Awesome Epitaph

John Donne,
Here I come.


A high-schooler came up with this when asked to write her epitaph. I read this article today and am really impressed with both the teacher and the students. And yes, for the record, John Donne is a pimp. Heck, Conan O'Brien got the inspiration for Pimpbot 5000 after reading Donne's "La Corona" sequence. It's a medical fact that reading more than two of his early aubades can get even Chuck Norris pregnant. The Titan Rocket program was eventually scrapped by NASA because John Donne's pimp-juice is a more reliable and powerful fuel source, leaving nothing behind but the great smell of Brut.

Make a Little Music Every Day Till You Die

I found out Henry Gaffney, one of my favorite teachers (my thesis advisor at Berklee) died yesterday. We were generations apart both in age and in musical taste, but I loved his gruff informality, profanity, his outspoken but sincere and kind atheism, and relentless insertions of a "y" where an "h" should be - oh, the yoomanity!


It's a real shock - I was still hoping to see him on a trip back to Boston sometime, or maybe I'd catch him out here on the West coast. Oddly, his passing seems to be affecting me more than some family deaths have. I knew him really mostly in passing - but he's one of the teachers who really affected me, gave me a lot to consider and mostly inspired me. 


I think I'm coming to see that teaching is a real through-line in my life, no matter how I've resented or resisted it. I've just kept falling into these situations where I'm instructing or tutoring or advising people. The old adage of those who can't teach, do, has always haunted me. I didn't want to be one of those washouts who resorts to teaching because he can't hack it in the "real world." 


I'm starting to think that may be backwards. Maybe teaching is just as valid and important as any other passion and pursuit. I know plenty of artists, writers and poets who crank out mediocre art, enjoy moderate success and give nothing back to nobody, content to live their meager version of the Artist's Dream.


Henry had the stones to admit that he didn't love the musician lifestyle - he refused to tour behind any of the several albums he released because he hated it. He didn't like being on the road, isolated from places and people he loved. He loved writing but didn't need the attention of being an ARTIST. At a younger age I might have faulted him for that, saying it was the easy way out, he should have stuck with it until he became James Taylor or Randy Newman at least. Now I think that's pretty brave - some people can be content with being John the Baptist or Big Bill Broonzy, making straight the way of the Elvis. 


I don't really have a poem for tonight, call me lazy or maybe only music can really do the trick. But here's a great little song from an awesome stupid movie called "Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story." It's sort of a combination of "Ray," "Walk the Line," and "The Patsy Cline/Buddy Holly/Richie Valens Story." It's sly, off-color, silly and dead-on-accurate in its depictions. I think Henry would approve. 

The music is also terrific throughout. This clip from the grand finale manages to both mock saccharine, sentimental uplifting tunes but still be an incredible saccharine, sentimental uplifting tune.

Love yourself, but not only yourself.


Abyssinia, Henry.

Little Things and Big Things

Here's another one that has the elusive quality I've come to call in my own snooty way "evocative specificity," being able to be both detailed and larger than life. It's about a hemodialysis machine, I think, which removes, filters and recirculates blood back into the system. But it's also about the things which leave us and come back. It may just be my religious predilections, but I think there's also some Communion here, and maybe hints of the Sea of Galilee.


However you read it, though, it has certain details which are essential to the poem's life: Farm Pond, a hammock, a specific day in a specific month. But by incorporating the repetition of the lines, building and reusing elements to make something larger, Rhodes is also emulating the ostensible subject of the poem, removing and replacing and recombining small pieces to keep the larger system moving. 


Good stuff, and it's all brought to you courtesy of the Internets: if you use iGoogle to set up news feeds and the like, there's a widget you can add from Poetry Daily which gives a brief, usually readable and often worthy poem every day. That's where this came from, so don't say the web is only for spam, Facebook and porn. Which it also is for.

Come to Me, His Blood

Martha Rhodes

Come to me, his blood, 

so I may cup you, 

be reservoir and ladle, both—

clean, store, and stir.

Then serve you back to him.
Come to me, his blood, ill, 

so I may warm, sieve, and funnel 

you back to him; his cheeks ruddy 

again, his head in my lap.

The wind is up! and sails our boat
across Farm Pond, our friends 

on shore waving us to picnic time—

a hammock-nap, a swim—

all four of us, all well.

Not dozens of summers ago,
but now, this final Sunday in July, 

come to me his blood, don't rush 

onto a lawn or street, don't seep—

but if you do leave him, if spilt, 

you who cannot slow or thicken,
redirect yourself—you must—come to me 

and I will bring you back to him.

A Russian Poet, This One Still Living(!)

I heard a podcast that featured Vera Pavlova, a Russian poet who has had fourteen books published in Russia and just had her first published in English. They seemed to make a big deal out of the fact that her husband is her translator, I guess everybody needs some kind of hook to get ink.


I enjoy the brevity of her poems - her voice can sometimes be too elliptical and compressed because of it, but when it works I enjoy the specificity and the enigmatic elements. Here's one that I think does this really well.

I think it will be winter when he comes

Vera Pavlova

I think it will be winter when he comes.
From the unbearable whiteness of the road
a dot will emerge, so black that eyes will blur,
and it will be approaching for a long, long time,
making his absence commensurate with his coming,
and for a long, long time it will remain a dot.
A speck of dust? A burning in the eye? And snow,
there will be nothing else but snow,
and for a long, long while there will be nothing,
and he will pull away the snowy curtain,
he will acquire size and three dimensions,
he will keep coming closer, closer . . .
This is the limit, he cannot get closer. But he keeps approaching,
now too vast to measure . . .




After having seen my share of harsh winters I appreciate the details, the painful starkness of a snowy landscape where making things out at a distance is like a torturous eye exam or an exercise in Rorschach discernment.


But the fact that you don't really know who "he" is, whether it's the poet's lover, father, nemesis, just a shadowy figure who takes up more and more room. You can invent the details for yourself, if you'd like, but I enjoy keeping it all a mystery. You can try on and take off any number of scenarios and conjectures, but not commit to deeply to any. 


I like it quite a bit, it's a distinctive voice that lacks pretense and artifice. I think I may have to buy her book, at the very least to see if her interpreter hubby is worth his salt.

Gerard Manley Hopkin and the Sins of the Flesh

Warning: sinful desires and blatant Augustinian condemnation abound!


The Poetry Foundation has a new iPhone app out today, which I highly recommend. (If, that is, you are a user of the iPhone, what one of my friends has termed "the magic Futurebox.") The app basically works like "Wheel of Fortune," where you get to spin two wheels of topics to get poems that fit a variety of subjects. I'll try: "Frustration" and "Spirituality."


The first of 19(!) poems is from Gerard Manley Hopkins, and I can't say there's anything more apropos.

‘I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day’

Gerard Manley Hopkins

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
What hours, O what black hoürs we have spent
This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!
And more must, in yet longer light’s delay.
With witness I speak this. But where I say         
Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament
Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent
To dearest him that lives alas! away.

I am gall, I am heartburn. God’s most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;         
Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.
Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see
The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.




I had to read this three times before I realized it was a sonnet, and I think this is the first time I've read this that I understood there's some homosexual longing and self-loathing in it, too. (I'm pretty late to ths party, judging by his Wikipedia entry.)When I was man-crushing on Hopkins at my worst, I never saw that - I just felt him a kindred Christian spirit. I guess he was, in a way. 


I discovered his work, like so many others I'm realizing, in high school. At that time I was as lusty as any teenage guy, but also deeply resentful and distrustful of myself and my urges. There were times when I had a forced regimen where anytime I had lustful thoughts I would force myself to stop whatever I was doing no matter where I was and do ten push-ups. I've got several embarrassed buddies who can attest to the veracity of that.


There's nothing like pent-up sexual desire to make you simultaneously cling to and fear God. There's some deep-seated distrust of sex that seems to just go hand in hand with the kind of needy longing that spiritual matters provides. Fortunately, there's an upside - some art that makes the two impulses both more conflated and more distinct. 


Thank God for art.

Special Thursday Silly: Edgar Allen Yum!

One of the best pop-culture parodies I've ever read. Here's a New York Times article about it, as well as the original source of the poem....

Make This Your Only Stock and Store

Edgar

Once upon a mid-day sunny, while I savored Nuts 'N Honey, 
With my Tuscan Whole Milk, 1 gal, 128 fl. oz., I swore 
As I went on with my lapping, suddenly there came a tapping, 
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at the icebox door. 
'Bad condensor, that,' I muttered, 'vibrating the icebox door - 
Only this, and nothing more.' 


Not to sound like a complainer, but, in an inept half-gainer, 
I provoked my bowl to tip and spill its contents on the floor. 
Stupefied, I came to muddle over that increasing puddle, 
Burgeoning deluge of that which I at present do adore - 
Snowy Tuscan wholesomeness exclusively produced offshore - 
Purg'ed here for evermore. 


And the pool so white and silky, filled me with a sense of milky 
Ardor of the type fantastic of a loss not known before, 
So that now, to still the throbbing of my heart, while gently sobbing, 
I retreated, heading straightway for the tempting icebox door - 
Heedless of that pitter-patter tapping at the icebox door - 
I resolved to have some more. 


Presently my soul grew stronger; hesitating then no longer, 
'This,' said I, 'requires an extra dram of milk, my favorite pour.' 
To the icebox I aspired, motivated to admire 
How its avocado pigment complemented my decor. 
Then I grasped its woodgrain handle - here I opened wide the door; - 
Darkness there, and nothing more. 


Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing, 
Doubting, dreaming dreams of Tuscans I had known before 
But the light inside was broken, and the darkness gave no token, 
And the only words there spoken were my whispered words, 'No more!' 
Coke and beer, some ketchup I set eyes on, and an apple core - 
Merely this and nothing more. 


Back toward the table turning, all my soul within me burning, 
Soon again I heard a tapping somewhat louder than before. 
'Surely,' said I, 'surely that is something at my window lattice; 
Let me see then, what thereat is, and this mystery explore - 
Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore; - 
'Tis the wind and nothing more!' 


From the window came a stirring, then, with an incessant purring, 
Inside stepped a kitten; mannerlessly did she me ignore. 
Not the least obeisance made she; not a minute stopped or stayed she; 
But, with mien of lord or lady, withdrew to my dining floor - 
Pounced upon the pool of Tuscan spreading o'er my dining floor - 
Licked, and lapped, and supped some more. 


Then this tiny cat beguiling my sad fancy into smiling, 
By the grand enthusiasm of the countenance she wore, 
Toward the mess she showed no pity, 'til I said, 'Well, hello, kitty!' 
Sought she me with pretty eyes that seemed to open some rapport. 
So I pleaded, 'Tell me, tell me what it is that you implore!' 
Quoth the kitten, 'Get some more.'

Barely Awake

I'm sleepy, I can't think very well right now. I'll let Theodore Roethke think for me. I can't get this poem's rhythm or sounds out of my head, and never have been able to. Soon it will be two decades since I first read this - I can't help but wonder if I'll be able to write something this lasting.

The Waking

Theodore Roethke

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.


We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.


Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.


Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.


Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me, so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.


This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.