A Sweet Unrest

A Little Yeats

Yesterday's New York Times had a nice article on the Yeats exhibit at the National Library of Ireland. The website for the exhibit is stunning, to my mind a very fine example of how technology can be used to both preserve yet make accessible all these lovely rare documents and notebooks that most people would otherwise never get to see.

I've only read two Yeats poems so far, The Lake Isle of Innisfree and When You Are Old. He's on the list though, one of the first I want to read once I've gotten through the Romantics. I have read his book Mythologies and there is some beautiful writing in there as well.

The Prelude: Book Two

On to Book Two then- Wordsworth and his boyhood pursuits and how important nature was to him growing up. He describes an adventure with some friends, after which they dropped off 'the minstrel of our troop' on a small island (let's hope he lived there)...

And rowed off gently while he blew his flute
Alone upon the rock, oh then the calm
And dead still water lay upon my mind
Even with a weight of pleasure, and the sky,
Never before so beautiful, sank down
Into my heart and held me like a dream.

Gorgeous. And I absolutely have to stop and talk about a song here because of that phrase, weight of pleasure. I'd heard it before:

If I care enough I will break your heart
Under the weight of pleasure

Different kinds of pleasure, I guess. Any Chris Whitley song is going to have an erotic element that I just don't see so far in Wordsworth. Wordsworth found inspiration and transcendence in nature. Whitley found it... elsewhere. But the need to transcend- I see it everywhere. That's what it's all about.

mp3: Chris Whitley - Vertical Desert

On the album Rocket House, buy here or on iTunes.

Goodbye, Fake Steve

I've linked to this before but I thought I'd print it here. I've been crazy about a blog called The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs. A while back Forbes journalist Daniel Lyons started it up- he uses the persona of Apple's Steve Jobs to comment on business, politics, entertainment and modern life in general. And every once in a while he wrote a little poetry. At first no one knew who was actually writing the blog and then it came out. I find him really funny.

Well, this kind of thing can't go on forever and Fake Steve announced last week that he is walking away from the keyboard. In appreciation of all the enjoyment I've gotten from his blog, I'd like to share my favorite poem, Eric Schmidt's Serenity Prayer. For those who don't know, Eric Schmidt is the grown-up brought in to run Google when they wanted to go public (more here).

Eric Schmidt's Serenity Prayer

Dear Lord,
You have blessed me with many gifts
including a two hundred billion dollar market cap
and a search monopoly that gushes cash
like nothing in the history of the planet.
For these things, Lord,
and for allowing me to beautify the world
by splattering glorious text ads on every available surface,
I give you thanks and praise.
But now, Lord, your humble servant seeks your assistance.
My stock, though still widly overpriced, has dropped
by nearly one hundred dollars.
My followers, fully vested, grow restless,
and begin to seek a new promised land.
Though free delicious cuisine
from every corner of the globe
is available to them twenty-four hours a day,
like sweet manna from heaven,
still they hunger for more.
Though we offer haircuts and laundry
and saunas and massages
and a roller coaster and bumper cars and a skee ball arcade;
though each drone need work only four days
a week and may devote one-fifth of his or her time
to personal interests, such as designing time machines
and rocket ships that can fly to Mars
or just totally fucking off,
still, these spoiled, bratty, greedy little pricks
keep leaving for Facebook.
Damn them, Lord!
Smite them down!
Send a plague upon Zuckerberg!
Something that itches and burns!
But seriously.
Lord, I need your help.
Give me patience.
And kindness.
And courage.
Help me to put up with Larry's bullshit
and Sergey's smug, condescending tone.
Help me tolerate their Legos and jumbo jets and cockamamie ideas,
like this crazy campus that looks
so much like a friggin kindergarten
that you half expect to see Barney
leaping out from behind the bronze T-Rex
or riding on the replica of Burt Rutan's spaceship
or having his photo taken with Meng.
Dear Lord, how did I get here?
And how can I get out?
You know as well as I do
that I have no idea how to manage this place.
No one does.
You know that our
ridiculous profit margins
have masked our many mistakes
and inefficiencies. You know
this madness cannot go on forever.
You know what time bombs
lie buried in our income statement.
Lord, I come to you now
in most humble supplication
to ask this favor:
Let your servants succeed
at something other than search.
VaporPhone (tm), social networking,
desktop apps, herbal supplements --
frankly, Lord, I don't care.
Just make it happen.
Speak to me, Lord.
I'm listening.
I'm all ears.
Of course, if this be not your will,
I will accept your decision.
But I swear if that's the case
I am so friggin out of here
it's not even funny.
Seriously, Lord.
One year, tops.
Then I'm gone.
That is all.
Amen.

The original post is here.

Namaste', Fake Steve.

Glittering Idly in the Moon

I loved this image from Book One. Young Wordsworth sneaks out one night and steals a skiff:

...It was an act of stealth
And troubled pleasure, nor without the voice
Of mountain echoes did my boat move on,
Leaving behind her still on either side
Small circles glittering idly in the moon
Until they melted all into one track
Of sparkling light.

Here's to troubled pleasure and secret midnight adventure!

The Prelude: Book One, Take Two

I am hell-bent, not on compromise, but on making sense of Wordsworth. 104 degrees and a head full of steam. Or something. Here it goes.

I started rereading The Prelude and, as usual, things aren't quite as grim as they appeared last week. I do understand some of it, maybe even a lot of it. It wasn't so hard to read through this time either so maybe I am also getting used to the language.

He starts out leaving the city behind him (so many good songs start out that way but I have to focus on this right now), he is happy to be back in nature, feels breezes both literal and creative, lets us know he's been stuck a while and is now happy to ramble freely but will soon want to apply himself to something. He starts talking about some of his frustrations with himself, his writing, and as I read this passage (lines 228-271) I wondered, how did it not grab me the first time through? Especially this:

Far better never to have heard the name
Of zeal and just ambition, than to live
Thus baffled by a mind that every hour
Turns recreant to her task, takes heart again,
Then feels immediately some hollow thought
Hang like an interdict upon her hopes.
This is my lot; for either I still find
Some imperfection in the chosen theme,
Or see of absolute accomplishment
Much wanting- so much wanting in my mind
That I recoil and droop, and seek repose
In indolence from vain perplexity,
Unprofitably travelling towards the grave
Like a false steward who has much received
And renders nothing back.
(Lines 257-271)

Unprofitably travelling towards the grave? I get that feeling.

It's only after all this that he goes into the Was it for this and the beautiful descriptions of what nature meant to him as a boy that filled my head the first time around.

Special Orders

I've written about Edward Hirsch before, but only his prose. I hadn't read any of his poetry until last week when his latest collection, Special Orders, was finally waiting for me at the library. I like the book- I like many of the individual poems and I like the way they all flow together to form a narrative of his life.

This one stood out for me immediately. It's accessible but also made me think a lot over some of his word choices. I think it captures a bit how uncomfortable it can feel to be an American.

Krakow, 6 A.M.

I sit in a corner of the town square
and let the ancient city move through me.
I sip a cup of coffee, write a little,
and watch an old woman sweeping the stairs.

Poland is waking up now: blackbirds patrol
the cobblestones, nuns rush by in habits,
and the clock tower strikes six times.
Day breaks into the night's reverie.

The morning is as fresh and clean
as a butcher's apron hanging in a shop.
Now it is pressed and white, but soon
it will be spotted with blood.

Europe is waking up, but America
is going to sleep, a gangly teenager
sprawled out on a comfortable bed.
He has large hands and feet

and his dreams are innocent and bloodthirsty.
I want to throw a blanket over his shoulders
and tuck him in again, like a child,
now that his sleep is no longer untroubled.

I'm alone here in the Old World
where poetry matters, old hatreds seethe,
and history wears a crown of thorns.
Fresh bread wafts from the ovens

and daily life follows its own inexorable
course, like a drunk weaving slowly
across a courtyard, or a Dutch maid
throwing open the heavy shutters.

I suppose there's always a shopgirl
stationed in the doorway, a beggar taking up
his corner post, and newspapers fluttering
from store to store with bad news.

Poetry, too, seeks a place in the world-
feasting on darkness but needing light,
taking confession, listening for bells,
for the first strains of music in a town square.

Europe is going to work now-
look at those two businessmen hurrying
past the statue of the national bard-
as her younger brother sleeps

on the other side of the ocean,
innocent and violent, dreaming of glory.

NPR has a nice interview with Hirsch- I really, really recommend it. He reads several poems from this collection, including another one of my favorites, Self-portrait. I was familiar with his background but I was still surprised by his voice, his accent. I guess I naively expect all American poets to sound like Boston Brahmins.

#@!% Wordsworth

Not really. I mean, I am angry, but I'm angry with myself and taking it out on him. I haven't been paying attention, I've been coasting along and now I realize that I am six books into The Prelude and I have no idea what is going on. None. It was the passage about Mount Blanc and Chamonix that brought it home. Since I've been there I felt I could, finally, relate to one of his experiences so I stopped to think about it and that's when I noticed that I don't understand any of it. Here is the beginning of the passage:

That day we first
Beheld the summit of Mont Blanc, and grieved
To have a soulless image on the eye
Which had usurped upon a living thought
That never more could be.

OK, what? It's one of the most jaw-dropping sights in the world, so what is the problem? So I reread this book, which is called Cambridge and the Alps, and I found this passage which I vaguely remembered. This is about his life at Cambridge, before the trip:

And not to leave the picture of that time
Imperfect, with these habits I must rank
A melancholy (from humours of the blood
In part, and partly taken up) that loved
A pensive sky, sad days, and piping winds,
The twilight more than the dawn, autumn than spring-
A treasured and luxurious gloom, of choice
And inclination mainly, and the mere
Redundancy of youth's contentedness.

I think I get this part, it's like choosing to wear all black and listen to a lot of Smiths maybe. So then I thought that his mopey reaction to Mont Blanc was a matter of teenage moodiness (actually I don't know exactly how old he is at this point, but that is the least of my worries and anyway it's post-university, so an angsty time). I was going with that, but then what he says next still doesn't make any sense to me. Here's the whole passage:

That day we first
Beheld the summit of Mont Blanc, and grieved
To have a soulless image on the eye
Which had usurped upon a living thought
That never more could be. The wondrous Vale
Of Chamouny did on the following dawn,
With it's dumb cataracts and streams of ice,
A motionless array of mighty waves,
Five rivers broad and vast, make rich amends,
and reconciled us to realities.

So then to the OED (the two-volume Shorter- I once worked in a place that had the entire glorious 20 volume set and it was shelved right next to my desk, so basically heaven on earth as I spent slow periods happily reading away and it looked like I was working) to find out that 'dumb cataracts' means silent waterfalls. OK... I still don't know what he is saying here. Imagining Mont Blanc is better than seeing it, the waterfalls are silent, the water is frozen, the waves are motionless and.. what? What does this mean? Anyone? Bueller?

While I await your thoughts (please!), I am going to start the whole thing over from the beginning. I will understand this.

And later, when I'm not in a temper, I may admit that the language is rather beautiful whether or not I get it.

Cherries

This post was inspired by equal parts MJRC, who reminded me how much I love cherries, and Nat, who reminded me how much I love the John Mellencamp song Cherry Bomb.

I haven't taken many pictures this week but I had to snap these. We've had a lot of fires around here and the air is smoky so the light is strange. I haven't written much about The Prelude because Wordsworth and I are still slogging it out in the Alps. I was happy to get to this part because I've actually been hiking and camping around Mont Blanc and Chamonix, so now I feel like Wordsworth and I have a little something in common. In fact, it was while coming down from Mont Blanc that I discovered I have a touch of le vertige. I had to have my hand held all the way down but that wasn't so bad. I made it. The night sky there was incredibly beautiful- I'd never seen stars like that, and I haven't since. I would go outside my tent in the middle of the night and stare up at them even though it was cold. Wordsworth seems to have been less impressed but I'll write about that a bit later as I'm still puzzling it out. In the meantime, I will try to entertain. Once a showgirl, always a showgirl.

So, cherry songs! I started thinking about cherry songs and other than Cherry Bomb I thought of Warrant's Cherry Pie, which requires no elaboration, and also Cherry Tulips by Headlights, which I was on the fence about at first. But I like it, though not as much as I like Market Girl. Both are on their MySpace.

Any other cherry songs? What am I missing?

Even though it was not a warm a day today, I lay out on a blanket in the garden for a bit, eating the cherries and remembering so clearly what it felt like to be seventeen. I do still, truly, believe that holding hands means something, and that dancing means everything. Maybe more now than ever.

The Romantic Imagination

I picked this book up used and I like it. It's a collection of lectures given at Harvard in 1948-1949 by CM Bowra. The first and last chapters are about the English Romantics in general, and each of the middle chapters is devoted to one of the major Romantic poets. For each poet, Bowra looks at a representative poem in detail (for example, for Keats he takes Ode to a Grecian Urn) and he uses this as a departure point to discuss the poet's work, career and his place in Romantic thought.

I've found this book to be extremely helpful and a pretty good read too. I keep returning to it- it's the perfect companion to my project of reading through the Romantic poets. Here's a quote I love- Bowra is discussing how important the real, everyday world was to the Romantics:

"There are perhaps poets who live entirely in dreams and hardly notice the familiar scene, but the Romantics are not of their number. Indeed, their strength comes largely from the way in which they throw a new and magic light on the common face of nature and lure us to look for some explanation for the irresistible attraction which it exerts. In nature all the Romantic poets found their initial inspiration. It was not everything to them, but they would have been nothing without it; for through it they found those exalting moments when they passed from sight to vision and pierced, as they thought, to the secrets of the universe."

I can definitely see the truth of this in the Keats I read, and the importance of nature to Wordsworth is made very clear right from the beginning of The Prelude as well. But, say for us today, can this kind of inspiration only come from nature? Or is it possible to see whatever the 'familiar scene' is, even if it's a city scene, in a 'new and magic light'? Do you have to be in nature to pierce the secrets of the universe?

Hmmm, Wordsworth

So, I'm not finding Wordsworth to be quite as immediately lovable as Keats. I'm a couple books into The Prelude (1805) and I'm feeling kind of eh about it. Maybe part of why it was so easy to fall for Keats is that Edward Hirsch's introduction to his poems is really informative, but also so admiring and exuberant that I couldn't wait to get cracking after reading it. The person who wrote the introduction to my volume of Wordsworth does not have Hirsch's joyous enthusiasm. It's super dry, academic writing and it makes me appreciate how lucky I was to start with Keats and Hirsch.

Then too, with reading so much depends on my own mood as well. I'm hoping to get a couple of uninterrupted hours to myself this weekend, and that I'll be mostly awake and really able to concentrate. That might do the trick. But right now I'm having a bit of trouble getting my footing.

In other news, I found a book of Billy Collins poetry. In my house! I have no idea how it got here. It appeared like magic and I'm so grateful for it. I can sneak a few lines of Billy Collins when I'm supposed to be doing something else and it resonates, it's not work. The language stays with me and then I have something to ponder while I go about the more mundane tasks of the day. And in this found volume, there is a even a poem called Lines Written Over Three Thousand Miles from Tintern Abbey which seems to poke a little fun at old Wordsworth.