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POEM: Steven Spender’s “The Truly Great”

24 April 2013

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THE TRULY GREAT

I think continually of those who were truly great.
Who, from the womb, remembered the soul’s history
Through corridors of light, where the hours are suns,
Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition
Was that their lips, still touched with fire,
Should tell of the Spirit, clothed from head to foot in song.
And who hoarded from the Spring branches
The desires falling across their bodies like blossoms.

What is precious, is never to forget
The essential delight of the blood drawn from ageless springs
Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth.
Never to deny its pleasure in the morning simple light
Nor its grave evening demand for love.
Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother
With noise and fog, the flowering of the spirit.

Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields,
See how these names are fêted by the waving grass
And by the streamers of white cloud
And whispers of wind in the listening sky.
The names of those who in their lives fought for life,
Who wore at their hearts the fire’s centre.
Born of the sun, they travelled a short while toward the sun
And left the vivid air signed with their honor.

—Stephen Spender

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For Valentine’s Day: Joanna Klink’s “I Would Remain by Night with You”

14 February 2013

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I WOULD REMAIN BY NIGHT WITH YOU

 

I would remain by night with you

who, having held me once, wrapped everything I knew

into my sleeping body’s hold and held fast and stayed.

You shuttled in sleep against me and away, not sleeping,

beached and exhausted by wine and rushes from

another life whose body my body meant to alter.

But I am wayfaring and recently wrecked;

I understand the cost of pulling free from what once loved you.

I would remain by night with you, if the night is clear enough

to see by, and the wind light enough to draw the stars

in the skin’s skies open, and the waves you sensed

through the dress in the wind are real, and only mine.

 

—Joanna Klink

Picture by J. Lou.

POEM: Sylvia Plath’s “Words”

13 February 2013

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WORDS

Axes
After whose stroke the wood rings,
And the echoes!
Echoes travelling
Off from the centre like horses.

The sap
Wells like tears, like the
Water striving
To re-establish its mirror
Over the rock

That drops and turns,
A white skull,
Eaten by weedy greens.
Years later I
Encounter them on the road—

Words dry and riderless,
The indefatigable hoof-taps.
While
From the bottom of the pool, fixed stars
Govern a life.

—Sylvia Plath

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POEM: Emily Dickinson’s [458]

8 January 2013

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[458]

Like Eyes that looked on Wastes—
Incredulous of Ought
But blank—and steady Wilderness—
Diversified by Night—

Just Infinities of Nought—
As far as it could see—
So looked the face I looked upon—
So looked itself—on Me—

I offered it no Help—
Because the Cause was Mine—
The Misery a Compact
As hopeless—as divine—

Neither—would be absolved—
Neither would be a Queen—
Without the Other—Therefore—
We perish—tho’ We reign—

 
—Emily Dickinson

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Robin Robertson’s “The Fishermen’s Farewell”

4 January 2013

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After several weeks of quiet, Robertson’s poem is just the place for the PACK to rile again. I hope everyone had a happy round of holidays.

I find this piece a moving (‘enchanting’ seems too buoyant an adjective) meditation on the nature of itinerancy, and, perhaps following, a poem couched in the conflict of weight, of sylph and earth. Robertson’s first two couplets are consonance-heavy (‘foam-flecked’ and ‘blue banners’ and ‘whipping west’), and my association of that stylistic choice with fourteenth century conventions (in, say, “Piers Plowman”), lends the piece an historical weight; to my taste, this is complimented by the mysterious facelessness of the fishermen, who aspire to be ‘rumor[s],’ ‘smoke-walkers.’ For all their association with the sea and with the insubstantial, the fishermen are heavy here, locked in land. This elemental conflict is marked pointedly in the eighth stanza, where ‘Their houses, heeled over in the sand [. . .] become ‘ruins,’ ‘cairn for kites’: the land-bound leg kicks up in ‘heeling,’ and the cairn is counterpoint to kite in three ways: as flying toy; as memory of spinnaker; as the drifting bird of prey, herself half-pilgrim on any ground.

Robertson’s use of cretic feet like ‘Callanish’ and ‘Dunnottar’ is especially poignant to this elemental end: the fishermen arrive from the sea fresh with puissance, live in abeyance on land, and then return to the ocean with renewed verve; the world of “The Fishermen’s Farewell,” then, occupies the breath between stresses. ‘[D]own by the quay/past empty pots, unmended nets, and boats[,]‘ the fishermen find themselves in a different drink, but wager on that partial conduit to sea nonetheless. I wonder: have seals as symbols ever seemed as grave and wise as this?

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POEM: Ted Hughes’ “The Horses”

22 October 2012

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THE HORSES

I climbed through woods in the hour-before-dawn dark.
Evil air, a frost-making stillness,

Not a leaf, not a bird—
A world cast in frost. I came out above the wood

Where my breath left tortuous statues in the iron light.
But the valleys were draining the darkness

Till the mooring—blackening dregs of the brightening grey—
Halved the sky ahead. And I saw the horses:

Huge in the dense grey—ten together—
Megalith-still. They breathed, making no move,

with draped manes and tilted hind-hooves,
Making no sound.

I passed: not one snorted or jerked its head.
Grey silent fragments

Of a grey silent world.

I listened in emptiness on the moor-ridge.
The curlew’s tear turned its edge on the silence.

Slowly detail leafed from the darkness. Then the sun
Orange, red, red erupted

Silently, and splitting to its core tore and flung cloud,
Shook the gulf open, showed blue,

And the big planets hanging—
I turned

Stumbling in the fever of a dream, down towards
The dark woods, from the kindling tops,

And came to the horses.
There, still they stood,
But now steaming and glistening under the flow of light,

Their draped stone manes, their tilted hind-hooves
Stirring under a thaw while all around them

The frost showed its fires. But still they made no sound.
Not one snorted or stamped,

Their hung heads patient as the horizons,
High over valleys in the red levelling rays—

In din of crowded streets, going among the years, the faces,
May I still meet my memory in so lonely a place

Between the streams and red clouds, hearing the curlews,
Hearing the horizons endure.

—Ted Hughes

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POEM: George Oppen’s “1930′s”

2 August 2012

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1930′s

                         I

Thus
Hides the
Parts—the prudery
Of Frigidaire, of
Soda-jerking—

Thus
Above the
Plane of lunch, of wives,
Removes itself

(As soda-jerking from
The private act
Of
Cracking eggs);
Big-Business.

                         II

The knowledge not of sorrow, you were saying, but of boredom,
Is of—aside from reading speaking smoking—
Of what Maude Blessingbourne it was, wished to know when, having risen,
“Approached the window as if to see what really was going on”;
And saw rain falling, in the distance more slowly,
The road clear from her past the window-glass—
Of the world, weather-swept, with which one shares the century.

—George Oppen

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Kay Ryan’s “New Rooms”

15 July 2012

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I’ve always been a bit bemused by Kay Ryan’s ascension into rarefied literary territory; it may be that the poems are too monic, or that, in that monism, they reside largely on the surface of things. Even having read a good part of The Best of It, I resigned myself to a shrug, thinking that, if nothing else, the poems have a decency and poise about them that is worthwhile.

Happily, two new poems by Ryan in Poetry have reinvigorated by interest: “Mister Time” and “New Rooms.” If I had to mark one difference between the composition of “New Rooms” (for example) and my general conception of Ryan’s monism, I’d say it has to do with artifice—per Charles Bernstein’s “The Artifice of Absorption,” ‘meaning [beyond] the exclusively recuperable elements of language’ (13). The purport of “New Rooms” is quite interesting in itself—that the mind is caught between ambience and a desire to ‘set up shop’—and the largeness of its supposition must contrast to Ryan’s trademark short-lined stanza. Also, there’s something strangely shabby about the mind’s ‘old rooms . . . tack[ed] up like an interior tent,’ insofar as one thinks of the mind as a place of electric activity, ideation, &c. And here (to use the parlance of the embattled Russian Formalists) is the poem’s most glaring estrangement:

     Oh but
the new holes
aren’t where
the windows
went.

I love this turn: I wonder immediately whether the mind has casements that shift upon shifts in environment or understanding; whether the ‘windows’ can accord to the head’s physical outlets, like the eyes and ears; but most because there’s a real muddying of whether the mind makes vistas or operates within other organs’ vista-making, and how drastically those vistas might change. And, truly, there is something darling about the domesticity brought to this quandary by ‘old rooms,’ ‘tack,’ ‘tent,’ and even ‘convenience.’

Yet, most importantly (at least for my taste) there’s redolence in the combine of language and form here that speaks directly to artifice, at least inasmuch as I connect the call to the act of making with an imaginative movement that wants to follow that making; there’s no spoor in a poem that could be mistook for a grocery list or a dashed-off post-it note.

You haven’t escaped me yet, Kay Ryan.