Every day Garrison Keillor personally sends me a copy of his newsletter, and today was Robert Pinsky's birthday. He was quoted expressing his belief that a poem's most important component is the physical response, and the breath, that it elicits from a reader's body. So naturally he's interested in the poem as something that's recited out loud, and I think he's been working on anthologies with this in mind.



This idea appealed to me, as I'd just been reading Thomas Hardy's depressing novel Jude the Obscure for an essay about tragedy. I have a few theories. And I was looking at his poetry as well, though it figured into my tragedy concoction the merest bit. What struck me, though, is how I remembered some of the poems very vividly, though I had not looked at them in twenty years. The poem I most remember I pretty much nailed when it came to the recitation of it. I had all the words exactly right.



Now how can this be? I'll type the poem out: it's grounded in a heavy Da-dum-dum rhythm (dactyllic, for your scholars.) Is that enough to lock it in the brain? Maybe it also has something to do with certain sexual fantasies I had about the professor of the class, a woman. But I think not. Truly, it's the rhythm that locked the poem in (the way seal-a-meal locks in freshness.) Otherwise it's your typical subject matter of love and death. The only thing I couldn't remember was the title.



The Voice



Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,

Saying that now you are not as you were

When you had changed from the one who was all to me,

But as at first, when our day was fair.



Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,

Standing as when I drew near to the town

Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,

Even to the original air-blue gown!



Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness

Travelling across the wet mead to me here,

You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness,

Heard no more again far or near?



Thus I; faltering forward,

Leaves around me falling,

Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,

And the woman calling.





I read in the intro to Jude that Hardy wasn't even considered all that good a poet, though it does startle me that not only this poem but many in his Collected are still quite familiar. How does memorability touch on merit?

Today I was reading the fall issue of the literary magazine Shenandoah, in which David Wojahn--an excellent poet--has written a thoughtful essay about the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, how it has a corner on the college market, what challengers are out there, what the history of anthologies in general looks like, etc. I did not realize that the anthology has gotten so large that now contemporary poets--people who wrote after WWII--have been put in a separate anthology, to distinguish them from the older canonized modern poets; of course in both anthologies they've dredged up, or restored, more of a diverse group than the standard white guys. Since I've been out of academia for the past five years, I've been evicted from the gravy train where I used to get sent these books for free.



Interestingly, Wojahn lists the omission of Larry Levis, along with my pal Rodney Jones, and many poets I admire, like Brigit Pegeen Kelly...and even me! My heart did a funny flip when I read that. Also he talks about the omission of Etheridge Knight, a so-called jailhouse poet whom I've always admired. Despite the cultural mandate for the anthology to be more inclusive, Knight has been dropped, I suspect because some of his great poems--like his ballad about a cabin boy who survives the wreckage of the Titanic by swimming to shore--wouldn't play well these days. In particular I remember the line: "Now pussy's good and that's no jive/but you got to swim not fuck if you want to stay alive" (I think the character Shine gets offered sex if he'll save a woman...) He wrote in a tremendous diversity of styles.



What I want to post (I'll find the Knight poem and post it another day) is this poem by Borges that Wojahn closes with. It's about all those of us who'll be a minor footnote in history. If we're lucky.



To a Minor Poet in The Anthology



What now is the memory of the days

that were your days on earth, that spun the thread

of luck and grief and were, for you, the world?



They were swept away in the measurable torrent

of years. You're a word in an index.



To others the gods gave everlasting laurel,

inscriptions on coins and obelisks, avid biographers;

of you, my obscure friend, we know only

that, one evening, you heard a nightingale.



Among the asphodel of the shades, your meager shade

will feel that the gods have been ungenerous.



But the days are a tangle of commonplace miseries,

and what better luck than to be the ash

of which oblivion is made?



On other heads the gods have poured

the relentless lights of glory,

that peers into the hidden and picks out flaws,

glory, that ends by ruining the rose it adores--

to you, brother, they have shown themselves more merciful.



In the ecstasy of a dusk that will never be night,

you hear the voice of Theocritus' nightingale.





Interestingly, I found a parallel in an Albert Goldbarth poem that also appears in this issue. The poem contains the tidbit that an Australian woman had her dead husband's ashes added to her breast implants. I do wonder if Goldbarth made this up.

Way back, all of a month ago, I re-read Baudelaire because I was thinking of the idea of spleen. We don't recognize it as a psychic constellation anymore--no, get with the therapeutic progam, here's your zoloft. I was thinking about how I am a grump, whether there is any value to be dredged from that, and it would seem important to salvage some value from the glower and the curmudgeonly mood, or else why harbor it, even nurture it, as I do? Being pissed off all the time is a distraction, granted. But I would rather hang around with Dorothy Parker than...uh...well... someone too willfully cheerful, like Andy Warhol.



So that brought me to Baudelaire, who wrote a batch of poems on the subject. Nowadays his poetry doesn't play well to our sensibilities, because it is a bit too darkly romantic, sort of like the mood of a bad vampire movie. But he wrote a few poems we should remember. Here is Richard Howard's version of "The Happy Corpse," whose sentiments I heartily endorse, and I don't think I'm a cynic for saying that:



The Happy Corpse



Wherever the soil is rich and full of snails

I want to dig myself a nice deep grave--

deep enough to stretch out these old bones

and sleep in peace, like a shark in the cradling wave.



Testaments and tombstones always lie!

Before collecting such official grief.

I'd rather ask the crows, while I'm alive,

to pick my carcass clean from end to end.



They may be deaf and blind, my friends the worms,

yet surely they will welcome a happy corpse,

feasting philosophers, scions of decay,



eat your way through me without a second thought

and let me know if one last twinge is left

for a soulless body deader than the dead!



I like the bit about the crows. I think often of the Tibetan notion of "sky funeral"--for lack of burial ground, the body is ground up and fed to the birds. Flight is a nice part of the imagining. Plus the speed of the circling seems efficient. Why flush all the nutrients down the sewer? Surely there is a lean crow, or a lean worm, out there somewhere waiting for a meal.

A couple of nights ago I took down the editions of the Norton Anthology of Poetry that I own--three, and it is frightening for me to think that, since I was in graduate school in Syracuse, three editions have come and gone, especially since it seems I was in school just last week, though it has been twenty years. The most recent poets are, of course, the ones who have changed most. So I was looking for absences, and was struck by the fact that Larry Levis wasn't included, since he seems bound for history, a good poet and a tragic man.



There was a poem of his that was famous for a while, and where has it gone? I found it in his book, The Dollmaker's Ghost.





To a Wall of Flame in a Steel Mill, Syracuse, New York, 1969



Except under the cool shadows of pines,

The snow is already thawing

Along this road...

Such sun, and wind.

I think my father longed to disappear

While driving through this place once,

In 1957.

Beside him, my mother slept in a gray dress

While his thoughts moved like the shadow

Of a cloud over houses,

And he was seized, suddenly, by his own shyness,

By his desire to be grass,

And simplified.

Was it brought on

By the road, or the snow, or the sky

With nothing in it?

He kept sweating and wiping his face

Until it passed,

And I never knew.

But in the long journey away from my father,

I took only his silences, his indifference

To misfortune, rain, stones, music, and grief.

Now, I can sleep beside this road

If I have to,

Even while the stars pale and go out,

And it is day.

And if I can keep secrets for years,

The way a stone retains a warmth from the sun,

It is because men like us

Own nothing, really.

I remember, once,

In the steel mill where I worked,

Someone opened the door of the furnace

And I glanced in at the simple,

Quick and blank erasure the flames made of iron,

Of everything on earth.

It was reverence I felt then, and did not know why.

I do not know even now why my father

Lived out his one life

Farming two hundred acres of gray Malaga vines

And peach trees twisted

By winter. They lived, I think,

Because his hatred of them was entire,

And wordless.

I still think of him staring into this road

Twenty years ago,

While his hands gripped the wheel harder,

And his wish to be no one made his body tremble,

Like the touch

Of a woman he could not see,

Her fingers drifting up his spine in silence

Until his loneliness was perfect,

And she let him go--

Her laughter turning into these sheets of black

And glassy ice that dislodge themselves

And ride slowly out,

Onto the thawing river.

Now I am reading this immensely interesting (for the most part) book by Lewis Hyde called The Gift, which a friend told me to read about twenty years ago though I am just now getting around to it. The main thesis concerns poetry's being a gift that circulates the way that potlatch gifts once circulated: the poet is given inspiration, writes a poem, then gives the poem to someone else (readers, but that is supposing there are any,) all without renumeration. The anthropological chapters gripped me, but I admit some of the chapter on usury I skipped--now we're on to Walt Whitman and I'm back once again entrenched.



It occurs to me that profuse poets--Hyde calls them "enthusiasts"--at least the famous ones of this ilk--are male. Neruda Whitman Ginsberg Blake. Whereas the poets I am pulled to these days are fairly restrained and are female--Elizabeth Bishop would be my prime example. Dickinson wrote a lot, but the poems themselves are restrained. I can't think of many women who are profuse. Is this because we are self-doubters?



Says Whitman: "I too knitted the old knot of contrareity."



Here and there with dimes on the eyes walking,

To feed the greed of the belly the brains liberally spooning,

Tickets buying, taking, selling, but in to the feast never once going,

Many sweating, ploughing, thrashing, and then the chaff for payment receiving,

A few idly owning, and they the wheat continually claiming.



Profuseness does not suit memory, though, however profuse is the grass.

But you can dance on the lawn, I will admit. Reading this makes me want to write to my friend from so long ago, which is the point I guess. The book is subtitled "Imagination and the Erotic life of Property," eros being the coming-together of separate things, and logos implying the discerning of their differences.



But I am not an enthusiast and would never go to a church where I was supposed to shout and dance. It was interesting to me that Hyde notes that rich people do not do this. Poor people do.

For many days I have been in the thickets of Emily Dickinson by way of a very thick biography. My friend Maria said she was told by a teacher: all women poets must confront Dickinson eventually. Now I understand this. I don't know why I didn't pay her more heed in my youth.



What entices me is ED's clear sense of election: her faith in her own poetry, that "this is my job to do"--though no one ever told her anything she wrote was worth a damn. When she briefly went off to Mount Holyoke the college was run by a Miss Lyons, who gave her the injunction: "Never write a foolish thing in a letter or elsewhere; 'what is written is written.'"



I have been thinking much about this because, as I prepare to move, I've been looking over old journals and pondering whether to burn them, as the writing contained in them is quite embarrassing. I don't know that I ever strove, as a daily act of living--instead I was the good-time girl. Possibly, historically, there are good writers who were good-time girls but I think not many. Think Zelda Fitzgerald and Edna St Vincent Millay. They come to sad ends.



Every time I go through Dickinson I find something really great though, like this here #1010:



Crumbling is not an instant's Act

A fundamental pause

Dilapidation's processes

Are organized Decays -



'Tis first a Cobweb on the Soul

A Cuticle of Dust

A Borer in the Axis

An Elemental Rust -



Ruin is formal - Devil's work

Consecutive and slow -

Fall in an instant, no man did

Slipping - is Crashe's law -



Well this is not a consistently true theorem but it seems applicable to chronic illness. I asked Maria, who is also a poet, why we didn't go the route of Emily Dickinson. Maria said: Because we wanted to have sex!



And therein was our ruin.

I found the Bishop poem--what I didn't have was the shape of the poem, which is the key to its structure. It's stunning how rapidly things will lose their currency in our culture--the Hemans poem circulating for more than a hundred years, then poof: it's gone.



Casabianca



Love's the boy stood on the burning deck

trying to recite "The boy stood on

the burning deck." Love's the son

stood stammering elocution

while the poor ship in flames went down.



Love's the obstinate boy, the ship,

even the swimming sailors, who

would like a schoolroom platform, too,

or an excuse to stay

on deck. And love's the burning boy.





I don't see how I could have forgotten a few key words: elocution, obstinate.

Last night, I read an amazing Richard Powers' essay in the new Pushcart volume about how computers will affect books and the narrative in general--some lab has created a program that can produce quite effective and genuine and even autonomous characters and plots. I don't quite know what to make of it all--both the essay and the cyber-world. Am I turning my back on the real one? Or the book one? By wasting time with the blog.



But I must say there is a serendipity that comes with all this information overload. In regards to my brain's limited storage capacity, for example, I have always tried to hold there Elizabeth Bishop's poem Casabianca, which I think I know by heart, and as I don't have her book at hand I'll type it out as well as I can remember:



Love's the boy stood on the deck trying to recite

"The boy stood on the burning deck."

Love's the boy stood on the deck while the whole

proud ship in flames went down.



Love's the boy, the burning ship and even the swimming sailors who

would love to have a schoolroom platform too

or any excuse to stay on deck.

And love's the burning boy.



Since I typed that from memory, the line breaks are probably all wrong, as well as other glitches. But I always loved that poem and never knew what it meant, until the other day when Garrison Keillor e-mailed me his chosen poem for the day. It's long, but here's the beginning of it, by Felicia Dorothea Hemans.



Casabianca



The boy stood on the burning deck

Whence all but he had fled;

The flame that lit the battle's wreck

Shone round him o'er the dead.



Yet beautiful and bright he stood,

As born to rule the storm;

A creature of heroic blood,

A proud, though childlike form.





FDH lived 1793-1835: don't know if I'll research her more than that. But at last the mystery is solved.



Also the other day I found out who Gaspara Stampa was (a 16th century Italian writer of sonnets.) Her name figured into a contemporary poem I used to like, and use in class, but I can't remember much more about it than that it included a line about having "hands like eggbeaters." If anyone knows where that line comes from, let me know.

Partly why I remain a renegade of the blogosphere is that I've not yet learned my Milton, not only "When I Consider How My Light Was Spent" but his bang-up "On the Late Massacre of the Piedmontese." You must learn these if you're is going to spend any time on line at the Post Office, me having never been much good for toting something like a book. And I got hung up on Milton as a result of having gotten hung up on swimming, long story, hole in body, surgery etc.



So now my skin has been remade entire, and I plan to swim as soon as the slush melts, tomorrow maybe. But in this week of holing up I've been thinking about my essay on birds, the one that exists 92% in my head. Emily Dickinson's going to be in it, and whipping through her each time I always find a lot of poems that are new. This time I also got a sense of the sweep of the work: as far as birds go, and she goes far, her work seems to utilize them a lot at its beginnings, and then she moves to more metaphysical subject matter, which makes sense, if we accept the myth that she became more and more agoraphobic--windows will only take you so far. This is sad, to contemplate how the physical constraints of a life also control its artistic production, and it was in protest of this idea that I decided, this fall, to keep track of the birds as they migrate in and out of town (would have been a better idea last winter, when the weather was fair...)



A couple of days ago in the freak storm we did go look off the point, where the ducks were huddled in the bay. Very close and still, immobile.



It's clear that Dickinson equates her poetic gift with bird song, and toward the end of her life she knows she's shutting down (from the whirlwind years of her younger adulthood.) Here is a good short one, #1478:



One note from One Bird

Is better than a Million Word -

A scabbard has - but one sword



I guess this is sad: her self-knowledge of her own winding down. It is the subject of #1089:



The Opening and the Close

Of Being, are alike

Or differ, if they do,

As Bloom opon a Stalk-



That from an equal Seed

Unto an equal Bud

Go parallel, perfected

In that they have decayed -