Poem of the Week 8/11/2008: We Did Not Make Ourselves

We Did Not Make Ourselves

We did not make ourselves is one thing
I keep singing into my hands
while falling
asleep

for just a second

before I have to get up and turn on all the lights in the house, one after the
other, like opening an Advent calendar

My brain opening
the chemical miracles in my brain
switching on

I can hear

dogs barking
some trees
last stars

You think you’ll be missed
it won’t last long
I promise


I’m not dead but I am
standing very still
in the back yard
staring up at the maple
thirty years ago
a tiny kid waiting on the ground
alone in heaven
in the world
in white sneakers

I’m having a good time humming along to everything I can still remember
back there

How we’re born

Made to look up at everything we didn’t make

We didn’t
make grass, mosquitoes
or breast cancer

We didn’t make yellow jackets

or sunlight

either


I didn’t make my brain
but I’m helping
to finish it

Carefully stacking up everything I made next to everything I ruined in broad
daylight in bright
brainlight

This morning I killed a fly
and didn’t lie down
next to the body
like we’re supposed to

We’re supposed to

Soon I’m going to wake up

Dogs
Trees
Stars

There is only this world and this world

What a relief
created

over and over

Michael Dickman 2008

Gone in this age are the great poetic reveries of Rilke and Coleridge, but it seems that there are still moments of reflection and expansion in poetry, and what a gem this poem is! Dickman must be somewhere in the imagist school of poetry, though he easily folds it into a narrative framework. This poem is formed from images of a moment and then a memory, but they suggest the scope of everything created, the failures and successes, all of the things of this world that somehow hover without us. Rilke's Things which "strangely concern us," despite their apparent existence.

One of the final lines, "there is only this world and this world" reminds me of a line from the Upanisads: "there is no second reality here." Something is spoken but not said.

Poem of the Week 8/4/2008: from Requiem for a Friend

from Requiem for a Friend
(Paula Modersohn-Becker 1876-1907)

...That is what you understood: the ripe fruits.
You placed them in bowls there in front of you
and weighed out their heaviness with pigments.
And so you saw women as fruits too,
and saw the children likewise, driven
from inside into the forms of their being.
And you saw yourself in the end as a fruit,
removed yourself from your clothes, brought
yourself in front of the mirror, allowed yourself
within, as far as your gaze that stayed huge outside
and did not say: ‘I am that’: no, rather: ‘this is.’
So your gaze was finally free of curiosity
and so un-possessive, of such real poverty,
it no longer desired self: was sacred.
So I’ll remember you, as you placed yourself
within the mirror, deep within and far
from all. Why do you appear otherwise?
What do you countermand in yourself? Why
do you want me to believe that in the amber beads
at your throat there was still some heaviness
of that heaviness that never exists in the other-side
calm of paintings: why do you show me
an evil presentiment in your stance:
what do the contours of your body mean,
laid out like the lines on a hand,
so that I no longer see them except as fate?
Come here, to the candlelight. I’m not afraid
to look on the dead. When they come
they too have the right to hold themselves out
to our gaze, like other Things.
Come here: we’ll be still for a while.
See this rose, close by on my desk:
isn’t the light around it precisely as hesitant
as that over you: it too shouldn’t be here.
Outside in the garden, unmixed with me,
it should have remained or passed –
now it lives, so: what is my consciousness to it?
Don’t be afraid if I understand now, ah,
it climbs in me: I can do no other,
I must understand, even if I die of it.
Understand, that you are here. I understand.
Just as a blind man understands a Thing,
I feel your fate and do not know its name
Let us grieve together that someone drew you
out of your mirror. Can you still weep?
You cannot.

Rainer Maria Rilke 1909
trans. A.S. Kline

This poem is Rilke's reflection on the death of his friend, whom Adrienne Rich chose in the last selection. The entire poem may be found in a book or, in this translation at the following website:

http://www.tonykline.co.uk/PITBR/German/MoreRilke.htm#_Toc527606968

Unlike Rich's treatment, Rilke explores the play between living and dying, between presence and absence, the realtively sensed reality of our own lives, the suffering held in them, interiority...

Poem of the Week 7/28/2008: Paula Becker to Clara Westhoff

Paula Becker to Clara Westhoff

Paula Becker (1876-1907) and Clara Westhoff (1878-1954) became friends at Worpswede, an artist's colony near Bremen, Germany, summer 1899. In January 1900, spent a half-year together in Paris, where Paula painted and Clara studied sculpture with Rodin. In August they returned to Worpswede, and spent the next winter together in Berlin. In 1901, Clara married the poet Rainer Maria Rilke; soon after, Paula married the painted Otto Modersohn. She died in a hemorrhage after childbirth, murmuring, What a shame!

The autumn feels slowed down,
summer still holds on here, even the light
seems to last longer than it should
or maybe I'm using it to the thin edge.
The moon rolls in the air. I didn't want this child.
You're the only one I've told.
I want a child maybe, someday, but not now.
Otto has a calm, complacent way
of following me with his eyes, as if to say
Soon you'll have your hands full!
And yes, I will; this child will be mine
not his, the failures, if I fail
will all be mine. We're not good, Clara,
at learning to prevent these things,
and once we have a child it is ours.
But lately I feel beyond Otto or anyone.
I know now the kind of work I have to do.
It takes such energy! I have the feeling I'm
moving somewhere, patiently, impatiently,
in my loneliness. I'm looking everywhere in nature
for new forms, old forms in new places,
the planes of an antique mouth, let's say, among the leaves.
I know and do not know
what I am searching for.
Remember those months in the studio together,
you up to your strong forearms in wet clay,
I trying to make something of the strange impressions
assailing me—the Japanese
flowers and birds on silk, the drunks
sheltering in the Louvre, that river-light,
those faces...Did we know exactly
why we were there? Paris unnerved you,
you found it too much, yet you went on
with your work...and later we met there again,
both married then, and I thought you and Rilke
both seemed unnerved. I felt a kind of joylessness
between you. Of course he and I
have had our difficulties. Maybe I was jealous
of him, to begin with, taking you from me,
maybe I married Otto to fill up
my loneliness for you.
Rainer, of course, knows more than Otto knows,
he believes in women. But he feeds on us,
like all of them. His whole life, his art
is protected by women. Which of us could say that?
Which of us, Clara, hasn't had to take that leap
out beyond our being women
to save our work? or is it to save ourselves?
Marriage is lonelier than solitude.
Do you know: I was dreaming I had died
giving birth to the child.
I couldn't paint or speak or even move.
My child—I think—survived me. But what was funny
in the dream was, Rainer had written my requiem—
a long, beautiful poem, and calling me his friend.
I was your friend
but in the dream you didn't say a word.
In the dream his poem was like a letter
to someone who has no right
to be there but must be treated gently, like a guest
who comes on the wrong day. Clara, why don't I dream of you?
That photo of the two of us—I have it still,
you and I looking hard into each other
and my painting behind us. How we used to work
side by side! And how I've worked since then
trying to create according to our plan
that we'd bring, against all odds, our full power
to every subject. Hold back nothing
because we were women. Clara, our strength still lies
in the things we used to talk about:
how life and death take one another's hands,
the struggle for truth, our old pledge against guilt.
And now I feel dawn and the coming day.
I love waking in my studio, seeing my pictures
come alive in the light. Sometimes I feel
it is myself that kicks inside me,
myself I must give suck to, love...
I wish we could have done this for each other
all our lives, but we can't...
They say a pregnant woman
dreams her own death. But life and death
take one another's hands. Clara, I feel so full
of work, the life I see ahead, and love
for you, who of all people
however badly I say this
will hear all I say and cannot say.

Adrienne Rich 1975-1976

Ms. Rich is a famously feminist poet, and in this poem she chooses two of the German poet Ranier Maria Rilke's best friends to give voice to. In its essence, the poem is a meditation upon the female artistic role, as creator of children, art, and the self. I chose this poem because I've been reading a biography of Rilke, and it seems like such an interesting time to have been alive--at the turn of the century. To be an artist was to devote one's entire existence to the production of beauty, to the exploration of life, and, as Rodin embodied, to "work, and nothing else." And to be a woman at the same time most likely had its own exhilaration as well.

Paula Becker had such a strange death for an artist, to die in childbirth, in creation, to bleed to death...

Poem of the Week 7/19/2008: Introduction to Songs of Experience

Introduction

Hear the voice of the Bard!
Who Present, Past, & Future sees;
Whose ears have heard
The Holy Word
That walk'd among the ancient trees,

Calling the lapsed Soul,
And weeping in the evening dew;
That might controll
The starry pole,
And fallen, fallen light renew!

``O Earth, O Earth, return!
Arise from out the dewy grass;
Night is worn,
And the morn
Rises from the slumberous mass.

``Turn away no more;
Why wilt thou turn away?
The starry floor,
The wat'ry shore,
Is giv'n thee till the break of day.''

William Blake

why are we leaving and why are we here

Poem of the Week 7/11/2008: from Patmos

from Patmos

Near is
And difficult to grasp, the God.
But where danger threatens
That which saves from it also grows.
In gloomy places dwell
The eagles, and fearless over
The chasm walk the sons of the Alps
On bridges lightly built.
Therefore, since round about
Are heaped the summits of Time
And the most loved live near, growing faint
On mountains most separate,
Give us innocent water,
O pinions give us, with minds most faithful
To cross over and to return.

So I spoke, when more swiftly
Than ever I had expected,
And far as I nevcer thought
I should come, a Genius carried me
From my own house. There glimmered
In twilight, as I went,
The shadowy wood
And the yearning streams of
My homeland; no longer I knew those regions;
But soon, in a radiance fresh,
Mysteriously,
In the golden haze,
Quickly grown up,
With strides of the sun,
And fragrant with a thousand peaks,

Now Asia burst into flower for me, and dazzled
I looked for one thing there I might know, being unaccustomed
To those wide streets where down
from Tmolus drives
The golden-bedded Pactolus,
And Taurus stands, and Messogis,
And full of flowers the garden,
A quiet fire; but in the light, high up
There blossoms the silver snow;
And, witness to life immortal,
On inaccessible walls
Pristine the ivy grows, and supported
On living pillars, cedars and laurels,
There stand the festive,
The palaces built by gods.

Friedrich Holderlin
trans. Michael Hamburger

Poem of the Week 7/7/2008: from Plato's Phaedrus

from Phaedrus

SOCRATES: And I must say that this saying is not true, which teaches that when a lover is at hand the non-lover should be more favoured, because the lover is insane and the other sane. For if it were a simple fact that insanity is an evil, the saying would be true; but in reality the greatest of blessings come to us through madness, when it is sent as a gift of the gods. For the prophetess at Delphi and thepriestesses at Dodona when they have been mad have conferred many splendid benefits upon Greece both in private and in public affairs, but few or none when they have been in their right minds; and if we should speak of Sibyl and all the others who by prophetic inspiration have foretold many things to many persons and thereby made them fortunate afterwards, anyone can see that we should speak a long time. And it is worth white to adduce also the fact that those men of old who invented names thought that madness was neither shameful nor disgraceful... [a discourse follows on the connection between mania and mantike (which, significantly, uses the root mn, for mind or attention), both of which signify a higher form of prophecy than augury. I do not know exactly what this distinction means, but would guess that it bears on the root mn]... Moreover, when diseases and the greatest troubles have been visited upon certain families through some ancient guilt, madness has entered in and by oracular power has found a way of release for those in need, taking refuge in prayers and the service of the gods, and so, by purifications and sacred rites, he who has this madness is made safe for the present adn the after time, and for him who is rightly possessed of madness a release from present ills is found. And a third kind of possession and madness comes from the Muses. This takes hold upon a gentle and pure soul, arouses it and inspires it to songs and other poetry, and thus by adorning countless deeds of the ancients educates later generations. But he who without the divine madness comes to the doors of the Muses, confident that he will be a good poet by art, meets with no success, and the poetry of the sane man vanishes into nothingness before that of the inspired madmen.

Plato

I find this passage incredibly provocative, and also in line with much later work about poetic composition, notably Milton's discussion of the Muse visiting him at night. It's so hard to even begin to write about it; the necessity for madness appears in the works of Foucault, the hymns of the Rg Veda, the poetry of Blake and Rimbaud, and the fiction of Nerval, to name only a very few. What does it mean to go mad, and what is the divine form of madness Plato is talking about?

Well, in the dialog, Socrates lists three qualities to this madness, though he says that he might be able to put some more into operation. Fiurst, this madness is a form of prophecy, and has guided countless persons on small and large scales. Second, it has a kind of healing quality, the capacity to dispel not disease, but "ancient family guilt." And third, it produces the most majestic poetry in the world... it is a wellspring of poetic composition, of life and well-being.

But what is it? Later in the dialog, we learn that our "right minds" are the sane ones, but that those are merely the products of human life, and that the madness is really the divine half of things. What if madness is nothing other than the loosening of the corset strings of ego and partition, forgetting and deception? I would guess that it is not merely expression, the crazed release of appetite (which is, perhaps, only the other side of the human side of sanity), but rather the subtle and ranging release of dreams. Perhaps madness is freedom, madness is a river, is blissful release and flight. What if it is the complete release of any sense of control over our lives, or complete submission, whatever that means? I suppose then the right question is how might we begin to strive for this kind of holy insanity, a divine drunkenness? Is this what it is, even? Do we all have tastes of it? How crazy does one have to become?

Poem fo the Week 7/1/2008: To be or not to be

from Hamlet, Act III Scene I

To be, or not to be--that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them. To die, to sleep--
No more--and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to. 'Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep--
To sleep--perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. There's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th' oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th' unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprise of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action. -- Soft you now,
The fair Ophelia! -- Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remembered.

William Shakespeare

One of the most (if not the most) quoted lines of all of Shakespeare struck me the other morning as one of the central questions of all existence, TO be or not to be. That is the question. That is the question. Why? Because it begs of us to consider why we are here, whether life is worth living, what life is, what keeps us here... What does? Just a fear of the afterlife and of the unknown, which would be almost pathetic (though perhaps nonetheless accurate at times)...*

The suicide question is perhaps the explicit, and even intended, meaning of the passage, but when it flashed to me, it seemed to be asking about To Sleep, Perchance to Dream. Death as sleep, the unknowingness of sleep, and that waking up and living might really demand that we face the "slings and arrows of existence," the "thousand natural shocks" that come to us daily. And why choose to be that? Is it nobler to suffer those things, nobler in the mind? TO be or not to be. To awake and suffer, or to sleep and dream?


*
Thus conscience makes cowards of us all, facing the ills we have. And why does Shakespeare write about conscience here? It is so lost from modern language, modern understanding of man--guilt is something to be expiated, but perhaps it has a taste of the other side of knowledge, perhaps it knows something more than we think that we know? Who are we? And why are we here? Should we choose to stay)?

Poem of the Week 6/23/2008: i am

i am so glad and very
merely my fourth will cure
the laziest self of weary
the hugest sea of shore

so far your nearness reaches
a lucky fifth of you
turns people into eachs
and cowards into grow

our can'ts were born to happen
our mosts have died in more
our twentieth will open
wide a wide open door

we are so both and oneful
night cannot be so sky
sky cannot be so sunful
i am through you so i

e.e. cummings

Who is the "you" in this poem? oh oh beauty poem. I think this is one of the best poems ever written, and that it plays into two of my larger questions: what role do relationships play in the meaningful part of self-development, and also, why does the modern world have such an obsession with them? Is the modern world on to something, or rather does it have a taste, through this experience, of the "sunful" in another? Of the release?

Poem of the Week 6/16/2008: No Second Troy

No Second Troy

Why should I blame her that she filled my days
With misery, or that she would of late
Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,
Or hurled the little streets upon the great,
Had they but courage equal to desire?
What could have made her peaceful with a mind
That nobleness made simple as a fire,
With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
That is not natural in an age like this,
Being high and solitary and most stern?
Why, what could she have done being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?

W.B. Yeats

comments to come. sunshine calls.

Poem of the Week 6/9/2008: I Missed His Book, but I Read His Name

I Missed His Book, but I Read His Name

"The Silver Pilgrimage," by M. Anantanarayanan . . .
160 pages. Criterion. $3.95.
- The New York Times

Though authors are a dreadful clan,
To be avoided if you can,
I'd like to meet the Indian,
M. Anantanarayanan.

I picture him as short and tan,
We'd meet, perhaps, in Hindustan,
I'd say, with admirable elan,
"Ah, Anantanarayanan,

I've heard of you. The Times once ran
A notice on your novel, an
Unusual tale of God and Man."
And Anantanarayanan

Would seat me on a lush divan
And read his name--that sumptuous span
Of "a"s and "n"s more lovely than
"In Xanadu did Kubla Khan"--

Aloud to me all day. I plan
Henceforth to be an ardent fan
Of Anantanarayanan,
M. Anantanarayanan.

John Updike 1963

The last two poems of the week have been amusing ones, but reading Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel is helping me appreciate the value of laughter and literature. It's so easy for thought et. al. to take itself seriously, and especially so for poets. The very word, today, rings of sensitivity and sensibility, as if it has a kind of flourish to it. So I admire the work of John Updike, who often writes for the New Yorker, and tickles and delights his readers. A delight!

Poem of the Week 6/2/2008: The Dover Bitch

The Dover Bitch

A Criticism of Life: for Andrews Wanning

So there stood Matthew Arnold and this girl
With the cliffs of England crumbling away behind them,
And he said to her, 'Try to be true to me,
And I'll do the same for you, for things are bad
All over, etc., etc.'
Well now, I knew this girl. It's true she had read
Sophocles in a fairly good translation
And caught that bitter allusion to the sea,
But all the time he was talking she had in mind
The notion of what his whiskers would feel like
On the back of her neck. She told me later on
That after a while she got to looking out
At the lights across the channel, and really felt sad,
Thinking of all the wine and enormous beds
And blandishments in French and the perfumes.
And then she got really angry. To have been brought
All the way down from London, and then be addressed
As a sort of mournful cosmic last resort
Is really tough on a girl, and she was pretty.
Anyway, she watched him pace the room
And finger his watch-chain and seem to sweat a bit,
And then she said one or two unprintable things.
But you mustn't judge her by that. What I mean to say is,
She's really all right. I still see her once in a while
And she always treats me right. We have a drink
And I give her a good time, and perhaps it's a year
Before I see her again, but there she is,
Running to fat, but dependable as they come.
And sometimes I bring her a bottle of Nuit d' Amour.

Anthony Hecht

!!!!!

Poem of the Week 5/28/2008: Dover Beach

Dover Beach

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the A gaean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Matthew Arnold

Matthew Arnold is my guilty pleasure. I think most of the content of this posting will show that, so while I am qualifying it, I happily stick to my opinions.

Despite all of the reasons to stay clear of this poem, I know that I like it; it's one of those things literary critics could probably appreciate but perhaps not out and out like? Actually, why am I saying that? Some idea about not sticking to cliches, to the easily accessed poems, but I really do appreciate this poem for what it is, a rather complete whole reflecting upon meaning, faith, the presence of modern life against the way things were, and finally the position of relationships within everything, not to mention one of my favorite lines of all time (for some reason, it seems just perfect to me, though it's certainly not the cleverest or most spectacular):

the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling

I miss music in poetry. An introduction to a volume of Rilke I recently read mentioned that with the coming of more recent poetry, a drier, more "willful" and active style came into being, and the lofty notes of Arnold's work

Another note: Matthew Arnold was once found on a naked jaunt in a stream, and, when admonished by the onlooker, yelled back, "Is it impossible you find anything imperfect in the human form divine?" Who says things like that? O sweet spirit of delight!

Poem of the Week 5/18/2008: from Little Gidding

from "Little Gidding"

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always--
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of things shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

T.S. Eliot

thoughts later.
goodbye college!

Poem of the Week 5/12/2008: Little Elegy

Little Elegy

That madman from the eastern regions
Ho Chi-chang
wild as wind and river

first time I met him
at the capital
he called me "angel in exile"

oh how he loved his cup
and now he's dirt
under the pine trees

he pawned his gold turtle
to buy me wine

as I remember that
tears wet my scarf.

Li Po
Trans. David Young

I don't think that Li Po's poems need much explanation; each is like a small glass globe, taking in the world, managing it so that it fits in the palm of one's hand.

A friend was challenging me that poetry can be too intrusive, (she may be thinking of confessional poets, and also undeveloped poets), who smear their emotions on the page, sharing what is little more than a diary entry, meant for no person's eyes. The emo-music of poetry. I suppose it's a rare thing to find a poem that really manages its emotion, though I think that all good ones should; Li Po's certainly achieves this through such carefully selected detail! The poem is so sparing with its images that what arise to us are the gold turtle, the tears on the scarf, the cup loved ny the madman, the dirt he now is...

Poem of the Week 5/5/2008: Black and White Stone

Black and White Stone

Sima
seeds a stone
in the air
The stone rises
Inside
an old man is asleep
If his eyes open
the stone explodes
whirlwind of wings and beaks
above a woman
who flows
through the whiskers of autumn

The stone falls
burning
in the eye's plaza
flowering
in the palm of your hand
speaking
dangling
between your breasts
languages of water

The stone ripens
Inside
the seeds sing
They are seven
seven sisters
seven vipers
seven drops of jade
seven words
asleep
on a bed of glass
seven veins of water
in the center
of the stone
opened with a glance

Octavio Paz 1971
Trans. Eliot Weinberger

Perhaps what will help the understanding of this poem most is to know that it was based on a dream Paz had. The author's note is as follows:

"I was not a friend of Joseph Sima's, but in 1969 and 1970 I had the fortune of seeing him a few times always briefly, at the gallery Le Point Cardinal in Paris. His presence and conversation created an impression on me that was no less vivid than his painting. Two days before writing the poem and dreaming the dram that are the object of this note, I had recieved a letter from Claude Esteban, asking me for a text--perhaps, he hinted, a poem--in homage to Sima. I barely remember my dream, except for the image of an almost spherical stone--a planet? giant gourd? light bulb? fruit?--floating in the air, slowly changing color (but what were the colors that alternately lit up and grew dark?) spinning around itself and over a landscape of fine sand covered with eyes--the eyes of Marie Jose who slept at my side. The undulating yellow landscape had turned into eyes that watched the stone breathe, dilating and contracting, suspended in the air. Then I was woken by a voice that said "Sima siembra" ("Sima seeds"). I got up and wrote, almost embarassedly, the poem that Esteban had requested. Three days later I read in Le Monde that Sima had died. As the newspaper arrived in Mexico three days after publication in Paris, I had dreamed the dream and written the poem just when Sima died."

Oddly, the way Sima, somebody Paz obviously admired, will be remembered best through a poem of Paz's; it is at moments like this when I reflect on and trust Shakespeare's idea of art lasting longer than the person himself.

Some other thoughts that came to me are those pertaining to latin poetry; this poem's sensuality and mysterious but clear imagery seem, to me, like Nietzsche's woman. That is, they are beautiful and true yet lead one forward, their mystery never quite grasped, quite understood. Reading this poem, it is perhaps best not to treat it like something to be Understood, but rather something by which to be humbled, or something to marvel at, legs crossed on the floor.

Poem of the Week 4/28/2008: Death

Death

Death calls my dog by the wrong name.

A little man when I was small, Death grew

Beside me, always taller, but always

Confused as I have almost never been.

Confusion, like the heart, gets left behind

Early by a boy, abandoned the very moment

Futurity with her bare arms comes a-waltzing

Down the fire escapes to take his hand.

"Death," I said, "if your eyes were green

I would eat them."

For what are days but the furnace of an eye?

If I could strip a sunflower bare to its bare soul,

I would rebuild it:

Green inside of green, ringed round by green.

There'd be nothing but new flowers anymore.

Absolute Christmas.

"Death," I said, "I know someone, a woman,

Who sank her teeth into the moon."

For what are space and time but the inventions

Of sorrowing men? The soul goes faster than light.

Eating the moon alive, it leaves space and time behind.

The soul is forgiveness because it knows forgiveness.

And the knowledge is whirligig.

Whirligig taught me to live outwardly.

Shoe shop. . . pizza parlor. . . surgical appliances. . .

All left behind me with the hooey.

My soul is my home.

An old star hounded by old starlight.

"Death, I ask you, whose only story

Is the end of the story, right from the start,

How is it I remember everything

That never happened and almost nothing that did?

Was I ever born?"

I think of the suicides, all of them thriving,

Many of them painting beautiful pictures.

I think of boys and girls murdered

In their first beauty, now with children of their own.

And I have a church in my mind, set cruelly ablaze,

And then the explosion of happy souls

Into the greeny, frozen Christmas Eve air:

Another good Christmas, a white choir.

Beside each other still,

My Death and I are a magical hermit.

Dear Mother, I miss you.

Dear reader, your eyes are now green,

Green as they used to be, before I was born.

Donald Revell

Does anybody have questions about this poem? I think that I could answer them, but that it is a poem that you all could puzzle out yourselves; he uses some basic college facts (it is a very collegy poem; Mr. Revell is a professor at the University of Las Vegas-Nevada), including the old idea that men are stars, the philosophic lynchpin that our perception shapes the world around us, that rationality is a mill that cannot itself learn, that must be informed by impressions. I think that Mr. Revell has read Blake-- these philosophic undertones align with Blake's.

At any rate, meditations on death are, I think, one thing poetry still has going for it, and one thing that many of us could do to think about a little more. Here, the lamentation is a measured one. That is, the thought of endings, and the grief for life that accompanies death (death's bride?), is cut by the funny tone of lines like, "Absolute Christmas" and by the playful wonder at Death, as well. Death is somebody who grows, who gets things wrong, who is so confusing that he must be forgotten; I take this to mean that man must push the thought of death away because simply he does not know what happens...

Revell also brings up questions of life, and death of course must do; with death, he wonders what the quality of life truly is. Are we ever born, he wonders, into a real and true place, or are we always drawn outward to pizza parlors and worry about our health in doctor's offices? Death calls us home, in a way, bringing the interior world to light again, the soul, the true home, whatever that means.

What does death demand of us? And how does Revell address it?I am grateful that Revell addresses the reader at the end of the poem, for, as a friend and I were discussing yesterday, death must necessarily be about oneself, and about life in general--the great grief of living lifts its chin, everything held in the eyes of a good old black dog.

Poem of the Week 4/21/2008: Your Hair of Snakes and Flowers

Your Hair of Snakes and Flowers

When I saw one of those men touch your hair,

I heard for the first time in many a year

the ancient battle trumpets and I saw

the banners of an army winding off to war

and felt that blind power urging me to knock

him out with one punch, send him tumbling to the floor.

If nobody had held me back, stopped me,

I would—God help me—have killed him on the spot,

stomped out his blood, and spit in it. I'm sorry,

but you must be aware your winding hair

is different now, a hornets' nest, a snakes' lair!

Yes, like a ball of snakes in a flower basket, dear.

Håkan Sandell
Translated from the Swedish by Bill Coyle

There would be all sorts of fun and easy ways to discuss this poem as the staging of epic in the modern world, how it stands at an intersection of traditional heroic poetry and modern love lyric. Then one could discuss the further intertwining of poet and translator, one language moving into another language.

But that is poetic wrangling, and I can't speak Swedish to compare the two anyway, so it seems that the implication of these intersections is that the battle of epic is a battle in one's own head, in one's own life. The great drums sound as the beating of a heart, the armies are energy and fury running down the arm, pulling the hand into a fist...

A final note: I don't think that it would be as good of a poem without the final line, when the speaker turns to his wife or girlfriend, and addresses her caustically and politely. Yes dear, he says, you are so sweet and dangerous.

Poem of the Week 4/14/2008: The List of Famous Hats

The List of Famous Hats

Napoleon's hat is an obvious choice I guess to list as a famous hat, but that's not the hat I have in mind. That was his hat for show. I am thinking of his private bathing cap, which in all honesty wasn't much different than the one any jerk might buy at a corner drugstore now, except for two minor eccentricities. The first one isn't even funny: Simply it was a white rubber bathing cap, but too small. Napoleon led such a hectic life ever since his childhood, even farther back than that, that he never had a chance to buy a new bathing cap and still as a grown-up--well, he didn't really grow that much, but his head did: He was a pinhead at birth, and he used, until his death really, the same little tiny bathing cap that he was born in, and this meant that later it was very painful to him and gave him many headaches, as if he needed more. So, he had to vaseline his skull like crazy to even get the thing on. The second eccentricity was that it was a tricorn bathing cap. Scholars like to make a lot out of this, and it would be easy to do. My theory is simple-minded to be sure: that beneath his public head there was another head and it was a pyramid or something.

James Tate 1996

This is a prose poem by James Tate; I have become interested in prose poems of late, partially because it begs the question ever interesting to me: what makes a poem? Why do we recognize some language as poetic and some not? Is there a cultural locus of this? I, at least, feel that a prose poem like this couldn't really exist before the modern age, for only now are we so chatty and cluttered that we have to abandon form, or rather that we can't appreciate more formal aspects of lanuage or poetry. Perhaps that's unfair. Well, it's probably true in many cases and not in others, I suppose.

My favorite definition for poetry was set forth by Howard Nemerov, himself an excellent poet. "Poetry," he writes, "is right language." So any proper description would make poetic language; clever style is thus not necessarily poetry (though is often counted as such), nor is high form. It has to be apt language. What does this mean? Oh, I hesitate to provide answers, so here, instead, are a few thoughts. Compression, paradox, symbolism (provided it doesn't symbolize something made up, like creativity or "sense of place," for example), and musicality often convey more of a thing, can lead us to the thing itself... This is probably a lot of quibbling. Does anybody have any thoughts, or is this something that it does not do to think about; perhaps, like the question of music, it's a case of: we know it when we hear it. That's satisfactory for me.

I hope you enjoy this poem. Funny poetry is a real gift of existence.

Poem of the Week 4/7/2008: The Third Century

The Third Century

The corn was orient and immortal wheat, which
never should be reaped, nor was ever sown. I

thought it had stood from everlasting to everlasting.

The dust and stones of the street were as precious

as gold : the gates were at first the end of the world.

The green trees when I saw them first through one

of the gates transported and ravished me, their

sweetness and unusual beauty made my heart to 

leap, and almost mad with ecstasy, they were such 

strange and wonderful things. The Men ! O what

venerable and reverend creatures did the aged

seem ! Immortal Cherubims !    And young men

glittering and sparkling Angels, and maids strange

seraphic pieces of life and beauty ! Boys and girls

tumbling in the street, and playing, were moving

jewels. I knew not that they were born or should

die ; But all things abided eternally as they were in

their proper places. Eternity was manifest in the 

Light of the Day, and something infinite behind

everything appeared : which talked with my

expectation and moved my desire.  The city seemed

to stand in Eden, or to be built in Heaven. The 

street were mine, the temple was mine, the people

were mine, their clothes and gold and silver were

mine, as much as their sparkling eyes, fair skins and

ruddy faces.    The skies were mine, and so were the

sun and moon and stars, and all the World was

mine ; and I the only spectator and enjoyer of it.

I knew no churlish properties, nor bounds, nor

divisions : but all properties and divisions were

mine : all treasures and the possessors of them. So

that with much ado I was corrupted, and made to 

learn the dirty devices of this world. Which now I 

unlearn, and become, as it were, a little child again

that I may enter into the Kingdom of God.

Thomas Traherne, from Centuries of Meditation

Though technically "prose," this work by Thomas Traherne stands in my "Poetry is right language" category. For it is certainly some of the most marvelous and remarkable language I have ever come across, at once simple and shining, as hard cut and as glittering as a gem. I steal that image from this "century." A Metaphysical poet, Traherne was most primarily a pastor and member of several holy orders in England in the mid to late 17th Century. I suppose it is unnecessary to write too much about this passage, for it stands as something to be slowly savored and tasted. However, it might be fruitful to think about the way the state of childhood works in this poem, and how it might open up into a much greater redemptive state; what is childhood, and why is it connected with the divine, the infinite? How is Traherne entering the Kingdom of Heaven now, though this childlike state? Happy reading.

Poem of the Week 3/31/2008: Death the Hypocrite

Death the Hypocrite

You claim to loathe me, yet everything you prize
Brings you within the reach of my embrace.
I see right through you though I have no eyes;
You fail to know me even face to face.

Your kiss, your car, cocktail and cigarette,
Your lecheries in fancy and in fact,
Unkindness you manage to forget,
Are ritual prologue to the final act

And certain curtain call. Nickels and dimes
Are but the cold coin of a realm that's mine.
I'm the acute accountant of your crimes
As of your real estate. Bristlecone pine,

Whose close-ringed chronicles mock your regimen
Of jogging, vitamins, and your strange desire
To disregard your assigned three-score and ten,
Yields to my absolute instrument of fire.

You know me, friend, as Faustus, Baudelaire,
Boredom, Self-Hatred, and, still more, Self-Love.
Hypocrite lecteur, mon sembable, mon frere,
Acknowledge me. I fit you like a glove.

Anthony Hecht 1995

Hecht's note: "Some bristlecone pines are the oldest living things on earth . . . a total of seventeen bristlecone pines have been found which, still living and growing, are over 4,000 years old, the oldest some 4,600 years old." Andreas Feininger, from his book Trees.
Also, the line, "Hypocrite lecteur...frere" comes from TS Eliot's "The Waste Land"

This poem springs from a series of "Death" poems by Anthony Hecht, including, Death Demure, Death the Oxford Don, Death the Society Lady, Death the Poet, Death the Judge, Death the Mexican Revolutionary, Death the Whore, Death the Copperplate Printer, and even a set of nursery rhymes about death. This last one is a delicious poem you can check out here:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=179071

"Death the Hypocrite" is titled after its narrator, the death that results from hypocrisy, or the death that deals in hypocrisy. It demands us to ask, what has death become in the modern world? Why would somebody try to avoid the question of death, and how? All of the little gimmicks modern man uses to put off the reality of death, that "certain curtain call," are actually tokens of death's appearance, his already having settled in. For fear of death is consciousness of death, is it not? To repress the reality of death is to slide under the need to come to any sort of reckoning with one's life, for life seems endless, formless, interminable. But to not terminate, ever, to simply mist and fritter one's life away, what kind of life is this, Hecht's poem begs us to ask. Indeed, he leaves us almost nowhere to turn for solace, for our small attempts to "preserve life"--jogging, vitamins, etc--shrink to nothing against the 4,600 rings on the bristlecone pine.