Poetry Redux

[quasimodo1]

James Wright (1927-1980) W.H.Auden chose

Wright's first book, "The Green Wall" for the Yale Younger Poets series in 1957.

James Wright, besides writing poetry and prose, translated Pablo Neruda, Cesar

Vallejo and George Trakl. His themes, alot of them alluringly dark, exibit backrounds

of personal isolation, process of disillusionment, events in an instant of time and

comparisons of youth to age. Some examples of Wright's great poetic lines: in

"Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio" .........."All the proud fathers are ashamed to

go home. Their women cluck like starved pullets, Dying for Love" and in the same

poem......."Therefore, Their sons grow suicidally beautiful, at the beginning of

October". In "A Blessing" he writes........"Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.

And the eyes of those two Indian ponies, Darken with kindness. They have come

gladly out of the willows, To welcome my friend and me." In "Hook" he writes of a

young man accepting help from a Native American outside a bus

station................."Did you ever feel a man hold/ Sixty-five cents/ In a hook, And place

it/ Gently/ In your freezing hand?" quasimodo1

[quasimodo1]

Kenneth Rexroth (1905-1982), favorite lines and some facts. from "Delia Rexroth

(died June, 1916)" ............"Under your illkempt yellow roses, Delia, today your are

younger/ Than your son. Two and a half decades-The family monument sagged

askew, And he overtook your half-a-life." from the poem "Vitamins and

Roughage" ..................."The special Hellenic privilege/ Of the special intellect seeps

out/ At last in this irrigated soil./ Sweat of athletes and juice of lovers/ Are stronger

than Socrates' hemlock;/ And the games of scrupulous Euclid/ Vanish in the

gymnopaedia." 1944 from the poem "Empty Mirror" ..........."As long as we are lost/

In the world of purpose/ We are not free. I sit/ In my ten foot square hut./ The birds

sing. The bees hum. The water murmurs over the rocks./ The canyon shuts me in."

1952 Kenneth Rexroth, born in South Bend, Indiana; he was a conscientious

objector during WWII, which was to be anathema during these years. He once

riduculed the editors of the "Partisan Review" as "Brooks Brothers Boys who got an

overdose of T.S.Eliot in some Ivy Leage fog factory." He did have some popularity

with his "great books" column where he discussed Homer, Apuleius, Lady Murasaki,

Montaigne, Cervantes and Tolstoy. These columns were compiled into a book

entitled "Classics Revisited". from "The Signature of All Things" he

writes................."The saint saw the world as streaming/ In the electrolysis of love./ I

put him by and gaze through shade/ Folded into shade of slender/ Laurel trunks and

leaves filled with sun." .{quasimodo1}

[quasimodo1]

Hart Crane's poetry has been criticised

incorrectly by most of the jounalist/critics

today except for the brilliant work of Edward

Dahlberg who addressed his poetry first and his

lifestyle later and on tangent. Most critics,

even the ones Crane called friends, conclude

that he missed the mark he set for himself but

still wrote great poetry, inspired poets and had

some major financial supporters. Philip Levine

contributed to Crane's valuation by writing "On

the Meeting of Garcia Lorca and Hart

Crane"............."Let's not be frivolous, let's
not pretend the two poets gave
each other wisdom or love or
even a good time, let's not
invent a dialogue of such eloquence
that even the ants in your own
house won't forget it. The two
greatest poetic geniuses alive
meet, and what happens? A vision
comes to an ordinary man staring
at a filthy river." (Philip Levine)

Crane

synthesized new transformations in "modern"

poetry, melding ornate Elizabethan forms, the

mysteries of Rimbaud, the unique sympathies

of Whitman...all to fix what he referred to as

"the broken world". His masterpiece "The

Bridge" reads like the age of jazz confronting

"The Waste Land". From "The

Bridge"............................Under thy shadow by the

piers I waited;
Only in darkness is thy shadow clear.
The City's fiery parcels all undone,
Already snow submerges an iron year . . .

O Sleepless as the river under thee,
Vaulting the sea, the prairies' dreaming sod,
Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend
And of the curveship lend a myth to God.

.....................



Some of Crane's

poems, not attemping the grandeur of "The

Bridge" are much more reader friendly and

fetching, like

"Forgetfullness".............Forgetfulness is rain at

night,
Or an old house in a forest, -- or a child.
Forgetfulness is white, -- white as a blasted

tree,
And it may stun the sybil into prophecy,
Or bury the Gods.

I can remember much forgetfulness.

.................................


Another

notable poem "Interior" has these great lines

(all excerpts).................................Wide from the

world, a stolen hour
We claim, and none may know
How love blooms like a tardy flower
Here in the day's after-glow.


Crane

wrote a great poetic tribute to Melville called

"At Melville's Tomb". excerpt-"Then in the

circuit calm of one vast coil,/ Its lashings

charmed and malice reconciled,/ Frosted eyes

there were that lifted alters;/ And silent answers

crept across the stars."





In the end, it is

true Crane was mercurial and self-destructive;

in 1932 at the age of 33, he carefully placed his

coat on the railing of a steamship in the Gulf of

Mexico, and went overboard.

{quasimodo1} (To Logos: still working on the clarity of this format)

[nebish]

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota by James Wright....the poetic equivalent of Two-Lane Blacktop

Hart Crane had the brain of a pea, according to ee cummings: HC's poems and endeavours don't seem that way..can you see it..?

[quasimodo1]

To Nebish: I like the "two-lane blacktop" comparison; that doesn't make Hart Crane an Interstate but his poetry is arresting and ambitious. Crane's personal life got very messy but I try to address the poetry more than the poet. And yes, I see it completely. What poet would you choose for another entry? quasimodo1

[quasimodo1]

Jorie Graham, (1950- ), Growing up in Rome, attending the Sorbonne in Paris,

expelled for participating in the student revolt of 1968, then film studies at NYU; she

had realms of experience as resouce for her poetry. One unique element of her

style was to leave a blank space when she arrives at a place in a poem that can't be

defined; it's almost a signature of her style and sign of her confidence. In a poem

she wrote before she adopted this special feature she

writes:........................................... ...."The world

is everywhere able to flow into itself without damage
or confusion. Something we don't know is complete without
us
and continues. On the other side
of the ocean, four dark sails joining to become black

granite cliffs, buckle over the water's end
protecting this finest of erosions.".................................................. .................(In High Waters)

Graham, now one of the classic contemporary voices of American poetry, won a

Pulitzer Prize in 1996 for her selected poems "The Dream of Unified Field" With a

backround in philosophy, she shocked reviewers in the early 1980's arriving via the

"American Poetry Review" where one critic after reading three of her poems said her

new voice was "like hearing Shostakovich after Tchaikowsky". She resists closure as

inevitable in poems; a reality that many writers reach for while Graham instictively

avoids, the goal being elusive or impossible. Like Penelope at the loom, she keeps

weaving the mystery and the reader hears both body and mind. In "Noli Me

Tangere", the poem begins..............."You see the angels have come to sit on the

delay/ for a while,/ they have come to harrow the fixities,/ the sharp edges/ of this

open/ sepulcher." Being trilingual, language always lingers in close backround. "I

was taught three/ names for the tree facing my window,/

Castagno...chassagne...chestnut."...from an early poem. Her abstract, mystical

qualities shine brightly in

"Prayer".................................................. ................................................"This is the force of faith.

Nobody gets
what they want. Never again are you the same. The longing
is to be pure. What you get is to be changed. More and more by
each glistening minute, through which infinity threads itself,
also oblivion, of course, the aftershocks of something
at sea. Here, hands full of sand, letting it sift through
in the wind, I look in and say take this, this is
what I have saved, take this, hurry. And if I listen
now? Listen, I was not saying anything. It was only
something I did. I could not choose words. I am free to go.".................................................. Jorie Graham continually probes in her poetry a real living world, shifting, changing and sliding into the future so that her poems are a shot fired at the moving target, too fast for an exact hit. In a later poem, "Orpheus and Eurydice" atschool.eduweb.co.uk/carolrb/greek/orpheus.html, the myth of maximum frustration, she writes: ........"Because you see he could not be married to it anymore, this field with minutes in it/ called woman, its presence in him the thing called/ future--{the indefinable space} could not be married to it anymore, expanse tugging his mind out into it,/ tugging the wanting-to finish out./ What he dreamed of was this road (as he walked on it), this dustiness,/ but without their steps on it, their prints, without song--"......................One last poem of Graham's has classic lines and is her best(?) work, a poem called "Fission", which she wrote after watching a film that touched her:...................."Everyone in here wants to be taken off/ somebody else's list./ Tick. It is 1963. The idea of history is being/ outmaneuvered./ So that as the houselights come on--midscene--/ not quite killing the picture which keeps flowing beneath,/ a man comes running down the aisle/ asking for our attention--" by Jorie Graham (1991). {quasimodo1}

[nebish]

John Berryman, Anne Sexton, Jerry Lieber & Mike Stoller

[quasimodo1]

To Nebish: I will do one of your authors next. Thanks for the suggestion. quasimodo1

[quasimodo1]

.........."Returning to the drifted snow, the rink
Lively with children, to the older men,
The long companions they can never reach,
The blue light, men with ladders, by the church
The sledge and shadow in the twilit street,
Are not aware that in the sandy time
To come, the evil waste of history
Outstretched..." from "Winter Landscape" by

John Berryman (1914-1972) A commentary

on Berryman can be endless. But one fact, one

trauma haunts his life and work; his father's

death outside his son's window when he was

seven years old. Despite this, he goes on to

create a body of work at once desparate,

humourus, egoistic and scholarly. A famous

line quoted often from "Dream Song 14":

................................"Life, friends, is boring. We

must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) "Ever to confess you're bored
means you have no/Inner Resources."

In Berryman's series of poems called "Dream

Song" his alter-ego Henry never rules a day.

After his mother moves them to NYcity,

Berryman acquires a scholar's education and

writing in cold-war America, he goes on to

create neurotic yet calm, confident and

despairing poetry until his last day. In "Dream

Song One: Huffy Henry hid the day"..............."All

the world like a woolen lover
once did seem on Henry's side.
Then came a departure.
Thereafter nothing fell out as it might or ought.
I don't see how Henry, pried
open for all the world to see,

survived.".................Influenced by British poets

W. B. Yeats, W. H. Auden, Gerard Manley

Hopkins, and the Americans Hart Crane and

Ezra Pound, he wrote "77 Dream Songs" within

which he smashes normal syntax and diction

yet creates a unique meter with both the

scholars language, street slang, high and low

lyricism and comedy. Eventually he wrote

almost four hundred poems collected as "The

Dream Songs."

Allowing Berryman to speak for himself as

Henry, another poem is forshadowing his own

life:
'Dream Song 114: Henry in trouble whirped out

lonely whines'


"Henry in trouble whirped out lonely whines.
When ich when was ever not in trouble?
But did he whip out whines
afore? And when check in wif ales & lifelines
anyone earlier O?—Some, now, Mr Bones,
many.—I am fleeing double:

Mr Past being no friends of mine,
all them around: Sir Future Dubious,
calamitous & grand:
I can no foothold here.............................................. .."

John Berryman, professor at the University of

Minnesota, at Harvard and Wayne State

University, never got over the early trauma; a

heavy drinker with emotional instabilities and

yet still a Fellow of the Academy of American

Poets, threw himself off a bridge in Minneapolis

in 1972. ..................................................
"The Traveller"


"They pointed me out on the highway, and

they said
'That man has a curious way of holding his

head.'

They pointed me out on the beach; they said

'That man
Will never become as we are, try as he can.'"

[quasimodo1]

Anne Sexton, (1928-1974), born Anne Gray Harvey in Newton, Massachusetts, had a

psychotic breakdown at the age of twenty-eight. "One night I saw I.A. Richards on

educational tv reading a sonnet and explaining its form. I thought to myself, 'I could do that,

maybe; I could try'. So I sat down and wrote a sonnet. The next day I wrote another one,

and so forth. My doctor encouraged me to write more. 'Don't kill yourself,' he said. 'Your

Poems might mean something to someone else someday.'" At this time both Sexton and

Plath studied with Robert Lowell and took up the "confessional" impulse favored by Lowell

and S.D. Snodgrass. Robert Lowell compared Sexton as "Edna Millay after Snodgrass."

When Anne Sexton was interviewed by the Paris Review, Sexton told the interviewer that

"Sylvia [Plath] and I would would talk at length about our first suicide, in detail and depth."

Plath, Sexton, Lowell and George Starbuck would meet after Lowell's class at Boston

University at the Ritz hotel where they would meet for martinis. From "All My Pretty Ones"

she writes: .................................................. .....................

"All my pretty ones?/ Did you say all? O hell-kite! All?/ What! all my pretty chickens and

thier dam/ At one fell swoop?.../I cannot but remember such things were,/ That were most

precious to me." -Macbeth (intro to poem). In the last stanza of this piece she writes,

............"I hold a five -year diary that my mother kept/ for three years, telling all she does not

say/ of your [her father] alchoholic tendency. You overslept,/ she writes, My God, father,

each Christmas Day/ with your blood, will I drink down your glass/ of wine? The diary of

your hurly-burly years/ goes to my shelf to wait for my age to pass/ Only on this hoarded

span will love persevere./ Whether you are pretty or not, I outlive you,/ bend down my

strange face to yours and forgive you." 1962 And in heavier piece called "Wanting to Die"

she writes this stanza exerpted here: ...................."But suicides have a special language./ Like

carpenters they want to know which tools./ They never ask why build./ Twice I have so

simply declared myself,/ have possessed the enemy, eat the enemy,/ have taken on his

craft, his magic./ In this way, heavy and thoughtfull,/ warmer than oil or water,/ I have

rested, drooling at the mouth-hole./ I did not think of my body at needle point./ Even the

cornea and the leftover urine were gone./ Suicides have already betrayed the

body.".................................................. .................................................. ......And the first two stanzas of "The Truth

the Dead Know" these two stanzas stand out:.............................................. .................................................. .... The Truth the Dead Know
by Anne Sexton


"For my Mother, born March 1902, died March 1959
and my Father, born February 1900, died June 1959


Gone, I say and walk from church,
refusing the stiff procession to the grave,
letting the dead ride alone in the hearse.
It is June. I am tired of being brave.

We drive to the Cape. I cultivate
myself where the sun gutters from the sky,
where the sea swings in like an iron gate
and we touch. In another country people die."


by Anne Sexton. .................................................. .................................................. Here is a partial list of her

poetry collections: (not a complete list):45 Mercy Street (1976)
All My Pretty Ones (1962)
Live or Die (1966)
Love Poems (1969)
Selected Poems (1964)
The Awful Rowing Toward God (1975)
The Book of Folly (1973)
The Complete Poems (1981)
The Death Notebooks (1974)
To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960)
Transformations (1971)
Words for Dr. Y.: Uncollected Poems 1978)............................................. .................................................. ...........
Another excerpt from the poem: "Snow White and the Seven

Dwarfs"..............................................."Looking glass upon the wall. . .
Once more the mirror told
and once more the queen dressed in rags
and once more Snow White opened the door.
This time she bought a poison comb,
a curved eight-inch scorpion,
and put it in her hair and swooned again.
The dwarfs returned and took out the comb
and she revived miraculously.
She opened her eyes as wide as Orphan Annie.
Beware, beware, they said,
but the mirror told,
the queen came,
Snow White, the dumb bunny,
opened the door
and she bit into a poison apple
and fell down for the final time.
When the dwarfs returned
they undid her bodice,
they looked for a comb,
but it did no good.
Though they washed her with wine
and rubbed her with butter
it was to no avail.
She lay as still as a gold piece." [6 stanzas from the 11 total] Sadly Anne Sexton was

discovered dead inside an idling car in a garage, October 4, 1974 {quasimodo1}

(the next posting will be a poet not of the suicidal school)

[stlukesguild]

...the next posting will be a poet not of the suicidal school

Awwww shoot!:crash: I was hoping for Hart Crane:sick:

[stlukesguild]

Robert Herrick (baptized August 24, 1591- October 1674)

Herrick was born in London, the son of Nicholas Herrick, a well-to-do goldsmith, who committed suicide when Robert was a year old. It is thought that he attended Westminster School although there are no absolute records of this. In 1607 he apprenticed to his uncle, Sir William Herrick, who was also a goldsmith and jeweler to the king. Herrick ended his apprenticeship after only six years, at age twenty-two, at which time he entered St. John's College, Cambridge.He graduated in 1617.

Upon graduation he began composing poetry and became active within the "Sons of Ben", a group of Cavalier poets centered around an admiration for the works of Ben Jonson. During this time he made numerous connections at court with influential figures such as the Earl of Pembroke, Endymion Porter, Newark, Buckingham, Edward Norgate, etc... His poetry circulated at court and it (and perhaps he himself) was known by the King and Queen. He was known to be charming and witty and and would have been a welcome guest wherever music and poetry were welcome. In or before 1627, he took religious orders. At this point one would have surmised either a minor position at court... or perhaps at the Chapel in Whitehall.

Unfortunately Herrick became attached as the chaplain to the ill-fated expedition to the Isle of Rhé and two years later he was appointed by the king to the position of vicar of the parish of Dean Prior, Devon in 1629. This small position far removed from the court in London and offering no great pay... yet demanding much of the vicar led Herrick to compose Mr. Robert Hericke: his farwell unto Poetrie . However, his responsibilities did not result in the end of his career as a poet. Indeed, it was in the secluded rural environs of Devon (located in South-West England) that he wrote some of his best work.

In spite of the demands of his post, he reportedly took his responsibilities as a parish priest to heart, and he was essentially a man at peace with his place and much beloved by his parishioners. Nevertheless, it has been recorded that he once was known to have thrown the manuscript of his sermon at an unfortunate parishioner who had fallen asleep during the sermon. His poem A Thanksgiving to God for his House describes an idyllic rural life, spent in his little house surrounded by animals (including his beloved spaniel and reportedly a trained pig) and the poor but not unwelcome parishioners... but not without his pleasures of "guiltlesse mirth" and "Wassaile Bowles... Spic'd to the brink". He was cared for by his devoted maid, Prudence Baldwin, the "Prew" of so many of his verses.

Following the English Civil War, his position was revoked on account of his refusal to make pledge to the "Solemn League and Covenant" which involved an alliance between the Protestants and the Scottish against their common enemy, the Royalists and Catholics... in return for England adopting the Scottish Presbyterian method of church government. Herrick was forced to return to London where he lived in Westminster, and depended upon the charity of friends and family. He spent this time preparing his poetry for publication. They were initially printed in 1648 under the title Hesperides; or the Works both Human and Divine of Robert Herrick. The volume contained hundreds of alternately exquisite lyrical love poems, short satires and epigrams, and religious poems. A second subsection included in the Hesperides was entitled Noble Numbers and was comprised solely of poems of sacred subjects

Following the Restoration in 1660, with Charles II assuming the throne, Herrick petitioned for his own restoration to his previous post. Herrick was returned to his position as vicar of Dean Prior again in the summer of 1662 where he would remain until his death in 1674, at the age of 83. Herrick was a bachelor all his life, and many of the women he names in his poems are thought to be fictional... although one cannot be entirely certain as to whether some are indeed based upon real women. Herrick wrote numerous poems in which his beloved "Prew" figures, but also poems for his brothers and their wives and their children... as well as one poem in which he imagines how he himself might part from his wife... if he were to have one:

THE APPARITION OF HIS MISTRESS
CALLING HIM TO ELYSIUM.
Desunt nonnulla—

COME then, and like two doves with silv'ry wings,
Let our souls fly to th' shades where ever springs
Sit smiling in the meads ; where balm and oil,
Roses and cassia crown the untill'd soil.
Where no disease reigns, or infection comes
To blast the air, but ambergris and gums.
This, that, and ev'ry thicket doth transpire
More sweet than storax from the hallowed fire,
Where ev'ry tree a wealthy issue bears
Of fragrant apples, blushing plums, or pears ;
And all the shrubs, with sparkling spangles, shew
Like morning sunshine tinselling the dew.
Here in green meadows sits eternal May,
Purfling the margents, while perpetual day
So double gilds the air, as that no night
Can ever rust th' enamel of the light.
Here, naked younglings, handsome striplings, run
Their goals for virgins' kisses ; which when done,
Then unto dancing forth the learned round
Commixed they meet, with endless roses crown'd.
And here we'll sit on primrose-banks, and see
Love's chorus led by Cupid ; and we'll be
Two loving followers, too, unto the grove
Where poets sing the stories of our love.
There thou shalt hear divine Musæus sing
Of Hero and Leander ; then I'll bring
Thee to the stand, where honour'd Homer reads
His Odysseys and his high Iliads ;
About whose throne the crowd of poets throng
To hear the incantation of his tongue :
To Linus, then to Pindar ; and that done,
I'll bring thee, Herrick, to Anacreon,
Quaffing his full-crown'd bowls of burning wine,
And in his raptures speaking lines of thine,
Like to his subject ; and as his frantic
Looks shew him truly Bacchanalian-like
Besmear'd with grapes, welcome he shall thee thither,
Where both may rage, both drink and dance together.
Then stately Virgil, witty Ovid, by
Whom fair Corinna sits, and doth comply
With ivory wrists his laureat head, and steeps
His eye in dew of kisses while he sleeps ;
Then soft Catullus, sharp-fang'd Martial,
And towering Lucan, Horace, Juvenal,
And snaky Persius, these, and those, whom rage
(Dropt for the jars of heaven) fill'd t' engage
All times unto their frenzies ; thou shalt there
Behold them in a spacious theatre.
Among which glories, crowned with sacred bays
And flatt'ring ivy, two recite their plays—
Beaumont and Fletcher, swans to whom all ears
Listen, while they, like syrens in their spheres,
Sing their Evadne ; and still more for thee
There yet remains to know than thou can'st see
By glim'ring of a fancy. Do but come,
And there I'll shew thee that capacious room
In which thy father Jonson now is plac'd,
As in a globe of radiant fire, and grac'd
To be in that orb crown'd, that doth include
Those prophets of the former magnitude,
And he one chief ; but hark, I hear the ****
(The bellman of the night) proclaim the clock
Of late struck one, and now I see the prime
Of day break from the pregnant east : 'tis time
I vanish ; more I had to say,
But night determines here, away.

Transpire, breathe.
Purfling, trimming, embroidering.
Margents, bowers.
Round, rustic dance.
Rage, the poetic "furor".
Comply, encircle.
Their Evadne, the sister of Melantius in their play
"The Maid's Tragedy".

Herrick's apprenticeship as a jeweler and goldsmith are especially intriguing when one considers just how jewel-like his poems are. He is a master of the miniature... rather like those Elizabethan cameos. (Its only fitting that my own personal collection of his poems is itself a miniature volume.) He's all flowers, perfume and other sweet scents, gems, and beautiful women. His touch is exquisitely light... "precious" in the finest sense of the world:

TO THE VIRGINS, TO MAKE MUCH OF TIME.

GATHER ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old time is still a-flying :
And this same flower that smiles to-day
To-morrow will be dying.

The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun,
The higher he's a-getting,
The sooner will his race be run,
And nearer he's to setting.

That age is best which is the first,
When youth and blood are warmer ;
But being spent, the worse, and worst
Times still succeed the former.

Then be not coy, but use your time,
And while ye may go marry :
For having lost but once your prime
You may for ever tarry.


DELIGHT IN DISORDER.

A SWEET disorder in the dress
Kindles in clothes a wantonness :
A lawn about the shoulders thrown
Into a fine distraction :
An erring lace which here and there
Enthrals the crimson stomacher :
A cuff neglectful, and thereby
Ribbons to flow confusedly :
A winning wave (deserving note)
In the tempestuous petticoat :
A careless shoe-string, in whose tie
I see a wild civility :
Do more bewitch me than when art
Is too precise in every part.

UPON JULIA'S CLOTHES.

WHENAS in silks my Julia goes,
Then, then, methinks, how sweetly flows
That liquefaction of her clothes.

Next, when I cast mine eyes and see
That brave vibration each way free ;
O how that glittering taketh me !

Poems such as these are just marvelous sensual delights! They remind me of the shimmer of satin and lace and a little glimpse of leg as might be found in the paintings of the French Baroque painter, Watteau...:

http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k255/Stlukesguild/Gammedamour-Watteau.jpg

or some of the more delicate poetry of Verlaine or the chanson of Faure or Debussy. The descriptive sensuality of Herrick's language employing allusions to sound, sight, scent, touch and even motion is absolutely exquisite. Who can ever forget "...how sweetly flows/ That liquefaction of her clothes..."? What a marvelous word.

Of course... if it is not already obvious... I have long been an admirer of Herrick's poetry. One poem in particular, The Vine, has always made me smile... if not break into laughter:

THE VINE.

I DREAM'D this mortal part of mine
Was Metamorphoz'd to a Vine;
Which crawling one and every way,
Enthrall'd my dainty Lucia.
Me thought, her long small legs & thighs
I with my Tendrils did surprize;
Her Belly, Buttocks, and her Waste
By my soft Nerv'lits were embrac'd:
About her head I writhing hung,
And with rich clusters (hid among
The leaves) her temples I behung:
So that my Lucia seem'd to me
Young Bacchus ravished by his tree.
My curles about her neck did craule,
And armes and hands they did enthrall:
So that she could not freely stir,
(All parts there made one prisoner.)
But when I crept with leaves to hide
Those parts, which maids keep unespy'd,
Such fleeting pleasures there I took,
That with the fancie I awook;
And found (Ah me!) this flesh of mine
More like a Stock then like a Vine.

Of course it should be mentioned that in contrast to these poems Herrick sprinkled the Hesperides with some poems of a darker nature... often taking the form of epigrams that satirize certain characteristics or weaknesses that Herrick found "ugly". Many of these may have been inspired by his parrishoners... while he is no less sparing of himself.:lol:

WRINKLES.

WRINKLES no more are or no less
Than beauty turned to sourness.

UPON HIS EYESIGHT FAILING HIM.

I BEGIN to wane in sight ;
Shortly I shall bid good-night :
Then no gazing more about,
When the tapers once are out

For more of Herrick (actually all of Herrick):
http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/herrick/herribib.htm

[quasimodo1]

First, let me thank stlukesguild for an outstanding post on a great, prolific poet. Before another is put up, does anyone have a poet in mind that they would like to see have a similar treatment? quasimodo1

[stlukesguild]

Yehuda Halevi or Yehuda ben Shemuel Ha-Levi c. 1075-1141

Medieval Moorish Spain was one of the most fabulous cultures of all history. The Moorish culture in what is today Morocco dates back to the time of the Roman Empire (and perhaps earlier) when they acted as trading partners with Carthage, the independent city-state founded by the Phoenicians and competitor/enemy of Rome. Following the destruction of Carthage the surrounding provinces were integrated into the Roman Empire and later Christianized. With the fall of the Roman Empire the Byzantine Empire, the Vandals and the Arabs all struggled to gain control of the Moors. Around 600 A.D. the region was brought under Arab-Islamic control. In 711, the now Moslem Moors conquered the Visigoths taking possession of the Iberian Peninsula and pushed well into France until eventually defeated by Charles Martel at the decisive Battle of Tours (or Battle of Poitiers). The Moslem forces continued to hold control of most of what is today Spain and Portugal and many of the native population converted to Islam. Nevertheless, a number of Christian-European city-states continued to initiate conflict with the Moors and to slowly push into Spanish-Muslim territories. In 1212 a coalition under Alfonso VIII of Castille pushed the Muslims out of central Spain. Nevertheless, they would hold out in the south until 1492 when the last Moslem stronghold in Granada fell to the Christian forces. With the "reconquista" of Spain by Christian forces there began a period of forced conversion to Catholicism shortly after Isabella and Ferdinand instituted the Inquisition in 1480. Not only was the Inquisition directed at Jews and Muslims who had overtly converted to Christianity but were thought to be practicing their faiths secretly... but also it was geared toward Protestants or other "heretics" who rejected Roman Catholic orthodoxy. The persecution lead to a mass exodus leading to a population loss of about 1/3rd by 1600.

From the tenth century A.D. until the final fall of Granada Moorish Spain or Arab Andalusia would represent one of the great cultures and great cultural experiments in history. In spite of the Moslem control, there was a religious tolerance so that Islam, Christianity, and Judaism all flourished. Intellectual concepts and beliefs of these three religions and the artistic ideas of the east and west were interwoven in the hot house environment of Arab Andalusia. Among the great artistic achievements of the era one might point first to the marvelous art and architecture of Seville and Granada... especially as found in Alhambra, the fantastic palace complex of the Moorish rulers and once proclaimed the beautiful city in the world:

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Beyond the visual arts, Arab Andalusia would inspire fabulous innovations in literature (Poem of the Cid, Solomon ibn Gabriol, Moses ibn Ezra, etc...) and music. The music of the Sephardic Jews would merge ancient Hebrew traditions with Arabic, Turkish, Persian, Greek, North African, etc. Attempts by the Jewish composer, Isaac Nathan in the early nineteenth century to revive some of this ancient music would serve as an impetus for Lord Byron's Hebrew Melodies. The German poet, Heinrich Heine's Hebrew Melodies were also rooted in the music of Arab Andalusia... but also the poetry of the great Spanish Hebrew poets, especially Jehuda Halevi.

Born c. 1075 in Navarre, Spain, Jehuda Halevi, Yehuda ben Shemuel Ha-Levi in full, was a Jewish poet, philosopher and doctor. Halevi's youth is said to have been spent in seeking both pleasure and in study. He chose medicine as a career, but exhibited a great aptitude for poetry. His poetry aroused the praise and admiration of his great predecessor, Moses ibn Ezra. Halevi made a masterful use of both lyrical Arabic poetic forms and the traditions of Hebrew poetry. His early themes were common to Arabic lyric poetry: wine, women, and song.

from: That Night a Gazelle

That night a gazelle
of a girl showed me the sun
of her cheek and veil
of auburn hair

like ruby over
a moistened crystal brow
she looked like dawn's
fire rising...

from: The Doe Washes

The doe washes her clothes
in the stream of my tears
and sets them out to dry
in the glow of her glory...

from: To Ibn Al-Mu'allim

Gently, my hard-hearted, slender one,
be gentle with me and I'll bow before you.
I've ravished you only in looking-
my heart is pure, but not my eyes:
They'd gather from your features
the roses and lillies mingled there.
I'd lift the fire from your cheeks
to put out fire with fire...

-translated by Peter Cole, 2007

from Parted Lovers

...If parting be decreed for the two of us,
stand yet a little, while I gaze upon thy face...

By the life of Love, remember the days of thy longing as I-
I remember the nights of thy delight.

As thine image passeth into my dream,
So let me pass, I entreat thee, into thy delight.
Between me and thee roar the waves of a sea of tears
And I cannot pass over unto thee...

Would that after my death, unto mine ears should come
The sound of the golden bells upon thy skirts.

-translated by Nina Salaman, 1923

Of course Hafiz was more than aware of the Greco-Latin traditions of love poetry as well:

from: Epithalamium

The stars of the earth are joined today-
a pair unrivalled in the hosts of heaven.
Even the Pleiades envy this union,
for breath itself can't come between them...

-translated by Peter Cole, 2007

His style, which was both personal and fluid... but also containing the mythic-visionary manner of the Hebrew Bible is all the more astonishing when one considers that Hebrew was NOT his native language. In spite of this, Halevi has the reputation as the greatest post-Biblical Hebrew poet.

Halevi described himself as the "immigrant from Christendom" due to his continual wandering. He had initially lived in southern Islamic Spain (some say Toledo). With time, he became disillusioned with the pleasure-seeking/ beauty-worshiping lifestyle of the Andalusian cultural ideal, declaring: "Don't be taken by Greek wisdom/ which bears no fruit, but only blossoms." This change of heart may have been in part due to a growing spiritual maturity, but it was also a response to the increasing intolerance toward Judaism which he was to witness following the assumption of control of Andalusia by the North African Almoravids. He moved initially to Seville or Cordoba and then eventually followed many other Jewish-Andalusian refugees to Castille, ruled by the tolerant King Alfonso VI. When King Alfonso died, however, anti-Jewish rioting broke out. Halevi seems to have continued to wander for some time, often witnessing the devastation of Jewish communities wrought by Christian and Muslim forces alike. At this time Halevi's poetry began to turn to serious spiritual/religious content and build even more so upon the Hebrew Biblical traditions:

from Heal Me Lord

Heal me Lord and I will be healed.
Don't let me perish in your anger.
All my balms and potions are yours
to guide to weakness or to vigor...

from True Life

I run to the source of the one true life,
turning my back on all that is empty or vain.
My only hope is to see the Lord, my king-
apart from Him I fear and worship nothing...

from Where Will I Find You

Where, Lord, will I find you:
your place is high and obscured
And where
won't I find you:
your glory fills the world...

-translated by Peter Cole, 2007

In spite of Halevi's rejection of easy pleasures of wine, women, and song and his rejection of the Arab-Andalusian culture he once embraced, his poetry still made masterful use of the forms of the Arabic lyrical poem traditions... often in combination with Hebrew traditions... in this case conjoining it with the tradition of the Biblical Psalms:

from Sabbath Hymn

On Friday doth my cup o'erflow,
What blissful rest the night shall know,
When, in thine arms, my toil and woe
Are all forgot, Sabbath my love!

'Tis dusk, with sudden light, distilled
From one sweet face, the world is filled;
The tumult of my heart is stilled-
For thou art come, Sabbath my love!...

translated by Hartwig Hirschfeld, 1905

At this time Helevi also became noted as a philosopher, composer various treatises upon Judaism. Perhaps the most well-known of these is The Kuzari, In Defense of the Despised Faith which presented Hebrew beliefs in clear-cut manner and argued against Greek philosophy, Islam, and Christianity. Eventually believing that he could only find peace of mind in the Holy Land Halevi bid farewell to friends and family shortly after the death of his wife and sailed for Alexandria, Egypt. He was greatly welcomed there. There were many admirers there and Egypt provided a large and safe Jewish community, free from intolerance or oppression. Nevertheless, Halevi was set upon returning to the Holy Land. He was advised against due to ill health, but continued to push on. It is thought that he passed through Cairo, Tyre, Damascus, and eventually arrived at Jerusalem. Tradition has it that he was slain by an Arab horseman while he was singing his great Song to Zion before the remaining western wall of the great Temple of Solomon (now known as the "Wailing Wall").

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from Song to Zion

Won't you ask, Zion,
how your captives are faring-
this last remnant of your flock who seek
your peace with all their being?
From west and east, from north and south-
from those near and far,
from all corners- accept these greetings,
and from desire's captive, this blessing...

-translated by Peter Cole, 2007

More by Halevi: http://www.angelfire.com/ct/halevi/

[stlukesguild]

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William Blake (November 28, 1757 – August 12, 1827) may just be my single favorite British poet so I will need to offer fair warning as to the possibility of some bias. Blake has long been accepted as one of the "great six" of British Romanticism (Blake, Byron, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge) and one of the greatest poets ever to have written in the English language. His achievements in the visual arts have gained him near equal acclaim. Nevertheless, Blake has also been one of the most misunderstood and maligned of any major poet. He is often portrayed as a half-mad genius, a wacked-out visionary who spoke to spirits, a political naif, a curmudgeon and "outsider", a self-taught artist and poet who had little knowledge or experience of the art of his predecessors or of his own time. Most of these stereotypes have little reality to them.

Blake may not have had the advantage of a formal education in literature at the university level... nevertheless, he was most certainly not unlearned. The reality is that Blake was very well-read and often of literature which was not part of the accepted canon of his time. Of course Blake was well-versed in the works of Shakespeare, Dante, Milton, Chaucer, Ben Jonson, Spencer, and the Bible... but other sources of inspiration include Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft, with whom he was friends and a political ally, Emanuel Swedenborg, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Plato, Plotinus, the Hermetica and the Bhagavad Gita, mythologies of the world from Egypt to Iceland to India to ancient Britain and even the Kabbalah. Not only was Blake well-read, but he was also an insightful reader who developed interpretations that freely challenged the accepted ones.

Blake developed an early love of drawing by copying engravings of masters such as Raphael, Michelangelo, and Albrecht Dürer. In this he was was fully supported by his father. Unable to afford apprenticeship to a painting master, Blake was initially apprenticed to the fashionable William Ryland, engraver to King George. Blake however would request that his father find a more suitable match for his talents, declaring that Ryland had "the hanging look about him". (In fact Ryland would end on the scaffold some years later, convicted for forging currency.) Blake spent his apprentice years under James Basire. Basire's manner of working was rather out-dated stressing the linear contours and avoiding the more painterly affects that would allow for replication of paintings or the creation of more atmospheric elements. His manner, however, was perfectly suited to Blake's own personal preferences for the linear sculptural form. Basire's chief source of income was the result of commissioned engravings to be made of architectural and sculptural details of English churches and cathedrals. Through his apprenticeship to Basire Blake was exposed to the stylistic abstractions of Romanesque and Gothic art which would have been largely dismissed by most artists of the time.

In 1778 Blake enrolled in the Royal Academy. He quickly rebelled against the preference of the academy for such painterly masters as Rubens, Rembrandt, and Titian... as well as against the president of the academy, Sir Joshua Reynolds. He detested Reynold's pursuit of "abstractions" and "generalizations" and he would write in the margins of his personal copy of Reynold's Discourses, "To Generalize is to be an Idiot; To Particularize is the Alone Distinction of Merit".

In 1782 Blake met John Flaxman (sculptor) and George Cumberland (one of the founders of the National Gallery) who would both become patrons of his work. He also met Catherine Boucher, who would become his wife. Illiterate at the time of his marriage, Blake would not only teach her to read and write, but also educate her in the art of watercolors and engraving. She would become an invaluable aid to him in the creation of his printed books and a great moral support.

In 1784 Blake and his brother, Robert opened a print shop, and began working with the radical publisher, Joseph Johnson. Through Johnson, Blake met with some of the leading intellectual dissidents of the time, including Joseph Priestly, John Henry Fuseli (whose art work clearly influenced Blake's own), Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas Paine, William Wordsworth, and William Godwin. Inspired by Wollstonecraft's views on marriage and sexuality Blake composed his Visions of the Daughters of Albion in 1793. It is quite possible that Percy Shelley may have come across Blake's writings in the possession of Mary Godwin (Shelley), Mary Wollstonecraft's daughter.

In 1788 Blake developed his method of "relief etching" (reportedly revealed to him by his deceased brother Robert in a dream) by which he produced most of his printed and illustrated books. Blake often referred to his illustrated books as "illuminated books"... a term used to describe the medieval books such as the Book of Kells, the Lindesfarne Gospels...

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...or the Tres Riches Heures of the Limbourg Brothers, in which the text and imagery were woven into a single unified artistic entity. These books were engraved or etched in a single color and then each volume was handpainted in watercolors by himself or Catherine.

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Blake also produced a large number of watercolor paintings illustrating scenes from the Bible, Milton, Dante, Shakespeare, and Chaucer. Some of these were bound with folios, while others were imagined as the basis for more ambitious printed books that he would never realize.

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Pieta

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Cain and Abel

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The Lustful Caught in the Whirlwind- from the Inferno

Blake's two thin volumes The Songs of Innocence and The Songs of Experience are perhaps his most famous poetic and artistic productions... and also the first instances in which he fully integrated his visual and poetic talents.

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The Songs of Innocence consist mostly of poems describing the innocence and joy of the natural world... or the world seen from an innocent viewpoint, advocating free love and a personal relationship with God unmediated by religion. The poems and the accompanying imagery are deceptively child-like. They strike one initially as simple... even naive... but reveal a deeper meaning with with repeated reading:

The Lamb

Little Lamb who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?
Gave thee life and bid thee feed
By the stream and o'er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing whooly bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice.
Little Lamb who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?

Little Lamb I'll tell thee,
Little Lamb I'll tell thee;
He is called by thy name,
For he calls himself a lamb.
He is meek and he is mild;
He became a little child.
I a child and thou a lamb,
We are called by his name.
Little Lamb God bless thee.
Little Lamb God bless thee.

Infant Joy

"I have no name;
I am but two days old."
What shall I call thee?
"I happy am,
Joy is my name."
Sweet joy befall thee!
Pretty joy!
Sweet joy, but two days old.
Sweet Joy I call thee:
Thou dost smile,
I sing the while;
Sweet joy befall thee!

In contrast, The Songs of Experience suggest a loss of innocence after exposure to the materialistic world, "unnatural" concepts such as good and evil, sin, and religion. Most of the poems of the latter volume offer a direct counterpart to the Songs of Innocence. Perhaps the best example is The Tyger, counterpart to The Lamb, and probably Blake's most famous (deservedly) poem:

The Tyger

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears
And water'd heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

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I have long held this lyric in my memory, like many nursery rhymes and poems learned in my youth. Like a nursery rhyme, it's hypnotic and chant-like... seeming oh so simple at first... but soon revealing far greater depths of thought... questions about the very nature of good and evil and creation. I'm always struck with chills as the poet finally confronts us with the ultimate question, "Did he who made the Lamb, make thee?", before returning once again to the beginning, "Tyger Tyger..." and leaving that question unanswered... but perhaps provoking a little spark in our minds.

Another favorite of the The Songs of Experience is The Garden of Love:

The Garden of Love

I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen;
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this Chapel were shut,
And ‘Thou shalt not’ writ over the door;
So I turned to the Garden of Love
That so many sweet flowers bore.

And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tombstones where flowers should be;
And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars my joys and desires.

This poem... again deceptively simple and childlike... confronts us with what were certainly rather revolutionary ideas at the time. The poem clearly suggests the naturalness of sexuality and rages against the manner in which organized religion attempts to repress our natural desires and label them as "sinful".

Blake was largely unknown outside of a small circle of admirers during his lifetime. His reputation began to be revived toward the end of the 19th century thanks to the admiration of poets such as W.B. Yeats and D.G Rossetti. Rossetti, an artist and poet, was greatly enamored of Blake's attempt to merge both the visual and literary arts. In 1847, Dante Gabriel Rossetti purchased a journal of Blake's from the brother of the artist Samuel Palmer in which one could see early compositional studies for many of Blake's more famous art works. The text of the manuscript included copies of many of Blake's poems from the Songs of Innocence and Experience. These exhibit numerous revisions. Perhaps more importantly, the so-called "Rossetti Manuscript" along with another original document known as the "Pickering Manuscript" contain several unpublished poems... including a number that contain some of Blake's most well-known passages:

Auguries of Innocence

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour

A Robin Red breast in a Cage
Puts all Heaven in a Rage

A Dove house fill'd with Doves and Pigeons
Shudders Hell thro' all its regions

A Dog starved at his Master's Gate
Predicts the ruin of the State...

Man was made for Joy & Woe
And when this we rightly know
Thro' the world we safely go.

Joy & Woe are woven fine,
A Clothing for the Soul divine;
Under every grief and pine
Runs a Joy with silken twine...

Every Night & every Morn
Some to Misery are Born
Every Morn and every Night,
Some are born to sweet delight.
Some are born to sweet delight,
Some are Born to Endless Night.

continued...

[stlukesguild]

continued...

Beyond Blake's lyrical poetry we find some of his greatest, yet most misunderstood and underrated work. His prose piece, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

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...may just be Blake's masterpiece. This brief book is composed of a series of meditations or "fancies" as Blake titles them, in which he puts forth many of his ideas about good and evil, free will, creation and even of literature:

Note: The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it.

Perhaps the most known passages of this work come from the series of aphorisms entitled, Proverbs of Hell:

A fool sees not the same tree a wise man sees.

A dead body revenges not injuries.

The nakedness of woman is the work of God.

What is now proved was once only imagin'd.

The eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn of the crow.

Expect poison from standing water.

You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.

Listen to the fool's reproach! It is a kingly title!

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Job, his Wife and his Accusers

Perhaps the most unique... and challenging work by Blake is his Job. This work is built of a title page and 21 engraved illustrations. At first glimpse one might assume that Blake has merely illustrated the Biblical text of Job... but as is usual with Blake, nothing is as simple as it first appears. The usual orthodox interpretation of Job is that he represents an admirable figure of faith and patience... a good man who is tested by God by having all of his worldly belongings stripped from him, his family killed, and his own body stricken with painful disease... and yet he does not lose his faith in God. Blake's Job is something of a critique of this interpretation. Utilizing images as well as inscribed quotes from the Book of Job and other Biblical texts, Blake presents the idea that Job does not begin as a man deeply faithful to God... but rather as a figure who is faithful only in appearance. He may do the right things... but for the wrong reasons. Blake suggests that the various trials that Job undergoes amount to a spiritual journey... from a false believer to a truly spiritual man. In what in perhaps the most powerful image, Illustration XI:

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Blake presents a Job condemned to the fires of Hell. Devils reach out from the hell fires below in an attempt to drag him down. Still his hands are clutched in prayer as he looks up to the Hebrew God, Jehovah, hovering over him. Jehovah points to the tablets of the law which condemn Job while the lightning bolt of damnation leap around him. And yet... as Job glances down at Jehovah's cloven foot and at the serpent of materialism with which he is intertwined... he realizes that this immovable God of the law is one and the same with Satan. The inscription "I know that my redeemer liveth" suggests that Job has begun to imagine that there is a better God.

Blake's epic poems, especially Milton and Jerusalem are undoubtedly his most challenging works. The staggering achievement of these works is that Blake has essentially created his own cosmology and mythology... an achievement not unlike that of Muhammad, Dante, or Homer. He essentially attempts to live up to his own declaration:

"I must Create a System, or be enslav'd by another Man's
I will not Reason & Compare; my business is to Create!

In Milton, Blake presents a fantastic narrative in which Milton is driven out of Heaven for his false representation of God as an external authoritarian being. To Blake there was no God outside of the God that resides within the human breast. Milton enters into Blake himself and begins a spiritual journey of remaking himself. Milton contains some of Blake's most fabulous and memorable poetry:

And did those feet in ancient time
walk upon England’s mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
on England’s pleasant pastures seen?
And did the countenance divine
shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
among these dark Satanic Mills?

Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!
I will not cease from mental fight,
nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
till we have built Jerusalem
In England’s green and pleasant Land.

(The oft-quoted phrase from this introduction to Milton, "dark and Satanic Mills" is among the first criticisms directed at the dehumanizing and polluting elements of industrialization and clearly made Blake a hero with the socially like-minded Pre-Raphaelites.)

If you account it Wisdom when you are angry to be silent, and
Not to shew it: I do not account that Wisdom but Folly.
Every Mans Wisdom is peculiar to his own Individuality
O Satan my youngest born, art thou not Prince of the Starry Hosts
And of the Wheels of Heaven, to turn the Mills day & night?...

And this is the manner of the Daughters of Albion in their beauty
Every one is threefold in Head & Heart & Reins, & every one
Has three Gates into the Three Heavens of Beulah which shine
Translucent in their Foreheads & their Bosoms & their Loins
Surrounded with fires unapproachable: but whom they please
They take up into their Heavens in intoxicating delight...

Ah weak & wide astray! Ah shut in narrow doleful form
Creeping in reptile flesh upon the bosom of the ground
The Eye of Man a little narrow orb closed up & dark
Scarcely beholding the great light conversing with the Void
The Ear, a little shell in small volutions shutting out
All melodies & comprehending only Discord and Harmony
The Tongue a little moisture fills, a little food it cloys
A little sound it utters & its cries are faintly heard
Then brings forth Moral Virtue the cruel Virgin Babylon

Can such an Eye judge of the stars? & looking thro' its tubes
Measure the sunny rays that point their spears on Udanadan
Can such an Ear fill'd with the vapours of the yawning pit.
Judge of the pure melodious harp struck by a hand divine?
Can such closed Nostrils feel a joy? or tell of autumn fruits
When grapes & figs burst their covering to the joyful air
Can such a Tongue boast of the living waters? or take in
Ought but the Vegetable Ratio & loathe the faint delight
Can such gross Lips perceive? alas! folded within themselves
They touch not ought but pallid turn & tremble at every wind...

But in the wine presses the human grapes sing not nor dance:
They howl & writhe in shoals of torment, in fierce flames consuming,
In chains of iron & in dungeons circled with ceaseless fires,
In pits & dens & shades of death, in shapes of torment & woe –
The plates & screws & racks & saws & cords & fires & cisterns,
The cruel joys of Luvah's daughters, lacerating with knives
And whips their victims, & the deadly sport of Luvah's sons...

The epic poem, Jerusalem is Blake's longest and most ambitious work. The narrative, which is confusing and does not seem to follow a linear manner, centers upon the fall of Albion, a personification of Man... Britain... or Western Culture. The work is cloaked in a dense symbolism where characters are all inventions of Blake's own personal mythology and where any single character can represent multiple persons, concepts, or even cities. In spite of this hermetic aspect the poem, like Milton, contains many brilliant passages:

Awake! awake O sleeper of the land of shadows, wake! expand!
I am in you and you in me, mutual in love divine:
Fibres of love from man to man thro' Albion's pleasant land.
In all the dark Atlantic vale down from the hills of Surrey
A black water accumulates, return Albion! return!
Thy brethren call thee, and thy fathers, and thy sons,
Thy nurses and thy mothers, thy sisters and thy daughters
Weep at thy souls disease, and the Divine Vision is darken'd:
Thy Emanation that was wont to play before thy face,
Beaming forth with her daughters into the Divine bosom
Where hast thou hidden thy Emanation lovely Jerusalem
From the vision and fruition of the Holy-one?
I am not a God afar off, I am a brother and friend;
Within your bosoms I reside, and you reside in me:
Lo! we are One; forgiving all Evil; Not seeking recompense!
Ye are my members O ye sleepers of Beulah, land of shades!...

Trembling I sit day and night, my friends are astonish'd at me.
Yet they forgive my wanderings, I rest not from my great task!
To open the Eternal Worlds, to open the immortal Eyes
Of Man inwards into the Worlds of Thought: into Eternity
Ever expanding in the Bosom of God, the Human Imagination
O Saviour pour upon me thy Spirit of meekness & love:
Annihilate the Selfhood in me, be thou all my life!
Guide thou my hand which trembles exceedingly upon the rock of ages...

Los answer'd: Altho' I know not this, I know far worse than this:
I know that Albion hath divided me, and that thou, O my Spectre,
Hast just cause to be irritated; but look steadfastly upon me;
Comfort thyself in my strength; the time will arrive
When all Albion's injuries shall cease, and when we shall
Embrace him, tenfold bright, rising from his tomb in immortality.
They have divided themselves by Wrath, they must be united by
Pity; let us therefore take example & warning, O my Spectre.
O that I could abstain from wrath! O that the Lamb
Of God would look upon me and pity me in my fury!
In anguish of regeneration, in terrors of self annihilation,
Pity must join together those whom wrath has torn asunder...

Inspiration deny'd; Genius forbidden by laws of punishment:
I saw terrified; I took the sighs & tears, & bitter groans:
I lifted them into my Furnaces; to form the spiritual sword.
That lays open the hidden heart: I drew forth the pang
Of sorrow red hot: I work'd it on my resolute anvil:
I heated it in the flames of Hand, & Hyle, & Coban
Nine times; Gwendolen & Cambel & Gwineverra
Are melted into the gold, the silver, the liquid ruby,
The crysolite, the topaz, the jacinth, & every precious stone.
Loud roar my Furnaces and loud my hammer is heard:
I labour day and night, I behold the soft affections
Condense beneath my hammer into forms of cruelty
But still I labour in hope, tho' still my tears flow down.
That he who will not defend Truth, may be compell'd to defend
A Lie:...

We are told to abstain from fleshly desires that we may lose no
time from the Work of the Lord. Every moment lost, is a moment
that cannot be redeemed every pleasure that intermingles with the
duty of our station is a folly unredeemable & is planted like the
seed of a wild flower among our wheat. All the tortures of
repentance. are tortures of self-reproach on account of our
leaving the Divine Harvest to the Enemy, the struggles of
intanglement with incoherent roots. I know of no other
Christianity and of no other Gospel than the liberty both of body
& mind to exercise the Divine Arts of Imagination.
Imagination the real & eternal World of which this Vegetable
Universe is but a faint shadow & in which we shall live in our
Eternal or Imaginative Bodies, when these Vegetable Mortal Bodies
are no more...

England! awake! awake! awake!
Jerusalem thy Sister calls!
Why wilt thou sleep the sleep of death?
And close her from thy ancient walls.

Thy hills & valleys felt her feet,
Gently upon their bosoms move:
Thy gates beheld sweet Zions ways;
Then was a time of joy and love.

And now the time returns again:
Our souls exult & London's towers,
Receive the Lamb of God to dwell
In England's green & pleasant bowers.

Blake never attained the recognition he deserved during his lifetime and he forever lived in near poverty. A prophet by calling and an engraver by trade he struggled to eek out a living in a highly competitive field working in what appeared to many to be a hopelessly outmoded manner... yet in many ways Blake was as innovative as a visual artist as he was as a poet. At a time when oil painting dominated the visual arts (and had dominated for centuries) Blake had the audacity to reject such in favor of print, watercolor and his ideal of the "illuminated books". While Western art reveled in the abilities of the artist to mimic the appearance of physical reality, Blake rejected such a goal as worthy of the artist, declaring "One power alone makes a poet, Imagination. The Divine Vision." As such it should come as little surprise that few took Blake's art seriously until the advent of Modernism when invention and imagination would triumph over the imitation of nature.

Beyond the books that Blake completed in an engraved manner he also produced numerous watercolor "illustrations" for other texts: the Bible:

http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k255/Stlukesguild/WiseandFoolishVirgins.jpg
The Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins

http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k255/Stlukesguild/LastJudgment-1.jpg
The Last Judgment

Milton's Paradise Lost:

http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k255/Stlukesguild/evethefall.jpg
The Temptation and Fall

Dante's Divine Comedy:

http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k255/Stlukesguild/TheBlasphemer.jpg
The Blasphemer

http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k255/Stlukesguild/AntaeusSettingDownDanteandVergil.jpg
Antaeus Setting Down Dante and Virgil

...chief among them. These may have been intended as studies for color engraved versions of these books. One might even suggest that Blake may have intended something along the line of what he had achieved with his Job: a merger of text and image that is a completely new invention. Blake's art would have a direct influence upon the work of a group of followers known as "the ancients" that included Samuel Palmer...

http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k255/Stlukesguild/Palmersmall.jpg
Samuel Palmer-Early Morning-engraving

and Edward Calvert...

http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k255/Stlukesguild/TheBrides.jpg
Edward Calvert-The Bride-engraving

His work would be a model for the design of children's books by the end of the 19th century as well as a major source of inspiration for the development of the so-called "book arts" as found in the works of Eric Gill...

http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k255/Stlukesguild/GillBiblesmall.jpg
Eric Gill-The Bible

and most importantly William Morris:

http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k255/Stlukesguild/kelmscottchaucersmall.jpg
William Morris/Edward Burns Jones-"Kelmscott Chaucer"

In spite of this, Blake's art did not attain a level of recognition equal to that afforded to his poetry until after mid-century with the increased access to color reproduction allowing for his work to be experienced as close as possible to the manner in which he had intended. Since that time Blake's work has grown greatly in popularity with artists and art lovers (as with lovers of literature)... and especially with those who follow the "book arts". A recent collection of 19 watercolors were broken up by the owners and 12 sold for more than $7 million US. In spite of the incredibly high price for works on paper, the sale was actually far below what was expected. (A good many buyers opted out of the auction due to anger over the fact that the collection had been quickly broken up by speculators out to make a quick dollar rather than allowing the Tate or another museum time to raise the funds needed to purchase the work as a whole) The recent exhibition of Blake's work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art drew crowds in numbers usually reserved for the finest painters in oils... not for an artist working in print and watercolor and often regulated to the category of "outsider artist". It is clear that Blake's achievements as a visual artist have attained a status that equals his achievements as a poet.

[Petrarch's Love]

What a fascinating little thread this is. I've enjoyed reading both Quasi and St. Luke's entries. Incidently, SLG, you've helped me feel friendly toward Herrick again. My reading for my recent exam included all the Noble Numbers and none of the secular works and I'm here to say that for a bachelor clergyman Herrick's love poetry is almost unbelievably superior to his religious verse. I had always enjoyed Herrick because of examples like those you note above, but I'm afraid I couldn't find much to praise in his religious verse.

Also, thanks for the detailed Blake post. He's a poet/artist I've always wanted to look into more closely (especially because of his close dialogue with Milton, Dante etc.), and your post added a little more to what little I already knew about him. Very nicely and informatively written.

Great reading fellas. Keep it up!

[ampoule]

What wonderful reading this has been. Thank you both so much.


Concerning poet John Berryman's mama who taught him...


"Ever to confess you're bored
means you have no/Inner Resources."

...now I know where the saying, "Only boring people are bored", comes from.


And stlukesguild, my heart skipped a beat when I saw The Lamb. I sang that as a solo in junior high school. I knew Blake was the author of the lovely words but I do not know who wrote the music. Still, I remember each note and its sweetness. Maybe a little research is in order.

Thank you again. For once I'm thankful I couldn't sleep. :)

(My message seems so simple in comparison to the information in this thread but I was unable to send quasimodo a pm :()

[quasimodo1]

"This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun

and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every

one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy,

devote your income and labor to others, hate

tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience

and indulgence toward the people, take off your

hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or

number of men, go freely with powerful

uneducated persons and with the young and with

the mothers of families, read these leaves in the

open air every season of every year of your life,

re-examine all you have been told at school or

church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your

own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poet

and have the richest fluency not only in its words

but in the silent lines of its lips and face and

between the lashes of your eyes and in every

motion of joint of your body." {part one, poetry redux: Walt Whitman}

[quasimodo1]

Compliments to Stlukesguild for a comprehensive and magnificent posting. quasi

[AuntShecky]

St Luke's Guild: Where do you find all of these paintings?

Quasimodo: Yours are among the very BEST postings on the entire forum! How generous it is of you to share with us your extensive research, your own critical expertise, and
your heartfelt appreciation for these poetic masters. Now, I would like to ask your "take" on James Merrill. I think his poem "The Black Swan" is one of the lyrical gems of the past century. I like Merrill's work as a whole, but some of the later books (based on messages via a ouija
board) stretch the reader's credibility, though they are indeed interesting and aesthetically pleasing.

[quasimodo1]

To AuntShecky: Thank you for your kind remarks although some of the moderators might take exception to what you say; it seems I give some of them fits, especially Logos, relative to copyright issues and admitedly I have gone beyond some bounds there. My take on Merrill is that I like his work but it's been awhile since I examined his work in depth. Right now, Whitman has my attention relative to some criticism that will be done on the "Redux" thread. There is one sub-site worth mentioning to give you one analyst's view...http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/merrill/puns.htm and his correspondence is on that site as well. For me, the letters of an author are most revealing, much more so than critics and essayists. I'll try to do James Merrill next but it won't be right away. Sincerely, quasimodo1

[quasimodo1]

Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself" (1855 edition) "I celebrate myself, And what I assume you

shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you." What poet today

would have the gall, the confidence, even the effrontery to title a poem this way?

Whitman's rhetorical questions are not easily or honestly answered..."Have you reckoned a

thousand acres much? Have you reckoned the earth much? Have you practiced so long to

learn to read? Have you felt so proud to get at the meaninng of poems?" Well you better

practice a little to get at the meaning of "Song of Myself". Still in the early lines he gives

great clues..."Sure as the most certain sure....plumb in the uprights, well entretied, braced in

the beams, Stout as a horse, affectionate, haughty, electrical, I and this mystery here we

stand." As Whitman says earlier, the mystery is "Always the procreant urge of the world."

This poem is more about the joi de vivre than himself. "Backward I see in my own

days where I sweated through fog with linguists and contenders, I have no mockings or

arguments....I witness and wait." This poet wants some special abilities to enhance his song.

"I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women, And the hints

about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps." From Part X,

Whitman acquits himself of worries and work ethics and experiences the world in his (and

our) inimitable way..."Alone far in the wilds and mountains I hunt, Wandering amazed at my

own lightness and glee..." He has allready declared that it is lucky to have been born, and if

so, it is just as lucky to die. The man has freed himself from one huge prejudice. Life also is

an outdoor activity, as if indoors constitutes man's normal, everyday state. Evolution came

along with "indoors" very late in the game; a game with no goal except your duty to take joy

in it. "I am enamoured of growing outdoors, Of men that live among cattle or taste of

the ocean or woods, Of the builders and steerers of ships, of the wielders of axes and

mauls, of the drivers of horses, I can eat and sleep with them week in and week out."

Part XVI begins with his variation on the theme of all-connectedness, of I am what you are, of

life being joyful by the quality of non-uniqueness; if I have seen it, done it, been there,

gone away...everyone else has too, in their ironically unique self. "I am of old and young, of

the foolish as much as the wise, Regardless of others, ever regardful of others, Maternal as

well as paternal, a child as well as a man, Stuffed with the stuff that is coarse, and stuffed

with the stuff that is fine..." And I think here is the true center of this poem..."AND I KNOW

I AM DEATHLESS, I KNOW THIS ORBIT OF MINE CANNOT BE SWEPT BY A CARPENTER'S

COMPASS, I KNOW I SHALL NOT PASS LIKE A CHILD'S CARLACUE CUT WITH A BURNT STICK

AT NIGHT. I KNOW I AM AUGUST, I DO NOT TROUBLE MY SPIRIT TO VINDICATE ITSELF

OR BE UNDERSTOOD, I SEE THAT THE ELEMENTARY LAWS NEVER APOLOGIZE, I RECKON I

BEHAVE NO PRODUCER THAN THE LEVEL I PLANT MY HOUSE BY AFTER ALL."

Refering again to the basic evolutionary process of life, in Part XXX, Whitman correctly

pontificates..."All truths wait in all things, They neither hasten their own delivery nor resist it,

They do not need the obstetric forceps of the surgeon, The insignificant is as big to me as

any, What is less or more than a touch? ......Only what proves itself to every man and

woman is so, Only what nobody denies is so." Irony thus is not a quirky thing or an unusual

event; it is a natural law. "I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journeywork of the

stars..." Lastly from Part LII, "I bequeth myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, If

you want me again look for me under your bootsoles." {Re: "Song of Myself" by Walt

Whitman, 1819-1892} quasimodo1

[quasimodo1]

Poetry Redux--James Merrill. Helen

Vendler said in an essay about James Merrill..."The

time eventually comes, in a good poet's career,

when readers actively long for his books: To know

that some one out there is writing down your

century, your generation, your language, your

life--under whatever terms of difference makes you

wish for news of yourself!" This incomplete

assessment of Merrill's sensibility occurs because of

James Merrill's family's wealth, being at the gamut

of society; his father's family founded Merrill-Lynch

Investments Inc. Fortunately Merrill's assets

included great poetic talent. He travelled

extensively and experienced his generation's

version of the "grand tour", visiting classical

locations, all the climes and nature, taking his

options and liesure in order to enable his literary

growth and concentrate on writing, always taking

his poetry to the next level. Bread was not a

necessity but another source of metaphor; his

readers by extension visit the Parthenon and the

Acropolis and other inspiring locations.

His very first poems indicated an early mastery of

lyrical ways and means. Avoiding the "starving

artist in his garrett" phase only aided a jump-start

carreer. Merrill describes the family house in an

early poem as a dwelling "whose west wall takes the

sunset like a blow" where "courtesies melt into blue

air. Lights for the future sleuth of the oblique." In

Merrill's rhetorical parlance, "Glory's grasp of

lightening rod labor, cost, frostbite, bedazzlement.

Down to the last friend's guitar and stories." In

Istanbul, his autobiographical persona wakes one

morning to find the right side of his face paralyzed.

He views this as a chance and a new proclivity to

change so that his "lean illuminations decompose".

At this time he is leaning over the brink of creating

his three related narrative poems into one

published volume: "The Changing Light at

Sandover"; a collection that in 1976 have no

previous equal in demonic force. The third of these

long poems, "Scripts for The Pageant" (1980) is

described by Charles Berger at its completion..."This

is poetry that may well be the most astonishing

poem ever written by an American" (perhaps a

slight hyperbole there). Merrill admits that this

three work volume was composed using a "ouiji

board" as a coda and "...Sandover" owes its origen

to many nights that Merrill and his companion,

David Jackson, spent using this parlor game

technique as a way of generating material, among

the other worldly voices in the poem are those of

Auden and Gertrude Stein. This experiment,

though never repeated, left Merrill inspired,

disillusioned and yet determined to move forward

with more elegant and concrete forms. (That is a

wild beginning for a poet who would come to

dedicate one of his later greater works to Richard

Howard.) Returning to a younger James Merrill,

educated at Amherst College, he wrote an honors

thesis on Marcel Proust (a fitting artistic

counterpart?), all the while dividing his living

arrangements between Athens, Stonington, CT and

New York City. These earlier days he began

displaying his absolute skill with the diabolical pun,

lyrical intensity and narrative and formal poetic

styles. In 1959 he wrote "A Dedication" and in 1966

he created "Charles on Fire", the latter is his

concept of an American "buldungsroman"

..."Without your intellectual and spiritual values,

man, you are sunk". Also in 1966, "Days of 1964"

was published; a strange, partially autobiographical

long poem describing his life in embassies, the

town of Palmyra, reports of time spent with an

ailing, aging woman and her daughter

(relationship?), material about the daughter's

wastrel son and conversations with the mother who

in this poem refers to James Merrill as her real son.

From "Days of 1964" ..."I paid her generously, I dare

say. Love makes one generous. Look at us; we'd

known each other so briefly that instead of

sleeping, we lay whole nights, open, in the

lamplight, and gazed, or traded stories" ....in the

woods one day, the poem continues..."Eat me, Pay

me--The erotic mask, worn the world over by

illusion, to weddings of itself and simple need.

...Where I hid my face, your touch, quick, merciful,

blindfolded me. A God breathed from my lips, If

that was illusion, I wanted it to last long; To dwell,

for its daily pittance, with us there." In

1972, he wrote the poem "Days of 1935", a very

long narrative poem with more than one mention

of the tragic Lindbergh kidnapping; a piece that

lingers over the vagaries of that particular year.

Later in 1972, Merrill radically changes his style

again in the enigmatic poem, "Syrinx". The allusion

in the title refers to a nymph in classical Greek

mythology, a follower of Artemis, known for her

chastity. Pursued by the amorous god Pan, she

runs to the river's edge and requests help from the

river nymphs. They help her (Greek mythology can

get really bizarre) by changing the nymph Syrinx

into hollow water reeds that make a haunted,

soulfull sound when the god Pan's breath blows

over them. (Pan is said to have cut the reeds to

create the first set of pan pipes as in the pan flute).

[Ref: Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.689ff] From the

poem "Syrinx"..."I tremble, still, A thinking reed.

Who puts his mouth to me, Draws out the scale of

love and dread--O Ramify, sole antidote? Foxglove

each year, cloud, hornet, fatal growths, Proliferating

by metastisis, Rooted their total in the gliding

streams. Some formula not relevant anymore,

though flower children might express it yet. ...Or

stop the four winds, racing overhead, Naught

Waste Eased Sought" {This critique and

description of James Merrill will continue. Three of

Merrill's best are still to be examined: "Lost in

Translation" "Poems for the Clothesline" and

probably his most famous poem, "The Black Swan" :
quasimodo1}

[stlukesguild]

For Blake images check out the William Blake Archive:

http://www.blakearchive.org/blake/

[AuntShecky]

These postings-- re: Blake, Whitman, and Merrill in particular -- are monumental! I am awestruck and humbled by the minds of these posters!

[Logos]

To AuntShecky: Thank you for your kind remarks although some of the moderators might take exception to what you say; it seems I give some of them fits, especially Logos, relative to copyright issues and admitedly I have gone beyond some bounds there. Uh, no, 'fits' is not quite the right word :) I've merely tried to explain copyright issues (http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showpost.php?p=423882&postcount=3) and it is my job to see that people here comply.

[Petrarch's Love]

Thanks for some more excellent posts on Whitman and Merrill, Quasi. This continues to be a fascinating thread.

[quasimodo1]

Louis Zukofsky is from the second wave of

American modernists, standing on the shoulders of

Ezra Pound, T.S.Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Joyce and

William Carlos Williams. Being both poet and critic,

he stands out mostly because of his 800 page

radical biographical poem called simply "A". He

said once about his work "I try to be as simple as

possible", yet in fact the sound leads to the sense

more than the opposite way, the standard way. It is

typical of his life that he achieved his MA, yet never

recieved his BA and this at twenty years old. He

worked for the WPA doing research from 1934 to

1942 creating a history of American handicrafts.

Some of his critics have called him the most

influential poet you never heard of. New York City

was his home and his resource. He died at Port

Jefferson, Long Island in 1978.

http://www.ofscollege.edu.sg/z-site/ An excerpt...

from "A" "Facing south, I looked
At the ferry at South Ferry
At night, the ruins of Castle Garden
Where Jenny Lind sang
Before my time — with the diamonds
Of the songs of the nightingale —
Long after the Castle became the Aquarium:
Swung back by my young pulse,
Recalled a seal in teal blue,
A compass in binnacle —
Asleep or sleepless .................................................. ..................

"Often in reading one of his poems, you can sense

multiple patterns at play; indeed, reading Zukofsky

induces this sensation. But these poems are not

multi-dimensional crossword puzzles: no solution is

required, or, for that matter, even desired. The

experience made possible through the crafting of

the poems is 'when the meanings are' (as Emily

Dickinson puts it): the meaning is not behind the

words but in the words as they unfold, and refold,

in the ear."

...............http://jacketmagazine.com/30/z-bernstein.html

.................................................. .............................................

The melody! the rest is accessory: …
My one voice. My other: is
An objective – rays of the object brought to a focus,
An objective – nature as creator – desire for what is

objectively perfect
Inextricably the direction of historic and

contemporary particulars

— from “A”-6



Louis Zukofsky (1904-78), The new biography

review can be found at this link...

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/20/books/review/Chiasson-t.html?ref=books#

...Zukofsky........"you

cannot talk about Zukofsky the man without talking

about the poem that collected, to an extent few

writers have ever attempted, the history of one

person’s perception of experience, from Bach to

Watts, from Spinoza to Kennedy."

.......................................quote from biography by Marc

Scroggins

[quasimodo1]

Charles Simic gives insight into his own work; "Awe is my religion, and mystery its church." Born 1938, he wrote in his memoirs (A Fly In The Soup), "My family like so many others, got to see the world for free, thanks to Hitler's wars and Stalin's takeover of east Europe." In 1954 Charles, his brother and his mother moved from the Yugoslavia and postwar/coldwar Belgrade to Manhatten and the US of Dodger baseball, burger and fries, chicken in every pot and the jazz clubs of the city. He characterizes and contours his life "in the mid 1970's at a nearby fair in Deerfield, New Hampshire. "What a life, I thought at the time. It's not enough to have six legs, they want you to do tricks, too. Then it occured to me. That's what a poet is; a six legged dog." In the 1967 poem called "MY SHOES" he writes autobiographically " Shoes, secret face of my inner life:/ Two gaping toothless mouths/ .........My brother and sister who died at birth/ continuing their existance in you,/ Guiding my life/ Toward their incomprehensible innocence." Simic imparts secretive and subtle joy together with darker sentiments; e.g. the four line poem, "WATERMELONS". (1974) "Green Buddhas/ on this fruit stand/ we eat the smile/ and spit out the teeth." In the poem "MY BELOVED (after D.Khrams)" (1981) with signature similes and metaphors, he writes: "In the fine print of her face/ Her eyes are like two loopholes/ .........When she crosses them (her legs) on the sofa/ It's like a jailer unwrapping a parcel/ And in that parcel is a christmas cake/ and in that cake a secret little file/ That gasps her name as it files my chains." (1981) By 1990 Simic has refined his style to bright, laconic verse, the peeks and valleys of emotion and controlled ironies...e.g. "ST THOMAS AQUINAS" (1990) (the patron of all universities and students) "I was on a park bench asleep./ It was like the art of ancient Egypt/ I didn't wish to bestir myself./ I made my long shadow take the evening train/ 'We give death to a child when we give it a doll'/ Said the woman who had read Djuna Barnes"./ reference: (Djuna Barnes, June 12, 1892 – June 18, 1982, was an American writer who played an important part in the development of 20th century English language), and further into the same poem....."I had the travels of Herman Melville to serve me as a pillow./ I was a ghost ship with its sails fully raised./ I could see no land anywhere./ The sea and its monsters could not cool me." Simic the cynic harmonizes with the Simic of joie de vivre; he counterpoints dark description with light and trivial experiences. From "THE DEVILS" (1990) ....."You were a victim of semiromantic anarchism/ in its most irrational form/ I was ill at ease in an ambiguous world/ deserted by providence"........"He's got dark ages on his brain, you said./ Who does, I asked and got no reply./ The world was quiet/ except when one of us took a sip of gin." Charles Simic was chosen Poet Laureate over 14 other poets by James H. Billington who describes his work "of rather stunning and of original quality." In "A BOOK FULL OF PICTURES" ....."The pages I turned sounded like wings./ 'the soul is a bird', he once said./ In my book full of pictures/ A battle raged: lances and swords/ made a kind of wintry forest/ With my heart spiked and bleeding in its branches.." Billington also said of Simic..."he's very hard to describe, and that's a great tribute to him. His poems have a sequence that you encounter only in dreams." When interviewed about what and who influenced him...Simic responded "I adored different kinds of poets" and goes on to mention the ancient Chinese poets, Roman poets (Virgil), French symbolists and American modernists. "I was so promiscuous. I'd be lying if I pretended that. I had just one great love." In 1996 Simic wrote "CAMEO APPEARANCE" where he refers to the wartime Europe of his youth...."I had a small, non speaking part/ in a bloody epic./ I was one of the/ Bombed and fleeing humanity./ In the distance our great leader/ Crowed like a rooster from a balcony/ or was it a great actor/ Impersonating our great leader?" In a collection of poems entitled "JACKSTAWS" he is obsessed by mortality. The epigraph for "Jackstraws" by Adam Zagajewski..."This moment- what is it?- just a mosquitto, a fly, a spec, a scrap of breath." Simic's primary concern in this collection is locating and capturing the ever-vanishing scraps of breath that make a life. If most poets in their later years become dull an staid, Simic in "THE GANG OF MIRRORS" will not go quietly into his night. From "Jackstaws" ........"And the one that's got it in for you,/ That keeps taunting you/ In an old man's morning wheeze/ Every time you so much as glance at it,/ Or blurt something in your defense,/ Screaming, raising your chin high,/ While it spits and chokes in reply." The Paris Review has in archive this great interview with Simic...http://www.theparisreview.com/media/5507_simic.pdf The Boston Review has an essay on Jackstraws ...http://bostonreview.net/BR24.3/henry.html Also the NYTimes has an article on Simic as new Poet Laureate http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/02/books/02poet.html?_r=1&oref=slogin# quasimodo1

[quasimodo1]

Poetry Redux...John Hollander......................................... .................................................. ..........................From John Hollander's collection, "Powers of Thirteen" [poem 162] "At thirteen already single-minded Abraham smashed up all the ideas in his father's house that were/ Likenesses of nothing, and turned his inner eye toward/ The lord of nonrepresentation, whose sole image/ Lies encoded somewhere in our own." It might be observed about John Hollander that his skilled and inspired poetry is lost in the rareified atmosphere of the top of the social and intelectual circles. That said, his poetry remains accessable yet subtle, profound and yet exibits similarity to the contemporary poetry of our time. His best efforts are both inferentially emotional and also distant; transporting his unique sense of comparison of disimilars by way of symbolic extrapolation. Hollander, a poet, among many other avocations, was born the day of the crash, in 1029; this held no omen status for the success of his variegated writing career. In addition, he was a writer, critic, professsor at four colleges and universities, among them Connecticut College, Hunter College, The CUNY Graduate Center and Yale University. A prolific writer and poet, he emassed kudos as Junior fellow of the Harvard Societry of Fellows, the Bollingen Prize for poetry, the Levenson Prize, A fellowship from the Gugenhiem Foundation, The Macarthur Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts, Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and The Poet Laureate of Connecticut. His work overall is heterogenious, urbane, never decadent, scholarly, never pedantic and always entertaining. Almost by way of contrast, his poems also display the profound, philosophical, even playfull and light...at once whimsical and serious and even farsical. When you include additional layers like mystery and transcendence, Hollander clearly is a master remeniscent of Hecht, Merrill and M.S. Merwin. In April of 2003, John Hollander was interviewed by Paul Devlin, at St. John's University c/o the Humanities Department (and with the assistance of the St. John's English Department who later published this interview). Devlin poses this question to Hollander..." In terms of educational practice, what ways can a teacher, perhaps an elementary school or high school teacher, make good poetry exciting and accessible?" Hollander's response is that those teachers must read the poetry aloud; the students must learn about intonation, about making a "close" reading of the poetry, make less emphasis of methodology, learn the immense value of the students own potential for originality, and especially the need to practice creative writing given that the student sees the possibility of writing himself. Another question asked by Devlin is...'Are there any great poets who you feel are overlooked [undervalued] today?" John Hollanders answer may seem a little convoluted but it is noteworthy that the poets and writers he mentions in his reply consist of a royal listing. They include Browning, Dante, Chaucer, Victor Hugo, Emerson, Melville, Whitman, Dickinson, Longfellow, Swinburne, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Shelly, D.H. Lawrence and Hardy. The reader can almost hear faint echoes of Whitman and Swinburne in his poem from the "Harp Lake" collection (copyright 1988). "Clay to clay: Soon I shall indeed become/ Dumb as these solid cups of hardened mud/ (Dull terra cruda colored like our blood);/ Meanwhile the slap and thump of palm and thumb/ On wet mis-shapenness begins to hum/ With meaning that was silent for so long./ The words of my wheel's turning come to ring/ Truer than truth itself does, my great/ Ding Dong-an-sich that echoes everything/ (against it even lovely bells ring wrong); Its whole voice gathers up the purest parts/ Of all our speech, the vowels of the earth,/ The aspirations of our hopeful hearts/ Or the prophetic sibilance of song." [published by Alfred A. Knopf. Inc. Copyright 1988 by John Hollander. Used with permission.] Now if I may allow a personal selection (a favorite), This is a quote from "River Remembered" [from the "Tesserae" collection, 1995, Alfred A. Knopf]. A few selected stanzas from this long poem: "The rhododendrons darkened leaves are curved/ Into tight scrolls, whose dry, hermetic books/ Will stay unread now, till the whitened world/ Unlocks its warmth; the frozen local brooks/ Muttering sotto voce at their own/ Ice remind us of a general notion;/ Running through land to an eventual ocean--/" (stanza one and two) Stanza 21 from "River Remembered" "--Oh see these chilling shades of foresight cast/ Across memory's warm places new engage/ Daylight in their transactions with the past,/ And scrawl their warnings on this dimming page/" From "An Old Fashioned Song" [part of the "Tesserae" collection] "No more walks in the wood:/ The trees have all been cut/ Down, and where once they stood/ Not even a wagon rut/ Appears along the path/ Low brush is tking over./ No more walks in the wood/ This is the aftermath/ Of afternoons in the clover/ Fields where we once made love/ Then wandered home together/ Where the trees arched above,/ Where we made our own weather/ When branches were the sky./" [1995, Alfred A. Knopf] [From "The Night Mirror" Copyright 1971 by John Hollander] "As the Sparks Fly Upward" "As of an ungrounded grief,/ Bluish sparks fly upward from/ Under the shadow-thickened,/ Tree-covered, part of night toward/ What can yet be construed as/ Dimmed azure, while the summer/ Glow of soft streetlamp light hums/ Listening leaves: fireflies/ Far from the sea rise in an/ Untroubled-looking midland,/ Soundless, their gaps in the dark/ Soundless, and the thunder soon/ Waves of remembrance in the darkening air./" From the same source collection (Night Mirrror), this poem "Another Firefly" has stunning first lines..."In a turning instant, my head/ catches light of a leaping star/ Over my left shoulder in a/ Green region of space darkened,/ Into distance beyond distance,/ A cold, green star, not rising like/ Sons and empires, slow as breath,/ In the way of stars, but as no/ Darkened water could have mirrored/ The partly glimpsed meteor in/ Surging reversal of falling---/" Digressing from Hollander's poetry, an illuminating article and review by Robert Von Hallberg called "The Effect of Loss On the Loser" (NYTimes book review section) has some excellent comment on John Hollander written recently. This quote by Hallberg stands out as both tribute and analysis. The review's focus is Hollander's collection called "Lead: In Time and Place" (101pp, $7.95...paperback). "Imagine a poet so confident in his resources that he might begin a book with Tennyson on his mind and end with Rene Char. John Hollander's technical range is well known now. His new book "In Time and Place" is in speaking of technique as something seperate in a distinguished poet. As usual in his collections, his approach is extraordinarily indirect. Though this marvelous book of poems, prose and prose pooems comes from real pain, not literary anxiety, Mr. Hollander's achievement is an imaginative marshalling of very different ideas for pushing loss and pain innto understanding. A lover's betrayal, a wife's departure, a friend's death, the mind's decline--Mr. hollander's idioms keep these figurations of loss overlapping on one another" It is fitting to end with a quote of Hollander himself... "The great advantage of the way live here now is that I am free of my own influence. Not being able to read what I have previously set down disobliges me from attendinng to it." The following is a bibliography of all John Hollander's poetry collections.[Poetry]

A Crackling of Thorns ( New Haven, Yale University Press, 1958)

Movie-Going and Other Poems (New York, Atheneum, 1962)

Visions from the Ramble (New York, Atheneum, 1965)

Types of Shape (New York, Atheneum, 1968)

The Night Mirror (New York, Atheneum, 1971)

Town and Country Matters (Boston, David R. Godine, 1972)

Selected Poems (London, Secker and Warburg, 1972)

Selected Poems, tr. Yorifumi Yaguchi (Tokyo, Bunri, 1972)

Tales Told of the Fathers (New York, Atheneum, 1975)

Reflections on Espionage (New York, Atheneum, 1976)

Spectral Emanations (New York, Atheneum, 1978)

Blue Wine ( Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979)

Powers of Thirteen (New York, Athenuem, 1983)

In Time and Place (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986)

Harp Lake (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1988)

Types of Shape [2nd. edition, with ten new poems, notes and introduction] (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1991)

The Death of Moses [libretto for oratorio by Alexander Goehr] (London, Schott and Co., Ltd., 1992)

Selected Poetry (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1993)

Tesserae and Other Poems (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1993)

Figurehead and Other Poems (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1999)

Reflections on Espionage [2nd edition, with as introduction and additional notes] (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1999)

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Poetry Redux: A.R.Ammons From the poem "Mansion", more serious than most of his work, "......SO IT CAME TIME/ FOR ME TO CEDE MYSELF, AND I CHOOSE/ THE WIND/ TO BE DELIVERED TO/ THE WIND WAS GLAD/ AND SAID IT NEEDED ALL/ THE BODY/ IT COULD GET/ .....WHEN THE TREES OF MY BONES/ RISES FROM THE SKIN I SAID/ COME AND WHIRLWINDING/ STROLL MY DUST/ AROUND THE PLAIN" Within every A.R.Ammmons poem, you find a concept and re-interpreted vision taken from the changing physics of nature, humans included. On a US Navy destroyer escort, he wrote his first poems, in the South Pacific. When he worked as principal of a Cape Hatteras elementary school, immense natural beauty of the hundred and forty mile barrier island was backround he would use. After managing a specialty glass factory in New Jersey, and before he started teaching at Cornell (1963), in 1955 he allready self-published a poetry collection: "Ommateum, with Doxology", a first edition which now can fetch three thousand in the rare books trade. 1963, Ammons writes "Still", a muted exaltation: BUT THOUGH I HAVE LOOKED EVERYWHERE,/ I CAN FIND NOTHING/ TO GIVE MYSELF TO:/ EVERY THING IS/ MAGNIFICENT WITH EXISTENCE, IS IN/ SURFEIT OF GLORY:/ NOTHING IS DIMINISHED FOR ME:" In 1965, the professor wrote this signature poem: "Corsons Inlet", a space of ocean and land between Strathmere and Ocean City, NJ..."I ALLOW MYSELF EDDIES OF MEANING:/ LIKE A STREAM THROUGH THE GEOGRAPHY OF MY WORK:/ YOU CAN FIND/ IN MY SAVINGS/ SWERVES OF ACTION/ LIKE THE INLETS CUTTING EDGE." In this same reflective poem..."RISK IS FULL: EVERY LIVING THING IN/ SIEGE: THE DEMAND IS LIFE, TO KEEP LIFE: THE SMALL/ WHITE BLACKLEGGED EGRET, HOW BEAUTIFUL, QUIETLY STALKS AND SPEARS/ TO STAB--WHAT? I COULD'T/ SEE AGAINST THE BLACK MUDFLATS-- A FRIGHTENED/ FIDDLER CRAB?" Ammons concludes this poem with another variation on the need and necessity of constant renewal..."THAT THERE IS NO FINALITY OF VISION,/ THAT I HAVE PERCIEVED NOTHING COMPLETELY,/ THAT TOMORROW A NEW WALK IS A NEW WALK." An immense volume of writing will follow; Ammons has found his stride, not so tentative, and eventually had published over twenty-five collections before his passing at seventy-five years, at Cornell in Ithaca, NY. A partial list of poetry prizes: The Bollingen, the Ruth Lily Prize, the Frost Medal, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, and the Library of Congress Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, in addition to his professor emeritus status at Cornell. Ammons writes in 1970 "Cascadilla Falls"....."PICKED UP A/ HANDSIZED STONE/ KIDNEY-SHAPED, TESTICULAR, AND/ THOUGHT ALL ITS MOTIONS INTO IT,/ THE 800MPH EARTH SPIN,/ THE 190-MILLION-MILE YEARLY/ DISPLACEMENT AROUND THE SUN,/ THE OVERRIDING/ GRAND/ HAUL." (photographs of these falls are available at http://nyfalls.com/cascadilla.html ) Elizabeth Mills, professor at Davidson College, said of Ammons he would "gather up pieces of clarity" and that he remarked to her while writing the "Lake Effect Country" that "I WANT TO DEAL WITH INTELLECTUAL CONGLOMERATES THAT COULD REVEAL THE NATURE OF THINGS." Ms. Mills described H.R. or "Archie" as he was known at Cornell, "an edgewalker, a seeker on the periphery." Edward Hirsch of the NYT is quoted on this poet: "Ammons was an essentially American poet of what Emerson called 'fluxions and mobility' who needed always to keep moving, bobbing and weaving, changing speeds (and tones), thinking on the fly, improvising--an adept poet of process, and proponent of motion, which he named 'the closest cousin to spirit.'" Another soft celebration of living is a poem called "The City Limits", a radiant piece from 1971: "...WHEN YOU CONSIDER/ THAT AIR OR VACUUM, SNOW OR SHALE, SQUID OR WOLF, ROSE OR LICHEN/ EACH IS ACCEPTED INTO AS MUCH LIGHT AS IT WILL TAKE, THEN/ THE HEART MOVES ROOMIER, THE MAN STANDS AND LOOKS ABOUT, THE/ LEAF DOES NOT INCREASE ITSELF ABOVE THE GRASS, AND THE DARK/ WORK OF THE DEEPEST CELLS IS IN A TUNE WITH MAY BUSHES/ AND FEAR LIT BY THE BREADTH OF SUCH CALMLY TURNS TO PRAISE." Fellow professor and friend at Ithaca, Roger Gilbert, commented on A.R.Ammons readership, "I think he felt a little isolated in Ithaca, and he had a very dedicated, but smaller following than other poets. I think he appreciated the awards, but what really mattered to him is having as many people as possible read his work." Rated best among his collections are: GLARE, 1997 THE NORTH CAROLINA POEMS, 1965 SPHERE: THE FORM OF A MOTION, 1974 and BOSH AND FLAPDOODLE, his last collection. Anticipating he was not an immortal, he wrote "In View of the Fact" about friends and family aging in an upbeat style: "THE NICE OLD MEN LEFT IN EMPTY HOUSES OR ON/ THE WIDOWS WHO DECIDE TO TRAVEL ALOT: WE/ THINK THE SUN MAY SHINE SOMEDAY WHEN WE'LL/ DRINK WINE TOGETHER AND THINK OF WHAT USED TO/ BE: UNTIL WE DIE WE WILL REMEMBER EVERY SINGLE THING, RECALL EVERY WORD, LOVE EVERY LOSS." Bibliography: ------------------Briefings: Poems Small and Easy. New York: W. W. Norton, 1971.

Brink Road. New York: W. W. Norton, 1996.

A Coast of Trees. New York: W. W. Norton, 1981.

Collected Poems, 1951-1971. New York: W. W. Norton, 1972.

Corsons Inlet: A Book of Poems. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1965.

Diversifications. New York: W. W. Norton, 1975.

Expressions of Sea Level. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1964.

Garbage. New York: W. W. Norton, 1993.

Glare. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997.

Lake Effect Country. New York: W. W. Norton, 1983.

The North Carolina Poems. Edited by Alex Albright. Rocky Mount: North Carolina Wesleyan College Press, 1994.

Northfield Poems. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1966.

Ommateum, with Doxology. Philadelphia, Pa.: Dorrance, 1955.

The Really Short Poems of A. R. Ammons. New York: W. W. Norton, 1990.

Selected Longer Poems. New York: W. W. Norton, 1980.

Selected Poems. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1968.

The Selected Poems. New York: W. W. Norton, 1986.

Set In Motion: Essays, Interviews, and Dialogues. Edited by Zofia Burr. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996.

The Selected Poems, 1951-1977. New York: W. W. Norton, 1977.

The Snow Poems. New York: W. W. Norton, 1977.

Sphere: The Form of a Motion. New York: W. W. Norton, 1974.

Sumerian Vistas. New York: W. W. Norton, 1987.

Tape for the Turn of the Year. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1965.

Uplands: New Poems. New York: W. W. Norton, 1970.

Worldly Hopes. New York: W. W. Norton, 1982. { http://www.themanhattanreview.com/archive/1-2_place.html Ammons interview}

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POETRY REDUX: WILLIAM MATTHEWS (1942-1997) ------------ As mentioned in a posting on William Matthews, he had observed when a young poet that most published poems fall into four thematic categories: "1. I went out into the woods today and it made me feel, you know, sort of religious. 2. We're not getting any younger. 3. It sure is cold and lonley (a) without you, honey, or (b) with you, honey. 4. Sadness seems but the other side of the coin of happiness, and vice versa, and in any case the coin is too soon spent and on we know not what." This flippant and satirical view of poetry did not keep Matthews from spending a lifetime perfecting his verse. Although he may have studiously avoided these particular cliche'd themes, he began a life of lively, sardonic, incisive writing which would bring him many of the famed poetry prizes and would see him become an established and prolific poet. His topics ranged from jazz to philosophy to media and allowed a portion of work dedicated to the "other". Matthews wrote of Freud, Nabakov, good food, the simple pleasures, wine and applied his poetic skills to the subtleties of fleeting if common experiences. While still an aspirant, he wrote "Bud Powell, Paris, 1959" --excerpt--TWO BUCKS FOR A SCOTCH IN THIS DUMP,--I THOUGHT, AND I BOUGHT ME ANOTHER. I WAS YOUNG AND PAIN ROSE TO MY CEILING, LIKE WARMTH,--LIKE A STORY THAT MAKES US COME TRUE--IN THE PRESENT. EACH DAY'S--MELOWDRAMA IN POWELL'S CELLS--BORED AND KILLED HIM. PAIN LOVES PAIN--AND CALLS IT COMPANY, AND IT IS." Matthews was from Cincinnati, born 11/11/42. He went for his BA at Yale and an MA from the University of North Carolina. Despite his view of most poetry as mostly bloated and ornate cliche'...he persisted at it for a lifetime, never discussing the lovelorn or hard times. By the day of his demise at 55, his birthday, this semi-cynical poet was an imposing figure in literary and university circles. A personal poet with an unique signature, his peers would say "he wrote his life." His poetry, as W.S. Merwin saw it, was suprising, delightful, loaded with wry grace and reassuring. William Matthews responded in an interview recorded at the Atlantic (monthly) Unbound website, "Life happens to us whether we have the good sense to be interested in the way it happens to us or not. That's what it means to be alive." From his book "Foreseeable Futures" he writes..."EACH EMOTION LASTS FOR ITS OPPOSITE__WHICH IS TO SAY, FOR ITSELF. OUR WATER MUSIC__EVERY MORNING RAINS DEATH'S OLD SWEET SONG.__BUT RELENTLESS JOY INFESTS THE BLUES ALL DAY." Moving on to a poem from 1998, no poet so eloquently attacks poetry, both method and audience, quite like Matthews... from "Inspiration" ..."I LOATHE POETRY. I HATE THE CLOTTED,__DICTY POEMS OF THE GREAT MODERNISTS,__DISDAINFUL OF THEIR TRUANT AUDIENCE,__AND I HATE ALSO PROLETARIAN POETRY,__WITH ITS DUTIFUL RANCORS__AND SING-ALONG CERTAINTIES.__I HATE POETRY READINGS AND THE DREADED VERB 'TO SHARE'. LET ME SHARE THIS KNIFE WITH YOUR THROAT,__.....IT TAKES A DEEP BELIEF IN ONE'S OWN IGNORANCE;__IT TAKES, I TELL YOU, DESPERATE MEASURES." In order to give a fair sampling of William Matthews poetry, here are some excerpts from a spectrum of his poetry.....from "outer space" -- "...THREADS ON A SCREW, THE WORM__OF A CORKSCREW, THE CIRCULAR__STAIRCASE TO SLEEP__...SOON THE MOON IS GONE__AS FAR AS IT CAN GO AND STILL COME BACK.__SOON THERE'LL BE NO ROOM__FOR YOU: THE MOON WILL BE ALL__STOMACH, LIKE A MELON" From "A Roadside near Ithaca" "......OR THEY'RE ONE BLUE THE SKY__CAN BE, AND ALWAYS, NOT__VARIUM ET MUTABILE SEMPER, RESTLESS FOREVER.__IN MEMORY, THOUGH MEMMORY EATS ITS BANKS LIKE ANY RIVER, __YOU CAN CARRY__BY CONSTANT REVISION__SOME LOVED THING:" From "The Blue Nap" -- "...THE NIGHT I SHARE WITH OTHERS IS CLOUDY__AS IF IT WERE GROGGY FROM SNOWING.__ON THE PLAINS, THE LIGHTS OF LONGMONT__WAVER. I BEGIN TO RE-INVENT MY LIFE, TURNING ON LIGHTS,__GRINDING SOME COFFEE BEANS__FRENCH ROAST, DARK ENOUGH TO SHINE. THE KETTLE__SENDS UP__ITS FLUME OF STEAM." From "Moving Again" -- "....IN A FEW GEOLOGICAL ERAS.__NEW MOUNTAINS MAY,__SHATTER THE EARTH'S SHELL__AND POKE UP LIKE STONE WINGS.__EACH PART MUST SERVE FOR A WHOLE.__I BRING MY SONS TO THE BASE__OF THE FOOTHILLS AND WE GO UP. .........WE GO UP THE MESA TOP AND LOOK DOWN__AT OUR NEW HOMETOWN. THE THIN AIR__WARPS IN THE MELTING LIGHT__LIKE THE AURA BEFORRE A MIGRAINE..." From "The News", a type of poem with very relaxed and not very intense purpose... -- "...FROM EACH HOUSE ON THE STREET,__THE BLUE LIGHT OF THE NEWS.__SOMEONE'S DOG WHIRPS THREE TIMES__AND SCUFFS THE LEAVES.__IT'S QUIET, A SCHOOL NIGHT.__THE PRESIDENT AND HIS HELPERS__LIVE AT ONE END OF THE NEWS,__PARENTS AT THE OTHER." Now the reader will notice a very intense and although seemingly impersonal; it is in fact very personal, probably dealing with the serious ill health of his wife (cancer). From "Living among the Dead" -- "...FIRST THERE WERE THOSE WHO DIED__BEFORE I WAS BORN.__IT WAS AS IF THEY HAD JUST LEFT__AND THEIR SHADOWS WOULD__SLIP OUT OF THEM__UNDER THE DOOR SO RECENTLY CLOSED__THE AIR IN ITS PATH WAS STILL__SWIRLING TO REST.__SOME OF THE FURNITURE CAME FROM THEM,__I WAS TOLD, AND ONE DAY__I OPENED TWO CHESTS__OF DRAWERS TO LEARN WHAT THE DEAD KEPT. .......BUT IT WAS WHEN I LEARNED TO READ__THAT I BEGAN ALWAYS__TO LIVE AMONG THE DEAD.__TO LOVE THE DEAD IS EASY.__THEY ARE FINAL, PERFECT__BUT TO LOVE A CHILD__IS SOMETIMES TO FAIL AT LOVE__WHILE THE DEAD LOOK ON__WITH THEIR ABSTRACT SORROW." In an overlong and partonizing interview conducted by Peter Davison of the Atlantic Monthly, the subject of Matthews' ill wife came up and he states about this trying period....."Its not easy to write a poem on these subjects. I didnn't write a poem because I thought it would be useful material. On the contrary: I noticed all the way through that neither I nor anybody else has much of a vocabulary for talking about my experience, or talking about Pat's experience (to the extent that I could guess what it was, or hear her tell me). Question posed by Peter Davison: "Would you call it an act of witness?" Matthews' reply: "Yes, it's an act of witness, but I needed to write the poem to invent a vocabulary, because it's a matter of pride for me not to be linguistically inadequate. We are all rendered mute and stupid by our experience from time to time, but the point of being a poet is that you have redress. I felt particularly challenged in this instance. It seemed to me a matter of pride--I hope I don't mean puffed-up pride, but the pride that a good cook takes in knowing how to save a curdling sauce. It was also an act of trying to rescue an important part of human experience from imaginative failures and thinness of vocabulary and failures of empathy. You can't give up to the forces of silence. They mean us harm." In another interview, by a skilled communicator, Matthews elaborates on, in the largest sense, the poetic creative process. "I do think that writing poetry imitates, in some ways, the process of keeping alert, keeping you poise, keeping your curiosity, keepinng all the balls up in the air--it's a model for an attentive life--in that it acts it out. If you were to say, 'what kind of symbolic actions can a poem perform?' "...The first thing I would say is I would use images from juggling and images from choreograpghy, and say that balance and posture, in the largest sense of the words, poise in the largest sense of the word, are some of the things that the writing of poetry teaches us. It also teaches us a certain ordinary bravery, which is not to call a spade a garden implement and not to leave out the stuff that you don't know the answer to, and things like that. It is good for the human spirit to speak the truth in public in an unquavering voice, and writing imitates some of that." .................................................. .....................You can't comment on William Matthews without quoting some of his poetry and enthusiastic words for jazz and especially Charles Mingus. When Matthews won the Book Critics Circle Award for "Time and Money: new poems" in 1995, he wrote about jazz artist Mingus...."YOU HAVE TO PICK UP THE BASS,__AS MINGUS CALLED HIS,__WITH AUDIBLE CAPITALS,__AND THINK OF THE SLOW YEARS THE WOOD SPENT AS A TREE,__WHICH MIGHT WELL HAVE BEEN ENOUGH FOR WOOD,__AND THINK OF THE SKILL THE BASSMAKER CARRIED __WITHOUT GREAT THOUGHT OF IT FROM HOME__TO THE SHOP AND BACK FOR DECADES,__AND KNOW WHAT BASSISTS BEFORE YOU HAVE PLAYED,__AND KNOW HOW MUCH OF THIS IS __STORED IN THHE BASS LIKE ENERGY__IN A SPRING AND KNOW HOW MUCH YOU MUST__COAX OUT. HOW EASY IT WOULD BE,__INSTEAD TO PULL A SWORD FROM A STONE,__BUT WHATS INSIDE THE BASS__WANTS OUT." Finally in the way of presenting William Matthews best work, an excerpt from his poem "Time" where he muses about the passage of time, of life....."AND YET WE MUST REMEMBER THIS__DIRE TIME HECTORS US ALONG WITH IT,__AND SO__WE MIGHT CONSIDER THANKS.__WEDNESDAY.__THURSDAY.__THUS WATER LICKS ITS STEADY WAY THROUGH STONE." -------------------------------------------------------A Selected Bibliography

Poetry

A Happy Childhood (1984)
After All: Last Poems (1998)
An Oar in the Old Water (1974)
Blues If You Want (1989)
Broken Syllables (1969)
Flood (1982)
Foreseeable Futures (1987)
Rising and Falling (1979)
Ruining the New Road (1970)
Selected Poems & Translations, 1969-1991 (1992)
Sleek for the Long Flight: New Poems (1972)
Stick and Stones (1975)
The Cloud (1971)
Time & Money: New Poems (1995)


Anthology

A World Rich in Anniversaries: Prose Poems, (1979)
Removed from Time (1977)
The Mortal City: 100 Epigrams of Martial (1995)


Essays

Curiosities (1989)
-------------------------------------------------------William Matthews, prizes and honors....Served as president of the Poetry Societry of America.....(1997)Ruth Lily Award.....Chair of the Literature Panel of the National Endowment for the Arts.....fellowships from the Guggenheim and Ingram Merrill Foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund.....professor of English and creative writing at New York City College.....finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize.....editor and co-founder together with Russell Banks of literary magazine "Lillabulero". q1

[quasimodo1]

Abstract

Lillabulero was a small literary magazine founded and principally edited by Russell Banks and William Matthews in 1964 while both were students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The magazine ran through 14 issues and contained poetry and prose works by lesser known authors, as well as critical pieces discussing developments in modern literature. Issues 1-5 were published in Chapel Hill, N.C.; subsequent numbers were published in Northwood Narrows, N.H. Banks and Matthews also founded a small press under the same name, which issued a series of chapbooks and other compilations of literary work. These undertakings were abandoned in 1974 to allow Banks and Matthews to devote more time to their own creative projects. Records consists primarily of letters relating to established and potential contributors to the magazine, as well as correspondence between editors Russell Banks and William Matthews and others at similar publications. The letters include commentary on submissions and discuss matters relevant to the production of a literary magazine at a small press. Also included are letters on more general topics, such as the nature of poetry, social conditions in the United States, and the war in Vietnam. There is also correspondence of a more personal nature among Banks and Matthews and their friends. Correspondents include Floyce Alexander, Carol Berge, Wendell Berry, James Bertolino, Alan Brilliant, Paul Hannigan, Geof Hewitt, David Ignatow, David Madden, Howard McCord, Paul Metcalf, Robert Morgan, Paul Pines, Henry Roth, Max Steele, Peter Wild, William Witherup, and Arthur Yanoff. Interspersed in the correspondence are several versions of a prospectus directed at potential funding sources and retailers and a few grant applications to government agencies and other sources of funding. There is also a brief essay entitled, "Why We Killed a Perfectly Healthy Literary Magazine," in which Banks and Matthews discussed the reasons for shutting Lillabulero down after the 14th issue. -- http://www.lib.unc.edu/mss/inv/l/Lillabulero.html