Poem of the Week 6/17/2009: Archy Interviews a Pharaoh

Archy Interivews a Pharaoh

[Archy is a cockroach who believes he is the incarnate form of a free-verse poet. At night, he types on Don Marquis' typewriter, and converses with his friend, Mehitabel the cat. Mehitabel, in turn, claims to be Cleopatra's incarnation. Make sure you keep in mind the image of a cockroach jumping from key to key on the typewriter. No wonder there are no caps or punctuation from the little, one-key at a time fellow. --SES]

boss i went
and interviewed the mummy
of the egyptian pharaoh
in the metropolitan museum
as you bade me to do

what ho
my regal leatherface
says i

greetings
little scatter footed
scarab
says he

kingly has been
says i
what was your ambition
when you had any

insignificant
and journalistic insect
says the royal crackling
in my tender prime
i was too dignified
to have anything as vulgar
as ambition
the ra ra boys
in the seti set
were too haughty
to be ambitious
we used to spend our time
feeding the ibises
and ordering
pyramids sent home to try on
but if i had my life
to live over again
i would give dignity
the regal razz
and hire myself out
to work in a brewery

old tan and tarry
says i
i detect in your speech
the overtones
of melancholy

yes i am sad
says the majestic mackerel
i am as sad
as the song
of a soudanese jackal
who is wailing for the blood red
moon he cannot reach and rip

on what are you brooding
with such a wistful
wishfulness
there in the silences
confide in me
my perial pretzel
says i

i brood on beer
my scampering whiffle snoot
on beer says he

my sympathies
are with your royal
dryness says i

my little pest
says he
you must be respectful
in the presence
of a mighty desolation
little archy
forty centuries of thirst
look down upon you

oh by isis
and by osiris
says the princely raisin
and by pish and phthush and phthah
by the sacred book perembru
and all the gods
that rule from the upper
cataract of the nile
to the delta of the duodenum
i am dry
i am as dry
as the next morning mouth
of a dissipated desert
as dry as the hoofs
of the camels of timbuctoo
little fussy face
i am as dry as the heart
of a sand storm
at high noon in hell
i have been lying here
and there
for four thousand years
with silicon in my esophagus
as gravel in my gizzard
thinking
thinking
thinking
of beer

divine drouth
says i
imperial fritter
continue to think
there is no law against
that in this country
old salt codfish
if you keep quiet about it
not yet

what country is this
asks the poor prune

my reverend juicelessness
this is a beerless country
says i

well well said the royal
desiccation
my political opponents back home
always maintained
that i would wind up in hell
and it seems they had the right dope

and with these hopeless words
the unfortunate residuum
gave a great cough of despair
and turned to dust and debris
right in my face
it being the only time
i ever actually saw anybody
put the cough
into sarcophagus

dear boss as i scurry about
i hear of a great many
tragedies in our midsts
personally i yearn
for some dear friend to pass over
and leave to me
a boot legacy
yours for the second coming
of gambrinus

archy

Don Marquis 1927

Poem of the Week 6/17/2009: from As You Like It

from As You Like It

[Jacques and Touchstone]

A fool, a fool! I met a fool in the forest,
A motley fool; a miserable world!
As I do live by food, I met a fool
Who laid him down and bask'd him in the sun,
And rail'd on Lady Fortune in good terms,
In good set terms and, yet, a motley fool.
'Good morrow, fool,' quoth I. 'No, sir,' quoth he,
'Call me not fool till heaven hath sent me fortune:'
And then he drew a dial from his poke,
And, looking on it with lack-lustre eye,
Says very wisely, 'It is ten o'clock:
Thus we may see,' quoth he, 'how the world wags:
'Tis but an hour ago since it was nine,
And after one hour more 'twill be eleven;
And so, from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe,
And then, from hour to hour, we rot and rot;
And thereby hangs a tale.' When I did hear
The motley fool thus moral on the time,
My lungs began to crow like chanticleer,
That fools should be so deep-contemplative,
And I did laugh sans intermission
An hour by his dial. O noble fool!
A worthy fool! Motley's the only wear.

William Shakespeare

In a speech about foolishness, we must wonder who Shakespeare truly casts as the fool. First, there is the man called "fool," the most obvious candidate; a second, intelligent glance, however, casts Jacques himself as the fool. Ultimately, I argue that the ultimate absurdity of the moment pulls Jacques, the man, and the rest of human life into fooldom.

What is the case for calling the man by the side of the road a fool? We can find socioeconomic and physical reasons. To begin, the word "motley" returns over and over in reference to the man, probably a dual reference. His messy clothes signal a low economic class, which could be due to some kind of mental disorder. Less tangibly, "motley" could refer to his demeanor, which could be as varied and patched together as his penniless clothes. After all, he seems to sing nonsense, obsessed with time and a sundial made from nothing more than a grubby stick in his pocket, hardly the artifacts of a sane man, after all.

And yet, this is not a comfortable reading! It takes the man's clothes and the loud words of Jacques at face value, and fails to listen to the "fool's" profound message treating decay and mortality; were we to side with the first interpretation, we would be the fools who failed to listen. But this is precisely what Jacques does. From a careful listen, Touchstone seems "contemplative," artistic, creative, and perhaps wise, meditating on life's impermenance. That Jacques guffaws for an hour, literally, makes him seem the fool to an intelligent listener.

And while this is the more convincing of the arguments, I believe that it's interesting, at least, to take the man at his word and imagine that, if all of human life is rotting, falling away, and final, then is it possible for any man to not be the fool, of time at least? I admit, this feels attractive to write of and less so when really thinking about it--for, if true, wouldn't a wise man be the one who knows his enemies, knows of time, knows his death? It is a question of knowledge of one's ignorance, and one, I suppose, that you could land on either end of; I'm not hesitant to say that what lies between and fool and a wise man is understanding, yes, that strange idea we think we all have, and yet, most likely, have not.

Poem of the Week 6/10/2009: Take This Waltz

Take This Waltz

Now in Vienna there's ten pretty women
There's a shoulder where Death comes to cry
There's a lobby with nine hundred windows
There's a tree where the doves go to die
There's a piece that was torn from the morning
And it hangs in the Gallery of Frost
Ay, Ay, Ay, Ay
Take this waltz, take this waltz
Take this waltz with the clamp on its jaws

Oh I want you, I want you, I want you
On a chair with a dead magazine
In the cave at the tip of the lily
In some hallways where love's never been
On a bed where the moon has been sweating
In a cry filled with footsteps and sand
Ay, Ay, Ay, Ay
Take this waltz, take this waltz
Take its broken waist in your hand

This waltz, this waltz, this waltz, this waltz
With its very own breath of brandy and Death
Dragging its tail in the sea

There's a concert hall in Vienna
Where your mouth had a thousand reviews
There's a bar where the boys have stopped talking
They've been sentenced to death by the blues
Ah, but who is it climbs to your picture
With a garland of freshly cut tears?
Ay, Ay, Ay, Ay
Take this waltz, take this waltz
Take this waltz it's been dying for years

There's an attic where children are playing
Where I've got to lie down with you soon
In a dream of Hungarian lanterns
In the mist of some sweet afternoon
And I'll see what you've chained to your sorrow
All your sheep and your lilies of snow
Ay, Ay, Ay, Ay
Take this waltz, take this waltz
With its "I'll never forget you, you know!"

This waltz, this waltz, this waltz, this waltz ...

And I'll dance with you in Vienna
I'll be wearing a river's disguise
The hyacinth wild on my shoulder,
My mouth on the dew of your thighs
And I'll bury my soul in a scrapbook,
With the photographs there, and the moss
And I'll yield to the flood of your beauty
My cheap violin and my cross
And you'll carry me down on your dancing
To the pools that you lift on your wrist
Oh my love, Oh my love
Take this waltz, take this waltz
It's yours now. It's all that there is.

Frederico Garcia Lorca
trans. Leonard Cohen


Little Viennese Waltz by Federico Garcia Lorca
In Vienna there are ten little girls,
a shoulder for death to cry on,
and a forest of dried pigeons.
There is a fragment of tomorrow
in the museum of winter frost.
There is a thousand-windowed dance hall.

Ay, ay, ay, ay!
Take this close-mouthed waltz.

Little waltz, little waltz, little waltz,
of itself of death, and of brandy
that dips its tail in the sea.

I love you, I love you, I love you,
with the armchair and the book of death,
down the melancholy hallway,
in the iris's darkened garret,

Ay, ay, ay, ay!
Take this broken-waisted waltz.

In Vienna there are four mirrors
in which your mouth and the ehcoes play.
There is a death for piano
that paints little boys blue.
There are beggars on the roof.
There are fresh garlands of tears.

Ay, ay, ay, ay!
Take this waltz that dies in my arms.

Because I love you, I love you, my love,
in the attic where the children play,
dreaming ancient lights of Hungary
through the noise, the balmy afternoon,
seeing sheep and irises of snow
through the dark silence of your forehead

Ay, ay, ay, ay!
Take this " I will always love you" waltz

In Vienna I will dance with you
in a costume with
a river's head.
See how the hyacinths line my banks!
I will leave my mouth between your legs,
my soul in a photographs and lilies,
and in the dark wake of your footsteps,
my love, my love, I will have to leave
violin and grave, the waltzing ribbons


Federico Garcia Lorca
trans. unknown! (this version is all over the internet, yet with no translator. Of the few english versions I read, this was my favorite, however)

I am offering two versions of this poem today to give some material that might be interesting if anybody is curious about the role or effect of translation on a poem or form of art.


http://www.harpers.org/archive/2009/04/hbc-90004805

Poem of the Week 5/23/2009: By the Sea

By The Sea

I started early, took my dog,
And visited the sea;
The mermaids in the basement
Came out to look at me.

And frigates in the upper floor
Extended hempen hands,
Presuming me to be a mouse
Aground, upon the sands.

But no man moved me till the tide
Went past my simple shoe,
And past my apron and my belt,
And past my bodice too,

And made as he would eat me up
As wholly as a dew
Upon a dandelion's sleeve -
And then I started too.

And he - he followed close behind;
I felt his silver heel
Upon my ankle, - then my shoes
Would overflow with pearl.

Until we met the solid town,
No man he seemed to know;
And bowing with a mighty look
At me, the sea withdrew.

Emily Dickinson

I guess my question with most Emily Dickinson poems is, what is happening? Which is a question of reading-- how are we to interpret what is going on? And how subjective is it? If it is subjective, will it reveal something about ourselves, and if it is objective will it reveal something about the world? In a way, I do not believe that the answer to this question is important, but I do think that investigating it is imperative. And to investigate, we must gather our impressions of the poem, which is another point about poetry (as I think of it)--the experience, subjective or whatever!--of reading and dreaming through emily dickinson's mind. 

These are a lot of questions, and with all of this I don't even know if there will be time right now to work out the poem for myself bit by bit. I can offer some ideas, I guess. To begin, there are some strange characters, and a strange landscape at play--the characters of the narrator, her dog, these strange frigates (warships), the sea, and some mermaids. All of these, I think, establish the dreamlike/mythic quality of the poem. And the arc of the story could be, roughly, a woman and her companion (one subordinate to her), and the various things that are interested in the woman, the ways they attempt to reach out to her, and then the one that does touch her, actually--the sea. What a sensual experience she paints in the middle stanzas, bringing not only the sea, but the reader's mind up with her. And then, when it sees her in some social context, or some more real, "solid" (certainly not watery) context, it recedes.

But this is the structural arc. It is so much like a dream that... how could anybody feel that they absolutely claim to understand what it is saying? For myself, it's such a lonely poem, and still charged, like a thundercloud I guess--the strength of the sea recedes against this woman, after knowing her and feeling her, recedes. The image of power and tension and loss... of love? I don't know, beauty perhaps. It is a tensile and lightly magnetic beauty, apparent in Dickinson's juxtaposition of images of delicacy with those of strength-- the sea lands on a woman like dew on a dandelion, and it, in its immensity, is as small and lovely as a pearl, has such beloved aspects as a silver heel, and yet it can bow with a mighty look... 

So that is my own quick and dirty interpretation. What is yours? No need to share unless you really feel compelled, I am hoping that you can ask yourself, reading carefully and examining even closer. 

Poem of the Week 5/17/2009: The Sleepwalker's Ballad

Sleepwalker's Ballad

Green I love you green.
Green of the wind. Green branches.
The ship far out at sea.
The horse above the mountain.
Shadows dark at her waist,
She’s dreaming there on her terrace,
green of her cheek, green hair,
with eyes like chilly silver.
Green I love you green.
Under that moon of the gypsies
things are looking at her
but she can’t return their glances.

Green I love you green.
Green of the wind. Green branches.
The stars are frost, enormous;
a tuna cloud floats over
nosing off to the dawn.
The fig tree catches a wind
to grate in its emery branches;
the mountain’s a wildcat, sly,
bristling its acrid cactus.
But—who’s on the road? Which way?
She’s dreaming there on her terrace,
green of her cheek, green hair,
she dreams of the bitter sea.

“Friend, what I want is to trade
this horse of mine for your house,
this saddle of mine for your mirror,
this knife of mine for your blanket.
Friend, I come bleeding, see,
from the mountain pass of Cabra.”
“I would if I could, young man;
I’d have taken you up already.
But I’m not myself any longer,
nor my house my home any more.”
“Friend, what I want is to die
in a bed of my own -- die nicely.
An iron bed, if there is one,
between good linen sheets.
I’m wounded, throat and breast,
from here to here -- you see it?”
“You’ve a white shirt on; three hundred
roses across -- dark roses.
There’s a smell of blood about you;
your sash, all round you, soaked.
But I’m not myself any longer,
nor my house my home any more.”

“Then let me go up, though; let me!
At least to the terrace yonder.
Let me go up then, let me!
Up to the high green roof.
Terrace-rails of the moonlight,
splash of the lapping tank.”

So they go up, companions,
up to the high roof-terrace;
a straggle of blood behind them,
behind, a straggle of tears.
Over the roofs, a shimmer
like little tin lamps, and glassy
tambourines by the thousand
slitting the glitter of dawn.

Green I love you green.
Green of the wind. Green branches.
They’re up there, two companions.
A wind from the distance leaving
its tang on the tongue, strange flavors
of bile, of basil and mint.
“Where is she, friend -- that girl
with the bitter heart, your daughter?”
“How often she’d be there waiting,
fresh of face, hair black,
here in green of the terrace.”

There in her terrace pool
was the gypsy girl, in ripples.
Green of her cheek, green hair,
with eyes like chilly silver.
Icicles from the moon
held her afloat on the water.
Night became intimate then --
enclosed, like a little plaza.
Drunken, the Civil Guard
had been banging the door below them.

Green I love you green.
Green of the wind. Green branches.
The ship far out at sea.
The horse above on the mountain.

Frederico Garcia Lorca
trans. John Frederick Nims

Poem of the Week 11/24/2008: Trismegistus

Trismegistus

O Egypt, Egypt—so the great lament
Of thrice-great Hermes went—
Nothing of thy religion shall remain
Save fables, which thy children shall disdain.
His grieving eye foresaw
The world’s bright fabric overthrown
Which married star to stone
And charged all things with awe.

And what, in that dismantled world, could be
More fabulous than he?
Had he existed? Was he but a name
Tacked on to forgeries which pressed the claim
Of every ancient quack—
That one could from a smoky cell
By talisman or spell
Coerce the Zodiac?

Still, still we summon him at midnight hour
To Milton’s pensive tower,
And hear him tell again how, then and now,
Creation is a house of mirrors, how
Each herb that sips the dew
Dazzles the eye with many small
Reflections of the All—
Which, after all, is true.

Richard Wilbur

If there's one thing that intrigues me about this poem, it's the movement of the poem's attitude towards Hermes, its questioning and confusion, its doubts and beliefs, and its final longing for whole, magic world. From a statement that the great myths of a great man become no more than children's stories and fables, to the discussion of the modern world's division of nature from itself, the sky from the earth, and people from each other, the poem moves finally to a mustard seed of longing for that state. The final stanza offers the sense one perhaps had as a child questioning its life at night, staring at the world with such wonder and hope--Wilbur uses the word "awe" for this--but having to do it in secret. That, the poet proposes, is the burden of the modern world--that we cannot question in open, that in spite of all we believe to have come to know, that something is still missing, that there is still some desire for what has been lost, and a desire for a self-reflective whole. And what a way to end it! Wilbur's simple last line, "Which, after all, is true," relaxes the poem, opening its end and its call to the daily man, including a modern poet's voice with the voice of ancient longing, shall we say.

Poem of the Week 11/17/2008: Pura Vida

Pura Vida

(¡Pura vida! —Costa Rican phrase for "O.K." or "Great!")

Such heat! It brings the brain back to its basic blank.
Small, recurrent events become the daily news—
the white-nosed coati treading the cecropia's
bending thin branches like sidewalks in the sky,
the scarlet-rumped tanager flitting like a spark
in the tinder of dank green, the nodding palm leaves
perforated like Jacquard cards in a code of wormholes,
the black hawk skimming nothingness over and over.

What does the world's wide brimming mean, with hunger
the unstated secret, dying the proximate reality?
Con mucho gusto—the muchness extends to the stars,
as wet and numerous as larvae underground
where the ants in their preset patterns scurry and nurture,
and the queen, immobilized, pours forth her eggs
in the dark. We are far from oaks and stoplights,
from England's chill classrooms and Tuscany's paved hills.

For thought is a stridulation, an insect sizzling,
knit of the moment's headlines and temperate-zone quips,
viable in the debris of our rotting educations,
that thatch where peer-groups call each to each in semes
ecosystematically. Great God Himself
wilts with a rise in temperature, a drop in soil acidity,
a new language in its grimacing opacity.
The brain's dry buzz revives, a bit, as evening falls.

John Updike

I like to think of this poem as a heat-induced outpouring of thought--all of the strange words and categorizations of trees, insects, as well as other unusual vocabulary (stridulation), seem to erupt out of the speaker's brain in the heat, causing a special simmering contemplation about the world--the con much gusto of it all, the thoughts "viable in the debris of our rotting educations."

Though I must say the real reason for choosing the poem was the middle paragraph, and my great fondness for John Updike's poetry.

Poem of the Week 11/10/2008: Sing a Song of Sixpence

Sing a Song of Sixpence

Sing a song of sixpence,
a pocket full of rye.
Four and twenty blackbirds,
baked in a pie.

When the pie was opened,
the birds began to sing.
Wasn't that a dainty dish
to set before the king?

The king was in his counting house,
counting out his money.
The queen was in the parlour,
eating bread and honey.

The maid was in the garden,
hanging out the clothes,
When down came a blackbird
and pecked off her nose!

There was such a commotion
that little Jenny wren
Flew down into the garden
and put it back again

Unknown, 17th Century

For some reason this song popped into my head today, and I thought it's actually a really nice, surrealist, fun poem to put up. One could say all sorts of silly academic things about it, but is there a need to talk about the surprise of the moment, the inherent violence of the children's song exploding out of the pie into the king's face, the role of the Jenny wren... all of that seems kind of funny and postmodern in the face of this little old song. 

Poem of the Week 11/3/2008: from The Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 1: The War Within

from The Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 1: The War Within

Having seen your son's forces set in their
places and the fighting about to begin, Arjuna
spoke these words to Sri Krishna

O Krishna, drive my chariot between the two
armies. I want to see those who desire to fight
with me. With whom will this battle be fought?
I want to see those assembled to fight for
Duryodhana, those who seek to please the evil-
minded son of Dhritarashtra by engaging in war.

Thus Arjuna spoke, and Sri Krishna, driving his
splendid chariot between the two armies, facing
Bhishma and Drona and all the kings of the earth,
said: "Arjuna, behold all the Kurus gathered together."

And Arjuna, standing between the tweo armies,
saw fathers and grandfathers, teachers, uncles,
and brothers, sons and grandsons, in-laws
and friends. Seeing his kinsmen established
in opposition, Arjuna was overcome by
sorrow. Despairing, he spoke these words:

O Krishna, I see my own relations here anxious
to fight, and my limbs grow weak; my mouth is
dry, my body shakes, and my hair is standing on
end. My skin burns, and the bow Gandiva has
slipped from my hand. I am unable to stand; my
mind seems to be whirling. These signs bode evil
for us. I do not see that any good can come from
killing our relations in battle. O Krishna, I have
no desire for victory, or for a kingdom of pleasures.

... Arjuna explains at length the ills of going to war against his own friends and family, until,

Overwhelmed by sorrow, Arjuna spoke these words.
And casting away his bow and his arrows, he sat
down in his chariot in the middle of the battlefield.



translated by Eknath Easwaran

It is telling that this chapter heading is, "the War Within," for we must ask, in this introductory section, what this war consists in. "Bhagavad Gita,'" translated, means "song of God," and so it seems that the violence cannot be real, or rather against other beings; rather, the violence is that of a war within. But what is this war? Well, it is a war for a kingdom and pleasures; if I had included the introduction section, it would become clear that it is also a family war, presumably the result of years of inherited grudges, misdeeds, and tiffs. It is a very great war, with two sides, each trying to beat the other, each side matched. Arjuna lets us know that the war is against Duryodhana's minons, who are attempting to please the "evil-minded one." All of these are facts. But are they the entire story?

The song probably includes many levels of interpretation, the large scale ideas about "following one's dharma," doing what one ought in a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation, but I think this moment is also a moment of confronting oneself, of having to sacrifice a personality, or a desire or craving, or a fear-- in the following sections, Sri Krishna gives Arjuna a teaching about the nature of reality and illusion, ego and Atman/Self... for a small book it spans the whole cosmos. You really ought to read it when you want to do so. It's on Google Books, even:

http://books.google.com/books?id=a-Oh_-rK5SQC&pg=PA71&lpg=PA71&dq=bhagavad+gita+the+war+within+chapter+1&source=web&ots=HB2_CE1zSC&sig=d0LdYh7zpjuejoF4M5VjeCDu0Gw&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=5&ct=result#PPA189,M1

Poem of the Week 10/27/2008: You I choose, of all the world alone

You I choose, of all the world, alone;
Will you suffer me to sit in grief?
My heart is as a pen in your hand,
You are the cause if I am glad or melancholy.
Save what you will, what will have I?
Save what you show, what do I see?
You make grow out of me now a thorn and now a rose;
Now I smell roses and now pull thorns.
If you keep me that, that I am;
If you would have me this, I am this.
In the vessel where you give color to the soul
Who am I, what is my love and hate?
You were first, and last you shall be;
Make my last better than my first.
When you are hidden, I am of the infidels;
When you are manifest, I am of the faithful.
I have nothing, except you have bestowed it;
What do you seek from my bosom and sleeve?


Rumi
translated by R. A. Nicholson

I don't think this poem is about a lover, as in flesh and blood. Instead it is about The Lover, Rumi's beloved, the One and Only, i.e. Truth, Reality, God, Objective Consciousness (poor english terminology is so impoverished). And it raises all sorts of fabulous questions--what is the nature of will, and what ought we really desire? What would real wishing be?

Poem of the Week 10/20/2008: The Broken Home

The Broken Home

Crossing the street,
I saw the parents and the child
At their window, gleaming like fruit
With evening's mild gold leaf.
In a room on the floor below,
Sunless, cooler—a brimming
Saucer of wax, marbly and dim—
I have lit what's left of my life.
I have thrown out yesterday's milk
And opened a book of maxims.
The flame quickens. The word stirs.
Tell me, tongue of fire,
That you and I are as real
At least as the people upstairs.

My father, who had flown in World War I,
Might have continued to invest his life
In cloud banks well above Wall Street and wife.
But the race was run below, and the point was to win.
Too late now, I make out in his blue gaze
(Through the smoked glass of being thirty-six)
The soul eclipsed by twin black pupils, sex
And business; time was money in those days.
Each thirteenth year he married. When he died
There were already several chilled wives
In sable orbit—rings, cars, permanent waves.
We'd felt him warming up for a green bride.
He could afford it. He was "in his prime"
At three score ten. But money was not time.

When my parents were younger this was a popular act:
A veiled woman would leap from an electric, wine-dark car
To the steps of no matter what—the Senate or the Ritz Bar—
And bodily, at newsreel speed, attack
No matter whom—Al Smith or José María Sert
Or Clemenceau—veins standing out on her throat
As she yelled War mongerer! Pig! Give us the vote!,
And would have to be hauled away in her hobble skirt.
What had the man done? Oh, made history.
Her business (he had implied) was giving birth,
Tending the house, mending the socks.
Always that same old story—
Father Time and Mother Earth,
A marriage on the rocks.

One afternoon, red, satyr-thighed
Michael, the Irish setter, head
Passionately lowered, led
The child I was to a shut door. Inside,
Blinds beat sun from the bed.
The green-gold room throbbed like a bruise.
Under a sheet, clad in taboos
Lay whom we sought, her hair undone, outspread,
And of a blackness found, if ever now, in old
Engravings where the acid bit.
I must have needed to touch it
Or the whiteness—was she dead?
Her eyes flew open, startled strange and cold.
The dog slumped to the floor. She reached for me. I fled.

Tonight they have stepped out onto the gravel.
The party is over. It's the fall
Of 1931. They love each other still.
She: Charlie, I can't stand the pace.
He: Come on, honey—why, you'll bury us all!
A lead soldier guards my windowsill:
Khaki rifle, uniform, and face.
Something in me grows heavy, silvery, pliable.
How intensely people used to feel!
Like metal poured at the close of a proletarian novel,
Refined and glowing from the crucible,
I see those two hearts, I'm afraid,
Still. Cool here in the graveyard of good and evil,
They are even so to be honored and obeyed.

. . . Obeyed, at least, inversely. Thus
I rarely buy a newspaper, or vote.
To do so, I have learned, is to invite
The tread of a stone guest within my house.
Shooting this rusted bolt, though, against him,
I trust I am no less time's child than some
Who on the heath impersonate Poor Tom
Or on the barricades risk life and limb.
Nor do I try to keep a garden, only
An avocado in a glass of water—
Roots pallid, gemmed with air. And later,
When the small gilt leaves have grown
Fleshy and green, I let them die, yes, yes,
And start another. I am earth's no less.

A child, a red dog roam the corridors,
Still, of the broken home. No sound. The brilliant
Rag runners halt before wide-open doors.
My old room! Its wallpaper—cream, medallioned
With pink and brown—brings back the first nightmares,
Long summer colds, and Emma, sepia-faced,
Perspiring over broth carried upstairs
Aswim with golden fats I could not taste.
The real house became a boarding school.
Under the ballroom ceiling's allegory
Someone at last may actually be allowed
To learn something; or, from my window, cool
With the unstiflement of the entire story,
Watch a red setter stretch and sink in cloud.

James Merrill

"The Broken Home" reads almost like a American short story, with the puns ("Time was money // but money was not time"), the slightly roughed up family anecdotes, the careful, exact, strange images and details like an avocado in a glass, or the "satyr-thighed" irish setter. This, plus some taste of quietness, interiority, storytelling, and pacing. Enough for an introduction? Well I could go on to say that, thematically, the poem touches on endless repetition of the same within ones own family; by the end of his life, Merrill is planting a replanting an avocado, perhaps a whisper or a new version of his father's own continual development and discarding of wives, of the life and death of family.

Poem of the Week 10/13/2008: Summer Holiday

Summer Holiday


When the sun shouts and people abound
One thinks there were the ages of stone and the age of
bronze
And the iron age; iron the unstable metal;
Steel made of iron, unstable as his mother; the tow-
ered-up cities
Will be stains of rust on mounds of plaster.
Roots will not pierce the heaps for a time, kind rains
will cure them,
Then nothing will remain of the iron age
And all these people but a thigh-bone or so, a poem
Stuck in the world's thought, splinters of glass
In the rubbish dumps, a concrete dam far off in the
mountain...

Robinson Jeffers

Poem of the Week 10/6/2008: Soni

Soni

I'm in a bar and someone's name is Soni
The floor is covered in ash Like a bird
like a single bird two old men arrive
Archilochus and Anacreon and Simonides* Miserable
Mediterranean refugees don't ask me what I'm doing
here, just forget that I've been with a girl
who'd pale and right Either way, I only remember blush
the word shame after the word hollow
Soni! Soni! I laid her back and rubbed
my penis all over her waist the dog barked in the street
below there was a theater and after coming
I thought "two theaters" and the void Archilochus and Anacreon
and Simonides sheathing their willow branches Man
doesn't search for life, I said, I laid her back and
shoved the whole thing in something crunched between
the dog's ears Crack! We're lost
All that's left is for you to get sick, I said And Soni
stepped away from the ground the light through dirty glass
rendered like a god and the author
closed his eyes

Roberto Bolaño
translated by Laura Healy

*Archilochus (Greek: Ἀρχίλοχος) (c. 680 BC – c. 645 BC) was a Greek poet and supposed mercenary.
Anacreon (Greek Ἀνακρέων) (570 BC-488 BC) was a Greek lyric poet, notable for his drinking songs and hymns.
Simonides of Ceos (Σιμωνίδης ὁ Κεῖος) (c. 556 BC-468 BC), Greek lyric poet, was born at Ioulis on Kea.

I think this is a wonderful poem--the eroticism and the violence shocking, and there is no clear line of activity; rather, the past and present, or perhaps the past and past, are so intermingled that to tear them apart would also tear apart the poem. In a way I don't think that these events are separate, for I imagine them in the head of the narrator; whatever he lives is crowded with his memories, which present themselves as real and vital. Pretty amazing and true to our lives.

There are more complicated statements about the erotic, poetry, and even some jokes in here too; the three greek references are all classical poets, and I wonder if their visitation is like the visitation of the fates, or whether they are a kind of muse. Moreover, Bolano brings in "the author" at the end of the poem, himself overwhelmed by these memories. What a blending of so many elements (blended but not mashed, if that makes sense; the events and characters are still somewhat identifiable in different scenes).

Poem of the Week 9/29/2008: Kubla Khan

Kubla Khan

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree :
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round :
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree ;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But oh ! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover !
A savage place ! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover !
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced :
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail :
And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean :
And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war !
The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves ;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice !
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw :
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight 'twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome ! those caves of ice !
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware ! Beware !
His flashing eyes, his floating hair !
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Poem of the Week 9/22/2008: Underground

Underground

Under water grottos, caverns
Filled with apes
That eat figs.
Stepping on the figs
That the apes
Eat, they crunch.
The apes howl, bare
Their fangs, dance,
Tumble in the
Rushing water,
Musty, wet pelts
Glistening in the blue.

Barack Obama 1982

I hope that you vote Obama. The rest of his poems, published at Occidental College when he was 19, may be found:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steven-barrieanthony/obamas-poetry_b_44271.html

Poem of the Week 9/16/2008: A Season in Hell

A Season in Hell

A while back, if I remember right, my life was one long party where all hearts were open wide, where all wines kept flowing.

One night, I sat Beauty down on my lap.—And I found her galling.—And I roughed her up.

I armed myself against justice.

I ran away. O witches, O misery, O hatred, my treasure's been turned over to you!

I managed to make every trace of human hope vanish from my mind. I pounced on every joy like a ferocious animal eager to strangle it.

I called for executioners so that, while dying, I could bite the butts of their rifles. I called for plagues to choke me with sand, with blood. Bad luck was my god. I stretched out in the muck. I dried myself in the air of crime. And I played tricks on insanity.

And Spring brought me the frightening laugh of the idiot.

So, just recently, when I found myself on the brink of the final squawk! it dawned on me to look again for the key to that ancient party where I might find my appetite once more.

Charity is that key.—This inspiration proves I was dreaming!

"You'll always be a hyena etc. . . ," yells the devil, who'd crowned me with such pretty poppies. "Deserve death with all your appetites, your selfishness, and all the capital sins!"

Ah! I've been through too much:-But, sweet Satan, I beg of you, a less blazing eye! and while waiting for the new little cowardly gestures yet to come, since you like an absence of descriptive or didactic skills in a writer, let me rip out these few ghastly pages from my notebook of the damned.

Arthur Rimbaud Translated by Bertrand Mathieu



Happy Halloween*
There were a lot of choices for this week's PotW--many writers have treated of Hell, of course (think Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton, Blake, Joyce--indeed all great epics following the Western tradition ought by right to have a passage to the underworld)... there could be an entire anthology of Hell, perhaps put together by a Beat or a Blakean? It would be a fabulous anthology.

At any rate, I picked this one because it treats a sort of interior Hell, addressed to the devil, yes, but it is remarkable that the narrator discusses his own abuse of his life. It also includes, darkly, some hope, which is perhaps an older meaning of Halloween; to enter the darkness in order to purge and to balance. The same thing happens in The Orestia. At the end (stop here if you haven't read it), Athena orders mankind to pay its debt to the Furies, to treat them properly, to give them some life still.


* (the posting date, not the fake chronological one)

Poem of the Week 9/8/08: Byzantium

Byzantium

The unpurged images of day recedes;
The Emperor's drunken soldiery are abed;
Night resonance recedes, night-walkers' song
After great cathedral gong;
A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains
All that man is,
All mere complexities,
The fury and the mire of human veins.

Before me floats an image, man or shade,
Shade more than man, more image than a shade;
For Hades' bobbin bound in mummy-cloth
May unwind the winding path;
A mouth that has no moisture and no breath
Breathless mouths may summon;
I hail the superhuman;
I call it death-in-life and life-in-death.

Miracle, bird or golden handiwork,
More miracle than bird or handiwork,
Planted on the star-lit golden bough,
Can like the cocks of Hades crow,
Or, by the moon embittered, scorn aloud
In glory of changeless metal
Common bird or petal
And all complexities of mire or blood.

At midnight on the Emperor's pavement flit
Flames that no faggot feeds, nor steel has lit,
Nor storm disturbs, flames begotten of flame,
Where blood-begotten spirits come
And all complexities of fury leave,
Dying into a dance,
An agony of trance,
An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve.

Astraddle on the dolphin's mire and blood,
Spirit after spirit! The smithies break the flood,
The golden smithies of the Emperor!
Marbles of the dancing floor
Break bitter furies of complexity,
Those images that yet
Fresh images beget,
That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.

William Butler Yeats

How does one begin to look at this poem? The opening stanza holds the line "all man is," and I think that would be an excellent question with which one might approach the poem. What is Yeats' vision of man, and if you find that it shifts or that it is nearly impossible to parse or pin down, then are there any perspectives that might shed light on man (fleshly, subconscious/mystical/visionary, mythic, violent, emotional, thoughtful etc)?

some notes of my own:
Yeats is placing his mythic Byzantium in the same category as Blake's Jerusalem or the great cities of the Old and New Testaments--real places in the worldly sense, but perhaps as well enormous landscapes inside the human being. So if there are aspects of blood and mire and violence in this poem, dolphins and golden birds and peace, then these are all characters in a vast subconsicous network, communicated to Yeats the poet, or perhaps in a way chosen by him to represent what man's inner experience is touched with from time to time.

Perhaps it will be helpful to read the beginning of this poem as a kind of movement from waking consciousness to a remembered draming consciousness; it opens with the receding of "the unpurged images of day," which leaves us what?

Poem of the Week 9/5/05: Heredity

Heredity

I am the family face;
Flesh perishes, I live on,
Projecting trait and trace
Through time to times anon,
And leaping from place to place
Over oblivion.

The years-heired feature that can
In curve and voice and eye
Despise the human span
Of durance -- that is I;
The eternal thing in man,
That heeds no call to die

Thomas Hardy

It's the small things, right? Like the strangeness of looking into an old photograph, or one's mother's face, and seeing oneself.

ps Thank you to my grandmother, who introduced me to this poem.

Poem of the Week 8/25/2008: Tristia

Tristia

I have taken to heart the lesson of goodbyes
In bareheaded laments in the night.
Oxen chew, waiting lengthens,
The last hour of the watch in the city.
And I bow to ceremonial cock-crowing nights
When lifting their lading of grief for the journey
Eyes red with crying search the horizon
And singing of Muses blends with the weeping of women.

Who can know from the word 'goodbye'
What kind of separation lies before us,
Or what the cock's clamour promises
When a light burns in the acropolis
And in his stall the lazy ox chews:
Why the cock,
The herald of new life,
Beats on the city walls with his wings?

And I like the way of weaving:
The shuttle comes and goes, the spindle hums,
And -- flying to meet us like swan's down --
Look, barefooted Delia comes!
Oh how meagre the basis of life,
How threadbare the language of elysium!*
Everything existed of old, everything recurs anew,
The flash of recognition is all that we welcome.

So be it: a translucent manikin
On a clean clay plate --
A squirrel's stretched-out skin:
Bent over wax, a girl examines it.
Not for us to guess at Grecian Erebus:**
For women wax, what bronze is for men.
On us our fate falls only in battles;
Their death they die in divination.

Osip Mandelstam 1918
translated by James Greene

*In Greek mythology, Elysium was a section of the underworld, the great field which held the souls of heroes and those with virtue.
**In Greek mythology, Erebus or Erebos (Ancient Greek: Ἔρεβος, English translation: "deep blackness/darkness or shadow") was the son of a primordial god, Chaos, and represented the personification of darkness and shadow, which filled in all the corners and crannies of the world. He was the offspring of Chaos alone.
(Thank you Wikipedia for the information in the footnotes, which I have introduced)

Poem of the Week 8/18/2008: Regarding Chainsaws

Regarding Chainsaws

The first chainsaw I owned was years ago,
an old yellow McCulloch that wouldn't start.
Bo Bremmer give it to me that was my friend,
though I've had enemies couldn't of done
no worse. I took it to Ward's over to Morrisville,
and no doubt they tinkered it as best they could,
but it still wouldn't start. One time later
I took it down to the last bolt and gasket
and put it together again, hoping somehow
I'd do something accidental-like that would
make it go, and then I yanked on it
450 times, as I figured afterwards,
and give myself a bursitis in the elbow
that went five years even after
Doc Arrowsmith shot it full of cortisone
and near killed me when he hit a nerve
dead on. Old Stan wanted that saw, wanted it bad.
Figured I was a greenhorn that didn't know
nothing and he could fix it. Well, I was,
you could say, being only forty at the time,
but a fair hand at tinkering. "Stan," I said,
"you're a neighbor. I like you. I wouldn't
sell that thing to nobody, except maybe
Vice-President Nixon." But Stan persisted.
He always did. One time we was loafing and
gabbing in his front dooryard, and he spied
that saw in the back of my pickup. He run
quick inside, then come out and stuck a double
sawbuck in my shirt pocket, and he grabbed
that saw and lugged it off. Next day, when I
drove past, I seen he had it snugged down tight
with a tow-chain on the bed of his old Dodge
Powerwagon, and he was yanking on it
with both hands. Two or three days after,
I asked him, "How you getting along with that
McCulloch, Stan?" "Well," he says, "I tooken
it down to scrap, and I buried it in three
separate places yonder on the upper side
of the potato piece. You can't be too careful,"
he says, "when you're disposing of a hex."
The next saw I had was a godawful ancient
Homelite that I give Dry Dryden thirty bucks for,
temperamental as a ram too, but I liked it.
It used to remind me of Dry and how he'd
clap that saw a couple times with the flat
of his double-blade axe to make it go
and how he honed the chain with a worn-down
file stuck in an old baseball. I worked
that saw for years. I put up forty-five
run them days each summer and fall to keep
my stoves het through the winter. I couldn't now.
It'd kill me. Of course they got these here
modern Swedish saws now that can take
all the worry out of it. What's the good
of that? Takes all the fun out too, don't it?
Why, I reckon. I mind when Gilles Boivin snagged
an old sap spout buried in a chunk of maple
and it tore up his mouth so bad he couldn't play
"Tea for Two" on his cornet in the town band
no more, and then when Toby Fox was holding
a beech limb that Rob Bowen was bucking up
and the saw skidded crossways and nipped off
one of Toby's fingers. Ain't that more like it?
Makes you know you're living. But mostly they wan't
dangerous, and the only thing they broke was your
back. Old Stan, he was a buller and a jammer
in his time, no two ways about that, but he
never sawed himself. Stan had the sugar
all his life, and he wan't always too careful
about his diet and the injections. He lost
all the feeling in his legs from the knees down.
One time he started up his Powerwagon
out in the barn, and his foot slipped off the clutch,
and she jumped forwards right through the wall
and into the manure pit. He just set there,
swearing like you could of heard it in St.
Johnsbury, till his wife come out and said,
"Stan, what's got into you?" "Missus," he says
"ain't nothing got into me. Can't you see?
It's me that's got into this here pile of shit."
Not much later they took away one of his
legs, and six months after that they took
the other and left him setting in his old chair
with a tank of oxygen to sip at whenever
he felt himself sinking. I remember that chair.
Stan reupholstered it with an old bearskin
that must of come down from his great-great-
grandfather and had grit in it left over
from the Civil War and a bullet-hole as big
as a yawning cat. Stan latched the pieces together
with rawhide, cross fashion, but the stitches was
always breaking and coming undone. About then
I quit stopping by to see old Stan, and I
don't feel so good about that neither. But my mother
was having her strokes then. I figured
one person coming apart was as much
as a man can stand. Then Stan was taken away
to the nursing home, and then he died. I always
remember how he planted them pieces of spooked
McCulloch up above the potatoes. One time
I went up and dug, and I took the old
sprocket, all pitted and et away, and set it
on the windowsill right there next to the
butter mold. But I'm damned if I know why.

Hayden Carruth

(this 200th PotW dedicated to MG).

Well, for the official 200th posting of the Poem of the Week, almost a month and a half late, please enjoy Hayden Carruth, a wonderful Southern poet who passed away a few weeks ago. This poem is, I think, quietly astonishing. (I do hope you finished it, though it is long). From its beginning it is simple and honest, moving from tale to tale in the classical American-story sort of way.

More interesting is that it seems to me that this simplicity is accompanied by some kind of deep respect for every thing and person in the story. What do I mean by respect? A kind of release of analytical thought about the chainsaws or the characters. Their stories are allowed to unfold according, roughly, to what happened. When Carruth stops visiting old Stan, he first says it merely as a fact that when Stan sewed up the hole in the bearskin, about that time, the narrator stops coming. No causal link, no superstition, just what happened, temporally. The speaker is then hesitant to provide a reason for stopping, saying that his mother was having "the strokes" at that point, and "I figured / one person coming apart was as much / as a man can stand." Again, this is a fact; what he figured, not what is somehow fully or abstractly true about the situation, but the much finer and more lovely facts of what happened.

Thus, in "Regarding Chainsaws" the meanings are truly shown and not told, which means that Carruth had to place an immense amount of trust in the things themselves to communicate. A chainsaw and a set of people are themselves trusted to hold the meaning. They do not say it, they do not emphasize or comment on it, or even feel about it; they simply happen, and Carruth's genius is first to see it, and then to let his seeing translate into the poem.



Wendell Berry gives a lovely account of Carruth in the article "My Friend Hayden," found:

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20428 .