Tangled Rope

I recently sent a friend a birthday copy of Spreading the Word: Editors on Poetry, a collection of 16 essays by editors of literary magazines published in the late 80s and reprinted through 2001. Neither of us are literary editors; we are both fairly excited (and excitable) about poetry, and I at least fancy myself a writer of poems from time to time. This collection provides some fairly interesting insights into the business, but more importantly some clear ideas about what makes a poem “publishable”.

The essays each center on one or two poems by a single author published by the editor, with the editor’s explanation of why that poet was chosen, and what that choice reveals about their own particular process of selection and editing. I intend to summarize key points from each of these essays over the next little while, to both share the insights and maintain a record for my own benefit.

David St. John, poet and editor of The Antioch Review penned the essay “On Editing”, which features two poems by Jane Hirshfield “In that World, The Angels Wear Fins” and “In a Net of Blue and Gold”.

David includes the following reflections on the task of editing:

• read widely in literary magazines “to … have as complete a sense as possible of who is publishing what”
• publish a poet only once during editor’s tenure
• avoid falling into patterns
• “there are millions of ‘competent’ and well-written poems…the poems I wished to published were … more eccentric, demanding, difficulty…’risky’”
• good screeners are invaluable, must know what is and is not desired, what to exclude and what to let through

On the Hirshfield poems David reveals, “each time I returned…I learned something new about them, and about myself as well. … Like all the best poems, they yielded slowly, like blossoms unfolding.”

Ted Joans reached from the last page,
pen stiff against my throat,
and choked.

There being no poetics, the critic is thrown back on prejudice derived from his existence as a social being. For prejudice is simply inadequate deduction, as a prejudice of the mind can never be anything but a major premise, which is mostly submerged, like an iceberg.

Northrop Frye, “Polemical Introduction”, Anatomy of Criticism

April has crumbled, and if I keep walking on it without noticing I might grind it into dust, which is good because dust is hard to keep track of even if you wanted to; more likely someone else sweeps it up and throws it away after you’ve left.

I’d say April is behind me, but it’s still on my mind. I’d say it’s behind us, as if claiming groupness would allow this to be true, but nothing past is ever behind us, and the world as a whole keeps connections to passed time with iron fishing line and jagged hooks.

I dwell on April for a moment because it was National Poetry Month, and, hoping to relive some of the private glory and joy I experienced last year, I had intended to mark the occasion with some particular effort toward increasing my understanding of (and exposure to) poetry, and sharing that on this web site.

Not much happened, though, and it is most honest and simplest for me to blame that on “my moods”, which sometimes shift in a day, or in a week, from indefatiguable enthusiasm to feeling much like the sticky residue on the floor that makes your shoes smack as you walk away.

At least its May now. Spring is here with rains that I remind me of being near the ocean, and I can look forward to the future when I will revisit the ocean, and pretend I am someone else, living a different life. In the meantime I will likely be generally happy to live my life, and try to make the most of it.

I’ve been reading a lot more lately, and getting the old satisfaction from it. I’ve been reading a lot of “young adult” literature, from Nancy Drew to Robert Cormier to more recent hip works, like Wake. I’ve been reading Ovid. I’ve been reading Nabokov. I’ve been reading short ghost stories and murder mysteries. I’ve been reading philosophical/critical tracts on poetry. I’ve been reading poetry that I haven’t even considered in the past.

I’ve been reading to fill the gaps in my stomach and my mind as I continue to work on a novel, which, as I’ve been saying for the past six months, is almost finished.

This is a second novel, the first, of course, I left unfinished last October in order to take a break and spend just two months on this new idea. Well, two has turned into seven, and this short, simple, easy idea has had its share of twists and turns and, more than enough confoundations. As often as not I spend my writing time and energy running away from myself, and dodging my own backward glances. When asked, How do you know if your work is good?, Juilan Barnes replied, “You don’t. All you know is that you have convinced yourself it is sufficiently good to sent to your publisher.” This I can accept. I know I can work hard, and I know once it’s drafted I’m pretty good at (and fairly comfortable with) revising.

Until then, there is the writing process, which is a lot like full-contact sparring without pads against someone who knows all your moves and any tricks you might hope to use to catch your opponent off guard. It is also a lot like expelling ectoplasm (I guess, for this is something I’ve never done nor even tried. But I can blame that failure on the act’s sheer implausibility). Not a pretty sight, and it’s done to understand the mystery of the thing, to satisfy the otherworldly urges that press out from the inside, but in the end you have to take it all back into yourself, even the gross bits, and pretend like everything is normal.

It’s May, and everything is normal, and everything, like the weather, is fine.

D. H. Lawrence (1885 – 1930) is a poet that I had neglected out of the prejudice that writers best known as novelists are best known as novelists (rather than as poets). But since I’ve begun to read him fairly deeply this month these prejudices have been dispelled. What most immediately struck me is that Lawrence’s poems are in many ways related to (and in fact may be impossible without) Whitman’s verse, and yet Lawrence clings to an individualist, peculiar, almost confessional nature that seems a stark departure for Whitman’s blanketing mantle of democracy and fraternity.

I’ve also been surprised at how fast these longish poems read. They flow swiftly, from image to image, circling through thoughts and ideas as he brings the poem to a culmination.

I begin with the sensuous poem Medlars and Sorb-Apples, which seems to delight in pleasures that might make Baudelaire blush. But though Lawrence begins with the fruit’s sexual connotations and declarations of its “Delicious rottenness” we may suspect that Lawrences has not finished turning things on its head. Indeed, the poet circles the reader around and back again, until we end up shadowing the Hell-side path of Orpheus as he returns a broken and lonely man. The speaker’s obsession with the fruits then takes on a new meaning in its potential for shameless and despairing inebriation.

Medlars and Sorb-Apples

I love you, rotten,
Delicious rottenness.

I love to suck you out from your skins
So brown and soft and coming suave,
So morbid, as the Italians say.

What a rare, powerful, reminiscent flavour
Comes out of your falling through the stages of decay:
Stream within stream.

Something of the same flavour as Syracusan Muscat wine
Or vulgar Marsala.

Though even the word Marsala will smack of preciosity
Soon in the pussyfoot West.

What is it?
What is it, in the grape turning raisin,
In the medlar, in the sorb-apple,

Wineskins of brown morbidity,
Autumnal exrementa;
What is it that reminds us of white gods?

Gods nude as blanched nut-kernels,
Strangely, half sinisterly flesh-fragrant
As if with sweat,
And drenched with mystery.

Sorb-apples, medlars with dead crowns.
I say, wonderful are the hellish experiences,
Orphic, delicate
Dionysos of the Underworld.

A kiss, and a spasm of farewell, a moment's orgasm of rupture
Then a long the damp road alone, till the next turning,
And there, a new partner, a new parting, a new unfusing into twain,
A new gasp of further isolation,
A new intoxication of loneliness, among decaying, frost-cold leaves.

Going down the strange lanes of hell, more and more intensely alone,
The fibres of the heart parting one after the other
And yet the soul continuing, naked-footed, ever more vividly embodied
Like a flame blown whiter and whiter
In a deeper and deeper darkness
Ever more exquisite, distilled in separation.

So, in the strange retorts of medlars and sorb-apples
The distilled essence of hell.
The exquisite odour of leave-taking.
     Jamque vale!
Orpheus, and the winding, leaf-clogged, silent lanes of hell.

Each soul departing with its own isolation,
Strangest of all strange companions,
And best.

Medlars, sorb-apples
More than sweet
Flux of autumn
Sucked out of your empty bladders
And sipped down, perhaps, with a sip of Marsala
So that the rambling, sky-dropped grape can add its savour to yours,
Orphic farewell, and farewell, and farewell
And the ego sum of Dionysos
The sono io of perfect drunkenness
Intoxication of final loneliness.

Medlars and sorb-apples are fruits best eaten when bletted, but apples are a different story. A bruised apple is the one you avoid; a rotten apple, of course, can spoil the whole barrel. I love how Lawrence leads the reader into a long cognitive trek in The Ship of Death with falling, bruising apples.

The Ship of Death

I

Now it is autumn and the falling fruit
and the long journey towards oblivion.

The apples falling like great drops of dew
to bruise themselves an exit from themselves.

And it is time to go, to bid farewell
to one's own self, and find an exit
from the fallen self.

II

Have you built your ship of death, O have you?
O build your ship of death, for you will need it.

The grim frost is at hand, when the apples will fall
thick, almost thundrous, on the hardened earth.

And death is on the air like a smell of ashes!
Ah! can't you smell it?
And in the bruised body, the frightened soul
finds itself shrinking, wincing from the cold
that blows upon it through the orifices.

III

And can a man his own quietus make
with a bare bodkin?

With daggers, bodkins, bullets, man can make
a bruise or break of exit for his life;
but is that a quietus, O tell me, is it quietus?

Surely not so! for how could murder, even self-murder
ever a quietus make?

IV

O let us talk of quiet that we know,
that we can know, the deep and lovely quiet
of a strong heart at peace!

How can we this, our own quietus, make?

V

Build then the ship of death, for you must take
the longest journey, to oblivion.

And die the death, the long and painful death
that lies between the old self and the new.

Already our bodies are fallen, bruised, badly bruised,
already our souls are oozing through the exit
of the cruel bruise.

Already the dark and endless ocean of the end
is washing in through the breaches of our wounds,
Already the flood is upon us.

Oh build your ship of death, your little ark
and furnish it with food, with little cakes, and wine
for the dark flight down oblivion.

VI

Piecemeal the body dies, and the timid soul
has her footing washed away, as the dark flood rises.

We are dying, we are dying, we are all of us dying
and nothing will stay the death-flood rising within us
and soon it will rise on the world, on the outside world.

We are dying, we are dying, piecemeal our bodies are dying
and our strength leaves us,
and our soul cowers naked in the dark rain over the flood,
cowering in the last branches of the tree of our life.

VII

We are dying, we are dying, so all we can do
is now to be willing to die, and to build the ship
of death to carry the soul on the longest journey.

A little ship, with oars and food
and little dishes, and all accoutrements
fitting and ready for the departing soul.

Now launch the small ship, now as the body dies
and life departs, launch out, the fragile soul
in the fragile ship of courage, the ark of faith
with its store of food and little cooking pans
and change of clothes,
upon the flood's black waste
upon the waters of the end
upon the sea of death, where still we sail
darkly, for we cannot steer, and have no port.

There is no port, there is nowhere to go
only the deepening blackness darkening still
blacker upon the soundless, ungurgling flood
darkness at one with darkness, up and down
and sideways utterly dark, so there is no direction any more
and the little ship is there; yet she is gone.
She is not seen, for there is nothing to see her by.
She is gone! gone! and yet
somewhere she is there.
Nowhere!

VIII

And everything is gone, the body is gone
completely under, gone, entirely gone.
The upper darkness is heavy as the lower,
between them the little ship
is gone

It is the end, it is oblivion.

IX

And yet out of eternity a thread
separates itself on the blackness,
a horizontal thread
that fumes a little with pallor upon the dark.

Is it illusion? or does the pallor fume
A little higher?
Ah wait, wait, for there's the dawn
the cruel dawn of coming back to life
out of oblivion

Wait, wait, the little ship
drifting, beneath the deathly ashy grey
of a flood-dawn.

Wait, wait! even so, a flush of yellow
and strangely, O chilled wan soul, a flush of rose.

A flush of rose, and the whole thing starts again.

X

The flood subsides, and the body, like a worn sea-shell
emerges strange and lovely.
And the little ship wings home, faltering and lapsing
on the pink flood,
and the frail soul steps out, into the house again
filling the heart with peace.

Swings the heart renewed with peace
even of oblivion.

Oh build your ship of death. Oh build it!
for you will need it.
For the voyage of oblivion awaits you.

Ovid’s Metamorphoses is one of those classic tomes that I let slip past during the years I could have been reading it. Indeed, I had no exposure to the classics in college and very little in high school, so the bulk of my more learned reading of Greek, Roman, and Italian literature has been on my own, and for my own pleasure. So Chris’s re-reading of the work inspired me to pick it up for the first time, and transliterate the experience here. My blog posts on these readings will be part summary, part commentary and analysis.

If I have to read a work in translation I like to assure myself that the translation is as accurate and literal as possible. In this case I did not pay translation much heed; instead, I selected several translations off of the shelf, read through random passages, and chose the one that I found most enjoyable. So instead of the acid-yellow-paged fifty-cent copy that had sat on my “reading shelf” for years I purchased the Allen Mandelbaum’s translation and dug in.

“The Earth”, “The Water”, “The Air”, and “The Fire” – Giuseppe Arcimboldo

Book 1′s deep and vast poetry immediately transported me away from myself, and immersed me in the the Greco-Roman creation myth as laid out by Ovid, beginning with chaos and potential:

…the sea
could not be swum, the air was without splendor
no thing maintained its shape; all were at war
in one same body cold and hot would battle;
the damp contented with the dry, things hard
with soft, and weighty things with weightless parts.

Already I anticipate the coming of Man, and the conflict–both internal and external–that humankind epitomizes. Ovid then describes how stars were here first, masked by the aether, along with the gods. “stars and the forms of gods then occupied / the porch of heaven”. Then came “the living thing the earth still lacked”:

Prometheus, son of Iapetus, made man
by mixing new-made earth with fresh rainwater
(for earth had only recently been set
apart from heaven, and the earth still kept
seeds of the sky–remains of their shared birth);
and when he fashioned man, his mold recalled
the masters of all things, the gods.

“Prometheus Makes Man”, by James W. Mah

There are a number of recognizable similarities between this creation myth and that found in Genesis, however Ovid’s earth-made man has not only the form of god(s), but something of the stars in the sky as well (I should compare this to other translations, as the language here implies this as much as it declares; [also, consider Bonaventure's mirrors]).This theme of man’s divine potential shrouded by his base physical nature continues as the world changes. It is era of Jove, and for man, the original, Edenic life slips away in favor of self-sufficiency and power, and the soft ease of the Gold Age gives way to increasingly harder, battle-natured metals.

Man’s power is on the rise, yet life becomes more difficult. Strife which is at first external (e.g. warfare) soon infringes on and disrupts relationships with neighbors and family (140-50). The ways of humans are so cacophonous to Jove that, in a more descriptive rendition of the Flood myth, he summons rain, rivers, and seas to drown mankind, until “all is sea, but with no shore”.

Just as YHWH allowed Noah to live, Jove expects a renaissance of mankind in the salvation of Deucalion and Pyrrha, who “love justice”. It is not long, however, before we see the troublesome duality of the world, both in the earth and in Man, reveal itself again. Even as the world heals itself, we see the rise and recession of the Nile express this duality:

For, tempering each other, heat and moisture
engender life: the union of these two
produces everything…
…
discordant concord is the path life needs

This relationship is not a simple conflict, and we speak of elemental nature, not blacks and whites; the duality, the contrast, and the conflict provides fertile soil for life, potential for improvement and sustenance. Ovid’s careful explanation of Man’s origins as a thing of the earth comes to mind, and he has only just narrowly escaped extinction by Jove’s wrathful flood. But Man survives; and just humility that Jove expects will be confounded by humans’ dual nature. In conflict and struggle they will find fertility for expansion, and potential for achievement through conflicts with nature, and, we anticipate, the gods.

At the risk of sounding like Billy Bob Thornton rambling towards an obscure pittance of irony, I want to start by mentioning that I test-drove a truck yesterday. I’ve never owned a truck, and am not the sort of guy you’d expect would want to own a truck. That’s another story.

This truck was on the discount lot of my local repair shop, and it looked as if it would smell thoroughly of cigarettes, for I could see through the locked door windows that the upholstery was marred and speckled with black ash burns. Once I got the key from the owner, I found it smelled like dog. In fact, it smelled like my dog, Deckard (RIP 2008). Deckard suffered from a skin disease the last few years of his life, and it caused him to reek. The smell of this truck cab was of a similar tone, and every bit as nauseating; it was somewhere between a sinus infection and drowned earthworms, with that unmistakable canine bouquet. Part of me wanted to roll the windows down. Part of me wanted to remember. By the time I got on the highway, the practical part of me left the windows up so I could better listen to the workings of the car.

On the surface this has almost nothing to do with Stephen Dunn’s poem “Dog Weather”. And I admit Mr. Dunn is not a favorite poet of mine, though I find his works extremely accessible, and the general mood of many of his poems matches my own. Perhaps too closely. Perhaps that is why he is not a favorite poet of mine.

Dog Weather
by Stephen Dunn
From Different Ones, 2000

Earlier, everyone was in knee boots, collars up.
The paper boy's papers came apart
in the wind.

Now, nothing human moving.
Just a black squirrel fidgeting like Bogart
in The Caine Mutiny.

My breath chalks the window
gives me away to myself.

I like the intelligibility of old songs
I prefer yesterday.

Cars pass, the asphalt's on its back
smudged with skid. It's potholed
and cracked: it's no damn good.

Anyone out without the excuse of a dog
should be handcuffed
and searched for loneliness.

My hair is thinning.
I feel like tossing the wind a stick.

The promised snow has arrived,
heavy, wet.
I remember the blizzard of...
People I don't want to be
speak like that.

I close my eyes and one
of my many unborn sons
makes a snowball
and lofts it at an unborn friend.

They've sent me an AARP card.
I'm on their list.

I can be discounted now almost anywhere.

So this poem is cleanly written, fairly clever, though perhaps a bit shallow, a little oto confessional for some readers taste. Yes, the form and style is the sort of “denatured” prose-as-poetry that Joan Houlihan complains about, and the punch line is no great epiphany (Growing Old Is Universal, No Good).

But I thought of this poem when I sat in the cab of that old, foul-smelling truck, perhaps merely through a simple association of the title with dog. It was buoyed in my mind as I struggled with the truck’s broken parking brake lever and I remembered doing the same to my grandfather’s old truck when I lived and worked with him in California as an adolescent. This took me to another summer job I held, working at a video rental shop that specialized in classic American cinema, which took me full circle to The Caine Mutiny, a film that I took home from the sane video shop eighteen years ago. This is a movie that revealed a very different Bogey from the two-dimensional hero of Casablanca, and was one of the first films I watched that summer that tindered my persistent obsession with classic American cinema.

“Dog Weather”, or rather, this occurrence, forced me to conclude that though my reasoning mind may refute a poem’s quality based on philosophy or a theory of aesthetics, I will allow–no, I will not deny that a significant testimonial for a poem’s success is retention in the reader’s mind. In this case I’d read Dunn’s “Dog Weather” just once, and probably years ago. I may have been amused by it, but it had not struck me as a poetic treasure, and so I imagine it sinking even then deep into the sucking gumbo swamp of my memory. But to have it rise up, washed in the rain of nostalgia, glinting somewhat in the sunshine of a much later, much different day gave me something like hope in being alive, and something like faith in reading poetry.

Watch Humphrey Bogart in The Caine Mutiny

“I am nothing but literature and can and want to be nothing else.”
–Franz Kafka, Diary

Last week I deleted my old blog (partially an accident) so I can’t recall if I actually began to write about poetry as parables or not. Perhaps that was in response to Chris Lott’s blog. No matter. I continue anyway.

Here are a couple of favorite poems by former US poet laureate Mark Strand (1934 – ). Not only do these poems delight me, fulfill my own criteria of poetic excellence, these illustrate a newness and continuance of parable, an allegorical narrative from which instructive meaning may be l gleaned. I use this term “parable” out of convenience, and because I believe it deserves a renaissance, but perhaps I should use apologue instead, for these two poems are more akin to Kafka’s tricky and sometimes paradoxical aphorisms than to the Biblical allegories to which many of us are most familiar.

That is to say these poems are not religiously didactic; instead, these poem-parables cling to the hope of being instructive, if only internally. Indeed, we may be living in an age of such reason–conflicted with exposure to a diversity of sometimes confoundingly disparate cultural norms–that nothing can be genuinely instructive, though we hope at least to end up turned in the right direction.

Eating Poetry
by Mark Strand

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.

The librarian does not believe what she sees.
Her eyes are sad
and she walks with her hands in her dress.

The poems are gone.
The light is dim.
The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up.

Their eyes roll,
their blond legs burn like brush.
The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep.

She does not understand.
When I get on my knees and lick her hand,
she screams.

I am a new man.
I snarl at her and bark.
I romp with joy in the bookish dark.

This poem delights me with its rhythm, its meteoric imagery, and it’s subject and meaning (no surprise to anyone who knows me. The prescriptive subtext here might be that the poem-reader is a loner, an unknown element delighting slavishly in pleasures that are nearly as incomprehensible to the readers as they are to others (insert W. G. Sebald quote here, if I could find it). Further, strand shows the poem-reader–engorged by the consumption–is unpredictable, his antics incomprehensible even to the library who make her home amongst the empowering words.

Because the poem-reader is a loner, the poem-reader can not, despite his joy, expect or demand that others appreciate the joy s/he finds in the poem. It reminds me, no, it assures me that even as antisocial as poem-reading may be, it is still a immeasurable value. Good poetry can rejuvenate. It can transform.

What better theme for us to dwell on as we pass through Easter, spring, and a reading of Ovid’s Metamorphoses?

Nostalgia
by Mark Strand

The professors of English have taken their gowns
to the laundry, have taken themselves to the fields.
Dreams of motion circle the Persian rug in a room you were in.
On the beach the sadness of gramophones
deepens the ocean's folding and falling.
It is yesterday. It is still yesterday.

The parable nature here is less obvious. In fact, if I were writing an argument, not a blog post, I would not use this as an example. So I will not stretch the limits of the poem by imbuing it with my own subjective interpretation; instead let me point out how this poem reaches into a recent history, in fact, just a sliver of history familiar to only a few, but made concrete by Strand’s imagery. When Strand summons the image of the Persian rug and the gramophone I am propelled backwards into a place of being which I tasted, yearned for, but could never have. “It is yesterday. It is still yesterday.” Strand explains in a final, sighing refrain.

Is it? Or is that merely where our minds insist to dwell?