About 10 years ago, Ed Skoog introduced me to the poetry of Douglas Stewart, which I love. I probably love it with extra insistence because nobody else seems to know about it — I’m a proselytizer. But I’d love it regardless. Stewart was like a 20th-century John Clare of the Australian bush, if Clare had possessed an “Audenesque air of jaunty reasonableness.” Read the sonnet “Yarrangobilly” and know that Stewart wrote hundreds of poems like it.
“the greatest blog comment in the history of the Internet”
Cody Walker emailed me to say that while April 27, 2016 might have seemed uneventful, “it’ll be remembered as the date of the greatest blog comment in the history of the Internet.” He pasted in a link to “Iambic Pentameter Has Nothing to Do with Your Heart,” an essay on the Kenyon Review’s web site in which Derek Mong disputes the claim that English verse goes boom-BOOM because the human heart does, too.
The piece generated a variety of comments, both yea and nay, but Cody was clearly referring to a long post by Richard Kenney, who argues persuasively that the heartbeat’s relationship to the iamb is neither causal nor coincidental. Impressively, he manages to do this without equivocating or simply splitting the difference. What makes it the greatest blog comment ever, though, is that it’s both the most extravagantly learned and the least smug. Kenney’s interest in the subject is absolute; his interest in scoring points is non-existent.
The editors of Poetry Northwest were so impressed that they reprinted the comment as its own essay. If you’d like to read it in its natural habitat (i.e. surrounded by other, less-temperate comments), scroll down from the original Kenyon Review post. The entire discussion is inside baseball, but I recommend it. It’s happening at the intersection of art, science, and philosophy, and it also contains an invaluable lesson in how to offer a lesson. Sometimes, when I’m about to post something online — some carefully fashioned bon mots or 400-word tantrum — I’ll pause and ask myself what Mr. Rogers would think of it. April 27, 2016 was a beautiful day in the neighborhood.
“Whole skies of stars / are a lesser wonder”
Here’s another poem that needs more readers. Glad I can help with that.
Lit Windows
By Glyn Maxwell
When I go home again,
when I know so many homes, but I mean the home
with the longest vowel, when I wander the old realm,
I pass them on the lane,
boys turned to men,
so I turn back to a boy
to pass them saying nothing. For it’s death
to be where one is not, where every breath
is a heaving of the oars
alone at sea.
I could grow white and old
and I will, I am well aware, grow white and old
looking through lit windows of the world
for people in their rooms;
for the blue, cold
light of a TV on
in an empty room . . . girl at a light so bright
she’s silhouette . . . a man who hangs his coat
and stands quite still . . . a mother
agrees with someone
over cake . . . the frosted light
of suppertime, of bathtime, of sex.
I don’t have what I have from reading books
but stopping by your homes
to see these sights
and wondering forever
who is someone else? Who on earth
are all these people to have known this with,
this world? Whole skies of stars
are a lesser wonder
than all your lights at evening,
all your lives. When the lights go out I’m there,
moving on. When it’s dark the stars are clear,
their immaterial eyes
believing, disbelieving.
“Nothing was God that is not here.”
A student introduced me to this poem by Robert Francis, and I can’t get over it. The simplicity of its vocabulary is such a lovely statement of faith in its premise — to glimpse the eternal, look to common things.
Nothing Is Far
Though I have never caught the word
Of God from any calling bird,
I hear all that the ancients heard.
Though I have seen no deity
Enter or leave a twilit tree,
I see all that the seers see.
A common stone can still reveal
Something not stone, not seen, yet real.
What may a common stone conceal?
Nothing is far that once was near.
Nothing is hid that once was clear.
Nothing was God that is not here.
Here is the bird, the tree, the stone.
Here in the sun I sit alone
Between the known and the unknown.
Heaney’s Republic
One of the things I love about the massive digital archive maintained by the Poetry Foundation is the little link at the bottom of each page: “Report a problem with this poem.” I suspect they hear from their share of smartasses — “It’s insufficiently outward-looking!” — but that strikes me as a small price to pay for the copy-editing help that poetry readers can provide. It’s one thing to locate a poem that you love online. It’s another, much rarer thing to locate an accurately transcribed version of it.
That was, I now realize, a rather frivolous introduction to a profound poem. Without further throat-clearing, here’s an error-free transcription of Seamus Heaney’s “From the Republic of Conscience,” because the internet needed one:
From the Republic of Conscience
I
When I landed in the republic of conscience
it was so noiseless when the engines stopped
I could hear a curlew high above the runway.
At immigration the clerk was an old man
who produced a wallet from his homespun coat
and showed me a photograph of my grandfather.
No porter. No interpreter. No taxi.
You carried what you had to and very soon
your symptoms of creeping privilege disappeared.
II
Fog is a dreaded omen there but lightning
spells universal good and parents hang
swaddled infants in trees during thunderstorms.
Salt is their precious mineral. And seashells
are held to the ear during births and funerals.
The base of all inks and pigments is seawater.
Their sacred symbol is a stylized boat.
The sail is an ear, the mast a sloping pen,
the hull a mouth-shape, the keel an open eye.
At their inauguration, public leaders
must swear to uphold unwritten law and weep
to atone for their presumption to hold office –
and to affirm their faith that all life sprang
from salt in tears which the sky-god wept
after he dreamt his solitude was endless.
III
I came back from that frugal republic
with my two arms the one length, the customs woman
having insisted my allowance was myself.
The old man rose and gazed into my face
and said that was official recognition
that I was now a dual citizen.
He therefore desired me when I got home
to consider myself a representative
and to speak on their behalf in my own tongue.
Their embassies, he said, were everywhere
but operated independently
and no ambassador would ever be relieved.
Auden: mind out of time
Something the worst poets and the best poets have in common: you suspect you’re spending more time reading their work than they spent writing it. I’ve been dipping again into W.H. Auden’s Collected, and I’ll be damned. His facility is just unbelievable. Every poem (every poem written before 1950, anyway) is such a technical marvel, and so seemingly effortless. Every stanza delivers its good-natured gut punch, no less potent for arriving right on schedule.
He’s also, to my ear, the most permanently contemporary of poets, even when he’s packing his poems with expiration-dated references. Lines like these, from the seriocomic “Letter to Lord Byron,” are going to feel timely for a long time:
We’ve grown, you see, a lot more democratic,
And Fortune’s ladder is for all to climb;
Carnegie on this point was most emphatic.
A humble grandfather is not a crime,
At least, if father made enough in time!
To-day, thank God, we’ve got no snobbish feeling
Against the more efficient modes of stealing.
The poem is 159 of those stanzas, all apparently written between July and October of 1936. Where did this man come from, and how can I get there?
“How can you dare?”
Kevin Durkin posted this Anne Stevenson poem on Facebook the other day, and I was startled by the mixed reaction to it.
The Victory
I thought you were my victory
though you cut me like a knife
when I brought you out of my body
into your life.
Tiny antagonist, gory,
blue as a bruise. The stains
of your cloud of glory
bled from my veins.
How can you dare, blind thing,
blank insect eyes?
You barb the air. You sting
with bladed cries.
Snail. Scary knot of desires.
Hungry snarl. Small son.
Why do I have to love you?
How have you won?
Many commenters loved it, but some were put off — saying that as parents they couldn’t relate, that the poem’s grotesque figurative language (“insect,” “snail”) was dehumanizing, that perhaps this was the product of postpartum depression. Granted, I haven’t given birth, but I think that’s what I most admire about the poem: in writing about a physical experience I’ll never have, Stevenson has described my profoundest emotional experience. No other poem I know of so fully comprehends the vulnerability, the split-openness, the terrifying powerlessness that a new parent feels in the presence of the baby. Who is this tyrant who somehow holds entire human hearts in his tiny, incompetent hands?
Yep. That’s definitely William Stafford’s granddaughter.
In his wonderful memoir Early Morning: Remembering My Father, William Stafford, Kim Stafford reproduces a conversation he had with his 11-year-old daughter, Rosemarie, shortly after her grandfather’s death:
“Rosie,” I said, “you haven’t cried, except that one time. You seem pretty happy.”
“Dad,” she said, “I have my feelings. I just don’t show them the way others do.” We looked out across the horizons of the dunes, and then the waves.
“I don’t have to hold on to Bill,” she said, “and I don’t have to let him go. He’s part of me.” A breeze rustled the dune grass. Distant, the breakers smacked down like a drum.
“There was something in his face,” she said, “no camera ever got—it was his calm. I have his calm.” She leaned toward me. “And nobody really dies. There are just five people: Sad, Shy, Curious, Angry, and Happy. Everybody comes out of those five, and then goes back. I’m not even a girl, really—I’m just kind of a mind-ship….”
“with sadder joy but steadier elation”
I just read a hand-wringing Wall Street Journal op-ed entitled “The Suicide of the Liberal Arts.” It opens — because such articles are legally required to — with a fond anecdote about the author’s hard-nosed high school teacher, Father Alexander, who insisted that nobody “in this day and age can be called well educated who has never read The Iliad.”
This reminded me of my favorite moment from a writer’s conference I attended a couple of years ago. Derek Walcott — the Nobel Laureate famed for his modern retelling of The Odyssey — admitted to the audience that he had never read The Iliad and had no desire to: “All these guys slicing heads…”
The castle has many entrances, my friends. Here’s a Derek Walcott poem I’ve always loved:
Nearing Forty
Insomniac since four, hearing this narrow,
rigidly metred, early-rising rain
recounting, as its coolness numbs the marrow,
that I am nearing forty, nearer the weak
vision thickening to a frosted pane,
nearer the day when I may judge my work
by the bleak modesty of middle age
as a false dawn, fireless and average,
which would be just, because your life bled for
the household truth, the style past metaphor
that finds its parallel however wretched
in simple, shining lines, in pages stretched
plain as a bleaching bedsheet under a guttering
rainspout; glad for the sputter
of occasional insight,
you who foresaw
ambition as a searing meteor
will fumble a damp match and, smiling, settle
for the dry wheezing of a dented kettle,
for vision narrower than a louvre’s gap,
then, watching your leaves thin, recall how deep
prodigious cynicism plants its seed,
gauges our seasons by this year’s end rain
which, as greenhorns at school, we’d
call conventional for convectional;
or you will rise and set your lines to work
with sadder joy but steadier elation,
until the night when you can really sleep,
measuring how imagination
ebbs, conventional as any water clerk
who weighs the force of lightly falling rain,
which, as the new moon moves it, does its work
even when it seems to weep.
“I’m not afraid of dying,” you said, “just of getting hurt.”
Today someone posted a Facebook status asking friends to recommend poems about parenthood, and although there are others I’ve read more closely and taught more frequently and thought more about, the first one that leapt to mind was Anne Porter’s “For My Son Johnny.” I’m grateful for the invitation to revisit this poem of love and loss. If its last lines don’t break your heart you should probably have your heart checked.
Porter was an anomalous poet. She was born in 1911, when “Large patches of the former century / Still lay about / Like snow in April” (outdo that simile, poets) and lived to be 100, but was known for most of her life as the wife of the painter Fairfield Porter. Though she wrote poetry steadily for decades, she didn’t publish a book until she was 83. I reviewed her second collection in 2006, and it has stayed with me, obviously. Thank you, Anne, for sharing a little portion of your great gift with us.
the poet in topeka 