two prose poems

[Selected and discussed by Carl Phillips in "A Brief Stop on the Trail of the Prose Poem" from Coin of the Realm]

Part of Eve's Discussion by Marie Howe

It was like the moment when a bird decides not to eat from your hand, and flies, just before it flies, the moment the rivers seem to still and stop because a storm is coming, but there is no storm, as when a hundred starlings lift and bank together before they wheel and drop, very much like the moment, driving on bad ice, when it occurs to you your car could spin, just before it slowly begins to spin, like the moment just before you forgot what it was you were about to say, it was like that, and after that, it was still like that, only all the time.

On the Writing of a Prose Poem by Russell Edson

When thinking of writing a prose poem it seems more than natural to think of suicide; to think of someone at last exposed to the God of things who might thunder, as I imagine it, from the sky, you have ruined my thing, now I shall ruin your thing.

another letter to another poet

Elizabeth Bishop’s response to Donald Stanford, a young poet approximately her age, on his responses to the poems she sent to him when she was a Vassar student in 1933 and 1934:

I realize that “sickening rupture” and “awful socket” . . . are, as you say, crude—but at the same time I think they “go.” After all, the idea behind that sonnet is not a very pretty one, and “sickening rupture” is its introduction. “Awful socket” has been prepared for by it, and the following line, which you liked, closes the unpleasant incident. They are the perceptions which give rise to the whole thing, so I don’t see how they could very well be left out or smoothed over. In the last one I’m afraid I didn’t intend to suggest the machine age at all—as I remember it, I had just brought two clocks back from the jeweler’s—and surely clocks are ancient enough to appear with dignity. The fault is mine, though, if you thought I was talking about a canning factory. . . .

Raising one’s eyes airplane-wise means simply upwards. You can say sidewise, why not up-wise, and so on to what’s up there?

I agree with you more on the subject of rhythm than would probably seem to be the case from the poems I sent you. I can write in iambics if I want to—but just now I don’t know my own mind quite well enough to say what I want to in them. If I try to write smoothly I find myself perverting the meaning for the sake of the smoothness. (And don’t you do that sometimes yourself?) However, I think that an equally great “cumulative effect” might be built up by a series of irregularities. Instead of beginning with an “uninterrupted mood” what I want to do is get the moods themselves into the rhythm. This is a very hard thing to explain, but for me there are two kinds of poetry, that (I think yours is of this sort) at rest, and that which is in action, within itself. At present it is too hard for me to get this feeling of action within the poem unless I just go ahead with it and let the meters find their way through. . . .

And one thing more—what on earth do you mean when you say my perceptions are “almost impossible for a woman’s”? “Now what the hell,” as you said to me, “you know that’s meaningless.” And if you really do mean anything by it, I imagine it would make me very angry. Is there some glandular reason which prevents a woman from having good perceptions, or what? . . .

You tell me to watch out for unpleasant phrases like “meditate your own wet”—when I have watched out for them and put them in deliberately. It has a lot to do with what I am attempting to write, so I guess I shall try to explain it to you. “Meditate your own wet” is unsuccessful, I see now, because it has such unpleasant connotations and it’s liable to carry the point rather afield. But—if you can forget all your unpleasant associations with the words—I think possibly you’ll admit that the phrase does for a second give you a feeling of intense consciousness in your tongue. Perhaps even that is unpleasant, but I think that momentary concentration of sensation is worthwhile . . . Have you ever noticed that you can often learn more about other people—more about how they feel, how it would feel to be them—by hearing them cough or make one of the innumerable inner noises, than by watching them for hours? Sometimes if another person hiccups, particularly if you haven’t been paying much attention to him, why you get a sudden sensation as if you were inside him—you know how he feels in the little aspects he never mentions, aspects which are, really, indescribable to another person and must be realized by that kind of intuition. Do you know what I am driving at? Well, if you can follow those rather hazy sentences—that’s why I quite often want to get into poetry . . .

letter to a poet whose poem I tried to critique

On further reflection, I feel that my argument was entirely flawed in that I was proposing a methodology to add a place for me in your poems, me being the iconic "reader"—whereas the whole idea of putting the reader in the poem is nothing but a construct proposed by various poets and/or critics and may have nothing whatsoever to do with your poetry.

That is to say, the MFA illuminates a field of received dreams, none of which may be your dream or mine, and the challenge, it seems to me, today and tomorrow, etc. is to take scraps of novelty gleaned from the MFA back into our own caves and try to recall what made us put words to page, syllables to music, thoughts to dancing.

Because no matter what we think, the MFA represents the academy, the state of affairs before you and I took note of received wisdom.

Whereas you and i represent our own art, what existed before we allowed the academy to probe and demolish, what persists today against a backdrop of greater, although not necessarily better, awareness.

Why are you writing a poem on June 14th? Not what do I or anyone else think.

Time for Carl Phillips

From Coin of the Realm: Essays on the Life and Art of Poetry, an essay titled "Myth and Fable: Their Place in Poetry":

Poetry shares, then, with myth and fable the strategy of building story around human experience, as a means of explaining that experience, or attempting to, and as a means of (sometimes) offering instruction regarding that experience. Also shared is a motivation. The reason I began writing—and continue to write—springs from a desire to understand in my own terms what is insufficiently understandable in the terms made available to me. But a shared strategy and motivation will not make myth out of poetry. Myth and fable are distinguishable by their applicability across time and cultural differences. When poetry has this quality, it is called—or I call it—resonant. This resonance gives poetry the valence and stamina of myth, at which point it can fairly be called great poetry. Some poetry takes on the mythic subject—love, death, loss, fear—but grounds that subject in such specifically autobiographical detail that we learn little more from reading the poem than that poet X has had such-and-such experience. The poem then has more the qualities of the journal or diary, its effect may be more cathartic than instructive (both for reader and wirter), more therapy than education, more history than myth, less resonant than reportorial. Which is not for a moment to say that such writing is not poetry, of which there are many different orders.

UK publishers take risks

Read Jai Clare's excellent blog on publishing and other topics, including pigs.

Becoming Elizabeth Bishop

For almost two weeks I've been reading Elizabeth Bishop: her poems and prose as well as three biographies by Brett C. Millier, Gary Fountain and Peter Brazeau, and David Kalstone.

The Millier volume takes the traditional approach: chronological rendering of birth, early death of father, institutionalization of her apparently insane mother, shuttling the orphaned child from one relative to another, schooling, lovers, jobs, travel, fame, death. A good job of biography, except for Millier's occasional tendency to say something important, e.g., "The sense that something was ending between herself and Margaret hovered at the edge of Elizabeth's conscious mind while making these travel decisions, though she was not yet aware of how imminent and how final the break would be," and then fail to clarify. Margaret is Margaret Miller, who up until this point in the biography has been EB's friend, but suddenly, after a gory accident, she is no longer's EB's friend? The reader waits for more, but there is no more.

The problem, I think, is the handling of the lesbianism. Millier is hesitant to specify friend vs. lover. People didn't talk about it back then, and rarely wrote things down. I am guessing EB's journals and letters are not explicit. Thus, the data must be gleaned from the recorded behavior and interviews with those still living, who may demand various forms of secrecy. But Millier would have done better to make things clearer sooner for the reader.

That leads me to the other intense weirdness: the naming of all parties except the lover EB brought to Brazil after the death of EB's long-time Brazilian lover, Lota de Macedo Soares. Millier calls the mystery woman Suzanne, Fountain/Brazeau reveal that Suzanne is a pseudonym, Kalstone reveals that her real name was Roxanne. Fine, if someone wants to remain unknown, but why not come right out and say, "We're protecting the innocent here." Innocent, now there's a word.

This is the problem with personality-based biographies. The facts of EB's life surely twined with the art she produced, but only elliptically, and the truly interesting stuff is what EB wrote. Millier does a good job of locating the creation of poems in time, and relating aspects of the poems to events and places in EB's life. She also documents EB's illnesses: asthma, allergies, alcoholism. One wants to know, I suppose, as much as is offered about the alcoholism. It was nearly disastrous for EB, but she lived through it, never conquered it, undoubtedly used it not only to survive but to allow the art. In my view, EB's alcoholism played a role similar to Lowell's psychosis. With such pressure, something needed to give. How lucky I feel that both artists survived as long as they did, produced such wealth.

The Fountain/Brazeau volume follows a pattern Peter Brazeau adopted with an oral biography of Wallace Stevens. Fountain joined up because Brazeau died before he could finish. The text offers brief stage directions that identify time, place, and players, then switches to transcribed interviews of people who knew EB. Most of the greats (Moore, Lowell, Lota) do not appear because they are dead. Still, we hear the words of teachers, schoolmates, friends, maids, doctors, publishers, admiring poets who knew EB at least through correspondence. She comes to life. I wish more biographers took the oral bio route.

But Kalstone's is the great book, and the sadness is that he died while writing it and was not able to conclude with a full discussion of EB's final poems, the great poems of Geography III. Nonetheless, this volume is breathtaking, not only as a wise, thoughtful, and loving unpacking of the poetry of Bishop, Marianne Moore, and Robert Lowell, but as an exploration of the relationships between great artists. Bishop found and introduced herself to Moore and became her student. Moore in some ways became the mother EB never had, and I say that in the kindest and most grownup way. EB was a Vassar graduate by the time she and Moore connected. EB sought a mentor, but disagreed from the very beginning. She BEGAN with her poetic genius, and needed to learn only how other "moderns" aimed and placed their energies. Moore endorsed and sharpened EB's descriptive power, and introduced her to her first publishers. All the while, EB resisted Moore's attempts to refine her. No, she would not eliminate water-closets and dung from her poems. Yes, the location of a poem in an apartment was precisely what mattered.

Kalstone shifts halfway through his book from Bishop-Moore to Bishop-Lowell. I can only begin to sense the passion between those two because I've not yet read all the collected letters. I can hardly wait. Kalstone spins the thread of their relationship by holding an EB poem next to an RL poem and talking through the texts as well as the information added to the texts by the letters. What a tragedy that Kalstone also has died, of Aids, in the '80s, and I know very little about him except that he was friend of Edmund Wilson, Adrienne Rich, James Merrill, Richard Howard.

I don't much want to talk about Becoming a Poet because I want you to buy it and read it. Read it slowly, as I did. Yes, it's about EB, MM, and RL, but more than that, it's about how a poet, a writer, learns to enter her own material and build her work. It's about three very different poets and how they created their worlds. Kalstone mostly ignores EB's illness and psychic trauma in order to pursue her work and the artistic process that allowed her to create her work. I have learned about myself through reading Kalstone. Now, can I use this learning to enter my own work?

fake velvet

From Kalstone’s Becoming a Poet: Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore & Robert Lowell, of the years 1952/53, EB in Brazil, RL in Amsterdam with Elizabeth Hardwick:

She told Lowell—encouraging him to write his autobiography—that writing the two stories [“In the Village” and “Gwendolyn”] had given her a great deal of satisfaction: “that desire to get things straight and tell the truth—it’s almost impossible not to tell the truth in poetry, I think, but in prose it keeps eluding me in the funniest way.” Lowell, too, found prose a recalcitrant medium: “a hell of a job,” he wrote her, “it starts naked, ends as fake velvet.” The point for each of them was not simply a deflection into prose. They were exploring the limits of prose as a vehicle for autobiography—just the reverse of what these efforts appeared to be. They were sharpening and altering their notions of what it meant to tell the truth in verse.

Kalstone also offers this quote from Bishop’s journal:

I think when one is extremely unhappy—almost hysterically unhappy, that is—one’s time sense breaks down. All that long stretch in Key West, for example, several years ago—it wasn’t just a matter of not being able to accept the present, that present, although it began that way, possibly. But the past and the present seemed confused, or contradicting each other violently and constantly, and the past wouldn’t “lie doon.” (I’ve felt the same thing when I tried to paint—but this was really taught me by getting drunk, when the same thing happens, for perhaps the same reasons, for a few hours.)

Fake velvet is generally what I feel about my own prose. Remarkably close but not real enough.

a scrap from Elizabeth Bishop's story

From “In the Village," that story The New Yorker accepted with difficulty:

It was a hot summer afternoon. Her mother and her two sisters were there. The older sister had brought her [the mother] home, from Boston, not long before, and was staying on, to help. Because in Boston she had not got any better, in months and months—or had it been a year? In spite of the doctors, in spite of the frightening expenses, she had not got any better.

First, she had come home, with her child. Then she had gone away again, alone, and left the child. Then she had come home. Then she had gone away again, with her sister; and now she was home again.

Unaccustomed to having her back, the child stood now in the doorway, watching. The dressmaker was crawling around and around on her knees eating pins as Nebuchadnezzar had crawled eating grass. The wallpaper glinted and the elm trees outside hung heavy and green, and the straw matting smelled like the ghost of hay.

Clang.

Clang.

Oh, beautiful sounds, from the blacksmith’s shop at the end of the garden! Its gray roof, with patches of moss, could be seen above the lilac bushes. Nate was there—Nate, wearing a long black leather apron over his trousers and bare chest, sweating hard, a black leather cap on top of dry, thick, black-and-gray curls, a black sooty face; iron filings, whiskers, and gold teeth, all together, and a smell of red-hot metal and horses’ hoofs.

Clang.

The pure note: pure and angelic.

The dress was all wrong. She screamed.

The child vanishes.

Later they sit, the mother and the three sisters, in the shade on the back porch, sipping sour, diluted ruby: raspberry vinegar. The dressmaker refuses to join them and leaves, holding the dress to her heart. The child is visiting the blacksmith.

In the blacksmith’s shop things hang up in the shadows and shadows hang up in the things, and there are black and glistening piles of dust in each corner. A tub of night-black water stands by the forge. The horseshoes sail through the dark like bloody little moons and follow each other like bloody little moons to drown in the black water, hissing, protesting.

Outside, along the matted eaves, painstakingly, sweetly, wasps go over and over a honeysuckle vine.

Inside, the bellows creak. Nate does wonders with both hands; with one hand. The attendant horse stamps his foot and nods his head as if agreeing to a peace treaty.

Nod.

And nod.

A Newfoundland dog looks up at him and they almost touch noses, but not quite, because at the last moment the horse decides against it and turns away.
Outside in the grass lie scattered big, pale granite discs, like millstones, for making wheel rims on. This afternoon they are too hot to touch.

Now it is settling down, the scream.

Now the dressmaker is at home, basting, but in tears. It is the most beautiful material she has worked on in years. It has been sent to the woman from Boston, a present from her mother-in-law, and heaven knows how much it cost.

First published in The New Yorker, the story later appeared as a prose piece in the middle of Bishop’s Questions of Travel and as the last piece in The Collected Prose.

if you only read one blog today . . .

Please read Mary Akers.

nothing avant garde, please

From Gary Fountain and Peter Brazeau’s Elizabeth Bishop: An Oral Biography:

in two cortisone-induced sleepless nights she finished “In the Village” . . . The New Yorker [in 1952] purchased the story for twelve hundred dollars, even though the editors felt it was an experimental piece for them because of its suggested rather than explicit story line. They wrote to Bishop about what appeared to them as non sequitors in her story, and she quipped that she did not “believe they could follow their noses.”

Marianne Moore

One sentence from "Nine Nectarines":

      Fuzzless through slender crescent leaves
           of green or blue or
           both, in the Chinese style, the four

      pairs’ half-moon leaf-mosaic turns
out to the sun the sprinkled blush
      of puce-American-Beauty pink
      applied to bees-wax gray by the
uninquiring brush
      of mercantile bookbinding.

It is possible for me to figure out what this might mean, but I don't feel a need to know.

utterance vs. poem

This morning I discovered Denise Levertov in a 1968 essay called "Origins of a Poem":

what the poet is called on to clarify is not answers but the existence and nature of questions; and his likelihood of so clarifying them for others is made possible only through dialogue with himself. Inner colloquy as a means of communication with others was something I assumed in the poem . . .

What duality does dialogue with himself, dialogue with his heart, imply? “Every art needs two—one who makes it, and one who needs it,” Ernst Barlach, the German sculptor and playwright, is reported to have said. If this is taken to mean someone out there who needs it—an audience—the working artist is in immediate danger of externalizing his activity, of distorting his vision to accommodate it to what he knows, or supposes he knows, his audience requires, or to what he thinks it ought to hear. Writing to a student in 1964, I put it this way:

. . . at some stage in the writing of a poem you must dismiss from your mind all special knowledge (of what you were intending to say, of private allusions, etc.) and read it with the innocence you bring to a poem by someone unknown to you. If you satisfy yourself as reader (not just as “self-expressive” writer) you have a reasonable expectation of reaching others too.

. . . A self-expressive act is one which makes the doer feel liberated, “clear” in the act itself. A scream, a shout, a leaping into the air, a clapping of hands—or an effusion of words associated for their writer at that moment with an emotion—all these are self-expressive. They satisfy their performer momentarily. But they are not art. And the poet’s “making clear” . . . is art: it goes beyond (though it includes) the self-expressive verbal effusion, as it goes beyond the ephemeral gesture; it is a construct of words that remains clear even after the writer has ceased to be aware of the associations that initially impelled it. This kind of “making clear” engages both the subjective and objective in him. The difference is between the satisfaction of exercising the power of utterance as such, of saying, of the clarity of action; and of the autonomous clarity of the thing said, the enduring clarity of the right words.

The poet—when he is writing—is a priest; the poem is a temple; epiphanies and communion take place within it. The communion is triple: between the maker and the needer within the poet; between the maker and the needers outside him—those who need but can’t make their own poems (or who do make their own but need this one too); and between the human and the divine in both poet and reader. By divine I mean something beyond both the making and the needing elements, vast, irreducible, a spirit summoned by the exercise of needing and making. When the poet converses with this god he has summoned into manifestation, he reveals to others the possibility of their own dialogue with the god in themselves. . . .

The need I am talking about is specific . . . the need for a poem; when this fact is not recognized, other needs—such as an undifferentiated need for self-expression, which could just as well find satisfaction in a gesture or an action; or the need to reassure the ego by writing something that will impress others—are apt to be mistaken for specific poem-need. Talent will not save a poem written under these misapprehensions from being weak and ephemeral.

traveling with Elizabeth Bishop

Here in Truro for the month of June, my first companion is Elizabeth Bishop -- her poems, prose, and letters, three biographies, and various essay collections. I began with Brett C. Millier's biography, Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It. Here is a poem from Bishop's second collection:

Insomnia

The moon in the bureau mirror
looks out a million miles
(and perhaps with pride, at herself,
but she never, never smiles)
far and away beyond sleep, or
perhaps she’s a daytime sleeper.

By the Universe deserted,
she’d tell it to go to hell,
and she’d find a body of water,
or a mirror, on which to dwell.
So wrap up care in a cobweb
and drop it down the well

into that world inverted
where left is always right,
where the shadows are really the body,
where we stay awake all night,
where the heavens are shallow as the sea
is now deep, and you love me.

I particularly like the shadows are really the body.

endings

I think a lot about how to end stories, since starting them is so much easier. This from Alice Mattison, “Coincidence in Stories: an Essay Against Craft” from The Writer’s Chronicle, Volume 36, Number 6:

In Virginia Woolf’s story “The Mark on the Wall,” a woman sits in her chair, speculating about a spot on the opposite wall that she can’t identify. It’s a nail, a bump, maybe a leaf—but she prefers thought to action, so instead of getting up to look, she lets her mind wander—for several pages—from the mark on the wall to all sorts of subjects. Eventually she says, “someone is standing over me and saying:

‘I’m going out to buy a newspaper.’
‘Yes?’
‘Though it’s no good buying newspapers . . . Nothing ever happens. Curse this war; God damn this war! . . . All the same, I don’t see why we should have a snail on our wall.’”

And the story ends, “Ah, the mark on the wall. It was a snail.” Nothing happens except perception and the mind’s response to perception, but the story turns out to be about war, the first world war. It’s a bit tedious to read, because we get the idea too quickly, but it’s a story I for one am glad to have, yet not eager to imitate. That kind of writing leads us down a narrower and narrower path and finally disappears into the forest of the mind. I get nervous when it becomes clear as I read a story that it’s going to end with somebody alone in a room realizing something; even here, Virginia Woolf introduces another character at the end, someone who speaks and acts. We do have inner lives, and trying to represent them in fiction is fine, but there’s just so much of it one can write or read before the inner life starts to feel like a trap.

Mattison’s description reminded me also of stories by Katherine Mansfield, dear Miss Brill. How small to large and back again can cause a story to oscillate and reverberate.

traveling with Merwin

About to embark on my travels, I began reading W. S. Merwin's Travels, this from the opening poem:

        . . . who
in the total city
will go on listening
to these syllables that
are ours and be able
still to hear moving through
them the last rustling of

paws in high grass the one
owl hunting along this
spared valley
the tongues of
the free trees our uncaught
voices reader I do
not know that anyone
else is waiting for these
words that I hoped might seem
as though they had occurred
to you and you would take
them with you as your own

old P&Ws

I uncovered a stack of unread Poets & Writers magazines. Plowing through them, I keep finding great lines.

Robert Creeley:

Is that a real poem, or did you write it yourself?

Kent Haruf:

Writing is my religion. Don't shit in my cathedral.

Copper Canyon Press

Recently Copper Canyon Press gave me a book of poems, In the Next Galaxy by Ruth Stone. Anguished lovely poems. Here are two:

This Strangeness in My Life

It is so hard to see where it is,
but it is there even in the morning
when the miracle of shapes
assemble and become familiar,
but not quite; and the echo
of a voice, now changed,
utterly dissociated, as though
all warmth and shared sweetness
had never been. It is this alien
space, not stark as the moon,
but lush and almost identical
to the space that was. But it is not.
It is another place and you are not
what you were but as though emerging
from the air, you slowly show yourself
as someone else, not ever remembered.

Genesis

Cylinder sacks of water filling the oceans,
endless bullets of water,
skins full of water rolling and tumbling
as we came together.
As though light broke us apart.
As though light came with the rubble of words,
though we die among the husks of remembering.
It is as we knew it would be
in the echoes of endless terminals,
in the slow scaled guises of ourselves
when we came together in the envelopes of ourselves,
the bare shadow, the breath of words invisible;
as slight errors repeating themselves;
as degradation passes like madness through a crowd.
It was not ordained.
It was one drop of salt water against another.

Now I need to buy all her other poems.

reading again

Every scrap of work required to obtain the blessed MFA from Queens University of Charlotte has now been completed. All that's left is the shouting, that is to say, I will teach the craft seminar and read from my thesis a week from Thursday, but the work is done, and I'm back to binging on fiction. I've missed it so much. First I read Cloud Atlas, then The Master, today it's Letting Loose the Hounds by Brady Udall. The delirious span of a novel. The taut bow of a short story. Okay, I haven't stayed bone dry but nearly.

I picked up this volume of short stories by Brady Udall about six months ago after reading "Buckeye the Elder" in an anthology. This afternoon, I read "Midnight Raid"—a divorced father forbidden to see his seven-year-old son arrives in the middle of the night to deliver a pet goat—and reread "Buckeye," which I would be happy to read a dozen times more. Brady's so good at beginnings, middles, and ends. "Midnight Raid" starts like this:

Roy growls and gives me the evil eye from inside his doghouse. He's flustered; I'm fairly certain this is the first time in his life a six-foot-three Apache Indian holding a goat has walked into his backyard in the middle of the night. Roy, there under the comfort of his own roof, seems to be trying to come to a decision. He doesn't know whether to raise hell or to make friends with me. I slowly take a step closer—no sudden moves—and ask him, as sincerely as possible, not to make any undue racket. He pokes his head out of his house and yaps, causing the goat I'm holding to let loose a thin stream of piss down my leg.

I suppose this ought to be explained.

To tell the truth, I can't remember a word of Edgar Mint because when I read it I was working too hard. All I remember is how good it was, so I'll be checking that out from the library another time.

delicious -- The Master

Colm Toibin's novel about Henry James -- The Master -- simply delicious. The best book I have read in a long time. The heart of my sympathy lies in a book like this. Yes, I liked Cloud Atlas, but not like this. The Master is exquisite. I will do my best to say more pronto.

D. A. Powell

from D. A. Powell's Tea:

[how his body stood against a thicket, rich in hardwood gentry: ponderous and gloomy]

how his body stood against a thicket.    rich in hardwood gentry:
    ponderous and gloomy
the limbs would still extend a noble canopy had they not been so
    alluring:    pitch and timber

hungry for plowland and pasture the notchers came.    char and rot the
    tools for clearing
driven deep into tangles the aching teams.    corduroy roads leading
    to the penetrable duff

he has been pioneered:    given to the final stump allowing
    settlement.    slow collapse
these trees stripped and unable.    there was no child in him:    a land
    traversed many times

signs dot the road where he should flourish.    could the sparse line on
    a sign indicate the forest

how to dance

From David Mura’s Turning Japanese: Memoirs of a Sansei. His dance teacher, Ono, is speaking:

“When you are sad, it is not just your single self who is sad, but all the dead people, the great number of souls who are living inside you . . .

“When you dance, you must dance through the wall of the body. During my dance of Mozart, I am not doing a lot outside, but I am moving inside. If I move too much outside, I lose the within, the source or energy, the feeling that propels the dance. In order to break through the wall, I must hold on to and not forget what’s inside. It’s the relationship between what is living inside me and the living realm of the dead that is dance . . .”

David Mura is a poet and an autobiographer. Am enjoying seeing through his lens.

Sympathy for Bad Poets

From Randall Jarrell's Poetry and the Age:

Sometimes it is hard to criticize, one wants only to chronicle. The good and mediocre books come in from week to week, and I put them aside and read them and think of what to say; but the “worthless” books come in day after day, like the cries and truck sounds from the street, and there is nothing that anyone could think of that is good enough for them. In the bad type of the thin pamphlets, in hand-set lines on imported paper, people’s hard lives and hopeless ambitions have expressed themselves more directly and heartbreakingly than they have ever been expressed in any work of art: it is as if the writers had sent you their ripped-out arms and legs, with “This is a poem” scrawled on them in lipstick. After a while one is embarrassed not so much for them as for poetry, which is for these poor poets one more of the openings against which everyone in the end beats his brains out; and one finds it unbearable that poetry should be so hard to write—a game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey in which there is for most of the players no tail, no donkey, not even a booby prize. If there were only some mechanism (like Seurat’s proposed system of painting, or the projected Universal Algebra that Godel believes Liebnitz to have perfected and mislaid) for reasonably and systematically converting into poetry what we see and feel and are! When one reads the verse of people who cannot write poems—people who sometimes have more intelligence, sensitivity, and moral discrimination than most of the poets—it is hard not to regard the Muse as a sort of fairy godmother who says to the poet, after her colleagues have showered on him the most disconcerting and ambiguous gifts, “Well, never mind. You’re still the only one that can write poetry.”

It seems a detestable joke that the “national poet of the Ukraine”—kept a private in the army for ten years, and forbidden by the Czar to read, to draw, or even write a letter—should not have for his pain one decent poem. A poor Air Corps sergeant spends two and a half years on Attu and Kiska, and at the end of the time his verse about the war is indistinguishable from Browder’s brother’s parrot’s. How cruel that a cardinal—for one of these books is a cardinal’s—should write verses worse than his youngest choir boy’s! But in this universe of bad poetry everyone is compelled by the decrees of an unarguable Necessity to murder his mother and marry his father, to turn somersaults widdershins around his own funeral, to do everything that his worst and most imaginative enemy could wish. It would be a hard heart and a dull head that could condemn, except with a sort of sacred awe, such poets for anything that they have done—or rather, for anything that has been done to them: for they have never made anything, they have suffered their poetry as helplessly as they have anything else; so that it is neither the imitation of life nor a slice of life but life itself—beyond good, beyond evil, and certainly beyond reviewing.

Cloud Atlas

This afternoon I finished David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. I liked it. Many parts delighted me, even though reading conditions were not the best: I spent a week reading the novel instead of two days because I’m moving on May 18th and that puts a crimp in everything.

Still, I would say that the novel is not top of class because the structure made it impossible for me to become intractably committed to any character or story line. One story cuts off mid-sentence—a new one begins. This happens five times. The sixth and middle story is the longest and written in a relatively exhausting invented dialect. After story number six ends—the first story that actually comes to a natural end before being interrupted—the fifth story resumes where it left off, if you can remember where that was. I couldn’t and had to flip back. After the fifth story ends, the fourth story resumes; etc. I flipped back three out of the five times.

I found all but one story extremely interesting, but I hate being preached to, and by the end, I’d been preached to as follows: people who fight and kill to gain money and power will eventually destroy the world, and if only individuals would realize that and fight against it, we could prevent that horror. Great. Thank you for sharing. Sorry to be so negative, but I guess I don’t read fiction for that sort of thing. I read fiction because I love to read about complicated people and the messes they get themselves into. I’m even willing to swap contexts, but if the author makes me do it in such large chunks that I forget who I’m supposed to be worrying about, well then, I don’t deeply worry about anyone.

Nevertheless, David Mitchell writes breathtakingly well. He has the great stuff. The Adam Ewing and Robert Frobisher stories were terrific. He does thriller genre in the Luisa Rey story and science fiction with Somni-451. Weirdly enough, the middle story, the one in the boggling dialect, might be my favorite. It’s called “Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ Ev’rythin’ After” and takes place on the Big Island of Hawaii. Here’s a scrap, not chosen but the first place I turned to:

I took the died babbit wrapped in a woolsack to the Bony Shore. So lornsome I was, wond’rin’ if Jayjo’s seed was rotted or my seed was rotted or jus’ my luck was rotted. Slack mornin’ it was under the bloodflower bushes, waves lurched up the beach like sickly cows an’ fell over. Buildin’ the babbit’s mount din’t take as long as Pa’s. Bony Shore had the air o’ kelp an’ flesh’n’rottin’, old bones was lyin’ ’mongst the pebbles, an’ you din’t hang ’bout longer’n you needed to, ’cept you was borned a fly or a raven.

Jayjo she din’t die, nay, but she never laughed twirly like b’fore an’ we din’t marry, nay, you got to know your seed’ll grow a purebirth or sumthin’ close, yay? Or who’ll scrape the moss off your roof an’ oil your icon ’gainst termites when you’re gone? So if I met Jayjo at a gath’rin’ or bart’rin’ she’d say, Rainy mornin’ ain’t it? an’ I’d answer, Yay, rain till nightfall it will I reck’n, an’ we’d pass by. She married a leather maker from Kane Valley three years after, but I din’t go to their marryin’ feast.

It was a boy. Our died no-name babbit. A boy.

Frequently he performs with such flourish that one needs to take a deep breath and go back and read it aloud:

We said we was herb’lists sivvyin’ for presh plants an’ maybe Yanagi b’liefed us an’ maybe he din’t, but he bartered us fungusdo’ for rockfish an’ warned us Waimea Town weren’t so friendsome as it’d been once, nay, Kona say-soed’n’knucklied ficklewise an’ you cudn’t guess their b’havin’s.

Imagine inventing this language and writing it ear-perfectly for seventy pages. Kudos. I look forward to more work from this author.

some days I need James Tate

From Return to the City of White Donkeys by James Tate:

Of Whom Am I Afraid

I was feeling a little at loose ends, so
I went to the Farmer's Supply store and just
strolled up and down the aisles, examining
the merchandise, none of which was of any use
to me, but the feed sacks and seeds had a calm-
ing effect on me. At some point there was an
old, grizzled farmer standing next to me holding
a rake, and I said to him, "Have you ever read
much Emily Dickinson?" "Sure," he said, "I
reckon I've read all of her poems at least a
dozen times. She's a real pistol. And I've
even gotten into several fights about them
with some of my neighbors. One guy said she
was too 'prissy' for him. And I said, 'Hell,
she's tougher than you'll ever be.' When I
finished with him, I made him sit down and read
The Complete Poems over again, all 1,775 of them.
He finally said, 'You're right, Clyde, she's
tougher than I'll ever be.' And he was crying
like a baby when he said that." Clyde slapped
my cheek and headed toward the counter with
his new rake. I bought some ice tongs, which
made me surprisingly happy, and for which I
had no earthly use.

Everyone should own a book or two by James Tate. Far cheaper than therapy.

Jane Alison's new novel

From The Millions (A Blog About Books), this review of Jane Alison's new book:

May 1, 2005

Fans of historical fiction set in far flung lands will likely enjoy Jane Alison's new book Natives and Exotics. It's a multigenerational tale set in South America and Australia that spans the twentieth century. The publisher notes liken the book to W.G. Sebald's The Emigrants, which is a lot to live up to. PW describes the book thusly: "More impressionistic than narrative, Alison's third novel is a lush evocation of the way people love and alter (and are altered by) the environments they inhabit."

Read the PW review at Amazon.

I haven't seen the novel yet, but her first two were superb, so I expect no less from this one.

David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas

First off, one sentence:

Sometimes the fluffy bunny of incredulity zooms round the bend so rapidly that the greyhound of language is left, agog, in the starting cage.

Next, a short scene from the Tim Cavendish segment:

I groped my way to the ammonia-smelling gents’, where a joker had stolen the bulb. I had just unzipped myself when a voice arose from the shadows. “Hey, mistah, got a light of sumfink?” Steadying my cardiac arrest, I fumbled for my lighter. The flame conjured a Rastafarian in Holbein embers, just a few inches away, a cigar held in his thick lips. “Fanks,” whispered my black Virgil, inclining his head to bring the tip into the flame.

“You’re, erm, most welcome, quite,” I said.

His wide, flat nose twitched. “So, where you heading, man?”

My hand checked my wallet was still there. “Hull . . . ” A witless fib ran wild. “To return a novel. To a librarian who works there. A very famous poet. At the university. It’s in my bag. It’s called Half-Lives.” The Rastafarian’s cigar smelt of compost. I can never guess what they’re thinking. Not that I’ve really ever known any. I’m not a racialist, but I do believe the ingredients in so-called melting pots take generations to melt. “Mistah,” the Rastafarian told me,” you need”—and I flinched—“some o’ this.” I obeyed his offer and sucked on his turd-thick cigar.

Ruddy hell! “What is this stuff?”

He made a noise like a didgeridoo at the root of his throat. “That don’t grow in Marlboro Country.” My head enlarged itself by a magnitude of many hundreds, Alice-style, and became a multi-story car park wherein dwelt a thousand and one operatic Citroens. “My word, you can say that again,” mouthed the Man Formerly Known as Tim Cavendish.

Wow. Chris Duncan, you should read this.

hyperbole a la Stevens

Tony Hoagland is one of my favorite poets and writes a wonderful essay, too. Here's Hoagland talking about a poem by Wallace Stevens in an essay called “On Disproportion." The essay appears in a highly-recommended volume called Poets Teaching Poets: Self and the World,, edited by Gregory Orr and Ellen Bryant Voigt, published by (no surprise) The University of Michigan Press.

Hyperbole is a peculiar instance of disproportion in which perspective is warped, a language event in which the naming of a thing inappropriately exceeds the size of the thing named, therefore causing a lopsidedness that threatens to capsize the poem. Consider the hyperbole with which Stevens begins “Two Figures in a Dense Violet Light”:

I had as lief be embraced by the porter at the hotel
As to get no more from the moonlight
Than your moist hand.

Be the voice of night and Florida in my ear.
Use dusky words and dusky images.
Darken your speech.

Speak, even, as if I did not hear you speaking,
But spoke for you perfectly in my thoughts,
Conceiving words,

As the night conceives the sea-sounds in silence,
And out of the droning sibilants makes
A serenade.

Say, puerile, that the buzzards crouch on the ridge pole
And sleep with one eye watching the stars fall
Below Key West.

Say that the palms are clear in a total blue,
Are clear and are obscure; that it is night;
That the moon shines.

Reading this overture, we entertain again the fleeting chance that we will encounter an actual relationship between two characters in a Stevens poem. This turns out not to be the case. Ultimately, the “Other” here is a sort of stand-in for the muse. Notice, though, the complex kinds of distance made possible by multiple types of inflation in the first stanza:

I had as lief be embraced by the porter at the hotel
As to get no more from the moonlight
Than your moist hand.

In the elaborately delayed syntax, the archaic diction (“as lief”), the crabby overstatement of the speaker’s petty preference, and the fantastic alternative to reality proposed (embracing the porter at the hotel), we get what amounts to character description. The speaker is simultaneously capable of self-mockery and the insulting observation about the moistness of his companion’s palm. The courtly, archaic, gibing use of the adverb “as lief” likewise frees us from the obligation to identify with the situation. The exaggerated poeticalness underscores the petty spirit of the complaint, and does so at an early point in the sentence. This style could be said to be uneconomical—the marriage of a lot of fancy words to a little bit of situation—but the result of this inflation is that we feel protected. We are provoked to recognize that here the gap between words and things is large, and that we are living in the roomy language-half of the equation. The safety of that license frees us to admire and enjoy the poet’s ability to inflect reality in ways that an exclusively plain style never could.

From the linguistic vaudeville of this highly stylized beginning, the poem takes an unlikely direction, eventually arriving at a tone of grave sincerity. For though the hyperbole of the opening is mockery, it nonetheless establishes a high rhetoric, which enables the poet to segue into a boozy eloquence and then into a serious invocation. Logically, perhaps, such a transition should not be possible. But Stevens demonstrates an important truth: that our tolerance for inconsistency, our ability to change direction in an artwork, is greater than we commonly suppose.

what a symbol can do

Gregory Orr from his book Poetry As Survival:

Story aspires to act through to resolution, and its details, gestures, and actions are revealing and also symbolic. But often the action of story arrives at a dead end and cannot deliver on its promise to resolve conflicts. It is then that symbol appears spontaneously to incarnate those contradictions or conflicts in a single object. A symbol allows an object to mean more than itself, to take on additional meanings, as a magnet might bristle with paperclips. The symbol’s unitary nature as an object acts as an embodiment of contraries and a reconciliation of thematic conflicts. Let me give an example from a poem by the African American poet Robert Hayden:

Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house.

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

The poem’s two characters, father and son, exist in a state of tension. Each character’s actions develop a separate thematic thread: the father’s ceaseless labor, the son’s fearful and guilty avoidence of his father. These separate stories are brought together and embodied in the “good shoes,” which become the single point of contact between the two characters who move about the dark house avoiding each other. What sort of discordant or conflicting meanings are concentrated in these shoes? They are the “good shoes,” as opposed to the everyday shoes. They are intended to be worn to church. The father has polished them and left them, like an offering at a church altar, for the son to wear. In order to go to church, the son must put on the shoes and thus acknowledge the father and the father’s labor on his behalf—the shoes contain both the father’s thankless and dutiful labor and the son’s guilty anguish. The son, who cannot (he fears “the chronic angers of that house”) or will not confront the father, is forced to confront him indirectly in the shoes. Hayden’s poem starts as lyric story, narrows its focus to the intense tension of the symbol, and then breaks into an agonized and incantatory lament (“What did I know, what did I know?”) as a way of resolving the unresolvable misery of the poem.

This is an excellent book for anyone, not just poets. I wish I had read this back when I was desperately and fruitlessly trying to figure out how to find endings for short stories.

Carol Peters

giggle. of course you went
to catholic school. my aunts
would take me to mass. i loved it.
purple. latin. gold. i took latin in school
first chance i got. the teacher was the first
lesbian i ever knew—
hands on my shoulders. my terror. ah,
to intone. the singing sound
of a priest. incense. dimmed lighting.
it was the finest
most magnificent churchy thing,
so much more
than i imagined.
that they dressed to go—slithery belted smocks—
hats with fly-struck veils and shiny shoes
with heels, purses, red stripes
of lipstick, and that they believed.
that was beyond me. already,
at seven, i believed nothing.

advice from poets

Roddy Lumsden has compiled a list of mistakes poets make. Thanks to my friend Susan Meyers for this treat.

eglantine

Some words have faded from the language, and eglantine is probably one of them, at least in the United States. You may remember my quoting it back in March from Wallace Stevens's poem "Floral Decorations for Bananas":

Well, nuncle, this plainly won't do.
These insolent, linear peels
And sullen, hurricane shapes
Won't do with your eglantine.
They require something serpentine.
Blunt yellow in such a room!

Today I found eglantine in William Wordsworth's The Prelude, a long poem divided into 14 books, this from the 8th, begin at line 230 in the 1850 edition:

. . . O'er paths and fields
In all that neighbourhood, through narrow lanes
Of eglantine, and through the shady woods
And o'er the Border Beacon, and the waste
Of naked pools, and common crags that lay
Exposed on the bare fell, were scattered love,
The spirit of pleasure, and youth's golden gleam.

What is eglantine? The Shorter OED says "Any of several hedge shrubs: spec. the sweet-brier, Rosa rubiginosa. Also occas. (chiefly dial.), the dogrose Rosa canina; the honeysuckle Lonicera periclymenum."

And why did both Stevens and Wordsworth use the word in their poems? Aside from its elegant feel, its eglantine feel? Sound sound sound. What else rhymes with serpentine and swims with the sound of the letter "n" and has a Latin root that means thorny or prickly, like Stevens's poem is thorny and prickly. Wordsworth was also on an n-roll and an l-roll as he carried his sound from neighbourhood to narrow lanes through eglantine all the way to that gleam that slant-rhymes with -tine.

Or they did it for some other reason entirely having to do with roses and/or honeysuckle, whose Latin name, Lonicera periclymenum, is one of my all time favorite designants.

Geof Huth

Spend some time visiting the world of Geof Huth. Scan down the right side of the page and visit his sub-blogs -- Mailartworks, for example.

Rumi, #82:

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down the dulcimer.

Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

today's amusement

Your Linguistic Profile:

40% Yankee

35% General American English

15% Dixie

10% Upper Midwestern

0% Midwestern

What Kind of American English Do You Speak?

Thank you, Jilly.

a sniff of Eliot

A moon sighting from T. S. Eliot's "Rhapsody on a Windy Night":

A washed-out smallpox cracks her face,
Her hand twists a paper rose,
That smells of dust and old Cologne,
She is alone
With all the old nocturnal smells
That cross and cross across her brain.
The reminiscence comes
Of sunless dry geraniums
And dust in crevices,
Smells of chestnuts in the streets
And female smells in shuttered rooms
And cigarettes in corridors
And cocktail smells in bars.

I picked this out of an essay called "Effects of Analogy" by Wallace Stevens, some of whose sound occupies a similar range. Listen to the beginning of "Sunday Morning":

Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.
She dreams a little, and she feels the dark
Encroachment of that old catastrophe,
As a calm darkens among water-lights.
The pungent oranges and bright, green wings
Seem things in some procession of the dead,
Winding across wide water, without sound.
The day is like wide water, without sound,
Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet
Over the seas, to silent Palestine,
Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.

Okay, not that similar. And, of course, Stevens likes to launch into things like this, from "The Comedian As the Letter C":

Portentous enunciation, syllable
To blessed syllable affined, and sound
Bubbling felicity in cantilene,
Prolific and tormenting tenderness
Of music, as it comes to unison,
Forgather and bell boldly Crispin's last
Deduction. Thrum with a proud douceur
His grand pronunciamento and devise.

Such a refined turn scintillates after one's been with Crispin and his creator for a while, once the poem, as Stevens says, "comes to possess the reader and . . . naturalizes him in his own imagination and liberates him there."

love poetry

from Michael Ondaatje's Handwriting:

The Siyabaslakara

In the 10th century, the young princess
entered a rock pool like the moon

within a blue cloud

Her sisters
who dove, lit by flares,
were lightning

Water and erotics

The path from the king to rainmaking

—his dark shoulders a platform
against the youngest instep

waving her head above him
this way
this way

Later the art of aqueducts,

the banning of monks
from water events

so they would not be caught
within the melodious sounds

or in the noon heat
under the rain of her hair

poetry submissions

Visit Beverly Jackson's blog for many fine things, including this link to a thoroughly useful article about how to submit poetry for publication.

Carol Peters

Years pass when death and safety suffice
like hibernation
until the air warms and shatters, again,
the fissure of tussle, feint of slash, fiery gouts—
that struggle with the bear.

Stevens feeling his way

From "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction":

X

Fat girl, terrestrial, my summer, my night,
How is it I find you in difference, see you there
In a moving contour, a change not quite completed?

You are familiar yet an aberration.
Civil, madam, I am, but underneath
A tree, this unprovoked sensation requires

That I should name you flatly, waste no words,
Check your evasions, hold you to yourself.
Even so when I think of you as strong or tired,

Bent over work, anxious, content, alone,
You remain the more than natural figure. You
Become the soft-footed phantom, the irrational

Distortion, however fragrant, however dear.
That's it: the more than rational distortion,
The fiction that results from feeling. Yes, that.

They will get it straight one day at the Sorbonne.
We shall return at twilight from the lecture
Pleased that the irrational is rational,

Until flicked by feeling, in a gildered street,
I call you by name, my green, my fluent mundo.
You will have stopped revolving except in crystal.

He does seem a dandy, yet so loving, so attuned to mysteries.

my green, my fluent mundo

Imagine being able to do that.

Thoughts on Frost

Remarks by Ezra Pound in 1931:

As a matter of history it should be stated that since 1912 Robert Frost had been producing New England Eclogues. Sincere, very dull, without tragedy, without emotion, without metrical interest, a faithful record of life without intellectual interest or any desire for anything not in it. The work, inferior to Crabbe, but infinitely better than fake. A great deal of New England life is presumably as Frost records it. It is difficult to see how such life differs greatly from that of horses and sheep.

I understand now why Randall Jarrell felt obliged to defend:

Back in the days when "serious readers of modern poetry" were most patronizing to Frost's poems, one was often moved to argument . . . In these days it's better . . . not much: the lips are pursed that ought to be parted, and they still pay lip-service, or little more. But Frost's best poetry . . . deserves the attention, submission, and astonished awe that real art always requires of us

I've never been wild about Frost, but I attribute that to my ignorance. Maybe all I object to is the adulation.

Carole Maso

Months ago my friend Bev loaned me a novel called Defiance by Carole Maso, in which Bernadette, a Harvard professor, is three months from being electrocuted by the state of Georgia for murdering two of her male students. The text is her Death diary. She is not repentent. She intended her crimes, but they did not succeed at annulling her losses. She dies enraptured by the grief of her childhood.

There is no way, I suppose you know, to atone for the theft of childhood.

That is her theme, and here is a writing sample:

The dream is green and I am fetus clinging. Clinging to your emerald bones in that time, that time before . . . Clovered to you. The last free place. Verdant, rich. The shining pelvis bone to which I clung. I flare at your waist. Unwilling to live outside. My first bit of real intelligence. A forcepped birth. In the year of our weariness, 1960. Taking the tongs. Traumatically. How the scene now stubbornly asserts itself again and again. Extracted. The patient etherized. Mother.

Before I disappoint you or let you down. Before you disappoint or let me down. Before you disappoint or let me down. Before numbers or stars, before language, before notions of beginnings or endings. Before a hand was raised. Before a hand existed at all. Before the brain. Sensing the body forming, quickly and slowly. There are miracles. Here come the fingers. Small toes. Frog heart. Amphibious in the watery dark. In the time before the world had anything against us yet. In the time of reprieve—suspended, lingering. Last forever. Never end.

The novel is brutal, mesmerizing, and superb. Maso fractures the storytelling into thousands of small pieces and completes the story of the deepest hurt only moments before the protagonist's execution. The reader has understood for a long time what happened, and therefore the final details only tattoo the truth.

I've already ordered another of her books, and I can imagine reading everything she's written. She teaches at Brown.

19th century transport

Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book II:

I deem not profitless those fleeting moods
Of shadowy exultation: not for this,
That they are kindred to our purer mind
And intellectual life; but that the soul,
Remembering how she felt, but what she felt
Remembering not, retains an obscure sense
Of possible sublimity, to which,
With growing faculties she doth aspire,
With faculties still growing, feeling still
That whatsoever point they gain, they still
have something to pursue.

                   . . . that universal power
And fitness in the latent qualities
And essences of things, by which the mind
Is moved by feelings of delight . . .

Oft in those moments such a holy calm
Did overspread my soul, that I forgot
That I had bodily eyes, and what I saw
Appeared like something in myself, a dream,
A prospect in my mind.

                   . . . Wonder not
If such my transports were, for in all things
I saw one life, and felt that it was joy.

silly book quiz

Avoiding the Muse said check out this Book Quiz.

You're Animal Farm!

by George Orwell

You are living proof that power corrupts and whoever leads you will
become just as bad as the past leaders. You're quite conflicted about this emotionally
and waver from hopelessly idealistic to tragically jaded. Ultimately, you know you can't
trust pigs. Your best moments are when you're down on all fours.


Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

Countering with this pig extravaganza.

Carol Peters

Face it. I don’t like dogs.
I fear them. In our culture
you can’t always dislike something you fear,
but you can if it’s a dog.

Silly, but I was bitten,
by a St. Bernard, no less.
Well, I was almost bitten.
A dog with a head bigger than mine
took my leg in his mouth
before his owner caught and beat him.
I wasn’t hurt, not physically, but
now people protect me.

Three houses down a little dog barks at night.
Everything startles him
so he bleats, he cries out for help,
and then someone beats him.
The cry turns to a yelp,
sometimes two, and then silence.

I don’t know who does it. I don’t
know those people, my neighbors,
but when I heard the man shouting
at his son, maybe beating him,
I called the police.
Three burly blues: “Which house, ma’am?”
I tried to tell them
but the houses are three deep here,
one driveway serves many.
It might be someone else’s dog.

I went to see it once—
a young black dog barking
behind a chainlink fence.
No one walks the dog.
I know because I walk.
The dog never leaves the property.

Today I’m driving down a city street
next to a young woman draped in black.
Every few seconds, she stops
and raises her arms, snarls and shouts,
makes faces at no one, at me.
She’s afraid, too, and I’m afraid of her.
We’re all afraid.

The three blues talked to the angry man,
but the dog is still there barking
at night, crying out,
and then he is beaten.
I am not, yet.

fighting the good fight

If you're hoping to find a publisher for your fiction, take the time to read Sue O'Neill's saga over at The Cusp of Something.

authors I've always meant to read

This week it's Jung and Wordsworth.

From Book I of The Prelude:

But speedily a longing in me rose
To brace myself to some determined aim,
Reading or thinking, either to lay up
New stores, or rescue from decay the old
By timely interference. I had hopes . . .
But I have been discouraged: gleams of light
Flash often from the East, then disappear
And mock me with a sky that ripens not
Into a steady morning . . .

The Poet, gentle creature as he is,
Hath, like the Lover, his unruly times,
His fits when he is neither sick nor well,
Though no distress be near him but his own
Unmanageable thoughts.

death

From the April issue of Poetry, an report from Aleksandar Hemon on Semezdin Mehmedinovic’s Sarajevo Blues:

"The precision of the detail, coupled with the awareness of what it all means, is everywhere in Sarajevo Blues. In 'Animals,' Semezdin writes:

I do not know how much longer I can bear a life like this. I get thrills every time, when at the thundering [of the artillery] outside, the cat snaps out of sleep and then, on my chest, I feel the slow unsheathing of her claws.

The sensory exactness of moments like this brought the siege home for me, quite literally, and made me comprehend what it was like to exist in Sarajevo. But Sarajevo Blues was not just bearing witness—although that would be admirably sufficient—it was also exposing the flimsy ways in which “our” reality (“we” being the unbesieged) is assembled to be comforting and bearable. For in the end, the central fact of every life is death, a fact that “we” choose to ignore for as long as possible. The purpose of “our” reality is to cover up the fact of death, and one of the things writers and poets can—and should—do is to unpack the lies of reality, beginning with the lie of life eternal in the present. What Semezdin did in Sarajevo Blues, with the heart and mind of a superb poet, was to recognize that the collapse of reality in Sarajevo was directly related to the ubiquity of death, which makes the city different from any other place on earth only in degree but not in kind. Nowhere is that more clear than in the poem called 'Corpse':

We slowed down at the bridge
to watch dogs by the Miljacka
tearing apart a human corpse
then we went on

nothing in me has changed

I listened to the snow bursting under the tires
like teeth crunching an apple
and I felt a wild desire to laugh
at you
because you call this place hell
and you flee from here convinced
that death beyond Sarajevo does not exist

Reading Sarajevo Blues, I not only understood what it meant to live in Sarajevo under siege—I understood what it meant to live."

Poetry is well worth reading. If the poetry sometimes disappoints (why is this?), the essays are often thrilling, and sometimes a review causes me to buy a new collection, e.g., Sarajevo Blues by Semezdin Mehmedinovic.

like bog oak . . . like a basalt egg

The Grauballe Man
by Seamus Heaney

As if he had been poured
in tar, he lies
on a pillow of turf
and seems to weep

the black river of himself.
The grain of his wrists
is like bog oak,
the ball of his heel

like a basalt egg.
His instep has shrunk
cold as a swan's foot
or a wet swamp root.

His hips are the ridge
and purse of a mussel,
his spine an eel arrested
under a glisten of mud.

The head lifts,
the chin is a visor
raised above the vent
of his slashed throat

that has tanned and toughened.
The cured wound
opens inwards to a dark
elderberry place.

Who will say 'corpse'
to his vivid cast?
Who will say 'body'
to his opaque repose?

And his rusted hair,
a mat unlikely
as a foetus's.
I first saw his twisted face

in a photograph,
a head and shoulder
out of the peat,
bruised like a forceps baby,

but now he lies
perfected in my memory,
down to the red horn
of his nails,

hung in the scales
with beauty and atrocity:
with the Dying Gaul
too strictly compassed

on his shield,
with the actual weight
of each hooded victim,
slashed and dumped.

music for Saturday

From Hart Crane. Sing this aloud.

Voyages I

Above the fresh ruffles of the surf
Bright striped urchins flay each other with sand.
They have contrived a conquest for shell shucks,
And their fingers crumble fragments of baked weed
Gaily digging and scattering.

And in answer to their treble interjections
The sun beats lightning on the waves,
The waves fold thunder on the sand;
And could they hear me I would tell them:

O brilliant kids, frisk with your dog,
Fondle your shells and sticks, bleached
By time and the elements; but there is a line
You must not cross nor ever trust beyond it
Spry cordage of your bodies to caresses
Too lichen-faithful from too wide a breast.
The bottom of the sea is cruel.

Voyages II

—And yet this great wink of eternity,
Of rimless floods, unfettered leewardings,
Samite sheeted and processioned where
Her undinal vast belly moonward bends,
Laughing the wrapt inflections of our love;

Take this Sea, whose diapason knells
On scrolls of silver snowy sentences,
The sceptred terror of whose sessions rends
As her demeanors motion well or ill,
All but the pieties of lovers’ hands.

And onward, as bells off San Salvador
Salute the crocus lustres of the stars,
In these poinsettia meadows of her tides,—
Adagios of islands, O my Prodigal,
Complete the dark confessions her veins spell.

Mark how her turning shoulders wind the house,
And hasten while her penniless rich palms
Pass superscription of bent foam and wave,—
Hasten, while they are true,—sleep, death, desire,
Close round one instant in one floating flower.

Bind us in time, O Seasons clear, and awe.
O minstrel galleons of Carib fire,
Bequeath us to no earthly shore until
Is answered in the vortex of our grave
The seal’s wide spindrift gaze toward paradise.

. . . This just in . . .

Stevens to Frost, "The trouble with you is you write about things."

Frost to Stevens, "The trouble with you is you write about bric-a-brac."

channeling Wright Morris

Wright Morris in About Fiction via my friend Madge:

Good fiction especially would seem to be at the mercy of the reader’s vulnerability. If he is en garde he is off target. He must be open to fiction at precisely those points where he has been closed to life.

Which I read as this:

The writer must be open to writing fiction at precisely those points where she has been closed to life.

Ho, Wallace!

My dear friend Caroline sent me Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered, an oral biography by Peter Brazeau. I cannot put it down. For one thing, it brings back the old life, the life of my parents back in the 30's, 40's, 50's, a life that is truly lost. And it explains in a non-directive fashion who this man was, Wallace Stevens, the bond-claims lawyer who wrote such poetry, his frequently devastating sense of humor, devastating in the sense that other people often didn't get the jokes, took offense even. How did I grow so old without knowing that Stevens and Hemingway had a fist fight in which Stevens broke his hand? So musical, this Wallace:

Snow and Stars

The grackles sing avant the spring
Most spiss—oh! Yes, most spissantly.
They sing right puissantly.

This robe of snow and winter stars,
The devil take it, wear it, too.
It might become his hole of blue.

Let him remove it to his regions,
White and star-furred for his legions,
And make much bing, high bing.

It would be ransom for the willow
And fill the hill and fill it full
Of ding, ding, dong.

Brazeau has done a similar book about Elizabeth Bishop, which I've purchased to read this summer. I plan to turn into Bishop during the month of June.

how it feels, learning to write

From Seamus Heaney's "The Mud Vision":

                         We sleepwalked
The line between panic and formulae, . . .
Watching ourselves at a distance, advantaged
And airy as a man on a springboard
Who keeps limbering up because the man cannot dive.

staying here

I live in a house surrounded by a concrete pad. Eight concrete steps lead from the pad up to the driveway and the carport.

Yesterday the painters painted the pad and the steps, and as they finished, it began to rain. It's been raining for sixteen hours, and the paint is still sticky. The only way to exit the house is through the slider onto the deck. From there I can walk down the stairs and down the path to the cottage, below which is impenetrable tropical vegetation.

I didn't think about the consequences of painting the concrete pad and steps. That I can't leave the property except by clambering across to a neighbor's yard. I don't know the neighbors. That means I can't easily reach my car. I should have gone grocery shopping because I'm down to a few eggs and a half a package of fake crab. Even the bread is gone.

I'm claustrophobic. My thesis is due in nineteen days. Did I mention it's raining?

This, too, shall pass.

123.5

from James Tata via Superfluities:

A new book meme circulating around the sphere is going by the name “123.5,” and its rules are these:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don’t search around and look for the “coolest” book you can find. Do what’s actually next to you.

Here's mine:

This part of the poem closes with the nineteenth-century gold rush:

      Then came the white man: tossed up trees and
         boulders with big hoses,
         going after that old gravel and the gold,
      horses, apple-orchards, card-games,
         pistol-shooting, churches, county jail.

This from Helen Vendler's Soul Says: On Recent Poetry. She's discussing Gary Snyder's poem "What Happened Here Before."

Ellen Dudley

Good interview with Ellen Dudley of the Marlboro Review.

a Rilke sonnet

The Sonnets to Orpheus, Part II, Number 12:

Will transformation. Be inspired by the flame
where a thing made of Change conceals itself;
this informing spirit, master of all that’s earthly,
loves nothing more than the moment of turning.
What’s heartset on survival is already stony;
how safe is it, hid in its innocuous gray?
Look out, from afar a far harder hardness warns it:
feel the approach of a hammer held high.

Whoever flows forth from himself like a freshet, Knowledge
        will acknowledge,
and lead him, entranced, through her wondrous world,
where endings are often beginnings and beginnings ends.

Every fortune-favored space you wander through, astonished,
is the child or the grandchild of Change. Even Daphne,
as she leafs into laurel, wants to feel you become wind.

[from Reading Rilke by William H. Gass; his translation]

From The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke:

I am lying in my bed five flights up, and my day, which nothing interrupts, is like a clock-face without hands. As something that has been lost for a long time reappears one morning in its old place, safe and sound, almost newer than when it vanished, just as if someone had been taking care of it—: so, here and there on my blanket, lost feelings out of my childhood lie and are like new. All the lost fears are here again.

The fear that a small woolen thread sticking out of the hem of my blanket may be hard, hard and sharp as a steel needle; the fear that this little button on my night-shirt may be bigger than my head, bigger and heavier; the fear that the breadcrumb which just dropped off my bed may turn into glass, and shatter when it hits the floor, and the sickening worry that when it does, everything will be broken, for ever; the fear that the ragged edge of a letter which was torn open may be something forbidden, which no one ought to see, something indescribably precious, for which no place in the room is safe enough; the fear that if I fell asleep I might swallow the piece of coal lying in front of the stove; the fear that some number may begin to grow in my brain until there is no more room for it inside me; the fear that I may be lying on granite, on gray granite; the fear that I may start screaming, and people will come running to my door and finally force it open, the fear that I might betray myself and tell everything I dread, and the fear that I might not be able to say anything, because everything is unsayable,—and the other fears . . . the fears.

I prayed to rediscover my childhood, and it has come back, and I feel that it is just as difficult as it used to be, and that growing older has served no purpose at all.

from the days when we knew about death

Mary Rowlandson was captured in a Narragansett Indian raid back in the seventeenth century. This excerpt is from The Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson:

Thus nine dayes I sat upon my knees, with my Babe in my lap, all my flesh was raw again; my Child being even ready to depart this Sorrowfull world, they bade me carry it out to another Wigwam (I suppose because they would not be troubled with such spectacles) Whither I went with a very heavy heart, and down I sat with the picture of death in my lap. About two houres in the night, my Sweet Babe, like a Lambe departed this life, on Feb.18.1675. It being six yeares, and five months old. It was nine dayes from the first wounding, in this miserable condition, without any refreshing of one nature or another, except a little cold water. I cannot but take notice, how at another time I could not bear to be in a room where any dead person was, but now the case is changed; I must and could ly down by my dead Babe, side by side all the night after.

[quoted in Susan Howe's My Emily Dickinson, a remarkable book; in my opinion, Howe gets Dickinson, whereas nearly everyone else I've read doesn't.]