For Elizabeth Bishop

Nautilus Island's hermit
heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage;
her sheep still graze above the sea.
Her son's a bishop. Her farmer
is first selectman in our village,
she's in her dotage.

Thirsting for
the hierarchic privacy
of Queen Victoria's century,
she buys up all
the eyesores facing her shore,
and lets them fall.

The season's ill --
we've lost our summer millionaire,
who seemed to leap from an L. L. Bean
catalogue. His nine-knot yawl
was auctioned off to lobstermen.
A red fox stain covers Blue Hill.

And now our fairy
decorator brightens his shop for fall,
his fishnet's filled with orange cork,
orange, his cobbler's bench and awl,
there is no money in his work,
he'd rather marry.

One dark night,
my Tudor Ford climbed the hill's skull,
I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down,
they lay together, hull to hull,
where the graveyard shelves on the town. . . .
My mind's not right.

A car radio bleats,
'Love, O careless Love . . . .' I hear
my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,
as if my hand were at its throat . . . .
I myself am hell,
nobody's here --

only skunks, that search
in the moonlight for a bite to eat.
They march on their soles up Main Street:
white stripes, moonstruck eyes' red fire
under the chalk-dry and spar spire
of the Trinitarian Church.

I stand on top
of our back steps and breathe the rich air --
a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail
She jabs her wedge-head in a cup
of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,
and will not scare.

I go to bed Lord Byron, and wake up bald.

~ Robert Lowell

[My day, I find, charts an opposite course.  I wake in the morning a romantic genius with keenest confidence in my ability to astonish the world, but by day’s end am so brow-beaten and reduced I’m shocked to find a full crop of hair reflected in the mirror.  I brush my teeth and meditate on the happy disjunction between outward appearance and inward reality.  Days like this Fernando’s dictum (“It’s better to look good than to feel good”) is a welcome consolation.  At least I have my hair.]

Right now, I can't help but think that the only flaw in Marini's biography is his clear preference of Lowell's second wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, over Caroline Guiness (his third wife).  While Lowell ends up living with Elizabeth again towards the end of his life, Marini's biography leaves me questioning the exact motivations behind Lowell's decision to separate himself from "Lizzie" in the first place.  The true testament to the strength of Mariani's writing, however, is that he conveyed the strength of Lowell and Lizzie's relationship so articulately that the drama of their breakup left me feeling personally affected.  I think that the fallout from Lowell's divorce, namely his decision to leave Lizzie for another woman, seemed so selfish on Lowell's part that it might very well explain his subsequent labelling as a hyper-masculine and anti-feminist writer.  My predominant question about Lowell still remains, namely how I might resolve his fluxuating acceptance and intolerance of homosexuality into a more clear position, and is augmented by his similarly vacillating stances towards most civil rights issues: race, gender, and religion (to name a few).  While I would like to attribute his variegated attitudes to his mania (he was manic depressive), I am more apt to believe that, like most of his poetry, his ideas (like two feet on different planks spreading further apart as the planks move away from each other-- an image he used to describe his indecision between life with Lizzie and life with Caroline) fixed themselves on his conservative upbringing and his liberal, even rebellious, adulthood.  What I do not know, and cannot know except by careful research, is this conflicting acceptance of his gay friends and his regular use of gay slurs (fairy being a favorite) were typical for his time.  Some of his intolerance might be a means for him to mask queer desires, since he does write about his first crush being for a boy, but I am reluctant to rely too heavily on this reading.   I do not want to get too absorbed in Lowell's personal life, instead I am particularly interested how I should read his poetry, especially where queer issues are presented.  I am inclined to reread Lowell as a more tolerant and liberal figure, though still someone benefitting from and comfortable with his masculine, heterosexual privileges (he was notoriously difficult on his wives, mostly as a result of his mania).  I'm curious to see where my research will take me.  Now that I am done with reading Mariani's biography, I am going to start reading some more of Lowell's poems a bit more closely.  I'll probably augment my readings with some critical essays here and there, but I'm expecting to immerse myself in criticism once I have a better grasp of Lowell's writing.

This morning, I was awakened by weird dreams, and for some reason was reminded of this poem that I wrote a decade or so ago after reading a Robert Lowell poem and looking at a Dali painting:

Epilogue II

I myself am hell, Robert. Like the painter
in Dali's D'Afrique who sits at easel,
right hand extended out to his audience,
eyes tracing it onto canvas with his left,
I have been fascinated by the blisters
on my middle finger, where the brush rests
and by the bottoms of my fingernails
turning lavender, the color of an illness.
But I am tired of it. Everyone's tired of it.
The cuticular colloquies. Climacteric
epiphanies like "the painter's vision is
not a lens, it trembles to caress the light,"
and "my mind's not right." Isn't the subject
of the painting what lies beyond this frame?

Lowell is typically read as an aggressively independent minded, Catholic, New England author.  Also, he is typically read as a man's man sort of poet-- fiercely masculine.  I see a lot of this in his work as well, but I also see a lot of queer undertones that I plan to emphasize in his work.  First, Lowell's poem "First Love" is about his youthful attraction to a male schoolmate.  In his poem, Lowell sees his attraction to women as "wisdom's fear," and something that developed with age.  I want to consider what I see to be a strong homosocial undercurrent throughout his biography, arguing perhaps that his attraction to literature is a sublimation for his queer desires.  For example, Lowell became a poet around the time that he started liking women and viewed literature as a primarily male discipline.  Also, most of his relationships with other men seem to have circulated around literary texts, perhaps most striking was his "monastic" summer spent in a small cabin with a male friend rigorously reading classic literature (sort of sounds like a "Brokeback Mountain" of literature, probably without the sex though).  Lowell clearly viewed literature as a form of religious asceticism, but my question is what did he deny or sublimate through this asceticism?  There are also several homophobic notes in some of his poems, interspersed with other notes that might suggest queer desires.  I believe that he saw homosexuality as something that could be overcome by sheer will, in the same way that he believed that he could become a poet through sheer will as well.  Although I do not want to speculate if Lowell DID overcome his desires (I do not think he did, especially because he seems to have kept some contacts with several gay authors that might have been sexual), I want to portray Lowell as an author who partially used queer attractions as an unconscious, if not conscious, inspiration for his writing.  I also read in Lowell a strong need for the author to "prove himself" as a man.  The author apparently worries about being emasculated, although I wonder what might be the source of this fear.  Lowell was raised primarily around women, but would that be enough to make him worry about his manliness so much?  I think that if I prod this question further, my persistence might bear some fruitful research (hehehe).

We were so eager for happiness, we forgot we weren’t free.

That’s one of the more poignant lines from Marjane Satrapi’s beautiful film, Persepolis - adapted from her graphic novel of the same name.  It tells the story of Satrapi’s own life: her childhood in Tehran, the overthrow of the Shah, the Islamic Revolution and the turmoil of the eight-year war with Iraq.  Especially powerful are her portraits of her grandmother and an executed uncle, and the frank, mesmerizing sequences that lead us through her student years in Vienna and subsequent (temporary) return to life under the ayatollahs. 

After Persepolis itself, my wife and I watched the “making-of” documentary also included on the DVD, which delves into the rather old-fashioned techniques used to such rewarding effect in the film.  Entirely drawn and inked by hand, the months of detailed labor behind Persepolis was once par for the course for animated features, but in the era of CGI requires a special devotion to craft that is vanishingly rare.  The robust, magical, shadow-theater quality of the final product is worth every hour poured into it.

Satrapi herself comments on the decision not to use computer-generated imagery.  The trouble with CGI, she suggests, is its absolute precision, and hence its inhumanity.  That sounds about right.  By their very nature, computer-generated images are the product of mathematical perfections alien to the human eye and hand.  I recently heard a Pixar director describe how in order to create a CGI image which will be received as true-to-life one has to engineer the illusion of dirt and flaws.  With traditional animation, on the other hand, one may strive for perfection in line and form as ardently as one wants without fear of actually achieving it, and the results are immediately received as true and familiarly human. 

A CGI movie may tell an inspiring story, then, and it may be a technical feat, but it can never be art in the same sense that a film like Persepolis can.  The greatest achievements of art are necessarily imperfect.  In fact, their imperfection is inseparable from their greatness.  The American poet Robert Lowell arrived at the same basic idea when he declared that “imperfection is the language of art” – by which he meant true and truly human art. 

Whether bequeathed us by swooning Greeks or as a side-effect of progress in science and technology, there is a mathematical idea of perfection at work in culture today which we're frequently tempted to admire for the wrong reasons or apply in the wrong cases.  We are so eager for perfection, you might say, we forget that we ourselves are imperfectible.  This misunderstanding is one of the more irksome and self-defeating pathologies of modern man.  Geometry, after all, may deliver us the distance of a star and chart out the recesses of space, but will never map the abyss of the heart.

and im now still waiting to find a designer whos not gonna bail on me. ive tried three. in the meantime me and her, ze big bozz of the publishing company im signed to, have checked out a paper store (to work out and buy paper for my book, and hers), visited a printing place thats part of a church/orphanage/convent, and get drunk many times to drown our sorrows at the exorbitant discount that bookstores demand to carry our books on their shelves. bitches.

its a funny thing i guess trying to publish a book in oompapa, this great country of ours. funny as hell. do we really need to, say. both me and her have got regular readers who visit our blogs every day. stalkers. rabid fans. the books are gonna cost us about 30 million rupiahs each to publish, promote, flog, stuff down peoples throats, etc. blogs cost nothing. or perhaps a fraction of the 828 thousand rupiahs that i pay for my slowy each month and of the 400 something that she pays for her veryfuckingfastnet. thats nothing compared to 30 fucking millions each. still theres something nice about books. fetishistic? maybe, i find books more attractive than real dolls, true. but herein lies the conundrum: because paper is so expensive in oompapa (printing is okay-priced), we cant make the beautiful books we first dreamt off anyway.

my book was gonna be called maps. spelled back to front so it reads like spam. like you have to read it in the mirror to realise its actually called maps. it was gonna be in the form of a map. like a standard tourist map one gets from galleries lafayette, say. with real and fake advertisements for starbucks, ooh la la, excelso, in the margins (perhaps well get them to pay for the real ads). but thats gonna cost us like hell. not funny hell. fucking hell. so now my books gonna look like a standard french mini-paperback. have you got a seuil copy of perecs l'infra-ordinaire? like that.

im alright with that i guess. masochistically perhaps, id like to know if the poems can stand on their own. without all my planned fripperies.

There is no doubt that the strength of the narrative lies in the consistent focus on the moral progress of the main character, John Grady Cole, who in addition to natural gifts, such as his way with horses, is brave and truthful, loyal and ingenious in adversity. Given that he seems to be about 17, his sinews and fibres, all of which are ultimately laid pretty bare, are all the more impressive. He is allowed three encounters in the course of the book — with Alejandra, the great-aunt and the judge — which must suffice for him, since there is no 'home' to go back to, only divorce and death, and he must be always ‘heading out.’

However, there is always the question of style that does not quite dissolve (the best style is unnoticeable) but remains to bug the reader. The Hemingway style has, 60 years later, become merely an affectation, though it is taught as orthodoxy in all American creative writing classes. (Even in Hemingway’s own later works there had entered in an element of self-parody.) The style adopted by McCarthy is sub-Hemingway and one finds, for instance, nine ands in eleven lines. (If a school child produced this, he would be told to rewrite the passage in self-contained sentences.) The early pages of any book contains much self-consciousness, as if the author were clearing his throat; here McCarthy seems to need to establish his illiteracy as one of this democratic credentials (dont, wont without punctuation) before exploiting his very considerable poetic and descriptive gifts. So the affected style both restricts and frees the writing in complex ways.

In the 1920s or 30s there was a famous spat between Hemingway and Aldous Huxley, subsequently analysed as "vernacular" versus "mandarin" by Cyril Connolly in Enemies Of Promise. And there is no doubt that there is a real difference in educational standards at stake, which surfaced again in "Redskins" (Ginsberg) versus "palefaces" (Lowell).

But in spite of his flourishing of these credentials there is no doubt — for instance in the monologues of the great-aunt and in the more "European" sections — McCarthy can handle and originate complex ideas in a compelling manner. These passages are among the least obscure in the book. But still the stylistic tic remains, the punchy rhythms, the unspoken dialogue, the show of inside knowledge of Spanish and horsecraft, the occasional portentous (but meaningless) sentences that can hardly convince anyone above high school level.

There is less of this literary static as the book unfolds but it never altogether goes away. The author seems attached to the style as a camouflage which allows him to get away with unmanly things like descriptions of moonlight. His successes of this kind may well validate his positioning of himself as a boll weevil in the great tree of Hemingway.  Still more, it may protect him against the overwhelming pressure on a writer of our time — what Virginia Woolf called “the spirit of the age” — the lure of journalism.[1] One only has to look, today, at the line-up presented as pioneers alongside the late Norman Mailer — Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote and Hunter S Thompson — to see the dangers. The result is that in the USA Ezra Pound is considered a poet, though he wrote no poems, and Mailer is considered a novelist, though he wrote no novels.

So far be it from me to unpick this instinctive writerly strategy of Cormac McCarthy, given that the result is a true novel, authentically compelling, absorbing and, no doubt, difficult to shake off.

But one cannot fail to wonder at the continuing influence — the prevailing orthodoxy — of the "school of Hemingway".

11-Nov-07

 'Built from nothing but high hopes and thin air': the line from the song 'Dig Lazarus Dig' sums ups the way that at least one fan seems to have felt about Nick Cave's new album of the same name. Tim Russell argued on Facebook that Cave had made a flimsy album, the worst of his career, and that Cave should 'dump the wife, give Blixa a call, move back to Berlin & buy a big bag of smack' (Feb 28, 2008 at 4:59 PM). The album stinks, Russell has it, because the Bad Seeds have produced some unsingable melodies and have been 'emasculated' (he accuses them of weedy instrumentation without the benefit of Blixa Bargeld). Russell also contends that Cave's lyrics have gone all unfunny and banal (he quotes the line 'We're gonna have a real good time' as an example). Russell's piece is passionate enough but wrong on a number of counts.

Wrong, first of all, is the idea that this is somehow an upbeat album. It's not sorrowful like No More Shall We Part or The Boatman's Call but it is grimy, deliciously sordid, full of terrible jokes (my personal favourite is 'I feel like a vacuum cleaner, a complete sucker'), crazed, desperate. 'Shiny Happy People' it ain't. Russell claims it's not fucked up enough. Not fucked up?

This is an album that has as its beating heart the ghost of John Berryman (1914-71), the US poet who committed suicide by jumping off a bridge and missing the water (1). Berryman's subject-matter is all the kinds of things Cave revels in on Lazarus. This is from the first of Berryman's Dream Songs:

What he has to now to say is a long

wonder the world can bear & be.

Once in a sycamore I was glad

all at the top, and I sang.

Hard on the land wears the strong sea

and empty grows every bed.

Berryman's alter ego, Henry, is lascivious, drunk, violent...in other words, a bit like Lazarus in Cave's song ('Larry grew increasingly neurotic and obscene').  In the lyric booklet which Cave publishes with the album, Cave's words have the same manic intensity as Berryman's, and reveal a similar penchant for the ampersand. Berryman uses the '&' to abbreviate, to suggest speed of thought, jokiness, nervous exhaustion (incomplete ideas, jumpy intensities). If anything Cave's ampersands are even more manic. Take this sample from 'Moonland' where

in moonl&

under the stars

under the snow

I followed this car

& I followed that car

through the s&

Berryman 's poetry and his biography are attractive to Cave for a number of reasons. There is the suicide (2):

                            Berryman was best!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

he wrote like wet papier mache/went the Hemming-way/weirdly

on wings & with MAXIMUM PAIN!!!!!!!!!!!!

But what's also attractive to Cave is Berryman's descent into madness and alcoholic indignities, and the lens which this creates, a lens through which Berryman sees America: 'Seedy Henry rose up shy in de world/& shaved & swung his barbells, duded Henry up,' writes Berryman in Dream Song 77. Macho, hopelessly pathetic, with a 'ruin-prone proud national mind,' Berryman's antihero journeys restlessly through dirty America, 'making ready to move on.'

But there are more layers yet to Cave's album. If Berryman is its beating heart, the roadmap of Dig, Lazarus, Dig is Homer's epic poem The Odyssey. The last track on the record,  'More News from Nowhere', tells the story of Homer's epic in miniature. In it appear Cave's versions of  Circe, the Cyclops and the Sirens. In fact, it seems that Cave's former lover PJ Harvey is the Siren he has in mind when he sings 'I saw Miss Polly!!!singing with some girls/I cried,--strap me to the mast!!!!'. Other songs take on aspects of The Odyssey. The song 'Night of the Lotus Eaters' fishhooks an episode in book nine of Homer's poem into a howl of junked up political frustration at our 'catastrophic leaders.'(3) 'Midnight Man' retells the story of what happens to Odysseus's wife when Odysseus is on his travels -Penelope's suitors are forever 'comin' round' to Odysseus and Penelope's 'place', vying for the chance to be her 'midnight man'.

If I've made Lazarus sound like a poem rather than a record, so much the better. Cave surely intends this to be a poem, a poem not set to music, but married to it. But to neglect the melodies here would be to do Lazarus a grave injustice. Heavenly murk characterises the sound of this badass Bad Seed musical journey through the land of the dead. Tim Russell asserts this isn't singable record. Yet I find myself utterly possessed by snatches of melody--oh strap me to the mast Mr Cave, if you would. 'Lotus Eaters,' for example, has a very trippy sound, in keeping with the narcotic undertow of the lyrics; Warren Ellis on 'mandocaster' and 'loops' appears to be responsible for part of the effect here, but the vocal, too, is a siren-song on Cave's part. Yes, we might miss Blixa on this or on any Bad Seeds production. But hell's bells, Ellis is extraordinary. He and his merry chums conjure up a whole legion of exotic instruments, even the names of which sound like they're capable of summoning up a few spectres: 'mandocaster,' 'cuica', 'loops,' 'vibra slap.' The viola on 'We Call Upon the Author' sounds like it's been ectoplasmically rearranged; the flute on 'Jesus of the Moon' levitates, man.

I could go on. But I won't, at least until I've seen the live show in May. Suffice it to say that this is a record with 'eat me' written on it. Be sure, however, to take repeated doses. Overdose if at all possible. If you do, I guarantee you'll find much more Homeric (and other) dark matter in Lazarus's beguiling murk. Get out your Homer and your headphones and dig.

(1) go to this page for a biog/bibliography: http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/berryman/life.htm

(2) The reference to 'went the Hemming-way' refers to the fact that the novelist Ernest Hemingway killed himself at the point where he felt he could no longer write. See http://www.ernest.hemingway.com/marywelsh.htm for more details.

(3)For the poetry anoraks amongst us, go to this blog which supports Barack Obama, and look at the use the blogger makes of Lowell's poem 'For the Union Dead' which takes the idea of  the US state as an aquarium and compare with Cave's lyric 'they fishbowled me and toured me round the old aquariums'. Has Cave been reading Lowell too? --Lowell and Berryman were contemporaries and friends.  http://progressiveerupts.blogspot.com/2008/03/for-union-dead-robert-lowell.html

I have enjoyed this semester of American Literature. Last semester I had American Lit to 1900, this semester it's been 1900-present. I do like reading a lot of the older great literary works, but it is refreshing to be reading more modern work after having three courses where all we read was work from the 1800's. I can relate more to the recent works than I could to stories that were written around the revolution, and the civil war.

I am kind of liking this confessional poetry genre. Thinking about it, much of the poetry written today can be seen as confessional poetry. Confessional poetry is really just when the poet writes in the first person(he or she is the narrator) and writes about subject matter in his or her own life. Most of the subject matter is depressing, which is why it was coined confessional poetry, because they are revealing things that most people would not reveal.

I don't think that today it is really seen as confessional poetry when people write about the tough issues in their lives. These poets that I've been studying were the ones that broke the barriers. Now that they are broken, more and more people have been writing "confessional poetry". This can be seen as positive of negative. In one aspect, more artists have the courage to express themselves. On the other hand, it may not be seen as brave anymore to reveal traumatic events when everyone else around you is also doing so.

Lowell himself is a transitional figure. He often travels between confessional and impersonal. His poem, "Walking in the Blue" is definitely a confessional poem. This is a poem about Lowell's stay at a mental institution. In the poem, he describes his feelings of isolation from the world, often relating them to some fish imagery. He describes himself and the other patients of "ossified young" meaning people who have become forever stuck in the mind-set that they were when they originally became mentally ill

Lowell's poem "Skunk Hour" is also a confessional poem. In it he describes his own decline, as well as the decline of New England. On the surface things appear to be functional, but as we delve deeper we can see that they are not as they appear to be. Sea and fish imagery appear again in this poem, also describing Lowell's isolation.

Lowell's poem "For the Union Dead" is the most impersonal of all three of these poems. It is not confessional because of the distance between the reader and the speaker. The title suggests a elegy. This poem is about the tackiness of the modern world, and the questioning of the pasts sacrifice. There is a big contrast between the past and present, which gives it a sort of "Waste Land" quality. The content of the poem is the speakers sadness over the tearing down of an aquarium that he loved very much when he was a child. This shows the modern world as being physical and precarious. Lowell sticks to his fish imagery, giving connections to the emotions he is feeling. In the end the aquarium is turned into a parking lot, which states a lot about the present human state.

L'allegria si addice a un cimitero più di ogni altra qualità conosciuta. Dico allegria, e non riso, sia chiaro: il riso sta al pianto come l'allegria sta alla tristezza. Sgomberato il campo da ogni equivoco esistentivo, da ogni pregiudizio vitalistico, da ogni attaccamento al quotidiano meterorismo delle cose interiori ed esteriori, un uomo trova nel cimitero l'ideale di una sana allegria, di una felicità modesta e tuttavia priva di condizionamenti. Se lo si considera prosaicamente come un luogo, non c'è davvero alcun motivo per avere allegria in un cimitero, se, viceversa, lo si sperimenta poeticamente come un abisso, allora ecco che esso si rivela come la sostanza stessa dell'allegria. Non a caso nessuna allegria è tanto perfetta quanto cimiteriale come quella degli angeli di pietra. Per questo fui un tempo The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket.

Now Paris, our black classic, breaking up

like killer kings on an Etruscan cup.

What does it mean, though? I'm not sure. A vigorous debate on this point was held in the letters column of the New York Review of Books in 2003, in response to James Fenton's essay on Lowell's collected poems.

Via Time Magazine's open archive, a 1964 review of For the Union Dead.

And while we're on the subject of Alps and great, discomfiting endings to poems, here's "Work Song," by Mark Levine. Thanks to Daily Miltonian for putting the full text online. Astonishingly, his collection Debt, which leads off with "Work Song," appears to be out of print. I know, I know, nobody buys poetry books -- but back when I knew a lot of people who did buy poetry books, everybody was buying this one.

“Work Song”

by Mark Levine

My name is Henri. Listen. It’s morning.
I pull my head from my scissors, I pull
the light bulb from my mouth–Boss comes at me
while I’m still blinking.
Pastes the pink slip on my collarbone.
It’s OK, I say, I was a lazy worker, and I stole.
I wipe my feet on his skullcap on the way out.

I am Henri, mouth full of soda crackers.
I live in Toulouse, which is a piece of cardboard.
Summers, the Mayor paints it blue, we fish in it.
Winters we skate on it. Children are always drowning
or falling through the cracks. Parents are distraught
but get over it. It’s easy to replace a child.
Like my parents’ child, Henri.

I stuff my hands in my shoes
and crawl through the snow on all fours.
Animals fear me. I smell so good.
I have two sets of footprints, I confuse the police.
When I reach the highway I unzip my head.

I am a zipper. A paper cut.
I fed myself so many times
through the shredder I am confetti,
I am a ticker-tape parade, I am an astronaut
waving from my convertible at Henri.

Henri from Toulouse, is that you?
Why the unhappy face? I should shoot you
for spoiling my parade. Come on, man,
put yourself together! You want so much to die
that you don’t want to die.

My name is Henri. I am Toulouse. I am scraps
of bleached parchment, I am a standing militia,
a quill, the Red Cross, I am a feather
in my cap, the Hebrew Testament, I am the World Court.
An electric fan blows
beneath my black robe. I am dignity itself.

I am an ice machine.
I am an alp.
I stuff myself in the refrigerator
wrapped in newsprint. With salt in my heart
I stay good for days.

EPILOGUE

Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme--
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?
I hear the noise of my own voice:
The painter's vision is not a lens,
it trembles to caress the light.
But sometimes everything I write
with the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot,
lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
heightened from life,
yet paralyzed by fact.
All's misalliance.
Yet why not say what happened?
Pray for the grace of accuracy
Vermeer gave to the sun's illumination
stealing like the tide across a map
to his girl solid with yearning.
We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.

--Robert Lowell

With special thanks to Richard McCann & Alison Smith.

Sylvia Plath murió tal día como hoy hace 45 años, en 1963. Tras una prometedora carrera como poeta, su muerte la elevó y la convirtió en mito.

Nacida en 1932 en Boston, uno de los momentos clave en la vida de Sylvia Plath fue la muerte de su padre sólo una semana después de su octavo cumpleaños. Esto marcó profundamente a Sylvia, muestra de ellos es su famoso poema llamado "Daddy".

En los años de juventud, empezó a escribir en la revista Mademoiselle, y fue en estos años cuando tuvo su primer intento de suicidio: se metió debajo de unas escaleras de su casa y se infló a pastillas. Se salvó por los pelos.

Le dieron una beca Fulbright para ir a Cambridge, donde conoció a Ted Hughes. Se casaron meses más tarde, en 1956. Con él tuvo grandes problemas entre otras cosas por las infidelidades de Hughes. Sin embargo tuvieron dos hijos, Frieda y Nicholas.

Ella se fue a Londres con los niños a una casa donde había vivido W.B. Yeats, famoso poeta de principios del siglo XX que se hizo la cirugía estética.

Finalmente y tras una atormentada y prolífica vida el 11 de Febrero de 1963, por la mañana Sylvia preparó el desayuno, se lo dejó puesto a los niños en sus habitaciones, tapó los huecos de las puertas con trapos, abrió la llave del gas y metió la cabeza en el horno. El veneno del gas sumado a las pastillas que había ingerido previamente provocó su muerte.

Dejó un enorme legado de poesía confesional, del tipo de Anne Sexton y Robert Lowell. Poemas como "Ariel", "Lady Lazarus" o su novela autobiográfica "La campana de cristal".

Está enterrada en Heptonstall, West Yorkshire.

Sylvia Plath, R.I.P.

Más información:

- Sylvia Plath en poets.org

- Sylvia Plath en la Wikipedia

But Hamilton's shade might be relieved to hear I don't want to let Lowell languish in that kind of hideous poetic limbo of the unread. Lowell's biography is complex, his behaviour, or at least what one reads of his behaviour, frequently repellent. But his poems! Obscure, clotted, difficult as they often are, Lowell's verse is a Leviathan, an alliterative, sonorous beast also capable of dextrous tenderness. Milton twists through his 'brilliant bad enjambment,' Hopkins too, and Donne the preacher. But there is also the counterpoint of Bishop there, plus Herbert, urging gentleness and restraint.

'A Quaker Graveyard at Nantucket' is a great example of the two voices at work.  The opening lines explode like a shell:

'A brackish reach of shoal off Madaket, --

The sea was still breaking violently and night

Had steamed into our North Atlantic Fleet,

When the drowned sailor clutched the drag-net. Light'

I've deliberately broken off here because I wanted to show the onward momentum of the enjambment, the unstoppable force gushing through the poem. This is damnation. This is hell, and the light we see is diabolical; the light of suffering and death. But always, when I remember this poem, I hear, too, the quieter reaches of it: 'Our Lady, too small for her canopy, sits near the altar.../Non est species, neque decor/expressionless, expresses God.' As a war poem, there's little finer, even if the syntax is a doubling, looping twisting thing. The music here is enough, more than enough.

And yet it is not enough for many to surrender to poetry like Lowell's, without what Keats would call 'an irritable reaching after fact and reason.'To feel a poem's rhythm without chasing out the meaning is hardly a fashionable pursuit these days. But if you haven't tried it, I recommend it. It's where reading becomes a state of being, stimulant not sedative. You don't think your way into the poem, the poem's music instead releases thoughts. Or rather, it liberates a deeper thinking: something synthesized, something luminous, something resembling a secular prayer.

At the head of his table
the wine baron
looks like an old Stravinsky.

There's green on the bread;
all the beautiful girls he knew
are old maids or dead.

One must admire him,
so assured of his triumphant return,
of making it abundantly,
yet spoiling his hopeless odds by talking.

He is drunk on his own wine,
his hundreds of servants filling 14 glasses
in chronological vintage at each place
with incantations of the price.
"It's a sacrilege for me to say it. . .
they mustn't heart me. . .
the best drink is a rum-banana daiquiri!"

He is not lacking love,
someone's young wife is on his right—
"Have you ever returned to a childhood house,
and found it unchanged?
It makes on so angry . . . it's so shrunk,
one wishes it wiped out—if it is wiped out,
that, of course, is another kind of catastrophe."

The girl hears and feels maternal.
His eyes never leave her lips.
She cannot cure his hallucination
he can bribe or stare
any woman he wants into orgasm. . .

He fills her ear
with his old sexual gramophone.

Like belief,
he makes nothing happen.

He, she, or she or she—
she is a stream,
one of the bubbles. . . one of the sparks
that flashed from the miscellaneous dish he gobbled.

Her face is delicate and disgusted,
as if she had been robbed, raped,
or repudiated by her mother—
a discarded ear of corn
lying in a sink,
leaf and cornsilk flipped to show
the golden kernels are browned. . .
his first image of a girl who refused.

His great lethargy calms him;
hypnos kai hydor,
Scotch and water—
he no longer asks for love.

Is this the substance he hoped for,
after a grasshopper life of profit—
to stand shaking on fine green legs,
to meet the second overflowing of Eros,
himself younger in each young face;
and see in that mirror
a water without the life of water,
a face aging
to less generosity than it had?

]]> http://sillyoldtwit.com/2007/11/28/seamus-heaney-robert-lowell-elvis-presley-an-exercise-in-name-dropping/ Wed, 28 Nov 2007 11:16:16 +0000 sillyoldtwit http://sillyoldtwit.com/2007/11/28/seamus-heaney-robert-lowell-elvis-presley-an-exercise-in-name-dropping/ Some time ago , 25 years ago that is.....I met the poet Seamus Heaney. I never met Robert Lowell or Elvis but like I say , I did meet Heaney.

I wrote to him , as I said , about 25 years ago. I was having trouble getting some of his books , not his regular editions but privately printed limited editions of his , and so I wrote to him to see if he could help me in some way. I did not really expect to get a reply so I was delighted when he wrote back and suggested that I call down to see him. (I live , perhaps a mile and a half from Sandymount where his home is.)

As I was walking up Sandymount Road with Dublin Bay on my left I happened to meet him in the street. It was about 12:00 noon , sometime in late Summer and there was a pleasant sea breeze as we met and I shook his hand. I remember the first question I asked him. "What's it like to be famous , to be the Elvis Presley of poetry " ? Now that may seem a somewhat odd question or even a foolish one so let me explain.

I could of course have asked him some 'profound' question about the Greek poets perhaps but the truth of the matter is that I wasn't really interested in his opinion of the Greeks or any other poets for that matter. Why after all would I be interested in another man's opinion when I've got my own ? But I was interested to know what it was like to be famous. I had never met anyone really famous before and let's face it , we are bombarded with images of the famous from the moment we become conscious of the wider world. So I asked him , "what's it like to be famous ". And it turned out to be a good question because while still yet in the street he began to talk about just that.

He talked the of fact that he hadn't actually made any money from the books he had published ( five at that point in time). That apart from his salary teaching he had not made any money from his fame at all. He told me how much he had paid for his house ( he got in just before the prices started to move upwards) and what it cost to put his kids through school and that sort of thing. We were walking along as he spoke and I think he was talking to himself as much as to me....he spoke of how it could be awkward , even embarrassing to be famous. He explained that he often might be in company with a fellow poet ( a better poet than him as he put it) and people would talk to him , ask his opinion while ignoring the sometimes older and better poet at his side. He spoke of the jealousies and enmities that it brought with it.

When we got to his house he brought me up to his study , a small room overlooking Dublin Bay , and we talked about poetry and poets. It was a pleasant experience apart that is from the smell. The smell , I hasten to say came not from his room but from the beach beyond his window. The sewage from all over Dublin City is deposited in Dublin Bay and in the summer it smells...it really smells. While I was there he was signing the sheets for his limited edition , "Poems and a Memoir". Just the sheets of paper , the book itself had not been bound at this point. As I say , it was a really nice experience and before I left he gave me some of his own poems , drafts that is , with revisions in his own hand.

I called down to his house two or three times after that ( he invited me). To be honest I cannot remember what we talked about but I suppose it had to do with poetry. But I can remember one conversation..... We were sitting in his kitchen. By 'we' I mean there were two other people there , one a fellow who had something to do with Field Day Publishing and the other guy was some artist who's name I have since forgotten.( I have a long standing interest in Irish art so the fact that I cannot even remember his name will give you an indication as to the nature of the 'artist'). Well , there we were , the four of us , with a bottle of wine on the table and the sun streaming in the window. The conversation was ( as we Irish say) terrific. Somewhere along the way Heaney told a joke about Robert Lowell. It seems that when he was introduced to Lowell the American just looked at him and said , "My friends call me Robert , but you can call me Bob". Ok , it's not that funny but it sounds a lot better after a couple of glasses of wine. I was sitting with my back to the window , my chair slightly back from the table , almost a spectator and it occurred to me that this was the kind of little anecdote that biographers love to record.

Later , as I walked home I couldn't help but think that yes , yes that little anecdote might well find it's way into some biography of Seamus Heaney but I would most certainly have been airbrushed out of it. A sobering thought but a true one nonetheless.

And I did in fact later meet one other famous person , a serial killer called Dennis Nilsen....... Oh , and I passed Bono one day on O'Connell Bridge but I didn't stop to talk to him so I guess that really doesn't count.

You can find an interview with Heaney on Youtube by following this link.