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.