Category: Poetry

Nouns

Nouns

have tense, like verbs—future, present, past. I can’t remember how I learned
the nouns that mean to me,
and can’t forget the ones I know.

The nouns that mean to me
are stars
in my familiar sky. I love them all,
even those I hate,
because they make my world.
When one is lost, or dies,
its light goes out.
I see the hole that’s where it used to be.

I have a patchwork quilt that’s made of lead.
Each time a noun that means to me is lost, or dies, I add a square. My quilt keeps gaining weight,
but I must carry it everywhere.
Soon the weight will be too much. I will
have to stop and rest.
You may see me, looking tired,
staring at the sky.
Later I will stop for good, wrap myself,
and sleep.
The starlight will not wake me.
The quilt will keep me warm.

—ca. 1984

The Value of Poetry

Most people today believe that poetry has little or no value. Along with other literature, the arts, and everything that academics call “the humanities,” poetry has been dethroned in the 21st-century league tables by science, mathematics, engineering, economics, business administration, finance, and technology. These practical subjects have value, so we are told, because they produce results that can be quantified and monetized. In the 21st century, money-value is the only value we recognize. We even say that something is important only if it “counts.” Music, novels, and films are important only as entertainment, and they are admired only if they make their producers a lot of money.

Practical subjects like science also have value because they ask questions that produce answers.

Poetry (which will stand here for all literature, music, dance, visual art, etc.) raises questions that have no answers—and what could be more useless, worthless, and pointless than that? We shall see.

In Small Is Beautiful (1973), the statistician and economist E. F. Schumacher writes, “The true problems of living . . . have no solution in the ordinary sense of the word. They demand of man not merely the employment of his reasoning powers but the commitment of his whole personality. . . . They demand . . . forces from a higher level, thus bringing love, beauty, goodness, and truth into our lives.” He goes on:

Science and engineering produce ‘know-how’; but ‘know-how’ is nothing by itself; it is a means without an end, a mere potentiality, an unfinished sentence. . . . At present . . . the whole of mankind is in mortal danger, not because we are short of scientific and technological know-how, but because we tend to use it destructively, without wisdom. More education can help us only if it produces more wisdom. 

In other words, poetry inspires us to think about the unanswerable questions that lead us toward wisdom, not just “know-how.” Who are we? Where are we? What are we doing, and what should we be doing? Schumacher notes that wrestling with such questions “tends to be exhausting, worrying, and wearisome. Hence people try to avoid it and to run away from it.” 

You may recognize that impulse in your own response to questions without answers like, “Who are we?” Perhaps it is reassuring to know that this is a normal response. Searching for wisdom isn’t easy. It’s a lifetime project. There is no guarantee of success. But without the wisdom that poetry, etc., may bring us, we will have no idea how to live; why to live; what to do with all our science and technology.

And that is the value of poetry.

[Image: https://wordart.com/get/image/8ohz8dol55xd.png]

The empire was attacked

The empire was attacked.

Babies cried, or lay lifeless

Mothers sprawled awkwardly

Young men, old men, old women, girls and boys

Body parts and fluids everywhere.

Only whimpers, or dazed silence as the sun shone indifferently.

 

It struck back.

Babies cried, or lay lifeless

Mothers sprawled awkwardly

Young men, old men, old women, girls and boys

Body parts and fluids everywhere.

Only whimpers, or dazed silence as the sun shone indifferently.

 

Somewhere, crowds cheered in triumph.

Somewhere, crowds screamed in rage.

—6 May 2011

 

Attention, for Donne, was everything

From Katherine Rundell, Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne, pp. 294-95:

It was very deliberately that he wrote poems that take all your sustained focus to untangle them. The pleasure of reading a Donne poem is akin to that of cracking a locked safe, and he meant it to be so. He demanded hugely of us, and the demands of his poetry are a mirror to that demanding. The poetry stands to ask: why should everything be easy, rhythmical, pleasant? He is at times almost impossible to understand, but, in repayment for your work, he reveals images that stick under your skin until you die. Donne suggests that you look at the world with both more awe and more scepticism: that you weep for it and that you gasp for it. In order to do so, you shake yourself out of cliché and out of the constraints of what the world would sell you. Your love is almost certainly not like a flower, nor a dove. Why would it be? It may be like a pair of compasses. It may be like a flea. His startling timelessness is down to the fact that he had the power of unforeseeability: you don’t see him coming.

The difficulty of Donne’s work had in it a stark moral imperative: pay attention. It was what Donne most demanded of his audience: attention. It was, he knew, the world’s most mercurial resource. The command is in a passage in Donne’s sermon: ‘Now was there ever any man seen to sleep in the cart, between Newgate and Tyburn? Between the prison, and the place of execution, does any man sleep? And we sleep all the way; from the womb to the grave we are never thoroughly awake.’ Awake, is Donne’s cry. Attention, for Donne, was everything. attention paid to our mortality, and to the precise ways in which beauty cuts through us, attention to the softness of skin and the majesty of hands and feet and mouths. . . .

[The quotation is from Donne’s Sermon XXV.]

We were attacked

We were attacked.

Babies cried, or lay lifeless.

Mothers sprawled awkwardly.

Young men, old men, old women, girls and boys,

body parts and fluids everywhere.

Only whimpers or dazed silence as the sun shone indifferently.

Somewhere, crowds cheered in triumph.

Somewhere, crowds screamed in rage.

We struck back.

Babies cried, or lay lifeless.

Mothers sprawled awkwardly.

Young men, old men, old women, girls and boys,

body parts and fluids everywhere.

Only whimpers or dazed silence as the sun shone indifferently.

Somewhere, crowds cheered in triumph.

Somewhere, crowds screamed in rage.

—6 May 2011 / 27 January 2023

“He didn’t believe it, no sir” or, “I’m masking for a friend”

[Manhattan’s dismantled Sixth Avenue elevated tracks were bought as scrap metal by Imperial Japan three years before the bombing of Pearl Harbor.]

plato told

him:he couldn’t
believe it(jesus

told him;he
wouldn’t believe
it)lao

tsze
certainly told
him,and general
(yes

mam)
sherman;
and even
(believe it
or

not)you
told him:i told
him;we told him
(he didn’t believe it,no

sir)it took
a nipponized bit of
the old sixth

avenue
el;in the top of his head:to tell
him

—e. e. cummings, 1944

Question: Why does it take a bullet in the head for us to see what has been right in front of our eyes the whole time?

George Saunders: What happens to me when I read fiction

From his wonderful book, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain (Random House, 2021)

I am reminded that my mind is not the only mind.

I feel an increased confidence in my ability to imagine the experiences of other people and accept these as valid.

I feel I exist on a continuum with other people: what is in them is in me and vice versa.

My capacity for language is reenergized. My internal language (the language in which I think) gets richer, more specific and adroit.

I find myself liking the world more, taking more loving notice of it (this is related to that reenergization of my language).

I feel luckier to be here and more aware that someday I won’t be.

I feel more aware of the things of the world and more interested in them.

Most of that applies to other art forms, too.

Persistence

Though we are mere
temporary
arrangements of molecules
caught in a welter of vast
processes
that began long before
and will continue long after
our molecules disperse again
into the soup from which they emerged,

yet we persist in
thinking ourselves important and
striving to make sense of
this fruit-fly existence.

American Ozymandias

(With apologies to Percy Bysshe Shelley)

I met a traveller from an antique land
who said, “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
lie in the undergrowth. Near them, a man’s
bearded face, half-buried, frowns
or sadly stares at ruins once so grand.
Shattered inscriptions can be read
whose noble aspiration rings—
With malice toward none, one said.
Whether that nation . . . can endure.
These broken words still sing,
though feebly, into the empty air.
Nothing else remains. Round that decay
the vegetation spreads, lush—yet bare—
all evidence of humans swept away.”

Ode to the Inner Ear

Miraculous device, unseen,
unnoticed, unremarked,
keeping us oriented and upright
as we navigate
the ups and downs, the lefts and rights,
calling no attention to itself.

But when it goes awry
we give it our
full attention
as the world spins,
as our eyes cannot find a fixed point,
as hot flush turns to clamminess, then sweats,
as the nausea builds to a climax of
violent vomiting.

O inner ear,
forgive our neglect,
resume your post,
save us from miserable dysfunction.
We will not forget.

—23 August 2021

Edith Wharton: The world is a welter and has always been one

The world is a welter and has always been one; but though all the cranks and the theorists cannot master the old floundering monster, or force it for long into any of their neat plans of readjustment, here and there a saint or a genius suddenly sends a little ray through the fog, and helps humanity to stumble on, and perhaps up.

The welter is always there, and the present generation hears close underfoot the growling of the volcano on which ours danced so long; but in our individual lives, though the years are sad, the days have a way of being jubilant. Life is the saddest thing there is, next to death; yet there are always new countries to see, new books to read (and, I hope, to write), a thousand little daily wonders to marvel at and rejoice in, and those magical moments when the mere discovery that “the woodspurge has a cup of three” brings not despair but delight. The visible world is a daily miracle for those who have eyes and ears; and I still warm my hands thankfully at the old fire, though every year it is fed with the dry wood of more old memories.

—A Backward Glance (1934)

“The Woodspurge”
by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828 – 1882)

The wind flapp’d loose, the wind was still,
Shaken out dead from tree and hill:
I had walk’d on at the wind’s will,—
I sat now, for the wind was still.

Between my knees my forehead was,—
My lips, drawn in, said not Alas!
My hair was over in the grass,
My naked ears heard the day pass.

My eyes, wide open, had the run
Of some ten weeds to fix upon;
Among those few, out of the sun,
The woodspurge flower’d, three cups in one.

From perfect grief there need not be
Wisdom or even memory:
One thing then learnt remains to me,—
The woodspurge has a cup of three.

Whitman & Lazarus on the crisis at the border

We asked the Brooklyn poet, Walter Whitman, for his thoughts about the “crisis at the border,” and he sent us this:

Unscrew the locks from the doors!
Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!

Though somewhat obscure, Mr. Whitman’s view of the situation seems to align with that of Emma Lazarus:

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

Premier sourire du printemps

Sent to me by my good friend, le sage du Mans, Christian Lebas:

de Théophile Gautier

Tandis qu’à leurs oeuvres perverses
Les hommes courent haletants,
Mars qui rit, malgré les averses,
Prépare en secret le printemps.

Pour les petites pâquerettes,
Sournoisement lorsque tout dort,
Il repasse des collerettes
Et cisèle des boutons d’or.

Dans le verger et dans la vigne,
Il s’en va, furtif perruquier,
Avec une houppe de cygne,
Poudrer à frimas l’amandier.

La nature au lit se repose ;
Lui descend au jardin désert,
Et lace les boutons de rose
Dans leur corset de velours vert.

Tout en composant des solfèges,
Qu’aux merles il siffle à mi-voix,
Il sème aux prés les perce-neiges
Et les violettes aux bois.

Sur le cresson de la fontaine
Où le cerf boit, l’oreille au guet,
De sa main cachée il égrène
Les grelots d’argent du muguet.

Sous l’herbe, pour que tu la cueilles,
Il met la fraise au teint vermeil,
Et te tresse un chapeau de feuilles
Pour te garantir du soleil.

Puis, lorsque sa besogne est faite,
Et que son règne va finir,
Au seuil d’avril tournant la tête,
Il dit : Printemps, tu peux venir !

 

American History

Slaveowners declaiming eloquently about freedom, and
merchants declaiming eloquently about the evils of taxation,
create a new nation
populated largely by brash, ignorant, racist know-nothings
who spin a wonderful myth about Success and the American Dream
and convince themselves that they are both the Good Guys
and (eventually) the Greatest Nation on Earth,
smugly confident that power and virtue can be perfectly aligned
in America.

Ignoring the crimes committed in their name,
they are astonished when their victims strike back.
“They hate us because we are free!” they cry,
as if that makes any sense at all.

And even now, after Civil Rights and Vietnam,
after Iraq and Afghanistan,
after Roe v. Wade and marriage equality,
after legalized marijuana and Black Lives Matter,
when everyone who’s woke gets their news
from TV comedians,
when a self-proclaimed socialist finishes second
in the Democratic presidential primaries—

even after all that, Hillary Clinton (!) gets three million more votes
but still loses the election
because of the anti-democratic Constitution
written by those slave-owning Founders,
and the anti-democratic Republicans in the Senate refuse
to acknowledge the obvious crimes committed by their president
whose re-election will depend on a few thousand votes in a handful
of white-majority midwestern states cast by
people who know nothing about
American history.

My Old Friend

for all of my old friends

My old friend lives far away
from me and
I live far away
from my old friend.
We send email back and forth
from time to time,
a photo, a song, or
something in the news.
I am a part of my
old friend’s life,
only a part,
and my old friend is a
part of my life, too,
but just
a part.
We share good memories.
One day my email will not be answered.
Or perhaps
one day I will not
be here to open
my old friend’s message.
One of us will become
pure memory.
Sooner or later
both of us will
disappear into the
land of eternal forgetting.

Faculty Meeting

We’re all aware of the math teacher’s problems.
The PE guy gets exercised over the smallest things.
The history teacher can’t forget his past.
The English teacher has choice words for everyone.
The geography teacher knows his place.
The biology teacher loves life, but hates frogs.
The computer science guy is bug-eyed.
The chemistry teacher overreacts to the slightest change.
The physics teacher is energetic, but no one understands him.
The art teacher claims he’s been framed.
Put the Home Ec teacher together with the Crisis Management Counselor and you have a recipe for disaster.

—ca. 2003

“Mending Wall,” by Robert Frost

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,

That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,

And spills the upper boulders in the sun;

And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

The work of hunters is another thing:

I have come after them and made repair

Where they have left not one stone on a stone,

But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,

To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,

No one has seen them made or heard them made,

But at spring mending-time we find them there.

I let my neighbour know beyond the hill;

And on a day we meet to walk the line

And set the wall between us once again.

We keep the wall between us as we go.

To each the boulders that have fallen to each.

And some are loaves and some so nearly balls

We have to use a spell to make them balance:

“Stay where you are until our backs are turned!”

We wear our fingers rough with handling them.

Oh, just another kind of out-door game,

One on a side. It comes to little more:

There where it is we do not need the wall:

He is all pine and I am apple orchard.

My apple trees will never get across

And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.

He only says, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder

If I could put a notion in his head:

“Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it

Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offense.

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,

That wants it down.” I could say “Elves” to him,

But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather

He said it for himself. I see him there

Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top

In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.

He moves in darkness as it seems to me,

Not of woods only and the shade of trees.

He will not go behind his father’s saying,

And he likes having thought of it so well

He says again, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

Number Sestina

Cooking for one

is, strangely, more difficult than cooking for two

although one ingredient may suffice for one, whereas three

ingredients may not be enough for two. But four

pounds of, say, beef, can be consumed pretty quickly by five

people, or six,

 

whereas even six

ounces of certain ingredients might spoil, waiting for one

person to use them up. Time is another factor. Some eat breakfast at five

in the morning, though this is unusual. Two

people who want to share meals must agree on such matters. Four

people who want to share meals will find this even more challenging, but if three

 

of them are children, it’s easier. Three

adults, however, will have trouble agreeing about anything. Dinner at six?

Some will find this quite sensible, as it provides the stomach four

hours’ digestion time before sleeping. But one

person in the group who insists on eating two

hours later—or earlier—will wreck the plan entirely. Five

 

o’clock is a bit early for the evening meal, since many people work until five.

Three students who share meals might have lunch at three,

since many students routinely stay up until two

a.m. or later, and hardly any of them wake up at six.

There may be one

somewhere, but for each of those there are four—

 

—or eight, or more—who sleep until noon. Musicians may not awake until four

p.m. if they don’t finish work until, say, five

in the morning. One

guy I knew finished his first gig at three

a.m. then went to another club and jammed until six.

You wouldn’t expect a guy like that to wake up much before two

 

in the afternoon, at the earliest. Even two

in the afternoon would give him less than six hours’ sleep. Four

p.m. would be more likely, and some in that situation would sleep until six.

Personally, that kind of schedule would finish me off in five

days, max. At my age, I couldn’t do it even for three

days. To be honest, I couldn’t do it for one.

 

A man my age can’t stay awake until two, much less five,

And getting up at four in the afternoon, or even three,

Is no way to live. Give me dinner at six, thanks. For one.

Poetry vs. Horses and Dogs

Found in John Merriman, Modern Europe: Volume One, From the Renaissance to the Age of Napoleon (1st edition, 1996):

Literature flourishes in Italy and princes there are not ashamed to listen to, and themselves to know, poetry. But in Germany princes pay more attention to horses and dogs than to poets—and thus neglecting the arts they die unremembered like their own beasts.

—Pope Pius II (1405 – 1464)

After reading Miranda Carter’s wonderful George, Nicholas, and Wilhelm: Three Royal Cousins and the Road to World War I, it is difficult not to connect Pius’s remark to the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, a.k.a. the House of Windsor, Britain’s royals, whose country houses were—are?—filled with dogs and hunting parties. Kaiser Wilhelm II was also an avid hunter. Carter describes Wilhelm’s enthusiasm for hunting, and that of his royal British cousin, the future King George V:

Wilhelm . . . kept a list of everything he’d ever killed: by 1897 it totalled 33,967 animals, beginning with “two aurochs, 7 elks” and ending with “694 herons and cormorants and 581 unspecified beasts.” George could bring down 1,000 pheasants in one day. At [the Windsors’ country estate] Sandringham the quantities of game shot were positively obscene.

Positively.

And in case you think this is all in the past, do an image search for “British royals with dogs and horses.”

Things fall apart

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

—from “The Second Coming,” by W. B. Yeats

Bridges. Airplanes. Political systems. Things fall apart.

Instructions for Making Compost

From a certain perspective,

compost is all about death.

Decay.

Decomposition.

That final descent from beauty

into a chaos of crumbs.

 

On the other hand,

compost is all about life.

New life, forming at the ground level

of the vast, intricate, beautiful ecology that makes us possible.

Microbes, worms, insects, fungi

all perform miraculous transformations

to produce the soil in which

our life is rooted.

 

Compost can be poetic.

Not too much; not too little.

Not too wet; not too dry.

Not too hot, not too cold.

Not too slow, not too fast.

Balance.

Nothing overmuch.

The yin and the yang doing their eternal dance

in perfect counterpoise.

 

When the balance is lost, compost stinks.

Use your nose,

restore the balance,

turn the pile,

add what’s lacking,

remove that which offends.

The rest is patience.

The Poet

The poet has no talent.

Can’t sing. Can’t dance. Cannot play a musical instrument. Can’t juggle. Can’t paint.

The poet has only words.

And so the poet uses words to sing, to dance, to make music—and other sounds.

Juggles with words.

Paints with words.

Creates motion, odors, tastes, physical sensations of all sorts.

Unlocks our memories. Makes us aware of what we have previously sensed only dimly.

Makes us wonder . . . about so many things.

All of this with words alone.

For the poet, alas, has no talent.

Rebirth

Everything is—not perfect, but cosy
When suddenly there’s a big lurch
That you can’t explain
Or control.

At first you think, no worries,
We’ll be back on course in a moment.
But we aren’t.

Then more lurches, some big
Some small
And long stretches in between.

Waiting.

Thinking, can’t we just go back
To where we were?
Trying to work out how this could happen
While that other voice is saying
Forget it pal; we’re done here.

And then more waiting.

Wondering where this is leading.
Somewhere new and different, of course,
But how, exactly?

No way to know.

—December 2006