Stevens Textplication 5: Disillusionment at Ten O'Clock

Photo: colinpuddephatt

Stevens once wrote, in a letter the details of which escape me, that he was a pure poet, or at least more of one than in his prolific later years, during his youth, before he wrote any verse to speak of, because he was "all feeling." I think of that when I read "Disillusionment at Ten O'Clock" from 1915, the first of his short poems to be heavily anthologized. It's easy to see why, for the poem is crystal clear compared to most of Stevens' work, and adds humor to the usual elegance for an intoxicating effect. Here's the poem:

The houses are haunted
By white night-gowns.
None are green,
Or purple with green rings,
Or green with yellow rings,
Or yellow with blue rings.
None of them are strange,
With socks of lace
And beaded ceintures.
People are not going
To dream of baboons and periwinkles.
Only, here and there, an old sailor,
Drunk and asleep in his boots,
Catches tigers
In red weather.

The literal meaning of this is fairly easy to dispense with. The speaker is disillusioned at his ten o'clock bedtime by the (for want of a better term) bourgeois lack of imagination in the people going to sleep with him at that customary time. Their final rituals before falling asleep, the donning of plain and uniform white nightgowns, do not give them a place to go to in their dreams, for their lack of imagination, represented by the exotic colors and frills they emphatically do not have, denies them the inspiration from which to construct the dreams that make life interesting (visions of baboons and periwinkles). This sense of "normal" people's ghost-like "quiet desperation" is contrasted with the old sailor, who has no ritual of social propriety at all being "drunk and asleep in his boots," but at least through his willingness to travel the world and derange his senses lives an exciting life in his dreams, one that "catches tigers in red weather."

We all can relate to that feeling of unease when all that's left of the day is to fall asleep. The comfortable and familiar surroundings sometimes remind us that life's excitement has passed us by in another busy day of working, and perhaps we wonder if this is all there is to life, if there's something else we could be doing. It's what Stevens does with this feeling that is so striking here. He doesn't pick up a book to maybe get lost in the fantasy of it, he looks coldly around at what is actually happening. His account of it, though, is, to say the least, ironic. Houses being haunted by white night gowns is anything but an unimaginative image - it's hilarious and creepy at the same time, like the best horror movies. And these colors of the night-gowns that aren't there, purple and green, green and yellow, yellow and blue; those are really not that hard to imagine, even with rings, in fact it's pretty easy to conceive of someone going to the store to buy them if it's so important, isn't it? And why are socks with lace and belts with beads ("beaded ceintures") considered "strange" in a middle-class boudoir circa 1915? Meanwhile, in contrast to all the colors and things presented as being so impossible, unattainable, "red weather," a virtually unintelligible concept, is presented as a tangible fact, plain as night.

Clearly Stevens has some of his usual bags of tricks up his sleeve. The critique of the sleeping-wear is not a complaint about the conventionality of his neighbors or himself so much as a personal cry about the bareness of life when stripped down to its essentials. Even when imaginatively re-created with ghost-story metaphors and conjured alternatives, reality just does not suffice, its dreams seem like death. The speaker longs for a world of pure imagination, where he can be that old sailor with dreams like Jack London stories who is "here and there" (implying that there is more than one sailor, or at least that he is a state of mind, maybe a dream himself). There is a glimmer in this, in something the speaker does not know like he knows his bedtime accouterments - the thing unknown, that must be imagined, is the only thing that matters, the only thing that seems real.

And what of the "red weather"? Now's as good a time as any to discuss Stevens' frequent use of color during this period. The place to start in this is to recall the color revolution in painting from the late 19th century to about the time this poem was written. The Fauves and then the Expressionists took colors out of their realistic context and amplified them on the canvas, as a way to express personal emotional states, move away from representation toward abstract pictorial qualities, or simply show what something really looked liked in a confluence of light and perspective. Poets like Stein and Apollinaire struggled to find a verbal equivalent to this disjointing of reality from expression. To a poet like Stevens, whose muse dictated a strict separation of reality, perception and expression, the use of colors must have seemed an opportunity to move away from meaning itself as painters moved away from their customary role of representation. Colors like white, red and green, freighted with an agreed-upon (or not agreed-upon) symbolism, don't actually "mean" anything, they, like dream images, take on the qualities the reader comes to them with. Colors are the perfect example, in fact, of subjective meaning. They don't express the point of view of the writer, but of the reader.

Symbolist poets prized colors for the way they revealed primordial ideals behind the surface of things for writer and reader to share,* but Stevens found no such comfort in any objective shared reality beyond the power of individual imagination. In this poem, for all of these reasons, colors become the unnameable, the tao between subject and object. The green nightgowns and red weather represent qualities that can't be expressed and can't be understood, but nevertheless are expressed and understood across incommunicable poles. Meaning is created, in other words, not communicated, and the means of the creation is the imaginative faculties. "Music is feeling then, not sound" Stevens wrote in another poem from 1915, "Peter Quince at the Clavier" (which also uses lots of inexplicable color). This use of color, and this expression of the distance between consciousnesses, is something that will continue and grow in Stevens' work.

*"A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu : voyelles" (A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue: vowels) - Rimbaud, Voyelles

The Back Pages of the News

We live in interesting times, all I can do amid the daily onslaught of apocalyptic events is to collect phrases and fragments from news stories and try to make it not make sense

Earth is in the birth canal
mob robbery on the rise
dissent is sterilized
by preemptive percussive grenades
at anarchistic hooligans on a debt jubilee parade
from their hidey-holes of preps, guns and gold
to evade the diktats of tribute for the carbon-cargo-cult
or the agitsmut of the illuminazis
and their fetish parasites
by debunking with mass junks
the brain-wrongery of the kleptocracy
and their plans of claustrophobic austerity
for the lemmingarati
with systematic mayhem
psychotronic mind control
meanwhile Iowa tsunamis
Chinese earless rabbits
sandbags on nuke silos
mass coronal comet/planet x ejection extinction events
radioactive wildfires
radioactive urine
radioactive whales

Black-Tipped City

All artists are criminals
but some make the world their gallery.
Where everyone's an outlaw
the artists' must do more.

Spontaneous Mountain Verse

Translation of Wei Wang, based on this exchange with Stephen Pentz

寂寞掩柴扉，　
蒼茫對落暉。　
鶴巢松樹遍，　
人訪蓽門稀。　
嫩竹含新粉，
紅蓮落故衣。
渡頭燈火起，
處處采菱歸。

Lonely quiet closing firewood gate,
Facing vague and ashen falling sun.
Cranes in lazy nests on top of pines,
People rarely visit wicker door.
Soft bamboo dusted with new powder,
Old red lotus clothes fallen away.
Lantern fires on jetty cast a light,
Water chestnut pickers everywhere.

Found Image

The Boom Lounge
by the elevated trains
colors leak through the cracks

In Thick Air

Enormity of Summer
the chainsaw finally broke
the Pontiac
that hauls the boat
sags with a flat -
Hydrangea
and Hibiscus
have replaced your family -
you cannot see
the neighbors through the weeds -
insanely happy
chickadees
as you battle giant trees
the shears keep slipping off
your grip
of sweat -
the books don’t look so clear
this time of year
the figures
are a blur
the briefs are longer
than they need to be –
the trains
are running late
but everyone would miss them
otherwise -
someone came at night to paint the whole town phosphorescent
but we are blinded
in our living rooms
where cats are
glaciers
shoes imbued with jewels
faces with that weariness
before they let it go -
a leaf floats off the dock into the pool

Days of Pain - 2

upside-down mushrooms green bricks
forceps must rip out some parts of me
the vines have wound round too thick
as hard to extract as a lover
but this pill like a lunar eclipse
keeps me nodding agreement in sleep

Days of Pain - 1

blue coffee green fly
companions for my journey
I'd rather be walking through Mongolia
but being present now must suffice:
I must learn how to hear my own screaming
how to let the world ride by

Stevens Textplication 4: The Silver Plough-Boy

Ezra Pound has so well trained us to view images as pictures and not as symbols – the lily, say, as sensuous flower and not harbinger of death – that poems written in the “high modernist” style – clipped, that is, of the purple Victorian moralizing (along with the marching orders of meter and rhyme) – can be challenging to read when they utilize traditional forms of allegory. "The Silver Plough-Boy" from 1915 (along with others from Stevens such as "Earthy Anecdote", "Anecdote of a Jar" and "Life is Motion") uses stripped-down images and plain phrasing to dramatize through the dynamism of its poetic action a kind of philosophical musing on the metaphysical relationship between man and reality. One of three poems excluded from the 2nd edition of Harmonium (and thus from the Collected Poems), "The Silver Plough-Boy" was resuscitated for The Palm at the End of the Mind selection by Holly Stevens, the poet’s daughter, and it's a fine poem:

A black figure dances in a black field.
It seizes a sheet, from the ground, from a bush, as if spread there by
some wash-woman for the night.
It wraps the sheet around its body, until the black figure is silver.
It dances down a furrow, in the early light, back of a crazy plough, the
green blades following.
How soon the silver fades in the dust! How soon the black figure slips
from the wrinkled sheet! How softly the sheet falls to the ground!

The literal movement of the poem – a "plough-boy" dancing at night, wrapping himself in an available sheet of laundry, plowing playfully (and perhaps backwards), and then sloughing off the sheet as morning comes, all the while dancing – is rendered so abstractly we are invited to view the presentation as something else entirely. “A black figure dances in a black field” it begins ominously, and never is the “person” in the title identified beyond the geometrical description. There are virtually no adjectives to qualify this strange scene, and the ones that are there (the “crazy plough”, its “green blades”, the suddenly “wrinkled sheet”) seem imaginative to the point of perversity. One is tempted to view the figure not as a person at all but as a metaphoric description of the way moonlight moves across the ground at night, dancing like a sheet, flowing into furrows, reflecting light on the blades that are green with the grass they have mowed, and dissolving all-too-perfectly as the morning sun rises. Why then is the figure black, the plough crazy, the sheet wrinkled?

Then there’s the elegiac quality to this scene despite its playfulness; the associations with death (burial sheets, black figures, the plough that could dig a grave, the dust), the “how soon” repetition at the end and its cadence of mourning. But the mourning is for the sheet, not for the presumably human figure, who dances away very much alive and unrecognized by the reader.

I think the key to “elucidating” this poem lies in first understanding that Stevens, no matter what images he uses, is typically only concerned with one topic, the dichotomy between reality and imagination. Bernard Heringman, in his essay “Wallace Stevens: The Use of Poetry” (English Literary History XVI, Dec. 1949, pp. 325-336), puts it this way:

“The world of Wallace Stevens’ poetry has always been two, ‘things as they are’ and ‘things imagined.’ The dichotomy has been so constant that certain terms are stock symbols of the two realms. The moon, blue, the polar north, winter, music, poetry and all art: these consistently refer to the realm of imagination, order, the ideal. The sun, yellow, the tropic south, summer, physical nature; these refer to, or symbolize, the realm of reality, disorder, the actual.”

Getting back to the symbolic or allegorical nature of this poem, we can easily substitute night for winter, silver for blue, dancing for music, the mysterious sheet for writing/poetry, plowing at night for creating/cultivating art, to see the actions of the black figure as acts of imagination. Accentuating this is the fact that the seven brightest stars in the Ursa Major constellation, called the Big Dipper in the U.S., is called the Plough in England and other parts of the English-speaking world (it’s elsewhere called the Big Bear and the Handle, among other imagined pictures). In other words, the star group that wheels about Polaris the North Star, reliably helping us locate it, is in this poem as well, identified as “crazy” (yet another term for the imaginative mindset).

Thus this short poem is full of touchstones to Stevens’ conception of the imagination, which as usual for Stevens goes beyond merely creating a work of art to creating oneself and what is all around one through the transformative powers of imagination. Let’s now follow with this in mind the dynamic of the poem. First, the black figure who is dancing in a black field feels the need to grab a sheet, to distinguish itself from the blackness it had become absorbed into, to shield itself, to take on the nature of something else. There is a need, in short, to be separate. The sheet that provides the separation, that turns the figure silver, also allows the figure to be visible. It allows everything it touches, in fact – the furrow, the plough and its blades – to be visible, like an aura around its dance. It’s like the black figure, by assuming the mask of the sheet, creates its own light, one that reveals beauty that would otherwise be unseen.

What is created here is a new self behind the gauze of silver, an imaginatively transformed self, like Stevens’ later “major man.” It is this new figure we mourn when the sunlight comes, the silver becomes invisible, the figure, still black, throws off the sheet like the poet would toss a crumpled/wrinkled piece of paper, and it falls to the ground so softly it’s like it was never there in the first place. There is no place in reality – “the light of day” – for the imagination. Its products never existed at all. Yet they did – something magical and inexplicable, like a vision of a mystic truth beyond our understanding. The contradiction is one that Stevens will come back to wrestle with time and time again.

The Connector Gods

The party lines have died, that flickered like thieves,
trees come out in time like teeth, homes get eaten,
yards sublimate to weed, but these outlast the Parthenon,
the hanging looms that thread through all the driveways
still vibrate black and taut, like strings for birds to pluck
when they're not singing, their barrels of electric charge up high,
bolts swaddled down in tar, to glow the hearths and cool
the roofs, bring multi-colored lamps across the neighborhoods
through strings as thin as jumpropes, that hold the homes like puppets
and we the audience can never see, although they block the sky
from here to China, as if they are the filaments that bind the cosmos,
that yarn that holds the moving light in place, that keeps it safe
to leap from islands of itself, to the self that's somewhere else,
ecstatic to discover that there is no space or time, just like they thought.

Not saying what cannot be said by saying it

Gertrude Stein of Bryant Park
slouches on her pedestal like Buddha
eyes down, inward turned, more serious
than you can possibly imagine, more serious than all
the serious people in the park, oblivious to the straw hatted
pianist playing 1920’s jazz, to the French girls making chit chat
sound like poetry, to the film crew and lunch-hungry throng, the world
in packed microcosm, to the great books of history on a kiosk by the bar.

No one wants a thing to do with her.
Even the pigeons offer her a wide berth.
All she has to show for all those years so serious
is the detritus of trees in between her downward hands.
It is enough.

Recursion Crenellations of the Schizophrenic Wolfangels

Edited texts of Hakim Bey, Jacques Derrida and Dan Winter (the three weirdest – and most radical – writers I could think of) combined and randomized multiple times, with resulting phrases selected and arranged as lines

Useless corpse-eaters energies
So-called welfare chaos
Flowers rotten of desiccate hologram
Striate a nostalgia astral
A Babylon milk of chaos-bearing architecture
Brilliant gods of lingam
Escaping of slice censorship labels
Theatre explicit of power
Apocryphal chthonic mechanics grimoires
A deranged sub-reptilian stabilizing bestiary
All of the spinout be unsheathed
The skulls sometimes lucid
First materials at daggers
For jerkwater crimes
Bloated slit-windowed ninja
Usage of invulnerability
Prescience burning
The Me Secret
In every quotidian skyrockets Tara
Paleolithic electricities
Turtles bleeding
Banal with the attributed China
The fedayeen immanence
What courses of sorcery
Blood-astral pornography of propaganda
Independent fractals of ducks
Bombs without evidentality
Writing of octaves implementation regimes
Pewter rebellion
Radical sensually of space and death
Wave polemical of unity anamnesis
Dusk ennui shaft the less sent
Ochre morphology
Denizens of Shiva’s bicyclists
Salacious aesthetic death beautiful
Schizophrenic metaphor agents presence
Your crimes of archaic evil
Fractal for pubescent sea-goddess
Punk desert
Organization ratholes
Artificial burning glances of DNA
Queer oasis crimes
Golden Javanese sultan hags
Forced metalinguistics
Speculative postal time
Rubber Tzara the perfected a
Paradigm words of dimpling dog
Licking heavy poetics
The stars brains books charge
Conjugating ratio eyes
Moses of Worm symbols
The infinite as dragons spoon-bending
Superluminal religion
Immortal cubes
Nothing profane outside statistical
Golden oblivion signatum
Death of God mass
Narrow being essence
Dream cells self-veiling upon satori silk only
bluegrey stupid correcting beauty through double skin conjugating
Oblivion
Fever crimes
Epicurian feral skulls
Feral Babylon Lion majority
Howling Avatars
Rotten time
Slit-windowed artificial depresentation
Moonlight mail-order empire
The sunlight sunflowers become them catalogues
Poetry syntax first horizon
Possible reggae in audience
Victorian astrolabes succubi
Elephant head bathtub Dr. of East
Dodeca star-politics
Sea-serpent on phase-lock
Dimpling of smutty the bluestar grandmother's death golden children
Earth Consensus
Obsolete Antinomians orgone-blue
Independent fractal banking
Full sepia reinterpretation
The break-dancer’s nostalgia weapons
Scotus Pancho
Temporary punk Sybarites
Railroad mind aesthetic
Jasper-green memory Ganesh
Duns Grammatica
Whole violet wave
Attic spies
Love Thunder polemical of playground center blue
And of vorticity by lost otherness
Mad flat pain
Root-system towns
Belated name-wave children desiring dragon dream heart soap
Self-veiling books
Hairless bleeding poetry flowers
Your umber totems of opposition
Flunk-outs surreptitiously atonal
The bloated abbreviation
From tepid communion
Sheltered punk science
Lucid disappeared dreambooks
Dawn Grammatica
Lion changes an infinite mind
Sex linguistics shit-for-brains annihilation
A usage tongue
Alleged chthonic animist between the saboteurs
Trace chain sepia metaphysics
Great implosive to smash
The immortal terror
Flowers messianicity
Anyone serve dreambooks here
Queer waveform theatre
The moonlight immanence censorship
Books will take instructions bleeding
Ennui butterflies
Become quotidian without theory
Postal turtles
The root-system details horoscopy scholars
Secret jasper-green
Polychrome mythopoesis forest
Spoon-bending HooDoo in police-ghosts
Astral Kali the snakes linguistic
Futuristic wormhole class
Implosion octaves
Woven of signatum violet
Javanese feux symbolo bay every There and When
Personal eidolons
The poems wet totalitarian thing
D’artifice violet longing
Thunder mirror of cause
Waste sea-goddess death
Embeds alembics what exemplary dissemination
Logocentric cosmos of playground
Symmetry cubes in oblivion
Stupid Hermes poets
Fails books religion through shaft worm

Champions

For Jesse and all the clan

Fuckin' A a happy day
It's time to bank this power play
The Bruins won

Let's blow the ay-ah hahn nice and loud
And throw some pup-cahn show we're proud
The Bruins won

We won't be drinkin' in the bahs
We won't be honkin' in our cahs
The Bruins won

Let's Irish punks and dum canucks
Meet midnight at the church of Dunks
The Bruins won

No unifahm with fuckin Shahks
The cup's back where the ice is hahd
The Bruins won

The gahden's furled with gold and black
They're never gonna take this back
The Bruins won

I got your only real spaht he-ah
I'll drown in Narragansett be-ah
The Bruins won

As victors, we must not be crass
Canadiens: kiss my fucking ass
The Bruins won

A toast to double-checks in June
A total eclipse of the moon
The Bruins won

From Worcester to Scituate, Lowell to Lynn
A wicked good cup is comin' - drink it in
The Bruins won

A Century of Forgotten Theories

A news item about U.S. government “payments” (credits) to banks and other financial institutions since the “credit crisis” of 2008 being sufficient to pay off over 90% of the mortgages in the U.S. prompted me to reflect on the Social Credit theories of C. H. Douglas, which were a key element in the creation and distribution of poetic High Modernism, and seen as the solution to all the dualistic isms of the 20th century by Pound, Eliot, Williams, Read, Chesterton, Beloc, Huxley and a host of other literary figures.

Bankers are the unacknowledged legislators of the world
More private and invisible than even poets
Who own the poems that flash in from the sun
As bankers own the funds dreamed from their pens
Created to be shared Credere* in either case
For laurels to the poet, interest to the bank.
We pay, with mortal minds, to see a vision through a vapor screen:
Endure ellipses, too-far distances,
words that never say quite what they mean
and are far too mean in not quite saying it
As we must pay, with our mere wages, for all the markups of production:
The extractions from the earth, safe passage over Styx,
the overhead of whips and chains, pornography of profits,
the interest entered daily like the tunnel into town.
But if we suspend our disbelief, these poets give us stories:
Of how to lose the sacred things, for the rarest kind of vision
the thing that still is pure, that still is useless
As bankers will give us, if we pretend they own all life, the things we ask:
Faster food, higher cheekbones, less ennui at work,
more choices among shoes and muses with lutes.
So exponentials of debt—and poems—must be produced
To keep this system stable
With no possible re-payment or of meaning in clear sight.
But no one seems to care about the bankers and the poets
As we walk down life with eyes and voices blazing
For diversions always rain straight down from God,
Butterflies, lions and delivery dogs
always seem to land with the most impeccable taste.

* Credit comes from Latin “to believe”

Flag Day Theme: Why Our National Anthem is the Best in the World

Reposted from 2009 for Flag Day because it is one of my personal favorites

To Robert, bien sur

It started with Henry the Eighth,
Speaking of Nonesuch, his would-be rival to Versailles:
"The sky will be spangled with stars,"
Before he sent the Plantagenets to kingdom come
With Henrician flair and became deformed, unlike
Richard "the winter of our discontent made glorious summer"
The Third, per the propaganda play by de Vere,
Based on the character assassinations of Saint Thomas
More, noted heretic burner, who famously called Luther,
Of the diet of worms and the 95 feces nailed to the door
To see which of them would stick,
"The shit coming out of the devil's asshole."
(Maybe that's why the Lutherans are leading the charge
To say "O Canada" is a better song when all that is is one
Magnificent view, and then it's all you can do
To look around for a place to get warm.)
A couple hundred years and a Portuguese spy named Colon
(Who let the Spanish "discover" America to preserve Brazil
And the African trade routes) later, some
Drunken, useless writer named Key gets tapped for
Disorderly conduct (aka pissing on a redcoat's boots),
And spends one very long night, of unrelenting brutality,
Like the kind you spend at Muhly's in Baltimore,
Where you're impressed like a sailor by a British girlfriend,
Who turns your shame into violence, your violence into shame,
And you question, really question, just why you're alive,
When your fabricated world is a corpse pulled apart by an ogre.
"In the dark night of the soul, it's always 3 o'clock in the morning,"
Key's grand-namesake declared, and it might have felt a little like that,
That bad night, with the only thing holding you together at the end
A ridiculous ragged flag, like a warm slice of peach cake,
Which seems like heaven itself, in the sunrise,
The beautiful acid sunrise on the psychedelic flag.
But it's not just a song about a flag (even though
That would already make it better than the French punk anti-song
And Germany uber alles who will crush you like a bug),
And it's not just about the way the word free, in the sense of
A runner too far ahead of the linebacker to be tackled,
Can be held for a nano-second or forever, or even how endurance
Makes us brave, in the sense of driving with the gas light on
Through the amber waves of Nebraska on a winter's night,
No, it's about the heart, the home, the place you go
After the killin' is through, where the drinking songs
Sound ennobled, the cat loves you for the fire you made,
And no one has to think about no stinking purple mountains,
Or any majesty, because you're glad to be alive,
That something astonishing has come from the horror,
Like the snowed-in night at a bar when necessity
Made inadvertent people invent buffalo wings.
Jimi Hendrix, its spiraling melody exploding in his head
As he parachuted into Vietnam, knew this.
Marvin Gaye, who didn't have to know about
Henry the Eighth's musicianship, or why he himself, on tour,
Always had one room for his preacher and another for his dealer,
Or even about Palestinian olive oil, FEMA death camps, Truman 12,
Or the judicial concept of "finality,"
Knew this.

Wandering the City Pondering Paul Blackburn

Land of no smiles
Hot tracks
Cold glass
(grey building     blue windows    grey sky)
Conveyance of minds
Through circles
Of a jewel
Cut from its center
Elegant but yet
We kvetch at the finite
Collapsing all around
In luminous flight
The small stories
The lower case i’s
Whose truths can only resolve to fictions
Before the new story    the truth
What the hell it’s time
Don’t you think?
Don’t the lies just weigh us down?
Do we really need them now
To feel complete, to feel
Alive?
In this city of the mind
Geniuses are the casualties
It’s for warmth we tell these lies
For two hearts cannot touch without
words
But hearts
Do not know any words
That tumble like white wood
Fueling ash
False the anger words
False the lust words
False the grieving words
False the words of fear
The material
Will only bend so far
To feel the novelty
Of being right
(in the dark lord Wizard’s bag)
The universe will only open
If I close the cabinet drawer
And leave my keys flat on the table
The limitless and how it’s limited
By word’s protective services
When walls walls walls walls walls
Around a heart
Can never speak
Isn’t it time
Don’t you think
To not automatically say no
To something that’s approaching?
This world is dying
This world where minds can kill
Where thoughts divide
Like cells
Where minds have fire
And win by burning
(Asian honks at Arab honks at Jew)
Time for meaning
To reside again in silence
In doing nothing
I hear it breathing
A torn and flattened city coughs
Even the sleeping
Prophet on the cardboard mat
Snores away that sound
As voices circle like tornados on the ground
There’s something waiting for us past the gasp
Let us breathe in

שיר ג 'רי

רק מי יודע רק את השבט
יודעים שבחוץ
רק מי שמחפש מילים לא את האמת
למצוא את האמת
רק מי שלא מאמין
האמונה יהיה
רק אלה ללא ידיעת או הבנה
יש חוכמה

הנבחרת לסבול
הם נבחרו כדי להרגיש
נבחר להיות שנוא
הם בחרו האהבה
נבחר להיות נפרדים
הם נבחרו לאחד
נבחר להיות כלוא דעתם
הם בחרו להיות חופשי

כולנו הנבחר
בגלל הסבל שלהם
כולנו הם בחינם
בגלל כבליהם
כולנו יודעים את האמת
כי הם לא יכלו
כולנו יודעים אלוהים
בגלל שהוא כל כך מוסתר היטב

Stevens Textplication 3: Tea

1915’s “Tea,” like its title short and resonant, was chosen by Stevens to end his first book Harmonium in both the 1923 edition and the 1931 reprint. In the latter case, he asked Alfred Knopf to place the 14 new poems he wanted to include at the end of the volume, but before “Tea.” This suggests that he felt it to be an appropriate coda that touched on all the concerns articulated in Harmonium: the relationship between reality and imagination, the nature of the divine, the primacy of the mind, the lure of the exotic, the sensibility of the esthete/dandy, and the embrace of free-verse experimentation influenced by painting revolutions such as imagism, expressionism and cubism. It’s all there, in fragmentary form, disguised behind a progression of rich images. Here is the poem:

When the elephant's-ear in the park
Shrivelled in frost,
And the leaves on the paths
Ran like rats,
Your lamp-light fell
On shining pillows,
Of sea-shades and sky-shades
Like umbrellas in Java.

This poem took on new life for me when I first saw elephant’s ears. This well-named leafy ground plant provides a strikingly exotic accompaniment to the flora of the Northeastern United States:

Elephant’s ears calls to mind the Baudelairean ideal of exotic beauty – that which is strange, wild, uncorrupted, luxuriant, languid, free and found in the pilfered cultures of the now-lost European empires (Java for example was exploited – and its population kept from starvation – by the Dutch conquerors primarily for the cultivation of tea). Stevens’ personal appreciation of the exotic perhaps was best expressed in the parcels he received from “his man” in Ceylon: packages of local art, food, fabrics and crafts to be delicately appreciated (Stevens in particular was a tea connoisseur). Such a fancy must run up against the reality of Northeastern U.S. winter at some point, the frost that makes the elephant's ears shrivel, even with the common seasonal image of blowing leaves strikingly visualized as rats scurrying, as if on the deck of a clipper ship on L’Invitation au Voyage, escaping like the poet to a finer world (more explicit nautical imagery referring to the island of Java and umbrellas reoccurs in "Sea Surface Full of Clouds," one of the 14 added poems for the 1931 edition of Harmonium).

The response of the mind to the turn in the seasons, the impinging of reality on fancy, is found in “your lamp-light,” which enlivens the pillows where one would presumably rest or sleep into a satisfying aesthetic experience. How odd that an unnamed addressee possesses this light. There are numerous potential explanations, running from tealights (addressing the tea as a votive) to an actual person (perhaps his wife, an embodiment of beauty bringing the finer things (back) to life). I prefer to see “your lamp-light” as an address to the reader of this volume, who has made it by this point all the way through, and who must carry the delicacy and lucidity forward. The reader is now “on his own” to recreate the poems in the separate world of his own imagination. The poet leaves a final image for that illuminating lamp, an afterimage of what appears to be a very exact and exquisite color: that of the sea and sky as represented in Java batik on an umbrella, something like this:

This is a meditative and expansive color, an appropriate tone with which to end the book. The triple meanings of the repeated word “shades” (hue/shadow/ghost) also play into the image, suggesting the way the actual pattern (whatever it is) may be impinged upon by the imaginative desire to place oneself in an unknown and special place, like a flickering light changes the appearance of a fabric. But the ending, the final note, can only be a metaphor: “like umbrellas in Java.” There is otherness and distance here, yes, but also the reality that, although few of us (least of all Stevens) have witnessed umbrellas in Java, we somehow, magically, through the wonderful powers of our empathy and imagination, know exactly what that looks and feels like.

Fascism

The Republicans sit on one side of the train, the Democrats on the other.
Actually, both sides are Republican, but they’re having heated debates
Whether liberals or Arabs took all our freedoms and whether
Communist China or Marxist Obama put our economy in the tank.
They take occasional breaks to read different papers.
There are Democratic ones and Republican ones.
Actually they are all Republican papers, full of stories
That cheer our “top-secret war” on Yemen,
That compare the head of JP Morgan to Samuel Adams (not the beer)
For complaining to (his employee) Ben Bernanke
About too much regulation of banks.* The train arrives,
The commuters go on to their different jobs, where they’re free
To speak their minds and surf Fox News, CNN, New York Times, CNBC
While their Facebook accounts are monitored for subversion,
Personal email accounts and message boards blocked,
“Controversial” websites reported to security
And training is given on how seemingly innocuous verbal comments
Can be grounds for immediate termination.
These rules don’t concern anyone, for they still can order shoes,
View porn, watch videos illegally downloaded.
One day there’s a protest in the street – a candlelight vigil, really,
For the tens of thousands who die each year
From using drugs as prescribed. The workers,
So fragmented in interests and views, unite from their petty disputes
To condemn these unknown, ragamuffin protesters:
“They’re paid to do this – a rent-a-mob…”
“They’re resentful of other people’s success…”
“They oughta move to North Korea…”
They cannot know that these protesters are in a database
That will keep them from the jobs these workers enjoy.
They cannot know what will happen, after the tasering and arrests,
How they disappear as if their dissent did not exist at all.

* As a side note, I’m not sure what JP Morgan Head Jamie Dimon’s beef is with the government – his bank received more money from the government to purchase one bank (WAMU, in the form of $900 billion in bad debt taken over by the government and wiped off the books) than the Federal government paid out total in 2008 in Social Security AND Medicare for every recipient in the United States—and the WAMU gift is just the tip of an inconceivably large iceberg.

New York Audience

For Stephanie, Taylor, Tom and the gang at Abrons

They waited like cougars for the doors
to open, the hungry few
who had to hear
this music

They had to lean in rocking
as she blew her trumpet through
a traypan full of water bell immersed
the birthing of a sound no one had heard before
the only sound that’s worth more than the hum of awful silence

The way her hands reversed
the beats, subverted all arpeggios
stilled the old bald man whose mind’s relentless voltage
sent foot-notes from the past of jazz with every note whoever played it
to shadow what was said and how that plagued him
her notes made him as a child

Their eyes were wide, mouths ajar
as she blew with lips at a distance from the brass
the whirr of the gentlest insect
part of the earth until ears learn how
to dig it out with equally gentle rapture of touch

The girls just sat there amazed
like their lives were changed and there was something they must do
when she blew on her flugelhorn like a flute
without a mouthpiece net, a plangent fife
to wrestle with the wind inside of trees

And I too felt my heart explode
tears came as if I hadn't known
how something had been long denied 'til it was given
when she pulled out a trumpet fully swaddled up in tin foil
and played the purest tones
like a dog I had to groan

At the Airport

The ramp agent shoots some hoops
At the desolate side of the terminal
By the gate they never use
That shows flights from other doors along the pier.
The locales change like postcards that no one will see:
Puerto Rico, Montreal, Fort Lauderdale…
A custodian walks the long white corridor
To collect the minimal trash and recyclables
Left in this satellite receptacle. He looks out the window
At the strings of empty cargo trunks
As if it’s a scene from nature. His jaw drops slightly.
A gestalt of cities flows out of tubes
Connected to giant white birds
But the bridge here is folded like an accordion
With a sheet on its end like a dressing.
At the podium, a microphone tilts down,
There’s a photo of Paris - La Tour Eiffel,
Lights are dimmed like a Friday night living room
As destinations beckon in the echo
And shoes click to get somewhere else
Far from here, where travelers sleep every Christmas
And puddle jumpers go for some rest between red eyes,
And now, alone in a chair, bags hugged to a slouching body,
There’s somebody dreaming, of things that nobody else
Believes exist, chasing the unseen flight that isn’t there
Until it comes.

Salvation Hill

Blue pine, red clay, green fescue fields
With clover stalks and seeds of hay,
Rock-lined rivers, jagged farms,
Deep forests never far away.

They look at people here with shock
As though they’d never seen this breed,
Read Bibles through their daily lives
The only news they’ll ever need.

With God above them blue as witness
They practice patience, model kindness;
They never honk or raise their voices
And always leave their homes in right good dress

Though curls will wilt and makeup puddles
And mist possesses all the trees,
The image of the Face remains
To make them better than they can be

As they scrape away at deep, imbedded sin,
Release it to the mercy of Christ’s blessings
As kids are released from preachers’ eyes
On jungle gyms in clearings.

This land that knows no other knows
It's but a spit inside infinity
That glows like gazes on the glass
At all the humble offerings on display.

In a Blink

Durham, NC

From your own words to code
Dr. Brain to Grand Theft Auto
Days in your room now a world
whirls around you
But love love love
has never changed

Congratulations Veronica on your Graduation from NCSSM!

Stevens Textplication 2: Blanche McCarthy

The wonder of "Blanche McCarthy," an altered villanelle from 1915, is the way it seems to arrive fully formed, as from the head of Zeus, to announce Stevens' unique poetic program. It's a mature and perfectly representative poem after 15 years of (on and off) struggle with fragments, awkward traditional forms and prose that galloped away like a horse. The detail is precise, the tone elegant and the implications vast, befitting the first selection in The Palm at the End of the Mind. Why this was never collected in his lifetime is a mystery, perhaps it has something to do with a very alive Blanche McCarthy (is this the same person they named the Blanche McCarthy Senior Center in Winsted, Connecticut after?) Here is the poem:

Look in the terrible mirror of the sky
And not in this dead glass, which can reflect
Only the surfaces - the bending arm,
The leaning shoulder and the searching eye.

Look in the terrible mirror of the sky.
Oh, bend against the invisible; and lean
To symbols of descending night; and search
The glare of revelations going by!

Look in the terrible mirror fo the sky.
See how the absent moon waits in the glade
Of your dark self, and how the wings of stars,
Upward, from unimagined coverts, fly.

The first line seems so familiar, yet so strange. The thought of the sky as a mirror just crystallizes the romantic dilemma; since all things are alive within a larger life, they express their connection with a higher consciousness, how could someone be satisfied with mere surface? The only place to look is in the "invisible" and "terrible," the great unknown. Any respectable post-Romantic (or more particularly, post-Shelleyan) poet must look beyond the portraiture in "dead glass" carefully described in the first stanza.

Once the mystic gaze is seized, one must look to "symbols of descending night," which I take to be stars, which provide as they have since antiquity "the glare of revelations." Stars provided the foundation for the coming of the Christ as fish (avatar in the age of Pisces), for the apocalypse (and its interpreters from Nostradamus) in the Book of Revelation, for the architecture of the pyramids, the navigation of the seas.

But there is something missing in a night full of stars: "the absent moon" that Stevens often uses as synecdoche for the uniquely human - the "self" of dreams, desires and imagination. The speaker urges us to see what is dark, what can't be seen but may be felt. Seeing in this sense would be an imaginative act, a re-creation of what one felt or dreamed it to be. It "waits in the glade of your dark self" to be given life.

The speaker also asks that we see another thing that can't be seen: the upward trajectory of stars, imagined as bird wings flying. This could compensate for what the stars by themselves can never provide, dynamic motion, a purpose, a rising, an earthly meaning. To make that more accessible, the stars must be like game birds flying from "coverts" (thickets). These hiding places are "unimagined" while the rest of the speaker's prescriptions rely on the imagination.

It appears there are limits to what the imagination can do. The arc of stars can be conjured as a familiar aspect of life, the rising and setting of Earth's rhythm, but their source, their nest, can't be conceived. We must work without this compass, using the tools of our minds and the physical world to create our heaven.

On this note Stevens' proper poetic journey begins.

Invitations from the Critical Voice

In Summer darkness funeral black commuters    pretend that I'm OK
have lost their souls like car keys     pretend that they're my friend
squint at lights they cannot see      everyone pretends that I’m fine
lights they don’t believe are really there     when they’re worried
but follow anyway      deeply worried for they think I’m defective
and there’s one man of course one man talking     they laugh at me
who says those things      they resent me they hate the fact I exist
those ignorant horrible things     they would kill me and that’s OK
such poisonous thoughts      it may be too late I’ve waited too long
he must be stopped from speaking    to get myself fixed I have no
he shouldn't be allowed to read the newspaper    I have no voice
I know his type    leave me the fuck alone I don’t want to have to
look at all of them listening in    say no no no and feel ashamed
I know their type    I want to kill you in my mind let me be invisible
they like Chinese food but they don’t like to sweat    leave me
they don’t do home improvement but do paper bag tests    don’t
they fetishize the margins as they prostitute to power     leave me
the type who wants to force the metric system on us     alone
or to worship the fairytale free market     I need a slap to feel alive
or think the HAARP waves won’t affect their guns     leave me alone
look at the woman scoffing and blaming, scoffing and blaming    to die
every day another opportunity to scoff and blame    I won’t take much
why can’t we get along we all are one why can’t you just chill?    space
why can’t that boy     why do they waste time on someone who can’t
who looks like I did at that age     offer a return on their investment?
cut his hair and wipe that sophomore grin?    how can they be so kind
can’t he keep his head away from that girl?      to someone who is dying?
will this train EVER leave it’s the 3rd day this week?     I’m terrified
I can’t afford to be late    maybe they will find out I’m a fraud? take
I must get to work now     how much was I born owing? take take
to pony up another idea     how exactly do I pay them back? take
that maybe just might work this time     I can’t live inside the woods
Jesus Christ what’s taking this train so long?    something evil in me
what’s that kid selling? is his grifting people’s money?    maybe he will say
in passing while popping gum    the things I’m afraid to say to myself
so disgusting his dumb luck his undeserved abundance    I’m a waste
I’m not going to town for fun    I don’t want to ever leave my house
I’m not doing this for my health    to make me penniless that much faster
it’s not like I get what I want EVER     my almost nothing is too much
does anyone here have a clue?     no one ever has to see me breathing
does this line end? am I here all alone?     I don’t deserve abundance
is there a punchline to this joke?   I want to burrow like a worm in dirt

Words Seen from the Train, Freed

Sound Shore          ticket machine         Cos Cob
Omar *
Greenwich Lock & Door
Bom Bay *
Rye Grill          Ficciones
Mamoroneck
Pumps & Controls
United Tile Group          Tufo's Wholesale Food
Pelham      Pace      LIFESAVERS
Seky *
Foodtown          Chicken Hut
logistics      forming      linen
extruders          custom molding
Riverroad Motor Inn
Trap          Trap          Trap *
Inner City Recycling
Williams Bridge
Pentecostal          Cookie's
Ace Bottle        Spring Scaffolding
Tint on Park      Tulnoy Lumber      Mugler Shoring
Fizz *
Cardinal Hayes High School          Burro
Cat        Mo        Vandals
Loc-B          Jar *
The Padded Wagon
Do Not Anchor or Dredge
Rozier Temple          La Esperanza
Choir Academy of Harlem
Foot Center of New York
search art schools
Ivoire
take control

* graffiti tag

Soundscape

The closer you get
the more obscure the boundary seems to be;
for example, this tree,
are its fingers playing the harp
or is it the harp being played?

After a Storm

The sun enters
raindrops like Christmas lights
on the pine tree

War Cry

“How can a generation fired by the urgency of injustice learn anew to bow its head in commemorial woe?” – D.G. Myers

A happy dream of being told to wait after re-education class to have my head chopped off, the cool liquid swabbed around my neck, my terse goodbyes apologizing to the king, then the holy joy of release … But no, thunder drums and car alarms as the sky is weeping, which will make it tough for the marching bands with cheap uniforms from Vietnam, reasonably priced instruments from Korea, special technique books from Japan. The Boy Scouts will be out in force to remind everyone that black people are genetically inferior and boys are often raped before they can be men. Flowers and balloons are there for all the dead refrigerators and automobiles buried on the edge of town by the Indian battleground, the things we fight for, with a little left over for Mr. McCready, whose mind was shot to hell years ago, and he walks every day around the town begging, but once a year he puts on a moth-eaten suit and salutes the children who share ice cream cones with him. There’s love for the Ladies’ Auxiliaries too, on the stern offensive as usual to make sure the men wear polished brass and bleached white gloves. They will trundle to the gravesites, when what the men lost is far away, to watch taps blow before the Spanish-American War Memorial. Preachers, politicians and reporters will be on hand with words of honor for the sacrifice of a distant apprenticeship, which in this place is with a gun and often involves killing people in their homes or obliterating villages by pushing a switch. No sacrifice in suffering that is ever of course allowed, only the fallen comrades who can't talk, the few the primitive enemy guns picked off before they all were slaughtered. They’ll be here too, the few who are left, the ones they say were on our side, now running dry cleaners and fast food restaurants with the same relentless efficiency with which they once defended their homeland; they will bring flowers too, for they’re Americans now, they’ll have barbeques with coleslaw and German potato salad with the rest of us. But the rain keeps coming down, and the crowd waits under canopies, talking of flags mistreated and graves not tended, not the death sentence most current soldiers have for using depleted uranium, or the horrific brain injuries now that are far worse than death, or even the current war, about to expand to five separate fronts for no apparent reason. It’s all about the ginormous pies, the sickening amount of meat, the stylish clothes made for pennies a day, the gadgets that are tracked by military technology and, above all, the hope of later fireworks, if the rain lets up, for the kids to feel the boom, of America’s domination, its ruthless scythes of ruin. The older veterans will excuse themselves, for the explosions are a little too much like flack, and reminds them of their younger days – before a million A-bombs hung over the world like a drunken soldier holding a gun to a little girls head.

The Purple Mourning Dove

Inspired by the introduction to Poems for the Millennium, Volume Two by Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris

Stifling freedom
“the dead … in the way” (C. Olson)
the one thing learning
obscures
the darkness
outside
seen through the veil
of darkness within
a civilization
of shame
hidden in dirt
underworld
vast with power grids
fueled by fear and separation
death
much exaggerated
“all darkness is golden” (P. Pate)
brings insight
makes birdsong
tell secrets
what we know of the light
how it makes us feel

The purple mourning dove
deepens the darkness with her song
what is gold, gold, gold
and all of it brass

of Capital that makes things glow
of War that brings beauty of spoils
of Politics that lets the speechless find their speech
of Words that know when to shut the fuck up

all of it gold
when voiced
when lives are risked diving to dig for it
glowing
voiceless
while shadow people moan
it’s not to speak for them
for they will never hear
it’s not to speak for anyone
its strength is the invisible
what is
and cannot be said
in word
golden

A value at odds
with values clamant for approval
we were born dead, you know
the groove is just gravy
tyrannies are tyrannies
because we believe them
what islands
what untrammeled jungles
must we find
to escape the tyrant
in our mind?

We can oppose without opposing
detach without detaching
alchemize words
by letting them speak for themselves
find the perpetual
in decay
speak, finally, for life
pretending we never have met

Stevens Textplication 1: Portrait of Ursula

This is the first in what I hope to be a series of explications of Wallace Stevens’ shorter poems, all taken from the collection The Palm at the End of the Mind. "Cy Est Pourtraicte, Madame Ste Ursule, et Les Unze Mille Vierges," written in 1915, is the second poem in that book, and the first poem he wrote to be included in his first collection, Harmonium. Here is the text:

Ursula, in a garden, found
A bed of radishes.
She kneeled upon the ground
And gathered them,
With flowers around,
Blue, gold, pink, and green.

She dressed in red and gold brocade
And in the grass an offering made
of radishes and flowers.

She said, "My dear,
Upon your altars,
I have placed
The marguerite and coquelicot,
And roses
Frail as April snow;
But here," she said,
"Where none can see,
I make an offering, in the grass,
Of radishes and flowers."
And then she wept
For fear the Lord would not accept.

The good Lord in His garden sought
New leaf and shadowy tinct,
And they were all His thought.
He heard her low accord,
Half prayer and half ditty,
And He felt a subtle quiver,
That was not heavenly love,
Or pity.

This is not writ
In any book.

The title, roughly translated from archaic French as “A portrait of Madame Saint Ursula and the 11,000 virgins,” is ostensibly a reference to the martyred Saint Ursula, a probably apocryphal 11-year old Romano-British princess who was murdered in Cologne by the Huns sometime in the second century on her way at the Pope’s behest to Rome. The 11,000 virgins refers to a monk’s suspicious transcription error than turned the 11 virgins traveling with her who were also murdered into a preposterously large number. The legend of her sainthood has been the subject of much portraiture, but her being married is a new development in the legend apparently originating with this poem. More likely the title is, as so often with Stevens, the stopping off point, the occasion that inspired it, in this case a painting or reference to Saint Ursula in one of the fancy gilded French books Stevens liked to read that may have reminded him of the pious woman in his own backyard. It’s impossible to know, but it’s a cool title, and strangely fits, suggesting how impossible fictions are often recorded as fact in art.

The poem itself has been variously interpreted as erotic, whimsical, sacrilegious and perversely obscure. Most of these interpretations center on God’s mysterious “subtle quiver” in reaction to Ursula’s seemingly commonplace offering. Since God is not responding as he usually does, with “heavenly love” or “pity,” he must be lusting after poor Ursula. Which just goes to show how most critics minds are in the sewers. There is literally nothing in the poem to suggest such an interpretation (save the excessive number of virgins in the title), and such a view would nullify the final line, given the sordid and well-documented history of male dieties lusting after maidens.

What’s more interesting is the straightforward treatment of Christian myth, a true rarity in Stevens, a case where a woman piously prays to God and upper-cased God in the skies responds in more or less the expected way. The first four stanzas are a rhymed but irregularly metered account of a woman discovering radishes growing while gardening, and instinctively combining them with flowers identified only by color (characteristically for Stevens during his Fauve period) as a secret offering to God, in marked contrast to her earlier public offering of the ceremoniously named “marguerite and coquelicot” on an altar. It is this private nature – and apparent humbleness of the gift – that prompts Ursula to weep “for fear that God would not accept.” The unrecorded nature of her act of faith, however, is precisely what makes her gesture so powerful. The key to this in my view lies in the contradictory lines “The good Lord in His garden sought / New leaf and shadowy tinct, / And they were all His thought.” Why would God seek something he already had? The solution lies in the essential Hindu notion that life exists because God wants to discover/rediscover Himself by separating into form. The "new leaf and shadowy tinct" would be the discovery of an aspect of Himself, light and dark, within His thought (which created and is the entire universe). God, in this cosmology, celebrates this re-discovery of things coming back home in his perception with "heavenly love" and compassionate understanding ("pity").

Ursula's act of faith throws a proverbial monkey wrench into this, by creating something unexpected, a wholly new thing, an element that was not originally part of God. Her intention, or more precisely the music Ursula made (“half prayer, half ditty”) while exercising it, created a new, human-formed reality that does not prompt the usual love and pity of the all-watching God, it changes Him, adds something different to the mix, a “subtle quiver.”

“This is not writ / in any book” because the power of Ursula's gesture comes from its private nature; it is a secret from everyone but God (and us lucky readers reading it in Stevens' book). I think Stevens here is reflecting, as he would many times subsequently, on the individual's relationship with the divine, the human ability to create something sacred where it did not exist before. It's a simple poem of faith, in the end, with a poignancy that belies Stevens' cold modern reputation.

Circular Breathing

When I see red
all the red in the universe
connects

When I say red
an independent hue
is born

Gemini Wind

Let’s say we are related
My world connects to yours -
A room to be shared.

Imagine there’s no meaning
In words save what we put there –
Let’s misunderstand.

Pretend we have a contract.
I will tell you what to do
And you won’t listen.


Let’s say that we are brothers
To be free to disagree -
To not surrender.

Imagine that it matters
That we lie and call it truth -
Feel wounded, abused.

Pretend we’re not understood,
That everything comes out wrong -
Mere nods are divine.


Let’s think of ourselves as twins
If it hurts to be the same -
No one will see it.

Imagine that we came from
Different mothers, different times –
I’ll see from your eyes.

Pretend our secret language
Is unknown to you and I -
Would we be less close?


Let’s say that we are lovers
Relying on chemicals
For us to feel one.

Imagine I can hear you
In the natterings of sleep -
That your dream has words.

Pretend that in a crowded
Room we still have endless space -
I can know you then.

A Poor Man's Poetics

There are few things I like more than reading my blogroll, and few things I hate more than philosophizing about poetry. So, resourceful ant I am, I've engineered a combination, and hereby present two recently posted thoughts on the nature of poetry from, respectively, First Known When Lost (Stephen Pentz) & Poems and Poetics (Jerome Rothenberg):

"Here, I think, in 'Love lies beyond the tomb,' [John Clare] in this unprejudiced singing voice that knows not what it sings, is some reason for us to believe that poets are not merely writing figuratively when they say, 'My love is like a red, red rose,' that they are to be taken more literally than they commonly are, that they do not invent or 'make things up' as grown people do when they condescend to a child's game. What they say is not chosen to represent what they feel or think, but is itself the very substance of what had before lain dark and unapparent, is itself all that survives of feeling and thought, and cannot be expanded or reduced without dulling or falsification... If this is so, then we are on the way to understand why poetry is mighty; for if what poets say is true and not feigning, then of how little account are our ordinary assumptions, our feigned interests, our playful and our serious pastimes spread out between birth and death."

- Edward Thomas, Feminine Influence on the Poets (1910), page 86.

The key that no one has lost
Poetry serves no purpose, I am told
and trees caress one another in the forest
with blue roots and twigs ruffling to the wind,
greeting with birds the Southern Cross
Poetry is the deep murmur of the murdered
the rumor of leaves in the fall, the sorrow
for the boy who preserves the tongue
but has lost the soul
Poetry, poetry, is a gesture, a landscape,
your eyes and my eyes, girl; ears, heart,
the same music. And I say no more, because
no one will find the key that no one has lost
And poetry is the chant of my ancestors
a winter day that burns and withers
this melancholy so personal.

- Elicura Chihuailaf, Mapudungun poet (trans. Rodrigo Rojas)

Light Without Sight

The dream is murky this morning,
fog where even dogs flash
like images in the mind -
we're breaking heaven in now
to these bodies -
rocks plashing through the blood
not past the eye.

Happy Birthday, Robert Zimmerman

70 years forever young in the Age of Dylan...

"You close your eyes and pout your lips and slip your fingers from your glove.
You can have the best there is, but it's gonna cost you all your love.
You won't get it from money." - from Idiot Wind, New York version

"You'll never know the hurt I suffered not the pain I raise above
And I'll never know the same about you your holiness or your kind of
love
And it makes me feel so sorry." - from Idiot Wind, Minneapolis version

One More For the Notebook

As every Russian story
near the beginning or end
says "[____] realized after 30 years
he did not know his wife at all,"
so it is easy
to watch the girl with fluttering lashes
and realize I know
everything about her,
from the manner in which her hands
unveil her hair,
to the reservoir reflections in her eyes
of the things she thinks
but does not say
with her mouth pulled back, listening.
Soon, a dialogue goes on
quite independent of her complaints
about classes, the weather, her mom,
one about the gifts of herself
she's afraid to offer—
what I've already received—
about what she's
holding back,
the understanding of me
I must learn for myself.
She's too discreet to say.

Three Connecticut Spring Scenes

I. Springdale
274 mushrooms
in the back yard,
exploding swirls
on eight-inch caps
like strudel, like stilled
whirlpools.

Each one is born fully formed
popping up like bubbles,
such is the desire
of the unique
to show who they are.

II. Kent Falls
What came first, the steps
or the waterfall?
The stone in ledges
like knotted pine
or the white fangs
of an obsession
through the tiger eye
bursting like smooth glass?

Why did it decide
with wilderness ubiquitous
to write its poem down here?

III. Bull's Bridge
The Housatonic River
is older than these graves,
older than the grist mills
and iron foundries,
the broken bridges
and rusted turbines
in cracking dams -

all worthy opponents
all fallen to the moss
and still the river seethes
its dragon scales, its vapor trails,
its lion manes and thunder train,
its mighty plashing
asking us
for something.

An Unnecessary Sermon

"Þau horfðu á mig þögul
og hurfu mér sýn
inn í nóttina myrkrið og nóttina."
- Snorri Hjartarson

Now that the world has ended
we finally can speak frankly,
as all the things you've held inside
were outside anyway,
larger than you ever knew
like everything you never saw,
for everything you saw was there
because it needs your eye
not because it was all
there was to see.

You never were alive
in the way you thought you were
but in the way that rocks and knowledge are,
and after all this gasp of time
you thought you were alone
you were sharing your brain all along
(the thickness of a cranium was no test for a friend),
it was just like the playgrounds of your childhood,
they never really ended, it never really mattered
that the sand was not the earth
and your shovel not the hand of mighty God.

It's time to go back home now
for a juice box and a nap,
how many things you knew that you could do, if not for hands.
You thought that there was never time enough
but there was only time
to take of distant vistas what you could,
to get as close as eyes and hands and voices would allow,
pretending it was real with all your soul
as if it was itself and not your
breath that made it actual.

Your mourning days are over.
This light would seem too vivid,
its strokes too magnified
when you were piecing out
the parts of you disguised
in people who needed your help
or who wanted you to die
or begged for the forgiveness
you never gave -
how small that all seemed then, but now how large,
larger than the sunlight that you worshiped,
to travel cross such infinite extents
to find: yourself, unborn;

in the universe past time
this feeling is what's new
what the hand of God on something small would feel like,
what it means to see it all in one detail,
how love is just a vehicle, on the other
side of light there is the eye
beyond the mind, beyond kind
we always knew, despite how far,
would still be there.

Descending Sign

The scarlet apocalypse of lipstick azalea
Scars the gray-green graveyard, the only color
            This lint-covered spring.
After awhile I start to take it personally
These days without sun,
           The waiting for the paint on the visible to dry
To unveil again the elves, gnomes and fairies
And a channeled wiccan wind to blow
            Like a chanteuse seduction

            Instead of these
Woodpeckers clanging the eaves
           Or the vengeful God of Science
With a logic born from chaos
Who blows imagined lives out of his breath
And assures us we can believe in anything
Whatever helps to cultivate the chemical of joy
           But, at the end of the day, his equation resolves
To the null set of total annihilation.

                                  The Gods here died too long ago,
They were no longer expedient,
           They no longer had the power to shock.
These people on the Hudson, these people of the mind
Admire the granite walls and mourn their rising
Convinced that they are made of something actual
            Not just their thought.

                               Human nature, infecting
All they touch, replaces an abundant world
           By saying nothing is beyond it.
                              So here they stay
Within the fog, noting weakness and calling it wit,
           Displaying knowledge like an aperitif
Best served to just oneself.

                                    A splash of sun
And the graffiti comes back to life.
The chatter all around, that makes of people
Confessor priests, goes on
          Because there never is a truth that stays,
The whole leaks through in every chiding
Of the neighbors, schools, assembly halls,
         Enough to fill the sumac leaves
With something more than grief.

Friday Afternoon on Park Avenue

The tell-tale liars emerge
when all the salesman
has left to hawk is
the relentless logic of his close

And the City
falls away from stone
onto sweetly
blinking steam

The last grounds of autonomy
go through the press
and one is held to the mediocrity
of one's half-assed, half-cocked status

Identity shifts like debt from one
credit to another,
warm as cigarette smoke
and just as fungible

But one can still play
dress up, wear musty
conductor's hats and debutante fur
from heirloom status attics

And speak of fabled lives
that glow beyond the rest
the smarter, harder-charging ones
whose names go on the gifts

In the constant interchange
between the accomplished and alive
between the ones blessed to be living
and the one's who've stolen a piece of God's mind

Fractured Self-Portrait

I.
I am the businessman everyone wants to read their poems to -
I write mine in my sleep
and they are everyone else's.

II.
I am the most famous poet in the world
but nobody knows who I am -
they're forever almost reciting my words
and almost making them turn to hollow sound.

III.
I am the shadow of the book,
the thought excluded from the literature -
the living cannot know a thing of death,
they must be free to flail about themselves.

Notes from El Yucatan

He was more like John-Paul Belmondo than John-Paul Belmondo, that 12-year old boy Roberto, who danced better than Baryshnikov but worshipped Michael Jackson. He could solve a Rubik’s Cube in 30 seconds, but couldn’t explain why they always served limes and called them lemons, or why he never went down even on the hottest days through the Parthenon-like eye-hole to the moss-topped oasis 100’s of feet down called the cinote. He never explained anything in fact, for it would still the flow, confuse the mind with thinking. He kept four women moving, including his mother and autistic sister who knew everything, and despised most every man, except of course the Shaman who turned into a jaguar eyes-first. They lived in a village like a National Geographic diorama, a few huts inside a cornfield by some sacred ancient crossroads the Nazis and the CIA had sent teams to investigate because it was an opening to Agartha. They had taken off the day from school as they habitually do, because the teachers get so cruel on torrid days when you pretended you weren’t smarter than they were, to picnic at a partially excavated pyramid deep in the jungle. They put mango and pineapple at its pinnacle for the aluxes. When they returned a half-hour later (though time is different there) the fruit was partially eaten, and beside it was a long crystal finger with an amethyst point. Marina reached for it, but Roberto said “no, you can’t take that.” They climbed back down to dance to Justin Beiber with other naiads, devas, nixies, talking birds and trees, the iguanas with watermelon lips watching. Next day, Marina was taken to the hospital, she woke up with an infection on her toe. The mere thought, her mother said, of having the crystal had poisoned her. That’s how pure it is there, in scorned Yucatan, where everything is equal and on speaking terms, for that jungle has no water, it falls through limestone sieves back to sea level.

Ordinary Woman

She listens to the tulips in their bells
While multi-tasking fresh emergencies
She coaxes secret truths they'd never tell
From buddhas in disguise as honey bees
There's always time for beauty
Although she's always harried
She always gives so others can be free

She's an ordinary woman
No one stops to see
No special love songs for her joie de vivre
But the earth can't dance without her
The birds refuse to sing
'Til she extends her soul another spring

Her world is just abundance to be shared
And all its pain just moments to console
For no one dies without someone who cared
There never is a life too small or low
It's the ones they don't remember
She always has a tear for
She leads the checkered orphans to the shore

Oh, a new wind has come
Now we must act as one
Maybe we all will know
The current she always follows

She's an ordinary woman
No one stops to see
No special love songs for her memory
But the earth can't spin without her
The bells can only ring
'Til she extends her soul another spring

Coda for a Ghost

Obama     no-bomb-ed     Osama
for photo        no photo
no body         at sea
like Mafia?        it’s Muslim
not Muslim        no problem
we’ve matched up the DNA
no DNA        facial recognition technology
what photo?        these photos
all phony        national security
the Pakis killed him        no Pakistan involvement (officially)
(they just have all witnesses in custody)
why kill him?        he fired first
he was unarmed         using his wife as a shield
wife was killed         only injured
the woman was not his wife        just some crossfire
but Khalid his son was killed        no, his son Hamza
the neighbor who walked by the house every day
said there was no Osama there        you needed an ID
to walk down the street        it was right next to the Military Academy!
inside his house        oval windows
outside his house        they’re all square
his hard drive was full of intelligence
no internet        no cell phone        no dialysis machine
our leaders watched it live on TV    no video, no audio, “fog of war”
“heavily armoured hounds with infared cameras”
assisted the Navy SEALS        but no one knows why the helicopter fell
        and don’t get me started on the towers...

And all of this to celebrate a death
above the other millions that we’ve killed.
It’s time to toast the victory, however temporary, however phony
we paid for with our children and our freedom,
to know what the loss of our money and dignity was for.
It’s the very thinness of the tissues of the lie
that makes us believe it all more strongly.

Relativism 101

"Does the heart have words?" the poet asked...
The men laughed "of course it does not,"
the women motioned but could not make a sound
and the children replied "when a word is smiling,
you know it has come from the heart."

"Does the earth feel pain?" the farmer asked...
The men said it was impossible scientifically,
the women said they feel the pain themselves
and the children asked the earth and reported
"someday you will learn."

"Are people good?" the pilgrim asked...
The men said "some are, some aren't,"
the women said "everyone is good
but everyone needs a little help"
and the children said that "fudge is good
and spiders when they're squashed, but people?"
They'd never had that, maybe it's something they should try.

At the New York Stock Exchange

The epicenter of capitalism (they say)
is as hollow as the Fabergé egg
Czar Nicholas bequeathed (in the boardroom)
before the Rothschild bankers finally offed him.
That egg, an old clock and a Venus by Warhol
are all that remain here of the traditional;
it's all media and machines now on the floor,
an automated photo-op casino show
for those who think the murders in their name
will one day pay off.

You can see yourself on flatscreen TV,
watch the corporate banners for the opening bell
be unfurled and folded like a military funeral,
joke about the royal wedding with security guards
as lonely as a witness at a courthouse one.
This is the "real world" greater than our own,
but it's just a TV studio, the balcony that seems so
immense is just so tiny.

Upstairs, in the offices, where the bosses used to sit
and send down pink slips while they tugged on their cigars,
are the Picasso's and Pollock's, the art without faces
they want us to think of as the great.
But somewhere, some 20-something retiree,
an Aldrich or such, with more money than his legacee's can ever spend,
holds in his private collection
the real stuff, Kirchner, say, or Beckmann from the war,
to look at with the horror that only his kind know,
the culpability not to be too widely shared,
even in the galleries of the bourse.

Three Poems by C.P. Cavafy

Poet Constantine P. Cavafy, born on this day 148 years ago, seemed born to torment translators. First there's the matter of his idiom — the crazy veering he did as a Greek in Alexandria between dialect and formal speech, modernity and antiquity, and that special eccentric diction that on occasion led him to coin his own words. But that is just a palimpsest of surface, possible with modern technology to peer through. The conundrum is his nuance, so precise that the normal mode of translators — equalizing semantic resonances on a pair of language scales — always seems to throw everything off. Even one stolen word to fill the vast linguistic chasm changes an entire poem, yet poetic translation is nothing without such stolen words. Cavafy, who also lived and studied in England, must be very pleased to see the frustration caused to us dim-witted Anglos when we try to enter his strange and wistful paradise — one invisible to all but the most refined sensibilities.

So, here are three poems that are not quite epic failures as translations. For more sophisticated mis-translations, one can view Cavafy's entire canon online, which also includes the Greek originals in written and spoken form. Oh, and I also posted my translation of a more famous Cavafy poem, The City, here two years ago. Happy birthday, C.P., you historian of the senses.

Chandelier

In a room small and empty, four walls only,
all green and covered in cloths,
a chandelier shines brightly with fire
and in each of its flames is the smolder
of lust’s sickness, the force of desire.

In that slightest of rooms the light multiplies,
the chandelier trembles with heat.
No ordinary light gets away from here,
it’s not made for timorous bodies
this fever of pleasure.

A December in 1903

And if I cannot tell about my love—
if I don't speak for hair, for lips, for eyes;
your face I hold it still inside my soul,
I hold the sound of your voice in my brain,
September days, erupting in my dreams,
chisel and paint my phrases and words
in every subject I touch, each idea I say.

Cleo's Illness

This Cleo, a nice
kid, three and 20 years old—
aristocratically bred, with a rare knowledge of Greek—
has fallen ill. He caught the fever
going around Alexandria this year.

The fever found him morally exhausted already
heartsick at his partner, a young actor,
who loved him and wanted him no longer.

He's seriously ill, his parents are worried.

The maid who raised him
is also afraid for Cleo's life.
In her fretful condition
she thinks of an idol
she loved when she was little, before she worked as a maid
at this prominent Christian home and became herself a Christian.
She secretly offers some cake, wine and honey
to the idol, and chants whatever supplications
she can remember — scraps, melodies. The silly
doesn't know if the little black demon Meles, father of Homer,
can cure a Christian or not.