Why go on? Haven’t we all asked ourselves this question at one time or another? Perhaps we are suffering from an illness, an infirmity, a condition that will not get better; perhaps a mate has died or left us for another; or it could just be that we are overwhelmed with problems or bored by our jobs, disappointed in our hopes, depressed despite medication.
In John Avildsen’s Save the Tiger (1973), garment manufacturer Harry Stoner (Jack Lemmon) is wealthy enough to live in Beverly Hills, wear an Italian silk suit, send his daughter to a school in Switzerland, drive a Lincoln Continental. But running a business is not easy. There are cash flow problems; employees’ egos clash; clients make unreasonable demands; the Vietnam War rages on in the background, awakening bad memories in Harry, a World War II veteran.
Harry is also haunted by memories of a more innocent time. Cookie Lavagetto of the Brooklyn Dodgers and Helen O’Connell of the Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra are two of the names that serve him as metonyms of that vanished past. When, at the end of the movie, he affirms his desire to live “for a season,” is it merely a wish for survival? No. “I want that girl in a Cole Porter song,” he says. “I want to see Lena Horne at the Cotton Club, hear Billie Holiday sing fine and mellow, walk in that kind of rain that never washes perfume away. I want to be in love with something.”
Asked to write poems articulating or enumerating their own “reasons for living,” NLP players came through with a winning array of poems. By June 20, our deadline, we had received 98 comments, some of them responses to or proposed revisions of poems provoked by the prompt. It is a pleasure to welcome one newcomer, Ashton Gildea, whose entry “The Essentials of a Life Worth Living” takes the form of an annotated list, full of surprises:
– Mosquitoes
and how with every scratch of your pores you engrave and release memories of summer nights among friends and lovers
– Alarm Clocks
and the daily reminder that somewhere you are needed by someone, urgently
– Traffic
and the opportunity, as an adult, to simply sit and sing along to your favorite songs
– Breakups
and the challenge to love yourself in an uncrowded mirror
– Pandemics
and all the time & silence to reintroduce you to yourself, undiluted
– Death
and the tears that cleanse your eyes to see all you’ve had in front of you all this time
“The Essentials of a Life Worth Living” resembles an inspired footnote to the sublime closing paragraph of Emerson’s “Compensation,” in which the essayist asserts that the “death of a dear friend, wife, brother, lover, which seemed nothing but privation, somewhat later assumes the aspect of a guide or genius; for it commonly operates revolutions in our way of life, terminates an epoch of infancy or of youth which was waiting to be closed, breaks up a wonted occupation, or a household, or style of living, and allows the formation of new ones more friendly to the growth of character.”
Meanwhile, inspired by Marianne Moore’s poem “Poetry,” Sally Ashton contributed “Life,”:
I, too, dislike it
at times—its rigors
of sorrow and pain
not eased by stiffening
my upper lip or imagining
a worst-case scenario.
Living it, however, with
a perfect contempt for platitudes
and suffering alike, I do find
I prefer it to the extreme
alternative, that which waits
for each of us, not some high-
sounding heaven, more cosmic
reintegration, something
I do not understand nor
admire. But to look at the Moon,
watch day spill over a lake, hold
my grandson’s hand, take a
walk with a friend, look into
my lover’s eyes, these things
are important because they are.
Considering death—a real world
with no me in it—I discover
a genuine interest in life.
The poem quotes the first line of Moore’s poem as well other significant words and phrases: “genuine,” “a perfect contempt,” “things [that] are important.” NLP regulars applauded Sally’s effort. Emily called it a “wonderful poem” but offered a condensed version, shortening Sally’s concluding 15 lines to these nine:
I prefer it to the alternative.
Look at the Moon.
Watch day spill over a lake.
I hold my grandson’s hand,
look into my lover’s eyes.
These things are important
because they are.
Considering death,
I re-discover life.
Favoring understatement and verbal economy, I like Emily’s edits and am curious how others feel. Sally, has Emily cut anything crucial?
Millicent Caliban, who holds NLP’s Walter Pater chair in literary scholarship, derived the impulse behind her poem from Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy. Here is “The Undiscovered Country Can Wait”:
Why rush? Sooner or later,
The eternal Footman comes.
Meanwhile, enjoy and bless whatever is.
Life may be a cabaret for some.
For others, a magnificent museum.
Don’t like that picture? Move on to the next.
Skip that dreary poem. Turn the page.
One painted a charming image of his bedroom
Or went mad and saw a starry night.
Another looked (thirteen ways) at a blackbird
Or wandered (and wondered) at some daffodils.
Someone else found David in a stone.
Behold their beauty, then find your own.
Taste a liquor never brewed, inebriate yourself.
Though much is taken, much abides.
Tear your pleasures with rough strife.
Do not go gentle. Stay up all night.
Finish the book. See how it ends.
There is a flurry of allusions; the last five lines alone echo Dickinson, Tennyson, Marvell, and Dylan Thomas. Mere show this is not; there is value in poetry that performs acts of criticism and allusion. To my mind the best lines are: “One painted a charming image of his bedroom / or went mad and saw a starry night,” from which Van Gogh emerges at the last moment. Less effective, however, are “Another looked (thirteen ways) at a blackbird / or wandered (and wondered) at some daffodils.” Why? Because the Stevens and Wordsworth poems (“Thirteen Ways of Looking at Blackbird” and “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” respectively) are perhaps too often invoked, and the poet’s parentheses belabor the thought.
I admire how Josie Cannella uses the haiku stanza—five syllables in line one, seven in line two, five in line three)—to organize “Nine Reasons to Breathe”:
Wakened by birds, a
sweetness second only to
being kissed awake.
Dogwood offers us
blossoms, like a waiter with
white lace laden plates.
The landing geese break
the river’s mirror, merging
with doppelgängers.
Winter trees, Nature’s
brushes set to dry after
painting the sunset.
Snuggled up for warmth,
not wanting to miss a thing,
lying dogs fight sleep.
Supine child sculpting
snow angels, bundled up, laughs.
Heaven here on Earth.
The plane takes off. We
beat gravity and defy
Mother Earth’s magnet.
Musician plays on
girl-shaped guitar. Our heartstrings
hum in harmony.
Our way enlightened
with pages, blocks, canvases
transformed by artists.
Michelangelo, the sculptor in Millicent’s poem, sees “David in a stone” and creates the beauty that affirms life; in Josie’s poem, the artist is nature, “painting the sunset” or distributing dogwood blossoms “like a waiter.”
Kaleiheana Stormcrow’s poem grabs our attention with its title, “You are mistaken, the gods have not forsaken us.” What follows is thoroughly interesting but cries out for the kind of edits that Emily can provide:
Rain falling from blackened skies
thunder cries, rains moisten soil plagued by dry
flowers bloom despite gloom and doom,
in summer my body ripens with Strawberry moon
Bearing witness to the interplay of darkness and light
moon against the backdrop of night is stark and bright
the sun never fails to set or rise
birdsong breaks silence asunder and fills the skies
morning mists creep skyward from the forest floor
rays of light shine through except where trees obscure
spectrums of color dance in the ocean
I imagine dreams already set in motion
Helios in his chariot sets the sky ablaze
signaling the end of another day
There is much to admire here—“Strawberry moon,” “the sun never fails to set”— and the exuberant rush of words is a pleasure. I can’t help feeling, though, that even an arbitrary method of editing—cut every second line, say, or omit every adjective—would give us a poem that packs a greater punch.
Angela Ball uses anaphora, repeating “Because” at the start of every line, to unify her “Reasons for Living”:
Because NYC is a large empty space
to write poetry
because alligators stand on their hind legs
under water
because the southern hemisphere gets a full moon
emblazoned with a horse and carriage
because they’re making a movie
of the sky’s dreams
and it’s showing continuously
because this hill is covered in soft grass
and you roll down
in a series of flashes
In “10 Reasons to Keep Warding Off the Worms (a.k.a., Savin’ Ate Nein) with thanks to Michael Sea Rush & nods to Manhattan (1979),” Paul Michelsen demonstrates his inventiveness. His wordplay implies that irreverence itself can serve as both a shield and an unconventional means of exposition:
One: To put off the inevitable, e.g., seeing the look of
disappointment on the face of God.
2: So I can skip right to the end
of all those books I still haven’t read.
III: Still doing re-writes on my book about decaying values
(Working title: Cheating with My Spouse’s Mistress).
Fore: Why let spontaneous indiscretions in the middle of
Bloomingdale’s be a thing of the past?
Cinco: My desire for “second opinions” from other therapists still burns.
Sicks: Free dance lessons.
Savin’: Just a bit more meaningless extravagance.
Ate: And a few more fits of rage, self-righteous misanthropy,
and nihilistic moods of despair.
Nein: So much more trouble to get into, and Trouble is my middle name. (Actually it’s not, but it sounds better than
“So much more Mortimer to get into.”).
X: In order to become the most devastating homunculus I can be.
Being funny is underrated; it is also quite difficult. The first two lines of Paul’s poem are priceless.
I wish I had space enough to present Elizabeth Aquino’s “Reasons for Living,” one of which is Fra Angelico’s Annunciation, and J. Randall Brett’s “Whap!” in which food is the answer,
life’s zuppa fateaglia –
stewed fate and beans,
its mélange of garlic
and curled fingertelli
pasta beckoning,
calling me spoonwards,
scent of fresh basil, all
giving both the fly and me
our reasons to let be.
I hadn’t planned to write a poem to this prompt, but I am reluctant to disappoint Charise Hoge, who encouraged me to write my own “Reasons for Living.” So I have:
Look at the dog asleep on the sofa.
You don’t need a reason.
A grown man will sprain an ankle
playing a boy’s playground game,
yet he plays. He drives to the beach
with a girl he hardly knows, half
his age, and she gets him high,
and he listens to Bunny Berigan’s
theme song, “Can’t Get Started,”
music by Vernon Duke, words
by Ira Gershwin, and what he feels
is nostalgia, not desire but
a postdated lament for its absence,
which like all laments is a secret
renewal of desire, a push against
the unmovable rock of existence.
Here’s a prompt for next time. Use one of the following three paintings as your point of departure:
Your poem can be a meditation on the painting or its subject matter, or you may introduce the painting and deviate far from it. You could, for example, write about poker, games of chance, Chinese food, prewar small-town America, Venus, Mars, beauty, war. It would be wise to incorporate a rhetorical trick, such as using, in every line, an anagram of a word in a previous line. Or consider writing a poem in which the first and last lines are identical. Limit: 12 lines.
Deadline: two weeks after the post goes up, noon any time zone.
ate in 1987 an extraordinary literary, intellectual and political scandal broke in a place we would least expect it: among the solemn deconstructionists of the humanities faculty at Yale University, the Sorbonne of Connecticut. One of the leading deconstructionists, the former Sterling Professor of the Humanities, Paul de Man, who died four years before, proved to have pulled the curtain on a dark stage in his wartime history. As a young man in his native Belgium, influenced by a powerful uncle who became a leading supporter of the Nazis, de Man had contributed some 170 articles to collaborationist newspapers. Though largely literary, they celebrated the historical justice and destiny of Nazism and, to put it at its least, colluded with its anti-Semitic philosophies.
Ed note: 
#/media/File:Edward_hopper_chop_suey.jpg){kind=link}