Now & Then, page 5
Come sweet death! be persuaded O beautiful death!
In mercy come quickly.
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26 Robert Hass / 1998
He also visited Congress and listened to the proceedings: “Much gab,
great fear of public opinion, plenty of low business talent, but no master-
ful man.”
According to his biographer Justin Kaplan, he began to look for work
when his money ran out, his health nearly broken by the long hours in
the hospital. But Washington, you will be surprised to learn, was full of
literary critics and keepers of the public morality. A friend went to the
secretary of the Treasury, Salmon Chase, to ask about getting Whitman a
clerk’s position at the Treasury. He brought with him a letter from Ralph
Waldo Emerson recommending Whitman as one of America’s great writ-
ers. Chase turned down Whitman’s application because he had written
a “very bad book” and was “a decidedly disreputable person.” However,
Secretary Chase, who collected autographs, kept Emerson’s letter of rec-
ommendation: “I have nothing of Emerson’s in his handwriting, and I
shall be glad to keep this.”
Eventually Whitman got a position as a clerk at the Department of the
Interior in the Office of Indian Affairs. He had hardly settled in when a
new secretary, Senator James Harlan of Iowa, took over the department.
Harlan was a militant Methodist. Also, according to Mark Twain, a “great
Injun pacificator and land dealer.” He fired Whitman immediately: “I will
not have the author of that book in this department.” And while he was
at it, he fired everyone “whose conduct does not come within the rules
of decorum and propriety prescribed by a Christian Civilization,” includ-
ing all the women in the department, since he regarded their presence as
“injurious to . . . the morals of the men.”
“The meanest feature of it all,” the old poet remembered years later in
Camden, “was not his dismissal of me, but his rooting around in my desk
in the dead of night looking for evidence against me.”
fe bruary 15
Stanley Plumly
Here’s a poem of Washington, D.C., on a winter day. It’s by Stanley Plumly,
from his book The Marriage in the Trees (Ecco Press):
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Farragut North
In the tunnel-light at the top of the station two or three
figures huddled under tarps built against the wind crossing
Connecticut at K. It’ll be noon before they rise in their
Navajo blankets, trinkets, ski masks and gloves to start the
day, noon before the oil slicks of ice on the sidewalks thaw.—
In the forties, after the war, in the land of Uz, when
somebody came to the house for a handout, my mother’d give
him milk money or bread money as well as bread and milk.
To her each day was the thirties. The men at the door had the
hard-boiled faces of veterans, soldiers of the enemy. My
mother saw something in them, homelessness the condition
of some happiness, as if in the faces of these drifters could be
read pieces of parts of herself still missing: like the Indian
woman in Whitman’s Sleepers who comes to his mother’s door
looking for work where there is no work yet is set by the fire
and fed: so that for my mother, the first time she left, it
became a question of whom to identify with most, the
wanderer or the welcomer.—The stunted sycamores on K are
terminal, though they’ll outlast the hairline fractures marbling
the gravestones of the buildings. Under the perfect pavement
of the sky the figures frozen in this landscape contemplate the
verities too fundamentally for city or country: their isolation
is complete, like the dead or gods. When I think of a day with
nothing in it, a string of such days, I think of the gray life of
buildings, of walking out of my life in a direction just
invented, or, since some of us survive within mental wards
of our own third worlds, I see myself disguised for constant
winter, withdrawn into the inability to act on the least impulse
save anger and hear myself in street-talk talking street-time.
—Such is the freedom of transformation, letting the deep
voice climb on its own: such is the shell of the body broken,
falling away like money’s new clothes; such is my mother’s
truant spirit, moving dead leaves with the wind among
shadows . . .
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I can tell you what interests me about this poem technically. Poets in
the sixteenth century used to describe a poem that shoulders out past
the usual base of ten syllables as written in a “strong line.” This poem
seems to have a base of fourteen syllables; it gets longer than that, but no
shorter, except in the second to last line. And it does what poems based
on syllable count often do: it mostly ignores the line-end, sweeps right
past it, ends the line raggedly on articles and prepositions. And this usu-
ally doesn’t work very well with a long-lined poem; it tends to make the
line itself as a musical measure disintegrate so that you get a feeling that
you’re reading chopped-up prose, unless the forward momentum of the
sentences and the thought gathers you with it. Which, I think, in this
poem they do.
Everyone projects their own dramas onto street people and probably
projects different dramas at different times. I like the way this poem’s
long breath, impatient, impelled forward, doesn’t have breathless urgency,
which is the effect you’d most likely get from this technique. Instead it
feels like the long breaths of hard walking in the cold. Plumly grew up in
rural Ohio and Virginia and teaches now at the University of Maryland.
He’s long been admired as a poet and critic, and in both his poetry and
criticism he’s been interested in John Keats, has written a poetry that
seemed American and Southern but could be gorgeous in the way of
Keats. So there is something surprising for people who know his work in
the toughness and force of this poem.
What moves and interests me about it though is what any reader would
probably get from it whether they knew his work or took an interest in
technique. The way the city’s homeless in the winter set him to think-
ing about old American archetypes, his mother’s kitchen-door kindness
to strangers, tough strangers, as a habit of the Depression years, and the
memory of the beautiful passage in Whitman about the Indian woman at
his mother’s door in rural nineteenth-century Long Island, these make-
shift and homemade charities of another age. And then the reversal comes:
that his mother was one of these wanderers. And then the question for
all of us about whom we identify with in the sentimental (but practical
enough) tableaus of charity. And then the end of the poem, which seems
to me curiously adult and bitter with an uncomfortable mix of wistful-
ness and emptiness in it. And there’s another darkness here, I suppose. This
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is, after all, the capitol city, the symbolic repository of an idea of freedom.
Wanderer, welcomer, body broken, truant spirit, all of us with our private
wounds and longings for transformation.
fe bruary 22
Sonia Sanchez
One of the nominees this year for the National Book Critics Circle
Award in poetry is Sonia Sanchez’s Does Your House Have Lions? (Beacon
Press). It’s a book-length narrative poem about a Southern black family
come to New York in the 1960s. The speakers are a young brother who
has plunged into the gay subculture of the city and into the civil rights
movement and who ultimately dies of AIDS; a Southern father afraid for
his children and guilty at his neglect of them; a sister who must come
to terms with her anger and grief; ancestral voices that speak the story
against the background of African American life. It’s written in a series of
intricately rhymed seven-line stanzas, each one a small song.
Here’s the sister speaking of her seventeen-year-old brother, who is on
the scene in Manhattan:
and the bars. the glitter. the light
discharging pain from his bygone anguish
of young black boy scared of the night.
sequestered on this new bank, he surveyed the fish
sweet cargoes crowded with scales feverish
with quick sales full sails of flesh
searing the coastline of his acquiesce.
Here is the brother drawn out of the life of the bars by a new voice in
the streets:
came the summer of nineteen sixty
harlem luxuriating in Malcolm’s voice
became Big Red beautiful became a city
of magnificent Black Birds steel eyes moist
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30 Robert Hass / 1998
as he insinuated his words of sweet choice
while politicians complained about this racist
this alchemist. this strategist. this purist.
Here is the father who has not been there for his son:
i was a southern Negro man playing music
married to a high yellow woman who loved my unheard
face, who slept with me in nordic
beauty. i prisoner since my birth to fear
i unfashioned buried in an open grave
of mornings unclapped with constant sight
of masters fattened decked with my diminished light.
Here are the ancestral voices that end the poem:
have you prepared a place of honor for me?
have you recalled us from death?
where is the mmenson to state our history?
where are the griots the food my failed breath?
where is the morning path i crossed in good faith?
what terror slows your journey to this dawn?
have you prepared a place for us to mourn?
In a note Sanchez explains that a mmenson is an “orchestra of seven
elephant tusk horns used on state occasions to relate history.” This is a
metaphor for her seven-line stanza, seven horn flourishes to tell the story
and preserve the memory.
march 1
Marie Howe
Marie Howe’s new book, her second book of poems, is called What the
Living Do (Norton). Many of the poems deal with a beloved brother’s
death from AIDS, but the book begins with poems of childhood and
adolescence. The boys’ fort that the girls couldn’t go into. The initiation
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where boys tie up girls, and things start to get out of hand, and the one
boy the girls might trust is afraid to say, “Stop it.” The pajama parties
where girls talk about boys and practice kissing. They’re delicious poems,
and they have the effect of making you understand how powerful the love
between a brother and sister can be, and what it might mean to have your
older brother and protector die before your eyes.
Howe’s way with language is very spare. Many of the poems have a
stripped-down, point-blank quality that gives them a certain radiance.
Here’s one:
The Last Time
The last time we had dinner together in a restaurant
with white tablecloths, he leaned forward
and took my two hands in his hands and said,
I’m going to die soon. I want you to know that.
And I said, I think I do know.
And he said, What surprises me is that you don’t.
And I said, I do. And he said, What?
And I said, Know that you’re going to die.
And he said, No, I mean know that you are.
Here’s another:
The Promise
In the dream I had when he came back not sick
but whole, and wearing his winter coat,
he looked at me as though he couldn’t speak, as if
there were a law against it, a membrane he couldn’t break.
His silence was what he could not
not do, like our breathing in this world, like our living,
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32 Robert Hass / 1998
as we do, in time.
And I told him: I’m reading all this Buddhist stuff,
and listen, we don’t die when we die. Death is an event,
a threshold we pass through. We go on and on
and into light forever.
And he looked down, and then back up at me. It was the look
we’d pass
across the table when Dad was drunk again and dangerous,
the level look that wants to tell you something,
in a crowded room, something important, and can’t.
march 8
John Koethe
I’ve been reading an extraordinarily interesting book of poems, Falling
Water (HarperPerennial) by John Koethe. It interests me so much because
one of his subjects is the kind of psychic withdrawal from public life that
many people who came of age in the 1960s underwent.
I hadn’t really thought about that time for a while or my own experi-
ence of it. Think about the young Americans who grew up having the
protected childhoods of the 1950s, threw themselves ardently into the
civil rights movement and the peace movement, found their heroes in
public figures like John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King
and Malcolm X, and saw them assassinated one by one, gunshots that
rang through the decade. And there was more: the shots fired at Kent
State by National Guardsmen in the wake of yet another escalation of the
war, the inconclusive and belated American withdrawal from Vietnam, the
investigation of burglaries sanctioned by a sitting president. These same
young people found themselves a few years later in the middle of adult
life in Ronald Reagan’s America when the public style was conspicuous
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indulgence, the gap between rich and poor was growing, and the media
heroes were millionaires like Donald Trump.
What happened to many of them was a retreat into private life, a kind
of internal exile they only half-recognized themselves, and it’s a story that
hasn’t been registered in our literature very well. Koethe’s book is about
disappointment in many forms. But I think one of the things he’s trying
to do is find a way to speak about this generational experience from the
point of view of a writer. The language of the poems is calm, analytical,
even abstract, and there is a dry anguish in it, an undertow of complex
and baffled emotion. The quality of the language may have to do with
the fact that he is a philosopher by profession. He’s written a book about
Ludwig Wittgenstein.
It doesn’t make for easy poems, but reading him I felt the “shock of
recognition” that lets you know you’re in the presence of real writing. See
what you think:
Morning in America
It gradually became a different country
After the reversal, dominated by a distant,
Universal voice whose favorite word was never,
Changing its air of quiet progress into one of
Rapidly collapsing possibilities, and making me,
Even here at home, a stranger. I felt its tones
Engaging me without expression, leaving me alone
And waiting in the vacuum of its public half-life,
Quietly confessing my emotions, taking in its cold
Midwinter atmosphere of violence and muted rage. I
Wanted to appropriate that anger, to convey it, not
In a declamatory mode, but in some vague and private
Language holding out, against the clear, inexorable
Disintegration of a nation, the claims of a renewed
Internal life, in these bleak months of the new year.
That was my way of ruling out everything discordant,
Everything dead, cruel, and soulless—by assiduously
Imagining the pages of some legendary volume marked
Forever, but without ever getting any closer. As I
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Got older it began to seem more and more hopeless,
More and more detached—until it only spoke to me
