Child Prodigies Bother Me

It's time for another list poem, but this one feels different, somehow.

In Fact

Susan Hutton

The first time I see my daughter. Yes. The moment later, 
when I first see my son. Precisely. The two weeks they are apart 
in the hospital. The day they both come home. Of course. 
Mason jars of peaches on the cellar shelf. The late February 
       rainstorm 
and then the smell. Undoubtedly. The first mornings we hear the 
      birds come back. 
The time between the touch and its arrival in the brain. Certainly. 
The years when Norgay and Hillary refused to say which of them 
had reached the summit first. Yes. The distracted way the girl 
smooths her skirt. Exactly. That 
mathematically there are no 
     beginnings or endings.
That is just it. The way water clouds when it cools.
After ten years, Michael lowers himself tenderly over my body 
and says we have so many years left. Visiting Michelle that winter, 
Paul teasing me about my canned tomato soup.
You only get to eat so many meals.
Remembering that afternoon fifteen years later.
Wondering if he was thinking of killing himself even then.




The connections and entanglements, neurons firing wildly. Everything is connected, you just have to walk out far enough to see it.


It's nice, too, that poems can be dark without being gothic. The sense of nostalgia slowly seeps into a mild dread, especially after several rereadings.


And then there's the disembodied voice of the speaker saying words of affirmation - it comes across a little like HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey, or the soothing voice of a nurse who knows you don't have much longer.


I did a little biographical search, but there's not much I can find about Ms. Hutton that's readily available, except that she lives in Michigan, has an MFA and had her first book published in 2007, when she was nearly 40. I don't know why that satisfies me, really - plenty of poets did their best work before they hit 27, that magical dying age for artsy types. 


But I like the idea that prodigies and wünderkinder aren't inherently better than someone who's bided their time, honed their craft and then released it. So somebody can play Bach at 8 - terrific. Is it any better than if they're 78? Frankly, I like to know my art has been marinated in some hard-earned wisdom before I've got to bite through the gristle and fat to get at the good stuff. It makes me feel more assured that it's all going to be worth it, both the reading and the writing.

Saturday Silly: Wernam-Hogg Lives!

So once again, it's Saturday and time for more hijinx. Here's a poem that's not great but not horrendous, either.

Slough

John Betjeman

Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough!
It isn't fit for humans now,
There isn't grass to graze a cow.
Swarm over, Death!


Come, bombs and blow to smithereens
Those air -conditioned, bright canteens,
Tinned fruit, tinned meat, tinned milk, tinned beans,
Tinned minds, tinned breath.


Mess up the mess they call a town-
A house for ninety-seven down
And once a week a half a crown
For twenty years.


And get that man with double chin
Who'll always cheat and always win,
Who washes his repulsive skin
In women's tears:


And smash his desk of polished oak
And smash his hands so used to stroke
And stop his boring dirty joke
And make him yell.


But spare the bald young clerks who add
The profits of the stinking cad;
It's not their fault that they are mad,
They've tasted Hell.


It's not their fault they do not know
The birdsong from the radio,
It's not their fault they often go
To Maidenhead


And talk of sport and makes of cars
In various bogus-Tudor bars
And daren't look up and see the stars
But belch instead.


In labour-saving homes, with care
Their wives frizz out peroxide hair
And dry it in synthetic air
And paint their nails.


Come, friendly bombs and fall on Slough
To get it ready for the plough.
The cabbages are coming now;
The earth exhales.




It reminds me somewhat of Eliot's choruses from "The Rock," especially




In the City, we need no bells:
Let them waken the suburbs.
I journeyed to the suburbs, and there I was told:
We toil for six days, on the seventh we must motor
To Hindhead, or Maidenhead.
If the weather is foul we stay at home and read the papers.
In industrial districts, there I was told
Of economic laws.
In the pleasant countryside, there it seemed
That the country now is only fit for picnics.
And the Church does not seem to be wanted
In country or in suburbs; and in the town
Only for important weddings.




But the real reason I brought it up is this:









It's also pretty awesome that "The Office" actually used a throwaway reference to bogus-Tudor bars as a punch line. Earlier in the show Tim (Jim Halpert UK) discusses the night life in Slough and how there were only two or three places to go for a drink.


"There was, oh my God, a themed nightclub called Henry the Eighth's. This was incredible. It had the Anne Bol-inn Alley, this is true, as you went into the loo, there was a sign that said mind your head, nice, and underneath someone had written 'And don’t get your Hampton Court.'"


High culture is pop culture is high culture is pop culture is high...

Candy Is Dandy, but Liquor Is Quicker

Today a liquor store opened up two blocks from my house, I picked something up on my way home from work. So now I'm sitting at my desk drinking a Fonseca Bin #27 Port, straight from the vinhateiros of Porto, Portugal. I burned my mouth yesterday when I taste-tasted some reheated borscht, so I feel a little sad I'm kind of wasting it.

But it's still pretty excellent. Here's a little something about wine, from the Chinese.

Third Poem on Wine

Li Po

Third month in Ch’ang-an city,

Knee-deep in a thousand fallen flowers.

Alone in Spring who can stand this sadness?

Or sober see transient things like these?

Long life or short, rich or poor,

Our destiny’s determined by the world.

But drinking makes us one with life and death,

The Myriad Things we can barely fathom.

Drunk, Heaven and Earth are gone.

Stilled, I clutch my lonely pillow.

Forgetting that the Self exists,

That is the mind’s greatest joy.

One thing I appreciate about a lot of Chinese and Japanese poetry is that there's a real absence of self in the poem. It makes for far less pretension and grandeur. Compare that verse proselytizing drunkenness to, say, Baudelaire or Beat poets. There it's all about what incredible geniuses they are for drinking themselves to a stupor. 

Here, it's not about the self. It's about removing oneself from the self. Can't say it's a goal I admire particularly, but it does prove an interesting diversion. 

Na zdorovye!

Tasty Man-Candy... with an MFA!

Man, I feel like a preteen girl first discovering Ricky Nelson! (Or Davy Jones, David Cassidy, cute not creepy David Bowie, Simon Le Bon, Aaron Carter, Justin Timberlake or whichever Jonas brother isn't already taken.)

Except my man-crush is a 58-year old English teacher at Vanderbilt who looks like a cross between Rodney Crowell and Floyd from the Andy Griffith Show. Ladies and gents, Mark Jarman!

I guess I should begin with his poetry. Man, I'm near swooning - I haven't had a discovery like this since Stephen Dunn or A.E. Stallings!

Descriptions of Heaven and Hell 

Mark Jarman

The wave breaks

And I'm carried into it.

This is hell, I know,

Yet my father laughs,

Chest-deep, proving I'm wrong.

We're safely rooted,

Rocked on his toes.

Nothing irked him more

Than asking, "What is there

Beyond death?"

His theory once was

That love greets you,

And the loveless

Don't know what to say.

Pretty good, right? Wrong - listen to the man read it. It's AWESOME.

He even puts most of the line breaks in just the way I like it: very brief pauses in the thought for line breaks, longer pauses for ends of sentences, longer still for a new stanza. NOBODY reads their own stuff this well.

Then there's his background - his father was a pastor who moved the family to Scotland for the poet's formative years. He met and married a soprano, studied with some heavyweights like Raymond Carver, then just wrote and taught for his career. That sounds awesome. And eerily familiar.

Plus the fact that he's one of the champions of New Formalism, something I identify with but can't quite seem to write most of the time. I'm all about the use of rhyme and meter, recovering all that unfashionable stuff. When everybody else wants to be Bukowski, it's cool to try to be Robinson Jeffers. It's hip to be square, man.

And finally, the thing that turned me on to him in the first place...

That Teenager Who Prowled Old Books

Mark Jarman

That teenager who prowled old books to find

Any argument with a whiff of the Holy Ghost—

I meet him again in his marginalia,

Which ignored the human sweat and stink and marked

Those passages that confirmed what he was hunting.

There was the milk white hart of evidence.

There was the hound of heaven, italicized bold,

Like an angry footnote chasing it off the page.

And there were the hunters, in pursuit themselves—

Plato, Lucretius, Virgil, Marcus Aurelius—

Who did not know he knew what they were after.

And so he missed a lot, all of it human,

Even while scribbling black and blue Eurekas!,

Bleeding through pages backwards—irrelevant notes.

It was all about something else, which he didn’t see,

As philosophers mounted their lovers from behind

And felt their limbs go dead from the toes upward,

And poets kissed a mouth that fastened tight

And locked tongues and tried to catch their breath.

"And so he missed a lot, all of it human." Story of my life, man.

Dang it, he wrote this poem and I should have beaten him to it! I can't tell if I want to kiss him or punch him. Or write him a valedictory ode.

I wrote a long time ago that Arcade Fire's "Neon Bible" stole my life story. Mark Jarman did it again.

Let's Make This One Quick...

... as the actress said to the bishop. (As David Brent said to the camera.)

It's a short one tonight, me hearties, but tomorrow I promise to make it up to you, I've got some fun entries planned. For now, I bring you a poem which was cast upon my shores by the wild waves of the Internet. Once again, it proves that there's not too few but too many fish in the sea.

The History of Forgetting

Lawrence Raab

When Adam and Eve lived in the garden
they hadn't yet learned how to forget.
For them every day was the same day.
Flowers opened, then closed.
They went where the light told them to go.
They slept when it left, and did not dream.

What could they have remembered,
who had never been children? Sometimes
Adam felt a soreness in his side,
but if this was pain it didn't appear
to require a name, or suggest the idea
that anything else might be taken away.
The bright flowers unfolded,
swayed in the breeze.

It was the snake, of course, who knew
about the past—that such a place could exist.
He understood how people would yearn
for whatever they'd lost, and so to survive
they'd need to forget. Soon
the garden will be gone, the snake
thought, and in time God himself.

These were the last days—Adam and Eve
tending the luxurious plants, the snake
watching from above. He knew
what had to happen next, how persuasive
was the taste of that apple. And then
the history of forgetting would begin—
not at the moment of their leaving,
but the first time they looked back.

Bear City, Bear Bear City!

Last month I got to hang out again with one of my best friends, whom I hadn't seen in over a year. With wives and some friends we went to an IHOP at midnight and had a perfectly awesome time with some perfectly dreadful service. 

We started talking about tattoos, the hows and (far more importantly) whys of all our ink. On his side he has a massive brown bear standing upright, which I knew, since he got it while he was visiting us in New England. But I didn't know the full story behind it: he had read that a native American tribe believed that all men were bears before they were men. Then man fell from grace with God, and they became men.

I kind of like that. And I like Lyle Lovett singing a song called "Bears."

And the SNL sketches, too.

And I like this too...

Magic Words

after Nalungiaq (translated from the Inuit by Edward Field)

In the very earliest time,
when both people and animals lived on earth,
a person could become an animal if he wanted to
and an animal could become a human being.
Sometimes they were people
and sometimes animals
and there was no difference.
All spoke the same language.
That was the time when words were like magic.
The human mind had mysterious powers.
A word spoken by chance
might have strange consequences.
It would suddenly come alive
and what people wanted to happen could happen-
all you had to do was say it.
Nobody could explain this:
That's the way it was.

Is This Ambiguity or Is It Something Else?

Anonymous

tsumo mo oshi

I regret picking
and not picking
violets.




Haiku is great, but not the way we teach it to school kids. Sure, I'm all for helping them appreciate poetry, and haiku are short, easy to understand and fun to do. For that  matter, a friend and I wrote what we like to pretend is the first three-word haiku.

On the Uses of Rational Thought

Philosophical

Intelligibility.

Anticlimactic.

But here's the thing - that's not a haiku! Sure, it follows the rules: three lines, seventeen syllables. But to define haiku by rules is to kill it.

Haiku is not an exercise in counting syllables, it's a poem that's all point and no middle. It's usually got natural themes and specific settings. There's lots of dualism, ambiguity and room for interpretation. It's got what an old Buddhist adage calls "the stink of Zen."

And teaching kids that the best way to write a poem is by counting... Well that just ain't right.

Here's another one that seems to have a lot of what actually makes a poem haiku.

Yagi Shokyu-ni

yakeshi no no

Violets have grown here and there

on the ruins of my burned house.

Listening Up

I've never read this poem, I've only heard it. I highly recommend the experience.

Dan Beachy-Quick

Chorus and Hero


(Play the audio and skip to 3:42)

Poetry Foundation

I must admit, shamefully, that I can't listen to poetry read. From the local open mic to Dylan Thomas to  Elizabeth Alexander's poem for President Obama's inauguration, I just have a hard time paying attention. My mind wanders, I start to critique the emotion and inflection, and then feel guilty for it.


I have a hard time believing poetry was once an oral tradition. I'll take bad jokes, cheesy ghost stories, "Prairie Home Companion" reruns or racist old-timey radio shows before I'll listen to someone read a poem to me. (Maybe this explains my prevailing attitude of "meh" to slam poetry. It's like stand-up comedy but without the funny and with more portentous pauses.)


So it's actually pretty unusual for me to enjoy it this much. I think it's the repetition and variation that really hooks me in. I know I'm missing a lot because I can't take my time, read and re-read, dwell on a sentence or phrase. But for once I enjoy letting the experience just happen, and whatever I'm not getting is just gone.

Swans and Vowels

Another poem that seems like one thing but has a twist ending. The end is actually pretty personal for me - all through high school I felt mocked and judged for my American accent when I spoke Russian and getting rid of it was pretty high on my list of things to do before I died back then.

Immigrant

Fleur Adcock

November ‘63: eight months in London.
I pause on the low bridge to watch the pelicans:
they float swanlike, arching their white necks
over only slightly ruffled bundles of wings,
burying awkward beaks in the lake’s water.


I clench cold fists in my Marks and Spencer`s jacket
and secretly test my accent once again:
St James’s Park; St James’s Park; St James’s Park.

Suddenly Not So Hungry

I may have mentioned that I'm not a fan of "nature poetry" as the term goes. Part of this is because I'm a city kid: I don't like camping, I don't like being on a farm, I like the reassurance of what David Byrne describes as "glass and concrete and stone." Byrne isn't as big a fan of cities as I am, but the point stands.

But in most of the great nature poems, nature is just setting for the true subject of the poem: people and how they react to nature. That's why I can hardly force myself to read most of the English Romantics but can deeply appreciate a collection like Seamus Heaney's "Death of a Naturalist." (Also because I bear a deep antipathy towards naturalists.) 

While he has obviously spent a lot of time outdoors, dealing with the natural world of trees and animals and birds and weather, what really intrigues him is what his observation of these phenomena says about him and therefore people in general. In that spirit I present this...

Turkeys Observed

Seamus Heaney

One observes them, one expects them, 
Blue-breasted in their indifferent mortuary, 
Beached bare on the cold marble slabs
In immodest underwear frills of feather. 


The red sides of beef retain
Some of the smelly majesty of living: 
A half-cow slung from a hood maintains
That blood and flesh are not ignored. 


But a turkey cowers in death. 
Pull his neck, pluck him, and look -
He is just another poor forked thing, 
A skin-bag plumped with inky putty. 


He once complained extravagantly
In an overture of gobbles; 
He lorded it on the claw-flecked mud
With a grey flick of his Confucian eye. 


Now, as I pass the bleak Christmas dazzle,
I find him ranged with his cold squadrons:
The fuselage is bare, the proud wings snapped,
The tail-fan stripped down to a shameful rudder.




You'll notice that it's not even called "Turkeys" but "Turkeys Observed." The observation of them is more honestly the thing which piques his interest. 


One more point of interest: I found what is most likely an alternate version online which I'll reproduce here:

Turkeys Observed

Seamus Heaney

One observes them, one expects them,
Blue breasted in their indifferent mortuary,
Beached end bare on the cold marble slabs
In immodest underwear frills of feather.

The red sides of beef retain
Some of the smelly majesty of living:
A half-cow slung from a hood maintains
That blood and flesh are not ignored.

But a turkey cowers in death.
Pull his neck, pluck him, and look -
He is just another poor forked thing,
An ink-blotch,y slump of putty.

He once complained extravagantly
In an overture of gobbles;
He lorded it on the claw-flecked mud
With a grey flick of his cConfucian eye.

Now, in my winter woolens and turned up collar,
I pass the butcher's bleak December dazzle
And casually note the importance
Of plumage and perpindicularity.


The final stanza is much stronger in the finished version: almost as though in his rough draft he didn't quite know how to stick the landing. "Plumage and perpendicularity"? Maybe Robert Frost or Wallace Stevens could get away with that, but it sounds forced for  Heaney. I much prefer the analogy of living birds to metal airplanes, the industrial means we have used to promote ourselves over the biological flying creatures.

Also, for the record, "An ink-blotchy slump of putty" has a funny Lewis Carroll ring to it, but I want this inscribed on my headstone: "He died as he lived: a skin-bag plumped with inky putty."

Saturday Silly: Tales from the Deep

I think for this week's Saturday switch I won't do something terrible but something fun. 

This is from a volume called "100 Poems on the Underground." Essentially, a group promoting poetry asked the London Tube to donate some blank ad space to put up poetry for the pleasure and enrichment of the riders. The program took off like a shot and one of the results was a book collecting some of the poems which had been featured.

The Loch Ness Monster's Song

Edwin Morgan

Sssnnnwhuffffll?
Hnwhuffl hhnnwfl hnfl hfl?
Gdroblboblhobngbl gbl gl g g g g glbgl.
Drublhaflablhaflubhafgabhaflhafl fl fl -
gm grawwwww grf grawf awfgm graw gm.
Hovoplodok - doplodovok - plovodokot - doplodokosh?
Splgraw fok fok splgrafhatchgabrlgabrl fok splfok!
Zgra kra gka fok!
Grof grawff gahf?
Gombl mbl bl -
blm plm,
blm plm,
blm plm,
blp






Awesome stuff - the author explains in a note that the lonely monster rises from the loch, looks around for the companions of its youth (other dinosaurs now long extinct) and finding no sign of them, returns to the depths of the lake after a brief swearing session. It's cute, it's fun, it's almost Jabberwockian - all things I could use more of, probably. (Most of the poetry I like is awful dark.)


Nearly any poetry organization I know of has as one of its aims: "The preservation and continued appreciation of poetry in contemporary public life."Meaning, essentially: people don't read poems anymore, and they should, but even if they get taught in school what it is, they don't get taught how to love it.


So why isn't there a program like this in every metropolis in America? Doing a perfunctory Google search shows some old results, some programs similar to the London Underground, but the most recent news story was from four years ago, and most of the results were much older than that.


Was the program discontinued? Was it lack of funds? Lack of interest? Or just time to move onto something else?


I would be shocked and awed to see something like this not just on buses or subways, but in elevators or waiting rooms or bus stops or anyplace people kill time. I mean, sometimes it's either read the writing on the wall or dig through the receipts in your wallet looking for SOMETHING to read.


I just can't help but feel that poetry isn't dead in contemporary society, but the means we're using to popularize poetry are.

You Ought to Be Kenneth Fearing My Fist in Your Pie-Hole...

...If you disrespect Kenneth Fearing.

I'm going back to the source again today, the red book that's always got my number: Ciardi's "How Does a Poem Mean?"

I listened to a podcast on this poem a little while back and found it interesting that Fearing was always viewed as a lightweight poet. He was seen as kind of entertaining but ultimately there just wasn't much there.

Most of what I've read of his work is really fantastic - pop culture references (dated of course), a real ear for language (especially hard-boiled Edward G. Robinson stuff, you gotta say it out one side of your mouth), and some weighty substance under the surface.

But I'll let you be the judge of that. To see what I'm talking about, you really have to read this one out loud.

Dirge

Kenneth Fearing

1-2-3 was the number he played but today the number came 3-2-1;
   bought his Carbide at 30 and it went to 29; had the favorite at Bowie but the track was slow—


O, executive type, would you like to drive a floating power, knee-action, silk-upholstered six? Wed a Hollywood star? Shoot the course in 58? Draw to the ace, king, jack?
   O, fellow with a will who won't take no, watch out for three cigarettes on the same, single match; O democratic voter born in August under Mars, beware of liquidated rails—


Denouement to denouement, he took a personal pride in the certain, certain way he lived his own, private life,
   but nevertheless, they shut off his gas; nevertheless, the bank foreclosed; nevertheless, the landlord called; nevertheless, the radio broke,


And twelve o'clock arrived just once too often,
   just the same he wore one gray tweed suit, bought one straw hat, drank one straight Scotch, walked one short step, took one long look, drew one deep breath,
   just one too many,


And wow he died as wow he lived,
   going whop to the office and blooie home to sleep and biff got married and bam had children and oof got fired,
   zowie did he live and zowie did he die,


With who the hell are you at the corner of his casket, and where the hell we going on the right-hand silver knob, and who
the hell cares walking second from the end with an American Beauty wreath from why the hell not,


Very much missed by the circulation staff of the New York Evening Post; deeply, deeply mourned by the B.M.T.,


Wham, Mr. Roosevelt; pow, Sears Roebuck; awk, big dipper; bop, summer rain;
   Bong, Mr., bong, Mr., bong, Mr., bong.




That one always made me both happy and cynical. I love the rhythms and movement, the imagery and confusion all through it. But it's also a deeply miserable poem, almost like a Mirror Universe Normal Rockwell. 

Here's another one.

X Minus X

Kenneth Fearing

Even when your friend, the radio, is still; even when her dream, the magazine, is finished; even when his life, the ticker, is silent; even when their destiny, the boulevard, is bare;
And after that paradise, the dance-hall, is closed; after that theater, the clinic, is dark,

Still there will be your desire, and hers, and his hopes and theirs,
Your laughter, their laughter,
Your curse and his curse, her reward and their reward, their dismay and his dismay and her dismay and yours—

Even when your enemy, the collector, is dead; even when your counsellor, the salesman, is sleeping; even when your sweetheart, the movie queen, has spoken; even when your friend, the magnate, is gone.


So yeah, Fearing is no lightweight. I gotta get me a collected works.

Not the One You'd Think

Yes, it's Ash Wednesday and even heretic Protestants like me can sit up and take notice. The obvious choice, of course, is T.S. Eliot's "Ash-Wednesday."


I have to admit that it's been my tradition every year to read it on this day, but it just seemed far too self-evident and naff (look it up) to do my post today on it. Not to mention the thing is a billion pages too long for a blog.


So here's another one, and I can't imagine that T.S. could really complain.

Divine Meditation 3

John Donne

O might those sighs and tears return again
Into my breast and eyes, which I have spent,
That I might in this holy discontent
Mourn with some fruit, as I have mourned in vain;
In mine Idolatry what showers of rain
Mine eyes did waste! what griefs my heart did rent!
That sufferance was my sin; now I repent;
'Cause I did suffer I must suffer pain.
Th' hydropic drunkard, and night-scouting thief,
The itchy lecher, and self-tickling proud
Have the remembrance of past joys for relief
Of comming ills. To (poor) me is allowed
No ease; for long, yet vehement grief hath been
Th' effect and cause, the punishment and sin.




I have to admit that I'd never even heard of John Donne until I read the Cliff's Notes on some of Eliot's minor poems. (You know, the ones where he rips whole phrases off of other poets' work.) But Donne is another writer who's never let me down no matter when I flip the pages open.


Donne was quite the ladies' man before he settled down with the two loves of his life, his wife Anne and Jesus. I really wonder if "self-tickling proud" is supposed to be a dirty onanism reference. Part of me would like to believe it - a vestige of Donne's younger, rakish self cracking through the old priest's stiff posture. But I highly doubt it. Still, one of the beauties of poetry is you get to keep the misreadings.


I also appreciate his point that grief can be both the result of sin, as well as the jumping-off point for more sin.

It all kind of feeds into the same pattern, strengthening and reinforcing the negative and self-destructive behavior. You can explain it using psychology, New Age philosophy, a bit of the old sackcloth-and-ashes, but it's the same problem. 

Who can deliver us from this body of death? Tune in to find out in 40 days.