sung by Perry Como
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sung by Perry Como
Posted by The Best American Poetry on March 16, 2012 at 07:03 AM in Music | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
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Carmen final dress rehearsal. Act II costume.
Yesterday I mentioned a silent promise to do better, and I made good on it! I love making good on promises! Last night's rehearsal was more focused and I did not flub my French. I'm going to be so bold as to say that I think I made a downright sexy gypsy smuggler-lady! (Living the dream, people. Living. The. Dream.)
Truth is, when I feel like I've done my best, it's not because the I didn't "mess up", it's because I told my part of the story as authentically as I could, and that I'm not just a body milling about, but a plot motivator. My Mercedes believes that she reinforces Carmen's power over Don Jose, adding to his madness. That's far more interesting than just singing the right notes and rhythms. Intent!
My beautiful artist-friend (the one who preaches cross-discipline creativity) also attests that the art isn't as interesting as the story of the artist who created it. So I think about my story; where am I and how did I get here?
It was over 7 years ago at a Christmas party when a sub-conscious yearning bubbled up and annouced itself to me. Surrounded by high school classmates who were always more interested in my effortlessly popular brothers, I stood and listened to their stories about exciting post-college lives with loves and high-paying jobs - a leggy blonde moving to London with her English fiance (I swear he was even wearing an ascot), or my middle school crush moving to China with his perfectly polished lady after vacationing in Goa or Bali or wherever it is the beautiful people go. It was suddenly my turn to share and I couldn't bring myself to say that I was just living in my brother's pool house, teaching teenagers how to sing beautiful vowel shapes. I couldn't do it. I was ashamed of my cowardice - ashamed that I was more comfortable encouraging the dreams of others than pursuing my own. I was envious of these peers living beyond the roads and codes of our youth. So I lied.
I lied, and proclaimed my intent to move to New York and try my hand at a career. It shocked me when I heard those words fall out of my face. And that it took the paralysis of shame and envy to uncover my true desire is not a point of pride either, but what makes me very proud is that I made good on that not-so-silent promise. I did not want to be a liar, so I packed all my clothes and went alone to a city I did not know. I set my intent, was my own plot motivator, and discovered that however negative the motivating factor may be, when the manifestation of it is a life lived more fully and fearlessly, I'm suddenly very grateful for my fear and my gifts. Birmingham, AL may not be London or Bali, but 3 hours in Seville every night is pretty beautiful.
Posted by Tynan Davis on March 15, 2012 at 04:05 PM in Guest Bloggers | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)
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Despite her claims to the contrary, Tynan Davis is a writer, as this week's blog posts prove. But she's mostly a singer and I've been poking around Youtube for samples to share. Turns out, Tynan was one of four performers selected to take a master class with the great Marilyn Horne. The experience was captured in four brief videos and I post them here for your delight. When you're done, head on over to Tynan's webpage and listen to a few more selections.
Posted by The Best American Poetry on March 15, 2012 at 12:59 PM in Guest Bloggers, Music | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
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Never in my life have I had to contend with so much hair. It's so foreign and distracting that I actually tried to blame it for some of my mistakes in last night's orchestra tech rehearsal. Lame excuse, amazing wig.
With each rehearsal comes a new layer of character, new opportunities and responsibilities. We began three weeks ago as ourselves, strangers in street clothes, safely tucked behind music stands and relative anonymity. The percussive accompaniment of the piano a subconscious metronome, keeping ensembles tight and harmonic textures even and easier to hear. Enter costumes, wigs, cigarettes and handkerchiefs, bottles and mugs. The on-stage business becomes more complex. Fluid, but needing attention.
Enter the orchestra. Can you hear the basson or french horn that supplies your pitch? Or can you only hear strings? Can you hear the rhythmic pulses of each measure while your only accompaniment is a tremolo? Can you even see the maestro? The ensembles loosen, words are flubbed. Thankfully we're all friends now so we don't judge each other, just ourselves. Silent promises to be better are made and the show goes on. Multi-tasking, anyone??
It's more magic than multi-tasking. Our playground is a stage, and on that stage exists a world of stories that want to be told. Costumes and wigs transport us to a different time, but the psychology of the human experience remains unchanged. Today, like 19th century Spain, we reconcile faith and expectations, we make poor choices and face the consequences, we are turned on by talent and power, and as Pat Benatar revealed: love is a battlefield. Final dress rehearsal tonight! More to come...
Posted by Tynan Davis on March 14, 2012 at 04:48 PM in Guest Bloggers, Music | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)
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Last night we passed an hour or so in Ithaca's Buffalo Street Books, a store that was saved from closing when the community raised over a quarter of a millior dollars to re-open it as a consumer co-op. (Now that's how to value the neighborhood bookstore!). We ran into Roger Gilbert and our talk turned to the much missed A. R. Ammons and Gilbert's biography in progress. Names of Ammons' former students came up, some of whom have blogged here. We spoke of the talented Jake Adam York and when I got home, I thought to let him know that he was roundly praised. Well, one click led to another and I landed on the Kenyon Review blog, where York has initiated a series of craft posts. The first is on the aubade, and here's a snippet. Follow the link to read the full post, and check back often for more of York's craft notes
"The aubade is a poem of the morning, of sun-up—though it’s also a poem of endings, traditionally presenting a farewell, from one lover to another, as one departs before the light catches them together. Since aubades both open and close, these poems seem capable of great depth or complexity of emotion—and they offer many opportunities for innovation."
Do you have a favorite aubade?
-- sdh
Posted by The Best American Poetry on March 14, 2012 at 11:24 AM in Poems | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
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The case against the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. ObamaCare, is not nearly as fun as an Imperial Fizz, though it's definitely fizzy. All of the law's ingredients, the whiskey, rum, lemon juice and sweet, sweet sugar of insurance policy arcana--all except the sparkling water of a mandate--have already been mixed and are being shaken as we speak. They can’t be taken apart at this point without dumping the whole shebang down the drain, which is not to say that the Supreme Court won’t do exactly that. And the glacial pace of the Affordable Healthcare Act's implementation, like the slow-motion process of its enactment, gives opponents plenty of time to whip up a frenzy of anti-Imperialism, before this drink ever hits the coaster.
I, ______________, should not be forced to pay for health insurance.
Fill in the blank with “taxpayer,” “small business,” “Utah” or “Catholic bishop,” and you’ve got the argument against ObamaCare. All of its critics base their opposition on that word forced, raising issues of liberty. Certainly, the recent contraceptive flap was initially introduced—by Republicans, not the media—and framed as a question of religious liberty. But if we’ve discovered anything from that debate, it’s that liberty is not the only value Americans hold dear. Liberty’s not the only value enshrined in the Constitution, either. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are the big three, and it wasn’t long before the national conversation morphed against Republicans’ will into one about a different set of values: whether women deserve to pursue the kind of happiness that comes from choosing when they have children, and to have the kind of life that comes from preventing pregnancy when it poses a health risk. Guess which two values trumped the third in a contest between the religious liberty of bishops (total of 195 in the U.S.) and the life and happiness of women (more than 150,000,000 in the U.S.)?
Not only are bishops a tiny group, they don’t use contraceptives and nothing in the health care law is making them do so. But when they act as employers, rather than as leaders of spiritual flocks, they have to follow the same rules as secular hospital or university administrators. As employers, they can’t dictate the health care decisions of their employees. They are not Imperial, though they do have nifty regalia.
Leaving the contraception coverage rule aside, I look at the broader debate over health insurance and find it odd that so much resistance to ObamaCare has come from the religious community, particularly fundamentalist Christians. Jesus had a lot to say about taking care of each other, from loving thy neighbor to all those blessings on the poor and vulnerable in the Beatitudes. He spent quite a bit of His time healing people and feeding them, and none of it lobbying. While He never ran for office, it’s easy to imagine Him favoring universal access to health care. On this specific topic, He said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor but the sick.”
Here’s what the emphasis in the New Testament is not on: taxes, small business, states’ rights or, frankly, political liberty. What little Jesus said about taxes, “render unto Caesar’s what is Caesar’s,” seems to argue in favor of paying them. He never mentioned small business, unless you count the enterprising moneychangers and dove-sellers in the temple, whom He whipped. Judging from that rare example of holy rage, His policy was not pro-business. The Chamber of Commerce would have despised Him. Jesus talked more about divorce than taxes. Where is the fundamentalist Christian groundswell to make divorce illegal? And how do the 1 in 3 divorced Evangelicals—Evangelicals defined as Christians who attend church weekly, take the Bible literally, and proselytize—reconcile their own failure to stay married with Jesus, their Lord and Savior?
But on caring for others, Jesus had a lot to say. He was inclusive, embracing tax payers, tax collectors, Samaritans, women, and other “others”—one might almost describe Him as a single payer plan. ObamaCare, emphasis on “care,” is inclusive, too. Embrace that moniker, Mr. President. It’s the Christian thing to do.
Posted by Julie Sheehan on March 13, 2012 at 07:17 PM in Current Affairs, Food and Drink, Religion, The Bible | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Tags: Care, Christian, cocktails, Constitution, contraception, Evangelical, health care, Imperial Fizz, Jesus, mandate, Obama, ObamaCare
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Posted by Tynan Davis on March 13, 2012 at 12:31 PM in Guest Bloggers | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)
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The late Madeline Kahn (1942-1999) was one of the most talented women of the 20th century. She received two Oscar nominations for Best Supporting Actress, the first in 1974 for her performance as Trixie Delight in Paper Moon; the second the next year for Blazing Saddles, in her unforgettable turn as Lily Von Shtupp, "The Teutonic Titwillow." In this movie, she sings possibly the dirtiest song ever written that never actually mentions sex, "I'm Tired"
In fact, her comic performances for Mel Brooks are what she is most remembered for: Blazing Saddles,Young Frankenstein, High Anxiety, and The History of the World, Part 1. She also did some brilliant work in early episodes of Saturday Night Live. If you have Netflix, check out her first appearance, from May 8, 1976. (Some of the clips are available on Hulu.) Her range is amazing: Marlene Dietrich, Pat Nixon, a twelve-year-old girl explaining sex to her friends at a pajama party, a film noire vamp singing "I Will Follow Him" with John Belushi's Jack Nicholsonesque private eye. There is also a sweet couple of minutes with Gilda Radner, which leads into Kahn singing this exquisite version of "Lost in the Stars" from Kurt Weill's musical of the same name (an adaptation of Cry, the Beloved Country, which just happens to be one of my favorite books). I remember watching this the first time it aired and, at the age of 14, being completely stunned. I've been looking for it again for 35 years. (I apologize for the poor quality of this clip. NBC is very stingy with their material, and this is the only version I have been able to find online, other than embedded in the complete SNL episode.)
Big Stars, Little Stars - Madeline Kahn by loischantrelle
Kahn was one of those people who got singing. What I mean is that, on top of a powerful voice with impressive range and lovely pitch, she knew how to present songs so that the lyric and music blended into a whole work of art, in the tradition of Sophie Tucker and Judy Garland, so that her singing became a true performance and a song-writer's dream. As funny as she was - and she was funny as all hell - this is what I love best about her as a performer. She could sing anything - from some blues to a duet with Sesame Street's Grover. Finally, here's a clip of her from the 1988 celebration of Irving Berlin's 100th birthday. Don't be surprised at how wonderful she is.
Posted by Laura Orem on March 13, 2012 at 12:05 PM in Laura Orem, Red Lion, Movies, Music | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)
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We're having fun playing with French vocabulary here in Birmingham. Our maestro is a charming Frenchman from Toulouse whose love of Carmen is contagious. His face is as expressive as any character's should be, and he's not so stereotypically French as to discourage our butchering of his native tongue outside of the score. Some favorites of the week: "Michaela's aria was gorgeuse today", or "je don't know where we are manger-ing", or the ever popular "Maestro, vous voulez the poulet avec the buffalo sauce?" It's not exactly Mérimée but it's a welcome divertissement!
Truthfully, I'm not feeling particularly creative or interesting at the moment, despite the hours of fun with uvular "r"s and mixed vowels. I have a beautiful painter-friend who preaches the gospel of cross-discipline creativity, and I desperately need an altered view. The novel on my nightstand has been there for 3 months; can't seem to get through it. There's a bit of flamenco in the opera, but I'm not breaking a good sweat and my arms are awkward. I went to the Birmingham Botanical Gardens and Museum of Art, but it was for opera fundraisers, so my time wasn't exactly my own. I'm not bored with my work, I'm bored with myself! I feel so selfish and one-dimensional. On one hand, from a vocal standpoint I'm wonderfully productive and focused, and I trust my voice and my ability to deliver a great product. On the other hand, I need some outside inspiration to invite me in for a bit. I need a playdate! Any suggestions for a wandering minstrel in need of creative fuel? In the movie of my life that plays in my head, this would be the time when my grandmother, played by Maggie Smith of course, would tell me that I must take a lover. And I would gasp a scandalized gasp and my ribs would painfully press against my corset and I might need my smelling salts or a vacation in Italy.
Maybe language play is my lover du jour?? Whilst singing all this French, I've been meditating on a concept that collaborative pianist Warren Jones introduced to me this past January, called the "accent d'insistance". As I understand it, originally French music was born out of translating Italian or German songs into French, which led to some awkward syllabic emphases. In order to make the music sound more "French", the singer had to "insist" that the appropriate accent happen, even if it fell on a weak or unaccented musical beat. When I asked our French maestro about it he responded with "You've got me there; does it mean you have to work extra hard to get it right?" Great. Exactly. Good talk, Maestro.
Maybe this will help explain: Below is the beginning of the second verse of Carmen's Habanera. There are 2 strong beats per measure, the last note of the second measure is musically weak, but it's the first syllable of the word "surprendre" and therefore needs a little oomph - you insist that there be a slight accent where normally you would not have one. Same goes for the first syllable in the word "battit" - it falls on very short note, but needs just as much emphasis as the second syllable that gets twice as much musical time. I'm probably complicating matters, but in practice, it seems to me that it's not so much that you accent the weak beat, but that you remain steady and give the subdivided beats equal weight. Hmmm....the meditation continues.
I'm not sure if that makes any sense. I am sure that in my body, in my mouth, that translates to wrapping around every syllable and granting every vowel shape and consonant a moment of glory. And it feels good and fun and very far from boring. Like a lover.
Posted by Tynan Davis on March 12, 2012 at 12:39 PM in Guest Bloggers, Music | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)
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Once a year, in March, every American wants to be a poet.
At least those glued to their televisions sets for the three weekends of the NCAA basketball tournaments. It’s why March is synonymous with Madness, the month in which much of America is obsessed with college basketball.
William Wordsworth, who played point for the 19th Century Romantics, defined poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” Wordsworth penned poems a half century and longer before basketball was invented in 1891, but his definition is the best explanation I’ve found for why even those Americans who don’t play or watch basketball care deeply for three weeks, 130 games. (67 games for the men, 63 for the women)
It’s why we leap up off the couch when an impossible, almost-half-court-chunk floats through the net to win a game. For that moment, we too levitate, like the ball, part from a mortal body. In symbolic spirit, we rush onto the court to embrace teammates and fellow fans. And at least in the early rounds, it’s with the belief that the moment will lead to more. And more. It’s all about the dopamine dump.
Basketball-induced dopamine is my drug of choice. I was born in Tobacco Belt North Carolina the year after UNC took the 1957 title –– beating Wilt Chamberlain and Kansas in triple overtime. My first pair of rubber pants broadcast “I’m Behind the Heels” though I ended up playing in college for rival Wake Forest. My claim to fame may be playing in the first Women’s Atlantic Coast Conference Tournament in 1978. I never had much of a jump shot, but I can still pass well, time a mean pick and have been playing coed pick-up hoops in New York City for 30 years. My favorite Mother’s Day surprise: a t-shirt with a photo of me blocking out two bigger guys for a rebound.
And why is this drug more powerful in March for insiders and outsiders alike? My theory hinges on a video clip basketball fans know well: N.C. State Coach Jim Valvano, moments after an improbable win in the 1983 championship, stunned by joy, running in circles like he is going to hug each and every one of us, all in the next minute.
In March, the pool of people to hug, to high-five is just so much bigger. All of a sudden those gushing about a give-and-go play the night before are gabbing with co-workers who in February would think the talk was about ordering lunch. It’s shared and ordered mass ritual that promotes ecstatic connection. Like poetry.
Wordsworth’s teammate, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, had something to say on this: “poetry, –– “the best words in their best order." Which is what millions of us will be seeking when we bet our brackets. That our ordering of the best teams in the best order will make us soar. Some hope that our discernment of merit will make magic. That our wisdom will march our teams into the alliterative aristocracy: the Sweet Sixteen, the Elite Eight, the Final Four.
President Barack Obama, our three-point-shooter in chief, unveils his brackets on national television on ESPN. Obama hasn’t picked a men’s winner since his first year when he correctly tapped the University of North Carolina, a key state in his electoral count. Obama scrimmaged with the Tar Heels during the campaign because some smart strategist knew the other basketball powerhouse in the state, Duke, skews Republican. Obama picked the women’s winner right once too, the Connecticut Huskies in 2010. Nothing risky in those top-seed choices.
“Surprised by joy,” to rework a Wordsworth line, is a big part of the fun. In a single-game elimination tournament, there are inevitable surprises. We all like to root for underdogs –– the Davidsons, the Butlers and George Masons that make a run. We know there’s no science to surprise; we know it might even be us. Here’s a tip for a basketball know-nothings: try the perceived pecking order of mascots. If the Wofford Terriers beat a powerhouse like the Kansas Jayhawks, suddenly your boss’ boss might know your name.
All you got to get right is six games and “One Shining Moment,” the song that closes out the championship, is about you, is the “one shining moment, you reached for the sky.” The first verse is all hard work and perspiration, a “best words, best order” disciplined approach to craft. The second verse blends in adversity, with annual video of wrenching injuries and missed shots.
It’s the bridge lines of the song, “Feel the beat of your heart/ feel the wind in your face” that CBS Sports counts on to turn on the tears. Romantic lines that could be pulled from a Wordsworth moment, though granted not set in an arena of 50,000 screaming fans. Here's the montage for Obama's bracket winner.
I’m convinced Wordsworth, who labeled golf “a day spent in a round of strenuous idleness,” would have loved basketball as “Strange fits of passion have I known/And I will dare to tell.” In fairness, CBS would be overstepping to personify Wordsworth’s “impatient as the Wind,” with drive after drive toward the basket. Or Wordsworth hearts, “the breathings of your heart,” with players thumping their chests.
But can’t you just picture Wordsworth and a buddy comparing their brackets over a beer. Crowing over wins, lamenting losses: “Not without hope we suffer and we mourn.”Appreciating as his fellow poet Coleridge noted, “Nothing is so contagious as enthusiasm.”
Catherine Woodard has played coed, pick-up basketball in New York City for three decades. Her poems have appeared in Poet Lore, Southern Poetry Review, RHINO and other journals. In 2011, Woodard was the featured poet at UnshodQuills.com, co-published Still Against War/Poems for Marie Ponsot and was a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She will be a 2012 fellow at the Hambidge Center in Georgia and is a board member of the Poetry Society of America. Woodard is a former president of Artists Space, one of the nation’s oldest spaces for emerging visual artists. Woodard has a MFA in poetry from the New School University and MS in journalism from Columbia University.
Find out more about Catherine Woodard and read her poetry and journalism here.
Posted by Catherine Woodard on March 12, 2012 at 09:27 AM in Guest Bloggers, Sports | Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBack (0)
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You guys! Thanks for having me back! I said it before and I'll say it again: I'm not a writer. I sometimes try to parade as one, but really I'm a hack and am much more comfortable breaking out into song (because that's normal). I mean, I still can't adjust to putting only one space after a period! Why did that even need changing?? Propriety be damned! I shall stick to two. And yes, I sang that dramatic statement in my head.
I'm writing from Birmingham, Alabama where I am singing in a production of Bizet's Carmen with Opera Birmingham. It's a funny thing, the freelance singer's life. Your home is an extended-stay suite. Your neighbors are other singers, a pianist, a director, a conductor, and various soccer and/or dance teams and their overly competitive parents. You're removed from your every-day "real" life, but this isn't "pretend" life either. We're at work and in our case, going to the office means singing your face off, opening up to criticism and judgement, and hoping to make a lot of musical magic happen in a very short amount of time. It's an amazing (challenging) creative chemistry that is uncovered when reckoning the preconceived visions of the singers, the projected vision of the director, and the conductor who has to hold it all together, bless his heart. It's a freaking miracle that it all comes together. I will articulate more of my musical experience here in Birmingham, but while we're still in rehearsals, I will abstain from sharing details that don't relate to my individual process. (I have a process? What? I mean, of course I have a process!) I would like to share a piece that my castmates and I bonded over during one of our first social gatherings. Or we bonded over the collective schadenfreude, I'm not exactly sure, but this painful video is from a concert version of Carmen. Below is the Act IV finale, the final scene of the show. Carmen and José are having one last dispute, but this Carmen mixed some meds and can't quite get it together. A cautionary tale of pharmaceutical woe!! Hope you cringe and enjoy!
Posted by Tynan Davis on March 11, 2012 at 11:08 AM in Guest Bloggers, Music | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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Posted by The Best American Poetry on March 11, 2012 at 08:23 AM in Poems | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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This week we welcome back Tynan Davis as our guest blogger. The New York Times recently described mezzo soprano Tynan as "a marvel: a stylish singer and a perky actress whose presence lighted up the stage consistently". This week she is in Alabama making her Opera Birmingham debut as Mercedes in Bizet's Carmen. In 2011 she made her Bel Canto at Caramoor debut as Cousin Hebe in Gilbert and Sullivan's H.M.S. Pinafore with The Orchestra of St. Luke's under the baton of Will Crutchfield. Other operatic and concert credits include: Mahler 2nd Symphony and Beethoven 9th Symphony with the Festival Orchestra of Christ Church Oyster Bay, the title role in Carmen and Bach's Cantata 82 with the Rapides Symphony Orchestra, and Dorabella in Cosi fan tutte and Ado Annie in Oklahoma! with the Natchez Festival of Music. Ms. Davis was a finalist in the 2010 Liederkranz Competition and a semi-finalist in both the 2010 Palm Beach Opera and Joy in Singing competitions.
Tynan is an alumna of The Children's Chorus of San Antonio and Stephen F. Austin State University. Learn more about her here and follow her on twitter @katherinetynan.
Welcome, Tynan
-- sdh
Posted by The Best American Poetry on March 10, 2012 at 10:45 PM in Announcements, Guest Bloggers | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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Speaking of concentric patterns, I have been – no, not meditating, more like ruminating – on how things always come back, on how everything is linked to everything. On ripple effects. On chakras. Cycle. Eternal return. And how you can glimpse the whole wheel sometimes and other times you just can’t.
While driving (in a circle; I’d forgotten something and had to go back) to dinner with a friend of mine recently, I asked him to translate the Sanskrit phrase inked across his forearm. He was maddeningly vague about it. “It’s Sanskrit.”
“I can see that. I don’t read Sanskrit. What does it say?”
His answer was not a translation – it was practically a koan, actually – but I managed to extract that it was a passage from the Bhagavad Gita and concerned meditation.Which made sense; I’d just been having a conversation with another poet about Charles Martin’s new translation of the Bhagavad Gita, which was about to be released. And I’m finding that whatever you are preoccupied with will present itself absolutely everywhere you look.
Sadly, meditation and I don’t get along very well (are you surprised? No?). I have a very chatty superego that keeps telescoping out to inquire “Am I meditating yet? Is my mind clear yet?” It’s a disaster. I’m still trying. But.
Now, I am not an expert in the interpretation of mandalas, but I know they are sacred art in both Hindu and Buddhist cultures, and that they are cosmograms, visual metaphors for the universe, depictions of pathways to enlightenment, and focus objects for meditation. They can be fairly simple or unbelievably complex, with intricate interlinked geometric figures (which makes sense; I mean you’d probably have a better chance at mental clarity if you stun everything else out of there with a great blast of impossibly complex abstractions rendered in eye-watering colors.). Anyway, at the center of many mandalas is a complex flower-like figure representing Nelumbo nucifera, the Sacred lotus. Presumably because of the way it rises from the mud and seems to float above the surface of the water, the lotus represents divine purity, detachment from earthly desires, freedom from illusion. Hindu deities are usually depicted sitting on a lotus. It is the flower of the enlightened mind.
Once I wandered into a yoga class in (of all places) Easton, Pennsylvania, and discovered that the studio was hosting a group of Tibetan monks who happened to be in town the same week I happened to be in town. They had constructed a raised dais in the front part of the studio, and were in the beginning phases of creating a mandala from colored sand. The work was incredibly slow and intricate, and to my total astonishment, it was done with no verbal communication among the monks. A circular form emerged, and over the next six days was filled in with a mind-bogglingly complicated, totally symmetrical system of interlocking geometric figures and symbols that, like the Sanskrit verse on my friend’s arm, I didn’t have the ability to decipher -- but that it was a tiny universe of its own, a labyrinth with preferction at its center, a whole both bigger and smaller than the sum of its parts, was clear. The blazing colors didn’t blur together at all, not a speck, though a single careless breath could have marred the pattern. It was almost literally unbelievable. I thought I would never see anything so astonishing again in my life.
Until they swept it off the platform and left.
Okay, yeah: we’re poets. We understand symbol. Metaphor is the coin of our realm. The symbols within the mandala might be arcane to the uninitiated, but we can all get the point the monks were making about the intricate business of living and thinking and developing and its utter ultimate impermanence. Of course. But… but… all that work, the intense focus, the precision, the dazzling beauty of it. How could you just calmly destroy it?
People sometimes say they write only for themselves, but I never believe them. I think we all write for someone, and I think we all hope we are writing for our own posterity, for a shred of permanence. I’ve destroyed poems zillions of times. When they didn’t work. When they failed. When I looked back at them and felt embarrassed that they’d come from my pen. But this sand painting was perfect. I knew then, and still understand, that there is a level at which that lesson is one I will never learn. I love the idea, of being genuinely focused on the process and not the result -- this is the essence of Keats's oft-quoted remark about achievement being tied to "negative capability," which I suppose he meant in the electrical sense, the negative pole being the one in the receptive state. In the end, whether we are focused on process, or result -- it's a guarantee that both of them have their Third Eye trained on us. Detachment from worldly desire, grasping, "irritable reaching after fact," -- it's all the same thing, and if the Tibetan Tantrics' calm sweeping away of their own work is a paticularly dramatic expression of the committment to detachment, it's certainly an idea present thoughout time and in cultures all over the world. I'm sure it's radically freeing if you can really do it. But part of me actually finds it profoundly sad at the same time.
But little matter: it's an ideal you reach only with death -- if then -- and there are things to be said for attachment too. Look, even the lotus isn't really "detached," it just looks that way. It has roots just like the rest of us; it’s tied to things that would kill it if they became untied.
But let’s not end on that note! I give you, for your meditational pleasure, James Merrill’s poem “Mandala,” a response to a letter advising him “to meditate upon the Third Eye". If it doesn’t make you laugh, you need to read it again. You know: circle back. Meanwhile -- thanks for letting me bend your ears again -- it's been a pleasure.
Mandala
OK. I see a whirlpool
Yawning at the Heart of things.
In grave procession seasons, elements, creatures, kings
Ride the slowly sinking carousel
From which they will never, not in ten million
Years, nor in any form, return. Thy are about to merge
With Nothing mirrored as a demiurge
Faintly Mongolian.
Outside that circus, trivia.
Everyone else must redo his clumsy exercise
Life after life. No wonder the third eye’s
Lid grows heavier.
All the same, I am setting my cat
Sights on two or three
More flings here in the dark. A certain ingenuity
Goes into meriting that.
One wants, to plot the boomerang curve
That brings one back,
Beyond the proper coordinates of Have and Lack,
A flair for when to swerve
Off into utter pointlessness –
Issues that burn like babies, furrows of grief and sloth
Sown with sperm, no talent glinting forth
Except for how to dress
At those last brunches on the yacht
While the pearly trough kept pace and the Martini pitcher
Sweated and swirled, becoming second nature
-- And oh yes, not
To return as a slug or a mayfly, plus one’s GI pair
Shortsighted brown, should carry, as I do,
A peasant “eye” of blue
Glass daubed with yellow. Turkish work. So there,
Your point’s made, I’m an infidel.
But who needs friends
To remind him that nothing either lasts or ends?
Garrulous as you, dear, time will tell.
Posted by Amy Glynn on March 10, 2012 at 11:43 AM in Guest Bloggers | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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True fact: the whole is equal to more than the sum of its parts.
Speaking of getting around, when I have guests from out of town, especially if they happen never to have been to San Francisco, there are certain places I gently suggest might be of interest to them, and some places upon which I simply insist. We can – though I will not force you to – ride a cable car, drink Irish coffee at the Buena Vista or go deal with whatever too-cool-for-school thingy is on gawk detail at SFMoMA (Once I saw food-nerd Alton Brown in a staredown with Marina Abramovic! Dude, that was weird. Did you know that dress was designed so she could pee in it?).
Anyway, on the list of things you’d have to really really work hard to talk me out of, even though it’s a tourist staple and frequently crowded, is Muir Woods, the redwood forest at the foot of Mount Tamalpais just across the Golden Gate from the city.
Sometimes, I’ve incorporated this into a goofy “Vertigo Tour,” in which we try to visit as many of the locations from Hitchcock’s masterpiece as still exist. You recall the scene, right? They’re there, in the dark in the forest, and standing there like Time itself there's a cross section of a tree, and they’re looking at the concentric growth rings as if that is where they will find all the answers.
When you enter the park, one of the first things you see is a cross-section of a monster tree, bigger around than you are tall, over a thousand years old, felled in a storm in, I think, the 30s. To provide a little perspective on timne from the redwood's point of view, some of the rings are marked with little arrows that say things like “Assassination of Archduke Ferdinand.” “French Revolution.” “Magna Carta.” “Battle of Hastings.” “Aztecs begin construction of Tenochtitlan, Mexico.”
The Coast Redwood or Sequoia sempervirens
is the tallest as well as the longest-lived tree on the planet (there are trees alive today that were putting on rings when Julius Ceasar died). It occurs only in a small range from the extreme south of Oregon to around Big Sur, California, and never more than 50 miles inland. Muir Woods, named for the influential conservationist John Muir (a devotee, may I add, of Swedenborg! I’m telling you, everydamnthing is connected) is the kind of place that would probably have made Swedenborg himself jump up and down and yell whatever the 17th century Swedish equivalent of “I told you! I told you!” would be. It is nothing so much as a living cathedral, with the ability some exceptionally well-crafted churches have, of making you feel alone in your own sacred space even with a million people around you, and of drawing your eyes – and presumably your spirit – upward.
Because they are so enormous, redwoods create a very dark forest floor. They do bear cones, like other needle-leaved evergreens – but although they can reproduce sexually, they don’t tend to, because a sapling germinated from a redwood seed is unlikely to get enough sunlight to get established. The sequoia has adapted around this by reproducing asexually – they “layer” or sprout new trees from their root burl. If the main trunk becomes damaged, new offspring trees will tend to form around it in a ring. So in old groves you often see the trees arrayed in circles and horseshoe or omega shapes.
The sequoia is almost unkillable. Fire can do it, but it is so well-protected by a thick layer of pithy bark that fire seldom reaches enough of the sapwood to feel the tree. Due to its extremely high tannin content there are basically no pests or diseases than can destroy an established redwood. What can kill a redwood (other than timbering) is drought, which is why you will only find them in such a small range. They require humidity, provided by the summer marine layer – the thick blanket of fog pulled off the Pacific by the dry hear of the interior valleys that gets stuck against the coastal mountains and utterly confuses tourists expecting sunny beaches and warm nights.
What does this have to do with Gestalt psychology? Nothing. Except that The main principle of Gestalt psychology is the concept of Prägnanz – which, get this, means: “pithiness.” What’s meant by it is that the human brain tends to marshall sensory perceptions into orderly, regular, symmetrical forms. Variants on Prägnanz include the Law of Closure (the mind “filling in the blanks” to make what it sees make more sense). the Law of Proximity (closeness in space or time causing the mind to perceive separate entities as a single unit); the Law of Common Fate (the tendency to see things as a collective or unit if they are moving in the same direction); the Law of Continuity (The tendency to notice a pattern and expand it; think of telephone poles or lamps on the side of a highway, and the way you imagine or “see” an endless sequence of them). And the Law of Invariance, which is the mind’s tendency to recognize a form or object independent of rotation or scale.
Didactic enough for you? But seriously, in all the megabicker about the place form has in poetry, does it do something for you, one way or the other, to think about how our minds might in fact be determined to impose form on things? We seem to need it. Which I suppose could be an argument for following the form-forming tendencies of the human brain, or fighting them. I could make either argument – but I do enough arguing. All I can say is that pattern – and mindful breakage of pattern – is something that pleases me. It is apparently something that also pleases the redwood, for whom the few decades of passionate jousting between the “formalists” and “free verse-ists” is a laughable blip. Try bellowing “Make it new!” to a sequoia. Feel better?
Thought not. Then again, the trees in Muir Woods were old when Shakespeare took up his quill. It’s all relative. Meaning it’s all related. Meaning: the whole is more, invariably, than the sum of the parts. So here’s to the parts that that bigger whole is made of.
Posted by Amy Glynn on March 09, 2012 at 03:23 PM in Guest Bloggers | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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We've just learned that guest blogger Robert P. Baird's post Spend it All (January 13, 2012) made the finals for the 3 Quarks Daily Arts & Literature prize. Read all about it here.
You can read Robert's January 9-12, 2012 posts here: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday,Thursday,
The winners will be announced on March 19.
Congratulations!
-- sdh
Posted by The Best American Poetry on March 09, 2012 at 12:56 PM in Announcements | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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Seventy years ago Edward Hopper completed his masterpiece, a chilling painting that captured the reality and pain of human loneliness. (For the information completist, the painting was finished on January 21, 1942). Nighthawks has become the iconic symbol of a supposed human inability to speak with others, much less understand them. The four figures in the painting do not speak. Hopper used himself as the model for both the man sitting next to his wife and the stranger sitting alone, as though he couldn't communicate with either his spouse or even his own self. His wife Jo was the model for the woman.
Much has been made of the fact that there is no entrance or exit from the diner, as though this were an existential illustration of being trapped in a world with lights so bright they don't let us hide and situated in a cosmos as impenetrably dark as a black hole.
When I look at the picture, I understand the standard critical reaction, but I see Nighthawks not only as a human but also as a writer. For me, the picture illuminates the writing condition, not just the human one.
To adapt the language of surrealism, Nighthawks shows a reality that looks like reality--like a photograph--but that pictured reality was never real. The picture describes a fictional world but with the verisimilitude to make viewers believe it genuinely existed. Indeed, based on a misleading statement by Hopper that he used a real diner as his model, generations of fans went in search of the place. It took an intrepid blogger named Jeremiah Moss to search diligently among historical documents in New York City and sadly conclude in a New York Times article that "the discovery that the "Nighthawks" diner never existed, except as a collage inside Hopper's imagination, feels like yet another terrible demolition."
Let's call what occurs in the real world "real reality" and what happens in the painting "seeming reality." But this seeming reality is better than real reality (it's ironically more real) because real reality has limits that seeming reality doesn't. Hopper needed for there to be a diner on that corner with those people sitting just where they sat when he wanted them to sit there. But the diner and the people weren't really there. (The surrealists, of course, called the seeming reality super real and then elided the words to form the word "surreal"). Seeming reality, however, differs from super reality because surrealist art focuses on scenes that appear to have a photographic reality but can't, even in principle, occur in real life. Melting pocket watches can't hang limply over tree limbs (as in Dali's The Persistence of Memory). Neither can a bird in a cage replace a head and body (as in Magritte's The Therapist). In contrast, as in Nighthawks, seeming reality could in principle occur in real life.
By using seeming reality, Hopper was able to offer not just a picture of reality that appeared to cohere with the real world, but emotional insights that would not have been available had he limited himself to real reality. This seeming reality, like realistic or naturalistic fiction, is revealing. By being able to be more flexible than real reality, it can present images to us that distill and illuminate the human condition more forcefully and better than real reality. That is why realistic fiction and other arts are so incredibly valuable and so needed by society.
Hopper sought to find a way to illustrate human loneliness and found in his imagination an image not available in real reality. From the reaction across the generations, the picture's audiences found Hopper's efforts painfully powerful.
Posted by Lawrence Epstein on March 09, 2012 at 12:27 PM in Larry Epstein's Culture Watch | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
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Speaking of cycles and circles, the leaf buds are breaking on my baby apple trees.
Anyone who knows me probably knows I am an unreconstructed botany geek and a serious fruit fetishist. I allow friends to assume we left San Francisco for the East Bay burbs for the decent public schools, but between you and me, what brought me back to the county that spawned me was the lure of summer heat and winter frosts on the east side of the coastal mountains – which meant the ability to grow fruit trees, maybe even tomatoes (known in their early days as “love apples” for their supposed aphrodisiac qualities). I have an entire collection of botanically-themed poems, my own personal de materia medica, ranging from food plants to ornamentals to psychotropics, and from the tiny to the gigantic. The last entry to be completed, the one that was still naggingly not right a year after the rest of the collection had been put to bed, and for all I know still hasn’t settled – is Malus domestica, the apple.
Few fruits are cultivated as broadly as the apple – probably only the grape has a broader range – and I can’t think of one with a deeper, more complex mythos. Nothing seems more American, yet apples are exotics here, brought from forests in the Kazakh range of the Silk Road through Europe and across the Atlantic to the American frontier. It has infiltrated myths and legends from the story of Atalanta to the Garden of the Hesperides to the Book of Genesis (yesterday I mentioned the theory – which I espouse – that the English-speaking world tends to think of the Forbidden Fruit as an apple due to a translational pun: malus, or apple, conflated with malum, or evil. Given the probable location of a Garden of Eden, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was most likely, in my opinion, the thorny, tangling pomegranate,
whose name, incidentally, means “grenade apple.”) and beyond, far beyond. Yet there is something – isn’t there? – in the apple being the emblem of… of what? Temptation, the strange ways wholesomeness and forbiddenness combine – of the pull of wildness and the pull of cultivation.
At the root of this, so to speak, is the apple’s exceptional genetic diversity (it’s believed that in the apple’s heyday in North America, with maybe 2500 varieties, we had something like a tenth of the apple’s genes represented) and its essential waywardness. Apples are heterozygous – as are humans – but they make us look like simpletons – their genome is fully twice the size of ours. Every apple tree produces, say, a few hundred apples each season. In each apple, there are five, maybe eight, seeds. EACH of those seeds, in each of those apples, on each of those trees, will grow a different offspring plant. Most of these are bound to be unpalatable, “spitters.” Occasionally, you hit the jackpot in the gene-combining lottery and get something spectacularly delicious. When you do, you clone. Grafting fruit trees is a practice that goes far back into the ancient world, and it is the only way to ensure that the progeny of the apple resemble the parent. In other words, the apple actually does, unless you actively prevent it, fall far from the tree.
Michael Pollan, in his marvelous book The Botany of Desire, refers to the apple’s “inherent prodigality.” I love this phrase, and how it resonates against the concept of cultivation, a word that means tending, tilling, making better through effort, and comes from “cultus,” Latin for worship, reverence – and labor. In his section on apples, Pollan largely follows the trail of the mythic John Chapman, or “Johnny Appleseed,” to whom we all probably recall being introduced in elementary school – the barefoot tin-pot-hatted treehugger who sowed apple seeds all along the American frontier. One thing, Pollan notes, that’s glossed over by the Disney version is that since wild-pollinated, seedling apples have a snowball’s chance in hell of being tasty, Johnny Appleseed wasn’t providing the frontier with fruit – he was “the American Dionysus” – those apples were intended to become applejack. Chapman was a shrewd businessman as well as a half-wild “green man” figure; part pagan, part Christian (Chapman, like Yeats, was an avid follower of Emmanuel Swedenborg, who venerated the natural world as a “living sermon” on what awaits us in Heaven). Chapman’s decision to plant only seed apples was part economic savvy, part philosophy (he felt grafting and cloning were sinful and that improving the apple was God’s job). Whatever his reasons, by planting literally millions of trees and allowing them to reproduce sexually – by allowing them to express their adulterousness – he helped them to self-select for adaptability to the American landscape, and he kept alive some potential for us to continue discovering nuances and fascinating variants in this exceedingly complicated fruit.
Not that we haven’t tried our very hardest to quash all that. Even the apparent “diversity” of apples you see in a good grocery store come from only six parent varieties. Commercial concerns – reliability, long shelf life, ease of harvest and shipping, glossiness and pleasant shape, and sweetness – have dummied down the apple to a shameful degree: the mealy-mouthed Red Delicious, the syrupy children’s-menu Fuji, the one-note Granny Smith. We have domesticated the apple into submission. It’s a good thing for large-scale commercial growers – but for us?
If you’re lucky enough to have, as I do, a crazy farmer’s market orchardist who grows some 150 varieties on a small farm nearby, you might get something of a glimpse of the apple’s potential. From August to December, the guy at my market brings in apples the size of pingpong balls to apples the size of small melons. Red, pink, yellow, brown, green, purplish, striped, freckled, russetted, shiny, bloomed, broad shouldered, conical, round, angular. Textures ranging from watery-crisp to dense and dry to melting, thin skins and thick, and a range of exotic sub-flavors – all of them “apple” – that would rival any wine tasting; herbaceous, nutlike, floral, winey, citrusy, breadlike. Some of them, like the Lady Apple and Blue Pearmain, have been in cultivation since the 1100s. Some, like the Gravenstein, will only grow properly in Denmark, a portion of northwestern Russia, and the outer fringes of the San Francisco Bay Area. He brings Mutsus, Esopus Spitzenburgs, the green Pippins I remember from my childhood before they were displaced by the tough-fleshed and unsubtle Granny Smith. Rome Beauty, Northern Spy, Winesap and Macoun. Some of them, when I ask him what they are, he says he has no idea.
Constancy is a virtue the apple lacks. What we get in exchange is mystery, surprise, complexity, seduction – the chance to discover something that has never existed before. I guess I think there’s an almost Swedenborgian allegory to poetry in this. Out of an infinitely complicated system of words and silences you try to achieve some balance of traits – you cultivate, allow reversion to wildness, cultivate. My own apple poem is about “adultery” and I’ve fielded a few cocked eyebrows from early readers who presume it’s confessional. (Um, no!) What I am talking about is the apple’s own tendency to run wild. Adultery. Adulteration. Alteration. All come from the same root (ha ha) – alter, to change. This is the apple’s master skill – to prevent it requires extremely attentive cultivation. Every apple you have ever bought is a clone, a genetic replica of a parent fruit, bred for fewer and fewer traits as time goes on. There are still people, like my guy, cultivating old heirloom strains, and some even letting wildlings do their thing in the hope of finding something new and amazing. But to reap consistency from an apple, you have to make it happen. Maybe not so different from humans after all, right?
Adult: from Latin adultus, meaning grown up, mature – ripe. As a euphemism for “pornographic” it dates to 1958, per the Online Etymology Dictionary.
My obsession with food plants has caused my garden to be more laboratory than landscape, and I’ve learned to be okay with that. After killing off three different apple trees by planting them during heat waves and then going on vacation, last year I bought young whips of four new (old) varieties and started to espalier train them against the fence in my backyard. One, the Gravenstein, my Danish grandmother’s all-time favorite and one you simply won’t find in markets because it is too eccentric to be commercially viable. Early ripening, sweet-tart, firm-fleshed, with distinctive red and green stripes. Two, the Cox’s Orange Pippin, a British dessert apple from the 1850s, russetted, subacid with hints of anise and cherry. Three, The Winter Pearmain, one of the oldest continually cultivated apples, dating to 1200 or so – sweet, greenish with russet dots and crisp flesh. Four, something I got for the girls called “Pink Sparkle,” an aromatic Pearmain type with an upside-down shape and hot-pink flesh. I am hoping for first blossoms in the next few weeks. I have no idea what these trees will do, whether they will like their conditions, whether they will adapt and thrive, whether they will give consistent, delicious fruit fall after fall, or throw sports and spitters. It may be years before I find out.
So, moral of the story? Prodigality ain’t all bad. At least if you’re an apple. But maybe also necessary in the quest to be a better writer. We are about cultivation, that’s certain. But perhaps we all need, in some form, an occasional reversion to wildness – less Apollo, more Dionysus – to understand what cultivation really means. And to be able to have more to cultivate. It’s a big world.
Posted by Amy Glynn on March 07, 2012 at 02:50 PM in Guest Bloggers | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)
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Bear with me, guys – I cannot think straight. Thus the theme of circling and spiraling. Pop the Dramamine now.
Though he isn’t always the first poet I think of if you ask me who my favorites or biggest influences have been, and though I read him less, return to him less, than to some of my other touchstone writers, the first poet I ever fell head over heels in love with was William Butler Yeats.
I was two. We had this book of poetry illustrated for children, one of those large-format coffee-table guys with weird, stippled early-seventies watercolor illustrations. The book contained everything from Chaucer to Ogden Nash, Blake to Dorothy Parker. My parents read to me from it, from the minute I was old enough to sit still. There was, basically, everything else in the book, and then there were the two short Yeats poems (“When You Are Old” and “The Old Men Admiring Themselves in the Water”) in a world unto themselves.
Nothing else caught at me like Yeats’s rhythms, his elegiac strangeness, which at a young age I already associated with Being Irish, because the same tone suffused gatherings of my father’s family (though it must be said, in somewhat lower diction and much aided by rum-and-diet-cokes), and the portentous beauty of his phrasing. Whatever it was, other poems were funny or pretty or sad or happy – Yeats was trance-inducing. Reading him again as a high school student, I began to feel I was in over my head with the subtleties of political movements and religions and artistic schools into which I had not been indoctrinated – but the music was still always there, and the eerie feeling of meanings behind meanings, connections waiting to be made. Symbolism isn’t cool these days, and hasn’t been for a good long time. But there is something in it all the same, isn’t there? I wouldn’t call myself a Symbolist, or an –ist of any kind, but as Official Torch-Carrier for the Uncool I will say that I seriously dig the idea of the transpersonal in poems – and perhaps even more, the wonderful organizing principles of homophone and synesthesia, seeming accidents of sense and of language (like the possible mistranslation in Genesis that gave us the idea that the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge was an apple: the Latin for apple is malus; for evil, malum – mala in the plural for each). Even the word “symbol” has mixed heritage, deriving from Latin symbolum (a sign of faith) and symbolus (a sign of recognition) – both of which come from the Greek symbolon, which is: an object, inscribed and cut in half, with the halves given to ambassadors of allied cities as a sign of their connection. In other words, faith and recognition.
How d’ya like them apples?
As an adult I find Yeats more perplexing than ever, though I know a bit more now about his life. He was something of a shapeshifter – poet, playwright, statesman, mystic. He was indisputably a master of the century-straddling preference for accentual-syllabic meter, though in his later years there’s a clear shift toward the Modernist esthetic of Ezra Pound. He was an Anglo-Irishman passionately devoted to Irish nationalism and its mythologies and folklore. Symbolist, occultist, member of the Golden Dawn and sometime disciple of Emmanuel Swedenborg, who was a hardcore Symbolist in his own right and greatly informed Yeats’ sense of mysticism:
"It was indeed Swedenborg who affirmed for the modern world, as against the abstract reasoning of the learned, and discovered a world of spirits where there was a scenery like that of earth, human forms, senses that knew pleasure and pain, marriage and war, all that could be painted on canvas..."
He finds a correlation between Swedenborg’s theology and the beliefs of the rural west of Ireland, noting:
"In the west of Ireland, the country people say that after death every man grows upward or downward to the likeness of thirty years, perhaps because at that age Christ began his ministry, and stays always in that likeness; and these angels move always towards the springtime of their life, 'and grow more and more beautiful' the more thousand years they live; and women who have died infirm with age, and yet lived in faith and charity and true love towards husband or lover come 'after a succession of years' to an adolescence, 'for to grow old in heaven is to grow young'."
Cyclical time remains a preoccupation of Yeats’ long after his poetry begins to trend toward Modernism. His occult poem “A Vision” (written with his wife and said to have been dictated by spirits), is an interesting precursor to James Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover. It, and many of his shorter works, contain the image of a gyre, or spiral, which for Yeats represented the development of the mind, at both individual and societal levels.
Speaking of cycling back, I think my first-ever post to this blog was about music, though at that time my preoccupation was with gibberish lyrics – scat singing, The Cocteau Twins, and the invented language of Sigur Ros.
Here’s another twist, if you will, on that topic: setting poems to music. Have any of you done it, and were you successful? I sing. I write poems. It’s a rare, rare day that I find myself able to write a song. People tend not to understand this, but though they seem at first blush to be the same thing, and though “lyric” obviously derives from the early oral tradition of poetry set to lyre playing – they ain’t, any more than a screenplay is the same thing as a movie or a blueprint the same thing as a building. I know lots of poets who are also songwriters (enviably good ones!) and at least a couple of fine poets who have tried their hands at libretti.
It’s hard, right?
I leave you with the text of Yeats’ very Swedenborgian poem The Two Trees, and an adaptation sung by Loreena McKennitt. Ponder.
The Two Trees
Beloved, gaze in thine own heart,
The holy tree is growing there;
From joy the holy branches start,
And all the trembling flowers they bear.
The changing colours of its fruit
Have dowered the stars with merry light;
The surety of its hidden root
Has planted quiet in the night;
The shaking of its leafy head
Has given the waves their melody,
And made my lips and music wed,
Murmuring a wizard song for thee.
There the Joves a circle go,
The flaming circle of our days,
Gyring, spiring to and fro
In those great ignorant leafy ways;
Remembering all that shaken hair
And how the winged sandals dart,
Thine eyes grow full of tender care:
Beloved, gaze in thine own heart.
Gaze no more in the bitter glass
The demons, with their subtle guile.
Lift up before us when they pass,
Or only gaze a little while;
For there a fatal image grows
That the stormy night receives,
Roots half hidden under snows,
Broken boughs and blackened leaves.
For ill things turn to barrenness
In the dim glass the demons hold,
The glass of outer weariness,
Made when God slept in times of old.
There, through the broken branches, go
The ravens of unresting thought;
Flying, crying, to and fro,
Cruel claw and hungry throat,
Or else they stand and sniff the wind,
And shake their ragged wings; alas!
Thy tender eyes grow all unkind:
Gaze no more in the bitter glass.
Posted by Amy Glynn on March 06, 2012 at 12:37 PM in Guest Bloggers | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
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<<<
The place everything has come to is where a new book of essays by the poet and professor Kevin Young lives: in some great, grey area. The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness roughly spans the history of black American art and tries, among other things, to get at what it is, essentially, to be black.
Young selectively unpacks the enormous suitcase of black culture and, too infrequently, asserts himself into the sorting. He remembers, revisits, and revises. The task he's set before himself is both unenviable (that's one big-ass suitcase) and exciting (what if he actually pulls this off?). The book argues and sifts its way from slave narratives to jazz to funk and rock and hip-hop with stops along the way for close reconsiderations of poets like Langston Hughes and Bob Kaufman.
It's full of allusions and ideas, half-ideas, dropped names, dropped ideas. You always feel that Young is severely under the influences of everything and everyone he's writing about. These are essays, treatises, and term papers—written with a contact high. In five pages, he might mention The Tempest, the Titanic, W.H. Auden, the Middle Passage, the boxer Jack Johnson, Peer Gynt, Muhammad Ali, Seamus Heaney, Bo Diddley, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Johnson, Black Like Me, and Tiger Woods. He is riffing, freestyling, and action-painting, yes. But he’s also driving so fast that there's rarely time to stop and look out the windows.
-- Wesley Morris, Slate
>>>
For the rest of Wesley Morris's Slate review, click here. You may order the book here.
Posted by The Best American Poetry on March 06, 2012 at 12:12 PM in Book Recommendations, Music | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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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