Hero Not Me

To seem heroic not the
much of anything I
feel old Tyson take a
swing I cream big
guy by luck oh how
souls non-perceive
what-all this here be

strange pose the nouveau
adulators fiercely skewing
machinations false in
sweetest idiom these
kiss-folk look for some
illuminating attribute
such glances
stay with me.

A Plaint to Man

When you slowly emerged from the den of Time,
And gained percipience as you grew,
And fleshed you fair out of shapeless slime,

Wherefore, O Man, did there come to you
The unhappy need of creating me -
A form like your own - for paying to?

My virtue, power, utility,
Within my maker must all abide,
Since none in myself can ever be,

One thin as a phasm on a lantern-slide
Shown forth in the dark upon some dim sheet,
And by none but its showman vivified.

‘Such a forced device,’ you may say, ‘is meet
For easing a loaded heart at whiles:
Man needs to conceive of a mercy-seat

Somewhere above the gloomy aisles
Of this wailful world, or he could not bear
The irk no local hope beguiles.’

- But since I was framed in your first despair
The doing without me has had no play
In the minds of men when shadows scare;

And now that I dwindle day by day
Beneath the deicide eyes of seers
In a light that will not let me stay,

And to-morrow the whole of me disappears,
The truth should be told, and the fact be faced
That had best been faced in earlier years:

The fact of life with dependence placed
On the human heart’s resource alone,
In brotherhood bonded close and graced

With loving-kindness fully blown,
And visioned help unsought, unknown.

***

The Verve is coming out with a new album in August. Awesome!

At C. Dale Young’s blog, “Avoiding the Muse,” an ongoing dialogue in the comments section contains both supportive and non-supportive commentary regarding Logan’s criticism. One of the comments contains this:

Perhaps Loan [sic] should take some of his double and triple adjectives and use them to prop up his banal work. Those who can, do. Those who can’t, criticize.

This comment indicates a misunderstanding, I think, of the nature of poetry, art, and criticism. This comment seems to be of the ilk that only people who can write poetry should comment on poetry…or if the critic’s poetry is bad then necessarily their criticism is bad. If so, then all of us who are not Picasso, Matisse, etc., should refrain from commenting at all upon painting because, well, we are not good painters. The vast majority of us cannot do what “geniuses” do in their field (poetry, fiction, sculpture, knitting, cooking, etc.)–we may be competent, even gifted, but we are not masters to be recognized beyond our time. However, all of us are able to interpret these within our context and evaluate. Just because we cannot do something does not mean we cannot judge it. I am guessing that many critics criticizing Logan’s criticism are mediocre or inept critics themselves. By their own logic, they should refrain from criticizing. Naturally enough, they don’t. Nor should anyone else refrain from evaluating art that they do not necessarily have a talent for.

***

Interestingly, a similar criticism of illogic has appeared in recent politics. John McCain stated that Barack Obama should not issue plans for ending the war in Iraq because he as not “been on the ground to get the facts.” Senator McCain’s argument implictly states that all those who have not been to Iraq but wish the American deployment to end right away are agruing without merit because they have not been to Iraq. A ridiculous suggestion. To take Senator McCain’s agrument to an extreme and twist it on him, one could suggest that if one needs to know the facts on the ground before undertaking a major action, then President Bush should have visited Iraq first and seen the facts on the ground before invading.

This is really the first article in a series. The other two deal with the “author” question (July 3rd article, July 4th article). The author question regarding Shakespeare has always amused and baffled me. (For those who might not know, there are some who suggest that William Shakespeare from Stratford-on-Avon could not be the actual writer of the plays). I am baffled and amused, in the end, because who actually wrote the plays does not matter. We have the plays, we have the poems, and they are invaluable contributions to not only English culture but human culture.

In another way, however, the author question angers me. Why? Most critics who wish to posit some other person than the man from Stratford as the writer ultimately suggest that that man could not have known enough about the court and a thousand other things to have actually written the plays. This angers me because it limits the imagination; it states that the human imagination is incapable of writing realistically (perhaps the better term is convincingly) about something for which it lacks first-hand knowledge. This is, frankly, ridiculous.

First, if the man of Stratford was not in a position to know enough about the court to write convincingly of it, then how could alternative writers know enough about the areas for which they are necessarily unfamiliar with themselves. The variety of experience and knowledge within Shakespeare’s play is beyond any one person to have had first-hand knowledge of. Of the proposed alternate authors, none of them, I believe, are known for murdering someone…which happens in several of the plays. None of them are actually monarchs…of which a few characters in Shakespeare’s plays are.

Second, I do not think that Agatha Christie actually murdered anyone. Yet, she wrote mysteries (and is one of the most translated English authors [Shakespeare is in that list as well]). Isaac Asimov never actually traveled to any other planets (another one of the most translated English authors). Yet, he wrote of other planets. Nor do I believe any robot with AI exist. Yet, he wrote of them. The point is that our imagination is not bound to our first-hand experience (and thankfully so), and this is what is disturbing about the authorship arguments.

Finally, I think that not enough consideration is given to the collaborative nature of drama and specifically playwriting (I do not want to presume to imply much knowledge here, my knowledge of Elizabethan theater practices is limited and nowhere near the similar level of expertise by those who would some one else other than William Shakespeare as the author). We know that Shakespeare assisted in the writing of Henry VIII, but he did not write the entire play. This seems likely for many plays, just that the other plays have better “integration” of a single voice. Actors, directors, etc., would have contributed to lines, scene cuts, and textual manipulations that would have been incorporated into the performing versions of the plays and which would, ultimately, have eventually come down to us in the versions of the plays we generally accept these days. My point is that these minor collaborators could have contributed knowledge unknown to Shakespeare, enriching the plays beyond measure.
It’s not necessarily the questioning who actually wrote the plays that upsets me (such inquiries are always valid, no matter how far fetched); it’s that the most common argument is that the man from Stratford could not have possibly written them because he lacked first-hand experience of much of what is written about in the plays. I prefer to suggest that no such straightjacket exists. I think the evidence, on the artistic side, supports that.

There is a boundary to men’s passions when they act from feelings; but none when they are under the influence of imagination.

– Edmund Burke

I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world

– Albert Einstein

I believe that there is, in the principle that informs the poetic art, a something which cannot be disengaged from the mythus, deposits, matiere, ethos, whole res of which the poet is himself a product.

My guess is that we cannot answer the question, “What is poetry?” (meaning, What is the nature of poetry?) without some involvement in this mythus, deposits, etc.
…
The poet is born into a given historic situation and it follows that his problems - i.e., his problems as a poet - will be what might be called “situational problems.”

I am sure there will be more as I work my way through the Preface.

In particular, I love Naxos’s recording sung by Karina Gauvin. The text is based on James Agee’s essay (though some call it a prose poem). The full Agee essay is well worth reading, but below is the text of Barber’s song. The music captures beautifully Agee’s nostalgia for a time past, when things seemed simpler, purer, and thus more worthwhile. It captures a very specific time of day and laments the passing of this (”and who shall ever tell the sorrow”). And Gauvin’s voice annunciates clearly the words while maintaining the emotional longing behind each phrase. Wonderful music.

It has become the time of evening when people sit on their porches,
rocking gently and talking gently and watching the street
and the standing up into their sphere of possession of the trees,
of birds’ hung havens, hangers.
People go by; things go by.
A horse, drawing a buggy, breaking his hollow iron music on the asphalt;
a loud auto; a quiet auto;
people in pairs, not in a hurry,
scuffling, switching their weight of aestival body, talking casually,
the taste hovering over them of vanilla, strawberry, pasteboard and starched milk,
the image upon them of lovers and horsemen, squared with clowns in hueless amber.

A streetcar raising its iron moan:
stopping, belling and starting; stertorous; rousing and raising again its iron increasing moan
and swimming its gold windows and straw seats on past and past and past,
the bleak spark crackling and cursing above it like a small malignant spirit set to dog its tracks;
the iron whine rises on rising speed;
still risen, faints; halts; the faint stinging bell;
rises again, still fainter, fainter, lifting, lifts, faints forgone: forgotten.
Now is the night one blue dew.

Now is the night one blue dew,
my father has drained,
now he has coiled the hose.
Low on the length of lawns,
a frailing of fire who breathes …
Parents on porches: rock and rock.
From damp strings morning glories hang their ancient faces.
The dry and exalted noise of the locusts from all the air at once enchants my eardrums.

On the rough wet grass of the backyard my father and mother have spread quilts.
We all lie there, my mother, my father, my uncle, my aunt, and I too am lying there …
They are not talking much, and the talk is quiet,
of nothing in particular, of nothing at all in particular, of nothing at all.
The stars are wide and alive, they seem each like a smile of great sweetness, and they seem very near.

All my people are larger bodies than mine, …
with voices gentle and meaningless like the voice of sleeping birds.
One is an artist, he is living at home.
One is a musician, she is living at home.
One is my mother who is good to me.
One is my father who is good to me.
By some chance, here they are, all on this earth;
and who shall ever tell the sorrow of being on this earth,
lying, on quilts, on the grass, in a summer evening, among the sounds of the night.
May God bless my people, my uncle, my aunt, my mother, my good father,
oh, remember them kindly in their time of trouble;
and in the hour of their taking away.

After a little I am taken in and put to be.
Sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto her:
and those receive me, who quietly treat me,
as one familiar and well-beloved in that home:
but will not, no ,will not, not now, not ever;
but will not ever tell me who I am.

Blackberry-picking

Late August, given heavy rain and sun
For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.
At first, just one, a glossy purple clot
Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.
You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet
Like thickened wine: summer’s blood was in it
Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for
Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger
Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots
Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.
Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills
We trekked and picked until the cans were full
Until the tinkling bottom had been covered
With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned
Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered
With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard’s.

We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.
But when the bath was filled we found a fur,
A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.
The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush
The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.
I always felt like crying. It wasn’t fair
That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.
Each year I hoped they’d keep, knew they would not.

Early Heaney (essentially, for me, his writing in the 70s and early 80s), I find the most enjoyable, the most refreshing. This poem captures the easy nostalgia (without crude sentimentality), rhyming, strong everyday images I find so compelling in his work. As with all Heaney, the simple story stands for much more than the story itself. We can enjoy it simply enough about youths excited with the blackberry-picking season only to see the majority of the fruit rot, uneaten. More generally, I think you can read this poem with the understanding that the fruits of life exceed our ability to enjoy; we let much go to waste. The reference to Bluebeard is a haunting image (and thoroughly apt imagewise, typical of Heaney in his prime). Anyways, I’ll leave a fuller interpretation to the reader.