Anniversary

From W.S. Merwin:

On the Anniversary of My Death

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day

When the last fires will wave to me

And the silence will set out

Tireless traveller

Like the beam of a lightless star

Then I will no longer

Find myself in life as in a strange garment

Surprised at the earth

And the love of one woman

And the shamelessness of men

As today writing after three days of rain

Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease

And bowing not knowing to what

Awkward

I'm so glad you all came to our renewal celebration. I'm sincerely grateful to have you as friends, and I love you all. Sometimes I feel awkward in expressing my emotions, but I'm working on that. It's a lot easier to use allusion as expression. I'm great at showing love through the words in other's works. 

So, a short poem by Thomas Lux. This one's for you, Sam:

I Love You, Sweatheart

A man risked his life to write the words.

A man hung upside down (an idiot friend

holding his legs?) with spray paint

to write the words on a girder fifty feet above

a highway. And his beloved,

the next morning driving to work. . . ?

His words are not (meant to be) so unique.

Does she recognize his handwriting?

Did he hint to her at her doorstep the night before

of "something special, darling, tomorrow"?

And did he call her at work

expecting her to faint with delight

at his celebration of her, his passion, his risk?

She will know I love her now,

the world will know my love for her!

A man risked his life to write the world.

Love is like this at the bone, we hope, love

is like this, Sweatheart, all sore and dumb

and dangerous, ignited, blessed—always,

regardless, no exceptions,

always in blazing matters like these: blessed.

 

To Sam

Sam, I have never better broken a rule. Here's a golden oldie from Phillip Sidney as a tribute:

My true-love hath my heart, and I have his,

By just exchange one for another given;

I hold his dear, and mine he cannot miss:

There never was a bargain better driven.

His heart in me keeps me and him in one;

My heart in him his thoughts and senses guides:

He loves my heart, for once it was his own;

I cherish his because in me it bides.

His heart his would received from my sight;

My heart was wounded with his wounded heart; 

For as from me on him his hurt did light,

So still, methought, in me his hurt did smart:

Both equal hurt, in this changed sought our bliss,

My true-love hath my heart, and I have his.

My true love hath my heart and I have his.

The weight of 750.5 mg

A little over 3/4 of a gram. 11.58 grains. About 2% of an ounce. If you're talking Newtons (force, not figs) .007 359 890 846 5 units, or roughly 736 dynes.

I like the idea of weight as measured in units of force, as gravity pinning something down to the earth. According to Newton's third law--all forces occur in pairs, each opposite and equal in magnitude--when a person falls, the earth falls in the opposite direction. Or, I suppose, each leaps to meet the other. 

When you fall and you feel the earth is rising rapidly toward you, you're right. It is. 

And (to misappropriate Flannery O'Connor's use of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's phrase) everything that rises must converge.

As my meds and I converge every morning and evening. 750.5 milligrams is the amount of medication I take in the morning. When I take the 5 pills that weigh so little, they pin me down to an inescapable truth: taking psychotropic (qu'est-ce que c'est?), psychiatric medications will be a lifelong ritual, part of my and Sam's management of my incurable, major mental illness.

When a person is depressed, she can fend off bad decisions by deciding to wait until tomorrow. Tomorrow might be better. When I take my meds, I remember that, at some unpredictable time, tomorrow will be much, much worse.  

I remember that the same is true for you, dear reader.

So, to lift our moods, let's hear something from Ms. Dickinson, from her posthumous Complete Poems 1924):

Today or this noon

She dwelt so close, 

I almost touched her;

Tonight she lies

Past neighborhood--

And bough and steeple--

Now past surmise.

Imaginary writing

I do quite a bit of imaginary composition. Manifestos when I'm in traffic (or fantastic, involved, 12-minute intricacies about why I might be late). The beginnings of a story as I walk to meeting on campus. Partial sestinas when I'm in the shower. (I like to take long showers, but it's hard to remember the pattern for that form.) Movie scenarios while my students are peer reviewing each other's papers.

That kind of composition is fleeting, and I think blogging sometimes resembles it. 

Recently, I've been composing my first class of this semester. Monday is the first official day of classes, and my TTh class starts Tuesday at 8am. Freshman Composition. Maybe I'll ask them about their mental essays, poems, and songs. 

I've actually written lots of posts between now and the last one I posted. A lot is going on right now for me mentally, physically, socially, politically. I'm not sure how much of it I want to disclose, so I've discarded pages of stuff. Instead I've been doing quite a bit of imaginary writing. It's written in lemon juice, invisible. Hold it over a flame to see the muddle.

A risk

Below appears the first poem I've seriously worked on in 10 years. I don't want praise (or disapproval, I suppose). The thing gazes at my navel hard-core and may make no sense. Posting it here feels risky and unwise. That's why I'm doing it. I can always take it down, right?

The Lot

Our moon buzzes orange.

Other moons nearby, moth-tinged,

cast a local light, 

filling the moist air.

They multiply the shadows

of hatchbacks and mid-size sedans.

Leaning against our car, we perform the drama

of who has the lighter

and where to go for beers:

You decide. No, you.

We've snuck away from the film of my illness.

Between the sadness

and the irredeemable joy,

I'm in remission. I am remiss.

Serious language

I take language seriously. When Sam and I had lunch together this afternoon at B&F, we had a great conversation with Matt about writing, of all things, and I enjoyed hearing him talk about the writing he's doing. He's serious about it.

Being serious about language (and about literature) means that I can be a little intense, and it means that I read carefully, as I've been trained to do, as I've chosen to do. When it's rewarding, it's really rewarding. 

But taking language seriously can isolate a person or distance her from others. For example, no one's supposed to mention book club to me. I can deal with that. It hurts only a little to not have the option to say no. 

It gives the clarity to see when others are trying to use language to occlude an issue. It's not a seeing through the occlusion; it's a seeing because. 

I'm facing the salient fact that many of Sam's friends are not my friends. Maybe even most. I knew that before. (How could I not when I typically take a couple of Klonipin before going out?) And now that I'm feeling healthier, which makes me more me, I'd like to have my own friends, people I see outside of the context of the group. Going to brunch or a wine tasting with someone is a good start. I just don't want to waste even more time with people whose eyes glaze over when I begin to answer the question, "So how's your work going?" 

So, here's some Wallace Stevens, king of alienation:

Anecdote of the Jar

I placed a jar in Tennessee

And round it was, upon a hill

It made the slovenly wilderness

Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,

And sprawled around it, no longer wild.

The jar was round upon the ground

And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion every where.

The jar was gray and bare.

It did not give of bird or bush,

Like nothing else in Tennessee.

First, do no harm.

Released in 2001, A Beautiful Mind still makes me angry. I bring it up because Netflix keeps suggesting that I take another look at it. In terms of craft, the film is lovely to look at, and the actors do their jobs. And I don't really care if it remains true to the events of Nash's life. What angers me is its fantasy about schizophrenia and the old saw about mad genius. Critics and viewers alike laud this movie for offering a glimpse into the experience of having serious mental illness. Isn't it pretty to think so.

(For bonus points, name the allusion.)

---

In other news, last night M asked me about how a person determines whether a poem is good. I talked a little too long about "One Art," then said that it's easier to show with a selection of poems, rather than a list of qualities. Our conversation makes me think about how I approach teaching poetry in 102. I don't care for the approach lampooned Dead Poets' Society---I'm not going to make a bunch of graphs. But I do believe that one can tell whether a poem has merit. As a pedagogue, I try to make the concepts we talk about as concrete as possible (e.g., handouts for 6 steps to a good thesis statement, 12 steps to a close reading, 6 right ways to use commas). Students like lists and handouts. So, it's not enough for me just to say that these 10 poems we've read are excellent because I say so and anything with 14 lines is a sonnet, no matter what anyone else says.

Poetry is a long and vibrant mode, such that its forms, variations, and ambiguities are much more difficult to quantify than any more recent form (e.g., novels). A traditional Shakespearian sonnet contains 14 lines of iambic pentameter, organized into three 4-line stanzas and a couplet, with a standard rhyme scheme, and a turn of some kind at the end, usually somewhere in the last 4 lines.

Using this description of the form, a person can still write a poem that will make your eyes and ears bleed. In fact, that's the most likely outcome. (Ooh!) It's like giving a person who has never cooked a bare-bones recipe for hollandaise sauce or pastry creme. Something's going break.

So I don't think I can write a list of elements to look for in a great poem. I can only repeat what has been said to me: Great poems are revelatory. They don't conform. Here's a list of terms you can use to talk about poems. Now let's look at one. 

Wilfred Owen (written between two tours in WWI. He himself became one of these youth just before the war ended.)

Anthem for Doomed Youth by Wilfred Owen. 

(He died in WWI a week before Armistice Day.)

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?

Only the monstrous anger of the guns.

Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle

Can patter out their hasty orisons.

No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells,

Nor any voice of mourning, save the choirs,----

The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;

And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?

Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes

Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.

The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;

Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,

And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

Rest peacefully, Mr. Russert

Tim Russert died this afternoon. You can turn on any t.v. channel or look at any website for the obligatory language of public grieving, but, watching MSNBC, I was deeply moved by the expressions of loss by those who knew him as a man. 

To me, Russert has only ever been a face on the screen, yet his integrity and curiosity were always evident. As much as I will miss him as a journalist, his family and friends must be devastated. 

Sam and I were talking about it just now, and he said what I've always felt as well: When you part from someone you love, even just to go to the grocery store, you should say, "I love you." The future is inscrutable. Our lives are short in time's span. But we become meaningful through expressing our connections with each other, however fleeting and however flawed.

From Yeats's "The Circus Animals' Desertion":

Those masterful images because complete

Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?

A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,

Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,

Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut

Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone,

I must lie down where all the ladders start

In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.

Something reminded me

One of my favorite literary devices is the allusion. It's like hypertext, but instead of having to click the word, reading it sets into motion a cloud of referents. I especially like it because it works well with how I encounter the world: one idea makes me think of another that makes me think of this poem, and what other poems did that poet write? Pretty soon, I'm off on a far different mental path, and then I'm suddenly at school, wondering how did I possibly drive here without noticing?

So, I followed a link from a friend's blog and read around the site. I discovered that the content (little, gnomic statements about life) made me think of poems I know or half remember, as though each statement were an unknowing allusion. Although I'm not the ideal reader of the site, it is kind of fun to read one of its aphorisms and then send myself on a sprawling search.

"No regret" reminded me of "Danse Russe" by William Carlos Williams. I love this poem in part because the tone is delightful. It describes a quiet moment of absurdity and love, and although most readers may take "lonely" to be typically a negative emotion, Williams uses it as a way to think about the pleasure of missing the beloved who is near or about to arrive. Then, loneliness becomes transformed into a longing that will be fulfilled. Now, I am the kind of person who likes to anticipate more than to arrive, so the idea appeals to me, that one's primary or essential element is longing. Here is Williams' poem:

Danse Russe

If when my wife is sleeping

and the baby and Kathleen

are sleeping

and the sun is a flame-white disc

in the silken mists

above shining trees,—

if I in my north room

dance naked, grotesquely

before my mirror

waving my shirt around my head

and singing softly to myself:

" I am lonely, lonely.

I was born to be lonely,

I am best so!"

If I admire my arms, my face,

my shoulders, flanks, buttocks

against the yellow drawn shades,—

Who shall say I am not

the happy genius of my household?

As I've mentioned before, a large part of the human condition is being ridiculous. Williams describes his naked dance, swinging his shirt around like an idiot. I know that dance. I've done it, seen Sam do it, and it's utterly charming how Williams talks about it. Sometimes, reader, we are grotesque, but far better to acknowledge it yourself than to have the reminder shoved upon you. 

The Return

So, I feel like I'm coming back to my senses, back to my life. What is still not clear is how my absence has affected the life I haven't been living. What am I coming back to? Have the houseplants died? Where has the dust settled? What kind of housekeeping needs to be done now? 

I'm tempted to call my incipient emergence a sea change, except that I can't forget the origin of the phrase, from The Tempest:

Full fathom five thy father lies;

Of his bones are coral made;

Those are pearls that were his eyes;

Nothing of him that does fade,

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something right and strange.

In the song, the Duke's dead body becomes exotic, when changed by the sea. But, also, Ariel is lying. Lying about the Duke's death, and also lying about what a sea-change actually produces.

What has happened, is happening, bears no beauty, but at least it's honest.

And now, for your delectation, a 1917 offering from Mr. Pound:

The Return

SEE, they return; ah, see the tentative

Movements, and the slow feet,

The trouble in the pace and the uncertain

Wavering! 

See, they return, one, and by one,        5

With fear, as half-awakened;

As if the snow should hesitate

And murmur in the wind,

            and half turn back;

These were the “Wing’d-with-Awe,”        10

            inviolable. 

Gods of that wingèd shoe!

With them the silver hounds,

            sniffing the trace of air! 

Haie! Haie!        15

    These were the swift to harry;

These the keen-scented;

These were the souls of blood. 

Slow on the leash,

            pallid the leash-men!

Post 20

And I haven't even posted the poem that gives the collection that gives this weblog its name. As Dr. Cross would mumble, let's not sully it further with commentary. So here it is, by Mina Loy:

Lunar Baedecker (1917)

A silver Lucifer

serves

cocaine in cornucopia

To some somnambulists

of adolescent thighs

draped

in satirical draperies

Peris in livery

prepare

Lethe

for posthumous parvenues

Delirious Avenues

lit

with the chandelier souls

of infusoria

from Pharoah's tombstones

lead

to mercurial doomsdays

Odious oasis

in furrowed phosphorous---

the eye-white sky-light

white-light district

of lunar lusts

---Stellectric signs

"Wing shows on Starway"

"Zodiac carrousel"

Cyclones

of ecstatic lust

and ashes whirl

crusaders

from hallucinatory citadels

of shattered glass 

into evacuate craters

A flock of dreams

browse on Necropolis

From the shores

of oval oceans

in the oxidized Orient

Onyx eyed Odalisques

and ornithologists

observe

the flight

of Eros obsolete

And "Immortality"

mildews . . .

in the museums of the moon.

"Nocturnal cyclops"

"Crystal concubine"

-----------------

Pocked with personification

the fossil virgin of the skies

waxes and wanes---

Blogging from JJ's

Many of my students are writing analyses for the first time. It's been difficult to convince them that I'm giving them the tools for analysis but that they don't have to use all of the tools. One student's writing on a Bertrand Russell essay about Conrad and feels she needs to bring in the historical relationships among Poland, Ukraine, Russia, and Britain. In 1250 words. I told her that I'll accept papers up to 10 pages, but no more.

To shift somewhat:

The following poem reminds me a lot of the previous post's Berryman poem, in that Bishop uses form to constrain deep, aching emotion. You've probably read it, but it's such a lovely villanelle. 

One Art

The art of losing isn't hard to master, 

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last of three houses went.

The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident

the art of losing's not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

--

Please note that this poem is copyrighted, and I've stolen it. I have mixed feelings on whether a company (like Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, LLC) should get to own a poem.

A typically constrained poet, Bishop breaks her own conventions with this poem: using two exclamation marks, the parenthetical outburst, the stuttering last line. Yet, she still manages to contain an otherwise destroying grief, the death of her lover, Macedo Soares. Although she affects a light tone until the last stanza, the poem as a whole always drives me close to tears. The chosen details ("the joking voice, a gesture/I love") are countered by the oddly formal "shan't." In the final line, she must command herself to complete the poem. She pushes the disaster of Soares's suicide away with the conditional "may" and the couching of grief as simile ("like"), but it doesn't work. She feels, and makes the reader feel, the intensity. The discipline it shows—she wrote 17 drafts—amazes me, but I think I understand the impulse of containment. To do otherwise risks spinning out of control: out of art, mastery, and eventually language. What in another poem might be a command to another (e.g., "Accept the fluster") emerges as commands to herself, as the parenthetical, italicized statement reveals. She is essentially talking to herself and to her dead Macedo, as one addresses a headstone, speaking for her own benefit into the void. She's trying to comfort herself, even through the disowned lie in the final stanza. 

"One Art" is perhaps the most affecting elegy I've encountered.

Better living through chemistry

It may be that few posts on this blog will revolve around a central idea or point. Except for those made up mainly of a poem. Berryman:

Dream Song 45

He stared at ruin. Ruin stared straight back.

He thought they was old friends. He felt on the stair

where her papa found them bare

they became familiar. When the papers were lost

rich with pals' secrets, he thought he had the knack

of ruin. Their paths crossed

and once they crossed in jail; they crossed in bed;

and over an unsigned letter their eyes met,

and in an Asian city

directionless & lurchy at two & three,

or trembling to a telephone's fresh threat,

and when some wired his head

to reach a wrong opinion, 'Epileptic'.

But he noted now that: they were not old friends.

He did not know this one.

This one was a stranger, come to make amends

for all the imposters, and to make it stick.

Henry nodded, un-.

---

This is a poem that couldn't really be written now. The "un-" would seem contrived, partly because of the need for a rhyme with "one," partly for the sake of being clever. But the poem contains (truly) a violent realization: what seemed like destruction only foreshadowed the possible extent of pain. Despite the poem's list of familiarity with the "imposters," Berryman chooses only to gesture at what the real ruin might be. Henry (Berryman's surrogate) has an insight that undoes him: what resides in his head turns out to be the strange but true ruination. Henry can only nod (affirm what's happening), nod it (move ruin's container) and nod at it (acknowledge the unmaking of himself). On all three levels, the nod leads inexorably to the interrupted dead end. 

That end fits, in terms of tone and rhyme. Although 45 does not follow a strict form, one can see rhyme schemes that are consistent within each 6-line stanza: ABBCAC; ABCCBA(or even AABBAA, if you like the slant);and ABCBAC. 

To take the poem at its word, though, would be a mistake. For despite the suicidal ideation present in the poem, Berryman plays, undercutting the poem's gravity. He uses near homonyms (stared, stair), dream-like associations (telephone, wired), and lots of internal rhyme, slant rhyme, and what might be called inverted rhyme (fresh threat). The repetition of phrases instantiates the false familiarity that the text addresses, but the shift in verb, from was to were, shows a change in register.

In the final analysis, Berryman's speaker (who is Henry and who is also Berryman) ridicules himself, his fears, and his ultimate destruction, after which is silence. 

Would you like some making strange, berserker

1. April 14. From 12:30–2:20 pm. In my department chair's office. 

2. I may be a little in love with Obama. His interview with Chris Matthews revealed both his considerable charm and his strategies for fixing much of what's wrong in the U.S. When any question raised a divisive issue, he kept bring it back to what Americans share, and it wasn't corny. I like to think that I recognize when I'm manipulated by political figures and cultural products (e.g., stupid tearjerkers). For example, in 1998, I went to the National Mall for the July 4 celebration. More than a million people (including me) sang the national anthem together. Even as I felt the tears well up, I thought about the politics of nationalism and my complicity in it. In contrast, Obama offers a kind of American politics founded on unity, not tribal, ethnic, partisan, or gender loyalties. (I'm looking at you, Clinton boosters. You know who you are.)

3. That said, I'd like to turn my more philosophical eye toward Verfremdungs. I don't like most of you. As I'm beginning to feel better, I'm beginning to enjoy being caustic again. I could give lots of examples from the past couple of weeks, like saying to a crying woman that her problems are boring. They are boring. My own problems are boring. I don't know why you people even read any of this. 

It may be alienation, but it's my alienation and I might remember how to enjoy it again. And now a poem, from the esteemed John Berryman:

Dream Song 1

Huffy Henry hid       the day,

unappeaseable Henry sulked.

I see his point,—a trying to put things over.

It was the thought that they thought

they could do it made Henry wicked & away.

But he should have come out and talked.

All the world like a woolen lover

once did seem on Henry's side.

Then came a departure.

Thereafter nothing fell out as it might or ought.

I don't see how Henry, pried

open for all the world to see, survived.

What he has now to say is a long

wonder the world can bear & be.

Once in a sycamore I was glad

all at the top, and I sang.

Hard on the land wears the sea

and empty grows every bed.