The Best American Poetry

Stranger in a Train Station

". . .if a stranger in a train station asks me my occupation, I never answer `writer' for fear that he may go on to ask me what I write, and to answer`poetry' would embarrass us both, for we both know that nobody can earn a living simply by writing poetry. (The most satisfactory answer I have discovered, satisfactory because it withers curiosity, is to say Medieval Historian.)"

-- Auden, "The Poet & the City"

Seventy years on: Auden's "September 1, 1939"

September 1, 1939

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
'I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,'
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the dead,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

-- W. H. Auden

"Tremor of Intent"

Anthony Burgess's Tremor of Intent (1966), his satire of espionage novels, bears a double epigraph. The first is from W. H. Auden:

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But between the day and night
The choice is free to all, and light
Falls equally on black and white.
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The second is from T. S. Eliot:

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The worst that can be said of most of our malefactors, from statesmen to thieves, is that they are not men enough to be damned. >>

"Comrade Auden" in the TLS

From "Comrade Auden" by David Collard (Times Literary Supplement, May 20, 2009)

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Auden’s verses apart, there are admittedly prose sections in Three Songs of Lenin which will provoke a modern audience to uneasy laughter. What are we to make, for instance, of the following titles from Song Three, which awaited Auden’s approval, and which appear partly in strident upper case? “THE GREAT PUPIL OF THE GREAT LENIN, STALIN, HAS LED US INTO BATTLE. / Into battle with our age-long backwardness.”

Does that second title contain a deliberate, undermining ambiguity? Is “backwardness” the thing against which the speaker is battling? Or is it the quality that defines followers of “the great pupil”? And what of the double-edged cry repeated five times towards the end of the film: “If Lenin could see our country now!”? Much of the film’s English commentary seems to a modern audience a balance between plain seriousness and a more troubling, equivocal tone. The show trials and purges of the Stalin era were still in the future, of course, but other poets, such as Osip Mandelstam in his “Stalin Epigram” (1933), were already ferocious in their denunciation of Lenin’s successor in the wake of enforced collectivization and the famine which followed, killing millions.
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For more of David Collard's TLS article, and for the poems themselves, click here

Compare to Ern Malley, who attributed to Lenin the fictitious statement, "the emotions are not skilled workers."

Auden on Lenin: Propaganda poems make nothing happen (twice)

From the Guardian. Note that the newspaper uses a photograph of Auden the elder statesman, face cracked; Auden would never have written poems in praise of Lenin after 1939.

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Unpublished Auden poems surface in film archive
Translations of Soviet propaganda songs discovered in the British Film Institute archives
Alison Flood
Saturday May 23 2009
guardian.co.uk

Three unpublished poems by WH Auden have surfaced in the archives of the British Film Institute more than 70 years after they were written.

They were discovered by David Collard while he was working through the papers of Ivor Montagu, the co-founder of the Film Society, as part of the research for a study of Auden's career in the cinema. The verses are a poetic translation of anonymous Russian peasant songs extolling the virtues of Lenin and his political heir Stalin, which Auden was asked to produce for the world premiere of a Russian propaganda film, Three Songs of Lenin, in October 1935.

When arranging subtitles for Three Songs of Lenin, Montagu had decided the songs -- around which the film is structured -- needed a more poetic English rendering, and approached Auden. The poet worked from a literal translation to produce three songs, published for the first time this week in the Times Literary Supplement.
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Read the rest of the Guardian story here.

Wham-O, youTube, and Wystan Hugh [by Ernest Hilbert]

Happy Memorial Day. I hope everyone is out doing something that involves barbecuing and hopefully the use of a Wham-O, Inc. “Slip n’ Slide” or perhaps the ever menacing death-from-above fun of Jarts, both of which hold a great nostalgic appeal for me. I’m working up notes for my interview with Donald Hall, which will take place on stage before a “live” audience at the West Chester poetry conference immediately upon my return from London. I hope to have some video clips from the interview for use on the CPR or E-Verse. On a related note, I really believe that youTube remains a realm of great potential for poets and their poems. My Australian E-Verse co-host Paul Fleming excerpted readings of several old chestnuts from our regular E-Verse videocast (or “vlog,” as he tells me to say) and posted them on youTube as stand alone videos. The most successful of these to date are W.B. Yeats’s “Byzantium” (16,000 views) and Percy Byshe Shelley’s “Ozymandius” (10,000 views). Allen Ginsberg’s “Victim of Telephone” (1,000 views) and Wilfred Owen’s “The Last War” (1,225 views) trail behind.

One of the most successful uses of youTube for poetry is “SpokenVerse,” by an actor

Sunday: Greetings, Gentle Readers, Please Welcome Puffenstuff Auden [by Ernest Hilbert]

Hello, everyone. It is a distinct pleasure to appear as guest blogger on Best American Poetry, one of my favorite online watering holes. I jet to London this Friday night for the annual book week festivities: four rare book shows, Christies and Sotheby's auctions, and my UK publication party for Sixty Sonnets at the Wheatsheaf pub, where I will read with Katy Evans-Bush and the renowned Ruth Fainlight. But before I go, I hope to bring you a week of whimsical poetic diversions. Over at my own blog, E-Verse Radio, I like to mix poems with some video content, both original and borrowed. One of the odder things I’ve stumbled upon while trawling the web is a “poem animation movie” of W.H. Auden “reading” “Musee des Beaux Arts,” posted by Jim Clark under the profile name “poetryanimations.” Have a look. The creator of this video animates (I think of H.P. Lovecraft’s “Reanimator”) a still photograph of W.H. Auden, who passed away in 1973. Poor Auden, who described his face as a “wedding-cake left out overnight in the rain,” looks like nothing so much as a sinister Muppet in this video, perhaps one of the wise and wizened creatures that shambled through Jim Henson and Frank Oz's 1982 film Dark Crystal, which has matured into something of a cult film. The video animation is clearly intended as a loving tribute to the great rumpled English poet, but it would be dishonest of me to suggest that it is not in some measure disquieting. Others in the series of “animated poets” are Walt Whitman, Dante, John Donne, and Roberts Frost and Service. Alongside poets, one may enjoy animations of Samuel Pepys and Agatha Christie. This is a noble project, to be sure, but I can’t help but feel the results fall somewhere between the animatronic Hall of Presidents at Disney World and the British satirical puppet show Spitting Image (think of the Genesis video for “Land of Confusion”). In any case, visit Clark’s “poetryanimations” group on youTube and subscribe if you enjoy his videos.

Lehman on Auden [by Angela Patrinos]

“April 6, 2009"

Even with all the rain, last night’s event at the New School was standing room-only.  Yet again.

David Lehman presented a lecture on W. H. Auden, giving us in one hour’s time the vital details and contradictions of the poet’s life and work, and addressing such questions as “Can a flawed poem be a great poem?”

By the age of twenty-two, Wystan Hugh Auden was the most prominent poet in England, with a sound more modern than any of the day.  For example:  “It’s no use raising a shout./No, Honey, you can cut that right out.”  And yet, in January of 1939, he left England and moved to New York City. His reason for coming to NYC—not definitively clear:  “He’d become accustomed to peregrinating,” David said.  Perhaps NYC was the next place on his list.  But perhaps, too, Auden desired to be a less-known entity.  Or perhaps it was because he fell in love with a young man from Brooklyn named Chester Kallman.

He seems to have been happy in New York —it certainly was his choice to be here—and yet he wrote “Refugee Blues” and “The Unknown Citizen,” and he spoke of loneliness.  Perhaps this was a loneliness that followed him here.  David read a poem that Auden wrote just before his arrival in NY, a poem inspired by a painting he’d seen in a museum in Brussels. “Pay attention to the adjectives and adverbs,” David said.

In order of appearance, they are “human, dully, reverently, passionately, miraculous, dreadful, untidy, doggy, innocent, leisurely, forsaken, important, white, expensive, delicate, amazing, calmly.’

The poem is titled “Musee des Beaux Arts” and the painting is Brueghel’s “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.”  Without a title placard for this uncanny painting, it’s unlikely that a viewer would know to search for, and find, the very subject of the painting.  No clues can be gotten from the gaze of the personages in the foreground, who leisurely turn away from what’s taking place in the horizon—the disaster, the forsaken cry, the unimportant failure of the fallen Icarus.

Auden on Critics

“There are people who are too intelligent to become authors, but they do not become critics."

-- W. H. Auden

Why Art?

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                   We have Art
in order that we may not perish from Truth.

                                      -- F. W. Nietzsche
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The epigraph to Auden's essays in The Dyer's Hand (1962).