pō’ĭ-trē

John Berryman

Listen (to Hoon read)

He lifted up, among the actuaries,
a grandee crow. Ah ha & he crowed good.
That funny money-man.
Mutter we all must as well as we can.
He mutter spiffy. He make wonder Henry’s
wits, though, with a odd

…something…something…not there in his
flourishing art.
O veteran of death, you will not mind
a counter-mutter.
What was it missing, then, at the man’s heart
so that he does not wound? It is our kind
to wound, as well as utter

a fact of happy world. That metaphysics
he hefted up until we could not breathe
the physics. On our side,
monotonous (or ever–fresh)—it sticks
in Henry’s throat to judge—brilliant, he seethe;
better than us; less wide.

- from: “The Dream Songs”, #219
Hoon adds,
An equivocating eulogy, saying almost as much about the author as the one eulogised, but perhaps this is in keeping with Stevens’ own solipcism — as well as his rugged commitment to truth, and against self-delusion.

The actuaries alludes to Stevens’ employment in the insurance business. An attorney, he rose to the position of vice-president at Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company. The grandee crow, of course, refers to his poem Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird (although given Berryman’s penchant for drinking it may also be an allusion to Old Crow bourbon whiskie as well).

What was it missing, then, at the man’s heart so that he does not wound?

While bringing Barryman’s own troubles into the circle of the poem, it also points out a problem that many readers have with Stevens’ style. Its abstractness, lack of references to other people inhabiting the universe, interpersonal relationships, love. This is a valid point. Perhaps any particular style cannot possibly suffice to fulfill all of one’s literary interests and desires. History gives us what it has.

A point of fact though, Stevens could wound. He got into a fight with Hemingway once in Key West. It was mainly Stevens, though, who got wounded; needing to take extra vacation time to allow his face to heal. Although Stevens was a large man, he was in his fifties at the time and Hemingway was twenty years his younger. Drinking was undoubtably involved.

Wallace Stevens

Listen (to Hoon read)

I

Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the black bird.

II

I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

III

The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV

A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

V

I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

VI

Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.

VII

O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

VIII

I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

IX

When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

X

At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.

XI

He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.

XII

The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.

XIII

It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.

Hoon writes,

I can remember reading this in the lit books and thinking, “Eh?”. I think when you’re young you expect art, especially high art, to reveal something to you about life, instead of thinking of it as simply its own kind of artificial experience that occupies and hopefully improves the passage of time. So while “13 Ways…” deals with a serious subject, death let us say, the poem may not have a great deal to say to us other than: “Hey, this is a poem. Enjoy!”

Stevens seems to have posed himself the problem of whether a series of thoughts, impressions, he used the term sensations, sharing a common theme, but without clear logical continuity, could be somehow arranged to form an aesthetic whole, and enjoyed both as a whole but also as a disconnected, kaleidoscopic set. A verbal collage. What is needed to achieve then the barest sense of unity we might ask? While not saying much, and perhaps not to be agreed to by all, we will still assert that temporal art needs an opening, a progression of impressions or ideas, and a close. For a poem this can be achieved either semantically or phonetically, usually both. “13 Ways…” opens with a  winter scene and closes with, let us say, the same scene. A certain degree of cohesion is thus achieved. In between the episodes expand and contract, and move through various moods, rhythms, and associations. The sections are brief, haiku-like, but perhaps self-consciously so, and not to be taken too seriously as such. (”A man and a woman are one. …”)

The almost inevitable theme, given the large number of sections, is that death is everywhere, surrounding all we do (stanzas: 1, 3, 6, 7, 8, 9, 12, 13), in sex and love (stanzas: 4 & 7); and cannot be avoided (stanza 11); but possesses humor (stanzas: 2, 4, 5 - a blackbird whistling!), and like many of Stevens’ own poems, a quiet, austere beauty (stanzas: 1, 3, 6, 9, 12, 13). To fail to see the humor in “I was of three minds./like a tree /in which there are three blackbirds”, and to search for some greater meaning there, well you might as well try to explain what semolina pilchards are. Many of the lines and sections end on unaccented syllables and this gives the work as a whole a generally unsettled feeling, which does resolve though quite effectively in the final verse. While a scansion of the poem is beyond the range of this discussion, such a metrical analysis would show such a wide variety of rhythmic patterns that the poem may be viewed as a study of metrical techniques. As such it deserves close reading, listening, study.

The work is anthologized a lot, so seems to achieve a satisfaction for a great number of readers, and has surely been imitated frequently, but I think that the failure of many of its imitators to achieve its level of popularity points towards the difficulty in finding an audience for this kind of loose associative structure (although I’m sure there are a lot who would disagree with that assertion).

Wallace Stevens

Listen (to Hoon read)

Children picking up our bones
Will never know that these were once
As quick as foxes on the hill;

And that in autumn, when the grapes
Made sharp air sharper by their smell
These had a being, breathing frost;

And least will guess that with our bones
We left much more, left what still is
The look of things, left what we felt

At what we saw. The spring clouds blow
Above the shuttered mansion-house,
Beyond our gate and the windy sky

Cries out a literate despair.
We knew for long the mansion’s look
And what we said of it became

A part of what it is . . . Children,
Still weaving budded aureoles,
Will speak our speech and never know,

Will say of the mansion that it seems
As if he that lived there left behind
A spirit storming in blank walls,

A dirty house in a gutted world,
A tatter of shadows peaked to white,
Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun.

Hoon adds,

Stevens’ verse, as I found it in the various lit books I was brought up on, was always a puzzle to me. Nothing in it seemed to make sense. It all seemed lacking  in purpose and, for lack of a better word, beauty. Much later in life, when I began to record poetry, my main motivation was a belief that hearing a poem recited, especially a difficult poem, makes it more comprehensible; since a certain amount on the meaning is encoded in the interpretation, in the prepared inflections of the reader. Thus it was natural that I should turn to a poet whose work I never felt I understood as a source for material to test this proposition. It was. then, a considerable and pleasant surprise to me that I should become so taken in with Stevens’ work. But what surprised me even more than my being able to understand the stuff was the sense of lyrical delight that comes with reciting Stevens. The works are clearly conceived with much more than just a regard for semantics, but with a deep appreciation for the sound and rhythm of words. It was “A Postcard…”, from IDEAS OF ORDER(1936), it’s rhythm and phrasing, which first opened my ears to how carefully Stevens composes in this regard.

And so on to the semantics.

I hate to discuss the meaning of this poem since it seems so much better that the reader/listener should engage the poem repeatedly and have its meaning revealed, reconstituted, in such a slower, more personal and self-reliant way; and I encourage the reader to break off reading here to pursue such a course. But Stevens can be difficult, and not just for the novice reader.

Edward Hirsch in his book Poet’s Choice(2006) gives a miserable interpretation of the poem under the chapter heading “Poetry Responds to Suffering”. Responding to the “Volcano” mentioned in the title, and phrase “gutted world” near the end, he reads the poem as “a prophetic elegy for a civilization that will be destroyed”. The sense is of a civilization in decline, but hardly destroyed.

The notion of a future generations handling, desecrating, our bones is not new. Hamlet’s graveyard scene comes easily to mind. The ignorance with which these future children do so leads directly to, is subsumed by, the general naivete that they bring to past culture, the words of the past, “the look of things”, their whole cultural inheritance. Indeed the central metaphor of the poem is the dilapidated mansion, which stands, quite simply, for this collective culture, but especially poetry. (Stevens’ symbols can be frequently, and somewhat surprisingly, stiff and conventional).

Their miscomprehension of the past takes place in a physical world that is itself devoid of a sense of aesthetics, that “cries out a literate despair”, eclipsing even the children’s naivete. The children though are “still weaving budded aureoles”, still growing halos of holiness and innocence. They walk past, presumably, the mansion on their way to school, and encounter it in their studies, where they may well “speak our speech and never know”: will only dumbly come to terms with their inheritance, but will dimly sense in it a haunted, lingering, “storming”, presence, the presence of the poet, the creative spirit of the past. This is the Volcano. The children’s neglect is, of course, something that recurs with every generation. Similar to how Wallace himself, let us say, disdained the Romantics. This would be all quite depressing, especially to the restless dead; or the under-read, unappreciated poet of the present; were it not partially compensated-for by the ever rejuvenating presence of the sun which copiously “smears” the mansion, and the whole landscape, with the same spirit that originally informed the poet. (This triumphal compensation is the surprise that the poet has been setting-up all along).

So did Stevens foresee the destruction of civilization?
Certainly he saw the radio, and the telephone, and the movies that they
made, and these things, in their own ways, destroy or erode literary culture-
I think he foresaw that.
—

There will be more Stevens this week. And, Xu Zhimo.

[blackmamba]

Wallace Stevens

Listen (to Hoon read)

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

Hoon adds,

The poem is from Steven’s TRANSPORT TO SUMMER (1947). He was 67
when it published.

For me it is remarkable how similar in mood this poem and music are. One thinks of Steven’s affection for the tropics and his love of the guitar, which he himself played. I don’t know if he played classical or not; or listened to Segovia who championed Ponce’s work and made recordings as early as 1927, but it’s nice to imagine that he had. The poem is in iambic pentameter, and though formatted as couplets makes more sense as verses of 4,5, 3, and 4 lines respectively. …The truth in a calm world,/ In which there is no other meaning, itself/ Is calm,
In this line it seems that Stevens, who was an atheist, is trying to demonstrate to the mind that requires a belief in a God-head, that the universe viewed from a non-believing point-of-view, is not necessarily chaotic; or at least has its own moments of meditation and quietude, that are as perhaps profound as those discovered by the believer. As in The Place of the Solitaire, and The Snow Man, the state of the mind is wonderfully reflected in the way the external world itself is presented to it. (Yes the guitarist is non-other than hoon).

(The music is of the Mexican composer Manuel M. Ponce (1882 – 1948), his Prelude No. 6 for guitar of 1930.)

—

[blackmamba]

Wallace Stevens

Listen (to hoon read)

Let the place of the solitaires
Be a place of perpetual undulation.

In the place of the solitaires,
Which is to be a place of perpetual undulation.

Hoon adds,

A Speculative Analysis

The poet goes to the seashore
and sees there a man playing solitaire with a deck of cards
on the beach, and is struck by the similarity between the man’s game,
its ceaseless yet always varying repetition, and the action, motion, of
the sea itself. More though, the analogy is between the spirit behind
the game and the sea, that spirit being the mind.
And so he writes a poem about the nature of the human mind. It is a
series of mock edicts or decrees declaring that the mind is meant to be
as restless, even repetitious, as the sea, and that we are most
conscious of this mental restlessness when we are alone.
And so we are left to wonder: Is this entertainment? to the mind?
for it to see itself reflected in the vast mindless and unending
plungings of the sea?
Well, is it?

(The washing machine is, of course, yet another restless metaphor.)

[blackmamba]

Wallace Stevens

Listen (to Hoon read)

Not less because in purple I descended
The western day through what you called
The loneliest air, not less was I myself.

I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.

Hoon adds,

“One short poem for a man,
One giant leap for mankind.”

is close to how I feel about this poem-
which, in the English language and its tradition and canon,
so greatly expands what a poem is and can be about.

Like stepping onto the moon?
better, perhaps, a nearby, undiscovered country;
a land that can be however strange as we can conceive it;
and the poet/reader, a solipsistic astronaut, moon-walker, sea-shore wanderer.

Solipsism is the theory that the self is the only thing that can be
known and verified, that the self is the only reality. The term is
often associated with Stevens.

Eliot had his wasteland, a broken decayed ruin of imagined past glories,
and Coleridge his Xanadu, and its haunted longings of the repressed self.
But Stevens sought, like the graphic abstractionists,
to put together whatever seemed to belong together,
knowing that that sense of belonging together grew out of the poet’s mind
and therefore makes sense.

The model for Hoon with his anointed beard and his solipsism,
may well be Walt Whitman. For consider these lines from Song of Myself:

Divine I am inside and out;
and make holy whatever I touch or am touched from;
The scent of these armpits is aroma finer than prayer
This head is more than churches or bibles or creeds.
…
I dote upon myself. There is that lot of me,
and all so luscious,
Each moment and whatever happens thrills me with joy.

— from: Song of Myself (first published: 1855).
—–
(musical accompaniment courtesy of the Redford Gamelan Band)

[blackmamba]

Richard Wilbur

Listen (to Hoon read)

Mind in its purest play is like some bat
That beats about in caverns all alone,
Contriving by a kind of senseless wit
Not to conclude against a wall of stone.

And has this simile a like perfection?
The mind is like a bat. Precisely. Save
That in the very happiest of intellection
A graceful error may correct the cave.

Hoon writes,

If you’re a teacher, or someone looking for a poem to recommend to some young ‘un, or class, just learning to recite, this is certainly a good one to consider. Humorous, with its made-up word, intellection, it is self-referential, demonstrating in its own intellectual word play, the very moral it wants to convey, the joy of recreational thought. Its mocking, lecturing tone, gives the young reciter a firm idea of a pose to aim-for.

(Bat sounds courtesy of myBelfry.com.)

[blackmamba]

Cesar Vallejo

Listen (to Cesar Ferreira read (in Spanish) and Eshelman read (in English))

Hay golpes en la vida, tan fuertes … ¡Yo no sé!
Golpes como del odio de Dios; como si ante ellos,
la resaca de todo lo sufrido
se empozara en el alma… Yo no sé!

Hay golpes en la vida, tan fuertes… Yo no sé!

In English, as translated by Clayton Eshelman.

The Black Heralds

There are blows in life, so powerful . . . I don’t know!
Blows as from the hatred of God; as if, facing them,
the undertow of everything suffered
welled up in the soul . . . I don’t know!

There are blows in life, so powerful . . . I don’t know!

Equivocal says,

Thought I would share this, certainly one of the most amazing poems
(and poetry recordings) I’ve heard in a while, by the great Peruvian
poet, Cesar Vallejo.

Not much that I can or ought to say in “analysis” of this piece,
except to say that it seems to rely especially on intonation (and
performance, I guess), such as in the famous first and last lines,
which come with such a force that the listener / reader has no choice
to accept them as something that the writer has actually lived. Raw.
Perhaps intonation can allow for a poem to be avant-garde, even
obscure and opaque, and shockingly immediate at the same time. It
helps to hear it out loud, of course. There’s only one other person I
can think of immediately who could pull something like this off, and
that is the singular Eugenio Montale, albeit in a different, intimate
way.

The poem is from Vallejo’s first book, and is from the Collected Poems
(2006) translated by the amazing Clayton Eshelman, whose translations
of Aime Cesaire haunted my teenage years, and who was the editor of
Sulfur, considered by some to be one of the best journals of
international literature ever. I like the way he reads his
translations, too. The whole of Eshelman’s Vallejo reading can be
found on the Penn Sound site ( http://www.writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/
), which is fast turning into the numero uno site for online recorded
poetry. (You’ll find that they have the COMPLETE recordings of
William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound, and that really is pretty hard
to beat.) Oh, and Efrain Kristal in APR has some very interesting
things say about this poem and about Vallejo and Eshelman at:
http://www.aprweb.org/issues/may05/vallejo.html

—
Do read Equivocal’s post on Performing Poetry.

[blackmamba]

T.S. Eliot

Listen (to Hoon read)

Stand on the highest pavement of the stair—
Lean on a garden urn—
Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair—
Clasp your flowers to you with a pained surprise—
Fling them to the ground and turn
With a fugitive resentment in your eyes:
But weave, weave the sunlight in your hair.

She turned away, but with the autumn weather
Compelled my imagination many days,
Many days and many hours:
Her hair over her arms and her arms full of flowers.
And I wonder how they should have been together!
I should have lost a gesture and a pose.
Sometimes these cogitations still amaze
The troubled midnight and the noon’s repose.

Hoon’s commentary,

“the girl who weeps”

A remembered love-
& the way the mind uses memories,
reworks, arranges things,
into a pattern that is more to its liking.
Hence the directorial tone that begins the poem,
the string of verbs in the imperative voice.

The poem is surely inspired by Emily Hale whom
Eliot fell in love with while at Harvard,
who shared a love for the theatre,
and would remain semi-attached to Eliot for the rest of her life,
and would become a recurring figure, in a veiled sense,
through several of his early works.

The lines:
“So he would have left / As the soul leaves the body torn and bruised, /
As the mind deserts the body it has used.”
reflects Eliots’s innate asceticism, his revulsion at sexuality,
and the misogyny that these feelings, perhaps inevitably, engender.
We witness here an artificer deriving a cruel pleasure
from a rearrangement of the memories of the incident.

Finally the auxilliary “woulds” are succeeded by a firm verb in the past tense:
“She turned away…” Are we finally getting at the truth?

Stepping back, as it were, he notes, both amusedly and pathetically:
“I should have lost a gesture and a pose”,
as though the arranged memories and his smug air of superiority
could be more fulfilling than an authentic loving relation.

Finally,”Sometimes these cogitations still amaze / the troubled midnight and
the noon’s repose.”
both the “sometimes” and the supercilious “cogitations”
create a distance and containment of the unfulfilled longing the speaker feels,
while, in the end, hinting at other imaginative practices.
——————-
see: Lyndall Gordon’s T. S. Eliot: an imperfect life London, Vintage 1998 pp. 75-85.

[blackmamba]

Sylvia Plath

Watch (Seph Rodney read)

I am a miner. The light burns blue.
Waxy stalactites
Drip and thicken, tears

You are the one
Solid the spaces lean on, envious.
You are the baby in the barn.

Seph’s response to the poem is among the most eloquent and heartfelt among all the readings I found on this site. An excerpt from his commentary,

“It was a date situation, I wanted to go out with this girl, and I just ended up feeling very bad at the end of it. It didn’t work out the way I wanted it to. I just ended up feeling kind of lonely and bereft, I suppose. I came home and I opened this book, and I read some of the poems, and up until that point I think my sense of poetry was that it was always this grandiose … highfalutin, not very real way of using language. I looked at this stuff and I could not believe it … It was powerful, it was rough, it was bitter, it was caustic, it was at the same time really urgent about a need for love. I was amazed that here’s a woman who was from a very well-heeled New England existence, and the stuff that she wrote really spoke to me, a man, a Jamaican immigrant. You could hardly get two people in the world more distant in terms of social, economic, intellectual, and religious realities. But she spoke to me. She spoke to me, she spoke, it seems, directly to my life. And because of that I have always loved her work … I love this poem because it is crazy, because it is headlong, it is brutal, and it does not proceed rationally … And the last line is like this gift from the gods.”

From Robert Pinsky’s Favorite Poem Project. This was among the first sites suggested to me (thanks Ludwig), when I first started this blog.