Saturday, January 22, 2011

"Elegy" is Greek for "Good-bye."

The other day a friend posted a translation of this poem into Russian and I realized I hadn't read this in quite a long time. It's very good and to my Yankee ear also very Welsh: histrionic, bombastic, somber, serious.




Dylan Thomas
Elegy

Too proud to die; broken and blind he died
The darkest way, and did not turn away,
A cold kind man brave in his narrow pride


On that darkest day.  Oh, forever may
He lie lightly, at last, on the last, crossed
Hill, under the grass, in love, and there grow


Young among the long flocks, and never lie lost
Or still all the numberless days of his death, though
Above all he longed for his mother's breast


Which was rest and dust, and in the kind ground
The darkest justice of death, blind and unblessed.
Let him find no rest but be fathered and found,


I prayed in the crouching room, by his blind bed,
In the muted house, one minute before
Noon, and night, and light.  The rivers of the dead


Veined his poor hand I held, and I saw
Through his unseeing eyes to the roots of the sea.
(An old tormented man three-quarters blind,


I am not too proud to cry that He and he
Will never never go out of my mind.
All his bones crying, and poor in all but pain, 


Being innocent, he dreaded that he died
Hating his God, but what he was was plain:
An old kind man brave in his burning pride.


The sticks of the house were his; his books he owned.
Even as a baby he had never cried;
Nor did he now, save to his secret wound.


Out of his eyes I saw the last light glide.
Here among the light of the lording sky
An old blind man is with me where I go


Walking in the meadows of his son's eye
On whom a world of ills came down like snow.
He cried as he died, fearing at last the spheres'


Last sound, the world going out without a breath:
Too proud to cry, too frail to check the tears,
And caught between two nights, blindness and death.


O deepest wound of all that he should die
On that darkest day.  Oh, he could hide
The tears out of his eyes, too proud to cry.




There's so much richness here in the imagery and the power: "Let him find no rest but be fathered and found." "Here among the light of the lording sky." "I prayed in the crouching room, by his blind bed,/In the muted house." 


But he's also such a master of form and rhythm that he seems to keep everything whirling effortlessly: just in the first two stanzas he weaves "ied" and "ast" and "ay" rhymes with consonants of  "d" and "b" and "l." It's kind of showy but that's just something you have to accept with Thomas — regardless of how well you love his work, you can't hold a candle to how highly he esteems it. I think it's a testament to his labors that with an ego whose weight could crush Atlas he still wills you to enter into the sympathetic contract so completely and without artifice. 


I'll have this poem in mind today as I fly south for my grandfather's funeral. I doubt he and Thomas's father would have been able to stand being in the same room. But the son is fearless in facing this death, he has tremendous pride in his father despite the obedience death demanded of him.



I hope my father's father will never lie lost or still all the numberless days of his death.




Sunday, January 2, 2011

Final Answer

Welcome, boys and girls! This is the portion of our program where I tell you all about the lessons I've learned.



Right off the bat, I learned every day is too often to write a blog. It's hard to keep finding new material that frequently without repeating yourself, and nobody has the time to read a new post every day that's not about Hollywood gossip. (Which was a close second to poetry in my choices for blog topic.) I think the absolute max would be 3-4 posts a week for something this esoteric; even that's pushing it.

I learned I don't know or like nearly as many poems as I thought I did. I was figuring I'd just fish through some of my anthologies and trot out an old chestnut anytime I got stuck. But I quickly went through the grade-A material and started getting desperate. It was a blessing in disguise because it made me search for new work, but it was definitely humbling to realize how little I know and what a small pool of poems I'm really drawing from.

I taught myself how to appreciate listening to poems. One of my early posts was about how I didn't even consider hearing a poem as reading it. I still think the "oral tradition" is somewhat overrated, especially in the age of Slam, but through podcasts and CD anthologies I've really learned that it makes a massive difference in HOW a poem gets read. Not every poet should read their own stuff: sometimes an actor should read it (Alfred Molina is especially good at this), sometimes another poet (see Dylan Thomas doing W.H. Auden). But when it's good, it's really on — see Li-Young Lee or Sylvia Plath.

I figured out pretty late in the game that it's a good idea to have a picture in every blog, so that people using visual RSS readers don't just have a boring old gray screen to stare at while they're deciding whether or not to click on the entry. Most of the time I could just do a Google image search of some weird phrase and pick one that amused me. But if I could do it over again, I might take more time to make the posts themselves more visually arresting.

Also, if I could do it again I might make more of an effort to draw readers in. I don't just mean expand readership, but make more of an effort to promote the blog or encourage friends and strangers that there might be something they'd find worthwhile. As it was, I mostly just kept scribbling, throwing posts into the black and hoping somebody paid attention. I think next time I'll get more on top of both interacting better with readers and networking to become linked with a larger community of bloggers and lit geeks.

There were definitely some missteps (like the PoemBowl to have people vote on which of my poems they preferred), but I found myself enjoying the infrequent features like "Saturday Suck/Silly," "Hollywood Versifier" and "Sunday Thoughts." It helps to break up the monotony of, "And here's .... another poem! I'd like to continue with some of those, find some more ideas for features that could help structure the blog.

So thanks to anybody who's been reading, whether it's on this site or on Facebook. I've really appreciated having your thoughts and feedback. I'll probably keep writing posts, but much less frequently. (I could really use that time for other things like picking my nose or rewatching the entire series of "Knot's Landing.")

Over all it was a good experience: I read and listened to a lot more poems than I would have otherwise, I read critical articles and found some other poetry blogs. It helped me to clarify some of my aesthetics, what I like and dislike and why. For the most part it was fun, but it could also be a real drag. I'm glad I did it, and I'm glad it's over. 

I'm not sure how "real" bloggers can do it day in and day out. In the immortal words of the anonymous limericist:

There was once a sad Maître d'hôtel
Who said, "They can all go to hell!
    What they do to my wife—
    Why it ruins my life;
And the worst is, they all do it well."

It's a new year. Time to change your life.