I heart coffeehouses

I read this poem, along with T.S. Eliot's "Preludes," at our dorm Fair Trade coffee house last night. I don't think there will ever be a day when I read something by Margaret Atwood and say, "Hmm, she could have done better." This poem is no exception:

IN THE SECULAR NIGHT

In the secular night you wander around
alone in your house.
It's two-thirty.
Everyone has deserted you,
or this is your story;
you remember it from being sixteen,
when the others were out somewhere, having a good time,
or so you suspected,
and you had to baby-sit.
You took a large scoop of vanilla ice-cream
and filled up the glass with grapejuice
and ginger ale, and put on Glenn Miller
with his big-band sound,
and lit a cigarette and blew the smoke up the chimney,
and cried for a while because you were not dancing,
and then danced, by yourself, your mouth circled with purple.

Now, forty years later, things have changed,
and it's baby lima beans.
It's necessary to reserve a secret vice.
This is what comes from forgetting to eat
at the stated mealtimes. You simmer them carefully,
drain, add cream and pepper,and amble up and down the stairs,
scooping them up with your fingers right out of the bowl,
talking to yourself out loud.
You'd be surprised if you got an answer,
but that part will come later.

There is so much silence between the words,
you say. You say, The sensed absence
of God and the sensed presence
amount to much the same thing,
only in reverse.
You say, I have too much white clothing.
You start to hum.
Several hundred years ago
this could have been mysticism
or heresy. It isn't now.
Outside there are sirens.
Someone's been run over.
The century grinds on.

In a Station of the Metro

Once I realized that there are a lot of long poems here, I thought maybe a short one would be fun.

In a Station of the Metro
Ezra Pound

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

So, the first line just runs, skipping and iambic. The second just drops, stagnant. One is motion, the other is stagnation. Of all the times I've looked at this poem, this last time is the first time I saw that. Just a reminder to read everything twice. Or, like, three hundred times.

On Rain and Nothingness

Sorry for the absence, no excuses will be made. Just to let you all know that I value your participation highly, read everything you post at least three times, but that all I read right now is Jorie Graham and her corresponding philosophers, and I've decided to spare you that part of my life.

Anyway, it rained here today and so I was infinitely productive. I thought how I really am content to just sit and live in my mind without really taking care of my body (aside from now-sustained vegetarianism) and then I got to thinking about this Wallace Stevens poem, The Snow Man. I also saw some ducks poking at the ground with their faces looking for worms in the rain and thought it was a nice metaphor how they were grasping at things unseen and uncertain; yet, their instincts told them that if they could not penetrate the earth in its moment of weakness they would starve. See how I slipped that in there? Been reading too much theology lately.

Wallace Stevens:
The Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

We talked about this one in class, as it pertains to a state of the mind. It really praises nothingness, as in, one must fully enter into a mind of winter in order to appreciate what others may find misery in.

It's still cold here, though. I won't go so far as to condone the cold. Just saying, as a coping mechanism, it's nice to sit inside the library and read poems.

And now, for another

Living In Sin

She had thought the studio would keep itself;
No dust upon the furniture of love.
Half heresy, to wish the taps less vocal,
The panes relieved of grime. A plate of pears,
A piano with a Persian shawl, a cat
Stalking the picturesque amusing mouse
Had been her vision when he pleaded "Come."
Not that at five each separate stair would writhe
Under the milkman's tramp; that morning light
So coldly would delineate the scraps
Of the last night's cheese and blank sepulchral bottles;
The on the kitchen shelf among the saucers
A pair of beetle-eyes would fix her own--
Envoy from some black village in the mouldings...
Meanwhile her night's companion, with a yawn
Sounded a dozen notes upon the keyboard,
Declared it out of tune, inspected whistling
A twelve hours' beard, went out for cigarettes;
While she, contending with a woman's demons,
Pulled back the sheets and made the bed and found
A fallen towel to dust the table-top,
And wondered how it was a man could wake
From night to day and take the day for granted.
By evening she was back in love again,
Though not so wholly but throughout the night
She woke sometimes to feel the daylight coming
Like a relentless milkman up the stairs

-Adrienne Rich

This poem is from my American Lit class last spring, and re-reading it made me love it even more than I remember. Even though I have to read it pretty carefully, I like that it's not broken up at all, except for the plethera of punctuation. I also loved the opposing night and day imagery, and how this woman's ideal is so well contrasted to the reality of the situation. The title is also interesting to me, and sets up the religious language throughout the poem.

Zbigniew Herbert's "A Life"

"A Life"

I was a quiet boy a little sleepy and--amazingly--
unlike my peers--who were fond of adventures--
I didn't expect much--didn't look out the window
At school more diligent than able--docile stable

Then a normal life at the level of a regular clerk
up early street tram office again tram home sleep

I truly don't know why I'm tired uneasy in torment
perpetually even now--when I have a right to rest

I know I never rose high--I have no achievements
I collected stamps medicinal herbs was O.K. at chess

I went abroad once--on a holiday to the Black Sea
in the photo a straw hat tanned face--almost happy

I read what came to hand: about scientific socialism
about flights into space and machines that can think
and the thing I liked most: books on the life of bees

Like others I wanted to know what I'd be after death
whether I'd get a new apartment if life had meaning

And above all how to tell the good from what's evil
to know for sure what is white and what's all black

Someone recommended a classic work--as he said
it changed his life and the lives of millions of others
I read it--I didn't change--and I'm ashamed to admit
for the life of me I don't remember the classic's name

Maybe I didn't live but endured--cast against my will
into something hard to govern and impossible to grasp
a shadow on a wall
so it was not a life
a life up to the hilt

How could I explain to my wife or to anyone else
that I summoned all my strength
so as not to commit stupidities cede to insinuation
not to fraternize with the strongest

It's true--I was always pale. Average. At school
in the Army in the office at home and at parties

Now I'm in the hospital dying of old age.
Here is the same uneasiness and torment.
Born a second time perhaps I'd be better.

I wake at night in a sweat. Stare at the ceiling. Silence.
And again--one more time--with a bone-weary arm
I chase off the bad spirits and summon the good ones.

--Zbigniew Herbert (translated, from the Polish, by Alissa Valles)



Honestly, although I may be an English/Creative Writing major, I'm not very proficient at understanding poems, thus hindering my ability to talk about them. But practice apparently makes perfect.

This poem was featured in the Jan. 22, 2007 issue of the New Yorker (p. 68-69), where I get my dose of poetry these days. "A Life" is just one of those things that I like without really knowing why. I suppose I'm intrigued by Herbert's reflective tone and purposeful (mis)use of punctuation; it seems to follow the speaker's stream of consciousness--if you think about your own, it's often fluid and choppy at the same time, repetitive, has tangents, and doesn't follow a logical order--and by the end of the poem, when they are finally used, the periods seem to tack on a sense of finality of his life and a sense of certainty that his life was indeed nothing special.

Alyssa

P.S. All of the lines in second to last stanza are supposed to be indented, but I can't figure out how to make that happen--

A little lighter

First of all, I'm glad I'm not the only one that was dissapointed in our poetry-lacking summer. However, I will say that I tend to gravitate towards more concrete poetry, rather than abstract. I enjoy thinking about a theme or image, but at the same time I like being able to sit down at the end of the day and say, yeah, I get that.

"And always an audience / for all this slaughter and laughter--"

Since I signed up for a class on the poet Jorie Graham, I've gotten pretty much obsessed. She says she comes from Wallace Stevens, yet her images have more of a solid foundation in reality. She studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, and absorbed Derrida's postmodern philosophy into almost all of her poetry. Given that, even a cursory glance at Omaha will reveal double meanings and oppositions that are not too opposed--"...always an audience / for all this slaughter and laughter," for one. So, I've got a couple of opinions about Omaha, but I hope it just gets the ball rolling. Not that everything here has to be war poetry.

The constant play on the theater of war is the most politically potent message. Even in the title, Omaha, there is the sense of being far removed. Omaha, in the center of the United States, was also the name of the center of the bloodiest scene in World War II--Omaha Beach, the site of the Allied invasion of Normandy on D-Day. At once, it is so far removed and yet inextricable from the violence. The phrase "balconied gods" evokes the indifference of those higher up, and she pulls us into the current time with "As I tell you this / the stage grows very dark." The next lines reverse the balcony/stage metaphor, putting the violence at the upper floor of an American city. The powerlessness of those below suddenly becomes the powerlessness of those above, and there are then her true feelings--that even the "balconied gods" cannot get the killing to end.