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.