Poor Keats. A Scorpio with Virgo rising and, just to clinch the deal, his moon in Gemini. This is the equivalent of being dealt the Fool, the Lovers (inverted), and the Tower as the three culminating cards in an eleven-card Tarot reading. There is sadness in his life, illness, a consumptive cough. But he has a generous soul, he meets afflictions with renewed resolve, he is capable of great feats of self-discipline. Willing to work hours on meters and rhymes, he is a born dreamer, who can shut his eyes and transport himself in a second to fairy lands forlorn, an enchantment of mist, an early autumn of heirloom tomatoes and three varieties of peaches. Life is a struggle, but he prevails, and then dies young.
Born on the 31st of October, Keats had a soft spot for Halloween and tried his hand at writing spooky verses that would scare school chums sitting around the campfire during the season of burning leaves. The fact that Keats's moon is in Gemini, that the nocturnal northeastern quadrant is predominant in his natal chart, and above all that Mercury is his ruling planet, supports the view of this poet as a divinely-ordained messenger of the gods trapped in the frail body of an undernourished London lad with his face pressed against the sweet shop window, as Yeats wrote.[1]
Keats's Venus is, like his sun, in Scorpio. This is crucial. It means he is as passionate as he is sensitive and a gambler not by instinct or by social association but by his intransigent attachment to his ideals. He can be loved by many but reserves his own love for one. Auden's poem “The More Loving One” depicts a conflict that Keats resolved each time he picked up his pen to write. He felt he was destined to be the more loving one in any partnership, and he would not have had it any other way, but he didn’t live long enough to test his resolve.
Keats loved the four elements and presented their interplay with the clarity that Vermeer brought to the study of light. Vermeer, too, was born on Halloween. In an unpublished story by E. M. Forster with a strong hint of bisexuality and a blithe disregard of historical possibility, the seventeenth-century Vermeer and the nineteenth-century Keats -- accompanied by Dorothy Wordsworth (nineteenth century) and Virginia Woolf (twentieth century) – meet in Oxford and discuss aesthetics and metaphysics as they float slowly down the Isis on a punt.
The story that Keats died because of a bad review in an influential Edinburgh journal is to the biography of English poets what history was in the mind of the automobile manufacturer who invented the assembly line, bunk, but it was kept fresh by Byron’s oft-quoted couplet in Don Juan: “Tis strange the mind, that fiery particle / should be snuffed out by an article.” But the mischievous Byron, born on January 22 (1788) -- an Aquarius trailing clouds of Capricorn, and with Cancer as his rising sign -- was as conflicted on the subject of his younger Cockney-born contemporary as Emerson was about Whitman after the former praised the latter, who proceeded to enlarge Leaves of Grass almost beyond recognition.
The position of Mercury in the third house has caused the greatest amount of comment among professional astrologers. The consensus view is that Keats resembled certain musical geniuses in his extraordinary talent, his humble origins, and his early death. Though he was less dashing than the patrician Byron and less angelic of aspect than Shelley, all the women polled said they would welcome a relationship with Keats, especially if she is in England while he is in Italy writing long gorgeous letters to her about Shakespeare plays, the nature of inspiration, the smell of mortality, and what Adam felt like waking up in Eden. Keats proved that greatness descends on the novice only after he has opened himself up to the risk of failure or embarrassment.
If Shelley is the poet of the autumn wind, the wind that destroys and preserves, animating the leaves and the waves and the clouds in a fury of activity, Keats is the poet of autumnal ripeness. Here are the last three lines of “To Autumn,” his ode to the “season of mist and mellow fruitfulness”:
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
The closing music shows that Keats took to heart his own advice to Shelley (“load every rift with ore”). A comparison of the two poets -- the one prospective, anticipatory, the other all righteous fire and visionary fury but also retrospective and melancholy -- is a fascinating study in comparative astrology. It has been said that the single most revealing piece of information you may have about a potential dating partner is whether he identifies himself more with Keats or with Shelley.
The muse visited Keats often in the spring of 1819. First came “The Eve of St. Agnes,” the lovers rushing away into the night; then “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” the lover seduced and abandoned. These poems were as immediate as dreams. And then came the odes, the greatest odes that English has to offer: to Psyche, to a Nightingale, on a Grecian Urn, on Melancholy, to Indolence. No poet ever packed as much magnificence in a line or wrote stanzas of such melodious charm that a simple, naive statement of Platonic optimism, which in lesser hands would be anticlimactic or worse, should seem to penetrate the heart of the mystery: “Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty.”
[1] Note: If you mix up the names Keats and Yeats, or pronounce one as if it were the other, the chances of your appreciating either are diminished by a seventh but not eliminated. The two names are separated by nearly five decades but linked by lyrical genius, with the prophetic mode ascendant in Yeats, while Keats -- brainy, anxious, and quick as befits a son of Mercury -- wins the laurels for sensuality and freshness: the palpable bubbles in the wine glass, the burst of a grape in the satyr’s mouth, the humming of flies on the porch screen in August, keen fitful gusts of wind.
I wandered lonely as a map
I had to return to the poisonous, little town of Wuhan
I played with my father’s ancient microscope
And I played with my mother’s telescope
And I met my sister’s metronome
And I walked to the line, the laser line
And I met and I sang
On my way through the buddhafields
On my way through each snowy peak
And I wandered through each snowy jag
I wandered, and that was that
And that was that
I wandered lonely as a map
Showy words and every word
And that was that
Near the poisonous little town of Wuhan
And that was that
--David Shapiro
10 / 25 / 20
Archie Rand, Motet #1, 2013, 24 x 36 inches, acrylic, enamel and fabric on canvas.
BravinLee is very pleased to exhibit the Motets, a series of 20 paintings by Archie Rand, after the poems of Eugenio Montale. Schedule: October 28-31 and November 4-7, 12-5pm. Appointments encouraged. For further information or to make an appointment please email us at info@bravinlee.com
“What you see is not what you see” – Philip Guston
Rand had previously responded to the work of Nobel Prize winning author, Eugenio Montale in a series of paintings (“Men Who Turn Back”) and then in 2013 Rand again engaged Montale’s formidable “Motets”, a group of 20 love poems that Montale seems to be mouthing into the air as they are addressed to a departed lover. In these poems a bombardment of imagery attempts to fill the negative space around an unhealed pain, the avenue to which Montale needed to, in futility, keep open. Rand’s pictorial armature derives from Giorgio De Chirico’s parallel entropy, which shares a spirit of the unfulfilled. Long recognized as a masterful artist, Rand brings the full force of his invention and lyricism to these works.
______________________________
The Archie Rand collaboration with the poet David Shapiro has its roots in their shared experience of growing up in New York City and being maverick teen prodigies. In his mid-teens Rand played piano professionally with artists who were to become major stars and, at the age of 17, was showing at the legendary Tibor de Nagy Gallery - and Shapiro, in high school performed as a violin soloist under Leopold Stokowski and at the age of 16 had published a major book of poetry that received praise from John Ashbery and Jack Kerouac.
When the exhibit went up at Peachtree Center,
the Chinese of Atlanta flocked downtown.
Jews had been in Henan so close to forever,
they weren’t seen as foreign. And we had found
an exhibit on China that wasn’t old vases.
Jews were Chinese in more ways than food.
Migration was not always out of the places
our families had fled; it had once been to.
Our pantries were “ethnic” not just for the shrimp chips
and wood ears, but as well for the matzah.
Maybe, when asked, Do you celebrate Christmas?,
we were not being checked for Zen or the Buddha.
We didn’t say it in so many words.
The line between Asia and Europe had blurred.
from the new issue of The Common, October 28, 2020
(Ed. note: In 2011 Mark Ford wrote for us about the experience of translating Raymond Roussel's Nouvelles Impressions d’Afrique. You can read yesterday's post here. Find Ford's new translation here. )
The first two extracts are footnotes from Canto IV. There are 98 lines of the main text in this canto, and 134 in footnotes! The first footnote is on the general theme of ambition, and the second on pride, and the fact that animals and birds (apart from the peacock) don’t have it, despite their various accomplishments. The third extract is from the enormous list in Canto II in which Roussel presents 207 examples of things that are visually similar but of different sizes.
1
There is no one who does not cherish an ambitious dream;
The worker believes he will see himself dictating, at the time of a strike
(These days people use their reason, and each, with their eye on the goal
((We all have one: as long as the nape of his neck,
Laid bare for the blade of the guillotine,
Remains for a quarter of an hour longer connected to his spine,
Thinking: “Letting one's prey slip occurs — often — even
To someone who holds it most securely” (((and indeed, the imbecile
Escapes from his padded cell, the prisoner in solitary confinement from his jail,
The cheese from the beak of the duped crow;
— On some occasions keeping silent is the best option;))),
The murderer has only one aim: escape;)),
Whatever his or her ideal is: to earn a large salary,
To give birth to children, to see the threshing floor overflowing with his grain
Or to make his pulse rate slow and settle down,
Feel that, to succeed, it is better to think and act
Than to make — jobbing worker, infertile wife,
Harvester or invalid — a wish in the moment
That a shooting star leaves its shining trail;),
Tired of giving his sweat to the bourgeoisie to drink
(It is often for Peter that Paul suffers and works;
Vespucci exploited Columbus’s discovery;
And it is to furnish a pearl for some finger or waistcoat
That an oyster spends its life labouring;), laws to his boss;
The slut in her attic dreams of living in style;
And to see his hands adorned with amethysts and holding a crozier
Is a fantasy dear to each fledgeling priest.
2
If human excellence drives out modesty
As much as Monday does the ardour of workers
(One gets used to leisure; the soul and the heart elsewhere,
The lycée pupil is sombre when he returns in October;),
And insanity, in the case of a criminal, the shame of his crime,
And an unsnowy winter high prices for road salt,
Yet pride is not a universal vice;
Leaving aside the peacock, it steers clear of beasts:
The swallow, despite its ability to predict tempests;
The ram, although it is the emblem of the order of the Grand Cross
(Everyone is familiar with the Golden Fleece); the cat,
Although it can work out its bearings at midnight without a candle,
Although it knows how to predict — just like the swallow,
But not so accurately or publicly —
By the static its fur gives off
The anger lurking in a sky that feigns calm,
Although it allows spinsters to enjoy a sweet old age
And can walk in silence even when not on a carpet;
The wolf, although a she-wolf had famous dugs;
The he-goat, although his skin furnishes humans with water-bottles;
Despite the high price currently demanded for his skin, the otter;
Although his name designates a fabric, the alpaca.
3
the candle end of a miser,
For a flat-headed drawing pin on its own
With its point in the air; — in Switzerland, at the bazaar, for an eyelash,
Curved escapee from a soft eye, the black horn
Of a chamois; — a warming pan after it’s been hung on its nail,
For a motionless pendulum, called back to life;
— In a rickshaw just as it's being readied,
The puller’s degrading harness, for a pair of braces;
— At a lewd woman's house, a pleasant lace-fringed pillow,
For an unused pincushion with a merry flounce;
— A mask put aside by a tired fencer,
For an eye protector to be placed over the glasses
Of a stonebreaker; — the clearly wrinkled temple
Of an old man, for the upper part of the underside of a fist;
— For the hair-touselling black cloth of a photographer,
That with which, generating a breeze, four people cover
A coffin; — an album of portraits, if, to open it,
You have to overcome one or two fasteners, for a parish register;
— For a lowly button hook, the hook, almost a part of his body,
Whose noble fate is to stand in for the five fingers of an armless man;
— An arm sling, for the scarf in which a much enlarged
Cheek is hidden on a day when it's inflamed;
— When he's making iron hot enough to be bent,
For a pair of hearth bellows, the bellows used in a forge;
— For that which someone with a cough shows to a throat-doctor,
An arched cavern, reddened by the setting sun,
With a solitary stalactite; — a lake of blood that appears
In a dangerous district, for the treacherous spittle
Of a consumptive; — at a saddler’s, the tether
From which an empty stirrup gleams, for the broken fastener
Of a yellow umbrella; — for the perfidious, sworn-at bit of shot
That an eater of game spits aside, cursing it to the devil,
A cannonball cleaving the air…
from the archive; first posted April 22, 2011
Nouvelles Impressions d’Afrique is largely made up of lists. Most of Canto II, for instance, is taken up by a list of 207 examples of things of things that might be mistaken for smaller things with which they have a visual similarity. The first of these is a lightning conductor, which is (much) bigger than, but looks like, a grey thread being passed through the eye of a needle; the last is a spider in a fisherman’s net, which looks like, but is (a bit) bigger than a louse in a hairnet. Some of Roussel’s examples in this list amply demonstrate why his writing was so popular with the Surrealists – though the compliment wasn’t returned; he said he found their work ‘un pur obscur’.
— for a single fried egg, on its own,
With a vigorously salted yolk, the skull, bent in prayer,
Of an old priest with jaundice;
— For that which someone with a cough shows to a throat doctor, [ie. an
inflamed uvula]
An arched cavern, reddened by the setting sun,
With a solitary stalactite;
All of these lists are introduced by a sort of ‘hook’. The ‘hook’ introducing this particular one is an eavesdropper overhearing a conversation about himself; our vanity is such, Roussel goes on to note, that even when we hear our large faults enumerated, it’s as if we fall under a spell that that makes us likely to mistake big things for little things: a porthole for a monocle; a guillotine for a cigar-cutter; an alligator by a sun-umbrella for a lizard by a mushroom. And so on. And so on.
There is no real reason why any of these lists should ever end. In Canto I the dominant list is introduced by someone having his photo taken, who wonders if, even if he keeps as still as he can, he will end up coming out blurred. At this Roussel breaks in: ‘((((Tels se demandent: - / ((((Such also wonder: -’, and we get 54 instances of people – and things – in comparable states of wondering; a lamppost if the three-headed dog Cerberus would sniff it with all three of its noses before urinating on it; a wall being battered by a loose shutter during a storm, what it is being punished for; an animal-tamer being eaten by a wild beast if his mourning widow will still be strictly in black (sans gris ni mauve) a year on; hot milk that has been left in the pot, if it will be poured with or without its skin.
It occurred to me that that Roussel’s lists, though undoubtedly the product of a very singular imagination, could actually also be the basis for quite useful and interesting writing school exercises. Just as Joe Brainard’s ‘I Remember’ format is widely employed to stimulate autobiographical prose pieces, wouldn’t the ‘Such Also Wonder’, say, work as an inspiring format? Such also wonder:
the bic pen-cap, how often it will be used
to clean the writer’s ear; the child’s tooth
under the pillow, if fairies really exist…
Like ‘le très special procédé (the very special method) that he used to write his novels and plays and posthumously explained in the essay ‘Comment j’ai écrit certains de mes livres’ (see the note on p. 233 of this edition of Nouvelles Impressions d’Afrique), the special methods Roussel developed in this, his final poem, might also, or so it seems to me, prove useful for later writers.
from the archive; first posted April 19, 2011
— Asian American Writers' Workshop (@aaww) October 27, 2020
This #PoetryTuesday we're partnering with @TheAALR and @SmithsonianAPA to share ten poems from BEST AMERICAN POETRY 2020, edited by @PaisleyRekdal.
From 10 AM until 7 PM, we'll be sharing a poem every hour. Stay tuned & follow this thread! pic.twitter.com/DTTH53bktG
--sdl
In today's New York Times, a place I know we all rush for the latest and "greatest" in poetry criticism, David Orr asks, in "The Great(ness) Game, basically, what will happen when THE generation of GREAT poets is gone.
Orr begins with noting that John Ashbery is the first living poet to have a volume in the Library of America. And this leads Orr to ponder: "What will we do when Ashbery and his generation are gone? Because for the first time since the early 19th century, American poetry may be about to run out of greatness."
Hit the 7-elevens! Stock up on greatness before the twister hits!
First off, “Great,” is a sloppy term, something to which Orr’s pile-up of potential definitions and questions, mostly rhetorical questions, gestures. To give him some credit, the definition of “great” is his topic; but notice the plague of single words meat hooked in quotation marks (“greatness,” “great,” “boring,” “good,” “major,” “serious,” &c.)—and THEN notice when Orr increasingly decides meat hooks aren’t necessary. Words whose meaning he begins by suggesting are up for grabs, are by the end of the essay, grabbed. The start of the essay is addicted to quotation marks on terms, while the end, I’m not sure if he thought this was subtle, features few. For a piece dealing with definition he plays faster and looser with the indefinite and definite than any writer I’ve ever read. Defining “great,” he opines, is an “increasingly blurry business.” [these quotation marks are mine—from now on I will bold the words he himself puts in quotation marks.] However “increasing blurry,” the term “great” is at the beginning of the essay more often then not held in quotation marks, and, by the end, great stands naked, proud, and apparently self-evidently in focus.
1. “The problem is that over the course of the 20th century, greatness has turned out to be an increasingly blurry business.”
Orr blames this on postmodernism’s questioning of “Truth, Beauty, [and] Justice.” But simple sense might tell us that as history progresses, we have fewer and fewer filters (years, critics, just plain old historic contingency) through which poetry must pass to get to us eager readers. Contemporary poetry is precisely that, contemporary, these poems haven’t been around long enough to have dependable gauges of “greatness” even were we to wish to make such questionable judgments. And there is the adventure! There is the delight, the pleasure, the challenge for the contemporary reader. I do not for one read a poem to decide, “Is this great?” I read it to see if it invents, if it makes me run out and read it to all my overly-patient friends, if I can’t stop running through lines of it as I fall asleep, if it gives me insight into big or little questions I’ve been puzzling over. Or if it shapes in language something that has been floating in the often addled ether of my thinking. Or if a new device makes me see language and its possibility in an unexpected way.
Continue reading "The Great(est) Game [by John Emil Vincent]" »
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After reading our post on painting fabric-covered furniture, Stacey Harwood sent us an email about her great “guest” chair. “I knew a white chair would not stay white for long in my NYC apartment so I bought some fabric markers and I invite our guests to sign it. I’m happy to say that it has been signed by some of our most celebrated poets: Mark Strand and John Ashbery are toward the top; Charles Simic is on the seat. You can also distinguish Jim Cummins, Susan Wheeler and Star Black (poet, collage artist, photographer). To the lower right is Gabriella Gershenson, a senior editor at Saveur. On the left are Deborah Landau and Richard Howard…”
Harwood’s husband, David Lehman is series editor of the annual The Best American Poetry books, which is how they come to have to many fine poets and writers as friends. Their blog is The Best American Poetry.
“It’s a wonderful record of the first two years in our apartment and truly a one-of-a-kind piece that gives us much pleasure.”
Harwood improvised a whole other order of guest book…
>>>
from Improvised Life: A Treasury of Inspiring Ideas
https://improvisedlife.com/2011/02/22/guest-chair-a-charming-play-on-guest-book/
______________________________________________________________________________________________________
Shibboleth
One didn’t know the name of Tarzan’s monkey.
Another couldn’t strip the cellophane
From a G.I.’s pack of cigarettes.
By such minutiae were the infiltrators detected.
By the second week of battle
We’d become obsessed with trivia.
At a sentry point, at midnight, in the rain,
An ignorance of baseball could be lethal.
The morning of the first snowfall, I was shaving,
Staring into a mirror nailed to a tree,
Intoning the Christian names of the Andrews Sisters.
“Maxine, Laverne, Patty.”
___________________________________________________________________________________________
Michael Donaghy was born in the Bronx to Irish immigrant parents. In his thirties, he settled in the UK, where he became a well-known and highly regarded poet. Also an accomplished flute and whistle player, he was an active part of London’s traditional Irish music scene. His sudden death at age 50 was a great loss to both the literary and traditional music communities. Fintan O’Toole’s piece for the Irish Times examines Donaghy’s “elastic identity.” Donaghy’s wife, Maddy Paxman, published a book in 2014 about their life together. See also The Guardian and the Poetry Foundation for more on Donaghy's life and work. See the Session for information on his life in Irish music. To hear him play, see this clip:
__________________________________________________________________________________________________
Oh, on summer mornings darting through
The county club's immense parking lot of
Antique cars restored with great affection
Or perfectly preserved: reds, greens, yellows,
As if snatched from the nearby flower beds,
And here the thwack of a struck tennis ball
Was heard, there a golf ball took to the air.
War das nicht eine schöne, schöne Zeit?
Oh, winter afternoons at the bowling alley
Down a flight of stairs from Diversey Avenue
Where outrageous transactions commonly
Took place; oh, and the movie theaters all
In walking distance of one another, the Covent,
The Century, the Lake Shore, and the Parkway,
Best loved of all, renowned for its decrepitude.
War das nicht auch eine schöne Zeit?
But oh, what has a beginning has an ending,
Said Senator Edward M. Kennedy at the time
Of his very grave brain tumor diagnosis. Alas,
But let's not make a federal case out of it.
As La Rochefoucauld observed, thinking of
Death, like staring at the sun, can't be done
For long, or shouldn't be. So grieve not. Oy.
Und hast du dich nicht so gut amüsiert?
The Seven Sages – a time-traveling band of philosophers
appearing in ancient China, India, and Greece.
The Seven Senses from which the Self must be emancipated.
The Seven Dwarves -- domesticated and Disney-fied into cuteness.
Bashful and Dopey being perennial favorites.
The Seventh Seal opens on the dark night of a knight as he wanders
Bergman’s black and white medievalism.
The Seven Deadly Sins --- without envy, greed, and pride
there would be no capitalism.
The Seven Brides, like Snow White, must civilizE
the Seven Brothers, best known for brawling, barn-raising,
and cocky dance moves, before a group wedding can take place.
-- Elaine Equi
Ed. note: The poem is from The Intangibles by Elaine Equi (Coffee House Press, 2019). The photo below was taken by John Tranter in New York City in 1992. Elaine is at the center, with Lyn Tranter to her right and David Trinidad puffing on a smoke.
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Radio
I left it
on when I
left the house
for the pleasure
of coming back
ten hours later
to the greatness
of Teddy Wilson
"After You've Gone"
on the piano
in the corner
of the bedroom
as I enter
in the dark
from New and Selected Poems by David Lehman
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