Posts Tagged Auden

some cover art

For the past six weeks I have been re-reading the original six Mike Hammer novels beginning with his second novel, My Gun is Quick. Today I take a look at his very first novel, I, the Jury.

From the beginning of MontanaWriter – over three years ago now– I have tried to think and write about books and poetry here always in the light of Auden’s six characteristics of a critic. (See the introduction to Book Reviews at MonatanaWriter.)

Auden, his prologue to Dyers Hand,  wrote that a critic should:

1. Introduce me to authors or works of art of which I was hitherto unaware.
2. Convince me that I have undervalued an author or a work because I had not read them carefully enough.
3. Show me relations between works of different ages and cultures which I could never have seen for myself because I do not know enough and never shall.
4. Give a “reading” of a work which increases my understanding of it.
5. Throw light upon the process of artistic “Making.”
6. Throw light upon the relation of art to life, to science, economics, ethics, religion, etc.

I undertook re-reading and “reviewing” Mickey Spillane for the same reason that I have chosen to write about most of the poems or books that have been reviewed here: because they are works of art worth thinking and writing about.

There is an irony, of course, to quoting Auden in a review of Mickey Spillane. While Auden enjoyed reading mysteries and even wrote one of the best essays ever written about the genre, he clearly doubted the “literary merit” of the books he viewed merely as enjoyable reading for winding down at the end of a day.

Auden was a lover of “cozy” mysteries, the British kind… not the hardboiled American kind. He was most certainly not one of the many millions who made Mickey Spillane the best selling writer in the world.

Yet it needs to be said, while Auden was as great a poet and critic as any in the 20th Century, he was dead wrong in one thing: mysteries can be true literature.

Raymond Chandler, Ross MacDonald, and Mickey Spillane are not merely great genre-writers, they are true artists… certainly some of the most significant literary stylists of the 20th Century.

While Chandler’s literary reputation has grown now over the years, and Ross MacDonald’s to a lesser extent, Spillane remains an artistic pariah… a greatly under-appreciated hardboiled genius.

In  a five year period between 1947 and 1952, Mickey Spillane wrote six Mike Hammer novels:

• I, the Jury (1947)
• My Gun is Quick (1950)
• Vengeance is Mine! (1950)
• One Lonely Night (1951)
• The Big Kill (1951)
• Kiss Me, Deadly (1952)

Based on a character that Spillane had in mind for a comic book, Mike Hammer and Mike Hammer’s voice must have been inhabiting the dark streets of Spillane’s imagination for some time before he finally sat down in front of his Smith-Corona Super-Speed and cranked out this pulp classic.

While I, The Jury was written in just 19 days, it is clear in the opening sentences of the book that the fully-formed character of Mike Hammer that comes into the room shaking rain off of his hat is already a force of nature, one of the great literary archetypes to ever step out of the pages of a book and into the world. In language and tone, writer and detective hit us hard immediately like a punch in the gut.

Returning now to I, The Jury after having spent the last month and a half reading the other five initial Hammer books made me appreciate this literary classic all the more.

Here are the opening lines of I, the Jury.

Enjoy!

The opening paragraphs of I, The Jury by Mickey Spillane

 

I shook the rain from my hat and walked into the room. Nobody said a word. They stepped back politely and I could feel their eyes on me. Pat Chambers was standing by the door to the bedroom trying to steady Myrna. The girl’s body was racking with dry sobs. I walked over and put my arms around her.

“Take it easy, kid,” I told her. “Come on over here and lie down.” I led her to a studio couch that was against the far wall and sat her down. She was in pretty bad shape. One of the uniformed cops put a pillow down for her and she stretched out.

Pat motioned me over to him and pointed to the bedroom. “In there, Mike,” he said. In there. The words hit me hard. In there was my best friend lying on the floor dead. The body. Now I could call it that. Yesterday it was Jack Williams, the guy that shared the same mud bed with me through two years of warfare in the stinking slime of the jungle. Jack, the guy who said he’d give his right arm for a friend and did when he stopped a bastard of a Jap from slitting me in two. He caught the bayonet in the biceps and they amputated his arm.

Pat didn’t say a word. He let me uncover the body and feel the cold face. For the first time in my life I felt like crying. “Where did he get it, Pat?”

[Spillane, Mickey (2001-06-01). The Mike Hammer Collection: Volume I: 1 (p. 5). Penguin Group. Kindle Edition.]

 

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keys

Poets end up writing about the writing process because they spend so much time thinking and wondering about it. It is the same reason Hollywood ends up making movies about making movies. We naturally write about what interests us and what we know best.

Years ago I started wondering for the first time about how writing on a computer changes my writing.  I had never like the soft sound of computer keyboarding and began to wonder if that sound somehow impacted how my poems sounded to me.

This is a poem I probably first started sometime in the mid-1990s. It is the first one I re-worked on my “new” Smith-Corona Super-Speed.

Enjoy!

For the next month or so, postings at MontanaWriter will be sparse by necessity, and I will be re-posting –with new content and edits– some older posts that were written and posted before readership here really began to grow. Soon, “and very soon,” there will be enough time again… for new directions and trajectories. But for now, patience is the order of the day.

The first  book of Seamus Heaney’s I ever purchased wasSweeney Astray at a used bookstore in Dinkytown, Minneapolis. That was in October 1986. Since then I have purchased and read many, many other books of his poetry and prose. I treasure each and every one.

By the time Heaney published Sweeny Astray in 1983, he had already written and published a number of volumes of poetry. On the day I purchased the book, a translation  of a medieval Irish work called Buile Suibhne, I was more familiar with the famous Irish  character of Mad Sweeney than I was of poet/translator Seamus Heaney. By the time I finished the book, I was a committed Heaney fan.

Those who are old enough to remember life before the internet, will remember that there was a time when finding information could be difficult, when was not as simple as just “googling” a name and sifting through hits.

In 1986, when I wanted to know more about this poet I had just “discovered,” and what other books he may have written, I had to go to the library at the University of Minnesota. I spent an entire weekend “researching” Heaney, taking notes in one of old  composition book I always used as a journal… and days combing the shelves of various used bookstores looking for his works. Almost 25 years later, out of habit I suppose, I still find myself looking for his works whenever I am at used bookstores, even though I think I have almost everything he has written.

Heaney was born in Northern Ireland. His best poetry centers around the places and faces of his childhood and youth. He is at his best when writing about those things. “Digging” is such a poem. It is also a wonderful poem about writing poetry.

Enjoy!

Digging

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pin rest; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.

Listening with a pencil and my ear, these are the lines I marked:

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pin rest; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down

* * * * * * * * * *

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.

This is one of Heaney’s first poems and in it we see so much that we have come to associate with him: sounds, themes, and that remarkable ear. There are few poets that are as delightful to read out-loud, or at least, few late 20th Century ones.

In Heaney we find the DNA of Yeats and Auden mixed with something earthier (Patrick Kavanaugh at his best). While Yeats and Auden have little of the the working class, the earthy, the common place in their language, perspective, or subject matter (something almost always a part of the best American poetry) , Heaney along with Ted Hughes, “rediscovered” the earth and earthliness and brought it back to British Isles poetry.

_____

One of the unexpected side-benefits of the lighter posting schedule I have had to keep for the last month is that the amount of spam comments MontanaWriter receives has dropped considerably. I remain mystified by the whole spam-a-blog phenomenon… especially when the spam messages aren’t even in the same language as that of the blog.

A recent cool spell in the North Country has meant that we have been able to open our windows again. My two-job work schedule gives me little time to go outside but at least I can drive and sleep with the windows open again. I can breath clean air… and dream.

When I am home or have time to sit between jobs, I have been nibbling around the stack of books on my coffee table and Kindle. A bite of poetry here, a chapter or two of a western there, a blog article for dessert. It is not my preferred reading schedule, but it is the one I can manage.

My daughters will tell you that I have little time or patience for television… or even movies for the most part. It is something I inherited from my mother and my father. My mother watched little tv at all and only went to two movies that I can remember, Godfather and Godfather 2. My father for the most part preferred to watch sports.

Books have always been my drug of choice… books and beer and bourbon. It is difficult to imagine a satisfying time in life without at least one of the three at my elbow. All three at the same time would mean I am on vacation.

One of the books I have been nibbling through on my Kindle (and my Kindle iPhone app) is Michael Chabon’s “Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands” In his introduction to the book of essays, Chabon claims that many writers and literary critics have forgotten that above all else reading is “entertainment” in the same way that movies and sports are.  The word entertainment though has such bad connotations for intellectuals and academics that no one wants to use it to describe something as serious as “real literature.” Entertainment belongs to video games and soap operas and genre fiction.

While I am admittedly a bit discomforted by the word entertainment, regular readers of MontanaWriter know that I share Chabon’s impatience with those who insist on anachronistic literary distinctions. Good writing is good writing. Good storytelling is good storytelling.

What Chabon terms entertainment, I have tended to call enjoyment and pleasure, believing these words to express more fully a depth not usually associated today with the world entertain. In the end it is the same. We read books, we watch baseball and the NBA finals, we listen to Coltrane and the Clash and George Jones, we sip whiskey and and drink cold beer ultimately for pleasure. For enjoyment.

There should be no shame in the artistic world to admitting such a thing. And yet Chabon reminds us that there is. But as W.H. Auden wrote, “Pleasure is by no means an infallible critical guide, but it is the least fallible.” And who are we  to argue with Auden.

_____

April is National Poetry Month. In honor of National Poetry Month, MontanaWriter will be featuring poems about poets, poetry, and writing poetry.

W.H. Auden

Today’s poems is one that has been featured once before at MontanaWriter, over a year ago. I feel justified in re-posting it here again because:

1. it is personal favorite
2. it is written by one of the greatest poets of the 20th Century
3. it is written about the greatest poet of the 20th Century
4. it is one of the best poems about poetry and poets ever written

In the poem, “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” we see Auden wrestling with the meaning of poetic and artistic immortality and what exactly that kind of immortality means: for the poet, for those who read the poems, and for the world/culture at large. For National Poetry Month, there can be no better discussion than this: Does poetry matter? And if so why?

For Auden this was not, of course, a merely academic question. It is not for any poet. To dedicate so much time and energy to something, to put so much of your self into something, you must believe – on some level – that it has some kind of larger meaning or purpose. That is really does matter.

Is poetry catharsis? Do poets write and readers read, to release emotional tension? There are poetry writing classes taught to cancer survivors, and victims of crime, to those battling addiction or abuse or loneliness. Is that what poetry is: a way to understand, express, and release emotions in a creative and constructive way, to aid ourselves and others?

Is poetry thought-formation? Do poets write and readers read, to have their mindsets re-ordered? There are Christian poets, and feminist poets. There are gay and lesbian poets? There are right-wing poets and left-wing poets? Is that what poetry is: a way to change outlooks politically, socially, and religiously?

Is poetry entertainment? Do poets write and readers read, to be entertained? Is a poem the same as a sitcom or movie, as a sporting event or some popular song on the radio? Is that what poetry is: a leisurely diversion that gives us a few moments of pleasure in an uncertain world?

Is poetry some part of all of these? Do poets write and readers read, for all of these reasons?

Is poetry something else altogether?

In Memory of W.B. Yeats

He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.

But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.

What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

II

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

III

Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.

In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

Listening with a pencil and my ear, these are the lines I marked:

Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen

* * * * * * * * * * * *

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

To pick a few lines out of a poem you have had memorized for decades… a poem you frequently recite parts of to yourself… is really quite difficult. On another day, I would no doubt pick different lines to highlight than these. But for National Poetry Month, they seem like the perfect lines to get the discussion started: Does poetry matter? And if so why?

____

W.B. Yeats chose a completely different direction for his “escapist” fiction: American westerns. I have always liked the image of the great Irish poet, writer of “The Second Coming” and “Leda and the Swan,” sitting in a chair in the evenings reading stories about gunslingers shooting it out in dusty cow-towns in fictional Montana or Colorado.

The kind of “bad prose” Hall detested would certainly have predominated in the westerns that Yeats would have been reading in the 1910s-30s, dime westerns and Zane Grey. While many modern westerns continue to suffer the same malady, by any objective measure, bad prose seems no more prevalent today in westerns or mysteries than in any other kind of fiction. Certainly a case can easily be made that some of the best writers and stylists of the English language  continue to work along the margins of fiction, that is, in the genres of Sci.Fi, Mysteries, and, of course, Westerns.

Working along the margins of an art allows the artist greater latitude in experimenting and trying new things. Cormac McCarthy is a good example of this. In Blood Meridian and All the Pretty Horses he experiments with the western. In No Country for Old Men with the mystery. In The Road with science fiction. The only genre he has not yet tackled is the romance novel. Maybe that is next. What a Cormac McCarthy romance would be like, I cannot even begin to imagine.

Personally, I happen to like mysteries and westerns and sports. I can find merit in all three… and in sci.fi. and fantasy. As I have written several times over the years at MontanaWriter, in the end it is only quality that matters:

The distinction between literary and genre fictions (mysteries, westerns, fantasy, and sci.fi.) is largely an artificial one. Those who still insist on making anachronistic literary distinctions do it for the same reason that all snobs make such declarations, self-aggrandizing assholery.

The only distinctions that can legitimately be made in literature are between good writing and bad writing and good stories and bad stories. When a work of fiction takes hold of your imagination, when the language continually invites you to turn pages, the writer has done his or her job. When the book haunts you and you can remember it years and years later, the writer has written a masterpiece.

So in the evenings you may find me reading just about anything, with the exception of romances. Unless, of course,  McCarthy does try his hand at one after all.

I read for pleasure and escape and to learn. I read to feed a hungry spirit and a hungry mind. I read to stoke the fires of imagination and to be reminded again of my humanity.  And I watch and enjoy sports for many of the same reasons… for all the same reason.

_____

Winter Path (copyright © m.a.h. hinton)

It has been warm this December in the North Country, and dry. So dry in fact that there are fire restrictions across the state. The drought that plagued the Lone Star state this past summer seems like it is wintering here in the north.

Outside my living room window last year was a world of white. Snow heaped upon snow. Banks so high that we could not even see the street.

This year all is different. Every other morning now, I have seen crows in my front yard, fat and black on the brown grass. They at least seem to be making the most of the milder weather.

My writing routine has been much interrupted of late, the drain of a second job finally taking its toll. Writing, for me at least, requires down-time and reading-time. I have had little of either for the last four months. It is hard to complain though about the burdens of two jobs when so many do not have any.

I am fortunate that neither job requires the manipulation of words. Auden’s famous quote comes often to my mind:  “A poet has not only to educate himself as a poet, he has also to consider how he is going to earn a living. Ideally, he should have a job which does not in any way involve the manipulation of words.”

Most of my life, I worked as a writer or editor. I am happy to have the opportunity to do something so far removed from both. The economic price though is that I have to work two jobs… for now. There is also admittedly a pride cost as well. I never get to do, or show off, what I am best at… most passionate at.

Today’s poem is a more recent one. And fitting for this time of year, if not this particular year.

Enjoy!

Walking the Dog at Night

suburban houses
glimpsed through trees
seem like farm houses
seen across empty fields
or like cabins on a lonely lake

the last stands of civilization for miles

that is the way the mind works
in the near emptiness of darkness

A few lights glimpsed here and there

a window
un-curtained
an empty room where the television is still on
a basketball game transitioning to a commercial
a tropical beach
a woman in a blue bikini
a bottle of beer

another house and a smaller window
the head of a man
standing
at a kitchen sink
doing dishes
talking over his shoulder
to someone further into the house

the sound of snow crunching under our feet
disturbs no one
makes no one come to a window
to peer out
or to a door
to flip on a light

we move like phantoms through patches of light
swallowed again and again by the night
only dog-prints and foot-prints
show we have passed

____

Ghost Room (copyright © m.a.h. hinton)

For the past couple of months, I have felt like a wandering Aramean. A complicated series of furniture misadventures with more plot twists than a Robert Ludlum novel had meant that for awhile our living room –the place where I do most of my reading and writing– had been transformed into a sofa storage and staging area. I was displaced and lost.

A perfect place to read

At different times in my life it has been different places. I have read Auden in a tent by flashlight late at night on the Continental Divide Trail in the Anaconda-Pintler Wilderness in Montana and Hugh MacDiarmad on a battered Lazyboy in a dingy St. Paul studio apartment overrun with box-elder bugs. I read Ezra Pound at an Irish bar in Chicago and Ford Madox Ford on long city-bus rides going to and from a downtown editing job I never really liked. I read Paradise Lost in a hospital waiting room and Ted Kooser in a cabin on Lake Superior. On beaches in Florida I read Travis McGee and in a dimly lit apartment of borrowed furniture in Saginaw, Michigan, I read Kafka and Yeats.

For the past few years, I have done most of my reading… and writing… in the living room of our Bloomington home overlooking our less-than perfect front yard and our quite-perfect suburban street. Since I never close the shades on the big window that faces the sidewalk and street and routinely read late into the evening, I have heard that the neighbors are well aware of how I spend my evenings. Whether they approve or not… I cannot say.

With my Kindle app on my iPod, I now find I can read almost anywhere… and frequently do. Sitting in the car waiting for a daughter, sitting in some waiting room or at a desk waiting for a computer I am working on to reimage or update…. And yet in the end, I spent the past few months feeling homeless because my living room, lined with books, was in disarray… and in a house with many rooms I had no place to go.

I am in the northeast corner of my living room again which is in southwest corner of our house. The room is a long rectangle. In front of me, in the southeast corner, is one tall bookcase with westerns and chess books and books about Montana, and next to that another small four-sided bookcase that spins filled with Modern Library classics. In center of the wall is a big picture window looking south over a yard that needs to be raked again. On the western wall, is one bookcase, a piano, and two more bookcases with glass doors on top to protect older books.

On the coffee table in front of the couch I am sitting on is a chess board and a few piles of books in various states of being read, and more books on the coffee table’s lower shelf. I look around the room, at spines of books I have read and plan to read. On books of history, and theology, and poetry, and mysteries, and science fiction, and fantasy, and French Literature, and Russian Literature, and books that have changed my life, and books that may change my life in the future… and I am as content as I am hard-wired to be. I have my home back. I have a good place to read.

____

This is the seventh book review in the series “Poets on Poetry.” Reviews of books in this series can be found at “Poets on Poetry.”

More than any poet, I associate Auden with mountains because that is where I first seriously read him. I carried a volume of his selected poems into the Anaconda-Pintler Wilderness when I worked trail crew there for the United States Forest Service during summers in the early 1980s. At nights, after everyone else went to sleep, I would lay in my sleeping bag with a flashlight balanced on my shoulder and read his poems long into the cool, clear night.

Later I read this book, Dyer’s Hand – which I think I picked up at a used bookstore near the Toledo Art Museum – when I was living briefly back in Montana after I had decided to no longer be a Lutheran pastor. I read it while I was studying Irish Literature and fly tying.

As a poet, Auden is one of a handful of 20th century poets that can truly be called great. As a critic, Auden is inspiring, insightful, imaginative, and quotable as hell. There is no critic of poetry that I would recommend above Auden.

Opening now the battered paperback book I first read more than 25 years ago, I look at lines I underlined and margin notes I made in those long-gone mountain days. Flipping pages, I recognize themes and trajectories that have guided my reading and writing life. Themes quite familiar to regular readers of MontanaWriter.

There are so many fine quotes, I do not know where to stop. In the end, I include quotes from just a few essays here. Another time, down the road perhaps, I will look at a few more.

In the North Country, it is full Autumn now. The trees we see every day are turning or have already turned. The days are dry and the sky that vivid blue that only those of us who live in the land of four seasons will ever truly know. I sit on my deck reading Auden… and the long years melt away…. and the flat country I inhabit now melts away. I am in the mountains again.

“It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.” (cf. “Foreword”)

“To read is to translate, for no two persons’ experiences are the same.” (cf. essay “Reading”)

“In learning to read well, scholarship, valuable as it is, is less important than instinct….” (cf. essay “Reading”)

“A poet cannot read another poet, nor a novelist another novelist, without comparing their work to his own. His judgements as he reads are of this kind: My God! My Great Grandfather! My Uncle! My Enemy! My Brother! My imbecile Brother!” (cf. essay “Reading”)

“Pleasure is by no means an infallible critical guide, but it is the least fallible.” (cf. essay “Reading”)

“The critical opinions of a writer should always be taken with a large grain of salt. For the most part, they are manifestations of his debate with himself as to what he should do next and what he should avoid. Moreover, unlike a scientist, he is usually even more ignorant of what his colleagues are doing than is the general public. A poet over thirty may still be a voracious reader, but it is unlikely much of what he reads is modern poetry.” (cf. essay “Reading”)

“Every writer would rather be rich than poor, but no genuine writer cares about popularity as such. He needs approval of his work by others in order to be reassured that the vision of life he believes he has had is a true vision and not a self-delusion, but he can only be reassured by those whose judgement he respects.” (cf. essay “Writing”)

“Writers, poets especially, have an odd relation to the public because their medium, language, is not, like the paint of the painter or the notes of the composer, reserved for their use but is the common property of the linguistic group to which they belong.” (cf. essay “Writing”)

“The degree of excitement which a writer feels during the process of composition is as much an indication of the value of the final result as the excitement felt by a worshiper is an indication of the value of his devotions, that is to say, very little indication.” (cf. essay “Writing”)

“No writer can ever judge exactly how good or bad a work of his may be, but he can always know, not immediately perhaps, but certainly in a short while whether something he has written is authentic….” (cf. essay “Writing”)

“… whenever English poets have felt that the gap between poetic and ordinary speech was growing to wide, there has been a stylistic revolution to bring them closer again.” (cf. essay “Writing”)

“Nothing is worse than a bad poem which was intended to be great.” (cf. essay “Making, Knowing, and Judging”)

“In the eyes of others a man is a poet if he has written one good poem. In his own he is only a poet at the moment when he is making his last revision to a new poem. The moment before, he was still only a potential poet; the moment after, he is a man who has ceased to write poetry, perhaps forever.” (cf. essay “Making, Knowing, and Judging”)

“A young poet may be conceited about his good taste, but he is under no illusion about his ignorance. He is well aware of how much poetry there is that he would like but of which he has never heard, and that there are learned men who have read it. His problem is knowing which learned man to ask, for it is not just more good poetry that he wants to read, but more of the kind he likes. He judges a scholarly or critical book less by the text than by the quotations, and all his life, I think, when he reads a work of criticism, he will find himself trying to guess what taste lies behind the critic’s judgement.” (cf. essay “Making, Knowing, and Judging”)

“Whatever his defects, a poet at least thinks a poem more important than anything which can be said about it….” (cf. essay “Making, Knowing, and Judging”)

“…it is from the sacred encounters of his imagination that a poet’s impulse to write a poem arises.” (cf. essay “Making, Knowing, and Judging”)

“… unless the poet sacrifices his feelings completely to the poem so that they are no longer his but the poem’s, he fails.” (cf. essay “The Virgin & The Dynamo”)

“A poet has not only to educate himself as a poet, he has also to consider how he is going to earn a living. Ideally, he should have a job which does not in any way involve the manipulation of words.” (cf essay “The Poet & The City”)

“The poet cannot understand the function of money in modern society because for him there is no relation between subjective value and market value.” (cf essay “The Poet & The City”)

“… every artist feels himself at odds with modern civilization.” (cf essay “The Poet & The City”)

“In our age, the mere making of a work of art is itself a political act. So long as artists exist, making what they please and think they ought to make, even if it is not terribly good, even if it appeals to only a handful of people, they remind Management of something managers need to be reminded of, namely, that the managed are people with faces, not anonymous numbers, that Homo Laborans is also Homo Ludens.” (cf essay “The Poet & The City”)

“…every artist who happens also to be a Christian wishes he could be a polytheist….” (cf. essay “Postscript: Christianity and Art”)

“To the imagination, the sacred is self-evident.” (cf. essay “Postscript: Christianity and Art”)

“A poet who calls himself a Christian cannot but feel uncomfortable when he realizes that the New Testament contains no verse (except in the apocryphal, and gnostic, Acts of John), no prose….” (cf. essay “Postscript: Christianity and Art”)

“As Rudolf Kassner has pointed out: ‘The difficulty about the God-man for the poet lies in the Word being made Flesh. This means that reason and imagination are one. But does not Poetry, as such, live from their being a gulf between them?” (cf. essay “Postscript: Christianity and Art”)

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"Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" by Brueghel

On a recent weekend trip to Iowa, killing time waiting for Sue who was at her college band reunion, I was doing two things that I like best: browsing bookstores and samplings new beers. (I have often thought that in a perfect world there would be a combination used-books store and bar on every other corner. On the other corners there would be good, non-chain restaurants.)

In one bookstore a collection of William Carlos Williams caught my eye. It is one that I once owned myself but have misplaced over the years. A paperback copy, it was too beat-up and penciled-up to consider buying. But since I like flipping through books of poetry that others have already highlighted and marked-up to see what lines they may have liked or notes they may have made, I spent a few minutes with it anyway.

Turning pages I saw familiar and favorite poems and lines highlighted, notes made in a cramped and unfamiliar hand, and some poems that I had all but forgotten.

One unfamiliar poem in particular stood out, “Landscape with the Fall of Icaraus.” The previous owner had made no marks on the poem at all. That is why it originally caught my eye. Reading it I found myself amazed that I could I have read it all those years ago and forgotten it… not made the quick and lasting connection between it and Auden’s “Musee Des Beaux Art,” one of my favorite Auden poems… one of my favorite poems in general, and one I have reviewed here at MontanaWriter ( Auden’s “Musee Des Beaux Arts.”).

Both William Carlos Williams and W.H. Auden wrote poems based on one painting  “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” by Flemish painter Pieter Brueghel. The two poems are as different as the poets themselves. Williams the American poet. Auden ever the English one. Auden moving from larger ideas towards the painting itself. Williams beginning with the painting and transcending out. And yet in the end one common theme expressed in such different ways: tragedy going unnoticed.

On a beautiful Friday morning, I am thinking of poems I have read and forgotten. Of books and lines misplaced over time. I am thinking of the thousand connections we so easily miss. The way we miss so often what is most important as we go about our daily lives. I am thinking how glad I am that I picked up William Carlos Williams. How glad I am that a previous owner also missed the connection between Williams and Auden that I too had missed all those years ago. I am thinking how wonderful a thing poetry really is.

Enjoy!

And then read Auden again ( Auden’s “Musee Des Beaux Arts.”).

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring

a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry

of the year was
awake tingling
near

the edge of the sea
concerned
with itself

sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings’ wax

unsignificantly
off the coast
there was

a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning

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