April 10 Taniguchi Buson: The Piercing Chill I Feel, Matsuo Basho: On a Barren Branch

Speaking of imagery… the perfect form to illustrate imagery is the haiku. A special poetic form that is near and dear to my heart. It is deceptively simple – everybody can count out the meter within seconds (5-7-5), but will spend a lifetime trying to be zen enough to use it to its fullest form. Haiku is about capturing a moment with the perfect words that speak to that moment. I always think of it as a moment of satori (burst of enlightenment or revelation) where a sight, sound, smell, touch or taste touches you on a very deep insightful level. It’s difficult to express haiku or what the poem is saying to you, but you have to have a very quiet mind to read it and understand the full moment of beauty.

Imagery in poetry in general is like this trying hard to express the perfect image in the perfect words to send across an idea or feeling to the audience. In yesterday’s poem it was idea that was trying to express itself: the Metro is filled with beauty and wonder. In today’s poem it is a visceral feeling that captures a moment or rather expresses an emotion.

Sometimes the most powerful prose comes from the most common sensory experiences – the dank smell of feces, the fresh smell of blossoms these two smells put the reader straight into the action. If a character enters a door and the room smells feces, subconsciously the reader thinks of this room as an evil, or at the very least, bad place to be. It always amazes me how the simple evokes so much. I think this is why the haiku is such a powerful form of poetry.

The Piercing Chill I Feel

by Taniguchi Buson

The piercing chill I feel:
my dead wife’s comb, in our bedroom,
under my heel…

This next haiku I included just because I LOVE Basho and I love the Fall.

On a Barren Branch

by Matsuo Basho

On a barren branch
a raven has perched –
autumn dusk

April 9 Ezra Pound: In a Station of the Metro

Here, I hit a new chapter of the textbook called “imagery”. This word is often associated with the visual arts, paintings, sculpture, film, murals, so when applied to the purely literary arts it takes on a slightly different tone. Instead of an image being presented for a viewer to interpret the idea it represents, a visual picture is painted with words. Instead of seeing a girl holding a frog, the poet writes: “she with dimpled cheeks and golden locks, a simple orange frock, stripped socks and tennis shoes puts pink lips near his smooth, slimy, green and brown, mottled, swamp-water skin.” The viewer is guided through the picture with symbols that represent the representation. What does the image of a girl kissing a frog mean? Well, we can take from our common social knowledge of fairy tales, or we can decide for ourselves something wholly unique (perhaps she is the symbol of socialization and he is the symbol of the wilderness).

When a poet creates a word portrait, the words are chosen very carefully to evoke the right image and the right emotional feeling. I could have called the girl “a slender, white beauty” and the frog “warty, mud-colored ugly thing”. This renders a different picture than the one I originally painted. Instead of Pipi Longstocking, the girl is a fairy tale princess and instead of an innocent swamp creature, the frog is some grotesque thing dug out of the mud.

Ezra Pound creates a word portrait in “In a Station of the Metro” in a similar manner. This poem was originally thirty lines, so be assured that the words chosen were done painstakingly so. He’s not simply showing us a visual, but giving us an impression much like a haiku. And when you read the poem, you feel as if you are in a magical place where many wondrous things are happening. The thing I love best about this poem is that it is proof that simple, though difficult to attain, is always best.

In a Station of the Metro

by Ezra Pound

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

April 8 Robert Frost: Fire and Ice

Another poem from the XJ Kennedy, Introduction to Poetry “Saying and Suggesting” chapter.

Anxiety, even the word makes our feet shift a bit. For some it is something to be avoided at all costs and others lived steeped within it like a fresh water fish lost in the ocean. For me it is a mire that I muck my way through. Last week, I shivered in my apartment as if a tsunami swept through and washed me out to see. I had the lovely gift of paranoia, fear  and illness: a man was trying to force his way into my life. I’d exchanged words with him and found him to be an angry man – a man filled with fire and yet direction to burn it in. He seemed quite satisfied to burn whoever he came into contact with and I, for one, was not interested in being one of them. But he seemed insistent none the less.

What do we fear the most? The end. I submit that all of those polls are wrong; we fear death much more than we fear public speaking. We can speak in public, but we do not spend our waking hours trying to avoid it – not like death. We write and do art to stay immortal. The same reason we procreate. We try to find adventure or pain to feel alive and if we cannot find it (or find the wherewithal to find it) we live it vicariously through theater, books, television, movies or the internet. Fear of death causes us to buy guns and start wars. I will be buying pepper spray and be taking self-defense classes – the fire won’t take me, not without a fight.

In Robert Frost’s poem he acknowledges the thing that we spend the most amount of time avoiding: that there is an end and it is inevitable. So how is the best way to face that end? And which “would suffice”? Should the world end with a bang or a whimper? Is it better to let our hatred and our fear eat us up or to let apathy take the day? Bang – one final world war or whimper – stagnation of all societies through lack of any invention or endeavor. If we are to read between the lines, perhaps the poet is suggesting that there is a middle ground, perhaps it is the only place to endure.

I’m back to my mire, feeling more confident, putting the incident into perspective; I’ve survived a lot so far why not this? But I am still vigilant. I hope that my form of fire can be guided into courage and my form of ice can be wisdom.

Fire and Ice

by Robert Frost

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

April 1 Wallace Stevens: The Emperor of Ice Cream

This is one of those poems that test me a bit since I have a hard time interpreting it. I love it none-the-less, there is something playful and mischievous in its tone. But underneath that tone there is something colder, more frightening.

This is another poem embedded in the “Saying and Suggesting” chapter, so what it says on the surface sounds more like a child’s chant, something silly and nonsensical, and, hey, ice cream. But keep in mind, children’s poems are often thinly disguised horror stories.

We all remember “ring around the rosie/pocket full of posies/ ashoo ashoo/ we all fall down!” That’s about the black plague, yet all little girls at sometime or another join hands and chant it, then fall and giggle. “London Bridge is falling down” is about imprisoning a woman (I’m thinking someone royal who was vying for the throne). “Take the key and lock her up.”

I like that “Emperor” is similar to a child’s poem and has what seems to be a thinly disguised as a protest, or perhaps just a warning to those who might encounter, “the muscular one… the roller of big cigars.” He seems to be the one with all the power as he is muscled and is whipping rather large (voluptuous) curds. But the woman in the beginning appears to be dead in the end and to have been for hire at the beginning (“wenches dawdle in such dress” – wenches aren’t known to dress conservatively). A discrepancy in power between the sexes? That’s what it suggests to me.

He’s not a warm guy if he is the emperor of ice cream, something delicious and creamy, but cold. Perhaps ice cream being sweet means that he’s attractive. Or perhaps it being a child’s treat means that he is immature, a brute. Perhaps he lures the innocent with it (“got some candy, little kid”). But the connotation that sticks out the most is that it is cold; a word that gets mentioned in the second stanza (and there are glass nobs – glass is often compared to ice and is the word for ice in French, a glazier is a glass installer). Oh, and there’s that whole dead body on a slab thing that might refer to lifelessness of the word “cold”. But cold also means without emotion, the word calculating is often paired with it. It almost makes me wonder, is the roller of the big cigars the one that might have done the deed? Perhaps this is a Jack the Ripper child’s poem. Ashoo! Ashoo! We all fall down.

The Emperor of Ice Cream

by Wallace Stevens

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscluar one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups Concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dwadle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month’s newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

March 28 Geoffrey Hill: Merlin

Before there was Gandalf, there was Merlin. He was the original magic using figure, but now he’s gone. And in a way this poem asks what did he take with him? Magic? Nobility? Is there a certain type of world, type of man that is gone with him?

“Create me a world with real tears, hard love as difficult as a child’s first steps,” says the poem “The End of Science Fiction”. It also has allusions to the bible and both talk about ancient, mythical kingdoms where people make bold moves and lived lives full of passion for the better or the worse. These were the men and women who are forged kingdoms and lead people to their destinies. Compare this to today where most things are molded in plastic.

Do I think everything was wonderful then and awful now? No. I wouldn’t be up for another bout of the Black Plague or the Children’s Crusade or the Spanish Inquisition.

On the other hand, I do kind of wonder what it would be like to live in a world without all of the noise of television, the internet, the ever-pervasive media. What would it be like to live in a world closer to the human touch, to live in a sense of wonder of Nature and the gentle movement of the rolling world? What would it be like to see the portents and the signs drifting through the clouds or a flock of birds, to have a sense of destiny. Would I feel as hum-drum as I do now?

Merlin

by Geoffrey Hill

I will consider the outnumbering dead:
For they are the husks of what was rich seed.
Now, should they come together to be fed,
They would outstrip the locusts’ covering tide.

Arthur, Elaine, Mordred; they are all gone
Among the raftered galleries of bone.
By the long barrows of Logres they are made one,
And over their city stands the pinnacled corn.

March 27 Walter de la Mare: The Listeners

I had a room in a house when I was in school where the doorknob was missing, so I grabbed a random scrap of paper and covered up the hole. The random scrap had this poem on it, so I read it ever day for two years.

For the longest time, I thought it was kind of a stupid poem, because it seemed to be about a crazy guy knocking on a door, paranoid that people could hear him. But the more I read the poem, the more I realized that this was not so. There was something alive inside the poem. This was something neither he nor I could see, hear, taste, smell or touch, but we could feel its presence creeping about in the poem’s words – something hidden between its lines watching and waiting and listening.

The house I was in was an old Victorian house, perhaps it too had listeners of its own. Perhaps I became haunted by a poem.

The Listeners

by Walter do la Mare

“Is there anybody there?” said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champed the grasses
Of the forest’s ferny floor:
And a bird flew up out of the turret,
Above the Traveller’s head:
And he smote upon the door again a second time;
“Is there anybody there?” he said.
But no one descended to the Traveller;
No head from the leaf-fringed sill
Leaned over and looked into his gray eyes,
Where he stood perplexed and still.
But only a host of phantom listeners
That dwelt in the lone house then
Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight
To that voice from the world of men:
Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair
That goes down to the empty hall,
Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken
By the lonely Traveller’s call.
And he felt in his heart their strangeness,
Their stillness answering his cry,
While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,
‘Neath the starred and leafy sky;
For he suddenly smote on the door, even
Louder, and lifted his head: –
“Tell them I came, and no one answered,
That I kept my word,” he said.
Never the least stir made the listeners,
Though every word he spake
Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house
From the one man left awake:
Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
And how the silence surged softly backward,
When the plunging hoofs were gone.

Is anybody out there?

A final note: This poem reminds me of the first part of the book Dracula where Johnathan Harker is lost in the Romanian back-country and stumbles upon the Count’s crumbling castle. He too hears voices and scratches in the night. There are listeners waiting for him, but never stirring – hungry, salivating listeners who are under the Count’s orders not to move.

I thought I would post some of the textbook’s questions attached to this, because they’re interesting and worth contemplating. It asks what you think the word “listeners” in the title means before you read the poem and after (still creepy)? What does the word “turret” suggest? And why does a bird fly from it? Why a “moonlit” door, instead of just a door? What is the Traveler’s story? Who is he? What promise is he keeping? What brought him to the castle? Why do you think so little happens in this poem? Does the lack of action suggest something?

 

March 26 Stanley Kunitz: the Long Boat

I’ve obtained a photo copy of several poems, but don’t remember where they came from. I am a collector of random works. I have many photo copies of poems and short stories – even one novel – just lining shelves tucked away here and there. I have thoughts and poems and pieces from books I liked jotted quickly down on sticky notes and torn notebook pages.

This photo copy of poems seems to contrast and compare poems – two per page. Today’s poem is a contrast of the poem that I put into the March 25th posting (the Ebbing Hour). It’s called “the Long Boat”.

In a way, they are opposite poems. They both involve the sea and sleep, but there the similarity ends. “Ebbing Hour” starts with a sleeper who wakes up and bravely faces what is before her “I don’t want to miss/the last important thing/I’ll ever do.” She feels that her time is up, just as the subject of this poem does, but she is fighting tooth and nail until the very end. “When you’re falling off a cliff, might as well grab at anything you can on the way down,” is a quote from a show that has always stayed with me and always been my motto from that time on.

But what happens when the mooring slips? When the ground is but a few feet away and your fingers don’t even brush at the cliff sides and longer? What if you’ve tried every option, even the crazy and stupid ones? I think that that is what this poem is about. I don’t think it’s a sad poem about what is lost, but instead a poem about acceptance and finding peace, finding your place in the Long Hall of your ancestors.

The Long Boat

by Stanley Kunitz

When his boat snapped loose
from its moorings, under
the screaking of the gulls,
he tried at first to wave
to his dear ones on shore,
but in the rolling fog
they had already lost their faces.
Too tired even to choose
between jumping and calling,
somehow he felt absolved and free
of his burdens, those mottoes
stamped on his name-tag;
conscience, ambition, and all
that caring.
He was content to lie down
with the family ghosts
in the slop of his cradle,
buffeted by the storm,
endlessly drifting.
Peace! Peace!
To be rocked by the Infinite!
As if it didn’t matter
which way was home;
as if he didn’t know
he loved the earth so much
he wanted to stay forever.

March 25 Elizabeth Austen: Ebbing Hour

Been a little sleepy lately, so I’ve fallen behind on my posts. I thought this poem kind of perfectly encapsulated what I’ve been going through (okay, sort of perfectly – let’s just say the tide has caught me in her swell and I have been overcome by her).

Ebbing Hour

by Elizabeth Austen

Don’t offer opiates.
Lay me naked in earth’s
liquid lap. Oh
lay me in the ocean’s hammock
still awake enough
to know myself her own.
Feet on her salt pillow,
hands at last with nothing
to grasp. For once I’ll
face unblunted
an event’s full force.
I don’t want to miss
the last impoartant thing
I’ll ever do. Let those
friends who remain
wade out with me
beyond the breakers and push.
I want to ride the swell.

March 21 Gwendolyn Brooks: The Bean Eaters

I like this poem a lot. It reminds me of my friend Sarah who hates romantic comedies with the fire of a thousand suns (well, not so much hate as they annoy the hell out of her). She did profess, however, to being quite particular towards romantic movies where an old married couple have to find a way to rekindle their romance, or move past some terrible family tragedy. In her mind, that is real romance, not a story about two, young twenty-somethings who don’t know anything about the real world, who they are or what they want; two mismatched people who would never get together in real life getting over false obstacles.

It is strange to call this couple Bean Eaters, something now used as an insult to the Hispanic community. They are referred to as an “old yellow” pair which implies that they are East Asian. The poem was published in 1960. I don’t know if the disparaging term was in use at that time, but I do know that people from East Asia were being referred to as yellow, but I wonder if that is what the focus is on. Perhaps “yellow” is in reference to their age – as in the pages of a book starting to turn yellow. Growing into their golden years, creatures of long time habit.

The habits referred to feel old, comfortable and homey, but poor. You can tell they’ve done their best to carve out a life together. Their ware is chipped, their wood creaks and their flatware is tin. There is a feeling of comfortable love here, of a life lived together worn down but sturdy.

The Bean Eaters

by Gwendolyn Brooks

They eat beans mostly, this old yellow pair.
Dinner is a casual affair.
Plain chipware on a plain and creaking wood,
Tin flatware.

Two who are Mostly Good.
Two who have lived their day,
But keep on putting one their clothes
And putting things away.

And remembering…
Remembering, with tinklings and twinges,
As they lean over the beans in their rented back room that is full of
beads and receipts and dolls and cloths, tobacco crumbs, vases and fringes.

 

March 20 Timothy Steele: Epitaph

Still on the subject of connotation and denotation, here is short poem to someone in the past tense. Could he be the honored dead? Probably not he’s referred to not as golden, but yellow. Whatever he left behind wasn’t very nice.

Now, yellow is a nice and bright color, one that reminds me of the daffodils in Spring. It can also refer to the color of urine – a little less pleasant and not so nice smelling. Yellow can also be the color of jaundice – sickly and disgusting, not such a pleasant state to be in – or cowardice which seems to be Sir Tact’s (do I detect sarcasm?) state. Not the best way to be remembered – hope to have something much kinder on my tombstone.

Epitaph

by Timothy Steele

Here lies Sir Tact, a diplomatic fellow
Whose silence was not golden, but just yellow.