Explanation for extreme lapse: I had to kill off my feeble attempt at blogging, or not-blogging, because I was already spending so much time at the computer that spending additional time there, or here, simply became excruciating to my legs and back. Plus my tendency is to acquire enthusiasms, and drop them, I know.

The modern preference is for the improvised product over the polished one. Hence: reality TV, blogs. Such a distillation is flawed of course because then how come people aren't rushing out to buy jazz CDs?

In my writing I've perhaps gone overboard on the polish and hope to learn to improvise, to allow for more raggedness. But no one needs to read my ragged maunderings, and there are already so many poetry sites.

Now I've gotten a service dog (no dropping that enthusiasm for a decade: this seems longer than my lifespan but it seems important to simply forge on. Otherwise the wheels lose their ability to gain any traction at all.)

Onward.

posted by Lucia at 9:37 AM

Spiderspace is set up to accomodate short bits of information sent often--to wit, e-mail. Long e-mails are annoying (long paper letters=good.) And so it is with these posts: short is better. But they must come often, or the totality of the work is considered stale.
I worry what this will do to the brain, accustomed to the flash modality of the music video and the channel surf.
But I'll stick to my guns here by posting something long that I hadn't seen before. It's a piece of writing by James Wright--a prose poem? Not sure where it comes from. I found it in an anthology and it struck me, hard.
Wright is my favorite poet, possessing that combination of erudition and foolish drunkenness, which, to speak stereotypically, are masculine traits (men get sentimental when they are drunk, which drives women crazy.) It's a style that woman can't write in, to do so would be false. So the style is denied us, off-limits, however maddening that is to think.

The Flying Eagles of Troop 62

Ralph Neal was the Scoutmaster. He was still and young man. He liked us.
I have no doubt he knew perfectly well we were each of us masturbating unhappily in secret caves and shores.
The soul of patience, he waited while we smirked behind each other's backs, mocking and parodying the Scout Law, trying to imitate the oratorical rotundities of Winston Churchill as a Southern Ohio accent:
"Ay scout is trusswortha, loll, hailpful, frenly, curtchuss, kand, abaydent, chairful, thrifta, dapraved, clane, and lethcherass."
Ralph Neal knew all about the pain of the aching stones in our twlve-year-old groins, the lava swollen halfway between our peckers and our nuts that were still green and sour as half-ripe apples two full months before the football season began.
Socrates loved his friend the traitor Alcibiades for his beauty and for what he might become.
I think Ralph Neal loved us for our scrawniness, our acne, our fear; but mostly for his knowledge of what would probably become of us. He was not a fool. He knew he would never himself get out of that slime hole of a river valley, and maybe he didn't want to. The Vedantas illustrate the most sublime of ethical ideals of describing a saint who, having endured through a thousand lives every half-assed mistake and unendurable suffering possible to humanity from birth to death, refused at the last minute to enter Nirvana becaused he realized that his scruffy dog, suppurating at the nostrils and half mad with rabies, could not accompany him into perfect peace...
When I think of Ralph Neal's name, I feel some kind of ice breaking open in me. I feel a garfish escaping into a hill spring where the crawdads burrow down to the pure bottom in hot weather to get cool. I feel a rush of long fondness for that good man Ralph Neal, that good man who knew us dreadful and utterly vulnerable little bastards better than we knew ourselves, and who loved us, I reckon, because he knew damned well what would become of most of us, and it sure did, and he knew it, and he loved us anyway. The very name of America often makes me sick, and yet Ralph Neal was an American. The country is often enough to drive you crazy.

posted by Lucia at 12:44 PM

Somebody left the comment that I should make the blogness of the blog more bloggy, but it's not really a blog, I don't check in as I should. Plus there is the problem of being populist--writers are supposed to be iconoclastic, not populist, populism taints. However...

I have been thinking about poetry's purpose, having offered brainless nonthoughts about this in the past. Now it seems to me that poetry in fact has many purposes. Here's one, #7, the populist purpose: it is our civic glue. Well, at least for those who want to be glued. Certain poems mark our cultural rites of passage, but: do we still have poems that operate in this manner, the way "Howl" did? Where/what are our public poems now?

There was also Philip Levine's "They Feed They Lion," holding its mirror to the race riots of the 60's.

They Feed They Lion

Out of burlap sacks, out of bearing butter,
Out of black bean and wet slate bread,
Out of the acids of rage, the candor of tar,
Out of creosote, gasoline, drive shafts, wooden dollies,
They Lion grow.
Out of the gray hills
Of industrial barns, out of rain, out of bus ride,
West Virginia to Kiss My Ass, out of buried aunties,
Mothers hardening like pounded stumps, out of stumps,
Out of the bones' need to sharpen and the muscles' to stretch,
They Lion grow.
Earth is eating trees, fence posts,
Gutted cars, earth is calling in her little ones,
"Come home, Come home!" From pig balls,
From the ferocity of pig driven to holiness,
From the furred ear and the full jowl come
The repose of the hung belly, from the purpose
They Lion grow.
From the sweet glues of the trotters
Come the sweet kinks of the fist, from the full flower
Of the hams the thorax of caves,
From "Bow Down" come "Rise Up,"
Come they Lion from the reeds of shovels,
The grained arm that pulls the hands,
They Lion grow.
From my five arms and all my hands,
From all my white sins forgiven, they feed,
From my car passing under the stars,
They Lion, from my children inherit,
From the oak turned to a wall, they Lion,
From they sack and they belly opened
And all that was hidden burning on the oil-stained earth
They feed they Lion and he comes.
___________
I never understood the poem well until I heard Levine explain how he had a job in his youth, doing something like unpacking ball bearings, and one of his black co-workers held up one of the burlap sacks they were using, noting that it was from the zoo. "They feed they lion from they sack." A co-opting of dialect? Yeah, maybe, sure. But probably the most enduring exposition of those times.

Need to work on the first six reasons.

posted by Lucia at 12:51 PM

For days, the weather’s gone like this: rainbow squall rainbow squall…ad infinitum. I keep thinking it must stop but it doesn’t. Usually we have a steadiness of one thing or another. Not a steadiness of unsteadiness.

Why it matters is that, because the squalls will short out my electronics, I’ve been living in even more isolation than my usual isolation. The cost/benefit ratio of my going out into the world is pretty high, and I’m always trying to muster the oomph to leave the house. This seems like a queer sort of life, though I often think, well Emily Dickinson didn’t leave the house and she didn’t fret about it.

Then today I read this poem by Charles Simic that approximated the circumstances under which I live.

To Laziness

Only you understood
How little time we have.
Not enough to lift a finger,
Not enough to blink.

The voices on the stairs,
Ideas too quick to pursue—
What did they all matter?
When eternity beckoned.

The curtains drawn,
The newspapers unread.
The keys collecting dust.
My mind was like a motionless ceiling fan,

World-weary, languid
As if the bed was a barge on the Nile,
One red sail in the sunset,
With barely a breath in it.

When I moved at last,
The stores were closed.
Was it already Sunday?
The weddings and funerals were over.

A few sluggish clouds in the sky,
Shadows idling in the doorways,
The patches of waning light
More and more silent and absorbed.

___________________
Lately I’ve been thinking about the value of indirection versus the value of declaration. My mind chooses rainbow then squall then back to bow, and then the “accessible” bow seems childish.

posted by Lucia at 10:12 PM

No one should mistake my offhand comments as substantial, though I found it interesting to be the superstratum of a kerfuffle transpiring several layers below me, since the sad fact is...I do not look much at this cyberspatial nooklet. But I did look a little.

Modernism especially lobbied for the imagination's privacy, which I suppose all artists guard (maybe my imagination's not so private because my real life is, now that I don't much go out.) But that privacy hangs balanced against the reader's privacy when he-she sits down with the poem--there are strings that do the hanging, make the balance, and to cut the strings (=disdain the act of communication) was modernism's great disservice. Or so sez me/said me.

Of course, I in turn used to disdain Wallace Stevens. That pompous obscurant whose poems, especially that one about a jar, really twisted my panties. But wait: so how come his are the poems that stick in the mind? Those ones we don't understand? Sticking in the mind would seem to be the best evidence of a populist aesthetic.

These thoughts I thank while sitting on the back porch with my baby sitter (and it's me who must be baby-sat in case calamity strikes) one afternoon of late. It was lovely, though it sounds so phony-baloney, to read Stevens out loud on a fine day. She called my attention to this poem, which I didn't know, and which seems like an elegy to the self, though I don't know whether Stevens wrote it when he was old. It is the last poem in the edition of his selected poems that I own. The meanings and the imagination behind the meanings remain private, though it communicates openly in terms of its simple language and its appeal to the brain's capacity for memorizing:

Of Mere Being

The palm at the end of the mind,
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze decor.

A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.

You know then that it is not the reason
That makes us happy or unhappy.
The bird sings. Its feathers shine.

The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird's fire-fangled feathers dangle down.

------
The poem makes a better statement about imagination and privacy than I could make. The poem is also of a piece with his prose statement about the poetry of war.

posted by Lucia at 5:53 PM

Life is complicated, because everything connects to everything else, and now with electronica this connectedness is so pervasive that we live in a blur, it seems. Tornado where we are the tiny end of it, but also connected to the giant swirl above.

I've been reading some surrealist poets (namely Dean Young, whose new book is heavily indebted to Kenneth Koch, one of the New York school dudes, who passed away recently. I was thinking: surrealism can embrace comedy, that's what is does well, but what can it do with tragedy, what can it do with war?)

The NY Times reviewed by book last Sunday. It was very quiet here, and I felt like a bee in a cathedral. The reviewer talked about me as comic, and mentioned in particular a poem from my last book, which was a theft of a Koch poem. This is what I mean by the connectedness of it all.

The poem's long (a poem gets long when the connections start spiraling,) but I'll post it here anyway. I can't get the line breaks right--where there's a capital letter, it's supposed to be a new line, as originally written. Small letter means the line was just too long to fit.

One Train May Hide Another
(sign at a railroad crossing in Kenya)

In a poem, one line may hide another line,
As at a crossing, one train may hide another train.
That is, if you are waiting to cross
The tracks, wait to do it for one moment at
Least after the first train is gone. And so when you read
Wait until you have read the next line--
Then it is safe to go on reading.
In a family one sister may conceal another,
So, when you are courting, it's best to have them all in view
Otherwise in coming to find one you may love another.
One father or one brother may hide the man,
If you are a woman, whom you have been waiting to love.
So always standing in front of something the other
As words stand in front of objects, feelings, and ideas.
One wish may hide another. And one person's reputation may hide
The reputation of another. One dog may conceal another
On a lawn, so if you escape the first one you're not necessarily safe;
One lilac may hide another and then a lot of lilacs and on the Appia
Antica one tomb
May hide a number of other tombs. In love, one reproach may hide another,
One small complaint may hide a great one.
One injustice may hide another--one colonial may hide another,
One blaring red uniform another, and another, a whole column. One bath may hide another bath
As when, after bathing, one walks out into the rain.
One idea may hide another: Life is simple
Hide Life is incredibly complex, as in the prose of Gertrude Stein
One sentence hides another and is another as well. And in the laboratory
One invention may hide another invention,
One evening may hide another, one shadow, a nest of shadows.
One dark red, or one blue, or one purple--this is a painting
By someone after Matisse. One waits at the tracks until they pass,
These hidden doubles or, sometimes, likenesses. One identical twin
May hide the other. And there may be even more in there! The obstetrician
Gazes at the Valley of the Var. We used to live there, my wife and I, but
One life hid another life. And now she is gone and I am here.
A vivacious mother hides a gawky daughter. The daughter hides
Her own vivacious daughter in turn. They are in
A railway station and the daughter is holding a bag
Bigger than her mother's bag and successfully hides it.
In offering to pick up the daughter's bag one finds oneself confronted by
the mother's
And has to carry that one, too. So one hitchhiker
May deliberately hide another and one cup of coffee
Another, too, until one is over-excited. One love may hide another love
or the same love
As when "I love you" suddenly rings false and one discovers
The better love lingering behind, as when "I'm full of doubts"
Hides "I'm certain about something and it is that"
And one dream may hide another as is well known, always, too. In the
Garden of Eden
Adam and Eve may hide the real Adam and Eve.
Jerusalem may hide another Jerusalem.
When you come to something, stop to let it pass
So you can see what else is there. At home, no matter where,
Internal tracks pose dangers, too: one memory
Certainly hides another, that being what memory is all about,
The eternal reverse succession of contemplated entities. Reading
A Sentimental Journey look around
When you have finished, for Tristram Shandy, to see
If it is standing there, it should be, stronger
And more profound and theretofore hidden as Santa Maria Maggiore
May be hidden by similar churches inside Rome. One sidewalk
May hide another, as when you're asleep there, and
One song hide another song; a pounding upstairs
Hide the beating of drums. One friend may hide another, you sit at the
foot of a tree
With one and when you get up to leave there is another
Whom you'd have preferred to talk to all along. One teacher,
One doctor, one ecstasy, one illness, one woman, one man
May hide another. Pause to let the first one pass.
You think, Now it is safe to cross and you are hit by the next one. It
can be important
To have waited at least a moment to see what was already there.

posted by Lucia at 2:37 PM

An old friend just called because she's going to write a piece for our new local alternative newspaper (the only other choice is a Gannet affiliate,) and she wanted to incorporate something from my blog, which is NOT a blog, really. She is a peace activist, and want to draw on some cockamamie thing I said (we both attended Scott Ritter's talk.) Have been thinking/writing about my youth, which was governed by Vietnam, a war that remains vivid to me, not so much because ofwhat actually happened overseas, events of which I had just the dimmest awareness (I am just now reading Fire in the Lake to learn about the actualities) but rather because of the psychic force the war exerted on our developing hormonal teenage brains. Because we were only dimly aware, death seemed a vapor that engulfed us. It was everywhere, we were doomed, so there was no reason not to (for example) take LSD, what did the long-term effects matter?

Now an opposing idea circulates in the culture (or is it an idea that circulates among those growing old) that our paramount duty is to maintain our health. This program is hard for me to sign on to because 1) America is being run by people whose motives are so incomprehensible and things seem to be going to hell, and 2) I am sick and do not desire a long life. I guess I would like to return to the youthful damn-the-doom way of living, but can't work up the oomph to party anymore.

Here is a poem by Hayden Carruth that seems to fit.

On Being Asked to Write a Poem Against the War in Vietnam

Well I have and in fact
more than one and I'll
tell you this too

I wrote one against
Algeria that nightmare
and another against

Korea and another
against the one
I was in

and I don't remember
how many against
the three

when I was a boy
Abyssinia Spain and
Harlan County

and not one
breath was restored
to one

shattered throat
mans womans or childs
not one not

one
but death went on and on
never looking aside

except now and then like a child
with a furtive half-smile
to make sure I was noticing.
__________

The poem's being so artless leaves you unprepared for the metaphor that closes and clinches the poem and leaves me breathless because I see that smile. Come to think of it...uh oh...I know whose smile it is. It is Donald Rumsfeld's smile.

posted by Lucia at 11:15 AM

My friend was talking about Wallace Stevens the other day, and I realized that I don't know much about Wallace Stevens, I'd always avoided him because I didn't understand his aesthetic. But. If you are talking about poems to be comitted to memory, then it's the Stevens poems that pop up: "Emperor of Ice Cream" (the corpulent one, the roller of fat cigars)--why? Maybe he was working on the problem of how to turn the psyche (the privatemost of utterings) into a civic utterance, a public utterance. Whereas someone like Ashbery is concerned with the psyche's utterings, but not necessarily turning them into something civic.

So while I was thumbing through my Stevens book I found this, which seems applicable to the recent posts. I don't think he intended it as a poem. Anyway, I'd never seen it before, so I will post it.

[Prose statement on the poetry of war]

The immense poetry of war and the poetry of a work of the imagination are two different things. In the presence of the violent reality of war, consciousness takes the place of the imagination. And consciousness of an immense war is a consciousness of fact. If that is true, it follows that the poetry of war as a consciousness of the victories and defeats of nations, is a consciousness of fact, but of heroic fact, of fact on such a scale that the mere consciousness of it affects the scale of one's thinking and constitutes a participating in the heroic. It has been easy to say in recent times that everything tends to become real, or, rather, that everything moves in the direction of reality, that is to say, in the direction of fact. We leave fact and come back to it, come back to what we wanted fact to be, not to what it was, not to what it has too often remained. The poetry of a work of the imagination constantly illustrates the fundamental and endless struggle with fact. It goes on everywhere, even in the periods that we call peace. But in war, the desire to move in the direction of fact as we want it to be and to move quickly is overwhelming.
Nothing will ever appease this desire except a consciousness of fact as everyone is at least satisfied to have it be.
_____

Back to Lucia: I'm still chewing on this. There is of course a problem with fact right now, that is has, in a flash almost, become so fluid that fact doesn't exist. At least in its "represented" forms. If fact was in opposition to the imagination in the WWII days of Stevens' writing, the fluidness of the new non-facts still aren't equivalent to the imagination. Or are they? Your imagination can create a cyber reality where you fly around on a pterodactyl. (Dactyl!) Or you quit typing and go outside to stare at the trees, so that's what I'm going to do.

posted by Lucia at 12:13 PM

No poem now, but I will post that I heard somebody quoting Mark Twain on the radio: "Patriotism is being proud of your country all the time, but proud of your government only when it's right." Or something like that. No, no--now I remember. It was from a documentary made from interviews of former CIA people and weapons inspectors, who stated that the administration, including honorable people like Colin Powell, knew it was lying on WMD. It made me feel badly about not having done enough...well, I didn't actually do anything...to stop the war machine. All I've done is write poems. Someone left a really thoughtul comment about this.

posted by Lucia at 6:49 PM

Vivian--who made this web site and tells me what to do since the electronic world is mostly foreign to me and I am content to leave it that way--said I should write: I do not have cancer. I do not have cancer, Lisa! Whew, what a relief. I only have m.s.--is that a code, as people once said the big C? The lesson is: stick to poetry, though I will say that the new drug I'd been researching, which I mentioned because it was recommended to my considereration, was taken off the market because someone died, and the disturbing thing about this news is that I learned it from the business page of the NY Times, reporting on how the company stock tanked as a result. Shine, perishing republic.

posted by Lucia at 11:58 AM

Morning postcript to last night: today in the NY Times, I read a short interview with the British sculptor Damien Hirst--I think that's how you spell his name--the guy famous for putting dead animals in glass cases. When he was asked if he was angry at the way that the U.S. dragged the U.K. into war, he replied that he bore no ill sentiments and that he was not interested in politics. Then he quoted Sylvia Plath as saying that she was not interested in Hiroshima, she wanted to know what a tired surgeon was thinking late at night.

This struck me as stupid: the tired surgeon is thinking about Hiroshima, of course (assuming a surgeon operates out of compassion.) We are pebbles in the cement, making a sidewalk maybe. And the pebble can say: I'm not a sidewalk, I'm a pebble, an iconoclastic little singing pebble. But the pebble is still a sidewalk. That's why liberalism is sometimes annoying in its piety--how childish to pretend we're not all complicit. That we're not the sidewalk. And the pretense of disengagement also says: I'm not the sidewalk, and so is equally exasperating. How stupid the pebble is that doesn't want to admit it's the sidewalk. Or at least, conversely, the sidewalk is the pebbles. There's still an element of mutual cooperation whether the pebble accepts this or not.

Maybe the civic voice, the Jeffers voice, belongs to the fuddy-duddy grandpa. And some people recoil against Plath as childish. I guess most of us are muddled, between these two polarities.

posted by Lucia at 11:59 AM

Last week Scott Ritter came through town, the former weapons inspector who has turned against the war. He seemed like a blowhard, though he also made a lot of sense: the crowd revolted against his denigration of the peace movement as being ineffective ("you people did not stop the war, your candidate did not win the election, so obviously your tactics aren't working.") For a moment it seemed he might get hurt. I left feeling bad about my general lack of spine in relation to the war, my inability to come to any conclusion for more than the time it takes for the next thing I read to turn me around.

I was reminded about wanting to write about having seen Ritter today, when I stopped into the library and flipped through Dana Gioia's new book of essays on poetry. The essay that I paused with concerned the Auden poem that was circulated after 9/11 (though I was reading quickly to get back outside into the sun, it seemed Gioia was claiming responsibility for its circulation.) Apparently he'd been on a reading tour when the planes hit the towers, and cited Auden in the context of lobbying for poetry's ability to bring people together and give them solace, to speak to some fundamental common element that some might call the human soul.

I don't know much but I do know that this is a gross misreading of Auden's poem, as I've argued elsewhere. The poem in question is all about confusion and conflictedness, and that's the reason why it was appealing after 9/11: we were confused and conflicted. Poetry can't solve anything, can't "do" anything (too complicated to explain here--see Auden's essays) nor should it try to solve and do. That's not its business. You don't expect your dog to mow the lawn.

Still, poetry speaks to us, and to history (which is different from solving and doing.) I was thinking about Yeats' poem "The Second Coming," which is one of the few that I have been able to commit to memory--if you want to talk about freaky historical synchronicities, Yeats is your man, not Auden. (Come to think of it, we were almost precisely at the end of one of Yeats' 2,000 year vortex cycles on 9/11.)

But to write that poem here wouldn't serve a purpose, because a) I already know it and b) it's a little too apt--it would seem a little hokey. So I'll type this other one by Robinson Jeffers, someone I was reading because he's one of my voids.

Shine, Perishing Republic

While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity,
heavily thickening to empire,
And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops
and sighs out, and the mass hardens,

I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make
fruit, the fruit rots to make earth.
Out of the mother; and through the spring exultances,
ripeness and decadence; and home to the mother.

You making haste haste on decay: not blameworthy; life
is good, be it stubbornly long or suddenly
A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than
mountains: shine, perishing republic.

But for my children, I would have them keep their dis-
tance from the thickening center; corruption
Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the
monster's feet there are left the mountains.

And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man,
a clever servant, insufferable master.
There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught
--they say--God, when he walked the earth.
____
Some people would say Jeffers is a windbag, I guess. Maybe any poem that tries to be "civic," even crotchety-civic, is doomed.

posted by Lucia at 8:44 PM

This week was sucked into the vortex by dint of my having gotten my final dose of chemo, ever, I think--we the afflicted are quick to jump at the expensive carrots of the pharma-dowjones cartel. I haven't wanted to put much personal information on this anthology, but I will say that researching yesterday the next new treatment for my disease was distressing in that my googling turned up several prospectuses--prospectusi?--of what kind of dough investors could expect to make on the new drug.

I know this is how the system works here, and also that money can drive medicine in ways that are not all bad, which leads us to politics, which is really what I have wanted to write about, as I've been thinking about what a marginal operation poetry is, whether it has any cultural importance, which translates to political importance and communicative importance (I do think poems should communicate, should try to speak to somebody beyond the writer.)

Yet every now and again you (=I) come across a poem of such urgency, such nail-on-the-heading of what didn't seem to be able to be nailed, that the artform poetry becomes worthwhile again, and you (=I) remember why you were seduced in the first place.

O.K., it was this, from C.K. Williams. A couple of white people like Tony Hoagland have tried to write about race recently, brave attempts that nonetheless make me squeamish, I think because the white person enters the poem with lopsided odds, such heavy armor (racial/cultural engagement being the battleground of our current politics--the descendant of house slaves defending the war/the shareholder earning dividends from the invalid.)

Williams, though, captures the squeamishness and makes it the poem's center of gravity:

The Singing

I was walking home down a hill near our house on a balmy afternoon under the blossoms
Of the pear trees that go flamboyantly mad here every spring with
their burgeoning forth

When a young man turned in from a corner singing-- no, it was more of
a cadence shouting
Most of which I couldn't catch, I thought, because the young man was black, speaking black

It didn't matter I could tell me was making his song up, which pleased me he was nice-looking
Husky, dressed in some style of big pants obviously full of himself
hence his lyrical flowing over

We went along in the same direction then he noticed me there almost beside him and "Big"
He shouted-sang "Big" and I thought how droll to have my height incorporated in his song

So I smiled but the face of the young man showed nothing he looked
in fact pointedly away
And his song changed "I'm not a nice person" he chanted "I'm not
I'm not a nice person"

No menace was meant I gathered, no particular threat, but he did want to be certain I knew
That if my smile implied I conceived of anything like concord
between us I should forget it

That's all nothing else happened his song became indecipherable to
me again he arrived
Where he was going, a house where a girl in braids waited for him on
the porch that was all

No one saw no one heard all the unasked and unanswered questions
were left where they were
It occurred to me to sing back "I'm not a nice person either" but I couldn't come up with a tune

Besides I wouldn't have meant it nor he had believed it both of us
knew just where we were
In the duet we composed the equation we made the conventions to
which we were condemned

Sometimes it feels even when no one is there that someone something
is watching and listening
Someone to rectify redo remake this time again though no one saw nor heard no one was there


(Note: I took the text off a PBS newscast of Williams I had seen, but of course the text was butchered, which shows maybe how trivial poetry has become, that no intern corrected the poem. Which shows the butchering effect of cyberspace, too.)

I wish I had written this poem/I have written this poem in my head.


posted by Lucia at 1:32 PM

I would be a boring blogger indeed if I kept apologizing for my laziness, but I did have a bit of interesting feedback on the Gilbert poem and so I'll post it, since it made sense to me. Here it is, if I can figure out how to cut & paste:

"Now, about that Gilbert poem--it saddened me. I really like Gilbert, but that NYer poem seemed like the ultimate proof that a guy that operates like him has a tough time when he's trying to carry a "message" (who doesn't?). I shouldn't say this about a poet whose boots I am not fit to lick, but the poem seems hokey to me. Perhaps there is an ironic layer there, as you suggest, and I am not of the constant ironical/cynical/ain't I an arch and hip little schoolboy school."

Still, I can't figure out which way the Gilbert is to be read--surely he intends to present the riddle. Dead-on, it is sentimental: its writer would have to possess the kind of flagrant optimism that's kind of sickening. Then again, I am repeatedly attracted to poetry that my more critical friends find sentimental, ditto for my responses to culture at large (when I heard Condie Rice say today (our occupational let's-put-on-a-show, say- it-in-your-Ethel-Merman-voice election day,)"The Iraqi people are brave," I got a little phlegm in my throat at the same as I threw my shoe at the radio. Ambivalence meaning to hold two feelings at once, what Keats was talking about when he talked of "negative capability," which is another way of saying wishy-washiness.

The corn-pone usually speaks to me. Perhaps it is just my bad taste.


posted by Lucia at 4:57 PM

Sometimes it does seem poetry is an obsolete activity, which gets me to questioning its social function (must it have a social function?) and the very question makes me despair. Although much of the poetry generated in response to current politics seems juvenile to me, lately I have come across some poems that seem indispensible to our culture and that are profoundly moral. As a not-so-moral person or poet, this makes me quiver. Is it all right if morality is not part of my kit bag? Why can't I lend my shoulder to pulling the sledge of justice? A despair deja vu, and the last was barely over.

Still, here is a Jack Gilbert poem, from the New Yorker of all places, that blew my mind. Its construction tackles all my aforementioned shorthanded qualms by sneaking up behind them.

A Brief for the Defense

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostils.
But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure.
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafes and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.

I have tried to figure out if this poem is facetious--I suppose it both is and is not.

Now there are machine guns mounted on rafts that circle below my house, and today the warplanes flew with much clamor overhead.


posted by Lucia at 10:16 PM

Every day Garrison Keillor personally sends me a copy of his newsletter, and today was Robert Pinsky's birthday. He was quoted expressing his belief that a poem's most important component is the physical response, and the breath, that it elicits from a reader's body. So naturally he's interested in the poem as something that's recited out loud, and I think he's been working on anthologies with this in mind.

This idea appealed to me, as I'd just been reading Thomas Hardy's depressing novel Jude the Obscure for an essay about tragedy. I have a few theories. And I was looking at his poetry as well, though it figured into my tragedy concoction the merest bit. What struck me, though, is how I remembered some of the poems very vividly, though I had not looked at them in twenty years. The poem I most remember I pretty much nailed when it came to the recitation of it. I had all the words exactly right.

Now how can this be? I'll type the poem out: it's grounded in a heavy Da-dum-dum rhythm (dactyllic, for your scholars.) Is that enough to lock it in the brain? Maybe it also has something to do with certain sexual fantasies I had about the professor of the class, a woman. But I think not. Truly, it's the rhythm that locked the poem in (the way seal-a-meal locks in freshness.) Otherwise it's your typical subject matter of love and death. The only thing I couldn't remember was the title.

The Voice

Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,
Saying that now you are not as you were
When you had changed from the one who was all to me,
But as at first, when our day was fair.

Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,
Standing as when I drew near to the town
Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,
Even to the original air-blue gown!

Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness
Travelling across the wet mead to me here,
You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness,
Heard no more again far or near?

Thus I; faltering forward,
Leaves around me falling,
Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,
And the woman calling.


I read in the intro to Jude that Hardy wasn't even considered all that good a poet, though it does startle me that not only this poem but many in his Collected are still quite familiar. How does memorability touch on merit?


posted by Lucia at 9:43 PM

Today I was reading the fall issue of the literary magazine Shenandoah, in which David Wojahn--an excellent poet--has written a thoughtful essay about the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, how it has a corner on the college market, what challengers are out there, what the history of anthologies in general looks like, etc. I did not realize that the anthology has gotten so large that now contemporary poets--people who wrote after WWII--have been put in a separate anthology, to distinguish them from the older canonized modern poets; of course in both anthologies they've dredged up, or restored, more of a diverse group than the standard white guys. Since I've been out of academia for the past five years, I've been evicted from the gravy train where I used to get sent these books for free.

Interestingly, Wojahn lists the omission of Larry Levis, along with my pal Rodney Jones, and many poets I admire, like Brigit Pegeen Kelly...and even me! My heart did a funny flip when I read that. Also he talks about the omission of Etheridge Knight, a so-called jailhouse poet whom I've always admired. Despite the cultural mandate for the anthology to be more inclusive, Knight has been dropped, I suspect because some of his great poems--like his ballad about a cabin boy who survives the wreckage of the Titanic by swimming to shore--wouldn't play well these days. In particular I remember the line: "Now pussy's good and that's no jive/but you got to swim not fuck if you want to stay alive" (I think the character Shine gets offered sex if he'll save a woman...) He wrote in a tremendous diversity of styles.

What I want to post (I'll find the Knight poem and post it another day) is this poem by Borges that Wojahn closes with. It's about all those of us who'll be a minor footnote in history. If we're lucky.

To a Minor Poet in The Anthology

What now is the memory of the days
that were your days on earth, that spun the thread
of luck and grief and were, for you, the world?

They were swept away in the measurable torrent
of years. You're a word in an index.

To others the gods gave everlasting laurel,
inscriptions on coins and obelisks, avid biographers;
of you, my obscure friend, we know only
that, one evening, you heard a nightingale.

Among the asphodel of the shades, your meager shade
will feel that the gods have been ungenerous.

But the days are a tangle of commonplace miseries,
and what better luck than to be the ash
of which oblivion is made?

On other heads the gods have poured
the relentless lights of glory,
that peers into the hidden and picks out flaws,
glory, that ends by ruining the rose it adores--
to you, brother, they have shown themselves more merciful.

In the ecstasy of a dusk that will never be night,
you hear the voice of Theocritus' nightingale.


Interestingly, I found a parallel in an Albert Goldbarth poem that also appears in this issue. The poem contains the tidbit that an Australian woman had her dead husband's ashes added to her breast implants. I do wonder if Goldbarth made this up.


posted by Lucia at 6:30 PM

Way back, all of a month ago, I re-read Baudelaire because I was thinking of the idea of spleen. We don't recognize it as a psychic constellation anymore--no, get with the therapeutic progam, here's your zoloft. I was thinking about how I am a grump, whether there is any value to be dredged from that, and it would seem important to salvage some value from the glower and the curmudgeonly mood, or else why harbor it, even nurture it, as I do? Being pissed off all the time is a distraction, granted. But I would rather hang around with Dorothy Parker than...uh...well... someone too willfully cheerful, like Andy Warhol.

So that brought me to Baudelaire, who wrote a batch of poems on the subject. Nowadays his poetry doesn't play well to our sensibilities, because it is a bit too darkly romantic, sort of like the mood of a bad vampire movie. But he wrote a few poems we should remember. Here is Richard Howard's version of "The Happy Corpse," whose sentiments I heartily endorse, and I don't think I'm a cynic for saying that:

The Happy Corpse

Wherever the soil is rich and full of snails
I want to dig myself a nice deep grave--
deep enough to stretch out these old bones
and sleep in peace, like a shark in the cradling wave.

Testaments and tombstones always lie!
Before collecting such official grief.
I'd rather ask the crows, while I'm alive,
to pick my carcass clean from end to end.

They may be deaf and blind, my friends the worms,
yet surely they will welcome a happy corpse,
feasting philosophers, scions of decay,

eat your way through me without a second thought
and let me know if one last twinge is left
for a soulless body deader than the dead!

I like the bit about the crows. I think often of the Tibetan notion of "sky funeral"--for lack of burial ground, the body is ground up and fed to the birds. Flight is a nice part of the imagining. Plus the speed of the circling seems efficient. Why flush all the nutrients down the sewer? Surely there is a lean crow, or a lean worm, out there somewhere waiting for a meal.


posted by Lucia at 9:02 PM

A couple of nights ago I took down the editions of the Norton Anthology of Poetry that I own--three, and it is frightening for me to think that, since I was in graduate school in Syracuse, three editions have come and gone, especially since it seems I was in school just last week, though it has been twenty years. The most recent poets are, of course, the ones who have changed most. So I was looking for absences, and was struck by the fact that Larry Levis wasn't included, since he seems bound for history, a good poet and a tragic man.

There was a poem of his that was famous for a while, and where has it gone? I found it in his book, The Dollmaker's Ghost.


To a Wall of Flame in a Steel Mill, Syracuse, New York, 1969

Except under the cool shadows of pines,
The snow is already thawing
Along this road...
Such sun, and wind.
I think my father longed to disappear
While driving through this place once,
In 1957.
Beside him, my mother slept in a gray dress
While his thoughts moved like the shadow
Of a cloud over houses,
And he was seized, suddenly, by his own shyness,
By his desire to be grass,
And simplified.
Was it brought on
By the road, or the snow, or the sky
With nothing in it?
He kept sweating and wiping his face
Until it passed,
And I never knew.
But in the long journey away from my father,
I took only his silences, his indifference
To misfortune, rain, stones, music, and grief.
Now, I can sleep beside this road
If I have to,
Even while the stars pale and go out,
And it is day.
And if I can keep secrets for years,
The way a stone retains a warmth from the sun,
It is because men like us
Own nothing, really.
I remember, once,
In the steel mill where I worked,
Someone opened the door of the furnace
And I glanced in at the simple,
Quick and blank erasure the flames made of iron,
Of everything on earth.
It was reverence I felt then, and did not know why.
I do not know even now why my father
Lived out his one life
Farming two hundred acres of gray Malaga vines
And peach trees twisted
By winter. They lived, I think,
Because his hatred of them was entire,
And wordless.
I still think of him staring into this road
Twenty years ago,
While his hands gripped the wheel harder,
And his wish to be no one made his body tremble,
Like the touch
Of a woman he could not see,
Her fingers drifting up his spine in silence
Until his loneliness was perfect,
And she let him go--
Her laughter turning into these sheets of black
And glassy ice that dislodge themselves
And ride slowly out,
Onto the thawing river.

posted by Lucia at 4:17 PM

Now I am reading this immensely interesting (for the most part) book by Lewis Hyde called The Gift, which a friend told me to read about twenty years ago though I am just now getting around to it. The main thesis concerns poetry's being a gift that circulates the way that potlatch gifts once circulated: the poet is given inspiration, writes a poem, then gives the poem to someone else (readers, but that is supposing there are any,) all without renumeration. The anthropological chapters gripped me, but I admit some of the chapter on usury I skipped--now we're on to Walt Whitman and I'm back once again entrenched.

It occurs to me that profuse poets--Hyde calls them "enthusiasts"--at least the famous ones of this ilk--are male. Neruda Whitman Ginsberg Blake. Whereas the poets I am pulled to these days are fairly restrained and are female--Elizabeth Bishop would be my prime example. Dickinson wrote a lot, but the poems themselves are restrained. I can't think of many women who are profuse. Is this because we are self-doubters?

Says Whitman: "I too knitted the old knot of contrareity."

Here and there with dimes on the eyes walking,
To feed the greed of the belly the brains liberally spooning,
Tickets buying, taking, selling, but in to the feast never once going,
Many sweating, ploughing, thrashing, and then the chaff for payment receiving,
A few idly owning, and they the wheat continually claiming.

Profuseness does not suit memory, though, however profuse is the grass.
But you can dance on the lawn, I will admit. Reading this makes me want to write to my friend from so long ago, which is the point I guess. The book is subtitled "Imagination and the Erotic life of Property," eros being the coming-together of separate things, and logos implying the discerning of their differences.

But I am not an enthusiast and would never go to a church where I was supposed to shout and dance. It was interesting to me that Hyde notes that rich people do not do this. Poor people do.


posted by Lucia at 12:00 AM

For many days I have been in the thickets of Emily Dickinson by way of a very thick biography. My friend Maria said she was told by a teacher: all women poets must confront Dickinson eventually. Now I understand this. I don't know why I didn't pay her more heed in my youth.

What entices me is ED's clear sense of election: her faith in her own poetry, that "this is my job to do"--though no one ever told her anything she wrote was worth a damn. When she briefly went off to Mount Holyoke the college was run by a Miss Lyons, who gave her the injunction: "Never write a foolish thing in a letter or elsewhere; 'what is written is written.'"

I have been thinking much about this because, as I prepare to move, I've been looking over old journals and pondering whether to burn them, as the writing contained in them is quite embarrassing. I don't know that I ever strove, as a daily act of living--instead I was the good-time girl. Possibly, historically, there are good writers who were good-time girls but I think not many. Think Zelda Fitzgerald and Edna St Vincent Millay. They come to sad ends.

Every time I go through Dickinson I find something really great though, like this here #1010:

Crumbling is not an instant's Act
A fundamental pause
Dilapidation's processes
Are organized Decays -

'Tis first a Cobweb on the Soul
A Cuticle of Dust
A Borer in the Axis
An Elemental Rust -

Ruin is formal - Devil's work
Consecutive and slow -
Fall in an instant, no man did
Slipping - is Crashe's law -

Well this is not a consistently true theorem but it seems applicable to chronic illness. I asked Maria, who is also a poet, why we didn't go the route of Emily Dickinson. Maria said: Because we wanted to have sex!

And therein was our ruin.

posted by Lucia at 9:50 PM

I found the Bishop poem--what I didn't have was the shape of the poem, which is the key to its structure. It's stunning how rapidly things will lose their currency in our culture--the Hemans poem circulating for more than a hundred years, then poof: it's gone.

Casabianca

Love's the boy stood on the burning deck
trying to recite "The boy stood on
the burning deck." Love's the son
stood stammering elocution
while the poor ship in flames went down.

Love's the obstinate boy, the ship,
even the swimming sailors, who
would like a schoolroom platform, too,
or an excuse to stay
on deck. And love's the burning boy.


I don't see how I could have forgotten a few key words: elocution, obstinate.

posted by Lucia at 10:44 AM

Last night, I read an amazing Richard Powers' essay in the new Pushcart volume about how computers will affect books and the narrative in general--some lab has created a program that can produce quite effective and genuine and even autonomous characters and plots. I don't quite know what to make of it all--both the essay and the cyber-world. Am I turning my back on the real one? Or the book one? By wasting time with the blog.

But I must say there is a serendipity that comes with all this information overload. In regards to my brain's limited storage capacity, for example, I have always tried to hold there Elizabeth Bishop's poem Casabianca, which I think I know by heart, and as I don't have her book at hand I'll type it out as well as I can remember:

Love's the boy stood on the deck trying to recite
"The boy stood on the burning deck."
Love's the boy stood on the deck while the whole
proud ship in flames went down.

Love's the boy, the burning ship and even the swimming sailors who
would love to have a schoolroom platform too
or any excuse to stay on deck.
And love's the burning boy.

Since I typed that from memory, the line breaks are probably all wrong, as well as other glitches. But I always loved that poem and never knew what it meant, until the other day when Garrison Keillor e-mailed me his chosen poem for the day. It's long, but here's the beginning of it, by Felicia Dorothea Hemans.

Casabianca

The boy stood on the burning deck
Whence all but he had fled;
The flame that lit the battle's wreck
Shone round him o'er the dead.

Yet beautiful and bright he stood,
As born to rule the storm;
A creature of heroic blood,
A proud, though childlike form.


FDH lived 1793-1835: don't know if I'll research her more than that. But at last the mystery is solved.

Also the other day I found out who Gaspara Stampa was (a 16th century Italian writer of sonnets.) Her name figured into a contemporary poem I used to like, and use in class, but I can't remember much more about it than that it included a line about having "hands like eggbeaters." If anyone knows where that line comes from, let me know.


posted by Lucia at 11:50 AM

Partly why I remain a renegade of the blogosphere is that I've not yet learned my Milton, not only "When I Consider How My Light Was Spent" but his bang-up "On the Late Massacre of the Piedmontese." You must learn these if you're is going to spend any time on line at the Post Office, me having never been much good for toting something like a book. And I got hung up on Milton as a result of having gotten hung up on swimming, long story, hole in body, surgery etc.

So now my skin has been remade entire, and I plan to swim as soon as the slush melts, tomorrow maybe. But in this week of holing up I've been thinking about my essay on birds, the one that exists 92% in my head. Emily Dickinson's going to be in it, and whipping through her each time I always find a lot of poems that are new. This time I also got a sense of the sweep of the work: as far as birds go, and she goes far, her work seems to utilize them a lot at its beginnings, and then she moves to more metaphysical subject matter, which makes sense, if we accept the myth that she became more and more agoraphobic--windows will only take you so far. This is sad, to contemplate how the physical constraints of a life also control its artistic production, and it was in protest of this idea that I decided, this fall, to keep track of the birds as they migrate in and out of town (would have been a better idea last winter, when the weather was fair...)

A couple of days ago in the freak storm we did go look off the point, where the ducks were huddled in the bay. Very close and still, immobile.

It's clear that Dickinson equates her poetic gift with bird song, and toward the end of her life she knows she's shutting down (from the whirlwind years of her younger adulthood.) Here is a good short one, #1478:

One note from One Bird
Is better than a Million Word -
A scabbard has - but one sword

I guess this is sad: her self-knowledge of her own winding down. It is the subject of #1089:

The Opening and the Close
Of Being, are alike
Or differ, if they do,
As Bloom opon a Stalk-

That from an equal Seed
Unto an equal Bud
Go parallel, perfected
In that they have decayed -

posted by Lucia at 10:14 PM

Vivian has been pestering me again, so I thought I'd type another poem. I have been thinking about poetry and patronage lately, and in my research came across the fact that Teddy Roosevelt did provide a stipend to E.A. Robinson after reading his first book--Robinson just had to show up: he read the paper and left it on the chair of his office at a NY customs house, to show he'd been there.

I also unearthed the fact that no Republicans have--is commissioned the right word?--well, given audience to an inaugural poem. At least of late. Kennedy famously had Robert Frost read "The Gift Outright," which is a loathsome poem I think (I don't want to memorize that one though perhaps I should, so I can drag it out whenever I want to prove my point about how poetry and politics do not mix usually, either for the purposes of the left or for the right and that goes for antiwar poems too.) Clinton had first Maya Angelou then Miller Williams (father of Lucinda) concoct poems for his inaugurals. Carter had James Dickey (must research what that wild man wrote.)

But no poems for Bush. And now he has been burned reciprocally by the poets. I've been wondering why it is exactly that poetry aligns itself with the left. Is it because, being not a profit-making endeavor, poetry lies outside the capitalist loop, and is therefore threatening?
There is more to it that I have to think through.

Okay but back to Robinson: I've known "Richard Cory" forever, because it was a Simon and Garfunkel song. His morals are simple, but that is the charm of the poems: they position themselves so opposite the cerebral calisthenics that T.S. Eliot was doing in those same years. The other day though I also found this one which has echoed with me.

Reuben Bright

Because he was a butcher and thereby
did earn an honest living (and did right),
I would not have you think that Reuben Bright
Was any more a brute than you or I;

For when they told him that his wife must die,
He stared at them, and shook with grief and fright,
And cried like a great baby half that night,
And made the women cry to see him cry.

And after she was dead, and he had paid
The singers and the sexton and the rest,
He packed a lot of things that she had made
Most mournfully away in an old chest
Of hers, and put some chopped-up cedar boughs
In with them, and tore down the slaughter house.


That's it: quite simple. But it makes me wish for rhyming poetry again, and yet when poets do rhyme these days, it (the poem) is usually like a businessman trying to hold a barn-raising or driving around in his model T on Sundays, everything so forced and corny. Rhyme is something we cannot go back to, at least not in the Reuben Bright way. This makes the poem so doubly sad. I don't have any solution.

posted by Lucia at 8:40 PM

Vivian says I have to blog, so all right already. I have not memorized Plath or Milton; in fact I had forgotten about them, having fallen off the improve-my-gray-matter track of late. What happened was that my van burst into flames, and Jim dragged me out and I survived, but I was not particularly grateful. People think you are a soresport if you make this kind of remark, and by way of reply I'll just post Tony Hoagland's poem.

Suicide Song

But now I am afraid I know too much to kill myself
Though I would still like to jump off a high bridge

At midnight, or paddle a kayak out to sea
Until I turn into a speck, or wear a necktie made of knotted rope

But people would squirm, it would hurt them in some way
And I am too knowledgable now to hurt people imprecisely

No longer do I live by the law of me
No longer having the excuse of youth or craziness

And dying you know shows a serious ingratitude
for sunsets and beehive hairdos and the precious green corrugated

Pickles they place at the edge of your plate
Killing yourself is wasteful like spilling oil

At sea or not recycling all the kisses you've been given
And anyway, who has clothes nice enough

To be caught dead in? You stay alive you stupid asshole
Because you haven't been excused

You haven't finished though it takes a stubborn appetite
To chew this food

It is a stone it is an inconvenience it is an innocence
And I turn against it like a record

Turns against the needle
That makes it play.


Poet Hayden Carruth wrote an essay about his suicide attempt--I think he later renounced the piece--in which he speaks of being granted time out of time by his survival (and I was never sure of what he meant by this.) However, I noticed that I was not possessed of a light-heartedness by my survival, the cathartic voltage of the saved. So there must be something wrong with me, I guess, though the value-assessment of life does change (and even our culture's insistence that you make an appropriate assessment) when you're one of the afflicted. You're half let off the hook, but only half--you still have to be a trouper.

And being a trouper I actually find more fun. Things keep happening. We rode our kayaks in the bay the other day and it was all bash bash bash saltwater in the face, our dinky bay more rough than I have ever seen and I am glad to have been so roughly handled by it. Too small to ever disappear like a speck, though last year a young man did--his canoe found but never him.

But I also was a party to the poem's ingrateful oil spill, as a full tank from my VW van leaked out and burned. Closed traffic on the main drag. In this way it was like a parade, a holiday.



posted by Lucia at 1:24 PM

I did find the Collins essay, "My Grandfather's Tackle Box." Are we to feel guilty for using our lives in our poems? I always proceeded on the assumption that I had the freedom to use my life, though it was never my life, was my mythical life. Anyway, a propos this topic, I thought I ought to memorize Milton's poem on his blindness, so that maybe it will teach me to quit obsessing on all those lives I should have had, the lives I think I want better than this one, the lives that thus occlude this one, with all its riches.

When I Consider How My Light Is Spent

When I consider how my light is spent
Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide
Lodged with me useless, though my sould more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest he returning chide:
"Doth God exact day-labor, light denied?"
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 mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed
And post o'er land and ocean without rest;
They also serve who only stand and wait."

Well I cannot exactly stand, and don't exactly believe, but the lesson is well-taken.

posted by Lucia at 11:40 PM

So I had a post to my guest book from somebody promoting a porno site--my friend Vivian (webmistress) reminded me that by now somebody has no doubt invented a program that sleuths through the guest book company's program so that more porn and more penis enlargement snake oil can infiltrate more aspects of our culture. And who are those men who desire to enlarge their penises anyway--no one I know is fessing up. But back to the guest book--the penetration gave me the heebie-jeebies, electronic though it be. So I scrapped the guest book feature, whose orange font I did not like anyway.

My pal Tim and I returned to Seattle a third time in as many months to see the poet David Kirby. I like his work very much--a Henry James scholar, he can cull from a big database, of high culture and low. Plus he is extremely entertaining, and accessible, which got me thinking about the whole subject of accessibility--the May/June issue of American Poetry Review contained an essay by a guy named F.D. Reeve, who wrote against accessible poetry as it is typified by (his clique) Billy Collins, Lawrence Raab and Tony Hoagland. It just so happens that I like these guys' poems in particular, which in turn got me thinking: so am I stupid? The mysterious Mr. Reeve was writing in rebuttal to a Collins essay I hadn't read that appeared in Poetry magazine. Collins' complaint was against the use of autobiography in poems, or so I gathered. In the APR essay at least, autobiography and accessibility were being conflated. That makes a dim sort of sense, in that autobiographical/confessional poetry was born in mid-century in response to T.S. Eliot's inaugurating a breed of poem that was 1) challenging academically and 2) devoid of autobiographical life (contrast Yeats or Hardy) ("poetry is an escape from personality"--this is Eliot I think in "Tradition and the Individual Talent.") So I guess we may never untangle the two sins, or virtues, depending on your inclination.

Whenever people want to talk about the virtues of working in what is called the "confessional" autobiographical mode, they inevitably come around to Sylvia Plath's poem, "Daddy." This is a memorable poem (a good one for memorizing too) in that it breaks many rules and points up the truth to my rule about rules: if you're going to break them then you have to break them profoundly so that the rule is utterly smashed. But too bad for Plath that she is remembered for her few somewhat hysterical poems at the expense of the many fine more meditative pieces that she wrote.

I wanted to try to learn a favorite poem of hers, which I'll type out now. By the way, the blog is coming along slowly because I truly am trying to memorize poems.

Black Rook in Rainy Weather
On the stiff twig up there
Hunches a wet black rook
Arranging and rearranging its feathers in the rain.
I do not expect a miracle
Or an accident

To set the sight on fire
In my eye, nor seek
Any more in the desultory weather some design,
Gut let spotted leaves fall as they fall,
Without ceremony, or portent

Although, I admit, I desire,
Occasionally some backtalk
From the mute sky, I can't honestly complain.
A certain minor light may still
Leap incandescent

Out of kitchen table or chair
As if a celestial burning took
Possession of the most obtuse objects now and then--
Thus hallowing an interval
Otherwise inconsequent

By bestowing largesse, honor,
One might say love. At any rate, I now walk
Wary (for it could happen
Even in this dull ruinous landscape); skeptical,
Yet politic; ignorant

Of whatever angel may choose to flare
Suddenly at my elbow. I only know that a rook
Ordering its black feathers can so shine
As to seize my senses, haul
My eyelids up, and grant

A brief respite from fear
Of total neutrality. With luck,
Trekking stubborn through this season
Of fatigue, I shall
Patch together a content

Of sorts. Miracles occur,
If you care to call those spasmodic
Tricks of radiance miracles. The wait's begun again,
The long wait for the angel,
For that rare, random descent.


(it was not until I typed out this poem that I saw the form: line endings in all stanzas match. So I am stupid.



posted by Lucia at 9:24 PM

Last night a few of us drove to Seattle to hear Galway Kinnel read: he is a poet whose voice commands great authority and he commits many poems to heart. His poems were great, and so was the delivery. So it was a boost for the project of this blog, which does feel a little silly when I stop to think about it. The memorization, though, has given me something more interesting to do than read Time magazine when I find myself waiting at the doctor's office without a book. In lieu of transcendental meditation.

Kinnel has also got me to thinking about civic oratory, about poems that fall within a loose category that I'd call the civil tradition. I'd argue that poetry of the past, at least some significant portion of it, intended to speak for us all as a culture and was an important part of the social glue. Errr...I'm shuffling through the mental database...well Frost certainly, some of Yeats, even Wallace Stevens had this intention. But now it is not so easy. We are suspicious of grand claims and, when it comes to language, prefer the demotic. Kinnell did seem to be a writing poems that are larger than himself--even though he's already pretty tall.

But he's not the poet I want to type here now. For a few weeks I've had a New Yorker on my desk that contains a poem by Philip Levine. He's an example of someone who maybe speaks to our larger American selves while at the same time keeping his writing free of oratorial grand gestures.

A View of Home

From Ontario's shore one sees
the smoking stacks of breweries,
the ore boats beached and fuming,
the satanic stove factory
where my great-uncle lost fairh
in serf-work, and sold his birthright,
his hip boots, his gauntlets
of cracked leather, his gold watch.
"Bye! bye!" he sang, from the window
of the train, his face aglow
with the joy of the adventure.
He was going back to die for good
Tsar Nicholas. The waters of life
are pure, the Tao says, but our river
is salted with blown truck tires,
non-union organizers, dead carp
floating silver side up, and is pulled
by a tide of money, and whatever it
nourishes it turns to pure shit.











posted by Lucia at 10:02 PM

I'm teaching (so to speak) an internet course, and we're operating with a theorem (to be proved true or not, as a hypothetical exercise) that a certain strain--I would argue a dominant strain--of American poetry at this moment comes out of the tradition of James Wright and Elizabeth Bishop (as opposed to say William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens.) There's a ridiculous sentimentality at work in Wright, and he can pull it off because a) the intellect behind it comes through somehow (haven't nailed this down yet) and b) the concrete images chosen are both melodically precise and thematically exact. Now that I think of Wright's concrete-ness I realize that it is, of course, completely informed by WCW. So I just shot myself in the foot.

But it did send me back to work on my memorization of "Autumn Comes to Martin's Ferry." I'm going to try to do it here by brain power alone, and then I'll check how I did. Multiple Sclerosis causes cognitive impairments that I know I suffer from, and this mental training will, I hope, counterbalance some of the impairment.

Autumn Comes to Martin's Ferry

In Shreve High Football Stadium
I think of pollacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville
and gray faces of negroes in the blast furnace at Benbow
and the ruptured night watchman at Wheeling Steel,
dreaming of heroes.

All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.
Their women cluck like starved pullets,
dying for love.

Therefore
their sons grow suicidally beautiful at the end of October
and gallop terribly against each other's bodies.


Spelled Polacks wrong, screwed up capitalization, fused two lines, but otherwise I did all right. I'd like to post another poem while I'm typing, one that is not nearly as well known. I'll try to memorize it--this will be hard, as it's so colloquial

Northern Pike

All right. Try this
Then. Every body
I know and care for,
And every body
Else is going
To die in loneliness
I can't imagine and a pain
I don't know. We had
To go on living. We
untangled the net, we slit
The body of the fish
Open from the hinge of the tail
To a place beneath the chin
I wish I could sing of.
I would just as soon we let
The living go on living.
An old poet whom we believe in
Said the same thing, and so
We paused among the dark cattails and prayed
For the muskrats,
For the ripples below their tails,
For the little movements we knew the crawdads
were making under water,
For the right-hand wrist of my cousin who is a policeman.
We prayed for the game warden's blindness.
We prayed for the road home.
We ate the fish.
There must be something very beautiful in my body,
I am so happy.


So there's the easy ecstatic end, the critic could argue, and what else? The poem's beauty comes from its structuring of the simplest building blocks. Its hyperbolic grattitude for the solid things of the world reminds me of the ancient Japanese poets that Wright often makes mention of.



posted by Lucia at 11:57 PM

My webmistress Vivian, who got me into this blog in the first place, recently suffered through the death of her mother. In the midst of the most horrible days, I was hoping to track her through her blog, thus sparing her my phone calls. She didn't log in on those days, though, and now she's thinking about killing her blog off altogether, though I think it's her intent to make a new one. In her case, it has served a good purpose, allowing those of us who worry about her with the means to track her (she lives alone.)

But there does seem to be something distasteful about broadcasting oneself to the world, particularly in the rightfully private moments of grief. When Jackie Kennedy died, when we heard her children on the radio, stoically reading the poems of C.P. Cavafy, a part of me felt that this public display had to be yet another false manifestation of the Kennedy myth, that true grief would never allow it. Grief's authentic manifestation would be an untranslated animal wail. And there's not much written about grief that strikes me as both great and true. Surely this is because of the difficulty we're met with when we try to translate its language. I'm not sure the translation is possible.

But I thought I might put up Emily Dickenson's great poem about grief's aftermath, #341. This is one I mean to learn. Last week I devoted myself finally to May Swenson's poem and have got it down. But my memory takes a lot of maintenance, I'm finding. Not sure how those ancient Greeks managed to master the thousands of lines that were required to get into college. We can understand why lyric poetry evolved.

341
After great pain, a formal feeling comes--
The nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs--
The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,
And yesterday, or Centuries before?

The feet, mechanical, go round--
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought--
A Wooden way
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone--

This is the Hour of Lead--
Rembembered, if outlived,
As freezing persons, recollect the Snow--
First--Chill--then Stupor--then the letting go--



posted by Lucia at 3:10 PM

At least my friend Vivian is reading the blog and catching the typos. A couple of other friends have expressed interest in the radio show I did on salmon, which as I've already noted here is not available at the KUOW website. So I'll type out the other poem I read that was not my own (I also read three of my salmon poems, which is about all I've got--though I readily admit I can't compete with Kunitz.)

The initiating premise for my poems, in several cases, are Scott Chambers' photographs of dead salmon. He feels quite strongly (as do others) that salmon populations are imperiled by our hatchery system, which for years has pumped out farmed fish that compete with wild fish, thereby altering the gene pool and behavior of wild stock. This genetic and behavioral dilution (in addition to habitat alteration and outright loss) is at the crux of the salmon issue here in the Northwest, whose loudest political manifestation is probably the removal (or not) of dams along the Columbia River. Biologists have gone in and killed the hatchery fish along rivers in Oregon where wild stock restorations are being attempted. This, of course, has led to public outcry--when people have gone hiking and seen salmon being bludgeoned.

We also bludgeon salmon here in Olympia, or used to. Reproductive success is apparently better when you mix the eggs and milt artificially--at least that is the practice of hatcheries. The new Pushcart anthology contains the poem I've already mentioned, about this very activity ("Killing Salmon" by a Portland poet named Matt Yurdana. I don't know him. He doesn't know his poem is here.)

I still wonder at the end of this poem, why Yurdana jumps to old movies. Artificiality meets artificiality, perhaps? So the letter in the wrong hands (in the movie) is also a reflection of how the fish have moved so far out of their natural context.

Killing Salmon

After five weeks it's difficult to see them, each like a shadow with
the same struggle and heft as the one it follows,

the swift, tapered moments nearly overlapping

as we wade into them, in pairs, after the net is pulled taut, one of us
stooping to find the muscled groove above the tail that's made for
the hand,

then twisting it up while sliding thumb and forefinger inside the
gills, holding it out and away from the body, while the other

delivers two quick blows behind the eyes with a length of steel pipe,
a shuddering, then a deep loosening

as it rides the conveyor up to the spawning room.

Those first days, their dramatic humps, the red and bruised greens
moving like a thunder storm across their bellies

kept us respectful and arrogant, believing we were an essential link
in their life cycle,

but now, every third day or so, one of us slips into a rage; maybe it's
a blunt snout ramming his shin, or the overgrown teeth snagging
his waders

that makes him climb, as each of us has climbed, the cement bank
of the holding pond, dragging the salmon behing him with more
anger

than long hours, miserable pay, and the agony of our lower backs
should allow,

fifteen second where everything wrong in his life exists in the body
of this fish,

and he kneels, jaws clenched, ears gone red, swinging the steel pipe
again and again until it is unrecognizable'

and afterward, before his breathing slows, he tries to tell himself he
didn't enjoy it, that it wasn't satisfying, but back in the pond

he's a little embarrassed, a little afraid, and it lingers

like the nightmares he used to wake from on those quiet summer
nights from back home,

trembling in the bathroom, washing his face under the startling light
or catching the tail end of an old black and white late-night
movie,

where two lovers suffered over a whisper out of context, a letter in
the wrong hands, a message never delivered on which the entire
plot rests,

simple and reassuring, mistakes he'd made a dozen times, misun-
derstandings he could understand and carry with him back into
sleep.



posted by Lucia at 11:41 AM

Yesterday I did my radio blab on the Bardo project, which is a loose coalition of a few folks who are interested in writing about photographs that a man named Scott Chambers took--the photos are of dead salmon. I have a few dead salmon poems, and Kim Addonizio has a rather nice one that I did not get to read on the air. Eventually my reading will be archived at kuow.org but it is not there now because of some problem caused by Garrison Keillor that I did not understand.

I did read a poem by a Portland poet named Matt Yurdana--"Killing Salmon" is in the new Pushcart Collection. In it, a fisheries worker goes postal on a salmon (after hearing me read it, a friend called to say that he felt this was emotionally inauthentic.)

But the mother of all salmon poems is by Stanley Kunitz. I admire this poem so much that I will also offer my critique: I don't like the places where the poem waxes metaphysical ("the only dance is love"--surely that is not true. It reminds me of Auden's "we must love one another or die"--which he renounced.)

Where Kunitz's poem gets it right is where it offers its concise and exactly accurate depictions of the death processes of the fish--one of the great biological spectacles on which this country is founded. And its strategy of positing some mode of human understanding, then denying that we can possess it, also seems like an accurate summary of our dumbfoundedness when we are confronted with this spectacle each year.

King of the River

If the water were clear enough,
if the water were still,
but the water is not clear,
the water is not still,
you would see yourself,
slipped out of your skin,
nosing upstream,
slapping, thrashing,
tumbling
over the rocks
till you paint them
with your belly's blood:
Finned Ego
yard of muscle that coils,
uncoils.

If the knowledge were given you,
but it is not given,
for the membrane is clouded
with self-deceptiions
and the iridescent image swims
through a mirror that flows,
you would surprise yourself
in that other flesh
heavy with milt,
bruised, battering toward the dam
that lips the orgiastic pool.

Come. Bathe in these waters.
Increase and die.

If the power were granted you
to break out of your cells,
but the imagination fails
and the doors of the senses close
on the child within,
you would dare to be changed,
as you are changing now,
into the shape you dread
beyond the merely human.
A dry fire eats you.
Fat drips from your bones.
The flutes of your gills discolor.
You have become a ship of parasites.
The great clock of your life
is slowing down,
and the small clocks run wild.
For this you were born.
You have cried to the wind
and heard the wind's reply:
"I did not choose the way,
the way chose me."
You have tasted the fire on your tongue
till it is swollen black
with a prophetic joy:
"Burn with me!
The only music is time,
the only dance is love."

If the heart were pure enough,
but it is not pure,
you would admit
that nothing compels you
any more, nothing
at all abides,
but nostalgia and desire,
the two-way ladder
between heaven and hell.
On the threshold
of the last mystery
at the brute absolute hour,
you have looked into the eyes
of your creature self,
which are glazed with madness,
and you say
he is not broken but endures,
limber and firm
in the state of his shining,
forever inheriting his salt kingdom,
from which he is banished
forever.



posted by Lucia at 9:26 PM

Someone asked that I write more here. All right! I'm shooting for twice a week to keep myself reading/memorizing. I still have to work on the Swenson, though.

So I was thinking of Sharon Olds, a popular poet, and as I said her book The Dead and the Living changed the poetic landscape for me. Now that book has come to me from the library because I couldn't find it in my storage locker, and I've been re-reading, and I see that where its flaw lies (besides in the eccentric line breaks) is in how it juxtaposes the sexual with...well, things that seem to be demeaned by the juxtaposition (a starving woman/her eggs in her ovaries dropping.) There was a time that sexual juxtaposition was revolutionary I suppose. It seems dated now, though, when it is used to elevate a poem's ability to startle (when there's nothing else startling or even happening particularly.) Or maybe it is indicative of a youthful period in a writer's life. I know I juxtaposed the sexual shamelessly. In my case I think this was indicative of a complete lack of taste. Someone, I forget, maybe Eliot, or Auden, talks about how taste should be a hallmark of a poet's merit. But I think that's wrong: bad taste is not irrelevant Or else what do we do with Whitman? Larkin? In certain ways I wish my taste had matured earlier in my life. But bad taste taught me things too. It can make a person fearless.

But I think the thing about Olds that was revolutionary was the forthright way in which she proceeded. Nothing arty-farty to jazz the poems up in a false way (this would be Sexton's flaw.) So here's a good example from Dead and Living, which came out in the eighties and is still in print.

THE ISSUES
(Rhodesia, l978)

Just don't tell me about the issues.
I can see the pale spider-belly head of the
newborn who lies on the lawn, the web of
veins at the surface of her scalp, her skin
grey and gleaming, the clean line of the
bayonet down the center of her chest.
I see her mother's face, beaten and
beaten into the shape of a plant,
a cactus with grey spines and broad
dark maroon blooms.
I see her arm stretched out across her baby,
wrist resting, heavily, still, across the
winy ribs.
Don't speak to me about
politics. I've got eyes, man.



posted by Lucia at 7:33 PM

I have been thinking about Sharon Olds ever since reading a bad review of her new book in the New York Times. In rebuttal I said to myself: Well we must remember The Dead and the Living. How much that book seemed to change everything in the 80s. Perhaps I was merely young. But at the time it riveted me with its fearlessness and its forthright voice.

So I went to my storage locker to find the book because I was going to post something here that would solidify my rebuttal--some superbly crafted small thing that was not about the self. I couldn't find the book, so the posting on that score will have to wait. But my thinking about Olds also made me think of Anne Sexton, who, it seems to me, is a grandmother to many of us no matter if we renounce her or not. I think all the charges of self-indulgence that have been lobbed at her make us forget the early work, which is tightly constructed and not at all hobbled by the poet's autobiographical life. So I'll post one that I mean to memorize, and I think it's a testament to the poem's craft that I can recall it so well even though I've never thought about it much.

(By the way, I did memorize the Logan.)

(Also: I just went to get this poem out of the Norton Anthology but there were no entries at all for Sexton--very surprising.)

HER KIND

I have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.

I have found the warm caves in the woods,
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,
closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:
whining, rearranging the disaligned.
A woman like that is misunderstood.
I have been her kind.

I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by,
learning the last bright routes, survivor
where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
I have been her kind.



posted by Lucia at 9:58 PM

I've been reading a book of movie reviews by Pauline Kael and she's making me feel stupid. I am impressed by her ability hitch a variety of data to the ox-cart of some grand critical claim. I doubt most grand critical claims can hold up under scrutiny, but still I am envious of those writers who are fearless enough to nail their collars to the whim of the moment. My thinking is generally too gauzy for that: I nail it but the fabric rips loose every time I turn my head.

Reading Kael brought me to the question: how come the poetry in the New Yorker (which Kael wrote for) is hardly ever good? Usually I find it prettty namby-pamby, and I know a lot of other people who feel the same way. You would think that an outfit that pays pretty well would have its pick of all the poems in the universe. But I bet the flood of incoming mail can clog the gears of the editorial machine.

So here is a New Yorker poem that I thought was pretty good. The writers name is Dan Chiasson. I realize there's a style of poem I like that is not lyrical, is not song, is not suited to memory and repetition. More likely the poem is an essay that blooms from the general root of narrative. We don't have a word for it exactly. Here's one: Narrexpozyric.

My Ravine

How will you know what my poem is like
until you've gone down my ravine and seen

the box springs, mattresses, bookcases, and desks
the neighboring women's college dumps each year,

somebody's hair dryer, someone's Herodotus
a poem's dream landscape, one half Latin and

one half shit, the neighboring women's college shit?
Wheelbarrow upon wheelbarrow, a humpbacked

custodian hauls old dormitory furniture down
and launches it, watching it roll into the pile.

You won't know how my poem decides what's in,
what's out, what decorum means and doesn't mean,

until you follow him home after work, and see him
going wild all night imagining those girls' old beds.

You won't know what I'm trying for until you hear
how every fall in my back yard a swarm of deer

materializes, scavenging where the raspberries touched
the radishes, now plowed under, itching the lawn

for dandelions, stare at each other and wander
bewildered down my ravine and turn into skeletons.




posted by Lucia at 9:42 PM

Lines from this poem by John Berryman often come back to me, especially: "Do me glory, come the whole way across town." The poem foreshadows the poet's suicide, and so I have always wanted to know the history of it--was it a suicide note delivered in the form of a sonnet? Will anyone stumble on the blog with the answer?

Of course Berryman is known for his dream songs, whose form is sort of a variant, extended sonnet. I think I can easily commit this one to memory, but it scares me. Is this a poem I want in my head? I do love it, but loving it is part of the problem. It delights in its own nihilistic urge.

THE POET'S FINAL INSTRUCTIONS

Dog-tired, suisired, will now my body down
near Cedar Avenue in Minneap,
when my crime comes. I am blazing with hope.
Do me glory, come the whole way across town.

I couldn't rest from hell just anywhere,
in commonplaces. Choiring and strange my pall!
I might not lie still in the waste of St. Paul
or buy DAD's root beer; good signs I forgive.

Drop here, with honour due, my trunk and brain
among the passioning of my countrymen
unable to read, rich, proud of their tags
and proud of me. Assemble all my bags!
Bury me in a hole, and give a cheer,
near Cedar on Lake Street, where the used cars live.



posted by Lucia at 6:46 PM

I contracted some sort of voodoo staph infection, perhaps in Hawaii, and last week it took hold of me and brought me closer than I perhaps want to brought to issues of mortality. The inescapable subject is the body, and it is oppressive to be brought to the body again and again. You try to think "Freedom" and hear in response "Body!" You try to think "Art" and hear "No, Body!" You try to think "Love" and get "Body" and that is the real zinger, eh. That even love has to be tainted.

So here is a poem I treasure on the subject. It's by May Swenson, about whom I know not much but that she was from Utah and is somewhat recently deceased. Not to grieve, though--she did live to be quite old.

Question

Body my house
my horse my hound
what will I do
when you are fallen

Where will I sleep
How will I ride
What will I hunt

Where can I go
without my mount
all eager and quick
How will I Know
in thicket ahead
is danger or treasure
when Body my good
bright dog is dead

How will it be
to lie in the sky
without roof or door
and wind for an eye

With cloud for shift
how will I hide?




posted by Lucia at 4:46 PM

This is a poem I want to remember by heart: John Logan's "Three Moves." It will appear in an anthology of un-anthologized poetry that will come out soon from University of Illinois Press, and I wrote an intro about Logan, who I suppose was a drunk. He was the first poet I ever saw give a reading, so his work is resonant for me.

I am very interested in the teeter-totter of the historical record, and why some (few) writers will flop into the lot of what will be remembered forever, while everybody else flops into the dustbin--what forces conspire to allow the few to join the record? I have a hunch it depends on which writers anticipate the aesthetic of the era to follow...but my theories are unformed, stay turned. Logan will be forgotten, I assume. But he did write this one great poem (which actually does turn up in a few anthologies.)

THREE MOVES

Three moves in six months and I remain
the same.
Two homes made two friends.
The third leaves me with myself again.
(We hardly speak.)
Here I am with tame ducks
and my neighbors' boats,
only this electric heat
against the April damp.
I have a friend named Frank--
the only one who ever dares to call
and ask me "How's your soul?"
I hadn't thought about it for a while,
and was ashamed to say I didn't know.
I have no priest for now.
Who
will forgive me then. Will you?
Tame birds and my neighbors' boats.
The ducks honk about the floats...
They walk dead drunk onto the land and grounds,
iridescent blue and black and green and brown.
They live on swill
our aged houseboats spill.
But still they are beautiful.
Look! The duck with the unlikely beak
has stopped to pick
and pull
at the potted daffodil.
Then again they sway home
to dream
bright gardens of fish in the early night.
Oh these ducks are all right.
They will survive.
But I am sorry I do not often see them climb
Poor sons-of-bitching ducks.
You're all fucked up.
What do you do that for?
Why don't you hover near the sun anymore?
Afraid you'll melt?
These foolish ducks lack a sense of guilt,
and so all their multi-thousand-mile range
is too short for the hope of change.



















posted by Lucia at 5:56 PM

I do believe in the weird synchronicity of the universe. For a few years I'd been thinking idly of this poet William Carpenter, who had a poem in one of the Best American Poetry volumes years back now--it was about a girl in a painting come to life and pulling off a heist. I had also seen some collaborations he did with an artist in the Beloit Poetry Journal. His second book was published by Northeastern University Press (they did my first book a few years later--so this seemed synchronous as well,) but when I called the press to obtain a copy they said is was out of print; no copies left. I looked on the Alibris site, and Amazon, but nothing.

So it was rather magical last week when I did my customary sweep of the used book store down the street to see what was new in the poetry section. On a low shelf was Carpenter's book, Rain, which I'd been looking for all these years! Supernormal forces must have drawn me into the book store that night:I don't know if Carpenter is still alive even, as I have not seen his poems for some years now and fear the cause of his silence. I suppose I could try to find him through his academic affiliation, but now he and I have the kind of paranormal connection I suspect I should just leave alone.

His work is characterized by parables told in plain speech, usually about doing something in the woods of New England, though the narratives are also illustrative of/run parallel with meditations on various sorts of human connections, mainly love in all its prickly forms. I thought I'd type out a copy of his poem "The Ice House." My blog won't do italics so you will have to envision them as needed.

THE ICE HOUSE

On Lincoln's Birthday we walk counterclockwise
around Mink Lake, watching the ice retreat,
though one ice-fishing shack is still out there,
which a man with a blue truck and a hat that
says International Harvester is trying to push
to shore, but his tires keep skidding, so he
ties a rope to the house with the idea
that he might pull it if it will not push.
We clap when the ice house moves, fall silent
when the rope breaks and he stands there crushed.
You ask what I am doing with myself these days.
I say writing, which is not exactly what you meant.
You ask, who do I see? By now the man is on
a cracked island of ice, he is pushing again
with the blue truck against the ice house, which
begins to slide. We clap again. It echoes off
Dog Mountain as if thousands of couples stood
watching like trees around the lake. I don't see
anyone. I have been stone blind for a year.
Oh, has it been a year? We ought to celebrate.
Out on the ice, the truck makes a sharp lunge
that thrusts the ice floe backward, opening
a black space so that the shack falls through
and a tidal wave travels beneath the ice,
a wave the size and shape of a small house
which breaks over our feet. The man stares
into the hole where his house was. He lies flat
on his stomach with his face in the cold lake,
trying to understand. On our way back, two
or three crows fly from a limb, so you, also,
begin flapping your arms like crow wings
and run over the snowy road, shrieking caw
caw and in your black jacket, black feathery hair,
as you run faster you transform into a crow,
sweetheart, you rise right off the ground and fly
through a cluster of white pines, over Mink Lake
where a man slowly pilots his blue truck across
the ice, where he looks up to feel the wind shifting
and a woman flying around and around his head
who is still beautiful, but the man thinks
only of the lost ice house, sinking in dark
water, in the deepest part of the lake, how
he will never retrieve it, how it had a stove,
two candles and a rocking chair, and on the wall
a calendar of twelve girls in their bathing suits,
one girl for each month, who are even now being
swallowed by deep pickerel, by huge rainbow trout.










































posted by Lucia at 11:41 AM

I had an idea that I would start with a poem by Vassar Miller, who died some years ago