, but reminds you that, underneath it all, life is an extraordinary gift.

There is a lot of stuff packed into the 134 words of that poem. How much? Well, my next novel should run to about 150,000 words and say essentially the same thing.

All best,
Michael

For My Uncle Dan . . .

2008-08-26T10:53:00.000-07:00

Dear All:

A few days ago, I attended the funeral of my Uncle Dan. He was born in County Kerry, Ireland, in 1907 and came to America at age twenty. Two years ago, he went back to Ireland and still knew every road, and recognized people he hadn't seen for seventy years. He led a rich life, left three children and two grandchildren behind, and was noted for his joy. Not many people get such a good deal out of existence.

But it was a sad day anyway.

During the services, the following verses, from Ecclesiastes, were recited more than once:

To every thing there is a season,
And a time to every purpose under the heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die;
A time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal;
A time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh;
A time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
A time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to get, and a time to lose;
A time to keep, and a time to cast away;
A time to rend, and a time to sew;
A time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate;
A time of war, and a time of peace.

Simple words, and a solace when you're saying goodbye to somebody who's had a full life. I want to note, however, that much of English and American literature is solidly built upon the Bible and specifically, the King James Version. Why? Because every family had a Bible. Even families that disapproved of books saw nothing wrong with reading the Bible. Lots of writers learned about cadence and language from the Old Testament.

The King James Version is also perhaps the only major work of literature ever written by a committee. First published in 1611, it was commissioned by King James I of England on behalf of the Church of England, and apparently involved over fifty translators. Nevertheless, it remains the gold standard for rich, sonant language. That was (the tail end of) the age of Shakespeare, remember. The vernacular was particularly good.

Even the KJV nods, however. Usually people say "under Heaven," rather than "under the heaven." This is how traditional verse perfects itself. Wording that sounds good for a decade or a century is eventually rubbed away, "all that glisters is not gold" changes the suspect word to "glitters," and so on.

All for today,

Michael

The White Lady of Poetry

2008-08-23T07:19:00.000-07:00

Dear Everybody:

Today's poem is by possibly the best-known poets in the universe:

Three Wise Men of Gotham
by Mother Goose

Three wise men of Gotham,
They went to sea in a bowl,
And if the bowl had been stronger,
My song had been longer.

Of this poem I can tell you two things: First, that Gotham is the town of fools, which is why New York City is often referred to as Gotham. (Though most people think that Batman is actually set in Boston. Go fig.) And second, that it's meant to be told to a sleepy child who's nagging for just one more poem. We tend to forget how long most poems used to be. That's because in the ages before radio (much less television and the internet), people had a lot less entertainment and a lot more time to fill. So they liked their poetry good and endless.

Today, of course, we have neither the time nor the patience for epic-length poetry. Shame on us.

All best,
Michael

The Great White Whale is Heard From

2008-08-21T06:37:00.001-07:00

Dear Everybody:

Today’s poem comes from an unexpected source... Ernest Hemingway. Yes, the Great White Whale of Twentieth Century American literature himself. You say you haven’t read the man? Shame on you. You’re never going to score with intellectual women like that! If you want an easy entree into Hemingway (and there are very few great writers as easy to read as he), I can recommend The Old Man and the Sea, which is slim, fast, and entertaining. After that, you should try a collection of his short stories. (“The Killers” is a killer story; I recommend it particularly.) Then... well, then you’re on your own. You can continue if you like, or not it you don’t. But you’ll have an informed opinion.

Like many novelists, Hemingway also wrote poetry. Like most novelists, his poetry wasn’t as good as his novels. But that doesn’t mean it’s bad. As witness:

The Age Demanded
by Ernest Miller Hemingway

The age demanded that we sing
And cut away our tongue.

[The rest of the poem has been removed because it’s almost certainly still in copyright. But I doubt you’ll have any trouble finding it on the Web.]

So what can we tell about this poem, just at a glance? Well, first, that the poet was young. Do you doubt me? Okay, I’ll glance at the date of publication, and it’s... 1925. He was 26 years old. Young.

So how could I tell? Because it’s punk – in the black-leather-and-mohawk sense. So was the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction.” Both are the laments of young artists: I can’t write anything good, I can’t get laid, o man I am so bummed out... The whole punk thing is simply this era’s manifestation of a stance that has been perfectly legitimate since forever. But which would look pathetic if somebody of my age copped it. Hemingway was very shrewd. Too shrewd to write the above when he was in his fifties. Shrewd enough to set it down when he was young enough to get away with it.

The other punk aspect of the poem was his deliberate offensiveness in using a word (s**t) that was literally unprintable at the time.

The second thing we get here is an insight into how Hemingway worked a revolution in American letters. Look at those words: Simple, unadorned, with only one adjective – and that one “iron.” No e’ens, oers or troths, no words ending in -est or -eth, nothing tangled, complicated or unclear. Just straight language such as you might hear on the street, but ordered, scansioned, and rhymed. He did something similar in prose. Without the scansion and rhyme, obviously.

Sounds simple, dunnit? Not, though.

All best,
Michael

Poetry: Not Just for Children Anymore

2008-08-14T07:02:00.000-07:00

Dear Everybody:

Holy COW! You will never guess what I just discovered on the Web! It's The Devil and Billy Markham by Shel Silverstein!!!!

Eh? So what, you say? Another light, witty children's poem? Oh, man, have you got a lot to learn!

So go right here, and read the whole damned (in both the literal and figurative senses) thing:

[Alas, the site is gone, possibly because the poem cycle is being sold as a play nowadays. I saw a magnificent one-man performance by Anthony Lawton once, and there are any number of clips on YouTube which fail to live up to him. But here's the opening:]

The Devil and Billy Markham
by Shel Silverstein

The Devil walked into Linebaugh's on a rainy Nashville night

While the lost souls sat and sipped their soup in the sickly yellow neon light.

And the Devil, he looked around the room, then got down on his knees.

He says, "Is there one among you scum who'll roll the dice with me?"

Red, he just strums his guitar, pretending not to hear.

And Eddie, he just looks away and takes another sip of beer.

[And on and gloriously on it goes . . . I encourage you to find a copy.]

Okay, have you read it? Really? Scout's honor and hope to die? Well, then...

Did that take your breath away or what? Yep, ol' Shel wasn't JUST an entertainer of children. (If you haven't heard Johnny Cash's version of SS's "A Boy Named Sue, incidentally, you're just plain culturally lame.) He was a bawdy, guitar-totin', women-seducin' kind of guy. Playboy used to commission him to go to exotic places, seduce women, and draw cartoons about the experience. Jules Feiffer (you artist-guys know about Feiffer, right? You'd best!) wrote an obituary saying that Silverstein was the envy of all other (straight) male cartoonists.

Now, the poems. Silverstein was obviously basing his works on the Negro holler, which...

Okay, wait. You don't know about Negro hollers? I worry about you guys. Try googling "The Signifying Monkey."

Done that?

If you have, you're now WAY up on your culturally illiterate cronies. Now, when you compare the two, what do you see? Two things:

1) Silverstein's work is far far far more sophisticated.

2) Parts of it have rotted and aged. A line here, a few words there, are embarrassing to read now. The reference to Harlan Ellison... You missed it? Well, it reads a little precious now.

What's the lesson here? Well, first of all I think The Devil and Billy Markham is a keeper. It's real lit, the true quill. But it can't score a perfect ten against oral tradition. The reasons for this are myriad and complicated and if you're interested, hit me up when you see me & I'll be glad to tell you. I'm a talker.

best,

m.

Pretty, Lovely, Ruthless...

2008-08-14T06:56:00.000-07:00

Dear Everybody:

Okay! Today we have a serious poem, and thank God for that. Before you read it, you should know that the proverb (sometimes attributed to Chaucer) mentioned was:

Better is it to suffer and fortune abide

Than hastily to climb and suddenly to slide

Also that "Nother" means "Neither," that to tarry the tide means to bide your time (sailing ships could only leave port when the tide flowed outward, remember), and abiding speed means continuing success, so that when Wyatt writes "And with abiding speed well ye may" he's saying, "Easy for you to say!" Oh, and "I wot alway" means "forever, for all I know."

Here's the poem:

I Abide and Abide and Better Abide
by Sir Thomas Wyatt

I abide and abide and better abide,
And after the old proverb, the happy day;
And ever my lady to me doth say,
"Let me alone and I will provide."
I abide and abide and tarry the tide,
And with abiding speed well ye may.
Thus do I abide I wot alway,
Nother obtaining nor yet denied.
Ay me! this long abiding
Seemeth to me, as who sayeth,
A prolonging of a dying death,
Or a refusing of a desir'd thing.
Much were it better for to be plain
Than to say "abide" and yet shall not obtain.

In brief: You say "wait" and I wait and suffer and nothing ever happens. Better you rejected me ("be plain" in your meaning) than tell me to wait for something that never comes.

We all know someone in this guy's situation, don't we? So I'm not going to discuss the meaning, but the poet. Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542) wrote the first sonnets in English. Why "in English" you ask? Because England was still something of a backwater in the sixteenth century, and its literature was largely derived from Italian models. The sonnet is an Italian invention.

A sonnet is (and here I check my handy Columbia-Viking Desk Encyclopedia) a poem of 14 lines, usually in iambic pentameter, in certain definite rhyme schemes. The Petrarchan sonnet is an octave and sestet (8 lines and 6 lines) rhymed abbaabba cdecde and the Shakespearean sonnet is three quatrains and a couplet, rhymed abab cdcd efef gg.

Take a second here, see which lines rhyme and tell me what we've got. Don't everybody raise your hands at once. That's right: abbaabba cddcee. Which is to say, a variant on the Petrarchan sonnet.

So what's the big fuss about sonnets? They're long enough make a logical argument, short enough to memorize, and the words are arranged in a way very natural to the English language, so that delivered smoothly, as an actor might, they sound like speech.

And this is important because?

Picture this: There's a man and a woman. She says, "Be patient, Fred. I'm just not ready for a serious relationship."

“You keep saying that," he replies. "And I keep waiting. Sir Thomas Wyatt was right."

“Huh?" she says.

And he leans forward and lets rip this poem. She's stunned. She's going to feel pretty damned foolish saying, "Yeah, but still. I mean, I kinda think we should, you know, wait," after that glorious torrent of words and emotion. The ball's in her court. She's only got two choices now: To lean forward and kiss him, or to say, "Oh, all right, fuck off if that's how you feel." Either of which leaves her suitor better off than he was ten minutes before.

But now you object that, really, this poem is just an advanced formed of verbal bullying. Well, yeah. What did you think love poetry is? Pretty to look at, lovely to hear, and absolutely ruthless in its intentions.

If you doubt me, read John Donne.

All best,
Michael

Naughty Auden

2008-08-14T06:54:00.000-07:00

Dear All:

As you've probably figured out by now, I have a soft spot for W.H. Auden. Here's one reason why:

As the Poets Have Mournfully Sung
by W. H. Auden

As the poets have mournfully sung,
Death takes the innocent young,

[The rest of the poem has been removed because it’s almost certainly still in copyright. But I doubt you’ll have any trouble finding it on the Web.]

No exposition needed today.

All best,
Michael

Auden's Shield

2008-07-29T06:03:00.000-07:00

Dear All:

Today's poem is from that pleasant man, Wystan Hugh Auden (and now you know why he published under his initials -- if you ever have children, don't do this to them). Here's the poem:

The Shield of Achilles
by W. H. Auden

She looked over his shoulder
For vines and olive trees,
Marble well-governed cities
And ships upon untamed seas,
But there on the shining metal
His hands had put instead
An artificial wilderness
And a sky like lead.

[The rest of the poem has been removed because it’s almost certainly still in copyright. But I doubt you’ll have any trouble finding it on the Web.]

You probably got this from context, but Thetis is the mother of Achilles and Hephaestos is the smith and armorer of the gods. Greek shields were carried slung over the shoulder when not in use. Often they were decorated. (Or perhaps it's only that the decorated ones were more likely to be preserved than the plain one. But soldiers at war do decorate things; check out the helmets of American combat soldiers.) And this is, no surprise, a pacifist poem.

This fits into a long tradition of using the Trojan War to discuss either war in general or, more commonly, whatever the current war is. People who are for the War du Jour evoke the heroism of the Iliad. People who are against it evoke its terrible waste of human lives. Note how the mention of "barbed wire" makes it explicit that the poet is not really talking about Troy but about Today. Note also how aptly the poem applies to the War in Iraq. I am not making a political statement here, only noting that all wars have an inherent similarity.

Auden was a pacifist. He came to the United States because he couldn't stand the war-mongering jingoism of his native England at the time. Which time was that, you ask? The very beginning of WWII. He didn't think England should get involved.

Well, Auden was a good man and we on this list are all good men, and good men may disagree. So it behooves us to be modest in our judgments, and to acknowledge the possibility that if one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century could be wrong, so could you and I.

All best,
Michael

Walt By Gawd Whitman!

2008-07-29T05:53:00.000-07:00

Dear Everybody:

It had to happen someday. Today we tackle Walt Whitman. Which means that the poem du jour is, by today’s standards, godawful long. Don’t let that daunt you! Whitman is the most lucid of poets; you’ll have no difficulty whatsoever understanding him.

I do recommend, however, that to make things easier on yourselves you print out and then read (rather than straining your eyes with the CRT) the following, one of Old Father Walt’s best:

I Sing the Body Electric by Walt Whitman

1 I SING the Body electric; The armies of those I love engirth me, and I engirth them; They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them, And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the Soul. Was it doubted that those who corrupt their own bodies conceal themselves; And if those who defile the living are as bad as they who defile the dead? And if the body does not do as much as the Soul? And if the body were not the Soul, what is the Soul? 2 The love of the Body of man or woman balks account—the body itself balks account; That of the male is perfect, and that of the female is perfect. The expression of the face balks account; But the expression of a well-made man appears not only in his face; It is in his limbs and joints also, it is curiously in the joints of his hips and wrists; It is in his walk, the carriage of his neck, the flex of his waist and knees—dress does not hide him; The strong, sweet, supple quality he has, strikes through the cotton and flannel; To see him pass conveys as much as the best poem, perhaps more; You linger to see his back, and the back of his neck and shoulder-side. The sprawl and fulness of babes, the bosoms and heads of women, the folds of their dress, their style as we pass in the street, the contour of their shape downwards, The swimmer naked in the swimming-bath, seen as he swims through the transparent green-shine, or lies with his face up, and rolls silently to and fro in the heave of the water, The bending forward and backward of rowers in row-boats—the horseman in his saddle, Girls, mothers, house-keepers, in all their performances, The group of laborers seated at noon-time with their open dinner-kettles, and their wives waiting, The female soothing a child—the farmer’s daughter in the garden or cow-yard, The young fellow hoeing corn—the sleigh-driver guiding his six horses through the crowd, The wrestle of wrestlers, two apprentice-boys, quite grown, lusty, good-natured, native-born, out on the vacant lot at sundown, after work, The coats and caps thrown down, the embrace of love and resistance, The upper-hold and the under-hold, the hair rumpled over and blinding the eyes; The march of firemen in their own costumes, the play of masculine muscle through clean-setting trowsers and waist-straps, The slow return from the fire, the pause when the bell strikes suddenly again, and the listening on the alert, The natural, perfect, varied attitudes—the bent head, the curv’d neck, and the counting; Such-like I love—I loosen myself, pass freely, am at the mother’s breast with the little child, Swim with the swimmers, wrestle with wrestlers, march in line with the firemen, and pause, listen, and count. 3 I know a man, a common farmer—the father of five sons; And in them were the fathers of sons—and in them were the fathers of sons. This man was of wonderful vigor, calmness, beauty of person; The shape of his head, the pale yellow and white of his hair and beard, and the immeasurable meaning of his black eyes—the richness and breadth of his manners, These I used to go and visit him to see—he was wise also; He was six feet tall, he was over eighty years old—his sons were massive, clean, bearded, tan-faced, handsome; They and his daughters loved him—all who saw him loved him; They did not love him by allowance—they loved him with personal love; He drank water only—the blood show’d like scarlet through the clear-brown skin of his face; He was a frequent gunner and fisher—he sail’d his boat himself—he had a fine one presented to him by a ship-joiner—he had fowling-pieces, presented to him by men that loved him; When he went with his five sons and many grand-sons to hunt or fish, you would pick him out as the most beautiful and vigorous of the gang. You would wish long and long to be with him—you would wish to sit by him in the boat, that you and he might touch each other. 4 I have perceiv’d that to be with those I like is enough, To stop in company with the rest at evening is enough, To be surrounded by beautiful, curious, breathing, laughing flesh is enough, To pass among them, or touch any one, or rest my arm ever so lightly round his or her neck for a moment—what is this, then? I do not ask any more delight—I swim in it, as in a sea. There is something in staying close to men and women, and looking on them, and in the contact and odor of them, that pleases the soul well; All things please the soul—but these please the soul well. 5 This is the female form; A divine nimbus exhales from it from head to foot; It attracts with fierce undeniable attraction! I am drawn by its breath as if I were no more than a helpless vapor—all falls aside but myself and it; Books, art, religion, time, the visible and solid earth, the atmosphere and the clouds, and what was expected of heaven or fear’d of hell, are now consumed; Mad filaments, ungovernable shoots play out of it—the response likewise ungovernable; Hair, bosom, hips, bend of legs, negligent falling hands, all diffused—mine too diffused; Ebb stung by the flow, and flow stung by the ebb—love-flesh swelling and deliciously aching; Limitless limpid jets of love hot and enormous, quivering jelly of love, white-blow and delirious juice; Bridegroom night of love, working surely and softly into the prostrate dawn; Undulating into the willing and yielding day, Lost in the cleave of the clasping and sweet-flesh’d day. This is the nucleus—after the child is born of woman, the man is born of woman; This is the bath of birth—this is the merge of small and large, and the outlet again. Be not ashamed, women—your privilege encloses the rest, and is the exit of the rest; You are the gates of the body, and you are the gates of the soul. The female contains all qualities, and tempers them—she is in her place, and moves with perfect balance; She is all things duly veil’d—she is both passive and active; She is to conceive daughters as well as sons, and sons as well as daughters. As I see my soul reflected in nature; As I see through a mist, one with inexpressible completeness and beauty, See the bent head, and arms folded over the breast—the female I see. 6 The male is not less the soul, nor more—he too is in his place; He too is all qualities—he is action and power; The flush of the known universe is in him; Scorn becomes him well, and appetite and defiance become him well; The wildest largest passions, bliss that is utmost, sorrow that is utmost, become him well—pride is for him; The full-spread pride of man is calming and excellent to the soul; Knowledge becomes him—he likes it always—he brings everything to the test of himself; Whatever the survey, whatever the sea and the sail, he strikes soundings at last only here; (Where else does he strike soundings, except here?) The man’s body is sacred, and the woman’s body is sacred; No matter who it is, it is sacred; Is it a slave? Is it one of the dull-faced immigrants just landed on the wharf? Each belongs here or anywhere, just as much as the well-off—just as much as you; Each has his or her place in the procession. (All is a procession; The universe is a procession, with measured and beautiful motion.) Do you know so much yourself, that you call the slave or the dull-face ignorant? Do you suppose you have a right to a good sight, and he or she has no right to a sight? Do you think matter has cohered together from its diffuse float—and the soil is on the surface, and water runs, and vegetation sprouts, For you only, and not for him and her? 7 A man’s Body at auction; I help the auctioneer—the sloven does not half know his business. Gentlemen, look on this wonder! Whatever the bids of the bidders, they cannot be high enough for it; For it the globe lay preparing quintillions of years, without one animal or plant; For it the revolving cycles truly and steadily roll’d. In this head the all-baffling brain; In it and below it, the makings of heroes. Examine these limbs, red, black, or white—they are so cunning in tendon and nerve; They shall be stript, that you may see them. Exquisite senses, life-lit eyes, pluck, volition, Flakes of breast-muscle, pliant back-bone and neck, flesh not flabby, good-sized arms and legs, And wonders within there yet. Within there runs blood, The same old blood! The same red-running blood! There swells and jets a heart—there all passions, desires, reachings, aspirations; Do you think they are not there because they are not express’d in parlors and lecture-rooms? This is not only one man—this is the father of those who shall be fathers in their turns; In him the start of populous states and rich republics; Of him countless immortal lives, with countless embodiments and enjoyments. How do you know who shall come from the offspring of his offspring through the centuries? Who might you find you have come from yourself, if you could trace back through the centuries? 8 A woman’s Body at auction! She too is not only herself—she is the teeming mother of mothers; She is the bearer of them that shall grow and be mates to the mothers. Have you ever loved the Body of a woman? Have you ever loved the Body of a man? Your father—where is your father? Your mother—is she living? have you been much with her? and has she been much with you? —Do you not see that these are exactly the same to all, in all nations and times, all over the earth? If any thing is sacred, the human body is sacred, And the glory and sweet of a man, is the token of manhood untainted; And in man or woman, a clean, strong, firm-fibred body, is beautiful as the most beautiful face. Have you seen the fool that corrupted his own live body? or the fool that corrupted her own live body? For they do not conceal themselves, and cannot conceal themselves. 9 O my Body! I dare not desert the likes of you in other men and women, nor the likes of the parts of you; I believe the likes of you are to stand or fall with the likes of the Soul, (and that they are the Soul;) I believe the likes of you shall stand or fall with my poems—and that they are poems, Man’s, woman’s, child’s, youth’s, wife’s, husband’s, mother’s, father’s, young man’s, young woman’s poems; Head, neck, hair, ears, drop and tympan of the ears, Eyes, eye-fringes, iris of the eye, eye-brows, and the waking or sleeping of the lids, Mouth, tongue, lips, teeth, roof of the mouth, jaws, and the jaw-hinges, Nose, nostrils of the nose, and the partition, Cheeks, temples, forehead, chin, throat, back of the neck, neck-slue, Strong shoulders, manly beard, scapula, hind-shoulders, and the ample side-round of the chest. Upper-arm, arm-pit, elbow-socket, lower-arm, arm-sinews, arm-bones, Wrist and wrist-joints, hand, palm, knuckles, thumb, fore-finger, finger-balls, finger-joints, finger-nails, Broad breast-front, curling hair of the breast, breast-bone, breast-side, Ribs, belly, back-bone, joints of the back-bone, Hips, hip-sockets, hip-strength, inward and outward round, man-balls, man-root, Strong set of thighs, well carrying the trunk above, Leg-fibres, knee, knee-pan, upper-leg, under leg, Ankles, instep, foot-ball, toes, toe-joints, the heel; All attitudes, all the shapeliness, all the belongings of my or your body, or of any one’s body, male or female, The lung-sponges, the stomach-sac, the bowels sweet and clean, The brain in its folds inside the skull-frame, Sympathies, heart-valves, palate-valves, sexuality, maternity, Womanhood, and all that is a woman—and the man that comes from woman, The womb, the teats, nipples, breast-milk, tears, laughter, weeping, love-looks, love-perturbations and risings, The voice, articulation, language, whispering, shouting aloud, Food, drink, pulse, digestion, sweat, sleep, walking, swimming, Poise on the hips, leaping, reclining, embracing, arm-curving and tightening, The continual changes of the flex of the mouth, and around the eyes, The skin, the sun-burnt shade, freckles, hair, The curious sympathy one feels, when feeling with the hand the naked meat of the body, The circling rivers, the breath, and breathing it in and out, The beauty of the waist, and thence of the hips, and thence downward toward the knees, The thin red jellies within you, or within me—the bones, and the marrow in the bones, The exquisite realization of health; O I say, these are not the parts and poems of the Body only, but of the Soul, O I say now these are the Soul!

Not exactly subtle. But precisely wonderful, in both the original and contemporary senses of the word. Whitman is one of the greatest poets America has produced. How great? Well, there’s a bridge named after him, located at the site of the ferry he used to take into Philadelphia from his home in Camden. Which is pretty good for a poet, and a gay one to boot.

But if he’s gay what’s all this stuff about women’s bodies doing in his poem? Ahhhhh. I am forced to rebuff the biggest lie you were ever told in English class: MODERN POETRY HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH SELF-EXPRESSION. Good poetry, I mean. The great poets all tried to give voice to the voiceless, to dignify with words their own age. So... women were half the world, more men lusted after women than men, and Whitman knew his duty.

You should also know that Whitman rewrote this poem (and, in fact, every poem in Leaves of Grass, his single greatest collection) several times. So there is no definitive text. Just texts he preferred at specific times. How postmodern can you get?

All best,
Michael

Making the Competition Look Dowdy

2008-07-29T05:48:00.000-07:00

(This is Thursday's post. I'll be traveling tomorrow and unable to get online, so I thought I'd put it up early.)

Dear Everybody:

We’re still in Finals mode. And today we have two extremely-easy-on-the-mind poems! First:

Eileen and Her Bully Machine

Hooray for Eileen and her bully machine

That turns out such volumes of stuff!

Some think it queer

She's so seldom here

Few find her absence enough.

She lives in this town

(At least, here's where's she's foun

d); She is graced with a runcible style.

Some think that she should

Write what they wish they could

But she freezes them out with a smile.

Let's all celebrate

Before it's too late

And time's wingéd chariot's seen,

That queen of the text,

Seldom sour, never vexed,

Eileen! -- and her bully machine.

Are you puzzled yet? A moment’s patience, and all will be made clear as clear. I got an email yesterday from Eileen Gunn, a wonderful but woefully unprolific writer, asking if she could use the above poem in her first collection of stories. Apparently I jotted it down one day a few years back when I was in Seattle to teach a writing workshop. So here’s a lesson for all you artistic types -- you don’t have to have genuine talent to be published!

(The “bully machine” is either Eileen’s typewriter or word processor, depending on what she had, and you knew of course that “bully” is a term of approbation. If you didn’t, you need to rush out and find a biography of Theodore Roosevelt stat!)

And here, below, is the poem I ripped off for structure and scansion:

How Pleasant to Know Mr. Lear

by Edward Lear

HOW pleasant to know Mr. Lear,

Who has written such volumes of stuff.

Some think him ill-tempered and queer,

But a few find him pleasant enough.

His mind is concrete and fastidious,

His nose is remarkably big;

His visage is more or less hideous,

His beard it resembles a wig.

He has ears, and two eyes, and ten fingers,

(Leastways if you reckon two thumbs);

He used to be one of the singers,

But now he is one of the dumbs.

He sits in a beautiful parlour,

With hundreds of books on the wall;

He drinks a great deal of marsala,

But never gets tipsy at all.

He has many friends, laymen and clerical,

Old Foss is the name of his cat;

His body is perfectly spherical,

He weareth a runcible hat.

When he walks in waterproof white,

The children run after him so!

Calling out, "He's gone out in his night-

Gown, that crazy old Englishman, oh!"

He weeps by the side of the ocean,

He weeps on the top of the hill;

He purchases pancakes and lotion,

And chocolate shrimps from the mill.

He reads, but he does not speak, Spanish,

He cannot abide ginger beer;

Ere the days of his pilgrimage vanish,

How pleasant to know Mr. Lear!

Years ago, Sean and Marianne and I were in London and went to the British Museum and the British Library (they’re both in the same huge building) -- which, incidentally, I urge you to do next time you’re there. One huge room is full of vitrines (great word, look it up) containing the rarest of rare books. Gutenberg Bibles, Medieval manuscripts, books of hours, the manuscript for “Ozymandias,” etc. etc. And there, among them, was a letter from Mr. Lear to a friend, saying, “I just wrote this today and thought you’d be amused” followed by the above poem with all his bright little illos. It made the competition look dowdy!

(You knew that Edward Lear, best remembered for his nonsense verse, was an artist, right? Not just those little drawings accompanying his poems. He was particularly well-known for his paintings of birds.)

All best,
Michael

Everybody's Favorite Lesbian Heartthrob

2008-07-29T05:43:00.000-07:00

Hey, everybody:

I've got some crunchy and thought-provoking poetry lined up for future du jours. But right now, Sean is prepping for finals, so I'm giving you something easy. Here it is:

In the spring twilight
by Sappho

In the spring twilight
the full moon is shining:
Girls take their places
as though around an altar

Which leaves you with two questions:

1) Why is this poem brief to the point of being absolutely cryptic?

2) Was Sappho really a Lesbian?

The answer to the first question is: What we have is only a fragment of the original poem. In fact, almost all that remains of Sappho's poetry is fragments. Believe it or not, there is only one complete poem by her extant! I have a volume of her complete works, and it's full of entries that in their entirety read like:

Anaitis... the trees in ...

In fact, most of the comprehensible fragments we have are extracted from Classical Greek books of grammar, which would illustrate a term such as "litotes" (look it up) with examples from the great poets.

And the answer to the second is: Literally, yes. Sexually, who knows? Sappho was from the island of Lesbos and everybody there (including her father) was therefore a Lesbian. The term got applied to tribades (to resurrect a word no longer in common parlance) simply because the island's claim to fame was Sappho herself.

The belief that Sappho was a woman-lover stems from the fact that she wrote first-person love poems expressing yearning for women. Alas, we don't know enough about her personal life to know if this sprang from personal feelings or if love-poems-directed-at-women was simply a hot commercial product for which she filled the need.

Sappho also wrote love poems directed at men. so if we have to take her poems as being autobiographical (an extremely risky proposition in the case of most literary types), then she was actually bisexual. But don't say that to a Sapphist (another synonym for tribade) or she won't be your friend. You can understand why: The Sappho who was painted so often on Grecian urns -- tall, regal, straight-backed, white-throated, with a great profile -- is an elegant and romantic symbol for women who prefer women. Let's not muck things up for them by dragging in sexual acts they'd rather not think of.

And here's a bonus question for you: 3) What the heck are those girls doing in the spring twilight? To which I reply: I have not the foggiest notion. But it's a pretty image, isn't it? Lovely and mysterious. Almost makes up for the terrible loss of the rest of the poem.

All best,
Michael

A Sad Poem, Yet a Beautiful One, Full of Mermaids and Soft October Nights

2008-07-29T05:38:00.000-07:00

Okay, Everybody!

If there’s one thing you’ve learned from the du Jours, it’s this: There’s no reason to be afraid of poetry. It’s just words set down on paper in interesting patterns, right?

So you’re not going to be intimidated in the slightest by:

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
by T. S. Eliot

LET us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent

[The rest of the poem has been removed because it’s almost certainly still in copyright. But I doubt you’ll have any trouble finding it on the Web.]

Okay, now have you read the poem all the way through? Or did you just skim lightly over it and skip down to the explication? If so, go right back and read the thing through. Don’t go on to the next paragraph until you have.

There. That didn’t hurt much, did it? You’re a little puzzled what the thing means, but it certainly sounded good. Well, it’s no wonder you didn’t find easy access to this one. It’s about a man who’s growing old and feels himself a failure. You guys are all young and on the way up, and if by chance you felt yourself as abject a failure as does Alfred J. Prufrock (and is that a failure-name or what? small wonder some humor writers later called their magazine’s mascot Alfred J. Newman), well... that would a remarkable sign of distinction in itself.

(A friend of mine who affects to dislike such poetry as pretentious, likes to say, “I don’t see what’s so difficult about eating a peach. I dare to eat a peach!” To which I can only reply, “And you think this is a sign of your own neurotic inadequacy, how?”)

So it’s a sad poem. And yet, a beautiful one, full of mermaids and soft October nights, carefully observed social details, and wonderful metaphors and similes. The sunset looking “like a patient etherised upon a table” is way over the top, and yet it captures perfectly that necrotic yellow color you get in late Autumn. (Wonderful word, necrotic. You should look it up.) Streets that follow “like a tedious argument of insidious intent” is just wonderful. The fog that curls around the house and falls asleep... Wow.

But I’m not going to explicate this poem for you. Why? Because Sean invited Ben into this list so the two of them could have something intellectual to discuss. So, Ben, this is my gift to you. This is, nobody doubts it, one of the great poems of English literature. There’s a lot to be snooped out of it. Have fun.

Jason and Ray -- you guys can discuss it, too, if you want. Or any combination of all of you. I won’t ask to see what you say. I appreciate how that would make you clam up. You’ve both looked up the Vermeer, right? Good.

All best,
Michael

His Luminous Light, Her Preternatural Calm

2008-07-29T05:34:00.001-07:00

Dear All:

I was about to send you a quick explication of "Try to Praise the Mutilated World" by Adam Zagajewski when a computer error wiped everything I had written from the face of the virtual universe. Oh, well. Here's another poem by the same man. Never heard of Zagajewski? Well, small wonder. He made his name in the late 1960s, roughly around the same time that people stopped taking poetry seriously. But he's probably the most famous living Polish poet in the world. Don't laugh. Even under Communism, Poland managed to maintain one of the most vibrant literatures in the world. No small feat when Moscow was cracking down on intellectuals, groups of all kinds, and above all uncensored books.

Shortly before the Berlin Wall fell, a group of Russian SF fans were allowed to visit their Polish counterparts for the first time in fannish history. They recorded that they were in awe of how many books the Polish fan groups had published. In Russia, if they liked a novel, they typed a copy of it (this was called samizdat, "self-publishing") and passed it around hand to hand.

Here's the poem:

Vermeer's Little Girl

by Adam Zagajewski

Vermeer's little girl, now famous

watches me. A pearl watches me.

The lips of Vermeer's little girl

are red, moist, and shining.

[The rest of the poem has been removed because it’s almost certainly still in copyright. But I doubt you’ll have any trouble finding it on the Web.]

You got what it's about, right? No? Then you should immediately (especially the artists among you) Google up Vermeer's "Girl With a Pearl Earring." Vermeer is famous for his luminous light, the preternatural calm of his subjects, and for making very few paintings that survived into modern times. There was a novel based on this painting, and I believe it was made into a movie as well. That's one successful work of art.

All best,
Michael

Not the Moon, a Bird . . .

2008-07-29T05:30:00.000-07:00

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Dear All:

Not quite as easy as yesterday's, but easy nonetheless. And by one of my favorite poets, too! Denise Levertov was one of the Beats, a group that included Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and most famously Allen Ginsburg. They were wild and crazy guys, free souls, free thinkers. She was the only girl allowed into the club. They didn't think that freely.

Here it is:

Wanting The Moon
by Denise Levertov

Not the moon. A flower
on the other side of the water.

The water sweeps past in flood,
dragging a whole tree by the hair,

[The rest of the poem has been removed because it’s almost certainly still in copyright. But I doubt you’ll have any trouble finding it on the Web.]

So, okay. It's about wanting things you can't have. And about the mixed joy and sorrow of it. Better to want and not have than never to have wanted. But still not as good as having the moon. You got that she began by saying (in the title) that she wanted the moon. Then... not actually the moon but an unobtainable flower. No, not the flower, a bird. And so on. So we know that the poem's not about the thing desired, but about the act of desire.

What should you note about this poem? How clean and clear it is. How is that achieved? Through her use of archetypal, almost abstract nouns: the moon, a flower, a tree, a barn, a bridge, and so on all the way to a jester, his bells, a tune, sorrow.

Oversimplifying wildly, in writing, there are two contradictory approaches: One is to employ simplified archetypes, as here, to make the story or poem universal. The other (in fiction, referred to by its opponents as "K-Mart realism") is to make everything as specific as possible: A low gibbous moon hanging over Winooski, Vermont; an ox-eye daisy, the elm behind St. Francis Xavier Elementary School with names and obscenities carved into its bark, old man Slater's barn, behind which Carl Hemsley and Jake Dermott used to smoke cigarettes and talk about how fast they were going to get out of Vermont as soon as they graduated high school. Both approaches work equally well, in the hands of someone who knows how to use them.

All best,
Michael

The Poet Always . . . ? (Don't Everybody Raise Your Hand At Once)

2008-07-26T07:56:00.000-07:00

Dear Everybody:

Okay, today’s poem is by somebody you’ve likely never heard of. Why? Well, because most living poets you’ve never heard of. And yet some of them are quite good. As witness the following:

Suicide Note
Mario Milosevic

The plaque on the Pioneer spacecraft
that was designed
to tell extraterrestrials
all about us could easily outlive us.

Then the centerpiece of the design,
the naked woman standing beside the naked man,
his hand raised in a bland greeting,
both of them exposed to the elements
in a way that testifies to their indifference,
could easily be interpreted as a man saying good-bye
while his one true love stands with him,
perhaps saying good-bye in her own way.

Eons after the last human has died,
this image might be found
and read as the last act of life,
stuffed into the bottle of a spaceship
and sent into the sea of the cosmos
saying we had it all
we could have lived forever
but there was something in us
that we could not help
which just wanted everything to die.

Nice stuff, eh? I trust I don’t have to tell you guys that the Pioneer was the first space probe to leave the Solar System, that a plaque was put on it against the unlikely chance that in some far distant future intelligent aliens might find it, nor that it was an awfully bland bit of work. (It was put together by that same committee which, challenged to design a horse, came up with a camel.)

See here the transformative power of words! Milosevic has taken that sad plaque and, through an act of interpretation, made it into something interesting and moving.

This poem appeared in a book titled Poets Against the War, which was put together after Laura Bush canceled a White House symposium on poetry because she learned that many of the invitees were planning to read poems critical of her husband’s invasion of Iraq. So there is a political dimension to it as well.

Percy Bysshe Shelly said that “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Well... that was a pretty dicey statement even then. But observe how (and whether you agree with their politics or not is irrelevant here) the real legislators and other politicians are afraid of them. That’s because poetry’s primary loyalty is to truth.

Which is all for today. Except to note that the sharp-eyed among you have noticed that this poem is neither in the public domain nor taken from a source where permission to copy was implicit. Which is why I contacted the poet (it’s my good fortune that we’re on speaking terms) and got his permission. I’m sending him a token payment even though, being a nice guy, he would have let me copy it free, just for the courtesy of my asking. But, as Sean will testify, there is one iron-clad rule in this household: THE ARTIST ALWAYS GETS PAID.

All best,
Michael

Naked American Superstar Poet

2008-07-12T12:34:00.000-07:00

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Dear Everybody:

Today is primary day in Pennsylvania. I voted for Howard Dean. It makes no difference to me that he dropped out of the race months ago. I am a stubborn man.

Meanwhile, the poetry polls closed Saturday night and the results are in. Two people voted to continue the Poems du Jour. One person asked to stop receiving them -- I counted that as a vote no. And two people abstained, possibly because they hadn't read the du Jours that week. Figuring that as a weak indication of disinterest, I counted them as a third of a no vote apiece. So, by the slimmest of margins, we continue.

Today, American superstar-poet, William Carlos Williams:

Danse Russe

by William Carlos Williams

If I when my wife is sleeping
and the baby and Kathleen
are sleeping
and the sun is a flame-white disc
in silken mists
above shining trees,—
if I in my north room
dance naked, grotesquely
before my mirror

[The rest of the poem has been removed because it’s almost certainly still in copyright. But I doubt you’ll have any trouble finding it on the Web.]

Strange stuff, nicht Wahr? The key to this poem lies in the pun in the final line, in the title, and in our knowledge of the poet's life. A genius is, or was originally, a spirit, a household guardian. The Ballet Russe (Red Ballet) was all the rage in Paris when WCW wrote this poem. And Williams disapproved of American poets going to live in exile in Paris, as was all the rage with intellectuals at the time, and thought that they should stay home and write from the heart of their own society and culture.

(You didn't know this last, did you? So how was that "our" knowledge? Well, first-person plural pronouns are notoriously tricky. As witness the sentence, "We have set foot on the moon.")

So there Williams is, at home, his family asleep (poets get, like, zilch attention in America), the "flame-like disc" of the sun or possibly poetic inspiration overhead, and he begins to dance. Clumsily, grotesquely, not like the elegant dancers in Paris at all. But perhaps he is doing what he is supposed to. Perhaps he'd the guardian-spirit of this country. Perhaps he's a genuine American genius.

Got that? That's a pretty safe interpretation of this poem. Now I'm going to give you a bad one. I ran across this on an on-line posting, but I've seen it before. It's a common enough reading: The narrator is a psychopath who's just killed his family. That's why they're "sleeping" when the sun is up. Now he dances grotesquely in front of a mirror, admiring the blood on his "arms, face, shoulders," etcetera. Whence, "Ballet Russe."

I mention this interpretation because it demonstrates the value of knowing something about the poet's life and intentions. Nobody who knows anything about William Carlos Williams believes that he sat down one day and thought, "Hey! I'll write something splatterpunk!" So this is not a valid interpretation.

But aren't all interpretations equally valid? No. The closest you can come to that statement and still be true is this: Everybody has a right to make their own interpretations. A poem (or any work of art) is a collaboration between the creator and the reader. The better the reader, the better the poem. But, let's be honest, some people are dolts.

Or, as we writers like to say, a book is like a mirror. If an ass looks in, he's not going to see an angel looking out.

All best,
Michael

Another Reason to Admire Russian Women

2008-07-12T12:28:00.000-07:00

Dear Everybody:

Today’s poem is by Anna Akmatova, possibly the greatest Russian poet of the Twentieth Century. Certainly, she’s way up there. It was written upon the death of her friend Mikhail Bulgakov.

Bulgakov is best remembered for The Master and Margarita, a wonderful comic-sad retelling of the Faust legend (sort of) in Stalinist Russia. I recommend the book to you all, it’s not hard to read and it has a bowtie-wearing cat who’s a sure shot with a pistol. The Master and Margarita was finished shortly before Bulgakov’s death in 1940 but not published until 1966. Before then it was circulated by samizdat, i.e., hand-typed copies that were passed among friends in the literary underground. Imagine loving a novel enough to type out a copy of it! Possession of them was a crime.

So, given that Akmatova’s life (remember?) was every bit as hard as Bulgachev’s, her quiet mastery, her refusal to give in to hysteria, exaggeration, accusation, and rant is all the more impressive.

Behold:

In Memory of Mikhail Bulgakov

by Anna Akhmatova

Translated by Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward

This, not graveyard roses, is my gift;
And I won't burn sticks of incense:
You died as unflinchingly as you lived,
With magnificent defiance.
Drank wine, and joked -- were still the wittiest,
Choked on the stifling air.

[The rest of the poem has been removed because it’s almost certainly still in copyright. But I doubt you’ll have any trouble finding it on the Web.]

So. She doesn’t offer graveyard roses to her dead friend, but this poem. He was aloof and defiant in the face of persecution. (Pretty much all worthwhile artists were persecuted under Stalin.) She praises his human virtues. She mentions “stultifying walls,” by which she means the system that kept him silent. I’m not sure who the “terrifying stranger” is... his genius, maybe? His death? But now he’s dead and nobody dares to mourn him publicly, for fear of attracting the attention of the government. Nobody, that is, but Anna. They’d already killed her husband and imprisoned her son. (Which is why she’s “half crazed,” “sick with grief” and “smoldering on a slow fire,” incidentally.) What more could they do to her?

It seems strange to her that this man couldn’t have outlived her. He seemed so much stronger than she. He hid his pain so well.

Frankly, I find that extremely moving. So I’ll only add that, while it’s dangerous to comment on wordplay in a translation, I should comment on that last line. You understood, of course, that the pain referred to both his illness and the government’s persecution. Not also the use of the word “mortal.” It means both fatal, as in “mortally wounded,” and also “human.” All mortals are subject to pain. His pain is not superior in kind to that of non-genius-writers. He simply, as an individual, stood up to it particularly well.

Wow.

All best,
Michael

Stand Back! That Poet Has a Bear!

2008-07-12T12:25:00.000-07:00

Dear Everybody:

Today, we touch lightly upon George Gordon Noel Byron, best known as Lord Byron. Picture it: Young, rich (until he ran up debts, living beyond his means) handsome, and a lord! And he was a romantic poet. And a great one. Did he make out like a bandit with the ladies? Yes, he did, and with young men as well.

So he was, first of all, scandalous. There were rumors he fathered a child upon his half-sister. Second of all, renowned. After "Childe Harolde's Pilgrimage" came out, he wrote that he awoke one morning to discover himself famous. And third of all, a poet whose work is still read and quoted with respect and enjoyment today.

When you put all of these together, you have the epitome and figurehead of the Romantic poets. What is Romanticism? My single-volume encyclopedia says, "A movement in the arts variously defined as a return to nature, exaltation of emotion and the senses over the intellect, and revolt agaisnt 18th-century rationalism." Very true. To which I would add that it also had a dark streak to it, a brooding obsession with death and decay which today we characterize as "Byronic." His influence still lives on. Buffy the Vampire Slayer owes a lot to Byron, as does every Goth you know.

So I present you with not one of his greatest poems, but one of his most Byronic:

Lines Inscribed Upon A Cup Formed From A Skull
by Lord Byron

Start not -- nor deem my spirit fled:
In me behold the only skull
From which, unlike a living head,
Whatever flows is never dull. I lived,
I loved, I quaffed like thee;
I died: let earth my bones resign:
Fill up -- thou canst not injure me;
The worm hath fouler lips than thine.
Better to hold the sparkling grape
Than nurse the earthworm's slimy brood,
And circle in the goblet's shape
The drink of gods than reptile's food.
Where once my wit, perchance, hath shone,
In aid of others' let me shine;
And when, alas! our brains are gone,
What nobler substitute than wine?
Quaff while thou canst; another race,
When thou and thine like me are sped,
May rescue thee from earth's embrace,
And rhyme and revel with the dead.
Why not -- since through life's little day
Our heads such sad effects produce?
Redeemed from worms and wasting clay,
This chance is theirs to be of use.

Okay, to clear up difficulties of syntax and vocabulary: "Start not -- nor deem my spirit fled" means "Don't be afraid and don't think I'm dead." The "whatever flows" is a joke; words used to flow from the skull; now wine does. "Quaffed" means drank. "Let earth my bones resign" means let the earth give up my bones. (Or, rather, just this one.)

The poem is, really, just a dark joke. You think it's gross to have a drinking-cup made out of a skull? Far from it! What's gross is burying it in the ground and letting it be eaten by worms. So drink up! After you're dead, if you're lucky, maybe somebody will make a cup out of your skull.

Only far more wittily phrased than that, of course. It's easy to picture him delivering this rant with the skull in one hand and finishing it off with a deep draught of wine.

Did Byron really have a skull cup? It's hard to imagine him not. There are places they can be brought today. And the young Byron liked to offend people (the technical term for this is epater les bourgeoises -- "shock the middle class"). When he was at Trinity University, there was a rule that students could not keep a dog. So he kept a bear.

All best,
Michael

An Unfortunate Afflatus

2008-07-12T12:21:00.000-07:00

Dear All:

A quick one today, from Theodore Roethke, who filled the role of modern Twentieth Century poet neatly: tormented, eaten away by the need for fame, suffering from depression, an alcoholic, and recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1954. Back then, it was thought a poet had to be seriously screwed up, if he was to be any good at all.

From the Web:

Although no one should wish a mental disorder on anyone, Roethke seemed to find inspiration in his depression, using the time to search his psyche for the meaning of his existence. Roethke said himself that within his bouts of mental breakdowns for which he was hospitalized, he would explore his thinking, analyzing his condition and using his insight as material for his poetry. His poetry is, therefore, very personal and introspective, expressed in themes of the tortured soul, searching for the self, connecting with the smallest of creatures, a vision of a dance, swirling with partners.

And here's one of his poems, which we have reason to believe is autobiographical:

CHILD ON TOP OF A GREENHOUSE, 1948
by Theodore Roethke

The wind billowing out the seat of my britches, 
My feet crackling splinters of glass and dried putty, 
The half-grown chrysanthemums staring up like accusers,

[The rest of the poem has been removed because it’s almost certainly still in copyright. But I doubt you’ll have any trouble finding it on the Web.]

I've got two comments here. Imprimis, the first line of the poem is terrible! Dreadful! A godawful miscalculation on Roethke's part. I'm sure it's carefully observed. Back when he was a kid, they wore huge loose trousers, yes, and doubtless when he climbed atop the greenhouse the wind went up the legs and ballooned out the seat. But on first glance, it's hard not to read that line as indicating that the kid has truly heroic flatulence. And the rest of the poem has to overcome the corrosive power of that image.

What right do I have to say such terrible things about a famous poet? Same right you have. I'm a reader. And in the long run, our opinion is what matters.

Secundus, note the poem's ending. After some gritty, involving detail (the feel of shards and dried putty underfoot, the glare of the glass, the trees plunging in the wind) that really puts you there in the kid's place, he ends with the people below pointing up and shouting. There's a wild exultation in that line, and the brilliance of it is that you read it two ways: From the adults' point of view, fearing the kid will fall through the glass and suffer terrible injury or even die. And from the boy's point of view, thinking everyone is shouting and pointing from astonishment and admiration.

From this point, you can go on to sermonize for hours about adults and children, differences of perception (a friend told me of the time her three-year-old climbed out on the porch roof and how, when she asked her five-year-old why he didn't run to tell her, he said, "But Mom! Spider-Man was going to swoop down and rescue him!"), the fragility of the world, etc., etc. But none of it is necessary. It's all contained within those seven lines, waiting to be unpacked.

A pity about the flatulence, though.

All best,
Michael

The (Original!) White Man's Burden

2008-07-12T12:15:00.000-07:00

Dear Everybody:

Here we go! Yesterday I gave you Ogden Nash on Kipling. Now here's Kipling on the British Empire. The British, it's been said, conquered the world in a fit of absent-mindedness. Well... not quite. They had a vision of themselves and nobody's ever articulated that vision better than Kipling.

The White Man's Burden
by Rudyard Kipling

Take up the White man's burden --
Send forth the best ye breed --
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness
On fluttered folk and wild --
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.

Take up the White Man's burden --
In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
An hundred times mad plain.
To seek another's profit,
And work another's gain.

Take up the White Man's burden --
The savage wars of peace --
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch Sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hope to nought.

Take up the White Man's burden --
No tawdry rule of kings,
But toil of serf and sweeper --
The tale of common things.The ports ye shall not enter,
The roads ye shall not tread,
Go make them with your living,
And mark them with your dead!

Take up the White man's burden --
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard --
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light: --
"Why brought ye us from bondage,
"Our loved Egyptian night?"

Take up the White Man's burden --
Ye dare not stoop to less --
Nor call too loud on freedom
To cloak your weariness;
By all ye cry or whisper,
By all ye leave or do,
The silent, sullen peoples
Shall weigh your Gods and you.

Take up the White Man's burden --
Have done with childish days --
The lightly proffered laurel,
The easy, ungrudged praise.
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years,
Cold-edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers!

Wow! Kind of takes the breath away, dunnit? You must sacrifice your happiness in order to wage "savage wars of peace" upon people who don't particularly want you to invade their countries, kill their brothers, destroy their cities. They'll hate you for it. But it's for their own good. They're savage and ignorant, and you're going to civilize them. It's your noble duty. And if, somehow, against all expectations your noble conquests only make things worse, why, it's their fault, not yours!

Now you understand why the man's work is banned in India. The Indians thought the British were just madmen from a parvenu barbaric country who had come to conquer and loot their ancient civilization. But the Victorians honestly bought this claptrap, which meant they were willing to suffer and die selflessly in the service of a very shabby cause. It made them unbeatable.

There are those who believe that poetry/fiction/art of all kinds can do no harm. I disagree. To say that is to say that it can do no good. Great art is capable of great good or great evil. And in defense of my thesis I offer the above.

And that's my thought for today.

All best,
Michael

Kipling's Vermont

2008-07-12T12:11:00.000-07:00

Dear Everybody:

Okay, you all remember Ogden Nash, right? A generation ago, that would've been a stupid question, like asking "You all know who Michael Jackson is, don't you?" Everybody read Nash, and most could quote him (here, off the top of my head: "A wonderful bird is the pelican/His beak can hold more than his belly can"). And where is now? Sipping beer with Ozymandias in the Land of Lethe.

But did you know that Rudyard Kipling, who wrote many wonderful stories, and some hideously jingoistic poems ("The White Man's Burden" is particularly ripe), and who by law may not be published in India, once lived in Vermont? Yes, he did. In fact, today you can rent his house and stay in it for a week or a summer.

Kipling in Vermont. It boggles the mind. Not only my mind but Ogden Nash's:

Kipling's Vermont
by Ogden Nash

The summer like a rajah dies,
And every widowed tree

[The rest of the poem has been removed because it’s almost certainly still in copyright. But I doubt you’ll have any trouble finding it on the Web.]

You guys knows what a rajah is and what suttee (mostly) was, right? If not, how hard would it be to look 'em up in a dictionary?

In apology for the other day's very long Rowley post, I shall make only two observations:
The first is that Nash wrote a lovely poem here. Just because somebody's being funny doesn't preclude him or her from being simultaneously serious as well. Asked to contribute a motto for her picture in her high school yearbook, my big sister Patty wrote: Many a True Word is Oft Said in Jest. "They thought I was kidding because I smiled when I said it," she told me. "No, I meant every word I told them."

The second is that if a terrific movie was made of Kipling's The Man Who Would Be King, a great big and fun adventure with appearances by Kipling himself at beginning and end. I recommend the DVD. Be sure to make popcorn.

All best,
Michael

Forgive the Suicidal Forger

2008-07-10T05:33:00.000-07:00

Dear Everybody:

Today you get to feel superior, because I'm presenting something that every English major in world knows about, but very few have actually read: A poem by Thomas Rowley.

Who was Thomas Rowley, you ask? Ahh, that's the wrong question. Ask rather, Who was Thomas Chatterton? Here, clipped from the Web, is the background:

More than two centuries after his death, the poet and forger Thomas Chatterton remains one of the most fascinating figures in English literature. Born in Bristol, in 1752, Chatterton demonstrated his literary genius at an early age. As a youth, he was a voracious reader and developed an early interest in antiquity; he was also writing poetry by the age of eleven. By the time he was fourteen, Chatterton had left school and was apprenticed to an attorney. He retained his interests in history and poetry, though, and soon embarked upon the path which would bring him notoriety.

Chatterton's access to a chest in his parish church which contained historical documents enabled him to obtain scraps of ancient parchment. It was on such scraps that he began producing manuscript poems which he claimed were the work of a fifteenth-century Bristol monk and poet, Thomas Rowley. Initially, Chatterton's audience was limited to local antiquaries who were thrilled to learn of the existence of this early Bristol poet. Soon, however, Chatterton became more ambitious. He sent samples of his work, including some of the Rowley poems, to Town and Country Magazine. In an effort to gain patronage from Horace Walpole, whose gothic novel The Castle of Otranto (1765) had claimed to be a translation of a lost manuscript, Chatterton sent Walpole samples of his Rowley poems. But after initially encouraging the young prodigy, Walpole subsequently changed his position and pronounced the Rowley poems forgeries, denouncing Chatterton in the process.
Although one of the Rowley poems was published in Town and Country Magazine in May, 1769--making it the only Rowley poetry published during Chatterton's lifetime--after his rebuke by Walpole, Chatterton turned his pen to political satire and other writing he could sell to periodicals, usually writing under pseudonyms. Chatterton achieved moderate success through his writing, and developed a reputation of some note in literary circles. Despite his achievements, however, Chatterton led the life of a pauper. He became severely depressed and experienced other health and financial problems which he could not overcome. In August 1770, Chatterton committed suicide by swallowing poison and was dead by the age of seventeen.

Michael here again: This image, of the youthful and talented poet starving in a garret and ultimately committing suicide, has been Chatterton's enduring legacy, and was a major influence on the later Romantic poets. But the poems themselves are not bad. As witness the following. (An eclogue is a short poem, especially but not necessarily a pastorale or idyll.)

ECLOGUE THE THIRD

Wouldst thou know Nature in her better part
Go, search the huts and cottages of the peasant;
If they have any, it is rough-made art,
In them you see the plain form of nature.
Has your mind a liking of a mind?
Would it know every thing as it might be;
Would it hear phrase of the vulgar from the peasant,
Without philosopher words and wisdom-free,
If so, read this, which I sporting penned,
If nothing beside, its rhyme may it commend.

MAN

But whither, fair maid do ye go,
O where do ye bend your way?
I will know whither you go,
I will not be answered nay.

WOMAN

To Robin and Nell, all down in the Dell,
To help them at making of hay.
MAN Sir Roger the Parson has hired me there,
Come, Come, let us trip it away;
We'll work and will sing, and will drink of strong Beer,
As long as the merry summer's day.

WOMAN

How hard is my fate to work!
Much is my woe:
Dame Agnes who lies in the Church,
With birlette gold;
With gilded borders of silver and gold strong untold,
What was she more than me, to be so?

MAN

I see sir Roger from afar,
Tripping over the Lea,
I ask why the lord's son
Is more than me.

SIR ROGER

The sultry sun doth speed apace his car.
From every beam a seed of life do fall;
Quickly gather up the hay upon the plain,
Methinks the cockse begin to grow tall:
This is alike our fate, the great, the small,
Must wither and be dried by Death's dart;
See the sweet flower hath no sweet at all;
It with the rank weed bears equal part,
The coward, warrior, and the wise be no more:
Alike to dry away, with those thele did lament.

MAN

All-a-Boon sir Priest, all-a-boon,
Bye your priesthood now say unto me:
Sir Gaufryd the knight, who lives hard by,
Why should he, than me
Be more great,
In honor, knighthood and estate?

SIR ROGER

Turn thine eyes around this hayed mead,
Carefully look around the sun-burn dell;
An answer to thy ballad here see,
This withered flower will a lesson tell
Arisen, it blossomed, it flourished, and did well,
Looking disdainfully upon the neighbor green,
Yet with the disdained green, its gory fell,
Full soon it shrank upon the day-burned plain,
Did not its look, whilst it there did stand,
To crop it in the body move some dread hand.
Such is the way of life: the lord's purse
Moves the robber him therefore to slay:
If thou has ease, the shadow of content,
Believe the truth, there's none more happy than thee:
Thou workest; well, can that a trouble be?
Sloth more would jade thee than the roughest day,
Couldst thou the secret part of souls see,
Thou wouldst full soon see truth, in what I say;
But let me hear thy way of life; and then
Hear thou from me the lives of other men.

MAN

I rise with the Sun,
Like him to drive the wain
And ere my work is done
I sing a song or twain.
I follow the plough tail,
With a long jug of ale.
But of the maidens, oh!
It lacketh not to tell;
Sir Priest might not cry woe,
Could his bull do as well
I dance the base heiedeygnes,
And baffle the wisest feints.
On every Saint's day,
With the minstrel am I seen,
All a footing it away,
With maidens on the green
But oh! I wish to be more great,
In renown, tenure and estate.

SIR ROGER

Has thou not seen a tree upon a hill,
Whose unbounded branches reach far to sight;
When furious tempests do the heaven fill,
It shaketh dire in woe and much affright:
Whilst the dwarf flower humbly decked,
Standeth unhurt, unharmed by the storm;
So is a picture of life: the man of might,
Is tempest-beaten: his woe great as his form
Thyself a flower of a small account,
Wouldst harder feel the wind, as higher thee didst mount.

Okay, pretty straightforward there. A "birlette" is a hood, or covering for the back of a woman's head. "All-a-boon" is simply a means of asking a favor. "Cockse" is, I'm guessing, some plant. "Thele" I have no idea about; perhaps it's a typo. And "heiedeygnes" are a kind of country dance. (Don't laugh. My generation used to dance the Hully-Gully and the Mashed Potatoes) The basic message -- "Be Happy With What You've Got. Donald Trump Pays for All His Wealth With Worry" is still with us. And I can think of only two more things to add to your reading.

First, note that the poem is much more interesting if you think it was actually written when it claims to be. It opens a window into the thinking of the times. But, knowing it for a forgery, we lose that. A pity, too.

Second, I'd like you to appreciate the work I've done cleaning up the spelling and vocabulary of the original, so you could appreciate it. Here's how it originally appeared:

ECLOGUE THE THIRD

Wouldst thou kenn Nature in her better parte
Go, serche the logges and bordels of the hynde;
If they have anie, it is roughe-made art,
In hem you see the blakied form of nature.
Haveth your mind a liking of a mind?
Would it kenne every thing as it might bee;
Would it here phrase of the vulgar from the hynde,
Without wiseegger1 words and knowlache11 free,
If soe, rede this, which Iche disporting1 pende,
If nete beside, its rhyme may it commend.

MANNE

But whether, fair maid do ye go,
O where do ye bend your way?
I wile know whether you go, I will not be asseled1 nay.

WOMANNE

To Robyn and Nell, all down in the Dell,
To help them at making of hay.

MANNE

Syr Rogerre the Parsone hav hired me there,
Come, Come, let us trip it away;
We'll wurche and will sing, and will drenche of strong Beere,
As long as the merrie sommers day.

WOMANNE

How harde is my dome to wurch!
Much is my woe:
Dame Agnes who lies in the Church,
With birlette golde;
With gelten aumeres strong ontolde,
What was she more than me, to be soe?

MANNE

I see sir Roger from afar,
Tripping over the Lea,
I ask why the lord's son
Is more than me.

SIR ROGERE

The sweltrie sun doth hie apace his wayne.
From every beme, a seme of life do fall;
Swythyn scille oppe the haie upon the plain,
Methynckes the cockse begineth to grow tall:
This is alike our doome, the great, the smalle,
Moste withe and be forwyned by Death's darte;
See the sweet flowere hath no sweet at alle;
Itte with the ranke wede berethe evalle parte,
The cravent, warriour, and the wise be blent:
Alike to drie away, with those thele did lament.

MANNE

All-a-Boon sir Priest, all-a-boon,
Bye your priestschype now saye unto mee:
Sir Gaufryd the knight, who lyveth harde by,
Whie should hee, than me
Be more great,
In honor, knighthood and estate?

SIR ROGERE

Attourne thine eyes around this haied mee,
Tentyflie look around the chaper delle;
An answer to thy barganette here see,
This welked flouertte will a leson tell
Arist, it blew, it florished, and did welle,
Loking ascance upon the naighbour green,
Yet with the deigned green, its rennome felle,
Eftsoons it shronke upon the day-brente plain,
Didde not its look, whilst it there did stonde,
To croppe it in the bodde move some drede hand.
Such is the way of lyffe: the lord's purse,
Mooveth the robber him therfor to slay:
If thou has ease, the shadow of contente,
Believe the trothe, theres none more haile yan thee:
Thou wurchest; welle, canne thatte, a trobble bee?
Slothe more wulde jade thee, than the roughest day,
Couldst thou the kivercled of soughlys see,
Thou wuldst full soon see trothe, in what I say;
But let me heere thy way off lyffe; and thenne
Heare thou from me the lyffs of odher men.

MANNE.

I ryse with the Sun,
Like him to dryve the wayne
And eere my wurche is don
I sing a song or twayne. I
follow the plough tayle,
With a long jubb of ale.
But of the maidens, oh!
Itte lacketh not to telle;
Syr Priest might not cry woe,
Could his bull do as well
I dance the bese heiedeygnes,
And foile the wysest feygnes.
On every Saints his day,
With the mynstrelle am I seen,
All a footing it away,
With maidens on the green
But oh! I wyshe to be more greate,
In rennome, tenure and estate.

SIR ROGERRE.

Has thou ne sene a tree upon a hylle,
Whose unliste branchs reachn far to sight;
When fuired unwers do the heaven fylle,
Itte shaketh deere in dole and much affright:
Whilst the congeon flowrette abessie decked,
Stondeth unhurte, unquaced by the storme;
So is a picte of lyffe: the man of might,
Is tempest-chaft: his woe greate as his forme
Thyself a flowere of a small accounte,
Wouldst harder fell the wind, as hygher thee didste mount.

To which I can only say: Ouch! But let's not remember our poor, suicidal forger unkindly. When you remove Ye Olde Spellinge and head-scratching vocabulary from his work, he was capable of lines as simple and sweet as:

On every Saint's day,
With the minstrel am I seen, A
ll a footing it away,
With maidens on the green

Ah, happy man! Even if it was all a lie.

All best,
Michael

A Poet, a Loon, and a Likable Gent

2008-07-08T05:26:00.000-07:00

Dear Everybody:

I'm back from two weeks in New Mexico, which is awesomely beautiful and intellectually engaging, and two days in Pittsburgh, where Marianne's mother lies in rehab, immensely tired but otherwise fine.

And here's today's poem:

London
By William Blake

I wandered through each chartered street,
Near where the chartered Thames does flow,
A mark in every face I meet,
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every man,
In every infant's cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forged manacles I hear:
How the chimney-sweeper's cry
Every blackening church appals,
And the hapless soldier's sigh
Runs in blood down palace-walls.
But most, through midnight streets I hear
How the youthful harlot's curse
Blasts the new-born infant's tear,
And blights with plagues the marriage-hearse.

Okay, so first you should know that "chartered" means authorized or incorporated under the law. Which is to say, "official." Blake's making fun of the concept -- if a street can be chartered, why then, so can a river! Next, when a poet mentions marks in a face, he's referring to "the mark of Cain," and if you don't get that one, hit the Bible. It's in Genesis, the first and single most entertaining book (I would not be so bold as to guess which book is the most profound) in the Old Testament. And "manacles" are of course handcuffs or chains.

William Blake was a poet, a loon, and an extremely likable gent. His drawings (which he did as illustrations for his poems) are as well known as the poems themselves. He was a mystic. He once drew a picture of the ghost of a flea -- and it was a good one. He invented his own mythology and religion. A friend once came to visit him, when he was old (this would be in the early 19th century), and found Will and his wife in their back yard, naked -- "Being Adam and Eve," he explained. If you care to look him up, almost any biography or article about the man will be vastly entertaining.

So, the poem itself: Blake went walking in London, where he lived, and every face he saw seemed woeful and weak. In every word, shout, or baby's wail, he heard minds imprisoned by their own weaknesses. The chimney-sweeps shouts appal the churches. ("Blackening" because the coal-smoke of the time darkened the stones black -- a lot of the old churches are still that color today.) The hapless (unlucky) soldier's sigh "runs in blood down palace walls."

This last, incidentally, is a kick-ass metaphor*. "Blood" evokes the violence of war, "palace" suggests that the army serves not the people but those in power, and "walls" conjures up the image of blank, unlistening stone... i.e., the soldier kills & is killed in service of those who neither see nor hear him.

Finally, Blake says, worst of all is how the teenage prostitute cursing degrades everybody: The newborn infant and the virtuous newlyweds alike are corrupted by and implicated in the guilt of such a terrible thing even existing in their world.

And that "marriage-hearse" at the end? The marriage of opposites, of the end of life and its bright center. This is called an "oxymoron," incidentally, which means a self-contradiction. What's that when it's at home? you ask. Break it down: "oxy" from the Greek oxys, meaning sharp, keen, or acid, and "moron" from the Greek moros, meaning dull or foolish. Literally, sharply-dull or acutely-foolish. So the word oxymoron is itself an oxymoron! Cool, huh?

Oh, and let me mention that Blake very carefully made sure to write happy poems as well, uplifting and cheering messages of encouragement to offset such observations as the above. So he was neither a prophet of doom nor a Pollyanna. He was somewhere in the middle, observing the world from different angles.

All best,
Michael

*Y'all know the difference between a metaphor and a simile, right? A simile is a comparison using the words "like" or "as." A metaphor is a direct comparison of two dissimilar things. Why should this distinction be important? Joseph Campbell, being interviewed explained this thusly: "A simile is saying The boy ran like a deer. A metaphor is saying The boy is a deer."

"That's a lie!" the interviewer cried, shocked.

Work Without Hope

2008-07-05T05:57:00.000-07:00

Dear Everyone:

Here’s a poem that’s one hundred seventy nine years old tomorrow.

Work Without Hope
by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
(composed 21st February 1825)
All Nature seems at work. Slugs leave their lair --
The bees are stirring -- birds are on the wing --
And Winter slumbering in the open air,
Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring!
And I the while, the sole unbusy thing,
Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing.

Yet well I ken the banks where amaranths blow,
Have traced the fount whence streams of nectar flow.
Bloom, O ye amaranths! bloom for whom ye may,
For me ye bloom not! Glide, rich streams, away!
With lips unbrightened, wreathless brow, I stroll:
And would you learn the spells that drowse my soul?
Work without Hope draws nectar in a sieve,
And Hope without an object cannot live.

Okay, did you follow it? The diction is a little forced (“elevated” the poet would have said), but once you make allowances for that, it’s clear enough. He’s writing in late February, right on the cusp of winter and spring, when the season is neither one nor the other, and life begins to stir. “Yet well I ken the banks where amaranths blow” means “I know well where amaranths blow in the wind.” But his lips are “unbrightened” (think big toothpaste commercial grin -- or, rather, lack of it -- here) and his brow is “wreathless.” He’s thinking here of the laurel wreath that was laid upon the brow of the winners of the Olympics in ancient Greece. The laurel wreath is a symbol of the poet. So he’s complaining that he’s not writing any poems.

Coleridge works without hope, and therefore his soul is in a drowse, half-asleep. And he has no hope because it has no object, which is to say, he can think of nothing to hope for. Basically, this is a poem about writer’s block. But it appeals to anybody who’s ever felt his or her talents going to waste just because they can’t figure out what to direct them towards.

And yet... spring is coming. (It helps to know that England this time of year is roughly two weeks further into the season than is Philadelphia.) It can’t be stopped. So the facts put the lie to his despair.

Coleridge was one of the Romantics, and had a particularly hard case of writer’s block. Tons of talent, relatively few poems. But those that survive, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” and “Kubla Khan” among others, look to be good for the long run.

All best,
Michael

The View from the Bridge

2008-07-03T06:01:00.000-07:00

Dear Everybody:

This one’s for everybody who’s ever been in London. Which is to say that it’s primarily for Sean.

Upon Westminster Bridge
by William Wordsworth

EARTH has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth like a garment wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour valley, rock, or hill;
Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!

Pretty straightforward. Guy loves London, goes out for a walk in the morning before anybody's awake and admires how lovely and strangely calm it looks from one of the bridges over the Thames. When "All that mighty heart" -- London -- is still.

So why bother writing a poem -- why not just send a postcard? Because simply seeing something cannot convey the emotions he felt. In proof of which, I provide you all with a link for a panoramic photo of the view from Westminster Bridge:

[link]

Which is better? Depends on what you want.

All best,
Michael

A Sip from the Pierian Spring

2008-07-01T05:19:00.000-07:00

Dear everyone:

Another aphorism, and its source, presented here as a stand-alone poem but actually a small section of Pope's "Essay on Criticism":

Alps on Alps by Alexander Pope

A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.
Fired at first sight with what the Muse imparts,
In fearless youth we tempt the heights of arts,
While from the bounded level of our mind,
Short views we take, nor see the lengths behind,
But more advanced, behold with strange surprise
New, distant scenes of endless science rise!
So pleased at first, the towering Alps we try,
Mount o'er the vales, and seem to tread the sky;
The eternal snows appear already past,
And the first clouds and mountains seem the last;
But
those attained, we tremble to survey
The growing labours of the lengthened way,
The increasing prospect tires our wandering eyes,
Hills peep o'er hills, and Alps on Alps arise!

Which paraphrases to: Don't dabble in learning. Small sips are intoxicating. When you're young, you discover Art (or Poetry or Whatever) and think you can create masterpieces better than anything seen before. But with age and study you learn that the mountain you climbed is only the first of endless chains, Alps upon Alps.

What he's arguing here is not that you should only study things you're willing to devote a lifetime to, but not to be proud of your learning. Thinking you know it all already only blinds you to the possibilities of what you're doing.

The interesting thing about this poem is that it starts with its conclusion. Moral: Get serious, commit yourself to the long run, pull yourself up by your bootstraps boy, life is tough and so is art! I'm betting that in the first draft those were the last two lines. But ending the poem with them would have been a downer. By putting them first, Pope could end on that exultant vision of the limitless possibilities of art, "Alps on Alps!"

Indeed. And he even got away with ending the poem with an exclamation mark. How many poets can say that?

All best,
Michael

P. S. Pieria is a region of Thessaly (which as we all know is in Greece) containing both Mount Olympus and Mount Pierus, which was sacred to Orpheus and the Muses. The Pierian spring bubbled with the water of learning and the arts. Pope expected his readers to know this, and for the most part they did. Now don't we all feel undereducated?

Glistery, Glittery, Gold

2008-06-28T05:15:00.000-07:00

Dear Everybody:

Quick and easy one today, both narrative and clear as clear. Here it is:

On a Favorite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes

by Thomas Gray

Twas on a lofty vase’s side,
Where China's gayest art had dyed
The azure flowers that blow;
Demurest of the tabby kind,
The pensive Selima reclined,
Gazed on the lake below.

Her conscious tail her joy declared;
The fair round face, the snowy beard,
The velvet of her paws,
Her coat, that with the tortoise vies,
Her ears of jet, and emerald eyes,
She saw; and purr'd applause.

Still had she gazed; but 'midst the tide
Two angel forms were seen to glide,
The Genii of the stream:
Their scaly armour's Tyrian hue
Thro' richest purple to the view
Betray'd a golden gleam.

The hapless Nymph with wonder saw:
A whisker first and then a claw,
With many an ardent wish,
She stretch'd in vain to reach the prize.
What female heart can gold despise?
What Cat's averse to fish?

Presumptuous Maid! with looks intent
Again she stretch'd, again she bent,
Nor knew the gulf between.(Malignant Fate sat by, and smiled.)
The slipp'ry verge her feet beguiled,
She tumbled headlong in.

Eight times emerging from the flood
She mew'd to ev'ry wat'ry god,
Some speedy aid to send.
No Dolphin came, no Nereid stirr'd:
Nor cruel Tom, nor Susan heard.
A Fav'rite has no friend!

From hence, ye Beauties, undeceived,
Know, one false step is ne'er retrieved,
And be with caution bold.
Not all that tempts your wand'ring eyes
And heedless hearts, is lawful prize;
Nor all that glisters, gold.

And what can we learn from this? (Aside from the fact that poets feel free to replace syllables in words with apostrophes in order to maintain scansion, I mean.) We learn that popular quotations, the ones we can quote without having ever read their sources, are often wrong. Gray was actually paraphrasing Shakespeare here at the end: "All that glisters is not gold," from The Merchant of Venice.

In the original, Portia is being wooed by the Prince of Morocco and gives him his choice of three caskets, one of which contains her picture. If he chooses rightly, she'll marry him. The first, of gold, is inscribed, Who chooseth me shall gain what many men desire. The second, silver, reads Who chooseth me shall get as much as he deserves. And the third, dull lead, has, Who chooseth me must give and hazard all he hath. You've all read fairy-tales. You all know how this one plays out.

The prince doesn't. He chooses gold. There's a poem inside, which reads:

All that glisters is not gold;
Often have you heard that told:
Many a man his life hath sold
But my outside to behold:
Gilded tombs do worms infold.
Had you been as wise as bold,
Young in limbs, in judgment old,
Your answer had not been inscroll'd:
Fare you well; your suit is cold.

Which is to say, don't judge by appearances. Well, at least the (mis)quotation gets the meaning right. Many don't. That "neither a borrower nor a lender be" speech that everybody quotes so approvingly? They overlook the fact that Polonius, who made that speech, was a blatant fool.

All best,
Michael

p.s. Notice how every line of the Shakespeare poem rhymes with "gold?" Try to imagine what's in the silver cask. "All that glimmers is not silver..." And then eight more rhymes for "silver." I don't think even Will could have made that into something decent.

The Clarity of Marianne Moore

2008-06-26T05:21:00.000-07:00

Hey, everyone. Another poem by the estimable Marianne Moore:

Silence
By Marianne Moore

My father used to say,
"Superior people never make long visits,
have to be shown Longfellow's grave
or the glass flowers at Harvard.

[Poem removed because it’s still in copyright]

Note the clarity. Note how all the high-flown, elevated poetic diction of Coleridge has been scraped away. It might have made sense to write like that in Coleridge's day, when an old man might still remember people who talked like that. But contemporary poets who use words like "o'er" and "enow" are really pushing it.

All best,
Michael

Solace and Magic

2008-06-24T05:13:00.000-07:00

Dear Everyone:

Here’s the poem I promised you yesterday. It’s pretty clear if you just make allowances for changes in diction. Read it through slowly, and I’ll give you a straightforward synopsis of it afterwards.

On His Blindness
by John Milton

WHEN I consider how my light is spent
E're half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one Talent which is death to hide,
Lodg'd with me useless, though my Soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, least he returning chide,
Doth God exact day-labour, light deny'd,
I fondly ask; But patience to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, God doth not need
Either man's work or his own gifts, who best
Bear his milde yoak, they serve him best, his State
Is Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed
And post o're Land and Ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and waite.

Non-poetical rephrasing: When I think about how I’m blind, though I’m not even old yet, and how I dare not write, though I desperately want to and am sure God requires it of me, I foolishly [“fond” used to mean foolish] ask myself, how can God demand that I do something I cannot do? But the patient part of my soul replies: God doesn’t need anything you can give Him. Those who are content with whatever happens to them serve God best. He has thousands of servants to do His bidding. They who patiently wait for the orders that never come serve Him as well.

And if you got the politics of that one, you’re already a Milton scholar! Here’s what was going on. Milton was a Cromwellian. He not only served under Cromwell in an important government post, he spent all his energies writing political tracts, including a defense of Cromwell’s execution of Charles I. Then, when Cromwell died, came the Restoration -- Charles I’s son, Charles II, returned from France and was given the English throne again. Milton was thrown in jail and in serious danger of losing his life.

So there he is, desperate to fight the godless forces of Monarchy and unable to do so. It shows the strength of his character that he was able to find humility in such a fix.

It’s only rarely that a personal decision of morality can be objectively proved the right thing to do. But it happens. Exiled from the political arena which he loved, he went on to write Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, two of the greatest poems in the English language. And even today people who find themselves unable to do that which meant everything to them -- the injured athlete, the defeated politician, and myriad more -- find solace in this poem.

Oh, and you’ve heard people talk about “the magic of words,” I’m sure. Consider this: People can find solace in the poem who would shrug off my rephrasing of it as a pep talk. Why is that? Magic.

All best,
Michael

The Political Richard Wilbur

2008-06-21T18:55:00.000-07:00

Okay, guys! We've got an easy one today. I sincerely doubt you'll have any trouble figuring out what this one is all about.

A Fable
by Richard Wilbur

Securely sunning in a forest glade,
A mild, well-meaning snake
Approved the adaptations he had made
For safety's sake.

[The rest of the poem has been removed because it’s almost certainly still in copyright. But I doubt you’ll have any trouble finding it on the Web.]

Yep, it's political. To figure out the specifics, you have only to go to the copyright date, which turns out to be 1987. Which means that the President of the United States was ...?

Don't everybody raise your hands at once.

That's right, Ronald Reagan. So this was an anti-SDI ("Strategic Defense Initiative," better known as "Star Wars") poem -- note the penultimate (this extremely cool word means simply "next to last") line. Not exactly subtle. Nor is it meant to be.

Now we're not going to go into the pros and cons of SDI -- intelligent people of good will may disagree on this issue. But I wanted to point out that (a) this poem is political as hell and that (b) many poems are political as hell. Including some which were so well made that they outlasted the common knowledge of just what those politics were.

One of those tomorrow.

All best,
Michael