While digging through the planner/student handbook of the seventh-grader I tutor twice a week, looking for assignments he had lost or hidden, I came across this writerly wisdom in a section titled “Tackling Essays” (can we, finally, declare a moratorium on sports metaphors?):
“An essay is basically a long, one-sided argument – without anyone arguing back or getting mad at you, of course. When you write an essay, you set out to make one single point about something. You’ll say what this point or argument is (that’s your thesis) in your introduction, and you’ll spend the rest of your essay explaining and supporting this one point.”
No wonder kids can’t write and don’t read. By this definition, essays, the most elastic, voluble and unplotted form, more closely resemble syllogisms than experiments. No longer attempts, as Montaigne suggested, they would aspire to become solutions. Essays reduced to “one single point” sound as humanly and linguistically compelling as quadratic equations. The most pleasureful essays (a favorite adjective of Dr. Johnson’s, defined in the Dictionary as “pleasant; delightful”) are quiet surprises from first word to last. To call an essay “experimental” ought to be redundant. Boswell reports in his Life:
“My readers will not be displeased at being told every slight circumstance of the manner in which Dr. Johnson contrived to amuse his solitary hours. He sometimes employed himself in chymistry, sometimes in watering and pruning a vine, sometimes in small experiments, at which those who may smile, should recollect that there are moments which admit of being soothed only by trifles.”
Essays are small experiments, at least in the hands of Johnson, Lamb, Chesterton and Guy Davenport. Perhaps I’m “soothed only by trifles” but they’re preferable to “long, one-sided argument[s],” which comes closer to describing most blogs.
Friday, April 30, 2010
Thursday, April 29, 2010
`And Whom, She Did Not Know'
“He saw a soft, suffering expression which was intelligent and touching: she seemed to him altogether graceful, feminine, and simple; and he longed to soothe her, not with drugs, not with advice, but with simple, kindly words.”
My student is sick again. She vomited in the bathroom and afterwards, on the advice of the nurse, slept for an hour on a bed in the classroom. Later, I tube-fed her at the table. As I was pouring the last of the water she coughed, bent forward and threw up on her lap and my left hand. Protocol is to leave the tube connected to her abdomen as a sort of emergency vent from her stomach, but formula, water and the rest spewed from her mouth onto her clothing, the table, floor, chair, waste basket and me.
The nurse and teacher washed her and changed her clothes. I disinfected the table and chair, and the custodian used a steam cleaner on the carpet. Pale and trembling but not crying, my student fell asleep again. The nurse spoke with her mother on the telephone and twenty minutes later she was at the door. Nurse, teacher, mother and I sat around the girl’s bed and talked, and then I settled her into a wheelchair and walked with the mother, a smart, polished woman, to her car. As we strapped her daughter into the front seat, I saw the mother was crying without making a sound.
“Her mother put her arms around her head and hugged her. What despair, what grief was in the old woman’s face! She, her mother, had reared her and brought her up, spared nothing…And now she could not make out the reason of these tears, why there was all this misery, she could not understand, and was bewildered; and she had a guilty, agitated, despairing expression, as though she had omitted something very important, had left something undone, had neglected to call in somebody – and whom, she did not know.”
[The quoted passages are from Chekhov’s “A Doctor’s Visit” (1898) in Constance Garnett’s translation. The situation in the story is different from Wednesday’s in the classroom but I had packed The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories (Volume 5 of The Tales of Chekhov) in my lunch bag and couldn’t deny the deeper human similarities.]
My student is sick again. She vomited in the bathroom and afterwards, on the advice of the nurse, slept for an hour on a bed in the classroom. Later, I tube-fed her at the table. As I was pouring the last of the water she coughed, bent forward and threw up on her lap and my left hand. Protocol is to leave the tube connected to her abdomen as a sort of emergency vent from her stomach, but formula, water and the rest spewed from her mouth onto her clothing, the table, floor, chair, waste basket and me.
The nurse and teacher washed her and changed her clothes. I disinfected the table and chair, and the custodian used a steam cleaner on the carpet. Pale and trembling but not crying, my student fell asleep again. The nurse spoke with her mother on the telephone and twenty minutes later she was at the door. Nurse, teacher, mother and I sat around the girl’s bed and talked, and then I settled her into a wheelchair and walked with the mother, a smart, polished woman, to her car. As we strapped her daughter into the front seat, I saw the mother was crying without making a sound.
“Her mother put her arms around her head and hugged her. What despair, what grief was in the old woman’s face! She, her mother, had reared her and brought her up, spared nothing…And now she could not make out the reason of these tears, why there was all this misery, she could not understand, and was bewildered; and she had a guilty, agitated, despairing expression, as though she had omitted something very important, had left something undone, had neglected to call in somebody – and whom, she did not know.”
[The quoted passages are from Chekhov’s “A Doctor’s Visit” (1898) in Constance Garnett’s translation. The situation in the story is different from Wednesday’s in the classroom but I had packed The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories (Volume 5 of The Tales of Chekhov) in my lunch bag and couldn’t deny the deeper human similarities.]
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
`Knowledge Is Given in a Bright Instant'
“Maybe some morning, walking in dry glass air,
I’ll turn and see the miracle happen:
nothing at all behind me, at my shoulder
the void, and stare with a drunkard’s terror.
“Then as on a screen, the trees houses hills
will settle abruptly in the usual deception.
But it will be too late; and silent I’ll go on
among men who don’t look round, with what I know.”
The lyric is from Eugenio Montale’s first collection, Ossi di sepia (Cuttlefish Bones, 1925), as translated by Sonia Raiziss and Alfredo de Palchi. In Montale, “miracles” – not always happy ones -- are forever imminent, likely to occur at ordinary moments. Life is different afterwards. The “usual deception” never again reassures.
One of our students is the slowest post-toddler I’ve known. She’s not physically hobbled though her gait is peculiar, as she throws her legs slightly to the side before pitching them forward, in a manner that recalls one of Beckett’s little men. She takes ten minutes or more to move the two-hundred yards from her bus, up the hill to the classroom. Her slowness is compounded by an obsession with whatever is going on behind her, even if nothing is going on. She’s always looking over her shoulder, staring, whether in anxiety or nosiness we can’t say, though I suspect the latter. She reminds me of both a low-sodium update of Lot’s wife (Genesis 19:26) and Montale’s poem.
Idiomatically, “looking back” suggests a temporal gaze, a review of past events, not a spatial scan. Almost fifty years after writing the poem cited above, Montale published “Backward Glance” (in Satura, 1971) with a first line only an old poet could write convincingly: “You turn around and it’s another century” (translated by Jeremy Reed). Some of us understand the sensation. The poem concludes like this:
“Knowledge is given in a bright instant;
we open the segments of the orange,
and realize that walking in this life
we never know if we’re alive or dead.
Nothing’s stable. The word dries on the change…”
[Both translations are from Montale in English, edited by Harry Thomas, Handsel Books, 2004.]
I’ll turn and see the miracle happen:
nothing at all behind me, at my shoulder
the void, and stare with a drunkard’s terror.
“Then as on a screen, the trees houses hills
will settle abruptly in the usual deception.
But it will be too late; and silent I’ll go on
among men who don’t look round, with what I know.”
The lyric is from Eugenio Montale’s first collection, Ossi di sepia (Cuttlefish Bones, 1925), as translated by Sonia Raiziss and Alfredo de Palchi. In Montale, “miracles” – not always happy ones -- are forever imminent, likely to occur at ordinary moments. Life is different afterwards. The “usual deception” never again reassures.
One of our students is the slowest post-toddler I’ve known. She’s not physically hobbled though her gait is peculiar, as she throws her legs slightly to the side before pitching them forward, in a manner that recalls one of Beckett’s little men. She takes ten minutes or more to move the two-hundred yards from her bus, up the hill to the classroom. Her slowness is compounded by an obsession with whatever is going on behind her, even if nothing is going on. She’s always looking over her shoulder, staring, whether in anxiety or nosiness we can’t say, though I suspect the latter. She reminds me of both a low-sodium update of Lot’s wife (Genesis 19:26) and Montale’s poem.
Idiomatically, “looking back” suggests a temporal gaze, a review of past events, not a spatial scan. Almost fifty years after writing the poem cited above, Montale published “Backward Glance” (in Satura, 1971) with a first line only an old poet could write convincingly: “You turn around and it’s another century” (translated by Jeremy Reed). Some of us understand the sensation. The poem concludes like this:
“Knowledge is given in a bright instant;
we open the segments of the orange,
and realize that walking in this life
we never know if we’re alive or dead.
Nothing’s stable. The word dries on the change…”
[Both translations are from Montale in English, edited by Harry Thomas, Handsel Books, 2004.]
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
`As Human Tongue Can Hardly Name'
A reader followed up on my mention of “Gusev” and read the Richard Pevear/Larissa Volokhonsky translation in Stories. He writes:
“This line from the story caught my attention: `Life can't be repeated, it must be cherished.’ Don't do this enough.”
The honest among us would agree. A well-nursed gift for grievance makes cherishing anything difficult. My student has a gastrostomy, a surgical opening into her stomach. On her abdomen is a feeding button. Twice each school day I open the button and attach a feeding tube and syringe, and into it I pour the contents of a ten-ounce can of formula and four ounces of water. The procedure takes about fifteen minutes. Unlike some of the kids, my student, who cannot speak, sits quietly and doesn’t fidget. She plays with a button or zipper on her sweater, worrying it with thumbs and index fingers.
Three others kids in the room are also tube-fed but take no solid food. Most mornings my student eats a half-cup of yogurt or applesauce, which I feed her with a spoon. She doesn’t chew, and swallows with difficulty. She weighs eighty-three pounds and is almost nineteen years old.
In “Gusev,” the title character is an orderly returning aboard a ship to Russia after service in the Far East. Gusev, like Chekhov, is sick with consumption. Most of the story consists of his conversations in the ship’s infirmary with another soldier, Pavel Ivanych, and his increasingly hallucinatory visions of life at home. Pavel Ivanych angrily complains about everything. Gusev is good-natured, optimistic, big-hearted. When Pavel Ivanych dies, a soldier asks Gusev, “Will God rest his soul or not?” Gusev answers:
“He will…he suffered long. And another thing, he was from the clerical estate, and priests have big families. They’ll pray for him.”
When told he is soon to die Gusev feels “eerie” and suffers from “some sort of yearning.” He is not frightened but dismayed. Gusev likens his state of mind to “sitting in a dark forest.” Chekhov writes:
“He dreams that they have just taken the bread out of the oven in the barracks, and he gets into the oven and has a steambath, lashing himself with birch branches. He sleeps for two days, and on the third day two sailors come from topside and carry him out of the sick bay.”
Gusev’s body is sewn into a canvas sack weighted with iron bars, and slid overboard off a plank. A shark rips open the sack. Here is Chekhov’s final paragraph, one of the loveliest and most mysterious I know:
“And up above just then, on the side where the sun goes down, clouds are massing; one cloud resembles a triumphal arch, another a lion, a third a pair of scissors…A broad green shaft comes from behind the clouds and stretches to the very middle of the sky; shortly afterwards a violet shaft lies next to it, then a golden one, then a pink one…The sky turns a soft lilac. Seeing this magnificent, enchanting sky, the ocean frowns at first, but soon itself takes on such tender, joyful, passionate colors as human tongue can hardly name.”
“This line from the story caught my attention: `Life can't be repeated, it must be cherished.’ Don't do this enough.”
The honest among us would agree. A well-nursed gift for grievance makes cherishing anything difficult. My student has a gastrostomy, a surgical opening into her stomach. On her abdomen is a feeding button. Twice each school day I open the button and attach a feeding tube and syringe, and into it I pour the contents of a ten-ounce can of formula and four ounces of water. The procedure takes about fifteen minutes. Unlike some of the kids, my student, who cannot speak, sits quietly and doesn’t fidget. She plays with a button or zipper on her sweater, worrying it with thumbs and index fingers.
Three others kids in the room are also tube-fed but take no solid food. Most mornings my student eats a half-cup of yogurt or applesauce, which I feed her with a spoon. She doesn’t chew, and swallows with difficulty. She weighs eighty-three pounds and is almost nineteen years old.
In “Gusev,” the title character is an orderly returning aboard a ship to Russia after service in the Far East. Gusev, like Chekhov, is sick with consumption. Most of the story consists of his conversations in the ship’s infirmary with another soldier, Pavel Ivanych, and his increasingly hallucinatory visions of life at home. Pavel Ivanych angrily complains about everything. Gusev is good-natured, optimistic, big-hearted. When Pavel Ivanych dies, a soldier asks Gusev, “Will God rest his soul or not?” Gusev answers:
“He will…he suffered long. And another thing, he was from the clerical estate, and priests have big families. They’ll pray for him.”
When told he is soon to die Gusev feels “eerie” and suffers from “some sort of yearning.” He is not frightened but dismayed. Gusev likens his state of mind to “sitting in a dark forest.” Chekhov writes:
“He dreams that they have just taken the bread out of the oven in the barracks, and he gets into the oven and has a steambath, lashing himself with birch branches. He sleeps for two days, and on the third day two sailors come from topside and carry him out of the sick bay.”
Gusev’s body is sewn into a canvas sack weighted with iron bars, and slid overboard off a plank. A shark rips open the sack. Here is Chekhov’s final paragraph, one of the loveliest and most mysterious I know:
“And up above just then, on the side where the sun goes down, clouds are massing; one cloud resembles a triumphal arch, another a lion, a third a pair of scissors…A broad green shaft comes from behind the clouds and stretches to the very middle of the sky; shortly afterwards a violet shaft lies next to it, then a golden one, then a pink one…The sky turns a soft lilac. Seeing this magnificent, enchanting sky, the ocean frowns at first, but soon itself takes on such tender, joyful, passionate colors as human tongue can hardly name.”
Monday, April 26, 2010
`I Was Listening to My Own Blood Pound'
In the nineteen-eighties I spent a lot of time on Long Island, a much-maligned New York City appendage I found congenial for its vestiges of a rural past and the birthplace of Walt Whitman in West Hills, Huntington Township. Once I made the pilgrimage to the house where he was born but it was closed and nearly as small and humble as the house in which Thomas Edison was born in Milan, Ohio. Next to the Whitman house was a carpet-remnants outlet.
I remembered these things while rereading a favorite American autobiography, Witness by Whittaker Chambers, who was born in Philadelphia in 1901 (nine years after Whitman’s death) and whose family moved to Lynbrook, in Hempstead, when he was three. Chambers writes:
“In the first decade of this century, the south shore of Long Island was a landscape of unself-conscious, miniature beauty. Everything was small – little farms, little orchards, little unplanned villages, little white houses master-built in exquisite, functional proportions, little birch and swamp-maple woods following the course of little streams that slid silently over glinting sand. It was all saved from paltriness by the tremendous presence at its edge of the ocean, with its separating miles of salt marsh and sweeps of sky across which fleets of clouds rode continually to and from the sea.”
Previously I thought of Chambers as a quintessentially urban figure (New York, Baltimore, Washington, D.C.), but that’s ridiculous considering his beloved farm in Maryland and the lovingly elegiac tone his prose assumes when describing the Long Island of his childhood. Two paragraphs after the one cited above Chambers writes:
“Years later, when I came to read Walt Whitman, through whose verses the same tides flood and the same surf pounds the same beaches, it was not like reading any other verse. It was as if, by plugging my ears, I was listening to my own blood pound. No land ever again has such power over him as that in which a man was once a child.”
Compare Chambers’ memories of rural Long Island with those of Whitman, another Quaker and sui generis American, in “Elias Hicks” (from November Boughs, 1888):
"How well I remember the region—the flat plains of the middle of Long Island, as then, with their prairie-like vistas and grassy patches in every direction, and the `kill-calf’ and herds of cattle and sheep. Then the South Bay and shores and the salt meadows, and the sedgy smell, and numberless little bayous and hummock-islands in the waters, the habitat of every sort of fish and aquatic fowl of North America. And the bay men—a strong, wild, peculiar race—now extinct, or rather entirely changed. And the beach outside the sandy bars, sometimes many miles at a stretch, with their old history of wrecks and storms—the weird, white-gray beach—not without its tales of pathos—tales, too, of grandest heroes and heroisms.”
I remembered these things while rereading a favorite American autobiography, Witness by Whittaker Chambers, who was born in Philadelphia in 1901 (nine years after Whitman’s death) and whose family moved to Lynbrook, in Hempstead, when he was three. Chambers writes:
“In the first decade of this century, the south shore of Long Island was a landscape of unself-conscious, miniature beauty. Everything was small – little farms, little orchards, little unplanned villages, little white houses master-built in exquisite, functional proportions, little birch and swamp-maple woods following the course of little streams that slid silently over glinting sand. It was all saved from paltriness by the tremendous presence at its edge of the ocean, with its separating miles of salt marsh and sweeps of sky across which fleets of clouds rode continually to and from the sea.”
Previously I thought of Chambers as a quintessentially urban figure (New York, Baltimore, Washington, D.C.), but that’s ridiculous considering his beloved farm in Maryland and the lovingly elegiac tone his prose assumes when describing the Long Island of his childhood. Two paragraphs after the one cited above Chambers writes:
“Years later, when I came to read Walt Whitman, through whose verses the same tides flood and the same surf pounds the same beaches, it was not like reading any other verse. It was as if, by plugging my ears, I was listening to my own blood pound. No land ever again has such power over him as that in which a man was once a child.”
Compare Chambers’ memories of rural Long Island with those of Whitman, another Quaker and sui generis American, in “Elias Hicks” (from November Boughs, 1888):
"How well I remember the region—the flat plains of the middle of Long Island, as then, with their prairie-like vistas and grassy patches in every direction, and the `kill-calf’ and herds of cattle and sheep. Then the South Bay and shores and the salt meadows, and the sedgy smell, and numberless little bayous and hummock-islands in the waters, the habitat of every sort of fish and aquatic fowl of North America. And the bay men—a strong, wild, peculiar race—now extinct, or rather entirely changed. And the beach outside the sandy bars, sometimes many miles at a stretch, with their old history of wrecks and storms—the weird, white-gray beach—not without its tales of pathos—tales, too, of grandest heroes and heroisms.”
Sunday, April 25, 2010
`The Proper Spirit'
We returned from the library to the sound of modernity – that is, a chainsaw – screaming behind the house. A pickup truck was backed into the driveway almost to the gate and the bed was full of green. Unannounced, our landlord had decided to cut down the Northern magnolias growing on the north side of the house against the neighbor’s wooden fence. I don’t understand his reasoning: “They’re nothing but weeds. Now you’ll get some sun in here.” True enough, but we have no windows on the north side, and he takes suspiciously enthusiastic pleasure in wielding his toy. My 9-year-old told him:
“That’s a good way to celebrate Earth Day.”
I’m going to miss the glossy deep-green leaves that turn buttery yellow before falling, last year’s robin’s nest and the microclimate under its foliage that encourages mushrooms but nothing green. I have no illusions about magnolias – a scrappy, opportunistic softwood that thrives in lousy urban environments. Wind-borne seeds, with the aid of much newly available sunlight, will soon replace our magnolia with true weeds. I’m with Richard Wilbur (from “A Wood,” Walking to Sleep, 1969):
“Given a source of light so far away
That nothing, short or tall, comes very near it,
Would it not take a proper fool to say
That any tree has not the proper spirit?
Air, water, earth and fire are to be blended,
But no one style, I think, is recommended.”
“That’s a good way to celebrate Earth Day.”
I’m going to miss the glossy deep-green leaves that turn buttery yellow before falling, last year’s robin’s nest and the microclimate under its foliage that encourages mushrooms but nothing green. I have no illusions about magnolias – a scrappy, opportunistic softwood that thrives in lousy urban environments. Wind-borne seeds, with the aid of much newly available sunlight, will soon replace our magnolia with true weeds. I’m with Richard Wilbur (from “A Wood,” Walking to Sleep, 1969):
“Given a source of light so far away
That nothing, short or tall, comes very near it,
Would it not take a proper fool to say
That any tree has not the proper spirit?
Air, water, earth and fire are to be blended,
But no one style, I think, is recommended.”
Saturday, April 24, 2010
`To Be Present in All Ages'
Almost forty years ago my professor of eighteenth-century English literature, the most lastingly influential of my teachers, observed casually that most of her students seemed unable to read anything written before Hemingway’s short stories. Already I had heard classmates whining about having to read Swift, Sterne, Johnson and Boswell, models of transparency if not always in Papa’s manner. With what writer would my professor date the outermost chronological limit of today’s students, I wonder. Vonnegut? Rick Moody? I remembered her sad jeremiad while rereading portions of Traherne’s Centuries of Meditation and coming upon this sentence:
“Men do mightily wrong themselves when they refuse to be present in all ages and neglect to see the beauty of all kingdoms.”
A gently apt turn of phrase: “present in all ages.” Judging by most blogs and book-related web sites, the cult of diversity has been adopted only by a minority of readers when it comes to pre-contemporary writers. Most remain present only in the impoverished present. Temporal parochialism reigns – an odd prejudice considering the ephemerality of this literary age. To limit one’s reading in time seems a graver foolishness than to do so in space (that is, by the language or nationality of authors). I feel the impulse to ask such time-blinkered readers: “When did you last read `Gusev?’ Religio Medici? `Apology for Raymond Sebond?’”
Ours may be remembered, if at all, as the Age of Geoffrey Hill. Speaking of Traherne, how many writerly echoes from how many centuries (besides Traherne’s) can you hear in Section CXXI of Hill’s The Triumph of Love (1998)?
"So what is faith if it is not
inescapable endurance? Unrevisited, the ferns
are breast-high, head-high, the days
lustrous, with their hinterlands of thunder.
Light is this instant, far-seeing
into itself, its own
signature on things that recognize
salvation. I
am an old man, a child, the horizon
is Traherne’s country."
“Men do mightily wrong themselves when they refuse to be present in all ages and neglect to see the beauty of all kingdoms.”
A gently apt turn of phrase: “present in all ages.” Judging by most blogs and book-related web sites, the cult of diversity has been adopted only by a minority of readers when it comes to pre-contemporary writers. Most remain present only in the impoverished present. Temporal parochialism reigns – an odd prejudice considering the ephemerality of this literary age. To limit one’s reading in time seems a graver foolishness than to do so in space (that is, by the language or nationality of authors). I feel the impulse to ask such time-blinkered readers: “When did you last read `Gusev?’ Religio Medici? `Apology for Raymond Sebond?’”
Ours may be remembered, if at all, as the Age of Geoffrey Hill. Speaking of Traherne, how many writerly echoes from how many centuries (besides Traherne’s) can you hear in Section CXXI of Hill’s The Triumph of Love (1998)?
"So what is faith if it is not
inescapable endurance? Unrevisited, the ferns
are breast-high, head-high, the days
lustrous, with their hinterlands of thunder.
Light is this instant, far-seeing
into itself, its own
signature on things that recognize
salvation. I
am an old man, a child, the horizon
is Traherne’s country."
Friday, April 23, 2010
`To a Praiseful Eye'
Wednesday morning my student suffered a seizure and stayed home. She came to school Thursday but was pale, trembling and unable to stay awake, so before lunch we sent her home. Even the nurse, who’s seen it all, shook her head and didn’t apply her customary smile. Another girl had a petit mal seizure in her wheelchair, her fourth of the day. Her body went rigid, her eyes rolled and she came back to us in about two minutes. In the hall, a teacher showed me the purple bump on the side of her jaw where a student had punched her earlier in the week.
The day shared the rhythm of the weather. It drizzled first thing and I wore my coat after leaving it home the day before. Into the afternoon, fog lingered among the cedars. The sky was low and cluttered, pale masses of higher clouds obscured by lower ones of charcoal-gray. Crows worked the lawn but no birds sang.
By the time I got home after 2:30, sun rays had cut through the thinning clouds. A wind started up and a pink flurry fell under the cherry tree in the backyard. The big-leaf maple, hung with red buds and green leaves, looks decorated for Christmas. I thought of Spenser’s sonnet beginning “Happy ye leaves!” In the nest dark-eyed juncos built in the shrub beside the driveway I found two eggs, pale gray and marbled with reddish-brown, and Spenser, the eggs and sun-lit leaves prompted thoughts of a modern Spenserian sonnet, Richard Wilbur’s “Praise in Summer”:
“Obscurely yet most surely called to praise,
As sometimes summer calls us all, I said
The hills are heavens full of branching ways
Where star-nosed moles fly overhead the dead;
I said the trees are mines in air, I said
See how the sparrow burrows in the sky!
And then I wondered why this mad instead
Perverts our praise to uncreation, why
Such savor's in this wrenching things awry.
Does sense so stale that it must needs derange
The world to know it? To a praiseful eye
Should it not be enough of fresh and strange
That trees grow green, and moles can course in clay,
And sparrows sweep the ceiling of our day?”
The day shared the rhythm of the weather. It drizzled first thing and I wore my coat after leaving it home the day before. Into the afternoon, fog lingered among the cedars. The sky was low and cluttered, pale masses of higher clouds obscured by lower ones of charcoal-gray. Crows worked the lawn but no birds sang.
By the time I got home after 2:30, sun rays had cut through the thinning clouds. A wind started up and a pink flurry fell under the cherry tree in the backyard. The big-leaf maple, hung with red buds and green leaves, looks decorated for Christmas. I thought of Spenser’s sonnet beginning “Happy ye leaves!” In the nest dark-eyed juncos built in the shrub beside the driveway I found two eggs, pale gray and marbled with reddish-brown, and Spenser, the eggs and sun-lit leaves prompted thoughts of a modern Spenserian sonnet, Richard Wilbur’s “Praise in Summer”:
“Obscurely yet most surely called to praise,
As sometimes summer calls us all, I said
The hills are heavens full of branching ways
Where star-nosed moles fly overhead the dead;
I said the trees are mines in air, I said
See how the sparrow burrows in the sky!
And then I wondered why this mad instead
Perverts our praise to uncreation, why
Such savor's in this wrenching things awry.
Does sense so stale that it must needs derange
The world to know it? To a praiseful eye
Should it not be enough of fresh and strange
That trees grow green, and moles can course in clay,
And sparrows sweep the ceiling of our day?”
Thursday, April 22, 2010
`I Prefer My Essay in Narrative Form'
In 1958, by which time he was a great poet but better-known for his role as a folksy, homespun poet, Robert Frost contributed a list of “Five Favorite Books” to the Chicago Tribune “Magazine of Books.” Other contributors included Richard Nixon, John F. Kennedy, Hemingway and Carl Sandburg (a real folksy, homespun poet). Frost said the “books that have meant to most to me in my lifetime” were:
The Old Testament, The Odyssey, The Poems of Catullus, Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Incidents of Travel in Yucatan by John L. Stevens.
I take this information from the invaluable Collected Prose of Robert Frost (2007) edited by Mark Richardson. The proper title of the last book cited by Frost is Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan (1841) and the author’s proper name is John Lloyd Stephens (1805-1852). John L. Stevens (1820-1895) was the U.S. Department of State minister to the Kingdom of Hawaii who tried to overthrow that nation.
I cite Frost’s list not to gloat over his slips of the pen but to report something more intriguing in Richardson’s annotations. He quotes an account given by Lawrence Thompson, the poet’s official biographer, of a 1946 conversation they had on the subject of “great books” (which Richardson calls a “fetish of the 1940s”). Frost complains that such lists are composed mostly of books in translation, and who “wanted to soak in a `bath’ of translators for four [undergraduate] years.” Richardson quotes Thompson saying:
“He would give his students four books to buy – not to read now, but at their leisure: Emerson’s Poems, Thoreau’s Walden, Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle, and St. Thomas’s Summa.”
A list, to be sure, both predictable and unexpected, admirable and curious. One is never certain with Frost what is self-revelation and what is performance. He’s a poet one would never bother with if so many of his poems weren’t so good. I trust I’m not alone in finding Emerson’s poems (like Thoreau’s) mostly unreadable. Even the essays are often compromised by Unitarian gassiness but in them reside some of the finest sentences ever crafted in English. Thoreau’s presence is no surprise, though one wishes Frost had chosen the journals. In a 1936 contribution to Books We Like, also collected by Richardson, Frost puts Walden third on his list of favorite books (Emerson’s Essays and Poems is tenth), and writes:
“Walden has something of the same fascination [as Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, second on his list]. Crusoe was cast away; Thoreau was self-cast away. Both found themselves sufficient. No prose writer has ever been more fortunate in subject than these two. I prefer my essay in narrative form. In Walden I get it and always near the height of poetry.”
I love that: “I prefer my essay in narrative form,” as he preferred his own poems. Darwin’s volume corresponds to Stephens’ two-volume work on the other list. It’s also better written, though I haven’t read Incidents of Travel since 1976 when a friend and I got interested in the literature of New World exploration. It too is a sort of “essay in narrative form.”
The stunning inclusion, of course, is the Summa Theologica. It’s like learning that Kay Ryan prizes Kierkegaard. Perhaps Richardson or another Frost scholar can tell us: Did Frost actually read the Summa? When? Does it show up anywhere else in Frost’s work or life? Or is his mention just another Yankee put-on?
The Old Testament, The Odyssey, The Poems of Catullus, Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Incidents of Travel in Yucatan by John L. Stevens.
I take this information from the invaluable Collected Prose of Robert Frost (2007) edited by Mark Richardson. The proper title of the last book cited by Frost is Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan (1841) and the author’s proper name is John Lloyd Stephens (1805-1852). John L. Stevens (1820-1895) was the U.S. Department of State minister to the Kingdom of Hawaii who tried to overthrow that nation.
I cite Frost’s list not to gloat over his slips of the pen but to report something more intriguing in Richardson’s annotations. He quotes an account given by Lawrence Thompson, the poet’s official biographer, of a 1946 conversation they had on the subject of “great books” (which Richardson calls a “fetish of the 1940s”). Frost complains that such lists are composed mostly of books in translation, and who “wanted to soak in a `bath’ of translators for four [undergraduate] years.” Richardson quotes Thompson saying:
“He would give his students four books to buy – not to read now, but at their leisure: Emerson’s Poems, Thoreau’s Walden, Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle, and St. Thomas’s Summa.”
A list, to be sure, both predictable and unexpected, admirable and curious. One is never certain with Frost what is self-revelation and what is performance. He’s a poet one would never bother with if so many of his poems weren’t so good. I trust I’m not alone in finding Emerson’s poems (like Thoreau’s) mostly unreadable. Even the essays are often compromised by Unitarian gassiness but in them reside some of the finest sentences ever crafted in English. Thoreau’s presence is no surprise, though one wishes Frost had chosen the journals. In a 1936 contribution to Books We Like, also collected by Richardson, Frost puts Walden third on his list of favorite books (Emerson’s Essays and Poems is tenth), and writes:
“Walden has something of the same fascination [as Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, second on his list]. Crusoe was cast away; Thoreau was self-cast away. Both found themselves sufficient. No prose writer has ever been more fortunate in subject than these two. I prefer my essay in narrative form. In Walden I get it and always near the height of poetry.”
I love that: “I prefer my essay in narrative form,” as he preferred his own poems. Darwin’s volume corresponds to Stephens’ two-volume work on the other list. It’s also better written, though I haven’t read Incidents of Travel since 1976 when a friend and I got interested in the literature of New World exploration. It too is a sort of “essay in narrative form.”
The stunning inclusion, of course, is the Summa Theologica. It’s like learning that Kay Ryan prizes Kierkegaard. Perhaps Richardson or another Frost scholar can tell us: Did Frost actually read the Summa? When? Does it show up anywhere else in Frost’s work or life? Or is his mention just another Yankee put-on?
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
`The Colors of the Rainbow in Colorless Ice'
Often in his journals Thoreau starts with an observation, drawn usually from the natural world, a perfect little seed of fact, and he waters it and warms it until it germinates and blossoms into a lush growth of prose-foliage. On Dec. 11, 1855, his visit to Holden Swamp in Conantum begins matter-of-factly: “No snow; scarcely any ice to be detected. It is only an aggravated November.” The last observation is dry Yankee wit, but only the seed or a part of it.
Thoreau notes that a northern bird, the pine grosbeak, has strayed to the southern fringe of its customary range. It doesn’t suggest “poverty,” Thoreau writes, “but dazzles us with his beauty.” Thus the watering and warming of the energy already latent in the seed. Read the entire entry, four paragraphs, but allow me to trace some of the growth of this lovely winter flower:
“The winter, with its snow and ice, is not an evil to be corrected. It is as it was designed and made to be, for the artist has had leisure to add beauty to use. My acquaintances [the grosbeaks], angels from the north. I had a vision thus prospectively of these birds as I stood in the swamps. I saw this familiar – too familiar – fact at a different angle, and I was charmed and haunted by it. It is only necessary to behold thus the least fact or phenomenon, however familiar, from a hair’s breadth aside from our habitual path or routine, to be overcome, enchanted by its beauty and significance. Only what we have touched and worn is trivial,--our scurf, repetition, tradition, conformity. To perceive freshly, with fresh senses, is to be inspired.”
Thoreau’s visual acuity, with eyes physical and spiritual, is hawkish; his clarity, except in most matters political (John Brown), enviable (“I had a vision…”). As a writer, how I’m charmed by his hard-won gift for lifting the mundane (a winter bird) into the beautiful and significant using mere words. He asks us to see the world anew, “with fresh senses.” Two paragraphs later:
“We get only transient and partial glimpses of the beauty of the world. Standing at the right angle, we are dazzled by the colors of the rainbow in colorless ice. From the right point of view, every storm and every drop in it is a rainbow.”
With her Thoreauvian eye Elizabeth Bishop writes in “The Fish”: “…everything / was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!”
Thoreau notes that a northern bird, the pine grosbeak, has strayed to the southern fringe of its customary range. It doesn’t suggest “poverty,” Thoreau writes, “but dazzles us with his beauty.” Thus the watering and warming of the energy already latent in the seed. Read the entire entry, four paragraphs, but allow me to trace some of the growth of this lovely winter flower:
“The winter, with its snow and ice, is not an evil to be corrected. It is as it was designed and made to be, for the artist has had leisure to add beauty to use. My acquaintances [the grosbeaks], angels from the north. I had a vision thus prospectively of these birds as I stood in the swamps. I saw this familiar – too familiar – fact at a different angle, and I was charmed and haunted by it. It is only necessary to behold thus the least fact or phenomenon, however familiar, from a hair’s breadth aside from our habitual path or routine, to be overcome, enchanted by its beauty and significance. Only what we have touched and worn is trivial,--our scurf, repetition, tradition, conformity. To perceive freshly, with fresh senses, is to be inspired.”
Thoreau’s visual acuity, with eyes physical and spiritual, is hawkish; his clarity, except in most matters political (John Brown), enviable (“I had a vision…”). As a writer, how I’m charmed by his hard-won gift for lifting the mundane (a winter bird) into the beautiful and significant using mere words. He asks us to see the world anew, “with fresh senses.” Two paragraphs later:
“We get only transient and partial glimpses of the beauty of the world. Standing at the right angle, we are dazzled by the colors of the rainbow in colorless ice. From the right point of view, every storm and every drop in it is a rainbow.”
With her Thoreauvian eye Elizabeth Bishop writes in “The Fish”: “…everything / was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!”
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
`Words Are the Wings That Lift Us Over'
Only one of the ten students in the special-education room where I work uses words and she relies almost exclusively on a small cache of nouns and verbs, and often is difficult to understand. The others are mute or rely on grunts, growls and whimpers that can be roughly translated as “happy” or “unhappy,” “hungry” or “sated,” “no pain” or “pain.” There’s no nuance, no ambiguity, no wordplay or irony, none of the lexical pleasures we take for granted. This forces us to rely on non-linguistic experience, empathy and intuition, but it also goads our gratitude for the gift of language.
In “Winged Words,” Rachel Hadas looks at the blessing of written and spoken language. Go here and scroll down to read the entire poem, but here is the first stanza:
“Trying to speak means flailing with
gestures half-sculpted out of need,
eloquent in the way of myth
—monumental, hard to read.
How does anything get said?
A nascent, feebly struggling thought,
hard to collect and to recover,
contrives to spit its substance out.
Words are the wings that lift us over.”
Our students, in this sense, never take wing though some take flight. Late in the school day on Monday, as we filled backpacks and put safety harnesses on kids for their bus rides home, someone noticed one was missing. A teacher had just put his harness on and turned to get a washrag to wipe his face, and he was gone. We carry radios and even before we understood what had happened we announced an all-points bulletin for the missing student. I’ve often worked with this kid and even fed him lunch on Monday. He’s big, strong and fast, has never uttered a word and is fueled by impulse and momentum. He’ll run because he’s already running. We eavesdropped on the frantic shouts of teachers on the radios.
After five minutes an able-bodied student who volunteers in our class and was on his way home phoned to say he could see the fugitive two blocks from school running down the sidewalk. He grabbed him and walked him back to class. Two teachers wept. One held the escapee by his shoulders, put her face close to his and said: “You scared us. Don’t you understand that?” He grinned. Hadas writes in the final lines of her poem:
“Words are the wings that lift us over
out of this limbo, away from here.”
In “Winged Words,” Rachel Hadas looks at the blessing of written and spoken language. Go here and scroll down to read the entire poem, but here is the first stanza:
“Trying to speak means flailing with
gestures half-sculpted out of need,
eloquent in the way of myth
—monumental, hard to read.
How does anything get said?
A nascent, feebly struggling thought,
hard to collect and to recover,
contrives to spit its substance out.
Words are the wings that lift us over.”
Our students, in this sense, never take wing though some take flight. Late in the school day on Monday, as we filled backpacks and put safety harnesses on kids for their bus rides home, someone noticed one was missing. A teacher had just put his harness on and turned to get a washrag to wipe his face, and he was gone. We carry radios and even before we understood what had happened we announced an all-points bulletin for the missing student. I’ve often worked with this kid and even fed him lunch on Monday. He’s big, strong and fast, has never uttered a word and is fueled by impulse and momentum. He’ll run because he’s already running. We eavesdropped on the frantic shouts of teachers on the radios.
After five minutes an able-bodied student who volunteers in our class and was on his way home phoned to say he could see the fugitive two blocks from school running down the sidewalk. He grabbed him and walked him back to class. Two teachers wept. One held the escapee by his shoulders, put her face close to his and said: “You scared us. Don’t you understand that?” He grinned. Hadas writes in the final lines of her poem:
“Words are the wings that lift us over
out of this limbo, away from here.”
Monday, April 19, 2010
`An Oak Leaf is a Thought'
At the community garden where we tend a plot sits a bench fashioned from recycled something-or-other with these words stamped on the back:
“Nature does nothing uselessly. Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC)”
"Oh, that Aristotle," one murmurs in relief. The line is from Politics, and wrenched from its context I’m not certain what the bench-endowers (among them, Starbucks) intend. As bumper-sticker wisdom it implies a vague purposefulness to the workings of the world. No frivolity, futility, contingency, capriciousness. No gratuitous beauty. It suggests fundamentalist Darwinism, the new determinism, and thus a misreading of Darwin.
Or maybe I’m reading too much into what is, after all, feel-good doodling on a feel-good piece of furniture, though feeling good has a certain usefulness. One arm of the bench, after all, has a hole in it large enough to hold a can of beer. If the Master Gardeners who run the show accept nominations for another thought on another bench I might suggest this from from Guy Davenport’s essay on Louis Agassiz:
“An oak leaf is a thought. It is a manifest idea. All of nature is some intelligent being’s meditation on being. And on becoming, one might add, but we need not limit ourselves to that angle of vision. The becoming is not growth but transformation. Oak, acorn; acorn, oak.”
It probably wouldn’t fit.
“Nature does nothing uselessly. Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC)”
"Oh, that Aristotle," one murmurs in relief. The line is from Politics, and wrenched from its context I’m not certain what the bench-endowers (among them, Starbucks) intend. As bumper-sticker wisdom it implies a vague purposefulness to the workings of the world. No frivolity, futility, contingency, capriciousness. No gratuitous beauty. It suggests fundamentalist Darwinism, the new determinism, and thus a misreading of Darwin.
Or maybe I’m reading too much into what is, after all, feel-good doodling on a feel-good piece of furniture, though feeling good has a certain usefulness. One arm of the bench, after all, has a hole in it large enough to hold a can of beer. If the Master Gardeners who run the show accept nominations for another thought on another bench I might suggest this from from Guy Davenport’s essay on Louis Agassiz:
“An oak leaf is a thought. It is a manifest idea. All of nature is some intelligent being’s meditation on being. And on becoming, one might add, but we need not limit ourselves to that angle of vision. The becoming is not growth but transformation. Oak, acorn; acorn, oak.”
It probably wouldn’t fit.
Sunday, April 18, 2010
`A Humus for New Literature to Spring In'
In March 1852, Thoreau returned to Harvard College, where he had graduated fifteen years earlier, to research early European exploration of Canada in its library. In his journal for March 16 he notes:
“The Library a wilderness of books. The volumes of the Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth Centuries, which lie so near on the shelf, are rarely opened, are effectually forgotten and not implied by our literature and newspapers. When I looked into Purchas’s Pilgrims, it affected me like looking into an impassable swamp, ten feet deep with sphagnum, where the monarchs of the forest, covered with mosses and stretched along the ground, were making haste to become peat. Those old books suggested a certain fertility, an Ohio soil, as if they were making a humus for new literature to spring in. I heard the bellowing of bullfrogs and the hum of mosquitoes reverberating through the thick embossed covers when I had closed the book. Decayed literature makes the richest of all soils.”
No writer is so comfortable, so equally at home in the worlds of books and nature as Thoreau. Emerson’s pages are musty in comparison, and Edward Hoagland’s sweaty and filled with mosquitoes. Thoreau’s balance, sometimes precarious, is rooted in his fine literary sense. He was neither scholar nor scientist but first and always a writer. The passage above might be rendered like this by a competent journeyman journalist:
“The Library is filled with old books. If writers read them they might find inspiration.”
Thoreau’s first sentence spans his two worlds – “Library,” “wilderness.” In the hands of some writers, “impassable swamp” would constitute a criticism. For Thoreau, it’s an invitation to “a certain fertility” of literary imagination. The passage, in its metaphorical exuberance, reminds me of a writer from the seventeenth century, Sir Thomas Browne, and one from the twentieth, Edward Dahlberg. Thoreau celebrated and perpetuated the tradition of rich, exacting prose and its reliance on “decayed literature.” He composed while immersed in the decomposed.
“The Library a wilderness of books. The volumes of the Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth Centuries, which lie so near on the shelf, are rarely opened, are effectually forgotten and not implied by our literature and newspapers. When I looked into Purchas’s Pilgrims, it affected me like looking into an impassable swamp, ten feet deep with sphagnum, where the monarchs of the forest, covered with mosses and stretched along the ground, were making haste to become peat. Those old books suggested a certain fertility, an Ohio soil, as if they were making a humus for new literature to spring in. I heard the bellowing of bullfrogs and the hum of mosquitoes reverberating through the thick embossed covers when I had closed the book. Decayed literature makes the richest of all soils.”
No writer is so comfortable, so equally at home in the worlds of books and nature as Thoreau. Emerson’s pages are musty in comparison, and Edward Hoagland’s sweaty and filled with mosquitoes. Thoreau’s balance, sometimes precarious, is rooted in his fine literary sense. He was neither scholar nor scientist but first and always a writer. The passage above might be rendered like this by a competent journeyman journalist:
“The Library is filled with old books. If writers read them they might find inspiration.”
Thoreau’s first sentence spans his two worlds – “Library,” “wilderness.” In the hands of some writers, “impassable swamp” would constitute a criticism. For Thoreau, it’s an invitation to “a certain fertility” of literary imagination. The passage, in its metaphorical exuberance, reminds me of a writer from the seventeenth century, Sir Thomas Browne, and one from the twentieth, Edward Dahlberg. Thoreau celebrated and perpetuated the tradition of rich, exacting prose and its reliance on “decayed literature.” He composed while immersed in the decomposed.
Saturday, April 17, 2010
`Flowers That Fly and All But Sing'
With my brother-in-law and his family we’ve rented a 10-by-30-foot plot in the community garden, deep in suburbia near a protected marsh and hiking trail. Gardeners are an earnest race, dedicated to sustainability and Swiss chard. They like building fences, posting signs – “Yard Waste!” – and proselytizing for compost. They wear funny hats and oversized boots. We have no philosophy of gardening, though I find it mindlessly satisfying, and our desires are modest -- a few vegetables, time in the sun, marigolds.
Someone had already tilled the plot and my sister-in-law had planted broccoli, cauliflower and red onions. We arrived with the clatter of shovels and rakes, in time to see a lone cabbage white flit across the cabbage-free plot. The boys pulled stones and weeds, and carried water from the spigot in buckets, I planted carrot and radish seeds and my wife took care of the lettuce, tomatoes and marigolds. I had worked all day and wanted to leave, postponing the green beans until the weekend, when a blue butterfly too small and flighty for me to identify followed the route of the cabbage white. It felt like a blessing and reminded me of Pnin’s “blue snow” and its retroactive echo in Frost’s “Blue-Butterfly Day”:
“It is blue-butterfly day here in spring,
And with these sky-flakes down in flurry on flurry
There is more unmixed color on the wing
Than flowers will show for days unless they hurry.
“But these are flowers that fly and all but sing:
And now from having ridden out desire
They lie closed over in the wind and cling
Where wheels have freshly sliced the April mire.”
Someone had already tilled the plot and my sister-in-law had planted broccoli, cauliflower and red onions. We arrived with the clatter of shovels and rakes, in time to see a lone cabbage white flit across the cabbage-free plot. The boys pulled stones and weeds, and carried water from the spigot in buckets, I planted carrot and radish seeds and my wife took care of the lettuce, tomatoes and marigolds. I had worked all day and wanted to leave, postponing the green beans until the weekend, when a blue butterfly too small and flighty for me to identify followed the route of the cabbage white. It felt like a blessing and reminded me of Pnin’s “blue snow” and its retroactive echo in Frost’s “Blue-Butterfly Day”:
“It is blue-butterfly day here in spring,
And with these sky-flakes down in flurry on flurry
There is more unmixed color on the wing
Than flowers will show for days unless they hurry.
“But these are flowers that fly and all but sing:
And now from having ridden out desire
They lie closed over in the wind and cling
Where wheels have freshly sliced the April mire.”
Friday, April 16, 2010
`Room For Only So Much Attention'
“There is only so much we can notice all at once.”
So writes Rachel Hadas in “Only So Much,” a poem about attentiveness and distraction. A baby perceives creation as “one great blooming buzzing confusion,” according to William James, and some of us relive that perception in times of stress or illness. Hadas convincingly chronicles a civilized mind careening among activities – painting, writing, recalling a dream – avoiding an unhappy reality. For her speaker, the wiry runners of strawberry plants recall the brain’s neural networks and her efforts to ground herself – a vivid image.
For a month last fall I worked with a bright, funny, always-moving seventh-grader with attention-deficit disorder, hyperactivity and a Jamesian baby’s perception of the world. It’s too much with him and frequently overwhelms him, like a bucket with too much water poured into it. Antaeus-like, he thrives on grounding. Recently his mother called and asked if I would tutor him twice a week after I get out of the high school where I work in a special-education center. With ground rules and a generous wage, I agreed, and our first session was Thursday.
Seated at his mother’s kitchen table, with my younger sons in the dining room doing their homework, we calculated the volume and surface area of prisms and cylinders, drafted a short story on the theme of rescue and a eulogy for Gandhi, and answered questions about Red Scarf Girl: A Memoir of the Cultural Revolution by Ji-Li Jiang. We had a good laugh over the definition of “study session” in the glossary of Red Scarf Girl:
“A small meeting intended to change someone’s behavior or thinking by studying Mao’s work and government documents. Held as needed, these sessions were used to improve revolutionaries and re-educate others.”
“That sounds like you, Mr. Kurp,” he said.
Holding this kid’s focus on a narrowly defined topic is like collecting smoke with a butterfly net. It can be done, but briefly and imperfectly. We labored for two hours, and for perhaps 20 minutes of that time my student worked with real absorption and dedication. By his standards he was Goethe. In the final line of her poem Hadas writes:
“But there is room for only so much attention.”
So writes Rachel Hadas in “Only So Much,” a poem about attentiveness and distraction. A baby perceives creation as “one great blooming buzzing confusion,” according to William James, and some of us relive that perception in times of stress or illness. Hadas convincingly chronicles a civilized mind careening among activities – painting, writing, recalling a dream – avoiding an unhappy reality. For her speaker, the wiry runners of strawberry plants recall the brain’s neural networks and her efforts to ground herself – a vivid image.
For a month last fall I worked with a bright, funny, always-moving seventh-grader with attention-deficit disorder, hyperactivity and a Jamesian baby’s perception of the world. It’s too much with him and frequently overwhelms him, like a bucket with too much water poured into it. Antaeus-like, he thrives on grounding. Recently his mother called and asked if I would tutor him twice a week after I get out of the high school where I work in a special-education center. With ground rules and a generous wage, I agreed, and our first session was Thursday.
Seated at his mother’s kitchen table, with my younger sons in the dining room doing their homework, we calculated the volume and surface area of prisms and cylinders, drafted a short story on the theme of rescue and a eulogy for Gandhi, and answered questions about Red Scarf Girl: A Memoir of the Cultural Revolution by Ji-Li Jiang. We had a good laugh over the definition of “study session” in the glossary of Red Scarf Girl:
“A small meeting intended to change someone’s behavior or thinking by studying Mao’s work and government documents. Held as needed, these sessions were used to improve revolutionaries and re-educate others.”
“That sounds like you, Mr. Kurp,” he said.
Holding this kid’s focus on a narrowly defined topic is like collecting smoke with a butterfly net. It can be done, but briefly and imperfectly. We labored for two hours, and for perhaps 20 minutes of that time my student worked with real absorption and dedication. By his standards he was Goethe. In the final line of her poem Hadas writes:
“But there is room for only so much attention.”
Thursday, April 15, 2010
`My Obligation to Appreciate All That is Good'
“…my obligation to appreciate all that is good, both in my own life and in the world around me.”
This portion of a sentence written by Terry Teachout earlier this week cheers me inordinately, in part because I’m weary of the assumption that intelligent, accomplished people, in order to be intelligent and accomplished, must greet their lives with boredom and frost, as though anhedonia were sophistication. I see this grim affectation in high-school students, coworkers, bloggers and big-name literary critics, among others.
Note that Terry specifies “all that is good” as the object of appreciation, not highly touted crap. A confident sense of what is good is best complimented by a serious distaste for the mediocre, tawdry and fake. The impulse to celebrate is heightened by a capacity for enthusiastic condemnation. The love of the beautiful and sublime implies surrender, which is the opposite of hipness, which is deemed a virtue only by adolescents. I’ve known few enviably happy people – two, to be precise -- who were hip.
In his introduction to The Selected Writings of John Jay Chapman (1957), Jacques Barzun quotes a passage from a letter by Chapman, a reminder of why we read the best that has been written (or listen to the best that has been composed, view the best that has been painted, etc.):
“Literature is for our immediate happiness and for the awakening of more literature; and the life of it lies in the very seed and kernel of the grain.”
Barzun goes on to energetically endorse the sort of writer and critic Chapman represents, singling out for praise his humor and style:
“To this day, and perhaps for all time, the fact that his work gives no earnest of solemnity will stand in the way of his acceptance by some readers: it is so hard, apparently, to believe words that one can readily make out, and so unnecessary to be grateful for thoughts that are given us fully, quickly, and agreeably. Some remnant of savage fear tells us that profundity has no business with the easy and the agreeable, so that in our atavistic moments we do not trust the man who writes as if improvising and who flouts professionalism.”
Be sure to click on Terry’s link to the Errol Garner Trio performing “Where or When” and allow me to suggest you watch and listen to Jimmy Rushing doing “Take Me Back, Baby.”
This portion of a sentence written by Terry Teachout earlier this week cheers me inordinately, in part because I’m weary of the assumption that intelligent, accomplished people, in order to be intelligent and accomplished, must greet their lives with boredom and frost, as though anhedonia were sophistication. I see this grim affectation in high-school students, coworkers, bloggers and big-name literary critics, among others.
Note that Terry specifies “all that is good” as the object of appreciation, not highly touted crap. A confident sense of what is good is best complimented by a serious distaste for the mediocre, tawdry and fake. The impulse to celebrate is heightened by a capacity for enthusiastic condemnation. The love of the beautiful and sublime implies surrender, which is the opposite of hipness, which is deemed a virtue only by adolescents. I’ve known few enviably happy people – two, to be precise -- who were hip.
In his introduction to The Selected Writings of John Jay Chapman (1957), Jacques Barzun quotes a passage from a letter by Chapman, a reminder of why we read the best that has been written (or listen to the best that has been composed, view the best that has been painted, etc.):
“Literature is for our immediate happiness and for the awakening of more literature; and the life of it lies in the very seed and kernel of the grain.”
Barzun goes on to energetically endorse the sort of writer and critic Chapman represents, singling out for praise his humor and style:
“To this day, and perhaps for all time, the fact that his work gives no earnest of solemnity will stand in the way of his acceptance by some readers: it is so hard, apparently, to believe words that one can readily make out, and so unnecessary to be grateful for thoughts that are given us fully, quickly, and agreeably. Some remnant of savage fear tells us that profundity has no business with the easy and the agreeable, so that in our atavistic moments we do not trust the man who writes as if improvising and who flouts professionalism.”
Be sure to click on Terry’s link to the Errol Garner Trio performing “Where or When” and allow me to suggest you watch and listen to Jimmy Rushing doing “Take Me Back, Baby.”
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
`Crisp and Rueful'
Visiting most bookstores is no pleasure. The chains, strictly speaking, no longer sell books, or at least books you might actually want to read and own. When I do visit, say, Barnes & Noble, it’s usually to buy greeting cards or gift cards to mail to relatives and friends. They can use the latter online and, with diligence, find something worth reading. Most of the good books on their shelves I already own, usually in better editions, and years have passed since I met anyone in a bookstore who knows or loves books. Either they are nullities who might as well be buying or selling tacos or shoes, or they’re pretentious grad-school types who wish they were buying or selling tacos or shoes. We visited Powell’s last week in Portland and because of its immense volume of volumes, I managed to fill several blanks on my shelves.
I rely instead on the public library, online book dealers, my own collection and the generosity of friends and editors, so I’m seldom at a loss for something to read. All that I miss is the reassuring ambience of a cluttered, unpredictably stocked shop staffed by someone who has actually read some of the better titles he’s selling. Today that sounds like a utopian whim.
In the library on Tuesday I found an anthology, Dark Horses: Poets on Overlooked Poems (University of Illinois Press, 2007), in which seventy-five poets choose poems they judge neglected, and write brief essays about them. Few of the poets and the poems they select are worth our time but I was pleased to see Rachel Hadas choose an old favorite, “A Bookshop Idyll” by Kingsley Amis. She writes:
“It is crisp and rueful, knowing about both life and letters, wise and funny and shapely – not a word too long or short.”
Judging by the poem, little in the worlds of books, poems, bookshops and human beings has significantly changed since Amis published his poem more than half a century ago. Leafing through “a thin anthology,” noting the poets and poems included, Amis’ speaker muses:
“Like all strangers, they divide by sex:
Landscape near Parma
Interests a man, so does The Double Vortex,
So does Rilke and Buddha.
“'I travel, you see', 'I think' and 'I can read'
These titles seem to say;
But I Remember You, Love is my Creed,
Poem for J.,
“The ladies' choice, discountenance my patter
For several seconds;
From somewhere in this (as in any) matter
A moral beckons.”
The only change I observe in the subsequent fifty years and more is the blurring of title preferences by sex. Today, a silly-sounding title like Rilke and Buddha might easily be written or read by a man or woman, and the same goes for Poem for J. Amis, as always, anatomizes us at our most hypocritical, vain and posturing.
A happy addendum: Rachel Hadas’ father, Moses Hadas, a classicist at Columbia University and colleague of Barzun and Trilling, was a sort of readerly teacher to me, though I never met him. Growing up, I read his translations of Tacitus, Cicero, Seneca and Plutarch, and I still consult his Ancilla to Classical Reading, which you’ll never find in the chains though you’re welcome to borrow my copy.
I rely instead on the public library, online book dealers, my own collection and the generosity of friends and editors, so I’m seldom at a loss for something to read. All that I miss is the reassuring ambience of a cluttered, unpredictably stocked shop staffed by someone who has actually read some of the better titles he’s selling. Today that sounds like a utopian whim.
In the library on Tuesday I found an anthology, Dark Horses: Poets on Overlooked Poems (University of Illinois Press, 2007), in which seventy-five poets choose poems they judge neglected, and write brief essays about them. Few of the poets and the poems they select are worth our time but I was pleased to see Rachel Hadas choose an old favorite, “A Bookshop Idyll” by Kingsley Amis. She writes:
“It is crisp and rueful, knowing about both life and letters, wise and funny and shapely – not a word too long or short.”
Judging by the poem, little in the worlds of books, poems, bookshops and human beings has significantly changed since Amis published his poem more than half a century ago. Leafing through “a thin anthology,” noting the poets and poems included, Amis’ speaker muses:
“Like all strangers, they divide by sex:
Landscape near Parma
Interests a man, so does The Double Vortex,
So does Rilke and Buddha.
“'I travel, you see', 'I think' and 'I can read'
These titles seem to say;
But I Remember You, Love is my Creed,
Poem for J.,
“The ladies' choice, discountenance my patter
For several seconds;
From somewhere in this (as in any) matter
A moral beckons.”
The only change I observe in the subsequent fifty years and more is the blurring of title preferences by sex. Today, a silly-sounding title like Rilke and Buddha might easily be written or read by a man or woman, and the same goes for Poem for J. Amis, as always, anatomizes us at our most hypocritical, vain and posturing.
A happy addendum: Rachel Hadas’ father, Moses Hadas, a classicist at Columbia University and colleague of Barzun and Trilling, was a sort of readerly teacher to me, though I never met him. Growing up, I read his translations of Tacitus, Cicero, Seneca and Plutarch, and I still consult his Ancilla to Classical Reading, which you’ll never find in the chains though you’re welcome to borrow my copy.
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
`And Dogwood'
At the far end of the athletic field at the high school where I work stands a tall but scrawny dogwood, lost among the surrounding conifers most of the year. Over spring break it blossomed and for a few weeks it will remain the loveliest, most conspicuous tree on school grounds, though even in its beauty the dogwood is a modest wallflower at the dance. As we walked our students around the track Monday morning I pointed out the flowering tree to several staff members, all of whom remained polite in their indifference.
Two dogwoods grew in the woods behind our house when we were kids. In a book of woodlore I read that the tree contained traces of quinine and that American Indians consumed it as a treatment for malaria. I ate a handful of the bitter petals and leaves, and never contracted the disease. Later I learned the Indians ingested a tincture brewed from the dogwood's bark.
In no conventional sense was Edgar Bowers a nature poet though his eyes and ears were like a hawk’s compared to the blurred myopia of poets like Mary Oliver or Gary Snyder. In “Elegy: Walking the Line” (For Louis Pasteur, 1990), Bowers returns to the rural Georgia of his childhood in the nineteen-twenties and -thirties. As always, loss is near-at-hand. His first book, published in 1956, was The Form of Loss. (Much recent poetry, of course, might be titled The Loss of Form.) Even when celebrating, Bowers’ lines turn elegiac. The portion of the poem's title after the colon I take to be a military reference. Bowers, an Army veteran of World War II, is referring to sentry duty. The poem’s speaker returns to a vanished childhood to review and secure his memories, walking the line of his family’s property like a sentry. Throughout the poem, one of the longest he wrote (135 lines), Bowers catalogs what he remembers – trees, flowers, garden vegetables, relatives, teachers, friends:
“On the sunnier slope, the wild plums that my mother
Later would make preserves of, to give to friends
Or sell, in autumn, with the foxgrape, quince,
Elderberry, and muscadine. Around
The granite overhang, moist den of foxes;
Gradually up a long hill, high in pine,
Park-like, years of dry needles on the ground,
And dogwood, slopes the settlers terraced; pine
We cut at Christmas, berries, hollies, anise,
And cones for sale…”
The poem is lovely, sad, bitter and sweet, written by a man approaching his seventies. In memory, albeit less poetically, I walk the line of my childhood landscape daily, noting the trees and flowers, the now-dead relatives, teachers and friends, the watermelons I grew beside the garage in 1959, one of which I gave to Miss Esson, my second-grade teacher, that Christmas. In memory, I can taste the sweetness of the melon and the bitterness of the dogwood.
Two dogwoods grew in the woods behind our house when we were kids. In a book of woodlore I read that the tree contained traces of quinine and that American Indians consumed it as a treatment for malaria. I ate a handful of the bitter petals and leaves, and never contracted the disease. Later I learned the Indians ingested a tincture brewed from the dogwood's bark.
In no conventional sense was Edgar Bowers a nature poet though his eyes and ears were like a hawk’s compared to the blurred myopia of poets like Mary Oliver or Gary Snyder. In “Elegy: Walking the Line” (For Louis Pasteur, 1990), Bowers returns to the rural Georgia of his childhood in the nineteen-twenties and -thirties. As always, loss is near-at-hand. His first book, published in 1956, was The Form of Loss. (Much recent poetry, of course, might be titled The Loss of Form.) Even when celebrating, Bowers’ lines turn elegiac. The portion of the poem's title after the colon I take to be a military reference. Bowers, an Army veteran of World War II, is referring to sentry duty. The poem’s speaker returns to a vanished childhood to review and secure his memories, walking the line of his family’s property like a sentry. Throughout the poem, one of the longest he wrote (135 lines), Bowers catalogs what he remembers – trees, flowers, garden vegetables, relatives, teachers, friends:
“On the sunnier slope, the wild plums that my mother
Later would make preserves of, to give to friends
Or sell, in autumn, with the foxgrape, quince,
Elderberry, and muscadine. Around
The granite overhang, moist den of foxes;
Gradually up a long hill, high in pine,
Park-like, years of dry needles on the ground,
And dogwood, slopes the settlers terraced; pine
We cut at Christmas, berries, hollies, anise,
And cones for sale…”
The poem is lovely, sad, bitter and sweet, written by a man approaching his seventies. In memory, albeit less poetically, I walk the line of my childhood landscape daily, noting the trees and flowers, the now-dead relatives, teachers and friends, the watermelons I grew beside the garage in 1959, one of which I gave to Miss Esson, my second-grade teacher, that Christmas. In memory, I can taste the sweetness of the melon and the bitterness of the dogwood.
Monday, April 12, 2010
`We Saw the Risk We Took in Doing Good'
Almost two years ago while the movers were hauling boxes and furniture off the truck and into the house I was impressed by the brashness of the dark-eyed juncos. They lit on power lines and trees and clicked away at the big impudent humans, as daring as wasps and not much larger. With robins, crows and house sparrows, they have remained our most consistent companions. On Saturday I discovered the juncos have built a nest in the shrub beside the driveway that I bump each time I open the door to my car.
It’s a tidy round bowl of twigs, needles and grasses, concealed on a shelf inside the scrawny, asymmetrical shrub, which resembles a scrub pine. The nest rests near the top, five feet off the ground. I have taken to parking slightly farther to the right so as not to disturb it. The seeming irresponsibility of the parents bothers me, like the human parents down the block who let their kids play soccer in the street. Part of me wants to remove the nest before the female has laid her eggs. Another part looks forward to watching their family grow, and yet another feels guilty for jeopardizing the birds’ welfare for my voyeuristic pleasure.
No one posed mundane moral dilemmas more powerfully and suggestively, using such humble materials, than Robert Frost. “The Exposed Nest” appeared in Mountain Interval (1920), which also included “The Road Not Taken,” “Birches” and “The Oven Bird.” The speaker and an unnamed “you” debate whether to build a shelter of grass over a nest of unfledged birds, after a cutter-bar mows the grass without injuring the young but exposing them to heat and predators. The speaker wonders:
“…would the mother-bird return
And care for them in such a change of scene
And might our meddling make her more afraid.
That was a thing we could not wait to learn.
We saw the risk we took in doing good,
But dared not spare to do the best we could
Though harm should come of it…”
My sons have promised to leave the nest alone. I don’t question their good will but curiosity, like “doing good,” is sometimes deadly. Most of us are most dangerous when convinced of the benignity of our motives.
It’s a tidy round bowl of twigs, needles and grasses, concealed on a shelf inside the scrawny, asymmetrical shrub, which resembles a scrub pine. The nest rests near the top, five feet off the ground. I have taken to parking slightly farther to the right so as not to disturb it. The seeming irresponsibility of the parents bothers me, like the human parents down the block who let their kids play soccer in the street. Part of me wants to remove the nest before the female has laid her eggs. Another part looks forward to watching their family grow, and yet another feels guilty for jeopardizing the birds’ welfare for my voyeuristic pleasure.
No one posed mundane moral dilemmas more powerfully and suggestively, using such humble materials, than Robert Frost. “The Exposed Nest” appeared in Mountain Interval (1920), which also included “The Road Not Taken,” “Birches” and “The Oven Bird.” The speaker and an unnamed “you” debate whether to build a shelter of grass over a nest of unfledged birds, after a cutter-bar mows the grass without injuring the young but exposing them to heat and predators. The speaker wonders:
“…would the mother-bird return
And care for them in such a change of scene
And might our meddling make her more afraid.
That was a thing we could not wait to learn.
We saw the risk we took in doing good,
But dared not spare to do the best we could
Though harm should come of it…”
My sons have promised to leave the nest alone. I don’t question their good will but curiosity, like “doing good,” is sometimes deadly. Most of us are most dangerous when convinced of the benignity of our motives.
Sunday, April 11, 2010
`Old Favourite Tree'
“Ascend to summer in the tree”
I thought of Eliot’s line from “Burnt Norton” while reading Nige’s elegy for elms, “those majestic, quietly dignified giants that used to dominate our countryside.” Ours, too. My childhood was more populated with trees than people, at least people whose company I would have voluntarily chosen, and trees were the occasion of my first sad and useful lesson in impermanence. Over several summers circa 1960, Dutch elm disease claimed most of the trees behind our house in suburban Cleveland.
Our backyard had been essentially a bower (from the Old English bur, “room, hut, dwelling, chamber”), an annex to the house, so dense was the foliage of the elms. Within years they were dead or dying and city crews sawed them down. One broad stump at the bottom of the hill – now a soft, mulchy spot – served as a love seat for me and the girl next door, literally – Karen Pirko, my first love. We sat there and told each other jokes. She and her family moved to Illinois in 1964, and I never saw her again. In “The Fallen Elm,” John Clare writes:
“Old favourite tree, thou'st seen time's changes lower,
Though change till now did never injure thee;
For time beheld thee as her sacred dower
And nature claimed thee her domestic tree.”
Clare’s “magnificent lyric,” as his biographer Jonathan Bate notes, is “at once elegy and protest poem.” His elms were stricken not with disease but human imbecility and greed—a neighbor committed “arborcide” for profit. Of course, Dutch elm disease (we called it Dutch elm “blight”) reached Ohio via human agency. The disease is a fungus spread by three species of elm bark beetle. It apparently arrived in the U.S. in 1928 in a shipment of lumber from the Netherlands, imported for use as veneer in a furniture factory in Ohio.
William Maxwell, a fellow Midwesterner, was born 44 years before me. In 1995, at age 86, he received the Gold Medal in Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In his three-paragraph acceptance speech he said:
“I wish that I had written The Great Gatsby. I wish that I had written `In the Ravine’ and `Ward No. 6.’ I wish that I had written The House in Paris. I wish that I had written A Sportsman’s Notebook. But the novelist works with what life has given him. It was no small gift that I was allowed to lead my boyhood in a small town in Illinois where the elm trees cast a mixture of light and shade over the pavements. And also that, at a fairly early age, I was made aware of the fragility of human happiness.”
I thought of Eliot’s line from “Burnt Norton” while reading Nige’s elegy for elms, “those majestic, quietly dignified giants that used to dominate our countryside.” Ours, too. My childhood was more populated with trees than people, at least people whose company I would have voluntarily chosen, and trees were the occasion of my first sad and useful lesson in impermanence. Over several summers circa 1960, Dutch elm disease claimed most of the trees behind our house in suburban Cleveland.
Our backyard had been essentially a bower (from the Old English bur, “room, hut, dwelling, chamber”), an annex to the house, so dense was the foliage of the elms. Within years they were dead or dying and city crews sawed them down. One broad stump at the bottom of the hill – now a soft, mulchy spot – served as a love seat for me and the girl next door, literally – Karen Pirko, my first love. We sat there and told each other jokes. She and her family moved to Illinois in 1964, and I never saw her again. In “The Fallen Elm,” John Clare writes:
“Old favourite tree, thou'st seen time's changes lower,
Though change till now did never injure thee;
For time beheld thee as her sacred dower
And nature claimed thee her domestic tree.”
Clare’s “magnificent lyric,” as his biographer Jonathan Bate notes, is “at once elegy and protest poem.” His elms were stricken not with disease but human imbecility and greed—a neighbor committed “arborcide” for profit. Of course, Dutch elm disease (we called it Dutch elm “blight”) reached Ohio via human agency. The disease is a fungus spread by three species of elm bark beetle. It apparently arrived in the U.S. in 1928 in a shipment of lumber from the Netherlands, imported for use as veneer in a furniture factory in Ohio.
William Maxwell, a fellow Midwesterner, was born 44 years before me. In 1995, at age 86, he received the Gold Medal in Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In his three-paragraph acceptance speech he said:
“I wish that I had written The Great Gatsby. I wish that I had written `In the Ravine’ and `Ward No. 6.’ I wish that I had written The House in Paris. I wish that I had written A Sportsman’s Notebook. But the novelist works with what life has given him. It was no small gift that I was allowed to lead my boyhood in a small town in Illinois where the elm trees cast a mixture of light and shade over the pavements. And also that, at a fairly early age, I was made aware of the fragility of human happiness.”
Saturday, April 10, 2010
`They're Pretty, So I Like Them'
“Heard a red-wing sing his bobylee in new wise, as if he tossed up a fourpence and it rattled on some counter in the air as it went up.”
Thoreau, of course, a journal entry from April 18, 1854. Who else would recognize the red-wing blackbird by its call, transcribe it as “bobylee” and liken the sound to a coin flipped on a counter? Metaphors don’t spontaneously generate out of vacuums: We say a gifted singer is “golden-throated.”
One summer I spent much of a morning seated on a log by a marsh in upstate New York. My companion was an ichthyologist-turned-ornithologist (as a young professor he had developed allergies to formaldehyde) who was documenting the territory-forming behaviors of red-wing blackbirds. The wetland was dense with cattails, phragmites and other reeds, and he had already sketched in the borders of avian nation-states on a map of the marsh, with each bit of turf defended by a highly vocal male. My professor friend, already old and deferring retirement, reminded me of Uncle Toby and his beloved fortifications.
I already admired the red-winged blackbird for its beauty, brashness and song. (Go here.) My friend’s knowledge, and generosity in sharing it, sparked new understanding of him and the bird. “Red-Winged Blackbirds” by Juliana Gray:
“The epaulettes redeem them; otherwise
I’d hate them, corvids stealing seed I’d bought
for cardinals and sparrows. But there’s that splash
of color: a swatch of yellow on the wing,
a hint of scarlet underneath that makes
their other feathers blacker than a raven’s.
They’re pretty, so I like them. I know it’s just
the males who wear such fancy duds, and no,
I haven’t missed the irony of that.
Here’s the point where I should turn the birds
to metaphors, embodiments of sex
or beauty, nature’s cunning artifice,
a broken heart or other human flaw.
Their shoulders blaze like eyes, like coals, like wounds,
like circumstance as they stretch and fly away.”
The start of the poem put me off. No bird is in need of redemption and who would begrudge seed to one species and indulge another? One of my late father’s late manias was squirrels and their impudent raids on his bird feeder. He welded a box of sheet steel and suspended it from steel cables behind the house. Squirrels sniggered and fed.
What redeems the poem is Gray’s questioning of conventional poeticizing. The bird’s “thisness,” she seems to say, is more than sufficient. There’s no need to strain after metaphors and confuse the result with a poem. Neither is it a poem if the poet merely points at the bird – “Here! See this?” Gray is poet enough to pack four similes into the final two lines.
Thoreau, of course, a journal entry from April 18, 1854. Who else would recognize the red-wing blackbird by its call, transcribe it as “bobylee” and liken the sound to a coin flipped on a counter? Metaphors don’t spontaneously generate out of vacuums: We say a gifted singer is “golden-throated.”
One summer I spent much of a morning seated on a log by a marsh in upstate New York. My companion was an ichthyologist-turned-ornithologist (as a young professor he had developed allergies to formaldehyde) who was documenting the territory-forming behaviors of red-wing blackbirds. The wetland was dense with cattails, phragmites and other reeds, and he had already sketched in the borders of avian nation-states on a map of the marsh, with each bit of turf defended by a highly vocal male. My professor friend, already old and deferring retirement, reminded me of Uncle Toby and his beloved fortifications.
I already admired the red-winged blackbird for its beauty, brashness and song. (Go here.) My friend’s knowledge, and generosity in sharing it, sparked new understanding of him and the bird. “Red-Winged Blackbirds” by Juliana Gray:
“The epaulettes redeem them; otherwise
I’d hate them, corvids stealing seed I’d bought
for cardinals and sparrows. But there’s that splash
of color: a swatch of yellow on the wing,
a hint of scarlet underneath that makes
their other feathers blacker than a raven’s.
They’re pretty, so I like them. I know it’s just
the males who wear such fancy duds, and no,
I haven’t missed the irony of that.
Here’s the point where I should turn the birds
to metaphors, embodiments of sex
or beauty, nature’s cunning artifice,
a broken heart or other human flaw.
Their shoulders blaze like eyes, like coals, like wounds,
like circumstance as they stretch and fly away.”
The start of the poem put me off. No bird is in need of redemption and who would begrudge seed to one species and indulge another? One of my late father’s late manias was squirrels and their impudent raids on his bird feeder. He welded a box of sheet steel and suspended it from steel cables behind the house. Squirrels sniggered and fed.
What redeems the poem is Gray’s questioning of conventional poeticizing. The bird’s “thisness,” she seems to say, is more than sufficient. There’s no need to strain after metaphors and confuse the result with a poem. Neither is it a poem if the poet merely points at the bird – “Here! See this?” Gray is poet enough to pack four similes into the final two lines.
Friday, April 09, 2010
`Let There Be Bread and Seeds in Time'
In memory, uncommon events, often the humblest, turn into private mythology. Seated alone at our kitchen table in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., some ten years ago, I stared idly through the sliding glass doors and across the deck into the wild cherry trees bordering the rear of our property. From the left entered a flash of unnatural blue, settling among the bobbing branches. The mind takes its time. I thought first of shimmering fabric, a silk scarf, before the analytical powers kicked in: an indigo bunting, perhaps the third or fourth I had ever seen. In seconds it fled.
I questioned the reality of what I had just seen, like the witness to a crime (or miracle) who doubts the evidence of his eyes. It was not only the bird’s unlikely beauty that made its abrupt appearance feel unreal, but its sense of prepared unexpectedness. I wasn’t looking for it but it arrived and I felt ready to see it. I felt like a theatergoer who discovers the play he expected has been scrapped for another, and is pleased. John Ciardi’s “Bird Watching”:
“Every time we put crumbs out and sunflower
seeds something comes. Most often sparrows.
Frequently a jay. Now and then a junco or
a cardinal. And once – immediately and never
again, but as commonly as any miracle while
it is happening, and then instantly incredible for-
ever – the tiniest (was it?) yellow warbler
as nearly as I could thumb through the bird
book for it, or was it an escaped canary? Or
simply the one impossible bright bird that is
always there during a miracle, and then never?
“I, certainly, do not know all that comes to us
at times. A bird is a bird as long as it is
there. Then it is a miracle our crumbs and
sunflower seeds caught and let go. Is there
a book to look through for the identity
of a miracle? No bird that is there is
miracle enough. Every bird that has been is
entirely one. And if some miracles are rarer
than others, every incredible bird has crumbs
and seeds in common with every other. Let there
be bread and seeds in time: all else will follow.”
Ciardi suggests the uncanny, ineffable and wonderful arrive unbidden. We can prepare ourselves, live and look and think in such a way – “Let there / be bread and seeds in time” – as to ready us for the miracle, the yellow warbler, the indigo bunting, but such things don’t arrive on demand.
I questioned the reality of what I had just seen, like the witness to a crime (or miracle) who doubts the evidence of his eyes. It was not only the bird’s unlikely beauty that made its abrupt appearance feel unreal, but its sense of prepared unexpectedness. I wasn’t looking for it but it arrived and I felt ready to see it. I felt like a theatergoer who discovers the play he expected has been scrapped for another, and is pleased. John Ciardi’s “Bird Watching”:
“Every time we put crumbs out and sunflower
seeds something comes. Most often sparrows.
Frequently a jay. Now and then a junco or
a cardinal. And once – immediately and never
again, but as commonly as any miracle while
it is happening, and then instantly incredible for-
ever – the tiniest (was it?) yellow warbler
as nearly as I could thumb through the bird
book for it, or was it an escaped canary? Or
simply the one impossible bright bird that is
always there during a miracle, and then never?
“I, certainly, do not know all that comes to us
at times. A bird is a bird as long as it is
there. Then it is a miracle our crumbs and
sunflower seeds caught and let go. Is there
a book to look through for the identity
of a miracle? No bird that is there is
miracle enough. Every bird that has been is
entirely one. And if some miracles are rarer
than others, every incredible bird has crumbs
and seeds in common with every other. Let there
be bread and seeds in time: all else will follow.”
Ciardi suggests the uncanny, ineffable and wonderful arrive unbidden. We can prepare ourselves, live and look and think in such a way – “Let there / be bread and seeds in time” – as to ready us for the miracle, the yellow warbler, the indigo bunting, but such things don’t arrive on demand.
Thursday, April 08, 2010
`O Tufted Entomologist!'
Ellen Emerson reported that her father, when she was a girl, often recited a scrap of his own doggerel:
“In Walden wood the chickadee
Runs round the pine and maple tree
Intent on insect slaughter:
O tufted entomologist!
Devour as many as you list,
Then drink in Walden water.”
I fancy the chickadee is Thoreau and the poem is a playful, faintly mocking tribute to his friend, rival and tenant, though I have no textual or biographical evidence to substantiate the whim. Ellen was born in 1839 so the chronology works. Emerson was not without humor, often of a rather sniffy sort. After all, at Thoreau’s funeral he said of the author of the two-million-word journal that ranks among the Rosetta stones of American literature:
“I so much regret the loss of his rare powers of action, that I cannot help counting it a fault in him that he had no ambition.”
But “tufted entomologist!” is awfully good and I imagine Thoreau would have claimed the sobriquet with pride. Among birds, he seemed particularly fond of chickadees, sometimes projecting onto them aspects of his personality. He refers to them in his journal as “the little top-heavy, black-crowned, volatile fellows” (Oct. 17, 1856) and writes on Oct. 15, 1859:
“The chickadees sing as if at home. They are not travelling singers hired by any Barnum. Theirs is an honest, homely, heartfelt melody. Shall not the voice of man express as much content as the note of a bird?”
Given the seasonal structure of Walden and the great paean to spring in the penultimate chapter, this journal entry from March 21, 1858, reads like cloaked autobiography:
“Standing by the mud-hole in the swamp, I hear the pleasant phebe [variant of “phoebe”] note of the chickadee. It is, methinks, the most of a wilderness note of any yet. It is peculiarly interesting that this, which is one of our winter birds also, should have a note with which to welcome the spring.”
“In Walden wood the chickadee
Runs round the pine and maple tree
Intent on insect slaughter:
O tufted entomologist!
Devour as many as you list,
Then drink in Walden water.”
I fancy the chickadee is Thoreau and the poem is a playful, faintly mocking tribute to his friend, rival and tenant, though I have no textual or biographical evidence to substantiate the whim. Ellen was born in 1839 so the chronology works. Emerson was not without humor, often of a rather sniffy sort. After all, at Thoreau’s funeral he said of the author of the two-million-word journal that ranks among the Rosetta stones of American literature:
“I so much regret the loss of his rare powers of action, that I cannot help counting it a fault in him that he had no ambition.”
But “tufted entomologist!” is awfully good and I imagine Thoreau would have claimed the sobriquet with pride. Among birds, he seemed particularly fond of chickadees, sometimes projecting onto them aspects of his personality. He refers to them in his journal as “the little top-heavy, black-crowned, volatile fellows” (Oct. 17, 1856) and writes on Oct. 15, 1859:
“The chickadees sing as if at home. They are not travelling singers hired by any Barnum. Theirs is an honest, homely, heartfelt melody. Shall not the voice of man express as much content as the note of a bird?”
Given the seasonal structure of Walden and the great paean to spring in the penultimate chapter, this journal entry from March 21, 1858, reads like cloaked autobiography:
“Standing by the mud-hole in the swamp, I hear the pleasant phebe [variant of “phoebe”] note of the chickadee. It is, methinks, the most of a wilderness note of any yet. It is peculiarly interesting that this, which is one of our winter birds also, should have a note with which to welcome the spring.”
Wednesday, April 07, 2010
`His Exact Knowledge of His Object'
Animals, not just Homo sapiens, have reputations, justified or not, among Homo sapiens. Pandas and koalas: cute. Vultures and turkeys: hideous (though the latter’s reputation is ameliorated by its toothsomeness). For others, their place in the hierarchy is more ambiguous. Thoreau writes of barred owls, “Solemnity is what they express,--fit representatives of the night.” (Journals: Dec. 14, 1858) Yet the same creature is feared and turned into an object of cheesy superstition, a Halloween decoration. That’s what comes of being nocturnal and ferociously efficient as a predator. I like most of “The Owl” by Carl Rakosi, especially the surprise of the second stanza:
“His element is silent and inexorable.
Mack the Knife waits in his eyes,
yet he is generous and brings his young
eleven mice four bullheads
thirteen grouse two eels
three rabbits and a woodcock
all in one night
“Is it too much to expect of prose
to learn from the owl
his exact knowledge of his object,
his exact eyes claws wings
and be the scourge of rats?
It might, like him, then live to
sixty-eight years in the clear impersonal
and look wise and imperturbable.”
“Inexorable” is false, too emphatic. About “Mack the Knife,” my thoughts are mixed. Owls are savage, not sociopathic, and for Americans, at least, Mack the Knife has more to do with Armstrong and Darin than Brecht and Weill. I like the hunting inventory – not overstated – and wonder where Rakosi pulled the details. “Generous” is too anthropomorphic but the abruptly introduced comparison with prose is breathtaking, worthy of Thoreau and Davenport. What can writers of prose emulate in the owl?
“Exact knowledge of his object”: I take it the writer’s object is the world. “His exact eyes claws wings” – that is, words, our tools. “And be the scourge of rats?” Rats are those who deny, distort or obscure truth. The writer is predator, truth is the prey. Robert D. Richardson gives us this in First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process:
“Choosing words and using words are the central inescapable acts of writing. `No man can write well who thinks there is any choice of words for him. [By choice here Emerson means a group of acceptable words, any one of which he could choose.] The laws of composition are as strict as those of sculpture and architecture. There is always one right line that ought to be drawn or one proportion that should be kept and every other line or proportion is wrong….So in writing, there is always a right word, and every other that is wrong.’”
“His element is silent and inexorable.
Mack the Knife waits in his eyes,
yet he is generous and brings his young
eleven mice four bullheads
thirteen grouse two eels
three rabbits and a woodcock
all in one night
“Is it too much to expect of prose
to learn from the owl
his exact knowledge of his object,
his exact eyes claws wings
and be the scourge of rats?
It might, like him, then live to
sixty-eight years in the clear impersonal
and look wise and imperturbable.”
“Inexorable” is false, too emphatic. About “Mack the Knife,” my thoughts are mixed. Owls are savage, not sociopathic, and for Americans, at least, Mack the Knife has more to do with Armstrong and Darin than Brecht and Weill. I like the hunting inventory – not overstated – and wonder where Rakosi pulled the details. “Generous” is too anthropomorphic but the abruptly introduced comparison with prose is breathtaking, worthy of Thoreau and Davenport. What can writers of prose emulate in the owl?
“Exact knowledge of his object”: I take it the writer’s object is the world. “His exact eyes claws wings” – that is, words, our tools. “And be the scourge of rats?” Rats are those who deny, distort or obscure truth. The writer is predator, truth is the prey. Robert D. Richardson gives us this in First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process:
“Choosing words and using words are the central inescapable acts of writing. `No man can write well who thinks there is any choice of words for him. [By choice here Emerson means a group of acceptable words, any one of which he could choose.] The laws of composition are as strict as those of sculpture and architecture. There is always one right line that ought to be drawn or one proportion that should be kept and every other line or proportion is wrong….So in writing, there is always a right word, and every other that is wrong.’”
Tuesday, April 06, 2010
`The Gratitude of Your Fellow-Citizens'
“The writer who never talks about eating, about appetite, hunger, food, about cooks and meals, arouses my suspicion, as though some vital element were missing in him.”
With Aldo Buzzi’s admonition from The Perfect Egg and Other Stories in mind, we left Portland and drove 60 miles west to Tillamook, Ore., home of the Tillamook County Cheese Factory. Just as I love reading detailed descriptions of processes – culinary, medical, manufacturing, artistic – so do I enjoy witnessing the same, especially in the company of a good guide. Factory tours at Tillamook are self-guided but the walls are covered with intelligently concise explanations of what’s go on along the assembly line below the gallery where we stood. There’s something deeply satisfying about watching the creation of a product (except for the start, the cow) you already use, and also the smooth operation of a beautifully engineered factory.
We left with an 18-ounce wedge of Vintage White Extra Sharp Cheddar, a 16-ounce brick of Extra Sharp Cheddar Cheese and two bags of Cheddar Cheese Curds, some of which remain unconsumed. We headed north and followed the Pacific shoreline for more than an hour, frequently passing two road signs I never saw while living in the Midwest – “Elk” and “Tsunami Hazard Area.”
All the while rain fell and a harsh wind blew off the Pacific. We stopped at a winningly named beach, Hug Point, ran to the water’s edge and stayed long enough to collect some stones. The one I found is shaped like an oversized peanut, and now it’s on my desk. Further to the north we stopped at an overlook at Cannon Beach. A marker said the Tillamook Rock Lighthouse stands on a rock just offshore but the rain, mist and sea spray obscured it. Today the lighthouse, built in 1881, is a privately owned columbarium.
Back home I grilled hamburgers topped with Tillamook cheddar. We ate well during our brief holiday in Oregon – in two delis, in a pan-Asian noodle shop, in the dining room of our hotel which serves a generous buffet breakfast (included in the cost of the room). In Portland every taquería, a dining habit we acquired in Houston, was closed – our only culinary disappointment. Buzzi writes of the people in Italy who would sniff at such déclassé places, and in the process delivers a Whitman-like celebration of life in a democracy:
“These are the same people who think that roast-chestnut sellers, hot-dog pedlars and market stalls are unsightly, while in fact they turn any anonymous site in the city into an attractive, human, therapeutic place for the usual neuroses. You stallholders (male and female), you landlords of old osterie [humble Italian taverns or restaurants] that have not been `done up’ with bowling alleys, you carpenters’ shops, you knife-grinders, umbrella sellers, chair caners, watermelon sellers, purveyors of chestnut cake, lupins, cooked pears, you who still live down by the railings, stuck between the privy and the trash cans, or out in Grottsville, should be entitled to the gratitude of your fellow-citizens.”
With Aldo Buzzi’s admonition from The Perfect Egg and Other Stories in mind, we left Portland and drove 60 miles west to Tillamook, Ore., home of the Tillamook County Cheese Factory. Just as I love reading detailed descriptions of processes – culinary, medical, manufacturing, artistic – so do I enjoy witnessing the same, especially in the company of a good guide. Factory tours at Tillamook are self-guided but the walls are covered with intelligently concise explanations of what’s go on along the assembly line below the gallery where we stood. There’s something deeply satisfying about watching the creation of a product (except for the start, the cow) you already use, and also the smooth operation of a beautifully engineered factory.
We left with an 18-ounce wedge of Vintage White Extra Sharp Cheddar, a 16-ounce brick of Extra Sharp Cheddar Cheese and two bags of Cheddar Cheese Curds, some of which remain unconsumed. We headed north and followed the Pacific shoreline for more than an hour, frequently passing two road signs I never saw while living in the Midwest – “Elk” and “Tsunami Hazard Area.”
All the while rain fell and a harsh wind blew off the Pacific. We stopped at a winningly named beach, Hug Point, ran to the water’s edge and stayed long enough to collect some stones. The one I found is shaped like an oversized peanut, and now it’s on my desk. Further to the north we stopped at an overlook at Cannon Beach. A marker said the Tillamook Rock Lighthouse stands on a rock just offshore but the rain, mist and sea spray obscured it. Today the lighthouse, built in 1881, is a privately owned columbarium.
Back home I grilled hamburgers topped with Tillamook cheddar. We ate well during our brief holiday in Oregon – in two delis, in a pan-Asian noodle shop, in the dining room of our hotel which serves a generous buffet breakfast (included in the cost of the room). In Portland every taquería, a dining habit we acquired in Houston, was closed – our only culinary disappointment. Buzzi writes of the people in Italy who would sniff at such déclassé places, and in the process delivers a Whitman-like celebration of life in a democracy:
“These are the same people who think that roast-chestnut sellers, hot-dog pedlars and market stalls are unsightly, while in fact they turn any anonymous site in the city into an attractive, human, therapeutic place for the usual neuroses. You stallholders (male and female), you landlords of old osterie [humble Italian taverns or restaurants] that have not been `done up’ with bowling alleys, you carpenters’ shops, you knife-grinders, umbrella sellers, chair caners, watermelon sellers, purveyors of chestnut cake, lupins, cooked pears, you who still live down by the railings, stuck between the privy and the trash cans, or out in Grottsville, should be entitled to the gratitude of your fellow-citizens.”
Monday, April 05, 2010
`A Good Head Cannot Read Amiss'
I had just finished a conversation with a retired aerospace engineer who volunteers in the Space Exploration room at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (we disagreed over the reasons for the premature demise of the Apollo program), when I read for the first time in at least 45 years the Classics Illustrated version of H.G. Wells’ The War of the World. The museum keeps a laminated copy in the space room and I stood there reading it with my 9-year-old and another boy of about the same age. I recognized panels on every page, in particular one near the end depicting human collaborators hunting down their fellows.
The comic, No. 124 in the series, was first published in 1955 when I turned three, and I probably first read it around 1959 or 1960. I accumulated dozens of Classics Illustrated comics alongside Batman, Superman and the usual super heroes. I would have started reading Wells’ science-fiction novels when I was about 10, and outgrew them within two years or so, and the rest of science fiction by 1965. I have no regrets about reading the genre at its (and my) appropriate age. Our reading is always evolving. What once compelled soon leaves us indifferent, especially when we are young. Robert D. Richardson puts it like this in First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process:
“When we read actively, we can profit from anything. `A good head cannot read amiss,’ said Emerson. `In every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides, hidden from all else, and unmistakably meant for his ear. No book has worth by itself, but by the relation to what you have from many other books, it weighs.’”
Without the appropriate reader, a book is inert and incomplete. Seasoned readers know the sensation of coming home to a book they are reading for the first time.
The comic, No. 124 in the series, was first published in 1955 when I turned three, and I probably first read it around 1959 or 1960. I accumulated dozens of Classics Illustrated comics alongside Batman, Superman and the usual super heroes. I would have started reading Wells’ science-fiction novels when I was about 10, and outgrew them within two years or so, and the rest of science fiction by 1965. I have no regrets about reading the genre at its (and my) appropriate age. Our reading is always evolving. What once compelled soon leaves us indifferent, especially when we are young. Robert D. Richardson puts it like this in First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process:
“When we read actively, we can profit from anything. `A good head cannot read amiss,’ said Emerson. `In every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides, hidden from all else, and unmistakably meant for his ear. No book has worth by itself, but by the relation to what you have from many other books, it weighs.’”
Without the appropriate reader, a book is inert and incomplete. Seasoned readers know the sensation of coming home to a book they are reading for the first time.
Sunday, April 04, 2010
`He Glanced at Thousands of Books'
“Emerson did not read in order to pick up the common coin of his culture or class. He did not even read with the Arnoldian hope of learning the best that had been thought and said. Emerson read for personal gain, for personal use.”
The three explanations Robert D. Richardson offers for Emerson’s lifetime of hearty, almost gluttonous reading are not mutually exclusive. To varying degrees, at various times, all have driven me, though the third is most compelling. Our first stop in Portland after checking in at the hotel was Powell’s, where I finally bought Richardson’s most recent book, First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process. Collectively, his biographies of Emerson, Thoreau and William James have influenced me more than the works of any other living writer, except possibly Geoffrey Hill.
I also picked up The Perfect Egg and Other Secrets by the late Aldo Buzzi, Stevie Smith’s Collected Poems and a lovely1929 edition of Charles Lamb’s Last Essays of Elia -- all books I‘ve read before, many times in the case of the latter two, but have never owned. I was surprised that Powell’s, at least according to its digital catalog, had not a single title by or about A.J. Liebling, Zbigniew Herbert or Michael Oakeshott.
We walked to the Portland Public Library and took a picture of the boys sitting on a stone bench with “Henry Fielding” carved on the back. A large black man stopped on the sidewalk, pointed at me and said to the boys, emphatically. “You guys got a good Dad there!” At the Portland Art Museum we viewed an exhibition ridiculously titled “More Than a Pretty Face: 150 Years of the Portrait Print” that contained two prints each by Henri Matisse and Richard Diebenkorn and one each by Balthus and Milton Avery. Richardson writes of Emerson:
“He generally took more books out of the library than he was able to read before they were due back. His charging records at the Boston Athenaeum, the Harvard College Library, and the Boston Society Library are not so much a measure of his intake as of his appetite. He glanced at thousands of books. He read carefully many hundreds that caught his attention. He returned over and over to a favorite few, including Montaigne, Plutarch, Plato, Plotinus, Goethe, de Stael, and Wordsworth.”
The three explanations Robert D. Richardson offers for Emerson’s lifetime of hearty, almost gluttonous reading are not mutually exclusive. To varying degrees, at various times, all have driven me, though the third is most compelling. Our first stop in Portland after checking in at the hotel was Powell’s, where I finally bought Richardson’s most recent book, First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process. Collectively, his biographies of Emerson, Thoreau and William James have influenced me more than the works of any other living writer, except possibly Geoffrey Hill.
I also picked up The Perfect Egg and Other Secrets by the late Aldo Buzzi, Stevie Smith’s Collected Poems and a lovely1929 edition of Charles Lamb’s Last Essays of Elia -- all books I‘ve read before, many times in the case of the latter two, but have never owned. I was surprised that Powell’s, at least according to its digital catalog, had not a single title by or about A.J. Liebling, Zbigniew Herbert or Michael Oakeshott.
We walked to the Portland Public Library and took a picture of the boys sitting on a stone bench with “Henry Fielding” carved on the back. A large black man stopped on the sidewalk, pointed at me and said to the boys, emphatically. “You guys got a good Dad there!” At the Portland Art Museum we viewed an exhibition ridiculously titled “More Than a Pretty Face: 150 Years of the Portrait Print” that contained two prints each by Henri Matisse and Richard Diebenkorn and one each by Balthus and Milton Avery. Richardson writes of Emerson:
“He generally took more books out of the library than he was able to read before they were due back. His charging records at the Boston Athenaeum, the Harvard College Library, and the Boston Society Library are not so much a measure of his intake as of his appetite. He glanced at thousands of books. He read carefully many hundreds that caught his attention. He returned over and over to a favorite few, including Montaigne, Plutarch, Plato, Plotinus, Goethe, de Stael, and Wordsworth.”
Saturday, April 03, 2010
`Unmapped, Unknown, Ourselves'
While packing Friday afternoon for a visit to Portland I paused to read e-mails and found one from a woman who met the poet Herbert Morris in the nineteen-sixties. She worked in a public library in Philadelphia and when Morris came to that city to visit his mother, he borrowed books. With her permission I quote portions of her note:
“I had many oblique conversations with him and meetings to talk in Rittenhouse Sq. I also corresponded with him during that period. Roughly 1963-1967. I have some twenty-five letters and short notes from him. It was always hard to ask him a direct question! Over those years I did learn about his life beyond his poetry. As the Eric Ormsby piece says he is `almost anonymous’ and has kept the facts of much of his life to himself.”
Morris (1928-2001) published four books of poetry. On the basis of their contents I rank him among the foremost American poets of his era and yet he seems to be little read. His name draws blank stares of non-recognition even from ambitious readers. Of late the Poetry Foundation has posted several of Morris’ poems including “Thinking of Darwin” (from Peru, 1983) which concludes with these lines:
“…latitudes of impossible
dimensions bleaching the horizon,
mapping what will not quite stay mapped,
nothing but desert at our backs,
nothing but darkness to advance on,
night on the routes that enter strangeness
more dangerously, in the evening,
than we can bring ourselves to say,
darkness and an interior
for which, of course, there is no name
except, unmapped, unknown, ourselves.”
Like other relatives and acquaintances of Morris who have contacted, my reader guards the poet's privacy, even in death. Such devotion is rare and commendable. She adds in her e-mail:
“His life even beyond his poetry was astounding. He was an amazing, caring man. He gave me time and attention when his life was filled with pain as well as joy. He was meticulous and persistent in his encouragement of others if he saw sparks of `possibilities.’ The more I learned about him the more inhibited (one might say unworthy of his attention) I felt.”
Please look for what’s left of Herbert Morris – his poetry – and savor his gift to the world.
“I had many oblique conversations with him and meetings to talk in Rittenhouse Sq. I also corresponded with him during that period. Roughly 1963-1967. I have some twenty-five letters and short notes from him. It was always hard to ask him a direct question! Over those years I did learn about his life beyond his poetry. As the Eric Ormsby piece says he is `almost anonymous’ and has kept the facts of much of his life to himself.”
Morris (1928-2001) published four books of poetry. On the basis of their contents I rank him among the foremost American poets of his era and yet he seems to be little read. His name draws blank stares of non-recognition even from ambitious readers. Of late the Poetry Foundation has posted several of Morris’ poems including “Thinking of Darwin” (from Peru, 1983) which concludes with these lines:
“…latitudes of impossible
dimensions bleaching the horizon,
mapping what will not quite stay mapped,
nothing but desert at our backs,
nothing but darkness to advance on,
night on the routes that enter strangeness
more dangerously, in the evening,
than we can bring ourselves to say,
darkness and an interior
for which, of course, there is no name
except, unmapped, unknown, ourselves.”
Like other relatives and acquaintances of Morris who have contacted, my reader guards the poet's privacy, even in death. Such devotion is rare and commendable. She adds in her e-mail:
“His life even beyond his poetry was astounding. He was an amazing, caring man. He gave me time and attention when his life was filled with pain as well as joy. He was meticulous and persistent in his encouragement of others if he saw sparks of `possibilities.’ The more I learned about him the more inhibited (one might say unworthy of his attention) I felt.”
Please look for what’s left of Herbert Morris – his poetry – and savor his gift to the world.
Friday, April 02, 2010
`The Cross Staggered Him'
Our neighborhood was almost exclusively Roman Catholic, mostly Poles, Czechs, Slovaks and Italians. We were among the non-churchgoers and our holidays were thoroughly secularized. My mother muddled the messages – the right sort of religion kept at the right distance was good but not for us. Good Friday was notable: Between noon and 3 p.m. we were not to play army or make any disturbance that might offend the Mass-goers around us. I’m still not a churchgoer but my mother’s prohibition of raucous fun while neighbors remembered Christ’s suffering – and perhaps her sentimentality – remains fast among my instincts.
Among many poets, three 20th-century masters address Good Friday. Eliot does so in a passage from “East Coker,” the second of the Four Quartets (1943), in the section beginning “The wounded surgeon plies the steel…”:
“The dripping blood our only drink,
The bloody flesh our only food:
In spite of which we like to think
That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood—
Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.”
Geoffrey Hill included “Canticle for Good Friday” in his first book, For the Unfallen (1959):
“The cross staggered him. At the cliff-top
Thomas, beneath its burden, stood
While the dulled wood
Spat on the stones each drop
Of deliberate blood.
“A clamping, cold-figured day
Thomas (not transfigured) stamped, crouched,
Watched
Smelt vinegar and blood. He,
As yet unsearched, unscratched,
“And suffered to remain
At such near distance
(A slight miracle might cleanse
His brain
Of all attachments, claw-roots of sense)
“In unaccountable darkness moved away,
The strange flesh untouched, carrion sustenance
Of staunchest love, choicest defiance,
Creation’s issue congealing (and one woman’s).”
Here’s a prose poem, “The Passion of Our Lord Painted by Anonymous from the Circle of Rhenish Masters,” by Zbigniew Herbert (from Inscription, 1969, translated by Alissa Valles):
“They have ugly mugs, but their hands are dexterous, accustomed to hammer and nail, iron and wood. They’re just now nailing Our Lord Jesus Christ to the cross. Loads of work to do; they have to hurry up so everything will be ready at noon.
“Knights on horseback as props for the drama. Their faces are impassive. Their long lances mimic trees without branches on that hill without trees.
“Able craftsmen are nailing – as was said – Our Lord to the cross. Ropes, nails, a stone for sharpening tools are laid out neatly on the sand. A bustle, but without excessive agitation.
“The sand is warm, painted meticulously, grain by grain. Here and there a tuft of grass protrudes stiffly and an innocent white daisy soothes the eye.”
Among many poets, three 20th-century masters address Good Friday. Eliot does so in a passage from “East Coker,” the second of the Four Quartets (1943), in the section beginning “The wounded surgeon plies the steel…”:
“The dripping blood our only drink,
The bloody flesh our only food:
In spite of which we like to think
That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood—
Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.”
Geoffrey Hill included “Canticle for Good Friday” in his first book, For the Unfallen (1959):
“The cross staggered him. At the cliff-top
Thomas, beneath its burden, stood
While the dulled wood
Spat on the stones each drop
Of deliberate blood.
“A clamping, cold-figured day
Thomas (not transfigured) stamped, crouched,
Watched
Smelt vinegar and blood. He,
As yet unsearched, unscratched,
“And suffered to remain
At such near distance
(A slight miracle might cleanse
His brain
Of all attachments, claw-roots of sense)
“In unaccountable darkness moved away,
The strange flesh untouched, carrion sustenance
Of staunchest love, choicest defiance,
Creation’s issue congealing (and one woman’s).”
Here’s a prose poem, “The Passion of Our Lord Painted by Anonymous from the Circle of Rhenish Masters,” by Zbigniew Herbert (from Inscription, 1969, translated by Alissa Valles):
“They have ugly mugs, but their hands are dexterous, accustomed to hammer and nail, iron and wood. They’re just now nailing Our Lord Jesus Christ to the cross. Loads of work to do; they have to hurry up so everything will be ready at noon.
“Knights on horseback as props for the drama. Their faces are impassive. Their long lances mimic trees without branches on that hill without trees.
“Able craftsmen are nailing – as was said – Our Lord to the cross. Ropes, nails, a stone for sharpening tools are laid out neatly on the sand. A bustle, but without excessive agitation.
“The sand is warm, painted meticulously, grain by grain. Here and there a tuft of grass protrudes stiffly and an innocent white daisy soothes the eye.”
Thursday, April 01, 2010
Memento Mori
A reader in Dallas with a timely reminder:
"Brian O'Nolan, Brian Ó Nualláin, Flann O'Brien, Myles na gCopaleen and (I gather) a number of others all died April 1, 1966, in Dublin."
"Brian O'Nolan, Brian Ó Nualláin, Flann O'Brien, Myles na gCopaleen and (I gather) a number of others all died April 1, 1966, in Dublin."
`And No More Singing for the Bird'
Observations of trees, birds and other animals behind the lines and in No Man’s Land appear with touching regularity in the “War Diary” Edward Thomas kept in the final months of his life. On Feb. 16, 1917, he notes:
“A mad Captain with several men driving partridges over the open and whistling and crying `Mark over.’ Kestrels in pairs. Four or five planes hovering and wheeling as kestrels used to over Mutton and Ludcombe.”
(Thomas sometime uses natural imagery to describe war. On Feb. 8, he writes: “Enemy plane like pale moth beautiful among shrapnel bursts.”)
March 11:
“At 6.15 all quiet and heard blackbirds chinking. Scene peaceful, desolate like Dulwich moors except sprinkling of white chalk on the rough brown ground.”
March 14:
“Ronville O.P. [observation post]. Looking out towards No Man’s Land what I thought first was a piece of burnt paper or something turned out to be a bat shaken at last by shells from one of the last sheds in Ronville.”
March 16, in what is presumably an inadvertent but grimly amusing double entendre:
“Larks and great tits. Ploughing field next to orchard in mist – horses and man go right up to crest in view of Hun at Beaurains.”
And this from March 31, 93 years ago Wednesday:
“Blackbirds in the clear cold bright morning early in black Beaurains. Sparrows in the elder of the hedge I observe through – a cherry tree just this side of the hedge makes projection in trench with its roots.”
April 7:
“Hardly any shells into Beaurains. Larks, partridges, hedgesparrows, magpies by O.P. A great burst in red brick building in N. Vitasse stood up like a birch tree or a fountain. Back at 7.30 in peace. Then at 8.30 a continuous roar of artillery.”
(In A Man Could Stand Up, the third volume of the Parade’s End tetralogy, Ford Madox Ford, a Great War veteran, writes: “There was so much noise it seemed to grow dark. It was a mental darkness. You could not think. A Dark Age! The earth moved.”)
The next day was Easter. Thomas made a journal entry but it makes no reference to the natural world. He was killed the following day, April 9, by a German artillery shell during the first hour of the Battle of Arras, and is buried in the Agny military cemetery outside Arras. Thomas had written his first poem in December 1914 when he was 36 years old; his last in January 1917, shortly before shipping to France with the Royal Artillery.
Written on one of the last pages of the diary is this solitary undated line:
“And no more singing for the bird”
“A mad Captain with several men driving partridges over the open and whistling and crying `Mark over.’ Kestrels in pairs. Four or five planes hovering and wheeling as kestrels used to over Mutton and Ludcombe.”
(Thomas sometime uses natural imagery to describe war. On Feb. 8, he writes: “Enemy plane like pale moth beautiful among shrapnel bursts.”)
March 11:
“At 6.15 all quiet and heard blackbirds chinking. Scene peaceful, desolate like Dulwich moors except sprinkling of white chalk on the rough brown ground.”
March 14:
“Ronville O.P. [observation post]. Looking out towards No Man’s Land what I thought first was a piece of burnt paper or something turned out to be a bat shaken at last by shells from one of the last sheds in Ronville.”
March 16, in what is presumably an inadvertent but grimly amusing double entendre:
“Larks and great tits. Ploughing field next to orchard in mist – horses and man go right up to crest in view of Hun at Beaurains.”
And this from March 31, 93 years ago Wednesday:
“Blackbirds in the clear cold bright morning early in black Beaurains. Sparrows in the elder of the hedge I observe through – a cherry tree just this side of the hedge makes projection in trench with its roots.”
April 7:
“Hardly any shells into Beaurains. Larks, partridges, hedgesparrows, magpies by O.P. A great burst in red brick building in N. Vitasse stood up like a birch tree or a fountain. Back at 7.30 in peace. Then at 8.30 a continuous roar of artillery.”
(In A Man Could Stand Up, the third volume of the Parade’s End tetralogy, Ford Madox Ford, a Great War veteran, writes: “There was so much noise it seemed to grow dark. It was a mental darkness. You could not think. A Dark Age! The earth moved.”)
The next day was Easter. Thomas made a journal entry but it makes no reference to the natural world. He was killed the following day, April 9, by a German artillery shell during the first hour of the Battle of Arras, and is buried in the Agny military cemetery outside Arras. Thomas had written his first poem in December 1914 when he was 36 years old; his last in January 1917, shortly before shipping to France with the Royal Artillery.
Written on one of the last pages of the diary is this solitary undated line:
“And no more singing for the bird”
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