The Best American Poetry

Did Goethe Read Horace? [by Raymond Sokolov]

Portrayal of Horace by Giacomo Di Chirico

Goethe’s famous mountain lyric, “On every summit,” (see yesterday’s post) reminded me of a now even more famous  “poetic” encounter in the mountains of Crete during World War II  between a German general and his British guerrilla captor, the writer Patrick Leigh Fermor.  In a scene right out of Jean Renoir’s La Grande Illusion, both men, thrown together on a wild crag, recall Horace’s ode 1.9 about Soracte, the limestone ridge 28 miles north of Rome now called Monte Soratte.

Similarly steeped in Latin, the general and the literary vagabond discover that they both can recite the poem from memory.

The Latin text can be found here.

Here is Dryden’s independently memorable translation:

Behold yon mountain's hoary height
Made higher with new mounts of snow:
Again behold the winter's weight
Oppress the labouring woods below'
And streams with icy fetters bound
Benumbed and cramped to solid ground.

With well-heaped logs dissolve the cold
And feed the genial hearth with fires;
Produce the wine that makes us bold,
And spritely wit and love inspires;
For what hereafter shall betide
God (if 'tis worth His care) provide.

Let Him alone with what  He made,
To toss and turn the world below;
At His command the storms invade,
The winds by His commission blow;
Till with a nod He bids them cease
And then the calm returns and all is peace.

Tomorrow and its works defy;
Lay hold upon the present hour,
And snatch the pleasures passing by
To put them out of Fortune's power;
Nor love nor love's delights disdain –
Whate'er thou getts't today, is gain.

Secure those golden early joys
That youth unsoured with sorrow bears,
Ere with'ring time the taste destroys
With sickness and unwieldy years.
For active sports, for pleasing rest.
This is the time to be posesst;
The best is but in season best.

Th'appointed hour of promised bliss,
The pleasing whisper in the dark,
The half-unwilling willing kiss,
The laugh that guides thee to the mark,
When the kind nymph would coyness feign
And hides but to be found again –
These, these are joys the gods for youth ordain.

I don’t know if Goethe ever read Horace’s ode, but I would be very surprised to learn that he hadn’t, given his obvious debt to the tradition of lyric poetry in Latin and, perhaps even more, to the Greek lyric poets whose work Horace deliberately imitated. The Soracte ode, for example, is written in a stanzaic metrical scheme invented by, or at least named after, the poet  Alcaeus, a sixth-century B.C. native of Lesbos and possible lover of Sappho.

Wine and love were apparently frequent subjects for Alcaeus. He survives in quoted fragments and lucky survivals found in papyri preserved in Egyptian rubbish dumps of the later Roman empire.

At any rate, its fairly clear that the Soracte ode was meant to be read as a Latinization of traditional Greek motifs, gracefully shifting from winter cold to a celebration of domestic warmth, wine and the amorous pleasures of  the moment, indulged without guilt, before the inevitable winter of life blows in.

We can only guess as to whether Horace had a specific Greek poem in mind, but his decision to write the ode in alcaics was a definite homage to the poetic manner of Alcaus and Sappho, who used the same meter. It was also a technical stunt  to recreate the prosodically diverse lines of the Greek form in Latin.  

Two millennia later, Tennyson took up the challenge in his “Milton.” Its four alcaic stanzas offer a Victorian echo of this archaic mode:

O mighty-mouth'd inventor of harmonies,
O skill'd to sing of Time or Eternity,
     God-gifted organ-voice of England,
          Milton, a name to resound for ages;

Whose Titan angels, Gabriel, Abdiel,
Starr'd from Jehovah's gorgeous armouries,
     Tower, as the deep-domed empyrean
          Rings to the roar of an angel onset—

Me rather all that bowery loneliness,
The brooks of Eden mazily murmuring,
     And bloom profuse and cedar arches
          Charm, as a wanderer out in ocean,

Where some refulgent sunset of India
Streams o'er a rich ambrosial ocean isle,
     And crimson-hued the stately palm-woods
          Whisper in odorous heights of even.

 

   Tennyson was deliberately showing off his skill with a metrical scheme entirely foreign to English lyric poetry. Goethe, on the other hand, made the intricate simplicity of Greek lyric poetry his own, unostentatiously. Germanizing its mix of technical sophistication, compression and simplicity of feeling.

 Most lyric poetry in English makes no such attempt to reflect the lyric poetry of antiquity. Ours is a freer, broader way of doing things, without exotic meters clogging the direct expression of feeling cloaked transparently in the native rhythms of iambic pentameter. Even Milton, who wrote plausible poems in Latin, wrote his epics in iambic pentameter, not in the dactylic hexameter of Homer and Vergil. Longfellow, unfortunately, could not resist the temptation to try his hand at the ancient meter in his cringemaking Evangeline:

This is the forest primeval.  The murmuring pines
        and hemlocks,
Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct
        in the twilight,
Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and pro-
        phetic,
Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their
        bosoms.
Loud from its rocky caverns, the deep-voiced neigh-
        boring ocean
Speaks, and in accents disconsolate answers the wail
        of the forest.

 Goethe, however, even in the emotionally somber, personal mood of his “Hiker’s Night Song II,”  fits naturally into the classical mode of lyric poetry, the tradition exemplified in its brevity and sharp emotional contrast by this short poem of Xenophanes (c.570-c.475 BC):

When you lie on a soft couch by the fire in winter,

Well-fed, drinking sweet wine and munching chickpeas,

Be sure you ask the man next to you:

What’s your name, Sir? Where are you from? How old?

Where were you, when the Mede came?

Food and wine and a fire are fine things, but don’t forget the horrors of the Persian invasion. Thirty-four words, a Goethean tension of peace and death in the smallest space.

Ironically, enough, this cameo survives not for its beauty and concision, or the way it shifts from elaborated mellowness to bluff, colloquial speech. No, it’s because of the chickpeas.

Xenophanes 18 has come down to us as part of a catalogue of fruits, berries and nuts in the Deipnosophistae of Athenaeus, a vast compendium of lore about food and dining compiled in Roman Egypt. If it weren’t for the chickpeas (erebinthous), Athenaeus wouldn’t have been interested.

Memo to Bridie Flynn (by Terence Winch)

My mother's name was Bridget Flynn.  One of eleven children, she was born just outside of the town of Loughrea, in county Galway, Ireland, on 23 November 1906.  Eight of her siblings stayed in Ireland, so I have many cousins there. The house (greatly modernized) and land are still in the family, owned by my cousin Martin Flynn, with whom I am close.  My mother immigrated to New York sometime in the early 1920s.  She married my father, Patrick Winch, in 1930. I am the youngest of their five children (first came Kevin, then Patricia, Eileen, and James).

Known as Bridie, my mother died on 14 January 1962, at age 55, after a long struggle with breast cancer. I was 16 at the time, and took her death very hard. In many ways that loss has marked me for life, and its aftermath has certainly had an impact on my writing. I had forgotten about the poem included here, which was written in 2005 and has never before been published.

My mother was funny, smart, and tough, with a bountiful supply of Irish farmgirl wisdom: you have to eat a pound of dirt before you die, she'd say. Or: you'll be better before you get married.  Or: you could talk the cross off an ass. I would guess that the photo above was taken when she was about 17, probably not long after arriving in the U.S. But since she came here as something akin to an indentured servant, I wondered about the stylish outfit she is wearing in the photo.  My cousin Mary Winch suggests that the photography studio may have provided it.  My mother missed Ireland all her life, but loved New York and hated going beyond the city limits.  The photo below is one of the last I have of her, taken by the back door of the Dew Drop Inn on 114th Street in Rockaway Beach, Queens, in the summer of 1960. Rockaway was "The Irish Riviera" in those days, and we spent all or part of the summer there when I was growing up. She was already sick when the photograph was taken, but not yet bedridden.     

___________________________________________________
 

­­­­­

Memo to Bridie Flynn

Your eldest son says he is dying fast, but he’s been claiming

that for years and still seems solid and hardy. Your middle son’s life

is an ongoing party of which he is the host. Your youngest son

has a job with his own little cubicle. He walks a lot, listens to music.

Makes tea every hour and a half or so, like all the Irish. 

For your elder daughter, life is a very happy

social event.  She lives in a doublewide  in Florida

with her husband, who just turned seventy-five. She loves

to talk, but her health isn’t too good. Your younger daughter,

the family beauty, is also the most spiritual of us all.

 

  

 

You’d be ninety-nine if you were still alive.  But you found

it necessary to die in 1962.  Jesus, Mom, 1962!  Kennedy

was president. I was in high school. Even I, your baby,

am now older than you ever were.  I knew there was no God

when you died.  I knew there was no afterlife when you

failed to visit me from the beyond.  I know there is food,

sex, music, books, sleep, art, movies, friends, talk, love.

Please tell me that’s enough. Just once, pay a little visit.

Tell me what I need to know before you go.

 

(ed note:  This post first appeared here on May 9, 2010)

Mothers Day (by David Lehman)

The brain has chambers
on different floors
a warren of offices
upstairs a library
a wine cellar below
but the soul is simple
like a mother who
packs your lunchbox
and you walk home
wearing the raincoat
she made you take
though it is sunny
and mild my mother
when I was four was
talking to another
mother and I strayed off
and went to the park
and found someone to
walk me home where I sat
on a car waiting for
her to come back she was
frantic but when she saw
me she laughed the soul
is a hungry boy eating
her soup in the kitchen

-- David Lehman

Note: "May 6" from The Daily Mirror: A Journal in Poetry (2000). May 6 1996, when this poem was written, was Mother's Day.

Monsieur Hulot, Mademoiselle Heather, Au Revoir [by Simon Barraclough]

A couple of years ago, after reading some Eliot and watching some Jacques Tati, I thought it would be a smashing idea to write a parodic blend of the two and it started thus:

The Hulot Men

Mistah Hulot—lui mort.

We are the Hulot men

We are the French men

Smoking together

Pipe bowls filled with straw. 

but it didn't get much further, thankfully. But another entanglement of poetry and Tati has come together in this image of Monsieur Hulot's brother-in-law's swanky new car in Mon Oncle:

for the cover of Heather Phillipson's new book is inspired by this vehicle. Regardez-vous:

and this cover has already had an article devoted to it in Art Review (one of the perks of being a practising artist as well as a poet).

The reason I mention all this is that last night was the London launch of Instant-flex 718 (Bloodaxe) at the Art Review Bar just off Old Street ('Silicone Roundabout' as almost nobody calls it) and the great and the good (although I prefer the term 'the out and the about') gathered to start up this gorgeously hued vehicle and drive it away.

The first words I heard out of Heather Phillipson's mouth, back in 2007, were:

The only men it's safe for me to love are dead –

O'Hara, Stevens, Berryman.

when I read with her at The Poetry Café in Covent Garden and I became a fan at that moment. These are the opening two lines from 'Devoted, Hopelessly', which appears in the book. By the way, the title refers to the type of glue used to bind the book. I could talk about how the title and some of the poems inside speak of the materiality of language as used by the poet. But I won't. 

What I will say is that this debut collection contains many hilarious, touching, surprising, and intriguing poems with wonderful titles like 'German Phenomenology Makes Me Want to Strip and Run through North London', 'Red Slugs in Every Irrelevant Direction', You're an Architect and I Want to Make Dinner for You' and 'Actually I'm Simply Trying to Find My Dressing Gown Sash'. 

I like a launch to be more of a party than a reading and Heather chose to read a single poem, pushing the needle of the 'launchometer' almost as far away from the 'reading' end of the 'party – reading' scale as it is possible to do. But she left us wanting more, which is always a good thing. 

Another good thing is that four of us peeled off to eat fish and chips at Kennedy's on Whitecross Street, which is worth a visit if you're ever out East.

So. As Monsieur Hulot departs at the end of Mon Oncle to allow his nephew to bond with his formerly stuffy father, Monsieur Arpel, so must I depart at the end of my week as guest blogger. It's been a pleasure and there were many other things I wanted to write about, like how can we get people to stop saying "x won the Internet"? but perhaps I will continue with these over at Mo' Worse Blues.

Au revoir. I leave you with an apposite poem from Heather Phillipson.

The Distance between England and America

Much could begin like this: a large man,

tie slackened, voice buoyed up by altitude.

My mind's elsewhere –

the air-conditioning. It's cold.

Above the Atlantic he bellows long vowels to me,

and I'm cabined, window-seated, polite.

With my English tone, I'm inadvertantly provocative –

No more salted pretzels for me, thanks Jeff.

 

At the sound of Charles Darwin's bassoon,

earthworms, apparently, writhed.

Jeff booms: Pittsburgh, golf clubs, his search for a wife.

I twist in my seat – suggest something,

in my movement, of all evolution.

His blanket folds back like an invitation

to navy shadows and polyester.

Heat and anything could happen under there.

 

Oh, take your loafers off, Jeff –

throw them in the aisle.

Your gusto can conquer my boredom, our bed can be the sky.

It's warming up. We won't be sleeping.

For almost nine hours beneath United Airlines covers

we'll share everything but thought.

In the morning, white bread rolls and Columbus, Ohio.

Women distribute plastic cutlery in the night. 

 

For more information on Heather, click here.

 

 

 

And – Which is More – You'll Beowulf, My Son! [by Simon Barraclough]

"Why are there beings at all instead of nothing?" That is the question. Yes, Heidegger, that's a pretty good originary question. I might go further back and ask why is there matter at all? But an originary question one gets asked a lot is "What first got you into poetry?" and variations thereof.

I had two 'big bangs' or inflations, or 'mini-bangs'. One courtesy of Auden when I was about 13 but one much earlier, when I was about seven years old, courtesy of Miss Campbell and Beowulf.

Ah, Miss Campbell, exotic and intoxicating on so many levels: a substitute teacher (a fresh face), an energetically tousled redhead, a lover of poetry, and a Canadian. In Huddersfield, at the start of the 70s – man's footprints freshly planted on the Moon – Miss Campbell was a sign of futurity and opportunity for me.

When the time came for her to leave ahead of our seemingly endless six-week summer holidays, she chose to leave us with two things on that poignant Friday afternoon: proper fresh popcorn and Beowulf.

Having only eaten pre-packaged, sweet soggy cardboard like Butterkist, I'd never seen popcorn made like this. I didn't know you could make it. Actual, neutron star-dense kernels of real corn. Hot oil. A sealed pan. A hail storm within the pan, and then an overflow of bright white and yellow corn-novae. Miraculous. But more so after butter and salt were added. From that day on my tooth became a savoury tooth and has remained so.

And, as we munched, she turned herself into live cinema by reading a modern translation of Beowulf to us. Terrifying. Suspenseful. Gory. Electrifying. I've no idea which translation she read to us. Look at how many there are:

Annotated List of Beowulf Translations

but it made me realise how exciting, troubling, suspenseful and entertaining poetry could be. Not that it always is. And not that is should be or has to be. But it was a great start for a seven-year old.

Years later I relished Seamus Heaney's 1999 version, which translates "Hwæt!" as "So." which is exactly how my Irish aunties begin every new story: "So."

So, I'd like to mention that there is a brand new translation missing from the list above, by Meghan Purvis. It begins, as playfully and colloquially as Heaney, with:

Stop me

if you've heard this one before: the lands up north,

hoar-bent, frost-locked, need deeper plows

to dig them. Here is one.

I haven't ventured much further than this yet but I'm on my way, with my popcorn, and memories of Miss Campbell.

Beowulf by Meghan Purvis from Penned in the Margins, London

 

 

 

Maris, Pollitt, Rumens [by Simon Barraclough]

There's only one reason to go to Piccadilly Circus: to visit Waterstones' magnificent flagship store. Okay, the cocktails at The Criterion are good also. Plus the ICA is nearby. Oh, and it's not far from Cicchetti's either. But remember that this part of London recently replaced the Swiss Centre cinema with M&M's World. I don't really even know what that is. I know that the vicinity smells of sickly sweet chocolate and the edifice pummels the retina with primary colours but I tend to scurry on by.

Anyway, I went to Waterstones last night to see Kathryn Maris, Katha Pollitt and Carol Rumens read from their new and recent books published by Welsh publisher Seren (the editor in chief, Amy Wack, was in town to introduce the three).

It's an odd thing writing up a reading. You're tempted to switch to 'book review' mode but then you'd be kind of reviewing people, which, until Google Glass makes it the norm for us to give each other 'star-ratings' as we walk down the street, doesn't feel right to me.

Plus, compared to reading poems on the page, a live reading has so many additional variables. Like tone of voice, length of intros, particular words that are explained and over which the poet stumbles when they come around in the text; and perhaps one of the poets might knock over a glass of water just before reading a poem about a washer woman. I'm not saying these things happened last night, but they might have.

Anyway, the large and appreciative audience was treated to three readings of great style, wit, emotion and skill. I have all kinds of rules and pet peeves about poetry readings but two halves of ten minutes from each poet worked very well. Certain themes recurred, including ironic, not-entirely-ironic, and rather political takes on Bible stories and experiments with the linguistic style of the King James Bible. 

There were poignant reflections on age and youth and the changing relations and attitudes between both, often within the same body. There was also a palpable, creative, tension between American and UK tendencies, especially regarding form. The three poets almost described a smooth spectrum from Rumens's frequent use of form, to Maris's increasing use of form, to Pollitt's occasional use of form.

Some discussion followed about these technical matters in the Q&A but no firm conclusions were drawn. Needless to say, I wrote down many choice lines and phrases in my notebook but I'm not sure they will work that well out of context (a bit like the way lines from poems posted as tweets often don't work) but I can recommend the poets' respective books:

God Loves You by Kathryn Maris

The Mind-Body Problem by Katha Pollitt

De Chirico's Threads by Carol Rumens

I also learned that 'Seren' means 'star' in Welsh. I should have known that, but it was pleasant to learn. I will leave you with one complete poem, from God Loves You. A domani.

This is a Confessional Poem

I am guilty of so much destruction it hardly matters

anymore. There are so many thank-you notes I never wrote

that sometimes I’m relieved by the deaths of would-be 

recipients, so I can finally let go of the shame.

I was awful to someone who was attached to the phrase

‘social polish’, as though she’d acquire it through repetition.

I took an overdose at a child’s 6^th birthday party.

I was born in a country which some have called

The Big Satan. I abandoned the country for one

that is called The Little Satan. I wished ill on a woman

who has known me for years and yet never remembers

who I am – and now she’s involved in a public scandal.

I have been at parties where I was boring.

I have been at parties where I was deadly boring.

I have worn the wrong clothes to sacraments, not

for lack of outfits, but for a temporary failure of taste.

I’m a terrible, terrible liar, and everything I say is full of

misrepresentation. I once knew a very sweet girl

who stabbed herself in the abdomen 7 times.

She believed she was evil and thought 7 was a holy number.

Besides that she was sane, and told me her tale

out of kindness – because guilt recognises guilt,

the way a mother can identify her own child.

I met her in a class called ‘Poetry Therapy’

in which the assignment was to complete this statement:

When one door closes, another opens.

I wrote: At the end of my suffering there was a door,

making me guilty of both plagiarism and lack of imagination.

I was the vortex of suffering: present, future and retroactive

suffering.  The girl tried to absolve me.

‘Don’t be Jesus,’ she said. ‘There are enough around here.’

I know I should thank her if she’s alive,

but I also know it’s unlikely I’ll rise to the task.

 

—Kathryn Maris

 

Bank Holidays, Bunking Off, Pasolini [by Simon Barraclough]

Yesterday was a Bank Holiday in the UK. This is a day we occasionally grant to our banks so that they can take a breather from refusing to lend to businesses, insisting on unnecessary payment protection schemes, finding ways to turn public bailout money into private bonuses, and so on. They need to replenish their batteries.

And the rest of us need to go have lunch in cafés attached to museums and galleries. For a freelancer, depending on one's success or commitment, either every day is a Bank Holiday or Bank Holidays remain something that only other people enjoy. I must confess, I bunked off and practised my F major scale.

I also had time to reflect on a recent event I organised for the BFI (British Film Institute). The BFI has a generous and welcoming attitude to poets and it enjoys exploring the links between poetry and cinema. Over the last few years I've been involved in their poetry/film crossover event 'O Dreamland', which invited poets to write about their digital archive (The Mediatheque); I launched my collaborative Hitchcock homage Psycho Poetica at the BFI in 2010; and last year Isobel Dixon, Chris McCabe and I premiered The Debris Field there.

This year I was asked to organise something for their recent epic Pasolini retrospective and I considered various approaches. I thought of poetically 're-staging' Theorem using six poets playing each of the main characters, and I also toyed with comparing the 'swinging Sixties' of Pasolini, Antonioni and Bertolucci.

But in the end I took my lead from Pier Paolo himself and his love of the literary portmanteau movie, so I suggested A New Decameron: ten films, ten poets, ten film clips, one evening of poetic and filmic enthusiasm. 

I asked nine other poets and writers to join me: Jane Draycott, Charles Lambert, Glyn Maxwell, John McCullough, Valeria Melchioretto, Luca Paci, Cristina Viti, Stephen Watts and Chrissy Williams. We were also lucky enough to have Rosa Mucignat of King's College London reading some of Pasolini's poetry in the Friulian language, with translations by Cristina Viti.

The sold-out show was funny, moving and powerful by turns and I wanted to give you a little taster by posting Chrissy Williams's poem and a film clip here. Chrissy freely admits to being obsessed with Pasolini's clownish muse, the great Ninetto Davoli. I'm currently talking to the BFI and the poets about getting all the work online in the near future.

First a small sample of the irrepressible Davoli from Chrissy's chosen film The Canterbury Tales.

 

And now her poem.

Ninarieddo

for Davoli in The Canterbury Tales

"col tuo sorriso, fulmineo e buffo" — Pasolini

"My only enemy is time" — Chaplin

 

I step to the screen

with your face so big, a kiss

with my arms reached up

would wrap around me whole.

Slip tongue, slip lip to the camera.

I fell in love with a face once

until it swallowed me.

 

And all him loved that looked upon his face

That each him loved who looked upon his face

No length of time or death may this deface

 

Step, nod to the screen and wink the bride.

You, happy as a goldfish in a glade.

You, little tramp with laughter for a face.

The bride winks back, slips back into a stolen moment.

Slip tongue to the world and hope for many moments.

 

and your face    is a song, fool

your eyes         light a dance, fool

lip-tight             on the laugh of language

                        on the laughter

 

Step hip to dance with shadows till it's time

and it's always time to dance with shadows.

We dance against the day the music slips.

We dance the laugh of lips in bandages.

 

Thy face is turned in a new array

Your face is mottled in a new array

 

No step is left behind,

just kicked in a new way.

Stories shift, dreamed high,

kicked about in an angel's face

which changes, because

everything is always changing

although it stays the same.

No story is left behind,

just slipped on in a new way.

 

and I'll see you here       again and again.

I'll love you here             again       again.

I'll fall and catch my heart         in your constant face.

 

I fell in love with a clown once,

with a fool. Now I am the new clown

of no good, who falls with a cane

as time rearranges the stories of your face.

 

Is the face enough?

Is any one face ever enough?

 

In all his face there was no drop of blood

With his face pale and with a heavy cheer

Now list you down with face all pale of hue

 

I fell in love with your face once,

with the face I found, and I will follow it, 

love, through all our familiar stories.

 

More about Chrissy Williams here.

The View from the Cuckoo's Nest [by Simon Barraclough]

Huffy Henry blogged      the day (Berryman)

I used to write a blog, five years ago, called Fallout. After a year or so, we fell out.

Comes over one an absolute necessity to blog (D.H. Lawrence)

I have a new blog called Mo’ Worse Blues but so far has only one entry announcing that more entries will follow soon. That’s been up for about a month. I will attend to it soon, I will.

For a long time I used to blog early (Proust)

But it will have to wait till after my vacation here; my week away in a blog cabin.

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own blog, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these entries must show. (Dickens)

Thinking of cabins and woods, while I neglect my own blog and set up here I feel a little like a cuckoo – albeit a (so far) welcome and cordially invited cuckoo – typing its way out of the shell.

Soul, wilt though blog again? (Dickinson)

I’m already perched quite high (here’s a photo of yesterday’s sunset, looking over The City)

but the view from the eyrie can seem dismal at times. Nations disintegrate; those who ‘do not wish to get embroiled in the conflict’ deliberately embroil themselves in the conflict; our party of power, which I detest, is compelled to ape a smaller, similarly detestable party in an effort to cling to its pseudo-mandate; buildings are collapsing around our desire for cheap produce; the British 1970s and 80s are under arrest for unspeakable acts; and poachers have picked Mozambique clean of its glorious rhinos.

But fretting in public like this makes me feel faintly absurd, like Proust’s Madame de Guermantes:

“I supposed that, since she was always dabbling in politics, she intended to show that she was afraid of war, as one day when she had appeared at the dinner table so pensive, barely replying in monosyllables, upon somebody's inquiring timidly what was the cause of her anxiety, she had answered with a grave air: ‘I am anxious about China.’” (The Fugitive)

So instead I will focus on cuckooness for now. First, a cuckoo that speaks with the voice of Ted Hughes (with perhaps a touch of Al Pacino doing Shakespeare):

Hooha! Hooha!

Dizzying Milkymaids with innuendo...

 

O Orphan of orphans! O moon-witted

Ill-bred dud-hawk!

Cavorting on pylons, you and your witch moll!

(From A Primer of Birds, 1981)

And one of Scottish poet Richard Price’s many wonderful birds, this one flying in a prose poem pattern: 

Cuckoo

It’s an uplifting call and when you hear it spring is coming, sure enough, resurrection, promise kept. But I’m not comfortable. That’s no life for her and it’s no life for anyone else mixed up in the whole business. The parents think the chick is just like them, and it’s a hero when it gets bigger. Then it’s all me me me, eating its brothers out of home and house, breaking its foster-mother’s heart as sure as. I can’t speak to her about it, and she won’t get help. She says: every one of my children is like a little Jesus, and that makes me…God.

(From Lucky Day, Carcanet 2005)

For the rest of the week I’ll be flitting in and out of the nest and will bring back some juicy scraps from the London poetry scene, among other things. But now it’s time to roost.

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!

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.