Vivian has been pestering me again, so I thought I'd type another poem. I have been thinking about poetry and patronage lately, and in my research came across the fact that Teddy Roosevelt did provide a stipend to E.A. Robinson after reading his first book--Robinson just had to show up: he read the paper and left it on the chair of his office at a NY customs house, to show he'd been there.



I also unearthed the fact that no Republicans have--is commissioned the right word?--well, given audience to an inaugural poem. At least of late. Kennedy famously had Robert Frost read "The Gift Outright," which is a loathsome poem I think (I don't want to memorize that one though perhaps I should, so I can drag it out whenever I want to prove my point about how poetry and politics do not mix usually, either for the purposes of the left or for the right and that goes for antiwar poems too.) Clinton had first Maya Angelou then Miller Williams (father of Lucinda) concoct poems for his inaugurals. Carter had James Dickey (must research what that wild man wrote.)



But no poems for Bush. And now he has been burned reciprocally by the poets. I've been wondering why it is exactly that poetry aligns itself with the left. Is it because, being not a profit-making endeavor, poetry lies outside the capitalist loop, and is therefore threatening?

There is more to it that I have to think through.



Okay but back to Robinson: I've known "Richard Cory" forever, because it was a Simon and Garfunkel song. His morals are simple, but that is the charm of the poems: they position themselves so opposite the cerebral calisthenics that T.S. Eliot was doing in those same years. The other day though I also found this one which has echoed with me.



Reuben Bright



Because he was a butcher and thereby

did earn an honest living (and did right),

I would not have you think that Reuben Bright

Was any more a brute than you or I;



For when they told him that his wife must die,

He stared at them, and shook with grief and fright,

And cried like a great baby half that night,

And made the women cry to see him cry.



And after she was dead, and he had paid

The singers and the sexton and the rest,

He packed a lot of things that she had made

Most mournfully away in an old chest

Of hers, and put some chopped-up cedar boughs

In with them, and tore down the slaughter house.





That's it: quite simple. But it makes me wish for rhyming poetry again, and yet when poets do rhyme these days, it (the poem) is usually like a businessman trying to hold a barn-raising or driving around in his model T on Sundays, everything so forced and corny. Rhyme is something we cannot go back to, at least not in the Reuben Bright way. This makes the poem so doubly sad. I don't have any solution.

Vivian says I have to blog, so all right already. I have not memorized Plath or Milton; in fact I had forgotten about them, having fallen off the improve-my-gray-matter track of late. What happened was that my van burst into flames, and Jim dragged me out and I survived, but I was not particularly grateful. People think you are a soresport if you make this kind of remark, and by way of reply I'll just post Tony Hoagland's poem.



Suicide Song



But now I am afraid I know too much to kill myself

Though I would still like to jump off a high bridge



At midnight, or paddle a kayak out to sea

Until I turn into a speck, or wear a necktie made of knotted rope



But people would squirm, it would hurt them in some way

And I am too knowledgable now to hurt people imprecisely



No longer do I live by the law of me

No longer having the excuse of youth or craziness



And dying you know shows a serious ingratitude

for sunsets and beehive hairdos and the precious green corrugated



Pickles they place at the edge of your plate

Killing yourself is wasteful like spilling oil



At sea or not recycling all the kisses you've been given

And anyway, who has clothes nice enough



To be caught dead in? You stay alive you stupid asshole

Because you haven't been excused



You haven't finished though it takes a stubborn appetite

To chew this food



It is a stone it is an inconvenience it is an innocence

And I turn against it like a record



Turns against the needle

That makes it play.





Poet Hayden Carruth wrote an essay about his suicide attempt--I think he later renounced the piece--in which he speaks of being granted time out of time by his survival (and I was never sure of what he meant by this.) However, I noticed that I was not possessed of a light-heartedness by my survival, the cathartic voltage of the saved. So there must be something wrong with me, I guess, though the value-assessment of life does change (and even our culture's insistence that you make an appropriate assessment) when you're one of the afflicted. You're half let off the hook, but only half--you still have to be a trouper.



And being a trouper I actually find more fun. Things keep happening. We rode our kayaks in the bay the other day and it was all bash bash bash saltwater in the face, our dinky bay more rough than I have ever seen and I am glad to have been so roughly handled by it. Too small to ever disappear like a speck, though last year a young man did--his canoe found but never him.



But I also was a party to the poem's ingrateful oil spill, as a full tank from my VW van leaked out and burned. Closed traffic on the main drag. In this way it was like a parade, a holiday.

I did find the Collins essay, "My Grandfather's Tackle Box." Are we to feel guilty for using our lives in our poems? I always proceeded on the assumption that I had the freedom to use my life, though it was never my life, was my mythical life. Anyway, a propos this topic, I thought I ought to memorize Milton's poem on his blindness, so that maybe it will teach me to quit obsessing on all those lives I should have had, the lives I think I want better than this one, the lives that thus occlude this one, with all its riches.



When I Consider How My Light Is Spent



When I consider how my light is spent

Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,

And that one talent which is death to hide

Lodged with me useless, though my sould more bent

To serve therewith my Maker, and present

My true account, lest he returning chide:

"Doth God exact day-labor, light denied?"

I fondly ask; but Patience to prevent

That murmur, soon replies, "God doth not need

Either man's work or his own gifts; who best

Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state

Is kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed

And post o'er land and ocean without rest;

They also serve who only stand and wait."



Well I cannot exactly stand, and don't exactly believe, but the lesson is well-taken.

So I had a post to my guest book from somebody promoting a porno site--my friend Vivian (webmistress) reminded me that by now somebody has no doubt invented a program that sleuths through the guest book company's program so that more porn and more penis enlargement snake oil can infiltrate more aspects of our culture. And who are those men who desire to enlarge their penises anyway--no one I know is fessing up. But back to the guest book--the penetration gave me the heebie-jeebies, electronic though it be. So I scrapped the guest book feature, whose orange font I did not like anyway.



My pal Tim and I returned to Seattle a third time in as many months to see the poet David Kirby. I like his work very much--a Henry James scholar, he can cull from a big database, of high culture and low. Plus he is extremely entertaining, and accessible, which got me thinking about the whole subject of accessibility--the May/June issue of American Poetry Review contained an essay by a guy named F.D. Reeve, who wrote against accessible poetry as it is typified by (his clique) Billy Collins, Lawrence Raab and Tony Hoagland. It just so happens that I like these guys' poems in particular, which in turn got me thinking: so am I stupid? The mysterious Mr. Reeve was writing in rebuttal to a Collins essay I hadn't read that appeared in Poetry magazine. Collins' complaint was against the use of autobiography in poems, or so I gathered. In the APR essay at least, autobiography and accessibility were being conflated. That makes a dim sort of sense, in that autobiographical/confessional poetry was born in mid-century in response to T.S. Eliot's inaugurating a breed of poem that was 1) challenging academically and 2) devoid of autobiographical life (contrast Yeats or Hardy) ("poetry is an escape from personality"--this is Eliot I think in "Tradition and the Individual Talent.") So I guess we may never untangle the two sins, or virtues, depending on your inclination.



Whenever people want to talk about the virtues of working in what is called the "confessional" autobiographical mode, they inevitably come around to Sylvia Plath's poem, "Daddy." This is a memorable poem (a good one for memorizing too) in that it breaks many rules and points up the truth to my rule about rules: if you're going to break them then you have to break them profoundly so that the rule is utterly smashed. But too bad for Plath that she is remembered for her few somewhat hysterical poems at the expense of the many fine more meditative pieces that she wrote.



I wanted to try to learn a favorite poem of hers, which I'll type out now. By the way, the blog is coming along slowly because I truly am trying to memorize poems.



Black Rook in Rainy Weather

On the stiff twig up there

Hunches a wet black rook

Arranging and rearranging its feathers in the rain.

I do not expect a miracle

Or an accident



To set the sight on fire

In my eye, nor seek

Any more in the desultory weather some design,

Gut let spotted leaves fall as they fall,

Without ceremony, or portent



Although, I admit, I desire,

Occasionally some backtalk

From the mute sky, I can't honestly complain.

A certain minor light may still

Leap incandescent



Out of kitchen table or chair

As if a celestial burning took

Possession of the most obtuse objects now and then--

Thus hallowing an interval

Otherwise inconsequent



By bestowing largesse, honor,

One might say love. At any rate, I now walk

Wary (for it could happen

Even in this dull ruinous landscape); skeptical,

Yet politic; ignorant



Of whatever angel may choose to flare

Suddenly at my elbow. I only know that a rook

Ordering its black feathers can so shine

As to seize my senses, haul

My eyelids up, and grant



A brief respite from fear

Of total neutrality. With luck,

Trekking stubborn through this season

Of fatigue, I shall

Patch together a content



Of sorts. Miracles occur,

If you care to call those spasmodic

Tricks of radiance miracles. The wait's begun again,

The long wait for the angel,

For that rare, random descent.





(it was not until I typed out this poem that I saw the form: line endings in all stanzas match. So I am stupid.

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--