Maine Interlude

Maine has a gorgeous, rugged coastline. I just spent a week around Blue Hill, Maine with family, not doing much besides visiting, eating, and playing with color settings on my camera that I didn't know I had.

The seaweed there is a bright yellow-orange that reminded me of one of my favorite poets, Edna St. Vincent Millay, who came from Maine.

I shall go back again to the bleak shore

And build a little shanty on the sand

In such a way that the extremest band

Of brittle seaweed will escape my door

But by a yard or two, and nevermore

Shall I return to take you by the hand;

I shall be gone to what I understand

And happier than I ever was before.

The love that stood a moment in your eyes,

The words that lay a moment on your tongue,

Are one with all that in a moment dies,

A little under-said and over-sung;

But I shall find the sullen rocks and skies

Unchanged from what they were when I was young.

-Edna St. Vincent Millay

I imagine the coast of Maine in winter would be a bleak thing indeed. In summer, however, it's quite glorious.

It is Margaret you mourn for.

William Blake, from For Children: The Gates of Paradise

Spring and Fall

to a young child

MÁRGARÉT, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves, líke the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Áh! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh


Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:    
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

-Gerard Manley Hopkins

That time of year

Wind from the Sea, Andrew Wyeth

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth from the west;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.

-That time of year thou mayst in me behold, William Shakespeare

Turkey Pond, Andrew Wyeth

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
---Those dying generations---at their song
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unaging intellect.
 

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick...

 

-Sailing to Byzantium, William Butler Yeats

Rimbaud's Sensation

Arthur Rimbaud was a French Decadent poet who produced his best known works in his late teens and gave up creative writing before he reached 21. This recently discovered photo is of the poet, second from the right, at around 30 years of age. Known as a libertine and a restless soul, he traveled extensively before his death from cancer shortly his 37th birthday.





Sensation

On blue summer evenings, I'll go down the paths,
Getting pricked by the wheat, walking on thin grass:
Dreamer, I'll feel its freshness at my feet:
I'll let the wind bathe my bare head.

I won't speak, I won't think about anything:
But infinite love will rise in my soul;
And I'll go far, very far, as a bohemian,
Into Nature, — blessed as if with a woman.

Edna St. Vincent Millay's (and my) bleak shore

I shall go back again to the bleak shore
And build a little shanty on the sand
In such a way that the extremest band
Of brittle seaweed shall escape my door
But by a yard or two; and nevermore
Shall I return to take you by the hand.


I shall be gone to what I understand,
And happier than I ever was before.
The love that stood a moment in your eyes,
The words that lay a moment on your tongue,
Are one with all that in a moment dies,
A little under-said and over-sung.



But I shall find the sullen rocks and skies
Unchanged from what they were when I was young.

Edna St. Vincent Millay's sonnets remain favorites of mine for their dense, explosive quality that manage to retain such poise and attitude. On a bleak morning after rain, I woke up early and came to this deserted, rickity old platform to watch the clouds part. Millay's words started running through my head. Remembering a line like "I will go back again to the bleak shore" is like finding a word on the tip of your tongue--it helps verbalize what I lack words for.

Livre d'Matisse

"I do not distinguish between the construction of a book and that of a painting and I always proceed from the simple to the complex." -Henri Matisse, 1946

Le Cygne
Livre d'artiste, or Artist's Book, were common at the turn of the 20th c. in France, and Henri Matisse produced more than a dozen illustrated books in his lifetime. Lucky folks in Atlanta will be able to see some of Matisse's most successful book illustrations on display at the Museum of Art at Oglethorpe University from January 17 until May 9. This exhibition looks lovely, and I enjoy the convergence of the simple lines of the lithographs and the poetry.

Matisse especially loved poetry, and he produced dozens of drawings and etchings to illustrate the work of French poets Stephane Mallarme and Pierre Ronsard that are on view. Initially he created a 30 lithograph portfolio in 1941, but seven years later Matisse had transformed it into a 128 page volume entitled Florilege des Amours de Ronsard. Matisse's drawings accompany the lyric poetry with flowers, nudes, dancers, and music.

I wasn't familiar with this part of Matisse's ouerve, and in looking for more information, found the artist had also illustrated James Joyce's Ulysses and Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal!, which leads me down another path of exploration...

Florilege des Amours de Ronsard

Swinburne and the Sound of the Sea

Swinburne at 23 by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Poor Algy. His long, sonorous verse gets left on the bookshelf to collect dust these days in favor of, oh, basically anything else. Algernon Charles Swinburne's rhymes are soft, full of imagery and classical references, and they build slowly to a swell. They are altogether too pretty and delicate for modern verse. Not to mention, what exactly is his point? The old accusation of him valuing sound over sense raises its head like a sea monster, a chimera.

Swinburne might be the opposite of modern tastes, which expect poetry's essence to be distilled, rhyming inconsequential, with a maximum of meaning packed in a minimum of syllables. Those qualities are not in Swinburne's verse. His poems works differently upon one, in a hypnotic way, as he gradually layers image over sound over meaning so gently and repetitively you hardly know how you have been lulled into such a trance. T.S. Eliot considers Swinburne acutely in this excerpt from The Sacred Wood, where he considers the poet's diffuseness his genius as well as his flaw.

Ever since I've been here in St. Maarten, the sound of the ocean has been in my ears day in and night out. It's what had me turning to Swinburne's verse after forgetting it for years (that, and the fact that I am dismally low on reading material). His poetry sounds like the waves, and according to Wikipedia the poet did as well:

"Swinburne accompanied Bell Scott and his guests, probably including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, on a trip to Tynemouth. Scott writes in his memoirs that as they walked by the sea, Swinburne declaimed the as yet unpublished 'Hymn to Proserpine' and 'Laus Veneris' in his strange intonation, while the waves 'were running the whole length of the long level sands towards Cullercoats and sounding like far-off acclamations'."

Henry Clarke, from Selected Poems of Swinburne

Swinburne was by all accounts a strange character, arguably the first English Decadent and influenced by both de Sade and the l'art pour l'art movement. He has been accused of every sin under the sun, although some doubt the truth of the accusations. (Oscar Wilde said of Swinburne that he was "a braggart in matters of vice, who had done everything he could to convince his fellow citizens of his homosexuality and bestiality without being in the slightest degree a homosexual or a bestializer.") A small man, with bright red hair and an exceedingly nervous temperment, Swinburne indulged himself until he collapsed and on the brink of death was taken under strict care, from which he never left in his remaining years.

If you read aloud his tribute to Baudelaire upon the his death, you can hear the soft and diffuse sound that rules his versification:

Shall I strew on thee rose or rue or laurel,
Brother, on this that was the veil of thee?
Or quiet sea-flower moulded by the sea,
Or simplest growth of meadow-sweet or sorrel,
Such as the summer-sleepy Dryads weave,
Waked up by snow-soft sudden rains at eve?
Or wilt thou rather, as on earth before,
Half-faded fiery blossoms, pale with heat
And full of bitter summer, but more sweet
To thee than gleanings of a northern shore
Trod by no tropic feet?

II
For always thee the fervid languid glories
Allured of heavier suns in mightier skies;
Thine ears knew all the wandering watery sighs
Where the sea sobs round Lesbian promontories,
The barren kiss of piteous wave to wave
That knows not where is that Leucadian grave
Which hides too deep the supreme head of song.
Ah, salt and sterile as her kisses were,
The wild sea winds her and the green gulfs bear
Hither and thither, and vex and work her wrong,
Blind gods that cannot spare.

Rest here.

Keats and Autumn

I saw Bright Star yesterday, a very romantic film about Romantic poet John Keats. Liberties may have been taken with the poet's love life, but the quiet, well shot movie is a beautiful period piece nonethless. Ben Wihshaw certainly looks the part of the 25 year old Romantic poet dying of consumption. There are some gorgeous shots of the English countryside. However the chief virtue of Bright Star must be the way it slowly takes you through some of Keat's verse.

It skipped the poem that I hoped to hear; his Ode to Autumn being very perfect for this time of year.

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness!
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o'erbrimmed their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers;
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, -
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing, and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

j

Eyes big love crumbs

i like my body when it is with your body. It is so quite new a thing. Muscles better and nerves more. i like your body. i like what it does, i like its hows. i like to feel the spine of your body and its bones, and the trembling -firm-smooth ness and which i will again and again and again kiss, i like kissing this and that of you, i like, slowly stroking the, shocking fuzz of your electric fur, and what-is-it comes over parting flesh ... And eyes big love-crumbs, and possibly i like the thrill of under me you so quite new ee cummings

Byron Updated

The BBC tries to make Lord Byron cool in this new video, as if he needed any help. The King Blues update 'mad, bad, and dangerous to know' Byron with a punk rock twist.

Change for the better? Eh...

Vanished Poet Rosemary Tonks

Rosemary Tonks, like the name Blinky Palermo, is a name I wish I had, or at least had invented. Tonks isn't the familiar name it once was, when the bearer was a promising writer in London in the 1960s. Now her name echoes like the ghost she has become of her own life. (It's a rather ungainly thud of an echo, but still.)

Tonks wrote two slim volumes of verse that you'd be hard pressed to find copies of. They are out of print and will not be republished. The author has forbidden her publisher to reprint it. Her writing reminds me of Edna St. Vincent Millay's in its tone and themes, but with a much updated form and sensibility.

Tonks now lives (the rumours go) in a shack in a garden in the countryside, where she accepts no visitors and she does not write. It's been so for 30+ years. There are rumours that she joined a Christian cult, which you might imagine from some of her writing was a major life change. This spirituality forbids her to write, and is given as the reason why she will not allow her work to be reprinted. Her struggle reminds me of Gerard Manley Hopkin's struggle between his work as a priest and his passion for writing. I worship art more than anything, and I only wish we had more from both authors. Born in 1932, she's seems on course to die as much of a mystery as she is now.

But I salvaged a poem for you here, from The Iliad of Broken Verses. It's something I quite enjoyed reading, and if you like, I can send you more.

Actually, I decided to include a second that I also liked very much.

THE SOFAS, FOGS, AND CINEMAS

I have lived it , and lived it,
My nervous, luxury civilization,
My sugar-loving nerves have battered me to pieces.

…Their idea of literature is hopeless.
Make them drink their own poetry!
Let them eat their gross novel, full of mud.

It’s quiet; just the fresh, chilly weather…and he
Gets up from his dead bedroom, and comes in here
And digs himself into the sofa.
He stays there up to two hours in the hole – and talks
-- Straight into the large subjects, he faces up to everything
It’s……damnably depressing.
(That great lavatory coat…the cigarillo burning
In the little dish…And when he calls out: "Ha!"
Madness! – you no longer possess your own furniture.)

On my bad days (and I’m being broken
At this very moment) I speak of my ambitions…and he
Becomes intensely gloomy, with the look of something jugged,
Morose, sour, mouldering away, with lockjaw….

I grow coaser: and more modern (I, who am driven mad
By my ideas; who go nowhere;
Who dare not leave my frontdoor, lest an idea…)
All right. I admit everything, everything!

Oh yes, the opera (Ah, but the cinema)
He particularly enjoys it, enjoys it horribly, when someone’s ill
At the last minute; and they specially fly in
A new, gigantic, Dutch soprano. He wants to help her
With her arias. Old goat! Blasphemer!
He wants to help her with her arias!

No, I…go to the cinema,
I particularly like it when the fog is thick, the street
Is like a hole in an old coat, and the light is brown as laudanum,
…the fogs! the fogs! The cinemas
Where the criminal shadow-literature flickers over our faces,
The screen is spread out like a thundercloud – that bangs
And splashes you with acid…or lies derelict, with lighted waters in it,
And in the silence, drips and crackles – taciturn, luxurious.
…The drugged and battered Philistines
Are all around you in the auditorium…

And he…is somewhere else, in his dead bedroom clothes,
He wants to make me think his thoughts
And they will be enormous, dull – (just the sort
To kep away from).
…when I see that cigarillo, when I see it…smoking
And he wants to face the international situation…
Lunatic rages! Blackness! Suffocation!

-- All this sitting about in cafés to calm down
Simply wears me out. And their idea of literature!
The idiotic cut of stanzas; the novels, full up, gross.

I have lived it, and I know too much.
My café-nerves are breaking me
With black, exhausting information.

Story Of A Hotel Room

Thinking we were safe-insanity!
We went in to make love. All the same
Idiots to trust the little hotel bedroom.
Then in the gloom...
...And who does not know that pair of shutters
With all the awkward hook on them
All screeching whispers? Very well then, in the gloom
We set about acquiring one another
Urgently! But on a temporary basis
Only as guests-just guests of one another's senses.

But idiots to feel so safe you hold back nothing
Because the bed of cold, electric linen
Happens to be illicit...
To make love as well as that is ruinous.
Londoner, Parisian, someone should have warned us
That without permanent intentions
You have absolutely no protection
-If the act is clean, authentic, sumptuous,
The concurring deep love of the heart
Follows the naked work, profoundly moved by it.

Savage Beauty: Edna St. Vincent Millay's Life

To be a biographer must be a great thing, I for one find the lives of the writers and artists whose work I love as interesting as their work. I've been deep into Savage Beauty, Nancy Milford's biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Like other poets I love, she difficult, demanding, calculating, celebrity-mongering, brilliant poet of love affairs and bohemianism and addictions. I swear I loved her for writing before I knew she had a place between Baudelaire and Byron in the annals of poete maudit.

I followed the poet from girlhood, where she was an ambitious poet, to adulthood, when she remained an ambitious child in an aging shell. The fairy tale Millay helped create of herself, as the little girl poet from Maine who gives voice to a generation of Jazz babies, a seductive whip of a girl sleeping with anybody whose anybody, falls apart.

Let the rest of us, she grows old. She doesn't take it well. Chronic drinking develops into addiction rather than lifestyle, and a habit for morphine steals her middle age. She becomes a hollowed out thing who could no longer write. And this she records in a notebook even as she stops writing all else. What time she wakes up, what she consumes, everything until she goes to bed.

A fascinating blog called Daily Routines pieces together how various distinguished people past and present lived. Gerard Richter woke up at 6:15 am to fix his family breakfast before starting work in his studio at 8 am. The writer Haruki Murakami for example runs marathons after working all morning. Millay in her early 50s was quite the opposite:

Chart
Miss Millay
Dec. 31, 1940

Awoke 7:30, after untroubled night. Pain less than previous day.
7:35- Urinated- no difficulty or distress
7:40- 3/8 gr. M.S. hypodermically, self-administered in left upper arm...
7:45-8- smoked cigarette (Egyptian) mouth burns from excessive smoking
8:15- Thirsty, went to the ice box for a glass of water, but no water there. Take can of beer instead which do not want. Headache, lassitude...
8:20- cigarette (Egyptian)
9:00- "
9:30- Gin Rickey (cigarette)
11:15- Gin Rickey
12:15- Martini (4 cigarettes)
12:45- 1/4 grain M.S. & cigarette
1.- Pain bad and also in lumbar region. no relief from M.S.

(M.S. is a morphine shot.)

Her devoted and charming husband Eugene took care of her like she was a little child through all this, even developing his own morphine addiction to see what she was going through by attempting to quit. After he died of lung cancer in his 50s, Edna was left alone and she kicked her morphine habit, although she continued to use prodigious amounts of alcohol and other pills. Yet she was finally beginning to write poetry again. Then, a year and half after Eugen died, she fell down the stairs of her home and broke her neck.

Friday Ravels in Review

Image via Wooster Collective

For a weekly recap, I'll start with the best: the video I made about Whole in the Wall, a street art exhibit, although I did have to correct something I said in the video by noting some great street art blogs. In second place, inspired by a discussion about Francis Bacon, I was excited to see and write about his retrospective at the Met. Then yesterday I tried to explain why the film The Queen put me off with it mix of fact and fiction.

And then a long time ago, when it was May, we touched on some Vermeer forgeries via Errol Morris's series of articles Bamboozling Ourselves. All 7 are now published, if you want to check out the full tale. I also got on my high horse about a poetry scandal in Britain. But that was long ago in May.

Now it's June, and so I expect the weather will cease and desist with this dreary, cold rain. I keep giving it stern glances out the window.

f

Scandal to Debate: National Poetry Scene

If you're British, you've been inundated by news of the Oxford Professor of Poetry. If you're American, you probably just yawned at the words. Perhaps if I had written the Professor of Poetry sex scandal you would have pricked up your ears (although after the Clinton scandal we might have become blase about lesser sex scandals). But poetry in Britain is a scandalous, lecherous business of machinations and ambition taken seriously by a surprising number of people.

What happened is this: Oxford University nominated esteemed poet Derek Walcott as Professor of Poetry, a largely honorary position with light lecture duties. Then allegations of sexual misconduct toward female students from 20+ years prior came to light (most notably in a book titled The Lecherous Professor). Anonymous letters about the allegation were sent to 100 Oxford faculty who would be voting on the professorship in a smear campaign. Amidst the scandal, Walcott stepped down from the candidacy. Whether these past allegations should have prevented Walcott from taking the position has become a contentious issue.

The saga continues: another candidate, Ruth Padel, was selected. A few days ago news broke that Padel had tipped journalists off to Walcott's allegations of sexual misconduct via email, effectively forming a part of the smear campaign against her rival. Padel resigned May 25 before officially holding office (while denying misconduct), and Oxford University is again left in a lurch. Poetry can be a dirty business!

This dirty business hides a wonderful secret: Britain is experiencing a poetic Renaissance in the public consciousness. In measurable news inches (just look at the culture section of the Guardian or the Times), British people are talking about poetry in their country more than ever. Aside from scandalous poets, a fuss has also been made over their new poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy, first woman and lesbian, the BBC is showing a series of programs examining poetry, and six new hardback editions of 20th century poetry have come out as part of an affordable line from Faber. Poetry is getting attention on a national level, and, if you look at comment boards, you'll see that people honestly care about who holds the Oxford position, other candidates, and kind of role it should be.

It might be a scandal, but one that fell on receptive ears. I doubt American poets are so much more virtuous. Where are America's poetry scandals and news inches and television programs? Why aren't we talking about poetry?

Originally published in Blogcritics Magazine.

Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poet/Priest

I caught this morning morning's minion, king-
dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird -- the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

Entitled The Windhover, you might, if you haven't read Gerard Manley Hopkins before, not have seen some of the words he made up for this poem, like 'sillion.' The meter too is unique to Hopkins; he created his own that he called sprung rhythm. The uniqueness and innovation that characterizes his passionate verse set him aside from his contemporaries of Victorian England--it has even been said he paved the way for free verse.

He lived his life as anything but free. Hopkins (1844- 1889) was a sensitive, bright youth who did well at Oxford. He converted to Roman Catholicism in 1866 and became a Jesuit priest in 1868, when he was 24 years old. This decision set the tone of his unhappy life, which was a struggle to repress his poetic and (homo?)sexual urges. Taking on the life of a Jesuit, Hopkins traveled to many part of England and finally Dublin, Ireland to teach, where he found himself friendless, unrespected, and ill at ease. These years led to his so-called terrible sonnets, which express great personal anguish.

His artistic dilemma only exacerbated his unhappiness (today we might call it manic depression), for he was a devout man. Hopkins felt that to publish his poetry would be too egoistic for a Jesuit priest, and not to publish would limit his poetic ability. He lived a divided life. He burned much of his early poetry, and stopped writing poetry later in life. Aside from a few odd periodicals, he was never published. Instead of poetry, he began to fill journals of incredible prosody and imagery, as well as wrote for more practical, religious purposes. Yet to the end of his life he remained both a devout Christian and a devoted writer. One might say of his poetry, as he writes in God's Grandeur:

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil.

Poetry ala Emily Dickinson for your Wednesday

I cannot live with you by Emily Dickinson (1830–86)

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 broken;
A newer Sèvres 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 keep apart,
You there, I here,
With just the door ajar
That oceans are,
And prayer,
And that pale sustenance,
Despair!

Ravels in Review Friday

Maybe it was the confluence of Friday the 13th and Valentine's Day, but posts this week veered from sweetly feminine to strongly feminist. Or maybe it was the full moon and hormones. You be the judge.

We went from (egads!) love poems, to an art salon, which, by the way, proved to be quite enjoyable, to a mini-bio of portrait painter Louise-Elisabeth Vigee-Le Brun, who success at the turn of the 19th c. was unprecedented. From Le Brun's Rococo paintings of women in big hats, we skipped forward in time to a fashion week rif, in which some new designs looked rather like Le Brun's paintings, and all this led to the feminist 'fabrics' of painter Nancy Friedmann.

In a gender-neutral moment, I wrote yesterday about BECA's program for emerging artists and how they are supporting it with this amazing $5 raffle. It's a great prize for a good cause, so check it out.

What's next on the agenda? Possibly some L.E.S. gallery reporting and a theater review. Stay tuned.

Love Poems (It is Valentine's Day after all)

I never knew until this morning
That Manhattan could be pink and blue
Or how much I love you, asleep
Deep in those closed eyes
Is your dream of pink treetops, Chagall visions?
Are we floating through the sky with a goat?
Is it as silent and white and pure
As I feel in my waking dream of you?
I wonder if Eve, on the first morning of creation,
Had an inkling of the way she could rip
the fabric of dreams.


Green is my love
Green like the blades of grass in Spring
Warlike wounds to the soles of my feet
Pricks to the red red exterior of my beating
Is green love so warlike, so prickly?
I know a childhood rhyme about a zebra.
What’s green and red all over, lover?

A love trembling, a quaking soul,
Heart's red drips on new grass
A lover who finds Spring comes early.

There are no trees in my garden.
Grass has been cut, hedges pruned.
Attacked by love, I lack strength.
I fall to green grass and look up,
Up to the stars and sky,
But I can't see—branches hang over
And shadows shelter the ground.
A tree has grown in my garden.

It grew unmolested and unmolesting,
Until faintly, I fell.

Soho Poetry Reading and its After-effects

Standing on a stool with papers in hand, the young poet declaims visions. The crowded back room of the Soho bar softly stirs fruit around sangria glasses, as he heaps polysyllabic words on their ears. The warmth and the crowd dull the senses a bit.

This was my night last nigh; a quick bike ride in the suddenly descended chill, and then crammed into a small barrel of a room to be shot at by local wordsmiths.

I didn't catch much. With all three of the readings I heard, the imagery obscured the train of thought, as if they ambitiously wished to express everything, rather than one thing. 'Poetry reading' sounds stuffy. On the contrary, it was familiar and relaxed, even if the deluge of verbal images stirred the heart without reaching the intellect. The energy of the live performance was a treat that somehow left me tracing the words of other poets around the inside of my head.

Is this the best way to experience poetry? Poetry takes one another life when it is read aloud and its musical quality predominates. Yet one--or I, at least--can't understand it as well as I can by sitting in silence with a poem and reading it again and again.

Yet I was reminded of a favorite poet of mine, who I've not read in many months, Edna St. Vincent Millay. The tone of her structured, explosive sonnets number her among my favorites (if I could do such a thing as pick favorites). Please allow me to present, for your reading pleasure, Ms. Millays' sonnet XLI in Sonnets From an Ungrafted Tree (1923), and allow me to fantasize she is reading it aloud at a Greenwich village speakeasy:

I, being born a woman and distressed
By all the needs and notions of my kind,
Am urged by your propinquity to find
Your person fair, and feel a certain zest
To bear your body's weight upon my breast:
So subtly is the fume of life designed,
To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind,
And leave me once again undone, possessed.
Think not for this, however, the poor treason
Of my stout blood against my staggering brain,
I shall remember you with love, or season
My scorn wtih pity, - let me make it plain:
I find this frenzy insufficient reason
For conversation when we meet again.

Unfinished and Unread Books

Lately all these arts and culture posts have been artsy in a visual way. That's fine in itself, except it's a symptom of a greater malady. And no, not being sick of hearing about the presidential election. It's that I can't dig my teeth into any new book. True, I could be to blame. I did try to read up on medieval history and found my enthusiasm waned quickly. There were no pictures. But I also took out a collection of short stories by Russian author Isaac Babel, whose style is excellent and subjects are humorous and folksy. He has a great short story, Guy de Maupassant, and it inspired me to go for the whole oeuvre at once. Sigh...bad idea.

I went to the New York Public library online. It's hard to search their catalogs, and I ended up almost ordering a dozen old favorites. However, the point is that I want new contemporary fiction. After my Milan Kundera phase, I want a new pet author. And I do not want this to became a fall of Dostoevsky or a winter of Proust. Dear god, I want to get through the winter without committing suicide. Classics thought they may be, my mind doesn't seem to be up for a challenge.

So I went to Borders looking for a cure. Tragic. The books they put on those shelves did not inspire me to read, but to finish my novel in a hurry, while the general reading public has no taste. Maybe then my project would survive on the turbulent waters of publishing.

What else has fallen beside the wayside? Poetry. I love the 17th century British poets, Langston Hughes, Edna St. Vincent-Millay, and of course Lord Byron. Lately, nothing has moved me.

Any suggestions to stir me out of this apathy? Anything? I'm on the library website now...