65 Years Later

Lt. Gen. Helmuth "Bony Karl" Weidling

Commander, 56th Panzer Corps

W.D. Snodgrass

-15 April 1945.

(At his improvised HQ on the eastern front,

Weidling cursed and threatened the head of 

the Hitler Youth who'd brought him some of

these boys as a replacement corps.)

What do they want? - to make me out a Frenchman

Spouting: honor, honor? A preacher? Philosopher?

That's someone else's job; I specialize. Morality

Isn't in my line. When the time came, I sold

My honor; I took the oath to Hitler and I fought

His wars, just or unjust, fair means or foul.

I'm here to fight, not save our culture, not make peace,

Not any of those lies we throw around. And I don't

Mind fighting over things that we can't win -

What's lost already, like Berlin; I fight.

I trained for war, get paid, gained my rank

In battle. Damned little else ignites my wires.

I don't screw my friends' wives. I don't rob

Cripples or lead 14-year old soldiers. Not much

Of a decalogue, but that's the best I've got.

Dear God, when my voice is the loudest voice

For decency, I say we're in trouble.




I read this when I worked for the school newspaper and you could pretty much get whatever book you wanted for free so long as an article got written about it. I saw it as more or less getting paid for a book report and then keeping the source material. Not bad.


The poem comes from "The Fuehrer Bunker," a book-length series of poems in various voices of National Socialist historical figures. It's actually far less expolitative and vulgar than it sounds. In fact, there's a certain amount of humanity in it. It reminds me of the fantastic German film "Downfall" that gets so parodied in Internet memes. Here's my favorite takeoff.









But it's easy to just brand them inhuman demonic monsters and that's that. It's much more difficult to comprehend that these were real people with motivations that didn't come out of comic books. (Although that particular Nazi misreading of Schopenhauer, Nietzche and the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" does have all the primary colors and ridiculous posturing of a really bad comic. Like Batman in the late '60s.)


So I highly recommend it - tough going but rewarding. And all without posturing and chest-beating, not bad.

I.. Drink... Your POESY!

The Room

C. Day Lewis (for George Seferis)

To this room—it was somewhere at the palace's
Heart, but no one, not even visiting royalty
Or reigning mistress, ever had been inside it—
To this room he'd retire.
Graciously giving himself to, guarding himself from
Courtier, supplicant, stiff ambassador,
Supple assassin, into this unviewed room
He, with the air of one urgently called from
High affairs to some yet loftier duty,
Dismissing them all, withdrew.


And we imagined it suitably fitted out
For communing with a God, for meditation
On the Just City; or, at the least, a bower of
Superior orgies...He
Alone could know the room as windowless
Though airy, bare yet filled with the junk you find
In any child-loved attic; and how he went there
Simply to taste himself, to be reassured
That under the royal action and abstraction
He lived in, he was real.




This is from a collection called "Poet's Choice," edited by a Paul Engle and a Joseph Langland. It's unique in that each of the one hundred poets collected therein is allowed to choose a single poem, their favorite or what they consider their greatest or just what struck their fancy, and then write a brief page or so explaining their choice.


C. Day Lewis (yes, father of eminent scene-chewer-in-residence Daniel Day Lewis) offers this note:


"I have chosen this poem partly because it is the last one I have written, and I always want the last one I have written to be my best, and generally it seems my best - for a few hours, or even days, after I have written it.


"I also like it because it is a profoundly personal poem which reads (I hope) like an impersonal one. It began with the phrase "to taste himself"; what it i s saying, from the personal point of view, is that I, like almost every elderly poet in England, have become involved willy-nilly in activities - committees, lectures, public stances - which have little to do with making poems, and which tend to diminish my reality, or at least my feeling of being real. The room the King goes into is his solitude, his sanctum - the part of him inviolate from public preoccupations, uncorrupted by public business.


"But of course the poem should have a similar meaning - about solitude and integrity - for any man or woman. If it has not, but is interpreted simply as yet another poem about 'the poet's predicament in the modern world,' or some such boring specialised (sic) subject - then it is worthless.


"Perhaps a better reason for choosing it is that Seferis, whom I believe to be the greatest living European poet, let me dedicate it to him."


I like the candor of giving such a trivial reason for considering it his best, especially since I've only once or twice written something which I didn't immediately after find a masterwork, or at least a worthy addition to my personal canon. It's always the greatest thing I've ever done, until it's not. (And invariably it's not.)


But am I the only one who finds "to taste himself" slightly grotesque?

If a Poem MEANS Something, It's Probably Not Very Good

This is one of the first poems I ever read about poetry. (The title is Latin for "The Art of Poetry.") I can't say I enjoy most of the subgenre of poetry criticism as told through a poem. (Although Alexander Pope's "An Essay on Criticism" is a wicked good read.)


But this is a poem that seemed to open up a new way to read things, where symbols don't "stand for" other things, metaphors aren't just clues to be unraveled, and every poem is ultimately about itself. After all, if you've got big, important things to say, you should be writing essays or stump speeches, not poems.


And this seems apropos in light of the Olympic Hockey finals: "For all the history of grief/An empty doorway and a maple leaf." (Yes, for some people that defeat still stings.)

Ars Poetica

Archibald MacLeish

A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit, 


Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb, 


Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown -- 


A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds.


                    * 


A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs, 


Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees, 


Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,
Memory by memory the mind -- 


A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs.


                    * 


A poem should be equal to
Not true. 


For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf. 


For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea -- 


A poem should not mean
But be.

Resurrection Sunday

I'll admit I'm a sucker for symmetry. Black Saturday had an Unholy Sonnet, I've got to throw up something classic for Easter Sunday. 

Resurrection, Imperfect.

John Donne

Sleep, sleep, old sun, thou canst not have repass'd,
As yet, the wound thou took'st on Friday last ;
Sleep then, and rest ; the world may bear thy stay ;
A better sun rose before thee to-day ;
Who—not content to enlighten all that dwell
On the earth's face, as thou—enlighten'd hell,
And made the dark fires languish in that vale,
As at thy presence here our fires grow pale ;
Whose body, having walk'd on earth, and now
Hasting to heaven, would—that He might allow
Himself unto all stations, and fill all—
For these three days become a mineral.
He was all gold when He lay down, but rose
All tincture, and doth not alone dispose
Leaden and iron wills to good, but is
Of power to make e'en sinful flesh like his.
Had one of those, whose credulous piety
Thought that a soul one might discern and see
Go from a body, at this sepulchre been,
And, issuing from the sheet, this body seen,
He would have justly thought this body a soul,
If not of any man, yet of the whole.




I've always been curious where Jesus was for that long weekend. When I was a kid the Apostles' Creed read, "He descended into Hell." Later I found out a lot of Protestants change that to read, "He descended to the dead." But either way it's problematic: he had accepted the guilt and punishment for sin, but was he in Heaven, or Hell, or neither? Even the Catholic Church doesn't recognize Limbo as a concept anymore.


Usually when I bring this up the answer I get is a famous one, supposedly from St. Augustine (though the citation escapes me at the moment): "Hell is reserved for those who ask such questions." If that's true it must hold a lot of curious people.

Black Saturday

Here's a case study in how to be ironic, sad, witty, pious, poignant and heretical simultaneously.

Holy Sonnet 5

Mark Jarman

This is the moment. This all we have.
But how can we say this? What do we mean
By saying this to children, like sad men
With minds gones rotten in a sexual hive,
Who show children the secret thing they have--
The answer to all questions? What do we mean,
Then, by the souls of children, women, men?
The question stung and swollen in the hive.
I think I know sometimes and feel the joy
Of loving only for a lifetime. Death
Will smoke us out like bees, but we'll forget
That we were going to see the end of joy.
Our souls will keep like honey after death.
We'll forget that we were going to forget.




It's a sonnet, alright, but unless you read it several times you probably won't notice. The line breaks fall in interesting places, the rhymes are usually slant rhymes or consonance, he repeats so many of the words that fall at the end of a line.


And the imagery is dense, confusing, wrapping back in on itself and refining the metaphors to ever less conclusive ends. It sure seems like a 21st-century metaphysical poem to me. And if you're going to follow in the footsteps of Donne, Marvell, Herbert and Hopkins this is probably the best way to do it.


You have to be full of failure. You have to be accepting of how worthless it is: poetry, religion, the world, yourself. You have to be resigned. But you have to never let that get in the way.


Even the darkest parts of the poem seem to have some hint of redemption or at the very least brokenness in need of becoming whole. How about the reference to sex offenders "who show children the secret thing they have?" Sure, it's horrific and stark, but there's also something moving about linking the biological facts to a secret thing, the answer to all questions, the hidden mystery you have to be initiated into.


Lest you think me a pedophile booster, let me assure you that nothing could be further from the truth. But there's something more holistic here than "To Catch a Predator." The poem looks at monsters and finds men. It looks at death and finds a forgetting. There's a hard-won optimism here, wisdom that comes from pain.


As Det. Somerset closes David Fincher's Se7en: "Ernest Hemingway once wrote, 'The world is a fine place and worth fighting for.' I agree with the second part."

You-Know-Whats... All Alone in the Moonlight...

I wrote this ten years ago on Spring Break - me and another guy rode in my friend Sam's Ford Windstar.  We unloaded at Sam's parent's place in Destin, Florida and went out to get some coffee at about the only place in town that seemed open. We came out a few hours later to find that a palm tree branch had obscured the "No Parking, Offenders Will Be Towed" sign and the Windstar was nowhere to be found. Sam's dad had to come pick us up. That was a priceless moment.

As I recall, the next day Janet Reno ordered the FBI to take Elian Gonzalez into custody and return him to Cuba. Alright, now I feel old.

Good Friday. 2000. Sitting in the Java Pit.

Matt Quarterman

Two Catholic boys count down hours of Lent
as Tom Petty mumbles and the X-Men tousle. 
Marlene Dietrich cozies up to Sachmo or Kurt Russell.
The three of us ignore her, and ask what the magazine meant.

Pool balls rub shoulders, "Pardon," gallantly tip their hats
to the flow of conversation on getting laid from the bar.
The back-room band covers versions of anthems on girls and cars.
My friends discuss new movies like the other hep cats.

I discuss a little religion, politics, conspiracies with a stranger.
Our eyes water in the smoke, but I relax in my blue jeans
and silently say a prayer to the hovering Unseen
because I love us sub-intellectuals and raspy singers.

And because between Han Solo, the Stooges, Miami Vice
is a portrait of the suffering, crucified Christ. 




I wrote this tonight after realizing it had been a decade since the above.

Good Friday. 2010. Trabant Coffee & Chai.

Matt Quarterman

Oh yes, now I remember. Years ago
(ten to be exact) I wound up here:
a notebook and a dirty coffee shop,
a pen just like this - same blue, same fine point,


the Lenten hours tick down and then they stop.
Of course I've aged, but I don't think they did:
the ink, the paper, coffee grinding loud
and strangers' conversations I don't join.


And he's still in the background somewhere here,
though now I'm writing from the other coast.
I think I hear him breathing down my neck
in exhalations of the Holy Ghost.


I long ago stopped looking everywhere
for God, but now I wish he'd break his stare.

Middlesex

Unbosoming

Michael Field

The love that breeds 
In my heart for thee!
As the iris is full, brimful of seeds,
And all that it flowered for among the reeds
Is packed in a thousand vermilion-beads
That push, and riot, and squeeze, and clip, 
Till they burst the sides of the silver scrip,
And at last we see
What the bloom, with its tremulous, bowery fold
Of zephyr-petal at heart did hold:
So my breast is rent
With the burthen and strain of its great content;
For the summer of fragrance and sighs is dead,
The harvest-secret is burning red,
And I would give thee, after my kind,
The final issues of heart and mind.





There's some "Song of Solomon" here, some naughty but tasteful "Kama Sutra," maybe a little "Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam." But whether you find it erotic or not, there's some class, some charm and some real poetry going on here. 


"That push, and riot, and squeeze, and clip,/Till they burst the sides of the silver scrip..." 


You can't really argue that the man has some real talent.


Michael Field was not a man. He was two women, Katherine Harris Bradley and her niece and ward Edith Emma Cooper, who wrote and lived together. Hailed as a new Shakespearian voice in drama and poetry by the critics, they confided their secret to friend and mentor Robert Browning. Who naturally proceeded to spill the beans. Is there anything those Brownings can't ruin?


There's a lot of bandying about as to whether they were actually lesbians and how far their relationship went. Predictably the more pruriently prudish Victorian voices harrumph a lot and protest loudly that it's quite impossible, while the Queer Studies majors chuckle that anyone could question it. 


Personally: don't know, don't care. The poetry is pretty fantastic, especially for the turn of the century for some ladies from Bristol. This is the same era that gave us "The Tay Bridge Disaster," after all. There's some Georgia O'Keefe in here, some "Vagina Monologues," but it's amazing to me how the reading of the poem changes when you change the gender of the speaker.