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Quote

From Eamon Duffy’s Marking the Hours: English People and Their Prayers, 1240-1570, which I have not yet read (this quote is from The Atlantic’s review):

Anything that brings us closer to the intimate feelings of people who lived centuries ago tempts us to abolish the distance that stands between us and a lost world. The trap of modernity is to assume that nothing is ever new, that men expressing themselves in private speak the same language across centuries.

I found this quote striking in its resonance regarding my own writing. For those who know my writing, I often use first person dramatic narrative or I write from the third person but cast it in that era. I do so because I find I am freer to speak in a voice I can make up, that is not my own (though it inevitably is). Also, I find history instructive, in that I tend to see the lessons of the past (whether ancient or not) as helpful to those of us living today (by “helpful” I mean illuminating the human condition of our time, which is and is not very different from our relatives).

The danger is that we can assume too much about what others thought. William Logan in a essay from his The Undiscovered Country comments at one point that we really cannot spot the instance when the modern notion of romantic love came to be – only that we know the Greeks would view our conception as exceedingly odd.

That said, I am writing poems, so mimicking the ancients in thought is not really my purpose. Instead, I use their history, their circumstance, our modern psychology and circumstance to frame a statement about life.

Duffy’s last sentence begins very interestingly: “The trap of modernity is to assume that nothing is ever new.” How often that phrase, “Nothing new under the sun”? Or “It’s been said before, there is nothing that has not already been said or thought”? But really? No. Duffy’s sentence captures a truth.

The Delight of A.E. Housman

I recently revisited some of A.E. Housman’s poetry. I have always enjoyed Housman’s verse. First, he was an expert formalist and an inspired formalist. He doesn’t necessarily create new forms or do unexpected things with meter and form, but he delivers a reserved, almost conversational verse. How he creates such a language in the strictness of form is a marvel to witness. Here is an untitled poem:

The night is freezing fast,
  To-morrow comes December;
    And winterfalls of old
Are with me from the past;
  And chiefly I remember
    How Dick would hate the cold.

Fall, winter, fall; for he,
  Prompt hand and headpiece clever,
    Has woven a winter robe,
And made of earth and sea
  His overcoat for ever,
    And wears the turning globe.

This poem demonstrates a bit of what I said above and well as illustrates the wonder I find in Housman’s verse. The language here is simple and plain. Not a word over three syllables (tomorrow, December, and remember, and all three in the first stanza). Iambic rhythm is strong and persistent (particularly in “How Dick would hate the cold”). The phrasing is readily understandable, and there are no fireworks going on.

This is all great form, but what keeps me coming back to Housman are the themes he considers. Of all the poems Housman wrote, most come down to one of two themes: A nostalgia for the loss of youth or a melancholy at the necessary end of life. This poem has a bit of both. Primarily, it is a lament for the end of life (”And made of earth and sea/His overcoat for ever,/And wears the turning globe”). Yet, there is a bit of the nostalgia of youth here: “And winterfalls of old/Are with me from the past.” Most amazingly, the insertion of a specific person: Dick. We know nothing about Dick other than he hated the cold. A small detail. Almost a forgettable detail. Yet, I think it is the charm of this masterpiece. A sly, personal detail (for which we do not need the actual biographical knowledge of who Dick is and how he relates to Housman) that centers both the nostalgia and the melancholy to a human level.

If you haven’t read Housman, do so. He may not have the pyrotechnics (and I am not averse to those, my love of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Dylan Thomas, and Hart Crane indicates otherwise), and he lacks the modernist obscurity and difficulty, but that is why Housman may remain more popular than Eliot and the other high modernists, because he relates more frequently and easily with everyone.

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Two rejection letters in two days. Ugh. Not that I didn’t expect to get such letters, just not necessarily right after the other. Ah well, turn around and resubmit.

12-Tone Music?

“Anthony Tommasini, classical music critic of The New York Times, gives a tutorial on 12-tone music.” Check it out. This 7:48 piece of video is a great introduction to understand the differences between tonality and atonality. At least for me, a lover of music but completely at a loss musically, this was illuminating. Of course, I’ve pestered at times my wife with lots of questions about music theory (she was a trumpet player with her high school band). She has demonstrated much patience.
Thanks to Alex Ross’s blog for the link.

Doris Lessing

How about this for a response on being told you have just received the Nobel Prize in Literature?

She did later say, “I swear I’m going upstairs to find some suitable sentences, which I will be using from now on.”

Autumn Is Here

Today really felt like autumn for the first time…a coolness to the air that had the hint of permanence. It is Indiana, so I will not count on it, but it felt right, finally. This evening the sky was overcast grey. Grey skies are typically associated with negative connotations, so I do not want that here. The clouds, low, mottled lighter and darker, were strikingly defined and appeared to be moving rapidly. It was an autumn sky.

I wrote this poem over some time, and I’m not certain it is very good, but I thought of it today.

Another Poem Written to Autumn

A season never submitted to silence.
Yet how many poems penned by the great
And lesser who viewed it as their estate?
Autumn surveyed as a special province:
The borders long, whose citizens cause no fuss.
With the maple’s early turning we see
An alphabet form a season’s decree.
Our question: How do we spell the end of us?

So many poems, and my pen shall add
Nothing. Still my pen moves, traces the border
Of a season, outlines the letters curled
In dying leaves. Of these words, I shall be glad,
For we can know no better place or wonder
Or desire than this season of our world.

Glyn Maxwell’s “The Sea Comes in Like Nothing but the Sea”

I recently completed Glyn Maxwell’s collection The Nerve. This is the opening poem:

The Sea Comes in Like Nothing but the Sea

The sea comes in like nothing but the sea,
but still a mind, knowing how seldom words

augment, reorders them before the breaker
and plays them as it comes. All that should sound

is water reaching into the rough space
the mind has cleared. The clearing of that mind

is nothing to the sea. The means whereby
the goats were chosen nothing to the god,

who asked only a breathing life of us,
to prove we were still there when it was doubted.

I have read this poem several times now (William Logan has suggested that Maxwell is a poet who requires multiple readings to sense his subtleties). I think this is the strongest poem in the collection, possessing a reservedness mostly unnatural to a majority of American poets (Maxwell is English). The first line of the poem is striking in its statement. Using iambic pentameter, Maxwell tells us something that we already knew, for it is true, “The sea comes in like nothing but the sea.” An interesting play on “nothing.” It holds two senses here: the “nothing” for which we have no word to describe it, and that the sea is whole in and of itself. Here there is no, “Oh, this is Miami beach” or “Oh yeah, the Jersey shore!” The sea is the sea. Maxwell says it so much better.

The next several lines move as methodically and wonderfully as that first, and then I head “The means whereby/the goats were chosen nothing to the god.” I asked, what the heck does this mean. How did we get goats here? I did a bit of research and could only come up with this reference to Leviticus 16:10:

But the goat, on which the lot fell to be the scapegoat, shall be present alive before the LORD, to make an atonement with him, and to let him go for a scapegoat into the wilderness.

This seems to me to fit into the next stanza’s line “who only asked a breathing life of us.” The poem suggests that the beauty of the sea (which is really what “The sea comes in like nothing but the sea” at least partially states) as created by “god” (Maxwell leaves this intentionally lowercase, I think, to allow for a wide, wide definition of god) can only be attested to by us: “to prove we were still there when it was doubted.” God needs us as much to prove it as it is required to create the sound of the sea.

At least, that’s where I am so far (i.e., my thoughts are most definitely going to alter).

The poem, in the end, has a lovely language (that iambic pentameter is so great in English) that edges toward a specific setting but wisely refrains from it. This is a poem of the sea, of its creator, of its observer.

From Death in Venice

I have been reading Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. For those who do not know, the story focuses around Gustav von Aschenbach, a novelist, who decides to vacation in Venice. He comments, at one point, about how his readers did not understand how much work it took for him to write his masterpiece. This is the phrase:

…had been gradually built up into greatness, layer by layer, through small daily installments as well as hundreds upon hundreds of individual spurts of inspiration…The writer had endured years of stressful absorption in one and the same work, devoting only his strongest and worthiest hours to its actual composition.

This is in, some regards, how my poems come about. I won’t pretend to greatness and the “years” is mostly not realistic for poems (though there have been the occasional ones that I have had for a few years, but I did not work on them constantly for that time). Still, the build up of a poem by layers, by individual spurts of inspiration is very true. I work a poem over and over. Sometimes nothing changes from draft to draft. To me, it is often a practice of thinking about the poem that a draft of a poem accomplishes; it can provide a spurt. Of course, changes do happen and they can be drastic, but each poem seems like a construction of small pieces, whose coordination and balance has been part of the process of writing.