Lines from R.S. Thomas' poem "The Belfry"

The poem by R.S. Thomas ends with the possibility of faraway hope, but some days, today for example, I can't get past these lines:

 
                 There are times
When a black frost is upon
One's whole being, and the heart
In its bone belfry hangs and is dumb. 
     - from "The Belfry" by R.S. Thomas 

       (More from R.S. Thomas)


 

Bio of poet Denise Levertov from an old anthology

This is the brief note for Denise Levertov from the anthology New British Poets published in the United States some time shortly after WW II. I think it is fascinating, particularly that last job in the list. Odd indeed. Also interesting is the first one on the list, "land girl." Land girls harvested crops during the war. In the book, Levertov's poems stand out, as do those of W.R. Rodgers, W.S. Graham and Keith Douglas. For me, anyway. Although I haven't finished reading the thing so I probably shouldn't say that.

Denise Levertov was born in 1923. Her father is a Russian Jew who became an Anglican theologian; her mother is Welsh. She studied Russian ballet from the age of twelve to sixteen. During the War she served four years as a hospital nurse, and she has worked in various odd jobs such as land girl, charwoman, children's nurse and companion to an alcoholic. She has published one book of verse, The Double Image. She recently married an American G.I. and hopes to come to the States.

The stained and tattered anthology.

All Falls Past

Confident he will get his feet
back under him in time,

since over the green fields
he'd run with power and grace,

as against the faulty city throngs
he long had winged untouched,

he's peaceful as the landscape skews;
soon enough he will outgain its new velocity.

Even when his footsteps shorten
instead of lengthen,

if his grace quavers and he doubts
his powers it must be from exhaustion.

And later if kneeling he wincing
recalls that he only ever falls in spirit, for now

he holds -- eyes closed, braced for landing --
that that hard rising ground will not abuse him.
                                              -J. O'Brien

Poem by W.R. Rodgers about autumn

I ran across this poem completely by accident, in the morning on the first day of fall, in an old, stained anthology called The New British Poets. I can't even tell what year the book was compiled, by critic Kenneth Rexroth. But it's a great collection, and I turned to Rodgers first because I like him, and there was "Autumn." This poem is so full of playful sound. I especially like "such a running-over of clover." Also "dryly shuffling through the scurf of leaves." ("Scurf" means flakes.) I'm struggling with "substractions." Don't miss "How my heart...was silk and thistle/By turns..."

Of course, fall in the west isn't really like this. But I remember falls past. All of my falls past.


Autumn
                              Going out, those bold days,
O what a gallery-roar of trees and gale-wash
Of leaves abashed me, what a shudder and shore
Of bladdery shadows dashed on windows ablaze,
What a hedge-shingle seething, what vast lime-splashes
Of light clouting the land. Never had I seen
Such a running-over of clover, such tissue sheets
Of cloud poled asunder by sun, such plunges
And thunder-load of fun. Trees, grasses, wings -- all
On a hone of wind sluiced and sleeked one way,
Smooth and close as the pile of a pony's coat,
But, in a moment, smoke-slewed, glared, squinted back
And up like sticking bones schockingly unkinned.
How my heart, like all these, was silk and thistle
By turns, how it fitted and followed the stiff lifts
And easy falls of them, or, like that bird above me,
No longer crushing against cushions of air,
Hung in happy apathy, waiting for wind-rifts.
Who could not dance on, and be dandled by such a day
Of loud expansion? when every flash and shout
Took the hook of the mind and reeled out the eye's line
Into whip and whirl-spools of light, when ever ash-shoot shone
Like a weal and was gone in the gloom of the wind's lash.
Who could not feel it? the uplift and total substraction
Of breath as, now bellying, now in abeyance,
The gust poured up from the camp's throat below, bringing
Garbled reports of guns and bugle-notes,
But, gullible, then drank them back again.
And I, dryly shuffling through the scurf of leaves
Fleeing like scuffled toast, was host to all these things;
In me were the spoon-swoops of wind, in me too
The rooks dying and settling like tea-leaves over the trees;
And, rumbling on rims of rhyme, mine were the haycarts home-creeping
Leaving the rough hedge-cheeks long-strawed and streaked with their weeping.
                                                                              - W.R. Rodgers

Poem by Richard Wilbur

Something about that need and yearning to answer each call, each temptation, or each possibility, and then the resonance of regret that becomes a part of you:

The Sirens
I never knew the road
From which the whole earth didn't call away,
With wild birds rounding the hill crowns,
Haling out of the heart an old dismay,
Or the shore somewhere pounding its slow code,
Or low-lighted towns
Seeming to tell me to stay.

Lands I have never seen
And shall not see, loves I will not forget,
All I have missed, or slighted, or foregone
Call to me now. And weaken me. And yet
I would not walk a road without a scene.
I listen going on,
The richer for regret.
                - Richard Wilbur, Ceremony, 1950

Excerpt from an Isaac Babel short story

From the short story "Guy de Maupassant." I love the line, have long, long loved the line -- think about the line frequently -- that reads, "I was sober and could have walked a chalk line, but it was pleasanter to stagger, so I swayed from side to side, singing in a language I had just invented." In the story, Raisa is a publisher's wife in St. Petersburg who wants to translate a new edition of Maupassant's works. Polyte, a literature professor whose French is better, is hired to assist her. They drink a lot. (In this scene, it's a whole bottle of very expensive Muscatel.) He falls for her, and "makes love" to her, in that old-fashioned sense, that 19th Century sense, where it might mean sex, but it might only mean attentiveness, flirtation, confessions and maybe a few stolen kisses. Or a grope here and there. Whatever it means, to me it can seem simultaneously more chased and more lecherous. I like that. The 29 books he refers to are the works of Maupassant, to whose greatness the story by Babel is a worthy tribute.

Raisa held out a glass to me. It was the fifth.

      "Mon vieux, to Maupassant."

      "And what about having some fun today, ma belle?"

       I reached over to Raisa and kissed her on the lips. They quivered and swelled.

      "You're funny," she mumbled through her teeth, recoiling.

      She pressed herself against the wall, stretching out her bare arms. Spots began to glow on her arms and shoulders. Of all the gods ever put on a crucifix, this was the most ravishing. 

      "Be so kind as to sit down, Monsieur Polyte."

...

        Night had blocked the path of my famished youth with a bottle of Muscatel '83 and twenty-nine books, twenty-nine bombs stuffed with pity, genius and passion. I sprang up, knocking over the chair and banging against the shelf. The twenty-nine volumes crashed to the floor, their pages flew open, they fell on their edges...and the white mare of my fate went on at a walking pace.

      "You are funny," growled Raisa.

      I left the granite house on the Moyka between eleven and twelve, before the sisters and the husband returned from the theater. I was sober and could have walked a chalk line, but it was pleasanter to stagger, so I swayed from side to side, singing in a language I had just invented. Through the tunnels of the streets bounded by lines of street lights the steamy fog billowed. Monsters roared behind the boiling walls. The roads amputated the legs of those walking on them.

                                                                     - From "Guy de Maupassant" by Isaac Babel

                                                                                       

Helen's gift of heart's-ease

 I want some. - J. O'B.

Into the mixing-bowl from which they drank their wine

she slipped a drug, heart's ease, dissolving anger,

magic to make us all forget our pains...

No one who drank it deeply, mulled in wine, 

could let a tear roll down his cheeks that day,

not even if his mother should die, his father die,

not even if right before his eyes some enemy brought down

a brother or darling son with a sharp bronze blade.

                                             
                                              The Odyssey
                                              Book IV: The King and Queen of Sparta
                                             

Shakespeare and the possible life of his wife, Ann

Of course, all Shakespeare biography involves guessing and much speculation. I read it anyway, alert for what seems most plausible. In Shakespeare's Wife, Germaine Greer's 2007 rehabilitation of Ann Hathaway, Greer points out with sometimes devastating effect the occasionally implausible, over-imaginative, often overly confident speculations of some Bard biographers over the centuries. She ruined a couple of once-loved biographies for me in the process, even as she herself made a few rather gymnastic leaps. The book is not just a fascinating argument for Ann's possible life, but a broad examination of town life in Tudor England. Ultimately, though, it is a statement to writers of lives that when you take the kinds of liberties Shakespeare biographers must take, you ought constantly to be checking your own prejudices and those of your times. This paragraph comes at the end of the book:

The Shakespeare wallahs have succeeded in creating a Bard in their own likeness, that is to say, incapable of relating to women, and have then vilified the one woman who remained true to him all his life, in order to exonerate him. There can be no doubt that Shakespeare neglected his wife, embarrassed her and even humiliated her, but attempting to justify his behavior by vilifying her is puerile. The defenders of Ann Hathaway are usually derided as sentimental when they are trying simply to be fair. It is a more insidious variety of sentimentality that wants to believe that women who are ill treated must have brought it upon themselves. The creator of Hero, Desdemona, Imogen and Hermione, knew better.

I'm wondering why you want to know

A public policy organization here wrote a crucial report about homicides in Oakland. I have it, have interviewed the authors about it, even though they were pretty hesitant about doing the interview. Anyway, the report, or analysis, is a primary tool for a big violence prevention approach the city is taking that I am writing a story about. I think the report is amazing and fascinating and was working on my piece and praising it and wanted to write a sentence about how long they had worked on it, but realized I didn't have that info. That's all. So I emailed one of the authors with the question, How long did it take you to put that report together? She responded with a question of her own:

I'm wondering why you want to know.

It's like these people are on drugs they're so paranoid. As if my job ain't hard enough. Now I'm kind of wondering why I wanted to know.

Poem by Derek Mahon

Can't find the book this poem comes from; it's somewhere among the piles

I have long loved this poem by the Irish poet Derek Mahon, but I always have to look up the word "imprevisable," even though its meaning is detectable from its spelling. It means "lacking predictability," but also can mean voluble, or "moving quickly from solid or liquid to vapor." I think maybe Mahon/Horace meant it to be read both ways, even though the meanings are, in this context, contradictory: that is, certainly the future is unpredictable, except that we will all change from our bodies of mass and water into vapor, into dust. But this is a happy poem with a message of embracing life in moments, as it happens, and not worrying yourself too much. I love "the days are more fun than the years..." Decant your wine.

How to Live
(Horace, Odes, Book One, II)

Don't waste your time, Leuconoe, living in fear and hope
of the imprevisable future; forget the horoscope.
Accept whatever happens. Whether the gods allow
us fifty winters more or drop us at this one now
which flings the high Tyrrhenian waves on the stone piers,
decant your wine: the days are more fun than the years
which pass us by while we discuss them. Act with zest
one day at a time, and never mind the rest.
                                                       - Derek Mahon