Walt Whitman

A Noiseless Patient Spider

A noiseless patient spider,
I marked where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark'd how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launch'd forth filament, filament, filament out of itself
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you O my soul where you stand,
surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect
      them,
Till the bridge you will need be form'd, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

as close as Robert Browning gets to Walt Whitman

[Robert Browning, 1855]

Two in the Campagna

I wonder do you feel today
As I have felt since, hand in hand,
We sat down on the grass, to stray
In spirit better through the land,
This morn of Rome and May?

For me, I touched a thought, I know,
Has tantalized me many times,
(Like turns of thread the spiders throw
Mocking across our path) for rhymes
To catch at and let go.

Help me to hold it! First it left
The yellowing fennel, run to seed
There, branching from the brickwork’s cleft,
Some old tomb’s ruin: yonder weed
Took up the floating weft,

Where one small orange cup amassed
Five beetles — blind and green they grope
Among the honey-meal: and last,
Everywhere on the grassy slope
I traced it. Hold it fast!

The champaign with its endless fleece
Of feathery grasses everywhere!
Silence and passion, joy and peace,
An everlasting wash of air —
Rome’s ghost since her decease.

Such life here, through such lengths of hours,
Such miracles performed in play,
Such primal naked forms of flowers,
Such letting nature have her way
While heaven looks from its towers!

How say you? Let us, O my dove,
Let us be unashamed of soul,
As earth lies bare to heaven above!
How is it under our control
To love or not to love?

I would that you were all to me,
You that are just so much, no more.
Nor yours nor mine, nor slave nor free!
Where does the fault lie? What the core
O’ the wound, since wound must be?

I would I could adopt your will,
See with your eyes, and set my heart
Beating by yours, and drink my fill
At your soul’s springs — your part my part
In life, for good and ill.

No, I yearn upward, touch you close,
Then stand away, I kiss your cheek,
Catch your soul’s warmth — I pluck the rose
And love it more than tongue can speak —
Then the good minute goes.

Already how am I so far
Out of that minute? Must I go
Still like the thistle-ball, no bar,
Onward, whenever light winds blow,
Fixed by no friendly star?

Just when I seemed about to learn!
Where is the thread now? Off again!
The old trick! Only I discern —
Infinite passion, and the pain
Of finite hearts that yearn.

Louise Bogan

[from Louise Bogan's The Blue Estuaries: Poems 1923-1968]

The Dream

O God, in the dream the terrible horse began
To paw at the air, and make for me with his blows.
Fear kept for thirty-five years poured through his mane,
And retribution equally old, or nearly, breathed through his nose.

Coward complete, I lay and wept on the ground
When some strong creature appeared, and leapt for the rein.
Another woman, as I lay half in a swound,
Leapt in the air, and clutched at the leather and chain.

Give him, she said, something of yours as a charm.
Throw him, she said, some poor thing you alone claim.
No, no, I cried, he hates me; he's out for harm,
And whether I yield of not, it is all the same.

But, like a lion in a legend, when I flung the glove
Pulled from my sweating, my cold right hand,
The terrible beast, that no one may understand,
Came to my side, and put down his head in love.

The Blue Estuaries: Poems: 1923-1968

spleen and ideal

"Browning is a man with a moderate gift passionately desiring movement and fullness, and obtaining but a confused multitudinousness"
      — Matthew Arnold

[the teaching of poetry can] "expose counterfeit work, thus gradually leading the student to the valid"
      — Ezra Pound

"the setting and comforts are those of a man with a private income, at home and petulant and spoiled, like the older Auden"
      — Michael Schmidt on Browning's poem "By the Fireside"

[Whitman's] "democratic syntax . . . the non-subordination of clauses"
      — Mark Strand

Morri Creech

[from Morri Creech's Field Knowledge, 2006; reprinted by kind permission of The Waywiser Press, London & Baltimore]

The Crux of Martyrdom

Simone Weil at the sanatorium in Ashford, Kent, England, 1943

It's not that she has given up desire
exactly; more like, it seems, the will to choose —
to swallow bread, potatoes, the ripe pear
a nurse has brought her, which she must refuse
for Christ's sake. Or for her people starving in France.
At first she stayed up late, with prayer and cigarettes,
wrote long lies full of tenderness to her parents

     I have never read the story of the barren fig tree
     without trembling. I think it is about me

telling of friends in London, the spring's rich blossoms;
yet no word about her health, her body's slow
failure. Day after day the doctors come
complaining of her stubbornness. They know
her. And she, their hopes. Still, she must not choose
to eat, must refuse everything save the logic
of refusal, which she cannot help but choose.

     the most beautiful life possible has always seemed
     to me one in which everything is determined

So her reason revolves along its course
toward that sure consummation for which she waits.
She waits and waits. Too tired now to rehearse
the poem where Love bade His guest to sit and eat,
she dreams of that attic room He led her to,
where bread was sweet, the wine like sun and soil,
and she could see, beyond the attic window,

     He entered my room and spoke: I understood
     that He had been mistaken in coming for me

a city's wooden scaffoldings, those boats
unladen by a river, and the sun
raging above the trees . . .
                                     The doctor's coats
Whisper by outside her door. She's alone.
No voice comes down to her; no hallowed word.
Even the headaches have stopped, which once held
her writhing in their vise. And yet she's stirred.

     when my headaches were raging, I sometimes
     had an intense desire to strike someone

Though it's late, and she's much too tired to write,
she can't quite still the current of ideas
or master her relentless appetite
for thought — philosophy, the worst disease
of a religious mind, perhaps her one
error. For hours she wrestles those abstruse
geometries, turning her whole attention

     I will consider men's actions and appetites
     as though they were lines, surfaces, and volumes

to the crux of martyrdom. French soldiers
and citizens in thousands have since gone,
quietly or not, to their deaths; how can her
own starvation measure against the ones
who could not choose to choose? Even her days
of factory work — yes, she's felt the strain
of labor, sweating near the furnaces

     perhaps He must use even worthless objects
     for His purposes: I must tell myself these things

that scorched her hands and fingers long before
Christ, like a migraine, seized her steady mind;
yet always she could have left. And now the war
has jilted her, denying her the blind
hand of necessity. She's made her choice.
The nurse bends down to take her pulse, offering
a sip of tea; but still she must refuse.

     if I only had to stretch out my hand to grasp
     salvation, I would not put my hand out

And though she's grown too weak to hold a cup
or spoon, she closes her eyes and sees that room,
that attic room, where she was told to sup,
and the long table shimmers, awaiting Him
who will offer her bread, although she must refuse
until He seat her there among the least
and feed them, too, who have no power to choose —

     Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back

till the Lord whose bread is hunger sets the feast.

Tristan Corbiere

To Mount Aetna

Sicelides Musae, paulo majora canamus
                                            — Virgil

Aetna — I've been up Vesuvius . . .
Vesuvius has shrunk, it seems:
There was more heat in me than streams
From that wounded crater in hot pus . . .

— They say you're like a woman. — What?
— Your age, I suppose — ? or maybe that cooked
Pebble, your heart? . . . Well, it's a thought . . .
Laugh? I thought I'd come apart?

— That dirty grin of yours, that cough
Thick as the phlegm of a senile lust;
Your old breast cancer draining off
Lava from under its scabby crust.

Comrade, let's go to bed together,
My hide against your sick hide; yes,
I swear by Venus you're my brother,
Vulcan! . . .
                  A little more . . . or less . . .

[translated by Dudley Fitts]

Paul Muldoon

[from Paul Muldoon's Moy Sand and Gravel, 2002]

The Otter

That was the year S—— told him how on the Queen's desk
there lay a great six-by-four-foot blotter
of such a blackness, she would aver,
a blackness so dense
and a grain so close, so compact,
no one could hope to hold
a mirror up to it
and thereby . . . and thereby hit
on any evidence of clandestine contracts or covenants, or old
enemies having entered a secret pact
to which she might be a party or affix her hand, any evidence
of the treachery he now saw written all over her,
rising as she did to meet him like the otter
that had risen once to meet him from Lough Eske.


Redknots

The day our son is due is the very day
the redknots are meant to touch down
on their long haul
from Chile to the Arctic Circle,
where they'll nest on the tundra
within a few feet
of where they were hatched.
Forty or fifth thousand of them
are meant to drop in along Delaware Bay.

They time their arrival on these shores
to coincide with the horseshoe crabs
laying their eggs in the sand.
Smallish birds to begin with,
the redknots have now lost half their weight.
Eating the eggs of the horseshoe crabs
is what gives them the strength to go on,
forty or fifty thousand of them getting up all at once
as if for a rock concert encore.

Gilbert Murray

[from Gilbert Murray's Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, published as The Classical Tradition in Poetry in 1927]

It is difficult in any circumstances to predict what one literature can learn from another. And the classical literatures, it might plausibly be argued, have long since taught English quite as much as can be considered desirable, and in some matters a great deal more. Still, as Shelley says, poetry is infinite. And a man must, I think, be in a state of "savage torpor" who imagines that he has no more to learn from Homer or Vergil. . . .

Of course, there is a strong spirit abroad which tries to throw off rules and exactitude. It is proud of trusting not to measured feet, but merely to its ear, which is perfectly sound doctrine if the ear is correct, but not otherwise. Unfortunately it hates a correct ear almost as much as a measured foot. Such a school, whether it makes merely for rough versification or definitely for vers libre, has its place and its justification in the progress of poetry; but the classical tradition will probably continue to look for advance by writing better and more carefully, not more carelessly and impatiently. No one can be sure that a method is wrong until it has been well tried; but it is difficult to expect good permanent results from one which is based predominantly on contempt for the practice of good poets, on self-assertion rather than worship, and on ennui rather than delight. Otherwise no one can prophesy or point the way. A poet must love the Tradition; otherwise he will not love poetry. He must love language and be tender and reverent with it, as well as bold; or he will never have master of its secrets. He must care enough for his work not to notice how much time and trouble he spends on it. He must, as Plutarch warns us, not be like those false lovers of Penelope who, when the found the Queen obdurate, contented themselves with the handmaids. It is along some such lines as these, and not by violent divergence from them, that I should expect to see the modern world find its way to some new Dante or Milton or Goethe, a poietes-aoidos who will bring back into our poetry the forgotten music of the lyre and the old sweep of the sea-bird.

Carl Jung via May Sarton

[from May Sarton's Journal of a Solitude, 1973]

If you imagine someone who is brave enough to withdraw all his projections, then you get an individual who is conscious of a pretty thick shadow. Such a man has saddled himself with new problems and conflicts. He has become a serious problem to himself, as he is now unable to say that they do this or that, they are wrong, and they must be fought against. He lives in "The House of Gathering." Such a man knows that whatever is wrong in the world is in himself, and if he only learns to deal with his own shadow he has done something real for the world. He has succeeded in shouldering at least an infinitesimal part of the gigantic, unsolved social problems of our day.

Harryette Mullen (for the pigs in my family)

[from Harryette Mullen's Recyclopedia: Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, and Muse & Drudge,2006]

Off the pig, ya dig? He squeals, grease the sucker. Hack that fatback, pour the pork. Pig out, rib the fellas. Ham it up, hype the tripe. Save your bacon, bring home some. Sweet dreams pigmeat. Pork belly futures, larded accounts, hog heaven. Little piggish to market. Tubs of guts hog wilding. A pig of yourself, high on swine, cries all the way home. Streak o' lean gets away cleaner than Safeway chitlings. That's all, folks.

Thomas Lowell Beddoes

[from Death's jest Book, 1850]

What is the lobster's tune when he is boiled?
I hate your ballads that are made to come
Round like a squirrel's cage, and round again.
We nightingales sing boldly from our hearts:
So listen to us.

                            . . . How I despise
All you mere men of muscle! It was ever
My study to find out a way to godhead,
And on reflection soon I found that first
I was half created; that a power
was wanting in my soul to be a soul,
And this was mine to make . . .

Louise Bogan

[After a lifetime of reading Helen Vendler's poetry criticism, I find it refreshing to go back and read her predecessor, Louise Bogan, who was not only a fine critic but also a fine poet. It's more than refreshing to read what Bogan wrote (cf. A Poet's Alphabet: Reflections on the Literary Art and Vocation) in 1940 about R. P. Blackmur]

R. P. Blackmur, author of the Expense of Greatness, is a good critic because he is serious, and has both sensibility and intellectual subtlety. He has, it is true, in a marked degree, the faults of these virtues. . . .

Although he can be completely wrong on matters situated on what he himself would call “the periphery,” Blackmur is frequently beautifully right in matters situated at the center. . . .

Blackmur, however, has serious lacunae in his special knowledge. And he carries an impeding, almost crippling, amount of extra baggage in the form of a whole critical vocabulary taken over from the moral philosophy so popular in English and American universities since the last war. If Blackmur made a determined effort to throw out of his vocabulary such words as “synergical,” “sordor,” “anterior,” “quotidian,” and most especially, “heuristic,” it would be all to the good. The terms from moral philosophy, too, tend to reduce some of his passages to pure Swahili . . . And they are not native to Blackmur's cast of mind; when he lets himself go he tends to think in images. This philosophic apparatus, moreover, is manipulated, often, with a kind of swank unbecoming to a sincere critic.

As his perceptions, for some reason, are likely to be good or bad in alternation, his courage, too, often wavers. He can be courageously offhand and even — surprisingly — flip in dealing with obviously bad poets; on the other hand, he treads rather carefully, mincing every statement into the minutest segments, in order to get around saying something directly damning about someone who, by reason of established position or what not, is not quite attackable. Using his own methods alone, he can be triumphantly right and revealing, in the case of T. E. Lawrence (this essay, in spite of its almost impenetrable structure and style, is the best in the book), while remaining incomplete and even biased in the cases of Yeats and Hardy. . . .

A perusal of some intense, personal, non-philosophic criticism, of the sort contained, for example, in Flaubert's Correspondance, would do Mr. Blackmur a world of good. French criticism of all periods might help him to overcome the more annoying — to the reader — coils and tangles of his subtlety. But he is on the side of the angels, and only needs more impatience, more courage, and perhaps ten more years of varied experience and wider reading, to make him a critic of imposing stature and of the first order.

Anne Pierson Wiese

[from Anne Pierson Wiese's Floating City, 2007, winner of the Walt Whitman Award]

Profile of the Night Heron

In the Brooklyn Botanic Garden the night
heron is on his branch of his tree, blue
moon curve of his body riding low
above the pond, leaves dipping into water
beneath him, green and loose as fingers.
On the far shore, the ibis is where
I left him last time, a black cypher
on his rock. These birds, they go to the right
place every day until they die.

There are people like that in the city,
with signature hats or empty attaché cases,
expressions of private absorption fending
off comment, who attach to physical
locations — a storefront, a stoop, a corner,
a bench — and appear there daily as if for a job.
They negotiate themselves into the pattern
of place, perhaps wiping windows, badly,
for a few bucks, clearing the stoop of take-out
menus every morning, collecting the trash
at the base of the WALK/DON’T WALK sign
and depositing it in the garbage can.

Even when surfaces change, when the Mom & Pop
store becomes a coffee bar, when the park
benches are replaced with dainty chairs and a pebble
border, they stay, noticing what will never change:
the heartprick of longitude and latitude
to home in on, the conviction that life
depends, every day, on what outlasts you.

Chard de Niord

[Chard de Niord as published in Harvard Review]

What the Animals Teach Us

that love is dependent on memory,
that life is eternal and therefore criminal,
that thought is an invisible veil that covers our eyes,
that death is only another animal,
that beauty is formed by desperation,
that sex is solely a human problem,
that pets are wild in heaven,
that sounds and smells escape us,
that there are bones in the earth without any marker,
that language refers to too many things,
that music hints at what we heard before we sang,
that the circle is loaded,
that nothing we know by forgetting is sacred,
that humor charges the smallest things,
that the gods are animals without their masks,
that stones tell secrets to the wildest creatures,
that nature is an idea and not a place,
that our bodies have diminished in size and strength,
that our faces are terrible,
that our eyes are double when gazed upon,
that snakes do talk, as well as asses,
that we compose our only audience,
that we are geniuses when we wish to kill,
that we are naked despite our clothes,
that our minds are bodies in another world.

Stephen Nachmanovitch

[from Robert Peake's blog post on an essay by Stephen Nachmanovitch]

there is a pathology inherent in all conscious thinking, and that pathology comes from taking a small linear segment of a circle of causation and taking it to be the whole thing . . . related to our illusory notion of the self - to our view of taking that which we are able to consciously scan, in our own processes, in our own thoughts, our own feelings, our own memories . . . to be the whole . . . [art helps] us to perceive that the self is a provisional, illusory construct that's useful for certain limited kinds of activity - but it's not the whole Self

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

[from "Frost at Midnight," 1798]

Only that film, which fluttered on the grate,
Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing.
Methinks its motion in this hush of nature
Gives it dim sympathies with me who live,
Making it a companionable form,
Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling Spirit
By its own moods interprets, everywhere
Echo or mirror seeking of itself,
And makes a toy of Thought.

. . . while the nigh thatch
Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall
Heard only in the trances of the blast,
Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles . . .

T. S. Eliot

[from T. S. Eliot's “Reflections on Contemporary Poetry,” 1919]

There is a kind of stimulus for a writer which is more important than the stimulus of admiring another writer. Admiration leads most often to imitation; we can seldom remain long unconscious of our imitating another, and the awareness of our debt naturally leads us to hatred of the object imitated. If we stand toward a writer in this other relation of which I speak, we do not imitate him, and though we are quite as likely to be accused of it, we are quite unperturbed by the charge. This relation is a feeling of profound kinship, or rather of a peculiar personal intimacy, with another, probably a dead author. It may overcome us suddenly, on first or after long acquaintance; it is certainly a crisis; and when a young writer is seized with his first passion of this sort he may be changed, metamorphosed almost, within a few weeks even, from a bundle of secondhand sentiments into a person. The imperative intimacy arouses for the first time a real, an unshakeable confidence. That you possess this secret knowledge, this intimacy, with a dead man, that after few or many years or centuries you should have appeared with this indubitable claim to distinction; who can penetrate at once the thick and dusty circumlocutions about his reputation, can call yourself alone, his friend: it is something more than encouragement to you. It is a cause of development, like personal relations in life. Like personal intimacies in life, it may and probably will pass, but it will be ineffaceable.

The usefulness of such a passion is various. For one thing it secures us against forced admiration, from attending to writers simply because they are great. We are never at ease with people who, to us, are merely great. We are not ourselves great enough for that: probably not one man in each generation is great enough to be intimate with Shakespeare. Admiration for the great is only a sort of discipline to keep us in order, a necessary snobbism to make us mind our places. We may not be great lovers; but if we had a genuine affair with a real poet of any degree we have acquired a monitor to avert us when we are not in love. Indirectly, there are other acquisitions: our friendship gives us an introduction to the society in which our friend moved; we learn its origins and endings; we are broadened. We do not imitate, we are changed; and our work is the work of a changed man; we have not borrowed, we have been wakened, and we become bearers of a tradition.

Anne Truitt

[from Anne Truitt’s Daybook: The Journal of an Artist, 1982; quoted in May Sarton’s At Seventy: A Journal, 1984]

I went straight to the Rembrandt self-portrait, painted when he was fifty-three, my age. He looked straight out at me, and I looked straight in at him.

There is a sort of shame in naked pain. I used to see it in my patients when I was working in psychology and nursing. They found it more seemly, more expedient to pull over themselves thin coverlets of talk. There is wisdom in this, an unselfish honor in bearing one’s burdens silently. But Rembrandt found a higher good worth the risk and painted himself as he knew himself, human beyond reprieve. He looks out from the position, without self-pity and without flourish, and lends me strength. . . .

Unless we are very, very careful, we doom each other by holding on to images of one another based on preconceptions that are in turn based on indifference to what is other than ourselves. This indifference can be, in its extreme, a form of murder and seems to me a rather common phenomenon. We claim autonomy for ourselves and forget that in so doing we can fall into the tyranny of defining other people as we would like them to be. By focusing on what we choose to acknowledge in them, we impose an insidious control on them. . . . The opposite of this inattention is love, is the honoring of others in a way that grants them the grace of their own autonomy and allows mutual discovery.

William Butler Yeats

[from "The Hour Before Dawn," Responsibilities]

‘You cry aloud, O would ’twere spring
Or that the wind would shift a point,
And do not know that you would bring,
If time were suppler in the joint,
Neither the spring nor the south wind
But the hour when you shall pass away
And leave no smoking wick behind,
For all life longs for the Last Day
And there's no man but cocks his ear
To know when Michael's trumpet cries
That flesh and bone may disappear,
And souls as if they were but sighs,
And there be nothing but God left;
But I alone being blesséd keep
Like some old rabbit to my cleft
And wait Him in a drunken sleep.’

Lynda Hull

[from Lynda Hull's Collected Poems, 2006]

Magical Thinking

A woman, after an absence of many years, returns
     to her old neighborhood and finds it a little more
         burned, more abandoned. Through rooftop aerials

the stadium’s still visible where the boys of summer
     spun across the diamond and some nights she’d hear
         strikes and pop flies called through the open windows

of the rooms she shared with a man she thought
     she loved. All that summer, she watched
         across the street the magician’s idiot son

paint over and over the Magic & Costume Shop’s
     intricate portico — all frets and scallops, details
         from another century. The more he painted though

the more his sheer purity of attention seemed
     to judge her own life as frayed somehow and wrong.
         Daily the son worked until the city swerved

toward night’s dizzy carnival with moons
     and swans afloat in neon over the streets.
         One evening she saw the magician’s trick bouquet

flower at the curb while he filled his car.
     He folded the multicolored scarves, then
         caged the fabulous disappearing pigeons.

It is a common human longing to want utterly
     to vanish from one life and arrive transformed
         in another. When the man came home, he’d

touch her shoulders, her neck, but each touch
     discovered only the borders of her solitude.
         As a child in that neighborhood she’d believed

people were hollow and filled with quiet music, that
     if she were hurt deeply enough she would break
         and leave only a blue scroll of notes.

At first when he hit her, her face burned.
     Far off the stadium lights crossed the cool
         green diamond and burnished cobwebs swaying

on the ceiling. Then she became invisible,
     so when the doctor leaned over and asked
         her name all she could think of were her dresses

thrown from the window like peonies exploding
     to bloom in the clear dark air. No music —
         merely a rose haze through her lids, something

ticking in her head like a metronome
     in a parlor, dusty and arid with steam heat.
         How many lives she’d passed through to find

herself, an aging woman in black, before the locked
     and empty shop. So much sleight of hand, the years
         simply dissolving. Again she hears the crowd,

a billow of applause rippling across the brilliant
     diamond, across the mysterious passage
         of time and the failure of sorrow to pass away.

Lynda Hull

[from Lynda Hull's Collected Poems, 2006]

Night Waitress

Reflected in the plate glass, the pies
look like clouds drifting off my shoulder.
I’m telling myself my face has character,
not beauty. It’s my mother’s Slavic face.
She washed the floor on hands and knees
below the Black Madonna, praying
to her god of sorrows and visions
who’s not here tonight when I lay out the plates,
small planets, the cups and moons of saucers.
At this hour the men all look
as if they’d never had mothers.
They do not see me. I bring the cups.
I bring the silver. There’s the man
who leans over the jukebox nightly
pressing the combinations
of numbers. I would not stop him
if he touched me, but it’s only songs
of risky love he leans into. The cook sings
with the jukebox, a moan and sizzle
into the grill. On his forehead
a tattoed cross furrows,
diminished when he frowns. He sings words
dragged up from the bottom of his lungs.
I want a song that rolls
through the night like a big Cadillac
past factories to the refineries
squatting on the bay, round and shiny
as the coffee urn warming my palm.
Sometimes when coffee cruises my mind
visiting the most remote way stations,
I think of my room as a calm arrival
each book and lamp in its place. The calendar
on my wall predicts no disaster
only another white square waiting
to be filled like the desire that fills
jail cells, the cold arrest
that makes me stare out the window or want
to try every bar down the street.
When I walk out of here in the morning
my mouth is bitter with sleeplessness.
Men surge to the factories and I’m too tired
to look. Fingers grip lunch box handles,
belt buckles gleam, wind riffles my uniform
and it’s not romantic when the sun unlids
the end of the avenue. I’m fading
in the morning’s insinuations
collecting in the crevices of the building,
in wrinkles, in every fault
of this frail machinery.

Allen Ginsberg

[from Allen Ginsberg's Journals Mid-Fifties 1954-1958, edited by Gordon Ball]

The poem as an equation (a machine) reproducing in verbal images the visual and other images of the dream . . . reproducing the elements which juxtaposed gave me the awe & terror & knowledge in the dream — successfully such an ideal poem could reproduce that “petite sensation” in the reader. . . .

Setting up two (images) points (with a gap) separate in time and showing the distance between them:

Examples

1
The host with someone indistinct
Converses at the door apart,
The nightingales are singing near
The Convent of the Sacred Heart,

And sang within the bloody wood
When Agamemnon cried aloud . . .
       T. S. Eliot, “Sweeney Among the Nightingales”

2
The slant moon on the slanting hill
Once moved us toward presentiments
Of what the dead keep, living still,
And such assessments of the soul

As, perched in the crematory lobby,
The insistent clock commented on . . .
       Hart Crane, “Praise for an Urn”

. . . Actually attaining an inner secret Time shock, the result of telescoping time by setting up two or more image points separated with a wide gap showing distance between them, the jump or interval or ellipsis of consciousness: a sort of mystical eclipse of Time arrived at thru the science of presenting clearly images showing change. . . .

The parallel between Cezanne’s theory and poetry theory — to present to the mind’s eye two equally strong images without editorial or rhetorical connection — same as without traditional perspective lines, for the effect of the juxtaposition: the resulting pun or ellipsis of Space. . . .

so much depends
upon
                               gap
a red wheelbarrow
       William Carlos Williams, “The Red Wheelbarrow”

. . . The ellipses between 2 points in the mind’s eye should show the finality of time in no uncertain terms . . . The clearer & starker & barer, the more sensational the Eclipse. . . .

Ellipsis in event gives rise to the grief-realization of time, or the cold shiver of eternity . . .

Ellipsis in syntax — dropping of articles, connectives, sawdust of the reason [CP: my italics] — to join images as they are joined in the mind: only thus can two images connect like wires and spark . . . [I] need to trap sensations and collect the fragments which give rise to them, by any means, reconstructing [sensations] in images. This means, events in time perceived, giving rise to a subjective emotion, illuminating time. . . .

Haiku

Thinking about ellipsis,
look in the mirror.

Gertrude Stein

[from Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 1933]

As Pablo [Picasso] once remarked, when you make a thing, it is so complicated making it that it is bound to be ugly, but those that do it after you they don't have to worry about making it and they can make it pretty, and so everybody can like it when they others make it. . . .

She had come to like posing, the long still hours followed by a long dark walk intensified the concentration with which she was creating her sentences. The sentences of which Marcel Brion, the french critic has written, by exactitude, austerity, absence of variety in light and shade, by refusal of the use of the subconscious Gertrude Stein achieves a symmetry which has a close analogy to the musical fugue of Bach.

[CP: Brion failed to appreciate Stein and Bach?]

Robert Burns

[from Robert Burns's "Tam O'Shanter"]

But wither'd beldams, auld and droll,
Rigwoodie hags wad spean a foal,
Louping and flinging on a crummock,
I wonder didna turn thy stomach.

Dorothy Richardson

[from Dorothy Richardson's Deadlock, 1921]

These women's rights people are the worst of all. Because they think women have been subject in the past. Women have never been subject. Never can be. The proof of this is the way men have always been puzzled and everlastingly trying fresh theories; founded on the very small experiences of women any man is capable of having. . . . [Men] must leave off imagining themselves as a race of gods fighting against chaos, and thinking of women as part of the chaos they have to civilize. There isn't any 'chaos.' . . .It's the principal masculine delusion. It is not a truth to say that women must be civilized.

Charlotte Smith

[from Charlotte Smith's "Beachy Head"]

The high meridian of the day is past,
And Ocean now, reflecting the calm Heaven,
Is of cerulean hue; and murmurs low
The tide of ebb, upon the level sands.
The sloop, her angular canvas shifting still,
Catches the light and variable airs
That but a little crisp the summer sea,
Dimpling its tranquil surface.

Donald Justice

[from Donald Justice’s Collected Poems]

“There is a gold light in certain old paintings”

1
There is a gold light in certain old paintings
That represents a diffusion of sunlight.
It is like happiness, when we are happy.
It comes from everywhere and from nowhere at once, this light,
        And the poor soldiers sprawled at the foot of the cross
        Share in its charity equally with the cross.

2
Orpheus hesitated beside the black river.
With so much to look forward to he looked back.
We think he sang then, but the song is lost.
        I say the song went this way: O prolong
        Now the sorrow if that is all there is to prolong.

3
The world is very dusty, uncle. Let us work.
One day the sickness shall pass from the earth for good.
The orchard will bloom; someone will play the guitar.
Our work will be seen as strong and clean and good.
        And all that we suffered through having existed
        Shall be forgotten as though it had never existed.

Carol Peters

[from Muddy Prints, Water Shine]

The Blues Lift

(or melt)
in the night

the fish I tracked
below the bridge

at the reservoir
the flights of juncos

         -> next

Carol Peters

[from Muddy Prints, Water Shine]

Plain Sinking

The bright red shoes
the bio-geared soles
rock me cheerily along a paved surface

a boat bucking seas
a hey a nonny the path
aha a pond draws me across green

to smutty white
my blunder my slide
an audience of young brown frogs cheeping

ten now thirty
spring and plash down
at my red boats commandeering

[originally published in Cairn]

         -> next

Carol Peters

[from Muddy Prints, Water Shine]

Morning Fog

A deer down
in a ditch, ears high

with listening,
turns away from the road

toward woods
she might leap for

were her legs folded,
not broken

by the wheels of a car
like ours.

Gardens she grazed
are safe from her visits.

A thicket’s flattened bed
begins to freshen.

         -> next

Carol Peters

[from Muddy Prints, Water Shine]

Hawk Watch

The fog that shrouds Pilot Mountain
dims our chance to see hawks kettle,
so we hike around Big Pinnacle on trails
where brown signs mark beginnings
and red-lettered signs suggest
the possibilities of injury or death.

Trails bracketed by rail fence
descend by steps of orange stone
to sandy windings, rocky ground
where twigs extend from pitch,
where long-haired caterpillars inch
across the leaves of laurel, and where webs
the shape of shallow sacks hang down
from water-spangled threads.

Sudden gusts shake drops from trees —
chestnut, oak, persimmon.
Rainbow lichens cover quartzite,
a towering dome,
climbing the rocks is forbidden
while ravens nest.
Red, white, yellow mushrooms
speckle the forest floor,
fungus grows in staggered layers
(childishly stacked plates).

When the fog begins to lift
we climb to stand for hours
amid the whirling swifts and monarch flutter.
Vultures — turkey and black —
converge and circle
gnarled and blasted trees.
Through glasses we spy warblers
in a leafy tangle — tseeta tseeta rising
from ribbed, spotted, pure throats.

Finally the heavens clear.
One by one the broad-winged hawks —
white stripes on their tails,
black bands on their wings —
remind us of what we may mourn
as they soar out of the north
toward winter.

         -> next

Alexander Pope

[from Canto II of Alexander Pope's "The Rape of the Lock"]

“Whatever spirit, careless of his charge,
His post neglects, or leaves the fair at large,
Shall feel sharp vengeance soon o’ertake his sins,
Be stopped in vials, or transfixed with pins,
Or plunged in lakes of bitter washes lie,
Or wedged whole ages in a bodkin’s eye;
Gums and pomatums shall his flight restrain,
While clogged he beats his silken wings in vain,
Or alum styptics with contracting power
Shrink his thin essence like a riveled flower:
Or, as Ixion fixed, the wretch shall feel
The giddy motion of the whirling mill,
In fumes of burning chocolate shall glow,
And tremble at the sea that froths below!”

Scott Snyder

[Scott Snyder's "Blue Yodel" from Voodoo Heart]

Pres was now deeply in love with her. He wanted to tell her so, but he refused to say anything until he could compose an adequate description of his feelings, which, frustratingly, he never felt able to do. The best comparison he’d come up with involved an exhibit on hydroelectricity he’d seen at a fair downtown when he was a child. The exhibit’s main attraction was a clear, life-size figure, a glass man filled with miniature wheels and paddles and belts hung with tiny wooden buckets. When water was poured through a hole at the top of th eman’s head, the machinery inside him whirred to life and one by one a series of bulbs strung through his legs and arms and head lit up like the points of a constellation until, finally, a large heart-shaped bauble of glass in the man’s chest flickered on and shined brighter than the other lights, so bright that Pres was forced to shield his eyes. Best he could figure, that was how he felt for Claire, how he would always feel, aglow.

Rick Bass

[Rick Bass, "Pagans" from The Lives of Rocks, 2006]

Richard and Kirby bought an old diving bell in an army-navy surplus store for fifty dollars — they had to cut a new rubber gasket for the hatch’s seal — and after that they were able to give each other crane rides into the poison river.

For each of them it was the same, whether lowering or being lowered: the crane’s operator swinging the globe out over moonlit water the color of mercuty, then lowering the globe, with his friend in it, into that netherworld — the passenger possessing only a flashlight, which dimmed quickly upon submersion and then disappeared — the globe tumbling with the current then and the passenger within not knowing whether or not the cable was still attached, bumping and tumbling, spotlight probing the black depths thinly, with brief, bright glimpses of fish eyes, gold-rimmed and wild in fright, and the pale turning-away bellies of wallowing things flashing past, darting left and right to get out of the way of the tumbling iron ball of the bathysphere.

The cable stretching taut, then, and shuddering against the relentless current: swaying and shimmering in place but traveling no more.

Then the emergence, back up out of total darkness and into the night. The gas flares still flickering all around them. Why, again, was the rest of the world asleep? The boys took comfort in the knowledge that they would never sleep: never.

Andre Gide

As soon as an emotion decreases, the pen should stop; when it continues to run on just the same — and it runs on all the more easily — writing becomes detestable. . . . The wonderful thing on this earth is that we are forced to feel more than to think.

W. H. Auden

[from W. H. Auden's Dichtung and Wahrheit]

II

Of any poem written by someone else, my first demand is that it be good (who wrote it is of secondary importance); of any poem written by myself, my first demand is that it be genuine, recognizable, like my handwriting, as having been written, for better or worse, by me. (When it comes to his own poems, a poet’s preferences and those of his readers often overlap but seldom coincide.)

V

If I were a composer, I believe I could produce a piece of music which would express to a listener what I mean when I think the word love, but it would be impossible for me to compose it in such a way that he would know that this love was felt for You (not for God, or my mother, or the decimal system). The language of music is, as it were, intransitive, and it is just this intransivity which makes it meaningless for a listener to ask: — “Does the composer really mean what he says, or is he only pretending?”

VI

If I were a painter, I believe I could paint a portrait that would express to an onlooker what I mean when I think the word You (beautiful, loveable, etc.), but it would be impossible for me to paint it in such a way that he would know that I loved You. the language of painting lacks, as it were, the Active Voice, and it is just this objectivity which makes it meaningless for an onlooker to ask: — “Is this really a portrait of N (not of a young boy, a judge or a locomotive in disguise)?”

via Louise Bogan and Donald Hall

William Butler Yeats

I have had to learn how hard is that purification from insincerity, vanity, malignance, arrogance, which is the discovery of style.

artists . . . servants . . . of mere naked life

Only that which does not teach, does not cry out, does not persuade, does not condescend, does not explain, is irresistible.


T. S. Eliot

My early vers libre, of course, was started under the endeavor to practice the same form as Laforgue. This meant merely rhyming lines of irregular length, with the rhymes coming in irregular places.

obscurity comes when the poet is still at the stage of learning how to use language. You have to say the thing the difficult way. The only alternative is not saying it at all.


Marianne Moore

the most difficult thing for me is to be satisfactorily lucid, yet have enough implication in it to suit myself

I am governed by the pull of the sentence as the pull of a fabric is governed by gravity.

words cluster like chromosomes, determining the procedure


Ezra Pound

a continuous curiosity . . . a persistent energy

Marianne Moore on submissions

I have a little curio, a little wee book about two by three inches, or two and a half by three inches, in which I systematically entered everything sent out, when I got it back, if they took it, and how much I got for it. That lasted about a year, I think. I can't care as much as all that. I don't know that I submitted anything that wasn't extorted from me.

Marianne Moore

[from Marianne Moore's "Camellia Sabina"]

    The food of a wild
mouse in some countries is wild parsnip- or sunflower- or
morning-glory-seed, with an occasional
grape. Underneath the vines of the Bolzano
grape of Italy, the Prince of Tails
might stroll. Does yonder mouse with a
    grape in its hand and its child
in its mouth not portray
    the Spanish fleece suspended by the neck? In that well-piled

    larder above your
head, the picture of what you will eat is
looked at from the end of the avenue. The wire cage is
locked, but by bending down and studying the
roof, it is possible to see the
pantomime of Persian thought: the
    gilded, too tight undemure
coat of gems unruined
    by the rain — each small pebble of jade that refused to mature,

    plucked delicately
off. Off jewelry not meant to keep Tom
Thumb, the cavalry cadet, on his Italian upland
meadow-mouse, from looking at the grapes beneath
the interrupted light from them, and
dashing round the concours hippique
    of the tent, in flurry
of eels, scallops, serpents,
    and other shadows from the blue of the green canopy.

John Dryden

[from Dryden’s “Mac Flecknoe," ca 1680]

. . .
This agèd prince, now flourishing in peace,
And blest with issue of a large increase,
Worn out with business, did at length debate
To settle the succession of the state;
And, pondering which of all his sons was fit
To reign, and wage immortal war with wit,
Cried: “ ’Tis resolved; for Nature pleads that he
Should only rule, who most resembles me.
Sh —— alone my perfect image bears,
Mature in dullness from his tender years:
Sh —— alone, of all my sons, is he
Who stands confirmed in full stupidity.
The rest to some faint meaning make pretense,
But Sh —— never deviates into sense.
Some beams of wit on other souls may fall,
Strike through, and make a lucid interval;
But Sh ——‘s genuine night admits no ray,
His rising fogs prevail upon the day.
Besides, his goodly fabric fills the eye,
And seems designed for thoughtless majesty:
Thoughtless as monarch oaks that shade the plain,
And, spread in solemn state, supinely reign.
. . .

Donald Hall

I am awfully glad Donald Hall (and not I) wrote this (from Their Ancient Glittering Eyes):

Eliot married poetry knowing that poetry was unstable. Because the form of poetry connects it to the crib, poetry is often the mother, and Eliot’s mother Charlotte was a poet. Vivien was as much unlike Eliot’s mother as could be, yet she was poetry. To marry the mother is at the same time wholly forbidden and wholly desirable. It is clear from Eliot’s poems that impotence, or at least sexual incompetence and coldness, obsessed him during his marriage to Vivien. Maybe Eliot married Vivien in order to be impotent, to suffer, and to write poems.

Andrew Marvell

A Dialogue Between the Soul and Body
by Andrew Marvell

Soul

Oh, who shall from this dungeon raise
A soul enslaved so many ways?
With bolts of bones that fettered stands
In feet, and manacled in hands;
Here blinded with an eye, and there
Deaf with the drumming of an ear;
A soul hung up, as ‘twere, in chains
Of nerves and arteries and veins;
Tortured, besides each other part,
In a vain head and double heart.

Body

Oh, who shall me deliver whole
From bonds of this tyrannic soul?
Which stretched upright, impales me so
That mine own precipice I go,
And warms and moves this needless frame —
A fever could but do the same —
And, wanting where its spite to try,
Has made me live to let me die:
A body that could never rest,
Since this ill spirit it possessed.

Soul

What magic could me thus confine
Within another’s grief to pine?
Where whatsoever it complain,
I feel, that cannot feel, the pain,
And all my care itself employs
That to preserve which me destroys,
Constrained not only to endure
Diseases, but, what’s worse, the cure;
And ready oft the port to gain,
And shipwrecked into health again.

Body

But physic yet could never reach
The maladies thou me dost teach:
Whom first the cramp of hope does tear,
And then the palsy shakes of fear;
The pestilence of love does heat,
Or hatred’s hidden ulcer eat;
Joy’s cheerful madness does perplex,
Or sorrow’s other madness vex;
Which knowledge forces me to know,
And memory will not forgo.
What but a soul could have the wit
To build me up for sin so fit?
So architects do square and hew
Green trees that in the forest grew.

4:15 PM, Wailoa Park, Hilo, Hawaii

[photo by Mary Jones]


[photo by Mary Jones]

Peter Orner

[from Peter Orner's The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo, 2006 — brilliant brilliant novel, thank you Sally Keith for the recommendation]

75 Intoxicationists in a Datsun

Bottle of Zorba on the dash, long since emptied. Obadiah and Kaplansk. All that’s left are their voices, their bodies are gone, floated up, poofed.

Obadiah: I understand that many Talmudic blessings require repetition as a way of ritualizing one’s contact with God.

Kaplansk: Really?

Obadiah: In other words, God not as a bolt of thunder but there in the simple everyday moments, in the tying and retying of one’s shoes. In a belch, if you will.

Kaplansk: Interesting, I hadn’t —

Obadiah: I myself believe in absolutely nothing. At least not today. This of course is the paradox. One never knows when faith — like love — will wander back like an old dog you thought was dead. It would all be easier if it stayed away for good. Don’t you think?

Kaplansk: Probably, but —

Obadiah: Would you like a mint?

Kaplansk: Please.


76 Antoinette

For her, it’s nearly a love story. She tells it as she beats a carpet she’s hung off the mapone in her garden. She beats the carpet with a wooden spoon the size of a small child’s head. At her feet the wash towels are boiling. Her apron is tight around her chest like body armor.

Thump. Dust waffles up.

There was once a man who stuck his wife’s hand with a fork to prove he loved her, and she walked around with this scar, proudly showing it to people. Then one morning she hacked off his legs with a panga and he bled to death in bed.

Thump. Dust waffles up.

But even after that, she showed her hand with pride. Four little valleys pronged in the flesh. Thy will be done. On earth as it is in heaven.

Thump. Thump. Dust waffles up.


77 Magnus Axahoes

He runs barefoot in the limp sand of the riverbed. He loves the feel of it between his toes. That sound, that shish shish, of sand being thrown behind him. There are days it is the sound alone that keeps his feet moving. That beautiful grinding. One day he’ll run as fast as Rubrecht Kanhala. To run with a pucker thorn in your foot is better, because then you feel no fatigue in the muscles, only the wound in your foot. The pain builds more than endurance. It creates forgetting — and if you can forget, that’s all that matters. He’s read this in a runners’ magazine. A Kenyan said it and it’s the truth.


78 Pohamba

And the goats snoofing each other’s asses and us sprawled, dunking buttermilk rusks in cold tea, and Pohamba’s got another brother.

“God have mercy,” Festus howls. “Spread-leg woman gave birth to an army.”

Pohamba’s on his stomach. A Standard Two he’s hired to do some chiropractic work walks up and down on his back as he talks.

“Abner, my fourth brother. He worked at the Budget on Peter Mueller Strasse. My other Windhoek brother. He cleaned the cars when the tourists brought them back from a week of chasing elephants at Etosha. Dirty dirty cars, and my brother Abner washed them like babies’ arses. . . .

scholar says . . .

[from Michael Schmidt's Lives of the Poets]

Figurative language is not Dryden’s forte. Often it is not integrated with the argument but runs alongside, decorating and heightening but not collaborating with it at a deeper level. Milton exemplifies another mode. In “lik’ning spiritual to corporeal forms” Milton begins with figure and metaphor and attempts a realization that itself carries moral significance; Dryden teases prose meanings into metaphor. In each case a partial process is enacted. Pope, by contrast, thinks in shapes and forms, exploits reversals, contains his meanings in the figures themselves but works as it were with atomized forms and metaphors, divorced from the expected context and releasing new meanings in an original context. His poetry tends to fragment into brilliant shards. Milton’s procedure comes closest to the “organic” concept of poetic form enunciated by Coleridge and exploited by the Romantics. Dryden’s procedure is remote from this. He distrusts antithesis, paradox and disjunction and is wary of placing excessive confidence in plain narrative, at least for didactic purposes.

Kilauea

[from Garrett Hongo's The River of Heaven, 1988]

Eruption: Pu'u O'o

We woke near midnight,
flicking on the coat closet's bulb,
the rainforest chilled with mist,
a yellow swirl of gas
in the spill of light outside.
Stars paling, tucked high
in the sky's blue jade,
we saw, through the back windows
and tops of ohia trees,
silhouettes and red showers
as if from Blake's fires,
magenta and billows of black volleying.
Then, a burbling underground,
like rice steaming in the pot,



shook through chandeliers of fern
and the A-frame's tambourine floor,
stirring the cats and chickens
from the crawl-space and their furled sleep.
The fountain rose to 900 feet that night,
without us near it, smoking white,
spitting from the cone 6 miles away,
a geyser of flame, pyramids and gyres of ash.



Novices, we dressed and drove out,
first to the crater rim, Uwekahuna
a canyon and sea of ash and moonstone,
the hardened, grey back of Leviathan
steaming and venting, dormant under cloud-cover.
And then next down Volcano Road past the villages
to Hirano Store on Kilauea's long plateau.
There, over canefield and the hardened lava land,
all we saw was in each other's eyes —
the mind's fear and the heart's delight,
running us this way and that.



Crossing Ka'u Desert

from under the harpstring shade of tree ferns
and the blue trumpets of morning glories
      beside the slick road,
the green creep of davallia and club moss
      (their tiny hammers
                                    staffed quarter-notes
                and fiddlenecks on the forest floor),
spider lilies and ginger flowers like paper cranes
      furling in the tongues of overgrowth,
                in the sapphired arpeggios of rain

to the frozen, shale-colored sea,
      froth, swirls, bleak dithyrambs of glass,
a blizzard of cinderrock and singed amulets,
warty spires and pipelines,
      threnodies of surf whirling on the lava land —

our blue car the last note of color
driving a black channel
                                    through hymnless ground

Theodore Roethke

[from Straw from the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke 1943-63, selected and arranged by David Wagoner]

Give me at least the harsh light, the serene imbecilic gaze
Of my groping animal fathers.
It's true enough I come from an ape, and at least twice a day return,
Chasing my tail, dizzy with intuition . . .

more Louise Bogan

[1932]

The M[abel] Dodges of the world take everything they want, surround themselves with objects, people, and movements (analysis, thinking with the stomach or glands, Lawrence, Jeffers and the like). . . . These women do not weep, or harden up in order to endure, or accuse endlessly, or become frightened. They want what they want from youth on. They take color only from what they have or where they live, or from the kind of fashionable idea that is current at some particular time or other. They work hard; they have no real sympathies (only “interests”); they early become unalterably set as themselves, so that other people have to attach themselves to them, like limpets, or revolve around them, like satellites — no real communion possible. When they are rich they have permanent secretaries. . . .

The lechery of men of middle age is as hard as a stone. They kiss as though they threw their faces against one; they do not wait and draw in passion as young men do; they strike out at a woman in a kind of frenzy, give embraces in a cold scuffle. They are afraid of being pitiful themselves, so they cannot give out that pity which a woman waits for in any embrace. They make love usually when they are drunk. They speak of golf, their sons and daughters, sometimes of their wives, in the intervals of throwing against a woman that hard face, those cold eyes, those hands tightened up like fists, that dreadful cold, half-open mouth with its licking tongue. . . .

“My time will come,” you say to yourself, but how can you know whether or not your time has not already come and gone? Perhaps one afternoon on the veranda in Panama, with the Barbadians whetting their sickles on the hill below, the Chinese garden green, the noise of breakers from beyond the hill, the crochet in your lap, and the cool room shuttered and the sheeted bed, perhaps that was your time. (But it was too early.) Or mornings in the sunny room in Boston, when the children cried loudly from the public school across the way, “A prairie is a grassy plain,” and you sat on the low couch with your books and papers about you, happy and salfe and calm: perhaps your time was then. (But you didn’t see it at all.) Perhaps it has been spent, all spent, squandered out, in taking of streetcars, drinking gin, smoking cigarettes, — in connubial love, in thousands of books devoured by the eye, in eating, sewing, in suspicions, tears, jealousy, hatred, and fear. Perhaps it is now, on a dark day in October, in the bedroom where you sit with emptiness in your body and heart; beside the small fire, drying your hair, — older, more tired, desperately silent, unhappily alone, with faith and daydreams (perhaps luckily) broken and disappearng with the dreadful pain in your shoulder which presages dissolution, infection, and age. Perhaps this very instant is your time — pretty late — but still your own, your peculiar, your promised and presaged moment, out of all moments forever.

Louise Bogan

[from Louise Bogan's "Self-Portrait, with Politics"]

This is the place, perhaps, to state my belief that the true sincerity and compassion which humane detachment alone can give, are necessary before the writer can pass judgment upon the ills of his time. To sink oneself into a party is fatal, no matter how noble the tenets of that party may be. For all tenets tend to harden into dogma, and all dogma breeds hatred and bigotry, and is therefore stultifying. And the condescension of the political party toward the artist is always clear, however well disguised. The artist will be "given" his freedom: as though it were not the artist who "gives" freedom to the world, and not only "gives" it, but is the only person capable of enduring it, or of understanding what it costs.

[from Louise Bogan's "Self-Questionnaire"]

How did you occupy your energy and your leisure?
     Mostly in suffering. I suffered mindlessly, without reference to events, to reality, to time, then as now.
You did not note architecture, or the weather?
     Yes, I noted these always. I saw the afternoon shadows deeply strike through the baroque windows, as I had seen them fall, in my childhood, deeply slant and fall, drawing the eye inward into unimagined interiors, through the wooden joints and the wooden sashes that interrupted, in crass squares, the lines of clapboards (under which, at that hour, the shadow deepened). I noted the excesses of plaster and the beautiful horizontal reticences of wooden shutters. I saw the shadows lengthen to such a degree that the ground had no more place for them; they reached the walls, and spread upward, flat and definite, like unfruited espaliered trees.
You never sought God?
     No.
What was it you sought?
     I sought love.

Bob Marcacci's podcast at MiPoRadio

I hope you'll find time to listen to Bob Marcacci's latest podcast:

Episode 19 of THE COUNTDOWN at MiPoRadio

Bob says,

"The podcast highlights the poetry of William Allegrezza, and also stars these poets and bloggers from around the world: Jill Chan, Peter Ciccariello, Del Ray Cross, AnnMarie Eldon, Juan Jose Martinez, Shin Yu Pai, Carol Peters, Rachel Phillips, Larry Sawyer & Mark Young.

If you like what you hear and you would like me to consider your own blog's offspring for future shows, send me a message and I'll add you to THE COUNTDOWN's blogroll. Comments and conversay appreciated."

Christopher Marlowe

[from Christopher Marlowe's Hero and Leander, ca 1580]

Ham’s story . . .

So lovely fair was Hero, Venus’ nun,
As Nature wept, thinking she was undone,
Because she took more from her than she left
And of such wondrous beauty her bereft;
Therefore, in sign her treasure suffered wrack,
Since Hero’s time hath half the world been black.

no fish no bicycle . . .

Like untuned golden strings all women are,
Which long time lie untouched, will harshly jar.
Vessels of brass, oft handled, brightly shine;
What difference betwixt the richest mine
And basest mold, but use? for both, not used
Are of like worth. . . .
Ah, simple Hero, learn thyself to cherish!
Lone women, like to empty houses, perish. . . .
One is no number; maids are nothing, then,
Without the sweet society of men.

appendix . . .

Above our life we love a steadfast friend,
Yet when a token of great worth we send,
We often kiss it, often look thereon,
And stay the messenger that would be gone;
No marvel then that Hero would not yield
So soon to part from that she dearly held;
Jewels being lost are found again, this never;
’Tis lost but once, and once lost, lost forever.

Jean Valentine

[from Jean Valentine's Growing Darkness, Growing Light, 1997]

Listening

My whole life I was swimming listening
beside the daylight world like a dolphin beside a boat

— no, swallowed up, young, like Jonah,
sitting like Jonah in the red room
behind that curving smile from the other side

but kept, not spat out,
kept, for love,

not for anything I did, or had,
I had nothing but our inside-
outside smile-skin . . .
my paper and pen . . .

but I was made for this: listening:
“Lightness wouldn’t last if it wasn’t used up on the lyre.”

16th century

Thomas Campion

     See how the morning smiles
     On her bright Eastern hills
     And with soft steps beguiles
     Them that lie slumbering still.
The music-loving birds are come
     From cliffs and rocks unknown,
To see the trees and briars bloom
     That late were overflown.

Ben Jonson

Drink to me only with thine eyes,
     And I will pledge with mine;
Or leave a kiss but in the cup,
     And I’ll not look for wine.
The thirst that from the soul doth rise
     Doth ask a drink divine;
But might I of Jove’s Nectar sup,
     I would not change for thine.
I sent thee late a rosy wreath,
     Not so much honoring thee
As giving it a hope, that there
     It could not withered be.
But thou thereon did’st only breathe,
     And sent it back to me;
Since when it grows, and smells, I swear,
     Not of itself, but thee.

William Dunbar

[William Dunbar, 15th-16th century, Scotland]

In Praise of Women

Now of women this I say for me,
Of earthly things none may better be;
They should have worship and great honoring
Of men, above all other earthly thing;
Right great dishonour upon himself he takes
In word or deed who ever women faults;
Since that of women coming all are we,
Women are women and so will end and die.
Woe come to the fruit would put the tree to naught,
And woe come to him right so that says aught
Of womanhood that may be any lack
Or such great shame upon him for to take.
They us conceived with pain, and by them fed
Within their breasts there we be bound to bed;
Great pain and woe, and mourning marvelous,
Into their birth they suffer sore for us;
Then meat and drink to feed us get we none,
But that we suck out of their breasts harm.
They are the comfort that we all have here,
There may no man be till us half so dear;
They are our very nest of nourishing;
In lack of them who can say any thing,
That foul his nest he flees, and for that
Exiled he should be of all good company;
There should no wise man give audience,
To such one without intelligence.
Christ to his father he had not one man;
So what worship women should have then.
That Son is Lord, that Son is King of kings,
In heaven and earth his majesty ay rings.
So She has borne him in her holiness,
And he is well and ground of all goodness,
All women of us should have honoring,
Service and love, above all other thing.

Jean Valentine

[from Jean Valentine’s Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems 1965-2003]

Sanctuary

       People pray to each other. The way I say “you” to someone else,
       respectfully, intimately, desperately. The way someone says
       “you” to me, hopefully, expectantly, intensely . . .
             — Huub Oosterhuis

You     who I don’t know     I don’t know how to talk to you

— What is it like for you there?

Here . . . well, wanting solitude; and talk; friendship —
The uses of solitude. To imagine; to hear.
Learning braille. To imagine other solitudes.
But they will not be mine;
to wait, in the quiet; not to scatter the voices —

What are you afraid of?

What will happen. All this leaving. And meetings, yes. But death.
What happens when you die?

“. . . not scatter the voices,”

Drown out. Not make a house, out of my own words. To be quiet in
another throat; other eyes; listen for what it is like there. What
word. What silence. Allowing. Uncertain: to drift, in the
restlessness . . . Repose. To run like water —

What is it like there, right now?

Listen: the crowding of the street; the room. Everyone hunches in
against the crowding; holding their breath: against dread.

What do you dread?

What happens when you die?

What do you dread, in this room, now?

Not listening. Now. Not watching. Safe inside my own skin.
To die, not having listened. Not having asked . . . To have scattered
life.

Yes I know: the thread you have to keep finding, over again, to
follow it back to life; I know. Impossible, sometimes.

Kevin Young

[from Kevin Young's jelly roll: a blues, 2003]

Etude

I love making
love most just

after — adrift —
the cries & sometime

tears over, our strong
swimming done —

sheet wreck —
mattress a life-

boat, listing —

from Boogaloo

. . . And the dog, listless,
lays down with

That thud you love,
sighing.

from Pastorale

. . . A weathervane
offering wind and N E W S

Interlude

I know now who
I am writing this to

& it ain’t you

Afraid it’s me
I cannot leave

alone well enough —

a sparrow striking again
again his own reflection

The Seafarer

[from Richard Hamer's translation of The Seafarer, a poem from the Exeter Book, a tenth century collection of Old English poetry]

The Seafarer

. . . He knows not,
Who lives most easily on land, how I
Have spent my winter on the ice-cold sea,
Wretched and anxious, in the paths of exile,
Lacking dear friends, hung round by icicles,
While hail flew past in showers. There heard I nothing
But the resounding sea, the ice-cold waves.
Sometimes I made the song of the wild swan
My pleasure, or the gannet’s call, the cries
Of curlews for the missing mirth of men.
The singing gull instead of mead in hall.
Storms beat the rocky cliffs, and icy-winged
The tern replied, the horn-beaked eagle shrieked. . . .

But he who goes to sea must ever yearn.
The groves bear blossom, cities grow more bright,
The fields adorn themselves, the world speeds up;
Yet all this urges forth the eager spirit
Of him who then desires to travel far
On the sea-paths. Likewise the cuckoo calls
With boding voice, the harbinger of summer
Offers but bitter sorrow in the breast.
The man who’s blest with comfort does not know
What some then suffer who most widely travel
The paths of exile. Even now my heart
Journeys beyond its confines, and my thoughts
Over the sea, across the whale’s domain,
Travel afar the regions of the earth,
And then come back to me with greed and longing.
The cuckoo cries, incites the eager breast
On to the whale’s roads irresistibly,
Over the wide expanses of the sea,
Because the joys of God mean more to me
Than this dead transitory life on land.
That earthly wealth lasts to etermity
I don’t believe. . . .

Let us think where we have our real home,
And then consider how we may come thither;
And let us labor also, so that we
May pass into eternal blessedness. . . .

Carol Peters

[from Muddy Prints, Water Shine]

Spider Strand

In a single night
a garden spider flings her web
across our drive, from neat hedge
to the gutter above the garage.

We step outside
to find her blazoned against the orb.
Mike moves to ground her.

Eight legs in barber stripes
climb a strand, then hesitate —
she seems to measure us.

“Stop,” I say.
I hold Mike’s arm. I spin him around
to the orb of sun blazing.

Our spider rides her silk
back to the gutter, steadily reels it back
into the spinnerets
she spun an evening from.

         -> next

Carol Peters

[from Muddy Prints, Water Shine]

Bovine

Ireland is green
and patterned with cows —
milk and beef,
handled and brindled.

Behind the cows
stand churners,
bottlers, stunners,
butchers, chefs.

I admire, I adore the cows.
A lady from Wisconsin complains,
"Why does she keep on saying cow?
She’s not a child."

         -> next

in englesh forto make a book

[from Michael Schmidt’s Lives of the Poets, 1998]

That’s a Renaissance notion: a final version of a poem. A poem was never finished. Like a cathedral it grew, bits were added or removed to make new space. Even as the poet dictated, scribes might add a bit or, when they grew tired and dozed, miss whole passages. Hovering over them was an ideal poem which the poet almost knew. But even he could change his mind: the poem he made one year might be out of date the next. Sir John [Gower] wrote his Confessio for King Richard [II]; when Richard proved unworthy, he made it over, adding an allegorical record of royal errors. Poems can die — or be killed by fire or neglect — unless the poet refashions and refreshes them. If he learns something new, he has to add it. The aim is to delight, but the purpose is to instruct. Delight without precept is pointless.

rainbow day

Carol Peters

[from Muddy Prints, Water Shine]

Mind the Face

As morning’s tidal outflow drains the marsh
and raises muddy prints in water shine
the girl

exposes nape and throat.
A heron blunders up from grass
with a grating cry.

The ebbing marsh
mirrors a house, aligns what distance blurs.
She tilts a glass,

she wishes to grow small enough
to be missed.
When she asks him not to speak

he smiles. Her mind
proposes two eyes, a nose, a mouth.
She’s afraid

to love someone this much.

         -> next

Carol Peters

[from Muddy Prints, Water Shine]

Philomel

Before she learns mourning
a girl discovers black horses,

black bees, a blossom’s groin,
grackles and sunflower seeds.

A swollen moon, wafer-thin,
rises in a milk-blue sky.

The nature of water is to run.
Grass roots in mud.

The wafer forced between her lips
clings to the roof of her mouth

where she can’t taste
or say, at first, what happened.

Collared doves settle and gasp
while a nightingale learns singing.

[broadcast on The Countdown, miPOradio, February 2007]

         -> next

Czeslaw Milosz

[from Czeslaw Milosz's Native Realm, 1968]

It does not matter how we name the basic opposition: heaviness and lightness; life taken as it is and life shaped anew; matter and spirit; walking on all fours and soaring in flight. What was my mutiny as an adolescent and then as a young man if not a refusal of that directionless existence of "hogs"? As a child I safeguarded myself against grownups by my passion for nature, my aquariums, my ornithological books. To grow up and destroy that elan which they, in their sobriety, disdained seemed awful. My almost unhealthy conviction that sexuality is evil may have had its source not only in the teachings of our Father Prefect but also in those moments when, as a child, I observed that it is precisely sexuality that makes fools of adults, weighing them down, depriving them of the capacity for disinterested enthusiasm.

My hero was the brave nineteenth-century naturalist, such an ardent collector of insects that on his wedding day he forgot about his beloved waiting at the church; he was discovered in his tails, high in the branches of a tree where he was just about to lower his top hat over a rare species of beetle; at this sight the bride-to-be fell fainting into her mother's arms and the enthusiast of knowledge remained a bachelor forever.

In choosing poetry later on, I remained loyal to the pledge I made to myself: that I would never be like them and succumb to the force of inertia. Through poetry, in other words, I wanted to save my childhood. But what fiery sword protects the artist? Only his faith in an objective value. For those who live passively, values melt away; they wane in the encounter with what is considered "real." Herein lies the secret of their impotent lives. And hence the traditional alliance between artists and revolutionaries. Because revolutionaries, with or without success, also search for objectively grounded values. They are saved by their violent "yes" or "no," by their upsetting the somnolent routine into which spiritual heaviness imprisons us. Their deed is equivalent to the creative act of an artist; it lifts them above themselves by demanding full surrender: no one puts words on paper or paint on canvas doubting; if one doubts, one does so five minutes later.

shrinkage

Howard Junker of ZYZZYVA reports in his latest blog post:

At Barnes & Noble, publishers are charged for "shrinkage," that is, the copies that have not sold but have gone missing.

If that's not a good reason to boycott Barnes & Noble . . .