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.

Readers,

If I’m not mistaken we’ve yet to run a poem by Kay Ryan, the relatively newly-appointed Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress, aka “Poet Laureate.” Prior to winning a major poetry award in 2004, Ms. Ryan was little-known. I’m not going to say much about this piece but do wish an art history expert (or even someone who remembers an undergrad class) would peep up about what the heck she’s talking about with this vanitas business. -ed.

DEATH BY FRUIT

Only the crudest
of the vanitas set
ever thought you had to get
a skull into the picture
whether you needed
its tallowy color
near the grapes or not.
Others, stopping to consider
shapes and textures,
often discovered that
eggs or aubergines
went better, or leeks,
or a plate of string beans.
A skull is so dominant.
It takes so much
bunched up drapery,
such a ponderous
display of ornate cutlery,
just to make it less prominent.
The greatest masters
preferred the subtlest vanitas,
modestly trusting to fruit baskets
to whisper ashes to ashes,
relying on the poignant exactness
of oranges to release
like a citrus mist
the always fresh fact
of how hard we resist
how briefly we’re pleased.

-2000

Here’s something quite amazing: a John Ashbery poem. I fecking love John Ashbery (anagram: “a BJ; he’s horny”). And yes, he’s that guy with the funny name and the funny poems which are so “hard” they don’t always seem funny. His aim, he once admitted, was “to produce a poem that the critic cannot even talk about.” But that should not prevent us from reading them, and talking about them. Maybe we have to adjust the way we talk about them. And the way we read. We often talk about the critic’s quiver of analytic arrows in this forum, but Ashbery has also said, “For me, poetry is very much the time that it takes to unroll, the way music does… it’s not a static, contemplatable thing like a painting or a piece of sculpture.”

This poem is one you really have to step into, maybe twice, to get the feel of. It’s long, but listen to it unroll like a fugue. Or flow like a river?

-ed.

PS: Visitors to the northern Italian town of Pavia will appreciate the final stanza.

INTO THE DUSK-CHARGED AIR

Far from the Rappahannock, the silent
Danube moves along toward the sea.
The brown and green Nile rolls slowly
Like the Niagara’s welling descent.
Tractors stood on the green banks of the Loire
Near where it joined the Cher.
The St. Lawrence prods among black stones
And mud. But the Arno is all stones.
Wind ruffles the Hudson’s
Surface. The Irawaddy is overflowing.
But the yellowish, gray Tiber
Is contained within steep banks. The Isar
Flows too fast to swim in, the Jordan’s water
Courses over the flat land. The Allegheny and its boats
Were dark blue. The Moskowa is
Gray boats. The Amstel flows slowly.
Leaves fall into the Connecticut as it passes
Underneath. The Liffey is full of sewage,
Like the Seine, but unlike
The brownish-yellow Dordogne.
Mountains hem in the Colorado
And the Oder is very deep, almost
As deep as the Congo is wide.
The plain banks of the Neva are
Gray. The dark Saône flows silently.
And the Volga is long and wide
As it flows across the brownish land. The Ebro
Is blue, and slow. The Shannon flows
Swiftly between its banks. The Mississippi
Is one of the world’s longest rivers, like the Amazon.
It has the Missouri for a tributary.
The Harlem flows amid factories
And buildings. The Nelson is in Canada,
Flowing. Through hard banks the Dubawnt
Forces its way. People walk near the Trent.
The landscape around the Mohawk stretches away;
The Rubicon is merely a brook.
In winter the Main
Surges; the Rhine sings its eternal song.
The Rhône slogs along through whitish banks
And the Rio Grande spins tales of the past.
The Loir bursts its frozen shackles
But the Moldau’s wet mud ensnares it.
The East catches the light.
Near the Escaut the noise of factories echoes
And the sinuous Humboldt gurgles wildly.
The Po too flows, and the many-colored
Thames. Into the Atlantic Ocean
Pours the Garonne. Few ships navigate
On the Housatonic, but quite a few can be seen
On the Elbe. For centuries
The Afton has flowed.
If the Rio Negro
Could abandon its song, and the Magdalena
The jungle flowers, the Tagus
Would still flow serenely, and the Ohio
Abrade its slate banks. The tan Euphrates would
Sidle silently across the world. The Yukon
Was choked with ice, but the Susquehanna still pushed
Bravely along. The Dee caught the day’s last flares
Like the Pilcomayo’s carrion rose.
The Peace offered eternal fragrance
Perhaps, but the Mackenzie churned livid mud
Like tan chalk-marks. Near where
The Brahmaputra slapped swollen dikes
And the Pechora? The São Francisco
Skulks amid gray, rubbery nettles. The Liard’s
Reflexes are slow, and the Arkansas erodes
Anthracite hummocks. The Paraná stinks.
The Ottawa is light emerald green
Among grays. Better that the Indus fade
In steaming sands! Let the Brazos
Freeze solid! And the Wabash turn to a leaden
Cinder of ice! The Marañón is too tepid, we must
Find a way to freeze it hard. The Ural
Is freezing slowly in the blasts. The black Yonne
Congeals nicely. And the Petit-Morin
Curls up on the solid earth. The Inn
Does not remember better times, and the Merrimack’s
Galvanized. The Ganges is liquid snow by now;
The Vyatka’s ice-gray. The once-molten Tennessee s
Curdled. The Japurá is a pack of ice. Gelid
The Columbia’s gray loam banks. The Don’s merely
A giant icicle. The Niger freezes, slowly.
The interminable Lena plods on
But the Purus’ mercurial waters are icy, grim
With cold. The Loing is choked with fragments of ice.
The Weser is frozen, like liquid air.
And so is the Kama. And the beige, thickly flowing
Tocantins. The rivers bask in the cold.
The stern Uruguay chafes its banks,
A mass of ice. The Hooghly is solid
Ice. The Adour is silent, motionless.
The lovely Tigris is nothing but scratchy ice
Like the Yellowstone, with its osier-clustered banks.
The Mekong is beginning to thaw out a little
And the Donets gurgles beneath the
Huge blocks of ice. The Manzanares gushes free.
The Illinois darts through the sunny air again.
But the Dnieper is still ice-bound. Somewhere
The Salado propels irs floes, but the Roosevelt’s
Frozen. The Oka is frozen solider
Than the Somme. The Minho slumbers
In winter, nor does the Snake
Remember August. Hilarious, the Canadian
Is solid ice. The Madeira slavers
Across the thawing fields, and the Plata laughs.
The Dvina soaks up the snow. The Sava’s
Temperature is above freezing. The Avon
Carols noiselessly. The Drôme presses
Grass banks; the Adige’s frozen
Surface is like gray pebbles.

Birds circle the Ticino. In winter
The Var was dark blue, unfrozen. The
Thwaite, cold, is choked with sandy ice;
The Ardèche glistens feebly through the freezing rain.