#212

p.141: https://books.google.com/books?id=pE8MBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA140&dq=Foregoing+the+Andes+the+sea+bottom+Angkor+211&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CCEQ6AEwAGoVChMI8Nneq46DxwIVxJUNCh0eDg5u#v=onepage&q=Foregoing%20the%20Andes%20the%20sea%20bottom%20Angkor%20211&f=false

I guess the Elder Wiseman pose wears out eventually too, with all that annoying attention from the congregation of young know-nothings clamoring to be enlightened. “Young things” really refers to the young women. It’s a common enough phrase, “young thing,” and easy enough to skip over, but why “thing”? Other, alien, inhuman, that’s why. Female. The male figure of power and accomplishment is the standard that establishes what is ideal and human. Women, especially the young ones, don’t fit that. They are something other, the Dionysian element of sexuality and revelry, opposed to the Apollonian reason and order which the speaker is a bit smugly trying on for size. Might as well since there isn’t much Dionysian vitality left in the fellow anyway. The girls don’t know that and they keep coming, though, drawn like moths to the candle of fame and the wise man’s perceived intelligence. Overflowing with all that thrumming sexual Dionysian energy, they crave the male figure’s calm, upright rational power—right? The poem veers into a quick Dionysian fantasy: “until I drop the Bacchae in its slot: / take that! and that!” The Bacchae is where all this Apollonian/Dionysian structuring comes from, and look, “drop the Bacchae in its slot” is a naked sexual reference. Not a nice one, but there it is. Get ready because I’m about to get all Dionysian on you, Sweetheart. “Take that!” is a violent sexual thrusting. It’s over in two lines. Then his brain returns to accumulating its fat. The reality of now is age, impotence, fatigue. The Apollonian is nothing more than a ruse, a cover-up, a pose disguising emptiness. There is barely enough mental energy enough for it, but the Dionysian erotic vitality was spent long ago. The irony is that it takes balance to be fully human: The women are perceived as little Dionysian sexpots, still basically animalistic without the Apollonian rationality they crave as they flock to the poet’s readings. But with his Dionysian energy long ago expended, the speaker is a stuffed jacket with leather patches on the elbows cowering behind the wizard’s phony beard. Even less human than the frisky young women who are screaming at him.

Once so sexy and alluringly maddening in their incomplete but powerful female sexual selves, they are still better now than what they will eventually become. That rhyme of “mother” with “smother” is a brutal one. Knives—for castration purposes—and smothering are what’s in store for the man exhausted of his Dionysian virility. “I will stay the night” he says—he’ll bed one yet anyway—because that’s what a man does, but without a challenging Dionysian strength of his own to match hers, to fight it off, really, the result is ugly. He’ll have nothing much to say—a quick reference to writing and language as elements of male vitality—and as a result he will be smothered. Brilliantly smothered. It’s lights out for yours truly, Henry, in the powerful female’s castrating, smothering embrace.

Ugh…

Oh, and then there’s the unstated but implied arrogance of the speaker imagining himself as the stalwart Apollonian figure in the first place, albeit a now-empty one, hollow as a bronze statue. But that’s for another day…

#211

https://books.google.com/books?id=pE8MBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA140&dq=Foregoing+the+Andes+the+sea+bottom+Angkor+211&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CCEQ6AEwAGoVChMI8Nneq46DxwIVxJUNCh0eDg5u#v=onepage&q=Foregoing%20the%20Andes%20the%20sea%20bottom%20Angkor%20211&f=false

The marvelous world we live on is so varied and marvelous that it’s part of the human condition (at least for the normally adventurous of us) that we want to go out and see some of it. Thus the tourist industry. It wasn’t always that way. Tess d’Urberville might normally have expected to never leave her valley and her poor little cottage, except her not-cousin cousin raped her and made her pregnant, and a chain of tragical romantic adventures got rolling, which took her as far as Stonehenge and a couple other far-off exotic spots in Southern England. A noose put an end to all that travel and exploration, but like I say, it’s a terribly unfair tragedy. The young sailor, Herman Melville, jumped ship in the South Pacific and took up with the Typee who lived on Nuku Hiva in the Marquesas, and who quite literally never, ever left their valley, except to raid the one next door on rare occasions. Of course it was paradise, with everything they needed, but it was a paradise with mountain walls around it. They were so adamant that no one was to leave the valley that they were furious with Melville when he tried, and when he finally got away, they came within a whisker of killing him for it. He was fortunate to have made it out. I’m glad he did because a world without Moby Dick in it would have been that much poorer a place. Henry David Thoreau took a dim view of travel in his books and journals, claiming that it was a consumerist waste of time and one of the questionable privileges that wealth purchases. He wrote in his journal,

If a man is rich and strong anywhere, it must be on his native soil. Here I have been these forty years learning the language of these fields that I may the better express myself. If I should travel to the prairies, I should much less understand them, and my past life would serve me but ill to describe them. Many a weed here stands for more of life to me than the big trees of California would if I should go there. We need only travel enough to give our intellects an airing.

He made one trip down the Concord and Merrimac Rivers in a rowboat with his brother, and one to Cape Cod, another to the Maine woods, all of which triggered great airings of the Thoreauvian intellect, but that was not distant heroic travel even for his day. He made it on one other trip as far as Minnesota. Still, for all his insistence on staying home and writing about the advantages and necessity of studying ones place, which is inexhaustible to the attentive and curious nature noticer, he was fascinated with travel narratives—Darwin, William Bartram, and more, were influential. I think Thoreau desired travel a lot more than he admitted, but a stay-at-home attentiveness needed to be the compensation for the life of poverty he chose. Travel is expensive. It was all about nature for Thoreau at any rate. Darwin and Bartram travelled to observe nature. In the end, the reason people read travel narratives, all the way back to Sir John Mandeville, who travelled through North Africa, the Middle East and India in the Middle Ages, and Marco Polo, who made it to China and Mongolia, is because it was such a strange and exotic thing to even think about. It was exceptional. Travel was romantic, but it was weird.

Thoreau’s compensation was to study the rhythms of the flowers and weeds in the woods around, and he wrote a famous essay about walking, which was the free, localized travel that substituted in his imagination for steamboat passage to jungles, snow-capped mountain, cathedrals, and palaces. It was just a question of how narrow to adjust ones focus and what one chooses to observe: What one chooses to value out of life’s experience. The other important thing about Thoreau’s experience is that he wrote it up. These amazing things that surround us don’t write or try to communicate, they just are. It was the Transcendentalist’s project to discern message in the fabric and gesture of the world, but that was as much a creative act as an interpretive one. The line between creativity and interpretation is less fixed than we like to admit. But the thing about creativity is that it doesn’t just poof things into existence out of a vacuum, and then, the thing created often takes on a reality. Thoreau died before he finished his great project, and no one is quite sure to this day what exactly he was up to, but he was closely observing the rhythms of nature, observing and writing them, partially as a scientist does—to interpret—but just as importantly as an artist does, so that he was writing into being a new and newly valid iteration of creation. C.S. Lewis has Aslan the Lion sing and roar Narnia into being. Exactly like that, yet not. Aslan creates Narnia out of a void. We create out of material that life presents. We sew shirts and dresses out of life’s gift of fabric. Thoreau is credited, as a result, as one of the first ecologists, or the first ecologist, but his real aim I believe was to push through the science into an understanding of God the Artist and then translate that work. Translation is an art in itself; it is more than reporting, more than decoding. The work must be faithful to the original but it must also be fully and thoroughly reimagined if it is to have life in the new form the translator sets out to create.

B. laments his travelogue shortcomings in this poem, though we know from The Dream Songs that he crisscrossed North America, had extended stays in France and England, and one in India. Respectable, but there’s plenty more to see. Instead, “Forgoing the Andes, the sea-bottom, Angkor, / he led with his typewriter. He made it fly / & walk to them sites for him.” The writer’s compensation! He creates his own iteration of the marvelous world, and it’s just as real and probably more accessible anyway than the sea bottom. Except—it’s not enough. You see someone in Greece with real problems, and remind yourself that it could be a lot worse, but that’s not enough either. The world waited in all its marvelous wonderment, and he wrote and wrote instead of seeing it. The compensation of that, the fabric of the created world he did experience, isn’t enough this time. “When nostalgia for things unknown grips him he growls / he’s saving it for the next time around.”

Maybe there’s a “next time around” and maybe there isn’t. There isn’t much comfort in that thought, seems to me, outside of a pretty adamant fundamentalist faith in reincarnation and an afterlife, but it’s the best he’s got at the moment. He’s not a fundamentalist: He’s groping for solace. The poet here is struggling with a bad suspicion: All this nose to the grindstone business was foolish. He missed so much. But I think I might argue with that: He roared something into being here. It’s true he didn’t pay enough attention to the world and its sites, not over the horizon, nor, like Thoreau, to what was growing under his shoes. But every one of us is, as Emerson claims, “part and parcel of creation.” He put something out there, roared and sung into being out of the fabric of his awareness, and that in itself is a wonder and a marvel.

#210

https://books.google.com/books?id=pE8MBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA139&dq=Sir+Herbert's+son+who+lives+near+Canterbury+210&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CB4Q6AEwAGoVChMItuyW58OAxwIVhM2ACh1scwBc#v=onepage&q=Sir%20Herbert's%20son%20who%20lives%20near%20Canterbury%20210&f=false

So where are the holy cities in America? Let’s see: San Francisco? It’s beautiful if you’re wealthy enough to live there. Seattle? Not holy, interesting city. Portland? Not holy, interesting city too. LA surely has some beautiful corners only because it’s so big. And there were the Beach Boys, who demonstrate that an elegant soul can arise and make himself heard, and that he can just as well be crushed. Both. But how can I see LA as anything but a vast plasticized commercial wasteland? New York—there has been the folk rock movement, the abstract expressionists, bebop, Jazz Age Harlem, and so much more. It’s gentrifying too, from what I hear. You pay $2500 a month to live in a tiny cell and gain the privilege of calling yourself a New Yorker. I’ve been there twice, had a couple nice visits. It’s true there’s a lifetime’s worth of life in NY. Washington—no. Anything in Texas? No (though I hear Austin’s cool). Santa Fe isn’t what it used to be. Miami—no. New Orleans? Don’t think so, though it’s supposed to be a lot of fun. Chicago? Great town. Holy? Not quite. Savannah is gorgeous, on display but closed off. The thing about American cities is that there is such energy in the US that pockets of holy beauty coalesce all the time. They come and go, and as soon as they form, fad and fashion and money and hip glitterize and monetize what made them worth seeking. But I’m not part of any movable holy scene and I don’t pick up to land in the hot places. I’ve lived in Toledo, Louisville, Dayton, Bloomington and Cincinnati. Not much to say about Toledo—the actual city seems mostly gone. Louisville—paradise in the countryside when I was young, and it’s painful to go back because that lovely landscape is now one strip mall after another, one housing project after another. A soulless florescent hell of pre-fab houses and parking lots, motivated by cars and oil and the lust to sell stuff. Dayton, my home town—at the turn of the 19^th century it was a fascinating city: the Wright brothers, Charles Kettering, Patterson and NCR, a city of engineers, problem solvers, forward-thinking civic-minded corporate tyrants, benevolent dictators committed to the common good, geniuses, well-mannered optimists forcing open new industrial vistas that they imagined then made real. Detroit was the muscle of the emerging auto industry, but Dayton was its brain. The 20^th century took care of all that. Dayton migrated away from its birth-locus, like so many American cities, and cars and lights shine with mercury and money and the energy of electrified oil, all to the south, like a crazed wild sucker from the roots of a rose plant that overwhelms the delicate art of the rose. Bloomington is a wonderful artistically vibrant, holy college town. Like with all great college towns, unless you’re one of the golden professors or a Southern Indiana native, you only get a few years there, then you’re obliged to move on. Cincinnati is a big, complicated, grand old river city, with all the problems of the rest of the Midwest, but with an architectural heart that has some hardened arteries but is still beating, and an ethnic legacy that keeps it unique. German, Appalachian, African-American the big three. It’s conservative overall. It has pockets, small ones, of life that come and go. But it ain’t no Paris, and it ain’t that holy.

B.’s invocation of Atlantic City is perfect: For awhile the East Coast’s answer to Las Vegas, in B.’s day it was all about hyper oceanside tourism—wax museums, saltwater taffy, pinball arcades, the Boardwalk, a long shopping mall. Miles of crowded tourists under beach umbrellas stuck in gray sand next to the gray Atlantic. Is this holy? Not by any definition I might offer. B. is fully aware it’s not, but it’s emblematic of where he sees American energy trending. Better yet, in the winter Atlantic City empties out. Without the concentrated energy of the crowds—with purses and wallets full of money—you get an instructive glimpse of what America has done to its soul when the moneyed crowds anywhere ebb. What you get is Ripley’s Believe-It-Or-Not museum full of genuine shrunken heads and torture implements on display—admission half price during the off-season. Seagulls squatting on posts, looking around, blinking, wondering why the dumpsters are all so empty. The restless gray constancy of the North Atlantic surf. The beach sand, still studded with cigarette butts from last August. Stay out from under the Boardwalk—you really don’t want to see what blew under there. One pizza shop and one bar, still open, catering to the locals, who leave their black and white TVs behind once a week: Gunsmoke. Leave It to Beaver. Red Skelton. What do you say we get a beer or something? So they head out to the Impala and drive to the Boardwalk, clumping along the echoing planks, skirting the workmen who hammer in replacements for the rotted ones, and when a pod of dolphins passes, a pelican dives for a mackerel, and a humpback whale on the horizon spouts and the weak sun catches it in a brief sparkle of rainbow they don’t look up. They miss it, turning from the ocean and opting instead for Frank Sinatra on the jukebox in the dark, smoky restaurant with its Budweiser and Miller High Life on tap and the corned beef and sauerkraut sandwiches it’s famous for.

#209

https://books.google.com/books?id=2o9-BAAAQBAJ&pg=PA209&dq=Henry+lay+cold+%26+golden+in+the+snow+209&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CB4Q6AEwAGoVChMIs_K7uZL-xgIVy5eACh14BgAd#v=onepage&q=Henry%20lay%20cold%20%26%20golden%20in%20the%20snow%20209&f=false

Dream or story? Can’t tell, doesn’t matter, but the key point is an attempt, at least momentary, to kick the bottle. Smash it on the sink! Unconscious wintertime drunks freeze to death now and then, so waking up hungover in the snow is a fairly serious moment. It’s golden enough if you survived, but man, that was close! If dream, then there’s import in said dream: Wake up from the booze-sodden nightmare of your waking, or wind up waking up dead in the snow. Your choice. It’s not so simple for the addict, of course, since the whole problem with addiction is that what seems a choice turns out not so freely chosen. Drives drive you. You need your needs, you know. Close calls may confer a bit of supplemental motivation for a time—long enough for some satisfactory bottle smashing?—though that seems to always wear off, doesn’t it? Tough place to find oneself at any rate, dream or actual.

#208

https://books.google.com/books?id=pE8MBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA137&dq=his+wife+gave+him+a+hard+time+unforgiving+208&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CB4Q6AEwAGoVChMI36_bobn7xgIVCdGACh2AoQi5#v=onepage&q=his%20wife%20gave%20him%20a%20hard%20time%20unforgiving%20208&f=false

A slice of life, including a romp with the kids, his wife turning up the heat about who knows what, and the arrival of The Times Literary Supplement, direct from London, leading to an assessment of the state of life and literature, which is what a literary journal is supposed to be about. For the professional scholar, critic and writer, this arrival throws wife and kids immediately into the background. “So many thinking & feeling, in so many languages”—it is truly amazing and overwhelming what literature brings to readers who open their minds to it.  All full of both wonder and hooey. “Risky & slavish looks the big scene”—slavish in that, as most writers probably realize at some level, especially those without a reputation yet, if you’re not up on the fashions you run into walls. Picasso earned the right to tear the art world—and modern perception of the whole world itself—to shreds and play blocks with the chunks because when he was young he could draw like an angel. B. claims that he hides back in his shell at the prospect of all this complication. Sometime, probably. I think it’s a pose at times. He put it out there professionally and artistically, broke strange new ground for poetry. But, it’s almost over, as this poem hints: “Henry his horns waved at the future of poetry, where he had been”—he had been in the future of poetry. True enough. Not any longer, that future is in the past. This was now a guy, who through a lifetime of practice, could write verse as effortlessly as breathing. Not so much of a poet anymore, though, a much higher calling. The greatest world-class chess players have to keep themselves in top physical condition because the work of the brain is such a physical activity. The muscles and the heart and blood need to be in flawless working order to support such strenuous effort. The most exhausted I’ve ever been came 1) after a backpacking trip in the dry, high New Mexico mountains, 2) after writing the last chapter of my dissertation in a week, and 3) after weekend chess tournaments in high school—five games over two days. All-consuming, serious competitive sport, absolutely exhausting. B.’s life has almost exhausted him. This is competent verse, and there are flashes of language left. But when he “hid back in his shell-ow”, I think he’s saying he knows he’s not the poet he used to be. And frankly, not the man he used to be. That in itself is a confessional statement, though, so the poet is not quite finished. Wringing out the last trickles of art from a body that’s drying up.

#207

https://books.google.com/books?id=pE8MBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA136&dq=I+have+a+gang+of+old+sins+unconfessed+207&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CB4Q6AEwAGoVChMIv523mYz5xgIVg5uICh3fTwWC#v=onepage&q=I%20have%20a%20gang%20of%20old%20sins%20unconfessed%20207&f=false

“Music comes painful as a happy look / to a system nearing an end”—pretty clear what’s going on here. The body failing, the consciousness and the imagination following. It has always seemed to me that simple enjoyment ought to be enough to prolong life—a cool breeze, coffee, birds singing, that one unexpected suite of flavors from a sip of good wine, an interesting or beautiful face, the tug of a fish on the line, the bright blue sparkle of some graceful insect, on and on. But pain can absolutely overshadow all that, I know, and emptiness is maybe one of the worst kinds of pain. Reports I’ve read on B. at the very end seem to confirm that there wasn’t much left, and it’s easy to compare the earlier YouTube readings with the later ones, which is pretty shocking. At the writing of this poem, he wasn’t done yet—he was still writing—but the engine was sputtering and the propeller had almost stopped turning and he was on the glide path to a crash landing. In this poem he plays with the conventions of casual greeting. “How are you?” is never meant as an invitation to list your problems. But, when we respond with the accepted convention, “Fine,” or “I’m hanging in there,” or “about half,” or, “can’t complain,” I suppose we do sometimes run through the parenthetical litany, though relegated to unspoken parentheses: “I’m fine (but this slipped disc in my back hurts and my wife left me for her lesbian yoga instructor and I had to put my dog down and my son’s parole was denied and this tooth is killing me and I’m losing my hair and the batteries in my hearing aid are weak and there’s all this diarrhea and my boss is a clockwatching twit and the Reds lost again and I had a thousand-dollar lottery ticket but I lost it when I fell in the river so now I can’t get this ingrown toenail fixed and the intervention over my addiction to crystal meth didn’t take and my fuel pump is out again, and did I mention how much my back hurts?). How are you?” 

Friendship invites a way through the convention of reticence. Buddies in some bar over a beer, women in a cute restaurant with glasses of chilled white wine or cups of steaming herbal tea. Or in a bar over a beer. They talk about what hurts, and it helps. I have a friend who recently pulled the story of my pancreatitis treatments out of me, because she feels it’s important to get people talking about their bodies; it’s the way to really get to know them. All right, you asked for it, I’ll tell you the story, though pancreatitis simply hurts like all get out and it has very little to do, actually, with me. Well…except that I had pancreatitis attacks over 50 times in my life, each one like a sword through the solar plexus, and I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy. It became part of who I am and a defining aspect of my experience whether I wanted it or not—I behaved, ate and drank, in ways I figured would steer me clear of it, I feared it, and I writhed under it when it came and begged the hospital ER staff to please do something. Drug me or knock me out or kill me, but make it stop. If you come in your life to the point where it won’t stop, it never stops, then the elements that factor into your decision-making process open up new, formerly unimaginable solutions that will make it stop. “How are you?”? “Well, let me tell you. I’m to the point where pain outweighs satisfaction and pleasure. I’ll be checking out here soon. How are you?”

 

Our bodies are intrinsic elements of our souls, determinants of whoever it is we unfold to be.

#206

https://books.google.com/books?id=2o9-BAAAQBAJ&pg=PA206&dq=only+after+ledgering,+endless+ledgering+206&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CB4Q6AEwAGoVChMI3vLC4Mj2xgIVxpmACh1NtgBk#v=onepage&q=only%20after%20ledgering%2C%20endless%20ledgering%20206&f=false

Reminds me that too often poets and scholars often have other poets and scholars solely in mind as their audience. Perhaps a handful of fawning graduate lickspittles. American crowds once gathered at the docks when they got news a shipment of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s latest book of poetry was due to arrive. But I suspect this snippet of powerful emotional pathos and drama wouldn’t have attracted much of a throng at the Brooklyn wharf: “because he would not take / the Platonic argument beyond what was necessary / to establish the text”—dig those italics, eh! Well, it matters to a scholar, and perhaps the odd literary/philosophical sycophant is swooning somewhere. It’s true I’ve had these kinds of arguments in graduate study classes and in the company of my writers’ group friends and colleagues, so I should tone it down. Not sure verse is the best way to put the argument forward though.

That’s enough on that. This opens up a self-indulgent free day! Here are just a few of the things on my mind these days:

--Monarch butterfly populations are down to 57 million from over a billion just a decade ago. That’s about a 95% drop if my quick calculation is correct. Corporate agriculture feels the best way to safeguard its business model is to wipe out the insect world, and it is being frighteningly efficient at it through new, incredibly powerful insecticides. This protects short-term profits, but it is long-term suicide, plain and simple. This is also what’s killing honeybees, and if those continue crashing, then the quality of our diets and lives will take a sharp and abrupt turn downward. You can count on it.

--The ebony jewelwing damselfly has entered my consciousness as one of the prettiest creatures flying. It’s not only the bright metallic blue and green body, it’s the delightful way they flit and dance when they’re on the wing. You find them along woodsy creeks and rivers, amidst the shady undergrowth, though they have a charming habit of perching in the only spot of sunshine available, the better to sparkle by in the humid gloom, I believe. We took a dank, sweaty, buggy walk through the woods along a creek the other day and saw many, there like always, but more than ever now I notice them. The latent Platonic existence of the jewelwing has taken form through the triggering of my attention. They’ve always been there, but now they’ve arrived.

--Gun violence continues in America unabated, and people continue dying in the most senseless ways. The culture that has been politically cultivated—rage, along with the unlimited access to all manner of guns—is incredibly destructive. The NRA is a villainous organization. Flat and simple, they are villains, and most of their members, of not louts and villains themselves, are dupes.

--Too many house finches on the bird feeder. But they’re innocent, and they’re hungry. I’d rather they moved on, but I’m not going to start picking them off with a BB gun or something ruthless and coldhearted like that. We get exactly these other birds: goldfinch, cardinal, tufted titmouse, downy woodpecker, red-bellied woodpecker, white-breasted nuthatch, chipping sparrow, Carolina chickadee. No others. The house finches will show up in a flock, though, and just sit there and drain the feeder. But the others shoulder in, and it can get pretty lively. Ruby-throat hummingbirds on the nectar feeder, though the honeybees sometimes swarm it and keep the hummers off. Robins out on the yard like always, a house-wren twittering always. Mockingbirds come to our yard all day to hunt the grasshoppers down in the lower part, but it’s all about quiet business and groceries for them. They don’t sing here. Their singing area is a block away. Crows in the woods, polite and well-behaved until a hawk or owl shows up, then there’s trouble. Chimney swifts always at dusk, a hundred feet up chasing bugs. A couple English sparrows out front that are eating the mortar from out between the bricks on the porch railing. They’ve actually broken through in a couple spots and we’ll have to have the porch tuck-pointed next year. The little pests are at it constantly. They go in back and visit the feeder only rarely, though.

--Not too many deer this year. We’ve protected the plants we want them staying clear of with little panty-hose pouches of Irish Spring soap, and we squirt them with a deer-repellent mixture of hot peppers, eggs and garlic. It really works, but I think the yard must stink so bad to them that they’re steering clear. Last year we saw deer in the yard 5 times a week. This summer, it’s more like once every other week. I always like seeing them though.

--Lazarus lizards. Some kid in the 1950s brought home a paper sack of wall lizards after his summer vacation in Italy (his family owned the Lazarus dept. store chain). He let them go in his yard. He brought another batch home a year or two later from Spain, a different subspecies of the same critter. They hybridized, and they now inhabit every wall and stone outcropping in the Cincinnati area. They’re spreading slowly, but they still haven’t gotten not too far away from Cincinnati yet. They moved in on us a couple years ago and we got to know the few of them out there. Now they’ve reproduced and the yard has gotten pretty lively with hundreds of tiny Lazarus lizards. We’re on the lookout for some garter snakes, which should calm things down once they get established.

--John Berryman’s Dream Songs, but anyone reading this knows that. I blog every day about these poems. The writing itself is never a burden, any more than brushing my teeth or showering is a burden. Some days are better than others as far as the material, which runs the full range from inspiring and electric to torpid and pointless. I’m pretty much sick of John Berryman at this point, though the ideas in his work just keep coming, and that’s fun. I knew this project would range widely, and it has. I’m finally convinced of something teachers and real writers have always told me: Writers don’t write from flashes of prior inspiration. That’s backwards. Writing itself generates the inspiration. If nothing else comes of this blog, that lesson will make an incredible difference to me going forward, and it will still have been worth it.

--Various extended-family dramas that I won’t mention here. Life for us in this house is good, and we’re dealing fairly well with whatever circumstances throw at us.

--I was under anesthesia back in mid-June to have a troublesome wisdom tooth removed. While anesthesia is one of the absolute blessings of modern medicine, it’s not benign. It took me six weeks to recover from the lingering physical fatigue it caused. I had to remember that it was the drug, not my age that was making me feel so tired. The last couple days have been quite peppy, and I can now contemplate a hike with a backpack again. I read Cheryl Strayed’s Wild to celebrate. I liked it, and while it doesn’t make me want to hike the Pacific Crest Trail (me and altitude have trouble seeing eye to eye) I could see doing the Appalachian Trail some day. My life doesn’t have room for that, but maybe when I retire, if I have strength and body enough left for it. My brother is planning on doing the full length of New Zealand’s answer to these 1000-mile+ trails when he retires in a couple years.

--I only have four items on my bucket list: 1) Do a loop in an open cockpit biplane. 2) Pet a tiger, lion, leopard, jaguar, or cougar. 3) Climb up the ratlines to the maintop of a square-rigged ship under full sail. 4) Scuba dive with a whale. I’ve done #1, which was an absolute hoot, and the best birthday present I ever got. #s 2 & 4 seem doable, and I’ll begin taking action. #3—I don’t know how to go about it. This occupies more of my brain clutter than it probably should.

--I had a novel under way, which languished for awhile, and is starting now to reassert itself. I’ve been productive as a writer this year—almost 40 poems is very respectable. But if fiction is coming, then I have to accommodate it, because I get physically sick if I don’t. I may have to start getting even more productive here soon.

--I’m teaching a summer class, the senior capstone, about transportation, oil, and cities. Had a good, respectful and worthwhile, but somewhat tense, class discussion about climate change the other day, featuring a student who could not or would not acknowledge that anthropogenic climate change is a real thing. Hopefully the lecture that followed on the science of climate change helped open up new avenues in his opinion-making. But as we also tactfully noted in class, climate change denial is not predicated on climate science. Something both political and psychological is at work. It may not have mattered.

--There’s more. Yard projects. Taking on piano and re-engaging with my guitar. New semester looming. I’m getting older, but life is good. I feel like things are in an opening phase, not the closing-down that one sometimes imagines as a result of aging. Day by day, month by month, bring it on!

#205

https://books.google.com/books?id=2o9-BAAAQBAJ&pg=PA205&dq=your+creator+is+studying+his+celestial+sphere+205&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CCkQ6AEwAGoVChMIhfbkseHyxgIVyZyACh3RZgv6#v=onepage&q=your%20creator%20is%20studying%20his%20celestial%20sphere%20205&f=false
 

A.E. Housman was one of B.’s favorite poets. He was English, born in 1859, died in 1936. He was mainly reclusive in his life, possibly since he was a homosexual man at a time when that was an outright dangerous thing to admit to publicly. He was acclaimed as a scholar and poet in his lifetime, though. His first book of poems, A Shropshire Lad was a huge hit, and his second, Last Poems, published in 1922, was also very popular. His poetic themes included unrequited love—he fell in love with his heterosexual roommate in college—and death. (Maybe it’s no surprise then that B. liked him so much.) He was an emotional late-Romantic. The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry notes that, “Houseman appears to have thought of himself as a loser, predestined to see hopes dashed and love unrequited.” (Now I really see why B. liked him so much—Housman was his spiritual antecedent!)

Housman’s poems have that old-timey 19^th century strict rhyme and meter, without the ear to vary it that the better poets, the Romantics and further back, had. Norton says his poems have a “limited lyricism, yet his poems stay in the mind and even outlast less limited ones. They are easily parodied, as is his esthetic, and perhaps inseparable from an element of ‘camp.’ Yet they have a refined agony, a stylized pain, a kind of courtly lovelornness which ensures their memorability.” I find a kind of stylized pain in this kind of critical language, but that’s just me. It’s not any worse than the next-generation stuff I had to read in grad school, which takes stylized rhetorical pain to incredible new heights, mainly to demonstrate the diabolical tolerance for it the writer had, I always figured. But I digress.

“To an Athlete Dying Young” by A.E. Housman.

I’ve read that the Romans would occasionally sneak up and kill a triumphant conquering war hero on his chariot during his tickertape parade through the streets of Rome, as a further tribute [thanks for nothing, is what I think…], ensuring the immortality of his triumph and sparing him that inevitable decline into old age and irrelevance and non-triumph that certainly awaited him after the glorious apex of this his victorious recognition. This poem has elements of that, though the athlete isn’t gloriously murdered. He just died. But his aging, decrepit life will no longer outrun his triumph. (This is so anti-Berryman’s life it’s almost comical.) Now, he’s only triumphant, though dead, but we all die eventually, so there’s that. Freud called this whole process rationalization, I believe: He’s dead, but thank God he was a hero! But when a young man—such a winner already, and full of even more promise—dies, well, you do the best you can. Lay a laurel wreath on his tombstone, shed a tear, and name a school after him. Sing songs about him, tell the kids, recite poems written in his honor. Erect a statue. Triumph is public property and shouldn’t be wasted. And a dead hero gives it a much longer shelf life.

#204

https://books.google.com/books?id=pE8MBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA133&dq=Henry+weak+at+keyboard+music,+leaned+on&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CDEQ6AEwAGoVChMI-tPl6MfxxgIVx5UNCh017A_P#v=onepage&q=Henry%20weak%20at%20keyboard%20music%2C%20leaned%20on&f=false

 There is an antique piano in our house, an 1878 Steinway square grand. Cincinnati—still a grand old river city, in spite of some inexcusable, violent and dim-brained architectural mayhem that began in the 60s—is so stuffed full of old pianos that you can’t give one away. Genuine ivory and ebony keys, cabinets of rosewood or mahogany, intricate hand-painted details inside where no one will ever see them. I bought ours for $200, paid $200 to move it home, and spent another $200 to have it tuned and have the mechanism of a couple broken keys fixed. When eventually we have it restrung and refinished, it’ll be worth something, but it’s not for sale. I’ve decided to learn to play it. I followed my first online lesson just yesterday. When it comes to the piano, I’m a toddler in a footie jumpsuit who just took his first step. I’ll obviously never be a great piano player at this point, but I’ll learn to play. It’s an exciting thing to take on though, because one thing I know about music, like with the other great art forms: Amazing, inexplicable things can rise from it, emergent forms that take shape from the notes like the organization of a tornado from the chaos of a cloud. This is what B. is talking about when he says the rules don’t matter. Emergence is a level above mere rules. A biological enzyme is a linear protein, a mile-long freight-train of amino acid boxcars, flat cars and tankers, logically organized and bound by a formal set of comprehensible rules. But the activity of the enzyme is not dependent on the chemistry of it or the order of its constituent parts. There are ligatures that fold the linear progression of the protein into a 3D tangle, a ball of fuzz, and it’s upon the topography of the lint-ball’s surface where the biological activity takes place. It can’t be predicted from the structure: Enzymatic activity is an emergent property. It’s the same with a poem: It begins with the prose-like progression of words in a straight line, but the ligatures—line breaks, rhymes, assonance, all the techniques at the poet’s disposal—fold the linear structure onto itself so that it takes on a 3D form, like a sculpture. It’s the sculptural form of the poem that we respond to as much as to what it says. That’s why it takes so much space and wordage to explicate a poem—there is so much meaningful, wordless structure in place, and mere prose is an unwieldy tool that isn’t well-suited to teasing it apart. It’s like untangling the snarl of fishing line off a reel with a wooden spoon. But it’s the only other available way of understanding what has been created. The point is this: Emergence. Rules don’t predict it. It’s magical.

Henry is at his piano, and while not a strong keyboard player, here come the goblins anyway, metaphors for the emergent emotions and astonishing forms that the any great art form can unleash. It is an amazing thing, really, but we’re so habituated to magic as an obvious aspect of the human condition that we don’t often enough stop to marvel at it. What if it scares us? What if we scream? Well: Same old crap…What’s his problem? No one listens. Yet, in the evocative last stanza of this totally cool, exciting Dream Song, we’re reminded of what all is out there, waiting to emerge:

            Tides bring the bodies back sometimes, & not.

            The bodies of the self-drowned out there wait,

            wait, & the widows wait,

            my gramophone is the most powerful in the country,

            I am trying, trying, to solve the andante

            but the ghost is off before me. 

You can’t solve the andante! What it throws at you is unpredictable, unforeseeable, emergent, the haunting of a ghost: Art. Go ahead, scream.

When the confessionality of a person resolves into a persona through an artistic interpretation, you don’t always have control over what emerges. Sometimes—often—it’s dangerous. There are bodies involved in that ocean, that may or may not wash back at you on the tides. This art business has resolved into disaster before. B. is using music as a metaphor, and he does it slickly. The andante is a metaphor for his poetry. To understand it, to understand what he’s doing, he uses his rational, rule-dependent brain, but it’s a clumsy tool, inadequate to the intricacy of the task. It will never understand this emergent, dangerous magic. It’s no wonder he screams, because who knows where this all came from? This shit is frightening.

#203

https://books.google.com/books?id=2o9-BAAAQBAJ&pg=PA203&dq=hilarious+loves+walking+the+streets+like+trees+203&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CB4Q6AEwAGoVChMIr8Gi8f7uxgIVQpQNCh3k1ALx#v=onepage&q=hilarious%20loves%20walking%20the%20streets%20like%20trees%20203&f=false
 
You asked for it, pal! What comes from recognition is attention. There’s a bit of biting the hand that feeds you to this bit of poetical complaining, but it’s not so severe or unforgivable. If the phone starts ringing off the hook, that’s an annoyance. It’s annoying; doesn’t matter why it’s coming. Fair enough. Isolation costs money, but it’s a comfort. “However, I shudder & the world shrugs in”, abetted by tape recorders, cameras, telephones. Trust me, you have no conception, from 1960-whatever, of what’s in store in another 50 years.

Last Monday: The doctor’s office, people in the waiting room. Flannery O’Connor’s short story, “Revelation,” mainly takes place in a doctor’s office. It’s summer in the Deep South, 1950s, there is no air conditioning of course, it’s stifling and hot in Georgia, people sweat together, complain about the heat, and talk to strangers because when you find yourself in the same place at the same time, suffering the same annoyances and torments, that’s what the culture has you do. You share stories, talk about yourself and what ailment brought you to the doctor, you share and reinforce each other’s prejudices and culture-wide racist assumptions one conversation at a time. I’m not being nostalgic or saying it’s ideal. O’Connor lays out a furious and contemptuous condemnation of the widespread, shallow ignorance she saw in her world in the South, and when she titles a story “Revelation” she means something spiritual and revolutionary. She does this with all of her stories. But the spread of shared ignorance she witnessed was person-to-person, and talking was the medium through which it translated. Communities, with both their mutual support networks and reinforcing of ignorance, are built this way, locally. People talk.

So there were ten people in the waiting room on Monday. Thank God there was no infernal, maddening television droning away like in too many waiting rooms these days. There was no piped-in music. Total silence. Every person, except for me and my wife, had their heads down, thumbing away into their cell phones. Some texting, some watching whatever, some playing games. Dead silence, except for some light beeping and other subdued digital noises. The texters may have been engaged in community-building or gathering news of life and the world, for good or bad, but it was spread tissue-thin, continent wide or global. The gamers were building virtual experiences filled with the complex details of astonishing virtual constructs: Virtual: Not real. But the local community, born of language-generated interpersonal contact, was utterly dead from everything I could see at that moment. Learning who we are, what we love and what we condescend to, from little 3 x 5 screens. Flannery O’Connor would have had absolutely nothing to work with.

I couldn’t help it. The weird, flat silence put me in mind of a silent movie from the 20s. What would Buster Keaton have done with this material? I laced my fingers together in front of my face and starting dancing my thumbs. Eyebrows raised, big contented smile. Ah yes, this works. “Stop that,” my wife hissed. Exaggerated surprise on my face. Point with a momentarily free hand to the other still in front of my face, thumb still moving, mouth the phrase, “I’m texting.” An elbow to the ribs. Hey! I’m part of the crowd here. Can’t you see my phone? Look how fascinating it is! My wife rolls her eyes at me and turns away, embarrassed, checking to see if we’re being watched (we’re not—no one has noticed), knowing that she’ll wind up truly mortified if this escalates any further. I thumb away on my imaginary phone, affecting a Charlie Chaplinesque, mime-like, mindless bliss. She starts giggling, and now I can stop.

We’re so surrounded with something that it feels normal, but that doesn’t mean it’s not extravagantly bizarre. Henry feels assaulted by the technology of his day, which shoulders in to record what he says so it can be fed to the waiting world’s appetite. Henry: You have no idea what’s coming. God help you now if you’re say, Kristen Stewart, the beautiful young actress in her 20s who slept with some guy not her recognized and publicly condoned boyfriend. Perhaps not an upright choice, but who cares? And utterly common and normal—and most to the point: Hers. Private. The global techno-appetite that made her a star expects to know everything about her in return, including the most intimate details of her sex life, so that she felt the need to hold a press conference and apologize to the world for her affair. I felt she was violated terribly. Some creep hacker got hold of Jennifer Lawrence’s private nude photos stored in her cell phone, and posted them to the Web. A merciless techno-violation. If you’re not famous, not the target of the techno-appetite, you still simulate the attention. You Facebook post your dinner, brag about your European vacation, spread the news to the world of Doritos and root beer on the patio. Thoreau saw the appetite for senseless minutia coming in the 1840s. He wrote in Walden:

We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate…. As if the main object were to talk fast and not to talk sensibly. We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.

Here is prescient, clear-eyed sarcasm of the highest order.

Much of tremendous value communicates through our exploding new global techno-nervous system, and there will never be a going back. But it’s sometimes better to talk sensibly rather than talk fast, and it does matter that we continue talking at all. And when we’re face-to-face, talking, if all goes well, we also can monitor through interpersonal etiquette the cues that ask us to back off—as much a part of community-building as communication.

#202

https://books.google.com/books?id=2o9-BAAAQBAJ&pg=PA202&dq=with+shining+strides+hear+his+redeemer+come+202&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CB4Q6AEwAGoVChMIpK-1prjsxgIVwsuACh0FFgfZ#v=onepage&q=with%20shining%20strides%20hear%20his%20redeemer%20come%20202&f=false

Strange and fascinating, this one. “peine forte et dure”—pain strong and hard. The images are consistent—in a hospital, at the scene of a religious service, though with ex-nuns and an ex-priest (not quite, in other words), but the overall tone and impact, and some of the allusions, are reminiscent of something more like the prelude to a ritualized torment down in some dungeon torture chamber. So it’s an incredibly weird and disturbing poem. Christianity, as I prefer to think of it, is founded in Jesus’s message of love, empathy and tolerance, but there is also the torture aspect of it that has a tendency to put me off. Unbearable physical torment is at the very heart and soul of the Christian story. I get it: Out of the depths of pain and humiliation arises something amazing: salvation, and it took all that pain and humiliation to release it. It’s an incredibly powerful story even if one only looks at it as a story, as opposed to an article of religious faith. I don’t like to dwell on it, though. But this poem draws off of that and turns it into something outrageous.

Is it dream, or a nightmare? It may well be because it has that weird nightmarish vibe. I also think it could be simple story-telling, that twists the events of a common-enough kind of religious worship service in a hospital—all hospitals have chapels—distorts it through the lens of the poet’s suffering into something sinister. Either way—there is pressure on the speaker, through pain strong and hard, to give up his secrets. But he’ll not break.

What secrets in The Dream Songs are being withheld, anyway? He doesn’t seem very shy about revealing whatever he’s thinking or experiencing. Except, as an artist, he picks and chooses, doesn’t he? Involves himself in an extended project of persona-crafting. Some persona. But I’m not judging—well, yes I am. Behold The Great Victim, crushed by events at once self-inflicted, extra-personal and worldwide, resulting in the model modern human man, a unique and bizarre mixture of shame and pride, courage and self-destruction, humiliation and arrogance, fury and cowardice. What’s being withheld? Is it the knowledge that the man’s personal creation was all a creation, an artifice, and that the creation could have taken any number of other forms? The persona gives justification and cover for someone now—the schmuck—free to smoke, drink, lecture tediously, fight, and philander, at will, with no reason to hold back because all this self-destructive behavior is the nuclear reaction at the core of a great work of modern art. Kablooey! Sublime, eh? No Schadenfreude-riven ex-nun with a set of thumb screws is going to get this admission out of this artist. Bring it on, sister.

#201

https://books.google.com/books?id=2o9-BAAAQBAJ&pg=PA201&dq=hung+by+a+thread+more+moments+instant+Henry's+mind+201&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CB4Q6AEwAGoVChMIh6q7qe7pxgIVCVyICh2NUQhh#v=onepage&q=hung%20by%20a%20thread%20more%20moments%20instant%20Henry's%20mind%20201&f=false

“Henry in twilight is on his own” strikes me as a sad line. The main context is philosophical—he has few ideological mentors left at this point. Everyone seems so comparatively dull and stupid, and it’s especially distressing when you realize that your own consciousness is dull and stupid to begin with. But this is also an assessment of the writer’s life and prospects more broadly. He’s on his own, in his twilight. It’s sad partly because I’m one year younger than this guy was when he ended it all, and I can tell anyone who cares that I don’t feel as if I’m in my twilight yet. Quite the opposite in fact. If I may be physically on the backside, there is still much mentally, spiritually, and creatively left to experience and accomplish. But that line is coming from a writer who, a decade younger than I am now, had already had his moment and was feeling the end approaching. Serious alcoholism, mental anguish, constant smoking, these all take a devastating toll, and pretty clearly he knew what he was up against. It seems to me that it would be okay to face death if you can look back and say you loved life, didn’t waste it, played the hand you were dealt with all the skill you managed to develop. If you threw your cards on the floor, then the approaching moment must be tougher to accost. Not that that was exactly what he did—to be a writer is to live too. He did that. But his body, through abuse, and thus his whole mind and spirit by extension, was giving out. Abused past its ability to respond with vitality. Madness threatens from there—scary. I don’t brood on my own physical vitality and incipient depression and madness that much because I don’t feel the need. The Dream Songs will force this avenue of brooding if you let them have any influence at all. But only for me when engaged with the work. On my own, at least as a writer, I’m like an ebony jewelwing damselfly, skipping unnoticed through the undergrowth, dazzling iridescent blue and green if you stop to look, maybe, but few do, not when there are woodpeckers and goldfinches and swallowtail butterflies, and flowers, foxes and deer, adorable little stripy chipmunks in the woods, on and on, clamoring for attention. I think that might just be my new emblem.  

But enough about me.

 

Creek Pool, Summer Day

If there is madness along the creek

Let the minnows live it

Sunken under the sun-steaming

Algae-sodden surface

Never stilling their silver flanks

Since the bass that keeps

To his hole under the grass bank

Ventures every dim blue evening

To inhale quick little fishes

Restlessness describes

The minnows' subsequent lot

Scribbling their panic

In crazy runes across the blank pool

That spell “movement

is our only hope

to rest is to cease

moving” and moving

So their sustaining

Movement maddens

Without cease 

Catatonic frogs hold motionless

In the green bankside slime:

Knowing, in their still

Spotted way, that not-stillness

Betrays their spots to the

Snakes that watch:

The snakes watch:

They wait, watch:

Waiting. 

DragonFlies on

       The Attack.

                                    changing

Direction. Darting

   hungry

                        Here anD

            Gone

and back

Tall heron’s bill an ivory sword

—a lighting lunge—

then she floats away,

over the still pool

lifting on the soft heat

like a long blue dragon. 

Concatenation of flitterings

Glittering blue and green

Sheening in the shade

Made of tinsel and foil

Like oil on the pool’s

Cool surface. Jewelwings

Cling to the heavy air

Fair and sparkling

Sparking my notice

This, the unassuming shy

Fly, damsel at her vanity.

KZ

#200

https://books.google.com/books?id=2o9-BAAAQBAJ&pg=PA200&dq=I+am+interested+%26+amazed:+on+the+building+across+the+way&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CB4Q6AEwAGoVChMI3OGs_uLnxgIV1yqICh2NCQHS#v=onepage&q=I%20am%20interested%20%26%20amazed%3A%20on%20the%20building%20across%20the%20way&f=false

Written during Christmas of 1963, from the same park across the street from the Supreme Court building, where he had also written DS 72 earlier. In late 1963, everyone was still amazed and stunned by Kennedy’s assassination just a month earlier, and still wondering what it meant and where it would lead. Kennedy is the man “not born today,” and of course, it being Christmas, the implied other reference is to Jesus, hung on his own “terrible tree.”

Kennedy’s life and presidency—his war record and injury from his PT Boat service in the Navy, the debates against Nixon, his great inaugural speech, the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, his setting the goal of landing a man on the moon “because it is hard,” his greatly popular wife, and then his involvement with Marilyn Monroe and other women, even a suspected involvement in Monroe’s death, the mysterious details around his assassination, the inexplicable shooting of Oswald by someone live on TV—all of it is receding now into American legend. But on Christmas Day, December of 1963, it was right there on everyone’s mind. At that moment, I was 5 years old. I actually remember a lot from that time of my young life, including, I can hardly believe it, when Marilyn Monroe died a year earlier. I remember seeing the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show a year and a half later. But for some reason I don’t remember anything about Kennedy’s assassination. But I have to think that for every American, the thought of it was frightening. This poem is simply a reflection of that—frightened, angry at the slow pace of details being released, anger at the fool world where such a thing can happen. Grief, not feigned for artistic effect, not dramatized grief, but the real thing. Honest and grieving.

We know from our perspective 2015 how the 60s unfolded in such a crazy way—Vietnam and all those people dying there, the Counter-Culture, the Silent Majority, MLK and the Civil Rights Movement, the wave of prominent assassinations, the great cultural production in music and literature, the real gains in progressive legislation. All the unrest. It was a time that caused real fear and anxiety in the established conservative power structures, and they began planning their pushback right then, which came to real power in 1980, and has now grown to monstrous proportions, destroying piecemeal many of the progressive gains bought in the 60s, often with blood.

I do think that a revolutionary countermovement is swelling from underneath and this is why neo-liberal power is responding with such destructive, hateful vehemence. Occupy Wall Street was unorganized, and it eventually fizzled, but it was just the beginning. Corporate power, fossil fuels, even Capitalism itself is looking vulnerable, is beginning to totter. Their days in power look to be starting to wane, finally. But the damage being done to voting rights, race relations, the environment—the whole planet!—education at all levels, women’s rights, right now, is so terrifying that it’s very natural and very easy to identify with the overall tone of this Dream Song: anger, but mainly grief, in the face of an unforeseen and stunning tragedy, in light of our series of unfolding tragedies, none of which, then or now, should have happened. It’s a hot, rainy summer for me at this moment, but Merry Christmas, Henry, from the future. I criticize and sneer at you all the time when I think you’ve earned it, but not today. Your moment at Christmas of 1963 and mine in July 2015 are not entirely different. When grief is genuine it merits respect.

#199

https://books.google.com/books?id=2o9-BAAAQBAJ&pg=PA199&dq=I+dangle+on+the+rungs+an+open+target&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CB4Q6AEwAGoVChMIl-WeqaflxgIVRSqICh1YhwSy#v=onepage&q=I%20dangle%20on%20the%20rungs%20an%20open%20target&f=false

I haven’t used the word “pity” too often yet, much less “pitiful,” in referring to John Berryman. Both words have the same root but have taken on somewhat divergent meanings. Both deal with a healthy, safe or non-suffering person who looks to someone suffering. “Pity,” especially to “take pity,” is to have empathy for the sufferer. The more common contemporary English use of “pitiful” has taken on a healthy measure of contempt rather than empathy. There are people out there who cultivate pity as a kind of interpersonal psychological tactic, though it can be pushed to the extent where it becomes counterproductive. He complains about his aching back, or she cries about the love relationship she screwed up, or he bitches about how unfair the boss at work treats him. It presents you as undeserving victim, with the expectation of a gift offered as compensation, out of pity. The gift is usually some kind of stroke—a kind word, a reaffirmation of value. Maybe money. The film Slumdog Millionaire has this shocking scene where a young beggar, working in slavery for a villainous kind of beggar’s pimp, suffers having his eyes put out with a hot spoon in order to maximize the pity he attracts, which presumably will increase the beggar boy’s earnings. It’s a testament, I guess, to the power of pity. The problem with too much pity, or the also contemptible “self-pity”, is that it can shade over into pitiful, and whatever persuasive influence it has is undercut.

The first line of this poem hopefully provides some justification for my treatise on the power of pity. “I dangle on the rungs, an open target.” So: target = victim ∴ Pity me! Offer me some approbation! Tell me I’m not rightfully suffering, that I don’t deserve it!

Because everything is going to pot. When the auto breaks down, and it’s beyond hope, park it and walk away. I did that once. My 1968, 2-door Chevy Impala, that my brother gave me, oxidized silver with two white doors, drove at an angle because of the twisted frame, it broke down for the last time. I emptied the glove compartment of the paperwork, took the license plate off, and walked home. If I had a gun I might have put a bullet through the radiator, but nah, I just left it on the street. It disappeared a week or two later. “Henry is dying.”

So it’s a poem that begins with an appeal for pity, flirts with the pitiful, lays out a list of the world’s broad, insufferable woes, gropes toward suicide—“jump at monsoon dawn”—confirms the mess with a quick synopsis of his life, conflicts and relationships: “They have all waited / the foes fierce, others whom Henry baited, / a forest of bottles.” There it is. Messed up. Pitiful. What are you supposed to think when you look back on your life and this is what you see? It’s pathetic.

“—Mr Bones, you a clown.” And this is the perfect, the perfectly apt, finale. This redoubles the whole sad tale. All this pain and failure, and the subsequent triumph resulting from the pain and failure, is not even something you can take seriously. It’s all been the Vaudeville soft-shoe of a dancing clown, a twisted joking performance. When you’ve gone to Las Vegas with $100,000 in your wallet, and you lose $99,900 in one epic night at the craps table, in front of a noisy, drunken, admiring crowd thrilled at the spectacle, men in sharp suits patting you on the back and shaking your hand, their breath smelling like the olive from a dry martini, the pit boss bringing you good, strong, well-mixed Manhattans, gorgeous women in sparkly gowns leaning on your shoulder, openly caressing you with their sequined breasts, whispering in your ear exactly what’s going to happen upstairs in about a half hour because your ruin has been so sexy and so spectacular, and losers of your caliber are so exotic and unusual—what’s left to do but fold your last C-note into a little moustache, tape it to your upper lip, and jump up on the table and sing out loud, with heartfelt passion, “What Kind of Fool Am I”? What a sordid ridiculous clusterfuck. But, hey, if that’s where you’ve led yourself, might as well go ahead and down another Manhattan real quick, take two of the girls upstairs, and just hope your stomach is strong enough to make it through without puking. When one night you can’t, then it’s over. You’ve burned up your fuel, nothing left but ashes, everyone waiting patiently for you to get it over with, put an end to it, but please hurry it up. This is getting pitiful.

#198

https://books.google.com/books?id=2o9-BAAAQBAJ&pg=PA197&dq=the+terraces+alive+with+magical+rain&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CB4Q6AEwAGoVChMIneqRn-vfxgIVyxGSCh2pLwoy#v=onepage&q=I%20held%20all%20solid%20then%20I%20let%20some%20jangle&f=false

 If one thing I’ve noticed is the attention of the artist to his writing and legacy at the expense of the vitality of his actual living life, this one turns that over. Not that his living life is all that lively—broken, sick, not strong. But the readers and critics swarming in to “untangle / the riddles of my little wit” are treated with impatience at best, and they’re regarded as “tiresome.” “How few followed / the One or both”—for all their numbers they don’t really get it anyway. But at the writing of the poem it doesn’t matter, because the poet is writing out of physical pain, which is overwhelming everything else. Pain will do that, makes it so that “I cannot think.” His broken left arm reminds him “the whole body can come to harm; / will.” Here’s the lesson finally creeping in?: Take care of your body, because none of the other stuff matters if it’s not in good working order. At the very least it gets more difficult because too often it takes more than you’ve got to work through the pall that descends on the mind and body when pain swells too acutely. Randall Jarrell fell into the same pit that B. is getting sucked down—addiction, illness, and the subsequent degradation of the higher kinds of productivity, poetry being the main one in question. Jarrell’s wife, like all of us, is left with the empty hole of her grief.

 

Posthole 

I’m done

for the work

on a hot morning

has taxed my over-

heated body

past endurance

my heart muscle

clanking like the shovel

against the rock

that stopped

progress on the last

posthole

let me rest and let

my sweat glands—

hysterical with their own

humid work—refill

and close

after I’ve read

for awhile I’ll

find an iron bar

use its point to shatter

the ignorant rock

book and bar

tools that keep us

digging

building

KZ

#197

https://books.google.com/books?id=2o9-BAAAQBAJ&pg=PA197&dq=the+terraces+alive+with+magical+rain&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CB4Q6AEwAGoVChMIneqRn-vfxgIVyxGSCh2pLwoy#v=onepage&q=the%20terraces%20alive%20with%20magical%20rain&f=false

I had a moment in Paris some years ago, outside of the famous ice cream shop on the Île Saint-Louis, with all the bustling activity, a pleasant early spring evening, people enjoying their lives and a treat with 30 or 40 marvelous flavors of ice cream and sorbet to choose from (cantaloupe and cassis for me) and it occurred to me (obviously, but still…) that this bustle and hum goes on all the time whether I’m in the middle of it or not, and Paris has been going, thriving, recreating, suffering, dancing killing and sexing, evolving for well over 2000 years. And by extension, so has Istanbul and Tokyo and St. Petersburg and Rio de Janeiro, and so too Cincinnati, which was tripping gaily right along without me at the moment. Part of the dream B. is reporting comes from the same realization, and whether distant through space or distant through time, it doesn’t especially matter, especially in a dream. Rains rained in those places just like it does here, and that helps bring them into an immediate, sensual focus. These places live(d) and thrive(d) and die(d), and the world is so incredibly large and diverse that our presence or not doesn’t matter and didn’t. It takes a self-absorbed ego to come to this point (nothing special in that—we are all guilty), but it also undermines the always-narcissistic ego in a healthy way. In a crappier mood I might ascribe including Cambridge, Mass, home of Harvard University, in a litany next to Angkor Wat and Machu Picchu as a “lost” city, as some kind of self-pitying lament over a career failure; but nah, it’s just a joke.

And then there were the dead, “all insane / & trying to sit up from fear.” I saw it all, he reports. Heck of a dream! Why trying to sit up from fear? I take it as the fear of being left out. All the world tripping along in activity, love, and brutality, and I’m not part of it? Since when? Um…since you died, pal. One might counter that you’re always part of it once you get here, through your legacy and perhaps through the eternal vitality of your spirit, but that’s probably another topic for another day. The fear—the fear that presses toward a veritable insanity—is that you’ve been left out.

So the everyday magical vitality of Machu Picchu and Angkor Wat, reduced to mere monumental skeletons, died away. Now there’s the world with its baseball and nuclear missiles. Ancient cities lived, then they died. Paris lives on for now, but it will die one day too, somehow, the Eiffel Tower decayed into traces of dissolved iron in the rich, virginal soil of the unpeopled ex-Parisian wilderness. But the bloody fucking news for now converges, doesn’t it?, and we lick ice cream cones, which lets us declare a brave, round screw it. Licking ice cream is an act of courage, a proclamation of the fearless insouciance we summon in order to face and to endure. Henry, the old Henry I remember from awhile back, just cowers from it. If ice cream is courage, then bourbon is cowardice. Which isn’t totally fair to bourbon, since it is designed as a kind of potent treat in itself, but it does have that characteristic of engendering drunkenness, which when carried to the extreme B. pursued, becomes a sniveling form of groveling cowardice. But in his defense, while the sniveling seems to have been real enough in his life, he transformed that into a second-level courage in the writing of it. The man snivels; the poet stands up and licks his bourbon proudly, tonguing his words without shame. Part of the bustle and hum anyway. All it takes is the bitten stub of a pencil and a damp cocktail napkin, potent instruments forging our connection to the life of life.

#196

https://books.google.com/books?id=2o9-BAAAQBAJ&pg=PA196&dq=even+at+Harvard+the+story+was+moths+his+toy+his+dream+his+rest&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CB0Q6AEwAGoVChMI3r7AvYTexgIVEDqICh0GWA7E#v=onepage&q=even%20at%20Harvard%20the%20story%20was%20moths%20his%20toy%20his%20dream%20his%20rest&f=false

Death. Okay, death it is. This has been a bright summer day, after much, much rain yesterday and for the past two weeks, and it was cool and breezy today, in the upper 70s—beautiful—and I was at my mom’s and it was summery and quiet, in that still midday quiet that reminds me of my childhood, when I would be outside alone or with friends, in the summer quiet and noticing that it was a quiet day. The three of us sat on her swing and talked for awhile. My son and I later went to the woods looking for snakes, but there was not much wildlife showing itself along the creek. The creek was slightly high and silty. We wanted to bring some snakes home to try and deal with the Lazarus lizards, which are cute and we love them, but like the deer, nothing is controlling them and there are getting to be too many. Lots of babies too, all these two-inch tiny-lizards scrambling all around the yard. Three or four garter snakes back on the wall in the garden will work wonders. The thing about snakes is that you can never seem to find one when you want one. We did see one lovely doe and a great blue heron. No dragonflies or butterflies, obviously because it was still cool and wet. They both like it hot and sunny. There were lots and lots of jewelwings, which are a large metallic green or blue or bluegreen damselflies, with black wings. They are very striking, with a lilting flight and sparking some vivid, cool metallic colors through the dim, humid understory in the woods they like best. Jewelwings are a fixture of my life, but I didn’t always notice them because they’re black and they’re not butterflies. Now I always stop and look, and I always think, odd that something so innocuous and so commonplace in the places I know, is so incredibly lovely when you stop to really look at one. They are gorgeous creatures. So, it was sunny and with an active breeze, but still and quiet anyway. An odd summer day. I just don’t have death on my mind, sorry, and whether this poem is good or bad doesn’t even matter—it’s too dang deathly. But I must adapt my feelings. Death it is.

We had death in mind when we were looking for snakes. Not that we wanted to kill the snakes—quite the contrary. We wanted to relocate them to our yard where they would bring death to the overpopulation of lizards that hasn’t reached plague-frog status yet, like in the Bible, but we can sort of see that day coming. There’s a flurry of lizards around here now, in an ecology where the local lizards are shy, and retiring. They have gorgeous tails, though, as bright and blue as jewelflies. But blue-tailed, or aka five-lined, skinks stay hunkered down under rocks and loose bark, and it’s rare to see one, though they’re common enough. The Lazarus lizards on the other hand are flat-out extroverts. Speaking of death, while we were at the creek we both stopped and watched a sparkling teal-colored jewelwing up close—they’re quite harmless and friendly—and it was munching on a little moth. We were standing in the creek and my son slipped on a slippery flat rock and scared it, but it made a circle and came right back to the same perch and enjoyed its tasty little moth in our company. Like I said, they’re friendly. You could catch one easy with your hands if you wanted to, but there’s no reason. They just skip around from eye level to knee level, very bright and colorful, and they’re as attractive a little thing as one can possibly imagine. And yes they’re predators, so death is involved in the life of a jewelwing, but they just don’t put in mind for me the “death is a box” crap that seems so alien on a day like this. Life is a feast, nudnik. How about you look around? Sure the mind stops someday—maybe. (Not a lot of salvation on the imagination the day you wrote this infernal poem, was there?) “Death is a box” my ass. You’ve squandered my patience because instead of sitting like usual in a leather chair in a book-lined study (the ceiling is painted dark brown, by the way), I’ve been out in the rain-humid sunshine today, you morose thing, and call me a sentimental tree-hugger if you must, but the blue of jewelwings helped keep my eyes open. Jewelwings reflect the glory of Creation, that’s what I think, and so do skinks even though I didn’t see one today, just as blue and just as stunning. You can keep Harvard, whether they’re after you or not. I’ll take the muddy, rain-swollen little creek in the woods, bereft of public snakes today, but trust me, they’re there, and its population of exquisite damselflies wavering through the dank humid greenery like a faculty of blue fairies.

#195

[p. 124: https://books.google.com/books?id=pE8MBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA124&lpg=PA124&dq=history's+two-legs+was+a+heartless+dream&source=bl&ots=so5wHaIZP4&sig=Ag21QtmQMll2NtpcFYvmxbnXmEw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CCIQ6AEwAWoVChMI4oX0g_baxgIViy6ICh1GFwPa#v=onepage&q=history's%20two-legs%20was%20a%20heartless%20dream&f=false]

 I think this is what I expected out of a confessional poem, the kind of treatment of the self that Sylvia Plath was so good at—there is depth to it, and it raises a serious question. The opening begins with a statement that Oklahoma, the poet’s boyhood home, has left him, sore from his great loss. Oklahoma, as a concept, a metaphor, is gone. That in itself is a huge statement. I can compare my own conception of myself and I can tell you that the Ohio will never leave me. Ohio, bland and Midwestern and rusty, doesn’t have the obvious cultural richness and pungent savor of a place like Kentucky, Texas, Virginia. Others. Even Michigan. Oregon. But there’s also much to it. “Ohio” is just more subtle, less flamboyant, but whatever it is has left its imprint on me. It would take much change, pain and loss for me to say that anything of Ohio has left me. So the opening of this poem is something to take seriously. There is a deep and subtle sadness about it. The self who has experienced this loss is already fragmented by it. The mirror reflects disarticulated pieces.

“All my pieces kneel and we all scream:”—Plath would approve.

“History’s Two-legs was a heartless dream”—whatever it is that “Two-legs” stands for—obviously the human condition, but is it more particular? I don’t think so. The point: History, as a metaphor for life, living, the world of the living, is not so real as we want to think it is. A rejection of it is implied here, maybe, but if it’s a dream, it’s a nightmare of a dream.

So what is reality, then? Here’s a list: “reskinned knuckles & forgiveness & toys / unbreakable & thunder that excites & annoys / but’s powerless to harm.” Here it is, a heaven of healing and not-harm. “The growing again of the right arm / (which we so missed in our misleading days) / & the popping back in of eyes.” I love the strangeness of it. The poem is more conventional underneath than its twisted and fragmented surface might imply, though, but it’s written from the twisted, fragmented present in this world. Beyond, in heaven or the life beyond, in reality, there waits healing and salvation—and a renewed vision. This is where, when, we’ll come to understand. It’s a hope and a prayer for that, even an assertion of it. And it’s also an abandonment of hope that this life will lead to understanding, because life on this plane is fragmented, which is to say, broken. It’s both a personal statement from a man who was broken early in his life, or who at least claims as much, but it’s also a much broader existential statement. He’s broken all right, but he’s broken because his world is broken. It’s a postmodern statement, developed before postmodern as a concept was even articulated. All the things we clung to, that modernism clung to, that modernism watched helplessly or joyfully( depending on your view) being wrecked—are now wrecked. What we have left is wreckage. But there is healing, a reskinning of knuckles, to come. Our eyes will pop back in and reopen. The wonder of childhood, wrecked, is latent in the wreckage and only waits for reassembly to awaken again to viability. It’s a personal statement but it arises out of an orthodox Judeo-Christian notion, and one of the first times so far that I trust it as genuine from this artist. He doesn’t have to mention God here—but he’s looking this time. He’s not speaking out of a superficial narcissism at all. This whole poem strikes me as a fragmented but frank appraisal of one persona’s place in the grand existential context, a context of ruination and shattering, but ultimately latent with salvation.