Mind of Winter

I stumbled across this post today on a weblog written by Ron Silliman, a modern poet of sorts. Its about an interesting genre of poetry know as pwoermds (a blending of “words” and “poems”). Given Mike’s recent post, I don’t think he’d like a poem like:

by Jonathan Brannen

laugnage

But, maybe? Truly, this tiny little pwoermds has some nice complexity. The first thought is “language,” but then you notice the hint at the words “laugh” and “age.” Has anyone ever heard of this genre before? I thinks its pretty neat.. and, the best part is I can claim to have read about 20 poems during my lunch hour and written about 200. and1.

Mnemosyne

by Trumbull Stickney

It’s autumn in the country I remember.

How warm a wind blew here about the ways!
And shadows on the hillside lay to slumber
During the long sun-sweetened summer-days.

It’s cold abroad the country I remember.

The swallows veering skimmed the golden grain
At midday with a wing aslant and limber;
And yellow cattle browsed upon the plain.

It’s empty down the country I remember.

I had a sister lovely in my sight:
Her hair was dark, her eyes were very sombre;
We sang together in the woods at night.

It’s lonely in the country I remember.

The babble of our children fills my ears,
And on our hearth I stare the perished ember
To flames that show all starry thro’ my tears.

It’s dark about the country I remember.

There are the mountains where I lived. The path
Is slushed with cattle-tracks and fallen timber,
The stumps are twisted by the tempests’ wrath.

But that I knew these places are my own,
I’d ask how came such wretchedness to cumber
The earth, and I to people it alone.

It rains across the country I remember.

I haven’t been posting poems regularly for several reasons, but looming large among them is that I haven’t been reading much new poetry. For some time now, my interests have been seated roundly in the past. I read poetry now, not to learn or to experience the new or unfamiliar, but to remember, to recapture a bit of what I’ve loved before. The whole of the reason I posted the Masefield poem was that beautiful couplet: “Only stay quiet while my mind remembers / The beauty of fire from the beauty of embers.” And, in truth, many of my old favorites are favorites precisely because they evoke strong memories, and many more address directly the importance of memory itself. Sometimes, they do both:

To F——

by Edgar Allan Poe

BELOVED! amid the earnest woes
  That crowd around my earthly path—
(Drear path, alas! where grows
Not even one lonely rose)—
  My soul at least a solace hath
In dreams of thee, and therein knows
An Eden of bland repose.

And thus thy memory is to me
  Like some enchanted far-off isle
In some tumultuous sea—
Some ocean throbbing far and free
  With storms—but where meanwhile
Serenest skies continually
  Just o’er that one bright island smile.

I’m not sure I can explain why I have come to take pleasure in poetry only so far as it helps me to remember pleasure, and it certainly strikes me as odd. After all, though Mnemosyne gave birth to the muses, the muses who brought us poetry did so to give us distraction and forgetfulness. As Hesiod says, “their nature is forgetfulness of evil and rest from cares.” And later, he writes:

If someone has sorrow and is sick at heart and stunned with fresh trouble on his mind, and if a servant of the Muses sings of the glorious deeds of men in former times or of the blessed gods whose home is Olympus, he quickly forgets his bad thoughts and no longer remembers his troubles: the gifts of these godesses instantly divert the mind.

[Hesiod, Theogony, Tr. Norman O. Brown]

For some reason, though, I cannot now find forgetfulness in poetry. A few of Brian’s recent posts have brought this contradiction starkly into view. I have within me no sympathetic string that resonates with the Livesay poem, and hence take no enjoyment from it; similarly for Bogan, since I have no experience of cold remote islands or blue estuaries, or anything moving but the blood.

I came to law school to put an end to my passions, to quell my desires ( “…rather as a violent man kills his horse, because he cannot control it,” says Chamfort). I wonder if I have been overstrong? Have I been a bit too successful? And what shall I do when the memories have been forgotten?

Epilogue to Through the Looking Glass

by Lewis Carroll

A boat, beneath a sunny sky,
Lingering onward dreamily
In an evening of July—

Children three that nestle near.
Eager eye and willing ear,
Pleased a simple tale to hear—

Long has paled that sunny sky :
Echoes fade and memories die.
Autumn frosts have slain July.

Still she haunts me, phantomwise,
Alice moving under skies
Never seen by waking eyes.

Children yet, the tale to hear,
Eager eye and willing ear,
Lovingly shall nestle near.

In a Wonderland they lie,
Dreaming as the days go by,
Dreaming as the summers die :

Ever drifting down the stream—
Lingering in the golden gleam—
Life, what is it but a dream ?

Mike,
Thanks for the upkeep!
I haven’t posted here for a while, but I hope to put some poems up soon…

I’ve updated the Guts of Winter to something the cool kids call an unstable nightly, a term that here means that things might all go to Hell in a very fast handbasket. Not much has changed yet, but with new guts I can start installing anti-spam stuff. And the posting interface has changed a bit. I have just spent a redonculous amount of time, though, trying to get everything on the main website to look like nothing changed at all. I’m tired now. So I’ll just leave it at this: I think it should be safe to post away, but something might break. Let me know if something does.

Also, as a general rule, I’m always willing to entertain design ideas. This site is remarkably customizable, so if you want to try something out, just let me know…

I’m a-gon’ attempt an upgrade to the infrastructure here. The blogware needs a new pair of shoes. I haven’t had a chance to test everything locally, so I have a feeling things may be buggy for a little while, but I’m about to lose my free time (right about… NOW), so it’s now or never, and never might be fatal. The upgrade will help with the comment spam, meaning we can turn on comments again, and it will make the interface a little nicer, a little smoother. Also, the password encryption is stronger in the new version, so no strange unwanted unfriendlies will be able to break in (btw, if you’ve forgotten your password, I can’t retrieve it, but I can reset it for you—just shoot me an email: Administrator 4t joke of all trades d0t com). I apologize in advance if I break things. I’ve been known to break things before. But I’ll do my best.

I mention this because as of this posting, I can’t guarantee that anything will work right until I finish the upgrade (and I can’t really guarantee anything then, either!). It’s best if nobody posts until I’m done. Thanks.

I have survived my exams (though I did not excel—thankfully, my grades do not interest me), but I still carry a few battle scars. My Property Law professor gave us a 7-hour exam centering around the hypothetical intellectual property issues that would be involved if (1) Samuel Taylor Coleridge had written Kubla Khan 150 years more recently than he did, (2) an explorer used an illegally published (pirated) copy of the copyrighted poem to discover underground lakes and caves in Mongolia, (3) a revolution in Mongolia led the area to be annexed by the USA, and (4) our property laws were retroactively applied to the former Mongolians. The exam question was so long that it took a solid half-hour just to read it, but it was peppered heavily with phrases from the poem. I debated whether I should post the poem to get it out of my system or print it and ritualistically burn it along with my Property textbook, which was no help at all on the “open-book” exam. I have opted for the former, but reserve the option of the latter. Here she is in all her glory:

Kubla Khan

by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree :
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
     Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round :
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree ;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

     But oh ! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
     Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover !
     A savage place ! as holy and enchanted
     As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
     By woman wailing for her demon-lover !
     And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
     As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
     A mighty fountain momently was forced :
     Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
     Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
     Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail :
     And ‘mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
     It flung up momently the sacred river.
     Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
     Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
     Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
     And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean :
     And ‘mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
     Ancestral voices prophesying war !
     The shadow of the dome of pleasure
     Floated midway on the waves ;
     Where was heard the mingled measure
     From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice !
     A damsel with a dulcimer
     In a vision once I saw :
     It was an Abyssinian maid,
     And on her dulcimer she played,
     Singing of Mount Abora.
     Could I revive within me
     Her symphony and song,
     To such a deep delight ‘twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome ! those caves of ice !
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware ! Beware !
His flashing eyes, his floating hair !
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

Selection from Very Like a Whale

by Ogden Nash

Now then, this particular Assyrian, the one whose cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold,
Just what does the poet mean when he says he came down like a wolf on the fold?
In heaven and earth more than is dreamed of in our philosophy there are great many things.
But I don’t imagine that among them there is a wolf with purple and gold cohorts or purple and gold anythings.
No, no, Lord Byron, before I’ll believe that this Assyrian was actually like a wolf I must have some kind of proof;
Did he run on all fours and did he have a hairy tail and a big red mouth and big white teeth and did he say Woof Woof?
Frankly I think it is very unlikely, and all you were entitled to say, at the very most,
Was that the Assyrian cohorts came down like a lot of Assyrian cohorts about to destroy the Hebrew host.

More later, perhaps, but exams now.

Etude

by Ted Kooser

I have been watching a Great Blue Heron
fish in the cattails, easing ahead
with the stealth of a lover composing a letter,
the hungry words looping and blue
as they coil and uncoil, as they kiss and sting.

Let’s say that he holds down an everyday job
in an office. His blue suit blends in.
Long days swim beneath the glass top
of his desk, each one alike. On the lip
of each morning a bubble trembles.

No one has seen him there, writing a letter
to a woman he loves. His pencil is poised
in the air like the beak of a bird.
He would spear the whole world if he could,
toss it and swallow it live.

The holidays have seen works of the current Poet Laureate lovingly thrust upon me. When Alan and Heidi visited, they gave me a copy of Kooser’s Weather Central, which begins with the poem above. It was a matter of minutes before I found several poems in it which I enjoyed and continue to enjoy. It was, in an oddly appropriate turn of events, a matter of just a few more minutes before I lost the book. I believe I left it in its wrapping on a table in a coffeshop in St. Paul. It was (and is) a brilliant gift, and I have since been able to replace the text.

Kooser, it is standard to mention, lives around Garland, Nebraska near Lincoln where he worked at the Lincoln Benefit Life Company and as an adjunct professor at the University of Nebraska. Laura and I recently passed through Lincoln stopping at a Wendy’s and noting that Alan would have insisted on the King Kong Burger across the street on our way to Kearney, NE where Laura’s mom is taking care of Laura’s grandfather. Regional flavor carried the day as I gave Laura’s mom a recording of loons (state bird of Minnesota) and received Kooser’s Sure Signs over a spread featuring Nebraska wine (not a typo).

I expect to be posting several of Kooser’s poems in the coming year and suspect I may try to post at least one poem by each past Poet Laureate of the US as a sort of project this year–for example, Louise Bogan’s Night. Also, this post represents my attempt to begin actually saying something about the poems that I post here. So here goes.

In reading Kooser the last weeks, I (and certainly others before me) have been struck most often by his metaphors. It is certainly the most noticeable device in his work, and he makes strong use of it. When I was in grade school, I was instructed that a simile used the words “like” or “as”, but a metaphor was an actual equation of two things that were in fact not the same. If you wander lonely as a cloud, that’s a simile, it becomes a metaphor if you claim to actually be a lonely wandering cloud. I have since found that the term is used much more broadly and a great deal of imagery gets clumped under it. It is in this vague sense of the word that I claimed to be struck by Kooser’s metaphors, but what strikes me about the metaphor of Etude is the way that it shades into equating the heron and the letter writer.

By the end of the poem, we take it that the subject of the poem has been the furtive writer of love notes on company time. He is like the heron; he would spear the world with his beak of a pencil and swallow it live. It is surprising then to return to the start of the poem and find that in fact the office worker begins as an image for the heron. The heron is like the letter writer.

As the poem begins, the narrator is watching a heron fishing and finds the bird’s stealth like that of the imaginary correspondent. The motions of the bird’s hunting become the words on the page, both their look and their effect. The heron is concrete: there, being watched. The office worker is thoroughly hypothetical: “Let’s say that he holds down an everyday job”. The heron is blue and his office worker would thus wear a blue suit. Yet at this point the priority is already starting to shift a little. If a heron is like a man in a blue suit, a man in a blue suit is like a great blue heron. If days are like fish, fish are like days. Until finally the days do a very fishy thing, they carry a trembling bubble on their lip. Now the days are fish. They’ve done what I was told in grade school was the hallmark of metaphor, they’ve transformed into something they are not. At this moment, the man is no longer an image for the bird. The observed bird is now an image for the imagined man.

By the final stanza, it is the man that we are observing and no longer the bird. He does not seem enthusiastic about his work, he blends in so that he can spear the days that pass. We have become concerned with the nature of the love letters. They are his hunting. Oddly, by the end, they form an aggression toward the world.

Night

by Louise Bogan

The cold remote islands
And the blue estuaries
Where what breathes, breathes
The restless wind of the inlets,
And what drinks, drinks
The incoming tide;

Where shell and weed
Wait upon the salt wash of the sea,
And the clear nights of stars
Swing their lights westward
To set behind the land;

Where the pulse clinging to the rocks
Renews itself forever;
Where, again on cloudless nights,
The water reflects
The firmament’s partial setting;

—O remember
In your narrowing dark hours
That more things move
Than blood in the heart.