`Reading Maketh a Full Man'

“All educationalists taught that reading was to be carried out pen in hand, ready to note in the margin metaphors, similes, exempla, sententiae, apophthegms, proverbs, or any other transportable units of literary composition. These were then to be copied out into one or more notebooks, divided either alphabetically or by topics, and to be reused in one’s own writing.”

Brian Vickers refers to the Renaissance humanists for whom reading and writing, learning and living, were joined in a dance of delight. He might also be glossing the dimming promise of digital culture (Vickers speaks of “notebook culture”), in particular the blogosphere. Many have likened blogs to the commonplace book, but the internet turns a blog into one page in an infinitely interleaved library of commonplace books. The passage above, for instance, comes from Vickers’ introduction to the Oxford World’s Classics edition of The Major Works by Francis Bacon. The interested reader can go here to read the rest of it, including these subsequent sentences:

“The Renaissance was fundamentally a notebook culture, its greatest literary productions displaying what has been called a stile a mosaico. Many passages in Montaigne or Rabelais, Bacon or Burton, Chapman or Webster, are tissues of quotations held together by a thin thread of argument. Modern readers must learn to see quotations as simultaneously foreign, the result of an individual author’s reading, and yet an integral part of the text, having been appropriated for and indeed by it.”

Modern readers, at least seasoned modern readers, have already learned this by way of literary modernism and its legacies. What are the poems of Eliot and Moore but “tissues of quotations,” with or without “argument,” thin or otherwise? Think of Joyce, Pound, David Jones, Benjamin, Beckett, Bunting, Zukofsky, Davenport, Hill – formidably learned men who weave their reading through their writing, not always successfully or modestly but often with pleasure-giving resonance. In “Of Studies,” Bacon writes:

“Reading maketh a full man; conference [“consultation”] a ready man; and writing an exact man. And therefore, if a man write little, he had need have a great memory; if he confer [“consult”] little, he had need have a present wit [“quick, alert mind”]; and if he read little, he had need have much cunning, to seem to know that he doth not. Histories make men wise; poets witty [“Ingenious, full of ideas”]; the mathematics subtile; natural philosophy deep; moral grave [“serious, weighty”]; logic and rhetoric able to contend. `Abeunt studia in mores’ [`Studies affect our behaviour’: Ovid, Heroides, xv. 83; Promus, no. 1121.’] (glosses by Vickers)

Such confidence in human potential is breathtaking, and the opportunity to fulfill such potential has never been more convenient. Anyone with an internet connection can sit at the same table as the Renaissance humanists. Reading and learning have never been so collegial.

In preparation for writing an essay on Louis Zukofsky I’ve been slowly rereading the books of his I own – A, Complete Short Poetry, Collected Fiction and Bottom: On Shakespeare. In the final volume Zukofsky devotes pages 143-161 of the University of California Press edition to “tissues of quotations [from Bacon] held together by a thin thread of argument.” The entire book is like that, a modernist re-embodiment of the Renaissance ideal. I read the Bacon section Friday morning and was pleased to see Zukofsky had quoted the passage from Bacon’s “Of Beauty” I had cited in Friday’s post:

“There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.”

`The Slow Passion'

Trash collection is Thursday morning when I wheel our three bins, parked in the shade of the shed, to the street. It’s a dull pleasing ritual and gives me the chance to see who’s living this week beneath the plastic bins. Customary tenants include earthworms, pill bugs, snails, millipedes, centipedes and slugs. In “Of Beauty,” Francis Bacon rightly says: “There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion” (The Essays or Counsels Civil and Moral, 1625). We’re in the middle of a dry spell, mud turns to dust, and our strange moisture-loving fauna is scarce. A single earthworm retreated when I moved the yard-waste bin.

In an interview with Peter Makin in 1984, the year before his death, Basil Bunting said: “Suckling poets should be fed on Darwin till they are filled with the elegance of things seen or heard or touched.” I’ve just read Darwin’s final book, published the year before his death in 1882, The Formation of Vegetable Mould, Through the Action of Worms, With Observations on Their Habits. Darwin makes convincingly grand claims for Oligochaeta:

“The plough is one of the most ancient and most valuable of man’s inventions; but long before he existed the land was in fact regularly ploughed, and still continues to be thus ploughed by earth-worms. It may be doubted whether there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world, as have these lowly organised creatures.”

I already knew this but Darwin fills me with admiration for worms. When we see them foundering on the sidewalk after rain – a common sight in the Pacific Northwest -- they’ve moved aboveground to avoid drowning. I've resolved to rescue those marooned on concrete before sunlight dries them like beef jerky.

One worm, no snails – a disappointment. I still see the latter's glistening trails of snot in the morning but they've retreated in the absence of rain, hiding deeper in their moist realm. As compensation here’s Thom Gunn’s “Considering the Snail” (My Sad Captains, 1961):

“The snail pushes through a green
night, for the grass is heavy
with water and meets over
the bright path he makes, where rain
has darkened the earth’s dark. He
moves in a wood of desire,

“pale antlers barely stirring
as he hunts. I cannot tell
what power is at work, drenched there
with purpose, knowing nothing.
What is a snail’s fury? All
I think is that if later

“I parted the blades above
the tunnel and saw the thin
trail of broken white across
litter, I would never have
imagined the slow passion
to that deliberate progress.”

Gunn is appropriately respectful of a tough little beauty, but never mentions the shell, the obvious focus for most observers. Instead, memorably, he gives us “pale antlers” and “What is a snail’s fury?” Who ever thought a snail capable of fury and passion? Brian Vickers, editor of the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Bacon’s Major Works I'm reading includes a note to the passage cited above:

“Cicero, De inventione, II. i. 3: nature never makes `anything perfect and finished in every part…She bestows some advantage on one…but always joins it with some defect.’”

`To See What Is Really There'

An unexpectedly good haul from a customarily disappointing used-book store:

The Sonnets, a recent Penguin collection of Borges’ poems in that form, edited by Stephen Kessler. Spanish texts and English versions, some already familiar, by twelve translators, one hundred thirty-seven poems in all. Borges seems well served. Most of the translated sonnets stand as good poems in English. Here is Alistair Reid’s rendering of “Religio Medici, 1643” from In Praise of Darkness (Elogio de la Sombra, 1969):

“Save me, O Lord. (That I use a name for you
does not imply a Being. It’s just a word
from that vocabulary the tenuous use,
and that I use now, in an evening of panic.)
Save me from myself. Others have asked the same—
Montaigne, Sir Thomas Browne, an unknown Spaniard.
Something remains in me of these golden visions
That my fading eyesight can still recognize.
Save me, O Lord, from that impatient urge:
To yield myself to tombstones and oblivion.
Save me from facing all that I have been,
That person I have been irreparably.
Not from the sword-thrust or the bloodstained lance.
Save me, at least, from all those golden fictions.”

The second book is an old favorite I’ve never owned – The Peregrine by the English writer John [Alec] Baker, whom I’ve always known as J.A. Baker. The first edition appeared in 1967. This is a paperback reprint without a copyright date from the University of Idaho Press, originally priced at $9.95. I got it for $4.98. The painting on the cover, attributed to Robert Bateman, is cheesy and wrong – no craggy, snow-streaked mountains among the Essex estuaries Baker tramps. But I’m pleased finally to own a copy of Baker’s masterpiece, and the first sentence in its second section remains bracing:

“The hardest thing of all is to see what is really there.”

A short time before our visit to the bookstore I noted a passage in Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place dated Jan. 3, 1915. It was written at the painter’s home in Salem, Ohio, midway between Cleveland and Pittsburgh:

“How too often do nature-writers express themselves thru natural phenomena instead of describing these for their own sake. Thus we have `the melancholy days are come,’ the writer puts his own personal melancholy into otherwise joyful days. Viewed absolutely every aspect of nature in beautiful. But sentimentalists, who are suffering some mental aberration, speak of dull grey skies and sad rainy days and actually believe their own misconceptions.”

For the writers Burchfield dismisses, the world and everything in it is a collection of well-polished mirrors. Mary Oliver comes to mind. The passage Burchfield quotes – “the melancholy days are come” – is from “The Death of Flowers” by William Cullen Bryant, the Mary Oliver of his day.

`Motion is Life'

Absorbed in Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place and abstracted to another place entirely, only slowly did I hear the wind. Our living room window faces a house crowded by cedars four times as tall as the one-story residence. Roused by the low moan, I saw the shaggy boughs blown horizontal. The convergence of wind and trees is always a multimedia show worth watching and this was better than most. Pinecones hit the roof. Somewhere I heard wood slamming wood. Leaves and dust blew down the street, and a baby stroller on the neighbor’s porch fell over. All in brilliant sunlight, no clouds or rain, and over in ten minutes.

Burchfield (1893-1967) was a great painter and fellow northern Ohio native. Trees and flowers were his trademark subjects though he also painted urban and industrial scenes. Go here to see “September Wind and Rain” and here for “North Wind.” Burchfield was also an accomplished writer – in private. He kept a journal for more than half a century, totaling more than ten-thousand pages, and a generous selection edited by J. Benjamin Townsend was published in 1993 by the State University of New York Press. Here’s an appropriate and not unusual passage from Aug. 17, 1914, when another sort of wind was raking Europe. Burchfield writes:

“If all musical sounds were to be forever silenced – orchestras, bands, human voices, birds & insects – and I were allowed to retain one sound to cheer me, I would ask that the wind might play in the tree-tops. The wind! Motion is life. All is dead that stands still.”

Burchfield is a rare painter who suggests motion on canvas. Sometimes he does this with squiggles resembling a cartoonist’s agitrons. They animate his pictures. His representations of wind remind me of this passage in Geoffrey Hill’s The Triumph of Love, Section XI:

“On chance occasions –
And others have observed this – you can see the wind,
As it moves, barely a separate thing,
The inner wall, the cell, of an hourglass, humming
Vortices, bright particles in dissolution,
A roiling plug of sand picked up
As a small dancing funnel. It is how
The purest apprehension might appear
To take corporeal shape.”

Clams

From a reader in Texas comes a welcome reminder:

"Joseph Mitchell was born on July 27, 1908, near Iona, North Carolina. In August 1937 he placed third in a clam-eating tournament on Block Island by eating 84 cherrystone clams."

`As Charming, and As Absolute'

“The romantic goes to SoHo and tries to participate in artistic modalities that were trivialized years ago in Europe. The realist finds all he needs where he is.”

Guy Davenport’s offhand dismissal of artistic poseurs, the shaved-head-and-ugly-glasses crowd, is also a defense of his own artistic strategy. Born in South Carolina, he lived the final forty years of his life in Lexington, Ky., far from the camp followers of a moribund avant-garde, and became one of the essential American writers of his time.

I met him once, twenty years ago at his house on Sayre Avenue. He was neat, well-groomed and dressed as conservatively (and tastefully) as a Methodist minister. His house, despite the presence of thousands of books and paintings, was clean and orderly but not oppressively so – and no hint of bohemian squalor. “The Shakers invented space, beautifully long empty rooms full of light,” he wrote, and it reminds me of the second-floor room where he had me sit to look at his paintings.

The second sentence above, the last one in “Lenard Moore” (The Hunter Gracchus, 1996), is more interesting. In nine words he distils the artist’s situation. Writing is best treated as a sober realist’s enterprise. In his study of Stephen Crane, John Berryman says literature is a man alone in a room with the language. No special clothing, body adornments, politics or geography are required. Just look out the window – anywhere, in fact, but the mirror.

Davenport’s review of Moore’s Forever Home, a poetry collection published in 1992, addresses the poet’s rootedness in North Carolina’s tobacco country and his devotion to the poems of the Japanese master Matsuo Bashō. (“And yet art comes from art, as it is a thing made with skill.”) In the sentences preceding those quoted at the top of this post, Davenport writes:

“What Moore finds in his past is an education of the senses, a validation of his world. This may be the most valuable act we can perform: to make peace with the only fate reality has given us. The power of poetry is demonstrated by Lenard Moore’s learning from Bashō that the smell of honeysuckle and the prudent departure of quail from a field are experiences as charming, and as absolute, in Onslow County as in the prefecture of Kyoto.”

`Neatness of Finish!'

The day started with a Steller’s jay at the back door and both of us startled. I was still bleary from bed, he was preoccupied with breakfast, when our worlds collided. He flew to the fir, lit ten feet up the trunk and, I swear, put the side of his head to the deeply gnarled bark as though he were eavesdropping on the next room. He stared at me through the glass door, listening, and flew off.

The Steller’s jay lives only west of the Rockies. To an Easterner’s eyes he’s a bold exotic, iridescent black and blue, fierce-looking, impatient, quick. Our Eastern cognate is the blue jay, just as bold but smaller and less furtive. Marianne Moore would have known the blue jay, not his Western cousin. She visited Seattle in the summer of 1922 and spent two days exploring Nisqually Glacier on the southern slope of Mount Rainier, the highest mountain in Washington, about sixty miles from where I’m sitting. She returned the following summer and in 1924 published an early version of “An Octopus,” an early masterpiece. Moore is famous for tinkering with her already-published work, sometimes scrapping entire poems. Here’s a portion of “An Octopus” later discarded:

“`Calypso, the goat flower—
that greenish orchid fond of snow’—
anomalously nourished among shelving glacial ledges
where climbers have not gone or gone timidly,
the one resting his nerves while the others advanced,’
on this volcano with the bluejay, her principle companion.
`Hopping stiffly on sharp feet’ like miniature icehacks—
`secretive, with a look of wisdom and distinction, but a villain,
fond of human society and the crumbs that go with it.’”

We haven’t visited Mount Rainier but sometimes see it glowing on rare, sunlit afternoons. Its light seems not a reflection but to emanate from within, an effect almost vulgar in its grandiosity. “An Octopus” is not about the cephalopod but the mountain and its cap of ice and snow. She describes its ice-fields as possessing “unimagined beauty,” but blue jays today are described as “rare fall and winter visitors in Washington,” and I’ve never seen one since moving here. Did Moore, the most persnickety of poets, misidentify the Steller’s jay, purposely or through inadvertence? Near the end of the poem she writes:

“if one would `conquer the main peak of Mount Tacoma,’
this fossil flower concise without a shiver,
intact when it is cut.
damned for its sacrosanct remoteness—
like Henry James `damned by the public for decorum’;
not decorum, but restraint;
it is the love of doing hard things
that rebuffed and wore them out—a public out of sympathy with neatness.
Neatness of finish! Neatness of finish!
Relentless accuracy is the nature of this octopus
with its capacity for fact.”

`By Chums That Passed Away'

Dave Lull, as always, comes to my rescue. About Saturday’s post linking Sir Thomas Browne and Emily Dickinson he writes:

“Richard Sewall says in his biography of ED that `Emily's reading list (Keats, the Brownings, Ruskin, Browne, 'the Revelations') is as misleading, in what it says and what it omits, as anything in the letter. Ruskin and Browne seem to have been of minor importance to her; perhaps she mentioned them because Higginson did in his article.’ (The Life of Emily Dickinson (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1974), volume two, page 543).

“Alfred Habegger says in his biography of ED only this about Browne: `Of course, Dickinson threw dust in her advisor's eyes. There is little evidence that for 'Prose' she went to Ruskin or Thomas Browne . . . .’ (My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: the Life of Emily Dickinson (New York: Random House, 2001), page 456)

“But maybe Mr Sigler has evidence that these two biographers weren't aware of, or that came later than their books.”

I don’t have access to the appropriate scholarship but kinship not influence is of more interest to me – elective affinities among writers, acknowledged or not. Habegger takes his title from a poem Dickinson wrote during the Civil War, around 1862 when she was in her early thirties:

“My Wars are laid away in Books —
I have one Battle more —
A Foe whom I have never seen
But oft has scanned me o'er —
And hesitated me between
And others at my side,
But chose the best — Neglecting me — till
All the rest, have died —
How sweet if I am not forgot
By Chums that passed away —
Since Playmates at threescore and ten
Are such a scarcity —”

Imagine if Dickinson had written “Friends” for “Chums.” The affectionate informality of the latter is a perfect choice for use in a death-haunted poem. Etymologists trace chum (as in friend, not salmon) to the 1680s: “university slang, alternative spelling of cham, short for chamber(mate), typical of the late-17c. fondness for clipped words.” Browne (1605-1682) might have known the word. And of course his biographer, Samuel Johnson, was called The Great Cham, said to be a corruption of khan. In Samuel Johnson: The Struggle (2008) Jeffrey Meyers writes:

“Johnson’s paternal role permitted him to address his chums with familiar nicknames. He called Mrs. Thrale’s eldest daughter, Hester Maria, `Queeney’ (after the biblical Queen Esther); the writer Arthur Murphy was `Mur’; Garrick, `Davy’; Hawkins, `Hawky’; Langton, `Lanky’; Beauclerk, `Beau’; Frances Reynolds, `Renny’; Edmund Burke, `Mund’; Boswell, `Bozzy’; Goldsmith, `Goldy.’ The names Burney and Percy came ready-made. Yet no one dared to call Johnson `Sammy’ or `Johnny.’”

`A Friend Who Taught Me Immortality'

Bill Sigler tells me something I should have known but didn’t:

“Speaking of women poets, [Sir Thomas] Browne was the single biggest influence on Emily Dickinson. That's a fact, not a Sigler fact.”

Learning that those we admire admire others we admire is always a comfort, like introducing friends to friends and watching as they become friends. I’ve never read a biography of Dickinson though I often return to her poems. I’m content with their enigmas, some of the most satisfyingly mysterious in the language. In a letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson on April 26, 1862, she writes:

“You inquire my books. For poets, I have Keats, and Mr. and Mrs. Browning. For prose, Mr. Ruskin, Sir Thomas Browne, and the Revelations. I went to school, but in your manner of the phrase had no education. When a little girl, I had a friend who taught me Immortality; but venturing too near, himself, he never returned.”

I should have noticed the affinity long ago. After all, who wrote this stanza?:

“Sleep is a death; oh, make me try
By sleeping what it is to die,
And as gently lay my head
On my grave as now my bed!”

Dickinson in the same letter to Higginson writes:

“You speak of Mr. Whitman, I never read his book, but was told that it was disgraceful.”

Sometimes our friends remain unfriendly.

`Bright Books!'

In Owls Head, while searching through William Buckminster’s barn, Rosamond Purcell recounts finding a cache of books, mostly novels, rotting but still readable – He Went with Marco Polo, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, They Were Expendable, The Gay Bandit. The first was written by her great-aunt, Louise Andrews Kent, and Purcell remembers reading Thornton Wilder’s novel in eighth grade. She says she “remembers the flavors, if not the details” of these titles but has no wish to reread them:

“These days, I do not want to spend too much time with fiction; I already know too well how to speculate about things that did not happen and about people I have never met.”

Perhaps it’s a matter of getting older but I’ve begun to share Purcell’s disenchantment with most fiction. In my office, propped against the books on my shelves, are picture-postcards of four writers – Samuel Johnson, Anton Chekhov, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett. The latter three are known principally for stories and novels, and remain among the small number of fiction writers whose work I return to regularly. Though I love Rasselas, Johnson’s essays, poems and Lives of the Poets are what I reread most often.

Sometimes I think fiction is written principally for the young, though Proust and Henry James call for a certain seasoning to be properly appreciated. One has less patience with the arbitrary and has reached some rapprochement with how much our understanding of the world is already rooted in acceptable fictions. Who needs fiction about fiction? My tastes run to the real, which seems marvelous enough. Purcell’s wonderful book sent me back to Henry Vaughan’s “To His Books”:

“Bright books! the perspectives to our weak sights,
The clear projections of discerning lights,
Burning and shining thoughts, man's posthume day,
The track of fled souls, and their milkie way,
The dead alive and busie, the still voice
Of enlarged spirits, kind Heaven's white decoys!
Who lives with you lives like those knowing flowers,
Which in commerce with light spend all their hours;
Which shut to clouds, and shadows nicely shun,
But with glad haste unveil to kiss the sun.
Beneath you all is dark, and a dead night,
Which whoso lives in wants both health and sight.
By sucking you, the wise, like bees, do grow
Healing and rich, though this they do most slow,
Because most choicely; for as great a store
Have we of books as bees of herbs, or more:
And the great task to try, then know, the good,
To discern weeds, and judge of wholesome food,
Is a rare scant performance. For man dyes
Oft ere 'tis done, while the bee feeds and flyes.
But you were all choice flowers; all set and dressed
By old sage florists, who well knew the best;
And I amidst you all am turned a weed,
Not wanting knowledge, but for want of heed.
Then thank thyself, wild fool, that wouldst not be
Content to know — what was too much for thee!”

Vaughan seems to have valued “bright” as the highest of compliments. In “The Retreat” he gives us “Bright shoots of everlastingness,” and in “The World”:

“I saw Eternity the other night,
Like a great ring of pure and endless light,
All calm, as it was bright…”

“Bright books!” is the perfect invocation for a dedicated reader. Books, the good reliable ones, are luminous, shining even through the dimmest stretches of our lives.

`From Words to Worms to Stars'

Here is an early prose poem by Zbigniew Herbert, “Episode in a Library,” from Hermes, Dog and Star (1957), translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Peter Dale Scott:

“A blonde girl is bent over a poem. With a pencil sharp as a lancet she transfers the words to a blank page and changes them into strokes, accents, caesuras. The lament of a fallen poet now looks like a salamander eaten away by ants.

“When we carried him away under machine-gun fire, I believed that his still warm body would be resurrected in the word. Now as I watch the death of the words, I know there is no limit to decay. All that will be left after us in the black earth will be scattered syllables. Accents over nothingness and dust.”

Herbert begins with a portrait of reader-as-vivisectionist. This is how students are taught to read poems, scalpel in hand. The blonde girl betrays no sense of enjoyment. The poem is meat but not sustenance. She might as well be disassembling a clock. Herbert takes the next unhappy step. Even poems left undissected are not immune to “the fatal corruptions of time,” as Sir Thomas Browne puts it in Religio Medici. In the face of our vanity comes “nothingness and dust.”

Late in Owls Head, Rosamond Purcell describes her exploration of the three-story barn on the grounds of William Buckminster’s eleven-acre scrapyard in Maine. She finds a collapsed bookcase holding shelves of decaying volumes, rotten beyond reading:

“There must be some evidence of narrative inside these books. I get to work. The pages are delicate, sealed in clumps, with the hollows between webbed with chitinous shrouds. There is no way to penetrate the pages without destroying them. Inside is a story of organic processes unintended by any author. I peer into these transitional hollows where the elements have been traded – type for ash – and wherever such a translation occurs I search for some visible resolution of decay. I am examining this fulcrum of decrepitude as if it were a thing. Inside these small-scale caves I observe a process of dissolution that is going on, all the time, in the cosmos everywhere – from words to worms to stars.”

I like the quiet transition from “narrative” to “story.” We look for meaning and make it up where none can be found. What Purcell finds is not a thing but a process, an inexorable one, no respecter of human vanities, though all is not lost in the movement from “words to worms to stars.” Kay Ryan says “Tenderness and rot / share a border.”

`Coincidence of Forms'

“Convergence is a phenomenon that offers infinite entertainment to anyone amused by coincidence of forms.”

Driving somewhere with my parents – endless smoke-choked outings to nowhere – I noticed a log leaning across a fence at an angle of about thirty degrees. I commented that it reminded me of a cannon, an object much on my mind during the Civil War centennial. My mother snapped, “Does everything have to remind you of something else?”

Well, yes. Nothing is trivial or dull if it evokes something else as part of a “coincidence of forms.” That’s the sort of imagination I’m stuck with – associative not analytical, happy with metaphor. Each object and word is a midden of meaning, a fact at the heart of Rosmand Purcell’s art. The sentence quoted above is from her introduction to Bookworm (The Quantuck Lane Press, 2006), photographs of decaying books and their cousins-in-form, the layered collages she assembles in her studio. Purcell’s is an art of visual echoes across time and space. Their decay is part of her subject, and this lends them a wistful, Sebaldian melancholy. Here’s a passage I wish I had written from her Owls Head (2003):

“Blackboard chalk, like the White Cliffs of Dover, is composed of millions of fossilized microscopic shells, algae, and single-celled animals called foraminifera. Lime comes from these calcerous nano-fossils that died on shallow ocean floors, forming beds of chalk. Under metamorphic pressure, compacted sediments in salt and fresh water turn into shale and slate. When I was a child, we used to roller-skate down sidewalks made of processed lime, draw squares for hopscotch, and write with chalk on brick and slate. When we drew on brick with chalk we dragged the exoskeletons of tiny animals across the surface of baked mud. So when my teacher took up chalk to write on slate in order to convey symbolically ideas about the English language, she was pressing creatures from an ocean against the bottom of a lake.”

Even across geological epochs, life is a dance of recurrent forms to those with imagination to see it. A lesson in paleo-geology is a riff on morphing. Purcell describes how a museum curator grew irritated when she photographed a mastodon tooth with “eight pinnacled cusps” and compared it to a mountain range. “It’s a tooth,” he insisted. (Well, yes.) She writes:

“The scientist may always need to know what something is but I intend to show these things, in the words of the late Minor White, photographer and pundit, for what else they are.”

With that final phrase I thought immediately of a line in Marianne Moore’s “He `Digesteth Harde Yron’”: “The power of the visible / is the invisible.” (On the same page as the Minor White paraphrase, Purcell writes: “Metaphors, to some, are like evil weeds.”) Moore’s poems and prose begin with attentiveness, disciplined seeing and enumeration of precise detail but don’t stop there. Her imagination, too, is disciplined, like Purcell’s or a good scientist’s.

Purcell collaborated on three books with the late Stephen Jay Gould: Illuminations: A Bestiary, 1987; Finders, Keepers: Eight Collectors, 1992; Crossing Over: Where Art and Science Meet, 2000. In Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes: Further Reflections on Natural Science (1983), the paleontologist and evolutionary biologist includes an essay, “How the Zebra Gets Its Stripes,” which mentions Moore’s poem “The Monkeys” and examines the Scottish biologist D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, author of On Growth and Form (1917). I’ve written before about Thompson and how I learned of his work from Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era (1971). Here’s some of what Gould has to say:

“D’Arcy Thompson struggled to reduce diverse expressions to common generating patterns. He believed that the basic patterns themselves had a kind of Platonic immutability as ideal designs, and that the shapes of organisms could only include a set of constrained variations upon patterns. He developed a theory of `transformed coordinates’ to depict variations as expressions of a single pattern, stretched and distorted in various ways.”

The permeability of the wall separating science from art is undeniable. The best of both draw from a melding of observation and imagination. As Kenner writes in the chapter titled “Privacies”:

“And the chemists, the physicists, the biologists, were everywhere discovering a pattern-making faculty inherent in nature. Salt was crystalline, bubbles were vectorial equalibria, Marconi’s pulses patterned the very ether, D’Arcy Thompson in 1917 explained how the bird’s skeleton and the cantilever bridge utilize identical principles.”

`Fraying, Tattered, Cracked, Flattened, Swollen'

The most enjoyable new book (new to me: it was published in 2003) I’ve read in a long time – enjoyable because its author is intelligent, friendly and deeply interested in her subject – is Owls Head by Rosamond Purcell, a photographer who befriends William Buckminster, owner for more than half a century of an eleven-acre scrap yard in Owls Head, Maine. The book simultaneously chronicles Buckminster’s life, the culture of coastal Maine and Purcell’s slowly evolving relations with Buckminster. It is gently, unpretentiously philosophical, a meditation on mutability, nature and art. She writes:

“I spend most of my life surrounded by man-made objects. I am familiar with the surface of things. To find them embedded in the natural world was a newfound pleasure—still—I had never seen so much stuff to which so much had happened. Fraying, tattered, cracked, flattened, swollen, dried, scrawny, collapsed, shredded, peeling, torn, warped, weathered, faded, bristling, moldy, clenched, tangled, punctured, battered, bashed-in, scooped-out, withered, engorged, trampled, toppled, crushed, bald, listing, leaning, twisting, hanging, buried, wedged, impaled, straggling, stretched, disjointed, disembowelled, skinned, docked, gnawed, entrenched.”

Purcell isn’t transcribing a thesaurus. Her prose is precise and pared-down, and she never shows off. She’s replicating with words the myriad ways in which Buckminster’s countless tons of castoff objects (the book bears the Lucretian subtitle On the Nature of Lost Things) flourish in decay. Shocking to book lovers is a description of volumes, thousands of them, long buried under soil and junk, excavated by Purcell and a friend:

“I have gathered up books in all phases of decay . . . I find a poetry book unfurled to the rain. It has a clotted look, like wet wool, as words, letters and syllables swell. Some words are now elongated, some lines swung round ninety degrees.”

One is left with the impression not of neglect or vandalism but of a new art form, and Purcell in 2006 published Bookworm, which includes photos of decaying books recovered from Buckminster’s scrapyard. Buckminster is not an artist, not even a conceptual artist (thank God), and never claims to be one, nor does Purcell make such claims. Their partnership is, however, collaborative. (At one point she quotes Flann O’Brien’s The Dalkey Archive: “It’s easier to believe in something that’s not there.”) She is an artist in images and words, and sees the art in Buckminster’s lobster traps, mattresses, baby dolls and moldering books. She comes close to defining her project:

“And while I struggle step by step and in nonacademic language [praise be] to define what the concept of fetishism means to me as a person who repeatedly falls in love (for it feels like love to me) with the way things look, it will take the length of this book to explain the ways in which this love manifests itself.”

Purcell weaves such quietly revelatory moments through her narrative. When she speaks in her own voice, Purcell lends flesh and blood to philosophy and reclaims it for thoughtful, nonacademic people. The voice I most often hear echoing in her words is the narrator’s in Tristram Shandy. I’m not claiming influence or imitation. For all I know, Purcell has never read Sterne, but often I hear his comically scrupulous, confiding tone, as in Chapter VI of the novel’s first part:

“You must have a little patience. I have undertaken, you see, to write not only my life, but my opinions also; hoping and expecting that your knowledge of my character, and of what kind of a mortal I am, by the one, would give you a better relish for the other: As you proceed further with me, the slight acquaintance which is now beginning betwixt us, will grow into familiarity; and that, unless one of us is in fault, will terminate in friendship…Therefore, my dear friend and companion, if you should think me somewhat sparing of my narrative on my first setting out,-bear with me,-and let me go on, and tell my story my own way:--or if I should seem now and then to trifle upon the road,--or should sometimes put on a fool's cap with a bell to it, for a moment or two as we pass along,--don't fly off,-but rather courteously give me credit for a little more wisdom than appears upon my outside;-and as we jogg on, either laugh with me, or at me, or in short, do any thing,--only keep your temper.”

`Another Waits for Manna'

A fortuitous convergence of books from the library:

Owls Head by the photographer Rosamond Purcell (The Quantuck Lane Press, 2003), is a portrait of William Buckminster, an eccentric collector/junkyard proprietor in Owls Head, Maine. What attracted me was the compactness of the volume among all the swollen photography books flanking it (770.92 PUR) and the elegance of the typeface on the pale-gray spine. A blurb on the back from Lawrence Weschler helped too. I’ve only just started reading it but was sucked in further by the epigraph for “Breaking Ground,” the first chapter:

“Don, lo cauecs vos ahura,
Que tals bad’en la peintura Qu’atre n’espera la mana.”
[Sir, the owl warns you:
This one gapes at the painting, another waits for manna.]
--Marcabru, L’autrier jost’ una sebissa
(troubadour pastorela, twelfth century)”

The other book is Food and Feasting in Art (The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2006) by Silvia Malaguzzi (translated by Brian Phillips), another small volume dwarfed by its surroundings (704.949641 MAL). I enjoy art books arranged by theme and this is a gem – generously illustrated chapters devoted to beef, artichokes, legumes, beer and melons. The one on bread (I had already noted Marcabru’s mention of manna) is especially good, much devoted to the obvious religious connection, with paintings by Giotto, Dieric Bouts the Elder, Gerard David, Vermeer, Gennari and Lubin Baugin, but the centerpiece is by an unknown Florentine artist:

“The Flour Bolter of Francesco Ridolfi, called Il Rifiorito, 1653, Florence, Accademia della Crusca [Academy of Bran].”

This is a rare case of a reproduction of a painting of food – roast beef on a hard roll? – rendered toothsome enough to stimulate salivation at three removes. Malaguzzi glosses the picture like this:

“This is among the works commissioned by the Accademia della Crusca in the 17th and 18th centuries. By tradition, each academician chose a nickname associated with flour, breadmaking, or the uses of bread.”

And this:

“The bread shown here is linked to the custom of using the soft part of bread for polishing intricate metalwork. The quote at the top is from Dante: `That his proficiency may be displayed’ [Paradiso, Canto XXV].”

Manna, like bread, is a metaphor for all sustenance, culinary and spiritual, body and soul. In the Marcabru fragment, one awaits art, the other food, jointly necessary for sustaining human life. In his essay “Carasau Bread” (The Perfect Egg and Other Secrets, 2005), the late Aldo Buzzi tells an uncomprehending Italian master-baker: “You see, bread is a topic of universal interest.” Zbigniew Herbert wouldn’t argue. In his poems and essays the Pole associates bread with the fundamentals of our existence. In “An Answer” (Elegy for the Departure, translated by John and Bogdana Carpenter, 1999), he writes:

“this will be night after hard reality
a conspiracy of the imagination
it has a taste of bread and lightness of vodka
but the choice to remain here
is confirmed by every dream about palm trees”

`Exuberance of Knowledge'

Seldom have I meditated so long on a paragraph drawn, after all, merely from a book review. In the Nov. 15, 1941, issue of The Nation, Marianne Moore reviewed Poems and New Poems by Louise Bogan, who was already a decade into her thirty-eight-year tenure as poetry editor for The New Yorker. The review, “Compactness Compacted,” is collected in Predilections (1955). Here is Moore’s final paragraph:

“Those who have seemed to know most about eternity feel that this side of eternity is a small part of life. We are told, if we do wrong that grace may abound, it does not abound. We need not be told that life is never going to be free from trouble and that there are no substitutes for the dead; but it is a fact as well as a mystery that weakness is power, that handicap is proficiency, that the scar is a credential, that indignation is no adversary for gratitude, or heroism for joy. There are medicines.”

This reminds me of nothing so much as the prose of Sir Thomas Browne, an association strengthened by Moore’s mention two paragraphs earlier of “a certain residual, securely equated seventeenth-century firmness” in Bogan’s verse. Browne’s prose, like Moore’s, is pleasingly rich, sonorous, witty and gnomic, and for those reasons I love it even when meaning exceeds understanding. The failing is mine not the writer’s.

In her Paris Review interview in 1960, Donald Hall asks Moore about the influence of prose stylists on her work. She acknowledges and cites passages (in the process composing a sort of spontaneous commonplace book) from Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, Francis Bacon, Benvenuto Cellini. Julius Caesar, Xenophon, Henry James, Ezra Pound – and Browne:

“`States are not governed by Ergotisms.’ He calls a bee `that industrious flie,’ and his home his `hive.’”

The first citation she takes from Christian Morals, Part 2, Section IV:

“Natural parts and good Judgments rule the World. States are not governed by Ergotisms. Many have Ruled well who could not perhaps define a Commonwealth, and they who understand not the Globe of the Earth command a great part of it. Where natural Logick prevails not, Artificial too often faileth.”

The “flie” reference is drawn from a bit of verse Browne incorporates into Religio Medici, Part 1, Section XIII:

“Thus shall my humble feathers safely hover,
And though neere earth, more then the heavens discover.
And then at last, when holmeward I shall drive
Rich with the spoyles of nature to my hive,
There will I sit, like that industrious flye,
Buzzing thy prayses, which shall never die
Till death abrupts them, and succeeding glory
Bid me goe on in a more lasting story.”

In his life of Browne, Dr. Johnson complains that the “exuberance of knowledge, and plentitude of ideas sometimes obstruct the tendency of his reasoning, and the clearness of his decisions…” Johnson here is a fuddy-duddy. It’s not Browne’s “exuberance of knowledge” (a wonderful thought) or “plenitude of ideas” that sometimes fail him but the limits of sixteenth-century medical and scientific learning. We don’t, however, read Browne in lieu of the Merck Manual.

Johnson describes Browne’s style as “vigorous, but rugged; it is learned, but pedantick; it is deep, but obscure; it strikes, but does not please; it commands, but does not allure…” But Johnson precisely describes Browne’s allure, which I find always pleasing, and Moore’s. In the penultimate paragraph of her Bogan review Moore writes:

“For mortal rage and immortal injury, are there or are there not medicines? Job and Hamlet insisted that we dare not let ourselves be snared into hating hatefulness; to do this would be to take our own lives. Harmed, let us say, through our generosity—if we consent to have pity on our illusions and others’ absence of illusion, to condone the fact that `no fine body ever can be meat and drink to anyone’—is it true that pain will exchange its role and become servant instead of master? Or is it merely a conveniently expunged superstition?”

`The Seasoning Without the Roast'

With an easy conscience I no longer make an effort to “keep up.” When I look at new poems, electronically or in print, almost invariably I’m bored after a line or two, and I can’t remember the last time I read a newly published piece of short fiction – not in this millennium, almost certainly. My literary center of gravity teeters around 1972 (if not 1922, 1851 or 1781). Boredom isn’t quite the right word because that implies effort at engagement – by reader, by writer – some unspoken compact between us.

When I look at a poem like this, it feels as though I’m gazing at random numbers or words written with an alphabet I don’t recognize. Grammarless, unmusical, dry, pulseless, almost verbless, it’s stillborn. A psychologist might say the poem displays a “blunted affect.” It has no chance to be memorable because anyone might have written it, and the guy who did is more interested in posing, in making a gesture toward a poem, than actually doing the difficult work of writing one (few things are more difficult). The author’s contempt for readers is palpable.

This state is peculiar because by nature I’m an enthusiast. I like to be pleased and enjoy myself, and have never shared the modern taste for camp – that is, indulgent pleasure in work so bad it’s “good.” That, I suspect, is an adolescent enjoyment, richly self-righteous, no longer available to me. In his chapter on Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Clive James writes in Cultural Amnesia (2007):

“A good writer of prose always writes to poetic standards. (One of the marks of poetry in modern times is that the advent of free verse opened the way for poets who could not write to prose standards, but that’s another issue.)”

What are “poetic standards?” Musicality, precision, concision, verbal éclat even in understatement, absence of pretension. I like J.V. Cunningham’s definition in “Poetry, Structure, and Tradition” (The Collected Essays of J.V. Cunningham, 1976):

“I mean by poetry what everyone means by it when he is not in an exalted mood, when he is not being a critic, a visionary, or a philosopher. I mean by poetry what a man means when he goes to a bookstore to buy a book of poems as a graduation gift, or when he is commissioned by a publisher to do an anthology of sixteenth-century poems. Poetry is what looks like poetry, what sounds like poetry. It is metrical composition.”

The poetic gift is rare, the one I envy most. Our age mistakes art for a democracy. Anybody can write a poem but it doesn’t logically follow that anyone can, or will, read it. Poetry, like all art, is not fair. In his chapter on Eugenio Montale, surely among the last century’s essential poets, James writes:

“In any kind of bad art, it is when the gift is gone that the experiment really does take over – the eternally cold experiment that promises to make gold out of lead, and bricks without straw. Leaving coldness aside (and we should leave it aside, because barren artistic experimentation can also be done in a white-hot frenzy), it might be useful to mention that Montale, in another essay, came up with the perfect term for a work of art that had no other subject except its own technique. He called it the seasoning without the roast.”

`A Flash of Splendour'

While writing an essay on Marianne Moore I remembered a poem by David Ferry, “Poems of Marianne Moore,” collected in Of No Country I Know (1999):

i

“Let her look at a stone:
The stone becomes an apple,
The apple of her eye.

Nor is it the only stone:
Her eye becomes a hand
To hold the apple up,

Gently for the mind,
Which is the truest eye,
Kindly to look upon.”

ii

“To squeeze from a stone its juice,
And find how sweet it is,
Is her art’s happiness.”

Ferry compactly, almost fable-fashion, describes Moore’s art and sensibility. Like a good painter or botanist, her vision is acute, bolstered by discipline, attentiveness and imagination. Moore sees more than most of us, and what she sees she loves as a gift of creation – “The apple of her eye.” The eye is the mind’s hand and we contemplate the world’s apples with this “truest eye,” the limber, receptive mind.

Ferry plays with the proverb/cliché “You can’t squeeze blood from a stone.” Moore squeezes, instead, its sweetness – its rightness and beauty. This is happiness and I place Moore among the happy poets, a celebrator ready with gratitude. In another poem, “Rereading Old Writing,” Ferry, a less sunny but hardly gloomy writer, says “writing / Is a way of being happy.” In a letter of consolation and encouragement she wrote in 1952 to a friend (and childhood friend of T.S. Eliot), the artist Edward McKnight Kauffer, Moore says:

“…there is a flash of splendour [the apple] apart from the pretext [the stone]; and when a thing snares the imagination, it is because of a secret excitement which contributes something private – an incontrovertible to admire afresh at each sight, like the bloom and tones of a grape or the glitter of Orion as one emerges into the dark from the ordinariness of lamplight.”

`Good and Full of Error'

From Hermes, Dog and Star (1957), a prose poem by Zbigniew Herbert, “Painter” (translated by Alissa Valles):

“Under walls white as a birch forest grow the ferns of paintings. Amid smells of turpentine and oils Miron reconstructs the drama of a lemon condemned to share its life with green drapes. There’s also a female nude.

“—My fiancée – Miron says. – She posed for me during the occupation. It was a winter without bread and coal. Under her white skin blood collected in blue spots. Then I painted a warm rosy background.”

For as long as I can remember my brother, mr. ken kurp, has been painting, drawing, clipping and pasting, assembling collages and writing non-sequitur titles to accompany them. Most of his pictures at least made me smile, whether out of enjoyment, amusement or politeness. It’s hard not to when Baudelaire and a ’62 Buick share “a warm rosy background,” with a nude thrown in for the hell of it. Ken works in his basement and garage, on weekends and after his day job at Walken Frame and Art in Cleveland, which he owns with Walter Waskawicz (Wal + Ken = Walken).

Ken’s first show, “Not Now We Are Busy,” opens Friday at his shop with a reception featuring “free hot dogs and green jello.” Ken has framed forty-five works dating from the last two years, including three portraits of states (Mississippi, Missouri and Massachusetts), three works devoted to the Nazi invasion of Poland and another sequence of three titled “People Holding Things in Their Right Hands and Looking to the Left.”

“There’s no big theme,” Ken told me. “The pictures are little glimpses, a journal, a commonplace book. Isn’t that what you call it?” Asked about the show’s title, “Not Now We Are Busy,” he said:

“That’s my life in the last ten years or so. People imposing. It’s not life imposing, because that’s not possible. It’s the invasion of personal freedom, the way we’re losing little pieces of our freedom all the time.”

Ken has based a number of paintings on poems by a writer we both admire, Zbigniew Herbert, though none is included in the show. One I remember from about three years ago was inspired by “In the Studio,” which includes these stanzas:

“When God built the world
he wrinkled his forehead
calculated and calculated
hence the world is perfect
and impossible to live in

“on the other hand
a painter’s world
is good
and full of error
the eye strolls
from spot to spot
from fruit to fruit”

As Ken talked about the unseen, unacknowledged erosion of personal freedom and how it relates to his work, I thought of a passage from an essay in Herbert’s Still Life with a Bridle, “The Nonheroic Subject”:

“Freedom – so many treatises were written about it that it became a pale, abstract concept. But for the Dutch it was something as simple as breathing, looking, and touching objects. It did not need to be defined or beautified. This is why there is no division in their art between what is great and what is small, what is important and unimportant, elevated and ordinary. They painted apples and the portraits of fabric shopkeepers, pewter plates and tulips, with such patience and such love that the images of other worlds and noisy tales about earthly triumphs fade in comparison.”

`Still the Firmament It Proves'

On the walk from city park to parking lot we passed a derelict house with a dense carpet of moss on the roof and an impressively overgrown yard. A light burned by the front door and someone had aligned seven paper coffee cups on the porch but the lawn had reverted to prairie. I thought of France as described by the Duke of Burgundy in Henry V --

“Wanting the scythe, all uncorrected, rank,
Conceives by idleness and nothing teems
But hateful docks, rough thistles, kecksies, burs,
Losing both beauty and utility…”

-- though beauty and utility were not lost in this green profusion. In three minutes the boys and I picked eight species of wildflower, including two types of daisy and a delicately pink wild rose. We could have added mullein but that would have destroyed the velvety plant, and we could have picked thistles but that would have hurt. The latter were tall, spiky and purple-flowered, and my wife had no objections to a mullein-free, thistle-free, cost-free bouquet, now in a vase on the kitchen counter. The next morning I had this message from a reader in New Hampshire:

“We have big old plants of `golf-ball thistles’ -- have you ever seen one of these odd-looking plants? The golf-balls are coming into bloom now (early, as everything here is this year) & the bees are all over them. I've seen as many as six on a single circular bloom.”

The name “golf-ball thistles” is new to my lexicon of floral folk names. (My lucky reader may be referring to this.) Like much in nature, thistles mingle beauty and the possibility of pain – lure the bee, repel the cow. Lazily, I think of all thistles as Scottish thistles, an impression reinforced by my reading of Hugh MacDiarmid’s A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, written largely in Scots and published in 1926. (Read portions of it here.) The edition I’m using is a pleasure to look at and hold, edited by John C. Weston and published by the University of Massachusetts Press in 1971. It’s also a pleasure to read, as Weston provides good notes and marginal glosses for most Scots words. He helps make sense of a poem that I might otherwise be forced to read in paraphrase or translation.

The title describes the literal setting and action of the poem: On a moonlit night a drunken man leaves a tavern and on the way home falls on a hillside and contemplates a thistle. He “graipples” with it. Weston writes:

“…the thistle represents not only the traditional Scotland or Scotsmen, but in MacDiarmid’s private symbolism, the divided nature of himself, the Scot, and of all mankind, a division which must be exploited, engaged, harmonized. The blossoms represent, like the moon toward which they extend, our spiritual, idealistic, romantic aspirations; the roots, our animal and fleshly ties; the disorderly growth of foliage and thorns between represents the contradictory elements of life…”

This is vaguely accurate but heavy-handed and programmatic, and ignores the humor and beauty of MacDiarmid’s poem, and though I don’t always understand what I’m reading I’m enjoying it. MacDiarmid’s drunk on the hillside occasionally reminds me of one of Beckett’s little men, human detritus with the Celtic comic gift. For sublimity, take this:

“How can I graipple wi the thistle syne,
Be intricate as it and up to aa it moves?
Aa airts its sheenan points are loupon yont me,
Quhile still the firmament it proves.”

A little glossing: syne is “since” or “then”; aa, “all”; airts, “ways”; sheenan, “shining”; loupon, “leaping”; quhile, “while.” In short, there’s something of heaven in a wildflower.

`He Tended to Speak Personally and Individually'

When my wife called Monday morning to tell me of Harvey Pekar’s death I was seated in the bleachers of the Bellevue Aquatic Center, reading John Williams’ anthology English Renaissance Poetry (1963) while my ten-year-old was swimming laps in the pool. News of death is always inconvenient and often undignified. I fear I’ll forever link the stench of chlorine with the death of Harvey and yet another piece of my spent youth, but Williams’ selection offers what I hope will prove happier, longer-lasting associations. Take “On the Life of Man” by Sir Walter Ralegh:

“What is our life? a play of passion,
Our mirth the musicke of division,
Our mothers wombes the tyring houses be,
When we are drest for this short Comedy,
Heaven the Judicious sharpe spector is,
That sits and markes still who doth act amisse,
Our graves that hide us from the searching Sun,
Are like drawne curtaynes when the play is done,
Thus march we playing to our latest rest,
Onely we dye in earnest, that's no Jest.”

“Musicke of division” refers to the entr’acte, music performed between the acts of a play. The association with Harvey, a longtime jazz fan and occasional critic, is pleasing. In his liner notes for the CD reissue of Gerry Mulligan-Paul Desmond Quartet in 1993, Harvey writes of Desmond (and he might be describing some of his own work):

“He had a small, pretty, vibratoless tone; an excellent upper register; and at his best an inventive, lyrical, improvisatory instinct.”

“Tyring houses” are another convention of the Elizabethan stage – the “attiring house” where actors dressed before a performance. The best parts of the film American Splendor are the “real” Harvey’s un-Hollywood-like, comically kvetching appearances. He was a natural actor when not acting. “Spector” is “spectator” with a suggestion of “spectre.” “Still” is “always” and “latest” is “last.”

In his brief introduction to Ralegh’s work, Williams (author of Stoner) provides a sort of epitaph for the poet that might likewise serve as Harvey’s:

“…he tended to speak personally and individually. Laconic, bitter, and defiant, his voice is one that strangely intimates the enigmatic loneliness of his life.”

Harvey Pekar R.I.P

I’m saddened to learn of the death today of Harvey Pekar, age seventy, author for thirty-four years of the comic book American Splendor, subtitled “From Off the Streets of Cleveland.” The best of his work was mordantly funny and true to the unglamorous working-class spirit of our home town. I met him once, at the home of my friend Gary Dumm, a comic artist and longtime Pekar collaborator. It was 1975 and plans for the first issue of American Splendor were still in the works.

In front of me is issue #6 of American Splendor, published in 1981. The first story, “Ripoff Chick,” was written by Pekar with art by Gary and another artist, Greg Budgett. In the final panel, Pekar says:

“Yeah, I know. It was sordid, it was disgusting. I got involved with Carla because I was goin’ crazy from loneliness, so I traded one kinda bad for another, knowing pretty much what I was doing, but doing it anyway. If I had to do it over again under the same circumstances, I probably would.”

ADDENDUM: After I sent my condolences to Gary Dumm he replied with the draft of a Facebook entry that proved too long for publication. Here's Gary unedited statement:

"As irascible and curmudgeonly as Harvey might have truthfully appeared in the pages of American Splendor and certainly somewhat in his daily life NOT recorded there, I can only say that in 30 plus years of knowing and dealing with him there was much more. He was, first of all, without fail a generous and helpful friend to me, whenever possible finding work that I could do either with him or not. Our working together at first was somewhat cautious, as Greg Budgett and I found that Harvey knew what he wanted and that was ALL that he wanted - we'd sometimes `deviate' particularly pictorially from Harvey's vision. But we hit a rhythm and an understanding, and that's why I'm proud to say that my art brought Harvey and his stories to life in almost every issue of American Splendor published. I `got' Harvey early on, realizing and appreciating that his quasi-reportorial writings about his life was almost zen in approach (although that appraisal Harvey would only laugh off). And so American Splendor became an integral part of my artistic life. I am so sorry for his passing, especially for his wife Joyce and daughter Danielle. We have lost a great talent, but they have lost so much more. Laura's and my thoughts are with them. I will miss talking with him and even hearing him kvetch about whatever: editors, publishers etc. So long, Harvey...like a Chekhov from Cleveland, some episodes and memories of you are there for the ages to read. I know that I'll never forget you."

`Make It Fit for Me to Say Much'

David Myers has posted thirteen epigrams he published twenty-five years ago with R.L. Barth. All are admirably concise, some amusing, others touching. Among the latter is “Dr. Johnson on the Death of His Mother,” with the accompanying reference, “Idler, 41” – that is, the essay Johnson published in The Idler on Jan. 27, 1759, six days after the death of Sarah Johnson at age ninety. Here’s Myers' poem:

“If you have tears, whoever you may be,
Enough to drop for mourners filing by,
Then let this train be your last cause for grief:
The last steps of an inoffensive life.”

The essay is remarkable for its calm philosophical gaze in the midst of overwhelming grief. Self-pity is absent. This is the Johnson who reliably inspires us as readers and fellow human beings. Myers' poem recalls this sentence from Johnson’s essay:

“The blameless life, the artless tenderness, the pious simplicity, the modest resignation, the patient sickness, and the quiet death, are remembered only to add value to the loss, to aggravate regret for what cannot be amended, to deepen sorrow for what cannot be recalled.”

A quiet, dignified tribute without straining after sentiment or significance, in which common words express deep feeling without getting in its way. In the ten days between learning of his mother’s illness and hearing of her death, Johnson wrote her four letters. Of them, John Wain in his biography writes:

“All these letters have been quoted and reproduced innumerable times, and could well be reproduced again now, but that they are so personal, so agonized, that it seems an intrusion to set them up in cold print for any casual eye to read.”

Wain reproduces one, the last (Boswell began including all four in the third edition of his Life), which begins: “Neither your condition nor your character make it fit for me to say much.” All involved -- Johnson, Wain, Myers -- are heroically tactful in their reticence.

Boswell reminds us he spoke with William Strahan, the printer for Johnson’s The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, composed in one week in the immediate wake of his mother’s death. Johnson, Boswell reports, wrote it to “defray the expense of his mother’s funeral, and pay some little debts she had left.” In Rasselas he writes:

“...in the decline of life shame and grief are of short duration; whether it be that we bear easily what we have borne long; or that, finding ourselves in age less regarded, we less regard others; or, that we look with slight regard upon afflictions to which we know that the hand of death is about to put an end.”

Johnson, the most quintessentially human of writers, was no blockhead.

`The Small Change of Real Knowledge'

I was reading the J.F. Powers story “The Devil Was the Joker” in the lobby of the YMCA while my seven-year-old was running around somewhere, when I overheard the conversation of two men sitting across from me. One was about forty and white-haired but boyish, wearing black gym shorts and a white T-shirt with a wolf on the front. I started paying attention when he mentioned attending AA meetings, his recent divorce and losing his job with a landscaping company. His friend was the same age, Hispanic and more affable, with a ponytail and thinning hair in front. I started taking notes:

Wolf: “I’m reading this book, man. Eckhart Tolle.”

Ponytail: “I heard of that somewhere.”

W: “You ought to read it. It helped me a lot.”

P: “I’m reading the third Frankenstein. Dean Koontz.”

W: “Where did that take place?”

P: “The old country.”

W: “Like Europe?”

P: “Yeah. I guess.”

W: “What’s his ideology?”

P: “What?”

W: “His ideology. His principles.”

P: “I don’t know. Victor was in biology. In the school the first thing he brought back to life was a frog. The second was a dog. Then he figured if he could reanimate a dog and a frog he could do a human.”

W: “It’s amazing, man, what people think is possible. What’s the original writer who did the Frankenstein book?”

P: “I don’t know. Mary something?”

W: “Poppins?”

P: “No, man. Some woman.”

W: “I dig Carlos Castaneda, that kind of spiritual stuff.”

Ponytail, after looking at the cover of his friend’s paperback: “You’re not a Oprah Book Club member, are you?”

W: “Aw, man, gimme a break. I gotta have a talk with the guy who gave it to me.”

P: “Who’s that?”

W: “The shelter manager.”

Powers’ story deals with two travelling men in the upper Midwest during the Korean War. The older, Mr. McMaster, sells magazine subscriptions and raises funds for the Clementine Fathers. He takes on a failed seminarian, Myles Flynn, as a sort of apprentice. It’s a grimly funny story about swapping stories, real and imaginary, fact and fiction. Powers writes:

“They were getting along very well, different as they were. Mac was a good travelling companion, ready wherever they went with a little quick information about the towns (`Good for business,’ `All Swedes,’ `Wide open’), the small change of real knowledge.”

`The Last Tenth is Indispensable'

“9/10ths of the books you read are an absolute waste of time – the last tenth is indispensable. But only after the event – You cannot foresee which ones they are. It’s hit and miss.”

“After the event” – that is, after much experience honing taste and critical faculties. We can think of a serious reading life as roughly triangular, moving from base to apex. When young we read broadly, indiscriminately, obeying impulse, disdaining authority. Literally, we don’t know any better – James Baldwin, Tolkien, Steinbeck, Edgar Rice and William Burroughs, Camus, Allen Ginsberg, Pearl Buck, everything Hoovered into the goatish maw. Embarrassing but inevitable. Who is gifted from youth with taste and discernment?

By the time we mature as readers, the proportions reverse: Nine-tenths of what we read is indispensable because we have learned what to disdain and what sustains. We spend more time rereading. The passage above is from the second volume of Paul Valéry’s Cahiers/Notebooks (2000). When he wrote it in 1942, Valéry was age seventy-four, three years from death.

`Virgil Might Have Known Those'

“Nothing too much but everything a little bit – this describes the classic diet. One needs a bit of Wittgenstein to balance all that Hegel, a dash of Chekhov to counter Dostoevsky, and some Sterne to maintain one’s sanity after a series of unscheduled encounters with Sir Walter Scott. It is a blessed variety, like that of a blooming garden: so many ways to grow, to be fruitful, to captivate, to soothe, and to be beautiful.”

The profusion of metaphor betrays him: That’s William H. Gass in “To a Young Friend Charged with Possession of the Classics” (The Temple of Texts: Essays, 2006). I admire and share Gass’ omnivorousness. Sample something of everything at the literary buffet. That’s how we train our palates to discern the piquant from the bland. To pick up Gass’ other metaphor: Reading is seeding, weeding and feeding. A New Yorker among my readers who summers in New Hampshire writes:

“Can't garden, so this is a good time to send the Virgil -- from his Of Bees, translated by T.F. Royds. Two summers ago up here I was under a great deal of family stress. I discovered this in a charming little anthology. I learned it by heart, & saying it over at night & resting & watching bees at work a lot helped get me through a bad patch.”

Here’s the passage she sent:

“The bees of Cerops, each in office meet.
The old have town to keep and comb to fence
And daedal chambers to construct; the young
Fly homeward late and weary, heavy-breeched
With thyme; on arbutus they also feed,
Grey willow, ruddy crocus, cassia,
And sumptuous lime and umber hyacinth.

“One rest is set for all, one time of toil:
At dawn they hasten out, none loiter then;
Again when eve has warned them to depart
From meadow-pasture, then is shelter sought,
The body's wants supplied, buzzings begin,
And murmured vespers ring round porch and door.
After, when chambers have them safe at rest,

“Silence attends them into night, and sleep,
The sleep they love, broods o'er their tired limbs.
They go not, when rain threatens, far afield,
Nor trust the sky when East grows boisterous,
But, courting safety 'neath the city walls,
Sip water there and make short journeys thence;
And oft, like yachts which cheat the unsteady wave
By ballasting with sand, they lift small stones
To poise them through the unsubstantial cloud.”

I love “heavy-breeched / With Thyme” and the catalog of flowers favored by bees, and understand why my reader found the passage soothing at a difficult time. She adds:

“Could anything be more charming? We have a little thyme-terrace here, so they can take their fill -- and beebalm, which Virgil didn't know about. On foxgloves they also feed -- Virgil might have known those.”

The notion that poems console would have gone unquestioned by our grandparents, assuming they could read. Sophisticates snort at the idea but if literature is more than a sterile game, an arrangement of “signs” signifying nothing, it must be suffused with the world. Are Virgil’s bees models of industry and prudence? Of course, and they’re beautiful and beautifully rendered in Royd’s translation. Even Gass, purportedly the arch-postmodernist, has bragged of his story “Emma Enters a Line of Elizabeth Bishop’s” (Cartesian Sonata and Other Novellas, 1998): “I managed to cram the names of 110 weeds into one paragraph.”

[Gass, who turns eighty-six on July 30, has just published an essay, “Retrospective,” in Triquarterly, from which the weed quote is taken. Warning: Edgar “Allen” Poe’s name is misspelled -- a lesson I learned from Guy Davenport.]

`Solitary, Silent, Compellingly Warm'

“If you want to set out on a journey let it be long
wandering that seems to have no aim groping your way blindly
so you learn the roughness of the earth not only with your eye but by touch
so you confront the world with your whole skin”

A metaphor for life and writing. Ironclad itineraries stifle and turn exploration into paint-by-number painting, an empty ritual. The driver racing across the continent, eating fast food and peeing in a bottle, sees nothing, learns nothing, goes to sleep at his destination the same person he was 2,700 miles earlier. When I start writing a paragraph I’m cheered by not knowing how it will end. If I knew I probably wouldn’t write the first word.

“Discover the insignificance of speech the royal power of gesture
uselessness of concepts the purity of vowels
with which everything can be expressed sorrow joy rapture anger
but do not hold anger
accept everything”

In "Legacies of Mr Cogito," an article about Zbigniew Herbert she published in 2008 in the Times Literary Supplement, Cynthia Haven writes: “Jozefa Hennelowa wrote in the pages of Tygodnik Powszechny that `Zbyszek's sense of humour was as dark as the era’, but at the same time he was calm and unyielding. Although he was penniless and not allowed to publish until the thaw of 1956, nevertheless he persisted as if there were no such circumstances - or rather, as if they did not have any importance. Hennelowa remembered him as solitary, silent, compellingly warm, but always with a touch of distance and irony.”

“So if it is to be a journey let it be long
a true journey from which you do not return
the repetition of the world elementary journey
conversation with the elements question without answers
a pact forced after struggle
great reconciliation”

On my long journey, readers and writers like the blessedly named Haven, an enthusiast of essential poets like Herbert and Anthony Hecht (who dedicated a poem to the Pole, “The Hunt,” in Millions of Strange Shadows), are precious and rare. In an e-mail she writes: “I need a separate room, where my double sits reading and does not look up.”

[The lines quoted above are stanzas one, five and seven from Zbigniew Herbert’s “A Journey,” translated by John and Bogdana Carpenter in Elegy for the Departure, 1999.]

`I Became a Tree, Part of That Bare Spinney'

In less than twelve hours I encountered the word “spinney” in a story by Peter Taylor (“The Old Forest”) and another by Guy Davenport (“The Owl of Minerva”). Of course, now I see it everywhere. It’s a curious word, pleasant to say, a noun that sounds like an adjective meaning “spine-covered,” which isn’t far off. It’s from the Latin spina, “thorn,” but since Shakespeare’s time has come to mean a small wood dense with undergrowth, an overgrown copse. I picture poplars, lindens or black locusts with dense thickets of blackberry beneath them. William Cowper, author of “The Poplar-Field,” writes in a March 19, 1785, letter to his friend and hymn-writing colleague the Rev. John Newton:

“One of our most favourite walks is spoiled. The spinney is cut down to the stumps: even the lilacs and syringas, to the stumps [the repetition is plangent and vaguely comic, a Cowper trademark]. Little did I think, (though indeed I might have thought it,) that the trees which skreened [sic] me from the sun last summer would this winter be employed in roasting potatoes and boiling tea-kettles for the poor of Olney. But so it has proved: and we ourselves have, at this moment, more than two waggon [sic] loads of them in our wood-loft.”

Though I found “spinney” in stories written by two Americans in the last thirty years or so, I sense the word is more typically used by English writers and probably is fading from the language. The most recent citation in the Oxford English Dictionary dates from late in the nineteenth century, and its first definition, “a thorn hedge,” is described as “Obs. rare.” The second is “a small wood or copse, esp. one planted or preserved for sheltering game-birds; a small clump or plantation of trees.” A spinney might be wild or cultivated, it seems, or a bit of each, and is most often marginal, which fits the usage of Taylor and Davenport. John Clare writes with longing of a spinney, in “The Fens”:

“Ah, could I see a spinney nigh,
A puddock riding in the sky
Above the oaks with easy sail
On stilly wings and forked tail,
Or meet a heath of furze in flower,
I might enjoy a quiet hour,
Sit down at rest, and walk at ease,
And find a many things to please.”

Now that I’ve thought about the word I’ve come to associate it with a ragged collection of trees and shrubs growing on the south side of Central Avenue in Colonie, N.Y., next to the southbound entrance to I-87, the Northway. I spent a morning there about twenty years ago with a field biologist, cataloging its plants, animals and human refuse. The floor of the concrete-bordered island was fifteen feet below street level, so treetops were even with the sidewalk. I was writing a story for my newspaper about the persistence of nature in urban and suburban settings. I still think of that spinney – ten degrees cooler than the street above (a true micro-climate), with traffic sounds muffled by earth and summer foliage – as a homely little paradise where birds and humans could cool off and feel secure.

In 1984, the Welsh poet-priest R.S. Thomas contributed the essay “A Thicket in Lleyn” to a volume titled Britain: A World by Itself. Thomas describes an extraordinary, Ovidian encounter with a flock of migrating goldcrests:

“The air purred with their small wings. To look up was to see the twigs re-leafed with their bodies. Everywhere their needle-sharp cries stitched at the silence. Was I invisible? Their seed-bright eyes regarded me from three feet off. Had I put forth an arm, they might have perched on it. I became a tree, part of that bare spinney where silently the light was splintered, and for a timeless moment the birds thronged me, filigreeing me with shadow, moving to an immemorial rhythm on their way south.”

I envy Thomas, though he was more at home, more kindly and receptive, among birds and trees than fellow humans.

`So Many Ingenious and Unlikely Disguises'

“In both men the egotism of the unhappy was powerfully evident. Unhappy people are egotistical, mean, unjust, cruel and less capable than stupid people of understanding each other. Rather than bringing people together, unhappiness drives them further apart, and even where it would seem that people ought to be joined by a similar cause of sorrow, they make themselves much more injustice and cruelty than in an environment in which people are relatively contented.”

Our species is infinitely inventive in devising new forms of misery and perfecting old forms that have flourished for millennia. An extraterrestrial might be forgiven for mistaking human unhappiness for our chief pleasure. In some cases, as in the passage above from Chekhov’s “Enemies,” the mutual misery of the two men can be understood if not entirely forgiven; in most, unhappiness is gratuitous, the inevitable result of unchecked self-centeredness or Pride, to use the more technically precise word.

Written when Chekhov was twenty-six, the story opens with the death from diphtheria of six-year-old Andrey. His father is Dr. Kirilov, like the author a provincial physician. The doorbell rings (in the first paragraph) and Kirilov greets Abogin who says his wife has just collapsed, perhaps from an aneurysm. Distraught and wishing to console his own wife, Kirilov at first refuses to accompany Abogin, who lives eight or nine miles away, but relents. When they arrive at Abogin’s house, the men learn that his wife had been feigning illness and has run off with “that clown Paptchinsky.” Both men at first are numb with their private griefs. Abogin, more given to self-pity than the doctor, unloads his self-serving history of his marriage. Kirilov explodes:

“`I don’t understand…’ muttered the doctor. `Why, what’s the meaning of it? Why, it’s an outrage on personal dignity, a mockery of human suffering! It’s incredible…It’s the first time in my life I have had such an experience!’”

Neither attempts to comfort the other. Abogin’s loss is less severe than Kirilov’s but no less agonizing, at least at first. Kirilov, a poor, prematurely aging man, exacerbates his anger with resentment over Abogin’s wealth and elegance. This is psychologically (that is, morally) acute of Chekhov. When we indulge self-centered anger we reach after any weapon, or invent one. The story ends with Kirilov nursing “unjust and cruelly inhuman” thoughts against Abogin and “all who lived in rosy, subdued light among sweet perfumes.” Here’s the final paragraph:

“Time will pass and Kirilov’s sorrow will pass, but that conviction, unjust and unworthy of the human heart, will not pass, but will remain in the doctor’s mind to the grave.”

It’s a chilling thought: self-centered anger is more lasting than grief. There’s no relief, no happy compromise, no mutually satisfactory resolution. Abogin and Kirilov will never achieve “closure,” that deluded pipe dream of pop psychology. In Anthony Hecht, his book-length interview with Philip Hoy published in 1999, the poet cites the passage from “Enemies” quoted above in connection with his great poem “Green: An Epistle” (Millions of Strange Shadows, 1977). He refers to “the infections of the ego” and says:

“…I find myself more in accord with the Church Fathers, with Milton, and others who find Pride the most radical, pervasive, and nearly ineradicable of all the sins. And this is so because Pride is capable of so many ingenious and unlikely disguises.”

`Let's Do an Anthology'

Every dedicated reader carries in his or her head an anthology, a private accumulation of favorite poems and lines from poems, even phrases and single words, for amusement, sustenance and consolation. It’s cheering to recall that “anthology” is from the Greek for “flower collection,” so one's anthology ought to give at least as much pleasure as a summer bouquet. A friend in New York/Texas on Saturday sent an e-mail with the subject line “Let’s do an anthology”:

“Patrick, take the poems you love that aren't in your favorite anthologies, add my favorites of the same fate, throw in a few favorites from books we have and love, and let's publish an anthology. We could put some Z. Herbert in there, a prose poem or two of Baudelaire, Hecht, a little Horace, V. Hugo, Pushkin, Rimbaud, Stevens and Wilbur.”

The operative word is “love,” without schoolmarmish duty or canon-bound war-horse obligations (though war horses are not forbidden). In other words, only the good stuff, no filler, the poems your sensibility has already collected. There’s no need to dig. I think immediately of Vaughan’s “The World,” Louise Bogan’s “Simple Autumnal,” Allen Tate’s “Ode to the Confederate Dead,” Hecht’s “Green: An Epistle” and Edgar Bowers’ “For Louis Pasteur.” It’s tough to stop once you start shuffling the mental Rolodex. Here’s what my friend proposed off the top of his head, calling them “uncollected favorites”:

Akhmatova's Requiem
Aiken's When You Are Not Surprised
Arnold's Dover Beach
Auden's Musee des Beaux Arts
Berryman's Dream Song 4
Brodsky's May 24, 1980
Celan's Deathfugue
Cunningham's Ars Amoris, Choice, and The Metaphysical Amorist (you add more)
Dennis's The God Who Loves You and A Maxim
Donne's (some of his secular stuff)
Garcia Lorca's Faithless Wife
Heaney's Digging
Herrick's Delight in Disorder
Hill's (several -- you choose)
Justice's Bus Stop and Men at Forty
Montale's The Lemon Trees
Pound's In a Station of the Metro and The River Merchant's Wife: A Letter (and perhaps a few others)
Simic's Against Whatever It is That's Encroaching and Cloud's Gathering
Tennyson's Ulysses
Vallejo's Black Stone on a White Stone
Warren's After the Dinner Party
Williams's Queen-Anne's Lace (and doesn't he have another, more erotic?)
Wyatt's They Flee From Me.

Not my list but a worthy one, with much overlap. My friend is fluent in French and I defer to his knowledge and taste but would suggest titles by Valéry and Ponge. He concludes his e-mail: “Go for it, Patrick,” and we invite you to do the same, “Hypocrite lecteur, — mon semblable, — mon frère!”

`What Beautiful and Palatable Bread!'

“What flavor can be more agreeable to our palates than that of this little fruit, which thus, as it were, exudes from the earth at the very beginning of the summer, without any care of ours? What beautiful and palatable bread! I make haste to pluck and eat this first fruit of the year, though they are green on the underside, somewhat acid as yet, and a little gritty from lying so low. I taste a little strawberry-flavored earth with them. I get enough to redden my fingers and lips at least.”

Readers who judge Thoreau a pleasure-denying ascetic ought to close his books now (the above is from Wild Fruits, 2000) and open one of Gary Snyder’s volumes of macrobiotic verse. Thoreau’s notion of pleasure is not ours but probably more discerning and nuanced. Who else would savor “strawberry-flavored earth?” I write this with reddened fingers, just returned from ninety minutes bent over in a strawberry field. My wife, my sister-in-law and her boyfriend picked raspberries; my two younger sons, my nephew and I, the strawberries.

Why the name? Etymologists say the Old English root is streawberige – that is, “straw” and “berry,” and not very helpful. Webster’s Third suggests the name derive from “the resemblance of the achenes on the surface to fragments of straw.” That’s a stretch. To my eyes it resembles a bulbous human nose pitted with blackheads. Thoreau offers an equally fanciful etymology:

“This is one of the fruits as remarkable for its fragrance as its flavor, and it is said to have got its Latin name, fraga, from this fact. Its fragrance, like that of the checkerberry, is a very prevalent one. Wilted young twigs of several evergreens, especially the fir-balsam, smell very much like it.”

Thoreau’s senses are electrically alive. Only the auditory (unsurprisingly) is missing. At the end of his eight-page entry for strawberries he writes: “You occasionally find a few ripe ones of a second crop in November, a slight evening red, answering to that morning one.” That other great celebrator of spring, Father Hopkins, asks in “The May Magnificat”: “What is Spring?” His answer:

“Growth in every thing—

“Flesh and fleece, fur and feather,
Grass and greenworld all together;
Star-eyed strawberry-breasted
Throstle above her nested

“Cluster of bugle blue eggs thin
Forms and warms the life within;
And bird and blossom swell
In sod or sheath or shell.”

“Star-eyed strawberry-breasted” is ravishing and Thoreau would have loved it. Both men, dead at age forty-four of diseases readily cured today, lived intense sensory lives. Both were equipped to relish the color, flavor and fragrance of strawberries. Thoreau’s final words were “Now comes good sailing,” followed by “moose” and “Indian.” Hopkins’ were "I am so happy, I am so happy. I loved my life.”

`What Holds One's Attention'

Bill Sigler recently posted two “unworthy translations of the Master,” that is, Tu Fu (712-770), or Du Fu, and sent me back to my companion of more than forty years – Poems of the Late T’ang, translated by A.C. Graham, in the slender old Penguin edition. What I like about Graham’s work is its starkness and clarity as English poetry. There’s no mushiness or gassy poeticizing, no striving to sound “Oriental,” whatever that means. Graham has learned from Waley and Pound but never apes them. If he were a Chinese poet, this is how his poems would sound. Here’s the third of five sections from a sequence titled “Autumn Wastes,” translated by Graham and written late in Tu Fu’s life:

“Music and rites to conquer my failings,
Mountains and woods to prolong my zest.
On my twitching head the silk cap slants,
I sun my back in the shine of bamboo books,
Pick up the pine cones dropped by the wind,
Split open the hive when the sky is cold
By scattered and tiny red and blue
Halt pattened feet close to the faint perfume.”

I choose this stanza because except for the head gear it describes a life not unlike my own, though written by a Chinese poet more than twelve-hundred years ago. Some poetry-bearing breeze wafts across the centuries, surely one of the functions of art. “Pattened” refers to the wearing of pattens, an antiquated and ridiculous form of footwear. Jane Austen writes in Northanger Abbey: “Wherever they went, some pattened girl stopped to curtsy, or some footman in dishabille sneaked off.” I particularly like the first and fourth lines of Graham’s version.

Graham includes his version of a poem Sigler also takes a crack at, “Autumn Meditation (5)”:

“The Gate of P’eng-lai Palace faces the South Mountain:
Dew collects on the bronze stems out of the Misty River.
See in the west on Jasper Lake the Queen Mother descend:
Approaching from the east the purple haze fills the Han-ku pass.
The clouds roll back, the pheasant-tail screens open before the throne:
Scales ringed by the sun on dragon robes! I have seen the majestic face.
I lay down once by the long river, wake left behind by the years,
Who so many times answered the roll of court by the blue chain-patterned door.”

Graham appends nine lines of gloss though the meaning remains opaque to this Chinese illiterate. I’m grateful to Sigler and Graham (and Pound and Waley) for revivifying a cultural presence that once seemed academic and now is downright neighborly. I hear Chinese spoken daily (though the speakers may never have heard of Tu Fu). Houston was monolingual compared to greater Seattle. At the swimming pool on Friday I heard Chinese, Vietnamese, Russian, Spanish, English and several of its mutations.

Marianne Moore writes in the foreword to her first prose collection, Predilections (1954):

"Silence is more eloquent than speech -- a truism; but sometimes something that someone has written excites one's admiration and one is tempted to write about it; if it is in a language other than one's own, perhaps to translate it -- or try to; one feels that what hold's one's attention might hold the attention of others. That is to say, there is a language of sensibility of which words can be the portrait -- a magnetism, an ardor, a refusal to be false..."

That's for Tu Fu, Graham and Bill.

`Their Shadowy Fate's Unfathomable Design'

For those who remain attentive, dramas are no less dramatic for being small. Clear skies and brilliant sunlight are scarce and precious in the Pacific Northwest and our backyard is canopied with layers of foliage. On those rare golden days, late in the afternoon, I wait for light to pierce the darkest corner, where two wooden fences meet and a big-leaf maple keeps mulch and mushrooms moist. Anthony Hecht long ago observed such a scene and saw in it “fear and awe.” Here is “A Cast of Light” from The Venetian Vespers (1979):

“A maple bough of web-foot, golden greens,
Found by an angled shaft
Of late sunlight, disposed within that shed
Radiance, with brilliant, hoisted baldachins,
Pup tents and canopies by some underdraft
Flung up to scattered perches overhead,

“These daubs of sourball lime, at floating rest,
Present to the loose wattage
Of heaven their limelit flukes, an artifice
Of archipelagian Islands of the Blessed,
And in all innocence pursue their cottage
Industry of photosynthesis.

“Yet only for twenty minutes or so today,
On a summer afternoon,
Does the splendid lancet reach to them, or sink
To these dim bottoms, making its chancy way,
As through the barrier reed of some lagoon
In sea-green darkness, by a wavering chink,

“Down, neatly probing like an accurate paw
Or a notched and beveled key,
Through the huge cave-roof of giant oak and pine.
And the heart goes numb in a tide of fear and awe
For those we cherish, their hopes, their frailty,
Their shadowy fate’s unfathomable design.”

Hecht adds beneath his title, like an orienting dedication, “at a Father’s Day picnic.” He’s a poet unusually sensitive to light and darkness, brilliance and shade, and unashamedly reads into them emotion. This poem reminds me of the sun-and-shadow game Ada and Van play in Nabokov’s novel, sweet and sad for its evanescence. The poem, like the scene described, is dappled with brilliance and shade. We planned a party in the backyard Thursday to celebrate my middle son’s tenth birthday but moved it indoors when clouds and drizzle and shade never dissolved.

Words and Music x Three

Music sometimes rivals words for my affections, which may explain my unfailing attraction to words used musically. Lately I’ve gorged on Bob Dylan and Aaron Copland, old and relatively new loves, respectively. For Father’s Day my oldest son burned me a CD of his recent favorites, many with New Orleans connections – “Go to the Mardi Gras” by Professor Longhair, “A Certain Girl” by Ernie K-Doe, “I Thought I Heard Buddy Bolden Say” by Jelly Roll Moron – and some just good music, like a live version of Van Morrison's “Domino.”. Here are three samples of music and musicians described by writers using literary analogy, all from excellent books:

“So in a sense, Sinatra was [composer Jimmy] Van Heusen’s work, the way Dr. Johnson was James Boswell’s. Tonight you get a great epigram, tomorrow a not particularly funny insult. But this was the guy he was writing both for and about, his model and canvas, so the time wasn’t wasted for either of them.”

[Wilfrid Sheed, The House That George Built, 2007]

“[Tenor saxophonist Zoot] Sims was a musician’s musician; players white and black loved him. If he’d been a writer, he’d be [Richard] Yates or Joseph Mitchell: plainspoken, but just plain better than everybody else.”

[Sam Stephenson, The Jazz Loft Project: Photographs and Tapes of W. Eugene Smith from 821 Sixth Avenue 1957-1965, 2009]

“Henry James would have relished such intricate footwork.”

[Whitney Balliatt describing a performance by pianist Bill Evans, Collected Works: A Journal of Jazz 1954-2000, 2000]