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.