Now & Then, page 4
O taste and see
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the subway Bible poster said,
meaning The Lord, meaning
if anything all that lives
to the imagination’s tongue,
grief, mercy, language,
tangerine, weather, to
breathe them, bite,
savor, chew, swallow, transform
into our flesh our
deaths, crossing the street, plum, quince,
living in the orchard and being
hungry, and plucking
the fruit.
She will be missed, sorely. Almost all of her books are available from
New Directions and should be in the bookstores, her essays on poetry as
well as her poems.
I walked into a classroom once where she had been teaching at a sum-
mer writers’ workshop and saw scrawled across the board in her hand
these words: Accuracy is always the gateway to mystery. So I think she would
not mind if I took this space to repair a mistake in a column of a few
weeks ago, where Wallace Stevens’s famous poem “The Snow Man”
appeared with an incorrect first line. The poem begins:
One must have a mind of winter . . .
The poem ends with the line about seeing “nothing that is not there and
the nothing that is.” A small poem in Denise Levertov’s last book, Sands of
the Well, may have had this poem in mind:
Seeing the Unseen
Snow, large flakes,
whirling in midnight air,
unseen, coming to rest
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on a fast-asleep, very small village
set among rocky fields: not one
lit square of wakeful window.
january 19
In Memoriam: William Matthews
Before Denise Levertov died in December, one of the gifted poets of my
generation, William Matthews, died, at the age of fifty-six, of heart failure,
in New York City on a November evening while he was getting ready to
go with his lover to the opera. Bill had style—a learned, bitter, brilliant
wit, an easy elegance that he liked to entangle and roughen. I think he
always wanted to be a jazz musician and, often, he wrote like one. And he
was attentive to moments of grace in the botched world. A friend once
said of him that he had the most forgiving of unforgiving eyes. The last
poem in his last book, Time and Money (Houghton Mifflin), was about
opera and the world; his wicked wit is in it and the things he cared about
in art:
A Night at the Opera
“The tenor’s too fat,” the beautiful young
woman complains, “and the soprano
dowdy and old.” But what if Otello’s
not black, if Rigoletto’s hump lists,
if airy Gilda and her entourage
of flesh outweigh the cello section?
In fairy tales, the prince has a good heart,
and so as an outward and visible
sign of an inward, invisible grace,
his face is not creased, nor are his limbs gnarled.
Our tenor holds in his liver-spotted
hands the soprano’s broad, burgeoning face.
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Their combined age is ninety-seven; there’s
spittle in both pinches of her mouth;
a vein in his temple twitches like a worm.
Their faces are a foot apart. His eyes
widen with fear as he climbs to the high
B-flat he’ll have to hit and hold for five
dire seconds. And then they’ll stay in their stalled
hug for as long as we applaud. Franco
Corelli once bit Birgit Nilsson’s ear
in just such a command embrace because
he felt she’d upstaged him. Their costumes weigh
fifteen pounds apiece; they’re poached in sweat
and smell like fermenting pigs; their voices rise
and twine not from beauty, nor from the lack
of it, but from the hope for accuracy
and passion, both. They have to hit the note
and the emotion, both, with the one poor
arrow of the voice. Beauty’s for amateurs.
Bill Matthews published ten books of poems, and I’m told he finished
another before his death. It helps to think that new book will be appear-
ing and a collected poems after that. It will give us some time to absorb
his passion and his accuracy, both.
january 25
Frank Bidart
Here is a poem that imagines Lady Bird Johnson contemplating with a
kind of practical sadness the fact that she and her husband will never be
loved as their predecessors were loved. In the poem Mrs. Johnson knows
this because her mother died young, and she knows how her father’s gaze
rested on her, when it did. The poet tells the story as briefly as possible. It
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isn’t a dire poem, but in its quiet way the territory it inhabits is implacable:
in this life the heart is going to be injured.
Lady Bird
Neither an invalid aunt who had been asked to care for a sister’s
little girl, to fill the dead sister’s place, nor the child herself
did, could: not in my Daddy’s eyes—nor
should they;
so when we followed that golden couple into the White House
I was aware that people look at
the living, and wish for the dead.
This comes from a new book, Desire (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) by Frank
Bidart. He’s one of our most powerful poets and in some ways one of
the strangest. His poems are almost always intense; they deal with what’s
most irreparable and terrible in living. The figures in his poems are often
transfigured by the painfulness of life, and they are not saved by it. Bidart
isn’t interested in the formulas of redemption. As in the great tragedies,
the source of the light that shines from his poems is conscious suffering,
no more but no less.
The strangeness of his work has to do with its bluntness, the often
abstract language, and with the way he uses his sources. He likes to rep-
resent to us instances from his wide and curious reading of some of the
most basic dilemmas of the human condition, refashioned in a stark, con-
temporary language. This poem must have come from a biography of
Lady Bird Johnson. Another poem seems to be a recasting of a sonnet
from Dante’s fourteenth-century meditation on love, La Vita Nuova. In
early Italian poetry “eros” or “amor”—the name of the god is capitalized
in the first printings of these poems—is a long way from our cute little
Cupid. He is usually a young male figure, terrible in his beauty. In this
poem Bidart does a harsh, almost ragged contemporary version of the
classic Italian sonnet—two quatrains and two triple-rhymed three-line
stanzas—to give us what seems to be a dream or an allegory of the awful
and devouring power of love and its loss:
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Love Incarnate
To all those driven berserk or humanized by love
this is offered, for I need help
deciphering my dream.
When we love our lord is love.
When I recall that at the fourth hour
of the night, watched by shining stars,
love at last became incarnate,
the memory is horror.
In his hands smiling love held my burning
heart, and in his arms, the body whose greeting
pierces my soul, now wrapped in bloodred, sleeping.
He made him wake. He ordered him to eat
my heart. He ate my burning heart. He ate it
submissively, as if afraid, as love wept.
All of Frank Bidart’s earlier books have been gathered in a single vol-
ume, In the Western Night, also from Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
fe bruary 1
A Polish Poet: Adam Zagajewski
One of my favorite contemporary poets is Adam Zagajewski, a Polish
poet who lives in Paris. Zagajewski was a member of the generation of
Polish writers who came of age during the Solidarity years. Two volumes
of translations of his poems have been published in English, Tremor and
Canvas, both from Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and two volumes of his essays,
Solidarity, Solitude (Ecco Press) and Two Cities (Farrar, Straus & Giroux),
imaginative and surprising books about politics and art. Lately, he has
been teaching half the year in Houston. And here, from his new book,
Mysticism for Beginners (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), is a poem that comes out
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of that experience. It’s a poem of the idling mind in that hour of dusk
when consciousness flickers like a pilot light:
Houston, 6 p.m.
Europe already sleeps beneath a coarse plaid of borders
and ancient hatreds: France nestled
up to Germany, Bosnia in Serbia’s arms,
Lobely Sicily in azure seas.
It’s early evening here, the lamp is lit
and the dark sun swiftly fades.
I’m alone. I read a little, think a little,
listen to a little music.
I’m where there’s friendship,
but no friends, where enchantment
grows without magic,
where the dead laugh.
I’m alone because Europe is sleeping. My love
sleeps in a tall house on the outskirts of Paris.
In Krakow and Paris my friends
wade in the same river of oblivion.
I read and think; in one poem
I found the phrase “There are blows so terrible…
Don’t ask!” I don’t. A helicopter
breaks the evening quiet.
Poetry calls us to a higher life,
but what’s low is just as eloquent,
more plangent than Indo-European,
stronger than my books and records.
There are no nightingales or blackbirds here
with their sad, sweet cantilenas,
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only the mockingbird who imitates
and mimics every living voice.
Poetry summons us to life, to courage
in the face of the growing shadow.
Can you gaze calmly at the Earth
like the perfect astronaut?
Out of harmless indolence, the Greece of books,
and the Jerusalem of memory there suddenly appears
the island of a poem, unpeopled;
some new Cook will discover it one day.
Europe is already sleeping. Night’s animals,
mournful and rapacious,
move in for the kill.
Soon America will be sleeping, too.
The translator is Clare Cavanagh. It’s a complicated poem—the exile
at a loss in a place where he cannot feel roots, or rather like some seed
beginning tentatively to send out roots; the acute sense of the violence of
history, the oddness of the circadian rhythms of our lives in relation to that
violence, the ordinariness of sleeping and waking. Zagajewski’s sense of the
power of art—of books, music, poetry—is never ironic. In his work Earth
belongs to the shadow, poetry to courage and the light. But in this poem,
anyway, poetry is an island, unpeopled, waiting to be discovered, and in the
last stanza the night animals are moving in. A rather terrible lullaby.
There are perhaps a couple of details to gloss. The line “There are
blows so terrible… Don’t ask” comes from the great Peruvian poet César
Vallejo who died in 1938. This comes from the first line of the title poem
of his first book, Los Heraldos Negros (The Black Messengers). It is a book
and a poem very much worth looking up. And another detail: there are, of
course, blackbirds in Texas, but not Turdus merula, the European blackbird,
which is a species of thrush and has a very rich song.
Zagajewski’s essays and poems are worth getting to know. Both can
be radiant, sharply intelligent, suffused with an irony bred of Eastern
Europe’s encounter with history, but full also of unexpected joy. Mysticism
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for Beginners has these qualities, also a restless melancholy, as if, when his-
tory takes an encouraging turn, as it has in Poland, the despairing land-
scapes that we carry inside us and that the world keeps echoing with
renewed violence and misery elsewhere become more clear.
Note: Adam Zagajewski continues to spend time in Houston, but he has moved
to Krakow from Paris, and a volume of selected poems in translation has appeared,
Without End, and another collection of prose, In Defense of Ardor (both pub-
lished by Farrar, Straus & Giroux).
fe bruary 8
A Question of Decency: Walt Whitman
Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass has been in the news again. Of course, if
poetry is news that stays news, it should be. It is, after all, one of the great
books in American literature, as wild, alive, and surprising now as on the
day it first appeared, and it’s also a profound argument for the idea that the
spirit of sympathy for other people and their problems is the root spirit of
American democracy. But this time around, because it was given as a gift
by a president to a White House intern, it was described by one print jour-
nalist as “a favorite passed among lovers, specifically for one poem, ‘Song of
Myself,’ with its intimations of oral sex in Canto 5.” I’ve seen at least one
television journalist ogle at the mention of the book’s name. Walt Whit-
man might have been amused, if he had not had his own troubles with
official Washington. Here, to put the matter in perspective, is the fifth sec-
tion of “Song of Myself,” the famous account of the ecstatic union of body
and soul, and the way it returns us to the world, alive with attention:
I believe in you my soul, the other I am must not abase itself to you,
And you must not be abased to the other.
Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat,
Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture,
not even the best,
Only the lull I like, the hum of your valvèd voice.
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I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning,
How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turn’d over
upon me,
And parted the shirt from by bosom-bone, and plunged your
tongue to my bare-stript heart,
And reach’d till you felt my beard, and reach’d till you felt my feet.
Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that
pass all the arguments of the earth,
And I know the hand of God is the promise of my own,
And I know the spirit of God is the brother of my own,
And that all the men born are also my brothers, and the women
my sisters and lovers,
And that a kelson of the creation is love,
And limitless are leaves stiff and drooping in the fields,
And brown ants in the little wells beneath them,
And mossy scabs of the worm fence, heap’d stones, elder, mullein
and poke-weed.
But let me stray from scandal a moment to gloss the poem. “Kelson”
is a wonderful old term from nineteenth-century boatmaking. It means
the bar of wood at the bottom of a boat that fastens the floor timbers
to the keel: “The kelson of creation is love.” “Worm fence” is another
old American term. Here’s a passage from an English traveler’s book of
1796, describing the characteristic look of the American countryside:
“They place split logs angular-wise on each other making what they call
a “worm-fence” and which is raised about five feet high.”
Walt Whitman came to Washington in 1863 to volunteer as a nurse
with a commission from the YMCA. There were forty or fifty tent-
hospitals in those days of the worst fighting of the Civil War, and rare
breezes in the muggy summer were said to carry the moans of young men
and the reek of gangrene across Capitol Hill. Whitman spent his days in the
grim and overcrowded wards, ministering to young soldiers. It was at this
time that he wrote these other well-known lines from Leaves of Grass:
