Vivian has been pestering me again, so I thought I'd type another poem. I have been thinking about poetry and patronage lately, and in my research came across the fact that Teddy Roosevelt did provide a stipend to E.A. Robinson after reading his first book--Robinson just had to show up: he read the paper and left it on the chair of his office at a NY customs house, to show he'd been there.



I also unearthed the fact that no Republicans have--is commissioned the right word?--well, given audience to an inaugural poem. At least of late. Kennedy famously had Robert Frost read "The Gift Outright," which is a loathsome poem I think (I don't want to memorize that one though perhaps I should, so I can drag it out whenever I want to prove my point about how poetry and politics do not mix usually, either for the purposes of the left or for the right and that goes for antiwar poems too.) Clinton had first Maya Angelou then Miller Williams (father of Lucinda) concoct poems for his inaugurals. Carter had James Dickey (must research what that wild man wrote.)



But no poems for Bush. And now he has been burned reciprocally by the poets. I've been wondering why it is exactly that poetry aligns itself with the left. Is it because, being not a profit-making endeavor, poetry lies outside the capitalist loop, and is therefore threatening?

There is more to it that I have to think through.



Okay but back to Robinson: I've known "Richard Cory" forever, because it was a Simon and Garfunkel song. His morals are simple, but that is the charm of the poems: they position themselves so opposite the cerebral calisthenics that T.S. Eliot was doing in those same years. The other day though I also found this one which has echoed with me.



Reuben Bright



Because he was a butcher and thereby

did earn an honest living (and did right),

I would not have you think that Reuben Bright

Was any more a brute than you or I;



For when they told him that his wife must die,

He stared at them, and shook with grief and fright,

And cried like a great baby half that night,

And made the women cry to see him cry.



And after she was dead, and he had paid

The singers and the sexton and the rest,

He packed a lot of things that she had made

Most mournfully away in an old chest

Of hers, and put some chopped-up cedar boughs

In with them, and tore down the slaughter house.





That's it: quite simple. But it makes me wish for rhyming poetry again, and yet when poets do rhyme these days, it (the poem) is usually like a businessman trying to hold a barn-raising or driving around in his model T on Sundays, everything so forced and corny. Rhyme is something we cannot go back to, at least not in the Reuben Bright way. This makes the poem so doubly sad. I don't have any solution.

Vivian says I have to blog, so all right already. I have not memorized Plath or Milton; in fact I had forgotten about them, having fallen off the improve-my-gray-matter track of late. What happened was that my van burst into flames, and Jim dragged me out and I survived, but I was not particularly grateful. People think you are a soresport if you make this kind of remark, and by way of reply I'll just post Tony Hoagland's poem.



Suicide Song



But now I am afraid I know too much to kill myself

Though I would still like to jump off a high bridge



At midnight, or paddle a kayak out to sea

Until I turn into a speck, or wear a necktie made of knotted rope



But people would squirm, it would hurt them in some way

And I am too knowledgable now to hurt people imprecisely



No longer do I live by the law of me

No longer having the excuse of youth or craziness



And dying you know shows a serious ingratitude

for sunsets and beehive hairdos and the precious green corrugated



Pickles they place at the edge of your plate

Killing yourself is wasteful like spilling oil



At sea or not recycling all the kisses you've been given

And anyway, who has clothes nice enough



To be caught dead in? You stay alive you stupid asshole

Because you haven't been excused



You haven't finished though it takes a stubborn appetite

To chew this food



It is a stone it is an inconvenience it is an innocence

And I turn against it like a record



Turns against the needle

That makes it play.





Poet Hayden Carruth wrote an essay about his suicide attempt--I think he later renounced the piece--in which he speaks of being granted time out of time by his survival (and I was never sure of what he meant by this.) However, I noticed that I was not possessed of a light-heartedness by my survival, the cathartic voltage of the saved. So there must be something wrong with me, I guess, though the value-assessment of life does change (and even our culture's insistence that you make an appropriate assessment) when you're one of the afflicted. You're half let off the hook, but only half--you still have to be a trouper.



And being a trouper I actually find more fun. Things keep happening. We rode our kayaks in the bay the other day and it was all bash bash bash saltwater in the face, our dinky bay more rough than I have ever seen and I am glad to have been so roughly handled by it. Too small to ever disappear like a speck, though last year a young man did--his canoe found but never him.



But I also was a party to the poem's ingrateful oil spill, as a full tank from my VW van leaked out and burned. Closed traffic on the main drag. In this way it was like a parade, a holiday.

I did find the Collins essay, "My Grandfather's Tackle Box." Are we to feel guilty for using our lives in our poems? I always proceeded on the assumption that I had the freedom to use my life, though it was never my life, was my mythical life. Anyway, a propos this topic, I thought I ought to memorize Milton's poem on his blindness, so that maybe it will teach me to quit obsessing on all those lives I should have had, the lives I think I want better than this one, the lives that thus occlude this one, with all its riches.



When I Consider How My Light Is Spent



When I consider how my light is spent

Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,

And that one talent which is death to hide

Lodged with me useless, though my sould more bent

To serve therewith my Maker, and present

My true account, lest he returning chide:

"Doth God exact day-labor, light denied?"

I fondly ask; but Patience to prevent

That murmur, soon replies, "God doth not need

Either man's work or his own gifts; who best

Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state

Is kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed

And post o'er land and ocean without rest;

They also serve who only stand and wait."



Well I cannot exactly stand, and don't exactly believe, but the lesson is well-taken.

So I had a post to my guest book from somebody promoting a porno site--my friend Vivian (webmistress) reminded me that by now somebody has no doubt invented a program that sleuths through the guest book company's program so that more porn and more penis enlargement snake oil can infiltrate more aspects of our culture. And who are those men who desire to enlarge their penises anyway--no one I know is fessing up. But back to the guest book--the penetration gave me the heebie-jeebies, electronic though it be. So I scrapped the guest book feature, whose orange font I did not like anyway.



My pal Tim and I returned to Seattle a third time in as many months to see the poet David Kirby. I like his work very much--a Henry James scholar, he can cull from a big database, of high culture and low. Plus he is extremely entertaining, and accessible, which got me thinking about the whole subject of accessibility--the May/June issue of American Poetry Review contained an essay by a guy named F.D. Reeve, who wrote against accessible poetry as it is typified by (his clique) Billy Collins, Lawrence Raab and Tony Hoagland. It just so happens that I like these guys' poems in particular, which in turn got me thinking: so am I stupid? The mysterious Mr. Reeve was writing in rebuttal to a Collins essay I hadn't read that appeared in Poetry magazine. Collins' complaint was against the use of autobiography in poems, or so I gathered. In the APR essay at least, autobiography and accessibility were being conflated. That makes a dim sort of sense, in that autobiographical/confessional poetry was born in mid-century in response to T.S. Eliot's inaugurating a breed of poem that was 1) challenging academically and 2) devoid of autobiographical life (contrast Yeats or Hardy) ("poetry is an escape from personality"--this is Eliot I think in "Tradition and the Individual Talent.") So I guess we may never untangle the two sins, or virtues, depending on your inclination.



Whenever people want to talk about the virtues of working in what is called the "confessional" autobiographical mode, they inevitably come around to Sylvia Plath's poem, "Daddy." This is a memorable poem (a good one for memorizing too) in that it breaks many rules and points up the truth to my rule about rules: if you're going to break them then you have to break them profoundly so that the rule is utterly smashed. But too bad for Plath that she is remembered for her few somewhat hysterical poems at the expense of the many fine more meditative pieces that she wrote.



I wanted to try to learn a favorite poem of hers, which I'll type out now. By the way, the blog is coming along slowly because I truly am trying to memorize poems.



Black Rook in Rainy Weather

On the stiff twig up there

Hunches a wet black rook

Arranging and rearranging its feathers in the rain.

I do not expect a miracle

Or an accident



To set the sight on fire

In my eye, nor seek

Any more in the desultory weather some design,

Gut let spotted leaves fall as they fall,

Without ceremony, or portent



Although, I admit, I desire,

Occasionally some backtalk

From the mute sky, I can't honestly complain.

A certain minor light may still

Leap incandescent



Out of kitchen table or chair

As if a celestial burning took

Possession of the most obtuse objects now and then--

Thus hallowing an interval

Otherwise inconsequent



By bestowing largesse, honor,

One might say love. At any rate, I now walk

Wary (for it could happen

Even in this dull ruinous landscape); skeptical,

Yet politic; ignorant



Of whatever angel may choose to flare

Suddenly at my elbow. I only know that a rook

Ordering its black feathers can so shine

As to seize my senses, haul

My eyelids up, and grant



A brief respite from fear

Of total neutrality. With luck,

Trekking stubborn through this season

Of fatigue, I shall

Patch together a content



Of sorts. Miracles occur,

If you care to call those spasmodic

Tricks of radiance miracles. The wait's begun again,

The long wait for the angel,

For that rare, random descent.





(it was not until I typed out this poem that I saw the form: line endings in all stanzas match. So I am stupid.

Last night a few of us drove to Seattle to hear Galway Kinnel read: he is a poet whose voice commands great authority and he commits many poems to heart. His poems were great, and so was the delivery. So it was a boost for the project of this blog, which does feel a little silly when I stop to think about it. The memorization, though, has given me something more interesting to do than read Time magazine when I find myself waiting at the doctor's office without a book. In lieu of transcendental meditation.



Kinnel has also got me to thinking about civic oratory, about poems that fall within a loose category that I'd call the civil tradition. I'd argue that poetry of the past, at least some significant portion of it, intended to speak for us all as a culture and was an important part of the social glue. Errr...I'm shuffling through the mental database...well Frost certainly, some of Yeats, even Wallace Stevens had this intention. But now it is not so easy. We are suspicious of grand claims and, when it comes to language, prefer the demotic. Kinnell did seem to be a writing poems that are larger than himself--even though he's already pretty tall.



But he's not the poet I want to type here now. For a few weeks I've had a New Yorker on my desk that contains a poem by Philip Levine. He's an example of someone who maybe speaks to our larger American selves while at the same time keeping his writing free of oratorial grand gestures.



A View of Home



From Ontario's shore one sees

the smoking stacks of breweries,

the ore boats beached and fuming,

the satanic stove factory

where my great-uncle lost fairh

in serf-work, and sold his birthright,

his hip boots, his gauntlets

of cracked leather, his gold watch.

"Bye! bye!" he sang, from the window

of the train, his face aglow

with the joy of the adventure.

He was going back to die for good

Tsar Nicholas. The waters of life

are pure, the Tao says, but our river

is salted with blown truck tires,

non-union organizers, dead carp

floating silver side up, and is pulled

by a tide of money, and whatever it

nourishes it turns to pure shit.

I'm teaching (so to speak) an internet course, and we're operating with a theorem (to be proved true or not, as a hypothetical exercise) that a certain strain--I would argue a dominant strain--of American poetry at this moment comes out of the tradition of James Wright and Elizabeth Bishop (as opposed to say William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens.) There's a ridiculous sentimentality at work in Wright, and he can pull it off because a) the intellect behind it comes through somehow (haven't nailed this down yet) and b) the concrete images chosen are both melodically precise and thematically exact. Now that I think of Wright's concrete-ness I realize that it is, of course, completely informed by WCW. So I just shot myself in the foot.



But it did send me back to work on my memorization of "Autumn Comes to Martin's Ferry." I'm going to try to do it here by brain power alone, and then I'll check how I did. Multiple Sclerosis causes cognitive impairments that I know I suffer from, and this mental training will, I hope, counterbalance some of the impairment.



Autumn Comes to Martin's Ferry



In Shreve High Football Stadium

I think of pollacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville

and gray faces of negroes in the blast furnace at Benbow

and the ruptured night watchman at Wheeling Steel,

dreaming of heroes.



All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.

Their women cluck like starved pullets,

dying for love.



Therefore

their sons grow suicidally beautiful at the end of October

and gallop terribly against each other's bodies.





Spelled Polacks wrong, screwed up capitalization, fused two lines, but otherwise I did all right. I'd like to post another poem while I'm typing, one that is not nearly as well known. I'll try to memorize it--this will be hard, as it's so colloquial



Northern Pike



All right. Try this

Then. Every body

I know and care for,

And every body

Else is going

To die in loneliness

I can't imagine and a pain

I don't know. We had

To go on living. We

untangled the net, we slit

The body of the fish

Open from the hinge of the tail

To a place beneath the chin

I wish I could sing of.

I would just as soon we let

The living go on living.

An old poet whom we believe in

Said the same thing, and so

We paused among the dark cattails and prayed

For the muskrats,

For the ripples below their tails,

For the little movements we knew the crawdads

were making under water,

For the right-hand wrist of my cousin who is a policeman.

We prayed for the game warden's blindness.

We prayed for the road home.

We ate the fish.

There must be something very beautiful in my body,

I am so happy.





So there's the easy ecstatic end, the critic could argue, and what else? The poem's beauty comes from its structuring of the simplest building blocks. Its hyperbolic grattitude for the solid things of the world reminds me of the ancient Japanese poets that Wright often makes mention of.

My webmistress Vivian, who got me into this blog in the first place, recently suffered through the death of her mother. In the midst of the most horrible days, I was hoping to track her through her blog, thus sparing her my phone calls. She didn't log in on those days, though, and now she's thinking about killing her blog off altogether, though I think it's her intent to make a new one. In her case, it has served a good purpose, allowing those of us who worry about her with the means to track her (she lives alone.)



But there does seem to be something distasteful about broadcasting oneself to the world, particularly in the rightfully private moments of grief. When Jackie Kennedy died, when we heard her children on the radio, stoically reading the poems of C.P. Cavafy, a part of me felt that this public display had to be yet another false manifestation of the Kennedy myth, that true grief would never allow it. Grief's authentic manifestation would be an untranslated animal wail. And there's not much written about grief that strikes me as both great and true. Surely this is because of the difficulty we're met with when we try to translate its language. I'm not sure the translation is possible.



But I thought I might put up Emily Dickenson's great poem about grief's aftermath, #341. This is one I mean to learn. Last week I devoted myself finally to May Swenson's poem and have got it down. But my memory takes a lot of maintenance, I'm finding. Not sure how those ancient Greeks managed to master the thousands of lines that were required to get into college. We can understand why lyric poetry evolved.



341

After great pain, a formal feeling comes--

The nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs--

The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,

And yesterday, or Centuries before?



The feet, mechanical, go round--

Of Ground, or Air, or Ought--

A Wooden way

Regardless grown,

A Quartz contentment, like a stone--



This is the Hour of Lead--

Rembembered, if outlived,

As freezing persons, recollect the Snow--

First--Chill--then Stupor--then the letting go--

At least my friend Vivian is reading the blog and catching the typos. A couple of other friends have expressed interest in the radio show I did on salmon, which as I've already noted here is not available at the KUOW website. So I'll type out the other poem I read that was not my own (I also read three of my salmon poems, which is about all I've got--though I readily admit I can't compete with Kunitz.)



The initiating premise for my poems, in several cases, are Scott Chambers' photographs of dead salmon. He feels quite strongly (as do others) that salmon populations are imperiled by our hatchery system, which for years has pumped out farmed fish that compete with wild fish, thereby altering the gene pool and behavior of wild stock. This genetic and behavioral dilution (in addition to habitat alteration and outright loss) is at the crux of the salmon issue here in the Northwest, whose loudest political manifestation is probably the removal (or not) of dams along the Columbia River. Biologists have gone in and killed the hatchery fish along rivers in Oregon where wild stock restorations are being attempted. This, of course, has led to public outcry--when people have gone hiking and seen salmon being bludgeoned.



We also bludgeon salmon here in Olympia, or used to. Reproductive success is apparently better when you mix the eggs and milt artificially--at least that is the practice of hatcheries. The new Pushcart anthology contains the poem I've already mentioned, about this very activity ("Killing Salmon" by a Portland poet named Matt Yurdana. I don't know him. He doesn't know his poem is here.)



I still wonder at the end of this poem, why Yurdana jumps to old movies. Artificiality meets artificiality, perhaps? So the letter in the wrong hands (in the movie) is also a reflection of how the fish have moved so far out of their natural context.



Killing Salmon



After five weeks it's difficult to see them, each like a shadow with

the same struggle and heft as the one it follows,



the swift, tapered moments nearly overlapping



as we wade into them, in pairs, after the net is pulled taut, one of us

stooping to find the muscled groove above the tail that's made for

the hand,



then twisting it up while sliding thumb and forefinger inside the

gills, holding it out and away from the body, while the other



delivers two quick blows behind the eyes with a length of steel pipe,

a shuddering, then a deep loosening



as it rides the conveyor up to the spawning room.



Those first days, their dramatic humps, the red and bruised greens

moving like a thunder storm across their bellies



kept us respectful and arrogant, believing we were an essential link

in their life cycle,



but now, every third day or so, one of us slips into a rage; maybe it's

a blunt snout ramming his shin, or the overgrown teeth snagging

his waders



that makes him climb, as each of us has climbed, the cement bank

of the holding pond, dragging the salmon behing him with more

anger



than long hours, miserable pay, and the agony of our lower backs

should allow,



fifteen second where everything wrong in his life exists in the body

of this fish,



and he kneels, jaws clenched, ears gone red, swinging the steel pipe

again and again until it is unrecognizable'



and afterward, before his breathing slows, he tries to tell himself he

didn't enjoy it, that it wasn't satisfying, but back in the pond



he's a little embarrassed, a little afraid, and it lingers



like the nightmares he used to wake from on those quiet summer

nights from back home,



trembling in the bathroom, washing his face under the startling light

or catching the tail end of an old black and white late-night

movie,



where two lovers suffered over a whisper out of context, a letter in

the wrong hands, a message never delivered on which the entire

plot rests,



simple and reassuring, mistakes he'd made a dozen times, misun-

derstandings he could understand and carry with him back into

sleep.

Yesterday I did my radio blab on the Bardo project, which is a loose coalition of a few folks who are interested in writing about photographs that a man named Scott Chambers took--the photos are of dead salmon. I have a few dead salmon poems, and Kim Addonizio has a rather nice one that I did not get to read on the air. Eventually my reading will be archived at kuow.org but it is not there now because of some problem caused by Garrison Keillor that I did not understand.



I did read a poem by a Portland poet named Matt Yurdana--"Killing Salmon" is in the new Pushcart Collection. In it, a fisheries worker goes postal on a salmon (after hearing me read it, a friend called to say that he felt this was emotionally inauthentic.)



But the mother of all salmon poems is by Stanley Kunitz. I admire this poem so much that I will also offer my critique: I don't like the places where the poem waxes metaphysical ("the only dance is love"--surely that is not true. It reminds me of Auden's "we must love one another or die"--which he renounced.)



Where Kunitz's poem gets it right is where it offers its concise and exactly accurate depictions of the death processes of the fish--one of the great biological spectacles on which this country is founded. And its strategy of positing some mode of human understanding, then denying that we can possess it, also seems like an accurate summary of our dumbfoundedness when we are confronted with this spectacle each year.



King of the River



If the water were clear enough,

if the water were still,

but the water is not clear,

the water is not still,

you would see yourself,

slipped out of your skin,

nosing upstream,

slapping, thrashing,

tumbling

over the rocks

till you paint them

with your belly's blood:

Finned Ego

yard of muscle that coils,

uncoils.



If the knowledge were given you,

but it is not given,

for the membrane is clouded

with self-deceptiions

and the iridescent image swims

through a mirror that flows,

you would surprise yourself

in that other flesh

heavy with milt,

bruised, battering toward the dam

that lips the orgiastic pool.



Come. Bathe in these waters.

Increase and die.



If the power were granted you

to break out of your cells,

but the imagination fails

and the doors of the senses close

on the child within,

you would dare to be changed,

as you are changing now,

into the shape you dread

beyond the merely human.

A dry fire eats you.

Fat drips from your bones.

The flutes of your gills discolor.

You have become a ship of parasites.

The great clock of your life

is slowing down,

and the small clocks run wild.

For this you were born.

You have cried to the wind

and heard the wind's reply:

"I did not choose the way,

the way chose me."

You have tasted the fire on your tongue

till it is swollen black

with a prophetic joy:

"Burn with me!

The only music is time,

the only dance is love."



If the heart were pure enough,

but it is not pure,

you would admit

that nothing compels you

any more, nothing

at all abides,

but nostalgia and desire,

the two-way ladder

between heaven and hell.

On the threshold

of the last mystery

at the brute absolute hour,

you have looked into the eyes

of your creature self,

which are glazed with madness,

and you say

he is not broken but endures,

limber and firm

in the state of his shining,

forever inheriting his salt kingdom,

from which he is banished

forever.

Someone asked that I write more here. All right! I'm shooting for twice a week to keep myself reading/memorizing. I still have to work on the Swenson, though.



So I was thinking of Sharon Olds, a popular poet, and as I said her book The Dead and the Living changed the poetic landscape for me. Now that book has come to me from the library because I couldn't find it in my storage locker, and I've been re-reading, and I see that where its flaw lies (besides in the eccentric line breaks) is in how it juxtaposes the sexual with...well, things that seem to be demeaned by the juxtaposition (a starving woman/her eggs in her ovaries dropping.) There was a time that sexual juxtaposition was revolutionary I suppose. It seems dated now, though, when it is used to elevate a poem's ability to startle (when there's nothing else startling or even happening particularly.) Or maybe it is indicative of a youthful period in a writer's life. I know I juxtaposed the sexual shamelessly. In my case I think this was indicative of a complete lack of taste. Someone, I forget, maybe Eliot, or Auden, talks about how taste should be a hallmark of a poet's merit. But I think that's wrong: bad taste is not irrelevant Or else what do we do with Whitman? Larkin? In certain ways I wish my taste had matured earlier in my life. But bad taste taught me things too. It can make a person fearless.



But I think the thing about Olds that was revolutionary was the forthright way in which she proceeded. Nothing arty-farty to jazz the poems up in a false way (this would be Sexton's flaw.) So here's a good example from Dead and Living, which came out in the eighties and is still in print.



THE ISSUES

(Rhodesia, l978)



Just don't tell me about the issues.

I can see the pale spider-belly head of the

newborn who lies on the lawn, the web of

veins at the surface of her scalp, her skin

grey and gleaming, the clean line of the

bayonet down the center of her chest.

I see her mother's face, beaten and

beaten into the shape of a plant,

a cactus with grey spines and broad

dark maroon blooms.

I see her arm stretched out across her baby,

wrist resting, heavily, still, across the

winy ribs.

Don't speak to me about

politics. I've got eyes, man.

I have been thinking about Sharon Olds ever since reading a bad review of her new book in the New York Times. In rebuttal I said to myself: Well we must remember The Dead and the Living. How much that book seemed to change everything in the 80s. Perhaps I was merely young. But at the time it riveted me with its fearlessness and its forthright voice.



So I went to my storage locker to find the book because I was going to post something here that would solidify my rebuttal--some superbly crafted small thing that was not about the self. I couldn't find the book, so the posting on that score will have to wait. But my thinking about Olds also made me think of Anne Sexton, who, it seems to me, is a grandmother to many of us no matter if we renounce her or not. I think all the charges of self-indulgence that have been lobbed at her make us forget the early work, which is tightly constructed and not at all hobbled by the poet's autobiographical life. So I'll post one that I mean to memorize, and I think it's a testament to the poem's craft that I can recall it so well even though I've never thought about it much.



(By the way, I did memorize the Logan.)



(Also: I just went to get this poem out of the Norton Anthology but there were no entries at all for Sexton--very surprising.)



HER KIND



I have gone out, a possessed witch,

haunting the black air, braver at night;

dreaming evil, I have done my hitch

over the plain houses, light by light:

lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.

A woman like that is not a woman, quite.

I have been her kind.



I have found the warm caves in the woods,

filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,

closets, silks, innumerable goods;

fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:

whining, rearranging the disaligned.

A woman like that is misunderstood.

I have been her kind.



I have ridden in your cart, driver,

waved my nude arms at villages going by,

learning the last bright routes, survivor

where your flames still bite my thigh

and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.

A woman like that is not ashamed to die.

I have been her kind.