Now & Then, page 13
and stupid way. The vague form this thought takes is of “a man with a
dog” who “comes to shoot us.” The listener, though, discovers he has his
own set of formulas, “everything has its own reward,” for example, which
he records with a not-entirely, or not only, self-mocking irony. Then we
come to the friend. But I don’t want to explain the poem to death. That’s
what the “valedictorian” in all of us wants to do:
The Friend at Midnight
Keeping in mind that all things break,
the valedictorian urged his future plans on us:
Don’t give up. It’s too soon. Things break. Yes, they fail
or they are anchored up ahead, but no one can see that far.
As he was speaking, the sun set. The grove grew silent. There
are more of us taking ourselves seriously now than ever,
one thought. We may never realize about our lives
till it’s too late, and a man with a dog comes to shoot us.
I like to think though that everything is its own reward,
that liars such as we were made to last forever,
and each morning has a special chime of its own.
Thus we were pitted against the friend who came at midnight
and wanted to replace us with a song. We resisted furiously:
There was too much food on his table, the night was too black,
while all around us shrinking bands of outsiders
entered into negotiations with the darkness. It
seems to omit us, his reasoning, or in the well of time
we may be overdrawn, and cosmetics come to put a good face
on us,
asking, why this magic wind, so many angles
against the river’s prism and the burnt blue sky?
To which one answers, nothing is adrift
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for long. Perhaps we will be overtaken
even in our happiness, and waves of passion drown us.
Now, wasn’t that easy? A moment’s breath and everyone
has gone outside to ponder the matter further.
Outside, children toboggan endlessly.
octobe r 18
Sterling Brown
This coming weekend at the Library of Congress a group of distinguished
poets and critics will be gathering to honor the work of Sterling Brown,
who was born in Washington, D.C., grew up in the vicinity of 11th and
R Streets, and wrote one of the classic books of American poetry in this
century, Southern Road, published in 1932.
Brown’s father, who came into the world a slave in eastern Tennessee,
was a professor of Religion at Howard University. His son went north
to college—a B.A. from Williams College, an M.A. from Harvard—and
then headed south to teach literature at some of the black schools that
were founded during reconstruction—Virginia Seminary and College
near Roanoke, Lincoln University in Missouri, and Fisk University in
Tennessee. It was a time—the years of lynchings and share-cropping ser-
vitude and Klan intimidation—when African Americans were migrating
out of the south in great numbers, so Brown’s was a reverse migration.
And Southern Road was the result of that experience.
It’s a remarkable book and not as well known as it should be. Partly it’s
a record of the people Brown met and the music he heard: street corner
blues singers and preachers, the gossip and oratory of Southern churches,
the talk of men who had spent time on work gangs and prison gangs,
in the cotton fields and hill fields of hardscrabble farms. His head was
full of the poetry of his time—Thomas Hardy and E. A. Robinson and
Robert Frost—and he listened to the language of that world and made
poems out of it that are as powerful, in their way, and as indelible as the
photographs of Walker Evans.
Here’s the title poem from the book. It’s a chain-gang song, the voice
of an older man steadying a younger one and telling him his story. And
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weaving through it you hear one of the things that West African music
brought to North America, the physical sounds of work embedded in
the song—the up-from-the-gut hunh of physical labor, steel against stone,
playing through the blues-like field chant like some final truth of bodily
misery and bodily release.
Southern Road
Swing dat hammer—hunh—
Steady, bo’;
Swing dat hammer—hunh—
Steady, bo’;
Ain’t no rush, bebby,
Long ways to go.
Burner tore his—hunh—
Black heart away;
Burner tore his—hunh—
Black heart away;
Got me life, bebby,
An’ a day.
Gal’s on Fifth Street—hunh—
Son done gone;
Gal’s on Fifth Street—hunh—
Son done gone;
Wife’s in de ward, bebby,
Babe’s not bo’n.
My ole man died—hunh—
Cussin’ me;
My ole man died—hunh—
Cussin’ me;
Ole lady rocks, bebby,
Huh misery.
Doubleshackled—hunh—
Guard behin’;
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Doubleshackled—hunh—
Guard behin’;
Ball an’ chain, bebby,
On my min’.
White man tells me—hunh—
Damn yo’ soul;
White man tells me—hunh—
Damn yo’ soul;
Got no need, bebby,
To be tole.
Chain gang nevah—hunh—
Let me go;
Chain gang nevah—hunh—
Let me go;
Po’ los’ boy, bebby,
Evahmo’. . .
It’s an exquisite act of listening and rendering, terrible in what it tells
us and by now too familiar. I can see why people didn’t get it at that time.
If you just glance through it, it could look like another slightly quaint
revival of folk poetry. You could miss the intelligence and exactness and
anger and fatality in the writing. When Southern Road appeared at the tail
end of the publishing boom that got called the “Harlem Renaissance,”
critics didn’t know what to make of it. The Negro, as Langston Hughes
dryly noted, was no longer in fashion. And I think people were faintly
embarrassed by Brown’s use of dialect. It seemed old-fashioned. The sound
readers wanted to hear, if they wanted to hear anything at all, had the new
jazz-and-blues-inflected sound of Harlem. So two of the great books of
the period that looked at life in the South, Brown’s book and Zora Neale
Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, seemed to disappear without
a trace. Now both books are finding their place as essential American
works, and this weekend in his native city, Sterling Brown is going to get
some of the attention and admiration he’s long deserved.
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octobe r 25
Robert Bly
It has idly crossed my mind that, in human societies, fall has traditionally
been the time of scapegoat rituals. But I reminded myself that the release
of the Starr Report materials and the grand jury video were timed to do
as much damage as possible before the November elections and not to
clear the fields of the lingering and resentful spirits of the earth we have
plowed and harvested in the months of the growing cycle. Halloween is
our way of buying off the ghouls of autumn, whatever Congress is up to.
Here, anyway, is a poem of the fall with its sense-quickening feel of
life and death. It comes from a pleasant and very readable new anthology,
Wild Song: Poems of the Natural World, edited by John Daniel and pub-
lished by University of Georgia Press. This one is by Robert Bly:
A Private Fall
Motes of haydust rise and fall
with slow and grave steps,
like servants who dance in the yard
because some prince has been born.
What has been born? The winter.
Then the Egyptians were right.
Everything wants a chance to die,
to begin in the clear fall air.
Each leaf sinks and goes down
when we least expect it.
We glance toward the window for some
thing has caught our eye.
It’s possible autumn is a tomb
out of which a child is born.
We feel a secret joy
and we tell no one!
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Robert Bly’s newest book is Morning Poems (HarperFlamingo). It is
a record of a project he undertook of writing a poem every morning,
as his friend William Stafford had done. The project may have been a
self-administered cure for the traumatic distraction, for a poet, of hav-
ing written a best-seller. Bly’s Iron John and the subsequent parody of
its ideas in various television shows had made him the kind of public
figure it’s not very helpful for a poet to be. He seems to have responded
by staying in bed and writing poems, which was, I think, a very admi-
rable solution. And the poems, even the darkest of them, have a fresh
playfulness. You can feel the way his imagination has been cut loose by
the practice.
I ran into him on a fall morning a couple of years ago. He was chuck-
ling to himself, looking both pleased and a little bewildered. I asked him
what was on his mind, and he explained that on that morning he’d had
a conversation with a mouse about sleeping curled up versus sleeping
stretched out, and had written a poem about it, which he recited to me
on the spot. I was amused to see that it had become the final poem in
Morning Poems:
A Conversation with a Mouse
One day a mouse called to me from his curly nest:
“How do you sleep? I love curliness.”
“Well, I like to be stretched out. I like my bones to be
All lined up. I like to see my toes way off over there.”
“I suppose that’s one way,” the mouse said, “but I don’t like it.
The planets don’t act that way, nor the Milky Way.”
What could I say? You know you’re near the end
Of the century when a sleepy mouse brings in the Milky Way.
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novembe r 1
Chase Twichell
Chase Twichell lives in the Adirondacks. In the last ten years she’s
published three very different and very strong books. The first, Per-
dido, was about desire and sexuality and dream. The second, The Ghost
of Eden, came as a surprise, an angry clear-headed book about the
destruction of the earth, as if she’d shaken off dream and desire and
taken a hard look at the way things were. The newest book, The Snow
Watcher (Ontario Review Press), has just arrived in bookstores, and
it’s a surprise again. Its setting is in her territory, the beautiful Keene
Valley not too far from Lake Champlain, and the subject, or the back-
ground of her subjects, is her work as a student of Zen Buddhism. I
recommend the new book, but if you go to poetry partly for a taste
of the movement of the inner life, I recommend you read all three of
them. They track the inner movements of one life with an unexpected
freshness.
Reading the poems in The Snow Watcher is like breathing cold air.
Organized as a kind of narrative of her apprenticeship in Zen meditation,
they are full of sharp observation, both of the world and herself, unsen-
timental poems, with a sinewy intellectual toughness, and, as the book
progresses, they open out into a stark, sometimes bewildered clarity. Here
are a couple of them.
The Innocent One
The watcher guarded the innocent one,
that was their relationship.
When the innocent one was in danger,
had angered the mother or the father
maybe, walked out on some thin ice
on purpose (for the sharp defining edges
of it) and suddenly needed a rescue,
the watcher would be the rescuer.
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That allowed the innocent one to grow up
reckless: she was always stabbing herself
in the heart to see what each new kind of love
felt like. Then her savior the watcher
would heal her wound by explaining everything.
We’re a very solid couple, the two of us.
We’ve grown up into a fine double person.
Weightless, Like a River
I heard of a teacher and went to him.
In the monastery I studied his words
and the way he moved his body.
He seemed weightless, like a river,
both in his words and in his body.
Dawn zazen, the windows’
river light . . . I heard
his bare feet on the wood floor.
All the slow fish of ignorance
turned toward the sound.
The Verge
Inside language there was always
an inkling,
a dark vein branching,
bird-tracks in river sand spelling out
the fact of themselves,
asking me to come toward them
and scratch among them with a stick
all the secrets I could no longer keep,
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until my words were nothing
but lovely anarchic bird-prints themselves.
I think that’s the verge right there,
where the two languages
intertwine, twigs and thorns,
words telling secrets
to no one but river and rain.
novembe r 8
A Canadian Poet: Roo Borson
The Toronto poet Roo Borson was born in California but has lived her
adult life in Canada and publishes her books there. They are not eas-
ily available in American bookstores, though she’s become one of the
best-known Canadian poets of her generation. She’s a clear writer, clear-
minded with a dark and musical imagination. I look forward to each of
her books. Her latest, Intent, or The Weight of the World, is published by
McClelland and Stewart in Toronto. Ask your local bookstore to order it.
Autumn
One night goes on longer than the rest, never so long,
whiled away. Then dawn.
Goodbye, insects. Hollow casings on the windowsill,
a dainty leg among the spice jars.
Goodbye, marigolds, the earth will not wait for you.
Trains hurtle by at the edge of cities,
the taste of bourbon, a mouthful of leaves.
Above everyone’s dining-table a chandelier burns.
Now the luxurious old wine can be uncorked,
the slicing of meat and bread, uncorked,
and in the black panes life goes on.
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And here’s one, a quick notation for the end of daylight savings:
2 a.m.
2 a.m., and the clocks have been turned
one hour backwards. Summer’s gone,
like rage or pleasure, the
possum we caught rolling,
drunk on garbage,
over the fence one morning,
and now the rain:
a glimpse, sometimes,
as of a second chance—
not fully fallen into sleep,
to be awakened.
novembe r 15
A Portuguese Poet: Fernando Pessoa
When José Saramago won the Nobel Prize for Literature this fall, his
name drew a blank from most of the literary folk I know. He is the first
Portuguese Nobel laureate, and it mostly reminded poets of the fact that a
Portuguese poet, who should have received the prize in his lifetime, didn’t.
Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) is one of the great originals of modern Euro-
pean poetry and Portugal’s premier modernist. He is also a strange and
original writer. Other modernists—Yeats, Pound, Eliot—invented masks
through which to speak occasionally, from Michael Robartes to Hugh
Selywn Mauberly to J. Alfred Prufock. Pessoa invented whole poets. In
fact, his work consists of the collected works of at least four very different
poets, all invented by him. He called these alter egos his “heteronyms.”
