new poem

My friend Fleda Brown and I have been sharing poetry prompts. The following is what I did with her demand that I write a poem about a dried-up creek (which I made into a brook, a likelier name in upper New England), a golf ball, and a collapsing barn.

                      Not To Be Expected

One evening before Youth Fellowship I found

Some organ pipes on the floor, and knelt beside them,

Singing “Long Tall Sally” into one. Meanwhile,

I signed my name with a finger in the dust

Of the nubbled concrete. No one had ever done

These things at once. No one would ever do them.

That was a fusty basement room in St. Luke’s.

Why this recollection on the bank of this brook?

Less strange to remember a poem by Robert Frost,

Whose brook runs out of song and speed come June.

The one I’m looking at has never sung,

Has never run. It barely crawls at ice-out,

And by now, mid-May, its water’s long since gone.

What’s new? Not much. It does this every year.

Snow melts, the freshets feed it, then it dies.

The barn opposed across the way... Enough

Of Frost, irrelevant here, where a barn leans sideways

In a field of weeds. It needs refurbishment,

Which it won’t get. The sills are rotted, walls

All splayed like a doomed doe’s legs on ice.

Did someone stand in the mow, golf clubs in hand?

Unlikely. How on earth did that dimpled ball,

Egg-like below me, find its nest of dried algae?

Nothing’s to be expected, never was.

Consider, say, some so-called normal couple,

And ready yourself to hear of odd behavior.

One may raise chinchillas, one love tango.

We wonder, Who’d expect it?  Answer: no one.

I labored to be unique when I was young,

But what of my uncle, who’d listen to the Ring

Of the Niebelung while plucking his farmyard geese?

It was just what he did, not striving to be eccentric.

His brother, my father, served a tough stint as a soldier,

Regular army, Europe, World War II.

So why did he love to sing old navy tunes?

Search me. Search him. He hated all salt water.

I smell his bay rum now as I recall him,

And contemplate a ball in withered muck,

And note a certain barn, gap-toothed, neglected,

And conjure Robert Frost, a favorite author,

And remember trying to sing like Little Richard–

Now what, I ask you, what can be expected?

On Literary Theory, and a New Poem

 I came across the following by way of the excellent online journal Numéro Cinq (full disclosure: I am an adviser to the magazine, which is edited by my good friend Douglas Glover, a superb Canadian fictionist and essayist –see, most recently, his remarkable story collection, Savage Love). Here is a comment by one Paul Bowes, of whom I know nothing save that he echoes many of my own sentiments. Mr. Bowes is responding to an article in The Guardian (U.K.) called "In theory: the death of literature," by Andrew Gallix.

In critical circles, ... (an argument) seems to depend increasingly on placing excessive weight on the 'symptomatic' significance of essentially minor writers such as Blanchot, whose reputation in the anglophone world as an important fictionist I find to be simply undeserved. (His non-fiction may be another matter.)

The recent literary-theoretical attention to Blanchot seems to me to have a lot more to do with the academy's perennial need to find new fodder for theorising - and to make careers for young entrants to a well-worked-over field - than any inherent merit in the writer. Theory will always be more fascinated by notions like 'belatedness' and 'exhaustion', because by implication they magnify the status of theory in relation to creative work. In readings of 'thin', 'exhausted' literature, the theorist is usually doing - and can be seen to be doing - more creative work than the original writer.

I also find arguments of this type curiously olde-fashioned, even Whiggish. They all seem to assume that 'literature' has a guiding spirit, and that its history is always moving towards the realisation of some final predestined form. But curiously, no matter which book or writer or era one chooses as the 'last book' or 'final author' or 'terminal epoch', actual literature has the bad manners to pay no attention, and persists in appearing in new forms.

The worst thing about these ideas is the authoritarian way in which they seek to take control of, and foreclose on the future. Where is literature going? These people don't know, any more than the rest of us, and their notions are essentially polemical rather than diagnostic.

Amen and amen.

The following new poem takes its impetus from the coldest Vermont winter I can recall in years and years. The temperature dipped to 30 below two nights ago, and has gone below zero every night for weeks. When the weather is thus frigid, however, the beauty of the woods and mountains is, as the poem implies, indescribable:

          Keeping At It at 20 Below

It’s too cold for me to stay out long at my age,

So I trek the half-mile road below our shed,

Its earth deep-hidden beneath the white.

Far east, Black Mountain shows up, razor-edged

On a sky full of crystals. My boots on frigid ground

Cheep so loudly that with my old guy’s ears

I can’t right off discern another sound:

Pine siskins in their scores. They wheeze from every

Evergreen in sight. I used to plow

On snowshoes through powder, hour on hour.

It shames me to say the notion scares me now.

Still it’s hard to keep with wistfulness when air

Keeps glittering so, and creatures no bigger than thumbs

Keep at it, cheerful, determined. Each bird tears

At bough-tips, feeding and chanting. I focus on one

That doggedly worries the tip of a spruce-cone, eats,

Then flits away.

                                                               Beyond the bird,

Beyond the emerald tree in which it sat,

Beyond the outlying mountain– well, what passes

Even beyond bright air, and who might sense it?

Not I.  It’s birdsong that prompts such opening phrases.

Beyond all this, let time complete my sentence.

 

More geezer poetry

A few months back, I reconsidered an old book of mine, The Floating Candles (1982).  I did not think all that badly of what I read in it, yet I had this odd impulse to take some of the poems and revise them as filtered through the three-decades plus of experience I've had since then. As a matter of fact, I have done just that, though I doubt anyone interested would be able to discern the original lurking behind the newer work.

The following poem was motivated in part by reflection on my vague curiosity as to what such "translations" would look like. 

A matter perhaps related: I so love being a grandparent that I'm beginning to wonder whether I can ever write another poem without at least some oblique mention of those beloved children. At all events, here we go:

              

                     Waking Late

My wife of three decades is at work

already.  Retired, I have time to consider

the smell of her cheek when she came indoors

from this morning’s chill. Can there be a heaven?

If so, it will hang in the air, that odor.

I’m not alone.

I have dear friends of a certain age

who scan the notices of death

like me, first thing, in the local paper,

comparing the age of the vanished with theirs.

We reckon the years we likely have left.

“A good, full life”–

that’s the cliché for those gone at 80.

I’m 72. I guess I’d expect

in heaven to hear babblings from our youngest of five

grandchildren, the constantly smiling Ruthie,

seven months old, and the wise-guy remarks

of her big sister Ivy,

the insouciant ones of her twin brother Creston.

Who’s afraid of Big Bad Death?

Not I. It’s what I’ll leave that hurts me,

including just now the best two dogs

we’ve owned, however we loved the rest.

It’s 20 below,

male pointer and female retriever nestle

by the reddened woodstove, tight together.

Outside, pine siskins jostle the feeder

and juncos peck their spills on snow.

We can see, in such clear and brilliant weather,

all the way to the mountains,

the rugged Whites beyond the river.

My wife and I love walking along

that totem flow on this side from New Hampshire.

Yesterday, after thaw and freeze,

the streambed’s ice chunks slapped back the sun

like gigantic gems.

I’ve had this late urge to go back and revise

my poems from an earlier time. Who failed

to be a little naïve when young?

There was so much I couldn’t imagine back then.

I had scarcely dreamed the oldest grandchild,

Cora, raspy

of voice, sharp of humor, her four-year-old brother

Arthur, who loves to tie me to chairs.

I tell myself now: Look up, out the window.

It’s a Monday, blunt cold, in February,

8 a.m. in the Year of Our Lord

2015,

when beleaguered deer are forced to keep moving

for fear of freezing if they pause too long,

when a sleek doe tiptoes down our drive,

her ten-month-old twin offspring behind her–

three silhouettes against whited lawn.

It’s been a hard winter,

with more to come, but they look so alive.

Rediscovery

I was recently going through some old folders of mine, and I came on a (very different) version of this poem– or rather the start of it. I clearly gave up back then, perhaps 20 years ago. All I had was the inscription from Freud, though I can't even remember why it should have caught my attention, nor where I stumbled on it, having not read Civilization and Its Discontents since my college days, which have receded into a fantastical era of fifty years and more back. I had the inscription and about 20 lines.

In any case, I elected to finish the poem, as I have here, though in all honesty I am not sure what this composition "means." That's all right. I may figure that out in due course. Meanwhile, as follows:

     On My Love of Country Life

                                    The question may be raised why we chose precisely the past of a                                                       city to compare with the past of a mind.

                                                                                          –Civilization and Its Discontents

He ruminated, cigar in crippled jaw.

Cocaine pulsed like the strobe on that cop’s cruiser.

There’s oceanic distance from where Freud sat

To where I stand just now as I visit Manhattan,

Which back in the doctor’s day was no Big Apple.

The Sheep Meadow still held sheep. But in time they’d vanish,

The park be thronged, and we’d raise his question–

Or I would, comparing his moment to our own,

When even that rim of posies by the reservoir’s

South end at 87^th seems a threat.

Imagination, mine at least, would crave

A village, clean, essential, if maybe not

The one I’ve lived in so long. Are you like me?

Can you conjure some antique European village,

Complete with organ grinder, playful monkey,

Coins chink-chinking softly in a cup,

Air soft as bedclothes too? Here in the city,

That bus’s diesel chokes me. Jackhammers rattle.

The very pigeons move from there to there,

Cosmopolites, while the park affects a show

Of green among the cans and candy wrappers,

Rinds and condoms, jugs of Sneaky Pete

In shards. The traffic seems deployed for battle.

Its headlamps will sweep across the stoops come dark,

Across the benches, where mad folks rage against

The day gone by, or politicians, sports teams.

Just so we heard our elders, late at night,

In our anxious puberty. They madly shrieked

Their calumnies downstairs, and slammed their doors.

Are you like me? Did you long for more precision?

Did you crave an explanation? Why do I keep

Including you? You may not be like me,

Who craved it –how I craved it– for years and years,

Some way to make some sense of my inward city,

Though I didn’t think in those terms, and even then,

My mind ached likewise for another place,

The one in which things blurred: soft nap of meadow,

The spring blooms’ brightness muted, peasant wagons

Full of hay gone evening-fragrant, glow

Of a setting sun on the houses’ brick, and beasts,

Both wild and tame, intent upon their grazing–

Their placid grazing, narcotic, every moment

Much like the one before, their mild jaws rolling.

Jean Connor, Poet Extraordinaire

I want here to celebrate one of Vermont’s literary treasures, Jean Connor, a poet who, after a long career as a librarian in upstate New York, now lives at Wake Robin, a retirement community in Shelburne.  I offer such celebration for no especial reason save that I’ve lately been rereading her 2005 collection, “A Cartography of Peace.” The book is beautifully produced by Passager Press, whose savvy editors specialize in the work of older writers.

I’m not sure I can improve on the jacket comment of my friend and former Vermont College colleague, poet Robin Behn, who notes that “only some art knows how to teach us how to live, and in a way that we are ... ardently willing to be taught.” Ms. Behn quite rightly puts Jean Connor at the head of this rare class.

Though W.H. Auden once advised us that “poetry makes nothing happen,” I feel things happening in myself at every turn in “A Cartography of Peace.” Ms. Connor, given her wonderful modesty, will likely balk at hearing me say so, but hers is a poetry of moral instruction. It is that very modesty, in fact, that allows such instruction. The poet’s lessons on how to live both a practical and a spiritual life are far from hectoring; they’re offered obliquely, and her work therefore demands particularly close attention. One can too easily miss its thematic forest for the trees of its keen observations, particularly of nature.

Consider, for one of myriad examples, Ms. Connor’s response to a natural harbinger in “Late August”:

            Then, not as an intruder,

            but as one accustomed to the place,

            the hour, a cricket began to sing,

            steady, sure, and as he sang

            the world slowed to meet

            his pace, found itself webbed

            about in peace. The grasses

            sleep-heavy, wet with dew.

As I say, one can easily –and profitably– dwell on the sureness of notice here, but as we meditate on these passages (and these poems demand just that, meditation)– as we meditate on these words and many others in her opus, we understand that the beauty and clarity of her language is itself the product of a meditative soul. Here the cricket is a perfect stand-in for the writer, who has the same capacity to induce peace. No, she is not an intruder but part of a composed scene.

There is simply no physical context, nor, so far as I can see, any season that escapes this fine author’s contemplative and ultimately redemptive response. In “Now, in March,” for instance, she speaks of a month that most upper New Englanders might consider the year’s least redeemable.

            Outside, drifts of brazen snow

            and the bitter hour glass of cold.

            Inside, pressed against the pane,

            pots of green and the first white

            geranium, tenuous, unfolding.

            and hidden deep within, the stubborn

            candle of my will, ablaze,

            steady, before that duality,

            death, a February thing, and life,

            which reaches out to April

            and on occasion sings.

What quiet brilliance here! If we recall that at the publication of this, her very first book, the author was 86 years old (at 96, she continues to write beautifully), one might suppose that the poet herself would be the “bitter” one, the sands in her personal hour glass falling apace. One might also consider her very urge to write a “brazen” impulse.  But no, those attributes belong to the apparently inauspicious landscape. Ms. Connor is subtly “stubborn,” not brazen; she willed herself in 2005, as she has done ever since, to sing about those things that can sustain us no matter where or when we look on ... if we allow them to.

Again, however, my object is less literary criticism than appreciation. The poet’s own words always seem sufficiently convincing on their own, as is manifest in another short poem, quoted here in its entirety:

            Overcast

            The day, of no great merit,

            ended– a dandelion gone to seed,

            minutes squandered, hours spent,

            no bright gold. Yet in the ledgered

            plainness of the day, overcast, common,

            some subtle brush of meaning

            held me. Was it those unexpected

            words of thanks, or the single lilac

            plunged in a paper cup,

            there on a stranger’s desk?

            Something, a fragrance,

            lingered well past dusk.

When I consider much contemporary poetry, which is premised on highfalutin intellectual theory, and which glories in wordplay for its own sake, I wonder if its authors, let alone its readers (such as they are) can possibly be moved by what is presented on the page? As Maxine Kumin once remarked to me in conversation, “If you aren’t moved by what you write, why do you bother?” Jean Connor’s poems move me greatly, in part because, although her intelligence is clearly profound, she wears it lightly, rightly implying that intellect on its own is not, as Wallace Stevens said, “what will suffice.” Here is a poet who believes that words not only have meaning but also consequence.

I’ll close with an observation, based in part on the passages below and many others in Ms. Connor’s work. Some may consider it quaint, even sexist, but so be it. I say what I do only because I believe it: Jean Connor’s verse is feminine. Mind you, I use that adjective in no way but honorifically: I mean that her poetry is short on ego, astoundingly attentive to eloquent detail– and long on charity, in the sense that Paul describes it in Christian scripture. She manifests a love so deep that the mere word “love” can’t describe it. To my mind, charity is what makes the world go round, and Ms. Connor herself mounts no effort to describe it. She simply enacts it.

In a poem aptly entitled “The Women,” she notes, among other things that

            ...there are more women than you might imagine who

            take care of old men who have forgotten

            the names of the women

            and the names of the sons and the daughters .

            These are the men who are not sure

            of a spoon. Sometimes they can be told

            how to hold and lift it.

I urge any reader of this blog likewise to read “A Cartography of Peace” for her- or himself, because I reduce its value by suggesting a single overarching moral gesture. Be that as it may, one sure thing we learn from this woman’s personal and artistic example is the virtue, not of resignation, but of acceptance, two very different matters. We learn that what is immediately before us, no matter what it be, is the thing that should demand our participation.

:

            Nothing here should surprise us.

            More women than you imagine

            teach themselves to live

            in that slim space between now and tomorrow.

Jean Connor is one of the women who have taught themselves to occupy that space, and having done so, she can teach us all.

Surviving Strangeness

                   My bachelor uncle, actually my mother's uncle, owned a farm, on which I spent every  moment I could from childhood into late adolescence. It has now, alas, been devoured by the great plastic octopus that goes by the name, incongruous to me, of development. Back then, though, it had the woods and fields and critters I craved and still do. 

I was fascinated by the ample cellar under the old man's old house, and especially by an odd sound (an archaic water pump, I now suspect), which emanated from far back in an unlit corner. I was at once scared and intrigued by that noise, and recently decided, some six decades and more later, to recall, as best I can, some of the feelings that came upon me not only on hearing the strange report from Whatever-It-Was but also on doing some of the earliest reading I can recall. 

Interior

Some oddities can settle forever

Within a mind– like that noise from within

My bachelor uncle’s cellar,

The unimaginable, deepest part

Where gravel gave way to dirt:

First, an almost inaudible whining,

And then that awful, protracted wheeze,

As of some strange animal fighting

In the gloom to muster its own air.

I’d make myself stand right there

By the steps to listen, every visit.

Not that I ever dared to walk  

Toward that recess, hidden

And dark. No, darker than any dark.

My little flashlight’s arc

Played over the mouth of what seemed a cavern,

The beast inside now a wolverine,

Now something vaguely like a lion

Or a scaly dragon from picture books

That stood by my bed in their nook.

Today I can make my own grim cave

In thought, where hordes of monsters crouch

That could carry my family off.

My ears have tinnitus, constant ringing,

Which almost recalls the breathing

Of the dreadful thing. That gruesome sound.

I can all but see the tight-coiled snake

That waits for someone alone

Like me. The bird flu, SARS, ebola–

All can be bears or bulls or

Outsized scorpions, jackals in packs.

And I doubt I’ll ever fathom why

One Little Golden Book

About a clan of peaceful gorillas

Should with each reading have thrilled me

And frightened me so, above all the mother

Ape’s last words to her infants at evening.

Some oddities live forever.

“Sleep,” she told them. “Don’t suck your thumbs,”

Which meant night was coming on.

Grandiosity and guilt

Am I alone in occasionally finding a spurious link between my own errors of omission and commission and major events, often tragic? I know at least that Norman Mailer (in whose company I'd quite happily NOT be seen) shared this surmise, connecting the assassination of one of the Kennedys to an illicit sexual foray on his part. Please. 

I'm aware that such thinking is at best narcissistic, and as a rule I dismiss it in a timely fashion. But my absence from home when my wife, yanked off her feet by a squirrel-chasing dog, broke her collarbone in a nasty way late in October, momentarily dipped me into such an idiot trough. The advent of the New Year, with its conventional impulse to resolutions, combined with that grandiose feeling of guilt to produce the following.

       I Should Have

Our dog was not used to a leash.

I should have been holding the dog.

The squirrel was used to leashed dogs.

The dog chased the squirrel to the end of the leash.

The squirrel seemed pretty blasé.

The dog is a strong yellow Lab.

She pulled my wife off her feet.

My wife broke her collarbone.

It was our granddaughter’s birthday.

I should have been at the party.

The whole family was there at the park.

I was in North Dakota.

I should have been holding the dog.

My bones are more tough than my wife’s.

Next day her little dog died.

Not the one that caused the trouble.

Rather, the poor old–blind–deaf spaniel.

He was my love’s special pet.

Our son drove here from his house.

Then he took his mom and her dog to the vet.

I should have been holding the dog.

Our son had just bought the house.

He and his wife were excited.

It was very unselfish to do what he did.

Our son dearly loves his mother.

I love her too beyond words.

It should have been I who drove her.

A man shot eight people soon after.

That mess was way out in Alberta.

I can be grandiose.

I can dream up phony connections.

I can think all bad things are my fault.

I should still have been holding the dog.

Such killings don’t happen up there.

But this was the second last year.

Such things should not happen anywhere.

Two of the dead were young children.

Then the man turned the gun on himself.

“This is awful for us,” said the chief of police.

The weapon was a 9 mill Glock.

It was stolen eight years ago.

But the murders went down in 2014.

So did those other bad things

Meanwhile I stood there or sat.

I paced. I slept. I did nothing.

What could I have done?

It’s five a.m. on New Year’s.

I should have found something to do.

I’ve been thinking of choices I’ve made.

I can think they have big consequences.

I should have been holding the dog.

More consequences than they do.

Oh I’m often so grandiose.

I think of a James Wright poem.

I think, “I have wasted my life.”

My reasons for thinking that differ from his.

In the grand scheme my choices mean nothing.

I accept that. I have no choice.

My wife once hung up a magnet.

Let go or be dragged, it said.

I’m physically stronger than she is.

I’m not so otherwise.

I should have been holding the dog.