`I Am Leading a Posthumous Existence'

To celebrate his birth on Halloween two-hundred fifteen years ago I’ve read this week among Keats’ poems and letters, noting old notations and making new ones (a quality of great writers being the eternal newness of their words), reading without thesis, waiting for lights to go on. Here, from the close of his letter to Fanny Brawne on July 25th, 1819 (two months after composing the great odes), comes one of many illuminations:

“Nor will I say more here, but in a postscript answer anything else you may have mentioned in your letter in so many words - for I am distracted with a thousand thoughts. I will imagine you Venus tonight and pray, pray, pray to your star like a Heathen.”

Keats was the smoothest of operators, whether or not he knew it (one suspects he didn’t): “I will imagine you Venus tonight…” What a line. Try to imagine being the recipient, though I’m unsure of its effectiveness in an email. I was toying with another Keats-Beckett convergence when Nige supplied it:

“Any book that begins in such a mode [`present tense narration’] is almost certain to be worthless. Unless it's this one:

“`From where she lies she sees Venus rise. On. From where she lies when the skies are clear she sees Venus rise followed by the sun. Then she rails at the source of all life. On. At evening when the skies are clear she savours its star's revenge...’

“That's Samuel Beckett. The rules don't apply.”

Right he is. Nige quotes the opening of Ill Seen Ill Said (1981) and I’ll supply the remainder of the paragraph:

“At the other window. Rigid upright on her old chair. It emerges from out the last rays and sinking ever brighter is engulfed in its turn. On. She sits on erect and rigid in the deepening gloom. Such helplessness to move she cannot help. Heading on foot for a particular point often she freezes on the way. Unable till long after to move on not knowing whither or for what purpose. Down on her knees especially she finds it hard not to remain so forever. Hand resting on hand on some convenient support. Such as the foot of her bed. And on them her head. There then she sits as though turned to stone face to the night. Save for the white of her hair and faintly bluish white of face and hands all is black. For an eye having no need of light to see. All this in the present as had she the misfortune to be still of this world.”

In his last letter, written to Charles Brown on Nov. 30, 1820, less than two months before his death, Keats says:

“I have an habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am leading a posthumous existence.”

`All Is Order There, and Elegance'

Today is the birthday of Paul Valery (1871-1945) and Ezra Pound (1885-1972), neither of whom I wish to write about except to note that Eugenio Montale, a greater writer than either, said of the former that he was “a poet who is not of today, but who remains contemporary,” and of the latter that he gave the impression of “a man who had not grown up” (both from The Second Life of Art: Selected Essays, 1982). Rather, I want to write about my friend working for a relief agency in Sudan who, as a birthday present, sent me nine pages of the commonplace book he has been keeping since taking the job in Africa. He writes:

“In Kay Ryan's `That Will to Divest,’ she talks about how hard it is to stop divesting oneself of things once you start. I have found that even with a few pages of excerpts from my favorite literature I seek constantly to cut those excerpts down to the essential words, sometimes ruining the poetic whole; thus you'll see a lot of ellipses.”

I understand the culling instinct. Reading is distilling and discarding, boiling down to essentials, dispensing with the ephemeral, especially as we get older. Like other animals, as winter nears we gather only energy-rich sustenance. I know Gary’s tastes pretty well, so I’m not surprised to find Auden, Baudelaire, Frost and Larkin in his commonplace book, but William Tecumseh Sherman (Memoirs, 1875) was unexpected:

“I would define courage to be a perfect sensibility of the measure of danger, and a mental willingness to endure it.”

So too is a song from John Dryden’s blank-verse adaptation of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (1679). Gary quotes only lines two through five of the second verse but I’ll give the entire song:

“Can life be a blessing,
Or worth the possessing,
Can life be a blessing if love were away?
Ah no! though our love all night keep us waking,
And though he torment us with cares all the day,
Yet he sweetens, he sweetens our pains in the taking,
There's an hour at the last, there's an hour to repay.

“In ev'ry possessing,
The ravishing blessing,
In ev'ry possessing the fruit of our pain,
Poor lovers forget long ages of anguish,
Whate'er they have suffer'd and done to obtain;
'Tis a pleasure, a pleasure to sigh and to languish,
When we hope, when we hope to be happy again.”

The song is sadly and happily erotic, and says something about desires of all sorts. And then I think about Gary working in so punishing a place, knowing he would point out the rewards of living there, and then I think of the passage he cites from Baudelaire’s “L'Invitation au voyage”:

“Là, tout n'est qu'ordre et beauté,
Luxe, calme, et volupté.”

In Richard Howard’s translation:

“All is order there, and elegance,
Pleasure, peace, and opulence.”

`It Is the Spring or Well, Not Its Water'

The most engaging book I've read in some time is Spartacus Road: A Journey Through Ancient Italy (The Overlook Press, 2010), Peter Stothard’s tracing of the 2,000-mile route followed by the slave army in 73-71 B.C. while they challenged the mightiest military of the day. The narrative mingles history and travel, meditation and deep classical learning. Stothard devotes much of Chapter VIII, “Torno to Picentino,” to Gaius Plinius Secundus, known to us a Pliny the Younger – letter writer, lawyer and magistrate, friend to Tacitus. Stothard writes:

“It is possible to recreate parts of the ancient world, and not only with Hollywood togas. We can know and imagine. We can build upon others’ knowledge and imaginations. We can select from our sources as from a guidebook or anthology. We do not need them all. An ancient source – a text of Pliny or Statius or Horace – is just what it says it is, no more so, no less. It is the spring or well, not its water. The source has always been there, sometimes hidden but unchanged in itself. The source is the same in every age. The water is not the same. We find the source. We drink the water. The water is different every day.”

The passage is stirring. The final five sentences, none longer than eight words, are an oath of allegiance to the past, a chant-like affirmation of tradition. They stir a feeling I get when reading the poems and prose of Zbigniew Herbert. I know I’m in the company of a civilized man, as I do when reading Montaigne, Montale or Guy Davenport (or Stothard). We share values – bookishness, respect for learning and an understanding of its limits, a sense of kinship with other civilized men and women, love and wariness of language, stoic acceptance of human transitoriness, a refusal to endorse the shoddy, dishonest or cruel.

In “Monsieur Montaigne’s Voyage to Italy” (The Collected Prose 1948-1998) Herbert writes:

“…it is the antiquities of Rome that made the greatest impression on Montaigne. The author of the Essays, who spends so much attention during his journey on meals and the cleanliness of bedclothes, falls into a truly poetic and exalted mood at the sight of the Forum. His sobriety, formed by ancient authors (Montaigne himself resembles a Renaissance Pliny), does not allow him to fall into sentimental raptures.”

Today we observe Herbert’s eighty-sixth birthday. He died July 28, 1998.

`Learn to Be Silent, to Listen'

In November 1958, the month she turned seventy-one, Marianne Moore published in World Week an article titled “If I Were Sixteen Today.” That one of America’s great poets should offer advice to the nation’s teenagers -- and that an editor commissioned such a piece – suggests we’ve undergone a cultural retrogression in half a century. By the nineteen-fifties (perhaps the summit of American culture) Moore was publishing reviews, essays and miscellanea in Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, House and Garden, Seventeen, and Women’s Wear Daily. One detects no sense of slumming when reading her Complete Prose (1988). In writers, as in plumbers and police officers, I most admire professionalism – competence mingled with what Moore calls “gusto,” a shot of enthusiasm and esprit de corps. Ponder the opening paragraph of her “Sixteen” piece:

“When I was sixteen—in fact thirteen—I felt as old as I have ever felt since; and what I wish I could have been when sixteen is exactly what I am trying to do now, to know that to be hindered is to succeed. If one cannot strike when the iron is hot, one can strike till the iron is hot (Lyman Abbott).”

The tone is old-fashioned American, the fondness for paradox and uncommon common sense as we savor in Thoreau and Lincoln. Moore is airily pragmatic with her pedagogy:

“Instead of hating an over-heavy curriculum and applying jest about the army -- `the incompetent teaching the indifferent the irrelevant,’ I would give thought to the why rather than merely the what of my subjects. Progressive forms in mathematics have unity-structure. You may not like arithmetic ; my aplomb suffers a trifle when a bank teller says, `Yes; it’s all right; I just changed a 6 to a 7.’ Arithmetic demands of memory a very exact kind of co-ordination; and in school, I found geometry a relief; Smith’s advanced algebra, easier than arithmetic; it exerted a certain fascination. Caesar’s Commentaries are—it is true—unostentatiously skillful, not traps for a drudge. Xenophon on dogs and in his treatise on horsemanship, is an expert.”

In the America of Elvis Presley, Moore lauds algebra, Caesar and Xenophon – educational reforms we’re still awaiting. I reread Moore’s essay in the staff lunch room over a turkey sandwich and contemplated reading it over the school intercom with all exits locked, but whimsy is transitory in those approaching their seventh decade. Moore offered five bits of overt advice, and the fifth seems cooler-headed than the intercom idea:

“5. One should above all, learn to be silent, to listen; to make possible promptings from on high. Suppose you `don’t believe in God.’ Talk to someone very wise, who believed in God, did not, and then found that he did. The cure for loneliness is solitude. Think about this say by Martin Buber: `The free man believes in destiny and that it has need of him.’ Destiny, not fate.”

`Falling Into Interest In'

The Paris Review has at last unsealed the vault and made available, online and without cost, its fifty-seven-year cache of interviews with writers. The old favorites are here – Eliot, Ellison, Henry Green, Bellow, Marianne Moore, Nabokov – though I notice an unmistakable falling-off in the last decade or so, a scraping-the-barrel-bottom sense of impoverishment: Stephen King? Joan Didion? Harry Mathews? And am I the only reader never to have heard of David Mitchell? The same period, however, also gives us interviews with Guy Davenport, Shirley Hazzard and Geoffrey Hill.

Davenport, the most gracious and articulate man I ever met, comes off fractionally more prickly than the writer I knew. He seems uncomfortable in so public a forum, especially when the subject turns uncomfortably personal. When John Jeremiah Sullivan asks, “Is anyone writing your biography?” Davenport replies: “I have no life.” This is charmingly disingenuous and, by contemporary standards, largely true. The interview documents Davenport's sense of humor. A few nuggets:

“I learned early on that what I wanted to know wasn’t what I was being taught.”

“The high schools are evidently teaching nothing. I was getting students who had read nothing, knew nothing, and thought the university existed for the sake of the Kentucky Wildcats.”

“There is really no teaching of English literature anywhere.”

“Living in Kentucky makes every other place delightful. It’s sheer joy to write about Basho in his Japan or Mandelshtam in his Russia or Dutch teenagers.”

“I think its taboo to write about any kind of happiness. I mean, Joyce Carol Oates would burn her typewriter if she accidentally wrote about some happy people.”

Here’s one that comes close to defining my debt to Davenport:

“There ought to be a phrase `fall into interest in’ to parallel `fall in love with.’ Once I’ve found something interesting, I look around for more about it.”

If only more teachers, readers and children shared such enthusiasm, the force that drives real education. I watch my sons “fall into interest in” mycology, the American presidency, Chinese calligraphy, particle physics, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, the Trojan War – you name it. For Davenport, there’s a simultaneity about all human times and places. Past and present are mutually dependent when it comes to culture. Asked about the importance of collage to his graphic and literary work he replies:

“It’s at once an acknowledgement of deep tradition and an invention of something new. This is why iconology is the true study of the world, the true way to criticize anything. Art comes out of art. You cannot have Brahms without Beethoven. You cannot have Beethoven without Bach. You cannot have Picasso without the whole history of art.”

Artists embody cultural memory. None is original and the best have deep memories. Reading Davenport’s remarks, I thought of a poem Janet Lewis wrote in her nineties, “The River” (The Selected Poems of Janet Lewis, 2000):

“Remember for me the river,
Flowing wide and cold, from beyond Sugar Island,
Still and smooth, breathing sweetness
Into still air, moving under its surface
With all the power of creation.

“Remember for me the scent of sweet-grass
In Ojibway baskets,
Of meadow turf, alive with insects.

“Remember for me
Who will not be able to remember.
Remember the river.”

Three times in eleven lines the poet says “Remember for me,” suggesting a place where memory and imagination merge. R.L. Barth, editor of the Selected Poems, writes of “The River” in his preface:

“What also impresses is the implicit trust in tradition – that there will be someone to remember and therefore keep alive the landscapes and people of the poems. Janet Lewis is, always was, in a profound and radical sense, a conservative.”

Like, idiosyncratically, Guy Davenport.

`Having Long Ago Known These Games'

In Poetry Month, surrounded by the likes of Stevens, Greville, Winters, Zbigniew Herbert and Keats, I’m fated to share the date of my birth – Oct. 26, 1952 -- with Andrew Motion. Not a bad sort, drab and harmless, the author of – sorry, I can’t remember. Of course, I’m no poet and compared to some of my other birthmates – Trotsky, Hillary Clinton, Pat Sajak – Motion is excellent company. Another birthday is always cause for gratitude if not celebration, and it certainly beats the alternative.

Last summer I read Emerson’s Society and Solitude, a collection of lectures-turned-essays published in 1870, the year he turned sixty-seven. Chapter XII is titled “Old Age.” In it, Emerson quotes a lengthy passage from an “old note-book” he kept at age twenty-two. It describes a visit he and his brother made to John Adams soon after the former president’s son, John Quincy Adams, was elected president. He quotes Adams on the significance of attaining age fifty-eight:

“When Mr. J. Q. Adams's age was mentioned, he said, `He is now fifty-eight, or will be in July ;’ and remarked that `all the Presidents were of the same age: General Washington was about fifty-eight, and I was about fifty-eight, and Mr. Jefferson, and Mr. Madison, and Mr. Monroe.’”

Some of President Adams’ calculations are a little off but how reassuring is the drift of his argument. It’s probably worth pointing out that the median age at which our presidents took office is fifty-four years and eleven months. The Constitution, fortunately, mandates a minimum age of thirty-five for presidential eligibility. I finally appreciated this wisdom two months before my thirty-fifth birthday, when I became a father for the first time. Aging and its demands are not for children.

Part of the pleasure of getting older is finding fewer battles to fight. One has less energy and uses it more economically, a default reality sometimes mistaken for wisdom. Emerson writes in the same essay:

“What to the youth is only a guess or a hope, is in the veteran a digested statute. He beholds the feats of the juniors with complacency, but as one who having long ago known these games, has refined them into results and morals.”

`Love Is Multiform'

Sadder for a reader than the death of a beloved writer is the protracted waning of the enthusiasm one felt for a former favorite. I’m not referring to the inevitable losses that accompany growing up. As adults, if we enjoy Edgar Rice Burroughs with the intensity of our ten-year-old selves, we haven’t put away childish things and our judgment is judged dubious. Rather, I refer to strong time-tested devotion to a writer and his work, probably formed when we were young but no longer children.

I first read John Berryman’s poetry around 1968, the year I turned sixteen and he published His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, the second volume of The Dream Songs. He and his friend Saul Bellow were the first contemporary writers whose work infatuated me, whose new books I awaited with excitement and bought as they were published. My feelings about Bellow’s fiction have only grown stronger.

Berryman’s excesses of style and self were precisely what attracted me when I was young. Later, my devotion remained in spite of the excesses, which amounts to a definition of sentimentality. Finally, I've concluded the excesses too often eclipse the poetic accomplishment. Berryman’s appeal at first was essentially romantic. He made self-destruction look ennobling, and without realizing it I sought a way to soft-sell suicide. The alcoholic coupling of braggadocio and self-pity too often blot out Berryman’s genuine gifts. The baby talk and blackface, reductive Freudianism and willful obscurity – in a word, the self-indulgence -- remind me vividly of my earlier selves. Not only could Berryman not stop drinking; he couldn’t grow up, and so he jumped from a bridge at age fifty-seven.

He was that baffling creature, an alcoholic, with all the attendant defects of character. Alcoholism fueled and corroded his gift, and became the self-consuming subject of his poetry. His gift was real, probably the most generous allotted his doomed generation. Elizabeth Bishop wrote Robert Lowell in 1962: “One has the feeling 100 years from now that he may be all the rage—or a `discovery’—hasn’t one?”

One of his poems from 1945, “Canto Amor,” is included in books of wedding readings. Berryman, married three times, would have been delighted. He composed twenty-two stanzas in terza rima, and the poem ranks among his best work. Near the end he writes:

“New musics! One the music that we hear,
this is the music which the masters make
out of their minds, profound solemn & clear.

“And then the other music, in whose sake
all men perceive a gladness but we are drawn
less for that joy than utterly to take

“our trial, naked in the music’s vision,
the flowing ceremony of trouble and light,
all Loves becoming, none to flag upon.”

Berryman composed a new music. Lowell called it “poignant, abrasive, anguished, humorous,” all true, but the dissonances of Berryman’s life drowned out the voice, leaving a great sadness and now a second sadness. In “Canto Amor” he writes: “Love is multiform.” Berryman was born on this day in 1914 and died Jan. 7, 1972.

`Which But Expressions Be of Inward Evils'

Late Friday, as I read in the living room, the rest of the house asleep, a sharp scream sounded outside, close but not at the door. I guessed female and young, a single discrete sound, no giggling, crying or footfalls. It might have been distress or fooling around, a precursor of Halloween. By the time I moved off the couch to peer through the curtain, the scene outside, illuminated by a cone of dim yellow light, was empty and still. All the windows were black. No cars, pedestrians or cats. Another minor mystery unresolved, but the small jolt of surprise, something elemental, still tingled. I had been reading Selected Poems of Fulke Greville, edited by Thom Gunn. Here is "Sonnet 100" from Caelica:

“In night when colours all to black are cast,
Distinction lost, or gone down with the light;
The eye a watch to inward senses plac'd,
Not seeing, yet still having power of sight,
Gives vain alarums to the inward sense,
Where fear stirr'd up with witty tyranny,
Confounds all powers, and thorough self-offence
Doth forge and raise impossibility;
Such as in thick-depriving darkness
Proper reflections of the error be;
And images of self-confusedness,
Which hurt imaginations only see,
And from this nothing seen, tells news of devils;
Which but expressions be of inward evils.”

Darkness encourages the morbid imagination, even in those of us no longer prey to nameless fears. Thoughts dismissible in daylight nag at night. R.L. Barth, poet, editor and Vietnam combat veteran, uses the first two lines of Greville’s sonnet as the epigraph for “Night-Piece” (Looking for Peace, 1985):

“No moon, no stars, only the leech-black sky,
Until Puff rends the darkness, spewing out
his thin red flames, and then the quick reply
Of blue-green tracers climbing all about.
In night such lovely ways to kill, to die.”

`When Death to Either Shall Come'

In the middle of a multiplication drill my fifth-grade student said she was “culturally different” from most of her friends. I pointed out that our school is a veritable Finnegans Wake of diversity, that we hear a dozen languages spoken in the halls, that “different” is meaningless here. She said her father “was black,” and I noted the past tense. She said he died last year. He was forty-two and had a heart attack. I asked if he had been sick a long time or was his death sudden. “He drank a lot,” she said. “He had brain damage too. He fell down on the sidewalk.”

Such matter-of-factness. No tears, no hint of grief or shame, and we returned to multiplication. I shared the information with her classroom teacher and he seemed shaken. This was news to him.

Robert Bridges, friend and editor to Hopkins, was born on this day in 1844. As with my student, his father died when Bridges was nine years old. The natural order is for one’s parent to die first, but not so soon, perhaps when we have children. Who’s to say whose grief, parent’s or child’s, is greater? Bridges writes:

“When Death to either shall come,--
I pray it be first to me,--”

`Fair Moon, I Climb Your Tide'

The moon is full tonight. Walk outside and lend it an undistracted moment. The beauty is classical and pure, as billions across time and space have understood. Remote familiarity, calculated mutability, bounteous minimalism – the moon reflects us and the world.

In his poems Yvor Winters turned to the moon with touching regularity. Among his titles are “The Bitter Moon,” “The Moonlight,” “Moonlight Alert,” “Moonlight on stubbleshining,” “Sonnet to the Moon” and two titled “Moonrise.” The moon shows up memorably in “An October Nocturne” and “The Slow Pacific Swell.” In his early work Winters invented a form without name – a single six-syllable line. In his third collection, The Bare Hills (1927), comes this rich miniature:

“Fair moon, I climb your tide.”

Beauty, power and human yearning in six monosyllables. In his commonplace book and gathering of aphorisms and meditations, Timber: or Discoveries (1641), Ben Jonson writes:

“The brief style is that which expresseth much in little.”

`To You I Gave My Whole Weak Wishing Heart'

Late in the summer of 1806, the life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge had grown even more chaotic than usual, and his customary dope-addled careening among misbegotten intentions wasn’t the only explanation. On Sept. 27 he published in the Courier a sonnet with a Cole Porter-like title, “Farewell to Love”:

“Farewell, sweet Love! Yet blame you not my truth;
More fondly ne’er did mother eye her child
Than I your form: yours were my hopes of youth,
And as you shaped my thoughts I sighed or smiled.

“While most were wooing wealth, or gaily swerving
To pleasure’s secret haunts, and some apart
Stood strong in pride, self-conscious of deserving,
To you I gave my whole weak wishing heart.

“And when I met the maid that realised
Your fair creations, and had won her kindness,
Say, but for her if aught on earth I prized!
Your dreams alone I dreamt, and caught your blindness.

“O grief!--but farewell, Love! I will go play me
With thoughts that please me less, and less betray me.”

This is “romantic” poetry, I suppose, in the queasy sense (in particular, the mother-child business). The italics and proliferation of exclamation points give it away. A few phrases are pleasing – “wooing wealth,” the closing couplet – but an arthritic reader could wring the self-pity (“yours were my hopes from youth”) out of these lines. (Donne and Drayton wrote very different poems titled “Farewell to Love.”) Let his peerless biographer, Richard Holmes (Coleridge: Darker Reflections, 1804-1834), gloss the chaos:

“But to whom was it addressed – to which Sara? To Asra or to Mrs Coleridge?”

The poem is less a poem than a poetic gesture, so there’s no definitive answer to Holmes’ question unless you accept “love trouble.” Holmes likes the sonnet and drops an intriguing tidbit, calling it “a beautiful adaptation of a piece by Fulke Greville.” Eight pages later Holmes writes:

“During the day he walked uneasily with Southey, and sank himself in the works of Fulke Greville, upon which he made copious notes. In the evenings he returned to the fray, and then made himself incoherent with opium.”

I wish I knew the Greville poem Coleridge was adapting (this, perhaps?). His admiration for the great Elizabethan, whose work went largely unpublished until after his death and whose reputation was resuscitated only in the twentieth century, is daring and admirable. Perhaps Charles Lamb, a dedicated antiquarian, commended Greville to his childhood friend. During Poetry Month it’s gratifying to link Greville with Coleridge, who was born on this day in 1772.

Coleridge ascended to greatness in “Frost on Midnight,” “Dejection: An Ode” and a few other poems but his voluminous prose – Biographia Literaria, the notebooks, letters, conversation and marginalia – and his life as limned in Holmes’ two-volume biography, are the reasons I’ve never said farewell to my love for STC, laudanum and all. Like Dr. Johnson he embodies contradiction, which makes him quintessentially human, like us. Too bad he died one hundred seventy years too soon. Coleridge had the lungs and learning to have been a great blogger.

`Slightly Foxed'

Our friends at The Dabbler have asked if we might spread the word about a contest: The prize is a one-year subscription to Slightly Foxed, the wittily titled and "really excellent quarterly booklover's review," and the contest has been opened to American readers. Please help foster Anglo-American relations and enter -- "to win," as advertizers needlessly say.

`Sympathy & Gratitude'

A growing numbers of students, mostly girls, carry books to the playground. A few walk around reading, as in the closing scene of Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451. Most find a bench or dry spot against a wall and reenact the school recesses of my childhood. Even as a kid I disliked the tedium of sports and most games, and even more I disliked the patronizing assumption that every kid wants to chase a ball and scream.

An Asian girl sat on a wall by the playground equipment in what I recognized as a reader’s reverie. In her lap was a fat volume I knew from thirty paces – the fourth Harry Potter. My three sons have read them all, often more than once, and have watched the movies repeatedly. The fourth-grader was on her third pass through Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. I sensed her irritation at the interruption -- recess is short and returning to class gets in the way of the important thing, and here’s yet another distraction – but she was polite and articulate: “When I read them it’s like I’m really there. I forget about everything else.”

Every dedicated reader knows – or remembers – the sensation of self-forgetting triggered by a book. When the girl realized I knew something about books, if not Harry Potter, and that I was not condescending to her as grownups do, she asked: “Do you know how I can write a letter to J.K. Rowling? Does she have e-mail?Do you think she’ll write back?” I suggested she write care of Rowling’s publisher and showed her in the book where she could find the address. In a notebook entry from December 1804, Samuel Taylor Coleridge writes:

“It is often said, that Books are companions—they are so, dear, very dear Companions! But I often when I read a book that delights me on whole, feel a pang that the Author is not present—that I cannot object to him this & that—express my sympathy & gratitude for this part, & mention some fact that self-evidently oversets a second. Start a doubt about a third—or confirm & carry a fourth thought. At times I become restless: for my nature is very social.”

When the bell rang, the girl lingered a little longer over her book, resignedly replaced the bookmark and drifted to the lines of kids by the door. She held the fat volume against her chest, hugging it. It takes only a reader and a book to be “very social.”

`Battered Unexpected Books'

A thrift store supporting an African relief agency has opened near my brother’s house in suburban Cleveland and he was pleased to find it stocked with a worthwhile selection of inexpensive books. On a recent visit he picked up a six-volume set of works by Shalom Aleichem; Anecdotal Evidence (Point Riders Press, 1993), a collection of prose poems by Texas writer Jim Linebarger; and The Facts on File Visual Dictionary. Ken paid almost nothing for eight volumes, which after all are bulky, space-consuming objects, unlike CDs and t-shirts, and management presumably prices them to move. I envy him each purchase.

In the wake of Fiddler on the Roof, Aleichem was an early enthusiasm, though I haven’t read him in years. It was the title of Linebarger’s slender volume – at sixty-one pages, almost a chapbook – that caught my brother’s attention and mine. Linebarger I know as the author of John Berryman, (Twayne, 1974), the first book-length study of the poet, published two years after Berryman’s death by suicide. On the cover of Anecdotal Evidence, my brother noted, is a “chop,” a new use of an old word. In etchings and lithographs, a chop is a mark or seal made with an embossing tool, usually carrying symbolic significance for the printmaker or owner of the press.

My brother described The Facts on File Visual Dictionary (1986) as his favorite reading matter of the moment. Comprehensiveness and precision of usage are admirable in writing and scholarship. Often in reference books they are cause for comedy. The only edition of the dictionary available in our library was the French/English version, edited by Jean-Claude Corbeil and Ariane Archambault. This proved fortuitous. How else would I have learned that the French for food processor is robot de cuisine. The rest of the 924-page book is equally rich in bicultural/bilingual comedy. The thirty-four-page “Clothing/Vêtements” chapter concludes with a page devoted to the “diving suit/scaphandre moderne” and clothing worn by a “clown/clown.” The latter’s “balloon pants” are “pantalon bouffant,” his “bulb” is a “faux nez” and his “big bowtie” is a “gros nœud papillon.”

The randomness of the stock, the unlikely juxtapositions of title, the book-obliviousness of those doing the selling – these are the charms of thrift-shop bookshops, along with cheap prices. Remembering his years selling used books in London, George Orwell writes in “Bookshop Memories” (1936):

“There is a peculiar flavour about the battered unexpected books you pick up in that kind of collection: minor eighteenth-century poets, out-of-date gazeteers, odd volumes of forgotten novels, bound numbers of ladies’ magazines of the sixties. For casual reading — in your bath, for instance, or late at night when you are too tired to go to bed, or in the odd quarter of an hour before lunch — there is nothing to touch a back number of the Girl's Own Paper.”

`You Heard the Language Right'

The New Compass was an online Canadian-American journal that published four issues in 2003-2004 before going the way of so many worthy literary endeavors. A number of its contributors have been associated with Yvor Winters, as students or poetic beneficiaries – Helen Pinkerton, Kenneth Fields, R.L. Barth, Dick Davis, Timothy Steele, Turner Cassity, Moore Moran. There’s much good writing here and the online archive is complete. I found The New Compass by way of Pinkerton who published “Coronach for Christopher Drummond” in the first issue:

“By lamp or morning light,
Bent close over the page,
You heard the language right,
No matter from what age.

“Whether Jonson's grieving prayers,
Or Milton's rich designs,
Or Melville's rugged verse,
Or Winters' densest lines,

“Your mind knew the intent,
Your voice wakened the sound—
The sleeping beauty pent
In chambers underground.

“Surrounded now by noise,
My words, that sought your praise,
Your understanding voice,
Confront the silent days.”

C.Q. Drummond was professor of English literature at the University of Alberta and died in 2001. Sarah Emsley, co-editor of The New Compass, writes in an editorial:

“For Christopher Drummond, conversation was essential to living: active, discriminating, intelligent, alive, and, above all, collaborative conversation. Mr. Drummond was a teacher who taught through conversation, and a literary critic who worked through his ideas in discussion and debate…In the weeks after his death I was frustrated with the conversations I heard around me in classes and seminars, and even more frustrated with my own inability to converse at the level he had required. So many of the things he said exist now only in the memories (and some class notes) of his students, as he published infrequently.”

One can see why Pinkerton wishes to eulogize Drummond and why she twice mentions his voice in the poem. A teacher, at the most essential level, is a voice, as is a writer. We communicate, yes, and relay information, but also chastise, soothe, entertain and inspire. Pinkerton distinguishes “noise” from “voice.” Noise is the empty, undifferentiated racket surrounding us. Voice is purposeful and focused.

Pinkerton’s poem taught me a new word, “coronach,” which The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms defines as “A Gaelic funeral song or dirge.” Drummond’s name recalls the Scottish poet William Drummond of Hawthornden (1585-1649), who wrote a sonnet on life and the inexorability of death:

“I know that all beneath the moon decays,
And what by mortals in this world is brought,
In Time’s great periods shall return to nought;
That fairest states have fatal nights and days;
I know how all the Muse’s heavenly lays,
With toil of spright which are so dearly bought,
As idle sounds of few or none are sought,
And that nought lighter is than airy praise.
I know frail beauty like the purple flower,
To which one morn oft birth and death affords;
That love a jarring is of minds’ accords,
Where sense and will invassal reason’s power:
Know what I list, this all can not me move,
But that, O me! I both must write and love.”

As I write Sunday afternoon, it’s the one-hundred-tenth birthday of Yvor Winters, who died Jan. 25, 1968.

`Much in Little'

What more appropriate way to celebrate the birth of Yvor Winters, born one-hundred ten years ago today, than to read one of his poems? Here is “Much in Little”:

“Amid the iris and the rose,
The honeysuckle and the bay,
The wild earth for a moment goes
In dust or weed another way.

Small though its corner be, the weed
Will yet intrude its creeping beard;
The harsh blade and the hairy seed
Recall the brutal earth we feared.

And if no water touch the dust
In some far corner, and one dare
To breathe upon it, one may trust
The spectre on the summer air:

“The risen dust alive with fire,
The fire made visible, a blur
Interrate, the pervasive ire
Of foxtail and of hoarhound burr.”

`One of the Truly Poignant Smells of Australia'

Among other distinctions, Les Murray is the supreme poet of smells, cataloguer of fragrance and stink. In “The Smell of Coal Smoke” (which also gives us “the Pears-Soap-smelling fire”) he writes:

“Coal smoke as much as gum trees now had a tight scent
to summon deep brown evenings of the Japanese war...”

And in “The Cows on Killing Day,” narrated by the title creature, Murray renders “The heifer human smells of needing the bull human / and is angry.” The seven-page long “The Nostril Songs” (The Biplane Houses, 2006), starts with an invocation to “P. Ovidius Naso” (Ovid), and turns into a veritable encyclopedia of scent:

“Fragrance stays measured,
stench bloats out of proportion:
even a rat-sized death,
not in contact with soil, is soon
a house-evacuating metal gas
in our sinuses; it boggles our gorge—
no saving that sofa:
give it a Viking funeral!”

The Australian poet, a serious Roman Catholic who dedicates his books “to the glory of God,” is a great Falstaffian lover of the senses and the creation that fills them. Today we celebrate his seventy-second birthday, which earns him a place in our ongoing observance of Poetry Month. Murray taught me an olfactory word for a phenomenon I knew immediately: “petrichlor.” This comes from his essay “The Import of Seasons” (written in 1985, collected in A Working Forest, 1997):

“In the mid-1960s, Drs. Joy Bear and Richard Thomas of the CSIRO [Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization] discovered that the characteristic smell of rain on dry earth, one of the truly poignant smells of Australia, was called by a yellow oil which they could distil from rocks and soil. They termed this oil petrichlor, `essence of stone…’

“Heavy rains release some of it from the earth’s surface to wash down into swamps and streams, where it triggers the reproductive activity of fish and other aquatic animals and thus starts the cycle of life after a drought. A fraction of this oil rising from the earth provides the smell we notice, an odour to which many animals are probably keyed.”

This most spiritual of poets is among the earthiest and most creaturely. He’s cranky and Old Testament-wrathful but his sympathies suffuse all creation. More, indeed, is Les.

`All That It Needed to Do in This World It Did'

For thirty minutes each morning I help a fifth-grade girl with arithmetic. Her grasp of the subject is eccentric, which may be true for all of us. The number nine stymies her. She counts readily by tens and knows her addition and multiplication tables – that is, she sees the answers in a flash, without calculation – but only through eight. With nines she resorts, laboriously, to her fingers.

She asked how to calculate the area of quadrilaterals and when I mentioned square inches and feet, she asked what that had to do with square roots--a subject she has never studied. She told me her favorite number is one hundred forty-four because it’s the product of multiplying twelve by twelve. When I told her a dozen dozens is called a gross, she giggled. She has a taste for numerical symmetry but she can’t multiple nine by three.

She was absent for two days and her mother told me her daughter’s five-year-old cousin had been diagnosed with a brain tumor, probably inoperable. My student hasn’t experienced severe illness or death. She’s sweet-natured, a genuine innocent. When she returned to school, she assured me her cousin is “just fine,” they had brought her home from the hospital and “hooked her up to a bag of stuff that goes in her arm.”

I thought of Janet Lewis’ “For the Father of Sandro Gulotta,” to which Lewis appended a note saying the poem was “written for Vicenzo Gulotta of Milano whose son was dying of leukemia”:

“When I called the children from play
Where the westering sun
Fell level between the leaves
of olive and bay,
There where the day lilies stand,
I paused
to touch with a curious hand
The single blossom, furled,
That with morning had opened wide,
The long bud tinged
with gold of an evening sky.

“All day, and only one day,
It drank the sunlit air.
In one long day
All that it needed to do in this world
It did, and at evening precisely curled
The tender petals to shield
From wind, from dew,
The pollen-laden heart.
Sweet treasure, gathered apart
From our grief, from our longing view,
Who shall say if the day was too brief
For the flower, if time lacked?
Had it not, like the children, all Time
In their long, immortal day?”

Beyond some point, glosses and explications are indecent.

`The Better You See the Earth'

For this Western reader Russian poetry is a scattered range of Urals surrounded by vast, empty steppes – a geography charted by my ignorance. There’s little between Pushkin and the cursed generation of Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Pasternak, Esenin and Tsvetaeva – and later, Brodsky. How different from my understanding, via translation, of Russian prose, from Pushkin to Nabokov and beyond.

One small exception is Mikhail Lermontov, born on this date in 1814 and so inducted into our celebration of Poetry Month. Verses and Versions (Harcourt, Inc., 2008), a gathering of Nabokov’s translations from the Russian, includes two brief prose pieces on Lermontov composed in the first years after Nabokov’s move to the United States in 1940. He writes:

“Though decidedly patchy, he remains for the true lover of poetry a miraculous being whose development is something of a mystery.”

Like his idol Pushkin, Lermontov died in a duel – “at the quite ridiculous age of twenty-seven,” Nabokov says, on July 27, 1841. Verses and Versions includes nine translations of poems by Lermontov, one in two versions. To add yet another layer of translation, linguistic and cultural, here is “Imitation of Heine”:

“A pine there stands in the northern wilds
alone on a barren bluff,
swaying and dreaming and clothed by the snow
in a cloak of the finest fluff—

“dreaming a dream of a distant waste,
a country of sun-flushed sands
where all forlorn on a torrid cliff
a lovely palm tree stands.”

The sentiment is conventional but I like its plainness and wistfulness, and the contrast of pine and palm. Lermontov was a soldier and fought in the Caucasus. Nabokov neatly distills Lermontov’s gift and diagnoses generalizing hacks:

“To be a good visionary you must be a good observer. The better you see the earth the finer your perception of heaven will be; and, inversely, the crystal-gazer who is not an artist will turn out to be merely an old bore.”

Among those who saw the earth best is another poetic birthday boy, Publius Vergilius Maro – Virgil -- born Oct. 15, 70 BCE. This is from David Ferry's translation of the second of Virgil’s Georgics:

“That man is blessed who has learned the causes of things,
And therefore under his feet subjugates fear
And the decrees of unrelenting fate
And the noise of Acheron's insatiable waters.
[…]
“He neither looks with pity on the poor
Nor does he look with envy at the rich.”

Between them, Lermontov and Virgil at their best define the poetry of precision and attentiveness to the physical world, with another world hovering nearby.

`In Short, Independent Thinkers'

While waiting for my flu shot I was reading Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Bookshop and sharing the waiting room with two middle-aged women reading magazines. A nurse holding a clipboard entered and asked cheerily, “Who’s getting the mammogram?” I exchanged looks with the woman seated across from me and said, cheerily, “Not I.” The woman beside me had started to stand, on her way to the mammogram, but fell back laughing into her chair and the nurse and the other woman joined her. Another sermon on political correctness and sensitivity narrowly averted, and to their credit all spared me the “Men-get-mammograms-too-you-know” lecture.

I had already begun rereading The Bookshop (1978) when reading Nige’s account of the English novel and its essential comic genius:

“..the most vigorous tradition in English fiction is surely a comic one, from Fielding, Smollett and Sterne to Wodehouse and Waugh and even Amis pere et fils (before they discovered 'seriousness'), by way of Peacock, Jane Austen, Thackeray, Meredith and the greatest and most English of them all, Dickens. Against that joyous, tumultuous stream, the sobersided tradition in English fiction - Richardson, George Eliot, Conrad, D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Graham Greene?, the Booker-winning set - seems a thin, sour trickle. Why did 'seriousness' come to be valued above all else?”

I might quibble as to Eliot and Conrad but Nige is right. More than ever I’m drawn to the comic, especially in fiction. Comedy is more serious, truer to the squalor and pain of living than tedious rectitude. It brings us lower faster and provides a convenient litmus test for mental health. Beware the bacillus of self-seriousness. The same goes for the dominant strain of American fiction – Twain, Melville ( thanks to Ishmael, our first stand-up comic), James, Wharton, Cather, Faulkner (I defy you to read As I Lay Dying or The Hamlet without laughing), Bellow, J.F. Powers, Flannery O’Connor and Nabokov. The last makes an oblique appearance, as does Graham Greene, in The Bookshop, set in the nineteen-fifties in an English seaside town:

“Opening the shop gave her, every morning, the same feeling of promise and opportunity. The books stood as neatly ranged as Gipping’s vegetables, ready for all comers.

“Milo came in at lunch-time. `Well, are you going to order Lolita?’

“`I haven’t decided yet. I ordered an inspection copy. I’m confused by what the American papers said about it. One of the reviewers said that it was bad news for the trade and bad news for the public, because it was dull, pretentious, florid and repulsive, but on the other hand there was an article by Graham Greene which said that it was a masterpiece.’”

A sad and very funny masterpiece. Funny fiction has been on my mind since recently rereading much of Flann O’Brien and all of Charles Portis. Another admirer of both is James Marcus with whom I exchanged e-mails last week while reading Masters of Atlantis. James writes:

“Portis is the funniest writer ever. Everything in Masters of Atlantis leaves me paralyzed with laughter and admiration--the hats, the internecine struggles, the crazy gold-extraction scheme, the decaying temple, and so forth. How does he sustain that deliciously poker-faced tone? I have no idea. I'm sorry he stopped publishing and went into seclusion, more or less--no interviews, no journalism, no new books. The Coen Brothers have now made a new version of True Grit, with Jeff Bridges in the role originally played by John Wayne. Perhaps that will nudge Portis back into the limelight a bit, but I'm afraid that he's too subtle for a mass audience.”

I hope that’s not true. Here’s a passage from early in Masters of Atlantis, when Lamar Jimmerson and his followers in the nineteen-twenties are organizing the Gnomon Society in the United States:

“Bates too pitched in anew. Through a friend at the big Chicago marketing firm of Targeted Sales, Inc., he got his hands on a mailing list titled `Odd Birds of Illinois and Indiana,’ which, by no means exhaustive, contained the names of some seven hundred men who ordered strange merchandise through the mail, went to court often, wrote letters to the editor, wore unusual headgear, kept rooms that were filled with rocks or old newspapers. In short, independent thinkers, who might be more receptive to the Atlantean lore than the general run of men. Lamar was a little surprised to find his own name on the list.”

Again, Nige is right: You won’t find that sort of thing in To the Lighthouse.

`There's Nothing Crows Won't Eat from the Menu'

Before walking into school I picked up the litter on the ground around the trash barrel – tissues, candy wrappers, half a pencil. The amount of refuse was unusual if not the resolute denial of its existence by passing students and staff. After stowing my lunch and book bag inside I noticed through the front window a peculiar vertical movement, a geyser of confetti. Inside the trash bin was a crow emptying its contents.

As a girl carrying a backpack and cello in its case approached the door, within six feet of the can and crow, the bird popped straight into the air, startled out of its trash-mining. The effect was like the jack (or jackdaw) shot from a jack-in-the-box. I watched the same pattern for twenty minutes before the bird departed for good. I walked out for a closer look and judged the crow had removed a bushel of refuse from the can. His object was a discarded bag of microwave popcorn, now shredded. It looked as though he had even consumed the ersatz butter. In a chapter titled “Intertwined Ecologies and Mutual Destinies,” the authors of In the Company of Crows and Ravens (John Marzluff, Tony Angell and Paul R. Ehrlich; Yale University Press, 2007) observe:

“There’s nothing city crows won’t order from the menu. They are fond of pizza crusts, hamburgers, French fries, sweet-and-sour pork, fried chicken, and almost any road-killed animal served up along the highway. More than half of our observations of crows feeding in the city were of them eating garbage…”

This account reminds me of lunchtime in the school cafeteria, though the kids are messier, noisier, more violent and waste more food. One-hundred fifty years ago last week, just nineteen months from death, Thoreau noted in his journal for Oct. 6, 1860:

“As I go over the hill, I see a large flock of crows on the dead white oak and on the ground under the living one. I find the ground strewn with white oak acorns, and many of these have been broken in two, and their broken shells strewn about, so that I suppose the crows have been eating them. Some are merely scratched, as if they had been pecked at without being pierced; also there are two of the large swamp white oak acorn-cups joined together dropped under this oak, perhaps by a crow, maybe a quarter of a mile from its tree, and that probably across the river. Probably a crow had transported one or more swamp white oak acorns this distance. They must have been too heavy for a jay.”

Thoreau’s birds share with my crow a methodical approach to food procurement -- focused, determined and hard-working, unlike students.

`Decorum Aloof from Conformity'

Geoffrey Hill dedicates Without Title, his 2006 collection of poems, “in omaggio a Eugenio Montale” and includes a translation of the Italian master’s La Bufera – “The Storm.” In a comparable spirit of homage we dedicate this post to Montale, born one-hundred fourteen years ago today, Columbus Day, in the explorer’s native city, Genoa.

Montale fashions a private realm that in the hands of another poet might remain hermetic, surrounded by an impermeable membrane of arcane private reference. Instead, with patience and attentiveness, we are permitted entrance and learn to hear what Jonathan Galassi, in “Reading Montale,” in his translation of Collected Poems 1920-1954, calls the poet’s “nervous, astringent music.” Here is Hill’s version of Montale’s La Bufera:

“The storm that batters the magnolia’s
impermeable leaves, the long-drawn drum roll
of Martian thunder with its hail

“(crystal acoustics trembling in your night’s lair
disturb you while the gold transfumed
from the mahoganies, the pages’ rims
of de luxe books, still burns, a sugar grain
under your eyelid’s shell)

“lightning that makes stark-white the trees,
the walls, suspending them –
interminable instant – marbled manna
and cataclysm – deep in you sculpted,
borne now as condemnation: this binds you
closer to me, strange sister, than any love.
So, the harsh buskings, bashing of castanets
and tambourines around the spoilers’ ditch,
fandango’s foot-rap and over all
some gesture still to be defined…
As when
you turned away and casting with a hand
that cloudy mass of hair from off your forehead

“gave me a sign and stepped into the dark.”

Go here for a video of Hill reading his version of La Bufera and here to read translations of seven Montale poems by three America poets, including a translation of La Bufera by Charles Wright. In Section CXXXIV of The Triumph of Love (1998), Hill gives another homage to Montale in which he clearly identifies with the master:

“It surprises me not at all that your
private, marginal, uncommitted writing—
this is to be in code—came at the end
to the forum of world acclaim. Decenza—
your term—I leave unchallenged; decorum
aloof from conformity; not a mask
of power’s harsh suavities. [Internal
evidence identifies the last
Eugenio Montale as the undoubted
subject of this address.—ED] It sets you
high among the virtuous avvocati—
the judges with the grasp of such vocation—
and puts you with the place-brokers, purveyors
of counsel, publishers, editors,
and senators-for-life; a civic conscience
attested by comedy: twenty-five years
with the Nuovo Corriere della Sera
as leader-writer and critic of first nights;
still your own man; publicities, public life,
the anteroom to the presence-chamber
of self-containment. (Machiavelli described
entering his study, robed as if for Court.)
But one man’s privacy is another’s
crowded at home—we are that circumscribed.
Machado who, to say the least, is your
grand equal, sat out his solitude, habitué
of small, shaky, wicker or zinc tables—
still-life with bottle, glass, scrawled school-cahiers—
put his own voice to slow-drawn induration.
I admire you and have trained my ear
to your muted discords. This rage twists
me, for no reason other than the sight
of anarchy coming to irregular order
with laurels; now with wreaths: Duomo drone-
bell, parade-mask shout, beautifully-caught
scatter of pigeons in brusque upward tumble,
wingbeats held by a blink.”

Decenza is “decency,” “decorum,” “propriety.” Avvocati is “lawyers,” “counselors, “advocates.” Antonio Machado (1875-1939) was the Spanish poet of whom Montale wrote: “ten lines of Antonio Machado are enough to announce the presence of great poetry.” Il Corriere della Sera was Italy’s most important newspaper after World War II, where Montale worked for many years as an editor and music critic. Hill celebrates Montale as a private man with the gift for living a public life, “decorum / aloof from conformity.” One thinks of T.S. Eliot, a great favorite of Montale’s.

After Dante and Zbigniew Herbert, Montale is the foreign-language poet I most often read. I recommend Montale in English (Handsel Books, 2004), a selection by many poets and translators edited by Harry Thomas; Galassi’s translations of Collected Poems 1920-1954 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998) and The Second Life of Art: Selected Essays of Eugenio Montale (The Ecco Press, 1982); and Selected Poems (Oberlin College Press, 2004), with translations by Galassi, Wright and David Young.

"That Bodleian Mind!"

Samuel Johnson published his last great work, Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, between 1779 and 1781. William Cowper writes to his friend the Rev. William Unwin on March 21, 1784, nine months before Johnson’s death:

“I am very much the biographer's humble admirer. His uncommon share of good sense, and his forcible expression, secure to him that tribute from all his readers. He has a penetrating insight into character, and a happy talent of correcting the popular opinion, upon all occasions where it is erroneous; and this he does with the boldness of a man who will think for himself, but, at the same time, with a justness of sentiment that convinces us he does not differ from others through affectation, but because he has a sounder judgement.”

No matter how eccentric Johnson’s judgments sometimes seem -- on Tristram Shandy: “Nothing odd will do long” – we defer to his “sounder judgement.” We extend him the courtesy of consideration, for even when wrong, Johnson is usefully wrong. Later in the same letter Cowper says, “I do not think him always just,” citing his assessments of Milton and Prior. Such lapses in Johnson, the poet reminds us, are not “through affectation.” Too many critics are poseurs, pandering and posturing to please their constituencies. As Cowper notes, Johnson possesses “the boldness of a man who will think for himself.” He writes of consequential matters, not parochial dustups, and his judgments are suffused with human understanding. In his chapter on the Lives in Samuel Johnson (1977), W. Jackson Bate writes:

“What we are dealing with is the rare ability, which was to become more rare with another generation, to look on literature as one example—one of several—of what mankind can do, and to prize and evaluate it accordingly. The sense of its value is further heightened by Johnson’s inability to forget how precarious this, like all other human achievement, really is: how quickly it can be lost, how difficult it can be to retain.”

A great critic is a moralist in disguise. Bate goes on to commend Johnson for sustaining “the dignity of literature in a way that self-defeating attempts to isolate it--to fence it off as a special preserve—can never succeed in doing." Johnson is the opposite of parochial. I happened upon “Samuel Johnson” by Wiley Clements, originally published in time for Johnson's tercentenary:

“The minds of some men are familiar lands
With mountains, rivers, moors, long winding roads,
Meadows, forest tracks and desert sands,
Vipers and hornets, scorpions and toads.
His mind was like a thundering sky at times,
A tempest, tidal wave, a storm at sea;
Again it was a campanile of chimes,
A quiet lake, a zephyr on the lea,
A picture gallery, a treasury
Of antique volumes curiously clept,
The archive of a scholar's memory
In which the whole of English speech was kept.
In company, if wit and sense declined,
What vast supply in that Bodleian mind!”

I love “that Bodleian mind!”

`The Primary Object of a Student of Literature'

In 1949, Lord Dave Cecil delivered his inaugural lecture as Goldsmiths’ Professor of English Literature at Oxford University, and eight years later included it in The Fine Art of Reading. In the title essay he writes:

“Art is not like mathematics or philosophy. It is a subjective, sensual, and highly personal activity in which facts and ideas are the servants of fancy and feeling; and the artist’s first aim is not truth but delight. Even when, like Spenser, he wishes to instruct, he seeks to do so by delighting. It follows that the primary object of a student of literature is to be delighted.”

Sixty years ago, Cecil’s words would have sounded unexceptional, even a little bland: Of course writers hope to delight readers, and of course readers and students of literature hope to be delighted. That’s what the artistic enterprise, the implicit collaboration of writer and reader, is all about. Today, Cecil’s words sound revolutionary and I remembered them when reading David Myers’ Shavian meditation on being a “reactionary”:

“I want to return to a time when writers were judged by their style, their success in bringing artistic coherence out of actuality’s confusion, their distinctiveness and distinction, even their interpretation of the human experience.”

I don’t know any other ways to usefully judge a writer. David’s tone is pugnacious, as we’ve come to expect, but also elegiac, almost nostalgic. He cares as much about books and writers as anyone I’ve known, but the critics – bloggers, reviewers, readers-without-portfolio -- making the biggest noises these days appear not to care much at all. There’s little evidence of pleasure in all the blather. They serve other masters and delight is not among them. David writes:

“I miss talking about books in terms of something other than their meaning. I would kind of like to go back to discussing authors as if they had intentions, just like their critics, which could not be happily dismissed in an effort to squeeze a more ingenious message out of them. I wish critics still had a conscience.”

And a sense of humor, and a delight in prose. For a blogger to dismiss Mario Vargas Llosa as “a committed counter-revolutionary” without mentioning Conversation in the Cathedral or any other title is delightfully funny, but that's not the same as having a sense of humor. I’d be delighted to know what such a reader makes of Tristram Shandy, Charles Lamb’s essays, Max Beerbohm's stories, Marianne Moore’s poems, A.J. Liebling’s Between Meals, Whitney Balliett’s jazz writing and the novels of Charles Portis. Too counter-revolutionary, I suppose, and too bursting with delight.

`You Have Your Eye on a Small Elusive Detail'

I’ve organized an informal hawk watch among the younger kids during recess. I got the idea last week when a kindergarten girl pulled on my hand and pointed at the sky. A hundred meters above us drifted a red-tailed hawk trying to look lazy and harmless. The day was sunny and cool, and he seemed to be riding the man-made thermals created by pavement, buildings and automobiles. A boy insisted the bird was an eagle, the only diurnal raptor kids seem to know. I explained that eagles are hawks but that information impressed no one.

Now I carry a notebook in my orange traffic vest and record our noontime sightings – five in four days, not a bad tally for a residential neighborhood. A small group, mostly girls, competes to see the first bird, and I’ll do almost anything to discourage whining, fighting and tetherball.

I’ve never paid much attention to the Irish poet Eamon Grennan, so I’m catching up by reading his Out of Sight: New & Selected Poems (Graywolf Press, 2010). He would be a more interesting poet if he used more stringent metrics and rhyme but he pays attention to details and makes for amiable company. Here is his hawk poem, “Detail”:

“I was watching a robin fly after a finch--the smaller
chirping with excitement, the bigger, its breast blazing, silent
in light-winged earnest chase -- when, out of nowhere
over the chimneys and the shivering front gardens,
flashes a sparrowhawk headlong, a light brown burn
scorching the air from which it simply plucks
like a ripe fruit the stopped robin, whose two or three
cheeps of terminal surprise twinkle in the silence
closing over the empty street when the birds have gone
about their business, and I began to understand
how a poem can happen: you have your eye on a small
elusive detail, pursuing its music, when a terrible truth
strikes and your heart cries out, being carried off.”

Grennan’s account of the hawk strike is closely observed and convincing – “a light brown burn / scorching the air.” The depiction of poetic inspiration as a sort of death is a complicated metaphor I haven’t quite understood. The poet seems to be both predator and prey. I wonder how the kids on the playground would react if they witnessed Grennan’s scene, if they would even understand it. As a reader, I understand “being carried off.”

`A Few Faint Clews and Indirections'

For the epigraph to his newly published Bob Dylan in America, Sean Wilentz chooses a line from Walt Whitman:

“Only a few hints—a few diffused, faint clues and indirections…”

The source, not identified by Wilentz, is “When I Read the Book”:

“When I read the book, the biography famous,
And is this then (said I) what the author calls a man's life?
And so will some one when I am dead and gone write my life?
(As if any man really knew aught of my life,
Why even I myself I often think know little or nothing of my real life,
Only a few hints, a few diffused faint clews and indirections
I seek for my own use to trace out here.)”

This is the version Whitman included in the “Inscriptions” section of his 1871 edition of Leaves of Grass. Note the unannounced emendation of “clew” to “clue” in Wilentz’s epigraph. Justin Kaplan, a Whitman biographer and editor of the Library of America’s Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, tells us the poem in the 1867 edition of Leaves of Grass had only five lines and concluded like this:

“(As if any man really knew aught of his life,
As if you, O cunning soul, did not keep your secret well!)”

Wilentz’s choice is inarguably appropriate to Dylan, a renowned shape-shifter and expectation-confounder. Has any major performer so perversely defied the hopes of audiences, scorned wishes while fueling speculation about motive and meaning? Whitman is also a Dylan forebear, culturally if not literarily, and Wilentz cites him eight times, usually in connection with another windbag, Allen Ginsberg. My problem is not with Wilentz but Whitman.

The excerpt out of context is good but the poem is awful. The second line is almost unreadable – try it aloud – with eight monosyllables in a row like knots in a shoe string. The poem reads like a throwaway, the sort of thing Horace Traubel was dutifully recording on Mickle Street a few years later. Significantly, Wilentz’s epigraph stands as serviceable prose.

Whitman’s coyness here is cloying. On one level, he’s suggesting what Henry James posed in the first sentence of “Louisa Pallant,” a story from 1890, two years before Whitman’s death: “Never say you know the last word about any human heart!” But Whitman is also baiting readers with portentous hints, whether of bastard offspring or homosexuality, take your pick. There’s something tawdry and self-regarding about the strategy. It’s a cute variation on what later was called “confessional” poetry.

I write this as a longtime admirer of Whitman’s best work. As a poet, he’s best at the level of words, phrases and lines. Like Wordsworth and Tennyson, he benefits from scrupulous editing by someone less likely than the poet to celebrate himself.

On a Line by Janet Lewis

As the sun rose the fog among the pines turned from gray to white as though someone had thrown green wood on the fire. Shadows grew long across the sidewalk and parking lot. The school stands in a shallow dip, a creek erased by concrete and landscaping. Fog lingered in the morning glare until a wind pushed it away like a collapsible wall.

On the first morning of my only visit to New Mexico, a friend drove us early to Albuquerque’s West Mesa to see the petroglyphs and watch the sun rise. An anomalous December rain had fallen overnight and shreds of fog clung to the desert. The air was cool and scented with sage. We climbed the rocks and looked at carvings, some dating from the time of Aquinas. The sun rose and quickly burned off most of the fog, and the road surface steamed. A wind rose and cleared the air in minutes, leaving rock and sunlight.

"The sunlight pours unbroken through the wind."

[The sentence is from Lewis’ “Paho at Walpi.” A paho is a Hopi prayer stick, as the poem suggests with “supplication,” “gratitude,” “entreaty.’ Walpi is a pueblo in northeastern Arizona, one of the oldest continuously inhabited villages in the United States.]

`More Pained By Ignorance'

To keep up with my ten-year-old son and the fourteen-year-old boy I tutor twice a week I resolved to review my forty-some-year-old knowledge of algebra and the way the school district teaches it. In effect, I’m doing my homework and discovering my ignorance is shamefully unignorable. I’ve always taken a recreational interest in math so my plight resembles that of the dilettante who knows a lot of vocabulary in a foreign language but no grammar. Communication is possible but awkward. As though to comfort me, Joe, a reader in New York City, asks if I know Philip Larkin’s “Ignorance” (The Whitsun Weddings, 1964):

“Strange to know nothing, never to be sure
Of what is true or right or real,
But forced to qualify or so I feel,
Or Well, it does seem so:
Someone must know.

“Strange to be ignorant of the way things work:
Their skill at finding what they need,
Their sense of shape, and punctual spread of seed,
And willingness to change;
Yes, it is strange,

“Even to wear such knowledge - for our flesh
Surrounds us with its own decisions -
And yet spend all our life on imprecisions,
That when we start to die
Have no idea why.”

I am indeed “ignorant of the way things work.” My knowledge of automobiles stops at the gas pump. I don’t know how to load a shotgun, ice skate, make chimichurri, dance, write a proper bibliography, box, apply stucco, carve a turkey, perform CPR or post a photo on this blog. I had to study before I could remember how to balance a simple quadratic equation. Optimistically, I would have lasted three days in Chaucer’s England.

On another level, the level of paradox, my ignorance proliferates: The more I learn, the more I learn how little I know, and a lot of what I think I know is questionable. In some areas, I can agree with Samuel Johnson in The Rambler #103: “We are more pained by ignorance than delighted by instruction.” I take no delight in relearning algebra but it eases the pain (and wounded pride) of incompetence. Pride is the rub, as Johnson knew. This is from The Rambler #137:

"Nothing has so exposed men of learning to contempt and ridicule as their ignorance of things which are known to all but themselves. Those who have been taught to consider the institutions of the schools as giving the last perfection to human abilities are surprised to see men wrinkled with study, yet wanting to be instructed in the minute circumstances of propriety, or the necessary form of daily transaction; and quickly shake off their reverence for modes of education which they find to produce no ability above the rest of mankind."

`A Pint of Plain is Your Only Man'

We celebrate two Flann O’Brien birthdays this month, a minimally appropriate gesture for a man of proliferating identities. Born Brian O’Nolan (or Brian Ó Nualláin) on Oct. 5, 1911, he became Flann O’Brien in 1939 with the publication of At Swim-Two-Birds, the funniest book in the language (or languages), rivalled only by another grim Irishman's. On Oct. 4, 1940, his first “Cruiskeen Lawn” (from crúiscín lán, Irish for “brimming small-jug”) column appeared in The Irish Times under the name An Broc ("The Badger"). Soon the columnist became Myles na gCopaleen (“Myles of the Little Horses”) and remained so until his death on April Fool’s Day 1966.

O’Brien earns observances during Poetry Month for at least two good reasons. Early in At Swim-Two-Birds a character named Shanahan recites to his friends Lamont and Furriskey a poem he attributes to Jem Casey, “the Poet of the Pick.” Shanahan says of this work: “By God you can’t beat it. I’ve heard it praised by the highest. It’s a pome about a thing that’s known to all of us. It’s about a drink of porter.” Here is that “pome,” “The Workman’s Friend”:

“When things go wrong and will not come right,
Though you do the best you can,
When life looks black as the hour of night -
A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.

“When money's tight and hard to get
And your horse has also ran,
When all you have is a heap of debt -
A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.

“When health is bad and your heart feels strange,
And your face is pale and wan,
When doctors say you need a change,
A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.

“When food is scarce and your larder bare
And no rashers grease your pan,
When hunger grows as your meals are rare -
A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.

“In time of trouble and lousy strife,
You have still got a darlint plan
You still can turn to a brighter life -
A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.”

It's not Yeats but surely funnier than Yeats, and it gave the world O’Brien’s most-quoted words, known even by nonreaders: “A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.” O’Brien’s real accomplishment as a poet can be found in his prose, which has a peculiar parodic precision about it and is never cheaply “poetic.” His choice of words often is unexpected, without the implied italicization indulged in by others.

I have just reread The Third Policeman, written by O’Brien immediately after At Swim-Two-Birds but published posthumously, in 1967. Ostensibly a more conventional novel, it renders a more disturbingly unconventional universe, mingling the modes of Dante and Chuck Jones, creating a fiction in which “cartoon physics,” a phrase favored by my younger sons, applies. Consider the nameless narrator’s first view the police station:

“As I approached, the house seemed to change its appearance. At first, it did nothing to reconcile itself with the shape of an ordinary house but it became uncertain in outline like a thing glimpsed under ruffled water. Then it became clear again and I saw that it began to have some back to it, some small space for rooms behind the frontage. I gathered this from the fact that I seemed to see the front and the back of the ‘building’ simultaneously from my position approaching what should have been the side. As there was no side that I could see I thought the house must be triangular with its apex pointing towards me but when I was only fifteen yards away I saw a small window apparently facing me and I knew from that that there must be some side to it. then I found myself almost in the shadow of the structure, dry-throated and timorous from wonder and anxiety. It seemed ordinary enough at close quarters except that it was very white and still. It was momentous and frightening: the whole morning and the whole world seemed to have no purpose at all save to frame it and give it some magnitude and position so that I could find it with my simple senses and pretend to myself that I understood it.”

The police station, he says, comes as his “greatest surprise” since seeing the “old man in the chair,” who, by the way, is the same man the narrator and his partner had earlier beaten to death with a bicycle pump and spade. Again, “cartoon physics,” or metaphysics. Much of the novel’s humor is of the cracked-logic, word-drunk, straight-face Irish species, as in this exchange between Policeman MacCruiskeen and the narrator, which might have shown up in a column by Myles:

“`What would you say a bulbul is?’

“This conundrum did not interest me but I pretended to rack my brains and screwed my face in perplexity until I felt it half the size it should be.’

“`Not one of those ladies who take money?’ I said.

“`No.’

“`Not the brass knobs on a German steam organ?’

“`Not the knobs.’

“`Nothing to do with the independence of America or suchlike?’

“`No.’

“`A mechanical engine for winding clocks?’

“`No.’

“A tumour, or the lather in a cow’s mouth, or those elastic articles that ladies wear?’

“`Not them by a long chalk.’

“`Not an eastern musical instrument played by Arabs?’

“He clapped his hands.

“`Not that but very near it,’ he smiled, `something next door to it. You are a cordial intelligible man. A bulbul is a Persian nightingale. What do you think of that now?’

“`It is seldom I am far out,’ I said dryly.”

Policeman MacCruiskeen shows the narrator an elegant wooden chest with brass fittings he made as a boy. Inside is an identical though slightly smaller chest, and inside that another one, and another, and so on – a neat metaphor for the novel we’re reading. The narrator says of the policeman's creation: “It was so faultless and delightful that it reminded me forcibly of, strange and foolish as it may seem, something I did not understand and had never even heard of." That too describes The Third Policeman and the best of O’Brien’s other work. Happy birthdays, Flann.

`What I Did Was Small But Good'

Word at last from my friend and reader who left more than a month ago for a two-year posting in Sudan, a country whose terrain is described as “generally flat, featureless plain; mountains in far south, northeast and west; desert dominates the north.” My friend works for a relief agency in a country that has known little relief for decades. He writes:

“Here in south Sudan I find dysfunction all around, on all sides, all hours. Yet life goes on, work goes on. Camus has his protagonist doctor say in The Plague that the essential is to do well one's métier.”

Anecdotal Evidence has always been about gifts, giving and receiving them, and my friend is always generous. Because he’s missing the glories of autumn in our hemisphere, and I have only words, here is “The Fall of Leaves” by one of my October Poets, Yvor Winters, who wrote about the deserts and mountains of the American West:

"The green has suddenly
Divided to pure flame,
Leaf-tongued from tree to tree.
Yea, where we stood it came.

"This change may have no name.
Yet it was like a word;
Spoken and none to blame,
Alive where shadow stirred.

"So was the instant blurred.
But as we waited there,
The slow cry of a bird
Built up a scheme of air.

"The vision of despair
Starts at the moment's bound,
Seethes from the vibrant air
With slow autumnal sound

“Into the burning ground."

In my friend I see the stoicism of Winters’ speaker, the diminishment of one’s sense of importance, the acceptance of larger cycles, including mortality. October is my birth month, and my friend and I are almost the same age, we both hear the “slow autumnal sound.” A late poem by Winters, “Two Old-Fashioned Songs,” is divided into “Danse Macabre” and “A Dream Vision.” Here is the latter of the second’s four stanzas:

“I had grown away from youth,
Shedding error where I could;
I was now essential wood,
Concentrating into truth;
What I did was small but good.”

I think of “essential wood” as heartwood, once called xylem, the portion of a tree’s interior most resistant to decay. Botanists debate whether heartwood is, strictly speaking, still living or something else. My friend concludes his note: “Bonne continuation, mon frere.”

`Life Is a Top Which Whipping Sorrow Driveth'

“Fulke Greville, servant to Queen Elizabeth, counsellor to King James, friend to Sir Philip Sidney.”

So reads the self-composed epitaph of the poet born on this day in 1554. When he died Sept. 30, 1628, only a few of Greville’s poems and a pirated edition of a play had been published. He was known not as a poet but as treasurer of the navy, chancellor of the exchequer and commissioner of the Treasury. Only in the twentieth century was his accomplishment as a writer of austerely passionate verse, the peer of Herbert, Donne and Shakespeare, truly weighed.

Some of the credit goes to the late Thom Gunn who in 1968 edited Selected Poems of Fulke Greville. A new edition recently published by the University of Chicago Press includes Gunn’s original introduction and a new afterword by Bradin Cormack, “In the Labyrinth: Gunn’s Greville.” It’s an essential book for admirers of either poet. Consider one of the poems Gunn includes, Sonnet LXXXVI from Caelica:

“The earth, with thunder torn, with fire blasted,
With waters drowned, with windy palsy shaken,
Cannot for this with heaven be distasted,
Since thunder, rain, and winds from earth are taken.
Man, torn with love, with inward furies blasted,
Drowned with despair, with fleshly lustings shaken,
Cannot for this with heaven be distasted:
Love, fury, lustings out of man are taken.
Then man, endure thyself, those clouds will vanish.
Life is a top which whipping Sorrow driveth,
Wisdom must bear what our flesh cannot banish,
The humble lead, the stubborn bootless striveth :
Or, man, forsake thyself, to heaven turn thee,
Her flames enlighten nature, never burn thee.”

“Distasted” here means “offended, disgusted,” Gunn notes. “Life is a top which whipping Sorrow driveth” mingles a child’s toy with earthly unhappiness and is a conceit worthy of King Lear. The notion that man, tormented by self-created desires, is like the storms blasting the earth is strikingly Hobbesian and modern. Gunn writes in the opening lines of “In Time of Plague” (The Man With Night Sweats, 1992):

“My thoughts are crowded with death
And it draws so oddly on the sexual
That I am confused
Confused to be attracted
By, in effect, my own annihilation.”

It’s Greville’s modernity, his occult kinship with us, with Gunn, Cunningham and Larkin, that drives me to read him more deeply and often even than Donne. To read him is like knowing a brother. Consider this passage from his Life of Sir Philip Sidney:

“For my own part, I found my creeping genius more fixed upon the images of life than the images of wit and therefore chose not to write to them on whose foot the black ox had not already trod, as the proverb is, but to those only that are weather-beaten in the sea of this world, such as having lost the sight of their gardens and groves, study to sail on a right course among rocks and quicksands; and if, in thus ordaining, and ordering matter and form together for the use of life, I have made those tragedies no plays for the stage, be it known, it was no part of my purpose to write for them, against whom so many good and great spirits have already written.”

ADDENDUM: Thom Gunn writes in the final sentence of his introduction to Yvor Winters: Selected Poems (Library of America, 2003): "For all his respect for the rules of poetry, it is not the Augustan decorum he came to admire but the Elizabethan , the energy of Nashe, Greville, Gascoigne, and Donne, plain speakers of little politeness."

`The Quiet Art of Keeping Calm the House'

My brother sent a photo he shot from outside through the rear window of his garage. The time is before sunrise, the framing night is black and the light inside warm and pale yellow. Hanging in the window like a Halloween decoration is a large orb-weaver in black silhouette. My brother wrote “arachnavoyeur” on the subject line of his e-mail. Visible inside, in what was once our father’s welding shop, is a book opened on the workbench, a coffee cup, paint can, brushes, pictures pinned to the wall. My brother paints here and reads before dawn.

My first thought on opening the picture was neither a personal memory nor anticipation of Halloween. Rather, the warm colors, the open book, the welcoming scene, reminded me of a well-known poem by Wallace Stevens, “The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm” (Transport to Summer, 1947). J.V. Cunningham called it “one of the perfect poems” (in “Tradition and Modernity: Wallace Stevens,” The Collected Essays of J.V. Cunningham, 1978). Today is the birthday of Stevens, born in 1879, and here is the poem:

“The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

“Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

“The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

“Wanted to lean, wanted much to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

“The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.

“The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

“And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself

“Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.”

Rereading it, I realized I had forgotten Stevens sets the poem in summer. I had, instead, composed a shadow-poem in memory, set in harsh, black winter. I was also struck by how often Stevens renders scenes of reading – probably the reason I thought of the poem when seeing my brother’s photo. I admire Stevens but often have little idea what he’s getting at. This poem is not in the jokey, flamboyant key of his most admired work, but suggests a sober mind at work. Cunningham explains my preference for “The House Was Quiet…”:

“There is no fiddle-dee-dee here. The setting is ordinary, not exotic. It is about a man reading alone, late at night. The phrasing is exact and almost unnoticeable. The style is bare, less rich than `Sunday Morning,’ but with this advantage over that poem, that none of its effect is drawn from forbidden sources, from what is rejected. The meter is a loosened iambic pentameter, but loosened firmly and as a matter of course, almost as if it were speech becoming meter rather than meter violated. It has in fact the stability of a new metrical form attained out of the inveterate violation of the old.”

Helen Pinkerton uses the first line of Stevens’ poem (and the third line and title) as the epigraph to “On Gari Melchers’s Writing (1905) in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art” (Taken in Faith: Poems, 2002):

“How often did she make such quiet, one wonders,
This woman writing at a covered table—
Full summer light warming the roseate hues.
Mauve, red, and pink of dress and cloth and room.
A Wedgewood pier glass shows three Roman figures
In ritual dance—cool neoclassic Graces—
Beside a clay pot of geraniums.
Her taste eclectic—like our modern lives—
Loving the past but settled in the living.

“She seems meticulous—even, perhaps,
Like Edith Wharton, passionate for order,
Feeling, as she did, that in house and novel,
`Order, the beauty even of Beauty is.’
Stevens, though you sought order in the sea
And grander heavens, the threat of nothingness
Unmanned you. Most women have no time for such,
For fate constrains them to immediate means,
The quiet art of keeping calm the house.”

Like Cunningham, Pinkerton once was a student of Yvor Winters, and in both we hear a common-sensical, quietly iconoclastic echo of their teacher. Pinkerton’s is a nice revisionist reading of Stevens: “the threat of nothingness / Unmanned you” makes me laugh. There is a flamboyant, overdramatized quality to some of Stevens’ angst, all that “poetry is god” business. Famously, he worked as an insurance company executive, but did he ever cook a pot roast, vacuum a rug or dust the book shelves? Someone has to light the lamp and get the kids to bed:

“The quiet art of keeping calm the house.”

Poetry Month

Despite rival claims, October is the true Poetry Month, a fact I suspected forty years ago and have subsequently confirmed. Throughout the month, on their birthdays, I will celebrate the poets of October by posting their work and writing about it. Readers are encouraged to nominate poets who meet two criteria: They were born in October, and I enjoy and admire at least one of their poems. The latter requirement eliminates from consideration James Whitcomb Riley, Dylan Thomas and Sylvia Plath. My list includes:

Wallace Stevens: Oct. 2, 1879
Fulke Greville: Oct. 3, 1554
Flann O’Brien: Oct. 5, 1911
Marina Tsvetaeva: Oct. 9, 1892
Eugenio Montale: Oct. 12, 1896
E.E. Cummings: Oct. 14, 1894
Publius Vergilius Maro: Oct. 15, 70 BCE
Mikhail Lermontov: Oct. 15, 1814
P.G. Wodehouse: Oct. 15, 1881
Les Murray: Oct. 17, 1938
Yvor Winters: Oct. 17, 1900
Arthur Rimbaud: Oct. 20, 1854
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Oct. 21, 1772
Robert Bridges: Oct. 23, 1844
John Berryman, Oct. 25, 1914
Andrew Motion: Oct. 26, 1952
Zbigniew Herbert: Oct. 29, 1924
Paul Valery: Oct. 30, 1871
Ezra Pound: Oct. 30, 1885
John Keats: Oct. 31, 1795

I kick off Poem Month with “October” by Donald Justice, born Aug. 12, 1925:

“Summer, goodbye.
The days grow shorter.
Cranes walk the fairway now
In careless order.

“They step so gradually
Toward the distant green
They might be brushstrokes
Animating a screen.

“Mist canopies
The water hazard.
Nearby, the little flag lifts,
Brave but frazzled.

“Under sad clouds
Two white-capped golfers
Stand looking off, dreamy and strange,
Like young girls in Balthus.”