Poetry discussion by contemporary poets

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

Sorry-- I have been so busy lately that I have not post this thread in over a week.--Tyr

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/fea...s/detail/90613

Essay
Dahl's Songs
Poetry is what makes Roald Dahl’s characters come alive.
By Adrienne Raphel




This month marks Roald Dahl’s centenary, and celebrations are already afoot. Llandaff,
Wales, his birthplace, is staging a citywide performance in tribute, and this year, Oxford University Press released the Oxford Roald Dahl Dictionary. Dahl is, of course, famous for his characters: Willy Wonka, Miss Trunchbull, the BFG. He’s also notorious as a character himself. He was a renowned misanthrope, infamous for his anti-Semitic comments. Tragedy marked his marriage to actress Patricia Neal: a taxicab struck their infant son, Theo; their daughter Olivia died of measles at age seven; and while Neal was pregnant with their fifth child, Lucy, in 1965, she suffered three cerebral aneurysms that left her in a coma for three weeks. Dahl helped nurse Neal back to health, but 18 years later, he divorced her and married the much younger Felicity Crosland.

Dahl is rightly famous for his fiction, but he published several collections of poetry as well, and a Roald Dahl novel is rarely, if ever, solely in prose. As illustrator Quentin Blake, Dahl’s longtime collaborator, writes in the introduction to Vile Verses, a 2005 anthology of Dahl’s poetry, “It is hard to read one of your favourite Dahl books without soon coming across some kind of song or a piece of verse.” Characters burst into lyric, as if the story line were an elaborate song and dance to get them to the actual song and dance. Roald Dahl’s poems are almost exclusively in tetrameter couplets, a loose ballad meter well suited to his frank, pragmatic voice. Dahl’s prose is charged with poetic devices—think of Esio Trot, tortoise spelled backward, or the dyslexic title character of The Vicar of Nibbleswicke. The people and creatures may be what readers remember of Dahl, but the poetry is what makes them come alive.

It is his poetry, as embedded in his prose, that brings out the quintessence of Dahl. His early novels burst with original poems. In James and the Giant Peach, first published in 1961, the Centipede celebrates the discovery that the Peach they inhabit is edible by bursting into an extemporaneous ode to the fruit. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which first appeared in 1964, is even thicker with poems than James. The prose itself is high octane, charged with alliteration and anaphora. When Wonka takes the Golden Ticket winners on a boat ride down the Chocolate River, the parents cry out:

He’s balmy!
He’s nutty!
He’s batty!
He’s dippy!
He’s dotty!
He’s daffy!
He’s goofy!
He’s beany!
He’s buggy!
He’s wacky!
He’s loony!

The monometer list, full of slant rhyme, becomes incantatory. The repetition of He’s is hypnotic, a string of unstressed syllables that create a singsong effect as we read down the column. Dahl has an incredible facility for putting words in our mouths: putting this poem into the voices of the nervous parents forces readers to vocalize the adjectives too. The words all mean the same thing, and they’re all trochees; we get the sense that the shouts could go on forever. Finally, Charlie’s grandfather breaks the spell: “No, he is not!” Grandpa Joe shouts, cutting off the endlessly iterative form.

Dahl becomes his most fantastical when poems enter the story. The Oompa-Loompas are the Greek chorus of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, providing commentary about the children in biting couplets. As the bad children are plucked off one by one, the manner of each child’s fall is sweet poetic justice, recounted even more sweetly in gleeful rhyme: just desserts, indeed. Augustus Gloop, the “great big greedy nincompoop,” is sucked into the Fudge Machine, where, the Oompa-Loompas tell us, we can be sure “that all the greed and all the gall / Is boiled away for once and all.” When Violet is turned into a giant blueberry, the Oompa-Loompas tell the cautionary tale of a Miss Bigelow, such a prodigious gum chewer that she, like “a clockwork crocodile,” eventually chews out her own tongue. Miss Bigelow is of the same world as Auden’s macabre spinster Miss Gee. Veruca Salt, the “little brute,” gets pitched down the garbage chute, descending from being spoiled rotten to living with rotten spoils. “It’s all nonsense, every bit of it!” Wonka assures the children—and us. But whether or not the poems are strictly true in content, they infuse the story with their spirit, a mix of sing songy lullaby and sheer terror. The couplets make the poems feel as though they should be soothing, though the content is anything but.

In Dahl’s collections of verse—Revolting Rhymes (1982), Dirty Beasts (1983), and Rhyme Stew (1989)—he riffs on familiar tropes from nursery rhymes and fables but gives them brutal twists. Revolting Rhymes presents updated fairy tales in which the heroes delight in skewering the villains and delivering deliciously wicked comeuppances. The chains of couplets entail that each rhyme will be met with its match, a sonic counterpart of the eye-for-an-eye code of justice that prevails. Goldilocks is presented as guilty of “crime on crime,” and justice must be served. “Myself, I think I’d rather send / Young Goldie to a sticky end,” declares Dahl. Big Bear tells Baby Bear, “Your porridge is upon the bed / But as it’s inside mademoiselle / You’ll have to eat her up as well.” In Dahl’s “Snow White,” the Dwarfs are gamblers, addicted to betting on horseraces. Instead of chastising them and helping them help themselves, as Disney’s Snow White might have done, Dahl’s heroine breaks into the palace, steals the Queen’s Magic Mirror, and takes it back to the Dwarfs, who ask it for the name of the winner of the next day’s horserace. The Mirror gives the name of the winning horse, the Dwarfs pool all their resources and bet on the horse, and they win big, providing the poem’s anti-Aesop moral: “Which shows that gambling’s not a sin / Provided that you always win.” That’s Dahl’s peculiar genius: he knows which characters need to get their comeuppance, but he also understands the delicious schadenfreude of letting heroes delight in wickedness at the expense of the bad guys. The Queen thought she’d eaten Snow White’s heart, so why shouldn’t Snow White and her fiends profit from the Queen’s prized possession?

Dirty Beasts is the heir to Struwwelpeter, Heinrich Hoffman’s brutal and wonderful 1844 collection of nursery rhymes that skewer rotten kiddies and adults. “The Pig,” for example, presents a precocious hog who realizes that his only reason for existence is to be made into food for humans. To save himself, the pig preemptively eats up Farmer Bland first. The anaphora and exclamations make readers feel for the pig:

“They want my bacon slice by slice
“To sell at a tremendous price!
“They want my tender juicy chops
“To put in all the butchers’ shops!

The pig creates a blazon to himself: he identifies all his wonderful body parts and makes himself seem like a porcine paragon, only to lament that all these excellent components are destined for the marketplace. Because the pig doesn’t want to be sliced and diced into products, he kills the farmer. It’s a Marxist justification of eating the hand that’s only feeding you to fatten you up for the slaughterhouse. (We could feel a twinge of guilt for Farmer Bland, but we don’t; after all, he’s Farmer Bland, not Farmer Grand.)

In “The Ant-Eater,” also from Dirty Beasts, Roy, a “plump and unattractive boy” from San Francisco who wants for nothing and whines for everything, acquires an anteater. The creature scours Roy’s garden day and night but can’t find a single ant, and Roy, a budding young literalist, refuses to serve him any other form of food: “Roy shouted, ‘No! No bread or meat! / Go find some ants! They’re what you eat!” So the anteater must resort to wordplay for his supper:

Some people in the U.S.A.
Have trouble with the words they say.
However hard they try, they can’t
Pronounce a simple word like AUNT.
Instead of AUNT, they call it ANT,
Instead of CAN’T, they call it KANT.

Our sympathies lie with the echidna, not with the rotten kid, and we cheer at the end when the beast turns on Roy for dessert.

Dahl is at his most poetic not strictly in the poems but in the interweaving of poetry and prose in his novels. The poems step outside to announce the author directly or to ensnare readers. Consider, for instance, the role of poems in the novel Matilda, published in 1988. Unlike James and the Giant Peach or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda is not studded with nonsense song and whimsical rhymes; other than a few ditties (“Mrs D, Mrs I, Mrs F I, Mrs C, Mrs U, Mrs L T Y”), the characters do not burst into poem or song. (This is not the same in the Broadway musical adaptation of Matilda, in which the characters do burst into frequent song.) Rather, the poems in Matilda are, for the most part, poems quoted from the outside world, not ones written by Dahl. Usually, Dahl’s novels create totalizing experiences: we are in the world that the novel creates, which is distinctly separate from our daily lives. But the poems are points that break the fourth wall. The poems from the real world that enter Matilda suggest that readers can enter this world too.

To discover the scope of Matilda’s reading abilities, Miss Honey tests her with a poem, bringing her a “thick book” and opening it at random:

“This is a book of humorous poetry,’ [Miss Honey] said. “See if you can read that one aloud.”
Smoothly, without a pause and at a nice speed, Matilda began to read:

“An epicure dining at Crewe
Found a rather large mouse in his stew.
Cried the waiter, ‘Don’t shout
And wave it about
Or the rest will be wanting one too.’”

This anonymous limerick appears in several publications well before Matilda, such as a 1946 edition of LIFE magazine, for example, as well as several anthologies of children’s poetry. But Miss Honey’s use of the specific adjective humorous cues us that her “thick book” is likely A Century of Humorous Verse, 1850–1950, edited by Roger Lancelyn Green. Green, who wrote many children’s books and beloved retellings of myths, was perhaps most famous as part of the Inklings, the legendary Oxonian discussion circle that included C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien among its core members.

Though Green is never mentioned by name, his shadow presence in the classroom evokes the Inklings: a whiff of The Eagle and Child, the pub where the Inklings convened, wafts into Miss Honey’s classroom. When Miss Honey asks Matilda about other books that she’s read, Matilda volunteers that she likes C.S. Lewis, though she critiques both Mr. Lewis and Mr. Tolkien for their lack of “funny bits.” Matilda and Miss Honey become a sort of counterpart to the Inklings, a feminist revision of the boys’ club.

The Oxford Roald Dahl Dictionary gives two definitions of funny: something that “makes you laugh or smile” and something that is “strange or surprising.” “Funny bits” are at the center of Matilda but not always amusing. The book chronicles Matilda’s fall from innocence and gain of self-knowledge, and funny shifts from the first to the second definition over the course of the novel.

Of course, Dahl has already bested Messrs. Lewis and Tolkien: Matilda implicitly offers a corrective to the literary criticism that Matilda explicitly voices to Miss Honey. The beginning of Matilda chronicles her pranks against her father, such as replacing his hair tonic with her mother’s hair dye. Matilda begins the story as a trickster figure, a Brer Rabbit or Reynard the Fox who survives in a hostile environment by outmaneuvering her oppressors.

It’s no accident that Miss Honey rhymes with funny. Dahl ascribes to a Dickensian theory of names. (Dahl loves Dickens, and the highest compliment he can pay himself is when the BFG names his favorite author as “Dahl’s Chickens”: both Charles Dickens and Dahl himself.) When someone named Aunt Spiker or Mr. Wormwood or Gizzardgulper appears, we’re on our guard; when we meet Miss Honey, we know we’re in sweet hands.

It’s also no accident that the shift in the book from funny-amusing to funny-strange occurs through a poem. When Matilda visits Miss Honey’s house, Miss Honey recites the first stanza of “In Country Sleep,” Dylan Thomas’s long, romantic poem about childhood and loss in the British countryside. Over the course of the poem, the “girl” in the first stanza becomes a medley of all fairy-tale heroines: she is Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel, any pure girl threatened by the encroaching evils of the outside world. The poem describes the lush, enchanted world as a beautiful garden, a place where the heroine remains safe. But this Eden is also a prison. “Sleep, good, for ever, slow and deep, spelled rare and wise” begins the second stanza: though the lovely woods may seem to be a haven protecting the girl from outside evils, the speaker also spins a magic spell around the heroine, keeping her permanently within the enchanted woods. No one will come “to court the honeyed heart from your side before sunrise,” the speaker assuages the girl, but it is unclear whether the reassurance is a promise or a threat. Is the speaker a parent lulling a child to sleep? Or is the speaker the witch in Rapunzel, keeping the princess locked in the tower, insulated from evil but isolated from good?

Dahl is extremely good at creating characters and plots that keep us moving lickety-split through the fantastical, the weird, the terrifying. But when Dahl wants us to get up close and personal with emotions—shock, disgust, glee, terror, triumph—he turns to poetry as a means of directly accessing the senses. Through poetry, Dahl gets under our skin.

Originally Published: September 6th, 2016

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/fea...s/detail/90781

Essay
"Gabble Like a Thing Most Brutish"
How Caliban, The Tempest, and a poet’s exile became the perfect storm for a first book.
By Safiya Sinclair


I’ve spent a good part of the last 14 years thinking about Caliban. The first time I read The Tempest, his anguish and corrugated selfhood spoke to me so acutely, I felt him to be real. His fevered dreaming as a slave in a stolen kingdom has also been my dreaming, his twangling instruments my own strange music.

Like him, I’ve always been an outsider. Home for me has always been a place of unbelonging. This is the strange yet all-too-familiar exile of living in the Caribbean, of being a part of the African diaspora: belonging in two places and no place at all. Home was not my island, which never belonged to us Jamaicans, though it’s all we’ve known, and home was not my family’s house, which we’ve always rented, all of us acutely aware of the fact that we were living in borrowed space, that we could never truly be ourselves there. Home was not the body. Never the body—grown too tall and gangly too quickly, grown toward womanhood too late. Like a city built for myself, home was a place I carved out in my head, where the words were always the right words, where I could speak in English or patois, could formulate a song or a self. Home for me has always been poetry.

It was the Old Poet, a Trinidadian writer and mentor, who first got me thinking about Caliban. At 15, I had just graduated from high school and for the first time faced the grim reality of a hopeless future that most Jamaicans understand to be the bleak circumstance of their birth. No one dared dream too far outside the confines of what history ungifted us, the poverty of this “developing country.” Neither of my parents had gone to college—going to a university was something hazy on the blurred horizon, far away and intangible—no one in my family knew how to apply to colleges or how they would ever afford them. I had been the top student at a private high school founded by rich white Jamaicans and American expats, who had also endowed a full scholarship for poor and talented students like me. Though I had flourished there, I realized much too late that this school had also prepared me for a future at an American university that my family did not have the means or the immigration papers to supply me with. While everyone in my class left for new lives and schools abroad, I stayed home, optionless.

Days grew into weeks, weeks into a year. I turned inward, turned to poetry as the only way to make sense of the world I had been given. In Montego Bay, we had scant access to books. I read everything I could find. I studied the Oxford English Dictionary. At 16, I submitted my first poem to be published in the Jamaica Observer, a riff off Plath’s “Daddy.” I still remember when the phone rang, and the Old Poet said with much authority: “This is serious. You have to come to Kingston and work with me.” For the first time, I felt seen. My parents (who didn’t have a car) hired a taximan who would drive me and my mother three and a half hours each way from Montego Bay to Kingston to visit the Old Poet every week. He gave me access to his impressive bookshelves and demanded I read the classics. Life felt full of possibilities as I dared to peer into the impoverished face of my own hope once again. For five years, I studied poetry, wrote, and workshopped with the Old Poet, a vital education that nourished my mind and kept me hungry until I finally received a full scholarship to go to college, six years after high school. I read and recited Yeats, Chaucer, Stevens, Walcott, Shakespeare. I performed my lessons as one bewitched.

Back then, the Old Poet was a god until, like all men, he wasn’t. “The Tempest is Shakespeare’s best,” he said with finality. “In each line, we can hear the rhythms of the sea as a poet who is nearing the end of his life.” In a lost letter that I remember well, he wrote, “Gollum is very much like a Caliban-figure, both gnarled and tortured,” and with those words, he pried open my own affinity for anguish—at this age I was very much drawn to anything suffering. So the damage was done—gone was my flirtation with the comedies, promises of star-crossed meetings that so appealed to youth—there in its place, blooming darkly, was my obsession with the ocean of magic and finality of The Tempest, still unaware that this ocean of magic and finality was the story of Jamaica itself. The play tells of Prospero, exiled from Milan and shipwrecked on an island, where he banishes the witch Sycorax (Caliban’s mother) and somehow learns enough magic to subjugate the island and its inhabitants in the flesh (Caliban) and spirit (Ariel). Prospero’s daughter, Miranda, too, is under his control.

As the first child of four, the fact of my girlhood was already disappointing. Very briefly, I danced with Miranda’s wild-eyed wonder under her father’s strict patriarchy as something similar to my own; I lived in a no-nonsense, disciplinary, Rastafarian household. We were a family of three girls and one boy, and every year that my sisters and I grew older so too did the separation between my father and my brother and the women in the house. Rastas openly accepted that a woman’s rightful place was in childrearing and household duties, to be confined to the kitchen except when she was menstruating. Many of my father’s Rasta friends refused to eat food cooked by a woman on her period and even made their menstruating wives sleep in a separate bedroom. Finally, the body fulfilled its dark promise and turned against me. Dear Miranda, Who taught you how to bleed? Did you anticipate and dread its arrival for many moons, like me? This was my first reading—that being a young woman exempted me from the same freedoms my brother had, that being a woman was the original site of exile. Like most Jamaicans, I arched toward another world, hoping to make a new place for myself. In America, wouldn’t I be my own Miranda, as reflected through a dark mirror—“O brave new world / That hath such people in’t!” Dear Jamaica, Is it true what Kamau Brathwaite said? That “the desire (even the need) to migrate is at the heart of West Indian sensibility, whether that migration is in fact or by metaphor.”? He has suggested that a Caribbean person becomes a Caribbean person only when they actually leave the Caribbean. Perhaps this is true.

•

The thick weed of the Sargasso, like the Middle Passage, is the largest gathering of all that is lost, clinging to the ghosts of things that never were. And the lost things, men and women of the African diaspora, scattered to sea on imperial ash, are now washed ashore in a postcolonial world. But what fractures the identity of the marginalized is the recognition of new, strange selves in that dark mirror, a tortured contemplation of duality—English language grown thick inside an African mouth. How do West Indian poets make sense of it, when the very language we speak betrays the history of our selves? Coming to America forced me to consider my blackness in a new light. Here, the world held me at arm’s length and highlighted all my differences as a strangeness: remarkable and invisible all at once. Being one of only four or five black students in the nearly all-white Bennington College cast a sharp spotlight on the actual site of my lingering exile—my blackness.

This was my second reading. It was a vital lesson: Here I was on a scholarship, six years after leaving high school, at another late start, estranged in another place. Fixed in time. I had left so much behind, but I had kept The Tempest. I carried the words and verses with me; the familiarity of its violence broke and reset daily in my bones. It was not Miranda, but Caliban who represented the fragmented psyche of West Indian poets like me. This, I realized, was the storm I carried around inside, the hurricane I was born under. Over the course of four years in the bright white bubble of Vermont, I encountered Caliban at the most important moments of my education. I was nearly always the only black student in class. Once, a teacher decided to make a hypothetical lesson of my being quiet in class: “For example,” she said, “if our black students never comment in class, then could we infer that all black students are lazy?” Once, a white student wanted to enact a minstrel show, blackface and all, as his final senior project. And so on. In a class on Shakespeare’s poetry, we were tasked to memorize and recite a verse from any of his plays. It didn’t seem like a choice, as I’d been feeling all along that my exile had always belonged to Caliban, who speaks entirely in lyric. I devoured the verse like fire and spoke each word as if I’d always known them. Because I had. Like Caliban, I was token, othered. Monstrous even. Like him, I felt home hardening like a wayward seed in my gut. I had lived and known each line to be true. His home was my home. His dis-ease:

Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me that, when I waked,
I cried to dream again.
Caliban, (Act 3, Scene 2, 135-143)

Dear Caliban, You know the rest of this story as if you had lived it yourself. In a Bennington workshop, a white woman first crossed her pen marks across the Jamaican patois in my story and wrote over and over: “Can you say this in English?” “Can you say this in English?” When I felt the too-familiar rage rise up in my throat and the slow choke of hurt that these words filled me with, I finally understood exactly why I was writing. In the face of prejudice, something indestructible had flourished. What had been only a hardening seed finally devoured all the air in my lungs and all by itself grew roots, became cannibal. The next week, I returned to workshop with a message I titled simply “Literary Manifesto.” It was here that I would first declare myself as Caliban:

Always at my heart is the quote of Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite: “The hurricane does not roar in pentameters.” This quote has been plaguing me recently, and defines what I’m most afraid of with this project—that presenting this [work] piecemeal to a coven of foreigners has somewhat corrupted the integrity of the work. Many people in this workshop have sought to subdue the work with the colonial marks of their pens—questioning the flora, fauna, and dialect of my native land, questions that have offended and plagued me as I contemplated who I was writing for. … Like Caliban, I have to question my identity as an Other, as defined by the colonist, while I am expected to express myself in the language of the colonist. But I want to define my identity and writing on my own terms, if me haffi bruk it dung inna patois, or iron it out in the Queen’s English—while always keeping the “u” in colour.

Many members of the class—all white—took great offence to this manifesto. Yes, I’d had a flair for rhetoric. I’d called them a “coven of foreigners” and “corn-fed strangers,” their pen marks “colonial.” But it stays with me to this day that they were offended. One student even threw my pages back across the table at me in disgust. Here in this workshop, this wasn’t a dialogue, and I finally understood the truth of America, as Caliban came to understand Prospero as a malevolent visitor—here freedom was only an invented jingle and not only would I never know the notes, I would always be exiled by its language.

•

This is my third reading. Historically and psychologically, the greatest cruelty of Prospero is not only the enforcement of his worldview but also the imperialism of his language. Caliban is enslaved by Prospero’s rules and laws and is taught Prospero’s language—in what Miranda declares a great kindness: the benevolent cultivation of the savage—but this really benefits only Prospero and Miranda. They arrive at Caliban’s island as cultural hegemonists who expect their language and customs to be understood but make no room for, or even consider, a cultural exchange with Caliban. If Prospero is to be believed, Caliban was born a cultureless animal, with no language, no identity: “thou didst not, savage, / Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like /A thing most brutish.” Prospero’s enslavement does not foster Caliban’s “cultivation” but instead hastens the eradication of his being; the autochthony of his personhood, written asunder.

What woman in Caliban’s position wouldn’t rage? Who wouldn’t feel a biological imperative to rebel, to people the “isle with Calibans”? In rebellion, Caliban seethes and plots, cursing Prospero’s linguistic imperialism; he wants to kill Prospero as much he wants to kill the part of Prospero that is within himself—“You taught me language; and my profit on’t / Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you / For learning me your language!” Shakespeare’s measured representation of Caliban’s fractured psyche is still the same broken reflection with which modern Caribbean people must contend. We are all Caliban. As Cuban essayist and critic Roberto Fernández Retamar explores in his essay “Caliban,” a postcolonial examination of Latin American and Caribbean identity, Caliban is our dark mirror and a direct metaphor of the chaotic Caribbean soul:

Prospero invaded the islands, killed our ancestors, enslaved Caliban, and taught him his language to make himself understood. What else can Caliban do but use that same language—today he has no other—to curse him, to wish that the “red plague” would fall on him? I know no other metaphor more expressive of our cultural situation, of our reality. …what is our history, what is our culture, if not the history and culture of Caliban?

Over the years, as I continued to navigate a life in the mostly white and cobwebbed corners of American academia, I realized that my poetry was not only informed by The Tempest itself, but that the voice in many of my poems was the voice of Caliban, as I had claimed him. Like Césaire and Brathwaite before me, how could I not identify with Caliban, the “savage” Prospero uses to catch fish and gather wood, whom Prospero uses to teach him the secrets of the island, and who speaks almost entirely from the root of his body? Caliban’s world is ruined when Prospero and Miranda arrive, and he is forcefully voided of his autonomy. He faces exile not only in his own land but also in his own skin (his thoughts are no longer in his own words), a psychic dilemma that overturns his world entirely, leaving Prospero as the grand arbiter of the change on the island. Both linguistically and metaphorically, the character of Caliban is a direct representation of what is seen as barbaric in me—the savage subaltern in the imperial narrativization of history.

Ever in the shadows of the play, even Caliban’s features are never quite precisely described—Shakespeare’s list of characters describe him simply as a “savage and deformed native of the island, Prospero’s slave,” and he is continuously referred to as a “monster” by the other characters inhabiting The Tempest, ambiguously described as being an animal or half-animal. Trinculo and Stefano degradingly address Caliban as “this puppy-headed monster. / A most scurvy monster!” “half a fish, and half a monster,” and “debauched fish.” From Shakespeare’s own evidence, we can assert that Caliban is not an animal—he is a sentient man, with his own thoughts and feelings, his own wants and claims to the island, who naturally dreams of peopling the “isle with Calibans.” The very name Caliban is a Shakespearean anagram of the word cannibal, the English variant of the Spanish word canibal, which originated from caribal, a reference to the native Carib people in the West Indies, who Columbus thought ate human flesh. It is there that the word Caribbean originated. By simply being born Caribbean, all “West Indian” people are already, etymologically, born savage. Whole worlds codified around my discovery of this simple fact of language, the linguistic fact of my birth, and I knew that from this one barbarous root, my debut poetry collection, Cannibal, was born.

Here I was, in a hurricane. I could not escape the work. Over the course of two and a half years, I worked on the manuscript of Cannibal (which the University of Nebraska Press published this month). In each new poem I wrote, I noticed the word cannibal popping up, if not in a line, then in the ghost meter of its sea. As I began organizing the book into sections, I realized that each section spoke to all these scattered points of exile—exile at home, exile of being in America, exile of the female body, and the exile of the English language. Quotes from Caliban, Prospero, and Miranda all reflected these different aspects of what had been lost, then found again in The Tempest, through a dark mirror. Soon I realized that Cannibal was in direct collision with The Tempest, interrogating these disruptive histories and the power of the language I live with.

It has always been my hope that beyond the margins of The Tempest, Caliban might find beauty and power in his own nature, flawed or not. The last poem I wrote for Cannibal, “Crania Americana,” tackles white supremacy and pseudo-scientific texts, sung through the defiant throat of Caliban, who seeks control of his assumed “savagery” on his own terms. In this poem, he boldly wears his “brutish” gabble “like a diadem, / this flecked crown of dictions, / this bioluminescence.” Circling the ocean-magic and a poet’s finality at the end of his life, I combed through The Tempest for every word and slur Caliban was called and alchemized there the rage of my family, my country, my identity. Mother, your cannibal lives there. What was once seen as monstrous, I sought to make beautiful. This was my final reading. Caliban’s anger is my father’s anger is my anger. What my native dialect of patois represents, and what my poetry represents, is not only a linguistic rebellion against colonization but also a willful remaking of the world to reflect all aspects of the Caribbean self. I am Caliban. I am cannibal. Dear Father, may I unjungle it?



Originally Published: September 20th, 2016

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/fea...s/detail/90711

Essay
Close Viewing
Touring the history of poetry in the YouTube age.
By Austin Allen



There she is, just after Willa Cather and before Eugene O’Neill. She’s bending toward a window, her lips soundlessly moving. A breeze stirs the curtain. Suddenly, from out of frame, a bird flies straight into her outstretched hand. It rests there for a second, takes in the room, then flits away again.

The video is a montage of New York in the Roaring Twenties: a jumble of street scenes, speakeasies, film stars, famous artists. The woman with the Mary Poppins touch is Edna St. Vincent Millay. She’s likely in her 30s, at the height of her notoriety as poet and bohemian. More than most of the writers featured, she seems posed, her scene clearly contrived. (How long was she waiting with birdseed in hand?) As a Greenwich Village literary star, she had an image to cultivate. This, her vignette seems to suggest, is what poets do all day: gaze out the window and wait for Inspiration to come to hand.

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Fifteen years ago, finding a clip of this kind would have taken some serious grunt work. Now, abracadabra, I reach out and summon it to my browser window. I didn’t know it existed; I just trusted that I’d be able to watch some Millay on a whim.

The age of online video has been a gift to many art forms: dance, stand-up comedy, piano music played by cats. For poetry—a musical art that often sits quietly on the page, a performative art whose icons are only sporadically recorded—it’s been a less obvious, but no less lucky, windfall. Quality film in this area has long been hard to come by. There have been just a few good poetry documentaries over the years, most notably Richard Moore’s USA: Poetry series for PBS (1965-66), which spotlights poets as varied as John Ashbery, Denise Levertov, and Richard Wilbur. I’m also fond of Annenberg Learner’s 1988 Voices & Visions, a classroom-friendly primer on great American poets from Whitman to Bishop, featuring a dream roster of commentators: Seamus Heaney, Helen Vendler, James Baldwin, and many more.

But most gifts from the windfall are as casual as YouTube itself. The video featuring Millay contains no credits; it’s simply labeled “New York City in the 1920s.” It was posted anonymously under the handle “historycomestolife.” For all I know, it’ll be gone tomorrow.

However scruffy by academic standards, online video libraries have dredged some remarkable treasures from obscurity. Even as they change the way new poets present their work, they’re reshaping our relationship to the history of the craft. “Read at random,” Randall Jarrell advised, and now poetry lovers can view at random too, free-associating our way through the most precious archival footage. It’s a new mode of research, a conjuring of spirits to our private theaters, where at a moment’s notice we can evaluate—or just savor—records that scholars a generation ago would have killed for.

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When I told a friend I was writing about great poets on video, he guessed right away which poet had sparked the concept. In 1967, Al Alvarez interviewed John Berryman for the BBC, sharing beers with him in a Dublin pub and letting the old lion hold forth. The footage has become legendary in poetry circles, for good reason.

Berryman’s verse is known for its contrarian rhythms, the quirks of emphasis he sometimes signals with fastidious accent marks. Watching him declaim his “Dream Songs,” you realize how physical those rhythms were, how he converted bodily and vocal tics into metrical ones. You see him hunch and rock, stroke his outrageous beard, jab a pedantic finger on the line “this is not for tears; thinking”—and jab even harder as he shouts the word But in an explosive volta.

Sure, he’s drunk, as the YouTube commenters gleefully point out. But sobriety wouldn’t smooth over such spiky eccentricity. We sense that for better or worse, we’re getting the full Berryman; the man, the poet, and the personae all come together. We witness the qualities that made him both brilliant and incorrigible, the awkwardness and passion that tangle so gloriously in The Dream Songs. We also see that he’s a bit of a ham—as though, if the BBC hadn’t been there, he might have recited to the nearest barfly.

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In the popular imagination, poets are Dickinsonian loners who would wilt in front of a camera. The video evidence tells a more complex tale. Browsing a century’s worth of clips, I was surprised at how many famous poets revealed a knack for showmanship.

Of course a few figures fit the elusive unicorn stereotype, whether because they neglected the public or vice versa. Footage of Elizabeth Bishop is scarce even though she lived until 1979. Lorine Niedecker appeared in someone’s holiday home movies and that’s it. Robert Hayden was rarely filmed even after becoming what’s now called US poet laureate; the NBC tape of one of his few screen appearances, on the talk show At One With, was erased. (Happily, at least one filmed Hayden interview survives: a fascinating conversation with Donald Hall, preserved in the University of Michigan online archives.)

There were also poets whose onscreen “careers” were constrained by their era. We would undoubtedly have seen more of Millay—by all accounts a magnetic performer—if she had lived past 1950. No extant footage of Dylan Thomas, the consummate celebrity poet, was on record until 2014, when researchers spotted him in the background of a 1951 film called Pandora and the Flying Dutchman.

But as the moving image conquered the culture, more and more poets ventured out to court its attentions, its different kind of fame and unreality. No figure is more emblematic of this shift than Marianne Moore. Here was one of the great literary recluses: a woman who for decades shared an apartment (and bed) with her mother, a profoundly inward writer whose family nicknamed her “Rat,” as in book rat. Then the overbearing mother died, the poetry collected some major prizes, and Rat emerged, blinking, into full-blown celebrity. There she is, in a Voices and Visions clip, throwing out the Opening Day pitch at Yankee Stadium. There she is charming a Today Show host who has asked about her work routine: “I save up things that I like pretty well until I need them.” She adds that she saves them “in a little book called School Assignments,” perhaps lending a fresh twist to her contention (in “Poetry”) that poetry seekers shouldn’t “discriminate against ‘business documents and school-books.’” She even looks the part of the eccentric writer—a part she tailored to her whims. Has any other morning show guest ever appeared in a tricornered hat?

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This self-promotional flair grew among the generation of poets born in the 1920s and 1930s, including the New York School and the Confessionals. For starters, quite a few of them participated in the abovementioned Richard Moore doc, including several whose segments we can look up for ourselves: Robert Duncan, Michael McClure, Frank O’Hara, Anne Sexton.

O’Hara’s appearance has already fed his legend; Ron Silliman likens the figure he cuts to “the Tasmanian Devil cartoon character, writing, drinking, smoking, talking to the camera, to friends in the room & to someone on the phone simultaneously with an ease & grace that was jaw-dropping. …” That’s fair enough, although anyone who has loved O’Hara’s poems won’t be too surprised by this whirlwind. Equally striking is Sexton, puffing her Salem cigarettes and radiating Old-Hollywood glamour. “My husband hates the way I read poems,” she coolly confides. “He says, ‘You sound like a minister.’” When this same husband appears in the doorway, she scolds, “Honey, don't be camera-shy.” She issues darker pronouncements too: “A hospital encases your soul.”

A few poets even gained something like media savvy. As his profile rose in the 1960s and 1970s, James Dickey became a recurrent talk show guest—and proved he was a born talker. He also scored a cameo in the film version of his novel Deliverance (after reconciling with the director, with whom he reportedly had an on-set fistfight). His performance as the menacing sheriff hovers somewhere between campy and inspired.

And of course there was Allen Ginsberg. None of his many tele-visitations ever matched his 1968 spot on William F. Buckley’s Firing Line, during which he recited a poem he’d written on LSD (“the fifth hour of LSD, for those who are specifically technologists in this”). It deserves to be an iconic ’60s moment: the beatnik icon preaching to the founder of modern conservatism, the poet’s blissed-out vibes meeting the pundit’s eerie grin, the guru conjuring “visible orchards of mind language,” “the brown vagina-moist ground” of a Welsh mountain, and other wonders as Buckley’s mugging condescension turns to concentration. The audience hushes, too. Ginsberg exerts an undeniable pull; with each zealous gesture he really is trying to commune with the host. The host isn’t high enough—no one ever could be—but when the poem reaches its triumphant climax, Buckley flashes his grin, his blue eyes, and admits, “I kinda like that.”

Yet Ginsberg’s appearances also capture what is least filmable about poetry, the aspects of the job that evaporate in limelight. During the same Firing Line broadcast, he delivers a tougher kind of wisdom: “No one can understand the problem of police brutality in America … without understanding the language of the police. The language that the police use on hippies or Negroes is such that I can’t pronounce it to the middle-class audience.” He’s taking a swipe at Buckley’s viewership—and probably at the network censors too. Those censors would have reviled much of Ginsberg’s own language; all these years later, the networks would still bleep out parts of Howl. And if the screen abhors certain kinds of frankness, it’s all but lethal to the state of inwardness that produces poems. In 1978, we find Ginsberg on The Dick Cavett Show, instructing Cavett in Tibetan-style meditation. Though Ginsberg stresses that the practice “includes the world ... it’s not a trip to the moon,” he seems to realize the absurdity of performing it for a crowd. However vital it was to his artistic life, the studio stage reduces it to an actor’s affectation. He keeps the lesson short and jokes about receiving “applause for doing nothing.”

Later, Cavett challenges him to improvise a haiku about the FBI. Ginsberg obliges: “FBI poring / over ancient Xeroxes, / beards growing white on their chins.” Hearing the tepid applause, he revises a line. Then he changes it back, declaring, “First thought, best thought.” But this apostle of poetic spontaneity doesn’t seem pleased with either version.

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What the camera is much better at eliciting—and even dramatizing—are the stories behind existing poems, including the secrets of an author’s “process.” Consider a 1982 episode of The South Bank Show devoted to Philip Larkin. Apart from publicity stills, his screen presence is limited to his hands as they leaf through an old notebook. Luckily, he revisits a masterpiece, “The Whitsun Weddings,” and his voice-over comments on the drafts reveal more than pages of criticism could.

“I thought I wrote it pretty quickly,” he recalls, “because I’ve always said that this was one poem that anybody could have written.” Reviewing his notes, however, he finds that not only did it take “an enormous time” but that “I didn’t even stick to it very conscientiously.” The poem, published in 1959, turns out to have had a glacial genesis: the train ride that inspired it took place in 1955, and he jotted down the first lines two years later. His puzzlement sounds genuine: “This is not the way I normally work.”

As he goes on to explain his working method, we might be surprised by Larkin’s surprise. “I advance very cautiously and slowly, and when I think I’ve got far enough, I cross it out and rewrite it.” A close-up shows pages full of tidy lines, nearly all of them struck through; the poem really is “advancing” like a wary army under massive attrition. Even when the battle is won, it isn’t: Larkin allows that the majestic ending is “deeply symbolic in various ways” but frets that “I don’t know whether, in fact, [it’s] as good as it could be.” He also notices that the final draft version ends with the words turning to rain rather than the familiar (and metrically superior) becoming rain. He muses that he must have made that change in typescript: “Type makes [a poem] look very different, and all sorts of unsuspected weaknesses catch your eye.”

The overall effect is to dampen any notion of a divine outpouring. For Larkin, this was a long trek from greater to lesser dissatisfaction. Reaching the end—that flawless arrival—required no miracles, just dogged patience and an implacably fussy ear.

A scholar could glean some of this from the archived drafts themselves, but other videos unearth context that would surely have been lost otherwise. If not for an obscure public-access TV interview, how could we have known about Lucille Clifton’s editing skirmish with Toni Morrison? Clifton told the tale to fellow poet Roland Flint on a 1991 episode of The Writing Life, backed by a set so heroically low-budget it makes your heart soar. Apparently Morrison, who edited Clifton’s early volume An Ordinary Woman, “couldn’t stand” a passage from the autobiographical “my poem” sequence:

she’ll keep on trying
with her crooked look
and her wrinkled ways,
the darling girl.

Although the younger writer “was in awe of Toni Morrison,” she refused to change that last line because, after all, “I write poems and she writes prose.” Besides, she adds with a big laugh, “I am a darling girl—why shouldn’t I say so?”

We encounter a few romantic anecdotes too, flashes of that side of the writing life that extends beyond proof pages and phone calls. Bantering with Robert Lowell in an uncredited clip from around 1969, Dickey reveals that he has a lovely, recurring dream more “heartbreaking” than any nightmare. “I fear those tears of loss, and deprivation … when you’re at the happy swimming pool, which is kind of like Eden, you see, for a few minutes of one anonymous suburban night, and is forever gone.” Dickey fans will hear echoes of his dreamlike anthology piece “The Lifeguard,” in which a tranquil lake becomes a place of irrecoverable innocence:

As I move toward the center of the lake,
Which is also the center of the moon,
I am thinking of how I may be
The savior of one

Who has already died in my care.

Almost as fantastical is the true story Adonis (Ali Ahmad Said Esber) tells a Danish interviewer about his beginnings as a writer. When he learned as a Syrian teenager that President Shukri al-Quwatli would be visiting his province, he resolved to read a welcome poem so impressive that Quwatli would grant his wish: “to go to school.” Incredibly, it worked. He got his audience with the president, recited his poem practically barefoot, and was rewarded with a prestigious scholarship. Later, infuriated by rejection letters, he took the pen name Adonis—because poetry editors “were trying to kill me” just as the wild boar killed the Greek hero—and saw his luck immediately change. All these decades later, he smiles: “In one way or another my own life became a sort of a myth. … Sometimes I hesitate to tell it. Because how can someone have a dream which becomes a reality?” But something in his manner—a restrained intensity, a puckish self-confidence—hints at the answer.

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What videos give poetry fans above all are performances: windows onto authors’ conceptions of pieces we’ve carried in our own heads; cadences we never detected on the page; obscure material, curiosities, “extras.” After one more viewing of the Berryman, I drink another late-night coffee and browse on.

Here’s Langston Hughes reading “The Weary Blues,” backed by an all-white jazz band, on Canadian TV in 1958. His voice and manner faintly recall the anchormen of that era—maybe it’s his direct, bespectacled gaze at viewers. His smooth, professional tone doesn’t oversell the poem’s musicality; he knows it’s already there in the language.

And here, just as effective, is Basil Bunting crooning “Briggflatts”—a bard of the old school, rolling his r’s and reveling in his vowels, wringing each drop of lyricism out of the verse.

And a performance that isn’t poetry at all but actual song. A few years ago, the Cortland Review filmed the late Claudia Emerson and her husband, Kent Ippolito, duetting on the country standard “How’s the World Treating You?” They’re strumming guitars at home as their cat paces the floor. Their harmonies are as sweet as their chemistry. Now that Emerson is gone, I can’t help hearing that moody little melody—Every day is blue Monday / Every day you’re away—in the background of her poems, which became self-elegies much too soon.

As the Web grows up, more and more such clips will surface, and countless others will be created by savvy younger writers. The kind of video interviews produced by the Academy of American Poets will become more common, even as performance pieces such as those featured by Button Poetry—not to mention crossover experiments such as Beyoncé and Warsan Shire’s Lemonade—draw viewers in the millions. We’ll see better organized archives with full scholarly apparatus. But I love the disorder we’ve got now, the haphazard flotsam that’s turned up on digital shores for people like me to pick through: home movies, blurry audience recordings, vintage Canadian TV. It suits the art form, which can seem both mysteriously remote and humbly local. And it confirms our sense that even the hammiest great poets remain somehow elusive, not quite adapted to the mass media hive—that the essence of their legacy floats somewhere out of focus, out of frame.

Originally Published: September 13th, 2016

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetrysoup.com/article/ed...nd_poetry-1647

Edda: Its Prose and Poetry
SOURCE: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition

EDDA, the title given to two very remarkable collections of old Icelandic literature. Of these only one bears that title from antiquity; the other is called Edda by a comparatively modern misnomer. The word is unknown to any ancient northern language, and is first met with in Rigspula, a fragmentary poem at the end of Codex Wormianus, dated about 1200, where it is introduced as the name or title of a great-grandmother. From the 14th to the 17th century, this word—but no one has formed a reasonable conjecture why—was used to signify the technical laws of Icelandic court metre, Eddu regla, and “Never to have seen Edda” was a modest apology for ignorance of the highest poetic art. The only work known by this name to the ancients was the miscellaneous group of writings put together by Snorri Sturlason (q.v.; 1178-1241), the greatest name in old Scandinavian literature. It is believed that the Edda, as he left it, was completed about 1222. Whether he gave this name to the work is doubtful; the title first occurs in the Upsala Codex, transcribed about fifty years after his death. The collection of Snorri is now known as the Prose or Younger Edda, the title of theElder Edda being given to a book of ancient mythological poems, discovered by the Icelandic bishop of Skálaholt, Brynjulf Sveinsson, in 1643, and erroneously named by him the Edda of Saemund.

1. The Prose Edda, properly known as Edda Snorra Sturlusonar, was arranged and modified by Snorri, but actually composed, as has been conjectured, between the years 1140 and 1160. It is divided into five parts, the Preface or Formáli, Gylfaginning, Bragaraeður, Skáldskaparmál andHáttatal. The preface bears a very modern character, and simply gives a history of the world from Adam and Eve, in accordance with the Christian tradition. Gylfaginning, or the Delusion of Gylfi, on the other hand, is the most precious compendium which we possess of the mythological system of the ancient inhabitants of Scandinavia. Commencing with the adventures of a mythical king Gylfi and the giantess Gefion, and the miraculous formation of the island of Zealand, it tells us that the Aesir, led by Odin, invaded Svithjod or Sweden, the land of Gylfi, and settled there. It is from the Ynglingasaga and from the Gylfaginning that we gain all the information we possess about the conquering deities or heroes who set their stamp upon the religion of the North. Advancing from the Black Sea northwards through Russia, and westward through Esthonia, the Aesir seem to have overrun the south lands of Scandinavia, not as a horde but as an immigrant aristocracy. The Eddaic version, however, of the history of the gods is not so circumstantial as that in the Ynglingasaga; it is, on the other hand, distinguished by an exquisite simplicity and archaic force of style, which give an entirely classical character to its mythical legends of Odin and of Loki. The Gylfaginning is written in prose, with brief poetic insertions. TheBragaraeður, or sayings of Bragi, are further legends of the deities, attributed to Bragi, the god of poetry, or to a poet of the same name. TheSkáldskaparmál, or Art of Poetry, commonly called Skálda, contains the instructions given by Bragi to Aegir, and consists of the rules and theories of ancient verse, exemplified in copious extracts from Eyvindr Skáldaspillir and other eminent Icelandic poets. The word Skáldskapr refers to the form rather than the substance of verse, and this treatise is almost solely technical in character. It is by far the largest of the sections of the Edda of Snorri, and comprises not only extracts but some long poems, notably the Thorsdrapa of Eilifr Guðrúnarson and the Haustlaung of Thjóðólfr. The fifth section of the Edda, the Háttatal, or Number of Metres, is a running technical commentary on the text of Snorri’s three poems written in honour of Haakon, king of Norway. Affixed to some MS. of the Younger Edda are a list of poets, and a number of philological treatises and grammatical studies. These belong, however, to a later period than the life of Snorri Sturlason.

The three oldest MSS. of the prose Edda all belong to the beginning of the 14th century. The Wurm MS. was sent to Ole Wurm in 1628; the Codex Regius was discovered by the indefatigable bishop Brynjulf Sveinsson in 1640. The most important, however, of these MSS. is the Upsala Codex, an octavo volume written probably about the year 1300. There have been several good editions of the Edda Snorra Sturlusonar, of which perhaps the best is that published by the Arne-Magnaean Society in Copenhagen in 1848-1852, in two vols., edited by a group of scholars under the direction of Jón Sigurdsson. There are English translations by T. Percy, Northern Antiquities, from the French by P.H. Mallet (1770); by G. Webbe Dasent (Stockholm, 1842); by R.B. Anderson (Chicago, 1880).

2. The Elder Edda, Poetic Edda or Saemundar Edda hins froða was entirely unknown until about 1643, when it came into the hands of Brynjulf Sveinsson, who, puzzled to classify it, gave it the title of Edda Saemundi multiscii. Saemund Sigfusson, who was thus credited with the collection of these poems, was a scion of the royal house of Norway, and lived from about 1055 to 1132 in Iceland. The poems themselves date in all probability from the 10th and 11th centuries, and are many of them only fragments of longer heroic chants now otherwise entirely lost. They treat of mythical and religious legends of an early Scandinavian civilization, and are composed in the simplest and most archaic forms of Icelandic verse. The author of no one of them is mentioned. It is evident that they were collected from oral tradition; and the fact that the same story is occasionally 922repeated, in varied form, and that some of the poems themselves bear internal evidence of being more ancient than others, proves that the present collection is only a gathering made early in the middle ages, long after the composition of the pieces, and in no critical spirit. Sophus Bugge, indeed, one of the greatest authorities, absolutely rejects the name of Saemund, and is of opinion that the poetic Edda, as we at present hold it, dates from about 1240. There is no doubt that it was collected in Iceland, and by an Icelander.

The most remarkable and the most ancient of the poems in this priceless collection is that with which it commences, the Völuspá, or prophecy of the Völva or Sibyl. In this chant we listen to an inspired prophetess, “seated on her high seat, and addressing Odin, while the gods listen to her words.”

She sings of the world before the gods were made, of the coming and the meeting of the Aesir, of the origin of the giants, dwarfs and men, of the happy beginning of all things, and the sad ending that shall be in the chaos of Ragnarök. The latter part of the poem is understood to be a kind of necromancy—according to Vigfusson, “the raising of a dead völva”; but the mystical language of the whole, its abrupt transitions and terse condensations, and above all the extinct and mysterious cosmology, an acquaintance with which it presupposes, make the exact interpretation of theVöluspá extremely difficult. The charm and solemn beauty of the style, however, are irresistible, and we are constrained to listen and revere as if we were the auditors of some fugual music devised in honour of a primal and long-buried deity. The melodies of this earliest Icelandic verse, elaborate in their extreme and severe simplicity, are wholly rhythmical and alliterative, and return upon themselves like a solemn incantation. Hávamál, the Lesson of the High One, or Odin, follows next; this contains proverbs and wise saws, and a series of stories, some of them comical, told by Odin against himself. The Vafprúðnismál, or Lesson of Vafprúðnir, is written in the same mystical vein as Völuspá; in it the giant who gives his name to the poem is visited by Odin in disguise, and is questioned by him about the cosmogony and chronology of the Norse religion. Grimnismál, or the Sayings of The Hooded One, which is partly in prose, is a story of Odin’s imprisonment and torture by King Geirrod. För Skirnis, or the Journey of Skirnir, Harbarðslióð, or the Lay of Hoarbeard, Hymiskviða, or the Song of Hymir, and Aegisdrekka, or the Brewing of Aegir, are poems, frequently composed as dialogue, containing legends of the gods, some of which are so ludicrous that it has been suggested that they were intentionally burlesque. Thrymskviða, or the Song of Thrym, possesses far more poetic interest; it recounts in language of singular force and directness how Thor lost his hammer, stolen by Thrym the giant, how the latter refused to give it up unless the goddess Freyia was given him in marriage, and how Thor, dressed in women’s raiment, personated Freyia, and, slaying Thrym, recovered his hammer. Alvíssmál, or the Wisdom of Allwise, is actually a philological exercise under the semblance of a dialogue between Thor and Alvis the dwarf. In Vegtamskviða, or the Song of Vegtam, Odin questions a völva with regard to the meaning of the sinister dreams of Balder. Rígsmál, or more properly Rígspula, records how the god Heimdall, disguised as a man called Rig, wandered by the sea-shore, where he met the original dwarf pair, Ai and Edda, to whom he gave the power of child-bearing, and thence sprung the whole race of thralls; then he went on and met with Afi and Amma, and made them the parents of the race of churls; then he proceeded until he came to Faðir and Moðir, to whom he gave Jarl, the first of free men, whom he himself brought up, teaching him to shoot and snare, and to use the sword and runes. It is much to be lamented that of this most characteristic and picturesque poem we possess only a fragment. InHyndluljóð, the Lay of Hyndla, the goddess Freyia rides to question the völva Hyndla with regard to the ancestry of her young paramour Ottar; a very fine quarrel ensues between the prophetess and her visitor. With this poem, the first or wholly mythological portion of the collection closes. What follows is heroic and pseudo-historic. The Völundarkviða, or Song of Völundr, is engaged with the adventures of Völundr, the smith-king, during his stay with Nidud, king of Sweden. Völundr, identical with the Anglo-Saxon Wêland and the German Wieland (O.H.G. Wiolant), is sometimes confused with Odin, the master-smith. This poem contains the beautiful figure of Svanhvít, the swan-maiden, who stays seven winters with Völundr, and then, yearning for her fatherland, flies away home through the dark forest. Helgakviða, Hiörvarðs sonar, the Song of Helgi, the Son of Hiörvarð, which is largely in prose, celebrates the wooing by Helgi of Svava, who, like Atalanta, ends by loving the man with whom she has fought in battle. Two Songs of Helgi the Hunding’s Bane, Helgakviða Hundingsbana, open the long and very important series of lays relating to the two heroic families of the Völsungs and the Niblungs. Including the poems just mentioned, there are about twenty distinct pieces in the poetic Edda which deal more or less directly with this chain of stories. It is hardly necessary to give the titles of these poems here in detail, especially as they are, in their present form, manifestly only fragments of a great poetic saga, possibly the earliest coherent form of the story so universal among the Teutonic peoples. We happily possess a somewhat later prose version of this lost poem in the Völsungasaga, where the story is completely worked out. In many places the prose of the Völsungasaga follows the verse of the Eddaic fragments with the greatest precision, often making use of the very same expressions. At the same time there are poems in the Edda which the author of the saga does not seem to have seen. But if we compare the central portions of the myth, namely Sigurd’s conversation with Fafnir, the death of Regin, the speech of the birds and the meeting with the Valkyrje, we are struck with the extreme fidelity of the prose romancer to his poetic precursors in the Sigurðarkviða Fafnisbana; in passing on to the death of Sigurd, we perceive that the version in the Völsungasaga must be based upon a poem now entirely lost. Of the origin of the myth and its independent development in medieval Germany, this is not the place for discussion (see Nibelungenlied). Suffice to say that in no modernized or Germanized form does the legend attain such an exquisite colouring of heroic poetry as in these earliest fragments of Icelandic song. A very curious poem, in some MSS. attributed directly to Saemund, is the Song of the Sun, Sólarlióð, which forms a kind of appendix to the poetic Edda. In this the spirit of a dead father addresses his living son, and exhorts him, with maxims that resemble those of Hávamál, to righteousness of life. The tone of the poem is strangely confused between Christianity and Paganism, and it has been assumed to be the composition of a writer in the act of transition between the old creed and the new. It may, however, not impossibly, be altogether spurious as a poem of great antiquity, and may merely be the production of some Icelandic monk, anxious to imitate the Eddaic form and spirit. Finally Forspjallsljóð, or the Preamble, formerly known as the Song of Odin’s Raven, is an extremely obscure fragment, of which little is understood, although infinite scholarship has been expended on it. With this the poeticEdda closes.

The principal MS. of this Edda is the Codex Regius in the royal library at Copenhagen, written continuously, without regard to prose or verse, on 45 vellum leaves. This is that found by Bishop Brynjulf. Another valuable fragment exists in the Arne-Magnaean collection in the University of Copenhagen, consisting of four sheets, 22 leaves in all. These are the only MSS. older than the 17th century which contain a collection of the ancient mythico-heroic lays, but fragments occur in various other works, and especially in the Edda of Snorri. It is believed to have been written between 1260 and 1280. The poetic Edda was translated into English verse by Amos Cottle in 1797; the poet Gray produced a version of theVegtamskviða; but the first good translation of the whole was that published by Benjamin Thorpe in 1866. An excellent edition of the Icelandic text has been prepared by Th. Möbius, but the standard of the original orthography will be found in the admirable edition of Sophus Bugge, Norroen Fornkvaeði, published at Christiania in 1867.

The Eddaic poems were rearranged, on a system of their own which differs entirely from that of the early MSS., by Gudbrand Vigfusson and F. York Powell, in their Corpus poeticum boreale (Oxford, 1883). This is a collection, not of Edda only but of all existing fragments of the vast lyrical literature of ancient Iceland. It supplies a prose translation.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/har...3A+The+Blog%29

Searching for Tía Harriet
By Urayoán Noel


Every once in a while I’ll hear a Latinx poet on social media describe getting published in Poetry as a dream come true. Invariably I’ll roll my inner eye. Sure, I get the prestige and the fact that the journal pay$ its contributors, and I find the current iteration of the journal a welcome joy to read, both for its formal adventurousness and its range of voices. Still, a part of me will instantly go back to those summer days in 1999 when I would try to stay cool by reading litmags at the Union Square Barnes & Noble. I would always struggle to care about the issues of Poetry, and as a young and hungry Boricua poet new to the U.S. lit game, I would wonder what was wrong with me: this wasn’t one of those genteel yawnfest journals for endlessly replicated high-society whitewashing, this was frickin’ Poetry magazine, Harriet Monroe’s Poetry, the Poetry of Eliot’s Prufrock (June 1915) and Langston’s “Po’ Boy Blues” (November 1926)!

I would spend a lot of that summer at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, new on the scene and taking in an alternative poetic history. Little did I know that I would end up writing a dissertation, and eventually a book, on Nuyorican poetry and the alternative it offered to print-centric histories of literary life in the U.S. Even now, as a professor of Latinx literature who can marvel at the cool Latinx work being published in recent issues of Poetry, I can’t let go of those memories of summer afternoons struggling to read the journal and thinking I should be at the Nuyorican instead, so I knew when I was asked to blog for Tía Harriet that I had to write this post.

Despite an auspicious beginning and an encouraging last few years, Poetry has hardly been a home to Latinx voices, especially as these have informed and been informed by social movements and political struggles over the last century. Certainly, Poetry is not unusual in this regard, not many places have. Still, given its stature and the outsize role of its Poetry Foundation in shaping the contours of poetry in an increasingly Latinx U.S., it becomes crucial to at least minimally reflect on Poetry’s Latinx history. (Also, as a poet who survives thanks to the generic version of expensive epilepsy medication, I’m happy the Poetry Foundation’s pharmaceutical fortune can be used for dissident purposes!)

In the early days of Harriet Monroe’s Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, a few Latinx poets figured as part of the modernist ferment. Most notably William Carlos Williams—whose Puerto Rican mother and British father met in the Dominican Republic—was part of the journal from almost the very beginning, its second year. In the June 1913 issue he appears alongside Rabindranath Tagore and others, and a couple of years later in the poem “A Confidence” (May 1915), he writes with a diasporic Caribbean intimacy about the dystopian climes of El Norte: “Today, dear friend, this gray day, / I have been explaining to a young man of the West Indies / How the leaves all fall from the little branches / And lie soon in crowds along the bare ground.”

Then there’s Salomón de la Selva, who crashed the New York scene with his 1918 debut Tropical Town and Other Poems but would later gain renown in Latin America for El soldado desconocido (The Unknown Soldier, 1922), an autobiographical book, informed by his experiences fighting in World War I, that also anticipates aspects of antipoetry. De la Selva’s “My Nicaragua” (November 1917) is an at once loving and ironic evocation of his homeland that dares to unwrite the exportable pastoral and with it the fantasy of the exotic other: “Not picturesque, just dreary commonplace—/ As commonplace and dreary as the flats / Here, in your cities, where your poor folks live.” There’s a clear global-south consciousness that links the everyday struggle of Latin America’s “tropical towns” to the barrios in the U.S., an especially important connection given that Nicaragua was occupied by the U.S. at the time. Williams’s and de la Selva’s translocal landscapes tropicalize the modern canon.

After the modernist heyday, however, things get bleak for Latinx Poetry. And I’m not even thinking of late-modernist giants such as Américo Paredes (who wasn’t primarily known as a poet) and Julia de Burgos (who wrote almost exclusively in Spanish and wasn’t substantively translated into English until the 1990s, unless, as Harris Feinsod notes, we count the FBI). What’s depressing is the almost total absence of poets from the Chicano and Puerto Rican Movements of the 1960s and 1970s, which were and remain crucial to shaping the field of Latinx poetry, and are also key to our contemporary social history.

In their introduction to the anthology Angels of the Americlypse: New Latin@ Writing (May 2014), editors Carmen Giménez Smith and John Chávez rightfully claim writers like Juan Felipe Herrera, Alurista, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Pedro Pietri, as key innovators and forerunners of the contemporary poets in their anthology, yet Alurista, Anzaldúa, and Pietri are all otherwise invisible in the pages of Poetry. (I used the search bar on the journal’s archive page, and I also browsed dozens of issues through JSTOR.) Even Herrera, the current United States Poet Laureate and certainly the most widely recognized poet emerging from the movimiento ferment of the 1960s and 1970s, only finds his way into the pages of Poetry in July 2016 (!), and then only as part of a dossier curated by the indefatigable Francisco Aragón, for his fantastic PINTURA : PALABRA project. (Aragón’s dossier also marks the first appearance of Lorna Dee Cervantes and Tino Villanueva, two major figures in Chicano poetry.) Herrera’s Rebozos of Love came out in 1974, and he had already mapped a radical post-movimiento poetics with the scores and photo-poems of 1983’s classic Exiles of Desire before receiving the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry for Half of the World in Light: New and Selected Poems. Given all this, his 2016 publication in Poetry is a literal afterthought.

Missing along with these 1960s and 1970s poets are the oral and performance traditions they recovered and reimagined at Flor y Canto festivals and cultural spaces such as the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. As far as I can tell, not a single Nuyorican poet from the Cafe scene has ever been published in Poetry, not foundational figures such as Pedro Pietri, Tato Laviera, Sandra María Esteves, and Miguel Algarín, and not even widely published younger poets emerging from the 1990s slam generation, such as Willie Perdomo and Edwin Torres. Lastly, largely missing along with Anzaldúa is the essential tradition of Chicana feminist poetics, without which we lose a proper framework for reading Latinx poetics from the perspective of not only gender, but also sexuality, race, language, territoriality, poetic form, and so on.

True, a number of these poets appear in a poets sampler called “U.S. Latino/a Voices in Poetry,” published on the Poetry Foundation website and apparently last updated in 2015. Still, this is simply a series of links to the poets’ individual pages on the Foundation website, many of which (and especially in the case of the elders whose key work predates the Web) contain no poems. Anzaldúa’s is a particularly sad case, given her stature and influence and how unfairly neglected her poetry has been compared to her essays. Her author page includes no poems, and as for articles “about” her only a review of TC Tolbert and Trace Peterson’s landmark 2013 anthology Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics, which mentions Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga’s legendary This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981).

While I can’t quibble with the biography’s claim that Anzaldúa’s “poems and essays explore the anger and isolation of occupying the margins of culture and collective identity,” I find it ironic how the author page reinforces Anzaldúa’s marginality with its lack of texts and its “Poet Categorization” limited to listing her “Life Span” (1942-2004). (I guess borderlands/frontera poet and Chicana/Xicana and radical-woman-of-color writer aren’t viable categorizations, for all of Anzaldúa’s best efforts.) Sure, we’re encouraged to make a suggestion if we “disagree with this poet’s categorization,” but although we’re glad to help, really that shouldn’t be our job!

Keeping in mind Audre Lorde’s distinction between a facile diversity managed from above and a difference that’s difficult and necessarily negotiated from within, we can ask that the Poetry Foundation’s fortune do more than just “diversify” poetry (ugh! versify or die!), and that it engage with the modes of difference that poets such as Anzaldúa present. Have the Poetry Foundation folks read Anzaldúa’s poetry and do they think it demands a new Borderlands category? Then they should create it! It would be cool to see, say, Rodrigo Toscano, a poet from the Borderlands of California currently listed as a “U.S., Mid-Atlantic” (?) poet, sharing a region with Anzaldúa, who was from the Rio Grande Valley. Poets aren’t just from places, they create spaces.

I’m grateful for the monumental undertaking that is the Poetry Foundation website as an archive of contemporary poetry in the U.S., and I’ve used it many times and will continue to use it in my classes, but I’m also concerned by its hegemonic might. Given its algorithmic weight, the Poetry Foundation page is typically among the first results when one searches for a given poet, and for deceased poets or poets who can’t, for any number of reasons, curate their web presence, the Poetry Foundation page becomes all the more important, as do its thoroughness and accuracy. What criteria determine the choice of content for these pages? How can individual poets and communities participate in the process beyond reporting “a problem” with a biography or disagreeing with a poet’s categorization? What about creating new categorizations, even ones that might make the Poetry Foundation question its own taxonomies? The shift from the taxonomy to the folksonomy, from the expert-generated to the community-generated, is the whole point of Web. 2.0 after all. Without it what we have is the illusion of participation.

That’s one of the lessons that I learned at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, that poetry is lived community, and that approaches to poetry that don’t make room for the messiness and beauty of that living, and for the difficulties that come with it, are just diversity without difference, the purely the managerial tokenism of the status quo. And if we don’t demand more from the Poetry Foundation’s millions, then rooting for Poetry magazine is no different from rooting for Citigroup or the DNC, for hegemonic and top-down liberal do-goodism, no matter who’s editing or how cool the new table of contents is. I’m not (much of?) a hater, so I’m not rooting against. I’m happy poets I love and admire are getting published and I’m happy that the 2016 version of Poetry is making Tía Harriet proud by doing what it should’ve been doing all along, but what do you want from me? Una cuki? Brown-y points? (Sorry!) I have a blog post to finish.

The 1980s brings with it the institutional visibility of Latinx literature and the rise of Latinx poets with MFAs, a number of them featured in Poetry. Standouts include Gary Soto, who appears numerous times and as early as May 1974 with work from what would become his debut The Elements of San Joaquin (1977), a classic of Chicano poetics of place. Another is Julia Alvarez, who although best known for her later novels, is well represented with poems such as “Heroics” (May 1982), a characteristically elegant lyric full of transnational feminist resonances: “Once, revolution / in the third world. / Now it’s love.” Alvarez’s work is especially important given the paucity of explicitly Latina feminist work, as well as the continuing invisibility of Dominican American poetry. Still, I was surprised not to come across work by some leading Latinx poets of the 1980s and 1990s, including Ray Gonzalez, Virgil Suárez, Carmen Tafolla, Jimmy Santiago Baca, and, among the Diasporican poets, Aurora Levins Morales, Judith Ortiz Cofer, (de Burgos translator) Jack Agüeros, and (Williams scholar) Julio Marzán. A more recent glaring omission is Rigoberto González, a leading poet and critic who has arguably done more than anybody else for Latinx literature over the past 15 years.

Nonetheless, the past decade has seen an increased Latinx presence in the pages of Poetry, first under the editorship of Christian Wiman, and especially since 2013 with Don Share at the helm. The past few years of Poetry have featured some established poets such as Ricardo Pau-Llosa (February 2013), but especially encouraging has been Share’s inclusion of an exciting range of newer voices such as Cynthia Cruz (May 2014, October 2015), Orlando Ricardo Menes (March 2016), David Tomas Martinez (June 2015), Rodrigo Toscano (May 2014), J. Michael Martinez (May 2014), Aracelis Girmay (April 2016), and Eduardo Corral (December 2011, April 2012, March 2014, March and September 2016). Particularly noteworthy is the inclusion of poets with roots and routes in Central and South America, who are remapping the contours of Latinidad beyond Chicano, Diasporican, and Cuban American imaginaries (Javier Zamora, November 2015, January 2016; Jennifer Tamayo, May 2014). I hope this trend continues.

Along the way, there were pleasant surprises. I discovered poets such as Engracia Melendez, whose “In Berkeley” (December 1923) beautifully reflects on how the speaker can only sing of Jalisco “In the coolness, the dampness— / Here in the north.” I also came across the work of Brazilian Canadian poet Ricardo Sternberg (November 1978), which challenges the limits of Latinidad, as if translating Bishop’s translations of Carlos Drummond de Andrade. I also enjoyed some stiff translations of Lorca (often considered an honorary Latinx) published shortly after his murder (April 1937), as well as a short and wonderfully weird youthful poem called “Umbrella” (December 1924) by future architect of the Puerto Rican “commonwealth” Luis Muñoz Marín, who wrote in English and lived in New York during the 1920s. Lastly, I appreciated coming across several poems by Rhina P. Espaillat, a Dominican American poet whose work remains unjustly neglected in Latinx contexts, perhaps because its elegant formalism is seen as passé in a post-1960s socioaesthetic context which equates formal liberation with political liberation. While, sadly, none of Espaillat’s bilingual or translingual poems are featured, a poem such as “Changeling” (August 1991) haunts me with its authoethnographic music: “I want to tell myself she is not you, / this sullen woman wearing Mama’s eyes.”

Speaking of transligual poems, it’s wonderful to see recent issues of Poetry feature poets such as Toscano and Barbara Jane Reyes (May 2014) and Craig Santos Perez (July/August 2016), who allow us to imagine what Doris Sommer calls a “nonmonolingual” public sphere that can “irritate” the state, especially since many of the older poets who are foundational to Sommer’s and my own aesthetic (Anzaldúa, Tato Laviera, Victor Hernández Cruz) never made it into the pages of Poetry. (A review of Cruz’s debut Snaps appears in the May 1970 issue, and he’s fortunately still around.)

Similarly, it’s thrilling to read a poet like Douglas Kearney (December 2013) mine the lyric, social, and verbivocovisual possibilities of rap in a journal that seemed to proceed as if hip-hop had never happened. Kearney’s poem embodies a point made by the late and sorely missed Amiri Baraka in a memorable review essay published in Poetry a few months earlier, that mainstream poetry venues can still get away with claiming to represent the vitality of contemporary work by poets of color while showing “little evidence of the appearance of spoken word and rap.” (Note to self: Poetry’s home city of Chicago is also home to the poetry slam and the Young Lords.)

In that same essay, Baraka argues that Cave Canem “has energized us poetry by claiming a space for Afro-American poetry, but at the same time presents a group portrait of Afro-American poets as mfa recipients.” This is a crucial challenge. As much as 23-year-old me would probably have liked the 2016 version of Poetry, and maybe even subscribed, it remains, like the bulk of Poetrilandia, largely MFA-centric and removed from other forms of poetry community. Maybe that’s not Poetry’s job, as it can afford to concern itself with publishing the “best” poetry, but it’s an issue for those of us thinking about poetry communities more generally.

In the wake of my own (beautiful, transformative) experience as a CantoMundo fellow, I have often asked myself and some of my fellow cantomundistas whether CantoMundo and its peer organizations can afford to be farm systems for Poetry. What happens when the editorial team changes, or the political climate? And what of all the poets on the outside, who have no shot (statistically and aesthetically) of ever being published in its pages, poets perhaps too raw or inelegant but who sustain poetry as a social and community practice, or who publish in community-oriented journals as daring and essential as PALABRA and The Acentos Review?

I know that CantoMundo, to its credit, has been moving toward allowing prospective fellows to establish eligibility in ways other than publication, including through a history of poetry readings and performances. Still, there’s a tension for me between the dream of (a living) poetry and the dream of (publishing in) Poetry, and I can’t imagine a version of Latinx poetics or U.S. poetics that didn’t properly account for that living poetry, something the Poetry Foundation website, with all its millions and media might, could do much better if it wanted to. So if I roll my eyes, it’s because I’m thinking back to the Poetry that wasn’t, to the poets that didn’t see its pages. Forget poetry foundations; you’re the foundation. You’re all beautiful. I’m sure Tía Harriet would dig you.

Tags: Amiri Baraka, Aracelis Girmay, Audre Lorde, Aurora Levins Morales, Barbara Jane Reyes, CantoMundo, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Carmen Giménez Smith, Carmen Tafolla, Cave Canem, Cherríe Moraga, Craig Santos Perez, Cynthia Cruz, David Tomas Martinez, Doris Sommer, Douglas Kearney, Eduardo Corral, Edwin Torres, Engracia Melendez, Federico Garcia Lorca, Francisco Aragón, Gary Soto, J. Michael Martínez, Jack Agüeros, Javier Zamora, Jennifer Tamayo, Jimmy Santiago Baca, John Chavez, Juan Felipe Herrera, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Julia Alvarez, Julia de Burgos, Julio Marzán, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Luis Muñoz Marín, Miguel Algarín, Nuyorican Poets Cafe, Orlando Ricardo Menes, Pedro Pietri, Rabindranath Tagore, Ray Gonzalez, Rhina P. Espaillat, Ricardo Pau-Llosa, Ricardo Sternberg, Rigoberto Gonzalez, Rodrigo Toscano, Salomón de la Selva, Sandra María Esteves, Tato Laviera, TC Tolbert, Tino Villanueva, Trace Peterson, Victor Hernandez Cruz, Virgil Suárez, William Carlos Williams, Willie Perdomo
Posted in Featured Blogger on Friday, September 30th, 2016 by Urayoán Noel.

I am a huge fan of the lesser known poets (especially my favorite one --Frank Stanton) as well as the legendary ones..
In fact, I am now considering starting a thread on the lesser known poets that so engage and enthrall we few that see their brilliance despite the
massive weight cast by the shadows of the legendary poets.--Tyr

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/fea...s/detail/69896

Essay
Rimbaud in Embryo
The lost poet Samuel Greenberg and the critical debate over his influence.
By Jacob Silverman
Self-portrait by Samuel Greenberg, courtesy of the Fales Library & Special Collections, New York University.

Some writers leave only traces, contrails across the literary firmament. They expire with few or no publications to their names, their legacies left as much to chance as to the efforts of the occasional passionate admirer. Contemporaries offer testimonies of superlative talent unfulfilled, of death robbing posterity of a name that, given time and circumstance, surely would have been added to the rolls of the great. And while some work might survive, appearing in the occasional anthology, it is shrouded in the pall of its author’s biography.

Samuel Greenberg belongs in the pantheon of literary manqués. He’s not totally forgotten—a few hundred poems survive; some were published in posthumous editions. In the 95 years since his death at the age of 23, he has endured as the prototypical “cult writer,” his works passed around like samizdat and occasionally earning an ardent, powerful admirer.

One of those admirers was Hart Crane, who, depending on your interpretation, drew significant influence from Greenberg or baldly plagiarized him. Crane’s poem “Emblems of Conduct” contains lines, either verbatim or with slight modifications, from six different Greenberg poems, including one called “Conduct.” Other work by Crane shows marks of Greenberg, whom Crane never met. The debate over just how much Crane took from Greenberg has animated Greenberg scholarship for decades, and has produced some worthwhile commentary on the nature of authorial influence. But at times it also obscures what is, on its own, a fascinating (albeit brief) life and oeuvre, deserving of its own consideration.

Born in Vienna in 1893, Samuel Greenberg was the sixth of eight children. At the turn of the century, his family immigrated to the United States, settling in the crowded tenements of the Lower East Side. In those early years he attended public and religious schools, learning to read Hebrew, and had a bar mitzvah, but in 1908, the same year his mother died, he left school in order to work.

The Greenbergs were a family of artisans. Samuel’s father worked with brocade, making decorative materials for synagogues’ Torah arks, and his brother Adolf made leather bags. After dropping out of school, Samuel worked with both of them.


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But sometime in 1912, around the same time he began writing poems in notebooks, Greenberg contracted tuberculosis and underwent what would be the first of many hospitalizations. Later that year, he also began taking piano lessons, though he reportedly had difficulty reading music and remaining focused. All the same, looking over one of Greenberg’s sketchbooks in the Fales Collection at NYU, which contains the bulk of his papers, I stumbled upon drawings of staff lines pebbled with musical notes, the name of each note written underneath; they were clearly some attempt at memorization. On the same page were a pair of delicately shaded hands—perhaps simply an exercise in anatomical drawing, though placed as they were, with the fingers curved slightly inward, they recalled a conductor leading an ensemble.

Greenberg read deeply of the British Romantics, as well as Blake, Milton, and Wilde, but he had a particular regard for music, attending concerts when he could and writing poems about Richard Strauss and Mendelssohn. After a concert at Carnegie Hall, Greenberg gave a copy of his poem “The Pianoforte Artist” to pianist Josef Hofmann. (In an autobiographical essay addressed to his brother Daniel, Greenberg wrote of these concerts, “I know we liked it better than life!”) Another poem, riffing about Brahms’s Paganini Variations, sends the reader through a gyre of rhapsody: “In each phrase / Beats, the patriotism of lyre love, improvised impulse spreads / Its familiar Master glow, Communication with the spirit muse.”

By April 1915, Greenberg was writing to William Murrell Fisher, a scholar and art critic whom Greenberg had met two years earlier at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in hopes of getting his work published. Time was running out for the young poet—“Sickness closed in with its careful teeth,” he wrote in that autobiographical essay. His tuberculosis had worsened (“the old story of weakness returned”); he had spent the previous two years in and out of hospitals, treatment facilities, and family members’ homes in New York, New Jersey, and Rhode Island. That summer, a doctor would remove a kidney. Through it all he wrote, not only hundreds of poems but also some short plays. When health allowed, he worked for his brother Adolf, the leather craftsman.


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Greenberg was also a prolific painter and sketch artist. Many of his sketches are of young men, done on scraps of paper or in small, dilapidated sketchbooks, and he reportedly liked to sit in Washington Square Park, where he drew strangers. The men tended to be in profile, finely dressed; occasionally they appeared as the barest silhouette, as if evaporating from the page. He also drew self-portraits—one shows him lounging in an ornately carved wooden chair, staring out almost playfully—and illustrations of his family members and fellow hospital patients. (One sketch is dedicated “to my friend William Fisher” and dated February 1915.)

The sketchbooks doubled as all-purpose notebooks. Besides the musical notations, there are scraps of verse and one apparently undelivered note, which reads, “Young man — 19. — wishes position in any office,” and is signed below.

Some of Greenberg’s handwriting is cramped and nearly indecipherable. In the Fales Collection, a line stuck out for me. It appeared below a simple, blocky sketch of a man’s dour face, cigarette prominently perched between his lips. The poet had written, “It is the gazing at the people one gets that way.”

With his own fragile health and both of his parents having died young, Greenberg was deeply conscious of his own mortality. In his drafts, he dated and initialed each poem, perhaps with an eye toward posterity. In the work itself, he treated death with respect but also not without a kind of sly playfulness. In the poem “To Dear Daniel”—Daniel was one of Samuel’s brothers—Greenberg wrote, “There is a loud noise of Death / Where I lay; / There is a loud noise of life / Far away.” The speaker knows that he is closer to his end than to his beginning. Some poems respond to death with disbelief that it could come so prematurely. One piece opens with the following lines: “Nurse brings me Medicine! Medicine? / For me! God, 20 years old! / Medicine!? I’ll leave it to thee! / The truth is a draught!”

Greenberg’s poetry employed bizarre spelling and syntax (many editions of his work have smoothed over these errors, at the cost of authenticity). He also tended to create what Philip Horton, an early Hart Crane biographer, called “archaic contractions”—'pon, e'en, e'er. Some words are unexpectedly capitalized. This is easily chalked up to his autodidact nature, but it may also owe something to Greenberg’s taste for Milton and Blake and the short plays he wrote, which were a mélange of Spenserian fantasy and Elizabethan drama. Like some of his poems, these plays took place in what New Directions founder James Laughlin, who published the first book of Greenberg’s poems in 1939, described as a “literary mythland.” One short drama, which I read in the Fales Collection, is titled “Capablanka” and dated October 1916. It concerns an anthropomorphic statue (the list of dramatis personae calls it “a motional statue”), three woodsmen, a talking “fairy snake,” and “an unknown magician” named Valotif, as well as several others.

Told in three short acts—the whole thing is only about 16 pages in typescript—the play’s basic action is mostly intelligible, but its prose tends toward the opaque, at times appearing like a deliberately obscure pastiche of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It features Greenberg’s characteristic spelling—“obsured,” “devine,” “familiars” used as a verb—and some evocative lines that show the beauty of what Laughlin called his “unconscious dictation.” “I varnish his throat,” one of the woodsmen offers by way of a threat; another, not believing that a monument can move, claims that there are “no such furies in granite”; the third speaks of “the cliffs sea / that moan their messages of wander foam / and dash over high sprays of lust.”

Perhaps fearful of giving him more than his due, critics have tended to praise and condemn Greenberg in a single line. They often dwell on his wildness, his untended lyricism, considering it both a virtue and a deficit, deeply intertwined.

John Berryman once remarked that Greenberg had “some power of phrasing” but “with rare exceptions so little control over syntax.” Thomas Lux, in his poem “Here’s to Samuel Greenberg,” describes Greenberg as “semi-illiterate / coughing it out among total / illiterates during the only time / in your life you had time / to write: on your back.” And yet, later in the same poem, Lux refers to him as “small master.”

Laughlin vacillated between even greater extremes, writing in the 1939 introduction: “The poetry of Greenberg is not great poetry, and it is not even important minor poetry ... and yet ... poetry it is, pure poetry, to an extent equalled by the work of few other writers.”

Philip Horton, writing in the Southern Review in 1936, also knocked Greenberg down before building him back up. “One has the successive impressions that the author was mad, illiterate, esoteric, or simply drunk,” Horton wrote. “And yet there flash out from this linguistic chaos, lines of pure poetry, powerful, illuminating, and original, lines unlike any others in English literature, except Blake’s perhaps.” Repeatedly, we observe a strange kind of diffidence: Greenberg is both semi-illiterate and a master, a powerful lyricist but out of control, not even a minor poet but also a creator of “pure poetry” (a phrase that both Laughlin and Horton used).

Could he be all of this—not either/or but both/and? Or did these critics, particularly the early ones such as Horton and Laughlin, not fully understand what they were looking at? The former called Greenberg “a visionary” before going on to ask, “But who was he, or is he? Did Hart Crane, who had his poems, know?”

Indeed, it is in Crane that we find someone whose critiques of Greenberg serve only to amplify his appreciation of him, cementing the picture of Greenberg as an untutored, untamed, and splendid lyricist—the poet equivalent of a naïve artist. Crane, in a letter to Gorham Munson praised Greenberg’s “hobbling yet really gorgeous attempts.” In the tragic poet’s work, Crane saw “a quality that is unspeakably eerie and the most convincing gusto.”

Crane first encountered Greenberg’s work in the winter of 1923–24. Greenberg had already been dead for six years, and Crane was staying in Woodstock, New York, where he spent time with William Murrell Fisher, likely the only person to know both men. Fisher showed Crane some of Greenberg’s poems, and Crane was immediately electrified, pacing around the room, declaiming lines.

In his letter to Munson, Crane also called Greenberg “a Rimbaud in embryo”—an epithet that makes some sense, as Rimbaud, though better educated, had left school by 15 and was done with poetry by 20. It’s difficult not to think in turn of Victor Hugo’s own description of Rimbaud: he called the fiery young poet “an infant Shakespeare.” In both cases, the young poet is granted a claim toward genius, but his precocity—he is embryonic, or he is an infant—somehow holds him back.

Rimbaud was a proto-surrealist, and in some of Greenberg’s work, one finds a surrealist bent. Laughlin cited Greenberg’s “The Pale Impromptu” as surrealist, “with its use of words for their own sake.” Its coded narrative and succession of disjointed phrases—“Water waves / torque blocks / Skulls of saints / patience absent / Yellow dreams / Sensive Stirs / Silent hills”—support this assessment. But Greenberg’s best work forsakes this experimentation, instead melding passionate first-person narratives—about the sea, death, God, poetry, mythological landscapes—with imagery that shimmers because it appears all the more carefully rendered.

Yet he also showed a surprising talent for restraint. “Conduct” begins with a painter illustrating a valley before giving way to Technicolor descriptions of an exploding volcano and darkening skies. But then Greenberg dials down his music to a pianissimo, and the poem resolves with a curious, almost mournful scene:

The wanderer soon chose
His spot of rest, they bore the
Chosen hero upon their shoulders
Whom they strangly admired — as,
The Beach tide Summer of people desired

After their meeting, Fisher gave Crane a sheaf of Greenberg’s poems and Crane set about retyping them. This sort of transcription, or re-scription, has been a common practice among writers for ages, but Crane took the process further. Greenberg, like such poets as Whitman before him, drew inspiration from the Brooklyn Bridge, and after copying Greenberg’s “The ‘East River’s Charm,” Crane added the following lines:

And will I know if you are dead?
The river leads on and on instead
Of certainty...

Drawing on “Conduct” as well as five other Greenberg poems, Crane cobbled together “Emblems of Conduct” from January to March 1924. (Marc Simon’s forensic analysis of Crane’s borrowings is the essential work on this subject. Simon, a literary scholar whose NYU PhD dissertation was about the Greenberg/Crane connection, would go on to edit The Complete Poems of Hart Crane.) He changed some lines, tinkering here and there, but the resulting three stanzas are largely a collage. Laughlin compared the final product to “centones of the Middle Ages, those patch-work poems in which Christian stories were told in lines torn from their contexts in pagan authors.” Laughlin continues, largely approvingly: “Crane did more than steal from Greenberg—he recreated, making something entirely new, entirely his own, from the original materials.”

The contemporary term for this is remixing, which at the moment has much cultural cachet. While I acknowledge the worth of remix in anything from Warhol to hip-hop sampling, it’s difficult not to think that Crane took more than his fair share and that he has benefited from his (understandable) stature as the greater poet. But many critics feel compelled to defend Crane, as if criticizing him in this instance, arguing that he let his enthusiasm for Greenberg get away from him, would undercut his otherwise formidable achievements.

“I do not think we even need to mention the word plagiarism,” Laughlin writes in his introduction to the 1939 volume, though he does just that. “We must strongly censure Crane for his failure to clearly state his source,” yet “no doubt he meant to acknowledge his debt ... it simply slipped his mind.” Yes, no doubt. It’s a pale justification, for Crane could have easily included a line of dedication or acknowledgment.

Another Crane biographer, Paul L. Mariani, calls Crane’s borrowings “problematic.” “Emblems of Conduct” was “a dreamlike poem, uncharacteristic of Crane,” Mariani writes, and “Crane’s attempt to take by eminent domain the scattered remains of a dead young poet was not, finally, one of his best efforts.”

But notions of influence, even of plagiarism, are rarely clear, even when, as in this case, there is a large body of inculpatory evidence. As Marc Simon has shown, Greenberg was not wholly sui generis. In 1915, Fisher gave Greenberg a copy of Thomas Carlyle’s Heroes and Hero-Worship (an apposite title, given the relationships here), and some of Carlyle’s imagery describing Iceland’s geography made it into Greenberg’s “Conduct” and, later, Crane’s “Emblems of Conduct.” Greenberg’s borrowings were not so direct, but they give some sense of where he looked for his own raw materials.

Greenberg may never escape the shadow of Hart Crane (though he surely deserves to have his complete works, including the drawings, published in a new edition). But the obligatory irony is that without Crane’s, say, overabundant enthusiasm for poems like “Conduct,” we might never know of Greenberg’s poetry at all. In stealing from Greenberg, Crane assured the lesser poet’s immortality.

Still, there is some sadness in knowing that Greenberg’s work will never quite stand on its own. Despite his fragile health and lack of education, Greenberg was uncommonly prepossessing. “The poet seeks an Earth in himself,” he wrote in one verse. He sought a world of his own making, but it was to be an ephemeral one, as he was subsumed by forces—and poets, too—greater than himself.

Originally Published: November 27th, 2012

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poe...ndation.org%29

Repeating Ourselves
Iteration and Reiteration in the October 2016 Poetry



In the no-name old tapestries, many
with halos, a glow or
a circle of jagged lines around each head
never bowed at the table, simply
looking straight on like a mirror gives us
back to ourselves.

In Marianne Boruch’s “The No-Name Tapestries,” the speaker sees herself in the anonymous figures of an artwork, and her own identity—like that of the work—grows hazy. Even the sentence’s grammar leaves us unsure of who’s doing what, confounding characters with a single ambiguous phrase: does “simply / looking straight on like a mirror” refer to the speaker’s gaze, or to the figures’?

If Boruch turns a tapestry into a mirror, Wayne Holloway-Smith’s “Some Waynes” is a funhouse mirror of a poem, reflecting its author in dozens of cartoonish variations:

Magic Wayne with flowers; Wanye West; Box-of-Tricks Wayne; Wayne sad on Facebook, proving he loves his daughter; the sporty Wayne — loves himself skinny; Bald Wayne, head like a rocking chair; Amy Waynehouse; Wayne the ironic; Fat Wayne — tits pushed beneath a Fred Perry Wayne…. all of them have stopped what they’re doing, all of them divided in two rows and facing each other, all of them, arms raised, they are linking fingers, all of them: an architrave through which 
I celebrate, marching like I am the bridegroom, grinning like I am the bride

Are these different people, different Waynes, who (unlike the unknowns in the Boruch poem) have in common only their name? Or does the name indicate the many people who exist within the same Wayne, fat and skinny, male and female, Wanye and Waynehouse, so that the speaker—like Boruch’s—turns multiple? Maybe so: toward the end, Holloway-Smith repeats “all of them” three times, emphasizing not only the quantity of Waynes but also their unity.

This poetic “box of tricks” concludes by celebrating oppositions. In festive formation, the Waynes divide in two, and so does Wayne himself. Then, at once bridegroom and bride, Wayne weds Wayne. What might this mean? In order to “marry” ourselves—to feel unified—do we first need to identify our inconsistencies?

Daisy Fried’s “No God in Us but Song” is, like Holloway-Smith’s, rife with copies and conflict:

Bored in the balcony reading your novel
hoping it will keep me awake — 
religion was always a blind spot — 
with my Sunday headache waiting for the service
to finish so I can retrieve my little chorister,
no god in us but song

Just as Boruch’s speaker sees herself within an artwork, we might see ourselves in this reluctant churchgoer, who—like us—is reading. And later we might see her in her daughter: when the mother was younger, we learn, she too was in a chorus, and now she notes “No god in us but song,” inviting us to see this poem as a kind of song.

Meanwhile, a less pleasant chorister, “pale important teenage Sophia,” delights in bossing around other children and in “leading them expressionless / in paired rows,” as though they were mere duplicates of each other (and of her). The girl is also a mother figure herself,

leaving Sophia alone striving with their robes,
sighing out her burdens in a way
she could only have learned from a mom.

While the poem brims with choruses, it’s also filled with solitary women: Sophia, the speaker, the single mother of a childhood friend. Alone in church, watching her daughter from afar, the speaker worries that she may lose her husband, who is 30 years older, and become a single mother too. “If I kept singing maybe I could keep you here,” Fried writes, and then: “If I kept singing I could keep you here.” But what would it mean to keep him there? To keep him alive? Or merely to keep him in the poem, even as death takes him away—to keep his likeness, in this poem full of likenesses?

Mortality lingers over the poem’s final scene:

and lonely Sophia in the shadowy indoors, unsnapping
the ruff of a straggling treble chorister,
stroking it neat, gently folding it away
as her tired mother nags hurry, hurry up please.

Tired Sophia, who could only have learned her attitude from her mother, is now subject to her mother’s weariness. “Hurry up please” brings to mind “HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME,” the closing call at pubs that appears—with an air of impending doom—in The Waste Land, and as the title of a similarly desolate Anne Sexton poem. Time is exactly what the fearful speaker must contend with. Meanwhile Sophia works slowly, gently, as if to make time, as if time were not rushing on.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/fea...s/detail/91017

Essay
Forever Words
A new book collects the unpublished poems of Johnny Cash.
By Paul Muldoon


The great artist has a finger on the pulse of his time; he also quickens that pulse. In the case of Johnny Cash, his music seems to well up directly from the poverty and deprivation of country life in the Great Depression, through the uncertainty of World War II, the Cold War, Korea, and Vietnam, to the victories of adulation and the vicissitudes of addiction. We might guess, even if we didn’t know, that Cash’s classic “Five Feet High and Rising” is an account of the flooding with which he was all too familiar from his 1930s achildhood in the cotton fields of Arkansas:

How high’s the water, mama?
Five feet high and risin’

How high’s the water, papa?
Five feet high and risin’

His song “Man in Black” is a deft and dexterous comment on Vietnam, a subject on which so many others were heavy-handed:

And I wear it for the thousands who have died,
Believin’ that the Lord was on their side

I wear it for another hundred thousand who have died,
Believin’ that we all were on their side

The relationship between the amphitheater and amphetamines, meanwhile, is rather neatly delineated in a piece collected here called “Going, Going, Gone”:

Liquid, tablet, capsule, powder
Fumes and smoke and vapor
The payoff is the same in the end
Liquid, tablet, capsule, powder
Fumes and smoke and vapor
Convenient ways to get the poison in

So ingrained in our collective unconscious is the voice of Johnny Cash that we can all but hear the boom-chicka boom-chicka of his guitar accompaniment, at once reassuring and disquieting in its very familiarity.

The defining characteristic of an effective lyric—even the greatest of them—is that it doesn’t quite hold up to the scrutiny we might bring to bear on a poem, that only something along the lines of that missing boom-chicka will allow it to be completely what it most may be. In the case of work that is previously unpublished, or hitherto overlooked, this intrinsic lack is thrown into even greater relief. Is it possible that Cash himself chose not to round out, never mind record, some or all of these pieces? Are we doing him and his memory a disservice in allowing them out of the attic and into the wider world? Writers of the stature of Elizabeth Bishop, T. S. Eliot, and Philip Larkin are among those whose reputations have suffered at least a dent from the indiscriminate publication of their second- or third-rate efforts. And the fact is that even great artists not only nod, like Homer, but also produce nonstarters and no-nos.

Such considerations weighed heavily on the team—John Carter Cash and Steve Berkowitz—most immediately involved in the collection and collation of the copious raw material from which I was able to make the selection for Forever Words. It was with an initial sense of relief, then an increasingly rapturous glee, that I realized there is so much here that will indeed broaden and deepen our perception of Johnny Cash and his legacy.

Before thinking about Johnny Cash’s legacy, though, I’d like to appeal to a passage from T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” which I continue to find particularly instructive in this matter:

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it.

The veracity of Eliot’s last profound observation may be seen in a piece like “The Dogs Are in the Woods”:

The dogs are in the woods
And the huntin’s lookin’ good
And the raccoons on the hill
I can hear them trailing still

These dogs are calling out to some of their not-too-distant relatives, the hunting hounds poisoned by Lord Randall’s dissed girlfriend, as reported by Lord Randall to his mother in the traditional Scotch-Irish folksong “Lord Randall”:

“What became of your bloodhounds, Lord Randall my son?
What became of your bloodhounds, my handsome young man?”
“O they swelled and they died: mother, make my bed soon,
for I’m weary wi’ hunting, and fain wald lie down.”

We’ve already seen the dialogue format of the “Lord Randall” ballad repurposed in “Five Feet High and Rising.” The “Muscadine Wine” we find in this collection is an offshoot of the same vine that gave us the blood-red wine in the Scottish standard “The Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens”:

The King sits in Dunfermline town,
Drinking the blood-red wine;
“O where shall I get a skeely skipper
To sail this ship or mine?”

Then up and spake an eldern knight,
Sat at the King’s right knee:
“Sir Patrick Spens is the best sailor
That ever sailed the sea.”

The King has written a broad letter,
And sealed it with his hand,
And sent it to Sir Patrick Spens,
Was walking on the strand.

It’s no accident that the tradition of the Scots ballad, along with its transmogrified versions in North America, is one in which Johnny Cash should be so at ease, given that the first recorded instance of the name Cash—that of Roger Cass—is found in, of all things, the Registrum de Dunfermelyn. The entry is dated 1130, during the reign of King David I of Scotland (r. 1124–1153). “The Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens” is set in Dunfermline a mere hundred sixty years later, in 1290.

We may also see the influence of the Scotch-Irish tradition in the use of the tag phrase at the end of each verse (a device we’ve come to associate with the work of Bob Dylan), in a piece like “Slumgullion”:

Every day’s a brand-new mountain
Don’t drink long at any fountain
You’ll be turned into slumgullion

“Slumgullion” is a word that means several things, including a watery stew, the watery waste left after the rendering of whale blubber, and the slurry associated with a mine. It is generally believed to be derived from “slum,” an old word for “slime,” and “gullion,” an English dialect term for “mud” or “cesspool.” “Gullion” may actually be a corruption of the Gaelic word góilín, “pit” or “pool.” The earliest recorded usage of “slumgullion,” in Mark Twain’s Roughing It (1872), refers to a drink:

Then he poured for us a beverage which he called “Slum gullion,” and it is hard to think he was not inspired when he named it. It really pretended to be tea, but there was too much dish-rag, and sand, and old bacon-rind in it to deceive the intelligent traveler.

The Scotch-Irish song tradition has a strong humorous component that may be detected in “Jellico Coal Man,” a song about life in a Tennessee mining town that could easily have been called Slumgullion had it not already been named after the wild angelica (Angelica sylvestris) that grows there in abundance:

It will warm your baby in the winter time
It comes direct from the Jellico mine
When the sun comes up that’s the time I start
You will see me comin’ with my two-wheel cart

There’s a not too-far-from-the-surface eroticism about this coal-mining man that straddles not only the ballad tradition but also the bawdiness of certain old blues songs. We recognize it in “Hey, Baby, Wake Up,” with its assertion that “I need my biscuit buttered, Babe.” We have detected it in “Who’s Gonna Grease My Skillet?” when he says “Who’s gonna squeeze my juice if you should go,” with a nod and wink in the direction of Robert Johnson’s “Squeeze my lemon.”

In addition to conjuring up the naughty nickname attached to, say, Jelly Roll Morton, “Jellico Coal Man” brings to mind the city of Jericho, the walls of which succumbed to the power of music when the Israelite priests sounded their ram’s-horn trumpets. (In one of those fascinating coincidences that many of us enjoy, Jellico was the childhood home of Homer Rodeheaver, the famous evangelist and trombonist.) The iconography of the Bible is a constant in Johnny Cash’s work, rarely so powerful as in a piece like “Job,” with its recalibration of Job as cattle baron:

Job was a wealthy man
He had a lot of kids and a lot of land
He had cattle on a thousand hills
He lived every day to do God’s will

On a technical note, there exist a number of versions of the “Job” text in Cash’s hand. As with several other pieces included here, I drew on these multiple manuscript sources to make a plausible “finished” version. An attentive reader may therefore remark on discrepancies and disconnects, variations and vagaries, between the printed texts and the facsimile material with which they’re so artfully interspersed. That reader may also notice the rationalization of stanza breaks and the generally normative tendencies of grammar, punctuation, and spelling. Cash’s occasional misspellings need be perpetuated no more than Yeats’s, and that includes the humorous humdinger “Caddilac.”

There’s another humorous strand running through a number of these lyrics that draws on the cowboy tradition, be it the Lone Ranger mounted on Silver, referred to in “Spirit Rider” (“I will mount my Hi-Yo and I will ride off, ma’am”), or the singing cowboy Roy Rogers in “Hey, Baby, Wake Up”:

Hey, Baby, wake up
Did you hear the latest news
The man said Roy and Dale split up
And Dale got Trigger, too
Yeah, I hear your sweet feet on the f loor
I knew that’d get through to you

That humor extends to the litany of exhortations in “Don’t Make a Movie About Me” that reflect Cash’s own ambivalence about celebrity and the associated tabloid slobbering:

Don't let 'em drag old Hickory Lake
For my telephones and bottles and roller skates . . .
Out a hundred yards from my lakeside house
Weighted down with a rock is a skirt and blouse
A dozen pair of boots that made a dozen corns
Trombones, trumpets, harmonicas and horns
And the tapes that I threw from the lakeside door
Silverstein, and Kristofferson from years before

This was the selfsame Shel Silverstein who won the Grammy Award for Best Country Song of 1969 for “A Boy Named Sue.” He was friendly with David Allan Coe, also mentioned in “Don’t Make a Movie About Me,” who had the distinction of embarking on his music career in Nashville while living in a hearse parked outside Ryman Auditorium, a macabre touch that would surely have ap- pealed to Cash. The song continues:

If they’re hot on a book called Man in Black Tell
’em I’ve got the rights and won’t give back If
you don’t know my tune you can’t get it right I
don’t talk about me in Man in White

As it turns out, Man in White is the title of Cash’s historical novel about the life of Saint Paul before and after his conversion. We’re reminded, of course, that Johnny Cash as the “Man in Black” is less gunslinger than psalm-singing preacher, the unapologetic nature of his Christian faith shining through in “He Bore It All for Me,” a piece that takes as its text Matthew 11:28, “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” A faith in the sense that there is a world beyond this one must at least partly inform the sentiments of “Forever”:

But the trees that I planted
Still are young
The songs I sang
Will still be sung

•

In addition to the sense that it functions within time, the great work of art brings with it a profound sense of timelessness. There’s a sense of immortality and inevitability that suggests (1) that it has always existed and (2) that it was always meant to exist in this form and this form only. Johnny Cash’s quiet insistence that his songs “will still be sung” might easily be read as self-regarding but is more accurately perceived as a manifestation of the humility that is an absolute prerequisite in art-making: it has less to do with his name and fame being bruited about in Dubai or Decatur or Dunfermline itself than with his achieving a kind of beautiful anonymity. It’s a claim to deathlessness that may be made only by someone who has taken into account that, like “The Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens,” Johnny Cash’s brilliant “California Poem” was written by everyone and no one:

The lights are on past midnite
The curtains closed all day
There’s trouble on the mountain
The valley people say


From FOREVER WORDS: The Unknown Poems by Johnny Cash, published by Blue Rider Press, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Foreword copyright © 2016 by John Carter Cash.

Originally Published: October 12th, 2016

Cash, was and will always be a hero to me, despite his personal faults/(demons)...
A country boy(like me), he retained most of his upbringing and championed the common man in song and poem.
Born and raised close to my hometown- he was my mother's favorite country singer, edging out Hank Williams SR.
BY JUST A TAD--SHE WOULD SAY.
AS LONG AS I CAN REMEMBER , HE WAS A GREAT AND TRUE POET TO ME...
His songs were poetry set to music..... -TYR

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poe...s/detail/90643

Prose from Poetry Magazine
Your Thorns Are the Best Part of You
Marianne Moore’s Observations and Stevie Smith’s All the Poems
By Vidyan Ravinthiran

Observations, by Marianne Moore.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $16.00.

Linda Leavell, whose biography of Marianne Moore was published three years ago, introduces this reissue of the poet’s 1924 debut, Observations:

There is no such thing as a definitive edition of Moore’s poems, 
for she revised her work throughout her life, continually 
asserting her authority in an ongoing dialogue with her 
reader.... Published on her eightieth birthday, The Complete Poems presents her final intentions but not necessarily her most compelling ones. Moore was not the same poet at eighty that she had been at thirty-seven, when Observations was published, nor was her readership the same. Twenty-first-century readers deserve to know the innovative poems that so excited H.D., Eliot, Williams, Pound, and Stevens and that were an “eye-opener in more ways than one” to the young Elizabeth Bishop. And they deserve to discover the emotional urgency of this socially engaged poet, whose views about multicultural tolerance, biodiversity, heroic open-mindedness, democracy, and individual liberty we are only now beginning to appreciate.

In Moore’s verse, snippets of borrowed speech or writing are recognized as such — they wear, quite without shame, their quotation marks — but her first impulse wasn’t to attribute, to include notes directing her readers to the original sources; this happened only at the prompting of Scofield Thayer, editor of The Dial. Moore’s “Note on the Notes” in the Complete Poems acknowledges contrary responses: “some readers suggest that quotation-marks are disruptive of pleasant progress; others, that notes to what should be complete are a pedantry or evidence of an insufficiently realized task.” Since she has “not yet been able to outgrow this hybrid method of composition, acknowledgements seem only honest.” So we have the poet apologizing to some people for including the voices of other people in her verse, in a possibly distracting way — alliteratively pleading: “Perhaps those who are annoyed by provisos, detainments, and postscripts could be persuaded to take probity on faith and disregard the notes.”

As Leavell comes to argue the contemporary relevance of Observations, another voice emerges. This isn’t the scholar analyzing and explaining the work, or the biographer documenting the life. It’s the salesperson talking, and uneasily, because aware always of their script, yet unwilling to entirely commit to its banalities. Academics are leaned on to speak this way, by publishers, funding bodies. Sometimes the voice, unhappily internalized, rises up from within, becomes fused with our real ambitions (I have been there, I understand and sympathize). But the strain shows, as “emotional urgency” comes together, earnestly, with “socially engaged” — we couldn’t have our poets any other way! — and the next clause hesitates as to whether Moore simply has opinions (“views about    ...    
heroic open-mindedness?”) or whether she has, let us say, the right opinions. Do we read poets for their “views”; and if we are “beginning to appreciate” Moore’s, is this because they agree with ours? 
I don’t mean to harp on about one sentence in a dedicated scholar’s introduction — written, no doubt, to time and word limits, as well as responsive to the current publishing (ugh) climate, but I do think the question must be asked, and that in such matters we should express ourselves precisely. For example, racists also have “views about 
multicultural tolerance,” strong ones, which they periodically communicate to me with an unvariegated stridency surely appalling to Moore, typically out of fast-moving cars.

I’m not saying that Moore wasn’t forward-looking and sensitive, or that these qualities haven’t been neglected, or passed over because camouflaged by the knottiness of her musical meanings, the lovely and tedious divagations which result from her refusal to ever not nuance. But I am saying that I wouldn’t go to Moore to have my “views” confirmed — that’s not what she’s for — and when she is prissy, or illiberal (she worried to Bishop that an unnamed acquaintance was “in the clutches of a sodomite”!) her verse remains intimate with me. In fact, the tendentious cavilling of her poems around the prospect of intimacy, their concern to assert views that can be shared, and a perpetual spiky awareness of their own off-putting behaviors — this is why I read her. Moore writes about self-protective animals, their often beautiful armor, and her poems don their polished plate, and occasionally take it off, with marvelous ceremony. “Black Earth,” 
excluded from the Complete Poems and happily included here, appears to self-describe with unusual openness:

Openly, yes,
with the naturalness
of the hippopotamus or the alligator
when it climbs out on the bank to experience the

sun, I do these
things which I do, which please
no one but myself. Now I breathe and now I am sub-
merged; the blemishes stand up and shout when the object

in view was a
renaissance; shall I say
the contrary?

The poet evokes in creatures and landscapes qualities she would like to possess. In this she is rather like the critic in the business of transforming her, Marianne Moore, into an ideal citizen. Yet as the third stanza reveals, there is always a turn; the recognition of a difficulty; a complication, which reveals the power of assertion as proceeding from an injury (those “blemishes stand up and shout”). Is Moore tolerant, open-minded? Sometimes. There are things one shouldn’t be tolerant of (she is not afraid, as we are, of the position of judgment; is in no danger of   becoming tolerant of intolerance), and openness of mind is periodic — you couldn’t live that way all the time, the fontanel must close if we are to survive. (The motives of publishing and publicity are not always good, in turning social injustices, and our injustices to nature, into buzzwords to be included if a book is to be picked up and sold.) And maybe the opening of the mind is not its own achievement, but a gift from outside us, unpredictable and to be anticipated, if never presumed.

Moore knows this, and it relates to her alternation between aphorism and incomprehensibility. Between self and other she discerns — can’t help but recognize, and crabbily adorn — countless 
barriers. Some of these wink in and out of existence, are playful, like those of a pinball machine, or the antic obstacles the player leaps and slides between in a platform video game; others, of long standing, thaw ominously, like Arctic sea ice decimated by black carbon. 
So I can’t see her as a cultural spokeswoman, not because Moore doesn’t worry where, and how, we worry, but since her poems simply 
don’t communicate that way. (Does our insistence on the politics which can be extracted from them manifest a remaining anxiety about the readability of her verse?) In her poems, someone speaks, would assert, and other voices protrude — rarely solely to confirm what has been said, or bully the reader. If there is a simple message, it never quite reaches us, but is, like Zeno’s arrow, paralyzed at every point of its arc through the air.

If Moore’s borrowings allow for the characterization of her as a modern collage artist, a devil-may-care dialogic experimenter, Elizabeth Bishop had quite a different view. Helping Moore with her translations of La Fontaine, she comes to a sadly astonished awareness of her mentor’s difference from other people, linked to her inability to hear or write verse in conventional ways. It seems that Moore “was possessed of a unique, involuntary sense of rhythm, therefore of meter”; what else would one expect, given that “she looked like no one else” and “talked like no one else,” and that “her poems showed a mind not much like anyone else’s”? The younger poet wonders of the older whether her deep-down oddity is helpless or chosen — it could be that her poetry emerged at a modernist threshold, that she was set free to experiment? — and is finally led to “realize more than I ever had the rarity of true originality, and also the sort of alienation it might involve.” When Bishop helps her out with simple rhymes, or turns her drafts iambic, Moore is astonished by what, to others, would be quite obvious emendations, or normalizations. It’s like those quotations in her verse — someone else arrives to lend a hand, to say what the poet is herself unable to, where she is prevented by abiding and mysterious impediments. Because a lack is remedied by it, a pedestrian encounter takes on the aspect of grace: “Marianne would exclaim, ‘Elizabeth, thank you, you have saved my life!’”

There are in Observations slight poems Moore was right to exclude from the Complete Poems, with its mighty epigraph: “Omissions are not accidents.” These are short lyrics, stingy rather than pointed — 
there’s a run of several at the start of the book. But we might consider “Reticence and Volubility” a rejoinder to the sales-voice looking to package Marianne Moore for the twenty-first century:

“When I am dead,”
The wizard said,
“I’ll look upon the narrow way
And this Dante,
And know that he was right
And he’ll delight
In my remorse,
Of course.”
“When I am dead,”
The student said,
“I shall have grown so tolerant,
I’ll find I can’t
Laugh at your sorry plight
Or take delight
In your chagrin,
Merlin.”

This was first published in the May 1915 issue of Poetry, as “The Wizard in Words.” Tolerance doesn’t mean to this poem what it means to us. (Nor does the concept of offensiveness, when it appears in conjunction, in “Injudicious Gardening”: “The sense of privacy /
 In what you did — deflects from your estate / Offending eyes, and will not tolerate / Effrontery.”) Matthew 7:14: “Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.” Moore is concerned, like the apostle, and Dante, with ethics, though a coherent theology is replaced here by misunderstanding encounters. The wizard and the poet discover a stance toward each other, but the student, “grown so tolerant” — a word placed under ironic scrutiny — can’t respond to the wizard either with laughter or approval at the moral “remorse” she understands, instead, as “chagrin.” I can’t pretend to understand the poem wholly, but I recognize Moore’s interest in failed relationships, and the limitations of retrospective judgement — the “delights” of moralizing. We wish to draw connections between ourselves and others, but to do so simplistically is a form of arrogance. Moore returns over and over again to this problem, and sometimes her poems don’t work because they do no more than utter a stalemate. All the poetry, for instance, of “To Be Liked by You Would Be a Calamity” is in the title. Which can’t be said of “Roses Only”:

You would, minus thorns,
look like a what-is-this, a mere
peculiarity. They are not proof against a worm, the elements, or mildew
but what about the predatory hand? What is brilliance without co-ordination? Guarding the
infinitesimal pieces of your mind, compelling audience to
the remark that it is better to be forgotten than to be remembered 
too violently,
your thorns are the best part of you.

The reader, the critic, seeking to turn Moore into someone entirely like themselves, will come up against those thorns. Her personality is indelible, and refuses “to be remembered too violently.” I delight less in the content of her opinions than the scrollwork of their framing; a defensiveness admitting of ebullience, and heartfelt pleasure, as she quests for the large, the liveable statement, through fields of digression.

Observations contains several of Moore’s large and small masterpieces, unweatherable poems which everybody should read. “To a Snail” is here; two versions of “Poetry” — more on this later — as well as “Critics and Connoisseurs,” “When I Buy Pictures,” “A Grave,” “Snakes, Mongooses, Snake-Charmers, and the Like,” “Silence,” and “Marriage.” Those familiar with the Complete Poems will notice changes — typically she cuts the flab, and swaps in clarifying punctuation; the later versions are the better ones. This is also true when she relineates: “The Fish” is printed here in a six-line stanza, rather than, as eventually transpired, a five; Moore must have realized there was no need for an intervening line containing only one word. Observations mentions “chaff” a few times, and separating the wheat from it is precisely what she editorially accomplished. Leavell observes that these changes represent not only a response to free verse, an including of its strategies, but also an assertion of Moore’s authority. The changes she makes are part of the difficult conversation this rather bizarre and, as Bishop has it, alienated person 
is trying to have, throughout her career, with her growing audience. If she moves to accommodate the reader, she also insists on her own predilections — the technical preferences of the poet about the tiniest quirks of sound and meaning. Moore’s self-editing extends what’s going on in the poems themselves, whose processes of assembly, whether consciously stilted or magically all-at-once and deft, are part of the spectacle.

Leavell describes Moore as a poet of “precision,” and it’s curious to note that in the original version of “Bowls,” a key line reads: “I learn that we are precisians”; Moore’s revision was to “precisionists.” For her, finding the right word is a moral duty, and “Picking and Choosing,” about literature and literary criticism, is improved when she picks and chooses what she wishes to keep in it. Trimming the verbiage, she has her poem speak with the clarity it praises in others. Yet the original does score a couple of points over its superior successor:

Literature is a phase of life: if
one is afraid of it, the situation is irremediable; if
one approaches it familiarly,
what one says of it is worthless. Words are constructive
when they are true; the opaque allusion — the simulated flight

upward — accomplishes nothing. Why cloud the fact
that Shaw is selfconscious in the field of sentiment but is otherwise re-
warding? that James is all that has been
said of him, if feeling is profound?
— From Observations

Literature is a phase of life. If one is afraid of it,
the situation is irremediable; if one approaches it familiarly,
what one says of it is worthless.
The opaque allusion, the simulated flight upward,
accomplishes nothing. Why cloud the fact
that Shaw is self-conscious in the field of sentiment
but is otherwise rewarding; that James
is all that has been said of him.
— From Complete Poems

In the later version, Moore is unafraid to speak (relatively) clearly; she removes what “accomplishes nothing,” and has learned how not to cloud the facts. The line break has us dwell a moment on the name of  Henry James — the shift to free verse has made possible a different 
inflection, capturing rather than displacing of the authority Moore describes and would emulate. Previously, the dead matter about words being “constructive / when they are true” arrived to rhyme with “if”; it’s no great loss. Yet the connection between “if” and “life” is more clearly felt in Observations. And it is a pity to lose the shift in the first two lines from a colon to a semicolon — Moore’s attentiveness 
to how these gently unlike forms of punctuation, and the repetition, alternatively color that hinging word. Rereading these poems, I was struck by her feeling for the semicolon as the grammar of tact. Moore takes this, I think, from her studies in prose style: “You were the jewelry of sense; / Of sense, not license”; ‘“I should like to be alone”; / to which the visitor replies, / “I should like to be alone; / why not be alone together?”’; “The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence; / not in silence, but restraint.”

“An Octopus,” that masterful ecopoem, a gigantically reader-resisting bio-mass of collateral quotation — evocative of Mount Rainier and its glacier — contains in Observations a full page of extra description. I quote some, not all:

Inimical to “bristling, puny, swearing men
equipped with saws and axes,”
this treacherous glass mountain
admires gentians, ladyslippers, harebells, mountain dryads,
and “Calypso, the goat flower — 
that greenish orchid fond of snow” — 
anomalously nourished upon shelving glacial ledges
where climbers have not gone or have gone timidly,
“the one resting his nerves while the other advanced,”
on this volcano with the bluejay, her principal companion.

The first quotation is from Clifton Johnson’s What to See in America, the others from government pamphlets Moore consulted in her research. (Notes on the lines that follow mention a “comment 
overheard at the circus,” and Anthony Trollope.) Mount Rainier’s complexity is twinned with its value — this is why the poet must be unobvious in her approach — and she won’t just have the reader take her word for it, but confects a masala of appreciative utterance. The “treacherous glass mountain” is said, itself, to possess the power of admiring; this is an extension of Moore’s own spreading admiration for multiple phenomena, including the orchid. This “anomalously nourished” flower (I love that haughtily appreciative, that scientifically cherishing adverb, it is Moore through and through) is feminized, 
and forms a partnership with the blue jay positioned as male. Rather like the climbers taking it in turns to ascend the mountain, one 
subject hands on the baton to the next — the glacier gives way to the snow-fed goat flower, which is in turn replaced by the bird.

Moore writes inclusively: she pastes in what others say, how different plants and animals behave. This means she’s unavoidably in the business of turning all this otherness into herself, or wishing to become closer to it. But these edits reveal the dangers. It was hard to know when to stop, and the question of what or who to mention next, to move the poem on, is one Moore struggled to solve. Leavell includes both the 1924 and the 1925 versions of “Poetry”; a third, radically shortened, appears in the Complete Poems. The 1925 poem is only transitional — a genuinely intriguing misstep:

I too, dislike it:
there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.
The bat, upside down; the elephant pushing,
a tireless wolf under a tree,
the base-ball fan, the statistician — 
“business documents and schoolbooks” — 
these phenomena are pleasing,
but when they have been fashioned
into that which is unknowable,
we are not entertained.
It may be said of all of us
that we do not admire what we cannot understand;
enigmas are not poetry.

The listed items are not sensuously imagined, and contribute only the theme of endurance (the elephant “pushing,” the “tireless wolf”). The movement from “I too, dislike it” — is this actually shocking, or only humorous, for the poet to say this about poetry? — to the social hedging of what “may be said of all of us” is, unbelievably for Moore, a smidge cowardly. Yet — to return to Leavell’s introduction — if “twenty-first-century readers deserve to know the innovative poems” of Observations as they originally appeared, Moore does suggest here, contrarily, that in these poems data is “fashioned / into that which is unknowable.”

What we “know” is not a secure possession in “The Labors of Hercules.” Here Moore immortalizes the words of, according to the note, “The Reverend J.W. Darr” — in arguing

that it is one thing to change one’s mind,
another to eradicate it — that one keeps on knowing
“that the Negro is not brutal.
that the Jew is not greedy,
that the Oriental is not immoral,
that the German is not a Hun.”

Here are the social “views” we are glad to acclaim; but the careful reader will require no such assurance that Moore is on the side of the angels. It’s good to have the first line and a half, cut by Moore in the Complete Poems, given its acidulous querying of the cliché, to change one’s mind: “eradicate” suggests racial cleansing. Moore is alert both to what we can know, and should keep on knowing, and what we can’t. Her revisions remind me of Wittgenstein: “what we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.” For “unknowable” appears in neither of the other versions of “Poetry.” The first, longer, messier, quotes Yeats on poets as “literalists of the imagination,” and is famous for going one better and defining poems as “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.” But Moore would finally shun all evasive talk, and canonize a majestic snippet. In the Complete Poems, she states what she believes. She no longer provides evidence to support her case, or nervously talks around the subject, for the reader must make up her own mind. About poetry, that is, and about Marianne Moore:

I, too, dislike it.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one 
discovers in
it, after all, a place for the genuine.


All the Poems, by Stevie Smith.

New Directions. $39.95.

There is a strand of English poetry, written by women, skeptical about the need of men to take themselves seriously. (Gender is fluid, cultural; yet the target exists, and these poems hit it, they’re both funny and clever.) Take Wendy Cope, who in “A Policeman’s Lot” pokes fun at Ted Hughes, who says the “progress of any writer is marked by those moments when he manages to outwit his own inner police system.” To be read to the strains of Gilbert and Sullivan:

No, the imagination of a writer (of a writer)
Is not the sort of  beat a chap would choose (chap would choose)
And they’ve assigned me a prolific blighter (’lific blighter) — 
I’m patrolling the unconscious of   Ted Hughes.

In Jo Shapcott’s “Religion for Boys,” “the little stone figure in the porch” of the temple of Mithras — a goddess in her own right — is amused by the devotees entering where no women are allowed to go:

She chuckles. These boys do such hard graft,
big tests where they’re sat hard against the fire
torturing themselves through seven grades towards
perfection.

Shapcott’s isn’t “light verse,” but Cope has been tarred with this brush, and then we have Stevie Smith. Her poems (despite an excellent monograph by Will May, the editor of this collection, and notable essays by Christopher Ricks and Philip Larkin, among others) still, perhaps, haven’t been appreciated in all their fine, textured seriousness. This may be because they poke fun at the kinds of seriousness we’ve inherited — and would suggest something better.

I say “we”: do I mean men, again? “Thoughts about the Person from Porlock” may have been the model for Cope’s poem, for it confronts the Major Male Poet, specifically Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who famously blamed the incompletion of “Kubla Khan” on an interrupting visitor. Though isn’t Smith more alive than Cope, to the motivations behind the poet’s language of (self-)confrontation? Pomposity is not so much deflated, here, as psychologically 
re-explained:

Coleridge received the Person from Porlock
And ever after called him a curse
Then why did he hurry to let him in? — 
He could have hid in the house.

It was not right of Coleridge in fact it was wrong
(But often we all do wrong)
As the truth is I think he was already stuck
With Kubla Khan.

Smith’s perceptiveness, her generosity (that parenthesis), requires of the reader more than a second glance. The social contact of the “Person from Porlock” was, it turns out, crucial to Coleridge, as both an excuse and an escape; for “he was already stuck” — with his poem? He had writer’s block? — no, he was “stuck / With Kubla Khan,” a personified aspect of himself he’d rather elude.

Smith is especially unsparing of   bullying men, like the eponymous “Major Macroo,” who lords it over the wife he neglects:

Such men as these, such selfish cruel men
Hurting what most they love what most loves them,
Never make a mistake when it comes to choosing a woman
To cherish them and be neglected and not think it inhuman.

Yet once again she doesn’t terminate with blame, but presses beyond, to cultural explanations. Macroo and his wife are perfectly suited — in a bad way. A malfunctory society produced them, the pair of them, even if the power is entirely in his hands. “How Cruel is the Story of Eve,” says Smith, designed to “give blame to women most / And most punishment”; this “is the meaning of a legend that colours / All human thought; it is not found among animals.” (Just one smack, of many, at repressive Christianity.) For Smith, as for D.H. Lawrence — or Hughes — animals, when they aren’t abominably tamed, provide an alternative to a sick culture; it’s good to see this discourse strapped to a feminist argument, instead of boosting a male writer’s self-esteem. But in both of these poems, Smith goes a little further, in asking what we really mean by “human”; and the slant-rhyme linking this word, or its negative, with “woman” (one of Smith’s best) reappears in “Girls!” from Mother, What Is Man?:

Girls! although I am a woman
I always try to appear human

Unlike Miss So-and-So whose greatest pride
Is to remain always in the VI Form and not let down the side

Do not sell the pass dear, don’t let down the side
This is what this woman said and a lot of  balsy stuff beside
(Oh the awful balsy nonsense that this woman cried.)

Balsy, not ballsy. But we shouldn’t reduce this poem to a joke — at least, not before it does this to itself. Smith’s rhymes, and slant-rhymes, are analytic, exhortatory, they sing with corrective spite. In the space between “girl” and “woman” she locates a deep uncertainty, 
and while she is evidently scornful of those, like Macroo, who consider women less than “human,” she is also alert to the need to keep up appearances, how tough it is “to appear,” to oneself and to the world, as a being coherent and complete. How miserably inevitable it is, that valuing oneself (as a woman, a particularly “human” woman) is accomplished at the expense of someone else — who must be judged wanting, if one is to be found, in contrast, acceptable.

“Miss So-and-So” corresponds to Major Macroo in her military language — these are the dying strains of the British Empire, reduced to team-calls in assemblies for sixth-formers — and we see here how Smith doesn’t stop at unworthy men, but also gleefully attacks over-refined, or vicious, or class- or race-conscious women, and (it’s the title of this next poem) their “Parents”:

Oh beautiful brave mother, the wife of the colonel,
How could you allow your young daughter to become aware of the scheming?
If  you had not, it might have stayed a mere dreaming
Of palaces and princes, girlish at worst.
Oh to become sensible about social advance at seventeen is to be lost.

If the first couplet of “Girls!” has the immediacy and punch of a Beyoncé lyric, this is closer to the songs of the Oompa Loompas in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Smith repeats herself — there are things she cares about, which more than get her goat, she demands change — but she’s also capable of many species of poem. Here’s a short one — a comic’s one-liner, really, though it’s a couplet:

This Englishwoman is so refined
She has no bosom and no behind.
— This Englishwoman

May’s helpful note directs us to Edmund Waller’s poem “On a Girdle”: “That which her slender waist confin’d, / Shall now my joyful temples bind,” he writes, and also — “A narrow compass, and yet there / Dwelt all that’s good, and all that’s fair.” In Smith’s poem, “refined” means — the irony is strong — sophisticated, but it also describes the Englishwoman as a creature, like one of the ludicrously 
effete dogs at Crufts, bred by specialists into what they consider a pure and pleasing shape. She is asexual, the victim of a mutilation — it’s as if the toffs, desperate to be rid of the urges which 
associate them with animals (and the lower classes), were the subject of Lamarckian evolution. The energies each generation neglects — 
the life not lived — affect the very stature of the next.

As this poem suggests, Smith’s true target is — again, this is one of her titles — “The English”:

Many of the English, 
The intelligent English,
Of the Arts, the Professions and the Upper Middle Classes,
Are under-cover men,
But what is under the cover 
(That was original)
Died; now they are corpse-carriers.

Her verse comes with pen-sketches attached: whimsical, piercing depictions of the characters in the poems, or the speakers of them, vibrating with irregular life. “This Englishwoman” appears wearing a hat with flowers on it, her pointed face the shape of the base of an iron (she’s smiling, smugly, the tiny lines of her eyebrows are cruel), protecting herself not from the rain, but the sun, with an umbrella. I’m reminded once more of D.H. Lawrence:

Man fixes some wonderful erection of his own between himself and the wild chaos, and gradually goes bleached and stifled 
under his parasol. Then comes a poet, enemy of convention, and makes a slit in the umbrella; and lo! the glimpse of chaos is a vision, a window to the sun.

Smith, too, is more than — a dead word — unconventional; she is an avowed “enemy of convention,” and would let in the sun that her Englishwoman shirks. Like Lawrence, she is a writer who would turn on its head the great English project of disapproval — really turn it against itself: “There is far too much of the suburban classes / 
Spiritually not geographically speaking. They’re asses.” She would disapprove of the disapprovers; the snobs, the sexists, the repressed.

Some explanation may be necessary here. Humans are status-conscious, and this is a fact of multiple cultures, and subcultures — Smith is particularly savvy about the tribalism of the literary world, “picking inferiorly with grafted eyes,” in which “So-and-so must be the driven out one, this the pet”; the familiar tale of “Miss Snooks, Poetess,” who never wrote a poem “that was not really awfully nice / And fitted to a woman,” and so “made no enemies / And gave no sad surprises / But went on being awfully nice / And took a lot of prizes.” Yet to be English is to enter into a special relationship with disapproval, an ineffaceable class-consciousness that persists today (it’s not the same as the division between rich and poor), however ironized (a common excuse) or deferred, or disguised, the compulsion to affront may be. Sometimes this urge to degrade is redirected towards the minorities of the moment — it isn’t a good time, in England, to be Eastern European. But the accents of disapproval are the same, they are recognizable. The English, compelled to revisit and renew, in so many details of their private lives, the distinction between working-class and middle-class lifestyles (those who’ve crossed this border, even a generation back, are petrified of being deported) have found ways of continuing this conversation into the twenty-first century, even while turning it into a joke, or changing the terms. The problem is that, as Smith tells us in “The English,” these people are infectious. Once you start to disapprove of them, to become intolerant of their intolerance, you’re at risk of playing their game. So Lawrence tries to counter the murderous force of class disapproval, taking as the guarantor of his convictions the permanent scandal of our sexuality, which he deploys as a deeper, a more convincing authority, than the snobbishness of the repressive bore. In doing so, he risks becoming a bore himself, a perfervid sermonizer. What Smith does is less obvious and easy to miss. She counter-accuses, but also places the voice of accusation itself under scrutiny.

On first approaching a publisher with her poems, Smith was told to “go away and write a novel.” Despite the more announced vitality, the love-addled bursting oomph, of its reader-buttonholing protagonist Pompey Casmilus, Novel on Yellow Paper does resemble Marianne Moore in its humorous digressive capturing of multiple voices. But Smith quotes, often, as critique. Not to summon viewpoints to her aid, but to shred them irreversibly. Here are some “nice little quotations for your scrap book. Or if you have no scrap book you can shoot them at your friends at your high-class parties”:

Should I Marry a Foreigner?    ...    You do not say, dear, if he is a man of colour. Even if it is only a faint tea rose — don’t. I know what it will mean to you to give him up but funny things happen with colour, it often slips over, and sometimes darkens from year to year and it is so difficult to match up. White always looks well at weddings and will wash and wear and if you like to write to me again, enclosing stamped addressed envelope, I will give you the name of a special soap I always use it myself do not stretch or wring but hang to dry in a cool oven.

Advice from an agony aunt — but the no-color of the newspaper-voice has started to run, has become crazily creative in its paranoia about race, decorum, wedding-wear, the housewife’s proper domesticities. (“Colours are what drive me most strongly,” says Smith; also that there “is no very strong division between what is poetry and what is prose”: like Moore, she’s intrigued by prose, has an ear for its borrowable forms, and clearly relishes, in this passage, the sonic bounce from “envelope” to “soap.”)

“I cannot play this game of quotations one minute longer. I get bored. But I am far too quickly bored. Reader, are you? Do you know how I think of you? I’ll tell you.” That’s Pompey, breaking off to speak to the reader in a voice that is deliciously vivid. Smith’s poems have this quality too, and this is why it’s hard to separate them from the institution she has become; the singing “disenchanted gentility” (Heaney) of her reading voice; the film, Stevie, about her life; and even those significant sketches she sticks next to the verse. But what I’d stress is how carefully written, how intelligently stylish, how deep-diving the words on the page can be; for I do think this is the best way to appreciate Smith, as a poet’s poet, whose printed voice can be both intimately hers and wryly denatured in its ventriloquisms. Yes, some of her poems are jokes. Others are consciously archaic, or exercises; the longer ones can be dull, in which the blurting looseness allows for the evaporation of the reader’s interest. She is interested in how far her voice, and that of others, can carry — how cogent our utterances really are; her verse is undecided on this subject, and so she risks superficiality. But she also writes works of undeniable art. Poems to read, and reread.

We might compare, for example, the woman-on-woman violence of “Girls!,” “Parents,” and “This Englishwoman” with “Everything is Swimming,” from The Frog Prince and Other Poems:

Everything is swimming in a wonderful wisdom
She said everything was swimming in a wonderful wisdom
Silly ass
What a silly woman
Perhaps she is drunk
No I think it is mescalin
Silly woman
What a silly woman
Yes perhaps it is mescalin
It must be something
Her father, they say    ...    
And that funny man William    ...    
Silly ass
What a silly woman

Elle continua de rire comme une hyène.

The quotation is from a short story by Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, whose title in the 1900 translation, Weird Women, is “At a Dinner of Atheists.” This group “composed exclusively of men” indulges — as the author says every all-male group does — in “abuse” of the opposite sex, being “disgusted with females — as they cynically called women.” (More disapproval of disapproval!) The story is told of Major Ydow and his wife Rosalba, who sleeps with the narrator, Mesnilgrand (he mentions “those beautiful arms I had so often 
bitten”; Smith is much taken with biting, it appears a few times in her verse) and becomes pregnant. The child — Ydow’s certain it is his — dies. One day Mesnilgrand must hide when the Major arrives and abuses Rosalba. She says she has never loved him, that the child was not his, but Mesnilgrand’s; she is portrayed as “insolent, ironical, laughing with the hysterical laughter of hate, at the most acute paroxysms of his wrath.” Ydow responds by smashing the vase in which he has, absurdly, embalmed his son’s heart; he attempts to rape her with his sabre-pommel covered in hot wax — with the idea of “sealing his wife” as she had sealed her letters to lovers. Mesnilgrand finally acts. He leaps out, kills Ydow, calls for a surgeon in case “the beautiful mutilated body” is still alive, and visits a church graveyard to bury the heart of the child that might have been his.

This ghastly tale may, d’Aurevilly suggests, have shattered the 
cynicism of its audience — we return to the hideous metaphor of “sealing”: “A silence, more expressive than any words, sealed the mouths of all.” I summarize the story to reveal the importance of Smith’s allusion. It positions her poem as a critique of the misogyny which, beginning with remarks at a party (as hostile in atmosphere as the dinner of atheists), is nevertheless continuous with real violence against women. If other Smith poems accuse other women, 
intolerant of their intolerance, here, that disapproving voice is itself revealed as eventually tyrannous. A woman’s effusiveness is mocked by the partygoers, attributed to alcohol, drugs, or a man — the doings of her father, or “that funny man William” — while the ellipses catch perfectly the tone of the behind-the-hand-whispered, snide aside. The French, in its italics, suggests a superior perspective, and confirms Smith’s target as the gossipers, not the woman herself. Whose laughter continues — but how impervious is it, to humiliation?

The verse shifts, without clarifying quotation marks, from what the woman says — briefly, her voice is that of the poem — to the framing of her remark by an incredulous auditor: “Everything is swimming in a wonderful wisdom / She said everything was swimming in a wonderful wisdom / Silly ass.” With that switch from “is” to “was,” Smith’s apparently immediate, incautious style contrives with intelligence a collision of different voices; a testing, as in Moore, of the power of assertion. I’d never thought about the absence from one of her most famous poems, “Not Waving but Drowning,” of what Joyce referred to as “perverted commas” — until I read, in this edition, May’s note:

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he’s dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.

According to May’s note, the version published in December 1956, in the essay “Too Tired for Words,” places

lines 3–4, 9, 11–12 in speech marks, and reduces second stanza to three lines with breaks after “dead” and “way”; the first two lines of this revised stanza are also in speech marks. A typed draft shows an illustration of a man being pulled from the 
water in place of the deliberately disjunctive female figure in published versions.

Smith writes about world-weariness, melancholia, and depression better than anybody, with cauterizing humor, and an awareness of how feeling is always, happily and horribly, prior to thought. This is a wonderful example of a masterpiece receiving the editorial attention it deserves — our experience of the poem is enriched by May’s intervention. Smith is indeed “deliberately disjunctive,” in multiple senses. 
“Moaning” isn’t obviously a speech-verb, so, even if the colon is there as a pointer, “I was much further out than you thought” is laid harshly 
bare. It isn’t speech cooled and hardened and situated within a larger utterance — it touches the reader directly. We then have what “they” say — again, the speech isn’t framed as speech, until revealed as the opinion of the misunderstanding “meelyoo” — Smith’s lovely mocking spelling, elsewhere — represented by that cold pronoun. The dead man has passed beyond understanding, and must speak from beyond the grave to explain himself to those with no ear for his torment. In “A Dream of Comparison,” Eve, who wishes only for a “cessation of consciousness,” argues with Mary:

Mary laughed: ‘I love Life,
I would fight to the death for it,
That’s a feeling you say? I will find
A reason for it.’

They walked by the estuary,
Eve and the Virgin Mary,
And they talked until nightfall,
But the difference between them was radical.

Ricks observes a superbly disjunctive final rhyme. (I think of  Moore’s “I May, I Might, I Must”: “If you will tell me why the fen / appears impassable, I then / will tell you why I think that I / can get across it if I try.”) Smith is preoccupied with the incommunicativeness between, as Wittgenstein has it, the world of the happy and the world of the unhappy; and the endlessly, perversely creative ways in which we fail to understand each other, in a war zone of cross talk, as our differences 
become radical. Yet she also asserts the possibility of connection, and is fascinated in particular by the complexities of friendship.

Two “war poems,” the first, again, famous; Smith referred to it as a mere steal from Still the Joy of It, by Littleton Powys, although her verse adds a lot — this isn’t a found poem:

It was my bridal night I remember,
An old man of seventy-three
I lay with my young bride in my arms,
A girl with t.b.
It was wartime, and overhead
The Germans were making a particularly heavy raid on Hampstead.
What rendered the confusion worse, perversely
Our bombers had chosen that moment to set out for Germany.
Harry, do they ever collide?
I do not think it has ever happened,
Oh my bride, my bride.
— From I Remember

Basil never spoke of the trenches, but I
Saw them always, saw the mud, heard the guns, saw the duckboards,
Saw the men and the horses slipping in the great mud, saw
The rain falling and never stop, saw the gaunt
Trees and the rusty frame
Of the abandoned gun carriages. Because it was the same
As the poem “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came”
I was reading at school.
— From A Soldier Dear to Us

In the second poem, a child understands more of  the sweet-mannered 
veteran than he knows. In the first, will the old man and his young bride truly coincide, or merely “collide,” as those bombers don’t, in the air? The speech is given, once again, without quotation marks, as if the poem spoke for each, and both; in “A Soldier Dear to Us,” there is no need to speak of what is known by other means. In “Dear Karl,” written to a German boyfriend, Smith sends him Walt Whitman’s poems, and seeks to preempt the “indignation” with which we ward off the emotional claims of others — “‘How dilettante,’ I hear you observe, ‘I hate these selections / Arbitrarily made to meet a need that is not mine and a taste / Utterly antagonistic.’” Summoning Yeats as well as the American poet, she insists on spreading the cloths of 
heaven under her lover’s feet:

For I, I myself, I have no Leaves of Grass
But only Walt Whitman in a sixpenny book,
Taste’s, blend’s, essence’s, multum-in-parvo’s Walt Whitman.
And now sending it to you I say:
Fare out, Karl, on an afternoon’s excursion, on a sixpenny 
unexplored uncharted road.

But Smith does have a joyous expansiveness, her riskily unprotected prolongations of self toward other, to give. What is caustic and comically summative in her verse is countered by this sweetness. I read “How do you see?” where her long argufying lines quiz, are sardonic and potent:

Oh Christianity, Christianity,
That has grown kinder now, as in the political world
The colonial system grows kinder before it vanishes, are you vanishing?
Is it not time for you to vanish?

 — and it seems to me she is that impossibility, not to be predicted (or taken lightly, or taken for granted): an English Whitman.

Originally Published: October 3rd, 2016

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.netessays.net/viewpaper/129425.html

Reading and Writing Poetry in the Classroom

November 2014


In an article called "Importance of Poetry in Middle and High School,"� it's explained that throughout history, poets have used language to express their thoughts, feelings, ideas and perspectives. By using rhyme, meter and line breaks, poets have addressed everything from nature of love or beauty of a spring day complex social issues. According to Dr. Jeanette Hughes research report for the Literacy and Numeracy of Ontario, poetry can increase students' literacy and linguistic awareness because it is important for students to be able to read and write or construct texts in multiple genres. Moving beyond pen and paper and using a variety of representing strategies (including visual arts or drama, for example) provide students opportunities to express themselves and demonstrate their understanding in alternate ways. A focus on oral language development through the reading and performing of poetry acknowledges that sound is meaning. When we hear the sound of the words in a poem read aloud, we gain a better understanding of the meaning of the writing. We can involve students in the dramatic exploration of poems in a variety of ways, including choral reading, readers' theatre, dance drama, shared reading, or role-play.
This stylistic flexibility can be freeing for unsure writers as it makes them more aware of the various ways language can be used and combined to create stories, images, and rhythms. Even if students don't understand each word or the meaning of a poem, exposure to new words, word combinations, and sounds is still healthy for the mind and inspires students to experiment with their own variations. Poetry is meant to be lifted from the printed page and explored in multimodal ways (visually, gutturally, and aurally). The use of new digital media for reading, writing, and representing poetry encourages an exploration of the relationship between text and image and how images sound might be used to mediate meaning-making. New med...

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/fea...s/detail/91088

Interview
Late Happiness
W.S. Merwin on his long career and trying to enjoy his luck.
By Alex Dueben
Photo © Matt Valentine

W.S. Merwin has been writing and publishing poetry for more than 60 years, since W.H. Auden selected Merwin’s first book for the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 1952. He’s collected awards ever since, especially in recent years: he was awarded the National Book Award in 2005 and the Pulitzer Prize in 2009, and in 2010, he was appointed the 17th poet laureate of the United States. Merwin also became the second living poet to have work published by the Library of America, in two volumes totaling more than 1,500 pages.

Last month, Merwin celebrated his 89th birthday and the publication of a new book of poetry, Garden Time. While writing some of the best work of his career, he has recently faced health challenges, including losing his eyesight. He spoke to the Poetry Foundation from his home in Hawaii about his dismay over the state of the environment, not living for others’ expectations, and trying to enjoy his luck. The following interview was condensed and edited.


I know you’ve been losing your eyesight over the last few years. How has that changed the process of writing for you?

It depends on what I’m writing. Poetry always has been a matter of being taken by surprise–sometimes in the middle of the night. My table in my study here is cluttered with little pieces of paper with a few words on each. They’re the beginning of something that might be a poem.

It’s been five years since I was able to read. My left eye is completely gone, and my right one has macular degeneration, which is getting worse all the time. That’s just the condition one lives with. I’ve been pretty well assured by my eye doctor that although my eyesight will be poor in my right eye, I won’t go blind. That’s nice because we live in a very beautiful place here.

Do you dictate everything now or do you still scribble on pieces of paper?

I try to write it down on a clipboard, and I give it to one of the people who comes to read to me. They are singularly good people. They’re all volunteers, and they’re very capable, very helpful. A great deal of Garden Time was done that way. I don’t know what people imagine the title means, but I was thinking of Blake: “The hours of folly are measur’d by the clock, / but of wisdom: no clock can measure.” The hours of wisdom are where you simply forget about time. For me, that’s the garden—this wonderful garden of palm trees around us. There are 900 species of palms here. I go for a walk in the morning, and I just love being here. I feel extremely lucky living here with my wife, my only love, and I’m able to see enough to wander around in the garden. It’s just a joy.

One of my favorite poems in your new book is “After the Dragonflies,” which beautifully describes these once-so-common creatures. “Now there are grown-ups hurrying / who never saw one / and do not know what they / are not seeing,” you write, which makes the issues of climate change and the sixth great extinction so very real and personal. How conscious are you of addressing conservation and environmental concerns in your work?

To my great astonishment, people got very excited about that poem. I’m delighted that they did. I have a biologist friend who works at the great biology department at the University of Oregon. Some years ago I was there, and he said, we’re losing a species a week. I was shocked, of course. The last time I saw him, he said, we’re losing a species every few seconds. We’re doing it. We’re using poison in the environment as though it didn’t matter. People use poison in the grass in front of their houses; they use poison along the roadsides. We’re poisoning the whole place. A number of species of birds have just disappeared from here in the last five years. I don’t know whether they’re completely gone or if we’ll ever see them again. We know that we lost a species just this year. People ask, how did you get interested in conservation, and I say if you’re interested in the world it’s not a matter of conservation, it’s a matter of reality.

People ask, what led you to live in the country? Well, this is the real world. The real world is not the red light down at the corner—it’s right here. It’s the thrush waking in the morning. We’ve allowed ourselves to get very far out of touch with it. It’s not bad just for the world; it’s very bad for us. I’m very sorry to see it happening. E.O. Wilson, the great biologist, said there’s a great division between the people who think the world is a city and then a whole lot of nothing and then another city, and the people who think the world is the forest and the grass and then a city and then the forest and the grass and then a city. One being the real world and the other one being something less than that.

Many of your poems have a fairly bleak vision of where things are going. But you also have poems that are more personal and celebrate nature, celebrate moments of joy.

It’s strange there are so many poems in world literature about unhappiness and that so few poems have been written about happiness. I think I’m so lucky because I’m relatively happy. Among the bits of luck is to have a temperament that is not gloomy. I may sound very gloomy in what I write, but I think we have a chance to be happy here. I don’t feel selfish about it. I think that the only right thing to do with good fortune like that—if one has the rare luck to have it—is to enjoy it, if one can.

Poems such as “December Morning,” with its first line, “How did I come to this late happiness,” definitely do that. Do you have any advice for the rest of us, besides being lucky? Is there something you did or a way that you approached life that you credit?

I’ve never relied on money. People asked, what are you going to do when you grow up? I said, well, I’m already a poet, but when they said, that’s not enough to make a living, I would say, what do you call a living? I don’t want any more than I need. I’ve always felt that way. I’ve never had any money unless I had a grant for a year or something like that. I say to young people, trust your luck and see how far it can take you. If you want to settle down and have a nice good American middle-class life and raise children, that’s one thing. If you don’t want to, that used to be considered rather shocking. There’s a wonderful line of Ibsen from The Lady from the Sea about being overridden by other people’s expectations. When I first got to Princeton, I thought, this is what I want. I wanted freedom and the ability to find out a little about who I am. I’ve been unbelievably lucky. I don’t know why. One never knows why one’s lucky. Some of it is skill, but most of it’s luck.

Garden Time moves between these beautiful passing moments and more haunting complex poems, as we’ve been talking about, and you close the book with “The Present,” which begins “As they were leaving the garden / one of the angels bent down to them and whispered / I am to give you this.” Could you talk a little about the poem? Because it’s about a moment of transition and coping and finding a new way forward.

It’s about the myth of the Garden of Eden. I think it’s a fascinating myth. There were the great angels behind Adam and Eve. As they’re leaving the garden, one of the angels bends down and says, I was told to give you this. I don’t know what it is, but it’s something that will apparently be of use to you. What it is, is laughter.

Real laughter is a great boon to our species, I think. We can find the world so remarkable that it makes us laugh. My sister said, you were that way as a child. You found everything, you just delighted in everything. I can remember watching sparrows on the wire along the street and spending a long time just watching the sparrows. I love the world. That’s what the angel is giving them—something they don’t have in the garden. There’s no laughter in the Garden of Eden. Why would they laugh? They’re in the Garden of Eden. But now you’re outside and here; you can know how to laugh. The moment their hands touch, they laugh. That’s what the poem is about.

Outside the garden–outside “garden time,” if you will—laughter is one of the things that sustains us.

Yes, I think so.

Could you talk a little about the Merwin Conservancy and the work you’ve been doing in Hawaii? You have 18 acres on the island of Maui with hundreds of varieties of palm trees.

I was living a few miles from here and a woman said there’s a piece of land for sale right out near the coast. I came over to see, and the land was very cheap. My parents had just died, so I had a little bit of money. There was nothing growing on it except down in the streambed. It was bleached, and it was listed in the county books as ruined land. I thought, I don’t believe nothing will grow here. I’d like to buy it and see about this. I think there are ways it can be brought back to life. It’s hard for people to come now and realize that was ever said about this land because it’s covered with trees. We welcome groups of schoolchildren and other people to come and be guided through the garden because fewer and fewer people get to even see places like this. It makes them happy. That’s the extraordinary thing. It does make them happy.

There are lot of mysterious things about trees we’re just learning all the time—communications among the root systems and communications among the leaf systems. The green world is very mysterious. It’s absolutely fascinating, and without it we wouldn’t exist. People talk about the environment as though it were something you could be interested in, like having a stamp collection or something. It’s not so. If there’s no environment, there’s no us.

In the past 12 years, you’ve been awarded the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, you were named poet laureate, and you became one of two living poets published by the Library of America. I’m not sure any other writer has had such a decade.

I can assure you it had nothing to do with politics on my part. [laughs] I don’t know why it happened. I don’t know how any of those things were chosen. They’d offered poet laureate to me several times, and I’d said no. It seemed to me that I would be tied to a reputation, and I felt that that was a limitation on my own freedom. It was important to be free. I had this very severe upbringing, and I wanted to find out who the hell I was. It’s taken me the rest of my life to find out who I was. I realized that so much of the modern world is based on people having to follow other people’s expectations. I wanted to avoid other people’s expectations. My upbringing was this strict Calvinism and I thought, throw it all out and see what’s really there. At the other end of my life, I’m still doing that.

I live just down the hill from the astronomers who get all the information from the telescopes over on the Big Island. They found 1,200 unknown planets in the Milky Way. I called up one of the astronomers, a friend of mine, Jeff, and I said, that was exciting! Was it exciting for you? He said, sure, we knew they were there, we just had never seen them on the screen, and then we saw them. He said, every time something like that happens I realize it could happen again and again.

The universe is a great unknown wonderful place, and we know nothing, really, to speak of about it. I think that either depresses and frightens one or is exhilarating. We are very important, and we’re not important in quite the way we think we are. Each one of us is unique, and we can find out a whole lot just by examining ourselves. I think that’s the essential thing. Not paying attention to how you’re going to make money, just paying attention to whatever is around you. Each one of those seconds is your only chance. It’s your life. And it’s wonderful. The more attention that we pay to our ordinary lives leads to a real elation that we’re here at all.

Originally Published: October 18th, 2016

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

http://www.poetrysoup.com/article/th..._browning-1626

The Poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Written by: Arthur Christopher Benson

IT is a matter of regret that there is no adequate biography of one of the very few women who have achieved real eminence in literature. Mrs. Richmond Ritchie has indeed written an article in the Dictionary of National Biography, but this from the nature of things could not be much more than a record. In the series of Eminent Women, Mr. Ingram has attempted to supply the want, and after reading his book through more than once we are bound to say that we regret that he has been first in the field. However, as Mrs. Browning herself says, "we get no good by being ungenerous, even to a book."

When Horne in the New Spirit of the Age gave some biographical particulars about Miss Barrett to the public, she wrote to him as follows:—"My dear Mr. Horne, the public do not care for me enough to care at all for my biography. If you say anything of me (and I am not affected enough to pretend to wish you to be absolutely silent, if you see any occasion to speak) it must be as a writer of rhymes, and not as the heroine of a biography. And then as to stories, my story amounts to the knife-grinder's, with nothing at all for a catastrophe. A bird in a cagecould have as good a story. Most of my events, and nearly all my intense pleasures, have passed in thoughts." And again later, when the paper had appeared:—"You are my friend I hope, but you do not on that account lose the faculty of judging me or the right of judging me frankly. I do loathe the whole system of personal compliment as a consequence of personal interest.... I set more price on your sincerity than on your praise, and consider it more closely connected with the quality called kindness.... I want kindness, the rarest of all nearly—which is truth."

Those are Mrs. Browning's own deliberate views, written it is true in early life, as to her own biography. That a biography need not be critical has been amply proved by Boswell; on the other hand, this only applies to a biography written by a contemporary friend, and even then it must be absolutely faithful. Boswell, it is true, admired too deeply to criticise. If he ever thought his subject ungenerous, ungenial, tyrannical, he does not say so; but at least he does not shrink from recording experiences which might suggest those qualities to readers who did not admire as he did. But any one who sits down to trace the history of one with whom he had no personal acquaintance, when that life is closed by death and rounded by the past, is bound to make some effort to discriminate. In Mr. Ingram's book the quality of discrimination is conspicuously wanting. He has evidently conceived an ideal and done his best to transmit it to others. That he has not altogether succeeded in disguising his heroine is no fault of his; as Miss Barrett complains in another sentence of the letter from which we have been quoting—"he has rouged her up to the eyes."

We must only touch upon two or three of the most salient points of Mrs. Browning's biography. Her life was uneventful enough, as far as events go, and its outlines are sufficiently well known. The impression which it leaves upon a reader is strangely mixed. The intellect with which we are brought into contact is profoundly impressive; the spectacle of a life so vivid and untiring, so hopeful and ardent, lived under the pressure of constant physical suffering, and the still more marked presence of morbidity both of thought and feeling, is inspiring and moving. But there is a want of wholesomeness about a great deal of it; there is a sense of failure somewhere. This reveals itself in its concrete form perhaps most clearly in the fact that with all the presence of high and animating thoughts, with the resolve of self-dedication to the poetic office, with the assiduous and systematic labour to cultivate the art of expression, yet obscurity seems to haunt so many efforts, and the instinct of discrimination so frequently appears to slumber. Mrs. Browning as a letter-writer is disappointing; again and again there is a touch of true feeling, a noble thought, but with all this there is a want of incisiveness, a wearisome seriousness, which of all qualities is the one that ought not to obtrude itself, a strange lack of humour, a certain strain—a scraping of the soul, as Tourgenieff has it. And this may, we think, be best expressed by the pathetic words that fall from her in the letter already quoted: her history was that of a bird in a cage. Not only from the physical fact that she was for many years of her life an invalid—but mentally and morally also she was caged, by imaginary social fictions, by certain ingrained habits of thought; and, last of all, as a passionate idealist, she saw with painful persistence and in horrible contrast the infinite possibilities of human nature and the limitations of low realities.

It is a curious fact which meets us at the very threshold of her life, that the author of "The Cry of the Children," the passionate partisan of the Abolitionist cause in America and of freedom in Italy, came from generations of slave-owners. In fact the Jamaica Emancipation Act cost her the loss of her Herefordshire home, by resulting in a large decrease in her father's fortune. It seems indeed typical of her sentiment, typical of the limitations and impersonality of her feelings that, among all her bitter reveries and passionate revolts against human tyrannies, it never (so far as we can judge from her correspondence) seems to have occurred to her that the wealth and comfort with which she was surrounded, the very dower of books that made life possible, was actually wrung from generations of slave-labour, the forced toil of hundreds of impotent lives. No one would ask for, or even hint at expecting, even from the most fantastic idealist, a renunciation of luxury thus acquired; but it is strange that the idea seems never to have entered her head.

She spent a happy though precocious childhood, but by the age of fifteen was already condemned to that bitter isolation of invalid life which, when it falls on a strong and vivid personality, has, fortunately for human nature, a purifying and ennobling effect. Intellectual effort became first the anodyne of physical evil, then the earnest aim of her life.

She never seems to have doubted as to the form that her impulsive need for expression was to take. "You," she writes to her father in the dedication of her second volume of poems, "you are a witness how if this art of poetry had been a less earnest object to me, it must have fallen from exhausted hands before this day." And again in the preface: "Poetry has been as serious a thing to me as life itself, and life has been a very serious thing; there has been no playing at skittles for me in either. I never mistook pleasure for the final cause of poetry, nor leisure for the hour of the poet. I have done my work, so far, as work—not as mere hand and head work, apart from the personal being—but as the completest expression of that being to which I could attain."

There is something very impressive about the earnestness of this. Its fault is perhaps that it is a little too outspoken: and, from a human point of view, we cannot help regretting that she did not a little more fall into that error which she so indignantly repudiates: if she had mistaken pleasure a little more, not perhaps for the final cause, but for one of the primary causes of poetry, we cannot help feeling that she might have done, if not such earnest, at least more artistic work.

One of the things that one expects to find in the biography of a poet is a detailed account of methods of composition. It is interesting to know whether morning or evening hours were devoted to writing; whether the act of composition was slow or quick; whether the poem was worked out in the mind before it was transmitted to paper; what proportion finished compositions bear to unfinished; whether incomplete work was ever resumed; whether the observation of language was systematised in any way. All these things one is particularly anxious to hear in the case of a poetess whose work bears at once traces of hasty and elaborate workmanship, whose vocabulary is so extraordinarily eclectic, whose rhymes are so peculiar, and often—may we say?—so unsatisfactory. Mr. Ingram's biography, abounding as it does in details of what we may call the interviewer's type, is almost entirely silent on these points. We hear indeed incidentally that the solid morning hours were Mrs. Browning's habitual hours of work; and a curious correspondence has been made public between herself and Horne, which shows that her rhymes, according to herself, were deliberately and painfully selected, principally in the case of dissyllabic rhymes (even, we fear, such pairs as Goethe and duty, Bettine andbetween ye) because she held that English composers, though the language was rich in these rhythmical combinations, had been instinctively slow in applying them to serious poetry. If Elizabeth Browning's, or indeed Robert Browning's, dissyllabic rhymes are the best defence that can be urged for this position, we must affirm that the general instinct on the whole has been right: such rhymes give a sense of fantastic elaborateness, and tend to concentrate the reader's attention too closely upon the technique of the composition. This is, however, a minor point. But it is interesting to observe that this very detail, which constitutes a blemish in the eyes of even indulgent critics, was a subject upon which Mrs. Browning had not only definite ideas, but enthusiastic convictions.

One other thing may be noted. It is alleged, though without certainty, that "Lady Geraldine's Courtship," a poem consisting of over four hundred lines, was actually composed within twelve consecutive hours. If that is so, it is a marvellous tour de force. The poem is one which, in spite of obvious faults, has an immense outburst of lyrical power and magnificent feeling; it contains many lines which linger in the memory; and every one who has had any experience of composition will recognise at once that, if this tradition about its origin be true, it is easy to understand why the poem was allowed to remain as it does. Besides the repugnance which most writers (and especially, we are inclined to think, Mrs. Browning) have felt for the limæ labor, the painful excision and chiselling of a work of any kind, there is a special distaste for meddling with a work which springs to life as it were in a moment; such work grows to have, even in the course of a few hours, a sentient individuality of its own which almost defies mutilation.

Mrs. Browning's best lyrical work was all done before her marriage; but the stirring of the truest depths of her emotional nature took voice in the collection of sonnets entitled "From the Portuguese"—strung, in Omar's words, like pearls upon the string of circumstance. In these sonnets (which it is hardly necessary to say are not translations) she speaks the universal language; to her other graces had now been added that which she had somewhat lacked before, the grace of content; and for these probably she will be longest and most gratefully admired. Any one who steps for the first time through the door into which he has seen so many enter, and finds that poets and lovers and married folk, in their well-worn commonplaces, have exaggerated nothing, will love these sonnets as one of the sweetest and most natural records of a thing which will never lose its absorbing fascination for humanity. To those that are without, except for the sustained melody of expression, the poetess almost seems to have passed on to a lower level, to have lost originality—like the celebrated lady whose friends said that till she wrote to announce her engagement she had never written a commonplace letter. Their fervour indeed rises from the resolute virginity of a heart to whom love had been scarcely a dream, never a hope. We must think of the isolation, sublime it may have been, but yet desolate, from which her marriage was to rescue her—coming not as only the satisfaction of imperious human needs, but to meet and crown her whole nature with a fulness of which few can dream. As she was afterwards to write:

How dreary 'tis for women to sit still
On winter nights by solitary fires
And hear the nations praising them far off.

And again:

To sit alone
And think, for comfort, how that very night
Affianced lovers, leaning face to face,
With sweet half-listenings for each other's breath
Are reading haply from some page of ours
To pause with a thrill, as if their cheeks had touched
When such a stanza level to their mood
Seems floating their own thoughts out—"So I feel
For thee"—"And I for thee: this poet knows
What everlasting love is."
To have our books
Appraised by love, associated with love
While we sit loveless.

Such a heart deserved all the love it could get.

The latter years of Mrs. Browning's life have a certain shadowiness for English readers. The "Casa Guidi," if we were not painfully haunted by the English in which interviewers have given their impressions of it, is a memory to linger over. The high dusty passage that gave access to the tall, gloomy house; the huge cool rooms, with little Pennini, so called in contrast to the colossal statue Apennino, "slender, fragile, spirit-like" flitting about from stair to stair: the faint sounds of music breathing about the huge corridors; the scent, the stillness,—such a home as only two poets could create, and two lovers inhabit.

Nathaniel Hawthorne gives, among some rather affected writing about a visit of his there, a few characteristic touches. "Mrs. Browning met us at the door of the drawing-room—a pale, small person, scarcely embodied at all; at any rate only substantial enough to put forth her slender fingers to be grasped, and to speak with a shrill yet sweet tenuity of voice. Really I do not see how Mr. Browning can suppose that he has an earthly wife any more than an earthly child; both are of the elfin race, and will flit away from him some day when he least thinks of it. She is a good and kind fairy, however, and sweetly disposed towards the human race, although only remotely akin to it. It is wonderful to see how small she is, how pale her cheek, how bright and dark her eyes. There is not such another figure in the world." "The boy," he says elsewhere, "was born in Florence, and prides himself upon being a Florentine, and is indeed as un-English a production as if he were a native of another planet."

This touch perhaps will explain why it is that we rather lose hold of Mrs. Browning after her marriage; England was connected in her mind with all the old trials of life which seemed to have fallen away with her new existence; ill-health, and mental struggle, bereavement and pain—even though it was pain triumphed over. With marriage and Italy a new life began. It became her adopted country—

And now I come, my Italy,
My own hills! Are you 'ware of me, my hills,
How I burn to you? Do you feel to-night
The urgency and yearning of my soul.

And there the English reader is at fault. He cannot call Italy his own in any genuine sense; much as his yearnings may go out towards her, in days when his own ungenial climate is wrapping the hedge-rows and hill-farms in mist and driving sleet, much as he may long for a moment after her sun and warmth, her transparent skies and sleepy seas, yet he knows his home is here. Even when he finds himself among her vines, when the lizards dart powdered with green jewels from stone to stone, and the dust puffs up white in the road beside the bay, he finds himself murmuring in his heart Mr. Browning's own words.

Oh! to be in England now that April's there,
And whoever wakes in England sees some morning unaware,
That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough—
In England now!

That is what he really feels; and however much he loves to think as a picture of the poet and poetess transplanted into the warm lands, his heart does not go out to them, as it would have done had they stayed at home. And so it comes to pass that some of the lines into which Mrs. Browning threw her most passionate emphasis, "Casa Guidi Windows," the words that burn with an alien patriotism—alien, but sunk so deep, that her disappointed hopes made havoc of her life—reach him like murmuring music over water, sweet but fantastic—touching the ear a little and the heart a little, but bringing neither glow nor tears.

They say that the Treaty of Villa Franca snapped the cord; that the bitter disappointment of what had become a passion rather than a dream broke the struggling spirit. It may be so—"With her golden verse linking Italy to England," wrote the grateful Florentines upon her monument. But England to Italy? No—"Italy," she wrote herself, "is one thing, England one." We feel that she passed into a strange land, and in its sweetness somewhat forgot her own: the heart is more with her when she writes:

I saw
Fog only, the great tawny weltering fog
Involve the passive city, strangle it
Alive, and draw it off into the void,
Spires, bridges, streets, and squares, as if a sponge
Had wiped out London.

Or:

A ripple of land: such little hills, the sky
Can stoop to tenderly, and the wheatfields climb.
Such nooks of valleys lined by orchises,
Fed full of noises by invisible streams
And open pastures, where you scarcely tell
White daisies from white dew—at intervals
The mythic oaks and elm trees standing out
Self-poised upon their prodigy of shade;
I thought my father's land was worthy too
Of being Shakespeare's.

II

"Mr. Kenyon," wrote Miss Barrett, "was with me yesterday.... he accused me of writing a certain paper in the Athenæum, and convicted me against my will; and when I could no longer deny and began to explain and pique myself upon my diplomacy, he threw himself back in his chair and laughed me to scorn as the least diplomatic of his acquaintance, 'You diplomatic!'"

Mr. Kenyon, without perhaps intending it, gave expression to a feeling which rises again and again half unconsciously in the mind even of the most sympathetic reader of Mrs. Browning's poetry: there is no diplomacy about it. The diplomatist achieves his successes not only by saying what he has to say in the most lucid possible manner—that is not enough—but by a discreet reticence, by implying possibilities rather than stating them, by guarded admissions, by suggestive silence.

There is a well-known rhetorical device, upon which Mrs. Browning in her classical studies must have not unfrequently stumbled, called the Aposiopesis—in plain English, the art of breaking-off. Classical writers are often hastily accused by young learners of having framed their writings with a view to introducing perplexing forms and intolerable constructions, so as unnecessarily to obscure the sense. But it is a matter of regret that Mrs. Browning did not employ this particular construction with greater frequency,—to use a colloquial expression—that she did not let you off a good deal. Many of her poems are weighted with a dragging moral; many of them fly with a broken wing, stopping and rising again, dispersing and returning with a kind of purposeless persistency, as if they were incapable of deciding where to have done. Poems with passage after passage of extraordinary depth of thought and amazing felicity of expression, every now and then droop and crawl like the rain on a November day, which will not fall in a drenching shower nor quite desist, but keeps dropping, dropping from the sky out of mere weakness or idleness.

To secure an audience a poet must be diplomatic; he must know whose ear he intends to catch. It is mere cant to say that the best poetry cannot be popular; that it should be read is its first requisite. When Gray wrote φων?ντα συνετο?σιν on his Odes he meant that there would be many people to whom they would not appeal; but it is ridiculous to say that the merit of poetry is in proportion to the paucity of its admirers. If Mrs. Browning aimed at any particular class it was perhaps at intellectual sentimentalists. As the two characteristics are rarely found united, in fact are liable to exclude one another, it may perhaps be the reason why she is so little appreciated in her entirety: she is perhaps too learned for women and too emotional for men.

Let us consider for a moment where her intellectual training came from. Roughly speaking, the basis of it was Greek from first to last; at nine years old she measured her life by the years of the siege of Troy, and carved a figure out of the turf in her garden to represent a recumbent warrior, naming it Hector. Then came her version of the "Prometheus Vinctus"; her long studious mornings over Plato and Theocritus with the blind scholar, Mr. Boyd, whom she commemorates in "Wine of Cyprus," when she read, as she writes, "the Greek poets, with Plato, from end to end"; her dolorous excursion with the Fathers; and at last, in the Casa Guidi, the little row of miniature classics, annotated in her own hand, standing within easy reach of her couch. Of course she was an omnivorous reader besides. She speaks of reading the Hebrew Bible, "from Genesis to Malachi,—never stopped by the Chaldean,—and the flood of all possible and impossible British and foreign novels and romances, with slices of metaphysics laid thick between the sorrows of the multitudinous Celestinas." But it was evidently in Greek, in the philosophical poetry of Euripides and the poetical philosophy of Plato, that she found her deepest satisfaction.

At the same time she was not in the true sense learned, though possessing learning far greater than commonly falls to a woman's lot to possess. Her education in Greek must have been unsystematic and unscholarly; her classical allusions, which fall so thick in letters and poems have seldom quite the genuine ring; we do not mean that she did not get nearer the heart of the Greek writers and appreciate their spirit more intimately than many a far more erudite scholar; that was to be expected, for she brought enthusiasm and insight and genius to the task; but her learning is not an animated part of her; it is sometimes almost an incubus. The character of her allusions too is often remote and fanciful. They fall, it is true, from a teeming brain, but they are not the simple direct comparisons which would occur to a man who had made Greek literature his own, but rather the unexpected, modern turns which so often surprise a student, like the red bunches of valerian which thrust out of the sand-stone frieze of a Sicilian temple—such comparisons, for instance, as the celebrated one in Aurora Leigh of the peasant who might have been gathering brushwood in the ear of a colossus had Xerxes carried out his design of carving Athos into the likeness of a man. Her characterization of the classical poets in "The Poet's Vow" will also illustrate this; now so extraordinarily felicitous and clear-sighted, as for instance in the case of Shakespeare and Ossian, and now so alien to the true spirit of the men described.

Sophocles
With that king's-look which down the trees
Followed the dark effigies

Of the lost Theban. Hesiod old,
Who, somewhat blind and deaf and cold,
Cared most for gods and bulls.

The fact was that she read the Greeks as a woman of genius was sure to do; she passed by their majestic grace, amazed at their solemn profundity, and yet unaware that she was projecting into them a feeling, a sentimental outlook which they did not possess, attributing directly to them a deliberate power which was merely the effect of their unconscious, antique, and limited vision upon the emotional child of a later age.

The strangest thing is that a woman of such complex and sensitive faculties should have given in her allegiance to such models. Never was there a writer in whom the best characteristics of the Greeks were more conspicuously absent. Their balance, their solidity, their calm, their gloomy acquiescence in the bitter side of life, have surely little in common with the passionate spirit that beat so wildly against the bars, and asked the stars and hills so eagerly for their secrets. Such a passage as the following, grand as is the central idea, is surely enough to show the utter incompatibility which existed between them: "I thought that had Æschylus lived after the incarnation and crucifixion of our Lord Jesus Christ, he might have turned, if not in moral and intellectual, yet in poetic faith, from the solitude of Caucasus to the deeper desertness of that crowded Jerusalem, where none had any pity,—from the faded white flower of a Titanic brow to the withered grass of a heart trampled on by its own beloved—from the glorying of him who gloried that he could not die, to the sublime meekness of the Taster of death for every man: from the taunt stung into being by the torment, to his more awful silence, when the agony stood dumb before the love." ... It was characteristic of a woman to bring the two personalities together, to dwell on what might have been; but this is not Greek.

The two poems which are the best instances of the classical mood, are the two of which Pan, the spirit of the solitary country, half beast, half god, is the hero. In these Mrs. Browning appears in her strength and in her weakness. In "The Dead Pan," in spite of its solemn refrain, the lengthy disordered mode of thought is seen to the worst advantage: the progression of ideas is obscure, the workmanship is not hurried, but deliberately distressing; the rhymes, owing to that unfortunate fancy for double rhyming, being positively terrific; the brief fury of the lyric mood passing into the utterances of a digressive moralist. But when we turn to the other, "A Musical Instrument," what a relief we experience. "What was he doing, the great god Pan, down in the reeds by the river?" The splendid shock of the rhythm, like the solid plunge of a cataract into a mountain-pool, captivates, for all its roughness, the metrical ear. There is not a word or a thought too much: the scene shapes itself, striking straight out into the thought; the waste and horror that encircle the birth of the poet in the man; the brutish elements out of which such divinity is compounded—these are flung down in simple, delicate outlines: such a lyric is an eternal possession of the English language.

As a natural result of a certain discursiveness of mind, there is hardly any kind of writing unrepresented in Mrs. Browning's poems. She had at one time a fancy for pure romantic writing, since developed to such perfection by Rossetti. There is a peculiar charm about such composition. In such works we seem to breathe a freer air, separated as we are from special limitations of time and place; the play of passion is more simple and direct, and the passion itself is of a less complex and restrained character. Besides, there is a certain element of horror and mystery, which the modern spirit excludes, while it still hungers for it, but is not unnatural when mediævalized. Nothing in Mrs. Browning can bear comparison with "Sister Helen" or "The Beryl Stone"; but "The Romaunt of the Page" and the "Rhyme of the Duchess May" stand among her most successful pieces.

The latter opens with a simple solemnity:

To the belfry, one by one, went the ringers from the sun,
Toll slowly.
And the oldest ringer said, "Ours is music for the dead,
When the rebecks are all done."
Six abeles i' the churchyard grow on the north side in a row,
Toll slowly.
And the shadow of their tops rock across the little slopes
Of the grassy graves below.
On the south side and the west a small river runs in haste,
Toll slowly.
And between the river flowing and the fair green trees agrowing,
Do the dead lie at their rest.
On the east I sat that day, up against a willow grey:
Toll slowly.
Through the rain of willow-branches I could see the low hill ranges,
And the river on its way.

This is like the direct opening notes of the overture of a dirge. Whatever may be said about such writing we feel at once that it comes from a master's hand. So the poem opens, but alas for the close! Some chord seems to snap; it is no longer the spirit of the ancient rhymer, but Miss Mitford's friend who catches up the lyre and will have her last word. The poem passes, still in the same metre, out of the definite materialism, the ghastly excitements of the story into a species of pious churchyard meditation; and the pity of it is that we cannot say that this is not characteristic.

Then closely connected with the last comes a class of poems, of so-called modern life, of which "Lady Geraldine's Courtship" shall stand for an example. This is a poem of nineteenth-century adventure, which is as impossible in design and as fantastic in detail as a poem may well be. The reader does not know whether to be most amazed at the fire and glow of the whole story, or at the hopeless ignorance of the world betrayed by it. The impossible Earls with their immeasurable pride and intolerable pomposities; the fashionable ladies with their delicate exteriors and callous hearts,—these are like the creations of Charlotte Brontë, and recall Blanche and Baroness Ingram of Ingram Park. And at the same time, when we have said all this, we read the poem and we can forgive all or nearly all—the spirit is so high, the passion is so fierce and glowing, the poetry that bursts out, stanza after stanza, contrives to involve even these dolorous mistakes in such a glamour, that we can only admire the genius that could contend against such visionary errors.

But we must turn to what after all is Mrs. Browning's most important and most characteristic work, Aurora Leigh. Unfortunately its length alone, were there not any other reasons, would prevent its ever being popular. Ten thousand lines of blank verse is a serious thing. The fact that the poem is to a great extent autobiographical, combined with the comparative mystery in which the authoress was shrouded and the romance belonging to a marriage of poets—these elements are enough to account for the general enthusiasm with which the poem was received. Landor said that it made him drunk with poetry,—that was the kind of expression that its admirers allowed themselves to make use of with respect to it. And yet in spite of these credentials, the fact remains that it is a difficult volume to work through. It is the kind of book that one begins to read for the first time with intense enjoyment, congratulating oneself after the first hundred pages that there are still three-hundred to come. Then the mood gradually changes; it becomes difficult to read without a marker; and at last it goes back to the shelf with the marker about three-fourths of the way through. As she herself wrote,

The prospects were too far and indistinct.
'Tis true my critics said "A fine view that."
The public scarcely cared to climb my book
For even the finest;—and the public's right.

Now what is the reason of this? In the first place it is a romance with a rather intricate plot, and a romance requires continuous reading and cannot be laid aside for a few days with impunity. Secondly, it requires hard and continuous study; there is hardly a page without two or three splendid thoughts, and several weighty expressions; it is a perfect mine of felicitous though somewhat lengthy quotations upon almost every question of art and life, yet it is sententious without being exactly epigrammatic. Thirdly, it is very digressive, distressingly so when you are once interested in the story. Lastly, it is not dramatic; whoever is speaking, Lord Howe, Aurora, Romney Leigh, Marian Earle, they all express themselves in a precisely similar way; it is even sometimes necessary to reckon back the speeches in a dialogue to see who has got the ball. In fact it is not they who speak, but Mrs. Browning. To sum up, it is the attempted union of the dramatic and meditative elements that is fatal to the work from an artistic point of view.

Perhaps, if we are to try and disentangle the motive of the whole piece, to lay our finger on the main idea, we may say that it lies in the contrast between the solidity and unity of the artistic life, as opposed to the tinkering philanthropy of the Sociologist. Aurora Leigh is an attempt from an artistic point of view to realise in concrete form the truth that the way to attack the bewildering problem of the nineteenth century, the moral elevation of the democracy, is not by attempting to cure in detail the material evils, which are after all nothing but the symptoms of a huge moral disease expressing itself in concrete fact, but by infusing a spirit which shall raise them from within. To attack it from its material side is like picking off the outer covering of a bud to assist it to blow, rather than by watering the plant to increase its vitality and its own power of internal action; in fact, as our clergy are so fond of saying, a spiritual solution is the only possible one, with this difference, that in Aurora Leigh this attempt is made not so much from the side of dogmatic religion as of pure and more general enthusiasms. The insoluble enigma is unfortunately, whether, under the pressure of the present material surroundings, there is any hope of eliciting such an instinct at all; whether it is not actually annihilated by want and woe and the diseased transmission of hereditary sin.

It is of course totally impossible to give any idea of a poem of this kind by quotations, partly, too, because as with most meditative poetry, the extracts are often more impressive by themselves than in their context, owing to the fact that the run of the poem is interfered with rather than assisted by them. But we may give a few specimens of various kinds. "I," she says,

Will write my story for my better self,
As when you paint your portrait for a friend
Who keeps it in a drawer, and looks at it
Long after he has ceased to love you, just
To hold together what he was and is.

And this is one of those mysterious, sudden images that take the fancy; she is describing the high edge of a chalk down:

You might see
In apparition in the golden sky
... the sheep run
Along the fine clear outline, small as mice
That run along a witch's scarlet thread.

And this is a wonderful rendering of the effect, which never fails to impress the thought, of the mountains of a strange land rising into sight over the sea's rim:

I felt the wind soft from the land of souls:
The old miraculous mountain heaved in sight
One straining past another along the shore
The way of grand, tall Odyssean ghosts,
Athirst to drink the cool blue wine of seas
And stare on voyagers.

We may conclude with this enchanting picture of an Italian evening:

Fire-flies that suspire
In short soft lapses of transported flame
Across the tingling dark, while overhead
The constant and inviolable stars
Outrun those lights-of-love: melodious owls
(If music had but one note and was sad,
'Twould sound just so): and all the silent swirl
Of bats that seem to follow in the air
Some grand circumference of a shadowy dome
To which we are blind; and then the nightingales
Which pluck our heart across a garden-wall,
(When walking in the town) and carry it
So high into the bowery almond-trees
We tremble and are afraid, and feel as if
The golden flood of moonlight unaware
Dissolved the pillars of the steady earth,
And made it less substantial.

It would seem in studying Mrs. Browning's work as though either she herself or her advisers did not appreciate her special gift. The longest of her poems are the work of her later years, whereas her strength did not lie so much in sustained narrative effort, in philosophical construction, or patriotic sentiment, as in the true lyrical gift. It seems more and more clear as time goes on that the poems by which she will be best remembered are some of her shortest—the expression of a single overruling mood—the parable without the explanation—the burst of irrepressible feeling.

I should be inclined, if I had to make a small selection out of the poems, to name seven lyrics as forming the truest and most characteristic work she ever produced—characteristic that is of her strength, and showing the fewest signs of her weakness. These are: "Loved Once," "The Romance of the Swan's Nest," "Catarina to Camoens," "Cowper's Grave," "The Cry of the Children," "The Mask," and lastly "Confessions," which seems to me one of the stormiest and most pathetic poems in the language. A few words of critical examination may be given to each.

The first fact that strikes a reader is that all of these, with one exception, depend to a certain extent upon the use of a refrain. Of course the refrain is a species of metrical trick; but there is no possibility of denying, that, if properly used, it gives a peculiar satisfaction to that special sense—whatever it be, for there is no defining it—to which metre and rhyme both appeal. At the same time there is one condition attached to this device, that it should not be prolonged into monotony. At what precise moment this lapse into monotony takes place, or by what other devices it may be modified, must be left to the sensitive taste of the writer, but if the writer does not discover when it becomes monotonous the reader will do so; and this is certainly the case in "The Dead Pan," though the refrain is there varied.

To a certain extent too it must be confessed that this same monotony affects two of the poems which we have mentioned: "Loved Once," and "Catarina to Camoens." The former of these deals with the permanence of a worthy love; and the refrain, "Loved Once," is dismissed as being the mere treasonous utterance of those who have never understood what love is. The poem gains, too, a pathetic interest from the fact that it records the great estrangement of Mrs. Browning's life.

"Catarina to Camoens" is the dying woman's answer to her lover's sonnet in which he recorded the wonder of her gaze. But alas! of these lines we may say with the author of Ionica, "I bless them for the good I feel; but yet I bless them with a sigh." The poem is vitiated by the unusually large proportion of faulty and fantastic rhymes that it contains.

"The Swan's Nest," the story of a childish dream and its disappointment, is an admirable illustration of the artistic principle that the element of pathos depends upon minuteness of detail and triviality of situation rather than upon intensity of feeling.

"The Mask" is not a poem that appears to have been highly praised. But it will appeal to any one who has any knowledge of that most miserable of human experiences—the necessity of dissembling suffering:

I have a smiling face, she said,
I have a jest for all I meet,
I have a garland for my head,
And all its flowers are sweet—
And so you call me gay, she said.

Behind no prison-grate, she said,
Which slurs the sunshine half-a-mile,
Live captives so uncomforted
As souls behind a smile.
God's pity let us pray, she said.

If I dared leave this smile, she said,
And take a moan upon my mouth,
And twine a cypress round my head,
And let my tears run smooth,
It were the happier way, she said.

And since that must not be, she said,
I fain your bitter world would leave.
How calmly, calmly, smile the dead,
Who do not, therefore, grieve!
The yea of Heaven is yea, she said.

It is not necessary to quote from either "Cowper's Grave" or "The Cry of the Children." The former is the true Elegiac; the latter—critics may say what they will—goes straight to the heart and brings tears to the eyes. We do not believe that any man or woman of moderate sensibility could read it aloud without breaking down. It has faults of language, structure, metre; but its emotional poignancy gives it an artistic value which it would be fastidious to deny, and which we may expect it to maintain.

Lastly, "Confessions" is the story of passionate love, lavished by a soul so exclusively and so prodigally on men that it has, in the jealous priestly judgment, sucked away and sapped the natural love for the Father of men. The poor human soul under the weight of this accusation clings only to the thought of how utterly it has loved the brothers that it has seen. "And how," comes the terrible question, "have they requited it? God's love, you have rejected it—what have you got in its stead from man?"

I saw God sitting above me, but I ... I sate among men,
And I have loved these.
The least touch of their hands in the morning, I keep it by
day and by night;
Their least step on the stair, at the door, still throbs through
me, if ever so light:
Their least gift, which they left to my childhood, far off in
the long-ago years,
Is turned from a toy to a relic, and seen through the crystal of
tears.
"Dig the snow," she said,
"For my churchyard bed,
Yet I, as I sleep, shall not fear to freeze,
If one only of these my beloveds, shall love me with heart-warm
tears
As I have loved these!"

"Go," I cried, "thou hast chosen the Human, and left the
Divine!
Then, at least, have the Human shared with thee their wild
berry wine?
Have they loved back thy love, and when strangers approached
thee with blame
Have they covered thy fault with their kisses, and loved thee
the same?"
But she shrunk and said,
"God, over my head,
Must sweep in the wrath of His judgment-seas,
If He shall deal with me sinning, but only indeed the same
And no gentler than these."

We have been dealing with a poet as a poet; but we must not forget that she was a woman too. From Sappho and Sulpicia (whose reputations must be allowed to rest upon somewhat negative proof) to Eliza Cook and Joanna Baillie, and even Mrs. Hemans, sweet singer as she was—how Mrs. Browning distances them all! There was something after all in the quaint proposal of the Athenæum, upon the death of Wordsworth, that the Laureateship should be offered to Mrs. Browning, as typical of the realisation of a new possibility for women. That alone is something of an achievement, though in itself we do not rate it very high. But the truth is that we cannot do without our poets; the nation is even now pining for a new one, and every soul that comes among us bringing the divinæ particulam auræ, who finds his way to expression, is a possession to congratulate ourselves upon. If there is that shadowy something in a writer's work, coming we know not whence and going we know not whither, unseen, intangible, but making its presence felt and heard, we must welcome it and guard it and give it room to move. "My own best poets," writes Mrs. Browning, "am I one with you?"

Does all this smell of thyme about my feet
Conclude my visit to your holy hill
In personal presence, or but testify
The rustling of your vesture through my dreams
With influent odours?

We need not doubt it; she is worthy to be counted among these,

The only teachers who instruct mankind
From just a shadow on a charnel-wall
To find man's veritable stature out
Erect, sublime—the measure of a man—
And that's the measure of an angel, says
The apostle.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

We have been dealing with a poet as a poet; but we must not forget that she was a woman too. From Sappho and Sulpicia (whose reputations must be allowed to rest upon somewhat negative proof) to Eliza Cook and Joanna Baillie, and even Mrs. Hemans, sweet singer as she was—how Mrs. Browning distances them all! There was something after all in the quaint proposal of the Athenæum, upon the death of Wordsworth, that the Laureateship should be offered to Mrs. Browning, as typical of the realisation of a new possibility for women. That alone is something of an achievement, though in itself we do not rate it very high. But the truth is that we cannot do without our poets; the nation is even now pining for a new one, and every soul that comes among us bringing the divinæ particulam auræ, who finds his way to expression, is a possession to congratulate ourselves upon. If there is that shadowy something in a writer's work, coming we know not whence and going we know not whither, unseen, intangible, but making its presence felt and heard, we must welcome it and guard it and give it room to move. "My own best poets," writes Mrs. Browning, "am I one with you?"

^^^^^^^COULD NOT HAVE BEEN BETTER SAID IMHO. AS THE MEASURE OF ANY POET IS QUALITY, DEPTH AND HEART OF THAT POET'S BODY OF WORK-- HAS NOT A DAMN THING TO DO WITH THE POET'S GENDER!
FEMALE POETS ARE STILL TO THIS DAY GETTING SHAFTED IN REGARDS TO FAME, APPRECIATION, RECOGNITION AND PROPER , WELL DESERVED PRAISE FOR THEIR WORKS.-TYR

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poe...s/detail/70312

Prose from Poetry Magazine
On Ghosts and the Overplus
Magic, metaphor, and dealings with the dead.
By Christina Pugh



Tonight I saw myself in the dark window as
the image of my father, whose life
was spent like this,
thinking of death, to the exclusion
of other sensual matters,
so in the end that life
was easy to give up, since
it contained nothing.
— From Mirror Image, by Louise Glück

You can spend your whole life thinking of death. Or soaring from it. My father was the opposite of Glück’s — steeped instead in the earthly, the decimal point, and the profit margin. Eight years into leukemia and he still had no time for death — no truck with it, as people used to say. He was a retired businessman still chairing company committees. He was a master gardener, devising ever new 
systems for labeling squash and trellising tomatoes. He was industrious, in the best sense. Frost might have said that his vocation and avocation had successfully united, as two eyes do in sight. Hospice was the roadblock. His own mortality was the real shock.

Hospice broke his heart.

This is the story I’m telling right now. I believe it to be true. Or might there have been another, different truth — some truth beyond a living 
person’s need to understand? I’d like to imagine a veiled waterway, hidden even from himself, that led him to a place beyond his conscious will and power. Could some internal stream have soothed the pain of his body’s betrayal? I’m guaranteed never to know. But I can still wish.

Can poetry reside in the recess of that mystery?



•



There used to be no house, hardly a room, in which someone had not once died.
— From Illuminations, by Walter Benjamin

Some years ago, a friend was talking to an owl at an artists’ colony near the Bighorns. Every morning before sunrise, she went out to greet the owl, and the owl spoke back. I understood that some profound content had been exchanged between the two of them — though it was also, perhaps predictably, hard to pin down in English. So 
I didn’t press her too hard for details.

What stayed with me instead was the euphoria of address — what Roman Jakobson called the conative function in language, or “orientation toward the addressee.” I like to think of it this way: the conversation’s subject isn’t really so important; the thrill is that the conversation happens at all. The linguistic rush of  face to face. Or in French, conversation is tête à tête: literally “head to head,” or putting two heads together.

This is what it feels like to fall in love.

Still, wouldn’t you be skeptical about the owl story?

A few years later, during my own stay at a colony, I myself   became the surprised target of a “visitation” — a ghost. It was said that a person, or persons, had died in the house where I was staying. One of them followed me up the staircase and spoke in my dark bedroom. Tripped the electrical circuit’s “light fantastic.” And made my keyboarding fingers type the initials “BS” — in a succinct (and, yes, 
hilarious) pan of everything I’d written that day.

The other residents there didn’t find my experience unusual. They had their own, similar stories. One of them told me not to worry.

To me, it had felt terrifying and then a little silly. A good agnostic, and a good empiricist, is not supposed to be visited like this, even if she’s also a poet. I couldn’t square that ghost — but I couldn’t deny its existence, either. It had all really happened. So I tried to redefine it as a local artifact. Or put it in the zoo. I told myself, Ghosts are part of the discourse here.

That sentence is a paradox: discourse sparks the intellect while ghost flouts its every rule. The sentence is also a diplomat — it brings reason and inexplicability to the same table. Most of all, though, it muzzles the ghost. Discourse routs the uncontainable. The uncountable. I fenced that ghost in language.

Since poetry is made of words — as Mallarmé told Degas — it’s 
capable of doing this, too. But a poem is also something else. Poetry is what lets the ghost reply, Don’t fence me in.



•



You have told me you gave it all away
then, sold the house, keeping only the confirmation
cross she wore, her name in cursive chased
on the gold underside, your ring in the same

box, those photographs you still avoid,
and the quilt you spread on your borrowed bed — 
small things. Months after we met, you told me she had
made it, after we had slept already beneath its loft
and thinning, raveled pattern, as though beneath
her shadow, moving with us, that dark, that soft.
— From Artifact, by Claudia Emerson

Look at the smallest, most ephemeral things around you. How many fingers have touched them? Do you know whose?

In Claudia Emerson’s sequence “Late Wife: Letters to Kent,” a newly remarried woman encounters her husband’s first wife, dead of cancer, in precisely those sorts of things. There is the quilt the late wife made, and one stray “driving glove” in the car. The late wife also made a video of her then-husband Kent coming home to their adorably excitable dog.

When she watches this home video, Emerson realizes that its erstwhile camerawoman and “director” is now, impossibly, directing 
her: “as though she directs / me to notice the motion of her chest / in the rise and fall of the frame.” Kent — the “you” in this passage from “Homecoming” — is unwittingly complicit in the strategy:

Then, at last, you come home
to look into the camera she holds,
and past her into me — invisible, unimagined
other who joins her in seeing through our
transience the lasting of desire.

The “you,” the “me,” and the “she.” Three pronouns that don’t 
always go well together. But this particular triangle is full of generosity. Emerson becomes the late wife’s coconspirator, confidante, 
receptor, continuation. Kent is the natural bridge: love for him has brought two strangers together, one posthumously, in these poems’ “unimagined” scenes. A single wife is not enough; two marriages combine in time to serve an idea, or “the lasting of desire.”

I don’t know how “true” these poems are, nor do I need to know. In other words, I don’t know whether, or to what degree, Emerson actually experienced the late wife as I did the ghost at the colony. Regardless, I see her poems as an act of radical empathy and eros — one that reimagined and loosened the outlines of a single self, or of a couple. It was an act that redefined triangulation not as tension or obstacle — the way it has been since time immemorial, or at least since Jane Eyre — but as the perfecting of each couple’s love, moving forward and backward in time.

I didn’t know Claudia Emerson. She died in 2014, also from cancer, at the young age of fifty-seven. When I read the news, my mind flew to Late Wife. It was all I could think about. At first, I felt it all had to be a mistake: that Late Wife made Emerson’s early death impossible. As if the book itself should have been a prophylactic. Then I wondered if the opposite were true.

I wondered, that is, if the poems were talismanic. They didn’t foretell Emerson’s death, but they narrated what had, in a sense, already happened: she herself was in the process of  becoming the “late wife” that the poems so lovingly inhabited.

In a sense, every poem becomes a site of askesis, or self-evacuation — since we don’t write literally with blood, but with black marks on paper, or their electronic equivalents. As we learn in our first workshops, our bodies (and explanations, and justifications) can’t follow our poems around in the world. But Emerson’s askesis seems different, as if she exchanged her very life for a rapt concentration on the dead. The danger of that statement, of course, is that it sounds a lot like magical thinking. It sounds like an aesthetic justification for a death that occurred too soon.

And maybe it is. But consider this: elsewhere in the poem I just quoted, Emerson calls the late wife’s video “scripted.” In the course of writing these poems, had Emerson tapped into something more powerful than poetry, or even than her life? In this case, the rhetorical term is prolepsis — meaning that, in some sense, we are always 
living with a future that has already happened.

What role can poetry play in such a life-script? Here are the first wife’s X-rays, as her doctors described them to Kent:

By the time they saw what they were looking at
it was already risen into the bones
of her chest. They could show you then the lungs
were white with it; they said it was like salt
in water — that hard to see as separate — 
and would be that hard to remove. Like moonlight
dissolved in fog, in the dense web
of vessels.
— From The X-Rays

Like the disease in the lungs, metaphor is everywhere. It’s ineluctable, even in the doctors’ diagnosis. The first wife’s illness becomes beautiful as an ocean or as moonlight dissolved in fog. It seems to me there is always a risk in lyricizing pathology, but I also sense that this is the perfect accommodation — the hand-in-driving-glove, if you will — between the ghost of the late wife and the poet who will become her successor. Like salt in water, the two of them had already grown so very hard to see as separate.

Maybe metaphor incites such eerie inevitability, which became the achievement of Emerson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book. Yet the poet’s biography shows that the poems themselves are not the end. It calls us beyond the poems, into the script.

This is what made Emerson’s death the hardest-hitting for me, despite our recent and staggering losses of giants like Seamus Heaney, Philip Levine, and Mark Strand. Strand who, in one of his last talks at the Poetry Foundation, discussed “the inevitability of surprise” in poems. He said that current poetry fashion had lost the taste for it.

Though she was alive when he spoke it, Strand’s phrase also describes Emerson’s demise.



•



All I know is a door into the dark.
— From The Forge, by Seamus Heaney

The history of the novel has a discrete historical place for the Gothic and its revenants. In poetry, though, the ghost can’t be confined to a single era. Claudia Emerson had so many ancestors. There was Coleridge and “Christabel.” Hardy’s final ghost poems. Rilke “transcribing” the sonnets to Orpheus, inspired by the dead Vera Knoop. Yeats writing A Vision. Merrill and his Ouija board. And so on.

Why do so many of these ghosts seep into the lives and deaths of poets? All I know is that the more I write poetry, the surer and less sure I become. The more deeply I listen to both the inflections and innuendoes of language, to paraphrase Wallace Stevens, the more astute and also superstitious I seem to be. The more densely I describe the textures of the world around me, the more of it I realize I am missing. The negatives of Matthew Brady’s Civil War photographs, built into greenhouse glass and described by Linda Bierds in The Profile Makers, make lovely analogues for this. Of course, it’s a short journey from photographic negatives to Keatsian negative capability, or the valuation of doubt and mystery that animates so many poets.

For me, poetry proliferates and flourishes in the intellect’s blind spot. But you have to have the intellect first; you can’t skip that step. I find intelligence to be most interesting when it’s tested — not when it’s challenged, but when we restrain it from being the default mode by which we apprehend the phenomena around us. Can strategies in the martial arts speak to this?

By the same token, the way of mind that attends the supernatural or numinous is hardly compelling without a formidable and even mutually exclusive foil. Ratiocination. This is where poetry inserts itself, again with Stevens, as what “must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully.”



•



My Ben!
Or come again,
Or send to us
Thy wit’s great overplus.
— From An Ode to Ben Jonson, by Robert Herrick


The dead have no ears, no answering machines
that we know of, still we call.
— From Leave a Message, by Bob Hicok


The “O” of apostrophe. The vocative, in Latin — and for   Jakobson, too. 
For the critic Barbara Johnson, apostrophe was what made lyric poetry itself; its long history could have been distilled into a single cry. Robert Herrick’s apostrophe transformed his dead friend, the bon vivant Ben Jonson, into “Saint Ben.” We cry to the dead, and we imagine that they answer us. The weirdness in me wants to say they sometimes even do.

Herrick was right, too, about the dead’s “overplus.” This is the uncanny excess that can’t be contained by empirical limits — even if it’s sheathed in Jonson’s wit or my own ghost’s “BS.” If Herrick’s term sounds mathematical, so much the better. Think of the late wife’s doctors and their metaphors.

Can we greet overplus without relinquishing our skepticism? Poetry keeps asking the impossible.

My father died two years ago today, in my childhood home that had become, for six short and endless hours, Hospice. His pain ripped him, even with morphine. To the end, I think, he was battling death, his legs still muscled enough to fight.

When it was over, the funeral home attendants zipped up his body and wheeled it away, leaving a silk rose behind.

Later that night, I startled awake and sat up. He was lying next to me, as if still in his hospital bed. But his eyes were peacefully closed, the way they hadn’t been in death. His face and body were calm — as if conflict and even muscularity had flown, or floated down a river. 
I leaned over and reached for his hand, then realized I was clawing my own bedsheet.

He was there. Or not. How would I ever know?

In poetry, perhaps more than anywhere else, we can try.

The answers won’t be there. Still we call.

Originally Published: February 26th, 2016


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Biography Poems, Articles & More
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Christina Pugh
Poet Details

Christina Pugh is the author of four full-length books of poems: Perception (Four Way Books, forthcoming 2017); Grains of the Voice (Northwestern University Press, 2013); Restoration (TriQuarterly Books, 2008); and Rotary (Word Press, 2004); and the chapbook Gardening at Dusk (Wells College Press, 2002). Her poems have appeared in journals such as the Atlantic Monthly, Poetry magazine, TriQuarterly, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, and in anthologies such as Poetry 180 (2003).

Pugh earned a PhD in comparative literature from Harvard University, where she was awarded a Whiting Foundation dissertation fellowship. She continues to publish criticism as well as poetry, with scholarly interests centering on the poetics of ekphrasis, poetic form and meter, the lyric poem as a genre, and manuscript scholarship treating the work of Emily Dickinson. Her articles have appeared in the Emily Dickinson Journal, Literary Imagination, and The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry Post-1945 (2013), among others. Her book reviews have appeared in Poetry magazine, Verse, Ploughshares, and Harvard Review.

Pugh has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Word Press First Book Prize (for Rotary), the Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship, the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, an individual artist fellowship in poetry from the Illinois Arts Council, the Associated Writing Programs’ Intro Journals Award, and the Grolier Poetry Prize. She has been granted residencies at the Bogliasco Foundation, Ragdale, Ucross, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. At the University of Illinois at Chicago, Pugh received a faculty fellowship from the Institute for the Humanities, a Graduate Mentoring Award for outstanding mentoring of graduate students, a Teaching Recognition Program award, and a Dean’s Award for Faculty Research in the Humanities.


Pugh is consulting editor for Poetry and a professor in the Program for Writers (the PhD program in creative writing) at the University of Illinois at Chicago

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

Comment on Article
Robert Herrick: A True Cavalier
Written by: William J. Long
Robert Herrick (1591-1674). Herrick is the true Cavalier, happy, devil-may-care in disposition, but by some freak of fate a clergyman of Dean Prior, in South Devon, a county made famous by him and Blackmore. Here, in a country parish, he lived discontentedly, longing for the joys of London and the Mermaid Tavern, his bachelor establishment consisting of an old housekeeper, a cat, a dog, a goose, a tame lamb, one hen,--for which he thanked God in poetry because she laid an egg every day,--and a pet pig that drank beer with Herrick out of a tankard. With admirable good nature, Herrick made the best of these uncongenial surroundings. He watched with sympathy the country life about him and caught its spirit in many lyrics, a few of which, like "Corinna's Maying," "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may," and "To Daffodils," are among the best known in our language. His poems cover a wide range, from trivial love songs, pagan in spirit, to hymns of deep religious feeling. Only the best of his poems should be read; and these are remarkable for their exquisite sentiment and their graceful, melodious expression. The rest, since they reflect something of the coarseness of his audience, may be passed over in silence. Late in life Herrick published his one book, Hesperides and Noble Numbers (1648). The latter half contains his religious poems, and one has only to read there the remarkable "Litany" to see how the religious terror that finds expression in Bunyan's Grace Abounding could master even the most careless of Cavalier singers.

Content from PoetrySoup.com. Read more at: http://www.poetrysoup.com/article/ro..._cavalier-1633
Copyright © PoetrySoup and Respective Poets.

[Tyr-Ziu Saxnot]

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poe...s/detail/90935

Prose from Poetry Magazine
Charms, Prayers, and Curses
By Beverley Bie Brahic

How Poems Think, by Reginald Gibbons.

University of Chicago Press. $25.00.

Do poems think?

Big question, one that has nagged people at least since Plato was grumbling about the dangerously loose thinking of poets in contrast to the rigor of philosophers. “There’s an old quarrel between philosophy and poetry,” he said in the Republic — but what exactly that quarrel was is moot — not least because Plato’s use of dramatic dialogue to make his case was itself poetical.

Much rides, no doubt, on one’s definition of thinking. Reginald Gibbons’s How Poems Think casts the net wide, assuming that poems think in all kinds of ways (abstractly, concretely, etymologically, metaphorically, sonically    ...    ), even poems with the limited attention span of — let me quote, for the fun of it, the beginning of Karen Solie’s neck-snapping “The Road In Is Not the Same Road Out”:

The perspective is unfamiliar.
We hadn’t looked back, driving in,
and lingered too long
at the viewpoint. It was a prime-of-life
experience. Many things we know
by their effects: void in the rock
that the river may advance, void
in the river that the fish may advance,
helicopter in the canyon
like a fly in a jar, a mote in the eye,
a wandering cause. It grew dark ...

“Sentences in unpredictable but deep sequence in unpredictable but braced lines,” Michael Hofmann says of Solie, who keeps a dozen balls in the air at once and lands them with no-stress aplomb. Here is Gibbons on another poet’s comparable flash and dazzle: “[His] poetic thinking moves very fast from one image or allusion to the next    ...    in what may seem non sequiturs rather than a ‘logic’ of syntax, line, narrative, setting, or argument.” Ashbery? No. Gérard de Nerval.

How Poems Think, however, rests its argument in a quieter place, walking us through a (by now) altogether more user-friendly snippet of  William Carlos Williams’s 1923 sequence Spring and All:

Pink confused with white
flowers and flowers reversed
take and spill the shaded flame
darting it back
into the lamp’s horn ...    

Gibbons points to the poem’s grace, its doublings, its darting movements, its phoneme repetitions and historical precedents, and to how its words, magically, poetically, seductively, coalesce to produce thought and feeling:

In his poem, Williams is giving the mere transience of the light from a lamp on a short-lived flowering potted plant its immortal moment, and its    ...    immortal    ...    articulation in a poem.... In rescuing the humble potted plant from oblivion, Williams performs an ancient poetic role, rescuing for a moment those of us who look at the potted plant with him.

•

Williams’s poem is the exclamation point of a book that digs into poetry’s rich, layered meaning-making humus. The oldest poems, it 
recalls, were oral: religious or magical contraptions — charms, prayers, curses — before they became tales of the tribe to be recited and embellished and handed down, eventually in writing, as exemplars (pop wisdom that irked Plato). Gibbons is “fascinated by the antiquity of poetry, or rather, of poetic thinking.... I mean the present-day practice of devices and structures of poetic thinking that were used long ago”; and his book is packed with poetry’s teeming underground life, here decaying, there sending up tender shoots. A little word like cumin gathers a jarful of observations: “The most ancient version of the word cumin was not very different in form and sound from our word.... The spell I might have chanted while holding my little cumin-seed sack would have been a kind of verbal apotropaic amulet ... pushing away  ... a disturbing or dispiriting thought.”

Not much breath is wasted exhuming poetry’s fall-back mode, the rhetoric of persuasion (consider that diminutive debate, the sonnet, 
taking its Petrarchan turn or thumping its Shakespearean couplet on the table; or Andrew Marvell’s deviously cogent “To His Coy Mistress,” or, for that matter, any number of homely but witty poems by our contemporary, Carl Dennis). Gibbons is happiest sifting through the Mallarméan echo chamber of British modernist Mina Loy,

Onyx-eyed Odalisques
and ornithologists
observe
the flight
of Eros obsolete
—From Lunar Baedeker

or Basil Bunting’s to-and-fro-ing between Anglo-Saxon and Latin root words. Poems, Gibbons wants us to know, have more ways of thinking than culture-bound readers might dream of, and he lays out his goods for us to contemplate: antiquity’s feminine weaving songs, Russian rhymes (that lead, rather than follow or merely ornament thought), nineteenth-century French and twentieth-century English-language poems that glide from sound to sound or, like Russian dolls, nest small words inside bigger ones — “ox” inside “onyx,” say. There is a secondary text here, too, about working against the grain — one’s own or the assumptions of one’s culture — to enlarge one’s poetic practice and mode of thinking — something Gibbons set out as a young poet to do:

In California around 1970, when in my early twenties I was living about fifteen miles inland from the shore of that “peaceful ocean” that was both a body of water and an idea, I was often trying to imagine how to write a poem that would be better, more interesting, than what I had written so far.

How Poems Think’s first chapter, part memoir — I’d have welcomed more of this narrative/discursive mode — recounts a formative 
encounter with Donald Davie, a contemporary of Philip Larkin who came to teach in the US. Davie, Gibbons tells us, deplored the American confessional: “In lyric poetry ... what you are doing is making the personal impersonal. This is different from making the private public.” Later, Davie would confess his own struggles:

It is true that I am not a poet by nature, only by inclination; for my mind moves most easily and happily among abstractions, it relates ideas far more readily than it relates experiences. I have little appetite, only profound admiration, for sensuous fullness and immediacy; I have not the poet’s need of concreteness. I have resisted this admission for so long, chiefly because a natural poet was above all what I wanted to be.    

“Just as the twig is bent the tree’s inclined”? No, says Davie. A true poem can be written by a mind “not naturally poetic”

by the inhuman labor of thwarting at every point the natural grain and bent. This working against the grain does not damage the mind, nor is it foolish; on the contrary, only by doing this does each true poem as it is written become an authentic widening of experience — a truth won from life against all odds.    

Gibbons also cites the French poet Yves Bonnefoy on the challenges and rewards of translation as a means of enlarging one’s understanding of how poems — and languages — work: “Opposing metaphysics [ ... ] govern and, sometimes, tyrannize the French and English languages. [ ... ] English concerns itself naturally with tangible aspects,” whereas French poetry is “a place apart, where the bewildering diversity of the real can be forgotten, and also the very existence of time, everyday life and death.” The English language, Bonnefoy has said, in his preface to Emily Grosholz’s translation of Beginning and End of the Snow, is “so much more aptly fashioned than my own for the observation of concrete detail at a specific place and time, otherwise put, for the expression of the events of a particular existence.”

Thus a French writer appreciates the earthiness of Shakespeare or Keats. And English poets — Eliot, Ashbery — absorb French wit, abstraction, and stream of consciousness. How Poems Think struck me as particularly illuminating on how the associative thinking of nineteenth-century French poets trickled down into English poetry, 
shifting it “from representing lived experience, reason, and the world and toward creating an imaginative experience unique to the poem, by means of evocation, ellipsis, allusion, mood, impressionistically presented feeling, and so on.” Today, Gibbons speculates,

perhaps mood too has been discarded in favor of a kind of 
unmistakable poem-ness ... that has no referent or purpose beyond providing the reader with an experience of a particular way of suggesting a meaning that cannot be thought, or of not being meaningful at all in any expected way.

A beautiful line of verse is all the more beautiful as it means absolutely nothing, a literary friend told Marcel in Swann’s Way — and Marcel blushed to think that he in his innocence expected of poetry “nothing less than the revelation of truth itself.” Rimbaud, whose 
kaleidoscopic, not-meaningful-in-any-expected-way Illuminations John Ashbery not so long ago translated, is described by Thom Gunn (in “Shit”) as having

Coursed after meaning, meaning of course to trick it,
Across the lush green meadows of his youth,
To the edge of the unintelligible thicket
Where truth becomes the same place as untruth.   

Making it new? Not necessarily, as Pound, translator of the Tang and the troubadours, knew: some of the new is the old stripped, painted new colors. Poking into cobwebby corners, weaving narrative into discourse, using assemblage, How Poems Think is a trove. I read it with a pencil — until I saw that underlining everything was the same as underlining nothing.


The Bonniest Companie, by Kathleen Jamie.

Picador. £9.99.

Reading the Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie and Baudelaire in tandem last autumn I happened on an uncharacteristic landscape poem by Baudelaire and its germ, a poem he composed in his youth, and was struck by how well — if unexpectedly — the sentiment in them corresponded to Jamie’s achievement in her new book, The Bonniest Companie, as well as in her previous collection, The Overhaul. The closing stanzas of Baudelaire’s “Elevation” (my stab at a translation):

Behind the anguish and the vast chagrin
Whose heaviness fills and weighs our lives down,
Happy he who with a robust stroke can
Rise towards fields luminous and serene;

The person whose thoughts, like skylarks singing,
Climb freely each morning towards the sky
— Who hovers over life, and effortlessly
Knows the language of flowers and mute things.

Jamie, like John Clare, one of her touchstone poets, is someone comfortable with the language of mute things, who turns readily for 
inspiration to what, oversimplifying (“everything that is is natural” as A.E. Stallings says), we call “nature.” People are less Jamie’s thing; they tend to potter about in the wings, gestured to now and then as a “we” or a “you.” Her poems are more, however, than felicitous snapshots of epiphanic moments involving deer, birds, or trees. Balanced between descriptions of objective reality and the expression of her own inner life, “The Shrew” (the small mammal) opens the new collection and illustrates Jamie’s complexity:

Take me to the river, but not right now,
not in this cauld blast, this easterly
striding up from the sea
like a bitter shepherd — 

and as for you, you Arctic-hatched, comfy-looking geese
occupying our fields,
you needn’t head back north anytime soon — 

snow on the mountains, frozen ploughed clods — 
weeks of this now, enough’s enough

 — but when my hour comes,
let me go like the shrew
right here on the path: spindrift on her midget fur,
caught mid-thought, mid-dash

Precision, understatement, and humor — the sharp-tongued, sardonic 
kind also native to the Canadian Anne Carson, perhaps to Calvinist societies in general — are key. Constitutionally modest, Jamie is quick to pull the rug out from under herself: “take me to the river, but not right now”; “enough’s enough.” One hears the parental voice half-humorously taking the child down a notch until taking oneself down a notch becomes second nature. Jamie’s language is as plain as her “cairn of old stones” (“Glacial”) but it bristles with perceptual and emotional intensity, with the tones and customs of harsh places.

How does Jamie pack so much into her laconic lines? I ask (mindful of Gibbons’s How Poems Think), and come up with some tentative responses: 1) by no-comment juxtaposing of alternate realities: here, ultimate things (the sacred river, death), there, sensuous pleasure in the moment’s “frozen ploughed clods” and spindrift on fur; 2) by linking herself to a humble creature (“let me go like the shrew”); 3) by peppering poems with feminine signs and diction (“comfy-looking”; that shrew, again, co-opted from its traditional role as a scold: “a bad-tempered or aggressively assertive woman,” says my unreformed dictionary); 4) by the sounds and rhythms of   her words — what Gibbons, 
probing historical parallels between poems and weaving, calls “sonic texture” (the nubbly “you Arctic-hatched, comfy-looking geese”); and 5) by gesturing towards pain (“when my hour comes”) without making a big deal of it. Much is implicit in Jamie’s reticent lyrics and, naturally, all the mute things are thingy — they are — but also metaphorical and moral. Some of Jamie’s critics speak of her wild creatures as mysterious others, akin to Ted Hughes’s roe deer, who “happened into my dimension.” I prefer to view them as part of a continuum of life forms, all of them — including, perhaps most of all, the human beings — largely inscrutable. Jamie’s realms, as she herself hints in “The Shrew,” overlap: the wind “striding    ...    / like a bitter shepherd”; the geese “occupy” like demonstrators or invaders; the shrew is “caught mid-thought, mid-dash” — a traditional female stance, but one whose ordinariness is relatively new to the lyric (the poem performs this state of between-ness by ending without punctuation). Bitterness and comfort, “The Shrew” commonsensically implies, are two sides of life. One senses that Jamie, a philosopher by training, would make a good Stoic.

Kathleen Jamie was born in 1962 in the west of Scotland. The Bonniest Companie is her seventh collection. Like The Overhaul, The Bonniest Companie’s poems are palm-sized: pebbles good for pocketing. Forget Les Murray’s “quality of sprawl.” This is an Arte Povera — like the sixties’ minimalists who made art of scrappy 
objects, Jamie is subversive in her use of domestic, often feminine, materials; in her stripped-to-the-bare-wood diction and organic forms, as well as in her incorporation of Scots vernacular to mark cultural confidence. The Bonniest Companie was written, she tells us in the notes, week by week over the year of the Scottish Independence Referendum. “23/9/14” was composed shortly after voting day:

So here we are,
dingit doon and weary,
happed in tattered hopes
(an honest poverty).
.................................................. ...................
On wir feet.
Today we begin again.

There is also a translation into Scots “eftir Hölderlin” (easy to read along with Michael Hamburger’s English translation) and an overtly political/ecological poem punningly called “Wings Over Scotland” (“Glenogil Estate: poisoned buzzard (Carbofuran). / No prosecution”) that appropriates media materials.

Honored for her depictions of wild places and creatures that, indirectly, have a fair amount to say about people, Jamie can, when she likes, evoke human tensions more forthrightly, as in two poems, “Moon” from The Overhaul:

Moon,
I said, we’re both scarred now.

Are they quite beyond you,
the simple words of love? Say them.
You are not my mother;
with my mother, I waited unto death.

and “Another You” from The Bonniest Companie, in which a sixties tune on the radio reminds Jamie of “Dad’s chair” and her mother:

your knitting bag, all
needles and pins ...
 ........................
... I never
could explain myself, never
could explain....
.....................
... It’s seven years
since you died, and suddenly I know
what the singers say is true — 
that seek as I might, I’ll never
find another you. But that’s alright.

“Change, change — that’s what the terns scream /    ...    / everything else is provisional, / us and all our works” (“Fianuis”). Rugged and sensuous, Jamie’s lyrics belong to and enrich a European tradition that runs alongside the postmodernists, borrowing their techniques — 
voices like Philippe Jaccottet (Swiss-French) and Tomas Tranströmer (Sweden). Jamie has said that poetry for her is “about listening and the art of listening, listening with attention. I don’t just mean with the ear; bringing the quality of attention to the world. The writers 
I like best are those who attend    ...    Seamus Heaney, Elizabeth Bishop, John Clare.” A group into which Jamie’s quietly intense poems fit well.


Prodigal: New and Selected Poems 1976–2014, by Linda Gregerson.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $16.95.

Linda Gregerson writes long, shapely poems that often come in parts, requiring assemblage. She will begin with an X, jump to a Y, swerve to Z, but eventually the whole shebang falls into place — as associatively-thinking poems do not always do — because Gregerson is good at making connections that might be a stretch for less well-exercised minds: her arguments, however deviously constructed, are sturdy — once you put it all together you can sit down in it. If there are — and there are — strong feelings in these poems, they are governed by an equally fierce intellect. Nothing leaves this workshop that has not been subjected to quality control.

A reader unfamiliar with Gregerson’s work might want to start with the selections from her more overtly personal collections, The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep or Waterborne. Gregerson, storyteller that she is, will often ground austere, impersonal poems with 
allusions to something prima facie autobiographical (“When my daughters / were little and played in their bath”). Still, the reader who starts with the new poems, where the question of authorial distance can be problematic, risks skating over layers of thought and experience that the reader familiar with the earlier poems will intuit. “The Wrath of Juno (the house of Cadmus),” one of the ten new poems, sits as boldly on the page as a bibelot by Marianne Moore, the voices in its faceted quatrains rarely easy to identify:

It’s the children nail your heart
to the planet, so that’s
how you nail them back.
Alcmena in labor

for seven days. Think of the man
who thought up the goddess
who thought of that.
And pregnant

Semele, stupid with pride, consumed
by the flames she had the gall
to ask for, though
I ought to have known

that wouldn’t be the end of it. Who’ll
rid me of the turbulent mess that comes
attached to a womb?

Based on episodes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, “The Wrath of Juno” has elements of dramatic monologue, soliloquy, and rant. The speaker 
rages — to herself? to a listener? — about a long, chaotic experience of the world. On another level she is our contemporary: a woman of a certain age who has learned to be skeptical, not to say cynical, about others (“Semele, stupid with pride,”) and the state of marriage, family, the polis, the planet. Gregerson’s range (rage) is immense; it encompasses history and literature, an ancient or the latest atrocity, wallpaper, and URLs. Mortgage payments chew the fat with 
“serotonin uptake” and “geometricians.” But when the somewhat autobiographical, if still seven-league-booted ironist dives underground the “I,” the “you,” and “the girl” become slippery, generalized, 
universal:

The planets make us what we are,
which means
in turn

the parts I learned in Tunis and at Delphi must
be surface
agitations on a deeper pool.

Talk to me, won’t you,
what was it like
in your other life?
— From Pythagorean

One of my favorite earlier poems in Prodigal’s selection is “With Emma at the Ladies-Only Swimming Pond on Hampstead Heath” from The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep. “With Emma” is a wry exploration of mother-daughter relations that exposes the resistances and vulnerabilities of both with (I would guess, hard-won) equanimity:

In payment for those mornings at the mirror while,
at her
expense, I’d started my late learning in Applied

French Braids, for all
the mornings afterward of Hush
and Just stand still,   
...........................................
I did as I was told for once,
............................................
She’s eight now. She will rather

die than do this in a year or two
and lobbies,
even as we swim, to be allowed to cut

her hair.    

A great deal happens in and between the lines of these plaited tercets. 
I admire — oh how I admire — the way the poem meanders reflectively and narratively (“shall we climb / on the raft / for a while?”) but ultimately ties all the ends up with a bow. I note the rich metaphoric content — of, say, braids and the word “cut,” and the 
celebration implied by the poem’s penultimate adjective, “honey-
colored.” Gregerson has a vast reservoir of pity. She also has a 
reservoir of anger one could drown in. “For the Taking” is a poem about the sexual abuse of a child by a family member: “and we / who could have saved her, who knew //     ...     // we would be somewhere mowing the lawn // or basting the spareribs    ...     //    ...     we // were deaf and blind.” “Failures of attention,” as “Good News,” another poem in the collection, concludes, loom large in Gregerson.

If Gregerson’s poems, especially the newer ones, feel highly-processed, the more one reads backwards in time, the rawer they turn out to be, in their guilts, obsessions, hurts, sorrow, anger. Her multi-stranded patterns are suited to her anxious, thinky meanderings. They test life from different points along the way, like Proust’s shifting views of the Martinville spires; they worry at common human experiences in an attempt to get to the bottom of what Gregerson would probably acknowledge is bottomless, abyssal. The poems in Prodigal should be read slowly; if at first they seem to be (as they are) the product of restless, honest, exceptionally well-furnished and 
rational mind, they are also, it transpires, stuffed with explosives.

Originally Published: November 1st, 2016