Category: Today’s Pillar of Poetry (Page 3 of 7)

Continuing in 2017 to work through the Poet’s Corner card deck.

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’
hierarchies? And even if one of them pressed me
suddenly against his heart: I would be consumed
in that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothing
but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains
to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.

“The First Elegy” from The Duino Elegies (1923), Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Stephen Mitchell

The elegies are named for Duino Castle on the Adriatic Sea. The card didn’t have much else about Rilke. Sad face.

Yes, I went to the city,
And there I did bitterly cry,
Men out of touch with the earth,
And with never a glance at the sky.
Oh, can’t hold the han’ of my love!
Can’t hold her pure little han’!

From “I Went to the City” by Kenneth Patchen.

Patchen was a poet and a painter. His idol was William Blake. He created many painted poems which he called “anticalligraphy” which were sometimes accompanied by jazz musicians.

And through the tremble of a sigh
May tremble through the story.
For “happy summer days” gone by,
And vanish’d summer glory—
It shall not touch, with breath of bale,
The pleasance of our fairy-tale.

From Lewis Caroll’s “Through the Looking Glass” preamble.

Carroll "wrote children’s literature that adults liked," much of it was poetry and puzzles. He was fond of “clever young girls” in the vein of Alice in Wonderland.

Week eight stats:

1 white American colonialist female
1 black American female
2 white American females
3 white American males
1 white Andalusian male
1 white Austrian male
1 Chilean male
3 white English males
1 white French male
1 white Italian male
1 white Scottish male
1 white Welsh male

1 1300s poet
1 1600s poet
1 1700s poet
6 1800s poets
8 1900s poets

One should always honor one's teachers, preferably before they pass away. You don't always make it.

I was fortunate to begin my undergraduate and graduate poetry workshops with two very strong poetry teachers in St. Louis, Missouri. Howard Schwartz was a master at teaching mechanics. In class we often debated poems word by word, even down to the advantages of using 'and' or 'the.' Steve Shreiner taught about feeling and persuasiveness and encouraged us to read other poets. I also had a big crush on him, which I vowed never to let happen again. And Steve Schreiner introduced me to the poet Tom Lux at a local reading Lux was giving. I never would have ended up at Sarah Lawrence College had I not heard those Tom Lux poems back then. They were funny and I wanted a teacher who was funny. Although I had some good classes with Jean Valentine, David Rivard and Joan Larkin, Tom Lux was the professor who sent me to Sarah Lawrence.

Thomas Lux passed away last week from cancer and many of his students have been posting tributes and commentary about what an important mentor he was to them, what an inspiring teacher and friend. In the mid 1990s, Lux was my "don" (or dedicated advisor) at Sarah Lawrence and I took two of his classes, a craft class and a workshop class. Lux had a larger-than-life presence. He was charismatic. His voice boomed during readings. He seemed comfortable in his own skin. He was the celebrity of the writing program. My friend and I called him poetry’s Daryl Hall. We loved to hear him recite the Refrigerator poem and we'd imitate lines of it to each other the way Tom read it: "because you do not eat / that which rips your heart with joy!"

And herein lies the rub for me because I've always had a hard time with celebrities. They walk around with such an impenetrable veneer, it makes one feel smaller. Tom's office at Sarah Lawrence was set up that way, too. It was a beautiful office, especially by the looks of the dives my other professors inhabited (basements were common). It was large and multi-textured, intellectual and full of stuff like Lux had lived a pirate's life. I scanned the New York Times photograph to the top left from a photocopy just to illustrate the scene: Tom in a large chair, his imposing shoulders and head towering over you as you sat uncomfortably in the lower chair. To be uncomfortable is a choice to be sure. But there it was.

I had a big blow up with Lux in that office. The fight wasn't even over poetry. It was over standards of behavior. He called me petty and another word which I can’t remember and can't believe now that I can’t remember as it was so upsetting to me at the time and I've carried that phrase around, ("petty and something"), like a big memorial gravestone all these years since. My eyes opened wide and I stood up to leave his office dramatically. He stopped me and we dialed the whole thing back into civility. He walked me from his office to Slonim Hall.  After that I knew I would never be one of his favorites.

But he told me my poems were brilliant, (whether they were or not), and he took the time to tell my family at graduation that I was a good poet, (I don't think they believed him), and the first time I ever had greens was as a party for the students up in his NYC apartment. He was like my difficult relative or the antagonistic mentor, the best kind of mentor probably, something you must push up against until it's gone. Despite the fact that I don't have the same connection to Tom Lux that other students had, despite all the drama at Sarah Lawrence, I've always been proud to have been one of his many doe-eyed students.

The obits

Thomas Lux, esteemed Georgia Tech teacher and poet (The Atlanta0-Journal Constitution)

Campus, Atlanta communities mourn the loss of Thomas Lux, director of Poetry@TECH (Georgia Tech)

Rest in Peace, Thomas Lux (1946–2017) (Poetry Foundation)

Sarah Lawrence College Mourns the Loss of Longtime Writing Faculty Member Tom Lux (Sarah Lawrence College)

Thomas Lux, 70, poet known for his generosity as a writer, teacher (The Boston Globe)

Renowned poet Thomas Lux, an Easthampton native, dies at 70 (MASS Live)

Remembering Thomas Lux (Technique)

Remembering a One-of-a-Kind Poet (The Atlantic)

The Old New York Times piece from which the photo above came: If Poetry Is Puzzling Who is to Blame?

So I'm still working through a deck of poetry cards I found in my parents house last year. This week randomness dealt out some good stuff:

It could not be dangerous to be living
   in a town like this, of simple people,
who have a steeple-jack placing danger
   signs by the church
while he is gliding the solid-
   pointed star, which on the steeple
stands for hope.

“The Steeple-Jack” by Marianne Moore

Moore was born in the outskirts of St. Louis, in Kirkwood, MO. She went to Bryn Mawr College and was a teacher and a librarian. She was also editor of The Dial and considered one of the modernist poets.

Great God! I’d rather be
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

“The World is Too Much With Us” by William Wordsworth

Wordsworth was a leader of English Romanticism movement, primarily a lyrical writer who believed specific experience served up universal meaning. He celebrated humanity, real language and this poem was his “recipe for  poetry as a ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" and "emotion recollected in tranquility.’”

America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing
America two dollars and twentyseven cents January 17, 1956.
I can’t stand my own mind.
America when will end the human war?

Allen Ginsberg from “America” 

Wow! So great to read this right now. The card calls Ginsberg’s “Howl” a “literary gauntlet hurled down” and calls this poem “a brutally funny indictment of the mechanized torture that awaits any sensitive soul caught like a rat in the consumer maze.” Hear Ginsberg read the poem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Orar-V3y5Sk.

Week seven stats:

1 white American colonialist female
1 black American female
2 white American females
3 white American males
1 white Andalusian male
1 Chilean male
2 white English males
1 white French male
1 white Italian male
1 white Scottish male
1 white Welsh male

1 1300s poet
1 1600s poet
1 1700s poet
5 1800s poets
7 1900s poets

These are the cards I pulled this week:

This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.

Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Requiem” (1950-1984)

According to the card, he lived a short life, beset with illnesses. However, he's known for his adventure tales and he did travel to the South Sea Islands and Samoa. This short poem "Requiem" was written as his own epitaph.

Toiling, rejoicing, sorrowing,
Onward through life he goes;
Each morning sees some task begin,
Each evening sees it close;
Something attempted, something done,
Has earned a night’s repose.

Whoa. Semi-colon overload, dude. This is from “The Village Blacksmith” by Henry Wadsworth Longellow (1807-1882)

The card states that Longfellow is “America’s first true man of letters.” He was a linguist, professor, translator, and critic, and “the most popular poet writing in the English language” during his 19th Century. Some of his greatest hits include: “The Song of Hiawatha,” “Paul Revere’s Ride” and “The Courtship of Miles Standish.” I own the book “Tales of a Wayside Inn” because for years while I was in college and our family spent Christmases in Boston, we would eat dinner at the Wayside Inn. I loved it. Which is obvious because I bought the book! Once I took my friends to visit his house but it was closed. There was a dispenser with buttons out front which appeased our disappointment.  The button had his picture on it and said, "I'm a poet too!"

Week six stats:

1 white American colonialist female
1 black American female
1 white American female
2 white American males
1 white Andalusian male
1 Chilean male
1 white English male
1 white French male
1 white Italian male
1 white Scottish male
1 white Welsh male

1 1300s poet
1 1600s poet
2 1700s poets
3 1800s poets
5 1900s poets

We’re still doing poem cards from the deck I found in my parents’ basement. Because they're easy like Sunday morning.

Time has an end, they say
sea-walls are worn away
by wind and the sea-spray.
   not the herb,
            rosemary.

This was from “Time Has an End” by H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) (1886-1961)

H.D. liked Greece and Egyptian mythology and hey, she was a Moravian from Pennsylvania! My parents are about to move from Lititz, Pennsylvania, where they’ve lived in retirement for many years and Lititz was founded as an exclusive Moravian community so I know a little somethin-somethin about Moravians. As does anyone else who owns that multi-pointed Christmas decoration, the Moravian star. H.D. moved to Europe in 1911, however, and folded in with Ezra Pound’s Imagists. She was “briefly engaged” to Ezra and it was his idea for her to sign her poems as “H.D. Imagiste.” (I’m not fact checking these cards, btw.) The card calls her a “poet’s poet” and I like this as a description of experimental poets, like pure vs. practical science. She was also in psychoanalysis with Sigmund Freud. She also translated Sappo's poems.

I see only a summer’s
transparency, I sing nothing but wind,
while history creaks on its carnival floats
hoarding medals and shrouds
and passes me by, and I stand by myself
in the spring, knowing nothing but rivers.

This is from “Pastoral” by Pablo Neruda (1904-1973), translated by Ben Belitt. Neruda is much loved for his “immense, heroic, prophetic, romantic and moving universe of words” as the card says and he was also controversial due to his “radical socialist politics,” (is this card bias or actually how we refer to his political stance?). He was exiled from Chile between 1936-1952. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971.

The fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over the harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.

From “Fog” by Carl Sandburg (1878-1967). That’s the poem in its entirety! It's a very popular and anthologized poem, according to my card, even though, like Walt Whitman, Sandburg went on to be know for his longer, more effusive lines.

Week Five Stats:

1 white American colonialist female
1 black American female
1 white American female
1 white American male
1 white Andalusian male
1 Chilean male
1 white English male
1 white French male
1 white Italian male
1 white Welsh male

1 1300s poet
1 1600s poet
1 1700-1800s poet
2 1800s poets
5 1900s poets

This week we cover three cards!

The bloodhounds have miss’d the scent of her way,
The hunter is rif’led and foiled of his pray,
The cursing of men and clanking of chains
Make sounds of strange discord on Liberty’s plains.
Oh! Poverty, danger and death she can brave,
For the child of her love is no longer a slave.

 From “She’s Free!” from Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911) LINK?

Harper wrote antislavery verses and gave many lectures and sermons before and after the Civil War. She wrote a prolific seven volumes of poetry and her novel Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted was the best-selling 19th Century novel by an African American writer.  She's also the first poet I want to investigate further from these cards.

To see a world in a grain of sand
And heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.

From “Auguries of Innocence” by William Blake (1757-1827)

Blake, the infamous poet/printer/painter, was “bereaved” by the “cult of reason” which he said was a big bummer to imaginative thinking. You can’t have both? This particular poem is a treaty against cruelty to animals.

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

“The Force That Through the green Fuse Drives the Flower” by the long-title guy, Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)

This poem is from one of his teenage notebooks. Another quote from the same poem, “Each image holds within it the seed of its own destruction…Out of the inevitable conflict of images, I try to make that momentary peace which is a poem.” Take that post-modernists! Thomas was a public poet, earning money on the lecture circuit and famously boozing it up. The card says he died after a legendary bar binge (at the White Horse in the West Village) and implies he might have died of alcohol poisoning. But, he might have actually died of pneumonia. It was also a time of severe air pollution in NYC. Read the revisionist theories:

The Guardian
Wikipedia

Week four stats:

1 white French male
1 white American colonialist female
1 white Andalusian male
1 white Italian male
1 black American female
1 white Welsh male
1 white English male
1 1300s poet
1 1600s poet
1 1700-1800s poet
2 1800s poets
2 1900s poets

It was announced on Oct 13, 2016 that Bob Dylan won the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” A few years ago I took a class on Nobel Prize Winning Poets at Santa Fe Community College and our teacher told us that no American poet had previously won the prize. This isn’t entirely true. Reports also stated he was the first songwriter to win. This wasn’t entirely true either. It turns out poet Rabindranath Tagore wrote a tune or two in his day.

Stories:

– Yahoo
– CNN
– The New York Times
– The Guardian
– NPR

Here are the Americans who have won:

1. First American was Sinclair Lewis in 1930 for prose.
2. Eugene Gladstone O’Neill won in 1936 for drama.
3. Pearl Buck won in 1938 for prose.
4. S. Eliot (an American poet) won for poetry in 1948 but he had emigrated to and is listed for United Kingdom.
5. William Faulkner won in 1949 for prose.
6. Ernest Hemingway won in 1954 for prose.
7. John Steinbeck won in 1962 for prose.
8. Saul Bellow (a Canadian) won in 1976 for prose as a resident of the USA for prose.
9. Isaac Bashevis Singer (Polish) won in 1978 for prose as a resident of the USA.
10. Joseph Brodsky (Russian) won in 1987 for poetry as a resident of the USA.
11. Toni Morrison won in 1993 for prose.

So if you decide not to include T.S. Eliot as an American poet because he had emigrated to the U.K., then you have to accept Joseph Brodsky as American by the same standard. You could split hairs and say Bob Dylan is the first native American winning while living in America.

In any case, there are a slate of full-time poets and novelists who are pissed off. Which seems to happen every year the prize is announced for one reason or another. This case is no different: http://time.com/4529524/bob-dylan-nobel-prize-literature-reaction/

Fictionistas usually feel like they should take precedent over poetry for reasons of cultural popularity and poets are always every-ready to be jealous of any competition from inside or outside their circles. I can easily see how a whole new subcategory could riffle their feathers. "What’s next? Bruce Springsteen?" I do think Bob Dylan deserved the Nobel Prize for taking songwriting in folk and rock to a higher level, (Both Scorsese's No Direction Home documentary and the book Jingle Jangle Morning touch on his elevation of the lyric), and for being a writing influence to so many writers and musicians worldwide. But I appreciate that he strongly problematizes the line between poets and songwriters.

Poet’s fully intend to die before this crepe-paper tent, the idea that poetry is somehow fundamentally different than song lyrics. "Songs are not poems!" they say. But they kind of are. I would put up a few Sting, Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen lyrics as poems; Bernie Taupin admits to having written poems that Elton John set to music. And many poets will concede that Dylan's lyrics are poetry. Plus, he has the best book of celebrity poetry I've read so far.  Many poetry verses have turned into songs and song verses have been just as inspiring and meaningful to people as poem stanzas, arguably more so in modern times. If you were presented with four lines of poetry and four lines of Bob Dylan lyrics, I’ll bet you would be hard pressed to find a difference. You can’t say, on the one hand, that form is essentially the power of rhythm but yet it doesn’t quite reach the level of melody. You’re playing a losing game of intellectual Twister. The hard cold facts of life, (thank you Porter Wagoner), are that the American Songbook is a canon of literature and Dylan has made enormous worldwide contributions to it.

Plus, Nobel judges have always followed their own drum. As I learned in my class, Nobel prizes are political and subjective. See the full list. Sometimes writers win for a single work, sometimes for a body of work, sometimes in recognition of leadership qualities or other nebulous reasons. Many of their choices look obscure to us today.

Dylan has gone all Woody Allen on us and has ignored the award. Good for him. The award comes with no requirements.

By the way, I just saw the Bob Dylan show this week at his Albuquerque visit to The Kiva Auditorium (see the set list). It was a great show. I loved the new revamps of old songs and particularly loved "Desolation Row."

I've also posted on my Cher blog a similar post to this with the added information of Cher's 10+ covers of Dylan. The fan blog All Dylan also gave a very lovely review of Cher’s history recording Dylan songs on her 70^th birthday this year: http://alldylan.com/cher-covers-bob-dylan/.

If we're gonna get thru these damn cards we gotta hustle. I tried to step it up this week and do two cards. 

Life is no dream! Beware and beware and beware!
We tumble downstairs to eat the damp of the earth
or we climb to the snowy divide with the choir of dead dahlias.
But neither dream nor forgetfulness, is:
brute flesh is. Kisses that tether our mouths
in a mesh of raw veins.

Lovely. This is from “Unsleeping City” by Federico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936), translated by Ben Belitt. Lorca is Andalusian (Southern Spain). The Poet in New York pieces, like this one, are from his year-long visit to New York City in 1929. It was his first time out of Spain and he wasn't so fond of it. The poems were published after his death. He is considered the most revered poet in Spain and he was murdered by fascists.

Here's another card:

In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost.

That's it. That's the full quote. It's from what is often referred to as "Dante's Inferno."  It's technically from “The Inferno” portion of The Divine Comedy by Italian poet Dante Allighieri (1265-1321), translated by John D. Sinclair.

Dante's life details are very sketchy but we do know he was forced into exile toward the end of his life due to pissing off Pope Boniface VIII.

Sheesh Boniface. By the way, Georgetown is also offering online classes on Dante's The Divine Comedy (in parts 1, 2 and 3).

Week three stats:

1 white French male
1 white American colonialist female
1 white Andalusian male
1 white Italian male
1 1300s poet
1 1600s poet
1 1800s poet
1 1900s poet

I'm still working through my deck of Poet's Corner cards that I found in my parent's house. Card number 2:

In silent night when rest I took,
For sorry near I did not look,
U waken’d was with thundering noise
And piteous shrieks of dreadfull voice.
That fearful sound of “Fire! And “Fire!”
Let no man know is my Desire.

This excerpt is from “Upon the Burning of Our House” (1666) by America's number one Puritan poet, Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672). This year I took a course in Puritain poetry from HarvardX. I took all their classes. More on that later. One thing I learned was that Puritan poets weren't only writing about their Puritan hangups. They weren't even all Puritan. But they all had a pretty tough time of it there in New England with disease, bad weather, angry indigenous Americans and those creepy, scary woods everywhere. Imagine showing a Puritan the Blair Witch movies. They would have lost their minds. Anyway, Bradstreet was the wife and daughter of two governors of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and her poems, the card says, were “steeped in ‘the Puritan darkness." She wrote 400 pages of poetry, (you go, girl!), and not all of them were “starkly religious.” She is "considered the first poet of consequence in the American colonies.”  Her poems show a “suppressed emotional life" and, sadly, only one of her books has survived (The Tenth Muse, Lately Sprung Up in America), the one that was "published in London in 1650 and posthumously in Boston in 1678."

Week two stats:

1 white French male
1 white female American colonialist
1 1800s poet
1 1600s poet

More about the poetry cards.