Mind of Winter

Here are two poems on a related theme. If I have already put up the Bishop poem before, I apologize. First, Billy Collins:

Forgetfulness

by Billy Collins

The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

Now, Elizabeth Bishop:

One Art

by Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

–Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Brian’s post about the early bird, lovely post that it was, left a small, very nasal fly inside my head who has been buzzing away, demanding a good swatting. This little essay is meant to be a rolled up piece of paper with which to do away with him.

Brian began by pointing out that metaphors are mortal. He then went on to talk about ‘proverbs’ – “lockets with fossils inside” – a suggestion that they die too. I think perhaps Brian was conflating two things here that can be teased apart. Thus the fly.

My question then— Metaphors die, do proverbs?
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The Sweeper of Ways

by Howard Nemerov

All day, a small mild Negro man with a broom
Sweeps up the leaves that fall along the paths.
He carries his head to one side, looking down
At his leaves, at his broom like a windy beard
Curled with the sweeping habit. Over him
High haughty trees, the hickory and the ash,
Dispense their more leaves easily, or else
The district wind, hunting hypocrisy,
Tears at the summer’s wall and throws down leaves
To witness of a truth naked and cold.

Hopeless it looks, on these harsh, hastening days
Before the end, to finish all those leaves
Against time. But the broom goes back and forth
With a tree’s patience, as though naturally
Erasers would speak the language of pencils.
A thousand thoughts fall on the same blank page,
Though the wind blows them back, they go where he
Directs them, to the archives where disorder
Blazes and a pale smoke becomes the sky.
The ways I walk are splendidly free of leaves.

We meet, we smile good morning, say the weather
Whatever. On a rainy day there’ll be
A few leaves stuck like emblems on the walk;
These too he brooms at till they come unstuck.
Masters, we carry our white faces by
In silent prayer, Don’t hate me, on a wave-
length which his broom’s antennae perfectly
Pick up, we know ourselves so many thoughts
Considered by a careful, kindly mind
Which can do nothing, and is doing that.

I would really like to hear any thoughts people have about this poem, which strikes me more and more each time I read it. Something is most certainly standing for something else here, I would say. But it is not in the way that I have grown accustomed to with Mr. Kooser– where the two ends of the analogy are made quite obvious and it is the striking likeness of them that lends power to the poem. Here, the poet poses more of a puzzle.

I feel pretty certain that this poem is about how I felt often at college watching the parade of nameless black folks cook for and clean up after white students (well, nameless outside of the gym– a credit to the sports program of St. John’s for sure). And how I feel at work now with Hispanic employees doing most of the same thing. There is one woman in particular… she cleans the bathrooms on the floor where my office is. I visit the bathroom a lot. She wears a lot of makeup and is fat. She cleans the bathroom twice a day during the hours I am there. Of course she has to wait outside the door of the men’s room, blocking the entrance, while the people doing business inside finish and come out. I’m not sure how she knows that it is all clear. Maybe they tell her to wait X amount of time and then go in. In any case, I think about her waiting there outside the room nodding to men like me as we come out of the bathroom, an awkward moment for sure. Need I point out that its a little sad and that I do– in a way– pray she doesn’t hate me?

But in this poem the sweeper is given a lot of dignity. To me he seems like the prophet in common clothes; Knight of infinite resignation, maybe. And why so much lingering in the poem on the sweeping, the leaves, trees, wet leaves? This is what stands for something I feel. But I can’t sort out what. With the line “The ways I walk are splendidly free of leaves” I start to feel certain that a clean walkway is a semblance of justice– an appearance that things are acceptable as they are, though the way is never and never can be finally free of leaves. There is more to expose, I think, in this analogy.

Anne

by Ted Kooser

Her body was the cellar
under her life.
The marks of the old floods
rounded the walls.
Everything that she’d had
had been carried outside
and burned on the lawn.
There was nothing left but a few broken jars
and some spiders,
eating each other
under the stairsteps.
Everyone seemed to know
that there was nothing
to go down into her for.

Domestics

by Ted Kooser

You take care of the housework
and leave the poetry writing to me.
Just leave the poems to me
and keep up with the housework.
I don’t want to find any of your poems
lying around the house,
particularly when somebody comes to the house
to look at my poems.
And one other thing, and don’t you forget it:
I’m the poet around here,
and you are the mistress of the poet.
If you think you can be the poet, forget it.
For as long as you live here,
you are the girl. I get to be the poet.

These two poems were facing each other in a book of 20 poems by Ted that Heidi had to go to great trouble to find. They run the spectrum, I think, from dark to light. I have been thinking a lot about dark and light in poetry. My favorite poet right now is Claudia Emerson, who I will post soon. Her poems lives in igloos at the dark end. Billy Collins’ poems rest under palms at the light end. Ted scrambles between them.

A website that we should link from this page: www.americanlifeinpoetry.org. New poem each week.

First, I should apologize if anyone has experienced difficulty with the site recently. I had a small communication error with the webhost and some configuration files were deleted. Everything’s been recovered, but there was a day or two of garbage loading… Anyway, in straightening that stuff out, I made a few minor changes to the layout:
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Marginalia

by Billy Collins

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O’Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

Other comments are more offhand, dismissive —
“Nonsense.” “Please!” “HA!!” —
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
who wrote “Don’t be a ninny”
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.

Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls “Metaphor” next to a stanza of Eliot’s.
Another notes the presence of “Irony”
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.

Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
“Absolutely,” they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
“Yes.” “Bull’s-eye.” “My man!”
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.

And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written “Man vs. Nature”
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.

Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria^o
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird signing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page—
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake’s furious scribbling.

Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents’ living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page

A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil—
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet—
“Pardon the egg salad stains, but I’m in love.”

For whatever reason, this reminds me of Hoke.

I can recall only one margin note I ever came across in a library book. It was in a section of Plato’s Republic dealing with what sort of poetry makes noble citizens and such claptrap. One of my predecessors had noted beside one of these proposals “then Homer becomes Herodotus”.

I don’t believe I have ever scribbled in a book I didn’t own. I have managed to mark up a few texts, but almost exclusively with asterisks, brackets, and question marks. I tried underlining with Hegel. It did not go well. I did, however, at least once manage to delve into actual notes. My copy of the Meno has “Knowledge as Easter Egg Hunt” scribbled in the margin.

Happy Easter.

Out of curiosity, what became of the ability to create new categories? It seems to me that Billy Collins could use one.

The Early Bird

by Ted Kooser

Still dark, and raining hard
on a cold May morning

and yet the early bird
is out there chirping,

chirping its sweet-sour
wooden-pulley notes,

pleased, it would seem,
to be given work,

hauling the heavy
bucket of dawn

up from the darkness,
note over note,

and letting us drink.

Metaphors are mortal. Most die silently, decay, and are forgotten. Others become fossils; such are the ones we call dead. We find them sometimes in cookies. Frequently, they attend meetings. The news of their death is reported almost daily in the pages of editorials and opinion magazines. Often, if we have nothing to say, we say them ourselves. Or we tell them to children, especially those in kindergarten, we wish to bore to sleep.

Many a proverb is a locket with a fossil inside. Once there was the image of a reluctant horse, now there stands in its place a reflex of language. Once a careful tailor threaded economy to forethought without seam, but only a nervous tic of the tongue remains of such labor.

A similar fate has befallen the early bird. I imagine that by now he is tired of catching the worm. There have been so many mornings. There have been so many worms. What use being first if there were so many worms? Why not, just once, a cricket? Or that grasshopper there, the one with the fiddle. In DC last summer there was a great feast to be had of cicadas. The birds could sleep to noon if they wanted and venture just a few feet to breakfast in luxury. These were the days of plenty, when none could go hungry, not if they tried. But the early bird could only look on, caged in words and consigned to a diet of worms. Such is the price of becoming a token of diligence, you stop being a bird.

From what I’ve heard, Ted Kooser is an assiduous writer and an early riser who worked on his poems before leaving for the office–an early bird, one might say. (An early bard one might also say, but puns will have to wait, today is metaphor.) He is also, from what I have read, a poet particularly attentive to metaphor. He is not the sort of fellow who let’s dead metaphors wander about in his verses, not without good reason. But a dead metaphor is only a problem if you use it as a metaphor.

A consequence of being a platitude is becoming familiar. There’s a game I’ve been playing since high school that consists of finding proverbs that could be complete sentences if truncated. Some examples: you can lead a horse to water; the road to hell is paved; a penny saved is a penny. These have a comic effect that relies on their being complete thoughts that seem incomplete by force of habit. The habit of words is a tool at our disposal. As surely as your pupils dilate at darkness, if I say “an apple a day”, you’ll think “keeps the doctor away”. You might not mind that “death is the mother of all beauty”, but “all’s well that ends” is discomforting.

When we read the title The Early Bird, we don’t think of a bird so much as we think of the phrase. And along with the phrase comes a sentiment. Allusion is a wonderfully economical device (letting culture do our work for us) that runs the risk of being missed entirely or seeming snobby. However, one can allude to clichés with confidence.

We know from the proverb that the early bird is a worker, a good worker who goes eagerly to his labors. And we know what his labors are. He’s out to catch the worm. It may be dark, it may be raining, it may be cold, but the early bird is out there because, dammit, the early bird catches the worm. Yet at the fourth line the early bird is not a hunter but a singer. Look at the early bird out there chirping away–such diligence.

The poem then pivots around a metaphor: the bird’s chirp is the chirp of a wooden pulley. The early bird is still a worker, but not the sort we would have had him be. The pulley is a device at the well, fresh with rain. The bird is lifting the sun, the bucket of daylight, out of the darkness, out of the rain, out of the cold. His chirps are the signs and the means of his labor.

In the proverb, the bird finds sustenance catching the worm. In the poem, the bird sustains us letting us drink. The early bird is much changed by the end of the poem. No longer looking out for number one, he is instead steadfast in the service of others. But what is it that we drink?

If Jon were here, I would propose a toast: to the dailiness of life.

Pinup

by Billy Collins

The murkiness of the local garage is not so dense
That you cannot make out the calendar of pinup
Drawings on the wall above a bench of tools.
Your ears are ringing with the sound of
The mechanic hammering on your exhaust pipe,
And as you look closer you notice that this month’s
Is not the one pushing the lawn mower, wearing
a straw hat and very short blue shorts,
her shirt tied in a knot just below her breasts.
Nor is it the one in the admiral’s cap, bending
Forward, resting her hands on a wharf piling,
Glancing over the tiny anchors on her shoulders.
No, this is March, the month of great winds,
So appropriately it is the one walking her dog
Along a city sidewalk on a very blustery day.
One hand is busy keeping her hat down on her head
And the other is grasping the little dog’s leash,
So of course there is no hand left to push down
Her dress which is billowing up around her waist
Exposing her long stockinged legs and yes the secret
Apparatus of her garter belt. Needless to say,
In the confusion of wind and excited dog
The leash has wrapped itself around her ankles
Several times giving her a rather bridled
And helpless appearance which is added to
By the impossibly high heels she is teetering on.
You would like to come to her rescue,
Gather up the little dog in your arms,
Untangle the leash, lead her to safety,
And receiver her bottomless gratitude, but
The mechanic is calling you over to look
At something under your car. It seems that he has
Run into a problem and the job is going
To cost more than he had said and take
Much longer than he had thought.
Well, it can’t be helped, you hear yourself say
As you return to your place by the workbench,
Knowing that as soon as the hammering resumes
You will slowly lift the bottom of the calendar
Just enough to reveal a glimpse of what
The future holds in store: ah,
The red polka-dot umbrella of April and her
Upturned palm extended coyly into the rain.

A Life

by Howard Nemerov

Innocence?
In a sense.
In no sense!

Was that it?
Was that it?
Was that it?

That was it.

Monday Morning

by Billy Collins

The complacency of this student, late
for the final, who chews her pen for an hour,
who sits in her sunny chair,
with a container of coffee and an orange,
a cockatoo swinging freely in her green mind
as if on some drug dissolved,
mingling to give her a wholly ancient rush.
She dreams a little and she fears the mark
she might well get–a catastrophe–
as a frown darkens the hauteur of her light brow.
The orange peels and her bright senior ring
make her think of some procession of classmates,
walking across the wide campus, without a sound,
stalled for the passing of her sneakered feet
over the lawn, to silent pals and steins,
dorm of nobody who would bother to pull an A or care.

I have been gone from this page for a long time and it makes me quite sad to look at the lovely things that have been written months ago and gone unanswered, unacknowledged, unheard by me. Can I respond after such a wintry absence? Do comments in cyberspace keep their flavor when thawed?

Mike, your Mnemosyne post was fine and timely. I too have wondered where I misplaced my soul since transitioning to my latest thing. John, lovely poem of graciously managable length. Brian, glad you liked the Ted Kooser book. Your comments on Etude added.

Let me say a word here about Kooser. Heidi and I have been to hear him twice at the Library of Congress and we (more her than me, actually) have avariciously gobbled up all his publicness over the last couple months – radio interviews, tv interviews, web interviews. The story of the man, apparently, is that he is from Nebraska and he is a good poet anyway. This is a drag. But still, having spent so much time in the slab of midwest that so marvelously coughed him up I do have to say that he has very familiar sensibilities. I am reading his Poetry Home Repair Manual now. If you haven’t heard of it, its what the title says it is, published this year. He talks about things not really being better for having been done one way than another. Yet he talks always about revising poems 30, 40, 50, 100 times before they are ready to be called done. Its a confusing Manual, as most are.

There was an interview with him in the NY Times magazine. Reading it, I was certain that the interviewer was kidding, laughing at herself/himself for acting such the snob when it was so ridiculous to do so. Anyway, I got a kick out of it.

Here is a better article about Kooser. Here is the poem inside it which I love:

The Blind Always Come as Such a Surprise

by Ted Kooser

The blind always come as such a surprise,
suddenly filling an elevator
with a great white porcupine of canes,
or coming down upon us in a noisy crowd
like the eye of a hurricane.
The dashboards of cars stopped at crosswalks
and the shoes of commuters on trains
are covered with sentences
struck down in mid-flight by the canes of the blind.
Each of them changes our lives,
tapping across the bright circles of our ambitions
like cracks traversing the favorite china.

When a critic talks about skillful pacing in a poem they are talking about the sentence that spans four lines and begins with “The dashboards.” I’ll leave the commentary at that for now.

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.