Forget the Album, Buy the Single

A good friend sent this to me the other day and it inspired me to go out and buy some more Hilda Doolittle aka HD. (No relation to Dr. Doolittle who founded the Pushmepullyou Institute.) She published this in 1945 as a response to the London Blitz and the tragedies everyone around her experienced, which sounds really trite until you start reading and it socks you in the jaw. She invokes mythology, Scripture, writing-as-immortality to make some sense out of things and find a way to redeem the time.


But the real moral here? If you send me some poetry you like, there's a very good chance I'll post something about it. Thanks for the poem, Rachel!


Usually I don't like taking fragments or excerpts of poems out of context, but tonight I'll make an exception. I can't seem to get this one out of my head, even though I can't quite seem to figure out what it  means, either. (Maybe if I read the rest of the book-length poem...)


I also like the unrhymed, unmetered couplets, as well as the internal rhymes here and there or just pleasing consonances of words that give it all a feel that this is actually a poem and not just a thought somebody broke up into stanzas.

from The Walls Do Not Fall

HD

But we fight for life,
we fight, they say, for breath,


so what good are your scribblings?
this - we take them with us


beyond death; Mercury, Hermes, Thoth
invented the script, letters, palette;


the indicated flute or lyre-notes
on papyrus or parchment


are magic, indelibly stamped
on the atmosphere somewhere,


forever; remember, O Sword,
you are the younger brother, the latter-born,


your Triumph, however exultant,
must one day be over,


in the beginning
was the Word.

Sons

Some friends had their first child tonight, a boy. It got me thinking about parents and children, how relationships seem pretty simple at the beginning and get more tangled as time goes on. It doesn't lessen those connections, but it does make them knottier.


This is one of Robert Hayden's best-known poems. It's definitely got one of the finest one-two punches I've read, the final lines. Especially during Holy Week, these ideas of fathers, sons and that austere, lonely love seem to resonate with me.

Those Winter Sundays

Robert Hayden

Sundays too my father got up early
And put his clothes on in the blueback cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.


I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,


Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?

Punch Line

Wait for it...

Unholy Sonnet 12

Mark Jarman

There was a pious man upright as Job,
In fact, more pious, more upright, who prayed
The way most people thoughtlessly enjoy
Their stream of consciousness. He concentrated
On glorifying God, as some men let
Their minds create and fondle curving shadows.
And as he gained in bumper crops and cattle,
He greeted each success with grave amens.


So he was shocked, returning from the bank,
To see a flood bearing his farm away--
His cows, his kids, his wife, and all his stuff.
Swept off his feet, he cried out, "Why?" and sank.
And God grumped from his rain cloud, "I can't say.
Just something about you pisses me off."




Most of what we know about God we seem to get from other people. To a lot of folks, God seems like a really big bastard. At least here he's a really big bastard with a wicked sense of humor.

Saturday Suck: Why Separation of Church and State May Be a Good Idea for Verse

I went on a bit of a poetry binge today, emerging with some Robert Hayden, Hilda Doolittle, a book on prosody, Randall Jarrell's critical essays "Poetry and the Age"... And "The Stuffed Owl: An Anthology of Bad Verse."


I can't tell you how pleased I was to find Isaac Watts included among the other supernumerary luminaries. No offense to those who are attached to the collected works of Wesley, Watts and Fanny Crosby, but the lyrics to hymns (especially the bulk of those written between 1700 and 2010) have always to me seemed to possess only the slightest literary (and to my mind, devotional) value.


As C.S. Lewis wrote: "I considered [hymns] to be fifth-rate poems set to sixth-rate music."  If it indeed requires a fifth-rate poet to recognize a fifth-rate poem, Lewis may be considered an expert on the subject.









I find it somewhat comforting, then, to realize that Mr. Watts' poetry is just as flaccid, staid and unpleasant as his hymns. Here, we get to see his reactionary politics and his religious fervor get conflated to a sufficient degree to cause Glenn Beck to chortle with glee.

On the Landing of William III

Isaac Watts

'Tis done ! they cried, and laugh'd aloud, 
The courts of darkness rang with joy, 
The' old serpent hiss'd, and Hell grew proud. 
While Zion niourn'd her ruin nigh. 


But, lo! the great Deliverer sails, 
Comission'd from Jehovah's hand, 
And smiling seas, and wishing gales,  
Convey him to the longing land. 


The happy day, and happy year, 
Both in our new salvation meet : 
The day that quench'd the burning snare, 
The year that burn'd the' invading fleet


Now did thine arm, O God of hosts ! 
Now did thine arm shine dazzling bright, 
The sons of might their hands had lost. 
And men of blood forgot to fight. 


Brigades of angels lined the way. 
And guarded William to his throne ; 
There, ye celestial warriors, stay. 
And make his palace like your own. 


Then, mighty God, the earth shall know 
And learn the worship of the sky : 
Angels and Britons join below, 
To raise their hallelujahs high. 


All hallelujah, heavenly King! 
While distant lands thy victory sing. 
And tongues their utmost powers employ. 
The world's bright roof repeats the joy. 




It's one thing to offer God praise that your side won. It's quite another to claim Satan is the other guys' head honcho and your guy's coronation is equivalent to the last chapter of Revelations. Good thing 24-hour news poetry networks were not (and have yet to be) invented.

Tautology Isn't Always a Bad Thing - Sometimes It's Just Tautology.

Ordinarily, poems about poetry seem insular at best and masturbatory at worst. There are notable exceptions, but anytime somebody writes a poem to tell you about "their process," you're probably not in for a good time. This is a notable exception, since the "I" and the "you" can be any author and any audience ever. 

There's something admirable and almost self-deprecating in this, beyond ego and ideals of communication and high art. This is just one person trying to figure out the weird mystery of how somebody can write something down and have it mean anything to anybody else.

When I'm: Where You

Philip Booth

When I'm writing, as
I'm now writing, I write
from wherever I've ever


been, up through a now
that has no here, out
into a there where


you, in a time beyond
now (to you rearrived
as time present), may


deep in yourself feel
words risen through
me: words no more mine


than now yours, as I
feel how it feels to
write out toward you


our need to figure
all it may mean, in this
very world, to be us.




And by the way, this is one of the greatest webcomics of all time: xkcd.

Something a Little Grim

"More Light! More Light!"

Anthony Hecht

For Heinrich Blucher and Hannah Arendt
Composed in the Tower before his execution
These moving verses, and being brought at that time
Painfully to the stake, submitted, declaring thus:
"I implore my God to witness that I have made no crime."


Nor was he forsaken of courage, but the death was horrible,
The sack of gunpowder failing to ignite.
His legs were blistered sticks on which the black sap
Bubbled and burst as he howled for the Kindly Light.


And that was but one, and by no means one of he worst;
Permitted at least his pitiful dignity;
And such as were by made prayers in the name of Christ,
That shall judge all men, for his soul's tranquility.


We move now to outside a German wood.
Three men are there commanded to dig a hole
In which the two Jews are ordered to lie down
And be buried alive by the third, who is a Pole.


Not light from the shrine at Weimar beyond the hill
Nor light from heaven appeared. But he did refuse.
A Luger settled back deeply in its glove.
He was ordered to change places with the Jews.


Much casual death had drained away their souls.
The thick dirt mounted toward the quivering chin.
When only the head was exposed the order came
To dig him out again and to get back in.


No light, no light in the blue Polish eye.
When he finished a riding boot packed down the earth.
The Luger hovered lightly in its glove.
He was shot in the belly and in three hours bled to death.


No prayers or incense rose up in those hours
Which grew to be years, and every day came mute
Ghosts from the ovens, sifting through crisp air,
And settled upon his eyes in a black soot.

Bringing the "Out" Back "In"

I, like probably many of you, thought war poetry went out of style somewhere between Wilfred Owen and "The Death of the Ball-Turret Gunner." Guess what, Private Pyle, you got served!

Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting

Kevin C. Powers

I tell her I love her like not killing   
or ten minutes of sleep   
beneath the low rooftop wall   
on which my rifle rests.   


I tell her in a letter that will stink,   
when she opens it,   
of bolt oil and burned powder   
and the things it says.   


I tell her how Pvt. Bartle says, offhand,   
that war is just us   
making little pieces of metal   
pass through each other.




Another one from the most recent Iraq conflict. But I think the best part is how it's a war poem not about war at all. Despite the grimy fear and exhaustion alluded to, there's a certain elegance and beauty in the style, turning killing into just another thing humans do, like love or letters. I don't know if it's a weakness in the poem. But I don't think it is.

Exercises in Narcissism

Or... another brand-new poem by lil' old me.

In the Quiet

Matt Quarterman

I’m waiting for something, but I think
the waiting is what I’m waiting for.
I’m listening in the silence, but the silence
is what I’m waiting expectantly, hoping to hear.
The stillness and the passing of time
are also things to taste and touch.
And if the taste is tasteless,
the touch unfeeling,
this is just the taste of water,
the touch of air.
To feel the flavor of water on your tongue,
to let your skin prickle in the grip of air
is to tune your senses finely,
to calibrate them to the highest power.
So I wait silently and let the still time
be the thing I wait for in the quiet,
in the dark.




I find church to be a pretty good place to get poems, or fragments of them, or sometimes just poem-y thoughts. In the past, that's mostly because the churches I attended favored sermons on the weightier (read: lengthier) side. I've got a box chock-full of church bulletins with my scribblings in the margins.


These days the church I go to has time built into the service to reflect, think, visit, pray or whatever makes sense for you-  to do something with what you've gleaned from the service so far. It's one of my favorite parts of the entire thing, and I've found that even when the subjects aren't directly religious the frame of mind it brings is really conducive to larger, deeper thoughts.


So although I wouldn't call this a poem about faith or religion, it is about meaning, and that's what I tend to glean from church right now. These things all have meaning, and nothing is wasted, not even the waste.


Some people who read this go to church and some don't, but most people I know have been to some kind of formal religious ceremony at one point or another. Have you ever been surprised by what you got out of a church service?

Saturday Silly: Why You Shouldn't Read Proust

So I stumbled across this in "Rebel Angels," the anthology co-edited by my mancrush Mark Jarman. (By the way, remember my cranky rant against Edward St. Lucie-Smith, the hack who included more of his own poems than Dylan Thomas's in an anthology of contemporary British poetry? I take it back - "Rebel Angels" would be vastly improved by including some of Mr. Jarman's work.)

I tend to look up a least a little biographical information about the poets whose work I post, and I was flabbergasted by today's poet. Thomas M. (Tom) Disch wrote quite a bit of work with which I'm already familiar, including "The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World" (which I picked up for 50 cents in a Goodwill and have enjoyed quite a bit), and "The Brave Little Toaster"! I'd like to add a few more exclamation points but my conservative attitude towards punctuation will not permit me.

But "The Brave Little Toaster"! So I'll definitely be learning more about his work - apparently he was one of the first science fiction authors to become involved in game design, mostly text-based adventure games. Does anybody even remember those? And apparently, Philip K. Dick felt he was important enough to denounce to the FBI for some imagined crimes, the paranoid narc. 

But today I give you a sonnet about his apparent antipathy towards one massive explicitly autobiographical achingly tedious record-breaking tome. (Take note of his acidic description of the author, complete with almost homophobic undertones, strange coming from a man who was openly gay for the last half of his life.)

A Bookmark

Thomas M. Disch

Four years ago I started reading Proust.
Although I’m past the halfway point, I still
Have seven hundred pages of reduced
Type left before I reach the end. I will
Slog through. It can’t get much more dull than what
Is happening now: he’s buying crepe-de-chine
Wraps and a real, well-documented hat
For his imaginary Albertine.
Oh, what a slimy sort he must have been—
So weak, so sweetly poisonous, so fey!
Four years ago, by God!—and even then
How I was looking forward to the day
I would be able to forgive, at last,
And to forget Remembrance of Things Past.

The Power of Nothing at All

This is the poem that introduced me to Archibald MacLeish, a Librarian of Congress in the '40s who resigned to become assistant Secretary of State. I've got a volume of his collected poems, but so far none has affected me as lastingly as this one has.

As a teenager this seemed like a companion piece to modernist dystopian poetry like "The Waste Land" or "The Second Coming." But now it seems more like a strange, revelatory drug trip or a dream recovered just before the forgetting.

The End of the World

Archibald MacLeish 

Quite unexpectedly, as Vasserot
The armless ambidextrian was lighting
A match between his great and second toe,
And Ralph the lion was engaged in biting
The neck of Madame Sossman while the drum
Pointed, and Teeny was about to cough
In waltz-time swinging Jocko by the thumb---
Quite unexpectedly the top blew off:


And there, there overhead, there, there hung over
Those thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes,
There in the starless dark the poise, the hover,
There with vast wings across the cancelled skies,
There in the sudden blackness the black pall
Of nothing, nothing, nothing --- nothing at all.




The first half almost appears to be a Beat extravaganza, with random names and professions, clauses unrelated and seemingly undefined. It's a little arch and a little twee all at the same time. Then the second half breaks loose, up, out, into something we can't quite seem to name. It's this kind of stuff that prose can't seem to crack, the magical realism that is deeper than magic and more solid than reality. 


Really, the closest I've found in other arts is in cinema: like in "Vertigo" when Stewart's character sees what he knows to be the ghost of the woman who died from his pursuit and the camera slowly swivels to reveal a black coach from the stables where they shared a quiet moment. It was astounding - somehow Hitchcock seemed to be speaking personally to me and only me, like I was the only person who had picked up on this small detail and realized the magnitude and portent of it all, and here he was bringing it back with the shock of revelation and the force of prophecy.


There's a nameless recognition and mutual confirmation exchanged that could never make literal connections, it's the random firing of synapses like fireflies on Independence Day, nearly burned out by the fireworks around you, but still you can recognize it for what these things are, even when what it is, is nothing.


It's these nothings that pull everything together.

I'm Lazy Tonight

So I'll post something I don't have to think about. Namely, one of my poems.


If you feel like giving some criticism, feedback or naughty comments that's great. You can't hurt my feelings, that would require me not to be completely dead inside.


Plus, if I crowdsource the editing on this, I don't need to do any more work. It's a win-win-win. And contrary to popular opinion, three wins don't make a fail.




NOTE: My poem "Taking Things Apart" used to be here. Now it's not. What gives? 

I'm preparing to submit poems for publication and almost every literary journal demands "right of first publication." Unfortunately — and laughably — this small corner of the Interwebs counts as prior publication, so they gots ta come down. Sadface. 

Breaking news from the world of Calliope!

It's not every day there's a poetry story in the news. What a world it would be if we had one-twentieth of the ink we spend on Lady Gaga for poetry news. (Sort of like the Thursday Next series, which seems to keep a lot of the flavor of humanity's passion for extremes while finding cool ways to channel them that only appeal to Lit geeks like me. And probably you, since you're reading this.)


But I tracked down the poem, and here it is.

Achilles (for David Beckham)

Carol Ann Duffy

Myth's river- where his mother dipped him, fished him, a slippery golden boyflowed on, his name on its lips. Without him, it was prophesised,
they would not take Troy.


Women hid him, concealed him in girls' sarongs; days of sweetmeats, spices, silver songs...
but when Odysseus came,


with an athlete's build, a sword and a shield, he followed him to the battlefield, the crowd's roar,
and it was sport, not war,


his charmed foot on the ball...


but then his heel, his heel, his heel...




The poet gave a brief interview. Carol Ann Duffy: Why I was inspired to write a special poem to David Beckham


The public aspect of some lives provides a narrative, a story, for the rest of us to follow. We speak of 'living the dream', a 'fairytale existence' of 'legends' and of 'heroes'.


Like Greek Myths, such public lives can contain triumph and tragedy and in a way we all learn from them, as we do from Ovid, or the Brothers Grimm, or Shakespeare.


The narrative of David Beckham's public life is, I'm sure, far from over... but this poem is written in sympathy for this part of his story and to draw a parallel with Achilles, who gave his name to Beckham's injury.




So there you have it. Not a great poem, not a great subject, not a great explication. But POETRY NEWS!

None More Black

Sometimes you just have to go dark. This is one of my favorite poems that I've stumbled on in the last year or so. It's so dense, there are so many layers and possible meanings. 

What is it about?

It gives me a bad feeling. And I like that feeling.

The Lie

Don Paterson

As was my custom, I’d risen a full hour
before the house had woken to make sure
that everything was in order with The Lie,
his drip changed and his shackles all secure.


I was by then so practiced in this chore
I’d counted maybe thirteen years or more
since last I’d felt the urge to meet his eye.
Such, I liked to think, was our rapport.


I was at full stretch to test some ligature
when I must have caught a ragged thread, and tore
his gag away; though as he made no cry,
I kept on with my checking as before.


Why do you call me The Lie? he said. I swore:
it was a child’s voice. I looked up from the floor.
The dark had turned his eyes to milk and sky
and his arms and legs were all one scarlet sore.


He was a boy of maybe three or four.
His straps and chains were all the things he wore.
Knowing I could make him no reply
I took the gag before he could say more


and put it back as tight as it would tie
and locked the door and locked the door and locked the door

Yeah, Suck It, G.K.!

Annie Dillard is someone I'm still trying to learn to appreciate.


Not that she's not talented and insightful, no. She's got brains and skill and vision aplenty. There's just something about her I can't quite latch onto, some twist of personality or maybe her obsessions just aren't mine.


I can't read "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" for more than a chapter or two without feeling itchy and annoyed, then I start to sweat, then I start to smell Off! in the air, then I wonder why the hell I came on this damn camping trip anyway, then... I put the book down.


But I do like a good grudge match, or maybe just an Old Master getting their nose tweaked or maybe their ears boxed or just a little comeuppance. I enjoy a little Chesterton now and again, but when somebody says something monumentally stupid like this, you've got to assume they're either being purposefully dense or they've got it coming.

The Man Who Wishes To Feed On Mahogany

Annie Dillard

Chesterton tells us that if someone wished to feed exclusively on mahogany, poetry would not be able to express this. Instead, if a man happens to love and not be loved in return, or if he mourns the absence or loss of someone, then poetry is able to express these feelings precisely because they are commonplace.
-Borges, Interview in Encounter, April 1969


Not the man who wishes to feed on mahogany
and who happens to love and not be loved in return;
not mourning in autumn the absence or loss of someone, 
remembering how, in a yellow dress, she leaned
light-shouldered, lanky, over a platter of pears-
no; no tricks. Just the man and his wish, alone.


That there should be mahogany, real, in the world,
instead of no mahogany, rings in his mind
like a gong-that in humid Haitian forests are trees,
hard trees, not holes in air, not nothing, no Haiti
no zone for trees nor time for wood to grow:
reality rounds his mind like rings in a tree.


Love is the factor, love is the type, and the poem.
Is love a trick, to make him commonplace?
He wishes, cool in his windy rooms. He thinks:
of all earth's shapes, her coils, rays, and nets,
mahogany I love, this sunburnt red,
this close-grained, scented slab, my fellow creature.


He knows he can't feed on the wood he loves, and he won't.
But desire walks on lean legs down halls of his sleep,
desire to drink and sup at mahogany's mass.
His wishes weight his belly. Love holds him here,
love nails him to the world, this windy wood,
as to a cross. Oh, this lanky, sunburnt cross!


Is he sympathetic? Do you care?
And you, sir: perhaps you wish to feed
on your bright-eyed daughter, on your baseball glove,
on your outboard motor's pattern in the water.
Some love weights your walking in the world;
some love molds you heavier than air.


Look at the world, where vegetation spreads
and peoples air with weights of green desire.
Crosses grow as trees and grasses everywhere,
writing in wood and leaf and flower and spore,
marking the map, "Some man love here;
and one loved something here; and here; and here."





But if anything were to make me a convert to Dillardism it would be this: 


"Some love weights your walking in the world;
some love molds you heavier than air."