Reading poems aloud (11.21.18)

Good Monday morning all!  What a beautiful weekend we’ve had . . . inspiring!

I wanted to share some thoughts about our project for Wednesday, which, as a reminder, is simply to read poems “with effect.”  Meaning?  What I have in mind is to try getting outside our individual voices, to hear ourselves literally, and to recite poems quite literally in a different voice or different voices.  So I guess this challenge calls for a little more explanation . . .

What is “voice”?
When we speak of voice in a poem, do we mean the “speaker”?  Do we mean “persona”?  Or do we mean the breath that forms sounds (varying air pressures) that enter the acoustic meatus, vibrate the drum, then circle the cochlea, igniting electrical impulses that send signals to the brain, which then converts the sounds to intelligence and emotion?  Ha!  I think “voice” means all these things.  And each one—speaker, persona, breath—is changeable, just like a line ending or an image in a poem; that is, voice is a choice.  When we write poems, we adopt (or try) to adopt a certain voice—the “authentic” voice we think of as our true selves, the dramatic voice, the comic voice, the “poetic” voice, the lyrical voice, and so on.

Reading vs. reciting vs. singing
When poets read aloud, that is, when we “breathe out” a poem, we adopt either a stentorian voice (what I am about to impart is Wisdom) or a kind of neutral voice.  That neutral tone is our “reading” as opposed to our declaiming or recitative voice.  Even less do we sing a poem.  And when you stop to think about it, since poems originally were songs and made to be sung (lyre is the root of lyric), it’s oddly prosaic that we merely “speak” poems.  Recitation, in opera, is an intoned speaking part.  That is, it is language or lines issued not in song but also not merely as the drone of standard speech.  It’s something in between these extremes.  And this may be what we’re after on Wednesday, a kind of operatic delivery that observes or even accentuates pauses, silences, consonantal sounds, nasals, labials and so forth that are present in a line of poetry.  Still, it’s possible to sing a poem, even one that isn’t necessarily set to an identifiable melody.  To me, the difference between singing a line of poetry and reciting it operatically is just one of degree.

Voice, sound and meaning
I believe that reading a poem aloud affects not just how it sounds but how it means.  When I read a poem silently, I use a voice, to be sure, but it is my Reader’s Voice, which as I say, is relatively neutral sonically and emotionally.  One thing I’ve learned or re-learned when working on poems for Program for Jazz is how giving voice to a poem—literally—can influence my understanding of it.  I often try different voices, rhythms, timbers, resonances, articulations when reciting or singing a poem, just to experience the different ways the content can be understood.

For Wednesday
I recommend the following for this Wednesday’s session . . .

• Go through a number of your own AND others’ poems and try reading them aloud, just to get a feeling for how they each might be “mouthed.”
• Select the ones that seem most receptive to different styles rhythmically, tonally, etc. and try different tempos with these examples.
• Choose two poems that seem to you to call for different styles of delivery aloud and spend some time with each . . . Varying tempo, pitch, intonation, “force,” articulation (even mumbling a line can be an option!); in front of a mirror, watch yourself as you recite/sing.
• If you’re especially brave or curious, try recording yourself.  You will find how much recording affects delivery, how much more conscientious you are about how you say the poem!
• Bring two poems to the session prepared to deliver them outside your normal style.  (Let’s limit them to one page, if possible, please.)

See you on Wednesday!

Just call me a rhymer (11.17.18)

Well, is it about time for some rhyme?  We’ve met for poetry for a year now, but not a word about rhyme.

Doug argues that sonnets that don’t rhyme aren’t really sonnets.  I won’t argue that point.  Many of the best sonnets in several languages—some of the best poems in several languages—are built on a strict rhyme scheme: abba abba cdc cdc is one; abab abab cde cde is another; and there is always abab cdcd eded ff, and abab bcbc cdcd ee no less!

But a rhyme scheme isn’t much of an adequate definition of the figure.  What is rhyme?  Repetition, for one (obvious) thing.  And pattern, as in the sonnet examples above.  Rhyme is sound—vowels and consonants, diphthongs too.  Rhyme is like to like. 

A rhyme works by contrast, by asserting difference.  And difference, in this sense, works only if there is a basis for or an expectation of similarity.  For a rhyme to work, difference within similarity must pertain, somewhere, somehow. Two or more words must be the same in one key aspect, but different in others:  Bow / now; bow / bough. 

I think what I’m trying to get around to is this: rhyme is various.  Here are some examples of the many kinds of rhyme you can deploy in a poem:

Exact or perfect rhyme: Now / cow / how / wow

Close or near rhyme: Now / brow / chow / prow / plow

Off rhyme: Now / know / new / nigh

The above are variations of “whole” or “masculine” or “simple” rhyme.[1]  The term “simple” just means a rhyming structure consisting of a single syllable or phoneme.  You might ask, Why is the pairing now / now not a rhyme?  The answer is that now / now is mere repetition or duplication.  Now / cow is rhyme because a change has been inserted orthographically: a c for an n. 

You can see in the other two kinds of simple rhyme a veering away from the exact: much remains in each grouping that is similar—the terminal ow’s, for instance—but difference becomes more and more evident. New vowels are introduced, and initial consonants are inserted; but the rhyme pattern remains monosyllabic.  Also note in the third example a purely visual differentiation in the “k” of know, and the “gh” of nigh.  In the latter case, the rhyme is auditory though not typographical: “gh” is pronounced similarly to “ow.”

But what about more complex rhyme patterns, the multisyllabic, or “feminine” forms?  Here are examples:

Exact rhyme: insight / inflight; unkind / unwind; interleave / interweave

Close rhyme: oral / aural / aureole; inferior / interior; instance / insistence

Off rhyme: energetic / panegyric; industry / ancestry;  oral / aerial

You can see in the above the progressions away from exactness to likeness toward mere resemblance.  If you look closer, you’ll also note other aspects of rhyme that don’t get much attention.  Look, for example, at the similarities of stressed and unstressed syllables in some of the pairs, where the stressed parts occur at the same position within the words and occur with similar force and duration.  Or again, look at the insertion of “sis” in the middle of instance, which both preserves and violates the rhyme at the same time!

Here’s an interesting definition or description of rhyme: Rhyme is not only possible in a language, but inevitable, because “the number of sounds available for any language is limited and its many words must be combinations and permutations of its few sounds.”[2]

Some questions to think about as you work on a rhyming poem for next Wednesday . . .

• Why DON’T we rhyme exclusively today, as poets once did?  In other words, why isn’t rhyme a requirement today?
• Why do so many poets apologize and make excuses for rhyme in their poems?
• Why isn’t rhyme coupled more often with “numbers,” that is, with regular meter and rhythm?
• Why is rhyme so often associated with light verse and other forms a non-serious poetry?  In fact, why is it so hard to use rhyme in dramatic or “heightened” poetry?
• Why is rhyme now considered inauthentic?

Of course, one answer to all these questions is that you can take rhyme too far.  The British (and certain slavish American poetasters) used to rhyme “again” with “pain.”  I lived and worked in the UK for four years; never heard any native do that!  Not even a poet.  Another might be that we no longer think of poetry as separate from ordinary speech and breath (thank you, William Carlos Williams).  Authentic poetry—that is, an authentic voice in a poem—speaks ordinary, maybe even extraordinary, but not pretty.

Following are some examples of poems using different kinds of rhyme.

Horticulture

On Her First Semester

at the University of Georgia – Athens

Auden (W. H.)

Once made a strong case

That universities not pardon

Graduates who don’t learn to garden.

Diplomas and plaudits

Should be as subject to audits

By horticulturists

As by multiculturalists,

Or so he believed.

Now, some are relieved

That today’s formal schooling

Requires no such fooling

Around.

That is, the capped-and-gowned

Set learn a curricula

Of nothing so particular

As gardening

Which, though it prevents the hardening

Of the soul and mind

And encourages our kind

To make an alloy

Of work and joy,

Is meticulous and slow,

A too deliberate way to know.

But consider, you

Are a kind of garden, too,

Where careful tilling

Can produce, if not thrilling

Results,

Then at least a mulch

Of humanity I’m

Convinced is sublime.

Thus in Athens, be fertile

With the myrtle,

So to speak.

It’s as good as learning Greek.

A Place Named Nome

(Poem to May Sarton on Anne’s Birthday, August 8, 1995)

Poems, some say, must rhyme,

But as for me, well, not all the time,

Which is to say, assertively, I’m

A person, a poet, a puttering enzyme

Of the type who frequently seem

To be lost, lazily, as in a dream

Upon a gurgling, wordful stream

Whose wordy wavelets gleam

Brightly, like liquid flame.

It’s not important, always, to frame

Your thoughts, or make them sound the same

At the end of each line, and no shame

Either, if you make room

Occasionally for the half-rhyme

Which, in poetry, is the rim

Of expectation, where to roam

Too long and too far from home

Leads to strange places with strange names like Nome,

Alaska, which to any worldly genome

Like you, like me, are poem, sweet poem.

“Clear Water in a Brilliant Bowl”

The Draycott, you know, is all that’s left of today.

Cadogan Gardens is pedestrianless.

In London all is surveilled, all surveilling.

The hotel staff slip farther and farther away.

From the earpiece: “I don’t feel so safe.”

Outside, a sycamore offers a lurker shade.

Through an open window someone’s shouting

Something ugly.  Things begin to chafe.

Your voice, lodged in my ear, feels the ocean

Away it is.  I couldn’t possibly help you, nor you me,

Not from here.  Here, where I see on a table

Clear water in a brilliant bowl — a notion

Somebody had an hour ago but forgot

To fulfill with flower heads from some pot.

Rondeau Saint Martin

We were so furious

when we heard the curious

news about Saint

Martin & his glorious

old paint,

we issued a joint

communiqué, a point-by-point

rebuttal of the serious

plot to anoint

a horse, of all creatures, in that delirious

rite.  It does worry us,

the shirt off his back.  It’s injurious,

anent:

the weariness

of the world. It’s never spent.

---

[1] I am going to set aside the obviously gendered implication here, except to say that men have defined the terms of poetry, as they have so much else in civilization.  There are workarounds: whole rhyme, for instance, or mono-syllabic rhyme.

[2] Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 1974.

Aesthetic distance (10.24.18)

Ce n’est-pas une pipe . . .  

Last session, I brought up a new term, "aesthetic distance."  If by now you have searched the net for anything on this idea, you likely have come to the Wikipedia entry.  To the extent that a work of art of any kind is referential or representational, it establishes a “fictional reality” that we connect with when we experience it.  This fictional reality tends to override our sense of what we’re actually doing (e.g., engaging with an artifact).

We can put this into theater terms, namely the “fourth wall” of a stage or movie screen.  There is a kind of “fourth wall” in a poem that we can think of as its “meaning” or the outside world to which a poem refers.  Sometimes, we skim over the fact that we are reading a poem—highly ordered language, verbal iconography—because we are caught up in what the poem’s words point to.  We often do the same thing when looking at a painting.  We see the images: trees or the reclining nude or the field of wheat or the face.  We “look past” the paints and pigments, the brush strokes, the compositional field, the frame, the canvas or paper, and so on.  We see a painting of a pipe and see . . . a pipe.  We are in the “fictional reality” created there.

Indeed, writers and readers of poetry—and I am willing to bet that almost every one of us involved in W@1--approach a poem as something other than a verbal artifact or construct.  We interpret it.  We read its meaning.  The words are not really “there” for us.

Let’s say you write in longhand a heartfelt, passionate, beautiful letter to your best friend.  Let’s say you then type it out on your laptop.  Then let’s say you randomly put in a return after every few words or phrases to create the effect of lines.  Have you written a poem or a letter to your best friend?

Does this question imply a false dichotomy?

Let’s say you next fuss with which words begin and end the lines, and capitalize the first letter of the first word of each line.  Have you now made a more poetic poem?

Let’s go farther and say that you deliberately mess with syntax, then throw in a wide empty space, begin a line half-way across the page, then eliminate punctuation (or throw it in wherever).  Let’s say you substitute a dash where a word might be expected, or insert two dashes in a row.  You are now in company with Emily Dickinson and E.E. Cummings.

Have you written a letter or a poem?  Maybe both!  One thing you have done, to be sure, is to adjust the aesthetic distance your reader will experience to what you have written: I am reading about my friend’s day at the beach . . . or . . . I am reading art.

As far as our week’s project is concerned, “aesthetic distance” is that capacity we have for contemplating any object—a sunset, a mushroom cloud, a pear, one’s face in the mirror, a dance, a melody, an aroma, a severed hand, a murder, a birth, a howl, a painting, a gait—for itself, in and of itself.  We can contemplate from near at hand or from far away.  Either works, so long as we strive to capture the thing’s thingness.

For this project, then, I recommend the following process:

Step 1: select a simple object.[1] 

Step 2: study the object, writing down what you see, hear, feel, smell, or taste.  Consider such things as color, shape, volume, relationship to its surroundings, light and shadow, and so on.

Step 3: shape any details you have noted into a description; for example, describe the object top to bottom, surface to depth, larger feature to smaller, brighter color to duller color.  Let the object determine how you proceed.

Step 4: condense what you develop in Step 3, create lines and any new word order that you feel captures the “essence” or the thingness of the object.

And here are some examples either of a treatment of an object as an aesthetic thing, a thing of beauty in itself, and of poems that similarly insist on reminding you that they are artifacts of language themselves rather than rhythmical essays or letters to the world.

Study of Two Pears 

                            ─Wallace Stevens

I

Opusculum paedagogum.[2]

The pears are not viols,

nudes or bottles.

They resemble nothing else.

II

They are yellow forms

Composed of curves

Bulging toward the base.

They are touched red.

III

They are not flat surfaces

Having curved outlines.

They are round

tapering toward the top.

IV

In the way they are modelled

There are bits of blue.

A hard dry leaf hangs

From the stem.

V

The yellow glistens.

It glistens with various yellows,

Citrons, oranges and greens

Flowering over the skin.

VI

The shadows of the pears

Are blobs on the green cloth.

The pears are not seen

As the observer wills.

The Wild Anemone

                           ─James Laughlin

I’ll call it the daring

flower its softness its

pallor so little suggesting

the strength with which

it fights the wind its 

petals so delicate it

seems a touch would wither

them yet they’ll outlast a

three-day storm and will 

outlast I think (and now

I speak to her) the tempests

that a foolish heart invents

to plague itself    because

it hardly dares to love

the wild anemone

the daring flower.

The Lark

               ─Mary Oliver

And I have seen,

at dawn,

the lark

spin out of the long grass

and into the pink air—

its wings,

which are neither wide

nor overstrong,

fluttering—

the pectorals

ploughing and flashing

for nothing but altitude—

and the song

bursting

all the while

from the red throat.

And then he descends,

and is sorry.

His little head hangs,

and he pants for breath

for a few moments

among the hoops of the grass,

which are crisp and dry,

where most of his living is done—

and then something summons him again

and up he goes,

his shoulders working,

his whole body almost collapsing and floating

to the edges of the world.

We are reconciled, I think,

to too much.

Better to be a bird, like this one—

an ornament of the eternal.

As he came down once, to the nest of the grass,

“Squander the day, but save the soul,”

I heard him say.

The Pot of Flowers

                                ─William Carlos Williams

Pink confused with white

flowers and flowers reversed

take and spill the shaded flame

darting it back

into the lamp’s horn

petals aslant darkened with mauve

red where in whorls

petal lays its glow upon petal

round flamegreen throats

petals radiant with transpiercing light

contending

                  above

the leaves

reaching up their modest green

from the pot’s rim

and there, wholly dark, the pot

gray with rough moss.

What Is a Poem?

                              ─Ruth Stone

Such slight changes in air pressure,

tongue and palate,

and the differences in teeth.

Transparent words.

Why do I want to say ochre,

or what is green-yellow?

The sisters of those leaves on the ground

still lisp on the branches.

Why do I want to imitate them?

Having come this far

with a handful of alphabet,

I am forced,

with these few blocks,

to invent the universe. 

---

[1] I would avoid anything that already has content, like a painting or some iconic image. If you can treat a painting as a painted object and without becoming distracted by its content, then go for it.

[2] Opusculum means “a little work” and paedagogum means “slave (accompanying small children).”  My Latin is worse than rudimentary, so I have no idea about this opening line, other than that it creates aesthetic distance pretty effectively.  For me, the line is pure sound.

Love poems! (10.17.18)

Lovey-Dovey All the Time 

I don’t know about all of you, but love has been on my mind a lot lately.  Love abused and love wielded like a club.  Love misremembered and love misinterpreted.  Love denied and love decried.  Love in these registers has been shoved in my face in very public and publicized ways.  And politicized.  And weaponized.  And pounded home like a closing argument.  Through it all, though, a groovy kind of love[1] keeps wanting to have its say, namely, through poems and songs.  On more than one occasion, if anybody has been listening, I could be overheard singing “All you need is love . . . love is all you need.”

A poet friend said recently, apropos of nothing much but the times we live in, “Where are all the love poems?” Right!  Well, they’re never far away, if we listen for them.  Some of you have brought lovely love poems in to share with the group lately (including moving ones by Doug and Curt this very afternoon), so I guess it’s time that we make a project out of writing love poems.

But what kind of love poems?  What is a love poem anyway?  By this I mean, what constitutes a love poem, what does it look like, how does it work, and, most importantly, what can be said in a love poem? There was a time when I believed the only thing that could be said in a love poem had already been said: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”  “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.”  What could I add to that?  Plenty, I think, if the following examples are any indication of the broad range of themes, moods, perspectives, treatments, voices etc. that love poetry opens up to us.

But please do this before you sit down to write your love poem for next week (or go rooting through your darning basket for the perfect length of thread): read these examples and my takes on them.  Then think about your own responses to them, whether they suggest new ways you can write about love.

AND NOTE: One thing I hope that you avoid is simply to write about love.  A love poem, in the sense that we are approaching it for next week, is an address to a lover or to something dearly loved.  It’s a poetic expression of love.

⤊ ⤊ ⤊

We could go back to the Greeks to have a look at love lyrics, to Sappho, for instance, and I suggest that you do so.  She wrote a very specific kind of love poem, very intimate, very poignant, very passionate, and very real (that is, not courtly).  Or we could study the Song of Solomon, in the Bible, which the literary critic Susan Sontag once described as an erotic love poem appropriated by the Established Church, which had to explain away, somehow, its obviously sexed-up language and imagery.  Or we could revisit Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella, or Shakespeare’s sonnets, or Spenser’s The Fairie Queene, or any number of famous poems and sequences.  And I hope you read these incredible works (well, in the case of The Fairie Queene, maybe portions of it): a poet should not pass on to the next world without having read these works, if only because there will be a quiz the day you arrive.  Instead, I’ve elected to keep the selection American.  You’ll see in the following pieces how differently love poems can be conceived of and written.

One thing to note about the American love poem: it’s almost always intimate, private (this is a bit of a paradox), deeply personal, and addressed directly to a beloved.  (June and Curt have given us a couple of very good examples of this type of love poem recently.)  This one, by Miss Bradstreet, is of course famously anthologized.  It is passionate and expressive, and, as I say, directed to one person.  It’s actually “English” and not “American,” since America didn’t exist for another century after she wrote it, but unlike many an English love lyric, it’s not written for show, that is, for the Court, in the way Shakespeare’s and Sidney’s love poems were written.  Miss Bradstreet was not trying to establish her bona fides with this one.  It’s homespun poetry, and that’s the American-ness of it to me.

To My Dear and Loving Husband

─ Anne Bradstreet (1678)

If ever two were one, then surely we;

If ever man were loved by wife, then thee;

If ever wife was happy in a man,

Compare with me, ye women, if you can.

I prize thy love more than the whole mines of gold,

Or all the riches that the East doth hold.

My love is such that rivers cannot quench,

Nor aught but love from thee give recompense.

Thy love is such I can no way repay;

The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray.

The while we live in love let’s so persevere

That when we live no more we may live ever.

Can you write a love poem about or to something other than your lover?  Can you address a love poem to someone you don’t know and will never know?  Can you express love for a corpse?  I think so.  I think Walt Whitman did in this one.

A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim

─ Walt Whitman (1865)

A sight in camp in the daybreak gray and dim,

As from my tent I emerge so early sleepless,

As slow I walk in the cool fresh air the path near by the hospital tent,

Three forms I see on stretchers lying, brought out there untended lying,

Over each the blanket spread, ample brownish woolen blanket,

Gray and heavy blanket, folding, covering all.

Curious I halt and silent stand,

Then with light fingers I from the face of the nearest the first just lift the blanket;

Who are you elderly man so gaunt and grim, with well-gray’d hair and flesh all sunken about the eyes?

Who are you my dear comrade?

Then to the second I step—and who are you my child and darling?

Who are you sweet boy with cheeks yet blooming?

Then to the third—a face nor child nor old, very calm, as of beautiful yellow-white ivory;

Young man I think I know you—I think this face is the face of the Christ himself,

Dead and divine and brother of all, and here again he lies.

I never thought about Emily Dickinson as a “love poet” until I read this poem in college.  I’d taken a semester-long course devoted to her work and this one really grabbed me, partly because it’s so accessible, but partly because of its obviously erotic undertones.  Emily Dickinson!  You could do with this poem what the Church Fathers did with Song of Solomon, I suppose, but why would you want to rob Emily of her private passions?

[Wild Nights]

─ Emily Dickinson (1891)

Wild Nights—Wild Nights!

Were I with thee

Wild Nights should be

Our luxury!

Futile—the Winds—

To a Heart in port—

Done with the Compass—

Done with the Chart!

Rowing in Eden—

Ah, the Sea!

Might I but moor—Tonight—

In Thee!

John F. Kennedy must have believed it was possible to write a love poem to one’s country when he invited Robert Frost to read this one at his inauguration.  We could use a poet (and a president) like that today, don’t you think?

The Gift Outright

─ Robert Frost (1942)

The land was our before we were the land’s.

She was our land more than a hundred years

Before we were her people. She was ours

In Massachusetts, in Virginia,

But we were England’s, still colonials,

Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,

Possessed by what we now no more possessed.

Something we were withholding from our land of living,

And forthwith found salvation in surrender.

Such as we were we gave ourselves outright

(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)

To the land vaguely realizing westward,

But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,

Such as she was, such as she would become.

Don’t be surprised to find a poet writing a love poem to himself, or more to the point, to his own image in a mirror.  Or even more to the point, to his own genius (that is, in the sense of uniqueness or essence).  And don’t be surprised that that poet is William Carlos Williams.  “Danse Russe” is set in about as private a setting as a poem can be . . . in a north room, no less.

Danse Russe

─ William Carlos Williams (1916)

If when my wife is sleeping

and the baby and Kathleen

are sleeping

and the sun is a flame-white disc

in silken mists

above shining trees,—

if I in my north room

dance naked, grotesquely

before my mirror

waving my shirt round my head

and singing softly to myself:

“I am lonely, lonely,

I was born to be lonely,

I am best so!”

If I admire my arms, my face,

my shoulders, flanks, buttocks

against the yellow drawn shades,—

Who shall say I am not

the happy genius of my household?

It’s no stretch to think of love poetry and nature in the same vein.  What is different about the following poem is its essential violence, and muted vehemence regarding mortally injured Nature in relation to Man, and the love directed toward that Nature.  Not everybody will classify this as a love poem, but it has always felt that way to me in its intimacy, its in-the-moment quality, its detail of “the beloved,” and its fatalness.

from Hurt Hawks

─ Robinson Jeffers (1928)

I’d sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk; but the great redtail

Had nothing left but unable misery

From the bone too shattered for mending, the wing that trailed under his talons when he moved.

We had fed him six weeks, I gave him freedom,

He wandered over the foreland hill and returned in the evening, asking for death,

Not like a beggar, still eyed with the old

Implacable arrogance. I gave him the lead gift in the twilight. What fell was relaxed,

Owl-downy, soft feminine feathers; but what

Soared: the fierce rush: the night-herons by the flooded river cried fear at its rising

Before it was quite unsheathed from reality.

Nobody said every love poem had to be uplifting or sentimental!  Robert Lowell was incapable of either of these gestures, anyway, at least in his poems.  Yet he could write soul-shaking love poems, fatalistic and downcast as they could be.  This one is part of a book-length sequence titled For Lizzie and Harriet, Harriet being his daughter, if I’m not mistaken.  So this is a love poem—intimate, almost oppressively so, and addressed to a specific person—by a very troubled man-husband-father-poet.

The Human Condition  (Harriet)

─ Robert Lowell (1973)

The impossible is allied to fact—

should someone human, not just our machinery,

fire on sight, and end the world and us,

surely he’ll say he chose the lesser evil—

our wars were simpler than our marriages,

sea monster on sea monster drowning Saturday night.

An acid shellfish cannot breathe fresh air. . . .

Home things can’t stand up to the strain of the earth.

I wake to your cookout and Charles Ives

lulling my terror, lifting my fell of hair,

as David calmed the dark nucleus of Saul.

I’ll love you at eleven, twenty, fifty,

young when the century mislays my name—

no date I can name you can be long enough.

Here’s another love poem, about love and the world, as the title plainly states.  Wilbur, who died recently, was a traditionalist all his life (in the cohort of Donald Hall, William Stafford, Donald Justice maybe).  He was an American poet, but looked to the east, to the Continent, when many of his generation were staunchly American or otherwise looking west, across the Pacific.  I think of the word urbane when I read his poems.  This poem is definitely a love poem . . . what kind of love poem, I am not so sure.  Okay, so maybe it’s “about” love rather than a direct expression of it, but it sure feels expressive to me.  Maybe it’s spiritual, or spirit, love we’re reading about here.

Love Calls Us to the Things of This World

─ Richard Wilbur (1967)

The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,

And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul

Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple

As false dawn.

Outside the open window

The morning air is all awash with angels.

Some are in bedsheets, some are in blouses,

Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.

Now they are rising together in calm swells

Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear

With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;

Now they are flying in place, conveying

The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving

And staying like white water; and now of a sudden

They swoon down into so rapt a quiet

That nobody seems to be there.

The soul shrinks

From all that it is about to remember,

From the punctual rape of every blessed day,

And cries,

“Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,

Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam

And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.”

Yet, as the sun acknowledges

With a warm look the world’s hunks and colors,

The soul descends once more in bitter love

To accept the waking body, saying now

In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,

“Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;

Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;

Let lovers go sweet and fresh to be undone,

And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating

Of dark habits,

keeping their difficult balance.”

Of course, love poems can be written as the blues, too.  Ai, which means “love” in Japanese, burst into my consciousness with her first book in 1973 (Cruelty) and then again with Killing Floor (1978). For some reason, I lost track of her after that, but she continued to produce books each decade until her death (breast cancer) in 2010.  She was known for writing raw stuff, poems suffused with violence and sex, as the titles above suggest, and as the poem below shows.  Sometimes these elements are direct, sometimes just below the surface.  I include this one to suggest that a “love” poem can express dependencies as well as passion.

Why Can’t I Leave You?

─ Ai (1970)

You stand behind the old black mare,

dressed as always in that red shirt,

strained from sweat, the crying of the armpits,

that will not stop for anything,

stoking her rump, while the barley goes unplanted.

I pick up my suitcase and set it down,

as I try to leave you again.

I smooth the hair back from your forehead.

I think with your laziness and the drought too,

you’ll be needing my help more than ever.

You take my hands, I nod

and go to the house to unpack,

having found another reason to stay.

I undress, then put on my white lace slip

for you to take off, because you like that

and when you come in, you pull down the straps

and I unbutton your shirt.

I know we can’t give each other any more

or any less than what we have.

There is safety in that, so much

that I can never get past the packing,

the begging you to please, if I can’t make you happy,

come close between my thighs

and let me laugh for you from my second mouth.

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[1] Forgive me, please, for this nod to Pop.