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.

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.