Back to the basics!

So I had my one-on-one with Jim earlier this afternoon! 

And so I wanted to post something from among the several gadzillion poems that came up during the conversation:
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Sonnet 129

By William Shakespeare

The expense of spirit in a waste of shame

Is lust in action: and till action, lust

Is perjur'd, murderous, bloody, full of blame,

Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;

Enjoy’d no sooner but despised straight;

Past reason hunted; and no sooner had,

Past reason hated, as a swallow’d bait,

On purpose laid to make the taker mad:

Mad in pursuit and in possession so;

Had, having, and in quest, to have extreme;

A bliss in proof,—and prov’d, a very woe;

Before, a joy propos’d; behind a dream.

All this the world well knows; yet none knows well

To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

James Tate

Our class had already discussed some of James Tate's work on the first day.  In today's class, Jim talked about this masterpiece of a prose poem:
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Goodtime Jesus

By James Tate

Jesus got up one day a little later than usual.  He had been dreaming so deep there was nothing left in his head.  What was it?  A nightmare, dead bodies walking all around him, eyes rolled back, skin falling off. But he wasn’t afraid of that.  It was a beautiful day.  How ’bout some coffee?  Don’t mind if I do.  Take a little ride on my donkey, I love that donkey.  Hell, I love everybody.

Contemporary poetry

During the informal Java House workshop this afternoon, it struck me that I read much too little of contemporary poetry.  So today I'm posting a piece by Hannah Gamble, who published her first book just last year.  Here are three more poems by her, including a companion poem to the one I'm posting.
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Leisure, Hannah, Does Not Agree with You

–After Catullus

By Hannah Gamble

Leisure, Hannah, does not agree with you.

Mouth stuffed with garlic cloves

testicular in shape and pungency, you asked yourself permission
for a chicken’s breast, a loaf of bread slicked with butter,

a cake with cherry glazes that would delight

any little girl with gaps in her teeth clapping “Cake!

Oh, cake! It is so worth a soiled dress!”

It’s as if, Hannah, leisure entered through your pores
and made you poor in spirit: “I have no work to push me,
I have no love to hold me, I have no hope to lift me. Only cleaning—”
which is not truly leisure, Hannah!
But you can fold these shirts like they do in the boutiques, sweetness.
Take a little pride in the smallish things—how shiny, your blue teakettle!
Tree branches slam against the windows, but your house
is a fortress; and you are too, Hannah.

Sarah Kirsch

What I learnt during the weekend:  Sarah Kirsch died at the beginning of the month (on May 5)

Here's one of her poems:
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Die Nacht streckt ihre Finger aus  

von Sarah Kirsch

Die Nacht streckt ihre Finger aus

Sie findet mich in meinem Haus

Sie setzt sich unter meinen Tisch

Sie kriecht wird groß sie windet sich

Und der Rauch schwimmt durch den Raum

Wächst zu einem schönen Baum

Den ich leicht zerstören kann –

Ich rauche einen neuen, dann

Zähl ich alle meinen lieben

Freunde an den Fingern ab

Es sind zu viele Finger, die ich hab

Zu wenig Freunde sind geblieben

Streckt die Nacht die Finger aus

Findet sie mich in meinem Haus

Rauch schwimmt durch den leeren Raum

Wächst zu einem Baum

Der war vollbelaubt mit Worten

Worten, die alsbald verdorrten

Schiffchen schwimmen durch die Zweige

Die ich heut nicht mehr besteige

Epithalamion

I don't know what (and---if at all---how much) access to technology I'll have during the weekends here, so I'm planning to blog only on working days.

This being a long weekend, that means I'll only blog again on Tuesday, May 28 (after today's blog).

And my friends Alysha Warner and Michael Robison are getting married tomorrow ... in Wyoming.  That's where I'd have been tomorrow, had I not been accepted to Iowa this summer.  So I'm posting today a poem that James Wright wrote for a wedding:
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A Moral Poem Freely Accepted from Sappho
     for the marriage of Frances Seltzer and Philip Mendlow

By James Wright

I would like to sleep with deer.
Then she emerges.
I sleep with both.
This poem is a deer with a dream in it.
I have stepped across the rock.
The three wings coiling out of that black stone in my breast
Jut up slashing the other two
Sides of the sky.
Let the dead rise.
Let us two die
Down with the two deer.
I believe that love among us
And those two animals
Has its place in the
Brilliance of the sun that is
More gold than gold,
And in virtue.

In almost nothing flat

Today in class, we looked at Yeats, and Wallace Stevens, and James Wright again.  We revisited the poem I posted yesterday, as well as another poem by James Wright (in addition to "Sailing to Byzantium" by Yeats and "The Man on the Dump" by Wallace Stevens).

Here's another one of James Wright's poems we had discussed on the first day.  In the interview I posted yesterday, Wright says this was one of "a few" poems that he "was able to get ... finished in almost nothing flat":
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A Blessing

By James Wright

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,

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.

We step over the barbed wire into the pasture

Where they have been grazing all day, alone.

They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness  

That we have come.

They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.

There is no loneliness like theirs.  

At home once more,

They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.  

I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,

For she has walked over to me  

And nuzzled my left hand.  

She is black and white,

Her mane falls wild on her forehead,

And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear

That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist.

Suddenly I realize

That if I stepped out of my body I would break

Into blossom.

The poet's voice

Here's James Wright in the Paris Review's "Art of ..." series.  I mean, I haven't read the interview yet, but I'm planning to read it tonight, and I'm posting the link now so that I don't have to look for it then (when I might be a little drunk)  :)  

And here's the poem we heard read aloud by Wright himself (in a recording) in class yesterday.  Jim pointed out the master stroke of "Therefore," as a line by itself:
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Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio

By James Wright

In the Shreve High football stadium,

I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,

And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,  

And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,  

Dreaming of heroes.

All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home,  

Their women cluck like starved pullets,  

Dying for love.

Therefore,

Their sons grow suicidally beautiful

At the beginning of October,

And gallop terribly against each other’s bodies.

Day of wonders

1.  I got to class on time, in spite of how late I had to drive last night!

2.  Jim's become even more picky---there are 15 spots every summer, but he took only 12 of us in 2011, then 11 in 2012, and now 10 this year---(in view of which) I'm really glad I got accepted for the third year in a row!

3.  Jim remembered me!

And not even half of the day is over, but I wanted to blog already, just in case I get too wasted to write later :)

The poems he read us while introducing the class this time were by James Wright, Charles Wright, and James Tate (in that order).  I think I might spend the rest of this week posting the James Wright pieces he mentioned today ...  here's the one we discussed in detail:

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Northern Pike

By James Wright

All right.  Try this,

Then.  Every body

I know and care for, 

And every body

Else is going 

To die in a loneliness

I can't imagine and a pain

I don't know.  We had

To go on living.  We 

Untangled the net, we slit

The body of this fish

Open from the hinge of the tail

To a place beneath the chin

I wish I could sing of.

I would just as soon we let

The living go on living.

An old poet whom we believe in

Said the same thing, and so

We paused among the dark cattails and prayed

For the muskrats,

For the ripples below their tails,

For the little movements that we knew the crawdads were making under water,

For the right-hand wrist of my cousin who is a policeman.

We prayed for the game warden's blindness.

We prayed for the road home.

We ate the fish.

There must be something very beautiful in my body,

I am so happy.

Iowa!

I finally arrived in Iowa City!  :)  Lessons from the road:

1.  Avoid driving through thunderstorms, if possible (but it won't always be up to you);
2.  Avoid driving through Chicago---it's worse than driving through a thunderstorm!

Class starts in less than seven and a half hours, so I won't write any more today, but more tomorrow  :)

Back to the sixties

A 1962 poem---i.e. from the same period as the Dream Songs---and also exactly as many lines as a Dream Song, but still very different from a Dream Song:
_________________
Traveling Through the Dark

By William Stafford

Traveling through the dark I found a deer
dead on the edge of the Wilson River road.
It is usually best to roll them into the canyon:
that road is narrow; to swerve might make more dead.

By glow of the tail-light I stumbled back of the car
and stood by the heap, a doe, a recent killing;
she had stiffened already, almost cold.
I dragged her off; she was large in the belly.

My fingers touching her side brought me the reason---
her side was warm; her fawn lay there waiting,
alive, still, never to be born.
Beside that mountain road I hesitated.

The car aimed ahead its lowered parking lights;
under the hood purred the steady engine.
I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red;
around our group I could hear the wilderness listen.

I thought hard for us all---my own swerving---,
then pushed her over the edge into the river.

Gatsby and the Grecian Urn

My daughter and I watched Baz Luhrmann's Gatsby today.  Maybe it is a good movie ...  I found myself constantly comparing it with the book, though, and there it fell short of expectations.  Far short.

But then again, maybe I'm just being generally hypercritical today, because I even found something I didn't like in Keats ... in this poem, I thought the high point was the end of the second stanza, and I didn't like how long the poem continued after its high point:
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Ode on a Grecian Urn

By John Keats

Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness!

 Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time,

Sylvan historian, who canst thus express

 A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:

What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape

 Of deities or mortals, or of both,

  In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?

 What men or gods are these? what maidens loath?

What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?

  What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

 Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;

Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,

 Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:

Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave

 Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;

  Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,

Though winning near the goal—yet, do not grieve;

  She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,

 Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed

 Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;

And, happy melodist, unwearied,

 Forever piping songs forever new;

More happy love! more happy, happy love!

 Forever warm and still to be enjoy’d,

  Forever panting and forever young;

All breathing human passion far above,

 That leaves a heart high sorrowful and cloy’d,

  A burning forehead and a parching tongue.

Who are these coming to the sacrifice?

 To what green altar, O mysterious priest,

Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,

 And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?

What little town by river or sea-shore,

 Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,

  Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn?

And, little town, thy streets for evermore

 Will silent be; and not a soul to tell

 Why thou art desolate, can e’er return.

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede

 Of marble men and maidens overwrought,

With forest branches and the trodden weed;

 Thou, silent form! dost tease us out of thought

As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!

 When old age shall this generation waste,

  Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe

 Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,"—that is all

  Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

Keats

For the last weekend before driving to Iowa (I can't stop boasting about it!), I'm reading Keats ... specifically, I'm reading the odes of 1819.  Keats works on developing a new stanza form in these, and I'm obviously interested in form  :)  but I do also enjoy everything else, such as his mastery of metaphor (a.k.a. magic) in this one:
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Ode on Melancholy

By John Keats

No, no! go not to Lethe, neither twist

 Wolf's-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;

Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss'd

 By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine;

Make not your rosary of yew-berries,

 Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be

  Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl

A partner in your sorrow's mysteries;

 For shade to shade will come too drowsily,

  And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.

But when the melancholy fit shall fall

 Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,

That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,

 And hides the green hill in an April shroud;

Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose.

 Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,

  Or on the wealth of globed peonies;

Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,

 Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,

  And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.

She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die;

 And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips

Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,

 Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:

Ay, in the very temple of Delight

 Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine,

  Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue

 Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine;

His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,

  And be among her cloudy trophies hung.

The last of the dream songs

Here's the last piece I wanted to post from the Dream Songs.  The British spelling in the fifth and the seventh lines are Berryman's (and not typos on my part):
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Dream Song 368

By John Berryman

At a gallop through his gates came monsters, buoyant
& credible & wild---his people fled
anguisht before them.
Soon the great city was all monsters, high-bred
& parti-coloured, comfy, digging in
like a really bad dream.

New rules were promulgated at the City Centre.
Those with more eyes, cast ruthlessly aside,
lurked to the suburbs.
The airport was closed down.  Animals were untied.
Thought of his kind ground & lurched to a halt,
all nouns became verbs.

Was all this the result of a failure of love,
he hailed a passing stranger, a young girl
with several legs.
He heard her shout, remote, 'You is a swirl
of ending dust, Your Majesty ...'  Since when,
he's hunkered down & begs.

#350

Another piece from Book VII:
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Dream Song 350

By John Berryman

All the girls, with their vivacious littles,
visited him in dream: he was interested in their tops & bottoms
& even in their middles,
for years Henry had been getting away with murder,
the Sheriff mused.  There'll have to be an order
specifically to stop climbing trees,

& other people's wives: we'll cut off his telephone,
stroke one, and hasten his senility,
stroke two: encourage his virtues, if he has one:
ask him upstairs more frequently for tea,
stroke four, put him on the wagon, Death,
no drinks: that ought to cure him.

The progress of age helped him, to be not good but better:
he restricted his passes to passes made by letters
he drank less.
Mlle Choinais noted a definite though small improvement in Henry:
as they passed forth across the northern sea,
a degree of gentleness.

The last Book

In Book VII of the Dream Songs, Henry (protagonist) sails to Ireland and stays there for the rest of the Book.  I decided to post three pieces from this (because the poem's ended); here's the first one:
_________________________________
Dream Song 316

By John Berryman

Blow upon blow, his fire-breath hurt me sore,
I upped my broad sword & it hurt him more,
without his talons at a loss
& dragons are stupid:  I wheeled around to the back of him
my charger swift and then I trimmed him
tail-less.

Offering dragons quarter is no good,
they re-grow all their parts & come on again,
they have to be killed.
I set my lance & took him as I would,
in the fiery head, he crumpled like a man,
and one prophecy was fulfilled:

that thrice for Lady Valerie I would suffer
but not be wax from like a base-born duffer,
no no, Sir Henry would win.
until a day that was not prophesied,
having restored her lands.  My love & pride
fixed me like a safety-pin.

The long book

Book VI:  133 dream songs.  Book VII (tomorrow) has 107.

This one opened with several dream songs addressing the death of Delmore Schwartz, then continued with death in general, as well as with other deaths (Randall Jarrell, R.P. Blackmur, Delmore Schwartz, Theodore Roethke, Sylvia Plath, Yvor Winters ... Hemingway).

And also with several other poems.

I'm posting this one:
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Dream Song 226

By John Berryman

Phantastic thunder shook the welkin, high.
The animals sat face to face & glared.
Henry was afraid.
Her love, which was not exactly that of a maid,
failed to assuage his terrible fears, who fared
forth in such a world.

Arose from throats anguish.  Disappeared in air
many, and many on the ground, and many at sea.
It was not a place to love.
Thumbs into eyes, enormous explosions of
what we know not, until sobriety becomes a vice.
'Our breakdowns guarantee us," said a pal.

I saw her in a dream, from my dream she woke,
pleasantness & courtesy & love
and all them stuff.
She had long hair as if long hair enough
to smother horrors.  What with her in the smoke
he did he will not say.

Book V

Starting with this one, the books are longer:  Book V has 54 poems.  Including ones touching upon the death of Randall Jarrell.

Here's one poem from this book:
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Dream Song 120

By John Berryman

Foes I sniff, when I have less to shout
or murmur.  Pals alone enormous sounds
downward & up bring real.
Loss, deaths, terror.  Over & out,
beloved: thanks for cabbage on my wounds:
I'll feed you how I feel:---

of avocado moist with lemon, yea
formaldehyde & rotting sardines O
in our appointed time
I would I could a touch more fully say
my consentless mind.  The senses are below,
which in this air sublime

do I repudiate.  But foes I sniff!
My nose in all directions!  I be so brave
I creep into an Arctic cave
for the rectal temperature of the biggest bear,
hibernating---in my left hand sugar.
I totter to the lip of the cliff.

About Book IV

Book IV has a specific premise:  The speaker (of the whole book) is dead (perhaps he has recently died).  The poems are all titled, and they are titled as a series--- as "Op. posth. no. 1" through "Op. posth. no. 14."  Instead of posting one poem, I decided to post the first lines of the fourteen poems---in order---
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The First Lines of the Poems in Book IV of John Berryman’s Dream Songs

Darkened his eye, his wild smile disappeared,

Whence flew the litter whereon he was laid?

It’s buried at a distance, on my insistence, buried.

He loom’ so cagey he say ‘Leema beans’

Maskt as honours, insult like behaving

I recall a boil, whereupon as I had to sit,

Plop, plop.  The lobster toppled in the pot,

Flak.  An uneventful thought came to me,

The conclusion is growing …  I feel sure, my lord,

these hearings endlessly, friends, word is had

In slack times I visit the violent dead

In a blue series towards his sleepy eyes

In the night-reaches dreamed he of better graces,

Noises from the underground made gibber some

The third book:

The first three books were originally published together as "77 Dream Songs" in 1964.  I read Book III today, and here is one of its poems:
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Dream Song 57

By John Berryman

In a state of chortle sin—once he reflected,

swilling tomato juice—live I, and did

more than my thirstier years.

To Hell then will it maul me? for good talk,

and gripe of retail loss?  I dare say not.

I don’t thínk there’s that place

save sullen here, wherefrom she flies tonight

retrieving her whole body, which I need.

I recall a ’coon treed,

flashlights, & barks, and I was in that tree,

and something can (has) been said for sobriety

but very little.

The guns.  Ah, darling, it was late for me,

midnight, at seven.  How in famished youth

could I foresee Henry’s sweet seed

unspent across so flying barren ground,

where would my loves dislimn whose dogs abound?

I fell out of that tree.

A dream song from Book II

I read Book II today.  Several of the dream songs allude to Robert Frost and his death (Frost died on 29.1.1963, this was first published as a book in 1964), one alludes to Paul Celan's famous 1948 poem "Todesfuge" ...  Here's a different one:
_____________________________________________

Dream Song 33

By John Berryman

An apple arc'd toward Kleitos; whose great King
wroth & of wine did study where his sword,
sneaked away, might be ...
with swollen lids staggered up and clung
dim to the cloth of gold.  An un-Greek word
blister, to him his guard

and the trumpeter would not sound, fisted.  Ha,
they hustle Clitus out; by another door,
loaded, crowds he back in
who now must, chopped, fall to the spear-ax ah
grabbed from an extra by the boy-god, sore
for weapons.  For the sin:

little it is gross Henry has to say.
The King heaved.  Pluckt out, the ax-end would
he jab in his sole throat.
As if an end.  A baby, the guard may
squire him to his apartments.  Weeping & blood
wound round his one friend.

Back+packing for Iowa City, Ia.

So I'm done with grading now, the semester is officially over  :)  No more getting up while the sun's still in the east (that always makes me feel I'm a bird that's about to eat a worm---yuck), no more falling asleep while it's still dark (that always makes me wonder what cool stuff will happen in the night that I'll miss on account of being asleep---all that ever happens during the day is boring old work).  

And it's 12 days until I leave for Iowa  :)  I want to prepare well for it this year, so I borrowed John Berryman's "Dream Songs" from the library, and I'm hoping to read it before I leave.  It's subdivided into seven books, so I'm planning to read one book a day (but the later books are longer ... we'll see).  I already read Book I today!

And as long as I'm reading, I'll post one of the dream songs each day on the blog.  Here's one I loved:
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Dream Song 4

By John Berryman

Filling her compact & delicious body

with chicken páprika, she glanced at me

twice.

Fainting with interest, I hungered back

and only the fact of her husband & four other people

kept me from springing on her

or falling at her little feet and crying

‘You are the hottest one for years of night

Henry’s dazed eyes

have enjoyed, Brilliance.’  I advanced upon

(despairing) my spumoni.—Sir Bones:  is stuffed,

de world, wif feeding girls.

—Black hair, complexion Latin, jewelled eyes

downcast …  The slob beside her       feasts …  What wonders is

she sitting on, over there?

The restaurant buzzes.  She might as well be on Mars.

Where did it all go wrong?  There ought to be a law against Henry.

—Mr. Bones:  there is.

Blogfree days

So my own kids started taking their finals today, and I even got a haircut yesterday to bring them good luck  :)  I'll skip the blog for the next few days (while I grade, etc.).  But not longer than a week---I'll write again on or before Wednesday next week ...