..Piero della Francesca, Nativity (1475) (you can click on it to see the birds better)
…..
……………………..POST HOC, ERGO PROPTER HOC
………………………..“Two magpies,” she wrote him
………………………………….on shore again in February.
………………………..He propped them up above
………………………………….the herb jars in the galley
………………………..all that winter while she
………………………………….traveled overland in Africa—
………………………..others hung there too, almost
………………………………….a dozen as the days lengthened
………………………..and the bright green shoots
………………………………….shone like spring in porthole pots.
………………………..He lay more naked in his letters then
………………………………….but the light-sick moths powdered
……………………….his thighs, made his eyes
………………………………….dapple and water as if he missed her.
………………………..Then she wrote again about
………………………………….small birds that migrate pole to pole
………………………..and told him he really ought
………………………………….to have more Arctic dreams.
………………………..It was then he began to notice
…………………………………the way the sheets twisted oh so
………………………..tight like water-wings about him.
………………………………….He wrote her twice to Porto Ferraio
………………………..but the letters came back
………………………………….to an empty berth and bits
………………………..of white silk on the bulwarks
………………………………….as if he’d undressed or cracked
………………………..in the terrible rush of the hatch—
………………………………….the brightness of a sheltered reach
………………………..perhaps, the ease with which
………………………………….mayflies rise on the silvery stream.
…………………………………………………..~
I was encouraged to find this list of popular references to my Latin title, which I feel sure will cause difficulties sooner or later — and now I know there are even children out there who can stand up for me. So I’m not so hard after all.
The second episode of The West Wing, titled “Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc”, makes use of the phrase.
In the first episode of the third season of The Big Bang Theory, “The Electric Can Opener Fluctuation”, Sheldon Cooper states to his mother that she is committing this logical fallacy.
In the Dinosaur Comics comic titled Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc, T-Rex points out this logical fallacy committed by Utahraptor.
Tim Minchin explains this phrasing in his 2010 comedy special “Ready For This.”
The thirteenth episode from the sixth and final season of “Crossing Jordan” uses “Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc” as the title of the episode.
In ‘Fortune,’ a season 10 episode of Smallville, Dr. Emil Hamilton, while being tortured by Amos Fortune for information, quotes the phrase and then explains its meaning.
…….
But will these viewers ask themselves “post hoc, ergo propter hoc?” when they re-evaluate their own lives as this poem re-evaluates my own? And will they suspect it’s in fact a love poem, or will they just know it’s a nativity at sea or at least somewhere on or near the surface of water?
And what about the magpies in both? One is all very well, like in the painting, but the “dozen” in the poem? Will they worry about that, because it’s my fondest hope they will?
…………………………………………………..~
This is a very small poem in a very small style, indeed as bare and simple as a Piero della Francesca painting, and as dependent on faith. That means your faith, the faith you have in yourself, the viewer, not in Jesus or Mary or anything like that but just in how much faith you are able to bring to whatever you see without rhyme or reason, like that tiny little bird on the left, or the big one on the stable roof for that matter, which is unmistakably a magpie. How still can you rest as you view two birds like that, for example, how long can you hold your gaze without blinking, without starting all over again to define what you see in relation to who you are, where you stand, what you expect, and what you know about me? Can you do that? Can you rest in uncertainties when you don’t even know who a poem is by or what it’s getting at? Can you trust yourself, in other words, and not just rush in to either explain it away, or appropriately file it ditto?
Like the poem of Gennadiy Aygi I quoted a few weeks ago and nobody seems to have noticed? Or Pierre Puvis de Chavannes?
Can you be as quiet and uncritical as that? Even if, as in my case, I’m the poet and I’m not Russian or French?
Or what if a friend sent you this poem because he or she wanted you to have it. Would you hold back the joy or the sorrow?
Christopher Woodman
………THE COMMENTS THAT FOLLOW DEVELOP THE THREAD
Cowpattyhammer 
Christopher Woodman said,
April 8, 2014 at 12:13 pm
…………………………………Click on it to see better who’s at the door.
I guess he’s my favorite painter, along with Piero della Francesca. Because of course this painting is where I live too, and of course I can’t do any better on colors or details in my poems than he can in his paintings, though in my case it’s also a result of my lack of talent and judgment whereas in his it’s all genius. But Gauguin is like me in other ways too — he’s not to be fully trusted either because he can’t make up his mind what’s true and what’s false. Indeed, it’s all in the retelling, isn’t it, even what he sees right in front of his own eyes and feels with his hands, like this woman? I mean, can you trust any of it? Or what he sees behind her in the doorway? Or maybe he doesn’t but she does, like living under the shadow of God?
……………………………………………..~
It’s at this point I get into so much trouble with my friends, Bill and Dawn, because I know either they’re blind or I’m crazy — which is why I fight so hard with both of them, of course, and refuse to lie down and be quiet as they tell me I should. They think I don’t lie down because I don’t listen whereas in actual fact it’s because I listen so well I know this is life and death for me as I’m almost out of time.
For example, “Leda Takes Another Lover,” a poem we fought over in “Make It New,” is either the beautiful little poem I think it is, or the terrible mess with foolish images and bad grammar of Dawn’s and Bill’s assessment. And that’s a very big one for me indeed, because if it really is such a mess then my own powers of creativity, discrimination, and understanding are seriously marred, and I should simply “go to bed.” That’s what my friend Jimmy taught me to say to threatening dogs when I was out running around his house in upstate New York, and they did. Now I bicycle everyday in the rice instead and when I’m chased by dogs they don’t understand my language. Also they don’t have any beds to lie down in or even go inside a house for that matter, minor detail. So now I do what my Thai friends have taught me to do instead, which is just to stop pedaling. That really puts the fear of God in the dogs as they are only brave when they’re sure I’m running away. Stopping pedaling means to the dogs I’m taking a stand, and even though I’m still coasting along at quite a clip, they stop running behind me and very soon I’m far, far away. Works every time, and I guess that’s what I’m doing now here. Just coasting — and of course, hoping.
Another problem is that I love my friends, Bill and Dawn, and I can’t bear it when they bark at me as if I were a stranger or at least somebody who shouldn’t be there. On the other hand, I’m aware enough to challenge myself, and of course I consider the possibility that I’m the dog that’s doing the chasing and not the other way around. But if I am that dog I’ve wasted my life wrestling with poetry, and I don’t mean just with my own poetry either as I’ve only written it as opposed to loving it for 24 years. I’ve been a poetry nut for 42 years on top of those 24, from the age of 8, to be exact, and as a result, boy do I know what this next painting is about. On the other hand, you wouldn’t catch me dead trying to explain it in words. Indeed, that’s why I write poetry instead of words, and the difference is that gulf between the barking dog and the bicyclist.
Christopher
Christopher Woodman said,
April 9, 2014 at 12:32 pm
I’d rather not tell you the name of the art historian who came up with this idea — I will in due course, I promise, but I think it’s much more interesting to look at it first all on your own, as I did for many hours before I read about it. In fact, there’s quite a substantial article that goes with it, and one of the most interesting questions it raises is why the underlying geometry had never been noticed before? Considering Piero della Francesca’s well-known interest in mathematics, and the way so many of his most celebrated paintings are constructed around geometry, how is it possible that no-one had noticed this very odd structure before? Are all those weird lines really there, or is it just the imagination of the art historian?
So what do you think?
With regard to my own work, I find that if I’m patient enough, and humble, my poems help me to find their particular, sometimes even perverse structures all on their own, indeed, they show me things I could never have imagined, what is more planned. For example, in the poem “Leda Takes Another Lover” that I mentioned in my last comment, the central portion got written and rewritten and rewritten for years, and I thought it would never be done — a veritable Proteus, it writhed it’s way through this and that and this preposterous shape, yet I never gave up, either asserted myself or surrendered. I always had the confidence it was there somewhere, and I stayed faithful. Had I grown impatient at some point, had I asserted my literary-critical or rhetorical authority, for example, and made it lie down nicely like a good writer does a good sentence in the corner, it might never have transformed itself into what it became, and its extraordinary delivery might never have happened.
Which is like the awkward tilt of the roof in Piero della Francesca’s ‘Nativity,’ the slight dislocation, the secular imperfection almost, that triggers everything off in the space like a kaleidoscope shifts. Piero had apparently never angled anything quite like that before, and it’s a very late painting, so something very special was happening, and still is. Indeed, breaking rules is for many artists the step just before new discovery.
And then there’s the magpie on that oddly twisted roof? I’d love to say, “One for sorrow,” of course I would (and secretly I do), but we have no way of knowing if our “one for sorrow, two for joy” rhyme was a superstition current in Piero’s time or not, though a magpie was something for sure as they always have been — their coloration, their flight, their habits, the arrogance of their chatter, how elegant they are yet always so rude, so elusive yet everywhere in your face. Whatever the bird is in the painting, you can’t deny the apex of the angle created by its tail and its legs, like navigational calipers plotting a fix. and even though you might not see the parallelogram the lines eventually delineate, you certainly sense it’s there.
And the little bird? Try a line from the little bird on the left to the upraised hand of the shepherd, and if you’re uncertain about that, the ox certainly isn’t as he knows exactly what he’s looking at, nor does the donkey have any doubt about when or at what to shout. (Most of you have never heard a donkey bray close by your ear, I feel sure, but in that little stable the delicate music of those angels would have been shattered!)
If you’re interested you can read my poem again here or, if you haven’t already done so, in the context , which is rough. But remember, if you don’t trust it this time either it still won’t speak to you.
Christopher
Christopher Woodman said,
April 10, 2014 at 11:55 am
AN OPEN LETTER TO DAWN POTTER
Dear Dawn,
I was very pleased to read about your almost success on your blog today, which of course is a total success in the context of your life.
Oddly enough, I think your having no advanced degree will actually be to your advantage in the end, and that you will eventually be hired, prized, and kept on for the rest of your life — precisely because you don’t have a graduate degree, precisely because as a writer that’s who you are, that true rarity in America, a working poet. Indeed, my feeling is that there are going to be more and more institutions who feel uncomfortable with the way they are both being used and using others in their MFA programs, and as a result more successful poets like yourself will be amateurs again, like Robert Frost was for so much of his life.
~
I was very interested in what you wrote me today as well, and couldn’t agree more:
Indeed, that fits in perfectly with what I wanted to say next on this thread, still under the wonky angle of Piero’s stable roof, and I hope you’ll forgive me for taking you up yet again on your reservations about my poem.
Because there’s a flaw in what you suggested about “Leda Takes Another Lover” which I didn’t see right away — your critical assessment of the grammar in my poem was based on an incomplete sentence.
This is what you posted on my blog:
The complete sentence goes like this:
By quoting the lines as you did you left out the subject of the construction, which certainly might lead a reader to feel that my grammar was muddled.
On top of that, the rhetorical thrust of the lines is very much weakened if the simile within a simile within a metaphor construction is left out. It’s one of the most important elements in the strange and exotic transformations that are taking place in the poem’s magical orchard.
The three pears are “like high-flying circus girls,” the poems says, and it’s they who “whisper what it might be like to swan” and then go on “[to] hang behind a fan all evening.” That’s the engine room of the poem. Whether you like it or not, it’s the pears that fly, whisper, and hang as if they were in a Marc Chagall painting, and the grammar as well as the figures of speech assist their metamorphosis into that gaggle of Degas-lit show-girls “taut and pliant in the orchard wings.” And I still find that delicious, I have to admit, both the pears and the girls.
And of course Leda hasn’t even taken her clothes off yet!
Christopher
wfkammann said,
April 10, 2014 at 11:01 pm
Really!
The word “they” refers to the arms raised to test him, no?
It is the arms that smell like three pears and “like three pears” is an adverbial phrase that describes “smell.” Diagram “they smell like three pears.” http://1aiway.com/nlp4net/services/enparser/
The word “pears” is not a subject and although there is no punctuation it feels like a stop after pears and a new “sentence” starting “the sun.”
In that case it would be “the sun” that whisper(s) what it might be like….
You might argue that it is “arms/they” that whisper, but pears?
I learned to diagram sentences in the eight grade; perhaps things have changed.
Christopher Woodman said,
April 11, 2014 at 9:28 am
Anything’s possible, Bill — metamorphosis is always a messy business, and at any particular stage in the process it can be just as difficult to predict the outcome as it is to determine exactly where it all came from — the chicken at the one extreme or the egg at the other, for example, and who would ever have imagined that mind-boggling stretch before God defined the parameters?
Speaking for myself, I only parse a construction in poetry if I’ve lost my way, and as I wanted to lose my way in writing this poem I didn’t parse it until Dawn suggested my grammar was a problem.
As I’ve mentioned, this passage didn’t settle down for a long time, and each time I came back to it I played around with it but always knew it wasn’t quite done, as if it were still in the oven. When I did finally know it was done it wasn’t because the grammar was neat but because the poem worked – at least for me, it worked, and I’ve tried it out on other people lots of times and it has worked for them too. Of course it’s just a small, ephemeral impression like a pastel, not a big, carefully layered oil, and if you want to you can just let your eye brush over it and enjoy it. Indeed, I was astonished when it came under such heavy critical attack.
Here’s the crux: Dawn assumed I intended the girls to be the subject of the three verbs. Because I lacked training in the craft of writing, Dawn suggested, I ended up with a subject/verb agreement problem. In reply to that I say “pears” is the subject, and that leaving out those two crucial lines as Dawn did was a critical oversight on her part.
In reply to your “diagram,” Bill, you could also parse it like this. The main clause is “they smell like three pears” followed by two relative clauses joined by the conjunction “and.” The focus of both clauses is “pears” — relative clause #1. says “pears”…”[that] the sun has been around” and relative clause #2 “pears…[that] whisper.” The second clause contains an additional relative clause as object beginning with the relative pronoun “what” — the three pears “whisper what it might be like” 1.) “to swan,” 2.) [to] “sip,” and “[to] hang.”
Sentence diagraming was in vogue when we were in school in the ’40s and ’50s, Bill, as was phonetic spelling, but as both had undesirable side effects, and caused as much pedagogical confusion as help, they have been largely abandoned. English is a wonderfully flexible language, more so than Latin, and should be allowed its freaky nuances like the ambiguous subject of “whisper,” one of the hinges upon which the gates of this poem swing to admit all sorts of celestations, if I might be allowed. But what is indisputable is that the phrase, “three pears,” is the subject of all the actions within the clauses, with the relative pronoun “that” [understood] working as a bridge between the pears and what they do or have done to them.
“Arms” is sidelined by the preposition “like,” so it’s not in the running. “They smell like pears” doesn’t mean the arms are pears but simply that they could be compared to pears in some aspects.
Of course nobody minds in a poem like this if her arms have some of the quality of pears, or even in real life, for that matter. “The armpits” and “the arches” at the end, on the other hand, are not compared with anything at all, and I hope for obvious reasons.
Which is where the poem goes, in fact, beyond figures of speech to her body — and that’s why it hurt me so much when even those last bare images were so roughly handled, as if nobody had ever loved like that before.
Christopher
Christopher Woodman said,
April 11, 2014 at 11:17 am
What’s so strange about using this little poem in such a critical dispute is that a.) it’s so light and inconsequential, and b.) it’s been the object of such intense revision for so many years and on so many levels. That’s what bugged me about the treatment it received on the last thread, and the suggestion that I’m just an amateur and should go back to school. Indeed, if anything I’m over-refined up to here, over educated in the trivium in particular, and as precious as I’m decidedly not precocious (I’m 74!).
So here’s how I started it.
I was madly in love with Natasha on the Seine, a 16 year old anarchiste who slept rough in her clothes if not naked on the empty barge beside which my boat was tied up along with a rough bunch of drifters, artists, musicians and mountebanks — a peasant girl with no language to speak of, just intensely white skin, black, black hair, musk, henna, kohl, huge biker boots, and of course that je ne sais quoi that drives poets mad.
I hardly knew her but fed her on board my boat almost every day and gave her money, as I did the others too. And yes, I wrote about her as if I were a 19th century French poet — and oh dear, I’m embarrassed to say just who I was reading. Because the very first version I wrote was in French — the first English version, which I’ve posted below as well, was my own quick translation for a friend, never intended to stand on its own as a poem. That’s why the French version is closer to a real poem than the English, which is pretty embarrassing considering how bad they both are. On the other hand, that was 22 years ago, and the poem has come a long way since then.
But I’m being much too honest.
LE VERGER…………………………………….—THE ORCHARD
Je ferme les yeux……………………………..—I close my eyes
parceque ça te rend curieuse.……………—because that makes you curious.
Tu me regardes dégoulinant— …………..—You watch me dampening—
je peux entendre tes épaules,…………….—I can hear your shoulders,
la silhouette de ton écoute.………………..—the outline of your listening.
Tu lèves tes bras pour me tester— ……..—You raise your arms to test me—
ils sentent comme trois poires ……………—they smell like three pears
le soleil était tout autour toute la journée—the sun has been around all day
et maintenant sont blanc avec le soir. ...—and now are white with evening.
Je suis la rosée de ton crepuscule. ………—I am the dew on your darkening.
Je me lève le long de tes bras comme des papillons de nuit.. —I rise up
……………………………………………………………..along your arms like moths.
Je suis or comme les hirondelles.…………..—I am gold like swallows.
Je m’écrie comme la lavande.………………..—I cry out like lavender.
Je te couvre de plumes brillament— ………—I feather you brilliantly—
tes aiselles, …………………………………………—your armpits,
tes voûtes. ………………………………………….—your arches.
Christopher
Christopher Woodman said,
April 12, 2014 at 8:21 pm
I promised you the name of the art historian who came up with the wonky geometry that lies behind Piero della Francesca’s ‘Nativity’ — his name is Jonathan Sansom and his fine article is called “Revealing Piero’s Sacred Geometry”.
I’d say that whether Piero actually worked with these geometric lines or Jonathan Samson just imagined them, we all know they’re there as soon as we see them, just as the three pears transformed into circus girls sipping champagne in my poem are there too whether we like them or not. They’re there because we imagine them there. The wonky roof of this particular stable was one of the first in the history of art to show the difference between what we human beings imagine as a stable roof in our minds and what our eyes tell us is actually there, and that’s watershed. “Leda Takes Another Lover” isn’t watershed by any means but it’s magic in the same way nevertheless, and obviously such magic makes us feel uncomfortable.
Magic is nothing but imagining something so vividly that it’s there, like God and the manger, Galileo and the sun, or Stephen Hawking and dark matter. In the past that was easy for people — today we feel such powers are not ‘real,’ and that’s our problem, not magic’s. We have arrived at the point where we can see what we call ‘virtual reality’ with our two, slightly dislocated eyes, but we still have a long way to go before we can catch up with what our ancestors were able to ‘see’ quite routinely on a much higher level, and just look what they achieved. And all we can do is just see, and most of the time there’s almost nothing there.
The irony is, of course, that the primitive mind is more intellectual than our own. Our method is more like the combustion engine, noisy, hot, dirty and unsustainable. If you don’t believe that, just look back and see what people in the past accomplished with their intellectual magic.
Christopher
……………
…………………….Oronsay, The Hebrides, Scotland (6th c. AD)
…………………….
Christopher Woodman said,
April 13, 2014 at 11:37 am
Christopher
wfkammann said,
April 14, 2014 at 8:42 am
Lovely,
would you comment on the insect images in your poems?
Christopher Woodman said,
April 15, 2014 at 6:06 pm
Thank you for that, Bill.
But I’m not sure why you ask me about the insect images in the poems, because I think they’re all pretty clear.
The most idiosyncratic image is perhaps the word “hatch” in “Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc”. Because, of course, the “hatch” of the insects at the end also refers to the “hatch” on the boat, so that whatever it is that happens takes place in two worlds. (Needless to say, I know you won’t ignore the title and jump to conclusions about that!)
I trust I did enough in the early parts of the poem to prepare readers for the first meaning — the poem is set on a boat with words like “galley,” “porthole,” “berth” and “bulwarks.” The hatching of the insects at the end, on the other hand, is suggested in the various chrysalis images that bridge the two worlds, the “sheets twisted oh so / tight like water-wings about him,” for example, “the bits of white silk on the bulwarks,” “undressed in the terrible rush of the hatch,” and of course, “cracked.”
In the last poem just above, “Afterwards We Returned to Paul’s Cottage on Oronsay,” I can only hope readers will know what it’s like to sit down in an old wicker chair on a very still, very uncomplicated porch, both what it sounds like and what it is like.
The creaking of the chair, the aging flowers that descend like birds, the way everything bows out in its own unique way silencing even the crickets.
More the hand-clap of a koan than the shot of a gun, more the beginning of life than the end of it.
Does that work for you?
Christopher
Christopher Woodman said,
April 16, 2014 at 1:17 pm
…
……………..St. Columba of Iona & St Magnus of Orkney in a Curragh.
Painting by the Scottish artist, Kate Leiper, for The St. Magnus Festival at Kirkwall in the Orkney Islands in 2009. [You can click on it to see this wonderful painting better.]
….
NOTES from the end of my book, LA-CROIX-MA_FILLE: Hexes, Ruins, Riddles & Relics, that used to be called Gold Leaf on the Waters!
“LA-CROIX-MA-FILLE” is an unpublished collection of 32 poems including two long ones, “Connemara Trousers” and “Les Fleurs de Sel.”
5 parts of “Connemara Trousers” were published in The Kenyon Review in 1992. Three additional parts, one of them 120 lines long, were added only very recently. You can see the whole thing HERE:
I add this note because the adaption of the ancient “bob & wheel” form I use in “Afterwards We Returned to Paul’s Cottage on Oronsay” and elsewhere is characteristic of my “Irish poems,” as they might be called — or “Scottish,” I don’t know. (The Scots who brought civization to Scotland by curragh in the 6th Century were Irish.)
“Les Fleurs de Sel” is in 12 parts. It’s imagery goes back to the years I spent on the sand flats and salt marshes of Guérande on the West Coast of Brittany, very much part of the same North Atlantic world. (As I’m still hoping to get “Les Fleurs de Sel” published, I don’t want to put any of it up yet — this is always a problem for me on this blog.)
All these wondrous places and stories have had a profound influence on my development as a person as well as a poet. Indeed, the older I get in my exile the more grateful I am that I’m sitting here still in my own wicker chair going nowhere.
…………
NOTES ON THE CURRAGH:
The man next to the mast is the captain — he has a drum to give commands which can be heard over the roar of the sea and the wind. At this moment the oars are deliberately locked in the water to slow the boat which is surfing perilously down a very large wave at a furious speed. The danger is what is called a “broach” — the boat goes so fast down a wave it turns sideways and flips over, which would have been fatal in an open boat like this.
The man at the bow holding on to the forestay is both feeling the tension in the mast and on look out — in such extreme weather it’s very hard to see as there is so much spray in the air, and the rocks in the Hebrides are everywhere. And of course they have no GPS or even a map to know where they are, and just a lodestone as a pointer if they’re lucky.
The strongest and bravest man of all is on the “steerboard” stuck out the back like a rudder, the real thing not yet having come to Scotland from China.
And this is precisely where I am now, as are you too, my friends. Indeed, we’re all in this small open curragh wrapped in animal skins, both the hull and our bodies together.
Christopher
Christopher Woodman said,
April 17, 2014 at 9:58 am
THE VENERABLE BEDE’S SPARROW
……………Lawson, St. Paul’s Church, Wearmouth-Jarrow, Yorkshire.
…..
…………………….“Hope” is the thing with feathers.
………………………..“Hope” is the thing with feathers –
………………………..That perches in the soul –
………………………..And sings the tune without the words –
………………………..And never stops – at all –
………………………..And sweetest – in the Gale – is heard –
………………………..And sore must be the storm –
………………………..That could abash the little Bird
………………………..That kept so many warm –
………………………..I’ve heard it in the chillest land –
………………………..And on the strangest Sea –
………………………..Yet – never – in Extremity,
………………………..It asked a crumb – of me.
………………………………………………………Emily Dickinson
……
from The Ecclesiastical History of the English People
“The present life of man, O king, seems to me, in comparison of that time which is unknown to us, like to the swift flight of a sparrow through the room wherein you sit at supper in winter, with your commanders and ministers, and a good fire in the midst, whilst the storms of rain and snow prevail abroad; the sparrow, I say, flying in at one door, and immediately out at another, whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry storm; but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, into the dark winter from which he had emerged. So this life of man appears for a short space, but of what went before, or what is to follow, we are utterly ignorant.”
…………………………………………………The Venerable Bede (731 AD)
wfkammann said,
April 18, 2014 at 9:45 am
In Human, All Too Human, philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche argued that
“Zeus did not want man to throw his life away, no matter how much the other evils might torment him, but rather to go on letting himself be tormented anew. To that end, he gives man hope. In truth, it is the most evil of evils because it prolongs man’s torment.”
Some say Zeus kept hope in the jar when the other evils were released; sparing humanity the greatest evil of all.
Christopher Woodman said,
April 18, 2014 at 11:46 am
Thanks for that, Bill — just what I needed.
What I like so much about Fenwick Lawson’s “Venerable Bede” sculpture just above is the way the quill looks like a dart in the upraised hand, or a paper plane perhaps, or maybe even a bird just taking flight. Indeed, The Venerrable Bede wrote not only the first history of Britain but invented the word “English” to describe his people long before anybody had ever thought of ethnic groups what is more nation states. He was also extremely perceptive in the way he developed images in his writing, his “sparrow” image, for example, still being the fundamental metaphor to stand for the world view of the northern people of his time. Indeed, nobody talks about the Dark Ages in Northern Europe without having recourse to The Venerable Bede’s little bird flying through the great Hall – the warmth, the music, the glow and the gold— but just for a few moments, then back to the blast. “Wyrd,” as it’s spelled in Beowulf — “destiny” (yes, and later on the Three Weird Sisters too).
I feel sure that Bede’s bird also lies behind Emily Dickinson’s “thing with feathers/that perches in the soul —/ and sings the tune without the words … /—in the Gale.” There’s no doubt in my mind about that, and I’d say the echo deepens The Venerable Bede as well, not just our Emily Dickinson.
~
It’s very important to remember that it was the Irish on their inaccessible islands in the North Atlantic who saved European civilization during the Dark Ages — the tiny, rock bound hermitage on the top of Skellig Michael, for example (almost impossible to land on even today, with no shelter whatsoever for a boat or even a well-equipt tourist ferry today, even in the fairest weather!), was one of the very few places in 10th Century Europe where you could still learn to read even if there were only a handful of books up there in the beehive huts, like an eyrie (and how the wind blows!).
St Columba sailed from Ireland to the Hebrides in the 6th Century, which means before the Viking raids became common. The stories and legends about why Columba left are as legion as they are contradictory, but almost certainly it was because of an uncontrollable temper as much as sanctity — they often go together. One story has it that Columba arrived first at the miniscule island of Oronsay in the Hebrides, but that when he climbed the only hill on the island he was still able to see Ireland on the horizon far to the south, and he couldn’t live with that, no sir. So he got back in his curragh and rowed even further up north to found the great (but tiny, tiny) monastery of Iona, and eventually on to the Orkneys, Lindisfarne, and into our hearts as much as our minds.
When Charlemagne went looking for an educated man to start his new school in Aachen in the late 8th Century he had to send all the way to Northumbria, of all places, to find the only truly educated man left in Europe, Alcuin of York, Bede’s disciple.
~
As to hope, Bill – that’s just what I meant in “Afterwards We Returned to Paul’s Cottage on Oronsay,” and I feel sure that’s what Emily Dickinson meant too.
One of the great questions has to be, why do religions so proscribe suicide, or at least the monothesisms do? The answer has to be that there is nowhere else that a human being can do what he is born to do but here — which is to learn how to love, share and forgive in a world that rewards the opposite, more ‘natural’ human responses much more readily…
It’s the quintessence of experience that’s the treasure, not just the experience in itself — and as any alchemist can tell you, it’s no fun in the fire.
Christopher
wfkammann said,
April 19, 2014 at 12:23 am
Taoist alchemy and esoteric Buddhist teachings both outline a path to immortality, a slowing of the aging process and an internal transformation into a oneness of which the body/mind/spirit is a micro-cosm.
You too seem to be interested in the elixir or essence of reality. How does this idea inform your poetry?
Christopher Woodman said,
April 19, 2014 at 9:00 am
Are you asking how this idea informs my poetry, Bill? You mean my poetry?
Because I don’t believe a word of Taoist alchemy or esoteric anything, for that matter, indeed I’m deeply skeptical of all self-serving, golden idols, but as far as informing my poetry is concerned, yes, of course it does, indeed every word of it — if it’s good, at least. Because all art is religion in the sense that art is what we human beings do to bind things together in such a way as to have a glimpse of what’s immortal — and the better the art the tighter the glue, so to speak, the more perfect and shiny the surface the closer we are to God — like that Ming cup that just sold for 30 million at Sothebys.
And that doesn’t mean we have to believe in God to have that glimpse either, which doesn’t make a shred of difference either way.
For art, like religion, distills the essence from things and gives us a glimpse of what it means to live forever. That’s why we put gold-leaf on our picture frames, have a Pantheon in Paris, a Bloomsday, and celebrate a ridiculous little confection like “Sailing to Byzantium.” I mean, imagine celebrating this?
………………Once out of nature I shall never take
………………My bodily form from any natural thing,
………………But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
………………Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
………………To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
………………Or set upon a golden bough to sing
………………To lords and ladies of Byzantium
………………Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
Did you read that? Did you see what it says? I mean, childish???
But of course this is what the writer says a bit earlier in the same poem about what a person can do about getting old, and even mechanical birds can’t be excluded from a cri de coeur as brilliant as this one:
………………An aged man is but a paltry thing,
………………A tattered coat upon a stick,
………………unless Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
………………For every tatter in its mortal dress,
………………Nor is there singing school but studying
………………Monuments of its own magnificence;
………………And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
………………To the holy city of Byzantium.
And here’s my equally foolish response – and please don’t tell me this is a poem of despair either, and especially if you know the holy city of Brooklyn and in particular the entrance to New York Harbor where it’s written. Just be brave as well as a better reader.
Next I’ll post a poem about the Resurrection as it’s almost Easter.
Christopher
wfkammann said,
April 19, 2014 at 10:31 am
Today in Patzcuaro we experienced 30 seconds of shake. (7.2 in Guerrero) The house moved; the chandeliers started spinning. Even the water in the underground cistern sloshed from side to side. That was Good Friday. Imagine what Easter will bring.
Christopher Woodman said,
April 19, 2014 at 8:10 pm
So glad you’re o.k, Bill and Ida. The earth is obviously in its fast thick pants breathing.
Hope this helps, hope you will read it out loud together and be safe:
Christopher
Christopher Woodman said,
April 21, 2014 at 10:51 am
…………
“Pietà,” sculpture in wood by Fenwick Lawson, Durham Cathedral (1981)
81 year old Fenwick Lawson has done most of his work in or around the ancient cathedral city of Durham in the North East of England, and is largely exhibited in local churches, holy sites and sacred museums. Although his imagery is steeped in Celtic Christianity, to my way of thinking his concerns are universal, and speak to all times, all concerns, and all peoples equally.
Here’s how his subject matter is described in the Introduction to his website:
I would say that if a viewer and/or reader is able to “look beyond the narrative” in art in general, all tales have the same underlying plot, and the deeper the tales the broader the net. Indeed, I would even go so far as to say that a poem like mine above as well as the little one that follows deliver the same message as Fenwick Lawson’s “Pietå,” — as do almost all such grievous love stories.
………
………………
I was very grateful to Bill Kammann for sending me the Fra Angelico painting that follows — he couldn’t have shown me in a better way that he knew what I was getting at. He also told me that he and Ida had read “Whatever My Good Would-Be Sisters Say” out loud to each other twice, and in both directions. They thought it might help to keep their minds off the huge earthquake that had just struck their house near Mexico City.
I was deeply grateful to them for that, and think it will work. At least it would have for me. (You can click on it to see it even better.)
……………..
Christopher
wfkammann said,
April 22, 2014 at 7:07 am
Christopher,
We loved the poem. It was perfect for Easter.
For me, the two hands in Fra Angelico’s painting are as expressive as Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam. I still remember the joy of seeing this for the first time at San Marco in Florence. Savonarola’s cell was anti-climactic.
Christopher Woodman said,
April 22, 2014 at 9:42 am
…
Christopher
Christopher Woodman said,
April 23, 2014 at 10:56 am
………
………“Squeezed in here you can get there too however little the horse.”
………………………………………………Maymyo, Burma
I have a good friend who’s a wonderful writer but gets angry at me if I suggest he may be writing about something more than what he thinks he is writing about. In a nutshell, my friend feels a narrative is just a narrative, and that a good writer’s responsibility is to write the narrative so well that it carries the reader along on a wave of well-wrought words — and that that’s what good writing is about. To suggest that there are other concerns beside narrative, and in poetry in particular, needless to say, is to assume that there are aspects of writing that a writer may not specifically ‘intend,’ God forbid, and my friend has no patience with that. In fact we get into the biggest trouble of all when I suggest that a poet can also write to find out things he or she doesn’t know, and that a message can go far beyond a poet’s intention, or even comprehension for that matter.
The kind of writing my friend champions is usually associated with the longer, narrative modes. Indeed, one of the reasons why the post-modern novel is so bulky is that writers like him tend to throw in everything including the kitchen sink, because it’s the craft and not the content that’s in charge, and the craft can do wonderful things even with sinks. Art that concerns itself more with the distillation of things, on the other hand, tends to be shorter, more austere, more ‘gnomic,’ like an Emily Dickinson poem, for example, or one of my own. On the other hand, though writing like Emily Dickinson’s tends to be simpler, shorter and plainer, it is often harder to talk about – in my experience there are more silences than there are words when the subject is Emily Dickinson, like the dashes that slow down her own little words scrawled on a slip of notepaper or the back of an envelope. Indeed, really to ‘get’ such writing requires painstaking self-examination, as if one were contemplating an icon on one’s knees for a glimpse of an entity one doesn’t yet know even exists. For that reason it may take a life time of patience to grasp the message of one tiny poem like “The Soul Selects Her Own Society,” for example — because, of course, we’re usually not ready for such a poem when we first meet it, or we may be so old we passed it 10 minutes ago later on, like Alice.
And here’s the wild one – my friend’s concerns are more ‘art for art’s sake’ than my own, I’d say. Because my friend looks at writing first and foremost as a demonstration of a writer’s skill — for him the writer is a craftsperson who molds a text with deliberate dexterity, informed taste, and control. My sort of writer, on the other hand, is equally concerned with art for understanding’s sake, and his or her work is going to encourage a reader to read also with the soul, for want of a better word. That’s why I would encourage students of poetry not to be too strict with words at first but to go for what they feel without imposing too much control. They should take big wooly chances by the handful while they can, I feel — and young writers often have the unselfconsciousness and bravura to do that better than adults who know so much about how to do it they can’t.
That’s why I would want my teacher to work with “meaning” in the classroom as well as craft. My friend, on the other hand, doesn’t want a poetry teacher even to mention the word ‘meaning,’ which makes him shudder. My friend feels that a teacher who discusses the meaning of a poem is imposing an academic, almost doctrinal sort of Interpretation on the student, whereas I feel the student who is not encouraged to seek meanings in the first place may remain unaware of the existence of such doors into another world altogether — and of course into his or her own inner life. And I’d say that’s a tragic omission in any education.
To be frank, I want students to know from the start that poetry is an adventure, and that real adventures are almost always hard at some point if not hard all the way. I’d want them to know that there always comes a time when you have to explore the outback in poetry, so to speak, or as Robert Frost put it in “Directive,” “back out of all this now too much for us.” I’d want students to know that that’s the place most great poems set out to discover, and that it’s rarely along a nicely trimmed path what is more through comfortable country, at least not all the way. Indeed, sometimes it becomes almost vertical.
Which is why a poetry classroom should be dangerous, shouldn’t it?
Christopher
………
P.S. I just decided to add this tiny little poem of mine at the end because for me it illustrates how much insight is generated by friction in a writer’s life, and as painful as that friction may be how positive it can be as well — as in my poem “He Mistakes Her Kingdom for a Horse,” which you probably know. (You can find it here if you want to reread it in this context.)
Good writing, like everything else, arises as much out of misunderstanding and turmoil as it does out of harmony and good will — the poem refers to the troubled relationship between Sonya and Leo Tolstoy as they lived and wrote War and Peace together at Yasnaya Polyana in the 1860s. [The description of the Battle of Borodino is one of the most terribly beautiful pieces of writing that has ever been penned, and it was their impossible relationship that made it possible. At least that’s what I feel.]
………
C.
Christopher Woodman said,
April 24, 2014 at 10:50 am
…………“True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,
………….as those move easiest who have learned to dance.”
True under certain circumstances only.
Notable exceptions are children, deer, lovers, aspen leaves at dusk, and some very young poets.
I wasn’t young or that lucky when I wrote the following, and I’d already been writing poetry for my own pleasure for many years. On the other hand, I did know what the poem was about at the time, and the reason I knew what it was about was that I wrote the poem to find out.
Indeed, what’s good about this poem is it’s ease in saying what is the hardest thing in the world for a human being to do, sometimes called flight, sometimes called magic. The boy in the painting by the contemporary Russian painter, Alexander Pogosyan, knows how to do it, obviously, but I bet this wonderful painter has never even tried to fly what is more to do magic with anything but a paint brush. Maybe that’s why he paints the wings so crude, and the feet so full of clay. Which I love (and I love the grammar in the way I say that there too).
And, of course, we all know that neither the poem nor the painting is about what they pretend to be about, but I wonder how many human beings would take either of them really seriously, like as important as fact?
And you know, I suspect an awful lot of people would, but I also suspect very few would ever have entertained the thought without art, or music, or falling in love. And even then they might need some poetry.
…………………………………“Over the Earth,” Alexander Pogosyan, (1963 – )
Christopher
Christopher Woodman said,
April 25, 2014 at 11:04 am
The following passage, among the most famous ever written about either writing or women, was part of a speech Virginia Woolf delivered at the National Society for Women’s Service on January 21, 1931, and eventually published posthumously in The Death of the Moth and Other Essays. But I don’t think it says what it is commonly thought to say, indeed I don’t think it’s even about sex. It’s about what we’re afraid of as artists, and I mean all of us , not just women. It’s about how we’re all afraid of what we don’t know, and that if others find out, well, we’ll be jerks.
Here’s the passage:
What I want to say, and to say specifically as a man, is that as a poet I am also a woman, and that I regularly experience precisely the same conundrum as the girl above. Indeed, I want to cut straight to this by showing you one of my favorite paintings of what it feels like to be me when I’m at my best not just in writing but in reading as well, or gardening, or even just dozing for that matter — and I want you to be sure to notice not just my beauty but the strength of my thighs, back and hair along with the way I knot my fingers in the grizzled mane of the beast even in such a perilous, sideways position, and how sweet he smells. And just in passing I’d like to say as well that I love this painting by Félix Vallotton, indeed the whole movement to which it belongs — the almost oriental stylization, the mystification, the depersonalization, and above all the lack of pretension that makes such an artist, male or female, into a magus, a sybil, an anchorite, or a castaway perhaps in some ship, croft, or attic — a figure almost like Conchis in John Fowles’ novel set on that Greek island, Spetses, remember? — a place where any of the artists I most love could have lived and painted easily as could any of their models. Look, you can see it right over there on the horizon!
..Félix Vallotton, “L’Enlèvement d’Europe” (1908) (you can click to see better)
That’s a start, and of course I’m still talking about what my friend said about “meaning,” that to teach it makes you into a sort of a man and your students into girls, and of course girls are intimidated if you tell them male answers, as if anybody knew what they were, or he would.
Any takers?
Christopher
wfkammann said,
May 3, 2014 at 9:25 am
Virginia Woolf says: This I believe to be a very common experience with women writers–they are impeded by the extreme conventionality of the other sex. For though men sensibly allow themselves great freedom in these respects, I doubt that they realize or can control the extreme severity with which they condemn such freedom in women.
You say: But I don’t think it says what it is commonly thought to say, indeed I don’t think it’s even about sex. It’s about what we’re afraid of as artists, and I mean all of us , not just women. It’s about how we’re all afraid of what we don’t know, and that if others find out, well, we’ll be jerks.
I say: It’s the poem which transcends the pigeon-hole. It doesn’t require a particular reader, which you seem to assume. It is not subject to an easy answer because even those who would nail the meaning down and move on will still be nervously looking over their shoulders sensing an inkling of a dangerous incompleteness in their pat answer. No, it’s the poem that has to do that and all the faith and suspended disbelief is for naught if it doesn’t.
Thank-you, Christopher, for your aesthetic and your faith.
Christopher Woodman said,
May 3, 2014 at 10:47 am
An interesting response, and I’d hoped somebody might rise to it.
It’s like the case of Donald Sterling of the NBA Clippers. The story is about racism, of course it is, but it’s also about something else just as pernicious but which still gets regularly under our radar.
So what’s the thought that we Americans are still unable to think when we’re sitting at our desks alone with this breaking news?
Is it sex?
Indeed, many feminists are saying the story is about sex, and how terrible it is that men still have such power over women in our society. But I ask you to be honest about where Donald Sterling’s power lies. Is it in his male good looks, his male clout, or maybe the male society he keeps, where he sits by the ringside at the big fights, or gets seated by the other big men at the Oscars?
None of the above, obviously, but still how slow we are to answer. Because money’s the answer, not sex, and that’s the thought we Americans still can’t think — curtailing anybody’s money is unthinkable in America today even when it’s distributed so unevenly and the imbalance is getting worse and worse and worse. Indeed, it’s the bane of our society, and I’d say that that’s partly because the thought of curtailing it is still largely unthinkable.
The fact is that not everybody who’s got money buys women anymore than they buy Fabergé eggs, boys, beagles or Ferraris. But they buy, for sure, and where there’s a market there are commodities, and the bigger the market the bigger and better the commodity (V. Stiviano is extremely beautiful, and she looks very smart too — I’d love to meet her!).
Think the Earl of Essex, or even Richard Burton.
Christopher
Christopher Woodman said,
April 26, 2014 at 9:14 am
Christopher
Christopher Woodman said,
April 27, 2014 at 9:19 am
WHEN I SWIM I THINK OF YOU
Jeanne Hébuterne by Amedeo Modigliani, Paris (1918)
Nearly ten years after her suicide, just 5 days after Modigliani’s death, and pregnant, the Hébuterne family finally allowed Jeanne’s remains to be transferred to the Père Lachaise Cemetery to rest beside his. Her epitaph reads: “Devoted companion to the extreme sacrifice,” and her grave is visited almost as much as Jim Morrison’s. Like this.
Christopher
Christopher Woodman said,
April 29, 2014 at 5:00 pm
SUZANNE VALADON
Suzanne Valadon (1882)
………………
Jean-Auguste Renoir, “Danse à Bougival”
(Suzanne Valadon et Jean Lhote) (1883)
………………
Toulouse-Lautrec painting Suzanne Valadon, Paris (1885)
………………
Edgar Degas, “Après le Bain 2” (Suzanne Valadon) (1896)
………………
Suzanne Valadon, “Après le Bain” (1908)
………………
Suzanne Valadon in her own studio, Paris (1920)
………………
Suzanne Valadon, “La Chambre Bleue,” (self portrait) (1923)
………………
Christopher Woodman said,
April 29, 2014 at 5:02 pm
……
……………………………………………………………….
Christopher
Christopher Woodman said,
April 29, 2014 at 5:05 pm
HE WRITES
Christopher
Christopher Woodman said,
May 1, 2014 at 11:17 am
…………
………….HEROES LIKE HEROINES
……………..
…………………………..Camille Claudel, aged 19 (1884)
……………..
…………………………..T.E.Lawrence, aged 22 (1910)
….
Christopher
(You can click here to read the rest of this poem — “Elegy for Heroes like Heroines” is the last of eight parts, and was published in the original Kenyon Review version. You can also see there the old photograph of young boys in a schoolhouse yard somewhere in Connemara about 1900, barefoot and in skirts. In addition there’s a brief note on the full poem, parts of which have only just been completed.)
…………
Christopher Woodman said,
May 2, 2014 at 11:09 am
……………
……
That’s about it, then, my friends.
I think this thread got to where I thought it might, though it certainly did take some turnings that surprised me including those two photos right at the end, the one of Rodin’s brilliant young colleague and the other of the 22 year old cadet who had already done such important archaeological work on the Crusades at Oxford before he came into his own as a saracen on the other side at 30 — and how he was hurt, just as much as she was. I just hope there were some chastening moments like that for you too, indeed that you found some conundrum of value to chase down and make part of your own lives as well.
I held my breath to see if anyone would still be hanging in there day by day, and I was very pleased to say that despite the silence, yes, there were visitors. Indeed, there were substantially more followers at the end than there where at the beginning, though goodness knows who you are.
So why didn’t you say?
………………………………………………~
The poems I have included in this thread from over the years are all in much the same style with just one or two exceptions — because I don’t write this fiercely all the time, especially as I’m not so brave at 74 as I was at 50 (I wrote “An Elegy for Heroes Like Heroines” at 50, and I hope you’ll agree that’s brave). These are also all poems that have either been published already, or that I know never will be published, at least not published separately from one of my books. And that’s not because the poems aren’t good enough but because, for one reason or another, they’re embarrassing. Indeed, most of the unpublished poems I include here have been seen by well-known editors over the years, and rejected many, many times — “They’re good,” they always tell me, “just not right for us” — short-hand for “we don’t know where to look.”
But my wife Homprang, who can’t read anything I write, still reassures me. “Don’t worry, Christopher — you’re time will come.” And I think she’s still right too — my time will come, I feel sure, and my ’embarrassing’ poems will be reassessed in the context of the whole body of my work, as well as my life. (You can see what I’m like in the photo above — and I’d say my poetry is still just like that though I was only 24 at the moment, already with 2 children.)
………………………………………………~
All the poems on this thread relate to what I call ‘faith’ in the Introduction, a topic which some readers of poetry today may find embarrassing as well.
Do you remember what I said at the very beginning about that, because I didn’t use the word ‘faith’ casually, nor did I mean ‘God’ or anything like that. Indeed, nobody is more convinced than I am that there’s no life after death, or that God isn’t dead. I also know that in death time dies, that the past and future no longer move away from each other, and that sorrow and joy are irrelevant.
The problem is that most modern readers turn off the moment I use religious imagery because they think I believe in it, whereas all I’ve done is assemble some images like flowers in a vase — some I create myself, of course, but many others I steal, modify, or just rub up with a nice soft cloth. Of course it’s the Christian images I arrange like this that cause readers the most trouble, including “soul,” a word which I love, because most readers are embarrassed to think anybody would write uncritical stuff like that today what is more expect modern readers to accept it. Ditto Buddhist imagery, which feels even more old-hat to most readers, indeed even to me (I almost never use Buddhist imagery even in my Buddhist poetry — a big topic in itself).
So with that all said, here’s my pitch ‘On Faith’ again. Do you remember?
Christopher
Christopher Woodman said,
May 4, 2014 at 10:19 am
In his last comment yesterday, Bill said:
I’d like to move my reply down to here because this is where I just reaffirmed my position, and indeed the issue is the key to this thread.
~
I’d say any poem requires a particular reader, Bill, and above all a challenging poem, one that has arisen out of a particularly intense moment of personal reflection.
At the same time there are many great poems based on popular tastes and assumptions, poems which require very little if any reflection. Indeed, poems like this often become part of our childhood memories, lending us as they do much needed protection against age and disappointment. I have my own security-blanket poems like this — I love Emily Dickinson’s little nursery-rhyme poem, “It’s all I have to bring today,” for example — you quoted it here , Bill, and I replied with Pádraic Colum’s, “The Drover,” one of the greatest folk-poems in English. Indeed, I even write such ‘simple’ poems on occasion, like “Where the Truth Lies,” for example ( click here and scroll down a bit to find it). “Where the Truth Lies” used to embarrass me but now it has transformed itself into a close friend. That’s because after many years I know I can trust it, that it’s always just itself, that like a rock I can lean on it. And that’s an important aspect of what I mean by ‘faith’ in the reading of poetry too, a quality which applies as much to great peasant poems as to those terribly difficult conundrums wrought by tormented artists on the limit.
Poems like “It’s all I have to bring today” and “Where the Truth Lies” are not the whole story, that’s the point, and particularly not today when poetry has become a new sort of Sacred Art. Billy Collins is one of the few genuinely ‘popular’ poets in our time, and that’s in part because he has chosen to stay comfortably at home, so to speak, to write as your neighbor. But even Billy Collins requires considerable reflection to read well — indeed, I’d say Billy Collins is a great poet in much the same way that Norman Rockwell is a great artist. (I remember when you turned up your nose at Norman Rockwell, Bill, dismissing him as a mere Saturday Evening Post illustrator, yet he’s surely one of our great painters, and if you can listen he will never stop talking to you, or should I say never stop looking, you at him, him at you — we argued that one out at some length here , both above and below.)
It’s a huge topic, but there’s no doubt that not all poetry is easily understood simply because to understand new things we need to develop new understanding as well as new equipment, just as the poet has to experiment with what he or she wants to say in order to express what has never been said before, like Piero della Francesca in that ‘Nativity,’ or so much of late Picasso. When “Lyrical Ballads” first came out it was “not liked at all by any,” don’t forget, yet it’s a piece of cake today — and I can remember when “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” was taught to me in highschool in the ’50s as “difficult,” whereas it’s now not only easy but friendly — and so beautiful! Indeed, I can’t think of any poem in which I have more faith.
Christopher
P.S. — mainly for you, Bill:
The irony is that I’m not a “difficult” poet in the sense that Ezra Pound is “difficult” in The Cantos, let’s say, or Rae Armantrout is “difficult” in her post-literate micrologues, that indeed what’s “difficult” about me is that I insist I’m comprehensible, and even make an effort to be clear. And that’s just plain embarrassing for modern readers and critics — indeed, the majority of readers and critics today are embarrassed for me as much as by me — and if not embarrassed then angry, indeed personally offended that I could assume so much. (You mean he means that? But that’s outrageous. Totally unacceptable, naive, stupid, an affront to everything that our craft has tried so hard to outgrow!)
C.
Christopher Woodman said,
May 4, 2014 at 8:31 pm
And what would such a poet sound like if you trusted him instead of dismissing him? What would he sound like if your life depended on deciphering his message, or if he were so famous and well-established you had no alternative but to pull yourself up by your own boot-straps to meet him half way, or else acknowledge that you were limited yourself?
Because there are many artists and poets who are like that, Anne Carson, for example, who never stops raising the bar? Yet we don’t dismiss her as foolish or inexpert when she does boxes, for example, because we have faith in her integrity, and know that if we hang in there she’ll deliver for sure, even if the work is a failure.
I think Louise Glück has won through to that too, not that everything she does is successful but because we have faith in her as a person as well as a poet, and we know that win or lose it’s going to be something we have to get our minds around.
Maybe even the grail like in “Directive,” embarrassing but there. Or even, dare I say it, Janet Malcolm — a mess we still want to grapple with. I mean, isn’t that another sort of trust aka faith?
C.
wfkammann said,
May 5, 2014 at 11:11 pm
Christopher,
You often accuse me of replying with Blake and Milton; well, here I go again. This time it’s Borges and I think he gets your point better than I ever will.
UNA ROSA Y MILTON
De las generaciones de las rosas
Que en el fondo del tiempo se han perdido
Quiero que una se salve del olvido,
Una sin marca o signo entre las cosas
Que fueron. El destino me depara
Este don de nombrar por vez primera
Esa flor silenciosa, la postrera
Rosa que Milton acercó a su cara,
Sin verla. Oh tú bermeja o amarilla
O blanca rosa de un jardín borrado,
Deja mágicamente tu pasado
Inmemorial y en este verso brilla,
Oro, sangre o marfil o tenebrosa
Como en sus manos, invisible rosa.
….
A ROSE AND MILTON
From the generations of roses
That are lost in the depths of time
I want one saved from oblivion,
One spotless rose, of all things
That ever were. Fate permits me
The gift of choosing for once
That silent flower, the last rose
That Milton held before him,
Unseen. O vermilion, or yellow
Or white rose of a ruined garden,
Your past still magically remains
Forever shines in these verses,
Gold, blood, ivory or shadow
As if in his hands, invisible rose.
….
Christopher Woodman said,
May 6, 2014 at 12:20 pm
Jesus was a miracle worker because he knew the art of real, effective magic, yes, and he took the time to explain that art on a number of occasions too.
What he said is that real magic is not about getting what you want what is more what you need, deserve, or fantasize about. On the contrary, it’s about getting what you know you’ve already got! And that’s precisely what he said right after the barren fig tree debacle that so upset the disciples, the moment when he blasted the poor infertile thing for not bearing fruit. Hard stuff, and a teaching which has nothing whatever to do with believing in other worlds either, just functioning more effectively and honestly in this one with all its bumps and wrinkles — believing in it, in other words, having faith in it just as it is.
So in the famous riposte in Mark 11/23, Jesus says:
Which is what the poet says too, at least the true poet does, the one that moves mountains.
~
If anyone wants to please me here at the end of this thread, he or she will read the little poem that follows not as if it were by a famous or not-famous poet, but just by me. If you do that it will be because you have come to realize that there is something of great value in a poem by someone who has discovered something special in his or her personal life, and has worked very hard to express it in poetry too, like for 24 years, and all of those after the age of 50 to boot.
Post Script. “Only this once, O God” are the last words of the bungling Prophet Samson, and they resonate throughout LA-CROIX-MA-FILLE.
At the end of the story, Samson is strung up in the shambles like a raw bison carcass on the last frontier, jilted, mocked, and humiliated by a howling pagan mob. And what does he do, this great prophet-warrior who has made such a mess out of his personal life? He prays, just as Jesus says you should:
“‘Suffer me that I may feel the pillars whereupon the house standeth, that I may lean upon them,'” he whispers.
Then quietly, on the breath, so to speak, as if it had so obviously already happened: “‘Only this once, O God.'”
“And he bowed himself with all his might; and the house fell upon the lords, and upon all the people that were therein. So the dead which he slew at his death were more than they which he slew in his life.”
Phew.
Hard indeed, on us all.
Christopher
……..
Christopher Woodman said,
May 7, 2014 at 12:45 pm
Dear Friends,
Before signing off I’d like to leave you with yet another little poem. It’s the companion piece to “Breezy Point which I showed you three weeks ago, and of course also links to “Only This Once, O God!” just above.
These three poems are all from an as yet unpublished book, “La Croix Ma Fille,” which also contains “An Elegy for Heroes Like Heroines” — I showed you that one just last week. (It’s the last part of a long poem called “Connemara Trousers.”)
In addition you might want to look back at the introductory poem to “La Croix Ma Fille”. “He Reflects on What His Genius Means” purports to be an antique relic “found amongst the ruins, thought to be Samson’s,” and the quotes from the Bible are all spoken by him as well, needless to say.
….
With very best wishes,
Christopher Woodman