Spiderspace is set up to accomodate short bits of information sent often--to wit, e-mail. Long e-mails are annoying (long paper letters=good.) And so it is with these posts: short is better. But they must come often, or the totality of the work is considered stale.
I worry what this will do to the brain, accustomed to the flash modality of the music video and the channel surf.
But I'll stick to my guns here by posting something long that I hadn't seen before. It's a piece of writing by James Wright--a prose poem? Not sure where it comes from. I found it in an anthology and it struck me, hard.
Wright is my favorite poet, possessing that combination of erudition and foolish drunkenness, which, to speak stereotypically, are masculine traits (men get sentimental when they are drunk, which drives women crazy.) It's a style that woman can't write in, to do so would be false. So the style is denied us, off-limits, however maddening that is to think.

The Flying Eagles of Troop 62

Ralph Neal was the Scoutmaster. He was still and young man. He liked us.
I have no doubt he knew perfectly well we were each of us masturbating unhappily in secret caves and shores.
The soul of patience, he waited while we smirked behind each other's backs, mocking and parodying the Scout Law, trying to imitate the oratorical rotundities of Winston Churchill as a Southern Ohio accent:
"Ay scout is trusswortha, loll, hailpful, frenly, curtchuss, kand, abaydent, chairful, thrifta, dapraved, clane, and lethcherass."
Ralph Neal knew all about the pain of the aching stones in our twlve-year-old groins, the lava swollen halfway between our peckers and our nuts that were still green and sour as half-ripe apples two full months before the football season began.
Socrates loved his friend the traitor Alcibiades for his beauty and for what he might become.
I think Ralph Neal loved us for our scrawniness, our acne, our fear; but mostly for his knowledge of what would probably become of us. He was not a fool. He knew he would never himself get out of that slime hole of a river valley, and maybe he didn't want to. The Vedantas illustrate the most sublime of ethical ideals of describing a saint who, having endured through a thousand lives every half-assed mistake and unendurable suffering possible to humanity from birth to death, refused at the last minute to enter Nirvana becaused he realized that his scruffy dog, suppurating at the nostrils and half mad with rabies, could not accompany him into perfect peace...
When I think of Ralph Neal's name, I feel some kind of ice breaking open in me. I feel a garfish escaping into a hill spring where the crawdads burrow down to the pure bottom in hot weather to get cool. I feel a rush of long fondness for that good man Ralph Neal, that good man who knew us dreadful and utterly vulnerable little bastards better than we knew ourselves, and who loved us, I reckon, because he knew damned well what would become of most of us, and it sure did, and he knew it, and he loved us anyway. The very name of America often makes me sick, and yet Ralph Neal was an American. The country is often enough to drive you crazy.

Somebody left the comment that I should make the blogness of the blog more bloggy, but it's not really a blog, I don't check in as I should. Plus there is the problem of being populist--writers are supposed to be iconoclastic, not populist, populism taints. However...

I have been thinking about poetry's purpose, having offered brainless nonthoughts about this in the past. Now it seems to me that poetry in fact has many purposes. Here's one, #7, the populist purpose: it is our civic glue. Well, at least for those who want to be glued. Certain poems mark our cultural rites of passage, but: do we still have poems that operate in this manner, the way "Howl" did? Where/what are our public poems now?

There was also Philip Levine's "They Feed They Lion," holding its mirror to the race riots of the 60's.

They Feed They Lion

Out of burlap sacks, out of bearing butter,
Out of black bean and wet slate bread,
Out of the acids of rage, the candor of tar,
Out of creosote, gasoline, drive shafts, wooden dollies,
They Lion grow.
Out of the gray hills
Of industrial barns, out of rain, out of bus ride,
West Virginia to Kiss My Ass, out of buried aunties,
Mothers hardening like pounded stumps, out of stumps,
Out of the bones' need to sharpen and the muscles' to stretch,
They Lion grow.
Earth is eating trees, fence posts,
Gutted cars, earth is calling in her little ones,
"Come home, Come home!" From pig balls,
From the ferocity of pig driven to holiness,
From the furred ear and the full jowl come
The repose of the hung belly, from the purpose
They Lion grow.
From the sweet glues of the trotters
Come the sweet kinks of the fist, from the full flower
Of the hams the thorax of caves,
From "Bow Down" come "Rise Up,"
Come they Lion from the reeds of shovels,
The grained arm that pulls the hands,
They Lion grow.
From my five arms and all my hands,
From all my white sins forgiven, they feed,
From my car passing under the stars,
They Lion, from my children inherit,
From the oak turned to a wall, they Lion,
From they sack and they belly opened
And all that was hidden burning on the oil-stained earth
They feed they Lion and he comes.
___________
I never understood the poem well until I heard Levine explain how he had a job in his youth, doing something like unpacking ball bearings, and one of his black co-workers held up one of the burlap sacks they were using, noting that it was from the zoo. "They feed they lion from they sack." A co-opting of dialect? Yeah, maybe, sure. But probably the most enduring exposition of those times.

Need to work on the first six reasons.

For days, the weather’s gone like this: rainbow squall rainbow squall…ad infinitum. I keep thinking it must stop but it doesn’t. Usually we have a steadiness of one thing or another. Not a steadiness of unsteadiness.

Why it matters is that, because the squalls will short out my electronics, I’ve been living in even more isolation than my usual isolation. The cost/benefit ratio of my going out into the world is pretty high, and I’m always trying to muster the oomph to leave the house. This seems like a queer sort of life, though I often think, well Emily Dickinson didn’t leave the house and she didn’t fret about it.

Then today I read this poem by Charles Simic that approximated the circumstances under which I live.

To Laziness

Only you understood
How little time we have.
Not enough to lift a finger,
Not enough to blink.

The voices on the stairs,
Ideas too quick to pursue—
What did they all matter?
When eternity beckoned.

The curtains drawn,
The newspapers unread.
The keys collecting dust.
My mind was like a motionless ceiling fan,

World-weary, languid
As if the bed was a barge on the Nile,
One red sail in the sunset,
With barely a breath in it.

When I moved at last,
The stores were closed.
Was it already Sunday?
The weddings and funerals were over.

A few sluggish clouds in the sky,
Shadows idling in the doorways,
The patches of waning light
More and more silent and absorbed.

___________________
Lately I’ve been thinking about the value of indirection versus the value of declaration. My mind chooses rainbow then squall then back to bow, and then the “accessible” bow seems childish.

No one should mistake my offhand comments as substantial, though I found it interesting to be the superstratum of a kerfuffle transpiring several layers below me, since the sad fact is...I do not look much at this cyberspatial nooklet. But I did look a little.

Modernism especially lobbied for the imagination's privacy, which I suppose all artists guard (maybe my imagination's not so private because my real life is, now that I don't much go out.) But that privacy hangs balanced against the reader's privacy when he-she sits down with the poem--there are strings that do the hanging, make the balance, and to cut the strings (=disdain the act of communication) was modernism's great disservice. Or so sez me/said me.

Of course, I in turn used to disdain Wallace Stevens. That pompous obscurant whose poems, especially that one about a jar, really twisted my panties. But wait: so how come his are the poems that stick in the mind? Those ones we don't understand? Sticking in the mind would seem to be the best evidence of a populist aesthetic.

These thoughts I thank while sitting on the back porch with my baby sitter (and it's me who must be baby-sat in case calamity strikes) one afternoon of late. It was lovely, though it sounds so phony-baloney, to read Stevens out loud on a fine day. She called my attention to this poem, which I didn't know, and which seems like an elegy to the self, though I don't know whether Stevens wrote it when he was old. It is the last poem in the edition of his selected poems that I own. The meanings and the imagination behind the meanings remain private, though it communicates openly in terms of its simple language and its appeal to the brain's capacity for memorizing:

Of Mere Being

The palm at the end of the mind,
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze decor.

A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.

You know then that it is not the reason
That makes us happy or unhappy.
The bird sings. Its feathers shine.

The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird's fire-fangled feathers dangle down.

------
The poem makes a better statement about imagination and privacy than I could make. The poem is also of a piece with his prose statement about the poetry of war.

Life is complicated, because everything connects to everything else, and now with electronica this connectedness is so pervasive that we live in a blur, it seems. Tornado where we are the tiny end of it, but also connected to the giant swirl above.

I've been reading some surrealist poets (namely Dean Young, whose new book is heavily indebted to Kenneth Koch, one of the New York school dudes, who passed away recently. I was thinking: surrealism can embrace comedy, that's what is does well, but what can it do with tragedy, what can it do with war?)

The NY Times reviewed by book last Sunday. It was very quiet here, and I felt like a bee in a cathedral. The reviewer talked about me as comic, and mentioned in particular a poem from my last book, which was a theft of a Koch poem. This is what I mean by the connectedness of it all.

The poem's long (a poem gets long when the connections start spiraling,) but I'll post it here anyway. I can't get the line breaks right--where there's a capital letter, it's supposed to be a new line, as originally written. Small letter means the line was just too long to fit.

One Train May Hide Another
(sign at a railroad crossing in Kenya)

In a poem, one line may hide another line,
As at a crossing, one train may hide another train.
That is, if you are waiting to cross
The tracks, wait to do it for one moment at
Least after the first train is gone. And so when you read
Wait until you have read the next line--
Then it is safe to go on reading.
In a family one sister may conceal another,
So, when you are courting, it's best to have them all in view
Otherwise in coming to find one you may love another.
One father or one brother may hide the man,
If you are a woman, whom you have been waiting to love.
So always standing in front of something the other
As words stand in front of objects, feelings, and ideas.
One wish may hide another. And one person's reputation may hide
The reputation of another. One dog may conceal another
On a lawn, so if you escape the first one you're not necessarily safe;
One lilac may hide another and then a lot of lilacs and on the Appia
Antica one tomb
May hide a number of other tombs. In love, one reproach may hide another,
One small complaint may hide a great one.
One injustice may hide another--one colonial may hide another,
One blaring red uniform another, and another, a whole column. One bath may hide another bath
As when, after bathing, one walks out into the rain.
One idea may hide another: Life is simple
Hide Life is incredibly complex, as in the prose of Gertrude Stein
One sentence hides another and is another as well. And in the laboratory
One invention may hide another invention,
One evening may hide another, one shadow, a nest of shadows.
One dark red, or one blue, or one purple--this is a painting
By someone after Matisse. One waits at the tracks until they pass,
These hidden doubles or, sometimes, likenesses. One identical twin
May hide the other. And there may be even more in there! The obstetrician
Gazes at the Valley of the Var. We used to live there, my wife and I, but
One life hid another life. And now she is gone and I am here.
A vivacious mother hides a gawky daughter. The daughter hides
Her own vivacious daughter in turn. They are in
A railway station and the daughter is holding a bag
Bigger than her mother's bag and successfully hides it.
In offering to pick up the daughter's bag one finds oneself confronted by
the mother's
And has to carry that one, too. So one hitchhiker
May deliberately hide another and one cup of coffee
Another, too, until one is over-excited. One love may hide another love
or the same love
As when "I love you" suddenly rings false and one discovers
The better love lingering behind, as when "I'm full of doubts"
Hides "I'm certain about something and it is that"
And one dream may hide another as is well known, always, too. In the
Garden of Eden
Adam and Eve may hide the real Adam and Eve.
Jerusalem may hide another Jerusalem.
When you come to something, stop to let it pass
So you can see what else is there. At home, no matter where,
Internal tracks pose dangers, too: one memory
Certainly hides another, that being what memory is all about,
The eternal reverse succession of contemplated entities. Reading
A Sentimental Journey look around
When you have finished, for Tristram Shandy, to see
If it is standing there, it should be, stronger
And more profound and theretofore hidden as Santa Maria Maggiore
May be hidden by similar churches inside Rome. One sidewalk
May hide another, as when you're asleep there, and
One song hide another song; a pounding upstairs
Hide the beating of drums. One friend may hide another, you sit at the
foot of a tree
With one and when you get up to leave there is another
Whom you'd have preferred to talk to all along. One teacher,
One doctor, one ecstasy, one illness, one woman, one man
May hide another. Pause to let the first one pass.
You think, Now it is safe to cross and you are hit by the next one. It
can be important
To have waited at least a moment to see what was already there.

An old friend just called because she's going to write a piece for our new local alternative newspaper (the only other choice is a Gannet affiliate,) and she wanted to incorporate something from my blog, which is NOT a blog, really. She is a peace activist, and want to draw on some cockamamie thing I said (we both attended Scott Ritter's talk.) Have been thinking/writing about my youth, which was governed by Vietnam, a war that remains vivid to me, not so much because ofwhat actually happened overseas, events of which I had just the dimmest awareness (I am just now reading Fire in the Lake to learn about the actualities) but rather because of the psychic force the war exerted on our developing hormonal teenage brains. Because we were only dimly aware, death seemed a vapor that engulfed us. It was everywhere, we were doomed, so there was no reason not to (for example) take LSD, what did the long-term effects matter?

Now an opposing idea circulates in the culture (or is it an idea that circulates among those growing old) that our paramount duty is to maintain our health. This program is hard for me to sign on to because 1) America is being run by people whose motives are so incomprehensible and things seem to be going to hell, and 2) I am sick and do not desire a long life. I guess I would like to return to the youthful damn-the-doom way of living, but can't work up the oomph to party anymore.

Here is a poem by Hayden Carruth that seems to fit.

On Being Asked to Write a Poem Against the War in Vietnam

Well I have and in fact
more than one and I'll
tell you this too

I wrote one against
Algeria that nightmare
and another against

Korea and another
against the one
I was in

and I don't remember
how many against
the three

when I was a boy
Abyssinia Spain and
Harlan County

and not one
breath was restored
to one

shattered throat
mans womans or childs
not one not

one
but death went on and on
never looking aside

except now and then like a child
with a furtive half-smile
to make sure I was noticing.
__________

The poem's being so artless leaves you unprepared for the metaphor that closes and clinches the poem and leaves me breathless because I see that smile. Come to think of it...uh oh...I know whose smile it is. It is Donald Rumsfeld's smile.

My friend was talking about Wallace Stevens the other day, and I realized that I don't know much about Wallace Stevens, I'd always avoided him because I didn't understand his aesthetic. But. If you are talking about poems to be comitted to memory, then it's the Stevens poems that pop up: "Emperor of Ice Cream" (the corpulent one, the roller of fat cigars)--why? Maybe he was working on the problem of how to turn the psyche (the privatemost of utterings) into a civic utterance, a public utterance. Whereas someone like Ashbery is concerned with the psyche's utterings, but not necessarily turning them into something civic.

So while I was thumbing through my Stevens book I found this, which seems applicable to the recent posts. I don't think he intended it as a poem. Anyway, I'd never seen it before, so I will post it.

[Prose statement on the poetry of war]

The immense poetry of war and the poetry of a work of the imagination are two different things. In the presence of the violent reality of war, consciousness takes the place of the imagination. And consciousness of an immense war is a consciousness of fact. If that is true, it follows that the poetry of war as a consciousness of the victories and defeats of nations, is a consciousness of fact, but of heroic fact, of fact on such a scale that the mere consciousness of it affects the scale of one's thinking and constitutes a participating in the heroic. It has been easy to say in recent times that everything tends to become real, or, rather, that everything moves in the direction of reality, that is to say, in the direction of fact. We leave fact and come back to it, come back to what we wanted fact to be, not to what it was, not to what it has too often remained. The poetry of a work of the imagination constantly illustrates the fundamental and endless struggle with fact. It goes on everywhere, even in the periods that we call peace. But in war, the desire to move in the direction of fact as we want it to be and to move quickly is overwhelming.
Nothing will ever appease this desire except a consciousness of fact as everyone is at least satisfied to have it be.
_____

Back to Lucia: I'm still chewing on this. There is of course a problem with fact right now, that is has, in a flash almost, become so fluid that fact doesn't exist. At least in its "represented" forms. If fact was in opposition to the imagination in the WWII days of Stevens' writing, the fluidness of the new non-facts still aren't equivalent to the imagination. Or are they? Your imagination can create a cyber reality where you fly around on a pterodactyl. (Dactyl!) Or you quit typing and go outside to stare at the trees, so that's what I'm going to do.

No poem now, but I will post that I heard somebody quoting Mark Twain on the radio: "Patriotism is being proud of your country all the time, but proud of your government only when it's right." Or something like that. No, no--now I remember. It was from a documentary made from interviews of former CIA people and weapons inspectors, who stated that the administration, including honorable people like Colin Powell, knew it was lying on WMD. It made me feel badly about not having done enough...well, I didn't actually do anything...to stop the war machine. All I've done is write poems. Someone left a really thoughtul comment about this.

Vivian--who made this web site and tells me what to do since the electronic world is mostly foreign to me and I am content to leave it that way--said I should write: I do not have cancer. I do not have cancer, Lisa! Whew, what a relief. I only have m.s.--is that a code, as people once said the big C? The lesson is: stick to poetry, though I will say that the new drug I'd been researching, which I mentioned because it was recommended to my considereration, was taken off the market because someone died, and the disturbing thing about this news is that I learned it from the business page of the NY Times, reporting on how the company stock tanked as a result. Shine, perishing republic.

Morning postcript to last night: today in the NY Times, I read a short interview with the British sculptor Damien Hirst--I think that's how you spell his name--the guy famous for putting dead animals in glass cases. When he was asked if he was angry at the way that the U.S. dragged the U.K. into war, he replied that he bore no ill sentiments and that he was not interested in politics. Then he quoted Sylvia Plath as saying that she was not interested in Hiroshima, she wanted to know what a tired surgeon was thinking late at night.

This struck me as stupid: the tired surgeon is thinking about Hiroshima, of course (assuming a surgeon operates out of compassion.) We are pebbles in the cement, making a sidewalk maybe. And the pebble can say: I'm not a sidewalk, I'm a pebble, an iconoclastic little singing pebble. But the pebble is still a sidewalk. That's why liberalism is sometimes annoying in its piety--how childish to pretend we're not all complicit. That we're not the sidewalk. And the pretense of disengagement also says: I'm not the sidewalk, and so is equally exasperating. How stupid the pebble is that doesn't want to admit it's the sidewalk. Or at least, conversely, the sidewalk is the pebbles. There's still an element of mutual cooperation whether the pebble accepts this or not.

Maybe the civic voice, the Jeffers voice, belongs to the fuddy-duddy grandpa. And some people recoil against Plath as childish. I guess most of us are muddled, between these two polarities.

Last week Scott Ritter came through town, the former weapons inspector who has turned against the war. He seemed like a blowhard, though he also made a lot of sense: the crowd revolted against his denigration of the peace movement as being ineffective ("you people did not stop the war, your candidate did not win the election, so obviously your tactics aren't working.") For a moment it seemed he might get hurt. I left feeling bad about my general lack of spine in relation to the war, my inability to come to any conclusion for more than the time it takes for the next thing I read to turn me around.

I was reminded about wanting to write about having seen Ritter today, when I stopped into the library and flipped through Dana Gioia's new book of essays on poetry. The essay that I paused with concerned the Auden poem that was circulated after 9/11 (though I was reading quickly to get back outside into the sun, it seemed Gioia was claiming responsibility for its circulation.) Apparently he'd been on a reading tour when the planes hit the towers, and cited Auden in the context of lobbying for poetry's ability to bring people together and give them solace, to speak to some fundamental common element that some might call the human soul.

I don't know much but I do know that this is a gross misreading of Auden's poem, as I've argued elsewhere. The poem in question is all about confusion and conflictedness, and that's the reason why it was appealing after 9/11: we were confused and conflicted. Poetry can't solve anything, can't "do" anything (too complicated to explain here--see Auden's essays) nor should it try to solve and do. That's not its business. You don't expect your dog to mow the lawn.

Still, poetry speaks to us, and to history (which is different from solving and doing.) I was thinking about Yeats' poem "The Second Coming," which is one of the few that I have been able to commit to memory--if you want to talk about freaky historical synchronicities, Yeats is your man, not Auden. (Come to think of it, we were almost precisely at the end of one of Yeats' 2,000 year vortex cycles on 9/11.)

But to write that poem here wouldn't serve a purpose, because a) I already know it and b) it's a little too apt--it would seem a little hokey. So I'll type this other one by Robinson Jeffers, someone I was reading because he's one of my voids.

Shine, Perishing Republic

While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity,
heavily thickening to empire,
And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops
and sighs out, and the mass hardens,

I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make
fruit, the fruit rots to make earth.
Out of the mother; and through the spring exultances,
ripeness and decadence; and home to the mother.

You making haste haste on decay: not blameworthy; life
is good, be it stubbornly long or suddenly
A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than
mountains: shine, perishing republic.

But for my children, I would have them keep their dis-
tance from the thickening center; corruption
Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the
monster's feet there are left the mountains.

And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man,
a clever servant, insufferable master.
There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught
--they say--God, when he walked the earth.
____
Some people would say Jeffers is a windbag, I guess. Maybe any poem that tries to be "civic," even crotchety-civic, is doomed.

This week was sucked into the vortex by dint of my having gotten my final dose of chemo, ever, I think--we the afflicted are quick to jump at the expensive carrots of the pharma-dowjones cartel. I haven't wanted to put much personal information on this anthology, but I will say that researching yesterday the next new treatment for my disease was distressing in that my googling turned up several prospectuses--prospectusi?--of what kind of dough investors could expect to make on the new drug.



I know this is how the system works here, and also that money can drive medicine in ways that are not all bad, which leads us to politics, which is really what I have wanted to write about, as I've been thinking about what a marginal operation poetry is, whether it has any cultural importance, which translates to political importance and communicative importance (I do think poems should communicate, should try to speak to somebody beyond the writer.)



Yet every now and again you (=I) come across a poem of such urgency, such nail-on-the-heading of what didn't seem to be able to be nailed, that the artform poetry becomes worthwhile again, and you (=I) remember why you were seduced in the first place.



O.K., it was this, from C.K. Williams. A couple of white people like Tony Hoagland have tried to write about race recently, brave attempts that nonetheless make me squeamish, I think because the white person enters the poem with lopsided odds, such heavy armor (racial/cultural engagement being the battleground of our current politics--the descendant of house slaves defending the war/the shareholder earning dividends from the invalid.)



Williams, though, captures the squeamishness and makes it the poem's center of gravity:



The Singing



I was walking home down a hill near our house on a balmy afternoon under the blossoms

Of the pear trees that go flamboyantly mad here every spring with

their burgeoning forth



When a young man turned in from a corner singing-- no, it was more of

a cadence shouting

Most of which I couldn't catch, I thought, because the young man was black, speaking black



It didn't matter I could tell me was making his song up, which pleased me he was nice-looking

Husky, dressed in some style of big pants obviously full of himself

hence his lyrical flowing over



We went along in the same direction then he noticed me there almost beside him and "Big"

He shouted-sang "Big" and I thought how droll to have my height incorporated in his song



So I smiled but the face of the young man showed nothing he looked

in fact pointedly away

And his song changed "I'm not a nice person" he chanted "I'm not

I'm not a nice person"



No menace was meant I gathered, no particular threat, but he did want to be certain I knew

That if my smile implied I conceived of anything like concord

between us I should forget it



That's all nothing else happened his song became indecipherable to

me again he arrived

Where he was going, a house where a girl in braids waited for him on

the porch that was all



No one saw no one heard all the unasked and unanswered questions

were left where they were

It occurred to me to sing back "I'm not a nice person either" but I couldn't come up with a tune



Besides I wouldn't have meant it nor he had believed it both of us

knew just where we were

In the duet we composed the equation we made the conventions to

which we were condemned



Sometimes it feels even when no one is there that someone something

is watching and listening

Someone to rectify redo remake this time again though no one saw nor heard no one was there





(Note: I took the text off a PBS newscast of Williams I had seen, but of course the text was butchered, which shows maybe how trivial poetry has become, that no intern corrected the poem. Which shows the butchering effect of cyberspace, too.)



I wish I had written this poem/I have written this poem in my head.

I would be a boring blogger indeed if I kept apologizing for my laziness, but I did have a bit of interesting feedback on the Gilbert poem and so I'll post it, since it made sense to me. Here it is, if I can figure out how to cut & paste:



"Now, about that Gilbert poem--it saddened me. I really like Gilbert, but that NYer poem seemed like the ultimate proof that a guy that operates like him has a tough time when he's trying to carry a "message" (who doesn't?). I shouldn't say this about a poet whose boots I am not fit to lick, but the poem seems hokey to me. Perhaps there is an ironic layer there, as you suggest, and I am not of the constant ironical/cynical/ain't I an arch and hip little schoolboy school."



Still, I can't figure out which way the Gilbert is to be read--surely he intends to present the riddle. Dead-on, it is sentimental: its writer would have to possess the kind of flagrant optimism that's kind of sickening. Then again, I am repeatedly attracted to poetry that my more critical friends find sentimental, ditto for my responses to culture at large (when I heard Condie Rice say today (our occupational let's-put-on-a-show, say- it-in-your-Ethel-Merman-voice election day,)"The Iraqi people are brave," I got a little phlegm in my throat at the same as I threw my shoe at the radio. Ambivalence meaning to hold two feelings at once, what Keats was talking about when he talked of "negative capability," which is another way of saying wishy-washiness.



The corn-pone usually speaks to me. Perhaps it is just my bad taste.

Sometimes it does seem poetry is an obsolete activity, which gets me to questioning its social function (must it have a social function?) and the very question makes me despair. Although much of the poetry generated in response to current politics seems juvenile to me, lately I have come across some poems that seem indispensible to our culture and that are profoundly moral. As a not-so-moral person or poet, this makes me quiver. Is it all right if morality is not part of my kit bag? Why can't I lend my shoulder to pulling the sledge of justice? A despair deja vu, and the last was barely over.



Still, here is a Jack Gilbert poem, from the New Yorker of all places, that blew my mind. Its construction tackles all my aforementioned shorthanded qualms by sneaking up behind them.



A Brief for the Defense



Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies

are not starving someplace, they are starving

somewhere else. With flies in their nostils.

But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants.

Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not

be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not

be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women

at the fountain are laughing together between

the suffering they have known and the awfulness

in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody

in the village is very sick. There is laughter

every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,

and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.

If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,

we lessen the importance of their deprivation.

We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure.

but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have

the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless

furnace of this world. To make injustice the only

measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.

If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,

we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.

We must admit there will be music despite everything.

We stand at the prow again of a small ship

anchored late at night in the tiny port

looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront

is three shuttered cafes and one naked light burning.

To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat

comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth

all the years of sorrow that are to come.



I have tried to figure out if this poem is facetious--I suppose it both is and is not.



Now there are machine guns mounted on rafts that circle below my house, and today the warplanes flew with much clamor overhead.