Folks,

Here’s an inspiring little piece for all of us who toil away in relative anonymity, sometimes concerned as to whether or not anyone ever feels the effects of what we do with the bulk of our time. This poem is notable for its sense of fun, for its good heart, its allusion and name-dropping, and its use of one of my favorite words, a word which is itself autological, which is another one of my favorite words. It also has a dedication and an epigraph, and the epigraph is from one of my favorite fiction writers. CRAY-ZAAY!

Corey Mesler was born in Niagara Falls and lives in Memphis, where he and his wife own and operate Burke’s Books. He seems like a real goofball, if you ask me, but he’s also said of his long road toward publishing and writing full-time, “In a very real sense, my words go out into humankind for me.” Pretty sweet. I suppose all of ours do, too. Have a good week! -ed.

GOD BLESS THE EXPERIMENTAL WRITERS
for David Markson

“One beginning and one ending for a book was a
thing I did not agree with.”

Flann O’Brien from At Swim-Two-Birds

God bless the experimental writers.
The ones whose work is a little
difficult, built of tinkertoys
and dada, or portmanteau and
Reich. God help them as they
type away, knowing their readers
are few, only those who love to toil
over an intricate boil of language,
who think books are secret codes.
These writers will never see their names
in Publisher’s Weekly. They will
never be on the talk shows. Yet,
every day they disappear into their
rooms atop their mother’s houses,
or their guest houses behind some
lawyer’s estate. Every day they
tack improbable word onto im-
probable word, out of love, children,
out of a desire to emend the world.

-2008

… anyway, what was I saying? Oh yeah: lay off my booze! Ah, so busy there I almost missed the verse. Well here it is, right under the wire.

As I was actually saying, last week, R.S. Gwynn is supposedly associated with the “new formalism” movement in poetry. I didn’t know there was such a movement, but there’s an anthology out, so there must be. At the time the movement earned its name–the mid-80’s–critic Dana Gioia remarked that “the revival of traditional forms” was only one of any number of possible responses to a sort of bankruptcy sensed in the poetry of that time… a sort of congeries of tail-ends of several spent strains in verse written in English. And Gioia was by no means disparaging a “return to form” (indeed, he’s been a part of it). Of today’s poet, Gwynn, Gioia wrote,

“By the time I had finished the volume [Gwynn's The Drive-In] I knew I had come upon one of the truly talented and original poets of my generation. I should probably also note two other obvious qualities of Gwynn’s poetry. First, he is ingeniously funny. Second, he is an effortless master of verse forms. No American poet of his generation has written better sonnets, and very few can equal him in the ballade, couplet, rondeau, or pantoum—not to mention the half dozen new forms he has invented. But, to be honest, it was neither Gwynn’s considerable formal skill nor his wicked humor that first attracted me, though those qualities surely added to my pleasure. Instead, it was his depth of feeling and intense lyricality.”

Yes, he is funny. Anyone who has spent time near a graduate department of English will appreciate this wisp of a poem:

Writer-in-Residence

He roared up to the cook-out on his Harley,
Invoking blessings from the Muse of Barley,
Passed round a joint, sliced the brie with his switchblade,
And groped the Chairman’s young wife, all of which made
The pallid tribe disperse with nervous laughter
And grant him tenure very soon thereafter.

And anyone who finds the beauty in late fall (I do not) will like this nature poem that seems to create a mini-refrain for each line. Happy Thanksgiving. -ed.

Coastal Freeze

It will come with warnings published on the air,
So beware
Laying bets on gulf-born breezes harboring
Hopes of spring.
Dwarf azaleas, playing suckers’ odds with doom,
Race to bloom,
But the front’s relentless lashing drains each bud-
Full of blood,
Laying low without distinction as it kills
Daffodils,
Calla lilies, bougainvillea, mustard greens.
For it means
All beginner’s luck runs sour, to be lost
To the frost,
Like a wealth of unconsidered good advice.
Glazed with ice,
Greenness shatters, brittle as an ancient bone,
And our own
Stunned camellia stands, white petals shed below—
Snow on snow.

All,

Aside from the shocking temerity of Mr. Murphy’s reply (how dare you!), I really loved that poem. I’d noted that the pantoum can create a sense of incantation, and thought privately that it was a good form for nostalgia… but that poem really created an amazing atmosphere of paranoia! I’d never heard of R.S. Gwynn, a true southerner before. There’s a brief bio, some approbative quotes, and a few poems here:

http://www.thehypertexts.com/R.%20S.%20%28Sam%29%20Gwynn%20Poet%20Poetry%20Picture%20Bio.htm

Sounds like a kick-ass dude, and one critic noted… well, hell, you know what? We’re gonna come back to him next week.

Keeping with the southern theme, though, alert reader Andrea Barrett of Nashville, TN, provides this week’s poem. Herself a therapist, she recommended Forrest Hamer, a working psychoanalyst who lectures at UC Berkeley and just happens to have published poems in some of the country’s finest literary periodicals. In keeping, also, with the general idea of therapy, I am opening the column for comments this week on the subject of the poem’s 3rd line. The tone/theme of the poem itself seems right for the occasion, and I did not even mention last week the gruesome and tragic shootings that happened at Fort Hood, in Texas. I think we should all feel free to reflect on that tragedy, and the perhaps personal ways it’s affected us, in any way we like. Oh and before you assume that this is free verse, remember that his name’s an anagram for “form star here.”

Have a good week,

-ed.

LESSON

It was 1963 or 4, summer,
and my father was driving our family
from Ft. Hood to North Carolina in our 56 Buick.
We’d been hearing about Klan attacks, and we knew

Mississippi to be more dangerous than usual.
Dark lay hanging from the trees the way moss did,
and when it moaned light against the windows
that night, my father pulled off the road to sleep.

Noises
that usually woke me from rest afraid of monsters
kept my father awake that night, too,
and I lay in the quiet noticing him listen, learning
that he might not be able always to protect us

from everything and the creatures besides;
perhaps not even from the fury suddenly loud
through my body about his trip from Texas
to settle us home before he would go away

to a place no place in the world
he named Viet Nam. A boy needs a father
with him, I kept thinking, fixed against noise
from the dark.

-1995

Readers,

wringing so much from a poem of couplets, we might have twice as much to say about a poem written in quatrains. I started thinking about it yesterday, how endlessly flexible they seem in the English language, how very nearly a default mode for lyric poetry. They are on the one hand the most rigid of formal choices–historically tried-and-true, the keystone of the sonnet, only four lines, no more no less!–and yet they seem to be the most transparent: when we read a poem of four-line stanzas, we hardly see the form at all. Here’s a little construction that puts the “four” back in formal: the pantoum. I’d thought it was another middle eastern form, but in fact it originated about 600 years ago in the Malay language, in what is now Indonesia. Victor Hugo is credited with introducing it to the West, and it became popular in 19th century French verse. There are just a handful of famous examples in English, including one by that elegant rake, John Ashbery. You can hear Caroline Kizer reading one here:

http://poetry.about.com/gi/o.htm?zi=1/XJ/Ya&zTi=1&sdn=poetry&cdn=education&tm=481&f=00&tt=14&bt=0&bts=0&zu=http%3A//www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15246

Rogers & Hammerstein even wrote one for the musical “Flower Drum Song” (“I Am Going to Like It Here”)!

A pantoum can be as long or short as it needs to be, and the 2nd and 4th lines of each stanza are recycled as the 1st and 3rd lines of each following stanza. The final stanza loops back to the first for its as-yet-unrepeated 1st and 3rd lines. These requirements make it difficult to create any sense, and also make a “normal” speech flow challenging. But in the right hands it also creates an incantatory refrain effect. Further, the repeated lines and words tend to take on new meanings in their new contexts. This is especially true in today’s poem, by Belgian-born-and-raised Laure-Anne Bosselaar. Ashbery refers to the meaning of a poem as being not much more than “the time it takes to unroll,” and the time of unrolling is important in this poem: it gets us back to where we started, changed. There’s something haunting and cryptic and autumnal about this piece, which is why, surely, the poet’s name anagrammizes to “a seasonal blear rune.” -ed.

STILLBIRTH

On a platform, I heard someone call out your name:
No, Laetitia, no.
It wasn’t my train—the doors were closing,
but I rushed in, searching for your face.

But no Laetitia. No.
No one in that car could have been you,
but I rushed in, searching for your face:
no longer an infant. A woman now, blond, thirty-two.

No one in that car could have been you.
Laetitia-Marie was the name I had chosen.
No longer an infant. A woman now, blond, thirty-two:
I sometimes go months without remembering you.

Laetitia-Marie was the name I had chosen:
I was told not to look. Not to get attached—
I sometimes go months without remembering you.
Some griefs bless us that way, not asking much space.

I was told not to look. Not to get attached.
It wasn’t my train—the doors were closing.
Some griefs bless us that way, not asking much space.
On a platform, I heard someone calling your name.

-2007

Greetings fellow adulators of Erato,

Today’s poem is sort of a history lesson, a formal exemplum, and a mystery all in one. I wanted to continue down the path of formal analysis and remembered our friend the ghazal, a strictly repetitive lyric arrangement of couplets made popular by the Persian, Urdu, and Turkish-speaking poets of the 13th century, although its roots stretch back to Arabic writers of the 6th century. The OED tells me that “ghazal” entered the English language in the late 18th century, while a dictionary of literary terms explains that the word comes from the Arabic for love-making. Meanwhile, the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics points out that the topic of a ghazal is traditionally erotic love, and that the author typically drops his own name somewhere near the end. The rhyme scheme of a ghazal is

aa ba ca da ea fa…

and many writers in English choose to use as the rhyme the same word, not just the same end sound (a less demanding version of the sestina we saw last week, perhaps). And ghazals are typically not too darn long, perfect reading for this forum.

But that’s not the half of it. Because this version by American poet Craig Arnold (1967-2009–his 42nd birthday would have been Nov. 16th) contains a sort of biography-in-miniature of the Spanish poet Federico  García Lorca (1898-1936), a hero as much for his associations with the avant-garde and anti-Fascists as for his fairly open homosexuality. It’s still not clear whether he was murdered for personal or political details, although I leave it to another reader (hint hint) to fill us in on the references Arnold makes here. Arnold, meanwhile, disappeared just this April while exploring a remote, active volcano on a Japanese island. He is assumed to have fallen to his death from a high trail.

Craig Arnold was educated at Yale and The University of Utah, and taught in Wyoming. He was also a member of the synth-pop band Iris, and known to be a mesmerizing performer of his own work, which he recited from memory, often clad in black pants and a black leather jacket. Appropriate, then, that his name is an anagram for “rad caroling.” Well I’ve gone on. As you read the poem, think about whether and how it fulfills the formal standards laid out in paragraph 1. What other formal choices is the writer making along the way? Does this poem read like a rigidly formal poem? Or, if it seems more “natural,” how does the writer achieve that effect? What, ultimately, is Arnold’s subject here? -ed.

GHAZAL FOR GARCIA LORCA

Still you came back knowing you must die in Granada,
intricate, tricky, disapproving, prying Granada.

One hand grips the collar, the other sounds the pocket.
They make no room for the shameless or the shy in Granada.

The fingers still point. The smiles always know.
Everything seemed to me about to cry in Granada.

The steep cobbled streets and cobblestones dewed by the cold,
late snow cradled in valleys against the sky in Granada.

The sketches stitched by your big sister into cushions
A bus I might have taken but didn’t try in Granada.

The guitar hot from the lathe, the leather ottoman,
all I wanted but had no room to buy in Granada.

Walking at night my sandals marked me American–
no one goes out in less than a coat and tie in Granada.

No one above contempt. I’ll never visit the caves.
I missed you every place and never knew why in Granada.

I felt at home, how home is hard with cruel people,
home even the gypsies leave, waving goodbye in Granada.

An absinthe glass, a slope clouded in rhododendron,
corroded-copper colored tile that caught my eye in Granada.

An Oh, an Ay, a consolation we could wander
hand in hand with, Garcia Lorca and I, in Granada.

Readers,

Ms. Proulx made such a good point last week when she called the rhythm of “The Solidier”’s last line a reversal of the iambic flow. The line with which it rhymes,

“Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given”

is still strictly iambic, that is:

-` -` -` -` -`
(or, duhDUM duhDUM duhDUM duhDUM duhDUM — read it aloud, you’ll see)

but it just has a tiny, extra, feminine (unstressed) syllable tacked on to make the past participle of GIVE. Hardly noticeable. But the last line,

“In hearts at peace, under an English heaven”

Has two iambs, in HEARTS at PEACE, followed by a trisyllabic foot with no stress at all (under an), followed by two clear trochees: ENGlish HEAVen. WTF? As I think Ms. Proulx suggests, it’s just kinda odd to watch a poem so seemingly emphatic end that way. And sometimes we respond to these sorts of choices the way we respond to a decrescendo or a descending scale in music: as if the poem were laying itself down to sleep (the big sleep). We get into dangerous territory when we ascribe meaning to the metrical units themselves (what is the moral value of an anapest, over a pyrrhus?), but, especially when a poet is consciously using a formal verse pattern, those choices do seem to invite further inspection.

A return to form is just going back to what one does naturally, and for me it’s actually a return to FORM, since that’s kinda how I learned to read poetry in the first place. Yes, I know, it takes all the fun out of it. But I enjoy the willful archaism of a modern sestina, as in this example by Deborah Digges. Alert reader Lauren Richey (who works at the veterinary center mentioned in the piece) brought an article on Digges to my attention after we’d read her poem “The Wind Blows through the Doors of My Heart” in August. Here is the full article, if you’d like to read it:

http://www.tufts.edu/alumni/magazine/fall2009/features/fugitive.html

For today, though, there’s no better explanation of why the sestina choice works for this poem than what the author, Rebecca Kaiser Gibson, says in a couple paragraphs:

“It’s not a simple poem, entwining as it does so many interrelated strands: a landlord, a tenant, a parade, a wedding, a matador, the sea, an orangutan, and a rampant array of specific trees and flowers. Here is both extraordinary vulnerability and powerful uplift. The flower thief herself often seems isolated, temporary, without possessions, and traveling ancient gypsy style. Yet the poem ends with transfiguration. The stolen flowers become the flower in the woman’s hair, which grows “star white. Then she’s gone.”

It’s possible to read this luxuriant poem a number of times without noticing, or even knowing, that it’s a sestina. The sestina is a highly structured form—six verses of six lines each, then a three-line verse—in which the last word in each line follows a special pattern. The form helps her circle round the disparate elements so that each becomes a necessary part of the drama. As in all Deborah’s works, there is an intense engagement with life in this poem. It is, among other things, about living richly in the intensity of the moment.”

The sestina has been around in English since Philip Sidney in the mid-sixteenth century. It was around before that in French and Spanish. If you haven’t seen one before (and if you’ve been following this reading group, you have–Paul Muldoon is among the contemporary writers who have taken it on), just look at the circulation of line endings, and the compression that occurs in the last stanza (a tercet). Now, at long last, here’s the poem. -ed.
THE FLOWER THIEF

Who watches behind curtains her landlord counting his hundred
or so jonquils, or fingering like a scout the dogwood’s
five or six snipped branches, knows the fugitive’s
lust for the wayward tea rose bobbing above the hedges.
She’s cased all winter the sidewalk gardens. She’s gone
at dusk among forsythia and lilacs, the curb-side gutters

petal-clogged, the tulip trees’ sprung husks pouched as gutted
fish. There the streets are littered with the blossoms of a hundred
redbuds blown and drifting like confetti after the parade’s gone
by. As if she were a part of that great wedding and would
greet them at the threshold, she clips the ripest from the hedges,
and for herself a few studded golden sheaths, just a fugitive’s

provisions, enough to set in jars on the leeward sills like fugitive
fires along a bluff above the sea, the camps stone-cold, gutted
by dawn, as clueless as the next, each bud anonymous, the donor hedge
in one moon phase replete. Who’ll know the difference in a hundred
years or care she spends them all in rented rooms? The green wood
tears away. Her hands are pollen-stained and dewy, and gone

at last are any traces of remorse, any self-promised penance, gone
as the roses she once threw to an old matador whose fugitive
soul she thought she’d always love and, grown up, someday, would
come back to. Another year she’d stood before the shit-gutted
cage of an orangutan, his floor a wash of how many hundred
fuchsia blossoms he’d stripped from the hydrangea hedges

So this seemed like as good a time as any to revisit the original. For the uninitiated, this is a very, very famous poem; we were all likely to have been assigned it at some point during high school. It’s short, let’s read it first:

THE SOLDIER

There are so many things to say about his poem. First, and most obviously, it’s a sonnet. But it’s a fun mixture of the Italian sonnet rhyme scheme (someone please jump in and explain), and the English sonnet rhyme scheme (someone please jump in and explain). How this blend affects the poem’s meaning is anyone’s guess (read: I’m not positing a thesis at the moment, but there surely are some…). And I’m not shying away from the term “meaning”–we could almost use “message”–here, because it seems rather clear, right? There are only 14 lines here, and yet the word “England” appears 4 times, and the word “English” twice. Why the repetition? And the other vocabulary: flowers, love, rivers, heart, dreams, happy, laughter, gentleness, heaven… is this a love poem?

It’s not an idle question. When I say this poem is very famous, we should also be aware that it’s famously criticized for being naive, imperialist, and jingoistic. I mean, its title is THE SOLDIER–is the juxtaposition between subject and tone jarring? From the contemporary POV, Brooke’s work has not held up as well as that of his fellow WWI poets, Sigfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen among them. The comparison is only somewhat unfair because Brooke died while the war was more or less in its infancy (on a Greek island, of blood poisoning), and before the horrors of trench warfare and shell shock really aroused the attention of the reading public (someone please fact-check me on this). This was a decisive time in English letters, and from our perspective it seems like Brooke stands on the far side of an aesthetic rift. It should come as no surprise that “The Soldier” was published shortly after his death, and that British military recruiters made convenient use of its popularity.

A biographical note: Rupert Brooke was one of that rare breed, the gentleman scholar-soldier. He was born into modest luxury and attended Cambridge. He later traveled and taught himself languages, submitting the odd “letter from abroad” to London newspapers. He certainly hung out with the right crowd: Virgina Woolf boasted of skinny-dipping with him, and WB Yeats referred to him as the handsomest young man in all of England. He gained some renown for his stately, Georgian verse before the outbreak of WWI. It is probably significant that, unlike the above-mentioned poets, Rupert Brooke served active duty in the Royal Navy during WWI, but did not see heavy combat. He was buried by his shipmates under a stone cairn, and his gravesite can still be seen on the island of Skyros.

I swear to G-O-D that contemporary American letters would not exist without the G.I. Bill. The Times today carried the obituary of teacher, editor, and essayist Richard Poirier, who died at the age of 83. After serving in WWII, Poirier returned to Massachusetts, where he attended Amherst through the G.I. Bill (Robert Frost was teaching there at the time), and then went on to, oh, Yale, Cambridge, and Harvard. He later founded the Raritan Review, which has published a bunch of poets I’ve heard of, and some poets I haven’t. Among the latter is this week’s contributor, Richard Howard. My Uncle Larry always said never trust a guy with two first names, but I like the line repetitions here anyway. Anyone know what this from is called? I ask because I genuinely don’t–I’m pretty sure even my remaining brain cells no longer function too good.

Have a great week, -ed.

Like Most Revelations

(after Morris Louis)

It is the movement that incites the form,
discovered as a downward rapture--yes,
it is the movement that delights the form,
sustained by its own velocity.  And yet

it is the movement that delays the form

while darkness slows and encumbers; in fact
it is the movement that betrays the form,
baffled in such toils of ease, until

it is the movement that deceives the form,
beguiling our attention--we supposed

it is the movement that achieves the form.
Were we mistaken?  What does it matter if

it is the movement that negates the form?
Even though we give (give up) ourselves
to this mortal process of continuing,

it is the movement that creates the form.

Readers,

I just learned that a good friend of mine (and the best friend of my dad, who turns 72 this day) died this morning. Mike was a professor of French, so I’m dedicating this François Villon poem, first in its original, and then in a translation by MV favorite Galway Kinnell, to him. -ed.

BALLADE

Je connais bien mouches en lait
Je connais à la robe l’homme
Je connais le beau temps du laid
Je connais au pommier la pomme
Je connais l’arbre à voir la gomme
Je connais quand tout est de même
Je connais qui besogne ou chôme
Je connais tout, fors que moi-même

Je connais pourpoint au collet
Je connais le moine à la gonne
Je connais le maître au valet
Je connais au voile la nonne
Je connais quand pipeur jargonne
Je connais fols nourris de crèmes
Je connais le vin à la tonne
Je connais tout, fors que moi-même

Je connais cheval et mulet
Je connais leur charge et leur somme
Je connais Bietris et Belet
Je connais jet qui nombre et somme
Je connais vision et somme
Je connais faute des Bohêmes
Je connais le pouvoir de Rome
Je connais tout, fors que moi-même

Prince, je connais tout en somme
Je connais colorés et blêmes
Je connais mort qui tout consomme
Je connais tout, fors que moi-même

***

BALLADE

I know flies in milk
I know the man by his clothes
I know fair weather from foul
I know the apple by the tree
I know the tree when I see the sap
I know when all is one
I know who labors and who loafs
I know everything but myself.

I know the coat by the collar
I know the monk by the cowl
I know the master by the servant
I know the nun by the veil
I know when a hustler rattles on
I know fools raised on whipped cream
I know the wine by the barrel
I know everything but myself.

I know the horse and the mule
I know their loads and their limits
I know Beatrice and Belle
I know the beads that count and add
I know nightmare and sleep
I know the Bohemians’ error
I know the power of Rome
I know everything but myself.

Prince I know all things
I know the rosy-cheeked and the pale
I know death who devours all
I know everything but myself.