Poem of the Week 8/25/2012: Keaton

Keaton

I will be good; I will be good.
I have set my small jaw for the ages
and nothing can distract me from
solving the appointed emergencies
even with my small brain
— witness the diameter of my hat band
and the depth of the crown of my hat.

I will be correct; I know what it is to be a man.
I will be correct or bust.
I will love but not impose my feelings.
I will serve and serve
with lute or I will not say anything.

If the machinery goes, I will repair it.
If it goes again I will repair it again.
My backbone

through these endless etceteras painful.

No, it is not the way to be, they say.
Go with the skid, turn always to the leeward,
and see what happens, I ask you, now.

I lost a lovely smile somewhere,
and many colors dropped out.
The rigid spine will break, they say—
Bend, bend.

I was made at right angles to the world
and I see it so. I can only see it so.
I do not find all this absurdity people talk about.
Perhaps a paradise, a serious paradise where lovers hold hands
and everything works.
I am not sentimental.

 Elizabeth Bishop

This poem is meant to be taken contrapuntally to the one that will follow tomorrow, as a vision of the human will, its force, tension, and sadness, in this one form. There's a lot more to say on this, tomorrow. I find it very touching and important, an impetus to go lightly, since it is so restrained.

Poem of the Week 6/27/2012: Sneeze Ode

Sneeze Ode

Here comes the sneeze with its end-of-the-world,
mobster-motor, a-gog cog.
You better not be holding nothing full,
better not got hurt ribs.
Rip right through your billet-doux, weed-whip
your honeysuckle before any bees get sip.
Unlike its wussy brother hiccups, its argument
is politics not music, neither poetical like the cough,
if there's blood it's on the wall
not crumpled in no hark-a-lark hankie.
Flu's coup but too like the wow of wooing,
there's nothing you can do, not the court
stenographer, not the pilot or his co--
so think about that next time you're landing in O'Hare.
Even the cathedral's got a crack in it's lunette,
there's a demon in the lemon, semen
in the seamen and out out it's got to come.
Opposite of hum-drum, nowadays
it's the best gods can do for visitation,
no shower of gold coin but a cold draft,
no whole swan but a feather tickle to the nose
then kerBOOM your body's not your own,
its shrapnel in orbit for years and years
before burning up in the atmosphere.

Dean Young 2006

Some notes about Dean Young's lithe and electric postmodern ode.

The first line opens with the announcement of the coming of the sneeze; this pulls directly into mind Yeats' poem "The Second Coming," with its line, "and what rough beast, its hour come round at last / Slouches toward Bethlehem to be Born." Yeats' poem addresses the human at a time when God has dropped away, and when the world is changing from its ancient order.

Also standing behind this poem, I think, is Philip Larkin's poem the old Fools - which reads - (At death you break up: the bits that were you / Start speeding away from each other for ever / With no one to see). And of course there is the entire history of Odes - Keats' comes famously to mind, Ode on a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn, To Autumn, etcetera.


What do these references do? Well - they inform the backdrop of the poem - it's as if all of literature is a stage, and the plays are composed of poems / scenes. This play opens with odes, moves to Yeats, Philip Larkin, and finally Sneeze Ode. 


So what is the sneeze ode? The poem's first half focuses on the sneeze itself, mocking Yeats and weaving in the strains of apocalypse, too. Its darkness is a bit hidden, I think, beneath its cheerful exterior. The darkness of blood in a handkerchief is probably the reference to Keats, who died of Tuberculosis. The sneeze is also dangerous, like Yeats' beast. It could crash your Chicago plane. This is one aspect of the sneeze - a cheerful, energetic destruction.


The second half I find the most interesting... in it, the sneeze seems to be repeated - a fundamental feature of our lives - the sudden explosion from within, whatever that internal infernal quality (be it the demon in the lemon or semen in the seaman) that cannot help but explode, this repeated something is what we are meant to inherit. This vision of the human of the receptacle or actor of phenomena that happen throughout all scales of life - the vessel of eternal recurrence let's call it - seems to me disturbingly religious. Or if not religious than simply disturbing, in that it perturbs our calm sense of sovereignty over ourselves, and places us much more in relation with the natural order of things - Dean Young really gives us the sense that we are natural and as temporal and eternally recurring as nature when he writes: "kerBOOM your body's not your own, / its shrapnel in orbit for years and years / before burning up in the atmosphere." 

Poem of the Week 4/24/2012: London

London

I wander thro' each charter'd street,
Near where the charter'd Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,
In every Infant's cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forg'd manacles I hear.

How the Chimney-sweeper's cry
Every black'ning Church appalls;
And the hapless Soldier's sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls.

But most thro' midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlot's curse
Blasts the new born Infant's tear,
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.

William Blake 1790

Not sure why I've been enjoying these political poems so much; "London" is an early sister-poem to Shelley's "England in 1819." Though nearly thirty years apart, both describe in prophetic voice (thanks Mr. Lehmann-Haupt for that one) the state of the political climate and the personal climate. It is as if the voice, in booming about the state of things as it is, begins to weave together the micro and macro cosms at play. In London, especially, Blake reveals that the slavery people experience is, indeed, internal rather than merely external. External forms, instead, result from the internal.

Indeed, Blake is the master of writing how internal processes like repression swing back out into our social forms and institutions. For example, marriage as the slavery of love results in the curse of the harlot in the final stanza. If humans were more free with their loving, their laws, and their possessions of one another, of thoughts, of their susceptibility to laws and law-making, command and control forms of power, or perhaps even more intelligent with these laws, internally, then perhaps we would create a more free world.

I have a LOT more ranty thoughts here about the nature of change, but I do want to note quickly how the cycle of Romantic poetry may register a past inability to change in historical consciousness, and link the French Revolution to that in Tahrir as well. With the French Revolution, for example, the country went from an idealistic, screaming freedom to the sudden blood-drenched Terror to Napoleon's reign. Rebecca Comay reads Hegel as interpreting France's revolution as failing as such because it never went through a spiritual revolution; the political and social forms changed, but the internal forms did not. What will happen with Tahrir Square? Will we have a similar problem of a revolution without a heart, or a heart without a revolution?

Indeed, I think of the first stanza as I walk through Harvard Square sometimes, perhaps because it looks something like London, and perhaps because that particular square, out of many in the city, brings together the most powerful and the most bereft. It punctures the divisions established around each and instead reveals the mind-forged manacles at play in each. The ennui and pain of the bourgeoisie, the hunger and addiction of the homeless... And in this strange time warp, still nothing changes in the world. Nothing, nothing changes in all the world...

Poem of the Week 4/18/2012: A Green Crab's Shell

A Green Crab's Shell

Not, exactly, green:
closer to bronze
preserved in kind brine,

something retrieved
from a Greco-Roman wreck,
patinated and oddly

muscular. We cannot
know what his fantastic
legs were like--

though evidence
suggests eight
complexly folded

scuttling works
of armament, crowned
by the foreclaws'

gesture of menace
and power. A gull's
gobbled the center,

leaving this chamber
--size of a demitasse--
 open to reveal

a shocking, Giotto blue.
Though it smells
of seaweed and ruin,

this little traveling case
comes with such lavish lining!
Imagine breathing

surrounded by
the brilliant rinse
of summer's firmament.

What color is
the underside of skin?
Not so bad, to die,

 if we could be opened
into this--
if the smallest chambers

of ourselves,
similarly,
revealed some sky.

Mark Doty 1993

One of my very favorite poems, Doty offers us an artifact so delicate that it ends up encompassing the vast sky, the ruins of the ages, a traveling case, and the firmament...

Poem of the Week 4/8/2012: England in 1819

Sonnet: England in 1819

 An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king,--
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who
Through public scorn,--mud from a muddy spring,--
Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know,
But leech-like to their fainting country cling,
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow,--
A people starved and stabbed in the untilled field,--
An army, which liberticide and prey
Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield,--
Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay;
Religion Christless, Godless--a book sealed;
A Senate, Time's worst statute unrepealed,--
Are graves, from which a glorious Phantom may
Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.

Percy Bysshe Shelley 1819

Who knew Shelley was such a radical? Such a revolutionary?  (aren't poets supposed to be dusty and locked in books these days?) Probably most Shelley scholars could have told one otherwise, and many casual readers, but I constantly find his vigor surprising. One can feel breathing through the poem the spirit of revolution, the true and vital political longing for change, as keen as many feel now. Indeed, it mimics that breath he hopes comes out of the "graveyard" of politics; he once said that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world," and in this case he may be legislating, in a way.

A bit of background - as Shelley is writing this poem, George III, the king of England, has literally been mad since 1810. This madness was the final stroke of a reign than spanned the American Independence (losing the Americas), the French Revolution and the subsequent Terror under Robespierre, and finally wars against Napoleon for more than a decade.

Just a few suggestions of a very few things to pay attention to in this poem: Shelley's diction - (listen to the consonants in the opening line), to his syntax (try to figure out the sentence) - I must leave it to this very scant reading, perhaps to be returned to at a later date.

Good evening, viva la revolucion!

Poem of the Week 3/21/2012: Having a Coke With You

Having a Coke with You

is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne
or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona
partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian
partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt
partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches
partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary
it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still
as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it
in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth
between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles

and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint
you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them

I look
at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world
except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick
which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together the first time
and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism
just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or
at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me
and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them
when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank
or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully
as the horse

it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience
which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I am telling you about it

Frank O’Hara


This may be one of the sweetest love poems of all modern time; simple and direct and flowing, it offers a particular picture of delight that seems just right to share during the heat and sweat of an early warm spell in Cambridge MA. It showed up in some readings in a class about queer theory - it's optimism, Jose Munoz argues, is what ought to be offered by being "queer," which is, I read, anything beyond the box of the normal, the habitual, the quotidien dull round... What is explosive and fresh! What snaps us into full and vibrant attention, flowing to that delicious other, and the world and possibilities expand; this is, he argues, the leaning in of Utopia, the faintest glimmer and promise. One should just as much say that these glimmerings light up life, make meaning, may be the revolution themselves.

Of course, there are the references to the meaning of art and beauty, the question of a lived and felt experience over that of the work of art, the way the work of art is itself propagated (Elaine Scarry writes that beauty begets beauty, a clicking brook of associations from one act of beauty to another - "this is why I am telling you about it," writes O'Hara), and these are also worth noting. And the poem takes up the great modern project of voicing the everyman, incarnated essentially by Wordsworth back in the day... Offering, alongside, another system of values - to seize the everyday! To live by loving every delicious detail of what is there - tulips and trees and coca cola and lover... Happy hot spring boston and beyond!

Poem of the Week 3/15/2012: God's Grandeur

God's Grandeur

THE WORLD is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; *
 It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil **
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?***
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
 Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
 Because the Holy Ghost over the bent *
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

* "All things therefore are charged with love, are charged with God and if we know how to touch them give off sparks and take fire, yield drops and flow, ring and tell of him." The Sermons and Devotional Writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins
** ll. 3, "oil." Crushed from olives. An early version read: 'like an oozing oil / pressed."
*** "Reck" means to pay heed to, to attend to.
* ll. 13-14. See Genesis 1:2 and Milton, Paradise Lost, i. 19-22. GMH also observed the manner in which the sea 'warped to the round of the world' in his journals.

Genesis 1:2, KJV - "And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters."

Paradise Lost, 1. 16-26:
And chiefly Thou O Spirit, that dost prefer
Before all Temples th' upright heart and pure,
Instruct me, for Thou know'st; Thou from the first
Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread [ 20 ]
Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss
And mad'st it pregnant: What in me is dark
Illumin, what is low raise and support;
That to the highth of this great Argument
I may assert Eternal Providence, [ 25 ]
And justifie the wayes of God to men.



One thing I find absolutely remarkable about this poem is the manner in which Hopkins blends the humble lyric with the Biblical and epic traditions - he brings a vast theology into earth, neither sacrificing the symbol of the dove, the olive, the Holy Ghost, or the genesis of all things, nor the humble things of the world in his poem - shook foil, a feathery wing, an olive.

It's fairly clear that the poem proceeds in three parts - the first two in the first stanza, and the last in the last.

To open, Hopkins clearly likens God to an electric charge - god is in everything, like some kind of static if only we reach out, that charge could enter us, give us a Zap. I suppose this is, in a way, radical, at least to blunt conceptions of God as other from this earth, an absolute being unknowable and who, perhaps, lives in heaven. This God, instead, is a force, the electricity shining from a beast's fur (Rilke), the static in your sock (there's a poem about this... whose name escapes me), the heat lightning in the distance, a shock, a shock, any shock!

About this holy fire, Hopkins offers both a prediction, "it will flame out," and a condition for it, as the glory of God, "Gathers to greatness." We can feel the energy in these statements, in their directness, their prophetic voice, and in the complex construction of the first three lines. They are each two pieces, in a way; the first line contains an internal slant rhyme between "charged" and "God," offering the drum beat, as well, of the D and G sounds that mark these first three lines. Lines 2-4, then, start the poem's beat with consonant-heavy, pounding, rhyming couplet, each split into two.

Hopkins does not let us rest, however; he stops us abruptly with the enjambment from "ooze of oil / Crushed," and then the question composed of single syllable words, "Why do men then now not reck his rod?" (ll. 4). This line taps out a new subject for the poem and announcing its next section - what has gone wrong, and why people aren't constantly struck by this grandeur. Moreover, the ambiguity of the antecedent for "his," it could be God or man, raise the question of whose self or piece of self really allows access to the divine. Does man have the rod - and we are abandoning ourselves? Is it the lightning rod of the Almighty? Perhaps the ambiguity actually signals that it is both, and the slippage between the antecedents is truly the best way of encapsulating the paradox of the touch between man and God - it is neither one nor the other - when this rod is activated, perhaps typical conceptions and sensations of self dissolve, and the categories slip from human to divine, charged with grandeur and glory.

Perhaps the following lines, however, make the case that this rod ought more properly be divine, since the world, when smeared with man, and smelling of him, prevents the holy from shining through us, "like shook foil."Indeed, perhaps modernity - the shoe, economy, getting and spending (wordsworth) - now protects us from these shocks, so that we no longer feel that cosmic electricity, of an energy but half our own... Hopkins, as ever, supports his statements with charged language - the repeated sssss sounds hiss with disdain, and the rhymes replace the holy with the fallen - "soil" and "toil" replace the divine metaphor of "oil," and "shod" and "trod" replace, of course, "God."

And yet, Hopkins almost cheerfully adds (perhaps one hallmark of disdain is the freedom it suggests from the thing disdained - it is below one, and the narrator of the poem, then, is above the soil and toil of commerce and materialism...), "for all this, nature is never spent; / There lives the dearest freshness deep down things" (ll. 9). Despite smears, the world is ever fresh; he expands this idea in a complex metaphor to close the poem. The metaphor is one of the sun coming up over "the brown brink eastward," but this metaphor is far vaster than we might think. God is presented as the Sun, but also as the Holy Ghost leaning over the deep (as the notes say, connoting Genesis and also Milton, bringing the weight of epic poetic memory to the poem, stirring the pots of feeling in hearts using beloved and old works from which the glory of God shines forth). And this ghost is similarly a dove, a natural symbol, an angelic symbol, the dove rescuing Noah from his time asea... Hopkins' image brings rising behind it a chorus of associations from sacred and poetic texts from thousands of years, a chorus of angels rising behind it - his poem thus mirrors the glory of God shining forth as from shook foil, the charge that rests in all things - the freshness and innocence and deep, childlike love for the divine, and the lightningshock of delight one feels upon reading it.

Poem of the Week 3/6/2012: from Romeo and Juliet

MERCUTIO:
O, then I see Queen Mab hath been with you.
She is the fairies' midwife, and she comes
In shape no bigger than an agate stone
On the forefinger of an alderman,
Drawn with a team of little atomies
Over men's noses as they lie asleep;
Her wagon spokes made of long spinners' legs,
The cover, of the wings of grasshoppers;
Her traces, of the smallest spider web;
Her collars, of the moonshine's wat'ry beams;
Her whip, of cricket's bone; the lash, of film;
Her wagoner, a small grey-coated gnat,
Not half so big as a round little worm
Pricked from the lazy finger of a maid;
Her chariot is an empty hazelnut,
Made by the joiner squirrel or old grub,
Time out o' mind the fairies' coachmakers.
And in this state she gallops night by night
Through lovers' brains, and then they dream of love;
O'er courtiers' knees, that dream on curtsies straight;
O'er lawyers' fingers, who straight dream on fees;
O'er ladies' lips, who straight on kisses dream,
Which oft the angry Mab with blisters plagues,
Because their breaths with sweetmeats tainted are.
Sometimes she gallops o'er a courtier's nose,
And then dreams he of smelling out a suit;
And sometimes comes she with a tithe-pig's tail
Tickling a parson's nose as 'a lies asleep,
Then dreams he of another benefice.
Sometimes she driveth o'er a soldier's neck,
And then dreams he of cutting foreign throats,
Of breaches, ambuscadoes, Spanish blades,
Of healths five fathom deep; and then anon
Drums in his ear, at which he starts and wakes,
And being thus frighted, swears a prayer or two
And sleeps again. This is that very Mab
That plats the manes of horses in the night
And bakes the elflocks in foul sluttish hairs,
Which once untangled much misfortune bodes.
This is the hag, when maids lie on their backs,
That presses them and learns them first to bear,
Making them women of good carriage.
This is she!


William Shakespeare  from Romeo and Juliet


A few fundamental puzzles for this passage -


Who is Queen Mab and what does she represent? (She is a midwife for faeries, or at least so says Mercutio. She does not actually seem to give birth to anything in the poem... so is this her primary role?)


Is she just some mischievous character or fantastic being? Does she have a psychological function? What does she reveal about the people that she encounters? Is she good for them or bad for them?


And why this prolonged discussion of her chariot in the beginning - does it have a function, or is it mere decoration? Does it matter that she's small?

Poem of the Week 1/28/2012: No Possum, No Sop, No Tears

No Possum, No Sop, No Taters

He is not here, the old sun,
As absent as if we were asleep.

The field is frozen. The leaves are dry.
Bad is final in this light.

In this bleak air the broken stalks
Have arms without hands. They have trunks

Without legs or, for that, without heads.
They have heads in which a captive cry

Is merely the moving of a tongue.
Snow sparkles like eyesight falling to earth,

Like seeing fallen brightly away.
The leaves hop, scraping on the ground.

It is deep January. The sky is hard.
The stalks are firmly rooted in ice.

It is in this solitude, a syllable,
Out of these gawky flitterings,

Intones its single emptiness,
The savagest hollow of winter-sound.

It is here, in this bad, that we reach
The last purity of the knowledge of good.

The crow looks rusty as he rises up.
Bright is the malice in his eye...

One joins him there for company,
But at a distance, in another tree.

Wallace Stevens 




This one's about winter. 

Poem of the Week 1/22/2011: "Of Bronze - and Blaze"

319

Of Bronze -- and Blaze --
The North -- Tonight --
So adequate -- it forms --
So preconcerted with itself --
So distant -- to alarms --
An Unconcern so sovereign
To Universe, or me --
Infects my simple spirit
With Taints of Majesty --
Till I take vaster attitudes --
And strut upon my stem --
Disdaining Men, and Oxygen,
For Arrogance of them --

My Splendors, are Menagerie --
But their Completeless Show
Will entertain the Centuries
When I, am long ago,
An Island in dishonored Grass --
Whom none but Dasies -- know.

Emily Dickinson

Poem of the Week 1/15/2012: from Song of Myself

5 
I believe in you my soul, the other I am must not abase itself to you, 
And you must not be abased to the other.

Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat, 
Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not even the best, 
Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice.

I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning, 
How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turn'd over upon me, 
And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart, 
And reach'd till you felt my beard, and reach'd till you held my feet.

Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth, 
And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own, 
And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own, 
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers, 
And that a kelson of the creation is love, 
And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields, 
And brown ants in the little wells beneath them, 
And mossy scabs of the worm fence, heap'd stones, elder, mullein and poke-weed.

6 
A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; 
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.

I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.

 

Walt Whitman, from Leaves of Grass

Always worth a read.

Poem of the Week 1/8/2011: Beyond the End

Beyond the End

In 'nature' there's no choice --
                                              flowers
swing their heads in the wind, sun & moon
      are as they are. But we seem
almost to have it (not just
      available death)

It's energy: a spider's thread: not to
'go on living' but to quicken, to activate: extend:
      Some have it, they force it --
with work or laughter or even
      the act of buying, if that's
all they can lay hands on--

             the girls crowding the stores, where light,
                  color, solid dreams are - what gay
             desire! It's their festival,
                  ring game, wassail, mystery.

It has no grace like that of
the grass, the humble rhythms, the
falling & rising of leaf and star;
it's barely
a constant. Like salt:
take it or leave it

The 'hewers of wood' & so on; every damn
craftsman has it while he's working
                            but it's not
a question of work: some
shine with it, in repose. Maybe it is
response, the will to respond--('reason
can give nothing at all/like
response to desire') maybe
a gritting of teeth, to go
just that much further, beyond the end
beyond whatever ends: to begin, to be, to defy.

Denise Levertov


"Beyond the end" announces its subject right away: the matter of choice. Levertov does not present a cosmology or a model of the mind so much as an expansive call to action, to energy - exuberance is beauty, blake says, and this poem seems to say so as well. In her zeal to extend energy everywhere, the poet even includes girls shopping as an expression of will, some kind of old English wassail, festival.

The poem addresses the question: is there something that makes humans more than natural, more than flowers swaying to some stimulus, rooted and planted? Perhaps, she suggests, we should rather be as unattached as a spider flying on its thread, flinging ourselves into the blue. And then to refine that image, carry forward "the will to respond," a kind of readiness, or axis perhaps, that holds one together inside. Water pressure inside, the power of oceans concentrated, fiercely joyfully waiting.