POETS Day! Poems from Wallace Stevens’s Harmonium

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Illustration by Rene Sears

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

TGIF is POETS for those without initiative. Make it happen. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

First, a little verse.

***

Wallace Stevens started late. His first poetry collection held an impressive, by debut poetry collection standards, eighty five titles, but when the book, Harmonium, was published in 1923, its author was in his early forties. He’d had time to backlog.

I covered Stevens’s morning routine—composing in his head as he walked to his office at Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company—in this space three years ago. In Harmonium, he wrestles with how he should see the world. Should he be grounded in the rational or loose in the imagination? The question is posed piecemeal and never resolved.

I remember when Donna Tartt’s A Secret History came out. My mother’s kitchen table review was that it’s a great book, but she put all she’s ever learned and considered into it and she won’t have anything else to say for five to ten years. That was in 1992. Tartt’s second book came out in 2002. Stevens spends a great deal of energy trying to sort himself. He wrote sparingly through the 20s, not writing regularly again until 1933 and not publishing another bound volume until Ideas of Order in 1936. Harmonium received harsh reviews. Mark Van Doren dismissed him from the genre by writing in The Nation, per Wikipedia, that Stevens’ wit “is tentative, perverse, and superfine; and it will never be popular.” There were nice things written too, but the negatives weighed on him. Maybe he, like Tartt in Mom’s pinning, spent his store. Maybe the critics brushed him back. Maybe he had to reconcile vers libre with actuary tables.

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POETS Day! The Present in TS Eliot’s “The Dry Salvages”

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Illustration by Rene Sears of The Dry Salvages rock formation off the coast of Gloucester, Massachusetts where TS Eliot spent his boyhood summers.

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

Welcome once again to POETS Day, where we usher in Henry Ford’s greatest creation – the weekend – a few hours ahead of schedule by embracing the ethos of the day: Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

Life’s too short for work, and nobody’s gonna notice if you hoof it mid-afternoon.

***

TS Eliot titled the third of his Four Quartets “The Dry Salvages” after a rock formation off the coast of Gloucester, Massachusetts, a fishing village and seaside retreat where the St. Louis based Eliot family spent their summers when the poet was a boy. Dry Salvages derives from an original French name for the formation transformed by time, mishearings, and local accent. Eliot tells us in a parenthetical preceding the poem, “presumably les trois sauvages,” Anglicized over time but, he instructs, “pronounced to rhyme with assuages,” so not as yet a fully English subject.

As with all of the Four Quartets, “The Dry Salvages” manages competing images presenting a theme. There’s a great deal going on and a great many ways to spend a thousand words on an aspect without touching on any number of other aspects. In this poem, the opening and recurrent image is that of water. The river is present, flowing, perceptible action. The sea is unknowable depths. Water rises from the sea, rains and forms oceans and back to the sea. The sea is the past and the future. We cannot know which or guess at more than the surface. The river is with us, changing in the moment. It is present. The idea permeates.

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POETS Day! Ezra Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley

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Photo by me.

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

The work week’s nearly finito; barely a few hours left. What are you doing? You’re not getting anything done between now and quitting time. Cut out and stop pretending. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

First, a little verse.

***

Ezra Pound was a very good poet but not a master versifier. I think he knew that. “Major Poet” is a term reserved for the greats who define their time and turn swaths of contemporaries into satellites. Yeats is a Major Poet, as is Eliot. “Minor Poet” sounds dismissive, though it’s not. Don’t mistake Minor for bad or run of the mill. Bad or run of the mill poets are called poets. A Minor Poet merits consideration enough have status conferred, to have demonstrated excellence if not tremendous influence.

In his essay “What Is Minor Poetry?,” Eliot picks out Robert Herrick, noting that he shows no “continuous conscientious purpose.” Herrick “is more the purely natural and un-self-conscious man, writing his poems as the fancy seizes him,” and it being Eliot writing, assumes we see and will make our own “gathering his rosebuds as he may” crack. Auden was more pragmatic, declaring that Major Poets have college courses devoted to their work and their work alone while Minor Poets do not. Auden would have made the rosebud joke.

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POETS Day! Dorothy Wellesley

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Illustration by Rene Sears

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

The work week’s nearly finito; barely a few hours left. What are you doing? You’re not getting anything done between now and quitting time. Cut out and stop pretending. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

First, a little verse.

***

from Fire
Dorothy Wellesley (1889-1956)

(‘Does not our life consist of the four elements?’
—Shakespeare)

The great stone hearth has gone.
An oblong electric tube is set in the wall
Like a cheap jewel.
Men converge no more to fire,
Men are on with the isolation:
The pride of science stands, and the final desolation.

No smoke, no danger, you tell me with veneration:
Much dies with the fire, young man,
More than one generation:
Man has known fire more than one generation.

That’s a tremendous opening. Yeats came across Dorothy Wellesley’s poetry in 1935 while putting together The Oxford Book of Modern Verse: 1892-1935 and had to meet her. According to Kieth Alldritt in his W.B. Yeats: The Man and the Milieu, the great poet was overcome: “My eyes filled with tears. I read in excitement that was more delightful because it showed that I had not lost my understanding of poetry.” Yeats further honored her with commentary in the Oxford Modern Verse introduction, writing “I knew nothing of her until a few months ago I read the opening passage in Horses, delighted by its changes in pace, abrupt assertion then a long sweeping line, by its vocabulary modern and precise.”

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POETS Day! Hugh MacDiarmid Thistled While He Worked

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Illustration by Rene Sears

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

I just got an email from my son’s college informing parents that our little darlings have to be out of the dorms by May, 9. That went quickly. Tempis fugit, carpe diem, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it,” Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

Honestly, that really snuck up on me. Freshman year: Almost down.

In the mean time, do that last one. Happy POETS Day.

First, a little verse.

***

I read about poets lives a good deal, and have decided that a lot of literary immortality is born from not having any idea what you’re doing on any front—politics, relationships, plain ole human decency—and making a ton of noise while you try to figure it out.

Not all, but many. Mild mannered insurance agent Wallace Stevens threw a punch at Hemingway. Pound blathered on about passports, clothing drives, new, new, new, and economic fantasy. The upright TS Eliot kept well within the rails when not tearing hundreds year old poetic tradition to pieces and filling the void with continuum-compliant fixes. He may have been the messiest of the lot. It’s seamless energy. Even in tubercular throes, Keats, Dunbar, Praed, and Lawrence produced poetry, sent out letters, remained exhibitionist observers. From one thing to another, promiscuous passions, stardom, hermitage; there is either a singularity of focus in the moment frequent to literary success or a conspiracy of biographers leading me to believe so. And the energy needs focus. One thing succeeds, fails, or finishes. What’s next?

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POETS Day! Apes in Hell

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Illustrated by Rene Sears

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

The work week’s nearly done and you’re spending these last few hours doing what exactly? Trying to look busy? Surreptitiously scanning restaurant reviews? Checking game times? Texting your friends about restaurants and game times? Cut it out and cut out. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

First, a little verse.

***

I’ve mentioned before that I’m an introduction reader if the introduction is relatively short or obscenely long. My theory is that I might as well read a short one and that a long one indicates something in the book requiring the long introduction; something I might otherwise miss. My experience shows mid-length ones to be fumbling, fawning, and filled with ten dollar praise of the sort grad students fuss out over beloved former teachers. If I like the book, I’ll read those after. It’s a slapdash theory, but it’s served me and I’m fixed in my habits.

Christian Lorentzen wrote the Introduction to the NYRB Classic edition of Take a Girl Like You by Kingsley Amis, and I’m a little ticked off at him. He’s funny and drops some whispered-about biographical info, though he’s writing about Amis and the info is about infidelity so it was loud whispering to begin with, but entertaining. I’m not going to work out the chronology, but Harper’s claims Lorentzen as a contributor, as do the London Review of Books and others. This intro is a small sample size, but I’m content to dub him one of the good guys and read what I come upon in the future. Still, he ticked me off. I’m pretty sure he gave away the ending of the book.

Not so terribly that I won’t read. I’m pretty, not totally, sure he spoiled it. Lorentzen gives a who’s who of the characters, outlines the conflict central to the plot, and then tells us the ending is “genuinely shocking.” But given the build up as explained there’s only one genuinely shocking ending. If he’s pulled a feint and one of the mains out of nowhere joins the priesthood, reveals himself as the Lindbergh baby, grows a trunk: fine. The ending isn’t spoiled. But given where the story, by his touching on it tells, is going… Dammit.

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POETS DAY! Keats Gets Snippy About Wordsworth

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Illustration by Rene Sears

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

In the summer of 1818, John Keats and his friend Charles Armitage Brown went on a walking tour of Scotland. It looks like the pair covered somewhere between six hundred to six hundred and fifty miles over forty-four days, so about fifteen miles a day, give or take and accounting for weather.

Keats wrote a series of letters about the journey to his consumptive brother Thomas, unable to travel with what they didn’t know at the time was his last bout with tuberculosis. He brings his brother along in these letters. It’s endearing. He’s colloquial and considerate. Reading, you get the sense he really did “Wish you were here.” You also get the sense that he was entertaining a bedridden friend, and further, the sense that his audience enjoyed laughing at small frustrations.

There’s a great deal about lovely views, divine salt water baths, and all the joys that make for good travel brouchuring, but Keats peppers it with amusing observations; little asides he would give were Thomas along.

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POETS Day! George William Russell, Co-Host of the Irish Literary Revival

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Illustration by Rene Sears inspired by the Paintings of AE

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

For those who care about golf, this is your time. The Masters and its NPR whisper-excitement for four televised days is a duck out of work away. For those who don’t care about golf, it’s going to be a pain in the ass getting a table at the neighborhood joint. My local sods the dining room and patio, props azaleas in all the corners, pulls in an under-armor collared shirt Hootie type band for post-round, and makes it damn near impossible for a regular to eat a club sandwich in peace. People in green and white holding red solo cups spill out into the parking lot. They pack the place and good for them, I guess.

Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. I hope your golf team wins.

First: verse.

***

In his younger years, George William Russell had a vision. Details of the vision are unclear to me, but “Aeon”, a Gnostic word meaning early being or ancient cosmic intelligence, popped from the fringe of understanding and held court, nipping at his synapses. He claims to have never heard the word before and to have been ignorant of its meaning until revelation fixed it front and conscious center. Obviously, he looked it up. Obviously it had meaning and implications. He decided Aeon would be his non de plume.

Something got confused. A printer was buffaloed by Russell’s use of the ash, or “Æ” character, to spell Æon. There doesn’t appear to be an academic reason for the ash. I can’t find support for using the symbol in aeon though there was a fashion for dressing up Latin and Greek terms with it as flourish in the late 19th and early 20th centuries whether called for or not. There were heavy metal album cover designers before there were heavy metal albums, so it’s possible Russell spelled for an esoteric aesthetic.

For whatever reason, he used it and the printer didn’t pick up on what he laid down. To the printer’s defense, Russell’s handwriting was notably atrocious. He’s lucky to have deciphered the hieroglyph as resembling A and E at all. The result was a work credited to an author named AE. Russell liked AE and kept it.

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POETS Day! St John of the Cross as Translated by Roy Campbell

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Sketch by St John of the Cross with color treatment by Rene Sears

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

Happy Easter and Ziessen Pesach, if I have that right. All to all.

There may not be work to get out of, but here’s some pseudo-POETS Day mystic verse.

***

When Juan Yepes, ordained John Matthias and later changed to John of the Cross, died in 1591, crowds thronged his viewing, tearing away pieces of the beloved spiritual leader’s burial clothes as mementos. There was impressive competition for his remains.

He was originally buried in Ubeda where he died. Two years later, he was relocated on the sly. The monks at Segovia felt that since he’d been prior of their monastery, they had claim to his remains. They left a leg behind for the Ubeda folks and donated an arm to be venerated in Madrid, but the bulk was whisked away by the Segovian interests. An appeal to Pope Clement VIII in 1596 put the Ubedans back in the game. The pope ordered John’s remains sent back. There was rumbling and arguing. In the end, the Ubedans added the other leg and the arm that wasn’t in Madrid while the Segovians held onto his head and torso.

I resisted saying St John had been the “prior prior” above, so I feel I’m entitled to make an “everybody wanted a piece of him” crack here: Everybody wanted a piece of him. People were different then.

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POETS Day! CS Lewis and Roy Campbell Agree to Disagree

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Illustration by Rene Sears

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

Major League Baseball season is upon us. The Sweet Sixteen is under way. You need not to be at work. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

First, some verse.

***

Roy Campbell says that in February of 1936 he was forced at gunpoint to vote, using a dead Spaniard’s identity, for the Popular Front. This would have been months before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Peter Alexander writes, in a footnote in his Roy Campbell: A Critical Biography that he was “unable to verify this story.” It’s important to note that he notes this because Campbell was an outrageous story teller whose facts regarding his own exploits need checking. But the truth is, Campbell led an outrageous life filled with noble, clownish, ill-considered, shrewd, Quixotic, and valiant, depending on the situation, deeds.

He’s hard to believe. Campbell bragged he was a spy for Great Britain during World War II. That wasn’t the lie. The lie was that he was good at it. His espionage involved getting drunk in Spain, cosying up to fellow bar patrons, and saying “Don’t tell anybody, but I’m a spy for England. Have you heard anything about what the Germans are up to?” (Not kidding.) You get enough of his exaggerations and then hear a surefire whopper where he claims to have played matador “bullfighting” a rhino in the wild, and it turns out he’s telling the truth. He survived, but the beast charged through his makeshift cape and made a mess out of his brother-in-law’s Range Rover. Such is the complicated task of making sense of the life of Campbell.

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