Mind of Winter

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 ?

My sister will be in town this weekend, so it looks like another week delay. I’m hoping we can meet more regularly when the spring kicks in, but I can’t say why I think that would happen. Nice weather? Oh well.

The plan, as far as I can tell, is to do Wordsworth still. The poem is a little long to post here, so I’ll just link it. If anyone finds this poem boring and tedious, I’m open to changing it.

One other thing, I’ve just got a new computer, so I’m able to post/email/etc. when not at work. My home email adress (for now) is jmlawless@mac.com and my AOL IM is jonlawless77.

Here’s my thinking. I will be talking poetry this weekend. I am perfectly happy to talk with myself, as I have begun to do on my morning Metro commute, but I would also enjoy discussions involving other, actual people. If anyone else is interested in talking poetry, I’d be happy to participate. I am far too tired to dig up good suggestions for specific poems, but I’m not picky. I’ve been reading some Swinburne, which I realize may not appeal to anyone else, but I’ve also been having real trouble with Mallarmé (a lot of trouble), and I always enjoy some Yeats… Then again, Brian posted a couple of very nice poems not all that long ago as well. I just noticed a few days ago that I had completely misread “The Illiterate” the first time through. I’m pretty lazy on first reading, and I failed to notice that it’s not actually about someone who can’t read. It’s a big, long similie. Pretty obvious to everyone else, I suppose, but I’m a little slow sometimes.

So, yeah. I’ll be talking poetry. Anyone else interested?

Just thought you should know.

Ye weep for those who weep? she said—
  Ah, fools! I bid you pass them by.
Go, weep for those whose hearts have bled
  What time their eyes were dry.
Whom sadder can I say? she said.

—from “The Mask” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Thanks, Mike, for that post. I enjoyed it very much. I’d like to launch a few brief volleys on the topic of death.

First, I, myself, dont make the leap to permanence when I think about how death bears on question of whether life is meaningful. I don’t think life would only be meaningful if it lasted forever– I believe that this is actually incoherent.

I do find myself thinking a lot about how many more dead people there are than living ones. And how narrow the way is for we, the living. Just a little nudge and we are nothing, just an infinitesimal voice in the cacophonous choir of the dead. And, being dead, the world just trudges on, full of the still living, the barely living waiting for their nudge. I am not even sure it factors into my thinking that the world forgets us; that we would be lucky to have our footprint in the world persist as long as it takes the flesh to come off the bone. That’s just talk, though. What really makes a difference to me is the thought that so much consciousness (culture, sound, fury) is so fragile. And that it couldn’t be any other way.

Here is Achilles on death and the meaning of life:

Fate is the same for the man who holds back, the same if he fights hard.
We are all held in a single honour, the brave with the weaklings.
A man dies still if he has done nothing, as one who has done much.
Nothing is won for me, now that my heart has gone through its afflictions
in forever setting my life on the hazard of battle.

The translation is Richard Lattimore

There were two points of discussion today (neither drawing directly from the poems we discussed, unfortunately) that I’d like to ruminate for a bit. We ate together—I hope you’ll pardon me this bit of public digestion. The first was Alan’s suggestion that some people believe poetry to be handicapped as a form of expression because its aim lies chiefly in avoiding a plain and clear articulation of the ideas it is used to express. I was for some time an adherent of a similar position, and I think it may still be at the root of my resistance to modern non-representational art (if an artist is trying to convey something to me, why can’t he articulate it in a way that I might more clearly understand?). The second is the idea that only the permanent is valuable; that the prospect of death might indict our attempts to achieve happiness as ultimately futile. I’m having difficulty with both of these ideas (and the difficulty will be apparent in what I write, I’m sure), so I’m going to “think aloud” a bit to see if I can begin to make sense of some vague notions that have been clouding my brain since this afternoon.

(Read more…)

Auden has an essay on Frost that I like. Here’s how it ends:

Hardy, Yeats, and Frost have all written epitaphs for themselves.

Hardy
I never cared for life, life cared for me.
And hence I owe it some fidelity…

Yeats
Cast a cold eye
On life and death.
Horseman, pass by.

Frost
I would have written of me on my stone
I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.

Of the three, Frost, surely, comes off best. Hardy seems to be stating the Pessimist’s Case rather than his own feelings. I never cared… Never? Now, Mr. Hardy, really! Yeats’ horseman is a stage prop; the passer-by is much more likely to be a motorist. But Frost convinces me that he is telling neither more nor less than the truth about himself. And, when it comes to wisdom, is not having a lover’s quarrel with life more worthy of Prospero than not caring or looking coldly?

I realize looking over this that it’s not clear that any of those are necessarily on any of the poets’ headstones. Still, I thought I’d mention it. If only because I like the essay.

I’m back to the old dailiness of life. After spending many beautiful days in South Carolina, watching the sunset and eating and drinking way out of the bounds of moderation, its painful to wake up early and go to work. As usual, there’s always a poem to make one feel better about life’s miseries. Here’s one that’s somewhat refreshing:

Well Water

by Randall Jarrell

What a girl called “the dailiness of life”
(Adding an errand to your errand. Saying,
“Since you’re up . . .” Making you a means to
A means to a means to) is well water
Pumped from an old well at the bottom of the world.
The pump you pump the water from is rusty
And hard to move and absurd, a squirrel-wheel
A sick squirrel turns slowly, through the sunny
Inexorable hours. And yet sometimes
The wheel turns of its own weight, the rusty
Pump pumps over your sweating face the clear
Water, cold, so cold! you cup your hands
And gulp from them the dailiness of life.

Hey! Can we do poetry this week at our place? It would help me out and it looks like chez Jon and Sam is the place to be FRI night. If its inconvenient, though, no worries.

I tell ya, I’m such a sucker for alliteration. (That and lights on trees in the winter.) So, needless to say, I enjoyed the Swinburne poem you posted Mike.

The snow is blowing out here in Nebraska, but not as high as the trees. That’s a good thing though since I intend to come home tomorrow. Thursday at Jon’s place sounds good to me.

See you all soon!

I apologize for being so out of things and unresponsive lately. I am so deeply drenched in the depths of the unpoetic and pathetic linguistic that the pressure is poised to prompt me to implode. But I’m hoping to take a break from it all for a couple hours to do our thing thursday night. Our place would be fine but lets keep it simple and do Jon’s unless he (or others) would prefer to come out to the palisades. And the poems Jon mentioned sound good to me. Oh and I heard this poem read recently and liked it. Its also contemporary and female (Elizabeth Bishop). ESSO was Exxon before it was Exxon.

Filling Station

by Elizabeth Bishop

Oh, but it is dirty!
—this little filling station,
oil-soaked, oil-permeated
to a disturbing, over-all
black translucency.
Be careful with that match!

Father wears a dirty,
oil-soaked monkey suit
that cuts him under the arms,
and several quick and saucy
and greasy sons assist him
(it’s a family filling station),
all quite thoroughly dirty.

Do they live in the station?
It has a cement porch
behind the pumps, and on it
a set of crushed and grease-
impregnated wickerwork;
on the wicker sofa
a dirty dog, quite comfy.

Some comic books provide
the only note of color—
of certain color. They lie
upon a big dim doily
draping a taboret
(part of the set), beside
a big hirsute begonia.

Why the extraneous plant?
Why the taboret?
Why, oh why, the doily?
(Embroidered in daisy stitch
with marguerites, I think,
and heavy with gray crochet.)

Somebody embroidered the doily.
Somebody waters the plant,
or oils it, maybe. Somebody
arranges the rows of cans
so that they softly say:
ESSO–SO–SO–SO

to high-strung automobiles.
Somebody loves us all.

Does anyone have any suggestions for this thursday’s meeting? I was thinking that we could briefly revisit Mary Oliver first and then move onto the Dylan Thomas poem that Brian posted. This conveniently leaves the 2 graveyard poems Alan posted for the thursday prior to Christmas (or we could do something else).

….

From my law school applications:

Lines Written Upon Reading the Caption Below a Picture of Natalie Portman with Her Hand Down the Back of Her Jeans, which Said Something about Ants in Her Pants

by Me, Unfortunately

Let us make haste, depart ; she will not dance.
Let us quaff our drinks and leave for France.
She would not pluck the fruit from off the vine,
Nor help our Bacchanal one step advance.
How humourless she is ! like hemlock wine ;
Yea, though we poured a thousand ants into her pants,
   She would not dance.

To atone for the assault on your sensibilities that must have been, I offer also a snippet from a poem by Swinburne called “Félise,” which I was reading on the Metro coming home. It’s a longer piece, quite beautiful in places, but in the latter half he decries the godless world at some length. The stars make an indifferent appearance:

from Félise

by Algernon Charles Swinburne

Do the stars answer ? in the night
  Have ye found comfort ? or by day
Have ye seen gods ? What hope, what light,
  Falls from the farthest starriest way
  On you that pray?

Are the skies wet because we weep,
  Or fair because of any mirth ?
Cry out ; they are gods ; perchance they sleep ;
  Cry ; thou shalt know what prayers are worth,
  Thou dust and earth.

Jon’s place. 6:30. Bueno.

The poems: The Sun, Mary Oliver/A Leave-Taking, Algernon Swinburne

We can do my place or whatever is most convenient…. If people have opinions, please post comments.

Heidi’s favorite poet is Mary Oliver. Contemporary. Female. A writer of books on meter, sound and other matters of form. Her own poetry is only indirectly so sturctured. I found a poem by her that I think would be a good counterpoint to the Swinburne. Its called the sun. Its quite different in tone and stlye, I would say.

Alan

The Snow Man

by Wallace Stevens

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

If one can abide stars that are simply points of light, inert things that don’t watch us and are no kind of companion—and certainly this is what we all believe nowadays—one can learn to adjust to an empty sky. An empty sky is awfully beautiful, too, and, moreover, reminds us that we are the more loving ones—the only ones who love. That is something of a distinction. Bronte would never adjust… but she is lost in her fantasy: could the dark of her pillow really be a surrogate for the washed out stars? Auden is more cynical. There is no difference between day and night if stars are not the sort to give a damn.

But maybe there is a difference… the daily washout of the stars by the blood-red sun doesn’t faze Auden while the total dark sublime would take (him) a little getting used to. I think Mike is right to wonder persistently about that last line. I feel strongly that we are meant to read ‘a little time’ as ‘a hell of a lot of time.’ So which is it—”no worries, man, the stars are just pretty lights anyway” or “this might take a good long while.” Maybe Auden is as susceptible to fantasy as Bronte. I know I am.