`Read and Let Read'

Often I discover English poets whose visas seem to have been revoked before they made it across the Atlantic. Take Peter Redgrove (1932-2003), who before last week was no more than a name. He’s a minor poet, “visionary” and “Jungian,” with a fatal hankering after the “mystical,” what Larkin called the “myth kitty” (a phrase that always brings to mind the lisped name of the saloonkeeper on Gunsmoke). In Poems 1954-1987 (Penguin, 1989) I found a poem (I can’t call it a sonnet, though it has fourteen lines) I liked. In “Serious Readers,” Redgrove displays a modest sense of humor:

“All the flies are reading microscopic books;

They hold themselves quite tense and silent

With shoulders hunched, legs splayed out

On the white formica table-top, reading.

With my book I slide into the diner-booth;

They rise and circle and settle again, reading

With hunched corselets. They do not attempt to taste

Before me my fat hamburger-plate, but wait,

Like courteous readers until I put it to one side,

Then taste briefly and resume their tomes

Like reading stands with horny specs. I

Read as I eat, one fly

Alights on my book, the size of print.

I let it be. Read and let read.”

Redgrove might have made a better poem had he written it as light verse and treated his trope as a joke. Recall Karl Shapiro’s “The Fly” and its immortal first line: “O hideous little bat, the size of snot.” Rhyme and metric regularity would have helped Redgrove’s poem, but I do like the notion of treating flies as readers, which brings to mind the first edition of Ford Madox Ford’s Return to Yesterday (1932) that I bought earlier this month. As previously noted, I found a four-leaf clover pressed between pages 120 and 121. What I missed until I started reading the book was an equally flattened housefly between pages 54 and 55, but it gets better. These pages of Ford’s memoir are devoted to his brief but admiring acquaintance with Stephen Crane. The fly fell out of the book as I was reading it but left a pale brown stain on the first appearance of the word fly in this passage:

“He would put a piece of sugar on a table and sit still until a fly approached. He held in his hand a Smith and Wesson. When the fly was by the sugar, he would twist the gun round in his wrist. The fly would die, killed by the bead-sight of the revolver. That is much more difficult than it sounds. One may be able to use a gun pretty well, but I never managed to kill a fly with the barrel much less the bead-sight.”

Presumably, some previous reader or owner wished to annotate the text with the referent of fly. The Smith and Wesson wouldn’t fit. 

`A Bashfulness of Feeling'

Sunday would have been Zbigniew Herbert’s ninety-third birthday. With Dante and Montale, he is the foreign-language poet I most often read. I favor his classical qualities -- irony, wit, stoicism, terseness, respect for tradition – and his refusal to compromise with his nation’s tormentors. I’m told he was a difficult man, especially in later years – cranky, intransigent, a drinker. That means nothing. Now we have only his words, amply translated, to console us. They most often concern, as he says in “Mr. Cogito Thinks About Blood,” “the obese history / of fatal human errors.” Here is “To the River”:

“River—hourglass of water metaphor of eternity

I enter you more and more changed

so I could be a cloud a fish or rock

while you are the same like a clock that measures

the metamorphoses of the body and descents of the spirit

slow disintegration of tissues and love

“I who am born of clay

want to be your pupil

and learn the spring of the Olympian heart

o cool torch rustling column

bedrock of my faith and my despair

“river teach me stubbornness and endurance

so in the last hour I become worthy

of rest in the shade of the great delta

in the holy triangle of the beginning and of the end”

Herbert neatly reverses Heraclitus. Humans are fluid. A river is unchanging, as are certain works of art – ridiculous thoughts to the corrosive, postmodern mind. In his essay “To Describe Reality,” Herbert writes:

“. . . irony is not cynicism but a bashfulness of feeling. What on the surface seems pessimistic is in fact a stifled call for the good, for the increase of the good, for the opening of the conscience.”

[All poems quoted are from Report from the Besieged City (trans. John and Bogdana Carpenter, 1985). The prose is from The Collected Prose 1948-1998 (trans. Alissa Valles, 2010).]

`A Little Pinch of Salt'

Reading Don Colacho (Nicolás Gómez Dávila) again, I came upon this: “Revolutions bequeath to literature only the laments of their victims and the invectives of their enemies.” Especially the laments. Much of the twentieth century’s lasting contribution to world literature was written by victims and survivors of revolution. Only by reading Solzhenitsyn and Shalamov, Isaac Babel and Osip Mandelstam, Aleksander Wat and Zbigniew Herbert, could a visitor from an unlikely future hope to understand our time.    

Only from them could they learn the lessons taught by meddlesome utopians. Chief among the witness-instructors is perhaps Nadezhda Mandelstam, the murdered poet’s widow. The final pages of her second memoir, Hope Abandoned (trans. Max Hayward, 1974), are a contribution to wisdom literature, to be shelved with Isaiah, Marcus Aurelius and Dr. Johnson:

“Everything we have been through here was the result of succumbing to the temptations of our era—to which no one is immune who has still to be struck down by the disease of putting his faith in force and retribution. Vengeance and envy are the prime motives of human behavior.”

Mandelstam’s sense of irony is bitter, unrelenting and earned. She leaves us feeling naïve and credulous: “No one should lightly dismiss our experience, as complacent foreigners do, cherishing the hope that within them—who are so clever and cultured—things will be different.” No one, she naggingly reminds us, is immune to the seductions of evil. The final paragraph of Chap. 41, “The Years of Silence,” ought to be read in full:

“This book, which I have now nearly finished, may never see the light of day. There is nothing easier than to destroy a book, unless it already circulates in samizdat or has found it ways into print (as used to happen to books in the Gutenberg period of Russian history). But even if it is destroyed, it may, perhaps, not have been entirely in vain. Before being consigned to the flames, it will be read by those whose expert task it is to destroy books, to eradicate words, to stamp out thought. They will understand none of it, but perhaps somewhere in the recesses of their strange minds the idea will stick that this crazy old woman fears nothing and despises force. It will be something if they understand that much. The thought of it will be like a little pinch of salt to sprinkle on their privileged rations, or a garnishing to whet their appetite for that other literature designed to edify and instruct people of their kind, functionaries to whom nothing matters, neither life, nor man, nor the earth, nor anything—dimmed by their breath—that lights our way. Heaven help them. But will they really succeed in their task of universal destruction?”

`Where Everything You Gaze Upon Is New'

The confluence of a birthday, the publication of a book review and a note from my high school graduating class (1970) sent me back to “1969,” the first poem in No Word of Farewell: Selected Poems 1970-2000 (Story Line Press, 2001) by R.S. Gwynn:

“A dim-lit, smoky bar. Your twenty-first

 Birthday has brought a golden Benrus watch,

 A marriage, a degree, a double Scotch?

 None of which will quite satisfy your thirst.

“It’s after one. The pianist is playing

 Procul Harum's `A Whiter Shade of Pale.’

 You scuff your side-zip boots along the rail

 And neither think of leaving nor of staying.

“Why bring it back again? Surely you know

 Your future guns his engine at the door,

 And soon enough he’ll steer an exit for

 A suburb where you have no wish to go.

“Why bring it back? Because you want me to.

 Because you want to light your cigarette,

 Clutching a scene which you cannot forget

 Where everything you gaze upon is new.” 

The “plot” might be Richard Yates’, from an earlier American era. Regrets, delusions. The speaker’s second-person is accusatory, suggesting guilt. We all sometimes wallow in nostalgia. “Clutching” is the operative verb, implying something desperate. Who doesn’t long for a time of innocence, real or imagined, when everything seemed new? Before we lost things and it all went stale.   

`Read Livy Against Livy'

Some will remember the stately procession of Edward Gibbon’s finale, his summation to “the greatest, perhaps, and most awful scene in the history of mankind”:

“ . . . the disorders of military despotism; the rise, establishment, and sects of Christianity; the foundation of Constantinople; the division of the monarchy; the invasion and settlements of the Barbarians of Germany and Scythia; the institutions of the civil law; the character and religion of Mahomet; the temporal sovereignty of the popes; the restoration and decay of the Western empire of Charlemagne; the crusades of the Latins in the East: the conquests of the Saracens and Turks; the ruin of the Greek empire; the state and revolutions of Rome in the middle age.”

I have just started reading Victor Davis Hanson’s The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won, and Hanson’s panascopic lens reminded me of Gibbon’s great book and his observation that history is “little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.” He also reminded me of Zbigniew Herbert’s “Transformations of Livy,” in which the Pole contrasts how four generations of the men in his family read the Roman historian. The poem was translated into English by John and Bogdana Carpenter in Elegy for Departure and Other Poems (2000), but was written in the 1980s while Poland remained under Communist domination:

“and so they read Livy—O season of blossoms—

in the smell of chalk boredom naphthalene for cleaning the floor

under a portrait of the emperor

because at that time there was an emperor

and the empire like all empires

seemed eternal”

That is how his grandfather and great-grandfather read Livy. In contrast: “Only my father and myself after him / read Livy against Livy / carefully examining what is underneath the fresco.” For the older readers among his relations, “the empire like all empires / seemed eternal,” as did the Soviet Union and its puppet states. Herbert’s poem concludes: “and the empire will fall.”

`Thirteen on Form'

My review of Thirteen on Form: Conversations with Poets, edited by William Baer, is published in the Los Angeles Review of Books. 

`The Contrarieties of Spring and Winter'

The cover of The Delights of Growing Old (1966) shows its author, Maurice Goudeket, sucking Gaulically on a cigarette. Despite his bad habits, Colette’s third and final husband lived to the age of eighty-eight. When he married the author of Chéri in 1935, she was sixty-two and he was forty-five. After Colette’s death in 1954, he married Sandra Annette Dancovic and had a son by her at age seventy-one. All of this is too characteristically French to be taken seriously, of course, but in The Delights of Growing Old, Goudeket salvages a sense of consolation:

 “It certainly appears that, for a man, sixty-five marks the end of that rather dangerous period which, for want of a better name, is now called his change of life. Once he has weathered this headland, he would generally set off with the wind behind him if only he would believe that he is at the beginning of the happiest stage of his voyage here below and forbids his mind to dwell upon its end.”

Goudeket seems to endorse Spinoza’s great challenge (Ethics, Part 4, Prop. 67): “A free man thinks of nothing less than of death, and his wisdom is a meditation, not on death, but on life.” I have meditated on this proposition since I first encountered it as a teenager, and that may be the point. We know we are mortal. How does that knowledge change our manner of living? Neither morbidity nor mindless hedonism seems the appropriate response.

Today, my sixty-fifth birthday, I coexist with most of my previous ages. I remember how it feels to be seventeen (when I was a university freshman), thirty-four (when the oldest of my three sons was born) and fifty-three (when I started Anecdotal Evidence). “The happiest stage of [my] voyage”? I don’t know. They’ve all been fairly happy, probably happier than I deserve.

In his sixty-fifth year, Dr. Johnson made his only visit to France and published A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland. Soon he would begin work on his crowning achievement, The Lives of the English Poets. In The Rambler #50, published the month he turned fifty-one, Johnson skewers the follies and vanities of old age: “Every old man complains of the growing depravity of the world, of the petulance and insolence of the rising generation.” Yes, we can be tedious and predictable, even when we are right. To correct the imbalance, Johnson urges self-respect. It’s time to grow up:

“To secure to the old that influence which they are willing to claim, and which might so much contribute to the improvement of the arts of life, it is absolutely necessary that they give themselves up to the duties of declining years; and contentedly resign to youth its levity, its pleasures, its frolicks, and its fopperies. It is a hopeless endeavour to unite the contrarieties of spring and winter; it is unjust to claim the privileges of age, and retain the playthings of childhood.”

`A Bitter-Sweet Passion'

“He saith our whole life is a Glucupicron, a bitter-sweet passion.”

A reader sent me a page-long passage from The Anatomy of Melancholy and asked what I made of it. Burton’s prose is always stocked with little miracles. The sentence above contains a mystery in the middle: Glucupricon. The OED spells it glycyˈpicron, cites Burton’s usage and gives a straightforward definition: “something composed of sweet and bitter.” In Greek it’s literally sweetbitter, the reverse of our familiar bittersweet. Here is Burton’s full paragraph:

“Discontents and Grievances are the lot of man: our whole life, as Apuleius well observes, is a Glucupricon, a bitter-sweet passion, a mixture of pleasure and of pain, from which no man can hope to go free: but as this condition is common to all, no man should be more disquieted than another.”

Burton expresses an essential human truth in language of uncharacteristic clarity and directness. Bittersweet I associate with Sappho, as in Jim Powell’s translation of a fragment (The Poetry of Sappho, 2007): “Eros limbslackener shakes me again-- / that sweet, bitter impossible creature.” Anne Carson, most of whose work is pretentiously unreadable, writes in Eros the Bitttersweet (1986), her least unreadable book: “It was Sappho who first called eros `bittersweet.’ No one who has been in love disputes her. What does the word mean?” Here is Carson’s version: “Eros once again limb loosener whirls me / Sweetbitter, impossible to fight off, creature stealing up.”

I like Burton’s “bitter-sweet passion.” 

`To Have an Intellect in Splints!'

Seven days before his twenty-fifth and final birthday, on Oct. 24, 1820, John Keats was quarantined on a ship in the Bay of Naples. The reason for the delay was not the tuberculosis that would kill him in four months but a suspected outbreak of cholera in Britain. He writes to Mrs. Samuel Brawne, Fanny’s mother, whom he will never see again:

“Give my Love to Fanny and tell her, if I were well there is enough in this Port of Naples to fill a quire of Paper—but it looks like a dream—every man who can row his boat and walk and talk seems a different being from myself--I do not feel in the world.”

The letter is heartbreaking. Keats remains a gentleman, resisting self-pity and self-dramatization, the easiest, least noble responses to illness and mortality. The desperately ill dwell in another country, away from us, the healthy. His letter, in part, reads like a war correspondent’s dispatch. He tries not to think of Fanny and their impossible love:

“I dare not fix my Mind upon Fanny, I have not dared to think of her. The only comfort I have had that way has been in thinking for hours together of having the knife she gave me put in a silver-case—the hair in a Locket—and the Pocket Book in a gold net. Show her this. I dare say no more.”

Passages like this are the reason I read Keats’ letters more often than even his finest poems. They possess what William Maxwell once called the “breath of life.” The letters are human documents, sometimes almost too painful to read:

“O what an account I could give you of the Bay of Naples if I could once more feel myself a Citizen of this world—I feel a spirit in my Brain would lay it forth pleasantly—O what a misery it is to have an intellect in splints!”

`The Weathered Patina of Age'

I know it was there Friday morning. I drive past it twice a day. We called it the Lincoln Log House. The siding resembled the wooden pieces in that building set, but much larger and painted light blue and maroon. The house was small and boxy looking, with a flat roof. Lately, the grass had gone unmowed. By Saturday morning the house had been replaced by a neat pile of rubble, mostly wood and plaster. Sunday, it was gone. Only a rectangle of concrete remained. It’s a “developing” neighborhood. Postwar houses are being torn down and replaced by bigger, more emphatic structures. In her final chapter, “A Note on New Ruins,” in The Pleasure of Ruins (1952), Rose Macaulay understands such things imaginatively:

“New ruins have not yet acquired the weathered patina of age, the true rust of the barons’ wars, not yet put on their ivy, nor equipped themselves with the appropriate bestiary of lizards, bats, screech-owls, serpents, speckled toads and little foxes which, as has been so frequently observed by ruin-explorers, hold high revel in the precincts of old ruins (such revelling, though noted with pleasure, is seldom described in detail; possibly the jackal waltzes with the toad, the lizard with the fox, while the screech owl supplies the music and they all glory and drink deep among the tumbled capitals). But new ruins are for a time stark and bare, vegetationless and creatureless; blackened and torn, they smell of fire and mortality.”

In Houston, we skip that romantic step in the history of ruin.

`Our World Was an Aristotelian World'

I wrote in an email to David Sanders on Friday: “It’s remarkable how [Henri] Coulette has suddenly snapped into place for me.” I wanted to thank David again. Sharing a writer with a reader, and then waiting to see what happens, is a rare pleasure because usually nothing happens. We expect indifference. So generous an act can be like dropping a stone in a dry well and waiting to hear the splash. In this case, the splash was deferred. Now I carry David’s gift to work--Coulette’s Collected Poems--so I can read it over lunch.   

In 1998, a decade after Coulette’s death at age sixty, the Iowa Review published “So Began the Happiest Years of My Life,” a brief remembrance of his time at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop beginning in 1952. Among his classmates were Donald Justice and W.D. Snodgrass, and John Berryman was one of his teachers. Coulette was born in Los Angeles and lived there for most of his life. His experience at a large Midwestern university was similar to my own eighteen years later, though he was better prepared and more emotionally mature. The only thing I was prepared for as a seventeen-year-old freshman was the library. Coulette writes:

“What made my happiness were the people and books I came to know. I can't name them all, without sounding like the dazed recipient of an Oscar. Still, I do name these few: Catullus and Horace, Dr. Johnson and Proust, Dante, Donne, and Baudelaire. They are still on my shelves, but those shelves could become rubble in a California earthquake, and it wouldn’t matter.”

This cinches the sense of affinity I finally felt while reading Coulette’s poems. Gratitude comes easily to him, and I like that too:

“We were lucky, those of us in the Workshop of those days, for our world was an Aristotelian world--there was a there out there--and it included the idea of a tradition, master to journeyman to apprentice.”

`He Liked to Blow the Grass Flat'

“He has learned one of the oldest and best tricks in art — how to give the effect of great power by implying generous amounts of untapped energy. This method is opposed to the dump-everything approach, which swamps, rather than whets, the listener’s appetite.”

The writer is Whitney Balliett; his subject, Dizzy Gillespie; the observation, a timeless truth about art. The trumpeter was born John Birks Gillespie on this date, Oct. 21, one-hundred years ago in Cheraw, S.C. About thirty years ago, I saw him perform in an outdoor concert in Albany, N.Y. In his early seventies, Gillespie was blowing hard and cutting up with the crowd and the other musicians. Even the most sophisticated art can be “accessible” – uncomfortable word, often used to patronize – when delivered with humor and gusto. Like Louis Armstrong and Fats Waller, Gillespie was not ashamed to be an artist and an entertainer. Watch him here teaching a crowd how to sing “Salt Peanuts.” Balliett’s brief description of Gillespie from more than half a century ago jibes with my experience: “A mild-mannered, roundish man, who wears thick-rimmed spectacles and a small goatee, and has a new-moon smile and a muffled, potatoey way of speaking.”

In an essay about the trumpeter Fats Navarro, whose playing Balliett finds superior to Gillespie’s, he writes: “Gillespie liked to clown and blare and do the fandango up and down his registers. He liked to blow the grass flat and divide the waters.” True, but the thing to remember is that Gillespie wanted to amuse listeners and make them happy – among the artist’s highest callings.

On Jan. 6, 1993, the day Dizzy Gillespie and Rudolf Nureyev died, a friend and I fumed when TV news reported only the latter and only as politics. Gillespie was an American, a jazz musician and 75 years old.

[Listen to Gillespie’s recording of Benny Golson’s “I Remember Clifford,” with Charlie Parker on “Groovin’ High,” and with Louis Armstrong on “Umbrella Man.”]

`Relapse Supinely into Self-Contemplation'

“Poetry, being normally short, cannot deal with too many lives at once, but at least it can present a variety of characters in different situations and different dramatic circumstances, and not relapse supinely into self-contemplation. That I find irritating.”

Much of Anthony Hecht’s poetry is a critique of solipsism, not in the technical philosophical sense but in the commonplace sense as defined by the OED: “excessive regard for oneself and one’s own interests, to the exclusion of others.” Our public and private lives – and book shelves -- are littered with such people. The passage quoted at the top is from an interview Hecht gave in 1998 in which he praises novelists, almost enviously, for “the amplitude of their imagination.” Some of Hecht’s finest poems are dramatic monologues, in which the speakers are sovereign characters, not mouthpieces for the author. Take the opening lines of “Green: An Epistle” (Millions of Strange Shadows, 1977):

“I write at last of the one forbidden topic

We, by a truce, have never touched upon:

Resentment, malice, hatred so inwrought

With moral inhibitions, so at odds with

The home-movie of yourself as patience, kindness,

And Charlton Heston playing Socrates . . .”

Self-deception is an irredeemably human trait. No one is immune. We forever rationalize and make ourselves look good, at least inside our skulls. In a 1970 letter to L.E. Sissman, Hecht discusses the poem and says: “There is, however, a sense of universal human corruption that is intended to embrace the reader along with everyone else. How can we recognize evil if we are untainted with it ourselves? Who is not tainted with it; and who, in the end, can be a reliable witness?”

Seventeen years later he writes in a letter to another friend, Harry Ford, about “Green: An Epistle”: “It is more precisely about the familiar modes of self-deception that almost everyone employs. It is therefore about illusion or delusions, and it consequently borrows the allegorical myth of Plato’s cave, transformed into a modern movie theater.” The dramatic monologue offers the potential for escape from solipsism and the deformations of character that follow. Consider the title poem in The Transparent Man (1990), spoken by a thirty-year-old woman in the hospital, dying of leukemia. Her thoughts, inevitably, turn inward, but she remains engaged with the world:

“Now all the leaves are down, you can see the spare,

Delicate structures of the sycamores,

The fine articulation of the beeches.

I have sat here for days studying them,

And I have only just begun to see

What it is that they resemble. One by one,

They stand there like magnificent enlargements

Of the vascular system of the human brain.

I see them there like huge discarnate minds,

Lost in their meditative silences.”

The speaker works hard not to bore or offend her visitors. There’s something heroic about her efforts to defy solipsism. I was jolted recently by a remarkably stupid reference to Hecht made by August Kleinzahler in a remembrance of Allen Ginsberg:

“The self-satisfied, conspicuously elegant poet Anthony Hecht, who was much admired in academic circles and the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize, visited our high school in 1966—on what was called Careers Day, a day put aside for distinguished alumni to speak to men in the senior classes about their vocations. I was quite definite about wanting to be a poet by the time I was sixteen or so. Mr. Hecht, with his vaguely English elocution (acquired in the Bronx?) was definitely not what I had in mind.”

 You should be so lucky, August.

Hecht died on this date, Oct. 20, in 2004 at age eighty-one.

`Now That's the Human Problem'

“The tongue is what we strop our words on.”

Sometimes we’re not ready for a writer. Over time, values and tastes evolve, deepening and decaying as we age. The writers we love at fourteen are unlikely to remain unchanged after half a century. A few do – Kipling, Shakespeare – but we’re always adding to and culling the private library we carry in our heads. Fortunately, the world’s stock of literature is bigger than any reader and perfectly indifferent to our decisions. 

Several years ago, the poet David Sanders, proprietor of Poetry News in Review, sent me a copy of The Collected Poems of Henri Coulette (University of Arkansas Press, 1990), edited by Donald Justice and Robert Mezey. It wasn’t a matter of incomprehension or indifference. I saw the technical deftness, the wit and sophistication accompanied by a satirical tartness. Coulette (1927-1988) had many of the qualities I most enjoy in a writer. He reminded me of Turner Cassity, but with the ferocity lowered. Still, I shelved the book after one reading, grateful to David but untouched, like Teflon.

Last week, I pulled the book out again, curious and guilty after hearing Coulette was admired by Zbigniew Herbert. In their introduction, Justice and Mezey quote the Pole as saying that while reading Coulette he felt “at once in the presence of a major poet, one in complete control of the technical resources of his art, but—more important to me—one who has seized upon thematic material of central importance to the modern world.” The lovely line quoted at the top is from “The Black Rose,” one of two previously unpublished poems Coulette dedicates to Herbert. Here is the final stanza:

“Mensch, ärgere Dich nicht.

The black rose, distilled, is our milk,

Our bitter milk. Na zdrowie!”

In three lines, Coulette alludes to World War II, a German board game (“Don’t get angry, pal”), a Polish blessing and toast, and possibly to Paul Celan’s most famous poem. When Coulette makes a pop culture reference, it doesn’t feel like slumming. He knows movies and detective novels, Horace and Raymond Chandler, and sees no reason to leave them behind. “The Fifth Season” is from his first collection, The War of the Secret Agents and Other Poems (1966). The only allusion I hear is Homer:

“It will be summer, spring, or fall—

Or winter, even. Who would know?

For no one answers when we call

Who might have answered years ago.

“The harvest will be in or not;

The trees in flower or in rime.

Indifferent to the cold, the hot,

We will no longer care for time.

“Mortal, of ivory and of horn,

We will become as open gates

Through which our nothing will be borne,

By which all nothing now but waits.

“It will be summer, spring, or fall—

Or winter, even. Who will care?

We will not answer when you call,

For nothing, nothing echoes there.”

Coulette values durability, a poem that will adhere for the long run. A poem ought to be at least a cunningly made as a chair – a heretical thought for a poet in his time and ours. If his work is suffused with melancholy, it also cheers us with plain-spoken eloquence. In a suite of sixteen epigrams, Coulette writes in one titled “The Collected Poems of What’s His Face”:

“Sixteen thousand lines, give or take sixteen—

And no two lines that you can read between.”

Honest readers will fill in the blank. There’s much to read between Coulette’s lines. Here is the final epigram in the series:

“A one-eyed cat named Hathaway on my lap,

A fire in the fireplace, and Schubert’s 5th

All silvery somewhere on a radio

I barely here, but hear—this is, I think,

As close as I may come to happiness.”

In a 1983 interview, Coulette says of his friend J.V. Cunningham, the master epigrammist of the last century: “My whole notion of what literature is about derives from him, that a poem is in a sense a statement, that the problem of reading somebody’s poetry is a simplified version of the basic human problem of trying to understand another without imposing your personality or beliefs upon another. But to really hear them and to really understand them. Now that’s the human problem.”

`But Few Men Have His Intrepidity'

A neighbor and his teenage sons recently acquired a second dog, an animal they found abandoned in a vacant lot. It was not yet thoroughly feral but its back and face are scarred, and it remains skittish around strangers. John is a formidable person, physically and otherwise, but has a soft spot for children, animals and most of his neighbors. He’s the only person I’ve known who feeds not only squirrels and birds but opossums. His new dog shares his bed.

Last Friday evening, his 17-year-old put food in the dogs’ dishes in the kitchen, the new dog grabbed a mouthful and ran into one of the bedrooms, where the other one joined her and started a fight. Spit, blood and fur were flying when the boy reached in to break it up and the new dog bit off the end of the middle finger on his left hand and swallowed it. John drove him to the hospital and learned the bone at the fingertip had been chipped. The doctor stitched him up, gave him a prescription for Tylenol 3 and sent him home. Three days later, John was still cussing out his son and his foolishness.

        

In The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1785), Boswell describes a conversation he is having with Dr. Johnson on this date, Oct. 18, in 1773.

Johnson says he might enjoy owning an island like Inch Kenneth, off the west coast of the Isle of Mull, in Scotland, but he would have to build a fortress for protection. Boswell says he would keep a dog. The story continues:

“JOHNSON. `So you may, sir; but a large dog is of no use but to alarm.’ He, however, I apprehend, thinks too lightly of the power of that animal. I have heard him say, that he is afraid of no dog. He would take him up by the hinder legs, which would render him quite helpless, and then knock his head against a stone, and beat out his brains. Topham Beauclerk told me, that at his house in the country, two large ferocious dogs were fighting. Dr. Johnson looked steadily at them for a little while; and then, as one would separate two little boys, who are foolishly hurting each other, he ran up to them, and cuffed their heads till he drove them asunder.”

Myth or dumb luck? The story flatters Johnson, of course, but seems true to his character. Boswell adds, “But few men have his intrepidity, Herculean strength, or presence of mind. Most thieves or robbers would be afraid to encounter a mastiff.” Not that Johnson is fearless. Most of his numerous fears are far from rational. Earlier in the same day’s entry, Boswell reports:

“I this morning took a spade, and dug a little grave in the floor of a ruined chapel, near Sir Allan M’Lean’s house, in which I buried some human bones I found there. Dr. Johnson praised me for what I had done, though he owned, he could not have done it. He shewed in the chapel at Rasay his horrour at dead men’s bones. He shewed it again at Col’s house. In the charterroom there was a remarkable large shin-bone; which was said to have been a bone of John Garve, one of the lairds. Dr. Johnson would not look at it; but started away.”

`I Hope to Mend'

“Either my temperament is changing or I am drying up—I don’t know which—but somehow a page or two pumps me quite dry nowadays. Still, like Dr. Johnson, `I hope to mend.’”

In the fall of 1898, Edwin Arlington Robinson is apologizing to his friend Edith Brower for announcing his intention to write shorter letters. In the preceding year and a half he has self-published his first volume of poems, The Torrent and the Night Before (1896), followed by The Children of the Night (1897). In his previous letter to Brower (Edwin Arlington Robinson’s Letters to Edith Brower, 1968), he speaks of “going, I expect, into winter exile.” He was preparing two more books, Captain Craig and Isaac and Archibald, that later were combined into one volume and published in 1902 as Captain Craig, a Book of Poems. Robinson was feeling the pressure, and tells Brower he plans to devote less time to letters and more to writing poems. Apparently, she felt snubbed.

The Johnson allusion is a minor mystery. I find two uses of “I hope to mend,” neither in a major work. One wonders how Robinson remembered it. On Jan. 24, 1778, Johnson writes a chatty, affectionate note to Boswell, who later included it in his Life. He tells his friend: “You always seem to call for tenderness.  Know then, that in the first month of the present year I very highly esteem and very cordially love you.” Here is the pertinent portion:

“You have ended the negro’s cause much to my mind. Lord Auchenleck and dear Lord Hailes were on the side of liberty. Lord Hailes’s name reproaches me; but if he saw my languid neglect of my own affairs, he would rather pity than resent my neglect of his. I hope to mend, ut et mihi vivam et amicis.”

“The negro’s cause” refers to the case of Joseph Knight, a slave bought in Jamaica by a Scottish landowner. After protracted litigation, the court ruled that Scots law did not recognize slavery and Knight was, in effect, set free. Johnson and Boswell helped prepare the case in Knight’s defense. (See this lecture.) Bruce Redford, editor of the five-volume Letters of Samuel Johnson, translates the Latin as “in order that I may live both for myself and for my friends.” Redford adds: “SJ seems to be recalling and amplifying a fragment of Horace, et mihi vivam (Epistles, I.xviii.107).”

The second appearance of “I hope to mend” is found in a March 2, 1782 letter to Lucy Porter, the daughter of Johnson’s late wife Hetty. He and his housemates are ill, and Dr. Levet has died: “So uncertain are human things.” He writes: “Such is the appearance of the world about me; I hope your scenes are more cheerful. But whatever befalls us, though it is wise to be serious, it is useless and foolish, and perhaps sinful, to be gloomy.” Johnson then apologizes to Lucy, the step-child he always felt closest to:

“Forgive me, my dear love, the omission of writing; I hope to mend that and my other faults.”

[Dave Lull, naturally has found a third instance of "I hope to mend," in a letter to Boswell dated Dec. 23, 1775.]

`I Am Not Romance-Bit about Nature'

If I could have chosen to be the recipient of anyone’s letters, from any era and any place, my choice would have been simple: Charles Lamb. How often have you received a letter (or email) that made you laugh when alone? Lamb cranked them out by the hundreds. Even great writers can be drab correspondents. Take Marianne Moore, whose letters are business-like. Or James Joyce, forever complaining, sponging or encouraging Nora to talk dirty. For sheer entertainment, Lamb is your man. Take the letter he wrote on this date, Oct. 16, in 1800, to his friend Thomas Manning. He might have written a single sentence: “I won’t be visiting you in Cambridge as promised.” Instead, after preliminaries, Lamb reports his activities of the previous night:      

“I wish to God you had made London in your way. There is an exhibition quite uncommon in Europe, which could not have escaped your genius,--a LIVE RATTLESNAKE, ten feet in length, and the thickness of a big leg.”

Why is that final metaphor so funny? Unexpectedness, I suppose, and pseudo-specificity (how big is a “big leg”?) – both Lambian specialties. Rattlesnakes are native to the Americas. In England in 1800, they would have been exotic and fearsome. A ten-foot rattlesnake is unlikely. For Lamb, the sight of such a creature is a cue for comedy:

“We walked into the middle, which is formed by a half-moon of wired boxes, all mansions of snakes,--whip-snakes, thunder-snakes, pig-nose-snakes, American vipers, and this monster. He lies curled up in folds; and immediately a stranger enters (for he is used to the family, and sees them play at cards,) he set up a rattle like a watchman's in London, or near as loud, and reared up a head, from the midst of these folds, like a toad, and shook his head, and showed every sign a snake can show of irritation.”

In the hands of a literal-minded drudge, think how dull this story might have been  -- like the vacation slideshows I watched as a kid. Lamb turns on the drama when he touched the snake’s cage: “I had got my finger away, nor could he well have bit me with his damn’d big mouth, which would have been certain death in five minutes. But it frightened me so much, that I did not recover my voice for a minute's space.” Famously, Lamb stuttered. Apart from his gift for deploying words interestingly, Lamb had a surplus of charm, a rare quality that involves keeping one’s self out of the way for the sake of entertaining others. “I dreamed of snakes in the night. I wish to heaven you could see it. He absolutely swelled with passion to the bigness of a large thigh.” Back to big legs again. Lamb signs off, “Yours sincerely, Philo Snake.”

About six weeks later, Lamb writes again to Manning, and again apologizes for not making it to Cambridge. Unlike most of his fellow Romantics, Lamb writes, “I must confess that I am not romance-bit about Nature.” He launches into an exalted (and quite sincere) paean to urban pleasures:

“Streets, streets, streets, markets, theatres, churches, Covent Gardens, shops sparkling with pretty faces of industrious milliners, neat sempstresses, ladies cheapening, gentlemen behind counters lying, authors in the street with spectacles, George Dyers (you may know them by their gait), lamps lit at night, pastry-cooks’ and silver-smiths’ shops, beautiful Quakers of Pentonville, noise of coaches, drowsy cry of mechanic watchman at night, with bucks reeling home drunk; if you happen to wake at midnight, cries of Fire and Stop thief; inns of court, with their learned air, and halls, and butteries, just like Cambridge colleges; old book-stalls, Jeremy Taylors, Burtons on Melancholy, and Religio Medicis on every stall. These are thy pleasures, O London with-the-many-sins. O City abounding in whores, for these may Keswick and her giant brood go hang!”

Richard Wilbur R.I.P.

From Cynthia Haven I have just learned that Richard Wilbur is dead at age ninety-six. This is what I recently wrote of this great poet: “Eschewing confession, trendy politics, and incoherence, Wilbur since the 1940s has remained a reliable and sophisticated pleasure-giver, in an unapologetically old-fashioned way.”

`And Now It Is Nowhere'

Without quite knowing it, a friend has resolved to drink himself to death. Such decisions are never made lightly, but they can be made unknowingly. Our minds contain compartments lined with semi-permeable membrane and equipped with a switch. Flip it and the membrane turns rigid like bone. In my friend’s case, cause and effect have become detached, and between them is a wall of unknowing. In his posthumously published “A Letter to a Friend,” Sir Thomas Browne writes:

 “Not to be content with Life is the unsatisfactory state of those which destroy themselves; who being afraid to live, run blindly upon their own Death, which no Man fears by Experience: and the Stoicks had a notable Doctrine to take away the fear thereof; that is, In such Extremities to desire that which is not to be avoided, and wish what might be feared; and so made Evils voluntary, and to suit with their own Desires, which took off the terror of them.”

The post hoc fallacy is tempting. It makes life easier by not looking at it too closely. Life loses meaning and death is always happy to fill the vacuum. Death is the great seducer. Some would say the great and charming deceiver. Stevie Smith was ambivalent in the matter. In “Why do I . . .” (All the Poems of Stevie Smith, 2015) she writes:

“Why do I think of Death as a friend?

It is because he is a scatterer

He scatters the human frame

The nerviness and the great pain

Throws it on the fresh fresh air

And now it is nowhere

Only Sweet Death does this

Sweet Death, Kind Death,

Of all the gods you are best.”

`The Most Jocular Euphemisms'

David Crystal’s many books make for addictive reading, though one seldom reads them systematically, first word to last. Most resemble reference works, though seldom shelved in the reference sections of libraries. Like dictionaries and collections of quotations, they are both tools and toys, useful and browseable. Take Words in Time and Place (Oxford University Press, 2014).  The volume’s subtitle makes its purpose explicit: Exploring Language through the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. Crystal arranges the book by subject, within which he includes a chronological timeline of synonyms as they entered the language.

I’ve written before about the bounteous supply of synonyms for intoxication found in English. Crystal gathers 151 of them, beginning with two from Old English, fordrunken and drunken. The first in English proper is cupshotten (c. 1330), of which Crystal writes: “There’s a link here with the noun, as in a shot of brandy.”  Here are some highlights: whip-cat (1582, “Presumably the drunkard comes home in a bad mood and takes it out on the cat.”), reeling ripe (c. 1611, used to describe Trinculo in The Tempest), muckibus (1756), blootered (1805), elephant trunk (1858, Cockney rhyming slang), spiflicated (1906), poggled (1923), liquefied (1928, “The basic meaning of liquefied is `transformed into a liquid state.’ No more to say, really.”), plotzed (1962, all-purpose Yiddish). My favorite dates to 1981, and it amounts to a novella in three words: “tired and emotional.” Here is Crystal’s gloss:

“One of the most jocular euphemisms for `drunk,’ with early citations showing its use in satirical and comedy settings. The first OED citation is from the British TV series Yes Minister: `Hacker tired and emotional after embassy reception.’”

The existence of words like blootered and poggled is yet another argument for writing poetry in rhyme. Some readers will recall the epical duel of words between two prostitutes in John Barth’s 1960 novel The Sot-Weed Factor. One whore throws a synonym for whore at the other in English and the other replies in French – 114 words heaved like rocks in each direction. The one I remember is mattressback. Crystal, perhaps in hommage to Barth, collects 114 from the OED, omitting mattressback. Nice to see prostisciutto (1930) on the list:

“A piece of wordplay from Samuel Beckett, who in Whoroscope blends prostitute and prosciutto to represent a woman regarded as an item on a menu.”

`Listen at This!'

As a native Northerner I never heard anyone say y’all except in movies or on The Beverly Hillbillies, where it sounded italicized for ironic emphasis. If it showed up in Welty or Faulkner, I never noticed. I assumed it was a minor piece of Hollywood stereotyping, shorthand for Southern hick. Not so says the British linguist David Crystal, who first encountered the word in Dallas in 1969 while buying a Stetson for his son. In “Tracking a Change: The Case of Y’all” (The Stories of English, 2004) he writes:

“And all kinds of people used it. A professor at the university used it when addressing her class of students, I hope y’all managed to read my paper. A cab driver addressed two of us in the back with a general Where y’all going? Most of the users were African-American; but many were white.”

In Texas, even in Houston (which is hardly representative of the entire state), y’all is ubiquitous and used as frequently by whites and Hispanics as by blacks. A white neighbor in his sixty-five years has virtually erased you (singular and plural) from his working stockpile of second-person pronouns and replaced it with y’all or y’all’s in the possessive form. His usage is unselfconscious and functional. He’s not broadcasting his Texas-ness or playing to the crowd of naïve Northerners.

Crystal dates the origin of the expression to the early nineteenth century in the American South. It was probably first used by blacks, though he adds, “one strand in the history of y’all probably has an Irish origin [youse].” Little is known with certainty. He confirms the word is “a monosyllabic variant of you all, rhyming with words like call.” Occasionally, especially among blacks, I hear the word stretched and almost turned into two syllables, an effect that reminds me of a singer using melisma. Crystal has drawn up rules of usage based on observation. For instance, y’all is seldom used more than once in a sentence and almost never at the end of a sentence. And he notes that y’all is more strongly stressed than you: “it has a greater impact in a sentence.” My observations suggest the word is often used to suggest friendliness and welcome. You used alone can sound generic or neutral.

I would never use y’all. It wouldn’t sound natural and might sound patronizing. For appropriate use, listen to Louis Armstrong on “Laughin’ Louie,” a gage-fueled Bacchanalia from 1933. In Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong (2009), Terry Teachout transcribes a pertinent portion of the dialogue:

“Y’all won’t let me play some hot riffs for you this evening, and you won’t let me sing for you, but you must listen at this beautiful number, one of them old-time good ones. Listen at this!”