NPM: Those Winter Sundays

Vlaho Bukovak, Father's Portrait

Poetry can be a reminder. It might tell us something we already know, but tells it in such a way that it touches upon things strange to our experience even as it conjures the familiar.

It can also remind us of practical things. I really need to write my father and there's no excuse for not having done it sooner.

Those Winter Sundays
Robert Hayden (1913-1980)

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?

Poetry, Language, Drag Queen Birds' Yawns, and Other Esoterica

So. We're about halfway through National Poetry Month. Yes,

See! It's got a logo and and a FAQ and everything. Very official.

Among the questions answered on this FAQ is...

Why was April chosen for National Poetry Month? 

In coordination with poets, booksellers, librarians, and teachers, the Academy chose a month when poetry could be celebrated with the highest level of participation. Inspired by the successful celebrations of Black History Month (February) and Women's History Month (March), and on the advice of teachers and librarians, April seemed the best time within the year to turn attention toward the art of poetry——in an ultimate effort to encourage poetry readership year-round. 

Seems my guess that April was selected because of its being the first full month of spring was overthought. Nevertheless, I've found poetry to be as connatural with springtime as magnolia blossoms and hayfever.

After writing nothing but prose for most of autumn and all of winter, in April I get an urge to write poetry. Whether I actually produce anything is (for now) as irrelevant as whether what I produce (or don't produce) is any good; the point is that during those first weeks when I wake up at dawn and can't fall back asleep for all the titmice and robins' caterwauling, when the lawn is lousy with lesser celandine, and when the frogs are wailing for frogs in the afternoon sun, prose suddenly isn't enough.

I don't love winter; not like I used to. I'm not alone in this. Every since five or so years ago, my friends talk about winter like it's not so much a season as some horrible annual affliction. When you can't comfortably or safely step outside without protective clothing; when the only two colors out any window are gray and pallid brown; when the only hours of daylight coincide with all the hours you're at your job -- why wouldn't you shut yourself in with your space heater, Internet connection, and video games? (Although I am an enthusiastic advocate of spending time outside in the cold, for now this is also beside the point.)

But when the world seems to wake back up again in April, I seem to myself to be waking up again. I approach things differently -- maybe with a more open heart, for lack of a better way of putting it -- and when something strikes me as being worth writing about, prose doesn't seem like a suitable vehicle for the idea.

Prose is linear. Prose is explanatory. Though it does stimulate emotion and sensation, prose speaks primarily to the intellect. It is the language of stories, arguments, and explanations. It is inadequate to convey experiences rooted in intuition or the encroachment of the waking life on the sublime. It is relatively tone deaf to the faint music of life. Not that prose is in all cases incapable of touching upon these things; but poetry does it much more efficiently. It is unencumbered by the standards that prose must observe in order to be effective prose.

All experience is essentially indescribable. All things in and of themselves are essentially inconceivable, and all feelings are essentially incommunicable. These facts don't come into play in our everyday lives because we do a very good job of insulating ourselves from our awareness of them.

We put these imponderables and their related (more pragmatical) qualities in a sensible order by way of language. Language is fantastic; language is what separates Homo sapiens from the rest of the animal kingdom. Human culture is inseparable from language. And even though it's probably our most useful tool for making sense of and operating within the world (if for no other reason than our inherited dependence on it), language -- any language -- is also rather clunky. Every human lexicon is rooted in a (paradoxically) unspoken consensus on the commonplace. We understand one another by signaling generalities of quotidian experience, which are impressed upon us by our verbal communities.

(Jargon. That's prose for you.)

When telling an anecdote, flaming someone of another political persuasion on a CNN comments page, or writing a highfalutin blog post about writing, our languages are rich enough. But during those particular instances when something in our subjective reality strikes us in a way for which we have no easy words to explain, we must adopt the language of poetry or otherwise resign ourselves to silence or a simplification that we know is unbefitting of the thing we experienced.

An instance. The other day I was standing and looking idly out a first-story window, and a lady cardinal landed on a rhododendron branch directly outside, three or maybe four feet away from my face. Her eyes pointed towards the window, but she didn't seem to notice me. Or maybe she did:

Male cardinals have such an astute, scholarly look about them, orthodox and earnest, oblivious to their dark-browed absurdity. Females, from a distance, aren't precisely drab, but rather understated and lovely in their modesty. But up close, this one looked like a drag queen -- dull brownish-gray breast and face, painted eyes, lavish red wings, and a thick, vivid orange beak. And she, alighting and holding to the bobbing branch, looked inside, looked towards me, opened her beak and yawned. Then she flew away.

There was something in this. Something clicked. A little padded mallet struck some inaudible chime.

What's the word for that feeling of surprise and subdued joy when you're looking out a window and a (female) cardinal lands on a branch and yawns at you and then flies away?

There's no word for it. If I wanted to convey, in words, the essential experience with any effectiveness (and if the prosaic explanation above conveys anything, it would only be the superficial details), I would have to resort to a different sort of language.

No vocabulary on Earth is commensurate with the interminable range of human perception and human conception. There is more to this existence than we know -- and one reason so much of it lies beyond our awareness is because we don't have the words for everything we experience.

In a reality where so much is fundamentally unknowable, data cannot be omniscient. So much can only be apprehended by intuition, and these things require a more circuitous mode of delineation than the nuts and bolts denotation offered by prose.

Poetry -- particularly in its modern form -- is the art of jury-rigging the lexicon of common experience to hit upon those thoughts, feelings, observations, and stories for which said lexicon ordinarily hasn't the means to express. As Jay Parini says, poetry is a language adequate to our experience. (This is the best definition I've ever heard, though it might be more accurate to call it a language more adequate to our experience.)

And to wring experience through language is important, even if we only do it for ourselves. By putting it in words, we place it in terms the intellect can understand, terms that we can understand. Nothing in the abstract belongs to us unless it can be communicated. If we can't express something, we don't really know it.

Poetry is an effort to apprehend some of the essence of a thing, an effort of a writer to read its meaning. If he shares what he writes, he conveys the experience -- or as much of it as he is able to capture -- to his fellow humans. If he does it effectively, what he passes on is the expansion of his own horizons.

We are social animals. Why should we not understand each other better? Reality is ineffable. Why should we not share our efforts to shed some light on its obscurities?

For the time being, poetry still serves this purpose better than any of our available tools. Perhaps in some future where the human brain goes digital and we can "download" one another's perceptions, down to the subtlest detail, it will become obsolete.

On second thought: I think it's more likely that it will become obsolete when (if) humanity is freed from its reliance on language in its transactions with reality. If you downloaded and played back on your digital brain that feeling of surprise and subdued joy when you're looking out a window and a (female) cardinal lands on a branch and yawns at you and then flies away, you'd still only have the feeling, which would still leave you wishing to scratch at the itch of an unasked question.

(But in the digitized, para-linguistic brains of this future, will puzzles still arise from the sensations of things? Or will sensation be sufficient? Unimportant. . . . .
for the time being.)

But for the time being, even in sprite of audiovisual media's waxing dominance over human communication, poetry remains one of the most effective tools for adhering to the maxim of "show, don't tell" in the expression of our experience.

If you were wondering why I bother will all of this National Poetry Month business, that might be your answer. (It also might help explain why I persist as an apologist of the written word.)

What I'm wondering is why I can't be in these April moods all year round.

NPM: Homage to Calvin Spotswood

Gustave Doré

I first read this poem by Kate Daniels in The Best American Poetry 2008. It was originally published by storySouth, which keeps it posted on its website (along with three other pieces by Daniels), saving me the trouble of transcribing it from the anthology. Good thing I checked; I was just a hair away from transcribing this thing, all 120 lines of it. I like it that much.

(Because of the length of some of the lines, the text is in in Times New Roman rather than the usual disclamatory Courier New to preserve the poet's line breaks. Not important, but I'm mentioning it in case anyone was wondering.)

Homage to Calvin Spotswood
Kate Daniels (1953 -)

Because I couldn't bear to go back to the southside
of Richmond and the life I had led there—the blaring
televisions, the chained up hounds, the cigarettes hissing
in ceramic saucers, the not never's, I’m fixin' to's,
the ain'ts—because anything at all was better than that,
I took the job. The four bucks an hour, the zip-front,
teal-colored, polyester uniform, the hairnets and latex gloves,
the intimate odors of piss and sweat, the eight hour
nighttime shifts of vomitus and shit, of death and death,
and then more death. Each day, I pinned on the badge that assigned me
to hell: nurse’s aide on an oncology ward for terminal patients.
 
Calvin Spotswood was my first patient. His metal chart
proclaimed him: "Non-ambulatory, terminal C.A.." A Goner,
the docs called him, a non-compliant asshole they wheeled
like a dying plant, out of the sun, out of the way,
so he could wither and perish at his own speed distant from those
with a happier prognosis.
They parked him in a dim back room so he could go unheard
when pain peeled him down to his disappearing center.
 
Calvin had dropped down through a chute in the day to day,
and skidded in for a landing on the flaming shores
of Stage III colo-rectal cancer. Nightly, he cooked there,
flipping back and forth on the grainy, cloroxed sheets
like a grilling fish. Timidly at first, I bathed the hot grate
of his ribs with tepid water, the cloth I dipped
almost sizzling dry on his heaving chest. I hated the feel
of his skin, the intimacy of my hands on his body. I hated
the smell beneath his sheets, the odor of his mouth. I hated
to touch him—a dying man, a devil, trapped, alive, in hell.
                                                                                                                  I feel
uncomfortable now, because he was black, imagining
Calvin as Milton's Satan, as if I am demonizing him unfairly,
or engaging in a stereotype based on race. But I had read the poem
and I recognized immediately the one who was "hurled headlong flaming"
from the gates of heaven, and "chained" for infinity "on the burning lake"
of his hospital bed. Like Lucifier, Calvin
was a troublingly complex anti-hero—a horrible person in many ways, stubborn
and stupid, had abused his nurses and cursed the doctors,
refusing the colostomy that might have prolonged—or saved—his life.
He wouldn't be unmanned, he said, shitting in a bag. No f-ing way.
He said "f-ing," instead of the full blown word,
a kind of delicacy I found peculiar, and then endearing.

And though the tumor, inexorably, day by day, shut him down, he wouldn't pray,
or console himself in any of the usual ways. Each afternoon,
he turned away from the Pentacostal preacher who stood with his Bible
at the foot of his bed, and said his name kindly and asked to say
a prayer or lay his hands upon the burning body. No f-ing way.
 
The tumor grew until it bound itself into his stomach wall
Each move he made extracted a fiery arrow of flaming pain
from his rotten gut. And when the house staff figured
they had him beat, and organized a betting pool on how soon old Calvin
would entrust himself to the surgeon's knife so he could eat
again, he still declined, still whined for pussy, porno mags,
and chicken fried in bacon grease. A third year resident,
Harvard M.D., wrote an order for the supper Calvin thought
he craved: mashed potatoes and buttered bread, a chicken-battered,
deep-fried steak. Beaming, our man consumed it while his doctor lingered
outside his door to await the inevitable result of the natural process
of human digestion . . . Here is where I need to remind you that this
was back when the old U.Va. hospital still stood, on the brick-curbed rim
of Hospital Drive, where the sign saying Private really meant white, a reminder
of what passed for health care in the segregated South.
Nurses still wore bobby-pinned, absurd white hats that looked
as if they were about to levitate off of their heads..
The R.N.'s were white, the practicals, black.
And none of the docs, of course, were black.
But Calvin was, and the Civil Rights Act was a decade old,
so it was the New South, instead of the Old, where Calvin consumed
his last good meal, deluded into thinking a black man in the South
had finally won. An hour later, he knew he'd lost, and patients
two floors down could hear him screaming from the mouth
of the flaming crater he filled with curses.
 
Night after night, wrist deep in the tepid water I bathed him with,
I stood at his beside and tried to change him from hot to cool
and listened to him discourse maniacally on the mysteries of gender:
Born again, he'd be a woman in slick red panties, a streetwalking
whore in high-heeled sandals and torn, black hose, opening his legs
for paper money, filling his purse with bucks to spend.
How anyone was granted a life like that he could never comprehend:
getting paid to fuck. His greatest treasure had been a dark red Pontiac with bucket seats
he'd drive to D.C.'s 14th Street to look for whores and a game of cards.
He'd been a lumberjack, he revealed one night. A quelling job,
and measured with his hands sphered into a circle, the muscles
jettisoned to illness. His strength had been his pride.
Now, he was a wiry and diminutive, sick stick of a man,
shriveled by a tumor. The image of his former power resided
in the two huge wives who guarded his door, one white, one black.
Passing between the corporeal portals of their womanly flesh,
my pale-toned puniness frightened me. But even in the final stages
of a violently invasive terminal carcinoma, nothing daunted Calvin—
not even the quarter ton of dominating, loud-mouthed women
with whom he had conceived six children. I marveled
at the unrancorous way they held each other, their cheap clothing
crinkling noisily, releasing that funky odor big people carry.
Their decalled fingernails, their huge, flopping breasts, their ornate hairdos— 
the one teased up and lacquered high in place, the other cornrowed
flat with beads—their flamboyance so obvious I couldn't help
but apprehend what Calvin Spotswood thought was hot in women.
Not me, of course, skinny college girl with straight brown hair,
and wire rimmed glasses, dog-ear-ing Book I of Paradise Lost. . . .
What Calvin adored were the superfluous extras I tried to delete— 
fat and loudness, clandestine odors of secreted musk.
 
At the end, cupping his withered, hairless testicles
in my cool, white palm because he asked me to, it wasn't anything
like witnessing a death. More like the birth of a new world, really,
he was entering alone. The little universe of sperm that twirled
beneath my hand, he was taking with him. On the burning bed,
his mouth lolled open in forgotten, wasted pleasure,
and I saw in my mind images of the South's strange fruit, the old photos
bound into books of black men who'd transgressed early in the century,
swinging heavily from trees—their demeaned postures and living deaths.
But Calvin was uncatalogued there. His name was written
in the dramatis personae of a slimmer text, an epic poem about the fall
from grace of a defiant, finger-flipping Beezelbub who dared
to challenge the creator of a world where black men swung
from the limbs of trees for admiring the backside of fair-skinned girls.
Calvin was the one kicking holes in the floor of that so-called heaven to hasten
his eviction. And so I cupped his balls. I did, and stroked his dick, marveling,
at the force of life even at the end, and the inscrutability of a God
who would keep alive a man who claimed to hate his f-ing guts
and nail into my mind forever, Calvin Spotswood in his final hours,
undiminished, unredeemed, unrepentant, his poor black body burning and burning.

NPM: Pablo Picasso's Portrait of Gertrude Stein; Gertrude Stein's Portrait of Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso, Portrait of Gertrude Stein

I count Gertrude Stein among the the top three poets whom I must make a point of exploring further. At present, this is the only piece of hers I've read more than once. I intend to rectify this before too long.

Once again, I will refer to those who better know what they are talking about for an exposition.

If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Pablo Picasso
Gertrude Stein (1874 - 1946) 

If I told him would he like it. Would he like it if I told him.
Would he like it would Napoleon would Napoleon would would he like it.
If Napoleon if I told him if I told him if Napoleon. Would he like it if I told him if I told him if Napoleon. Would he like it if Napoleon if
Napoleon if I told him. If I told him if Napoleon if Napoleon if I told him. If I told him would he like it would he like it if I told him.
Now.
Not now.
And now.
Now.
Exactly as as kings.
Feeling full for it.
Exactitude as kings.
So to beseech you as full as for it.
Exactly or as kings.
Shutters shut and open so do queens. Shutters shut and shutters and so shutters shut and shutters and so and so shutters and so shutters shut
and so shutters shut and shutters and so. And so shutters shut and so and also. And also and so and so and also.
Exact resemblance to exact resemblance the exact resemblance as exact as a resemblance, exactly as resembling, exactly resembling, exactly
in resemblance exactly a resemblance, exactly and resemblance. For this is so. Because.
Now actively repeat at all, now actively repeat at all, now actively repeat at all.
Have hold and hear, actively repeat at all.
I judge judge.
As a resemblance to him.
Who comes first. Napoleon the first.
Who comes too coming coming too, who goes there, as they go they share, who shares all, all is as all as as yet or as yet.
Now to date now to date. Now and now and date and the date.
Who came first Napoleon at first. Who came first Napoleon the first. Who came first, Napoleon first.
Presently.
Exactly as they do.
First exactly.
Exactly as they do too.
First exactly.
And first exactly.
Exactly as they do.
And first exactly and exactly.
And do they do.
At first exactly and first exactly and do they do.
The first exactly.
At first exactly.
First as exactly.
At first as exactly.
Presently.
As presently.
As as presently.
He he he he and he and he and and he and he and he and and as and as he and as he and he. He is and as he is, and as he is and he is, he is
and as he and he and as he is and he and he and and he and he.
Can curls rob can curls quote, quotable.
As presently.
As exactitude.
As trains.
Has trains.
Has trains.
As trains.
As trains.
Presently.
Proportions.
Presently.
As proportions as presently.
Father and farther.
Was the king or room.
Farther and whether.
Was there was there was there what was there was there what was there was there there was there.
Whether and in there.
As even say so.
One.
I land.
Two.
I land.
Three.
The land.
Three.
The land.
Two.
I land.
Two.
I land.
One.
I land.
Two.
I land.
As a so.
They cannot.
A note.
They cannot.
A float.
They cannot.
They dote.
They cannot.
They as denote.
Miracles play.
Play fairly.
Play fairly well.
A well.
As well.
As or as presently.
Let me recite what history teaches. History teaches.

NPM: News Report, September 1991

Oof. Too busy a day, too tired for lengthy preamble, and I don't feel I'm familiar enough with Denise Levertov (I've only begun reading her during the last month or so) to capably introduce her or her work. But I think this 2002 article from The Digital Journalist will give you enough exposition concerning this particular piece.

Denise Levertov (1923-1997)
From Making Peace

News Report, September 1991

U.S. BURIED IRAQI SOLDIERS ALIVE IN GULF

                         "What you saw was a
                         bunch of trenches with 
                         arms sticking out."
                         "Plows mounted on
                         tanks. Combat
                         earthmovers."
                         "Defiant."
                         "Buried."
                         "Carefully planned and
                         rehearsed."
                         "When we 
                         went through there wasn't 
                         anybody left."
                         "Awarded
                         Silver Star."
                         "Reporters
                         banned."
                         "Not a single
                         American killed."
                         "Bodycount
                         impossible." 
                         "For all I know, 
                         thousands, said
                         Colonel Moreno."
                         "What you 
                         saw was a bunch of 
                         buried trenches 
                         with people's 
                         arms and things 
                         sticking out."
                         "Secretary Cheney
                         made no mention."
                         "Every single American
                         was inside
                         the juggernaut
                         impervious
                         to small-arms
                         fire." "I know 
                         burying people
                         like that sounds 
                         pretty nasty, said
                         Colonel Maggart,
                         But . . . ."
                         "His force buried
                         about six hundred
                         and fifty
                         in a thinner line
                         of trenches."
                         "People's arms 
                         sticking out."
                         "Every American
                         inside."
                         "The juggernaut."
                         "I'm not 
                         going to sacrifice 
                         the lives 
                         of my soldiers, 
                         Moreno said, it's not 
                         cost-effective."
                         "The tactic was designed 
                         to terrorize,
                         Lieutenant Colonel Hawkins
                         said, who helped
                         devise it."
                         "Schwartzkopf's staff
                         privately
                         estimated fifty to seventy
                         thousand killed
                         in the trenches."
                         "Private Joe Queen was
                         awarded
                         a Bronze Star for burying
                         trenches with his
                         earthmover."
                         "Inside
                         the juggernaut."
                         "Impervious."
                         "A lot of the guys
                         were scared, he said,
                         but I
                         enjoyed it."
                         "A bunch of 
                         trenches. People's
                         arms and things
                         sticking out."
                         "Cost-effective."

NPM: The Parrot

Madeleine L'Engle wrote more than just A Wrinkle in Time. For that matter, she also wrote more than just young adult science fiction/fantasy books. Among other things, she also published several books of poetry. Here is a piece from one of them!

The Parrot

Madeleine L'Engle (1918 - 2007)

Lovingly transcribed from The Weather of the Heart

It was better in the jungle.

There I could imitate

the sound of dawn.

I could speak with the voice

of many tongues

and even if I didn't understand

I was still, in a sense,

an interpreter.

I could call with the song

of setting stars.

I could whisper with the leaves

before rain.

It is not the cage

that prisons me.

I, who live by mimicry,

have been remade

in the image of man.

NPM: Homosexuality

Norman Bluhm & Frank O’Hara

I was asked to come up with a list of poets whose books are either missing from the library shelves or falling apart on them, and when I began thinking about 20th century poets who are underrepresented in our collection, I thought of -- of. Oh god. What's his name again?

Completely blanked out. Had to consult an anthology to remember it was Frank O'Hara I was thinking of. And, after rereading some of his work, it seems like a marvelous idea to share a poem of his today (and to better acquaint myself, in the meantime, with more than just his hit singles).

Homosexuality
Frank O'Hara (1926-1966)

So we are taking off our masks, are we, and keeping
our mouths shut? as if we'd been pierced by a glance!

The song of an old cow is not more full of judgment
than the vapors which escape one's soul when one is sick;

so I pull the shadows around me like a puff
and crinkle my eyes as if at the most exquisite moment

of a very long opera, and then we are off!
without reproach and without hope that our delicate feet

will touch the earth again, let alone "very soon."
It is the law of my own voice I shall investigate.

I start like ice, my finger to my ear, my ear
to my heart, that proud cur at the garbage can

in the rain. It's wonderful to admire oneself
with complete candor, tallying up the merits of each

of the latrines. 14th Street is drunken and credulous,
53rd tries to tremble but is too at rest. The good

love a park and the inept a railway station,
and there are the divine ones who drag themselves up

and down the lengthening shadow of an Abyssinian head
in the dust, trailing their long elegant heels of hot air

crying to confuse the brave "It's a summer day,
and I want to be wanted more than anything else in the world."