"How the Pope Is Chosen"

I’ve been reading “How the Pope Is Chosen” by James Tate, a poem in which one of my clear-headed creative writing students perceived “metaphors.” Hmm . . . Certain aspects of the poem certainly drop shadows we would expect cast from other shapes. Pope selection is orchestrated in terms of poodle selection:

If a Pope’s hair is allowed to grow unchecked,

it becomes extremely long and twists

into long strands that look like ropes [. . .]

Popes are very intelligent.

There are three different sizes.

The poodle, the juvenile delinquent and the rugged western hero can all stand in for the Pope as director Tate checks the lighting and tapes off marks on the stage.

For me, however, the poem stands in for and calls our attention to a certain kind of language at once nostalgic, because we’ve grown up with it, and ridiculous, because we’ve grown beyond it. We are lulled to some other psychological state by rhetoric so reassuring that Highlights Magazine should take note:

growing up to become a Pope is a lot of fun.

All the time their bodies are becoming bigger and stranger,

but sometimes things make them unhappy.

And the poem, for all of its finely honed humorous barbs, grows bigger and stranger and more tonally complex. The same lips that slurp bowls of cream attract black flies. This is no vendetta against Catholicism or The American Kennel Club, even if their shared pomp is brought into question. The poem is ultimately about the joy and futility of making meaning.

[G.F.A.]

"Xantha Street"

"Xantha Street" is what gets me.  Kees has the "angels rise" but it's "on page 289" and even though this is done "splendidly" and "to Heaven", nevertheless "the evening still comes on."  

I go back to that idea again and again of the odd detail or the minor or mundane particular that in a moment takes over the whole scene.  Roland Barthes described this as the punctum and Mieke Bal as the navel, among others.  

"The climate of murder hastens newer weeds" and death's all around, you're "frantic, but proud of penmanship.  Beasts howl outside; / Authorities, however, keep the pavements clean." 

What's that slide that takes place in existence from what's taken to be important to what's not so that what's not entirely trumps the other and then becomes what is?  See page 289.  Feel the evening come on.  Note the penmanship and pavement.  Ponder the bellybutton and laugh, or get the point.  Your own point as you see it, a Barthian punctum amidst the studium.  -bbc 


 

"The Smiles of the Bathers"

"The Smiles of the Bathers"

I’ve been reading Weldon Kees’ poem, “The Smiles of the Bathers,” and thinking about the line, “Water and wind and flight, remembered words and the act of love." It’s a list with seven stressed syllables. Out of context, and divorced from its perfect pulse, it reads a bit too primal, as if perhaps the poet has allowed himself to be carried too far away from the twentieth century’s grit and tight, sidewalk pivot by bloated universals. But Kees is better than that. The above list is neither – could never be – the poem’s opening or closing line. Instead, it’s the poem’s central metaphor. I think we know, or at least intuit, that any list has a tendency toward litany, invocation and prayer when included in a poem. The string of concepts, however, has to be considered together and, thus, constitutes a type of metaphor.

Kees frames all of the above as “perfect and private things, walling us in” with their “imperfect and public ending.” They are “interruptions.” And the bathers, lovers, scholars and pilots from the first four lines, all solid, tax-paying citizens of the above twentieth century, cannot bank on momentary smiles. They, ironically, cannot even bank on death’s ultimate interruption, for there is “No death for [them.] [They] are 

involved.”

                    - G.F.A.

Self, Variations

Whitman’s expansive self recalls for me what people tell me about atman and Brahman in Hinduism and confirm him as a mystic, in a certain sense.  His “mysticism” is based in “empirical” description but a phenomenon under his description isn’t “just there.”  It’s there as we’ve seen it and experienced it and felt it.  It’s there as it’s run through our brains and been spit out as particular words.  Letting words do their work is simultaneously letting our brains do their work – that’s the entire brain system / body, from head to toe and back again.

I need Whitman’s expansive empirical mysticism, or something like it, from time to time, perhaps often.  However, there can be a disconnect, a bit of the pie in the sky, and this is where I relate sometimes more with some portions of Ashbery, where we have the expanded sense of self but now drastically more finite.  I’ll never get over the first words of his I read years back, the opening of his Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975), opening poem,

            I tried each thing, only some were immortal and free.
            Elsewhere we are sitting in a place where sunlight
            Filters down, a little at a time,
            Waiting for someone to come.  Harsh words are spoken….

            (From J.A., “As One Put Drunk into the Packet-Boat”)

We might start with the air of Icarus before he gets too far, before the emergency, and before a potentially fatal fall and end up sitting right where we are, waiting, in the sun, filtering to a little spot there within eye-shot of a maple, in a squabble.

-bbc

"Love Poem Against the Spring"

I’ve been reading Marianne Boruch’s first book, View from the Gazebo, and thinking about how sentiment may very well simultaneously be the first tool in the poet’s box and the first hurdle a poet is obligated to overcome. It’s kind of the Chuck Berry riff of writing poems; it cannot be denied, but must be applied with care and timing. More specifically, I’ve been reading “Love Poem Against the Spring,” a poem that opens with lines that neither deny nor reverse sentiment:

Spring means nothing but camouflage

so we dare to say these corny things.

It’s spring once more - no irony, no high-modern cruelty. Instead, Boruch acknowledges all the existing green that any new attempt at green blends into. She acknowledges the unavoidable matrix of sentiment that consumes any new declaration of love, the “camouflage,” the “corny things.”

     She concedes spring and its purple flowers, but never denies her own discomfort: “OK, they’re cute. My hunger’s not.” I like that the speaker’s ache stays complex. She is accused of being a computer by a friend, but the calculations here are clearly the necessary (and probably futile) steps to avoid breakdown: “Perhaps the pretty air / exaggerates some things.” These concessions to sentiment nearly mask the anger. The intelligence here just exasperates the sense that the speaker, more alert and alone for defying a mindless vernal camouflage, is utterly disconnected, and by the end of the poem she has earned her take on an image common enough to be cliché but strangely effective in triplicate. She has earned her collapse into a heightened state of emotion that could be “sentiment” if decades of academic poetry workshops had not thrown sentiment out with the bathwater:

Last night I saw three couples, incredible throwbacks,

strolling into the dusk, two so giddy, they’d love anything.

I’m quiet as a brick. But for spring

this far I’d go – glad, I guess, to shed this coat. It’s you

I crave, you who gets more stunning

as we age.

                              -- G.F.A.

What Works?

I keep thinking about what works.  Always depends, of course, but there are some reliables: past reading + experience along with gentle questioning of how it feels, to begin with.  Recently I keep coming back to #132 in Complete Poems of E.D. (T.H. Johnson / Back Bay edition):  “I bring an unaccustomed wine / To lips long parching / Next to mine, / And summon them to drink; / Crackling with fever, they Essay….”  I find this trustworthy, affectively speaking.  And by the time we get to the last bit here my neurons are firing up, too.   

So as I’m reading, I’m implicitly asking Does this feel right? but also Does this contain or expand my intellectual universe?  Am I opened up and strengthened?  Or am I shut down and made even less significant than I already am?  When I get to Whitman’s assertions, I certainly feel the expanse:  “I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise, / Regardless of others, ever regardful of others, / Maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man…” (Leaves [1855] in Whitman: Poetry & Prose, Library of America).  

I have to admit that I get a little suspicious and cautious about Whitman’s optimism and romanticism at times.  Feels like we could be set up for a fall, perhaps unnecessary fall.  Still, often the risk seems worth it.  “A learner with the simplest, a teacher of the thoughtfulest, / A novice beginning experient of myriad of seasons, / Of every hue and trade and rank, of every caste and religion, / Not merely of the New World but of Africa Europe or Asia . . . . a wandering savage, / A farmer, mechanic, or artist . . . . a gentleman, sailor, lover or quaker, / A prisoner, fancy-man, rowdy, lawyer, physician or priest. / I resist anything better than my own diversity, / And breathe the air and leave plenty after me….”  

-bbc

 

Loneliness in Jersey City

“Loneliness in Jersey City”

I’ve been reading “Loneliness in Jersey City” by Wallace Stevens and thinking about metaphor’s central place when committing acts of poetry. To enter the poem we must consider its unlikely opening equation: “The deer and the dachshund are one.” It’s odd, but far from dismissible, more than passing strange. The stanza continues with a syllogism that never quite resolves: “Well, the gods grow out of the weather. / The people grow out of the weather; / The gods grow out of the people. / Encore, encore, encore les dieux . . .” I imagine Stevens fit to be tied, at the end of his rope, so to speak, stacking the world into probabilities as he did during his day gig as v.p. of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company. Nothing adds up. No foothold presents itself. This is not whimsy, but hell for a guy who wrote in “Three Academic Pieces,” (a Harvard lecture,) of the magic that can happen when metaphor bridges “things of adequate dignity.” I feel Steven’s isolation emerging as the poem goes on to surrender its street scene: its darkened steeple and its all-night immigrant serenades.

I remember a creative writing worksheet from my high school days. It was designed to help young people avoid clichéd expressions. Instead of writing “busy as a bee,” it instructed, one should invent a level of business more like, “as busy as a mustard paddle at a picnic.” I, frankly, fear the poetry that grows out of such instruction.

                               - G.F.A.