Like a Requiem

for Michel, in loving memory of his wife, Lili

On mornings when there's no one else to tell
the paper still arrives. The milkman makes
dogs bark at 5 a.m. The sun comes up,
unjustly bright, exactly as you saw
it overspread your coffee and bad news.

The news read round the clock is uniform.
Everyone is dying for more life,
the radio says. The mailman's on his way,
bringing the bills that say how much it costs
to see the sun again. When you were here,

day smelled like mint and sage. Nobody had
the same day you had. Stars took special shapes,
the constellations Ampersand or Love.
Here in our garden grass grows now. The sun
rises, shines some, and passes down the west,

like requiems, which, skillful, sound the same,
whoever writes or plays them. It is not
events which give a form to forms; it was
you, and the grass grows, dogs bark, men drive off
to do what men do when they have no choice.


I wrote this poem on commission from Michel Brochetain, who wanted it for his splendid Russian art site,

www.brochetain.ca

It's worth your time and attention.

as the body is one, and hath many members

As time goes by, my verse seems to become more supple, more flexible, which makes it the mirror image of my physical body. Let us hope that the body of my verse and the body of my body demonstrate that "as the body is one, and hath many members and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body."

from Days of Our Lives

9
That year I saw 3, maybe 4 great men.
I don't recall what pearls they had to drop,
what they looked like, the timbre of their voices
or suits. I talked once, maybe for 3 minutes,
to a lapis-eyed blonde who didn't know my name.
I knew hers, remember every word,
and have concocted several dozen lives
of swift conclusion. All end up inside
her. At 2 a.m. at the Rockybilt counter,
hard and bright as a Hopper, I could drink
coffee, mop up secret sauce, and wonder
how anyone had ever finished James,
if Strether would find Bohemia in Paris,
whether he'd "live" and why anybody cared.

from Days of Our Lives

15
The chemlab flash fired in a sunburst
of eyebrows and steam, the alarms claiming
the end of class, the sprinklers playing April,
and happy singees coughing into the sunlight.
Learning seeps in, pore-wise, or explodes in-
appropriately in the absence of
loco parentals. So under dormers,
beneath graduation gift patchwork quilts,
the love of clear-cut classes multiplies
beyond reason, without regard, ungraded,
and altogether traditionally.
If by the next day the glass is swept up,
the puddles all expunged, the windows boarded,
youth blooms eternal, for a little while.

Google's quote of the day,

from Flannery O'Connor: Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.

Thank you, Ms O'Connor.

If you have to choose

Well, yes, you can find me on Facebook, and I'll be happy to note your favorite movies and relationship status; but if your time is limited, and you have to choose, visit me here. Here be poems.

Nepotism? Anyone?

If any of you regular readers (you know who you are, all 3 of you) have close family members who are like Carly Simon's father, don't be embarrassed to point them in this direction. I'm like Arlo Guthrie -- "I'm not proud...or tired."

For Dr Feldman: After Martial

Your standards, Burton, force you to condemn
A verse not passed into an apothegm.
Forgive me, will you, if I do not die
To earn the moist approval of your eye.

Expunging the visible world

From an obit for Helen Frankenthaler in the WSJ:

Frankenthaler belonged to the second generation of the New York School, whose guiding light was the critic Clement Greenberg. Greenberg held that the essence of modern painting was the expunging of all references to the visible world and an emphasis on painting's purely formal elements—the flatness of the canvas support and the colors arrayed across it.

I post this just in case you're lying awake at night, wondering why "modern painting" doesn't interest me.

From the mailbag:

The end of the year does not mean the mailbag is overflowing with copies of Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners.

"RHE, have you ever wonder why nobody cares? Maybe because no one can understand ennything you say?"

I have. There was this one guy, once, who understood something I said, but he died.


"Yo, could you write a sestina about Un ballo in maschera ?"

Yo. No.


"Who's better, Auden or Frost?"

Lou Brock. I'd give up Ernie Broglio just to get him on my team.

The Year in Review

 I did not win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

 I did not get a 10-year extension from the Angels (or, come to think of it, the Devils).

 I am not going to be the Republican nominee. Probably.

 I did not read any of my poems at the Super Bowl halftime show. (N.B. I have written new poems since then.)

 Neither Brad Pitt nor Tilda Swinton is playing me in a new biopic. (On the plus side, neither is Cee Lo Green nor The Swedish Chef.)

 My new budget is deadlocked in committee. If it isn't passed (and funded) soon, I may have to shut down.

 Last time I looked, at least 3 of the authors on the NYT bestseller list were dead. (In several more cases one just couldn't tell.) This offers me promise for the future.

From the Mailbag

Dear Dr. or Professor Epstein,

Is marriage between two siblings, one adopted and one birth, forbidden by the consanguinity laws?

Who exactly do you think I am? In any event, I'd refer all such questions to Jerry Lee Lewis and Dick Clark.

RHE--

How long are you going to keep this up?

How long you got?

RHEpoems,

WTF?

Try a comma after the W.

From the mailbag

Are you for real?

No, I'm really not.

I like your poems very much and they sound intelligent but I don't understand them. What do you think I should do?

Read them just because you like them. I understand them, mostly, and it hasn't helped me all that much.

Are you available for children's parties and bat mitzvahs?

Sorry, I can't do balloon animals. The screechy sound the balloons make paralyzes my central nervous system.

From the Mailbag

Here and at the other places where I read your comments you are such a know it all. You think you know everything don't you?

I don't know.

From the mailbag:

RHE, you've got a lot of gaul.

Yes, they said that to Caesar, too. Come see me again in March, sometime around the Ides.

I took one of your poems to class. My teacher said it was blank. I told her it wasn't and tried to show her, but she is a teacher and does not listen.

Many teachers are honorable practitioners of a noble profession. Not all. You should have told her it was a printer error.

Why do you like Kipling so much?

Aw, come on--this is just too easy.

RHE

Poetry Proper 3

is now available online. I'll bet you can't imagine why I'm telling you this.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/64246923/Poetry-Proper-3rd-Issue

Following

Thanks to those who, mysteriously, are "following" this blog, especially since I know almost none of you, so, as Gatsby might say, there's nothing merely personal about it. Much obliged.

Today's Reading

Said Job, It's tough but someone has to do it.
He boiled. His kids went AWOL. And the grass
Shrank as if cursed, a mumbo-jumbo lawn.
A snapshot of its photosynthesis
Was all he had: he propped it on the mantel.
The mantel broke. The rooftree split. His wife
Yelled and drank and tore up the laundry room
And split for Abu Dhabi. Praise the Lord,
Said Job, who had the faith, a nasty rash,
And more regrets than camels. Said the Lord,
Aha. This was a test. Had it been real,
The seas would have been emptied, deserts spun
Like bubbles in a centrifuge. His kids
Returned for dinner, fired up their bongs,
And lived in expectation. Job believed,
Yet noticed that his lawn was not the same.

from the mailbag

Yes, I can write limericks. As it happens, I had occasion to improvise a couple this week. No, I rarely do, and I don't think the local paper would be interested. Perhaps Posterity will publish my occasional verses as the final volume of my Collected Works. After all the Major Poems, of course.

I get some very odd emails.

The Scrambled Egg Principle

It has been justly observed, that discord generally operates in little things; it is inflamed to its utmost vehemence by contrariety of taste, oftener than of principles
--Johnson, Rambler 99

I had a girlfriend once who liked her eggs scrambled hard. I liked mine scrambled loose. Instead of saying that we liked our eggs cooked differently, she insisted that she scrambled eggs correctly; I scrambled them wrong. From this I derived the Scrambled Egg Principle: Do not elevate differences of taste into differences of principle. I see that, as usual, Johnson has anticipated me.

You Call This a Miracle

The sun shines, the stars shine, the breezes blow.
Yes, yes, the grasses do their stuff: they grow.
Leaves cycle through their tricks: first come, then go.

I'll bet the brook is babbling, birds are tweeting.
M. Nature, smiling, seems to bear repeating
With equanimity. Wow. It's just like meeting

Old Uncle Albert, who keeps telling stories
Worn when Trajan, new to his martial glories,
Heard them and giggled. As do all old tories,

Then praise the miracle of repetition.
And you are dead and given up to fission.
The oldest story. Used without permission.

Marcus Antonius

I threw it all away for love,
They say, but never what "it" is,
More important than what I kept,
Some qua superior to bliss,
That never, ever rhymes with "dove,"
And much more manly. Jesus wept.

You ever ride in a trireme, bud?
Better to fall on your sword or asp.
Drink while you can. Our day was done
The instant Old Baldy learned his grasp
Would not slip though slick with blood.
She can be my Rubicon.

Late last evening

"Uh...Mr....uh...Upstum, this is Obviously Phony Name at Market Research Interminable with a short survey about your political opinions."

"I'm not an Anarcho-Syndicalist."

"So are you planning on voting in the upcoming mayoral election?"

"I'm not an Anarcho-Syndicalist. I'm not even a Wobbly. And I can't spell Czolgosz."

"All right. Well, Mr....uh...Ippstern, how would you rate the possibility you will be voting for Chris Romer in the upcoming mayoral election--absolutely certain, probably absolutely certain, or maybe absolutely certain?"

"If I can't vote for Baxter B. Stiles, I'm not voting. Goodbye."

Waiting for Monday

He rose, but he did not feel resurrected.
He wasn’t doing Easter any more,
Just Sunday morning. If they wanted eggs,
He’d scramble; if they needed chocolate,
No problem; but what sermonizing dead
Itinerants had to do with plastic grass
And chicks collapsed in marshmallow--well, he

Knew, he really did. Osiris was
His middle name, practically, he wore
A golden sprig upon his sleeve and let
Sleeping gods lie, if that helped them advance,
Kings for a day in topiary groves.
Okay, he saw the sunrise--prairie light
Again this year. No matter where you are,
There always is an east. It’s over there,
East for a day. It’s always over there.

The children flexed their sugar-ridden thews
And made the windows clamor, all those panes
So light could be admitted and diffused.
It would move west. Perhaps the children, too.
And all of them would run out at the sea,
Awaiting new gods, who’d rise up from behind,
Out of the desert where the gods are born,
Into a heartland, where the gods subside.

From the mailbag:

RHE, you write like a dead guy. When you wake up, let me know.


Dear Unknown Correspondent,

That's just creepy. That would make me...what? Jesus? Osiris? Whitney Houston? A zombie?

From the mailbag

Dear Richard Epstein,

I accidentally read one of your poems while looking for the real Richard Epstein. I hope it never happens again.

Best wishes,
[name withheld]

Dialogue

Are you a famous poet?
There are no famous poets, not in the sense you mean.
Okay. Are you famous for a poet?
That's a good question. Well put.
Well?
Well what?
Are you?
No.
Oh.

Non serviam

Everyone reverentially quotes JFK's famous inaugural "Ask not..."; no one seems to think about it. If people did, they'd see it's just plain wrong. It's those who live in fascist, monolithic states whose purpose is to serve the state: their primary question is, What can we do for our government? In the US it's supposed to be exactly the opposite. The government exists to serve the citizenry, not the citizenry to serve the government. We should be asking what our country can do for us, not what what we can do for our country. Of course the answer usually is, and should be, "Leave us alone."

RHE
P.S. No, I don't believe calling it our "country," rather than the state or the government makes any difference. Are you really going to draw some mystical distinction here? Do you really think that the citizens of a country exist to "serve" it?

Note to poets everywhere

If your poems are not more interesting than you are, change vocations.

Dead Grandpa Encounters Eschatology

It's grand here, says the sublime
Old Gentleman. No need
For innocence or crime,
Legs up to here or seed.
We're much too clean for lust,
And all our loins are dust.

I miss my loins, he says.
They kept me concerned at night.
They danced to fill my days.
I never asked respite.
I'd dance for stamps and coins,
Could I have back my loins,

Dead Grandpa says, but no
One flashes him satin knickers.
They book no titty show
For arrivisted slickers.
Dead Grandpa hums a psalm
Extolling holy calm.

Here at the Pearly Gates
He met a sadder sack
Just yesterday, called Yeats,
Who blessed the golden back
Of trollops, drunks, and tarts
And claimed the healing arts

Began in carnal sweats.
No disembodied voice
Can order man, said Yeats,
Who in a cloud of noise
Ascended. DG swears,
And trudges up shiny stairs,

Dodging the falling roses,
Hoping it isn't peace,
Among all posthumous choices,
In which his travails cease,
A beer, a broad, a sleep.
Dead Grandpa's climb is steep.

the Total Abstinence Principal

"Scrooge was better than his word. He did it all, and infinitely more; and to Tiny Tim, who did not die, he was a second father. He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world. Some people laughed to see the alteration in him, but he let them laugh, and little heeded them; for he was wise enough to know that nothing ever happened on this globe, for good, at which some people did not have their fill of laughter in the outset; and knowing that such as these would be blind anyway, he thought it quite as well that they should wrinkle up their eyes in grins, as have the malady in less attractive forms. His own heart laughed: and that was quite enough for him.

He had no further intercourse with Spirits, but lived upon the Total Abstinence Principle, ever afterwards; and it was always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge. May that be truly said of us, and all of us! And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless Us, Every One!"

from the mailbag

"Aphrodite rhymes with nightie. Venus rhymes with penis. Artemis doesn't rhyme with anything. Hence the virgin goddess thing. If her name had been Regina, she wouldn't have stood a chance."

Okay. Thanks for that. Bullfinch skipped that part.

Responses

Dear Faithful:

Turns out my magisterium overlaps yours after all. Too bad.


Dear Dilettante:

No, "Silence, exile, and cunning" is not the same as "Don't ask, don't tell."


Dear Fellow Student:

I regret the death of Hyman Datz, who taught Johnson and Boswell. (Well, he was old enough. What I really meant was, He taught us Johnson and Boswell.) More an anecdotalist than a scholar, given to re-using notes so old, yellow, and brittle, they looked as though they had been excavated for the occasion, he still inspired students to read authors they would otherwise have ignored. The Augustans are not always an easy sell. They did not tweet; neither were they groovy. Between them Drs Datz and Chapman animated and reanimated the deserving dead. All these years later, and how I love an opportunity to say, "Sir, I have found you an argument; but I am not obliged to find you an understanding."

In grad school I first encountered Dr Datz in the Dept's main office. He said, "You're Epstein, right?" "Yes," I said. "I hear you're pretty smart," said Dr Datz. "Who wrote 'Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean'?" I told him. "Well, most people don't know that," he said. I didn't tell him my father used to recite that at the dinner table. He only knew a couple poems. That was one. I'd also have been safe if Dr Datz had asked me, "Who wrote, 'Barrel-house kings, with feet unstable, Sagged and reeled and pounded on the table,'" but that wasn't going to happen.

Be Gone

They boil, the leaves. I can't imagine why.
They've nothing to do but wait a while, be gone,
And be forgotten. Oh. I guess I can.
Imagine, then, that birdhouse over there--
Well, you can't see it now. Even the scraps
Of wood and seed and feathers have been moved,
Displaced, replaced--we bought it at a shop,
Biodegradable and peasant built.
The peasants moved to cities, some of them,
Others, their hands removed on grounds of state,
Differently accommodated. Now
The blue tits are unhouseled, and the squirrels
Have moved to that manor down the block, where lunch
Is carefully replenished, day by day,
As many days as squirrels will ever know.

From the mailbag

I don't understand a word you write. I used to think this was my fault, but now I think its [sic] you because you don't write very well.

Dear Anonymous: I suspect you are right. If I were you, I should stick to Great Poets, who always write clearly and simply, as though they were viewing a dead princess through pellucid water.

The child that sucketh long is shooting up,
The planet-ducted pelican of circles
Weans on an artery the genders strip;
Child of the short spark in a shapeless country
Soon sets alight a long stick from the cradle;
The horizontal cross-bones of Abaddon,
You by the cavern over the black stairs,
Rung bone and blade, the verticals of Adam,
And, manned by midnight, Jacob to the stars,

says Dylan Thomas. He's a great poet, and I'm sure you understood every word of that.

Clarity does not prove quality. Neither does difficulty. Keep in mind what Randall Jarrell said: "When you begin to read a poem you are entering a foreign country whose laws and language and life are a kind of translation of your own," and try not to judge the poem by your expectations.

Ora pro nobis, author of The Idea of a University

The beatification and canonization of someone who lived in modern times makes a silly spectacle. John Henry Newman was a talented polemicist; and given his effect on thoughtful, but somewhat weedy, young men, he must have been a charismatic figure in his way. But do you believe he worked the requisite miracles? Do you think he's specially able to intercede for you with The Virgin Mary, this author of the novels Loss and Gain and Callista?

I suspect that if we had known St Francis or St Jude or St Patrick the way men within our memory knew Newman--that is, as someone to argue politics with over a beer--we'd find their sainthood equally preposterous. Who is playing advocatus diaboli in the canonization process? Has he spoken to Chuck Kingsley and Matt Arnold yet?

Talking to Myself

So I was talking to myself. "Self," I said, "this is disappointing." "Then why do you keep sending them out?" said my self. "At your age, you still hoping to be discovered?" "What's the alternative?" I said. "Don't send them out," said my self. "Oh," I said. "I never thought of that."

It Appears There Are Swans on the Roof of That Office Building

The blancoed office building flaps,
covered in swans. The roof is white
with spots of orange, a flash of black
like semaphore. They’re never still.

Arrivals and departures seem
off schedule, bent by maintenance
left unperformed while bombardiers
brought down protest. Why here, why now,

why only on the roof, will be
explained in Union Halls, The Grange,
by Leda in her signet ring,
and CNN. A broken swan

comes tumbling 7 stories down.
Wide wings aflame in late-day sun
evaporate before they hit.
It’s love in dreams. The dying swan

pirouettes. Cobs and cobblers cry
to muted trumpets, shouldering
swansdown aside, startled and stuck,
lorelei high over black streets.

Poetry Proper

Issue 1 of Poetry Proper is now available at

poetryproper.blogspot.com

Worth your attention, if only because Paul Maddern is co-editor and it contains 2 poems by one of my favorite poets.

No Pruning Hooks

Assuming it survived, the vine would pull
The back fence down, assuming that it throve
And neither burned nor drowned, nor in a fit
Of fad became a vegan course for pests,
Of which this yard has plenty—all the block,
If truth be told, and what are vines, if not
A place to sit and tell the truth and beat
Our swords to silent crepitude? And if
The fence should fall, then we could see beyond
Each other, all those pests beyond the pale,
As those within, superior and still
And pulled towards peace—that is, if it survived.
And if it failed, we still could have a fence.

The Night Stalker

Wet shiny stones. Of course the archer tripped.
His unnotched arrow trickled to the ground,
And he stomped off, thwarted assassin, bent,
Incompetent, and loony as a grebe.

What is the point of bad guys, if it takes
A clever chappie to be nasty? Want
Is all, he told the darkness, and the cats,
Trolling for fallen nestlings, didn't care.

I meant disaster. If I had my druthers,
The gutters would run red. Babies would wail,
Alone in their bassinets. No one would come.
It's not my fault my mum smoked and my birth

Was unattended by dark prodigy
And bungled by a bonesetter half baked.
If I had my way, I'd be home in bed,
Smiling, a bloody handprint on my quilt.

Some brainy bastard cried himself to sleep.
The saintly prayed to be released. A corps
Of engineers built dams against the day
An asteroid would wallop Crater Lake.

Cities of Literature

Dublin has just been named the 4th "city of literature" by UNESCO. (Right. The UN should be trusted on the subject of literature almost as much as the Nobel Prize people.) The first 3 were Edinburgh, Melbourne, and--get ready for it--Iowa City. Super. Dublin? No argument from me. Edinburgh? Sure--the train station is called "Waverly." Melbourne? Of course. Barry Humphries is from Melbourne. Iowa City? Let us move on, shall we?

How about London and Paris? Too obvious? How about Oxford, Mississippi, and Hannibal, Missouri, then? Or Denver. There's this world-class poet... .

Pass me the ashes. Hold the shade.

There are moods in which Horace 4.7 seems to me the most perfect poem ever written. We no longer live in a time when every schoolchild is required to translate it, but here is a famous 4-line portion 3 times rendered into English.

Damna tamen celeres reparant caelestia lunae:
nos ubi decidimus
quo pius Aeneas, quo Tullus diues et Ancus,
puluis et umbra sumus.

Her losses soon the moon supplies,
But wretched man, when once he lies
Where Priam and his sons are laid,
Is naught but ashes and a shade.
(Johnson)

But oh, whate'er the sky-led seasons mar,
Moon upon moon rebuilds it with her beams;
Come we where Tullus and where Ancus are
And good Aeneas, we are dust and dreams.
(Housman)

Yet the swift moons repair Heaven's detriment:
We, soon as thrust
Where good Aeneas, Tullus, Ancus went,
What are we? dust.
(Conington)

Save your breath

An article in the CHE asks whether believers should pray for Christopher Hitchens. The best answer: Who gives a shit? Not Hitchens, I suspect, unless he is secretly pleased to know people are thinking about him, whoever those people might be (and whatever they might be thinking). The prayerful will do Hitchens neither good nor harm, of course; whether the additional smugness and self satisfaction engendered is good for those doing the praying is none of my business, though my opinion on the subject is pretty obvious.

What is most notable is the way some of the faithful have reacted. The author, Carlin Romano, quotes, "If you don't die a excruciatingly painful death, I suspect you will have months of incredible and terrible agony. Sort of like reading your articles, but not nearly as bad. You are a nasty and hateful man." Most of the community of believers will not have phrased their feelings so bluntly, but you know that a good many are smacking their lips over the notion that Their God still can deliver personal retribution. More sad than disgusting, or more disgusting than sad?

http://chronicle.com/article/No-One-Left-to-Pray-To-/66283/

In the Cemetery of the Alexandrians

This is one of the first poems I ever wrote. It appeared in a student magazine called Foothills.


Beneath this slab of exegesis
the liver is gone, gone is the heart.
Applaud the marble Master's thesis
that shades the worms who eat the art.

from the mailbag

Q: Do you understand your own poems?

A: Sometimes. The ones dictated to me by angelic presences in tie-dyed t-shirts and hot pants often elude my full comprehension. Does it matter? About Browning's Sordello Tennyson is said to have remarked that there were only two lines in the poem which he could understand: "Who will may hear Sordello's story told" and "Who would has heard Sordello's story told," and both of them were lies.

Dear Anonymous critic:

"More cowbell" doesn't count as a critique. If you'd been first with it, or even seventh, maybe, but now? It's like writing, "I think you should adjust your line breaks." Try something different. Perhaps your next anonymous letter could begin, "If the river were whiskey and you were a diving duck... ."

Never the Twain

Yesterday was the 100th anniversary of Mark Twain's death, a good time to remember a great writer.

Twain always disappoints. He never outgrew his need to shock or clown or impress, an amusing thing in a Dave Barry-style humor columnist, but something a novelist cannot afford. The collapse of Huck Finn as it moves towards its conclusion is only the most famous example; every one of his books exhibits the same deficiencies. I tend to like Life on the Mississippi best because it is frankly a collection of sketches.

Not every novelist needs to be Henry James, but think how much good a touch of Mr James would have done Mr Clemens.

from the mailbag

I see you have a Facebook page now & you use it. Wouldn't you be better off spending all that time practicing poetry? It needs it.

No doubt. But Facebook inspires me, and I learn so much from it. Did you know there are people out there--even poet-people--with thousands of friends? It's like having phone books for friends. Did you know that when you ask people to befriend you, they might reply, "And you are who?" thus proving that the predicate nominative is still alive and well.

You know people only find there way here because you wrote that 1 pome with friction in the title right?

I have mentioned this before. I'm just happy my peeps are happy. If I have facilitated frottage, I'll just have to live with that.

Dear RHE, Did you know that it is not the medeival ages anymore?

So have I heard, and do in part believe it.

RHE, your ugly and ur mother dresses you funny.

Dear Mr Justice Scalia,

There is no need to personalize this.

Dryden says, Happy New Year

All, all of a piece throughout;
Thy chase had a beast in view;
Thy wars brought nothing about;
Thy lovers were all untrue.
'Tis well an old age is out,
And time to begin a new.

Henry did not waffle

Fowler's back, and about bloody time:

http://www.hoover.org/publications/policyreview/72770362.html

Dead Grandpa Falls Down Stairs Quietly

Dead Grandpa fell down stairs last night. He didn't
bump much, a thing of ectoplasm mostly,
but made the clocks run backwards 20 minutes,
and all the photographs began to weep.

At times like these we know Dead Grandpa's with us,
a waning disincarnate sort of Gramps
who knows things--like what fish forks are--he never
knew before, but he cannot help us much.

He tries, we know: that's why at 2 a.m.
he's mounting stairs and falling, featherweighted,
on the Oriental runner in a heap,
light, light, like the yellow leaves or spindrift.

Why is there a "their" there?

In the CHE today "Female Science Professor" writes, "If you don't like another professor, don't take your dislike out on their students and postdocs." I am always irritated by that use of "their"--the plural pronoun with a singular antecedent, utterly illogical, calling attention to its lack of gender bias.

Mine doesn't seem to be the majority view. Those whose opinions I respect remind me that the usage goes back at least to Shakespeare,"God send every one their heart's desire!" Thackery writes, "A person can't help their birth." And "in lowliness of mind let each esteem other better than themselves," says the King James Committee.

I don't care. I find the construction, as currently used, smugly self satisfied in its correctness (and, yes, I'm probably projecting here), but each person must please themselves.

Even more pregnant and uniquer, too

The lead to this column from the Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/sep/04/why-reading-dickens

suggests that Dickens is "even more ubiquitous" than he used to be. Are there degrees of ubiquity? Can you be "even more omnipresent"? Is it childish to be annoyed by this sort of thing?

I don't want to be ungrateful, though. I learned a new word from the column, aptronym, then, from looking it up, another, the synonymous euonym. I feel more omniscienter than ever.

from the mailbag

Dear "u stink":

Yes, I get to decide whether your "comment" shows up here or not. I'm sorry you feel offended and excluded, but not all that sorry.

I can summarize your unposted comment for you; maybe that will salve your lacerated sensibilities. You don't like me; you don't like my poems; you suspect I dress funny; I was spawned by Satan; I am personally responsible for Israeli foreign policy and, apparently, Venezuela's, too; and you are convinced I was raised by evil nuns in evening gowns, who tempted me with illicit decolletage while flogging me for not having memorized Lesbia Brandon.

Actually, I made that last part up. You didn't say anything nearly that interesting. And there's an o in "people," not a double e.

P.S. Yes, I see that have only 1 "follower," though "pariah" [note spelling; it rhymes with "Mariah," as in Carey or they call the wind] seems a bit harsh. I'm sure you're correct in saying many bloggers have more--hordes, throngs, multitudes fed with loaves and anapests. All of them should be watching parking meters.

Say it ain't so

Is it true that orange rhymes with Blorenge, a hill in Wales?

from the mailbag

RHE you know nobody reads this don't you? I read it enough to know that nobody reads it, so I guess I wasn't right when I said nobody reads it. Maybe I should of said something like Almost nobody reads this blog and nobody but you cares about it. Don't you have anything better to do?

Dear Sir or Madam:

No.

Your poems all sound a lot alike to me, same voice every time. Maybe it's time for some variety.

I can't say you're wrong, but the explanation--which is that I wrote them all--suggests how little I can do about it. I have the same reaction when I read through a collected Hardy or Yeats or Frost or Housman. Superior voices, maybe, but they give one the same feeling of surfeit. The answer probably is something like, Lyric poems by the same poet shouldn't be read in bulk. A few poems at a time, from a volume dipped into at random, may be a better way to go.

You are an energizer bunny. Don't you ever get discouraged?

Thank you. Yes.

Are the bagels any good in Denver?

Not as good as they are elsewhere. The locals blame the altitude. I think it's global warming. Or maybe the Illuminati. To be fair, the rellenos can be very good indeed.

RHE

"Faith-based" discussion

I read another article this morning on the relative merits of societies predicated on religious belief and those which are secular. (It was in the CHE; you can find it at aldaily.com.) It was learned and dispassionate and even handed. It entirely missed the point. Such articles almost always do, because their unstated premise seems to be that whether we believe or not depends on what we would find most useful. Left undiscussed is truth. If there are no intellectually respectable arguments for the existence of God--and there aren't--what difference does it make whether we'd be better off in an Age of Faith? As Bishop Butler said, "Things and actions are what they are, and the consequences of them will be what they will be: why then should we desire to be deceived?" Our preferences don't really figure into the matter.

Perhaps we should end with another famous believer. Johnson said, "the mind can only repose on the stability of truth." Of course Johnson seems to have spent much of his life muttering to himself, "I do believe. I do believe. I do, I do, I do."

Mailbag

1. For the umpty-seventh time, yes, I am the Richard Epstein. Those other Richard Epsteins are each a Richard Epstein. Yes, that professorly chap is more famous, but, dude, the gentleman is an attorney.

2. No, I do not know why a certain class of intellectual dilettante advocates the legalization of marijuana, but the prohibition of tobacco. Probably because I smoke cigars. And why are you asking a poet this question? This sort of conundrum is best addressed by Jerry Seinfeld.

3. As between Derek Walcott and Ruth Padel, I'd choose Francis Turner Palgrave, who has prior experience in the position, wore a long, but rather patchy, beard, is responsible for The Golden Treasury, which promoted the confusion of good poetry with Good Taste, and who edited a volume of selections from Robert Herrick mysteriously entitled Chrysomela.

4. No, I have no idea why the guy who played Kumar and Dr Kutner is in the White House now. What made you think I could explain this? Anyway, isn't Martin Sheen still President? Maybe Kumar/Dr Kutner knows him. Or Charlie Sheen.

5. I prefer the Oxford comma, even though Fowler eschews it, except when its omission would occasion confusion. The truth is, I like punctuation. I hope someday I shall find a grilled cheese sandwich bearing the imprint of a semi-colon. Should/would works just the same as shall/will, except that the distinction is even less observed. Do not get me started on decimate.

Particularly flarfy

Ron Silliman writes of Kevin Davies, "Davies appears to have found a spot exactly halfway between language poetry and flarf, or maybe to have heard what was particularly flarfy about Bruce Andrews’ approach to langpo."

And I stopped reading there. Mr Silliman performs a valuable service to readers in his comprehensive cataloguing of literary links. I am really grateful to him for that. But when he speaks in propria persona, he is almost always wrong. Or wrong headed. Or just silly. Whenever he first quotes, then discusses a poem, he makes me want not to read it. Perhaps that's a public service, too.

The World Downriver

The world is somewhat broader than the word
suggests—the tiny globes slotted for banks
or pencil sharpeners, the sort of news
which offers brief and intimate reviews
of life in Akron. Give a world of thanks
for not obtruding Kenya on our notice.
And which of you sophisticates has heard
the prayer that Kundar packaged on a lotus
and floated down the river for his dad,
so lately deceased? The world is somewhat bigger
than what can be ignited by a trigger
in mating season. Even with the bad
strangers excluded, still sit you and I,
a world, we say, grown old, grown dark, gone by.

A rare post about economics

The main thing I've learned from this depression is how dependent our economy is on people buying things they don't really need. The automobile industry is the perfect example. The carmakers are going under, and this is a catastrophe. Tens of thousands of people will lose their jobs, billions of dollars will disappear from the economy, and this is all a very bad thing. (Really. No tongue in cheek. Who wants to see their friends, neighbors, and countrymen lose their jobs?) But no one is saying that people are going to have to do without cars. As far as I can tell, almost everyone who wants a car already has a car or two, cars which are perfectly serviceable or which can easily be made so. The car industry is in dire straits because people aren't buying cars to replace cars which don't really need to be replaced. So, we are told, we have to fix this.

On the other hand, the pundits say, our global ecology is in imminent danger of collapse because we are such wasteful, profligate stewards of our planet. We must not flush our toilets every time; we need to recycle the aluminum foil in which we grilled our streaks (which we shouldn't be grilling) (or eating). But we need to buy cars (and stereos and computers and televisions and houses) we don't actually require, because the global economy will disintegrate if we don't. Leaving aside the minor improvements in efficiency made in each automotive model year, what could be more wasteful of resources than buying a car you don't need?

In my heart I believe that nothing could improve this situation but a population 1/3-1/2 as numerous as it is now; but the means of reaching that end are too awful to contemplate.

So all we can do is to buy as many cars as possible made entirely of recycled aluminum foil.

I've Placed Cherubim

This, from These Denver Odes, appeared in Candelabrum.

I've placed cherubim in the garden,
armed of course to repel sin. My guests
see them, sigh, and say, "Oh, angels. Cute."
Maybe this garden isn't Eden,
and I am locked inside, not sin exiled.
The cherubim are defaced by rain,

as I by impure escapades,
most of which were someone else's--
Munchausen's amorous dotage.
I smile at the girl I slept with.
Since she knows nothing about it,
she thinks me harmless and makes change.

At sunset, when the wind gains
and we shrink, we remember.
We do that very well now,
half-cocked and stiff where we stand,
true lies an analgesic
in the angels' sightless eyes.

And they're all divided into 3 parts

A reader reports that when he types "rhe poems" into his search engine, the first half-dozen websites refer to gallstones and how to be rid of them. "Why?" he asks, but answer came there none.

Civilization and its contents

I've been reading Yeats lately. Despite all the time (and prose) he devoted to his "ideas," it's hard to imagine a great poet with less to say. And this isn't because he relied on inspiration: notwithstanding his loony notions of automatic writing, this is the guy who claimed to write his poems out in prose, then versify them. If that's so, I wonder what prose paragraph this started with--

Who will go drive with Fergus now,
And pierce the deep wood's woven shade,
And dance upon the level shore?
Young man, lift up your russet brow,
And lift your tender eyelids, maid,
And brood on hopes and fear no more.

And no more turn aside and brood
Upon love's bitter mystery;
For Fergus rules the brazen cars,
And rules the shadows of the wood,
And the white breast of the dim sea
And all dishevelled wandering stars.


Lift your tender eyelids, maid, my Aunt Fanny. I believe the classically Woosterian response to this is, "Pish. Oh, and tosh, too."

And yet. And yet. Was Yeats a great poet? You betcha. I'd sigh with contentment if I could have written those last 4 lines, and I have no idea what they mean. It's a very mysterious thing, Great Poetdom.

Dr Johnson & the ungilded pill

The Scottish government proposes to fight alcohol abuse by outlawing discount liquor and imposing a "social responsibility fee" on drink. Their theory, unarticulated, must be that only the affluent should be allowed to get drunk.

As so often is the case, Johnson had the best response. Mrs Thrale tells us,

—"What signifies," says some one,"giving halfpence to common beggars; they only lay it out in gin or tobacco."

"And why should they be denied such sweeteners of their existence? (says Johnson) it is surely very savage to refuse them every possible avenue to pleasure, reckoned too coarse for our own acceptance. Life is a pill which none of us can bear to swallow without gilding; yet for the poor we delight in stripping it still barer, and are not ashamed to show even visible displeasure, if ever the bitter taste is taken from their mouths."

Johnson had no great love for Puritans or Scots (though he heightened his remarks about the latter for dramatic effect); one can only imagine his response to this latest proposal, which should be outlined by a minister with a name like Praisegod Barebones.

R.I.P.

Two of my favorite popular artists died today, John Mortimer and Andrew Wyeth. Mortimer was the creator of one of those indestructible characters who survive their own begettors and the books they were put in--like Tarzan and Sherlock Holmes and Superman. But he was more than that. He was a lawyer who stood for the best thing--law as a bulwark for the protection of civil liberties, a personal rebuttal to the lawyer joke. And one admires Wyeth for the same reasons one admired Frost: he wanted to go his own way and stand against the tide of the prevailing aesthetic and produce what he thought was great art. From my perspective--that of someone whose aesthetic in painting is congruent with Tom Wolfe's The Painted Word--he succeeded.

Hoi polloi

Dear World:

Please stop writing "the hoi polloi." "Hoi" means "the." The "the" is thus redundant.

The Arbiters of Style disagree with me on this. One representatively writes,

Hoi polloi is Greek for “the common people,” but it is often misused to mean “the upper class” (does “hoi” make speakers think of “high” or "hoity-toity"?). Some urge that since “hoi” is the article “the hoi polloi” is redundant; but the general rule is that articles such as "the” and “a” in foreign language phrases cease to function as such in place names, brands, and catch phrases except for some of the most familiar ones in French and Spanish, where everyone recognizes “la"—for instance—as meaning “the.” “The El Nino” is redundant, but “the hoi polloi” is standard English.

(http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/hoipolloi.html)

They disagree, but they're wrong. And their argument, which seems to be that redundancy is acceptable when people don't recognize it, will fail completely as soon as we properly educate everyone. So stop some folks on the street today, on the elevator, at your local DazBog, and tell them, " `Hoi' means `the,' you know."

Thank you.

RHE

P.S. On the other hand, everyone in Santa Fe, natives, tourists, and employees alike, calls the famous hotel there "The La Fonda." Sometimes, piling Pelion upon Ossa, they call it "The La Fonda Hotel."

Last year, Dec. 31st,

I wrote, I am tired of reading bad poems and worse poems and, every once in a while, not-good poems, which cheer me up, because, though not good, they are better than bad and worse. The remedy is in my own hands, of course. I need to spend less time reading new poems online and more time reading old poems in books. The fault is not entirely with the online poetry sites I visit. Most new poems are bad--at every time and in every place. We forget that because history is an editor, and time has winnowed what we know. It is possible that were I to see as many brand-new Elizabethan and Caroline poems as I see Bushy verse, I should be as dismayed by then as I am by now. (I don't really believe that, you know.) But I don't. The moiety of those new poems lined pie pans and lit fires, so I never have to take them into account. Anyway, it may be that too much brand spanking new poetry, read online or off, is not good for you. I need to find out. Do I see any reason to revise that? No. Will Obaman verse be better than Bushy verse? Can't see why. The point remains that most new writing is bad. How many novels from the 80s do you remember? In another hundred years, how many will be up there with Middlemarch and Martin Chuzzlewit? Poems are no different. The more new poems you read, the more bad poems you read. There are compensations. Reading new work keeps you in touch with the Zeitgeist. It gives you a line on the competition. It helps you see what is merely local and temporary--it's what everybody else is doing, too. On the other hand, you don't really need to be kept in touch with the Zeitgeist: it's yours by definition. And your competition ought to be Marvell and Ransom, not Scuzzboy631. Read what entertains and instructs you. Read what helps you with your own work. But keeping au courant is not an end in itself; and when it is, it's mostly a dead end. Happy New Year.

Dead Grandpa Fades to Black. Or Green.

from The Complete Dead Grandpa


At last, Dead Grandpa says, the dead
live for the live, not for themselves:
he for life only, they for life in him.

Tonight the grandson feels the wind
irrigate dreams and dreams there is
a little touch of Grandpa in the night.

And just as well. The more he's dead,
the less he is. He's losing mass.
This afterlife is more than life.

Soon he will be rolled round with rocks:
have his wish worth: remember, me,
death is the reason for the long season.

Think forward to a birth, your death,
the end. We can be met as grass
and ignorant and blind and very green.

Obscurity

An email from an annoyed reader who encountered my latest poem ("Manifest Destiny"), complaining of its obscurity. The burden of her grievance is that I must do it on purpose, to show off in some way--to show that I'm superior to ordinary readers or that I know big words (perhaps I have sesquipedalian longings) or that I'm trying to attract attention for bad things because I don't deserve it for good.

It is an old, old plaint. When I hear it, I think, as I so often do, of Jarrell and his "The Obscurity of the Poet," one of my favorite passages of which goes,

If we were in the habit of reading poets their obscurity would not matter; and, once we are out of the habit, their clarity does not help. Matthew Arnold said, with plaintive respect, that there was hardly a sentence in Lear that he hadn't needed to read two or three times...You and I can afford to look at Stalky and Company, at Arnold, with dignified superiority: we know what those passages mean; we know that Shakespeare is never obscure, as if he were some modernist poet gleefully pasting puzzles together in his garret. Yet when we look at a variorum Shakespeare--with its line or two of text at the top of the page, its forty or fifty lines of wild surmise and quarrelsome conjecture at the bottom--we are troubled.

The truth is, my correspondent doesn't really like poetry. I suspect that is true of almost all the people I encounter in poetry places on the Web. They are there for other reasons--good reasons, bad reasons, their own reasons--and those rarely have anything to do with a life filled with the sound of Hopkins and Browning and Landor, Greville and Raleigh and Sidney. They need to pass some time. They require company. They need to be noticed. They need to be healed. They want to feel in touch with matters of aesthetics; and poetry still carries with it shreds and tatters of prestige--as long as you don't look at it too closely or dirty your hands with crumbly old iambs and messy tropes.

Perhaps it was too hot

Yes, I know I am a bit of fine-arts Philistine, so I shall quote a few sentences from the BBC's report of the Turner Prize competition w/o further comment:

The exhibition's curator, Sophie O'Brien, told the BBC it was a "really exciting" year for the prestigious, and often controversial, prize.

She said: "The Turner Prize is about showing things that are intriguing and surprising and interesting."

Wilkes' work features a supermarket checkout, and a female mannequin perched on a toilet with a bowl with left-over bits of dried porridge at her feet.

Last year Mark Wallinger, the artist whose work includes dressing up as a bear, took the prize for his replica of Brian Haw's anti-war protest in Parliament Square.

And from The Times:

One of them, Cathy Wilkes, 42, is a Glaswegian who gathered together a television, a sink with a single human hair and a pram and titled it She's Pregnant Again when she represented Scotland at the Venice Biennale in 2005.


This time, she has placed a mannequin on a lavatory next to two supermarket check-out counters. Four horse-shoes and bits of discarded wood dangle from wires attached to the mannequin's head. They appear to bear no relevance to the check-out counters on which the artist has arranged bowls and spoons, as well as empty jars with the remnants of food. Scattered across the floor are piles of tiles and broken pottery in a plastic bag.

And, after all, what need is there to comment? What can one say after, "Four horse-shoes and bits of discarded wood dangle from wires attached to the mannequin's head"?

From the same genre is Ron Silliman's praise of The Reality Street Book of Sonnets (http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/), which includes the following passage.

Or Tim Atkins’ “Sonnet 20”:

Dogs
Window
Gar
.
.
.
.
.
March
.
.
in jet-streams, jet-streams
.
yabber

Certainly a sonnet is possible in which these words fall in these places. Yet is not clear if anything, in fact, is missing.

It's a passage which rings perfectly true, as long as human intelligence never intervenes.

The Odd Couple

Katy is standing up for Frank O'Hara and Ernest Dowson (http://baroqueinhackney.com on August 20th, et seq.), a pair who deserve each other. I can see their shades in Poesy Limbo, reciting to no one in particular:

Pedant and pitiful. O, how his rapt gaze wars
With their stupidity! Know they what dreams divine
Lift his long, laughing reveries like enchanted wine,
And make his melancholy germane to the stars?


And here I am, the
center of all beauty!
writing these poems!
Imagine!


Together they are frank and ernest, but I have no taste for either. At least in admiring Dowson (however tongue-in-cheek the admiration may be), she is swimming against the tide. O'Hara is the poet du jour, idol of the moment: a taste for him is cheap, easy, and, to my admittedly limited mind, inexplicable.

Bad blog, boring blog

Most blogs about newly-published poems and current writing are bad and boring because most new poems are bad and boring, and trying to inflate them into subjects of real or permanent interest just won't work. It was always so. We forget how many poems have to disappear to create our impression of an era. Donne and Milton and Pope and Swift and Wordsworth and Keats and Frost and Yeats were not representative of their times--that's why we remember them. Elkanah Settle and Archibald McLeish--they were representative. But they wouldn't have been very interesting to monitor on a daily bloggy basis. Those trying to keep us up to date on What's New keep butting their heads against this immoveable wall.

It is of course possible to write sharp and funny disparagements of bad poems, but as a regular exercise, it isn't good for you, and it's wearing. And that's one of the problems with reading/writing about new poems all the time: you know in advance that most of what you're going to read will be bad. How can that be good?

The summer doldrums

seem to have begun in spring.  Global warming, I presume.  It seems quiet and sort of half hearted around the poetry areas where I read.  Perhaps the activity is all taking place in a Room of Requirements or a new branch of the He-Man Woman-Haters' Club*, undisclosed to me.  I attribute the silence here to a general sense of awe, readers struck dumb by wonder.  Occam might suggest a simpler explanation.

*Are allusions to The Little Rascals still generally comprehensible?  If I sing the "Happy Birthday, Mr. Hood" song, will anyone know what he got as a gift?

Emotion recollected in daffodils

I find it difficult to write poetry on the road. I guess I'm a Wordsworth kind of guy: the poetry comes whilst I'm distracted at my desk or during a really boring meeting. I hope I am storing materials which will produce those subsequent poems, though I suspect most of that occurred long ago, and I am still living off the capital, and I can alway write a poem out of sheer will, if I want to, but those aren't the poems one believes in most. Those come later, if they come at all.

At the moment I am noting, once again, that the English robin and the American robin are two completely different birds and wondering why, all those years I was studying English lit, no one ever said so. Important as the robin is to Merrie Old EngLit, no one mentioned it. One of the hazards of an American kid being taught English books by American teachers: I suspect they didn't know either. I think about this every time I'm here, wondering what else I've missed and what a British student, reading Faulkner or Twain, passes by unawares.

Imagine that

In his Preface to The Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth writes,

I might perhaps include all which it is necessary to say upon this subject by affirming, what few persons will deny, that, of two descriptions, either of passions, manners, or characters, each of them equally well executed, the one in prose and the other in verse, the verse will be read a hundred times where the prose is read once.

Imagine that. Wordsworth says it so matter-of-factly, so off-handedly, he must have believed it was so, yet it posits a state of affairs I find almost inconceivable. Commenting on the passage, Randall Jarrell says,

One sees sometimes carved on geology buildings: O Earth, what changes thou hast seen! When a poet finishes reading this passage from Wordsworth, he thinks in miserable awe: O Earth, what changes thou hast seen! Only a hundred and fifty years ago this is what people were like.

Imagine, say, John Grisham sitting around mooning, unable to change out of his pyjamas, thinking miserably, "I wish I could write these stories in verse, so I could attract some readers." Imagine that. I can't.

New year's irresolution

I am tired of reading bad poems and worse poems and, every once in a while, not-good poems, which cheer me up, because, though not good, they are better than bad and worse. The remedy is in my own hands, of course. I need to spend less time reading new poems online and more time reading old poems in books. The fault is not entirely with the online poetry sites I visit. Most new poems are bad--at every time and in every place. We forget that because history is an editor, and time has winnowed what we know. It is possible that were I to see as many brand-new Elizabethan and Caroline poems as I see Bushy verse, I should be as dismayed by then as I am by now. (I don't really believe that, you know.) But I don't. The moiety of those new poems lined pie pans and lit fires, so I never have to take them into account.

Anyway, it may be that too much brand spanking new poetry, read online or off, is not good for you. I need to find out.

P.S., a day later:

I can't imagine how editors cope with this phenomenon. One told me recently, apologizing for a cursory reading, that she receives 1000 poems a week. Almost all of them must be dreadful, but even if they weren't, how could she know? Gentle Reader, would you--literate, experienced, sensitive connoisseur that you are--have been able to sort the Tennysonian wheat from the Victorian chaff if it had come to you, a single poem concealed among 999 others, with 1000 still pending from the week before and 175+ more about to arrive in that day's mail? No wonder most of them give up and settle for publishing their friends or, if they publish the poems of strangers, selecting those which look most like the poems they published last time. 52,000 poems a year! And that's one editor at one magazine.

Comments

When I post prose, I get comments. When I post verse, I don't. What does this mean?

Anyway, here's a prose query. There's an awful lot of blank verse out there on the internet--Paradise Lost. All of Shakespeare's plays. Thompson's The Seasons. The Ring and the Book. But if you type "blank verse poem" into Google, one of the things you get, on the very first page, is my poem "A Short Course in Theology" on this blog. Why? (Not that I'm complaining. An awful lot of people find their way here in just that manner. No word on how disappointed they are when they arrive.)

An Ars Poetica

He bade them sit and watch from cozy chairs.
Rabbit, he said, and there it was, a jugged
Hare, for the coarse of palate. He said, Sun!
And into the room his kid slouched. "What up, Pops?"
This isn't a piece of cake, he told them. There,
Right on the rug, synthetic, hard as brass,
A slice of apricot pie declared itself.
Poets do magic. What they want is sense,
He said. A copper spray of pennies sailed
Lustily round the room, harboring on
The children's shoulders. Not no other word,
The poet shouted: ungrammatically,
Their room, and all and everyone, was gone,
And he alone was left to tell some tale.

Out of Sequence

Atonement over, now comes autumn.
First contrition, then the fall.

Over at

one of the very-impressed-with-itself Poetry Places posters are listing what's currently on their desks. Such a list. You should be such a Scholar-Mensch. Everyone is reading Yeats and Dante and Beowulf and The Complete Works of Bertran de Born. They are glancing through Cavafy and Murasaki and Seamus Heaney. They are idling away their non-ode-ing hours with Homer and Propertius and the untranslated Manilius and memorizing The Mutabilitie Cantos.

None of them is reading Elmore Leonard's new novel. They do not mention James Lee Burke or Charles McCarry or Philip Roth or Joseph Heller. They can't be bothered with Trollope or early Dickens. They spit on The Reivers and Sanctuary. Joseph Andrews? Scenes from a Clerical Life? Shamela? The Bab Ballads? I don't think so. They've got Buddenbrooks to think about.

I don't know which would be worse, if I believed them or if I didn't. If the first, they are prigs; if the second, poseurs. Anyway, I can't think about them anymore. I've got a velvet painting of Mickey Spillane to finish.

More poems, fewer poets

I'm told there is another new Best American Poetry out*. This means another surge in chatter about poets and clique of poets and schools of poets** and departments of poets and incestuous poet-y relations***. And so on. And so on. And scooby dooby dooby. All I have to say is, Ooh sha sha.

I just don't care about these poets and their lives. Not until the booksellers hire Dr Johnson to write brief biographical prefaces to collections of their poems. If you want to get my attention****, tell me, not about the poets, but about the poems. I don't care if there are major defects in these poets' characters. If they wear their knickers on their heads and snort Cheez Whiz, I can live with that. If their poems aren't good, I won't be thinking about them anyway; if their poems are good, I'll forgive them almost anything.***** Point me at the good poems, and tell me anything you think I should know about why you think they're good. Or tell me they're bad poems, and warn me off.

But for God's sake, talk about the poems and leave the poets alone. Or at least move them to the back of the line.

RHE
* I don't care all that much, because I know from the start that it's fatally deficient--i.e., none of my poems is in it.

**As though such poets were krill. Could be, I suppose.

***As though they were Lots of poets.

**** And my guess is you don't. Or, to be more precise, you don't give a shit whether you do or not.

*****Time that with this strange excuse/Pardons Kipling and his views, etc., etc.

You never know, do you?

Today someone arrived at this blog by performing a Google search for "tapir fucking at the zoo." Wonder what he was hoping for.

Why do fools fall in love?

What holds message boards together is the need for praise. For all the blather about how poets just want straightforward criticism so that they can grow (you can do the same thing at The House of Pies, and it tastes better) (are there still Houses of Pie?), what they really want is acclamation. So they forum shop till they find a place where other posters either like what they write or are willing to say they like it, in exchange for reciprocal tub-thumping.

Anyone reading through poetry websites/message boards/forums will find himself saying over and over again, "Anyone who likes that would like okra boiled with Gummi Bears." But the answer is pretty obvious, really: today's gushee is tomorrow's gusher. And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make. Workshop-wise.

It's a nicely-nice thing, I suppose: a place for everyone in the internet poetry universe; and if the stomach sometimes recoils when drivel is overpraised, well, our turns will come, too, when we have found the right foster family----change places, and handy-dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief?

What about Gutenberg?

One of my poems appeared this week in an online journal. It looks fine; the "magazine" itself is neither better nor worse than the print outlets in which my poems more commonly appear; and the editors deserve thanks for their doubtlessly unremunerative devotion to the art. But for us sons and daughters of print, there is something oddly unsatisfying about e-journals and online publication. It seems so ephemeral and provisional. (No offense to that other magisterial symbol of our times, The Shit Creek Review.)

I know this is illogical of me. Scholars, fans of poetry, and potential biographers are not going into Widener, browsing through bound back volumes of the DeKalb Literary Arts Journal or Phoebe in the hope of finding a dimly remembered poem of mine. And yet. And yet. They could. Is the same going to be true of my latest electronic incarnation?

Variations

Many beginning prosodists treat metrical variations as though they were vermin: find them, identify them, then ruthlessly exterminate them. But variations are neither good nor bad in themselves; they are only prosodic tools. All that matters is how they're used and whether they work. When you've noticed that Shakespeare's

What studied torments, tyrant, hast for me?
What wheels? racks? fires? what flaying? boiling?
In leads or oils? what old or newer torture
Must I receive, whose every word deserves
To taste of thy most worst?

is not perfectly regular, your analysis has only begun, not concluded. Too often, though, I see "critiques" which are little more than lists of metrical variations, as though they were spelling errors, and the critic had performed some regulatory action by ferreting them out. I usually respond with some reference to Milton's

Rocks, Caves, Lakes, Fens, Bogs, Dens, and shades of death[,]

since critiquers are a tad hesitant to claim either that every other word must be stressed or that Milton didn't know what he was doing. (They may think, "If only he'd had access to The Gaz," but they aren't quite brave enough to say it.)

Dear Good-Hearted, Fan-like Correspondent,

Thanks for the suggestion that I talk more about myself, that I reveal more--what do I read, what do I eat, what do I drink, who do I know, who do I do, what do I listen to, what was I like as a obnoxious, precocious whippersnapper, how many bedrooms in my house, how many frozen toaster waffles in the fridge, how do I like my steak, that sort of thing. I have considered your request in the generous, earnest spirit it was made.

No.

Every Mother's Song

Born with teeth, a caul, a head of hair,
 marked for great things,
Is anybody there
 to hear the mother as she sings,

Unto me is born, is born, here, a child?
 The same starfall
Spattered a desert, wild
 forest predators saw it all.

He now pays bills, she irons out disputes.
 No one here sings
To the naked men, suits
 of skin, cold miraculous things.

Apart from You

I've never been particularly happy with this poem, but I don't get all that many requests, so, Shirley, I dug it out of the filing cabinet.

Apart from you, there have been none.
Yes, I have stared. I looked at one
who walked like leaves caught in a breeze.
I pictured this, remembered these.
Piffle. Trifles. Bagatelles.
Our bed at night remembers, tells
me more than I should know. It makes
too little noise. I wake. It wakes
shadows of colors, and once a light,
though briefly, shook apart the night.
I must be done. I am undone
apart from you. There have been none.

Plot

Assume a woman. There she sits, bemused,
already knowing she has been assumed.
Women do, mostly. She lifts her long hair
and lets it fall, half flirting, half fatigued.

Assume an incident, the victim slumped
against your hedge, holding himself together.
The cops have come. The perp has fled. You can
assume the rain will not efface the blood,
though something will, if you can hang around.

Picture the telephone. It is prepared
to ring, whether it rings today or not.
If no one calls, you can pick up your phone
to see if it's still working. But it is.

Assume the central man. If vectors run
from woman through the phone to accident,
he'll light them up at night. And if they don't,
he can propose the sense of why they should.
It falls together, when you reach the end.

Sauce for the gander

Someone referred to me a website posting "formalist poetry by women." Folks have been trying to enlighten me for years, but I must be ineducable: it just hasn't worked. I still don't understand why such places and labels aren't offensive. You know, don't you, that if someone opened a site dedicated to "formalist poetry by men," it would be booed, hissed, reviled, and castigated for being openly, blatantly sexist. (It also would be ignored, but that's a different problem.) Why is this different?

I welcome answers, you know, though if they consist of little more than "you troglodytic brute," I'll just delete them.

Something He Probably Should Have Seen

Early Epstein. As I've often noted, it can be difficult to look over work from a long time ago. And a bit confusing. Is it the poems which we outgrew, superseded in skill and command, or is it merely that we've changed--not necessarily improved--so that what interested or impressed us once does so no longer? This seems to me to hold up better than most of what I was writing then. It appeared in the British magazine Seam.


It was all there and then all gone.
There must have been a time at which
he didn't see the warning signs--
the drop in temperature in rooms
he entered or the shabby food,
sentimental occasions they
let slip by or slept through. When he
himself awoke and found the house
empty, the children gone, the dogs
gone too, their snapped chains on the ground,
the weeds knee high, the weather changed,
one of the cars absconded with,
the battery of the other dead,
he figured he had overlooked
something he probably should have seen.

Dumb runs wild

The poetry boards I read and where I sometimes post seem to have collapsed in a heap of stupidity, meanness, spite, recrimination, and sheer incompetence, as though everyone simultaneously had said, "I can't take it any more! All this trying to be intelligent and artistic, well read, well mannered, and literate--it's just not me, and I give it up! Let the real me flow!"

And flow it has. It turns out everyone has pretty much hated everyone else all along, and they didn't really like poetry all that much either. Many of them actually seem to resent poems, as though poetry were an imposition on their time and a burden on their attention. With some of them, that comes as a surprise. Others? Not so much.

2 More Epigrams

from The Greek Anthology

I lie here waiting, while this small hole mends.
I lie here waiting. Waiting never ends.



And Then There Fell

No she so fair as his,
alarming in the spring.
So fair, such joy in this,
none needs no other thing,
not he. He had her all.
Then summer changed to fall.
How could it have been so?
And then there fell the snow.

And Monsters Underneath the Bed

The prince of darkness keeps a nightlight on,
Casper the friendly ghost, Count Chocula
The sweet undead, or Spiderman the lord
Of flies.  It helps him when the shadows grow
A second head or look like Angela,
So white, her bodice and her breasts are one
Insipid sight.  No princess for the prince
Who keeps his favorite souls in coffee cans
Along with his loose change.  They make a sound
Like pinto beans or minute rice.  He thwarts
His nightmares with the songs of nursery school.
Last time he was in hell, he took a snack—
A juicebox and his favorite fruit, handpicked.
Tonight he can smell ashes on his breath
And hear a jewsharp twanging where his chest
Would be if he were more conventional.
A flashlight underneath the blanket helps,
But not that much, too much to know, too soon.

And So to Bed

     This is a really old poem.   It appeared in the Ball State University Forum.


To dinner we had Paul and Sam, my bosses,
and their young blonded wives (acquired lately,
at no small charge of alimony, losses
of stock and children, both lamented greatly).
The trout was awful—thawed a bit and breaded.
Sam said he knew where corporately we’re headed
(to hell, he thinks).  Paul never says too much.
He drank almost two bottles of my best
French white bordeaux; I thought he looked a touch
green towards the end.  His wife was tightly dressed,
skirt slit to the thigh (which, nudging against mine,
made me uncomfortable, what with the wine).
Michelle wore her blue denim suit, of course.
She looks less like a preppie than a horse
after a couple joints.  I thinks she keeps
me back, of which Paul’s drinking is a sign.
Then, much as always, after all departed,
she starts to strip.  And here the poor tears started
(her fists curl up and shudder when she weeps).
I might have been gentler in what I said.
A final cigarette.  And so to bed.

2X

The stones evince no brogue, the skyline not
A trace of paddy, taters, or the wee
Dear men in funny shoes and buckled hats.
Vikings, you say? A pyre burns the night,
Which helps me read this ATM. I've no
Experience of euros, and I falter.
Never you mind. A lacerated heart,
A kidney grilled for breakfast: these are good
Solid attractions. Phonics stroll the park,
The poteen in them brewing up a storm;
And maybe help will come from God or Spain,
And Pizza Place, just up the street, delivers.
But not from evil, nor from cheesy bits.
These are the incidents of life and faith
From which we cannot flee, though packaged tours
Offer us, all-included, to new homes,
Good homes like these, which never flinch, stood stone
On stone, until they proffer us the bread
Of Liffey. Maybe then this hole will fill,
The betting shops acknowledge their defeat,
The rain-peeled townhomes open colored doors.

Fragment on a Fragment

This, also from Epigrams, also appeared in Lyric.


So long as men shall live      The broken page
said nothing more.  Although the dust

I see I reached

7500 hits this morning. (7311 of them probably were mine.) That's a good morning's work, I expect, for some of the Big & Rich Blogs, so thanks to those of you who read here, regularly or once in a while: your hearts must be as pure as Galahad's, for, Lord knows, there's no fringe benefits here, nothing to tempt you but the poetry itself.

RHE