The Best American Poetry

The Greening of Bohemia [by David Yezzi]

I want to tell you about one of my favorite poems at the moment. It’s from Lord Byron’s Foot, by George Green, which was selected last year by David Mason for The New Criterion Poetry Prize and recently published by St. Augustine’s Press. As an editor at The New Criterion, I was thoroughly delighted by Mason’s choice, since I had championed George’s work on a number of occasions, both in the magazine and in The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets.

I remember showing up several years ago to a marathon reading organized by Roddy Lumsden at a bar up by Columbia University. We were asked to write a poem based, I think, on some theme—the theme, like the poem I produced, was eminently forgettable.

After a couple hours of poems sliding by like fried eggs off of memory's Teflon, George got up (he may have been the last reader, in fact) and read “Bangladesh.” So surprising and so weird was this poem, we were rapt. You could have heard the reshelving in Butler Library. And funny! So funny. The abrupt, associative segues and the logic-defying half-slapdash, haphazardness of the narrative resolves, quite mysteriously, into a unified, warmly satiric portrait of an age that we lived though in Downtown New York and loved for its Bohemian craziness and, and, now, in hindsight, for the wince-making tartness of its bittersweet excesses. He wrote the poem the night before, he told me, when I said how much I liked it.

Riotous and sweetly sad: such a killer combo. Bravo, George Green!

 

Bangladesh

 

We have to start in 1965,

when all the gay meth heads couldn’t decide

which one they most adored, Callas or Dylan,

both of them skinny as thermometers,

posing like sylphs in tight black turtlenecks.

Then, gradually, a multitude of Dylans

                                  

began to fill the park, croaking like frogs,

strumming guitars, blowing harmonicas,

hundreds and hundreds, several to a bench.

But there was only one Maria Callas,

sequestered in her gloomy Paris pad

and listening to Maria Callas records

 

(and nothing but), her bulky curtains closed,

which works for me because it worked for her.

What doesn’t work is three David Lee Roths,

one checking bags at Trash and Vaudeville, one

strutting with ratted hair up St. Mark’s Place,

and one zonked out in tights and on the nod,

 

surrounded by the Dylans in the park.

David Lee Roth times three would mean the times

would have to change, and so a roving band

of punk rockers began to beat the Dylans,

chasing them through the park and pounding them

senseless, then busting up their folk guitars

 

or stealing them. They even torture one

unlucky Dylan by the children’s pool,

holding him down to burn him with Bic lighters,

then cackling when he begs to keep his Martin.

Later on at the precinct, deeply troubled,

a sensitive policeman contemplates

 

the crimes. Why were marauding gangs of punks

beating the Dylans in the park? He asks

himself, repeatedly, not realizing

that they, the punks, were cultural police

determined to eradicate the Dylans

and purify the park of Dylanesque

 

pollutions and corruptions, rank and abject

folk rock recrudescences, and worse—

that odious and putrid piety,

the sanctimoniousness of all the Dylans,

the phony holiness that peaks for Bob

(his faddish Christianity aside)

 

during the benefit for Bangladesh,

where George insists that Yoko not perform

and John agrees ’till Yoko blows her stack,

and they start primal-screaming at each other,

John flying out of JFK and nodding,

and Eric flying into JFK

 

and nodding. Well, Ravi would go on first,

the one and only Ravi Shankar, folks.

I saw him five times, three times high on acid,

the first time straight with Richard and his mom,

Debbie, who drove us down from Podunk High

to see him at the Syria Mosque (long gone,

 

bulldozed in ’75). Debbie’s not well.

Last August she was totally Alzheimered

and, my sweet lord, she made a pass at me,

which was embarrassing. Rebuffed but proud

she sat down on the porch swing with a thump,

and, chirping like a parakeet, she swung.

 

(And in the Department of Self-Promotion Department: my book Birds of the Air is featured on Poetry Daily today! Thanks, PD!)

 

Tomorrow: I attend the dress rehearsal of my daughter’s grade-school production of Romeo & Juliet and come away impressed not only by the performances, which were super, but also by the playwright who clearly has what it takes!

Speak the Speech, Part II [by David Yezzi]

If you can keep your head, while Dennis Hopper recites Rudyard Kipling’s “If” on the Johnny Cash Show, then you are a better man than me, my son. Check it out:

 

The poem (still wildly popular in England) and Hopper are both quite good. Personally, I have been unsuccessful thus far in recruiting celebrities to recite my work on television. My fallback is to read the poems myself, occasionally in public. There's an open mic near me that I like called Carmine Street Metrics, though it takes place on Ave. B (after getting bounced from the Bowery Poetry Club last year). If I have a new poem, I like to try it out there. Reading a poem out in front of an audience has become an important step in finishing it, or in seeing if it is, in fact, finished. 

When, several years ago, I started teaching a class in performing poetry (it’s basically an acting class for poets), what struck me most was that performing a poem invariably led to revision. But testing the poem on the voice—where, more and more, I’ve come to feel the poem really lives, i.e., in its spoken music—the rough spots become more appaent. I can easily hear places where the rhythm falters, where the clarity and precision of the expression are obscured.

Not surprisingly, people are often much better at reading other people’s work than at reading their own. The difficulty of presenting one’s own poems is two-pronged, I think. On the one hand, our own poems are so personal, so close to home, so connected to our sense of self-worth that it can be terrifying to present them to an audience. (Even if one's poetry is not autobiographical, it is a charged expression that can be ticklish to read in public.) 

And, on the other hand, the poem may have gone cold for us, written, as it was, sometimes months or years earlier. It reminds me of the wonderful passage in G. K. Chesterton’s book on Robert Browning: “There is an old anecdote, probably apocryphal, which describes how a feminine admirer wrote to Browning asking him for the meaning of one of his darker poems, and received the following reply: 'When that poem was written, two people knew what it meant—God and Robert Browning. And now God only knows what it means.' ”

The fact is that, over time, we lose touch with the emotions that gave rise to the poem; we become dull to the very intensities of sound and meaning that we were at pains to include in the poem. In order to give the poem its due in performance, we have to reawaken our emotional connection to the words. 

It’s just what we would do if we were called upon to read out the work of another poet, so why not do it with out own work. I’ve gone on too long here, so I won’t get into specific exercises at this point. For an unbeatable example of how to break down the sense of a verse passage and find hidden in each word both meaning and feeling, one cannot do better than this excerpt from John Barton’s “Playing Shakespeare” (the book of the same name is an invaluable text for poets as well as actors). Watch as, at about 2:10, Ian McKellen begins to go word by word through “Tomorrow and Tomorrow”:

 

 

(Tomorrow and tomorrow, a look at Geroge Green's poem "Bangladesh" from his new book Lord Byron's Foot.)

 

Cory's Choral Story [by David Yezzi]

I like E. A. Robinson. I really do. No, I mean it. I really like his stuff much of the time. Especially the lyrics. The long poems, not so much (except maybe as sleep aids).  Well, anyway, I want to like him a lot, but sometimes I get put off by a certain tone of . . .  what? Fustiness? Creakiness?

More and more, I’m realizing, though, that it is not always Robinson’s voice I am hearing in the poems, or not just his voice. The more I think about his poems—such as “Reuben Bright” and “Richard Cory”—the more I begin to understand the dramatic nature of his work. (The dramatic element in lyric poetry is something I’ve been interested in for a while now, and you can read more about that here. I hope that this post might serve as an extension of some of the ideas put forward in that earlier essay.)

For my money, “Eros Turannos” is Robinson’s greatest poem. (This is just me talkin’ here.) I love that poem deeply and unequivocally, and I’ve always admired Yvor Winters’s take on it, as adopting the music of W. M. Praed’s vers de société for tragic ends. (In fact, more successfully than Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge, the poem uses the conventions of Greek tragedy to elevate its subject to devastating dramatic effect.)

The poem is a love story as Gothic horror tale. A woman’s fear of growing old alone is greater than her fear of a man she knows deep down she should refuse. The result is a loveless union, isolation, confusion, and despair. The poem ends with these two stanzas:

We tell you, tapping on our brows,

   The story as it should be,—

As if the story of a house

   Were told, or ever could be;

We’ll have no kindly veil between

Her visions and those we have seen,—

As if we guessed what hers have been

   Or what they are, or would be.

 

Meanwhile, we do no harm; for they

   That with a god have striven,

Not hearing much of what we say,

   Take what the god has given;

Though like waves breaking it may be,

Or like a changed familiar tree,

Or like a stairway to the sea,

   Where down the blind are driven.

The “we” is a choral voice (a dramatic voice!) that Robinson uses often and which lends his poetry its particular social cast. Here is how the poet and critic D. H. Tracy describes the effect, from an essay in Contemporary Poetry Review:

Robinson’s use of the choral presence is innovative and, in its particular form, remains strikingly rare. It came to him early but not always easily: the drafts of “Eros Turannos” show that the fifth stanza, where the “we” is introduced, went through the most revisions. The Robinsonian “we” is not simply a means of lending generality to discourse or speculation, or a casual way of implicating the reader. It is not the French on. It has an understanding of its point of view, as a point of view, and is capable of distinguishing itself from omniscience. It does not exist to characterize itself, as in certain dramatic monologues, but to characterize another. It would seem intuitive to a playwright, I think, but in poetry in English there is little of it or anything like it—perhaps in Stevie Smith, or James Weldon Johnson’s “Brothers—American Drama.” Robinson’s insight into the possibilities of choral pronouncement arises from a serious consideration of what our collective being is and how individual lives acquire and lose meaning in it. . . .”

Really brilliant, this. And a real key to Robinson’s poems. In fact, it was when I began thinking about the choral voice in Robinson that I came to better understand one of Robinson’s most burnished chestnuts, “Richard Cory,” a poem that I respected but never truly warmed to.

BAPsters will, of course, know the poem, but here it is for reference:

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
"Good-morning," and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich – yes, richer than a king –
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.

What has always bothered me about this poem was how seemingly pat its theme was, i.e., Ah, life! How sad that even the man who has everything in the eyes of the world cannot be happy with his lot. It seemed not so much tragic as moralizing somehow, and this pat theme seemed to me to dampen its humanity. 

The poem has always been popular (Robinson, remember, was awarded three Pulitzers, only one fewer than Frost!), adapted as a folk song by Simon and Garfunkel:

 

 

 

But I, I work in his factory

And I curse the life I'm living

And I curse my poverty

And I wish that I could be,

Oh, I wish that I could be,

Oh, I wish that I could be

Richard Cory.

The S&G version actually gets at something vital about the poem (though it in no way rivals the beauty of Robinson’s verse-making—song lyrics are a different sort of thing). The chorus is sung from the point of view of a townsperson of Tillbury, the imagined village (based on Gardiner, Maine), where many of his poems are set. (The "I" takes on a choral quality, sung in harmony by S and G.)

 

 

 

 

(I am told that Robinson once lived in this bell tower overlooking Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village.)

In fact, I see now the poem is far more tragic and horrible than I first imagined, and the way in to this new, darker understanding is through the choral voice in the poem. Look at the nasty stuff the townspeople say:

We people on the pavement looked at him

In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;

Then consider the tone of: “And he was rich – yes, richer than a king.” Hear the bitter dig behind the repetition and that word king? Dang! If I was Richard Cory and everyone’s envious eyes (the eyes of the world!) were on me all the time, I might not make a good end either. Tracy’s observation about Robinson's poems implicating the reader is exactly right: we are the “We.” We drove Richard Cory to this. Just as we (the town, society) helped drive the blinded woman down the steps at the end of "Eros Turannos" (or so, I believe, it is suggested). 

Or like a stairway to the sea,

   Where down the blind are driven.

Driven down by themselves? Perhaps. But we are the abettors. Robinson's poems are about us every bit as much as they are about these sorry denizens of the Vacation State. Robinson, it turns out, was a freaking genius of poetry's dramatic context, if only we tune our ears to hear it. I knew I liked him. But, now, like one of the Tillburyites who envied Richard Cory, I hate him, too.

Two Byrons (by David Yezzi)

(Ed note:  This post originally appeared on April 16, 2008.  Mark Doty picked Yezzi's "Minding Rights" for inclusion in The Best American Poetry 2012.  You can hear him read his poem at the BAP launch reading on September 20.  sdh)

OK, it has been a day from hell--two days from hell, in fact. I don't know about you, but taxes were completely brutal this year. I envy you, if you are one of those fortunate people who actually gets money back! I more than envy you; I want to come stay with you and eat food out of your refrigerator. I'm also exhausted this morning. I was up until 2:30 finishing a review, for which I will receive a small amount of money that will then be reported to the IRS so that I will owe taxes on it next year.

I thought I might write about the blues today. I'm in the mood. I was planning to expatiate on the pleasures of Mississippi John Hurt's alternating-thumb base line on the acoustic guitbox, and how his treble-line melodies infuse traditional songs like "Stack O'Lee Blues," "Casey Jones," and "Frankie and Albert" with his singnature sound. Then there's "Candy Man." "Candy Man"!: "He's got stick candy that's nine inches long, / He sells it faster than a hog can chew his corn / Candyman, candyman!" But I think I'll do that tomorrow . . .

Instead, I want to quote from a book of Macaulay's essays that I picked up on the giveaway shelf at the library this morning. A free book! Things are looking up. Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859) was an English poet, reviewer, essayist, historian, and MP for Edinburgh. Here's a bit from his essay on Lord Byron, which I read on the subway on my way to work (I want to quote a bunch of it because, a) it's a great portrait of Byron and B) the prose rocks):

In the rank of Lord Byron, in his understanding, in his character, in his very person, there was a strange union of opposite extremes. He was born to all that men covet and admire. But in every one of those eminent advantages which he possessed over others was mingled something of misery ans debasement. He was sprung from a house, ancient indeed and noble, but degraded and impoverished by a series of crimes and follies which he had attained a scandalous publicity. The kinsman whom he succeeded had died poor, and, but for merciful judges, would have died upon the gallows. The young peer had great intellectual powers; yet there was an unsound part in his mind. He had a naturally generous and feeling heart: but his temper was wayward and irritable. He had a head which statuaries loved to copy, and a foot the deformity of which the beggars in the street mimicked. Distinguished at once by the strength and by the weakness of his intellect, affectionate yet perverse, a poor lord, and a handsome cripple, he required, if ever man required, the firmest and most judicious training.

Macaulay goes on in this vein for quite a while. It's pretty good stuff, and wonderfully sympathetic to Byron, though not nearly as sympathetic as Auden's tribute to him in "Letter to Lord Byron." Auden doesn't name Macaulay, but it's critics of his ilk that he is skewering. In fact, there are enough correspondences between the essay and Auden 's poem that I can't help wondering if Auden had it partly in mind:

I like your muse because she's gay and witty,
       Because she's neither prostitute nor frump,
The daughter of a European city,
       And country houses long before the slump;
       I like her voice that does not make me jump:
And you I find sympatisch, a good townee,
Neither a preacher, ninny, bore, nor Brownie.

A poet, swimmer, peer, and man of action,
--It beats Roy Campell's record by a mile--
You offer every possible attraction.
      By looking into your poetic style
      And love-life on the chance that both were vile,
Several have earned a decent livelihood,
Whose lives were uncreative but were good.

You've had your packet from the critics, though:
      They grant you warmth of heart, but at your head
Their moral and aesthetic brickbats throw.
      A "vulgar genius" so George Eliot said,
      Which doesn't matter as George Eliot's dead,
But T. S. Eliot, I am sad to find,
Damns you with: "an uninteresting mind".

--DY

 

Don Paterson at the Y (by David Yezzi)

Here's a little intro I wrote for Don Paterson, who read at the 92nd Street Y last night with Paul Muldoon. It's not much of anything, and certainly not even a shadow of Paterson's gorgeous reading, but it has a few biographical facts that might interest folks who don't know Paterson's work. Unfortunately, I had to leave out quotes from poems I thought he might read. Here's one from his latest book, Rain, called "Correctives" that breaks my heart (the second-born of his identical twin boys, now 10, has a hand tremor, as the result of a difficult birth):

The shudder in my son’s left hand

he cures with one touch from his right,

two fingertips laid feather-light

to still his pen. He understands

 

the whole man must be his own brother,

for no man is himself alone;

though some of us have never known

the other hand’s kindness to the other.

Don Paterson, 92^nd Street Y, October 14, 2010

When Bernard Schwartz from the Poetry Center contacted me about this evening with Don Paterson and Paul Muldoon, it wasn’t immediately clear to me if he was putting together a poetry reading or a rock concert. I mean, on the one hand, we have Paul Muldoon—rhythm guitarist, songwriter, and co-founder (with the Milton scholar Nigel Smith) of the “Stones-via-Cream-via-Hendrix” influenced rock band Rackett, performing at the Knitting Factory and other venues—and on the other hand Don Patterson, jazz guitarist, songwriter, and co-founder with Tim Garland of the Euro-jazz-Celtic-folk ensemble Lammas, whose numerous albums include tracks such as The Water in the Rock, a setting of a poem by Antonio Machado for voice and 12-string guitar. What kind of evening are we talking about?, I asked Bernard. Strictly poetry, he assured me.

And yet I can’t help feeling that, despite the absence of Marshall stacks and gleaming Zildjian symbols, what we have in prospect tonight is, in a very important sense, an evening of music. Given the innumerable nuanced sounds that good poetry makes—its rhythms, its chimes and hiccups, its hectorings, its sentence sounds and melodies, its organ tones and wave-laps of syntax: in other words, its music—it is not surprising that the poet and the musician should often be the same person.

Originally from Dundee, Scotland, Don Paterson left school at 16 and moved to London to join a band. Poetry, for him, came later, even as music remained a constant companion and a companion project. Music may be found throughout Paterson’s poems—sometimes as the subject itself. Take his poem “The Box,” from his collection Landing Light, a poem written in the shape of a guitar—the box of the title refers to the hollow body of an acoustic guitar, as in guit-box. Like his poems, this instrument is so well-made, so attuned to and expressive of the sounds of feeling that, as he says, “it takes no more than a dropped shoe or a cleared throat on the hall landing to set its little blue moan off again.”

Or there is the tribute in his most recent collection, Rain, to the minimalist electronic group TBA, from the Republic of Georgia, and its leader Natalie “Tusja” Beridze. The charged music of the poem halloos Paterson’s admiration for a fellow musician, with a glimpse, too—in its incantatory techno-speak—of Paterson’s parallel life at the moog and the mixing board:

                        Though I should confess that at times I find your habit of maxxing

                        the range with those bat-scaring frequencies ring-modulated

            sine-bursts and the more distressing pshycoacoustic properties

            of phase inversion in the sub-bass frequencies somewhat taxing

                        you are nonetheless beautiful as the mighty Boards

            themselves in your shameless organicising of the code.

Organicising the code—that is what the best poets (and musicians) do, isn’t it? They take the raw matter, the data and the program of language, and make it their own. Paterson uses rhyme—in the poem I’ve just quoted from and elsewhere—and meter with a freshness and mastery that gives us the cadence of our contemporary speech as if for the first time.

Rain—how presciently titled, given the down-pour outside—is dedicated to the memory of the poet Michael Donaghy, a fellow musician on the page and off. Michael read at the Unterberg Poetry Center not long before he died, of a cerebral hemorrhage at age 50, six years ago now. Though Michael lived his adult years in London, he was a boy in New York. While he was working as a doorman, a Y patron in his building, Joan Jacobsen, saw him reading a book of poetry and gave him a Poetry Center membership, which he remembered fondly on that night. In Paterson’s sequence “Phantom,” Michael speaks to his friend: “Don’t let pass,” the phantom says,

talk of my saintliness, or those attempts

to praise my average musicianship

beyond its own ambitions: music for dancers.

All I wanted was to keep the drum

so tight it was lost under their feet,

the downbeat I’d invisibly increased,

my silent augmentation of the One—

the cup I’d filled brimful . . . then even above the rim!

But these outward connections to music and musicians are also pointers to the deeper, more mysterious and affecting music in Paterson’s poems—through which the poems express our deepest connections to one another. There is the heartbreaking lyric of a son’s trembling hand, of a swing-set that feels the absence of the child, of the lie that will not be silenced, and of the crushing lack left by a friend who has died. Tonight, let’s have some of the old songs—while they’re still new!—performed by one of our very finest singers, Don Paterson.

Eliot's Message in a Bottle (by David Yezzi)

My squib today is about the epigraph to The Waste Land, which I had forgotten refers to the Sybil of Cumae, about whom more below. I’ve read the epigraph (and its translation) many times in the Norton Anthology and more recently in The Oxford Book of American Poetry and elsewhere, but only this week was I reminded by the composer Thierry Lancino--who had included a few lines of Eliot in a recent composition—of the wider resonances of the reference. (Again, apologies, if this is old hat.)

First, there’s the epigraph to Eliot’s poem, taken from Petronius’s Satyricon: 

Here is the translation: “For once I saw with my own eyes the Cumean Sibyl hanging in a jar, and when the boys asked the Sibyl, ‘what do you want?’ she answered 'I want to die.’”

The story the Sybil of Cumae (quoted off the Web) goes something like this: “During the seven years when the Theban prophet Teiresias had been a woman . . . he was said to have had a daughter, Daphne, radiant as the day. It is no surprise that she caught the attention of a god, Apollo no less, who granted her the gift of prophecy and anything else she asked for. She grabbed up a handful of sand and demanded to live as many years as there were grains of sand in her grasp, but neglected to ask for eternal youth. When she spurned Apollo’s love, he refused to grant the omitted boon, and she was fated to grow old. She became the Sybil of Cumae, in Italy, and continued to age, withering away until she was hung upside down in a bottle, saying only that she wished to die.”

The allusion gives particular poignancy to Eliot’s poem, not least of all when Teiresias speaks in the third section, The Fire Sermon:

I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,
Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see
At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives
Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,
The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights
Her stove, and lays out food in tins.
Out of the window perilously spread
Her drying combinations touched by the sun's last rays,
On the divan are piled (at night her bed)
Stockings, slippers, camisoles and stays.
I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs
Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest--
I too awaited the expected guest.
He, the young man carbuncular, arrives,
A small house agent's clerk, with a bold stare,
One of the low on whom assurance sits
As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.
The time is now propitious, as he guesses,
The meal is ended, she is bored and tired
Endeavors to engage her in caresses
Which still are unreproved, if undesired.
Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;
Exploring hands encounter no defense;
His vanity requires no response,
And makes a welcome of indifference.
(And I Tiresias have foresuffered all
Enacted on this same divan or bed;
I who have sat by Thebes below the wall
And walked among the lowest of the dead.)
Bestows one final patronizing kiss,
And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit . . .

The Sybil was a transitional figure between the religion of the ancients and Christianity. She is said to have foretold the coming of Christ and is alluded to in the Dies irea:

Dies irae, dies illa

solvet saeclum in favilla:

teste David cum Sibylla.

(That day of wrath, that dreadful day, / shall heaven and earth in ashes lay, / as David and the Sybil say.)

Another interesting resonance, I suspect, to Eliot’s masterpiece! The sly Possum.

David Yezzi on Rachel Wetzsteon

Death is not the end when a poet dies. What we dearly miss is everything they have to tell us about the minutiae of life, about head colds and deadlines, restaurants and articles, embarrassments and triumphs. And gossip, always gossip—about our doings and others’. But the poems keep talking. They talk with even greater clarity and power, in fact, because they are no longer in process. They are finished. Yet like all good art, they continue to unfold, have things to say, even new things to say that we hadn’t heard before.

from Able Muse.  Read the complete essay here.

Thanks, David.

-- sdh

Auden's Ear for Yeats (David Yezzi)

Here's a thought I had rereading Yeats's slightly curious and gorgeous-sounding late poem "Long-Legged Fly." I am pasting it below, so you can judge for yourself. If you are game for this miniature experiment in what Christopher Ricks might call allusion (intentional and perhaps un-), read the poem and count how many Auden poems it brings to mind. In other words, it seems to me that something of the music of this poem found its way into a number of Auden poems, about which more in a second. Here's the Yeats poem; find the lines that Auden must have admired most:

That civilisation may not sink,
Its great battle lost,
Quiet the dog, tether the pony
To a distant post;
Our master Caesar is in the tent
Where the maps are spread,
His eyes fixed upon nothing,
A hand upon his head.
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence.

That the topless towers be burnt
And men recall that face,
Move most gently if move you must
In this lonely place.
She thinks, part woman, three parts a child,
That nobody looks; her feet
Practise a tinker shuffle
Picked up on a street.
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
Her mind moves upon silence.

That girls at puberty may find
The first Adam in their thought,
Shut the door of the Pope's chapel,
Keep those children out.
There on that scaffolding resides
Michael Angelo.
With no more sound than the mice make
His hand moves to and fro.
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence.

Parts of this sound a lot like Auden to me. In the opening ("Our master Caesar is in the tent / Where the maps are spread, / His eyes fixed upon nothing, / A hand upon his head), I hear Auden's "Fall of Rome": "Caesar's double bed is warm". Also: there is in the Auden "civilization" as a subject (as well as the lassitude and concupiscence that have weakened it). In "Quiet the dog" its hard not to hear "Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone" (from "Funeral Blues"); and that line along with the next couple--"tether the pony / To a distant post"--recall for me lines from "Musee des Beaux Arts": "Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse / Scratches its innocent behind on a tree." Now, here's the thing about this last bit: both "Funeral Blues" and "Musee . . ." were (I believe) written first, so who is echoing whom?!

And that's just the first stanza. What about "That girls at puberty may find / The first Adam in their thought, / Shut the door of the Pope's chapel, / Keep those children out." That sounds very Audenesque to me (I haven't pinned down the particular echo yet--maybe the contemporaneous "Roman Wall Blues." Thoughts?). What's Audenesque is at times quite Yeatsian. I mean, I guess I knew it was. Auden's great elegy plays variations in the key of Yeats. Auden's "In Memory of W. B. Yeats" was written in February 1939, the month after Yeats died. Yeats's "Long-Legged Fly" appeared later that same year in Last Poems and Two Plays. 

I guess the common thread here is the two poets' "public voices," the way they both sound when addressing citizens in a public forum (as opposed to their private-love-poem voices).The refrain, by contrast, seems to me pure Yeats: "Like a long-legged fly upon the stream / His mind moves upon silence." I can't quite imagine Auden coming up with that mystical metaphor. Auden was at times, however, a capable tonal chameleon, so perhaps I'm wrong about that. Please let me know of any other echos you might (or might not!) have heard.

Come on out on Wednesday night! (David Yezzi)

Swallow Press & Book Culture

invite you to a reading to celebrate

The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets

with Daniel Brown, John Foy, George Green & Molly McQuade.
Introduced by David Yezzi

Wednesday, February 17, at 7:00 p.m.
Book Culture
2915 Broadway  (entrance on 114th Street)

Hardy Smackdown (by David Yezzi)

There's a provocative article in the current issue of the London-based magazine Standpoint titled "Eliot versus Hardy" by Dan Jacobson, an emeritus professor at University College. In it, Jacobson tells of an interesting reversal in his literary tastes: he began with a rapturous fondness for Eliot that over time was supplanted by an appreciation of Hardy's homier virtues. It's a fascinating compare-and-contrast, not least because the two were basically contemporaries. When Eliot wrote (unfavorably) about Hardy in After Strange Gods (1930), Hardy had been dead only two years. Hardy, for his part, copied verses from Eliot into his notebook.

The piece is likely to raise eyebrows and even hackles. I'd be curious to hear what people think. My favorite part of the article, though, was the inclusion by Jacobson of a lesser-known Hardy poem that I found both stark and charming. It's musical and strange--pure Hardy--and it's called "Waiting Both."

A star looks down at me,
And says, ‘Here I and you
Stand, each in his degree: 
What do you mean to do, —
          Mean to do?'

I say: ‘For all I know,
Wait, and let Time go by,
Till my change come.'-‘Just so,'
The star says. ‘So mean I: —
                So mean I.'