I’ve gotten into a number of conversations about this recently and I just wanted to throw my 2 cents into the ring. And the first thing I have to say is that I consider Artificial Intelligence to be a misnomer. It suggests notions of sentience and consciousness that, despite what some random and panicky Google employee might think, is never going to happen. I’m not going to go into why Algorithms ≠ Sentience and never will. That’s a rabbit hole full of quibbles and false equivalencies. It’s like arguing how many angels dance on a pin. Suffice it to say, science can’t even currently define sentience/consciousness, let alone create it “artificially”. AI is just a set of algorithms no different—and I can’t emphasize this enough—no different, practically speaking, than a pocket calculator. If you ask any calculator what 2+2 is, it will tell you. 4! My God! Artificial Intelligence! Sentience! Consciousness!
No.
Correctly answering questions is not a sign of sentience. ChatPGT is just a glorified calculator. That’s all it is. Which is why I would call it algorithmic intelligence rather than artificial intelligence. Ask ChatGPT a question and you’re asking a calculator a question. The only difference between the two comes down to the sophistication of the algorithms used and the answer given. That’s all it is. You can unplug it or take out the batteries when you get bored with it. It’s just algorithms.
Now, onto the subject of algorithmic intelligence vs. art, music and literature. It ain’t gonna happen. Here’s why: Back in 2015, AlphaGo became the first computer Go program to beat a human professional Go player without handicap on a full-sized 19×19 board. AlphaGo accomplished this feat through the use of “Deep Learning“, what developers termed a “Neural Network”. The unfortunate upshot of all this terminology, like “neural”, is that it leads one to think that developers must have created something like a brain. But that’s not what they’ve done. What they’ve done is to write elegant algorithms that mimic perceived cognitive features in biological systems—and in a very limited sense. They’re not mimicking “consciousness”. They’re mimicking, at an algorithmic level, the way biological systems are perceived to organize and analyze information. I write perceived because AI is only mimicking one aspect of a biological system ascertained through observation. Neural networks in no way define or recreate “intelligence” or “sentience”. The reason that AlphaGo could master Go is because, though the algorithms were difficult to perfect, there was a fool-proofevaluation function that defined success. Either AlphaGo won or AlphaGo lost.
Period.
The same doesn’t work for producing art, a symphony, or poetry. Algorithmic intelligence, for example, has no way to evaluate the aesthetic/emotional success or failure of a poem. Given that human beings can’t even agree on what constitutes a great poem (mostly for lack of knowledge, ability or talent) an algorithm has no hope. I’ll occasionally be asked why I obsess over a definition of great poetry and why public appeal matters. It’s because public appeal is humanity’s version of an evaluation function; and it’s most effective when it functions over time. That’s why we can say that Shakespeare, Bach, Keats, Mozart, da Vinci and Beethoven are our greatest artists and why we can say that as an objective measure (despite all the hand waving among those who continue to insist that all art is subjective and a matter of taste). A work of art’s appeal, over time, is an objective measure. It’s the only one we’ve got.
The problem for algorithmic intelligence is that genius is rare.
This means that if Algorithmic Intelligence is tasked with creating a poem, its models—the thousands and thousands of poems it can sample—are going to be almost wholly mediocre. And because algorithmic intelligence has no concept of mediocrity, has no evaluation function pertaining to the artistic accomplishment of a poem, it will, at best, “learn” how to flawlessly mimic humanity’s mediocrity. By way of example, I get sent dozens of poems over the course of a year and, with few exceptions, they are all mediocre. But what is striking is how similar the mistakes of algorithmic intelligence are to the mistakes of mediocre poets. In short, algorithmic intelligence is rapidly “getting better at “learning to mimic” mediocre poets, and that’s because mediocre poets and algorithmic intelligence are both drawing from the same well. (Interestingly, part of what makes mediocre artists mediocre is they lack the ability to accurately evaluate their own output, called the Dunning Kruger Effect.)
You might object that if it takes time for humans to identify and agree on great art, then expect the same from algorithmic intelligence. The problem is that the next one hundred years are going to expose algorithmic intelligence to vastly more mediocre art, music and literature—along with a hundred years worth of confused human evaluation. That’s only going to make algorithmic intelligence even better at mimicking mediocre poets and readers. Ultimately, the mirror that AI will hold up to humanity, in terms of art, is not humanity’s genius but it’s bland mediocrity. And that’s because mediocrity, with rare exception, is what humanity produces.
To summarize, the only evaluative guidance algorithmic intelligence has as regards the “success or failure” of its art is human taste. God help it.
Pity the mediocre poet, composer or artist, because that’s who algorithmic intelligence is going to put out of business.
she brings
to me the frank contagion of
an afternoon; the moon’s delirium when
the sun, too soon, goes down. I pick the panicles
of grass that dart her dress—I love
her dress. I love it the color of her hips
and love the green odor of the summer’s cuttings
at her lips; and I forget myself,
I—the smelting of ore into the bone
and tissue of an hour—am made, for an hour,
more than what I am.
she arrives
through slow intersections where
the riders come and go; she among them, opening
her umbrella into snow. she arrives.
I take her raincoat and umbrella
and where we sit before the window, the windows
outside our own show buildings from
the inside out; and here and there
the men and women like ourselves who gather
as we gather, who take wine
wineglass, cutting board and bread
before the window-lit climes of the city.
the streets thrum below us with their ebb
and flow. let’s drink to the waves
we can’t see but feel incessantly
against the window’s glass; the tide
subsiding beneath the mass of steel and concrete
façades.
don’t ask what savagery
or tenderness, what thousand lives
have brought her life and mine together. the sands
of Troy are clotted by the blood
of men, killing and killed for Helen’s beauty—
and love.
when she’s mine again
and the great ships set sail and the fire
and feast are done, the snow’s ashes descend
on the cars parked and departing. what ruins we leave
we never leave behind.
the girl,
the girl with the many-colored braids
replies: love leaves no ruins. she, barefooted,
who dances in the scarab’s eye with enameled hair
and lips. she leaps over the leaping seas.
love leaves no monuments, she says, no cold
command or shattered torsos sinking, sinking
into the desert sands.
a cracked tin pail
locked in ice beneath the barn light catches
the snow and roundabout the bottom where
the tin is welded, rust has rusted through;
and were there anyone to pick it up
the bottom, where the raindrops drum, would fall
into the mud.
the girl who dances, dances
in rusty pails and with the singing rails
of streetcars. some nights the river walks
among the signs and storefronts, and streaks
the watery roads with lampposts; the evergreens
with its twisting gray ribbons. some nights walking
along the river bank, the waters move
in leaden contemplation, darkly indifferent
to what reflects.
the girl who dances, dances
among the shock of willows and her hair
is rapturous as the water-witch. love leaves
no ruins, she says. love builds no edifice
of glass or stone but beats the drum of flesh
and bone.
let go the finch’s cry, the cry
of root and mud; the stench of earthen growth
out of the ruinous sludge, and from the soil
the berries of the spindle tree, but
the berries—colored like the girl’s lips—
are poisonous to taste or kiss. do you see
the purple shadows drip and pool beneath
the yellow birch?
She’s dancing in an orange
and yellow skirt. she won’t answer where
she goes. The rain has turned to snow; the bus
pulls out into the afterglow of brakes
and headlights.
I’ve seen her out among
the cattails, dancing in a rusty pail,
but don’t believe me. I’ll lie for beauty,
I’ll burn the city to the ground; the sands
To sheets of glass. I’ll pull the towers down,
I’ll throw the pail into the trash—the rusted pail.
The snow has turned to ash.
the sun’s still not gone down
and out the bedroom window is the laundry,
the wind billows in the sail of sleeves
and lifted backs as though the clothes and bedsheets
pulled the world after them into
the distant waters—the world’s dark waters
that edge a summer’s field with starlight. we are
ourselves our passion’s ruins. I say
To her, the downspout buckled, maybe
tomorrow I’ll replace it. I’ve waited
so long to mow that now the tall grass flounders under
the heady weight of seed.
I stand outside the store.
a bookstore looking in.
the woman walking through the door
is what it’s like in Berlin—
always wondering where she’s been.
to think that even while I’m writing,
I’m already gone;
that for a little while, delighting
here and there in song
I’ve been vanishing all along.
but,
as I was saying to her, before the iron brawling
of the streetcar interrupted us,
the yellow streetcar that follows
the preordained rails through the cobblestone streets:
but
as I was saying: let us be naked side
by side. there’s nothing better or as truthful.
let us lie together and let us lie. there’s nothing otherwise
to make sense of.
don’t try.
Patrick Gillespie | March 17th 2021
Quintet in C D. 956
Note: I continue to tweak this poem so, until I update my reading, the reading will reflect the original version.
I happened to be down at one of our “local” bookstores—this one being Books a Million. I don’t normally stop by because they don’t normally carry anything I’d be interested in, but they’re a great indicator as to what’s being read. The book store doesn’t pretend to be interested in literature. They’re strictly in it to sell; and that means knowing what’s on trend. They’re like a glorified airport bookstore. If you like those bestseller, glossy paperbacks with the cheap paper, that’s their specialty. In the fantasy section, for example, they don’t mess around. You’ll find several different collections of Tolkien and all of Christopher Tolkien’s various collections, and Game of Thrones. Sarah J Mass seems to be a hot ticket right now, but it’s hit or miss for other fantasy authors. The poetry section is a footnote, but I took pictures.
Apparently Bukowski sells well. I’d go so far as to say that, according to the popular readership, Bukowski is thegreat poet of the latter 20th century. I’ve written about Why I love Bukowski. I think what this demonstrates, above all, is that his popularity is durable. The same can’t be said for Robert Lowell, for example. He’s championed by critics like William Logan, among others, as the great poet of the post-modernists, but who reads him? I can’t remember the last time I saw a book of his in a bookstore. BAM isn’t buying. Bukowski is a story teller and connects with readers in a relatable and comprehensible way. And he has a biting sense of humor. Do I think he ranks among the greats? Maybe. If he can be, it’s not because of his skill in verse or language. He wrote lineated prose. But he arguably did it better than any other poet in the sense that readers remain affected by and interested in what he wrote. That’s also what poetry does. The poet W.S. Merwin wrote lineated prose that’s just as easy to read as Bukowski’s, but none of his books are at BAM. I find Merwin’s verse to be unmatchably generic and the content of his poetry dull as the day is long, and it looks like the general public does too. So it’s not just that Bukowski’s verse is comprehensible, but that he has something to say.
I found it interesting that there were so many copies of The Odyssey. Do people buy it because it’s the Lord of the Rings of its day? Or because it’s assigned in classrooms everywhere—and always in demand? I’m inclined to think it’s the latter. I find it hard to believe that most people, sitting at home, would say to themselves: Today I shall read The Odyssey. Feel free to disagree with me if you have some life experience in this regard. I’d be interested in hearing it. Notice the book to the right: How to be Love(d), because this pertains to the next photo:
Notice all the books by devoue and Drake/Sin (and the yellow and purple books on the left all by the same publisher). These all fall, in my opinion, under the rubric of Instapoetry. There’s probably an apt description for the content of the poetry but I’d call it a combination of Self-help, Affirmations, and you’re-not-alone–in-the-world greeting card verse. Devoue will write:
as women
everyone thinks we're fine
because makeup hides
the sleepness nights
and the tears we cry
The verse has zero (0), as in null, literary value. It’s just the mawkish poetry of affect. But, it’s what sells and what it demonstrates is that the general public is still in love with poetry and open to poetry that communicates. Full stop. The general public is emphatically not interested in the pointless obscurities that typifies too much poetry of the latter 20th century. There is a clear disconnect between what the editors at Poetry Magazine and the New England Review publish, and what the broader public wants to read. It’s been that way ever since Harriet Monroe, when she founded Poetry magazine, declared war on the popular taste in poetry. That said, I wouldn’t say that all poets should start writing instapoetic affirmations. Bukowski showed that a poet doesn’t have to write greeting card verse to engage the public. But the durable poets will be the one who can communicate and have something to say. There was also one book of Robert Frost and one of Mary Oliver. Notice TS Eliot on the right. There’s one copy of The Waste Land and several of Practical Cats. The modernist poets get at least one book each in BAM’s poetry section. Covering their bases.
There’s Oliver’s book on the right, but notice all the books by Lovelace. These all fall under the same instapoetic affirmational content as devoue’s verse. It’s strikingly similar and that’s probably why it’s popular and why BAM is stocking multiple copies:
she cries just as much when
she's completely happy
as she does when
she's utterly devastated.
(she likes to think it's enough to
water wildflower meadows.)
they may call her pathetic.
they may call her dramatic.
they may call her a baby.
but she thinks it's a blessing
to feel everything so much.
she cries just as much when
she's completely happy
as she does when
she's utterly devastated.
(she likes to think it's enough to
water wildflower meadows.)
they may call her pathetic.
they may call her dramatic.
they may call her a baby.
but she thinks it's a blessing
to feel everything so much.
The three light blue books on the left, by Shelby Leigh, are also instapoetry:
like an anchor
around my ankles
i can't escape the voice
in my head that says
you'll never beanything but nothing.
If you’re having trouble telling one poet from another, you’re not alone. I’d love your opinions, but my own is that all these poets have hit on a demand that is unquestionably aimed at and caters to a female readership. Between these books and the many Youtube bloggers also catering to the emotional seascape otherwise known as womanhood, I have a new-found respect for the tortured, emotional terrain of the female psyche.
And these books by Courtney Peppernell? I’ll give you one guess as to the kind of poetry inside:
Flowers on Your Doorstep
You deserve flowers on your doorstep
and coffee in the morning.
You deserve notes left on your dashboard
and ice cream sundaes at 3 a.m.
You deserve honesty every day
and to be kissed every hour.
You deserve to be reminded
how beautiful you are.
And if you let me,
I'll show you every day.
I promise.
This is from Pillow Talk, which is a bestseller at Amazon. If you see other multiple copies in the pictures above, books I haven’t mentioned, I’m willing to bet they’re also in the instapoetic affirmation genre.
So. This is what poetry sells. This is what the poetry section looks like at BAM. I know there are independent bookstores with more diverse selections, but how much of it do they sell? BAM wouldn’t be buying multiple copies if they weren’t selling them. I just find it interesting how clearly BAM’s poetry section demonstrates the disconnect between the poetry that sells and the poetry of the MFA and literary journals. None of the poems in any of the books above would ever, in your lifetime or mine, appear in Poetry or the New England Review. Let alone APR. I don’t want to write instapoetry,. myself, and I don’t admire instapoetry in any literary sense, but one must acknowledge that it’s offering something to readers that the vast majority of poets don’t—content that is relevant and meaningful.
One last comment. This sort of affirmational instapoetry isn’t new. Way back in 1987, a book called Emmanuel’s Book: A Manual for Living Comfortably in the Cosmos was offering strikingly similar fare. And if you go back further, Kahlil Gibran’s books and poetry are comparable. But that’s all I really have to say. You all deserve flowers on your doorstep.
How discretely she arranges
her porcelain figurines
in 18th century skirts; with cheeks
like amorous tangerines.
What if, between their thighs, beneath
the lace and filigree
there were sculpted just a touch
of incivility?
But let's discuss the weather.
The crumpets are divine.
She says: 'I baked them just this morning.
The recipe is mine.'
'I wonder if I could,' I say,
'if I were short of yeast
or flour— Could I skimp a little?
Would it matter in the least?'
'On no, my dear, leave out no detail!
The recipe's exact.
I'll know if there's been skimping but,
as mother always said—"Tact."'
Recipes | March 2nd 2023 by Me
I’m currently working on a separate poem and this one snuck its way in. Enjoy.
So I was reading an article in the New Yorker entitled The End of the English Major. Which relates the sad decline of English majors in favor of STEM. And full disclosure, despite being a writer, poet and reader of great literature, I can’t tell you how happy I am that all my daughters are STEM majors, not English majors. I have read articles in the past, explaining the benefits, to an employer, of a major in “English”, but I can’t say as I’ve found them all that compelling. If you’re an English major who has parleyed their education into something more than being a struggling author, who didn’t end up in a completely unrelated career, or who didn’t perpetuate the pyramid scheme by producing more English majors, then let me know how it’s done and why you’d recommend a degree in “English”.
Anyway.
To me, it’s the cost/benefit ratio. Given the ruinous debt incurred by a college education, what student would want to obtain a degree for which there’s little to no demand? All the various articles defending the English major essentially appeal to the intellectual and spiritual benefits. But that don’t pay the bills. Besides that, the New Yorker article devotes one paragraph to the argument that the decline is due to the emphasis on criticism and theory rather than literature itself—feminism, post-structuralism, deconstructionism, Marxism etc… (I can’t begin to name them all.)
~ Others, though, suggest that the humanities’ loss of cultural capital has been hastened by the path of humanities scholarship itself. One theory is that the critical practices have become too specialized. Once, in college, you might have studied “Mansfield Park” by looking closely at its form, references, style, and special marks of authorial genius—the way Vladimir Nabokov famously taught the novel, and an intensification of the way a reader on the subway experiences the book. Now you might write a paper about how the text enacts a tension by both constructing and subtly undermining the imperial patriarchy through its descriptions of landscape. What does this have to do with how most humans read?
Certainly, any high school student with an interest in literature will no doubt come across literary criticism, the kind made incomprehensible with academese—language that will be utterly inaccessible to anyone but members of the priestly class. They might, for example, stumble across the book American Poets in the 21st Century, an all but unreadable and stultifying book full of chestnuts like these:
“Central to Spahr’s work of moving the poem away from poetry’s implicit emphasis on individuals and toward collectivities is the understanding that collectivities are often composed against a constitutive outside.” P. 144
“Morris effectively valorizes somatic experience to dispossess and repossess the language of identity. This is no hairsplitting intellectual argument…” p. 226
“As the remainder of this essay will demonstrate, the “cobbled solutions” Wheeler devised in her own attempts to invigorate poetry’s radical cultural force involve foregrounding, both formally and in her poems’ content, the contemporary “problems” of “steamroller” consumerism/commodification and of artistic assimilation so as ultimately to recast them as opportunities and resources.” p. 306
“In other poems, performivity asserts the constructed identity over the essential self when poems speak from the male voices of Casanova…” p. 58
“She tests the potentials of the work she samples in relation to their points of contact and fracture — where the palindrome meets the merry-go-round. What happens to both structures upon contact and what futurities are proposed at the point of contact?” p. 284
These examples were taken from my own review. And I ask you, what high school student, on what planet, in what universe, would be inspired to major in English having read any of this word salad—this miserably written academese by people who profess to know something about writing? If potential English majors were made to read this book first, it would be the end of English departments. (And it occurred to me that there are also schools of poetry that have gone down rabbit holes like these, paralleling criticism, but since no one reads this poetry anyways, it’s beating a dead horse.) So.
Moving on.
This whole post was begun to share a single sentence from the New Yorker article that— I don’t know. Was it some kind of performative irony? Because I tell you, I’ve reread it a dozen times and it’s completely above my pay grade. It follows in the same paragraph quoted above:
Rita Felski, whose book “Uses of Literature” is studied in Adams’s A.S.U. class, has argued that the professional practice of scholarship has become self-defeatingly disdainful of moving literary encounters. “In retrospect, much of the grand theory of the last three decades now looks like the last gasp of an Enlightenment tradition of rois philosophes persuaded that the realm of speculative thought would absolve them of the shameful ordinariness of a messy, mundane, error-prone existence,” she wrote. “Contemporary critics pride themselves on their power to disenchant.”
To which I can only say: Wut? I briefly tried to look up “rois philosophes” but, nah, forget it. I don’t know what in the hell she’s talking about. None of it. And I just think it’s supremely ironic that even the critics of the critics have made themselves incomprehensible, and then wonder why undergraduates have decided that organic chemistry and fluid physics are far easier to grasp. Do any of you understand what she said? If so, educate me.
~ The work of the text is to literalize the signifiers of the first encounter, dismantling the ideal as an idol. In this literalization, the idolatrous deception of the first moment becomes readable. The ideal will reveal itself to be an idol. Step by step, the ideal is pursued by a devouring doppelganger, tearing apart all transcendence. This de-idealization follows the path of reification, or, to invoke Augustine, the path of carnalization of the spiritual. Rhetorically, this is effected through literalization. A Sentimental Education does little more than elaborate the progressive literalization of the Annunciation.
After unloading on Modernism I felt—guilt. What boorish behavior, I said to myself. Why can’t you just get along? Why can’t you be like Edward Hirsch? He just published The Heart of American Poetry, where he writes “deeply personal readings of forty essential American poems we thought we knew… exploring how these poems have sustained his own life and how they might uplift our diverse but divided nation.” Why do I find this insufferable? How am I any less insufferable? Instead of my blog nourishing our diverse and thriving ‘community of poets‘, I oil my axe. Even here in Vermont, I pick fights with former Vermont poet laureates—and in the local paper no less. I guess I enjoy blood-letting. In the clash of arms there’s more to be learned about poetry (for me) but probably not for the vast majority of readers who prefer to simply enjoy poetry, not dispute it. Robert Frost once wrote that “No sweeter music can come to my ears than the clashofarmsovermy dead body.” Same here.
That got me thinking, why am I like this?
The answer, strictly in terms of poetry, is that I might be more like Ezra Pound than not. Pound had little patience for the generation of poets preceding him, and neither do I. I find little to admire in the poetry of the latter 20th century. Like him, for better or worse, I have opinions about how poetry should be written. For Pound, the aesthetics of Georgian poets made him grind his teeth. He struck out anything resembling it from Eliot’s The Waste Land. Britannica has the following to say of Georgian poetics:
~ …taken as a whole, much of the Georgians’ work was lifeless. It took inspiration from the countryside and nature, and in the hands of less gifted poets, the resulting poetry was diluted and middlebrow conventional verse of late Romantic character. “Georgian” came to be a pejorative term, used in a sense not intended by its progenitors: rooted in its period and looking backward rather than forward.
Pound played his part in that characterization. When Frost came to England, he said he had ‘come to the land of The Golden Treasury. That is what I came for.’ Pound referred to that same anthology as ‘that stinking sugar teat’. Pound’s objections to Georgian Poetry were both political, he bristled at their insular British imperialism, and aesthetic—what he perceived as their roots in Victorian verse and sensibility. Interestingly, when Poetry’s Harriet Monro planned the series of anthologies called Georgian Poetry, she originally meant to include poems by Frost and Pound. They were excluded at the last minute when Edward Marsh decided to keep the anthology a purely British anthology. That might have contributed to Pound’s contempt, but his aesthetic differences were nonetheless very real.
If it’s possible to set aside Pound’s antisemitism, which TS Eliot shared by the way, and Fascist collaborating; if it’s possible to consider his ambitions and inestimable generosity in isolation (to writers and poets including Joyce, Hemingway, Eliot, Yeats, and Robert Frost) then I admire him as a poet. Even if the execution of his vision was flawed, The Waste Land wouldn’t exist in its current form without him. To quote Hollis, who was referencing Hemingway, “He witnessed their wills and he loaned his own money, and encouraged in each of them a fortitude for life. ‘And in the end,” said Hemingway, “a few of them refrain from knifing him at the first opportunity.'” [p. 319, The Waste Land, A Biography of a Poem]. He had an eye for greatness in other poets and writers, and knew where to find it even when the writers themselves didn’t. Pound didn’t accomplish what he did by writing glowing encomiums. He picked fights. He made enemies. While there’s a place for those who think every poem is precious, I like the Pounds of the world. I’m of the mind, as I’ve written before, that it’s the responsibility of every generation to smash the sacred icons of the generation before. There hasn’t been enough of that in my opinion. Despite the unqualified praise that has anthologized many latter 20th century poets—they’ve produced little that holds a candle to Frost, Stevens, Eliot, Cummings, etc… Freed by an elder generation from the conventions and mannerisms of the 19th century, they turned modernism into their own mannered conventions. There are latter 20th century poets who stand out, but they aren’t, by any stretch, among the great poets.
So maybe this post is partly to further clarify what I wrote in Matthew Hollis & the death of The Waste Land. I meant, not the death of The Waste Land, but the death of the mannered and conventional poetics that grew from its example. I like and admire the modernist poets. The Waste Land itself, along with a number of other poems by Eliot, rank among the very greatest. Pound, on the other hand, was no Eliot. His Cantos fail the test of first rate poetry but, to his credit, he was truly original and was attempting a poetry equal to his vision. In my show of penitence, I decided to finally buy my own copy of the Cantos (the full text is available online). And it was this copy that spurred this post.
The book was discarded by the Chandler/Gilbert Library in Arizona. What made me feel like I ought to revisit Ezra was the due date slip. The book was only checked out once, due back on April 24th 1990. The book was printed in 1986. So, arguably, the book was only read/checked-out once during its 37 years at the library. Pound himself recognized the inaccessibility of the Cantos and worried that his poetry would be forgotten (despite Eliot’s reassurances). Inasmuch as Pound himself is integral to the story of modernist poetry, his own writings won’t be forgotten. But they may be seldom read. The same fate awaits most, if not all, of the better known poets of the latter 20th century.
I also picked up Pound’s Personæ, an original hard cover printed in 1926. More of my making amends.
There’s a rugged quality to Pound’s versification that I like, despite or because of his contradictory predilection for archaic grammar and poeticisms—thees and thous, hasts and haths, -ests and -eths. And yet it can work. I like it most of all in his poem, The Seafarer. The idiosyncrasies of Pound’s versification feel perfectly suited to the rugged and ancient Anglo-Saxon he was translating. It is, frankly, a breath of fresh air next to the generic and characterless versification of contemporary free verse. Pound left off, as he called it, the “platitudinous address to the Deity” which, some argue, was added later by a separate author. My own opinion is that the Christian moralizing of the final third are nothing like the first two thirds of the poem. They possess none of the evocative poetry but read like the self-satisfied bloviating of a third rate theologian. You can read a complete modern translation here. Pound was right to omit the final lines, in my opinion. Based on the quality of the poetry and the complete shift in tone, it’s hard to imagine that the poem, as we have it now, is by a single author. My own completely evidence-free speculation is that the original Anglo-Saxon Seafarer concluded with a possibly similar but more secular, if not ambivalent, note. The original poetry certainly would have been much better. But this was entirely inadequate to the sensibilities of some secondary author who couldn’t resist closing the poem with a pompous and aphoristic sermon—much like the prim Victorians who loved nothing better than a closing moral. If I’m correct, then the secondary author probably also touched up earlier portions of the poem. Pound was having none of it.
May I for my own self song’s truth reckon,
Journey’s jargon, how I in harsh days
Hardship endured oft.
Bitter breast-cares have I abided,
Known on my keel many a care’s hold,
And dire sea-surge, and there I oft spent
Narrow nightwatch nigh the ship’s head
While she tossed close to cliffs. Coldly afflicted,
My feet were by frost benumbed.
Chill its chains are; chafing sighs
Hew my heart round and hunger begot
Mere-weary mood. Lest man know not
That he on dry land loveliest liveth,
List how I, care-wretched, on ice-cold sea,
Weathered the winter, wretched outcast
Deprived of my kinsmen;
Hung with hard ice-flakes, where hail-scur flew,
There I heard naught save the harsh sea
And ice-cold wave, at whiles the swan cries,
Did for my games the gannet’s clamour,
Sea-fowls, loudness was for me laughter,
The mews' singing all my mead-drink.
Storms, on the stone-cliffs beaten, fell on the stern
In icy feathers; full oft the eagle screamed
With spray on his pinion.
Not any protector
May make merry man faring needy.
This he little believes, who aye in winsome life
Abides ’mid burghers some heavy business,
Wealthy and wine-flushed, how I weary oft
Must bide above brine.
Neareth nightshade, snoweth from north,
Frost froze the land, hail fell on earth then
Corn of the coldest. Nathless there knocketh now
The heart's thought that I on high streams
The salt-wavy tumult traverse alone.
Moaneth alway my mind’s lust
That I fare forth, that I afar hence
Seek out a foreign fastness.
For this there’s no mood-lofty man over earth’s midst,
Not though he be given his good, but will have in his youth greed;
Nor his deed to the daring, nor his king to the faithful
But shall have his sorrow for sea-fare
Whatever his lord will.
He hath not heart for harping, nor in ring-having
Nor winsomeness to wife, nor world's delight
Nor any whit else save the wave's slash,
Yet longing comes upon him to fare forth on the water.
Bosque taketh blossom, cometh beauty of berries,
Fields to fairness, land fares brisker,
All this admonisheth man eager of mood,
The heart turns to travel so that he then thinks
On flood-ways to be far departing.
Cuckoo calleth with gloomy crying,
He singeth summerward, bodeth sorrow,
The bitter heart's blood. Burgher knows not —
He the prosperous man — what some perform
Where wandering them widest draweth.
So that but now my heart burst from my breast-lock,
My mood ’mid the mere-flood,
Over the whale’s acre, would wander wide.
On earth’s shelter cometh oft to me,
Eager and ready, the crying lone-flyer,
Whets for the whale-path the heart irresistibly,
O'er tracks of ocean; seeing that anyhow
My lord deems to me this dead life
On loan and on land, I believe not
That any earth-weal eternal standeth
Save there be somewhat calamitous
That, ere a man’s tide go, turn it to twain.
Disease or oldness or sword-hate
Beats out the breath from doom-gripped body.
And for this, every earl whatever, for those speaking after —
Laud of the living, boasteth some last word,
That he will work ere he pass onward,
Frame on the fair earth ’gainst foes his malice,
Daring ado, ...
So that all men shall honour him after
And his laud beyond them remain ’mid the English,
Aye, for ever, a lasting life’s-blast,
Delight mid the doughty.
Days little durable,
And all arrogance of earthen riches,
There come now no kings nor Cæsars
Nor gold-giving lords like those gone.
Howe’er in mirth most magnified,
Whoe’er lived in life most lordliest,
Drear all this excellence, delights undurable!
Waneth the watch, but the world holdeth.
Tomb hideth trouble. The blade is layed low.
Earthly glory ageth and seareth.
No man at all going the earth’s gait,
But age fares against him, his face paleth,
Grey-haired he groaneth, knows gone companions,
Lordly men are to earth o’ergiven,
Nor may he then the flesh-cover, whose life ceaseth,
Nor eat the sweet nor feel the sorry,
Nor stir hand nor think in mid heart,
And though he strew the grave with gold,
His born brothers, their buried bodies
Be an unlikely treasure hoard.
Pound’s translation, or transliteration, can’t be beat. His archaisms somehow perfectly capture the flavor of the source. In some ways the poem itself reminds me of Tennyson’s Ulysses. Maybe the original Anglo-Saxon, if there was an original, ended somewhat like Tennyson’s poem. “No man at all going the earth’s gait, But age fares against him,” Then better for the seafarer to return to the sea, to strive, to dream and to perish in his “self song’s truth” than in a grave strewn with gold. There is no treasure hoard but to live life to the fullest. Maybe I’ll write that ending myself.
So I was just reading this article The husband-and-wife forgers who fooled the art market — and made millions, and thinking to myself: there’s no greater historian or critic than the forger. In order to produce the kind of forgery that can fool anyone but a chemist, one has to be greater expert and historian than any of the experts and historians examining your forgery. Not being an artist, I can only marginally imagine what goes into producing a convincing fake: what colors were available; how they were produced; brush strokes, the thickness of the application, the canvass itself, how it’s aged, etc… Literary forger happens too. the Britannica discusses literary forgery here. It’s not just a matter of imitating the poet or writer’s style, but one has to also (as with art forgeries) use the right paper and ink. My sense, reading the entry in Britannica, that if one is going to forge Steinbeck, for example, the smart money is on forging correspondence rather than a short story or novel. The reasons are obvious. It takes far less artistic competence to forge a letter than to forge a literary work. To judge by the success of art forgeries, it’s apparently easier to forge art than literature. Then again, a far more mundane explanation might be that there’s far less money in forging poetry or novels.
There have also been musical forgeries. You can find a discussion of that here. And I’m frankly disappointed that there aren’t more musical forgeries. That said, there are white hat forgers and black hat forgers. The white hat forgers are the ones like Robert Levin and Timothy Jones, who are so knowledgeable of Mozart’s composition that they can “forge” completions of Mozart’s incomplete works. And then there’s Rudolph Lutz. He goes a step further by creating entire compositions, from the ground up, in the style of JS Bach. Lutz’s understanding of Bach’s compositional technique is astonishing. But it’s more than that. Lutz composes. He has the knowledge and he possesses the compositional genius to make music out of that knowledge. As an example: Cantata 145. The original first movement is missing, so what did Lutz do? He wrote an instrumental introduction in the style of Bach. You can watch it here. Not only that, but Lutz also wrote an entire Cantata in the style of Bach, and it’s incredible. You can listen to that here.
There was the black hat forgery of Haydn’s piano sonatas that were so good they fooled the “great” quote-unquote Haydn historian Robbins Landon, who (when I was an 18 year old and naïve idealist) told me that the only reason he wrote his mammoth Haydn biographies was for the money. I kid you not. “Why, for the money! he said.” The forgeries also fooled the great pianist Paul Badura-Skoda. You can listen to Badura-Skoda playing them on Youtube: Hob XVI:2a – Keyboard Sonata No. 21; Hob XVI:2b – Keyboard Sonata No. 22 ; Hob XVI:2g – Keyboard Sonata No. 26; Hob XVI:2d – Keyboard Sonata No. 24; Hob XVI:2e – Keyboard Sonata No. 25; Hob XVI:2c – Keyboard Sonata No. 23. (Sadly, you won’t find these on Spotify because the whole affair probably embarrassed Badura-Skoda.) None of these sonatas are by Haydn but they’re very good. When I first heard them I thought they were oddly redolent of CPE Bach, but I didn’t put too much thought into it after that. Haydn was a great admirer of CPE Bach. Haydn, like Mozart, kept a catalog of the music he had written. In the case of these sonatas, he had written down four measure incipits (the theme on which each sonata was written). The sonatas were lost and only the incipits remained. So, all the modern forger had to do was to write sonatas, in Haydn’s style, based on Haydn’s own themes. I personally think they’re pretty good. I have no trouble listening to them and enjoying them. Even knowing they’re rank forgeries, I include them in my Haydn playlists. They fit right in. The most famous musical forgery, which really was a forgery intended to fool the recipient, was Franz Xaver Süssmayr completion of Mozart’s Requiem. Mozart died before completing the Requiem. In need of the money, Mozart’s wife commissioned Mozart’s hapless student, Franz Xaver Süssmayr, to complete the Requiem. Pity poor Süssmayr, a composer who Mozart once characterized as clueless as a duck in the thunderstorm, having to forge the music of one of the greatest composers who ever lived. In all honesty, and given his limited skill set, he did okay.
I’ve dabbled in forgeries myself. I understand how poets write. I see how they think and how they use language, similes, metaphor and imagery. I’m good at that. One of my “white hat” forgeries would be Sunday, which is not meant to fool someone into thinking it’s by Wallace Stevens, but imitates his habits of thought. It’s meant to be, in its way, an answer to his. Another would be Ulysses in Burlington Vermont, which riffs on Tennyson. I did, once, forge Shakespeare. I did such a good job that I was banned from the Shaksper Listserv (this would have been in the 90s). I typed the anonymous The Wisdome of Doctor Dodypoll “into the internet” and, because the devil whispered in my ear, I added a touch of “Shakespeare”. I’m an easy mark for the devil. For years, this version of Doctor Dodypoll could be found on the internet. Even when I wrote to websites telling them that they had reposted the forgery of a con artist, they didn’t believe me. Can you spot me?
Leander. My Lord, he fears that you will be angry with him.
Alphonso. You play the villain: wherefore should he fear?
I only proved her virtues for his sake,
And now you talk of anger. Aye me wretch,
That ever I should live to be thus shamed!
Alberdure. Madame, I swear the Lady is my love;
Therefore your highness cannot charge my father
With any wrong to your high worth of her.
Constantine. Sister, you see we utterly mistake
The kind and princely dealing of the Duke:
Therefore without more ceremonious doubts
Lets reconfirm the contract and his love.
Katherine. I warrant you my Lord – the Duke – dissembles.
It is not love doth speak, for such strong terms
Hath ever love. Dear Sister, do but note
The fruit tree giveth not that is not pruned
For nature teacheth us th’extravagance
Of outward show doth sap the inward stock
In substance and of worth. It is love
That like the gentle drop of rain speaks not
Its name unto the earth yet calls from forth
The ground the weary seed. (Nor yet the voice
Of angels can amaze the knotted bud
As doth a single drop of rain from heaven.)
And so true love should do, for that speaks not
That does in deeds what words may never do.
Alphonso. Here on my knees, at the alter of those feet,
I offer up in pure and sacred breath
The true speech of my heart and heart itself.
Require no more if thou be princely born.
And not of rocks or ruthless tigers bred.
Katherine. My Lord, I kindly cry you mercy now,
Ashamed that you should injure your estate
To kneel to me; and vow before these Lords
To make you all amends you can desire.
Flores. Madame, in admiration of your grace
And princely wisdom, and to gratify
The long wished joy done to my Lord the Duke,
I here present your highness with this cup,
Wrought admirably by th’art of spirits,
Of substance fair, more rich than earthly gems,
Whose value no man’s judgment can esteem.
Alphonso. Flores, I’ll interrupt the Duchess thanks
And for the present thou hast given to her
To strengthen her consent to my desires,
I recompense thee with a free release
Of all offenses twixt thyself and me.
Flores. I humbly thank your excellence.
Katherine. But where is now unkind Earl Lassinbergh,
That injures his fair love and makes her wear
This worthless garland? Come, Sir, make amends,
Or we will here award you worthy penance.
Lassinbergh. Madame, since her departure I have done
More hearty penance than heart could wish,
And vow hereafter to live ever hers.
Katherine. Then let us cast aside these forlorn wreaths,
And with our better fortunes change our habits.
Unfortunately for me, my forgeries have not made me a millionaire. Or maybe that’s a good thing. Looking at my Dodypoll forgery after 30 years, older and wiser, I know I could do better. The syntax wouldn’t fool a real Elizabethan/Shakespearean scholar, but now I’m betting I could. My only regret is that my forgery isn’t better. One of the best ways to learn how to write poetry is to imitate, and in truth it’s how most poets start out anyways—whether they know it or not.
The other question that forgeries bring up, and that others have discussed elsewhere, is if a forgery is good enough to fool the experts, then doesn’t that make it a work of art? If someone were to forge Mozart’s 28th piano concerto, and fool the world’s musicologists, wouldn’t that make the piano concerto as great an accomplishment as the 27th? The same question was asked of the Haydn forgeries. What does it mean to be a sonata by Haydn? Why should we treasure one and not the other? What, in truth, makes a work of art valuable? Getting back to the original article from CNN, why should Wolfgang Beltracchi’s forgeries be considered works of art? Shouldn’t they be? Isn’t the art of forgery an art in and of itself? Why not a Wolfgang Beltracchi exhibition a hundred years from now? Consider Salvator Mundi by Leonardo daVinci. Question Mark.
Most believe it to be by daVinci, but others don’t.
~ The British art historian Charles Hope dismissed the attribution to Leonardo entirely in a January 2020 analysis of the painting’s quality and provenance. He doubted that Leonardo would have painted a work where the eyes were not level and the drapery undistorted by a crystal orb. He added, “The picture itself is a ruin, with the face much restored to make it reminiscent of the Mona Lisa.” Hope condemned the National Gallery’s involvement in Simon’s “astute” marketing campaign. ~Wikipedia Feb 15th 2023
Before it was identified as possibly being by da Vinci, it was bought for $1,175. After being claimed as a Da Vinci (and being “touched/cleaned up”), it eventually made the rounds until it sold at Christie’s in New York on 15 November 2017 for $450,312,500. That’s right. You read that right. The same painting went from being worth just over a thousand dollars to almost half a billion. ‘But it’s a da Vinci!’ you say. But it’s also the same painting that was bought for just over a thousand dollars. What are you really paying for? The name or the art? The answer is obviously—the name. The same is undoubtedly true of the Haydn forgeries. They may be quite good, musically, and might do Haydn no shame, but they’re not “a Haydn”. Could you imagine if poetry sold like art? I’ve often thought that I should offer to sell my individual poems, written by me, by hand, on something like a canvass (or on the best paper money can buy). And framed. Should I? They won’t be cheap. There will only be a limited number. They will be “a Gillespie”—the poetry of the poet written in his own hand. Make me an offer because, you know what? They’re going to be valuable. I’m not famous now, but I will be. Whether that happens when I’m alive or dead is a whole other matter. Bet on dead (if you’re the betting kind).
When somebody bothers to forge my poetry, then I’ll have made it.
I’m still reading, at my slow pace, Hollis’s book The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem, which gets mixed reviews (from me). Hollis spends at least half, if not more, of Part I discussing Ezra Pound and his poetry. And yes, Pound’s editing was essential to the development of The Waste Land, but Hollis’s discussion of Pound fails to elucidate his editorial process or, really, The Waste Land itself. Hollis seems to assume that discussing Pound and his poetry is enough, but it’s not. One could start the book on Page 219 (Part II of the book), where Hollis actually begins his “biography” of the poem, and the book wouldn’t horribly suffer. The first 218 pages are largely scene setting and, of that, the same could have possibly been accomplished with a third as many pages. We don’t need to know how much Eliot paid for rent, how many times the water swept over the estuaries of Bosham Channel, what Virginia thought of Vivien, or who attended this or that boozy dinner party.
But here’s what really struck me about the book (and I in no way dispute The Waste Land’s greatness), it reads less like a centenary celebration of the poem and more like an unwitting elegy to the era. When I read Pound’s poetry, especially his poetry, and the development of the modernist aesthetic, it all strikes me as tired and exhausted. We’ve lived in the fallout of the modernists all our lives. And sure, Pound wrote a handful of anthologizable poems, but so did any number of serviceable poets in the centuries prior to Pound. Pound was nothing exceptional in that respect. And yes, Pound was an original poet. His Cantos were original. His poetic ideas were original. But originality, as the 20th century has amply demonstrated, isn’t enough. By no stretch of the imagination are the Cantos a first rate poetic achievement. They’re the uneven product of a troubled visionary. There are moments of rigor and beauty, but also the banal masked by inaccessibility.
We’re almost a quarter of the way through the 21st century and modern poetry is still largely 20th century poetry—and it’s exhausted. One senses a public desperate for poets to move on, to let go of the 20th century and its facile conflation of “difficulty” with originality, depth and artistic worth. Think of Rupi Kauer’s poetry. Think of it as minimalist poetry—as if all the junk and excess of 20th century poetry had finally been jettisoned from the living room. And think of her incredible success! Consider how strange that Mary Oliver’s poetry, the most successful and widely read of the latter 20th century, still needs defending while John Ashbery’s poetry, with only a fraction of the readership, is already published in the Library of America. While he was still writing! The difference is that Oliver didn’t write the “difficult” poetry that is still consistently favored by poets, academics and critics. As the New Yorker puts it:
~ By any measure, Oliver is a distinguished and important poet. She published her first collection, “No Voyage and Other Poems,” in 1963, when she was twenty-eight; “American Primitive,” her fourth full-length book, won the Pulitzer Prize, in 1984, and “New and Selected Poems” won the National Book Award, in 1992. Still, perhaps because she writes about old-fashioned subjects—nature, beauty, and, worst of all, God—she has not been taken seriously by most poetry critics. None of her books has received a full-length review in the Times. In the Times’ capsule review of “Why I Wake Early” (2004), the nicest adjective the writer, Stephen Burt, could come up with for her work was “earnest.” What Mary Oliver’s Critics Don’t Understand
The difference is that the editors (and poets) who decide these things have a stake in exalting the aesthetics of the last hundred years (themselves being acolytes of modernism and its various offshoots—Acmeism, Imagism, Free verse, Futurism, Objectivism, Dada, Postmodernism, Surrealism). But one gets the feeling that they’re at war with 21st century readers. Readers read poets like Oliver and Kauer in the millions all while being subtly (and not so subtly) told that the great poets are the “difficult” poets—poets they have little interest in reading. There’s a clear disconnect. That’s okay if you’re an artist, have a canvass to sell, and can auction it off to the 1%. If success is defined as living off your creative work, then artists optionally don’t have to care whether the general public likes their work. They only have to appeal to a narrow coterie of critics, taste-makers and the auction house. Poets don’t have that luxury.
But really, getting back to The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem— It’s the exhaustion. It’s how Pound and Eliot’s novel ideas, to me, sound spent and worn out. The last hundred years have run their innovations into the ground—along with being misunderstood. When poets lacked the talent to make their subject matter new, they turned from content to medium. “Make it new” meant hiding mediocrity behind a veneer of “difficulty”—the pointless obscurities, the superficial complexities in verse and language, the vapid “profundity” signaled by abstruse and obscure allusions. Joyce recognized the academic appeal of “difficulty” when he wrote that Finnegan’s Wake would “keep the critics busy for 300 years.” He perfectly understood his audience. Think of academia as a secret society and academics as the high Priests of inaccessible 20th century texts. Only through them, their books and their classes, can the keys to the obscure text be found. Is it any wonder they champion these texts? Do you want the keys to Pound’s Cantos? Then how about A Companion to the Cantos by Carroll F. Terrell, Pound’s Cantos Declassified by Philip Furia, A Guide to the Cantos of Ezra Pound, Revised Edition, by William Cookson, etc… Without their keys the Cantos are inaccessible to even the most sophisticated reader. They would have to speak multiple languages and simultaneously be familiar with extensive biographical trivia concerning Pound’s life and times. But it’s in the interest of a variety of editors, critics, and poets to give the impression that literature is great when and because it’s difficult. It’s their livelihood after all. But one wonders when the 20th century will end for poetry? Maybe we’ll know when it no longer feels necessary to write New Yorker articles defending a poet who was the most successful of her generation from critics championing poets who remain among the least successful of their generation.
you should know,
I only meant to recite
a poem of love and gratitude,
but seeing you tonight?
forgive the weather
that pinches buds into cries
of burst leaves—for the runoff
between April’s thighs.
sudden weather
by me
February 1st 2021
Alongside all my other projects, I’m working on pulling together a collection of erotic haiku and poems. Thought I’d post some along the way. I want to write one erotic poem for each week of the year—many already written. This is part of an effort to gradually collect all my writings in one place. These for my belovèd muse, Erato, the muse of the erotic, poetry and lyric poetry.
As I edit North of Autumn, I thought I’d put all the novel’s poems in one place. I previously posted them as I wrote them. North of Autumn is written in the same universe as Tiny House Big Mountain. The latter is on its way to being published by Raw Earth Ink. I also added readings of the poems. Reading the poems is my favorite part, but also what I’m never satisfied with. Now, having them all together, I want to write more hymn meter. Also (adding this after having published the post) I didn’t include the poem Haute Couture, which I wrote for the novel but decided not to use.
Whatever rakes the attic floor,
There won't be any ghost;
And if there's scratching at your door,
A gust of leaves at most.
Though I may whisper my good-byes,
Who hears the Thrush's song,
Who's seen which way the Raven flies
Will never stay for long.
I'll have crossed the fresh-laid snow
And left no trace behind;
The summers that I used to know
Will since have slipped my mind.
P.S.
Life is itself enough to scare
The living half to death,
No need for supernatural fare
To steal away our breath.
P.S. - Hymn #7
Each element best mends itself
When human beings have erred—
Metal is with metal welded
And clay with clay repaired
But tell me when the last word's spoken—
If this is how we end it—
Tell me when the heart is broken
What element will mend it?
Broken
The morning glories may mistake
Whatever wall they try
And in their slow mistaking take
A window for the sky.
They press against the glass and reason
They touch the celestial sphere
(Above Earth’s evanescent season
Divinity is near).
How strange and unaccountable
Is heaven to these flowers—
My indoors unpronounceable
And foreign to their hours.
As if I were a deity
They watch me come and go,
Their guileless spontaneity
More God-like than they know.
These flowers searching the sidereal
For something like perfection
Might almost witness the ethereal
Yet miss their own reflection.
Hymn #9 - The Morning Glories
You mostly needn’t guess
(Or second guess) the season,
You know it more or less:
You know it by the spider
Fattened on the addled flies.
They crowd September’s cider.
And if the weather’s terse
And fitful then it’s likely
April; yet suppose this verse
Is buried under snow?
Your guess is good as mine.
Vermont. You never know.
Every year it’s touch and go.
If despite your hurry
You pause just long enough
To momentarily query
The verses here and there,
You next may ask yourself
If poems aren’t everywhere?—
If maybe all along
(And even by a sidewalk)
There wasn’t always song?
And though that may be true,
It’s true because all poetry
Is truthfully in you.
Two Sidewalk Poems
Cosima Lia Tilden
Died Dec 15 1893
in þe 73d
yr of her age.
Here lies a piece of Earth
That for a little while
Was all my joy & worth
Heaven in her smile
A world of love & mirth
All was ours in a brief square mile.
Forgive me if I'm worse for wear.
There's nothing I've to show
For writing poetry here and there.
One should take care, I know—
The ant instructs us patiently—
The winter will be long—
But where would summer's evenings be
Without the cricket's song?
Hymn #14 - Fables
Odysseus, wily navigator, you
Who have endured a thousand harborless sorrows,
I too have suffered.
I, being sent to launder
Your mistress’s apparel in the river
Or often, by myself, to bring from orchards
A desired olive, fig or grape, was also
Betrayed by those you’ve slain—made by them
A slave to slaves—my vessel desecrated
My lading mired and diminished, sorted
With weeds and brackish waters—yet for that
Condemned.
Odysseus, wily navigator—
Tell him, your minstrel with the wine stained fingers
Who sings of wayward tides, of witches, Gods
And far-flung isles, that I was also lost
Longing for home who had no home to search for;
And tell your songster in your rage you snared
My sisters by one rope between a pillar
And dome; and that we were together lifted,
Each beside the other, nooses round
Our necks until our feet no longer touched
The earth—the knots tight as a luthier’s string.
Tell your songster, though he sings of you
To tell of the twelve girls who were like
Thrushes that spread their wings to fly at last
But could not. Though struggling, we only breathed
To take another dying breath—our agony
Your pleasure.
Tell him: ‘Sing of girls, of slaves
To slaves, who twitched a little while but not
For long; whose rags were left behind, bone broken
And creaking in the winds of Ithaca.”
Tell him that we waited to be lain
Among the corpses we ourselves had carried
From the blood-soaked hall.
So long as sings your minstrel,
Odysseus, so long will fly from us
The last syllable of our breath: that far
From Ithaca, cries of murder, bloodshed
And vengeance—where the grass at evening shivers
In sea-spray and the noiseless spider sifts
The wind—was seen a startled thrush that cried out,
Took flight above the drumming waters, even
Above the dissolution of the air,
Into the spreading fingers of the Milky Way.
Ithaca
The seasons do not tabulate
The yearly gross and net,
And neither do they contemplate
What quotas go unmet.
The endless inefficiencies
Give reason to be worried
(There's no escaping winter's fees)
Yet dreams will not be hurried.
The dreary mind cannot affirm
What nature testifies—
The paltry labor of the worm
Becoming butterflies.
Hymn #8 Butterflies
I otherwise would hardly write
(These poems are hit or miss)
But here I sit, alone tonight,
Still thinking of your kiss.
Just so you know, a storm came through;
The garden is a mess.
You ought to see the honeydew.
They're floating more or less.
The melons drift from row to row,
And peas are here and there.
Don't bother asking if I know
Which vegetables are where.
But I can tell you either way
The melons are delicious,
The flesh— so cool, so sweet. To say
Much more would be seditious.
I washed the dirt from some tomatoes;
Diced and tossed them in
With several waterlogged potatoes—
(The soup's a little thin).
The weather teaches us, I guess,
What is and isn't ours—
But have I mentioned, nonetheless,
How beautiful the stars?
Thursday’s Letter Hymn # 17
I've seen the threadbare eyes of women
Their longing turned to doubt.
They pass me by like shrouds, these women,
Who've looked too deeply out.
I've watched the speechless men go by;
Their loose and tattered frames.
I've watched—beyond repair—these men
With their forgotten names.
If nothing else then know that some,
Depending where they dwell,
Would trade all heaven's angels singing
For just one kiss in hell.
Hymn #3 - Threadbare
I’m told they finally closed the bridge.
They say
It’s for the season. I don’t mind it closed.
Autumn is the time of year a tree
Will make her apron from the leaves she scatters;
And neat and tidy as a pin she’ll strew
The self-same skirt with fruits and nuts. The shame
Is when her labor’s swept into a ditch
Her summer lost to all the traffic’s coming
And going.
Were the brook to drown the bridge
As she’s been threatening to for forty years
I’d be as pleased to see it gone. And sure
I’d have to go by Hodge’s into town.
Old Hodge! Such stories as he liked to tell!
He’s since long gone but I remember how
My mother scolded him from time to time.
She’d ask him. ‘Stealing berries from your neighbor?
No fields of your own?’
‘Too shaded,’ he’d say.
And then she’d answer, ‘Cut down all those Hemlocks!
And why not plant your berries there?
‘I’d never!’
He’d answer with a wink my ways. ‘Someday
They’ll up and go all by themselves. You’ll see.’
And I being just a little girl saw how
They could and straightaway that night I dreamt
Of Hemlocks.
Just past midnight came a gust
That shook the windowpanes. I sat upright
Or dreamt I did. When one’s so young life’s anyhow
A half-remembered dream.
I looked straight out
The window where I saw the further ridge
And Hodge’s Hemlocks quaking top to bottom.
I slipped from bed and tip-toed to the sill
And leaned with nose and elbows. There was not
The slightest breeze and yet the Hemlocks teetered
And tottered down the ridge the way we used to
Before electric came—when all we had
Was balancing a candle in one hand
And the other out before us all the same.
They slipped into the hollow; not just Hemlock,
But birch and Sugar Maple followed.
They swayed into my dooryard just as though
They’d been there all along. Next there was a tapping
As of a bony finger at the window
As might a neighbor come by casually
To say ‘Hello’. And what with all their reeling
And almost falling down, there were everywhere
Acorns, pine cones, twigs and whirligigs
And apples that swung like rusty bells whose tongues
Had since gone dry and shriveled.
What was I?
Six? Seven? I thought nothing more than straight
Undo the latch and open up the window.
I meant to let them in and in they came—
The sprung and rickety articulation,
The lean, long-fingered limbs. They combed and lifted
My hair, and poked and plucked and pinched my nightgown
(And by my nightgown picked me up). I held
My blanket sailing round me as I spun
From limb to limb. Their plaint timbers groaned
And popped as though the ocean rolled beneath them.
Their roots like prying thumbs dismantled obstacles:
They sent the stones from stone walls tumbling down
And knocked the stooks out of their rows and columns.
Sure as I stand and talk to you today
I still can feel the ribbing tips of sticks
Like fingertips, the sticking scent of pine,
The papery slough of the birch and wild vine
Against the skin. They took me from the dooryard
Into the wooded valley where the brook
Runs leisurely; where oftentimes I’d look
For Marigold and Summersweet. You might say
The child taking home the buds of May—
The firstlings of the season—was no different
Than were the woods returned to take the child
Straight from her house into the wild. By rights
It’s just the same.
They set me barefoot
On the leaf and needle covered floor.
I turned a little circle as I pulled
My blanket into something like a hood
(As if to hide). The scent of petrichor
Was in the air. I peeked; they gawked at me.
They stood like giants stooping low as if
To better see the girl they’d snatched away
(Tiny as I was). And then it seemed
That they’d decided. First to do was take
My blanket. You would hardly think a Thornapple
Could be so delicate and yet it was.
And then the others took to prodding me
Until I’d lifted up my arms and stretched them straight
To either side. They circled me like tailors,
I in their fitting room.
You’ll want to know
Just what the forest wanted. To tell the truth,
I know as little now as then. The best
I ever do is simply tell the story—
How if there were a spider’s web between
The aspen’s limbs, a birch would twirl it away:
She’d wind a yarn to weave into my braids
With Fleabane’s petals at my shoulder blades;
How when the Willow brought the cattail’s leaf
The Popple made me wristlets and a sash;
And as I waited came the Cherry Tree
To daub my lips with Hobble Bush (Witch-Hobble
Its hereabouts called). To think that they would stain
A girl’s lips with that!
You might have thought
The late September’s wind had riled them—splayed
A hundred limbs into a thousand fingers
Grasping at their leaves before they fell,
But this was no haphazard storm or season
For soon as they had daubed my lips and cheeks
They made me sandals for my feet—tied with cords
Of knotted grass—and lastly wove a crown
Of honeysuckle vine and the silk of Thistledown.
A train of dragonflies attended me
With ruby wings and emerald eyes—they circled
As if I were the Fearie Queen and they
My courtiers. Then the forest made no sound
Apart from here and there the leaf, the stick or fruit
That fell or struck the ground.
I’ve since been told
That old marble, the moon, went tumbling down;
Hodge’s jenny jumped the neighbor’s fence
And quarreled with the goose. The wind went nibbling
At every door and window so bedeviling
The weather vane that wakened ghosts ran riot
Knowing neither which way to heaven nor which
To hell. Their cold and bristling exhalations
Struck all they touched with frost, and passing by
Turned raincoats inside out. Shutters banged
And barn doors howled on swung and worried hinges;
Roof shingles clamored for a hold. The owl
Swallowed the mouse—the whiskers first and then
The whip of tail. Its yellow eyes surveyed
The farm yard’s squalor as the cat went dripping
Like licorice through the split and missing teeth
Of hemlock planks. That was the night to close
The bulkhead lest the cellar’s belly fill
With leaves and rain. Some thought the dish and spoon
Might finally run away and others, with
The mortise cracking in the attic, thought
The house elves, who steal from our kitchens,
Tapped back in place the oaken pegs worked loose
By the wind and weather. They’re the elves who snatch
A tea-leaf from the cupboard, so little
That you or I would never notice, steeped
Where dewdrops gather on the rosebud’s lip—
So slight a cup!—a hummingbird in turn
Might rob the petal if they’re quick enough.
I’ve seen it done. But none went out that night
Who needn’t go. There was only just
Myself, a wide-eyed girl, who danced with Dogwood,
Larch and Sugar Maple. I was passed
From each to each with little pirouettes.
They lightly held my hand above my head;
And while I spun I lifted up the hem
Of my pajamas just the way a Lady
Might hold the corner of her gown while dancing.
It airily tumbled as I hopped and skipped.
My heels made spirals, my toes made ringlets, round
And round I went. How grown and ladylike
I felt! I nodded graciously and bowed
And curtsied. They kept their rugged rhythm.
They thumped their hollow trunks and clapped their sticks
And with their sticks made melodies.
The forest,
Had there been anyone to wander by,
Would have seemed to them to bend and sway
According to the weather. A gale
Of leaves and then another just before
The lightning crackled in the understory
And stood my hair on end. The dancing faltered.
I lifted my pajamas to my knees
And scurried to my blanket. Here and there
A raindrop stamped the earth with a flowering splash
Of dust and water. Then, as if decided
To pay no mind, a Honey-locust nudged me
To dance some more. But just like that the lightning
Struck like a thistle’s lash across the sky
And turned the bowl of water upside down.
The rain fell down in sheets.
‘No!’ I cried.
‘No! Take me home!’ The forest pricked and pinched me.
‘Let me go!’ I cried.
I tried to hide.
I pulled my blanket tightly round my shoulders
And would have run away but stumbled—
The rolling acorns bruised my heels and needles
Poked between my toes. ‘I want to go—!“
But then stopped short of crying ‘—home!’. An Oak tree
Appeared, its hollow like a yawning mouth,
The vines of wild grape among its roots
As though the old Oak trailed an ancient beard.
The woods made way until the great tree stood giant-like
Above me. I held my blanket to my eyes
When with the thumb and finger of its branches
It picked me up by my pajamas (pinched
Between my shoulder blades). I kicked and flailed
Above its gaping hollow when straightaway
It dropped me. Down I fell into the maw
And down into the endless dark, falling and falling—
Myself a piece of autumn.
I closed my eyes
At first; but feeling only weightlessness
I slowly opened them again. I saw
The tiniest light that seemed both far away
And close enough to touch. All else forgotten,
I reached. I almost touched before a moth
Took flight. It fluttered round me, through my fingers,
Flew away and back again before
I’d cupped my hands. And just as moths will do
It zigzagged fitfully until it landed.
How beautiful it was! The moth shown through
And through with light. Another fluttered round me
And then another. If I fell or floated
I couldn’t say. I turned and tumbled slowly
And held my hands out as the moths glittered, faery-like,
Between my fingers and then dragonflies
And even leaves, all lighted like the moths,
Joined me. I was like a little planet
And they the stars accompanying me through darkness—
The endless night.
And then I cried aloud!
I landed on my bed! The comforter
And pillows burst. The air above was filled
With feathers just as if the moths, the dragonflies
And leaves had all along been angels. They’d scattered,
As suddenly perplexed as I was.
Little
By little I began to hear again
The household sounds of open windows.
The pop and stutter of their hinges. The storm
Had passed me by. I watched the ghostly curtains
That neither came nor went. They moved in moonlight
And moonlight glittered on the floor. I went
Barefooted where the rainfall pooled and drew
A chair behind me.
Still not tall enough,
I stood on tip-toes once again to reach
The window latch. A trailing gusts of rain
Confused the glass. I thought I saw the Hemlocks,
If only through the momentary blur.
I thought they bobbed and sunk into the earth
Once more.
Needles were between my toes
And there were acorns in my bed. I picked
A cocklebur out of my sheets and here
And there were petals slipping from my hair.
Into the WoodsAs told by Mrs. Agnus Merryweather of Brookway, Vermont
I’ve seen them sometimes out alone,
Out walking roads too late
For any business but their own—
Lost to what they contemplate.
I’ve seen as they have seen: the grim,
The few remaining rags
Of autumn strung from the black limb,
How every hour lags.
I too, without a place to go
And nothing to my name,
Have wandered through the rain and snow
And would have said the same:
There’s only guessing at what may
Or may not come tomorrow,
But I have seen enough today
To know the taste of sorrow.
Hymn #7 - Sorrow
I know better than to say:
Give no thought to when.
There’s nothing to wish the ache away,
But that we’ll meet again.
Give to the intervening hours
As much as absence takes
But nothing more—our love is ours;
And the bonds affection makes.
To you alone the keys
Who, friend and lover, part;
To you the secret codices
And chambers of my heart.
Ellie’s HymnAs written in the notebooks of Ellie Tydan, mother of Zoē Tydan.
PoemShape 