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.