Category Archives: Topical Verse

Topical Verse: Doing Justice

Posted on by under Authors, Pooms/Poetry, Topical Verse

One of the ironic benefits of a lengthy education in a language’s literature (English in this blog’s two editorial cases) and its attendant scholarship is that you become skeptical of narratives and theories that purport to comprehensively explain any of that literature’s constituent parts, let alone the whole thing. Your bullshit radar gets good at spotting what Kingsley Amis calls “Victorian system building.”

If you ever took an English-lit survey in college, you probably encountered the magisterial Norton anthologies. I don’t use that adjective ironically: those books really are the best undergraduate-level anthologies ever assembled. You can carry a decent chunk of civilization’s accomplishments under your arm. Sorry, Longman, Heath, and other anthologies, but it’s true. (Although the Heath texts did help demonstrate what the supposedly conservative Norton has long since embraced, which is the idea that texts by “minority” writers are often not minor).

Problem is, an anthology has to simplify things a lot, because it is hard to cover all the ins and outs of English in a single volume. For example, according to your author’s much-thumbed and -beloved household Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, American poetry has two founding magicians, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. This is true, to an extent. Nobody in America had written anything that sounded remotely like Leaves of Grass before New York’s original bohemian perv showed up, and there is still nothing like Dickinson’s extraterrestrial hymns.

But things get more complicated from there. Despite the attempts of some critics to map Whitman onto William Carlos Williams (the vernacular, Jacksonian, quotidian voice); or to draw a line from Dickinson to Wallace Stevens (the aristocratic, post-symbolist, bizarro-metaphysical lyric tone); or to demonstrate that Dickinson is to Elizabeth Bishop as Whitman is to Allen Ginsberg, what Philip Larkin says about painters is true. (Grad students planning to write a dissertation which systematizes everything so brilliantly that a school hurls a tenure-track job at you, take note, then quit grad school immediately.) For Larkin, “each painter represents an exhaustion of a particular way of seeing things.” If visual art constitutes “heightened seeing,” he contends in this 1947 letter, then “Poetry = heightened talking.”

This doesn’t mean that the Romantic myth of the genius who has nothing to learn from anyone is true. Only creeps like Percy Shelley and Kanye West believe that. Rather, great artists are singularities, but within patterns, within contexts, within historical communities. They are both radical and traditionalist. Their language of experience is an intensified mutation of some other rather large group’s or groups’ language of experience.

Here I come to one of my favorite poets, Donald Justice. Homie often gets pegged as one of Stevens’s heirs, because his poems frequently read like dream-logic parodies of symbolist puzzles, but his work is also plainspoken. His voice might remind you of Raymond Carver, the Spoon River Anthology, and Whitman. Justice’s best poetry is situationally intelligible: in other words, you can generally tell what the basic set-up is (“OK, guy is looking at some flowers and remembering childhood”), which makes it easier to enjoy yourself. Much love to T.S. Eliot, but it doesn’t always have to be difficult. His heightened talking still sounds like regular talking. His poems could be scenes from novels.

Anyway, here is “The Telephone Number of the Muse” (1973):

Sleepily, the muse to me: “Let us be friends.
Good friends, but only friends. You understand.”
And yawned. And kissed, for the last time, my ear.
Who earlier, weeping at my touch, had whispered:
“I loved you once.” And: “No, I don’t love him.
Not after everything he did.” Later,
Rebuttoning her nightgown with my help:
“Sorry, I just have no desire, it seems.”
Sighing: “For you, I mean.” Long silence. Then:
“You always were so serious.” At which
I smiled, darkly. And that was how I came
To sleep beside, not with her; without dreams.

I call her up sometimes, long distance now.
And she still knows my voice, but I can hear,
Beyond the music of her phonograph,
The laughter of the young men with their keys.

I have the number written down somewhere.

Topical Verse: The Short Game

Posted on by under Pooms/Poetry, Topical Verse

With the exception of Dorothy Parker, American poets have never been much for light verse. Ogden Nash doesn’t count, because his writing blows (File under: The Rhymes Usually Seem Forced, and also The Poems Are Not Funny). Things are different for English poets. This probably has something to do with their culture’s flair for irony, discomfort, and verbal wit, as well as its historical lack of an entrenched fundamentalist Protestantism. Think about it: even many of their Serious Poets are funny, like Shakespeare, Pope, Browning, Auden, Larkin, Louis MacNiece, Lord Byron, Donne (the dirty early stuff) and, well, you get the picture. Though not Milton. Oh god, not Milton.

Kingsley Amis is best known for novels like Lucky Jim, The Old Devils, and One Fat Englishman, all works that established him as one of the past century’s great comic novelists. But he was also a bang-up poet (seriously, he’s in the Norton anthologies) and a solid critic, so it isn’t surprising that his edition of The New Oxford Book of Light Verse (1987) is great. Here are two poems, both short, both always topical, neither serious.

“Limeraiku” (by Ted Pauker)

There’s a vile old man
Of Japan who roars at whores:
“Where’s your bloody fan?”

—————

“Miss Twye” (by Gavin Ewart)

Miss Twye was soaping her breasts in the bath
When she heard behind her a meaning laugh
And to her amazement she discovered
A wicked man in the bathroom cupboard.

Topical Verse: Neruda’s Job Letter

Posted on by under Topical Verse

The boutique styling lab (a Supercuts down the road) where I get my hair cut is across the way from a thrift shop with an above-average paperback selection. The shop, or “shoppe,” as the sign has it, is close to UCSB in a neighborhood where a lot of graduate students live, so it gets quality runoff. Today I went in before driving home and found the City Lights-published, Stanford-curated selection of Pablo Neruda’s poems. It only seems fair to share the good luck, so here is “Poet’s Obligation” (1962), one of his late lyrics:

To whomever is not listening to the sea
this Friday morning, to whomever is cooped up
in house or office, factory or woman
or street or mine or harsh prison cell:
to him I come, and, without speaking or looking,
I arrive and open the door of his prison,
and a vibration starts up, vague and insistent,
a great fragment of thunder sets in motion
the rumble of the planet and the foam,
the raucous rivers of the ocean flood,
the star vibrates swiftly in its corona,
and the sea is beating, dying and continuing.

So, drawn on by my destiny,
I endlessly must listen to and keep
the sea’s lamenting in my awareness,
I must feel the crash of the hard water
and gather it up in a perpetual cup
so that, wherever those in prison may be,
wherever they suffer the autumn’s castigation,
I may be there with an errant wave,
I may move, passing through windows,
and hearing me, eyes will glance upward
saying: how can I reach the sea?
And I shall broadcast, saying nothing,
the starry echoes of the wave,
a breaking up of foam and of quicksand,
a rustling of salt withdrawing,
the grey cry of sea-birds on the coast.
So, through me, freedom and the sea
will make their answer to the shuttered heart.

(Trans. Alastair Reid)

Topical Verse: Take it Easy, Mr. Heaney

Posted on by under Topical Verse

Seamus Heaney was the first famous poet I ever saw read, which was a serious stroke of luck, because the man’s careful, confident, mellow delivery (in that Northern Irish accent which some writers unfairly get to have) of his poems matched how great those texts are on the page. I was twenty, I bought Opened Ground (his first major Selected volume) that night, and I have creased the hell out of it ever since; there are few books I open more, and I imagine that goes for a lot of people.

Heaney’s best work is at once intensely, almost fanatically, taken by the grubby human round of love, heartbreak, death, and all that good personal stuff; rooted in a scholar’s grasp of other texts, whether we’re talking Greek bards, Modernist fiction, or Irish folklore; and tempered with a grown-up willingness to write contemporary history into one’s work without ignoring the personal. In terms of pure musical care and pleasure, his lyrics, which often obscure their structural rigor, are magnificent on a level that Keats, Whitman, Dickinson, Auden, and maybe (maybe) a dozen other poets have attained. Heaney spent a half-century spitting fire, son.

He died yesterday at the age of 74. Over the next week or so the Anglophone world’s pop-highbrow outlets will publish tributes and assessments. Reading a couple will be enough. A few cheap contrarian blasts aside, these will correctly note that people will be reading the guy on Mars someday. But the encomiums will also be critically shallow (too many comparisons to Yeats, because DURR they were both Irish), politically tendentious (overemphasizing the admittedly great poems he wrote about The Troubles and ignoring texts set in California and elsewhere, or which aren’t geopolitically defined), and not especially interested in the words themselves so much as what cultural role he played as Famous Writer Who Taught At StanHarvardford.

The best way to send off a poet is to cite his poems. Since this probably shouldn’t be a 5-million-word post, I had to focus. It took a while to pick something, which ended up being “The Skunk,” from Field Work (1979), one of his best collections. Enjoy.

Up, black, striped and damasked like the chasuble
At a funeral Mass, the skunk’s tail
Paraded the skunk. Night after night
I expected her like a visitor.

The refrigerator whinnied into silence.
My desk light softened beyond the verandah.
Small oranges loomed in the orange tree.
I began to be tense as a voyeur.

After eleven years I was composing
Love-letters again, broaching the word ‘wife’
Like a stored cask, as if its slender vowel
Had mutated into the night earth and air

Of California. The beautiful, useless
Tang of eucalyptus spelt your absence.
The aftermath of a mouthful of wine
Was like inhaling you off a cold pillow.

And there she was, the intent and glamorous,
Ordinary, mysterious skunk,
Mythologized, demythologized,
Snuffing the boards five feet beyond me.

It call came back to me last night, stirred
By the sootfall of your things at bedtime,
Your head-down, tail-up hunt in a bottom drawer
For the black plunge-line nightdress.

Topical Verse: The Dog Days

Posted on by under sports, Topical Verse

Ryan and I have long argued that Opening Day of the Major League Baseball season should be a federal holiday. But baseball’s popularity isn’t what it was even thirty years ago. There are many reasons for this: the steroid scandal, the strike of 1994, new technologies that have made watching other sports on television a lot more exciting, as well a general ratcheting up of our need to be “entertained” every second of every day. Baseball isn’t “entertaining” like basketball or football, though I’d argue both of those sports are less wildly exciting than people claim. How many two-yard runs up the middle can one watch? And how many Milwaukee Bucks games get the adrenaline raging?

Baseball is now seen by many as something past its prime, especially as football games are the most-viewed programs of any kind each week. But this way of valuing a sport misses the point. Football’s season is only 16 games, whereas the baseball season stretches out for 180, if you include the playoffs. Its rhythms are more like our own lives: we must get up, go to work, go home, and find joy where we can. Maybe people look to sports for something other than dailiness, but I have always loved the slow pacing of baseball. It fits into my life perfectly. I can duck in and duck out, have it on in the background while I do other things, give it my full attention as the bases load and anticipation builds. I don’t want to sound like a D-list academic in a Ken Burns documentary, waxing poetic about a game in 1912 I never saw, but the folks who talk almost gleefully about baseball’s “demise” are missing out on something important, and something uniquely American.

In honor of August baseball, here’s the A.E. Housman poem “To An Athlete Dying Young.” Maybe baseball needed to die in the 1960s for people to really appreciate its virtues. I’m glad it’s still going out there every day though.

To An Athlete Dying Young

The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.

To-day, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.

Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.

Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears:

Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.

So set, before its echoes fade,
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,
And hold to the low lintel up
The still-defended challenge-cup.

And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl’s.

 

Topical Verse: Back to School

Posted on by under Pooms/Poetry, Topical Verse

The end of my summer is only a couple days away, so in honor of the return of the school year, I give you Tony Hoagland’s “America.” It describes a feeling all teachers have had: dismissing something a student says only to realize that you actually agree. All teaching is learning, but it’s easy to forget this on bad days when the class in front of you seems to exist only to make you feel ignored. You can’t let this diminish the respect you give your students’ ideas though, because you were once that precocious, jaded, vague, insecure, or pretentious student, and you’ve probably changed a lot less than you’d like to believe.

America

Then one of the students with blue hair and a tongue stud
Says that America is for him a maximum-security prison

 

Whose walls are made of RadioShacks and Burger Kings, and MTV episodes
Where you can’t tell the show from the commercials,

 

And as I consider how to express how full of shit I think he is,
He says that even when he’s driving to the mall in his Isuzu

 

Trooper with a gang of his friends, letting rap music pour over them
Like a boiling Jacuzzi full of ballpeen hammers, even then he feels

 

Buried alive, captured and suffocated in the folds
Of the thick satin quilt of America

 

And I wonder if this is a legitimate category of pain,
or whether he is just spin doctoring a better grade,

 

And then I remember that when I stabbed my father in the dream last night,
It was not blood but money

 

That gushed out of him, bright green hundred-dollar bills
Spilling from his wounds, and—this is the weird part—,

 

He gasped “Thank god—those Ben Franklins were
Clogging up my heart—

 

And so I perish happily,
Freed from that which kept me from my liberty”—

 

Which was when I knew it was a dream, since my dad
Would never speak in rhymed couplets,

 

And I look at the student with his acne and cell phone and phony ghetto clothes
And I think, “I am asleep in America too,

 

And I don’t know how to wake myself either,”
And I remember what Marx said near the end of his life:

 

“I was listening to the cries of the past,
When I should have been listening to the cries of the future.”

 

But how could he have imagined 100 channels of 24-hour cable
Or what kind of nightmare it might be

 

When each day you watch rivers of bright merchandise run past you
And you are floating in your pleasure boat upon this river

 

Even while others are drowning underneath you
And you see their faces twisting in the surface of the waters

 

And yet it seems to be your own hand
Which turns the volume higher?

Topical Verse: Be All That You Can Be

Posted on by under Authors, Topical Verse

It is either comforting or not at all comforting to know that Silicon Valley didn’t invent the temple of life-hacking, the ruinous belief that one might perfect oneself and master existence: to know that this conceit is much older, basically post-Enlightenment modernity’s favorite way of doing things. Perfected under American Protestantism, given a cozy sheen by the techno-progressivism that emerged from Western research institutions after World War II, and now distinguished by a frantic strain indicative of life’s realities after the Great Recession, the only difference is that now there are more media platforms for spreading it. Dr. Oz and Bill Gates are winning the game. Why aren’t you? Get thee to a library, and check out some Horatio Alger.

Artists have done their bit of pushing back. Wallace Stevens put his shoulder to the wheel with “The Poems of Our Climate” (1937-1942), which emphasizes that a life of “complete simplicity,” an existence stripped of all ambiguity and uncertainty and longing, would be pretty awful. Or rather, striving for a life like that is awful, because only a lunatic would try to get it.

I.
Clear water in a brilliant bowl,
Pink and white carnations. The light
In the room more like a snowy air,
Reflecting snow. A newly-fallen snow
At the end of winter when afternoons return.
Pink and white carnations – one desires
So much more than that. The day itself
Is simplified: a bowl of white,
Cold, a cold porcelain, low and round,
With nothing more than the carnations there.

II.
Say even that this complete simplicity
Stripped one of all one’s torments, concealed
The evilly compounded, vital I
And made it fresh in a world of white,
A world of clear water, brilliant-edged,
Still one would want more, one would need more,
More than a world of white and snowy scents.

III.
There would still remain the never-resting mind,
So that one would want to escape, come back
To what had been so long composed.
The imperfect is our paradise.
Note that, in this bitterness, delight,
Since the imperfect is so hot in us,
Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.

Topical Verse: Summer

Posted on by under Authors, Pooms/Poetry, Topical Verse

We’re officially in the dead of summer, and it feels like it here in southern California. Actually, it has felt more like summer in Louisiana here in L.A. for the past couple weeks. Just gross and humid. Still, I realize that most people in America have it much worse, so for today’s topical verse I’ve chosen a poem that celebrates both summer and place, William Blake’s “To Summer.” If you haven’t read much Blake, go to your local used bookstore and hunt around until you uncover an edition of his poems that also contains some of his etchings and drawings. Then, find your nearest pleasure garden, post up under a good shade tree, and read until you fall asleep nestled up against summer’s bosom. This is what this lazy weather is for, folks.

To Summer

O thou who passest thro’ our valleys in
Thy strength, curb thy fierce steeds, allay the heat
That flames from their large nostrils! thou, O Summer,
Oft pitchedst here thy golden tent, and oft
Beneath our oaks hast slept, while we beheld
With joy, thy ruddy limbs and flourishing hair.

Beneath our thickest shades we oft have heard
Thy voice, when noon upon his fervid car
Rode o’er the deep of heaven: beside our springs
Sit down, and in our mossy valleys, on
Some bank beside a river clear, throw thy
Silk draperies off, and rush into the stream:
Our valleys love the Summer in his pride.

Our bards are famed who strike the silver wire:
Our youth are bolder than the southern swains:
Our maidens fairer in the sprightly dance:
We lack not songs, nor instruments of joy,
Nor echoes sweet, nor waters clear as heaven,
Nor laurel wreaths against the sultry heat.