#181 The Translator--II

[No online link available.]

B. is criticizing Communism’s basic assumption that “every tree is judged equal tall, / in faith without debate.” Obviously this is anathema for somebody pinning his hopes on fame, which assumes the famous person has something unique and special to offer. “Henry is dreaming of a society, / one where the gifted & hard-working / young poet is cherished, kissed as a king / to come, a prized comer.” Writing poems produces nothing the totalitarian state values—wheat and machinery, for example—so the poet Brodsky was given five years hard labor in a “distant locality”, Siberia, where his labor would atone for all those years of parasitism on the State. It’s a shocking pronouncement to an artist, all right. But artists have always been held dangerous by totalitarian states, and often are persecuted. Here in the US, that is happening as well, though not to the extent the Soviet Union or the Nazis took it. Several US states are seeing great universities damaged through this kind of movement. Universities of course are liberal hotbeds of dangerous thinking and uncomfortable knowledge, where elitists disrespectful of American exceptionalism criticize, speak up, and generally get in the way of what is right and good. We can’t send them to Siberia, but we can certainly starve the beast that supports them. This is a step toward the outright Soviet/Fascist style oppression that Orwell warned against, a bit more direct and aggressive than the Huxley take on how to suppress artists, which is to let them talk, overwhelm them with bullshit, marginalize them as trivial, and no one listens. No need for unpleasantness.

The totalitarian accusation of artists as parasites is poppycock, of course, though the word “poppycock” probably doesn’t capture the violent undertones that accompany direct suppression. It’s all hypocritical to a breathtaking degree, as insistence on a kind of enforced equality is used as cover for the same old wealth/power elite arranging things for their own benefit and destroying anyone who gets in their way. Eventually Soviet Communism collapsed through corruption and abysmal public morale, and the Nazis would have gone the same way eventually if the Soviets and the US and Britain hadn’t destroyed them first. In the meantime, enormous damage was done.

At least there is one thing to remember: In destroying artists, the totalitarian state acknowledges the power of art. Let the State be publicly criticized and politically resisted, absolutely, but some of the most effective tools to undermine the bad guys is to laugh at them on one hand and to beautifully show them for exactly what they are on the other, so that a broader moral imperative takes root. Most people are basically good, and will act through systems that maintain their integrity, though they are vulnerable to lies and to the grasping of psychopaths. Totalitarian states can fight back with violence and suppression, and they often gain the upper hand through terror, but eventually, laughter and beauty shine on their agents and they wither, anxiously cowering inside their 40^th story corner offices.

B. knows: A little political ranting is good for the spleen now and then.

#180 The Translator--I

(Scene: Leningrad, the trials of the young poet Joseph Brodsky for ‘parasitism.’ The judge’s name deserves record: one Mme Saveleva. Let her be remembered.)

Henry rushes not in here. The matter’s their matter,

and Hart Crane drowned himself some over money,

but it is Henry’s mutter

that seldom has a judge so coarse borne herself so coarsely

and often has a poet worked so hard for so small

but they was not prosecuted 

in this world. It’s Henry’s matter, after all,

who is ashamed of much of the Soviet world

in their odium of imagination.

Translated not just Pole but Serbian

(a tough one, pal—vreme, vatre, vrtovi)

& Cuban: O a bevy! 

They flocked to him like women, languages.

Bees honey but wound—African worst—Pasternak bees,

whom they dared not to touch

though after they ruin his friend, like this young man

who only wanted to walk beside the canals

talking about poetry and make it.

They all vary in their cultural details according to common underlying themes, authoritarians. Stalin and all the Communists, Mussolini, Hitler and the Fascists, King Henry the 8^th and a whole long list of numbered historical monarchs worldwide, a long, sordid litany of African, Latin American, Asian dictators in smaller countries. There are CEOs in this our own proud nation who rose to their positions through analogous pathologies, and give just as few shits about the people they ruin in the construction and safeguarding and application of their wealth, privilege, and power. They can’t do it alone. They all had/have politicians, bureaucrats, judges, managers, in some cases clergy, in many cases police and military, who take care of the finer details of the work. Censoring opposition is a time-honored tactic, and if you believe George Orwell in 1984, it is one of the very raisons d’être of tyranny, the thing the tyrant and his subordinate tyrants most live for and find satisfying. It’s not just a means to an end, it’s the end in itself, the application of power that justifies having power, power’s mean and dangerous point. I have no doubt whatsoever that some of the meanness we see in contemporary American life and politics follows from the same dictates—education “reform” at all levels, privatized prisons that create a market for human beings, the attacks on women and minorities, the squandering of environmental resources, the removal of the social safety net for the poor—money is the root cause, the movement of wealth upward to the rapacious powerful few whose satisfaction comes not in the having but in the acquiring. The satisfaction of exerting power and suffering through the cultural structures already in place appears to have an enormous satisfaction for certain well-placed, outwardly elegant psychopaths, who in this country wear fine dark wool suits and who communicate through the fabric of their suits and the color and pattern of their ties, like birds of paradise in the esoteric but finely specific details of their mating plumage. Honest words would be clumsy and dangerous. You don’t need them. You speak in code, or you just know. You know where to get the right haircut, and you know the restaurants where you can display the proper bottle of wine. (Drinking the wine is only ancillary to the point.) You communicate through signals that you know what to do. That gains you entrance to the closed circle, where honest, criminal language ventures forth. Most of the time, the waiters don’t record it.

To call a poet a “parasite” in the judgement of a court of law is power taken to such an arrogant extreme, and an extreme of such entrenched, unshakeable confidence, that there’s no longer any need for hiding. The point is not only to silence but to humiliate, and the other point, just as critical, is to crow and spread. Judge Mme Saveleva, it appears from B.’s accusation, did just that, and so a gentle poet bore the brunt of power, was lined up in its bureaucratic crosshairs and took the bullet. For poems.

I’ll quibble with B. on one thing here: He asks that her name be remembered, in infamy and disgrace of course, but remembered and reviled. No. Forget her name. Don’t forget what she did, and don’t forget her victims. But forget her. I’ve forgotten her already. If one of our recent men of power, as just one small representative and un-named example, ever goes to prison, I will write him a long polite letter, outlining how I feel about his war, his corporation, and the people who needlessly died because of his leadership. And I will most definitely include a poem in that letter. I do hope that he lives a long, long time, so that there is ample opportunity for the interior state of his soul and his heart to become apparent across the mismatched halves of his dishonest face. When his heart finally stops, then it will be time to forget that he existed and we can relegate his banality to the comforting emptiness of a particular forgetting.

Communism in the guise that Berryman knew it, in the Soviet Union, has collapsed. It perpetuates for now in other areas, but the USSR is gone. It does have thriving kin and spawn, however. If poetry can teach as well as terrify and comfort, then so much the better. But that’s why some tyrannies imprison poets. Terry Tempest Williams writes about a protest she participated in. She had a pencil and notepad in her pocket. “What are these?” the arresting officer asked. “Weapons,” she replied.

#179

[No online link available.]

Well I guess it’s tough having all these demands placed on one to perform, again, that which has caused the demand in the first place. Every job has its grunge work, doesn’t it?: ER surgeons get sick of blood and bandages, teachers get sick of grading mediocre papers, clerks get sick of filing the same forms, Led Zeppelin had to sing the same damn “Stairway to Heaven” for the 10,000^th time to the same arena full of the same stoned, shirtless fans, who all looked alike. One more ditch to dig, one more washing machine to repair, one more bolt to fasten on the refrigerator assembly line. Back and forth all day, one row after another, behind the mule or on top of the tractor. One more poetry reading. Same old shit. “A terrible applause pulls Henry’s ear,” he says, then addresses his old friend in blackface: “Why don’t we fold us down in our own laps, / long-no-see colleague & brother?” This has been Henry’s go-to mode under pressure: Fold away, diminish, collapse, crawl into a hole. Get drunk. “—I don’t think’s time to, time to, Bones. / Tomorrow be more shows”. More papers, more bandages, another song to sing. Keep plowing.

“—The grand plough // distorts the Western sky.” Even the constellations of the night sky remind us: “the history of the Species: work, work, work.” Well—depends on who you talk to. American Indians saw these white intruders coming and set out, as you would expect, to learn what these people were like. They saw the women working all the livelong day on household chores, children in school all day learning how to work and how to tolerate all that work, the men out working all day long, and the Indians thought, this is crazy! Life is a feast, the land and sky are fresh and sacred, and how do these maniacs spend it? Working? Like—ALL DAY??? And their work is their religion? But, oh crap, when they decide it’s time to bend their industry to your destruction, they’re focused, driven, maniacal—dangerous. The intruders still wouldn’t have won the continents except they had plague on their side, a ferocious potent ally that eased their way to victory. But they credited their own work and their own determination. Well, the victors tell the stories and propagate their own self-proclaiming myths. That’s always how it works.

Sometime long ago, in my late-teen era, I read an essay by Isaac Asimov about work and labor. I can’t relocate it, but I remember the premise well enough because it struck a chord. His main idea was that the agricultural revolution instituted the foreign concept of labor into human culture. Before agriculture, labor was unheard of: Hunting was hard, often dangerous and grueling, but it was never the back-and-forth repetition of plowing, sowing, and reaping, a new and alien mode of being which settled into the human psyche and established itself as the norm. It wasn’t work. Now, work folds all through our behaviors: We’ve come to live in patterns of repetitious regularity. Asimov, from his optimistic moment in the 1950s, figured that automation would supplant the need for labor, rescuing us from the endless, Sisyphean repetitions that Thoreau marveled at in Walden:

What I have heard of Bramins sitting exposed to four fires and looking in the face of the sun; or hanging suspended, with their heads downward, over flames; or looking at the heavens over their shoulders “until it becomes impossible for them to resume their natural position, while from the twist of the neck nothing but liquids can pass into the stomach”; or dwelling, chained for life, at the foot of a tree; or measuring with their bodies, like caterpillars, the breadth of vast empires; or standing on one leg on the tops of pillars—even these forms of conscious penance are hardly more incredible and astonishing than the scenes which I daily witness. The twelve labors of Hercules were trifling in comparison with those which my neighbors have undertaken; for they were only twelve, and had an end; but I could never see that these men slew or captured any monster or finished any labor.

Thoreau ends by claiming, “But men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon plowed into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is a fool's life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before.”

I was wide open to the thoughts of Asimov and Thoreau on the foolishness and waste of work, and I was also wide open and vulnerable to the accusation that immediately follows, that if you don’t work, you’re lazy. You’re not an ant, you’re a grasshopper. Sloth is one of the seven deadlies, you know. The opposite of work is damnation. Someone very close to me said about her family, “You can tell how much they love you by how hard they work for you.” The question of whether work is an expression of love or a replacement for it arises, but I’ve always chosen to assume the former from a good person and her good family. But there’s an expression for you of just how deep the association of holiness and love with labor has penetrated. There are scores of good people (Thoreau’s snark aside) who don’t feel the need to uproot the work ethic. Just work. It doesn’t matter what work you do. Just work.

“There’s a bell” B. writes. The bell has historically regulated our time in relation to work. Later in the same stanza, B. uses the word “knell”—the tolling of the church bell to mark a funeral—so B. is connecting work with death. “All right, I’ll stay. The hell with the true knell, / we’ll meander as far as the bar.” He’ll do his work, his reading, as expected, staving off for awhile the true knell of death and replacing it with the ersatz business of his poetic work, work, work. The bar waits, with its backlit selection of fine amber whiskies. It ain’t true as the knell, but it’s adequate compensation for a life spent working. That it slowly kills you also is a kind of tormented validation of Thoreau and Asimov. Thoreau in reference to his “Squire Make-a-stir” gets the last word:

Talk of a divinity in man! Look at the teamster on the highway, wending to market by day or night; does any divinity stir within him? His highest duty to fodder and water his horses! What is his destiny to him compared with the shipping interests? Does not he drive for Squire Make-a-stir? How godlike, how immortal, is he? See how he cowers and sneaks, how vaguely all the day he fears, not being immortal nor divine, but the slave and prisoner of his own opinion of himself, a fame won by his own deeds. Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion.

We internalize it, it kills and hollows our spirits, and we’re helpless against it. Get back to work.

#178

[No online link available.]

I like these lines, after a brief report of a dream set in France: “Rid slowly of all his dreams / he faced the wicked ordinary day / in a tumult of seems”. Writers sometimes are judged by how “real” their work seems, or how relevant its effect is on our understanding of the environment we inhabit. But as a poet he’s laying out a thunder of seems and he’s fully aware of that fact. Credit for candor here, and a nice escape from a wicked ordinary day. “whilst wanderers on the coasts look for the man / actual, having encountered all his ghosts / off & on, by the way.” In other words: Critics still don’t get it, those self-important phonies proselytizing from their offices in New York, Boston, LA and San Francisco, who have made B., or Henry, I suppose, famous, but perhaps it’s all based in la-de-dah. If that’s the case, it strikes me that B. might have been wondering just what he had gotten himself into—I would. All that fame-making malarkey. “Work while you can…along those treacherous coasts.” Yep. The coasts are treacherous, taking away the accolades from which fame sprouts and the fruit that ripens from there being what Poet Berryman has pinned his hopes on. There is an insecurity that has to follow from that, prizes and the starry-eyed attention of grad students aside. He goes on to note, in italics, that, “We are struck down, repeat the chroniclers, / having glowed.” It can get whisked away, folks. Make hay while the sun shines. Seize the day. The poem ends on more terrific lines: “Leaving the known world with an awkward kiss / he haunted, back among     his colleagues in this verse / constructed in angry play.” “Angry play” is as good an encapsulation of the Dream Songs as anything. There’s a lot of meaning folded into these lines. He leaves the known world, the wicked ordinariness of it, the land of critics and scholarly orthodoxy, and “haunts” his way, ghostlike, into the dream world of versifying, rounding out the poem which had started with a dream, and he back with his colleagues. Art is an escape here, but an understandable escape from the madness and hypocrisy of the normal.

I’m so happy to have run into such a great Dream Song, one of my favorites so far, because I was starting to get a bit exasperated with this poet, and like Ismael, it was taking positive act of will and a strong moral principle to refrain from stepping into the street and begin methodically knocking people’s hats off. But going to sea, or going a-whaling, is no option for this sailor, so I was feeling a bit grim in the mouth and my hypos were getting an upper hand of me. I’m sitting here in the Denver Airport thinking, I can keep doing this. I can keep going. When B. gets off his whining, he can write all right. It’s a hurried and noisy atmosphere here, like New York harbor going on two centuries ago that Melville knew pretty well, and the garbled announcements, the two business suits right behind me talking about who to schedule and who to lay off, the ear-piercing whining—what is that?—the rain and thunder outside, the smell of Starbuck’s coffee, the nearby roar of jets throttling up outside the window and the distant roar of jets ascending through the rain out on the runway. There will be nostalgia for this kind of airport scene two centuries from now, probably. Probably from some putz like me. But it’s all pretty wicked and ordinary right now, except I’m about to step onto a massive, powerful machine and fly at 30,000 feet across the continent. You have to marvel at our ordinary, in all its glorious, wicked magnificence. But you can’t concentrate or create here. The airport won’t tolerate it. There are critics lurking around about here. But I’ll get home and I’ll haunt away again soon. What a life it is we live, I’m telling you.

#177

Am tame now. You may touch me, who had thrilled

(before) your tips, twitcht from your breast, your heart,

& burnt your willing brain.

I am tame now. Undead, I was not killed

by Henry’s viewers but maimed. It is my art

to buzz the spotlight in vain, 

flighting ‘at random’ while Addison wins.

I would not war with Addison. I love him

and Addison so loves me back

me backsides, I may perish in his grins

& grip. I would he liked me less, less grim.

But he has helpt me, slack 

& sick & hopeful, anew to know what man—

scrubbing the multiverse with dazzled thought—

still has in store for man:

a doghouse or a cave, is all we could,

according to my dreams. I stand in doubt,

surrounded by holy wood.

Joseph Addison was a writer from the 17^th century, one of the leading proponents in his day of genteel manners and taste. Here’s a typical quote from Addison: “What sunshine is to flowers, smiles are to humanity.” B. would of course have a full measure of snide contempt for this kind of sentiment. The poem isn’t about Addison, though, who is used as a stand-in for the poet, Robert Lowell. It’s about the response of Lowell to the Dream Songs, which came out in The New York Review of Books in 1964, and which was mixed in its assessment of the poems. He thought they were all the things Dream Songs are noted for—funny, horrifying, inventive, but he also found them befuddling and obscure and claimed he couldn’t understand many of them. (Especially regarding the early ones, this isn’t such an extravagant claim.) B. was terribly wounded, and wrote DS 177 in response.

In a year-long sequence of three basic drawing classes I took in college, along with a couple of my architecture major roommates, we were asked to draw a large self-portrait. My first attempt was fairly wooden. It was a profile of a large guy crouched in a set of track-sprinter’s starting blocks, the idea that he hadn’t started running yet. Meh. I didn’t like it, thought it was forced, uninteresting, obvious, wooden. I sat through the classroom critique, which only made it through half the work, and mine was overlooked for that day. I saw this other amazing work, from really talented artists. (U. of Cincinnati has a top-tier design, art and architecture school. I was out of my league. But I do think, looking back, that I grew rapidly.) Then I turned the page over—the paper given us for the assignment was three feet wide and six feet long, with ragged edges on the ends from where it had been torn off of a huge roll—and did another one. In the image, I was seated at a table, with a book in front of me that was blank. My glasses were blank, and I had my fist against my cheek in a classic pose of utter boredom. Around my head was a kind of energetic aura. I didn’t have Van Gogh’s similar self-portrait in mind because I hadn’t seen it yet, but the effect was close. The rays of energy around my head were pretty solid, with shading and form. I also put a bug on the front of the table, I don’t know why, but I’ve since learned that this bug has some kind of psychological significance, and not a good one. The effect, though, I thought, was striking. Blank and hard to read from the outside, but with all this passion and energy inside, that wasn’t going to be contained. I was satisfied enough with it that I was actually looking forward to putting it up on the wall next to the other self-portraits done by art students with genuine talent. Since the drawings were too big to take home easily, we left them in a locked closet in the classroom. Sometime in the days between classes, before the next crit, some budding art critic opened the closet and wrote “sucks” on my piece. In pencil, I erased it, but the damage was done.

This piece was good, genuine, and its image made an effective statement about who I was and how I saw myself. The graffiti that defaced it didn’t change my assessment of the drawing—I know darn well that it was the best thing I had done yet, that it was not only good, but inspired, and that it stacked up quite well against anything done in that class. But it was different, it was unorthodox within that class’s context, and I paid a price for my small departure from artistic orthodoxy. My self-esteem took a hit. This defacement had been the work of one of conservatism’s blockheaded henchmen, probably too stupid to know the role he or she was playing in the world of art and creativity. It changed my view of the world, and it hurt. I didn’t whine about it, but I do understand B.’s wounded fee-fee—up to a point. We want to be loved, always, unconditionally, and we want our work to receive the same unconditional admiration and love. Maybe success in B.’s case made him thin-skinned. Try sitting through an MFA workshop some time, that toughens you up quick, and if that doesn’t do it, then the first hundred printed rejection slips from editors so unimpressed (or busy, to be fair) that they can’t be bothered to comment should do the trick. But he had more invested in his legacy by this time than any student, and he was sensitive. With his life a shambles, his legacy had to have legs to make his very existence mean anything. I have to say that I still like The Dream Songs for the most part, their inventiveness, their appalled take on the world’s injustice, their manic humor. B. himself, he’s getting like some distant cousin’s uncle who shows up at a family Thanksgiving gathering, won’t take off his NRA cap, saying one incorrect thing after another without the slightest notion that he’s gone past offensive into the realm of pathetic. Somebody needs to tell him… Lowell might have been trying.

#176

http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/john-berryman/1060

Well, I’d sure like to think that “Henry’s girl” is his daughter, but I doubt it. I don’t think his daughters were old enough to fly off to Paris before he died. Maybe the girl in question is his student, which is not so good. Maybe she’s his mistress—but who cares? “Love” can mean a lot of different things, but when you imagine taking your sock off, the skin coming off with it, and the torrent of blood running on the floor reminds you of your love? Some definition of love that is. Something tells me a daughter isn’t involved. Times like this we need to remember: The Dream Songs were never meant to be understood you understand, they are merely meant to terrify and comfort. This is a terrible image. It’s something, though.

A dream at the end, love with those false front teeth as false as his anti-hopes. She wasn’t his mistress or his daughter, she was probably some student he was pining over, and he was shameless enough to admit it and write about it. Good for her making it to Paris unscathed. His metaphorical disgraceful bloody foot wasn’t her problem. It was his.

There’s candor, which is generally considered a positive attribute. Then there’s the action of an old wrinkled fart, his dirty underwear stuffed in the pocket of his raincoat, flashing the assembled commuters in a subway station. It should be stirring and scandalous, but New Yorkers, and Parisians for that matter, aren’t too flapped by this kind of nonsense, and the old guy gets a contemptuous laugh or two and a few hoots, and everyone’s nose goes back to their smartphones. Just another day in the big city.

The risk you run with stuff like this poem is that the bored subway riders and the few poetry readers left in the world ignore you because you’re so pathetic there’s no sense worrying about it. Bloody foot my foot. My patience for this kind of hoo-hah on a tired evening, after an amazing day at a conference with people who choose productive engagement as a way to spend their lives, has bled away.

#175

[No online link available.]

Wow, you know, why not? Lay it out there. This one begins with a riff on “Old King Cole”: “He called for his his butts & he called for his bowl / & he called for his fiddlers three / in vain.” It’s hard not to read “butts” and “bowl” as snide references to sex and booze, all of course, in vain for the old guy who isn’t really that old but worn out from drinking, and now trying to stop drinking so he can stay less worn out than he would otherwise be if he kept drinking. In the end, looking on his life, “Henry has much to do.” This is positive. Sure, we all do, and he did. So, he tells himself, relax, continue. “The world is a solemn place, with room for tennis. / Everybody’s mouth / is somewhere else, I know, somebody’s anus.” Ugh. “Tennis” is there, trust me, because it’s a close rhyme for “anus,” an excremental image if there ever was one. And, really, it is sort of true—we all have masters, who humiliate us, sometimes, often. “I speak a mystery, only to you. / Here’s all my blood in pawn.”

One last humiliation then, besides sucking down the unsatisfying porthole leavings the Man deigns to grace you with so inelegantly, you return the favor not with shit but with blood, a far more valuable product. There’s a take on capitalist socio-economics not too shrouded in euphemism right there. Eat shit, give blood, and as that Japanese prison-camp commander tells Alec Guinness and the other captured British slaves in The Bridge on the River Kwai, “Be happy in your work!”

It does demand a relentlessly twisted, dark take on the world to see it only in these crappy terms, but it’s possible, and it even holds up to a certain amount of scrutiny—except, like a poem, there are competing interpretations to life, too. I’m not regarding the world from that place today.

#174 Kyrie Eleison

Complex his task: he threads the mazers daily,

sorts out from monsters saints and rewards them,

produces snow.

Blind his assistants, some in the Old Bailey,

some at the Waldorf Towers, the Pump Room,

Trying their best O.

And he shall turn the heart of the children to their fathers

and this will not be easy. The wound talks to you.

It’s light as a promise

to Rahab the spies’. Words light as feathers

fly. Wake with rage-ruined limbs. Hoarfrost is blue

at dawn on the storm-windows.

Thuds. Almost floors. In the garden I am alone

among the animals. There is shrill music

of which the less said the better.

Cold dough: is not that the one thing that might matter?

That, and the frightful fact that I am alone

while he sorts out the bloody saints.

Now this is a Dream Song! I had no idea what it’s about at first, completely cryptic and obscure. Yes! I much prefer these to the flat, obvious, wheedling ones. And with a couple clues it all heaves nicely into focus—confessional, very emotional, and in line with the motifs he has established, but a cut above many of the others.

“Kyrie Eleison” is the Greek phrase for the introductory call and response of the Roman Catholic mass (“Lord have Mercy. Lord have Mercy. Christ have mercy. Christ have mercy.” Etc.) So call and response is the guiding concept in this one. I like it because this whole project is a kind of call and response.

The poem begins with this line: “Complex his task.” So who’s “he”? A clue follows: “he threads the mazers daily, / sorts out from monsters saints and rewards them, / produces snow.” So who is it sorts monsters from saints and rewards them? Two possibilities, seems to me, either God, or could it be, to quote a line from Gravity’s Rainbow, “the idle, amused dum-de-dumming of old Mister fucking Death he self”? I’m going with that.

“The wound talks to you” can be seen at first as something to do with Christ’s wounds, but it’s not: It’s the wound of the poet, received at the death of his father, the gift that kept on giving. B. jumps around that abruptly. The others details line up: Rage-ruined limbs (his body is not in good shape). Thuds: A common experience as the raging alcoholic finds himself on the floor, again. I am in the garden, alone: A flashback, to the moment of finding his father? I think so. This poem throws us through instantaneous jerks through time and space.

Rahab was a spy, a prostitute who helped the Israelites capture Jericho. A promise to her, because of who she was, might not have a lot of heft. Because of who he is, his profession, words fly from him—light as feathers. Do they mean anything? Depends on how much gravity one attributes to feathers.

Cold dough: Money: The one thing that might matter as far as making a difference in one’s life. In the midst of his suffering, a given in his life, at least the comfort of wealth might alleviate things a bit. Not to be. So he is alone, which in its cold way does make a difference, while he imagines and waits for death to separate the sinners from the saints, each destined for his or her just reward.

It’s a cri de coeur, a cry from the heart. I find it quite moving.

#173 In Mem: R. P. Blackmur

[No online link available.]

So, in early 1965, B. learned that he was admitted to the roll of the National Institute of Arts & Letters. He was drinking hard, and in pain from a variety of physical problems. T.S. Eliot died, and of course whenever a poet died, B. got upset about it. Then R.P. Blackmur died, and B. was upset again. Blackmur had been an old acquaintance, but B. hadn’t written or spoken to him in 15 years. Blackmur was an English academic and a poet, who always wrote in strict rhyme and meter, work with an old-fashioned tone to my taste. If you’re not careful with it, meter and rhyme can distort the syntax pretty drastically, giving the language that archaic flavor, like this passage from Blackmur’s “By Luckless Blood”:

Soft to the river falls the millet field

moulding and giving to the wind, as might

an ordinary woman slowly yield

by moonlight her own summer to the night.

It’s fine. Makes me feel like I’m walking alone through the deserted, mid-nineteenth century galleries of some local art museum, a bored guard watching your every step that echoes around the 30-foot ceiling and dark paneling. (If only you could move the benches aside and play racquetball in there!) You clasp your hands behind your back, gaze at the intricately executed perfect flesh tones, maybe some Greek god or a chubby midget angel with a tiny penis floating overhead, some gorgeous young woman pressing the back of her hand to her distressed brow, in grief over a deceased pigeon, and you think, nostalgia be damned, to be stuffed away rich and young and stunted in some damn mansion in 1840 was the very apotheosis of pointless tedium. You move on to the Abstract Expressionist gallery, with the requisite Mark Rothko canvas, equally tedious and pointless, and you’re forced to think, thank God for Netflix, Facebook and Candy Crush Saga. I wonder what trouble Lindsey Lohan has gotten into lately? How did Meg Ryan’s latest facelift turn out? Who got voted off Dancing with the Stars?

This Blackmur poem is interesting, “A Labyrinth of Being: Lament of a Father-to-Be”: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse/42/5#!/20579100

Now if this child be born,

it is our own death, tiding. 

Here’s a question: Do you think Donald Hall had this poem in mind when he wrote “My Son, My Executioner”? https://www.poeticous.com/donald-hall/my-son-my-executioner (Hint: It’s a rhetorical question, with a flat “duh” as the obvious answer.)

It always comes around to death, doesn’t it? Thomas Pynchon has this to say, in his introduction to Slow Learner, a collection of the early stories that launched his career: “When we speak of ‘seriousness’ in fiction ultimately we are talking about an attitude toward death—how characters may act in its presence, for example, or how they handle it when it isn’t so immediate.” This applies to Berryman, and to his fictional character, Henry. But the line between character and writer is blurred in The Dream Songs, and the conflation of character and writer works both ways: Henry is obviously an extension of the poet’s ego and persona, but it feeds back onto the writer: Berryman partially fictionalized his life as he lived it, became his own character, a walking, talking, stumbling Huckleberry Finn. Eventually he jumped off a bridge and suffocated in the mud—nothing fictional about that, right? But death and the “attitude toward death” are just folded all through these poems. On one hand, it has to be true that the death of an old acquaintance, never mind the death of someone he claimed to be closer to, like Delmore Schwartz, would elicit an emotional response. This is especially true because the life B. actually lived wasn’t stable, or controlled, or even marginally happy. Death hovered nearby all the time. The confessional poet captured these emotions, gave them form, and they ring through the canon now like singing bronze Zen bowls. But you know what? If someone I knew fifteen years ago, and hadn’t heard from since, if I hear months later that that person died? I say, hmmph, too bad. He was okay, I used to like him. I don’t really profess grief, and I especially don’t affect grief. Unless it’s part of my act: Unless it’s a major aspect of what makes my work filled with an unarguable “seriousness”: Unless it’s in character.

#172

http://allpoetry.com/Dream-Song-172

Sylvia Plath is of course the famous and much-loved poet/suicide, and it’s pretty obvious that her suicidal example is infiltrating the mind of B. here, “though the screams of orphaned children fix me anew”—a pretty powerful statement about the hold that love and responsibility can have on people. I can’t help noting something else, though, the inclusion of the narrative voice of “stricken Henry with his sisters & brothers / suddenly gone pauses to wonder why he / alone breasts the wronging tide.” It’s about the inclusion of the self with the pantheon of famous and accomplished poets who seem to be one-by-one passing away. Perhaps calling him on this isn’t fair, since his awards, accolades, and the literary social circles he moved in must have planted some awareness of a legacy through his work. But he certainly invested a lot in that legacy and investment in it crops up all the time in the poems, that the legacy of the work is the overall point of his life beyond momentary struggle for relief from his torments. In the meantime the life itself is a shambles, in spite of his occasional attempts to wrest things back onto the straight and narrow. Alcohol addiction is a bad addiction, though, a notoriously difficult one to shake

Sylvia Plath was found dead with her head in an oven, the infamous and terrible image of the desperate woman crawling away from her life—away from her literary success, her family, all the accolades and accomplishments, all the satisfactions waiting if she had found a way to pull through. She didn’t though, and that’s that. Once it’s over, it’s over. From the vantage of some sixty years later, her literary reputation has thrived, to the extent that I’ve always seen her as one of the figures that young writers have to deal with. Hemingway is another. That was the case with me at any rate. I do have trouble fathoming, in Berryman’s case, how the abstract and notoriously fickle continuance of reputation, in which he seems to be investing so much of his ego, compensates for an actual life and its actual satisfactions. The answer, I guess, is that the life was screwed up anyway, damaged beyond repair before it ever really even got started, so a reputation that has some chance of enduring arises as compensation as much as anything.

For Plath, the mental illness and the depression that came with being alive amounted to torment. It’s expressed in frank terms in “Lady Lazarus,” http://www.sylviaplathforum.com/ll.html one of the poems that nearly every young romantic English major stews over, sometimes obsessively, in my case at 3 and 4 am, crouched under an umbrella in the rain, sitting on a low stone wall in Belleview Park, looking over the spectacular and terrifying spectacle of a great city laid out at my feet. Fortunately for me, the depression and bewilderment that are often parts of life, or parts of one particular stage of life, never swelled close to the level of needing to check out. But I remember looking out and being astonished at the insensible callousness, the coldness of it all. That’s a state of mind that depression can bring one to. In my case, I also recognized it as a bit of a pose. So here’s another college-era poem that deals with depression and self-dramatization. It’s all a game, until you act on it. Then it’s not a game anymore, and in fact you realize it never was.

The Prowler 

“I'm a prowler,”

I lie, “I walk the sleeping

streets at night with my hands  

in my pockets.” I say this, devising

the illusion of a lonely soul—

a romantic who pursues

his elusive spirit along corridors

of quietly humming street-

lamps, among deserted city parks.

I state this with a twist

of regret, knowing well

that I'm happy enough. Until

I find myself in fact

walking the dark

avenues, past empty fenced-

in diamonds, and notice

how familiar it all seems.

I've come here before, under

lamp colonnades, seeking

a way past this creation.

KZ

So, an artifact from a long-ago state of mind, but I feel okay looking back on it from here because there’s a level of self-awareness in the guy that you don’t necessarily expect from anyone that young, or from anyone at all for that matter. This poem arrived in a single flash, I got up from my brooding 3 a.m. seat in the rainy park, went straight home and wrote it down quickly, then went to bed.

David Wojahn has a terrific article about Berryman, published in Blackbird, and he has this to say about suicide and reputation, Berryman’s suicide, and Ann Sexton’s almost inconceivable attitude towards Plath’s death:

Suicide, from a bridge of all things: now there was a career move. And remember, the sixties were scarcely over; these were the waning days of existentialism, of live-fast-and-die-young, when suicide and early death possessed a cachet that they hadn’t had since the days of the Romantics. Hendrix, Joplin, Morrison, James Dean and Plath: they were the new Chattertons and Young Werthers. Self-destruction was hip, and it even had its protocols, not as elaborate as those for hari-kiri, but nearly as ritualized. Anne Sexton, who would end her own life shortly after Berryman, reacted to the death of Plath with a horrifying competitiveness. As Sexton biographer Diane Middlebrook writes,

Sexton was frank about her anger with Plath for having “stolen” the finale Sexton planned for her own career. “That death was mine!” Sexton told her doctor. Suicide was a glamorous death, for an artist; the world would now pay more serious attention to Plath’s poetry than was otherwise conceivable. . . . More, Sexton knew that her own suicide, whenever it occurred, would seem like a copycat act. This seemed unfair to Sexton, since she was older than Plath.

Well. My point, and Wojahn’s here, is that suicide as a career move was in play. It seems crazy, and it’s natural to condemn it. But it seems to be part of the mid-century artist’s kit, for good or bad. “Glamorous”: What a word for it! I was raised Catholic, and I hear at every baptism, and every renewal of baptismal vows that arise in church now and then, about one’s promise to reject “the glamor of evil.” It’s an easy step to turn this around and generate “the evil of glamor.” If suicide is accomplished in service of glamor, then isn’t it perhaps evil as well? I don’t know Sexton’s poetry well, but I find her response to Plath’s suicide at least repugnant. Sorry, I just do. If B. is being seduced by such stuff, which it seems like, then woe to him. But I would maintain that his attitude toward it is more complicated than Sexton’s. (I’ll probably have to take her on and study her life and work now. More on her, then, at some future date.) Plath seems to be much more genuine in her suffering and her death, if that makes sense and doesn’t come off as too callous.

Depression and suicide are not happy concepts to deal with, especially on a bright, lush mid-June Sunday morning, Father’s Day, with my family here giving me presents and cooking for me, and with lots of promise not only in the day ahead but in life in general. But in learning about what’s what in life, back when, and struggling with it, I visited the states of mind that B. is engaging with in this poem, and that Plath was overcome by. For me it was silliness, and I knew it, but young and silly coexist naturally. It’s okay. Berryman eventually was overcome, like Plath. It wasn’t a pose for Plath, and it wasn’t a game, and it wasn’t a romantic phase some bright young twerp was flirting with. It was real, and it killed her. Berryman? Same thing, but not so fast…. In either case, dead is dead. Suicide is tragic if there’s anything but a stretching for glamorous attention involved. I’ll try to remember to give the guy a break. He may have engaged in self-dramatization, but you can’t read The Dream Songs and deny they arise out of a real measure genuine suffering. A sober reflection, and a measure of grief if they or their work mean anything to at all, seems appropriate to me.

#171

http://www.famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/john_berryman/poems/12163

A love poem. It seems a bit sad to me, only when it’s put in the context of this poet’s life. It’s obviously a poem to his wife, Kate, who was much younger than he was, very beautiful, smart, and had some heat to her apparently. It’s easy enough to agree with B.’s puzzlement here, why she’s with someone like him so much older than her “to add that she likes Henry / for reasons unknown.” But, still, it’s a love poem to a woman who probably deserved a good love poem. They were married for eleven years, and during that period he spent a lot of time in the hospital, for alcoholism detox and repeatedly for what they used to call a nervous breakdown. Eventually, as he decayed and declined, instead of his wife she became his caretaker. Eventually she gave up. Sometimes I’ve defended his poems by noting that, look, it’s the record of a weird or ugly figment of thought of a kind that passes normally through the minds of most people, and that in most people would move through rapidly and be gone. But the poet catches it and sets the fleeting feeling in print, to be gawked at forevermore. Set in stone. In gawking at it we also feel a bit of revulsion. It’s that thing we recognize in ourselves, and he gave it substance in words. This poem is on the other side of that coin. Something rather beautiful, and while we see the typical twisted Berryman syntax occasionally, there are also classical references, to Shakespeare’s language, the language of 19^th century love poems like Browning and others. It’s conventionally beautiful, and it’s well crafted. He’s got the chops to pull off something like this no problem. Of course, it’s the record of something ordinary and lovely lighting like a moth in his imagination, but that didn’t stay very long. We get the record of it though, but it leaves me with the feeling that there’s something a little bit pitiful going on here. There’s a kind of standard response to praise, or love, which is to say, aww shucks. Me? Moi? But that’s mainly just custom or even etiquette. Given the frailties of this guy, there’s something more than that. Well-adjusted people can accept a measure of praise. Well-adjusted people in strong relationships know on some level they deserve the love that comes to them from a lover; they should. Here, he just seems puzzled, and is saying thank you for this mystery—for now. In the end, if you don’t feel you deserve it, you’ll likely sabotage it. That’s what he did, of course, for the third time. Neglect, constant infidelity, rivers of alcohol, the old litany.

So, the context of this nice but conventional love poem adds a poignancy to it. Poignant: adj. evoking a keen sense of sadness or regret.

We probably ought to let the man write a simple love poem to his wife, but it has been nearly a half year now, a Dream Song a day for just short of six months, and I’ve learned a few things about this fella that I’d just as soon have done without. I know the love poem is not quite the simple love poem it seems. It could have been. It is on the surface. But in the end it’s more complicated than that.

#170

—I can’t read any more of this Rich Critical Prose,

he growled, broke wind, and scratched himself & left

that fragrant area.

When the mind dies it exudes rich critical prose,

especially about Henry, particularly in Spanish, and sends it to him

from Madrid, London, New York. 

Now back on down, boys; don’t express yourself,

begged for their own sake sympathetic Henry,

his spirit full with Mark Twain

and also his memory, lest they might strain

themselves, to alter the best anecdote

that even he ever invented. 

Let the mail demain contain no pro’s or con’s,

or photographs or prose or sharp translations.

Let one-armed Henry be.

A solitaire of English, free of dons

& journalists, keeping trying in one or two nations

to put his boat back to sea.

 

The most important line of this poem is the final one, where Henry claims he’s trying to put his boat back to sea. In other words, getting his act together, being a writer and probably a sane, sober (in relative terms anyway) human being. But it’s the conflict between artist and critic that gets most of the attention. Here’s Mark Twain on critics: “The critic's symbol should be the tumble-bug: he deposits his egg in somebody else's dung, otherwise he could not hatch it.” Henry has his own fragrant scatological response to the problem. What’s worse is when the critics don’t get the point of what they’re criticizing or expounding on in Rich Critical Prose, with the ability to alter the best anecdotes that even Mark Twain ever invented, who was the master at anecdotes. My experience with the kind of contemporary critical prose Henry is railing against was that once you work your way through the dense thickets of jargon, meant to exclude non-initiates as much as communicate to the select, the ideas aren’t that complicated. And most people who have made their way through a graduate program in English realize there are forests of nonsense out there masquerading as scholarship. I don’t mean that as a blanket condemnation, but there is quite a lot of it. It’s something to behold.

As far as critics not getting the gist of a Dream Song, I think Henry might want to give them a break. Some of those poems, the early ones especially, are tough nuts to crack. I’ve had a few embarrassing miscues myself, and B. himself cautions that Dream Songs are not meant to be understood—which may be an admission that they don’t always make sense. (Which makes sense when you remember he wrote a bunch of them on cocktail napkins at 2 a.m., sloshed in some bar or another.) You’re just supposed to feel them, be terrified and comforted. But the critic’s mission is to make sense, (or appear to make sense of an esoteric kind to a select cadre of initiates). So take one kind of critical approach which is to use language partially to intimidate and terrify, then apply that to Berryman’s poems, some of which amount to evocative jabberwocky, and you apparently get some pretty high-falutin’ horse hockey. I think it’s hilarious. A story I heard once concerned an editor working on a collection of critical essays about a well-known and much-loved writer, and the writer asked her, “Who are you people? What is it that you do?” Well, the tension between creative and critical types, lumped together in English Departments in ways that art historians and painters don’t have to deal with, is old hat to academic insiders. B. gets to have a slap at critics here, and he farts in triumph over it. In the end, one must appreciate the necessity of valorizing Berryman’s arcane patriarchal socio-linguistic conventions while recognizing the intersections embodied syntactically between a modernist poetics and the post-modern vertigo of excess that resulted in the post-anthropocentric, quasi-anti-humanist discourses located in the quiescent spaces of his work’s lived negotiations. Pffffrrrrrtttt….

#169

[No online link available.]

“Books drugs razor whiskey shirts / Henry lies ready for his Eastern tour”. Everything you need for a tour of poetry readings! The poem references his broken arm—no neckties because he can’t tie one with his cast, and while there are some fairly mundane details like that, they alternate with this: “there’s also the dough, to help out Vietnam” and “it’s doing what must be done, / helping them kill each other.” A poet has to make a living, and in his day as much as now, royalties from book sales weren’t going to cut it. There is teaching, and well-paid readings if the artist is of sufficient fame and stature, in one case where the attendees ponied up a $500 dollar fee to watch the famous poet do his act, and the money went to the war effort, to help the South Vietnamese kill the North Vietnamese, who by the way were trying to kill them as well, and isn’t war grand? Confessional poetry gets a bit sullied by such accounts, perhaps: “Warm / should everybody mouth a lawless tit.”

The poet and Zen philosopher, Gary Snyder, notes somewhere in The Practice of the Wild, I believe, that when times are out of joint you’re forced to make compromises. So, for example, I recognize the fossil fuel industry now for the thuggish, planet-devouring institutions they’ve become. Thuggish because they use their wealth and resultant power to further their ends, which is simply to mine and sell more fossil fuel—to the tune of almost 90 million barrels a day of oil alone—at the expense of the ecological integrity of communities, ecosystems and the planet as a whole. But I have to drive a car. I can buy a fuel-efficient car, advocate and vote for public transportation, alternative energy sources, but in the end I still drive to work. The world is out of joint, and if I am going to live and work in this particular community, my choices are constrained. So that’s partially what’s going on in this poem, a recognition of forced constraints and a snide response to the money that comes from supporting something that compromised his values.

I attended a literature and environment conference, which most of the attendees flew to. Bill McKibben, the outspoken activist who has worked, spoken and written for years about fossil fuels and climate change, was a speaker. He noted the discrepancy there as well—to fly somewhere in a jet airplane is a carbon-loaded activity. His advice: Make it count. Compromises loom everywhere. It doesn’t have to mean you’re a hypocrite. Just make it count.

#168 The Old Poor

and God has many other surprises, like

when the man you fear most in the world marries your mother

and chilling other,

men from far tribes armed in the dark, the dike-

hole, the sudden gash of an old friend’s betrayal,

words that leave one pale, 

milk & honey in the old house, mouth gone bad,

the caress that felt like all the world for a blow,

screams of fear eyeless, wide-eyed loss,

hellish vaudeville turns, promises had

& promises forgotten here below,

the final wound of the Cross. 

I have a story to tell you which is the worst

story to tell that ever once I heard.

What thickens my tongue?

and has me by the throat? I gasp accursed

even for the thought of uttering that word.

I pass to the next song:

 

Well: Have a nice friggin’ day, huh? J.

I’ve been talking about something this poem brings up from several different angles lately. I was talking with my wife about this kind of thing. I told her, you guys get on me for being cynical sometimes, but wheedling and complaining a little bit for me is the opposite of being cynical. It means there is still hope in my heart that things can change, be better than they are, that they can improve, and from that standpoint, complaining is a way of isolating that which needs to be changed—the first step toward action, and that action is prompted by hope, and by faith that people who step up, set goals, organize into communities, that these people can make change, make progress happen. The opposite is to slow down, come to a stop (sin is a lack of motion), and not care any longer. You just quietly fade away—don’t take care of yourself, smoke too much, have out-of-body experiences that substitute for engaging with life on this planet, dry yourself out until you turn into a two-legged piece of ambient beef jerky. Maybe not even aware of what’s happening. I talked about hope and despair in a meeting today, with the Environmental Action Committee, when we sidetracked a bit from the immediate issues at hand into a discussion of hope, engagement, and anti-environmental propaganda. The Pope is due out tomorrow with a Papal Encyclical, where he intends to push for worldwide recognition of climate change as a moral imperative. His timing is deliberate, with three major conferences arriving this year addressing climate change and its impact on disempowered, disenfranchised people around the world. The pushback against such revolutionary discussions, that threaten the established world economic and energy paradigms, have been effective, concerted, and in sum, monstrous. The propaganda of the status-quo would tell us that all is fine, the reality on the ground, and from voices in science, is that things are bad and getting worse. The overall effect of these discordant messages is confusion, which leads to despair, finally to apathy, which was the goal all along. When apathy gets established then a question arises, about life in general and about one’s life in particular. What’s the point anymore? and the follow up, Why even live? Why bother staying alive? Why not just commit suicide? That’s the word the poet here dares not mention, I believe. Suicide. There are ways to end oneself that don’t necessarily have to end one’s life, like a gunshot or jumping off a bridge. You can just meekly check out. Also a kind of suicide.

So, is this poem a result of engagement or apathy? Engagement in that naming the problem is the first step toward a solution of it. Apathy in that perhaps it’s one last utterance from an overwhelmed psyche, listing the all the reasons that one need not bother anymore. It’s too much.

It’s hard to say, except that the poet was still writing, at least, and was still alive. That’s an engagement with life. But it’s also possible to imagine some future audience, or some kind of abstract posterity, offer it a suicide note, a goodbye cruel world statement, and by the way—a middle finger a round “fuck you”—then check out. Clearly, that’s what is approaching. Maybe he’s not quite there yet. By not naming the word, the final acceptance of despair, he’s still being motivated by hope, even if it’s tenuous grasping at a straw to try and keep himself afloat in the maelstrom of existential muck he lists so clearly.

In the meeting today, once we discussed propaganda, we talked about grief. The old paradigm, folks, is dying before our eyes: The rhetoric is bankrupt, we’re running out of oil, our political system is awash in corruption, people are suffering and dying out of sight of power, or worse, in sight of it and under its contempt. The climate is changing because we haven’t cared, and that’s because we’ve been told not to care. That has led to apathy, a sense of powerlessness, disenfranchisement.

But the apathy is being challenged by activity, organization, communities asserting themselves. We had a ceremony on my campus where we grieved what was being lost. The integrity of the ecological world is unraveling, but also the dominant paradigm—late capitalism—is unravelling too, and that also causes grief. The list of landscapes, species, communities being lost is frightening. The impending loss of what we know is frightening. But moving through that, for all of us who were there that day, has been uplifting. In acting, organizing, making change, speaking out, we’re finding a lot of reason for hope, grounded in the approaching changes. But it has come through a spirit of cooperation, of humility in league with other humble members of a community. You’re not alone, and you’re for sure not some rugged individualist overcoming all challenges, and if you think you are, that’s your ego speaking. Go ahead, be brilliant, get famous, Big Shot. The massive violences of the failing dominant paradigm and its lying propaganda will overwhelm your ego. Depend on it. It will reduce you to apathetic whining. Is that what’s happening here? The absence of forward-looking hope is disturbing, for sure. But I’m an optimist now, now that I’ve faced our collective grief. I’m not ready yet to give up in this particular instance, this poem that records one man’s moment of negativity that threatens to overwhelm him. The word that despair leads to is holding off for now, and that means that the speaker hasn’t succumbed to despair. Yet.

Hamlet was nearly overcome with despair, but in confronting all that business with his mother, he freed himself well enough to get killed honestly. There are references to Hamlet in this poem, especially if one reads the list of the world's ills as being inspired, at least partly, by personal incidents--generally the smart choice with B. In the end, it still seems to me like a pretty outsized ego doing the comparisons, even if he was wrestling all his life with why his father died and wondering what role his mother had in it all.

#167 Henry's Mail

[No online link available.]

One’s mail is often full of the most dreadful stuff—junk, of course, bills, and I’m lucky enough to have almost totally avoided courts and lawyers in my life so far, but I’ve heard they can fill the box with some pretty dreadful business too. The first stanza is a confessional list of the kind of crap that arrives in the mailbox, and it’s ironic and funny. “his insurance firms / are rich with info enigmatic.” This is followed by a wish that the mail would come three or four times a day, like it used to do in pre-telephone London and Paris, and still did (apparently) in Togo in the 1960s, and did in his boyhood Oklahoma. Is this ironic? Oh yes. Then the poem ends with this: “I dote on my mail: I need its bung: / and the postman may indeed follow the moon and the sun / but believe me he fellows not Henry.” “Bung” is the hole in the side of a barrel, and the other actual definition that follows from the first—the anus—is pretty clearly the one B. is referring to. Then the pun on “follows” and “fellows”. The guy is not happy with his mail, and the whole thing is pretty funny in the typical bitter mode of The Dream Songs.

I’ve referred only on occasion to my student poems from back in college days, because this for the most part is meant to be a creative and forward-looking project, but this one is so apt, and it’s one of my favorites from back in the day, that I think I’ll go ahead and share it. From an undergraduate Creative Writing Workshop, probably about 1984, Don Bogen the professor, and I remember that he liked it a lot. I remember deliberately choosing flat diction and flat, end-stopped lines. I was living at the time in a barnlike Victorian shotgun with a tottering chimney, and I was dreading the mail.

 

Old Chimney

Crumbs of soft mortar and brick bits

      litter the walk beneath the old chimney.

It drops pieces with each January rain,

      and might fall in a stiff wind.

Trickles of decayed powder,

     light on sleeping cats.

The mailman brings bad news

     and leaves cold footprints in orange dust. 

KZ

#166

[No online link available.]

About B.’s ears, mainly figurative, which is good since nothing could be less interesting than this guy’s ears. His actual hearing was dulled from a childhood disease, so there’s that. But it’s his metaphoric “ear” for rhythm and language that is engaging enough. From the moment he was born, he was a writer: “when Henry keen & viable // began to poke his head from Venus’ foam, / toward the grand shore, where all them ears would be / if any. / Thus his art started.” The rest of his body disintegrated as he lived—cracked and broken, as we’ve seen, and of course partially pickled. But in the end “Only his ears sat with his theme / in the splices of his pride.” A couple double entendres in the last line there—“splices” probably referring to his unorthodox punctuation, and “pride” with both the positive and negative meanings in play, hubris on one hand, but accomplishment on the other. A confessional poem through and through.

Here’s a really good poem about ears: http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/ear-organ-made-love

Shall I try one too? Sounds good!

 

Music to Her Ears

These fleshy horns show best when hidden

Underneath her hair, though as a scaffold

For jewels on a woman, they’ll hold

My gaze a moment, not unbidden 

If she hangs them there. But ears

Are not so much to glow with splendor

The soft of sheening pearls, but more

To take the splendor in. She hears 

The lonesome hoot-owl’s nightlong throes—

Guitars—a reverent amen—

Plaints of melancholy love, like when

The Beach Boys sing “God Only Knows.”

KZ

#165

[No online link available.]

Title this one “Ode on a Broken Arm.” There is a mildly humorous pun on “humerus”, and there is a kind of odd mock-romantic tone, addressed to the speaker’s body, with images of an orange moon glistening on a placid sea, and this final stanza:

O prostrate body, busy with your break,

false tissue forming, striving to recover,

when will you make do like the moon

cold on a placid sea, with three limbs, take

the other for a cruise, like an elderly lover

not expecting much.

Right at the end a pronouncement on aging arrives. The broken limb, like an elderly lover, doesn’t have much vigor to offer, but love entails more than sex. Patience and a gentle care define the mood. The poem is okay. I kind of like it. I don’t have much more to say about it.

An image arrived out of nowhere yesterday which has been rattling around the vacant boxcar of my empty head, so let’s play in the aura of today’s ersatz romance and see what comes of that:

 

Blue Foxtrot with My Orangutan Love

How her silver dress shimmers!

Her bare hairy feet, those opposable

Toes with strong yellow nails

Grip the dance floor.

My wan legs shuffle, stiff

As brass-tipped canes

My weak arms search for her waist

The blocks of my dense feet

Struggle to follow my lady’s gorgeous

Simian rhythm, curving

Like the fronds of a tree fern

Through the music’s crowded

Melancholy. Her little round head

The narrow, soulful eyes

Like rich brown nuts

That gaze into mine teach

Me the deep, tasteful pleasures

Of figs and intricate branchways

Swinging through the warmth

Of her dark, soft forest

In the loving flow

Of a tropical rain.

So arrives the one moment

I have ever, from my sad humanity, danced.

Desperately I ape the graceful

Nature of her slow, lithe steps

Her long orange hand

Rests like a birdwing

Butterfly on my shoulder,

And her other, cradled

Like a python around mine

Crushes my phalanges

In the ravish of her hold

My scapula cracks,

The clavicle, with a soft

Pop beneath my soft flesh,

Fractures, and if there is pain

I will not feel it

Through the mists of blue music

And my grave devotion

Foxtrotting with my orangutan love. 

KZ

#164

 [No online link available.]

“O world so ill arranged!” I couldn’t be more sympathetic, although the world has its bright spots as well. It looks in the first stanza as if Henry fell down—falling and falling through levels of air—and broke a bone somehow. So his statement isn’t quite the broad philosophical lament it might seem out of its context: “Couldn’t William at least break a collar-bone?” This puts things on a more prosaic level, and it’s funny enough. Then comes a reference to the pills. Lots and lots of pills come with the hospital visit, to add to the parade of pharmaceuticals he’s probably taking already. The doctors, as one can imagine, haven’t been sure how to treat the self-destructive alcoholic, but you can bet drugs were involved. So how handle this lost cause?

There seems to firm no answer

save from the sexton in the place that blinds

& stones and does not hurt: Henry springs youthfully

in his six-by-two like a dancer. 

A sexton is the caretaker for a churchyard, also usually the gravedigger, so that place that blinds & stones is the grave—there’s the answer. His six-by-two is his coffin. Of course he spent some figurative couple weeks down there some time back in the op. post. series, which is still humorous enough, especially that last scene where, once liberated, he’s back in the midnight churchyard with a shovel, digging his way back down to the comfort of the coffin! His six-by-two here is a bit less comically literal than that; it’s his figurative coffin, the confines of which are imposed by his body (his failing body). But from that he still “dances”. Dance is the body-movement art, so there’s something odd about him dancing from a failing and now broken body, but for the poet, it’s actually a reference to his writing, which seems to be dancing away splendidly. 

I pulled a nerve in my neck once, the discomfort of which I wouldn’t wish on anyone, and I couldn’t sit at the computer (pre-laptop days) for nine months. No writing on my dissertation got done that year, because my body had other plans. But if you’re lucky, you only break your left arm when you get injured , so you can still sit in a bar, with notebook and pencil, and dance and dance like Fred Astaire. His Ginger Rogers is the whole screwed up planet and that miniscule corner of it in the form of his screwed up psyche. It’s glamourous too, like foxtrotting with a shaved orangutan in a sparkly dress.

#163

[No online link available.]

An uncomplicated poem about aging, and a self-assessment. “stomach & arm / Henry endured like a pain farm.” That’s part of aging all right. Ouch. Then he worked all day and all night, and nothing turned out. Another aspect of aging is that we lose some of our mental acuity. Join the club. Second stanza: the “lust-quest” seems to be over, he now having become an honest householder and all. Except for that one woman, Amy, in another city. Whatever. Third stanza, it’s Thanksgiving. Assessing where he’s at. “I do this thrice a year; that is, I grope / a few sore hours among my actuals / for evidence of knighthood.” That old ego keeps on throbbing though, doesn’t it?

My response to this poem? Meh. And I would bet that B. felt pretty much the same way. There is a small critical voice squeaking in my intellectual background like a mouse in the corner of an empty church that would argue something about the poetry of the ineffectual, how a vapid poem brilliantly encapsulates the vapidity of ordinary aging—but that would be hogwash. Not a chance.

Here’s a story about aging, naïveté, and hard lessons in a hard world. I had dinner last night with an old friend, who I’ve known since I was 15, lived with in 3 or 4 different houses and apartments all through our extended years in college. We shared the deepest secrets of our painful burgeoning into young adulthood, and though our lives pull us in different directions these days, we can still read each other like brothers. He’s an architect, co-owner of his own firm, his partner another of our college roommates from back when, when we all shared an affectionate old barn of a house. We found ourselves in a park in Over the Rhine, the rapidly reviving historical district in Cincinnati, amazed like everyone else in this town at the incredible pace of the change happening there. Architecturally, OTR isn’t just a city treasure, it’s a national treasure, an amazing neighborhood, the largest intact historical district in any city in the US, from what I understand. It was lively and fun on a Thursday night in June, kids playing, people walking dogs, a band playing up on the old bandstand. Picturesque, diverse and lovely, and quite remarkable given how run-down the neighborhood was just a few short years ago. But the neighborhood is sadly marred by the new high school built next to the park, an incoherent, noisy, inexcusable failure of a building, and quite frankly a civic embarrassment given its location and the fact that it houses one of Cincinnati’s most cherished and proud institutions.

Turns out the firm my friend was working for at the time had been in the design competition, which I never knew, and had made it through as a finalist. He had designed his firm’s entry, which sensitively addressed the various challenges the site threw to the designer. In the end they didn’t get the job, which was a disappointment, but that’s life. But they were shocked to see the design that did win—which, honestly, is truly awful. It’s not just that it’s bad, it’s worse than bad. You have to work really hard to come up with something so inappropriate and so blockheaded. So some years later, my friend ran into the city official in charge of the project. What happened? he asked. The answer: Oh, yours was by far the best design, no question. But I don’t know you. You were a wild card. I didn’t know if you would do what you were told. Maybe you would have been concerned with doing the right thing, or with what’s best for the kids at the school, and I couldn’t have that. You’d best learn something about politics.

Sitting in front of the embarrassing structure that wound up getting built, that execrable piece of crap, that chancrous blot on an otherwise gorgeous urban environment, I was stunned, every bit as much as he was at the moment he received that speech. We talked for much of the evening about what it all meant. The surrounding OTR cityscape dates from a time when design aesthetics mattered, and there was an understanding of aesthetics, and an insistence that if you were going to be permitted to build something important in this great city, it must strive to beautify and uplift the city. Those are old-fashioned ideas, but they were taken seriously, and we now have glorious Over the Rhine to show for them. Now? A couple things: Aesthetically, the present building should not stand, but it does. It does because aesthetics standards have been twisted, muddled, degraded, corrupted, confused, to the extent that not many people can look at a building and know how to judge it anymore, and the end result is that too few people actually even care. They’ll tolerate such a travesty. If you do care, or you do have an opinion, you’re elitist. The other thing is that aesthetics weren’t the trump card anyway. Political connections were what won the day. Best learn to play the politics.

It’s so challenging to learn an art. It takes years of focused study and practice. Even with all the study and practice, bad artists can still make it to positions of aesthetic influence through the other “arts” of persuasion, glad-handing, and bullshit—and then they end up promoting bad aesthetics. In architecture, aesthetic influence and politics meet, because buildings define cities and they’re necessary, but they’re enormously expensive. The problem is that power brokers are not art critics, but more to the point, they don’t care about aesthetics. Not at all. At least not in this conservative town. In fact, there’s a measure of contempt for that. An architect with integrity needs his aesthetic and technical training, but turns out that a critical part of his technical training needs to involve political acumen. It’s a lot to ask. In the case of that school, the power and influence systems at City Hall miserably failed the city. The lecture my friend received from that city official was part gloating and rubbing some aesthete elitist’s face in his failure, but we also felt that it was also offered as a lesson: This is the way the world works, kid. Best learn your politics if you think you’re gonna make it big in this town. We looked at each other and understood that you can still be naïve in your 50s. It’s hard to move forward after such a lesson.

It’s pretty clear that B. played the literary power circles very well, and even though he repeatedly fell on his face personally, there always seemed to be a friend close by to help him back to his feet. I don’t see DS 163 as a disastrous mote of literature. While it’s not great like many of The Dream Songs, it’s also not as actively bad and embarrassing as some of them either. But it’s not the poem’s merits or lack thereof that got it into a great book. I think Berryman’s connections and his reputation are what let this nebbish poem skulk its way into the collection. Aesthetics had nothing to do with it.