NPM: Don't Grow Old

Well, I just spilled coffee on my keyboard. And since I use a laptop, all of my computer's important organs sit directly beneath the keyboard. Either the hard drive can be salvaged or I take up binge drinking.

Since this is being posted from somebody else's computer, I'm going to keep it brief. A couple days ago we looked at a brief Whitman poem in which Walt waxes transcendental about old age. Allen Ginsberg (1926 - 1997) -- who I, if I believed in such things, would say is the same soul that was Whitman, born into a new body -- shares a few observations on aging and death throughout a series of poems written throughout 1976, the year his father took ill and died. "Don't Grow Old" consists of eight pieces written between January and October of that year. Their tone and quality varies -- at this point in his career, after becoming a world-renowned genius iconoclast with Howl, Ginsberg clearly wasn't approaching his work with the same focus and hunger he demonstrated during the 1950s. But when they're good, they're good.

Excerpts from
DON'T GROW OLD
By Allen Ginsberg

III

Wasted arms, feeble knees
    80 years old, hair thin and white
         cheek bonier than I remembered —
head bowed on his neck, eyes opened
    now and then, he listened —
  I read my father Wordsworth's Intimations of Immortality
"...trailing clouds of glory do we come
      from God, who is our home..."
         "That's beautiful," he said, "but it's not true."

"When I was a boy, we had a house
    on Boyd Street, Newark — the backyard
        was a big empty lot full of bushes and tall grass,
    I always wondered what was behind those trees,
When I grew older, I walked around the block,
    and found out what it was back there —
         it was a glue factory."

May 18, 1976


V

FATHER DEATH BLUES

July 8, 1976 (over Lake Michigan)

NPM: Sousing, screwing, and science with Omar Khayyam

Tonight we will be taking a look at the work of Omar Khayyam (1048 - 1131): renowned Persian mathematician, scientist, philosopher, and poet. Mathematicians might best recognize him for his "Treatise on Demonstration of Problems of Algebra" and "On the Difficulties of Euclid's Definitions." As an astronomer, he devised a famous (though now lost) star chart and participated in the creation of the reformed Iranian calendar, which is still in use today. As a student of the Aristotelean tradition, he contributed to the philosophy of mathematics and purportedly worked for decades as an instructor of Avicennism. And as a poet, he wrote scores of ditties about getting shitfaced and macking it to rosy-cheeked ladies.

Guess which he's most famous for today?

The term "Ruba'i" is Arabic for quatrain; the plural form becomes Ruba'iyat. Hence, "The Ruba'iyat of Omar Khayyam" simply means "The Quatrains of Omar Khayyam." (Note: Ruba'iyat is pronounced something like "ruby yacht.") As a poet, Khayyam is a lot like an early 1990s punk band: his stuff is really short and it all sounds the same, but it's a whole lot of fun.

In the 19th century, British poet Edward Fitzgerald introduced Khayyam to Western audiences by translating a big chunk of the Ruba'iyat into English. In the 20th century, scholars and poets Peter Avery and John Heath-Stubbs published their own translation, feeling that Fitzgerald's Victorian flourish and rhyme schemes didn't capture the original feel of the poems as accurately as they would like. Since I'm a fan of both translations, we'll be looking at a few selections from each.

(I remember a lecture by a young Russian academic who discussed the importance of translating poetry. Not just once, but over and over and over and over again. Each successive translation brings us to a greater understanding of the piece by placing it in a different perspective. The most simple aspect of this principle could be illustrated with the English translations of The Divine Comedy. By wedging the translated version into the terza rima rhyme scheme of the original Italian, the translator has to allow for inaccuracies and clunky language in order to reproduce the content of the original lines while adhering to a strict rhyme scheme that is much easier to follow in Italian than in English. By eschewing the rhymes and drafting a more direct and eloquent translation using, say, unrhymed iambics, the translator reproduces the content of the original fails to capture the musical form and feel of the original. By reading one or the other, you're missing out on something. Unless you feel like becoming fluent in Italian, your best bet is to read both versions and let one fill in the blank spots of the other.)

Without further ado...

Excerpts from
THE RUBA'IYAT OF OMAR KHAYYÁM
As translated by Edward Fitzgerald (1809 - 1883)

You know, my friends, how long since in my house
For a new marriage I did make carouse:
Divorced old barren reason from my bed,
And took the daughter of the vine to spouse.


Ah, fill the cup: —what boots it to repeat
How time is slipping underneath our feet:
Unborn to-morrow and dead yesterday,
Why fret about them if to-day be sweet!


Into this universe and why not knowing
Nor whence, like water willy-nilly flowing:
And out of it, as wind along the waste,
I know not whither, willy-nilly blowing.


'Tis all a chequer-board of nights and days,
Where destiny with men for pieces plays:
Hither and thither moves, and mates, and slays
And one by one back in the closet lays.


Alike for those for who to-day prepare,
And those that after a to-morrow stare,
A muezzín from the tower of darkness cries
"Fools! Your reward is neither here nor there."


And this I know: whether the one true light,
Kindle to love, or wrath consume me quite,
One glimpse of it within the tavern caught
Better than in the temple lost outright.


And much as wine had play'd the infidel,
And robb'd me of my robe of honour — well,
I often wonder what the vitners buy
One half so precious as the goods they sell.


And when thyself with shining foot shall pass
Among the guests star-scatter'd on the grass,
And in thy joyous errand reach the spot
Where I made one — turn down an empty glass!

Excerpts from
THE RUBA'IYAT OF OMAR KHAYYÁM
As translated by Peter Avery (1923 - 2008) and John Heath-Stubbs (1918 - 2006)

Tonight I will make myself a tun of wine,
Set myself up with two bowls of it;
First I will divorce absolutely reason and religion,
Then take to wife the daughter of the vine.


The firmament secretly whispered in my heart,
'Do you know what sentence fate laid on me?
If my revolving were in my control,
I would release myself from this circling.'


If I'm drunk on forbidden wine,* so I am!
And if I'm an unbeliever, a pagan or idolator, so I am!
Every sect has its own suspicions of me,
I am myself just what I am.


Oh you without knowledge, the corporeal shape is nothing.
And this dome of the nine charted spheres is nothing:
Take comfort, in the place of being and decay
We are creatures of a single moment — also nothing.


Since all a man gets in this place of two doors
Is only a heart of sorrow and the giving up of life,
He who never lived a moment is happy —
That man is at peace whose mother never bore him.


Do not expect much of the world and live contented,
Ignore the good and ill that time brings;
Take wine in your hand and a sweet girl's tresses
For they quickly go and these few days do not last.


Get up and leave the passing world's regret,
Be glad and make a moment pass in glee:
If the world's nature had a hint of fidelity,
Your turn would not come for you at all, as it did for others.


Drinking wine and consorting with good fellows
Is better than practising the ascetic's hypocrisy;
If the lover and the drunkard are to be among the damned
Then no one will see the face of heaven.


Every now and then someone comes along saying, 'It is I.'
He arrives with favors, silver and gold, saying 'It is I.'
When his little affair is sorted out for a day,
Death suddenly jumps out of ambush saying, 'It is I.'


Khayyám, if you are drunk on wine, enjoy it,
If you are with the tulip-cheeked, enjoy her:
Since the world's business ends in nothing,
Think that you are not and, while you are, enjoy it.

Oh, cool! The Magic: the Gathering card I once used as a bookmark just fell out of my copy of the Fitzgerald text!

See you tomorrow, kids.

*Drinking wine is forbidden by the Koran and therefore outlawed in many Muslim societies. If Khayyam and Rumi's work is anything to go by, wine prohibition in the Muslim world evidently worked (or works, rather) about as well as marijuana prohibition in the West.

NPM: Rumi the Sufi, the Sufi of Whitman

Howdy. This time our bi-nightly National Poetry Month tour takes us to 13th Century Persia, where we glance at a piece by the Sufi bard Rumi that I copied out of a friend's collected edition a while back.

I often look at Rumi (1207 - 1273) like a poppier, chick-friendly, Iranian version of Walt Whitman. All the stuff of his that I've read revolves around the same cluster of themes -- mysticism, god, love, being drunk, these things as metaphors for one another -- but he's a lot of fun to read and tends toward concision much more than our dear old Walt. (Of course, Walt's whole point was to chant and enumerate multitudes, but we're veering off topic.) What say we have a look at Rumi?

One, One, One
by Rumi (translated by Andrew Harvey)

The lamps are different,
But the Light is the same.
So many garish lamps in the dying brain's lamp shop,
Forget about them.
Concentrate on essence, concentrate on Light.
In lucid bliss, calmly smoking off its own holy fire,
The Light streams toward you from all things,
All people, all possible permutations of good, evil, thought, passion.
The lamps are different,
But the Light is the same.
One matter, one energy, one Light, one Light-mind,
Endlessly emanating all things.
One turning and burning diamond,
One, one, one.
Ground yourself, strip yourself down,
To blind loving silence.
Stay there, until you see
You are gazing at the Light
With its own ageless eyes.

Of course, Rumi and Whitman share more in common than a tireless optimism and a reliance on a few different chords. Whitman's concept of the Soul is a lot like the Sufist idea of the Divine Unity, a fact that was not lost on Walt himself:

A Persian Lesson
by Walt Whitman

For his o'erarching and last lesson the greybeard sufi,
In the fresh scent of the morning in the open air,
On the slope of a teeming Persian rose-garden,
Under an ancient chestnut-tree wide spreading its branches,
Spoke to the young priests and students.

"Finally my children, to envelop each word, each part of the rest,
Allah is all, all, all — immanent in every life and object,
May-be at many and many-a-more removes — yet Allah, Allah, Allah is there.

"Has the estray wander'd far? Is the reason-why strangely hidden?
Would you sound below the restless ocean of the entire world?
Would you know the dissatisfaction? the urge and spur of every life;
The something never still'd — never entirely gone? the invisible need
of every seed?

"It is the central urge in every atom,
(Often unconscious, often evil, downfallen,)
To return to its divine source and origin, however distant,
Latent the same in subject and in object, without one exception."

Hmm. As long as we're back to Whitman, let's allow him to respond to our insinuations of his being a blabbermouth with a quickie but goodie:

To Old Age
By Walt Whitman

I see in you the estuary that enlarges and spreads itself grandly as it pours in the great Sea.

Check back on Thursday, when we'll have a look at another Persian poet who might just be the anti-Rumi. And on Friday, we'll see what Whitman's 20th Century reincarnation has to say about old age.

NPM: The Idea of Order at Key West

Hey, kids! Guess who belongs to a low income bracket and neglected to do his taxes until the very last minute? THIS GUY.

I've got to go add up a few figures. While I'm doing that, I would like for you to read this piece by Wallace Stevens (1879 - 1955), which happens to be my personal favorite poem of his.

It's another long and possibly challenging read, but I promise a rewarding experience to anyone who takes the time to work through it. If this is your first time with the piece, reading it out loud to yourself from start to finish will be very helpful in following the language and meaning. If you are still skeptical as to why anyone should find it necessary to use such diffuse and difficult means to convey information, I would challenge you to find a way to summarize, condense, or rewrite the piece to be shorter and easier to read, but without detracting from or altering its meaning or message.

THE IDEA OF ORDER AT KEY WEST
by Wallace Stevens

She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.

The sea was not a mask. No more was she.
The song and water were not medleyed sound
Even if what she sang was what she heard,
Since what she sang was uttered word by word.
It may be that in all her phrases stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard.

For she was the maker of the song she sang.
The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea
Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.
Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew
It was the spirit that we sought and knew
That we should ask this often as she sang.
If it was only the dark voice of the sea
That rose, or even colored by many waves;
If it was only the outer voice of sky
And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled,
However clear, it would have been deep air,
The heaving speech of air, a summer sound
Repeated in a summer without end
And sound alone. But it was more than that,
More even than her voice, and ours, among
The meaningless plungings of water and the wind,
Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped
On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres
Of sky and sea.

                It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.
She measured to the hour its solitude.
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.

Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,
Why, when the singing ended and we turned
Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,
The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,
As the night descended, tilting in the air,
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.

Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker's rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.

NPM: Crossing Brooklyn Ferry

(Photo pilfered from New York Habitat.)

National Poetry Month continues. Tonight we will be having a look at my favorite piece by the father of American poetry, Mr. Walt "I chant a new verse" Whitman (1819 - 1892).

As the first truly American poet, Whitman's influence on English-language literature cannot be understated. Remember, the United States kicked off as a British colony. After winning their independence, the formerly British subjects conscientiously went about trying to establish their own culture, an endeavor that entailed devising distinctly American modes of literature and art. In an 1844 essay, Ralph Waldo Emerson lamented that the nation still had yet to establish an independent poetic tradition:

I look in vain for the poet whom I describe. We do not, with sufficient plainness, or sufficient profoundness, address ourselves to life, nor dare we chaunt our own times and social circumstance. If we filled the day with bravery, we should not shrink from celebrating it. Time and nature yield us many gifts, but not yet the timely man, the new religion, the reconciler, whom all things await. Dante's praise is, that he dared to write his autobiography in colossal cipher, or into universality. We have yet had no genius in America, with tyrannous eye, which knew the value of our incomparable materials, and saw, in the barbarism and materialism of the times, another carnival of the same gods whose picture he so much admires in Homer; then in the middle age; then in Calvinism. Banks and tariffs, the newspaper and caucus, methodism and unitarianism, are flat and dull to dull people, but rest on the same foundations of wonder as the town of Troy, and the temple of Delphos, and are as swiftly passing away. Our logrolling, our stumps and their politics, our fisheries, our Negroes, and Indians, our boasts, and our repudiations, the wrath of rogues, and the pusillanimity of honest men, the northern trade, the southern planting, the western clearing, Oregon, and Texas, are yet unsung. Yet America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres. If I have not found that excellent combination of gifts in my countrymen which I seek, neither could I aid myself to fix the idea of the poet by reading now and then in Chalmers's collection of five centuries of English poets. These are wits, more than poets, though there have been poets among them. But when we adhere to the ideal of the poet, we have our difficulties even with Milton and Homer. Milton is too literary, and Homer too literal and historical.

And then Walt Whitman came along. When Walt sent Ralph a copy of Leaves of Grass, the latter answered him with this letter:

Dear Sir,

I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of “Leaves of Grass.” I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy. It meets the demand I am always making of what seemed the sterile and stingy nature, as if too much handiwork, or too much lymph in the temperament, were making our western wits fat and mean.

I give you joy of your free and brave thought. I have great joy in it. I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be. I find the courage of treatment which so delights us, and which large perception only can inspire.

I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a little, to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty. It has the best merits, namely, of fortifying and encouraging.

I did not know until I last night saw the book advertised in newspaper that I could trust the name as real and available for a post-office. I wish to see my benefactor, and have felt much like striking my tasks, and visiting New York to pay you my respects.

R.W. Emerson

In any event, let's get on with this thing. I was planning on sharing some Whitman anyway, but after sitting next to a man reading a printout of Crossing Brooklyn Ferry on the subway (and reading it over his shoulder), it seemed imperative that I share it with you folks immediately.

I won't lie: it's a long poem. But it is well worth working through. Think of it this way: you can either spend the next ten to fifteen minutes half-consciously browsing YouTube, Facebook, or Tumblr memes, sucking in a hundred little jokes that will become annoying, irrelevant, and/or forgotten in a matter of months or weeks; or you put a little time and effort into focusing on something that might actually make you think, linger in your mind, and remain as powerful and pertinent the next time you chance to read it. It's totally up to you, but I trust you to do what is right.

CROSSING BROOKLYN FERRY
by Walt Whitman

1.

FLOOD-TIDE below me! I watch you face to face;
Clouds of the west! sun there half an hour high! I see you also face to face.

Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes! how curious you are to me!

On the ferry-boats, the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose;
And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence, are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose.

2.

The impalpable sustenance of me from all things, at all hours of the day;
The simple, compact, well-join’d scheme — myself disintegrated, every one disintegrated, yet part of the scheme:
The similitudes of the past, and those of the future;
The glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings — on the walk in the street, and the passage over the river;
The current rushing so swiftly, and swimming with me far away;
The others that are to follow me, the ties between me and them;
The certainty of others — the life, love, sight, hearing of others.

Others will enter the gates of the ferry, and cross from shore to shore;
Others will watch the run of the flood-tide;
Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and west, and the heights of Brooklyn to the south and east;
Others will see the islands large and small;
Fifty years hence, others will see them as they cross, the sun half an hour high;
A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence, others will see them,
Will enjoy the sunset, the pouring in of the flood-tide, the falling back to the sea of the ebb-tide.

3.

It avails not, neither time or place — distance avails not;
I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence;
I project myself — also I return — I am with you, and know how it is.

Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt;
Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd;
Just as you are refresh’d by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was refresh’d;
Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift current, I stood, yet was hurried;
Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships, and the thick-stem’d pipes of steamboats, I look’d.

I too many and many a time cross’d the river, the sun half an hour high;
I watched the Twelfth-month sea-gulls — I saw them high in the air, floating with motionless wings, oscillating their bodies,
I saw how the glistening yellow lit up parts of their bodies, and left the rest in strong shadow,
I saw the slow-wheeling circles, and the gradual edging toward the south.

I too saw the reflection of the summer sky in the water,
Had my eyes dazzled by the shimmering track of beams,
Look’d at the fine centrifugal spokes of light around the shape of my head in the sun-lit water,
Look’d on the haze on the hills southward and southwestward,
Look’d on the vapor as it flew in fleeces tinged with violet,
Look’d toward the lower bay to notice the arriving ships,
Saw their approach, saw aboard those that were near me,
Saw the white sails of schooners and sloops — saw the ships at anchor,
The sailors at work in the rigging, or out astride the spars,
The round masts, the swinging motion of the hulls, the slender serpentine pennants,
The large and small steamers in motion, the pilots in their pilot-houses,
The white wake left by the passage, the quick tremulous whirl of the wheels,
The flags of all nations, the falling of them at sun-set,
The scallop-edged waves in the twilight, the ladled cups, the frolicsome crests and glistening,
The stretch afar growing dimmer and dimmer, the gray walls of the granite store-houses by the docks,
On the river the shadowy group, the big steam-tug closely flank’d on each side by the barges — the hay-boat, the belated lighter,
On the neighboring shore, the fires from the foundry chimneys burning high and glaringly into the night,
Casting their flicker of black, contrasted with wild red and yellow light, over the tops of houses, and down into the clefts of streets.

4.

These, and all else, were to me the same as they are to you;
I project myself a moment to tell you — also I return.

I loved well those cities;
I loved well the stately and rapid river;
The men and women I saw were all near to me;
Others the same — others who look back on me, because I look’d forward to them;
(The time will come, though I stop here to-day and to-night.)

5.

What is it, then, between us?
What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years between us?

Whatever it is, it avails not — distance avails not, and place avails not.

6.

I too lived — Brooklyn, of ample hills, was mine;
I too walk’d the streets of Manhattan Island, and bathed in the waters around it;
I too felt the curious abrupt questionings stir within me,
In the day, among crowds of people, sometimes they came upon me,
In my walks home late at night, or as I lay in my bed, they came upon me.

I too had been struck from the float forever held in solution;
I too had receiv’d identity by my Body;
That I was, I knew was of my body — and what I should be, I knew I should be of my body.

7.

It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall,
The dark threw patches down upon me also;
The best I had done seem’d to me blank and suspicious;
My great thoughts, as I supposed them, were they not in reality meagre? would not people laugh at me?

It is not you alone who know what it is to be evil;
I am he who knew what it was to be evil;
I too knitted the old knot of contrariety,
Blabb’d, blush’d, resented, lied, stole, grudg’d,
Had guile, anger, lust, hot wishes I dared not speak,
Was wayward, vain, greedy, shallow, sly, cowardly, malignant;
The wolf, the snake, the hog, not wanting in me,
The cheating look, the frivolous word, the adulterous wish, not wanting,
Refusals, hates, postponements, meanness, laziness, none of these wanting.

8.

But I was Manhattanese, friendly and proud!
I was call’d by my nighest name by clear loud voices of young men as they saw me approaching or passing,
Felt their arms on my neck as I stood, or the negligent leaning of their flesh against me as I sat,
Saw many I loved in the street, or ferry-boat, or public assembly, yet never told them a word,
Lived the same life with the rest, the same old laughing, gnawing, sleeping,
Play’d the part that still looks back on the actor or actress,
The same old role, the role that is what we make it, as great as we like,
Or as small as we like, or both great and small.

9.

Closer yet I approach you;
What thought you have of me, I had as much of you — I laid in my stores in advance;
I consider’d long and seriously of you before you were born.

Who was to know what should come home to me?
Who knows but I am enjoying this?
Who knows but I am as good as looking at you now, for all you cannot see me?

It is not you alone, nor I alone;
Not a few races, nor a few generations, nor a few centuries;
It is that each came, or comes, or shall come, from its due emission,
From the general centre of all, and forming a part of all:
Everything indicates — the smallest does, and the largest does;
A necessary film envelopes all, and envelopes the Soul for a proper time.

10.

Now I am curious what sight can ever be more stately and admirable to me than my mast-hemm’d Manhattan,
My river and sun-set, and my scallop-edg’d waves of flood-tide,
The sea-gulls oscillating their bodies, the hay-boat in the twilight, and the belated lighter;
Curious what Gods can exceed these that clasp me by the hand, and with voices I love call me promptly and loudly by my nighest name as I approach;
Curious what is more subtle than this which ties me to the woman or man that looks in my face,
Which fuses me into you now, and pours my meaning into you.

We understand, then, do we not?
What I promis’d without mentioning it, have you not accepted?
What the study could not teach — what the preaching could not accomplish, is accomplish’d, is it not?
What the push of reading could not start, is started by me personally, is it not?

11.

Flow on, river! flow with the flood-tide, and ebb with the ebb-tide!
Frolic on, crested and scallop-edg’d waves!
Gorgeous clouds of the sun-set! drench with your splendor me, or the men and women generations after me;
Cross from shore to shore, countless crowds of passengers!
Stand up, tall masts of Mannahatta! —stand up, beautiful hills of Brooklyn!
Throb, baffled and curious brain! throw out questions and answers!
Suspend here and everywhere, eternal float of solution!
Gaze, loving and thirsting eyes, in the house, or street, or public assembly!
Sound out, voices of young men! loudly and musically call me by my nighest name!
Live, old life! play the part that looks back on the actor or actress!
Play the old role, the role that is great or small, according as one makes it!

Consider, you who peruse me, whether I may not in unknown ways be looking upon you;
Be firm, rail over the river, to support those who lean idly, yet haste with the hasting current;
Fly on, sea-birds! fly sideways, or wheel in large circles high in the air;
Receive the summer sky, you water! and faithfully hold it, till all downcast eyes have time to take it from you;
Diverge, fine spokes of light, from the shape of my head, or any one’s head, in the sun-lit water;
Come on, ships from the lower bay! pass up or down, white-sail’d schooners, sloops, lighters!
Flaunt away, flags of all nations! be duly lower’d at sunset;
Burn high your fires, foundry chimneys! cast black shadows at nightfall! cast red and yellow light over the tops of the houses;
Appearances, now or henceforth, indicate what you are;
You necessary film, continue to envelop the soul;
About my body for me, and your body for you, be hung our divinest aromas;
Thrive, cities! bring your freight, bring your shows, ample and sufficient rivers;
Expand, being than which none else is perhaps more spiritual;
Keep your places, objects than which none else is more lasting.

12.

We descend upon you and all things — we arrest you all;
We realize the soul only by you, you faithful solids and fluids;
Through you color, form, location, sublimity, ideality;
Through you every proof, comparison, and all the suggestions and determinations of ourselves.

You have waited, you always wait, you dumb, beautiful ministers! you novices!
We receive you with free sense at last, and are insatiate henceforward;
Not you any more shall be able to foil us, or withhold yourselves from us;
We use you, and do not cast you aside — we plant you permanently within us;
We fathom you not — we love you — there is perfection in you also;
You furnish your parts toward eternity;
Great or small, you furnish your parts toward the soul.

I don't know about you, but I love how Whitman's whole oeuvre basically consists of:

Look at this thing here. It is awesome.
Look at that thing next to it. It's so great.
Those things over there? Check them out. They are as awesome as the first things.
Let's look at them all at once. I am having an amazing time.
There are so many cool things. Look, there's another one over there. It means so much to me.
Let's look at that first thing again.
Fuck, is it ever great.

You're great.

Stray consideration: imagine something happens to Manhattan: urban crumbling during a serious economic crisis, flooded by rising sea levels, leveled during a war, etc. What new meanings will Crossing Brooklyn Ferry assume then?

NPM: Ee to the Dee

(Image ganked from In the Labyrinth)

For night three of our National Poetry Month Spectacular, we shall spend some quality time with the crowned and sceptered Queen Bee of American Verse, the distinguished balladatrix Emily Dickinson (1830 - 1886).

I LIKE A LOOK OF AGONY

I like a look of Agony,
Because I know it's true —
Men do not sham Convulsion,
Nor simulate, a Throe —

The Eyes glaze once — and that is Death —
Impossible to feign
The Beads upon the Forehead
By homely Anguish strung.



I'VE SEEN A DYING EYE

I've seen a Dying Eye
Run round and round a Room —
In search of Something — as it seemed —
Then Cloudier become —
And then — obscure with Fog —
And then — be soldered down
Without disclosing what it be
'Twere blessed to have seen —



I REASON, EARTH IS SHORT

I reason, Earth is short —
And Anguish — absolute —
And many hurt,
But, what of that?

I reason, we could die —
The best Vitality
Cannot excel Decay,
But, what of that?

I reason, that in Heaven —
Somehow, it will be even —
Some new Equation, given —
But, what of that?



I CANNOT LIVE WITH YOU

I cannot live with You —
It would be Life —
And Life is over there —
Behind the Shelf

The Sexton keeps the Key to —
Putting up
Our Life — His Porcelain —
Like a Cup —

Discarded of the Housewife —
Quaint — or Broke —
A newer Sevres pleases —
Old Ones crack —

I could not die — with You —
For One must wait
To shut the Other's Gaze down —
You — could not —

And I — Could I stand by
And see You — freeze —
Without my Right of Frost —
Death's privilege?

Nor could I rise — with You —
Because Your Face
Would put out Jesus' —
That New Grace

Glow plain — and foreign
On my homesick Eye —
Except that You than He
Shone closer by —

They'd judge Us — How —
For You — served Heaven — You know,
Or sought to —
I could not —

Because You saturated Sight —
And I had no more Eyes
For sordid excellence
As Paradise

And were You lost, I would be —
Though My Name
Rang loudest
On the Heavenly fame —

And were You — saved —
And I — condemned to be
Where You were not —
That self — were Hell to Me —

So We must meet apart —
You there — I — here —
With just the Door ajar
That Oceans are — and Prayer —
And that White Sustenance —
Despair —



IN LANDS I NEVER SAW THEY SAY

In lands I never saw — they say
Immortal Alps look down —
Whose Bonnets touch the firmament —
Whose Sandals touch the town —

Meek at whose everlasting feet
A Myriad Daisy play —
Which, Sir, are you and which am I
Upon an August day?



WE OUTGROW LOVE LIKE OTHER THINGS

We outgrow love, like other things
And put it in the Drawer —
Till it an Antique fashion shows —
Like Costumes Grandsires wore.



HER GRACE IS ALL SHE HAS

Her Grace is all she has —
And that, so least displays —
One Art to recognize, must be,
Another Art, to praise.



TELL ALL THE TRUTH BUT TELL IT SLANT

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise

As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —

Look at that last poem again. Read it closely. What do you suppose Ms. Dickinson was trying to say?

Hah! That was a trick question. "What is he/she trying to say?" is exactly the wrong question to ask when approaching a poem (or most any other work of literature, for that matter).

What Ms. Dickinson is trying to say is sitting right there in black and gray. Had she been trying to articulate something other than what is represented by the forty-one words written in the order and format you see, she would have written that instead.

We risk falling into a similar trap by asking questions such as "what is the point of this piece?" and "what's this poem about?" as though its whole meaning could be better (or at least more efficiently) expressed summed up as a two-sentence "because of this, then this" blurb.

If a writer's ideas came to him as blurbs, he wouldn't go to the time and trouble of writing stories or poems: he would write simply in blurbs.

Some ideas cannot retain their meaning when truncated to a tweet or Facebook status update. Some ideas resist articulation altogether.

You know this is true. You've had thoughts, made connections, glimpsed patterns in things that you were at a loss to explain to somebody else. You've experienced moments in your life that seemed charged with profound meanings you could sense clearly, but never quite describe.

If poetry still has a valid function, this would be it. It is a means of wielding "language adequate to one's experience," as Jay Parini puts it; using words in such forms that they can better capture those sights, sensations, and intimations we're so often at a loss to explain.

(Remember: if you cannot articulate something, you do not really understand it. Writing is often a process of learning, not just reporting.)

A truly good piece is a gestalt of content and form. The form elevates the content. The content beatifies the form. Without the content, the form is vacuous. Without the form, the content is crude.

NPM: Road-Side Dog

For the second course of our National Poetry Month buffet, we will be having a few pieces by the Pulitzer-winning Polish poet Czesław Miłosz (1911 - 2004). It would be dishonest of me to preface them with a listing of biographical snippets and a catalogue of his most acclaimed works, because in truth I know very little about the man and would only be paraphrasing the contents of his Wikipedia page.

The only work of his with which I am familiar is his 1999 book Road-Side Dog, which my father left in my care when he left for Poland. Even though I'm not a fan of the "prose poem" label, it would be difficult to characterize the majority of Road-Side Dog's contents as anything else.

The excerpts posted below all share a common theme. Poets have always written poems about poetry, or about the experience of writing poems. Depending on how such pieces are handled, the results can either be compelling or self-important and obnoxious. What else can you think but "hack" while reading a poet's tenth poem in a row about what a lovely thing poetry is and how wonderful/agonizing it feels to sit down and write, packed with another dozen linguistic terms used as metaphors for their experience (something people seriously need to stop doing).

Miłosz, however, gets away with writing poems about poets and poetry. Maybe that tone of his, that note of ascetic detachment. Maybe it's his managing to avoid both sententious I LIVE MY LIFE IN THE SERVICE OF THE MUSE BECAUSE LOOK WHAT A UNIQUE AND INTERESTING PERSON I AM sap and its equally unbearable inverse, the OH WHY HAS FATE THUS BURDENED ME WITH THIS GIFT CALLED ART WHICH IS ALSO A CURSE sludge. Perhaps it's how his pieces seem to have been written so that people other than his poet buddies could enjoy and learn from them.

Excerpts from
ROAD-SIDE DOG
by Czesław Miłosz
(translated to English by the author and Robert Hass)

EMBARRASSING

Poetry is an embarrassing affair; it is born too near the functions we call intimate.

Poetry cannot be separated from awareness of our own body. It soars above it, immaterial and at the same time captive, and is a reason for our uneasiness, for it pretends to belong to a separate zone, of spirit.

I was ashamed of my being a poet, as if, undressed, I would display in public my physical defects. I envied people who did not write poems and whom for that reason I ranged among the normal. And in this I was wrong: few of them deserve to be called that.

A FLAW

Poetry, every art, is a flaw and reminds human societies that we are not healthy, even if we confess it with difficulty.

The complex of Tonio Kröger in Thomas Mann: an artist, aware of his affliction, envies average people. Early, I discovered this in my own way.

UNMANLY

Writing poetry is considered an unmanly occupation. Practicing music and painting is not so burdened. As if poetry itself were taking on itself the blemish of all the arts, which are covertly branded effeminate.

In a tribe busy with serious occupations—i.e., war and getting food—a poet secured a place for himself as a witch-doctor, shaman, a possessor of incantations which protect, cure, or harm.

HOW IT WILL BE

Intuitions of an artist. He sees in a sudden flash, lasting a second, his oeuvre as it works in unforeseeable structures after two or three hundred years.

His oeuvre in two or three hundred years. If the language in which it was written exists. And thus a dependence, how great, upon a multitude of fools who, using that language, will pull it down, and upon the wise who will lift it up. How many of the first, how many of the second?

THE LANGUAGE

The desire for truth is confronted with poems, with tales written by you long ago. And then you are ashamed, because it was all sheer myth. Neither did any of it happen, nor did you feel the feelings contained therein. The language itself unfurled its velvet yarn in order to cover what, without it, would equal nothing.

OEUVRE

We strove, but our goals disintegrated one after another and now we have nothing except works of art and our tribute paid to their creators.

Also sorrow and compassion. For an artist, a poet, or a painter, toils and pursues every day a perfection that escapes him. He is satisfied with the result of his labor for a moment only, and is never certain whether he is good at what he does.

Many share the fate of that painter. He was not concerned with earthly possessions, he lived and dressed haphazardly, and his sacred word was: "To work." Every morning he would stand before his easel, working all day, but no sooner had he finished a than he would put his canvas in the corner and forget it, to start a new picture in the morning, always with new hope. His attempt to pass the examination for the School of Beaux Arts was unsuccessful. He loved masters of painting, old and contemporary, but had no hope of equaling them. Detesting worldly life, as it would lure him away from work, he stayed apart. He lived with his model, with whom he had a son, and after seventeen years of cohabitation married her. His paintings were systematically rejected by the Salons. He needed confirmation of his worth, but though his friends praised him, he did not believe them and considered himself a failed painter. He would kick or trample his canvases or would give them away freely. In his old age he despaired over his failure but continued to paint every day. In his native town, where he lived, he was slighted and hated; it's hard to tell why, for he did not harm anybody and helped the poor. Uncouth, in stained clothes with ripped-off buttons, he looked like a scarecrow and was a laughing-stock of children. His name was Paul Cézanne.

This tale may comfort many readers, since it confirms the familiar pattern of greatness not recognized and crowned late. However, there were numberless artists, similarly humble and hardworking, often living not far from us, whose names mean nothing today.

Thoughts/reactions, anyone?