A Sweet Unrest

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.

Hello, Wordsworth

I had a hard time deciding which poet to take up next. I knew I wanted to study another Romantic poet and I was debating between Blake and Wordsworth. In Blake's favor was the fact that I already owned his complete works and I've already made a pass through The Four Zoas. But Keats was a great admirer of Wordsworth, and because of that it was hard to shake the desire to read him next. Then Eiron made a comment about The Prelude, about going from someone who hadn't read it to someone who had. It sounded momentous and that sealed it for me: Wordsworth. I want to be someone who has read The Prelude.

Well, it turns out it isn't quite so simple. There are four Preludes. And Eiron and his computer are taking separate vacations right now so I can't ask him which one he meant. I've done a little poking around and it seems like the 1805 text might be the one, but just to be safe I'm reading at least the first three texts (the 1798, the 1799, and the 1805). Any thoughts?

This points out another difficult area for a poetry newbie like me. With the celebrated, deceased poets- the ones where scholars have combed all through their notebooks and papers dredging up every last scrap of verse, even the bits the poets never intended to see the light of day- it's really hard to know where to start. I do absolutely understand why this is a valuable undertaking, but it's not always easy to decide what to read first. Contemporary poetry is a lot more straightforward in this sense. But I'm not opposed to a little or even a lot of research, so it won't deter me. Hello, Wordsworth.

FSJ

Poetry is sometimes found in surprising places. One of my gurus- one I haven't talked about yet on this blog- has a new one posted. I'm talking about Fake Steve Jobs. Click here to read his poetic thoughts on the passing of Bo Diddley. Maybe not his absolute best work but I'm sure he has a lot going on. If you're new to Fake Steve, be sure to check out his classic Eric Schmidt's Serenity Prayer.

Namaste', FSJ. I honor the place where your poetic impulses and my goofy yet twisted sense of humor are one.

Romantics

I've been thinking about these lines:

And the moon, whether prudish or complaisant,
Has fled to her bower, well knowing I want
No light in the dusk, no torch in the gloom,
But my Isabel's eyes and her lips pulp'd with bloom.

Yes, it's Keats again. I'm really trying to move on, but these lines have been swirling around in my head. It's fitting, as they are from a song that he wrote. I like that first line, 'the moon, whether prudish or complaisant,'. I can't believe in a prudish moon, and I can't believe that Keats believed in a prudish moon either. I'd like to believe in a complaisant moon, a courteous, obliging moon hiding herself away, leaving a dark, dark sky to ensure the safety of the couple. But maybe the moon, most of the time anyway, is simply neutral. There. She doesn't really need to do anything other than show up.

I've been asking myself, why do I care so much whether Porphyro and Madeline make it out of the house, whether Catherine and Heathcliff are allowed to be together at long last, whether the narrator of this poem is able to kiss his Isabel in accommodating darkness. Shouldn't I be beyond this kind of thinking by now?

I thought that I'd outgrow this kind of thing
Tell me, aren't we supposed to mature or something?
I haven't found that yet
Is this as grown-up as we ever get?

That's Everything But The Girl. The truth is, I've spent most of my life trying to stifle my romantic leanings. They seem out of place. But they haven't gone away, and in fact seem to get stronger as the years go by. Even though I should know better. Or should I?

All the best poets know it's complicated.

I see a sky of stars and realise that I'm divided
I hear a sad guitar and I decide I'm undecided

That's Roddy Frame. He's romantic but he's a realist too. That's why I love him. He can write a sad song- a song that is partially about things gone so wrong that the only way to right them would be to go back in time and and do it all over- that contains the stunning line:

God made all the stars and sea for you and me

And then it seems like we are right back where we started. Anyway, that's what I've been thinking about.

Listen to Marble Arch (a demo version) by Roddy Frame here. Buy here (isn't he still so gorgeous?), here or on iTunes.

Listen to The Heart Remains A Child by Everything But The Girl here (until Monday only). Buy here or on iTunes.

Porphyro and Madeline are the couple in The Eve of St. Agnes. Highly recommended.

And I highly recommend the whole of the Keats song I quoted. Read it in a whisper- urgently (you don't really have a choice, the words conspire to hurry you along)- by candlelight.

Blue Peninsula

Blue Peninsula by Madge McKeithen was, in part, the inspiration for the Life/Lines project I wrote about earlier (here and here). The book is about how McKeithen finds some solace in poetry when her son is stricken with a debilitating (both mentally and physically) illness which has no diagnosis. I was looking forward to reading it since I was so taken with the Life/Lines idea, but I ended up not liking the book itself quite as much as I expected to. I think this is mostly a matter of personal preference: I'm not usually one for memoirs, and it is much more a memoir than a poetry book. And I probably would have responded better to a simpler writing style.

But there is a lot of good in the book, first and foremost the poems themselves. McKeithen has given me several poets to explore further. She also makes some noteworthy observations about the place of grief in modern society. And I think it's nice to hear about someone finding what they need in poetry, or in any art form really. I mean, I get that.

Here's one of the poems that stood out for me from Blue Peninsula:

On Turning Ten

The whole idea of it makes me feel
like I'm coming down with something,
something worse than any stomach ache
or the headaches I get from reading in bad light--
a kind of measles of the spirit,
a mumps of the psyche,
a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul.

You tell me it is too early to be looking back,
but that is because you have forgotten
the perfect simplicity of being one
and the beautiful complexity introduced by two.
But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit.
At four I was an Arabian wizard.
I could make myself invisible
by drinking a glass of milk a certain way.
At seven I was a soldier, at nine a prince.

But now I am mostly at the window
watching the late afternoon light.
Back then it never fell so solemnly
against the side of my tree house,
and my bicycle never leaned against the garage
as it does today,
all the dark blue speed drained out of it.

This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself,
as I walk through the universe in my sneakers.
It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends,
time to turn the first big number.

It seems only yesterday I used to believe
there was nothing under my skin but light.
If you cut me I could shine.
But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,
I skin my knees. I bleed.

Billy Collins

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Well, National Poetry Month is over and attention has turned to other celebrations (National Preservation Month, National High Blood Pressure Month...). But this space is devoted to poetry 12 months a year. At least it is when we aren't swooning over our favorite troubadours. So even though the cameras may have gone elsewhere, here at A Sweet Unrest World Headquarters I've slipped into a new party dress, opened another bottle of Champagne and kept right on celebrating poetry.

This weekend I read Simon Armitage's translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. This is exactly the kind of book I would have avoided in the past, under the assumption that I wouldn't get it. And I'll admit that when I cracked it open, ignoring the introduction and rushing headlong onto the first page of the poem, I thought my old assumptions were right. I was halfway down the first page thinking, 'if this is the translation, what the hell does the original look like??' when I realized that it's a parallel text and the original is on the left side of the page and the translation is on the right. Embarrassing but all too true. Once I got that sorted though, it was smooth sailing. The translation is very accessible- you don't need any notes or background at all to figure out what's going on. And Armitage kept to the highly alliterative style of the original, which makes the words and lines themselves pure pleasure to read. The poem is entertaining and suspenseful and just a really good tale. It's one I'll return to.

I'd never heard of Simon Armitage before reading about this book, but now that he's on my radar I see his name everywhere- he's over here breaking down the genius that is The Smiths' This Charming Man, he's over there turning The Odyssey into a radio play for BBC and then publishing his version in book form. I will definitely follow him as he is also interested in both poetry and pop music. I'm not the only one! I look forward to reading his version of The Odyssey as well as some of his own poetry.

In the meantime, this was the first Arthurian tale I'd ever read (so many humiliating disclosures in one post) and I'd like to read more. Any recommendations for me?