Posts Tagged poetry review

Sun Worshipper (copyright © m.a.h. hinton)

A.E. Housman began his poetry career by self-publishing his own volume of verse. He had sent the 63 poems that make up A Shropshire Lad to many publishers. They had all turned it down. In the end, he paid to publish it himself in 1896.

I resonate naturally with those poets who have had trouble finding audiences for their work. It gives me hope. It reminds me of what ultimately matters.

Houseman’s poetry has a remarkable musicality that has led many composers over the years to write works based on his poems. It is a musicality based on his superior understanding of rhyme, of course, but also I think on his under-appreciated sense of silence.

Silence and space are the most difficult part of poetry to explain and to learn. It is the thing that most separates poetry from prose. The thing that is closest to the magic-talk and god-talk that ultimately lies at the heart of all poetry… and hence makes poetry in the end the most sacred and powerful of all the arts.

When we read a poem aloud we feel the silence in rest-stops and breath-stops… in the little breath-catches that mirror surprise and wonder. This is one of the many reasons that poetry should always be read aloud. Imagine your favorite song never being played, but always laying quiet on a page.

In the season where memories of Christmases-past mingle so easily with our daily activities and plans, “Into My Heart An Air That Kills” seems like the perfect poem.

Enjoy!

When I lived in Chicago I would occasionally go to a little bar to read and study over a pint of Guinness… and to watch Cubs games in the spring and fall. One of the waitresses, who was young and pretty and very much in love with a med student at the University of Chicago, was an on-again off-again French Literature student. Seeing me reading Yeats one day she said, “You should read Belloc. He makes English beautiful… and fun. Everybody in Chicago reads too much Irish Literature. Irish poetry is depressing, just like Irish music.”

Belloc was an unrepentant Roman Catholic with a prophetic eye. From the Wikipedia article on Belloc, comes this quote, which I have found re-quoted several places over the last few years, by various writers:

The story must not be neglected by any modern, who may think in error that the East has finally fallen before the West, that Islam is now enslaved—to our political and economic power at any rate if not to our philosophy. It is not so. Islam essentially survives, and Islam would not have survived had the Crusade made good its hold upon the essential point of Damascus. Islam survives. Its religion is intact; therefore its material strength may return. Our religion is in peril, and who can be confident in the continued skill, let alone the continued obedience, of those who make and work our machines? … There is with us a complete chaos in religious doctrine… We worship ourselves, we worship the nation; or we worship (some few of us) a particular economic arrangement believed to be the satisfaction of social justice… Islam has not suffered this spiritual decline; and in the contrast between [our religious chaos and Islam's] religious certitudes still strong throughout the Mohammedan world lies our peril. ~ Hillaire Belloc

“October” is fine example of what Belloc in his poetry does best. It is certainly a fine poem for an October day.

Enjoy!

October
Look, how those steep woods on the mountain’s face
Burn, burn against the sunset; now the cold
Invades our very noon: the year’s grown old,
Mornings are dark, and evenings come apace.
The vines below have lost their purple grace,
And in Forreze the white wrack backward rolled,
Hangs to the hills tempestuous, fold on fold,
And moaning gusts make desolate all the place.

Mine host the month, at thy good hostelry,
Tired limbs I’ll stretch and steaming beast I’ll tether;
Pile on great logs with Gascon hand and free,
And pour the Gascon stuff that laughs at weather;
Swell your tough lungs, north wind, no whit care we,
Singing old songs and drinking wine together.

____

(copyright © m.a.h. hinton)

Here in the North Country, October means change: leaves changing from shades of green to shades of gold and red; nights changing from warm to cool and then changing at last to cold. And behind all the change is a waiting… an anticipation for what we know is to come. What comes, of course, every year and yet every year seems to take us by surprise. In this little poem Sandburg captures so well the many complex emotions surrounding the changes inherent in October.

“Falltime” comes from Sandburg’s second collection of poems, Cornhuskers. In it he makes interesting use of repetition: Gold and gold, thistle blue and larkspur blue, shining and shining, and, of course, birds, bird, and birds. It is an interesting way to make sure the emphasis is where he wants it to be.

The more time I spend with Sandburg, the more I appreciate his work, even his lesser known and smaller poems… maybe especially his lesser known and smaller poems.

A poet’s reputation is made on their best work. We know Frost for “Road Not Taken” and “Death of the Hired Man” and we know Eliot for “Prufrock” and “Wasteland.” Yet the more time you spend with poetry the sooner you realize that ultimately you truly love and admire a poet, not for their great works, but for the character and direction of their small and eloquent gestures.

On a transitional October morning, “Falltime” seems like just the right poem.

Enjoy!

Falltime
Gold of a ripe oat straw, gold of a southwest moon,
Canada thistle blue and flimmering larkspur blue,
Tomatoes shining in the October sun with red hearts,
Shining five and six in a row on a wooden fence,
Why do you keep wishes on your faces all day long,
Wishes like women with half-forgotten lovers going to new cities?
What is there for you in the birds, the birds, the birds, crying down on the north wind in September, acres of birds spotting the air going south?
Is there something finished? And some new beginning on the way?

____

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”)

_____

“We should not make light of the troubles of children. They are worse than ours, because we can see the end of our trouble and they can never see any end.” ~ William Middleton

“… never talk as grown-up people do of the happiness of childhood.” ~ W. B. Yeats

There are some poems that you find yourself returning to again and again. “Childhood” by Richard Aldington is one of those poems for me. Certain memories and images, certain events, even certain lines and images from other poets and poems will suddenly bring this one to my mind. That is the way of great poetry. And this is certainly great in every sense of the word.

I first remember reading this poem as part of an anthology when I was about 15 or 16 years old. It may have been in a copy of Some Imagist Poets (which is now available for free many places, including here) or it may have been another anthology all together. What I do remember is that the volume was blue and old and it was in the library that was in the basement of the Broadwater County Courthouse. And I remember reading this poem and loving it.

As a poet, Aldington is classified as an “Imagist.” The term Imagist was originally coined by Ezra Pound to describe the kind of poetry both Aldington and his more famous wife, poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), were writing. The kind of poetry Pound himself was exploring. The credo of those who viewed them selves as  Imagists is spelled out nicely in Some Imagist Poets:

1. To use the language of common speech, but to employ always the exact word, not the nearly-exact, nor the merely decorative word.
2. To create new rhythms — as the expression of new moods — and not to copy old rhythms, which merely echo old moods. We do not insist on ‘free-verse’ as the only method of writing poetry. We fight for it as for a principle of liberty. We believe that the individuality of a poet may often be better expressed in free-verse than in conventional forms. In poetry, a new cadence means a new idea.
3. To allow absolute freedom in the choice of subject. It is not good art to write badly about aeroplanes and automobiles; nor is it necessarily bad art to write well about the past. We believe passionately in the artistic value of modern life, but we wish to point out that there is nothing so uninspiring nor so old-fashioned as an aeroplane of the year 1911.
4. To present an image (hence the name: “Imagist”). We are not a school of painters, but we believe that poetry should render particulars exactly and not deal in vague generalities, however magnificent and sonorous. It s for this reason that we oppose the cosmic poet, who seems to us to shirk the real difficulties of art.
5. To produce poetry that is hard and clear, never blurred nor indefinite.
6. Finally, most of us believe that concentration is of the very essence of poetry.

In “Childhood,” Aldington achieves what he sets out to do. There is certainly nothing “blurred” or “indefinite” about it. It is exactly what an Imagist poem is suppose to be. It is exactly what a poem is suppose to be.

Enjoy!

Childhood

After a month of high heat and humidity, we woke up yesterday in the North Country to cooler air. Fall is still a month away, but NFL training camps have begun and the Gopher players and their new coaches are preparing for the expanded Big 10 season.  Yesterday we could turn off the AC, open windows, and go for long a walk. Yesterday we got a foretaste of the feast to come.

My mind is on Yeats as it is so often during times of seasonal and life transitions. More than any other poet – for there is no poet I have read more or closer – Yeats’ words regularly come to me unbidden. I find myself walking down a quiet hallway and suddenly his words are there keeping cadence with my echoing steps… my breath and heartbeat singing his words.

As I have said on this blog on other occasions, Yeats – more than any other poet – grew greater over time. Most of his best work was done in his fifties, sixties, and seventies. His poetic ear and intellect sharpening, not dulling, with time and experience

“Among School Children” is a poem from later in life and has long been one of my favorites. It’s famous last stanza is familiar to any English major. Occasioned by a visit the famous Irish poet/statesman made to a classroom of children, this is a poem about fame, and aging, and youth, and remembering…. But most of all it is a poem about the true power of art.

Yesterday I stood in my backyard and read this poem out-loud to the day, my breath making sounds Yeats once made, my heart beating in time with his, my bones and soul filled with the same emotion. That is the power of art… of poetry… of Yeats.

Enjoy!

Among School Children

I

I walk through the long schoolroom questioning;
A kind old nun in a white hood replies;
The children learn to cipher and to sing,
To study reading-books and histories,
To cut and sew, be neat in everything
In the best modern way – the children’s eyes
In momentary wonder stare upon
A sixty-year-old smiling public man.

II

I dream of a Ledaean body, bent
Above a sinking fire. a tale that she
Told of a harsh reproof, or trivial event
That changed some childish day to tragedy -
Told, and it seemed that our two natures blent
Into a sphere from youthful sympathy,
Or else, to alter Plato’s parable,
Into the yolk and white of the one shell.

III

And thinking of that fit of grief or rage
I look upon one child or t’other there
And wonder if she stood so at that age -
For even daughters of the swan can share
Something of every paddler’s heritage -
And had that colour upon cheek or hair,
And thereupon my heart is driven wild:
She stands before me as a living child.

IV

Her present image floats into the mind -
Did Quattrocento finger fashion it
Hollow of cheek as though it drank the wind
And took a mess of shadows for its meat?
And I though never of Ledaean kind
Had pretty plumage once – enough of that,
Better to smile on all that smile, and show
There is a comfortable kind of old scarecrow.

V

What youthful mother, a shape upon her lap
Honey of generation had betrayed,
And that must sleep, shriek, struggle to escape
As recollection or the drug decide,
Would think her Son, did she but see that shape
With sixty or more winters on its head,
A compensation for the pang of his birth,
Or the uncertainty of his setting forth?

VI

Plato thought nature but a spume that plays
Upon a ghostly paradigm of things;
Solider Aristotle played the taws
Upon the bottom of a king of kings;
World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras
Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings
What a star sang and careless Muses heard:
Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird.

VII

Both nuns and mothers worship images,
But thos the candles light are not as those
That animate a mother’s reveries,
But keep a marble or a bronze repose.
And yet they too break hearts – O presences
That passion, piety or affection knows,
And that all heavenly glory symbolise -
O self-born mockers of man’s enterprise;

VIII

Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul.
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

_____

A page from MacLeish's Notebook

“What can be explained is not poetry.” W.B. Yeats

It is summer and my mind is wandering. I stand in front of my bookcase and pick up a volume of Archibald MacLeish that I first read 30 summers ago, when I was first in love with poetry… in love with love. I look at lines I underlined, notes I made, cross references I noted to other poets and poems. I read the lines I underlined out loud. My breath makes the same sounds my younger self once made… that MacLeish once made. I forget my restlessness.

MacLeish brings an intellect to his poetry that is impossible not to admire. Yet if you approach a MacLeish poem merely intellectually you will miss most of what makes him a great poet: his underlining emotive integrity. All poems after all (even those by intellects as great as MacLeish’s) begin as emotive moments.

“Sigmund Freud Discovers the Sea Shell” is a prime example of what makes MacLeish a great poet: his textual duplexity. (“Textual Duplexity” may not be a real term, but I like like it anyway… it gets as close to what I mean as any term I can think of.) The prosaic argument that the poem makes is straight forward. But the poetic heart of the poem is not an idea but an emotion. Indeed, if the poem was merely a discussion of the relationship between science and religion it would be neither a poem nor unforgettable. It is the integrity of emotion that makes this a good poem… that makes it unforgettable. That make you stand 30 years later speaking the words into the air as if your life depended on it.

Enjoy!

Sigmund Freud Discovers the Sea Shell
Science, that simple saint, cannot be bothered
Figuring what anything is for:
Enough for her devotions that things are
And can be contemplated soon as gathered.

She knows how every living thing was fathered,
She calculates the climate of each star,
She counts the fish at sea, but cannot care
Why any one of them exists, fish, fire or feathered.

Why should she? Her religion is to tell
By rote her rosary of perfect answers.
Metaphysics she can leave to man:
She never wakes at night in heaven or hell

Staring at darkness. In her holy cell
There is no darkness ever: the pure candle
Burns, the beads drop briskly from her hand.

Who dares to offer Her the curled sea shell!
She will not touch it!–knows the world she sees
Is all the world there is! Her faith is perfect!

And still he offers the sea shell . . .

What surf
Of what far sea upon what unknown ground
Troubles forever with that asking sound?
What surge is this whose question never ceases?

_____

When will man know what birds know?

There are poets I love because they represent elusive/ideal/transcendent/otherworldly beauty: Yeats, Keats, Shelley, Milton, Blake, Byron. There are other poets I love because they represent familiar/democratic (small “d”)/transubstatiated/ thisworldly beauty: Kooser, Heaney, Whitman, Frost, and Sandburg.

I still have my first volume of Carl Sandburg that I ever purchased, Honey and Salt. I bought it for $1.50 new in September 1976, according to a note I made in my 16-year-old hand on the inside front cover. Thirty-five years later it still sits on my shelf… one of only a few books that remain from my pre-college days.

This weekend while driving back from the Great Smoky Mountains, Sue and I decided at the last minute to stop by Galesburg, Illinois, to see Carl Sandburg’s birthplace. Since I had a long record for finding writer’s museums/homes closed at the times I tried visiting, and since it was late Sunday morning, we did not expect it to be open. But we thought it was worth seeing anyway.

It was open and a wonderful tribute to wonderful poet.

“Wingtip” comes from the volume Honey and Salt. It is a simple poem, but one that I have always loved. At once elegant and democratic, easy and complex… it is the work of a poet in love with the world and with the things of this world. In a word, it is pure Sandburg.

Enjoy!

Wingtip
The birds – are they worth remembering?
Is flight a wonder and one wingtip a
space marvel?
When will man know what birds know?

_____

There are a number of very good poems about growing old. Yeats, of course, wrote a goodly number but all poets if they live long enough find themselves moved to write about the process of aging. It is as inevitable as… aging itself.

As a poet, Mark Strand belongs to that peculiar class of professional teacher/poets that has come to dominate poetry in particular and to a lesser extent literature in general. That he has spent his life in academia no doubt influences the language and themes of his work. He is truly an international poet and his poetry reflects it.

Strand has always been a bit of a struggle for me in much the same way that Robert Bly is. Their surrealistic poems can easily leave me cold and feeling like they are trying too hard. “The Remains” is not one of those poems. It has at its core an honest emotion that cannot be ignored.

On the 52nd 4th of July of my life, it seems like the perfect poem.

Enjoy!

The Remains
I empty myself of the names of others. I empty my pockets.
I empty my shoes and leave them beside the road.
At night I turn back the clocks;
I open the family album and look at myself as a boy.

What good does it do? The hours have done their job.
I say my own name. I say goodbye.
The words follow each other downwind.
I love my wife but send her away.

My parents rise out of their thrones
into the milky rooms of clouds. How can I sing?
Time tells me what I am. I change and I am the same.
I empty myself of my life and my life remains.

_____

Montana Sparrow (photo © m.a.h. hinton)

Billy Collins’ popularity and financial success make him one of those poets it is hard to ignore. The quality of his poetry makes him impossible to forget.

Collin’s poem “The First Dream” is a excellent example of what makes him a great poet: a great idea/moment presented magnificently. There is nothing complex about the form or language and yet it accomplishes much. It dives straight to the heart of the matter… straight to the heart of being human.

It is also a great example of two truisms about poetry that I have written about elsewhere on this blog:

• poetry is ultimately born in an emotive moment, and
• all poems are really love poems.

On a beautiful summer day, what could be better than a love poem about dreams.

Enjoy!

The First Dream
The Wind is ghosting around the house tonight
and as I lean against the door of sleep
I begin to think about the first person to dream,
how quiet he must have seemed the next morning

as the others stood around the fire
draped in the skins of animals
talking to each other only in vowels,
for this was long before the invention of consonants.

He might have gone off by himself to sit
on a rock and look into the mist of a lake
as he tried to tell himself what had happened,
how he had gone somewhere without going,

how he had put his arms around the neck
of a beast that the others could touch
only after they had killed it with stones,
how he felt its breath on his bare neck.

Then again, the first dream could have come
to a woman, though she would behave,
I suppose, much the same way,
moving off by herself to be alone near water,

except that the curve of her young shoulders
and the tilt of her downcast head
would make her appear to be terribly alone,
and if you were there to notice this,

you might have gone down as the first person
to ever fall in love with the sadness of another.

_____