There is a Languor of the Life

I keep coming back to Emily Dickinson.


Adrienne Rich, in 1975, wrote a powerful essay about Emily Dickinson called "Vesuvius at Home:
The Power of Emily Dickinson."   I have been re-reading that this past week. It came to me to re-read it after my Intro to Poetry class had a 75 minute class/casebook study of some of her poems and some of her letters and some letters about her.  She has been on my mind ever since.

Listen to this passage from the Adrienne Rich essay:

“….Dickinson was convinced that a life worth living could be found within the mind and against the grain of external circumstance: “Reverse cannot befall/ That fine prosperity/ Whose Sources are interior—.” (#395). The horror, for her, was that which set “Staples in the Song” —the numbing and freezing of the interior, a state she describes over and over:

There is a Languor of the Life
More imminent than Pain—
’Tis Pain’s Successor—When the Soul
Has suffered all it can—

A Drowsiness—diffuses—
A Dimness like a Fog
Envelops Consciousness—
As Mists—obliterate a Crag.

The Surgeon—does not blanch—at pain
His Habit—is severe—
But tell him that it ceased to feel—
The Creature lying there—

And he will tell you—skill is late—
A Mightier than He—
Has ministered before Him—
There’s no Vitality.

(#396)

 

and

 

For the poet, the terror is precisely in those periods of psychic death, when even the possibility of work is negated; her “occupation’s gone.” Yet she also describes the unavailing effort to numb emotion:

Me from Myself—to banish—
Had I Art—
Impregnable my Fortress
Unto All Heart—

But since Myself—assault Me—
How have I peace
Except by subjugating
Consciousness?

And since We’re mutual Monarch
How this be
Except by Abdication—
Me—of Me?

(#642)

 

This numbness is something that holds me . It's a true comfort zone. But it keeps me from writing poetry with the depth it deserves.   Give me some of your single-minded courage, Emily.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Stone Dog

It's the middle of November, now, and so I am still posting poems about death and remembering the dead:

This one appeared in my book  Vexed Questions:

 

 

The Stone Dog

 

My father and I
wander the Protestant cemetery
Oaklands
examining tombstones. Gravitating toward
a door sized flat stone
with a life sized Labrador
keeping watch
over the bones of his owner.
I’m small enough to ride him,
and I do, while the brown leaves flag me,
while my father smokes and waits.

Even in his absence
I have roamed cemeteries:
Emmitsburg Blandford Kinzers
Mount Saint Mary’s
Oaklands again, Saint Agnes,
West Chester Friends ,
The cemetery of forgotten birthdays
The cemetery of rejected poems
The cemetery of bad choices


Now I stand before my parents’ grave
on a blue sky April day,
gusty winds cough
on the hill high bluff above
Route 100, where
cars fly by.
They're glad to lie there
by the road they rode so often,
the road to Exton
to Morstein
to Atglen
to Gap.
More at the glen, gaping
at a stone dog I searched for last week,
where someone had stolen him.

 

The moon never beams without bringing me dreams

Painting "Annabel Lee"  by Christian Schloe


Edgar Allan Poe is a favorite with my Intro to Poetry class, and this highly musical poem is in their text.  The painter Christian Schloe is a favorite of mine.

The poem:


Annabel Lee
                                            

By Edgar Allan Poe 

 

                                            

It was many and many a year ago,

   In a kingdom by the sea,

That a maiden there lived whom you may know

   By the name of Annabel Lee;

And this maiden she lived with no other thought

   Than to love and be loved by me.

I was a child and she was a child,

   In this kingdom by the sea,

But we loved with a love that was more than love—

   I and my Annabel Lee—

With a love that the wingèd seraphs of Heaven

   Coveted her and me.

And this was the reason that, long ago,

   In this kingdom by the sea,

A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling

   My beautiful Annabel Lee;

So that her highborn kinsmen came

   And bore her away from me,

To shut her up in a sepulchre

   In this kingdom by the sea.

The angels, not half so happy in Heaven,

   Went envying her and me—

Yes!—that was the reason (as all men know,

   In this kingdom by the sea)

That the wind came out of the cloud by night,

   Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.

But our love it was stronger by far than the love

   Of those who were older than we—

   Of many far wiser than we—

And neither the angels in Heaven above

   Nor the demons down under the sea

Can ever dissever my soul from the soul

   Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;

For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams

   Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;

And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes

   Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;

And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side

   Of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride,

   In her sepulchre there by the sea—

   In her tomb by the sounding sea.

Unbroken forehead from the east

First snow of the season today.

Here's a great snow poem by Emily Dickinson:

It sifts from leaden sieves,
It powders all the wood,
It fills with alabaster wool
The wrinkles of the road.

It makes an even face
Of mountain and of plain, —
Unbroken forehead from the east
Unto the east again.

It reaches to the fence,
It wraps it, rail by rail,
Till it is lost in fleeces;
It flings a crystal veil

On stump and stack and stem, —
The summer’s empty room,
Acres of seams where harvests were,
Recordless, but for them.

It ruffles wrists of posts,
As ankles of a queen, —
Then stills its artisans like ghosts,
Denying they have been.

 

After a Line from Ezekiel

Happy to say that this poem, published in Synaeresis-Art and Poetry in June 2018 ,  has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize:

After a Line from Ezekiel 

                                                          

I keep my Distance from Congress,

from joining this dance,

this trance of doublespeak fast talk,

this prance of  smug smiles.

This tense keeps my future in my past.

 

Oil of wintergreen, of tic tac,

Interrogates a protein,

Questions if a teenaged temper

Will bring on another war.

What will be the next diaspora?

What spores and spondees

What spontaneous combustion?

 

These are the remaining tribes:

Secretive Roma gathering their bright shawls of sunset

Apricot and rose colored, gold gleaming,

Silent birders clutching their binoculars,

Stalking the Pine Siskin,

The meadowlark in the tall weeds by the highway,

Shadowy softball girls clothed in their muddy uniforms,

Weeping aides from the crumbled hospices,

Wheeling the loved ones still living.

Shivering Syrian children

Who chew their shoelaces.

These are the exits of the city:

Behind the bombed out grocery store,

Under the ivy shrouded billboard,

Where woods meet river.

 

 

 

Acorns and Oaks

Thought for today:
 

"Our ordinary mind always tries to persuade us that we are nothing but acorns and that our greatest happiness will be to become bigger, fatter, shinier acorns; but that is of interest only to pigs.  Our faith gives us knowledge of something better: that we can become oak trees."



-  E.F. Schumacher

Philip Roth Predicted This

Philip Roth

This book was published in 2004; Roth described it as an “exercise in historical imagination” Roth died in May of 2018.

 

 

I read the following article in this week's New Yorker  about this book, and how chilling a read it was!

 

The author is Paige Williams.

 

I am cutting and pasting the entire article here:

 

 

Prescient     by Paige Williams

In Philip Roth’s novel “The Plot Against America,” it is 1940; the famed pilot Charles Lindbergh becomes President and secretly launches a pogrom against Jews. A foreign power, Nazi Germany, interferes in a U.S. election. Journalists are targeted with violence. The Roth family, of Newark, agonizes over the nation’s escalating anti-Semitism. As Hitler decimates Europe, Lindbergh pursues an “America First” policy of nonintervention. Roth said that “Plot,” which was published in 2004, was an “exercise in historical imagination”: he wondered if what happened in Europe could happen here.

Earlier this year, Bernard Schwartz, the director of the 92nd Street Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center, contacted Roth and proposed staging a reading of “Plot.” Schwartz would invite nine actors to perform the novel, each delivering an abridged chapter. Roth, a skillful reader of his own work, embraced the idea. He’d watched the election of Donald Trump with horror, telling his friend the New Yorker writer Judith Thurman, “What is most terrifying is that he makes any and everything possible.”

Roth often talked about “the terror of the unforeseen,” Schwartz said. “That terror transcends the perils that continue to face the Jewish community, and extends to any group that finds itself made more vulnerable: Muslim Americans, immigrant populations, poor people, elderly people.”

In May, with the show’s planning under way, Roth, who was eighty-five, died. Then, twenty-seven hours before the performance, scheduled for October 28th, a man with an AR-15 and three handguns killed eleven people during Shabbat services at Tree of Life, a synagogue in Pittsburgh. He told a SWAT officer that “all these Jews need to die.”

In New York, Schwartz added security. Just before 1 P.M. the next day, nine hundred people streamed into the Y’s Upper East Side auditorium, past a guard with a black Labrador retriever. The performance was dedicated to the Pittsburgh dead. The actor Michael Stuhlbarg walked to a lectern onstage and delivered the novel’s opening lines: “Fear presides over these memories, a perpetual fear. Of course no childhood is without its terrors, yet I wonder if I would have been a less frightened boy if Lindbergh hadn’t been President or if I hadn’t been the offspring of Jews.”

The audience absorbed the novel’s descriptions of the Roth family: the father, an insurance agent; the mother, a PTA leader; the older brother, who can draw. They live in a second-floor flat on Summit Avenue, near genteel Union County, “another New Jersey entirely.” In the darkened auditorium, people chuckled.

Lindbergh, campaigning for President, makes proud declarations about “our inheritance of European blood.” A “rabid constituency” develops, “flourishing all across America.” On the night the Republican Party makes him its nominee, the Roth children are awakened by neighborhood fathers shouting “No!” from “every house on the block.” Stuhlbarg intoned, “The anger that night.”

Chapter 2: President Lindbergh travels to Iceland to meet with Hitler, whom he calls “a great man.” It was impossible not to think of Trump’s meetings with Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un. The playwright Ayad Akhtar read a passage about “Lindbergh’s spirit hovering over everything.”

In the greenroom, the actors who were going to perform the remaining chapters reviewed their scripts, which had been abridged by the Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro. Shapiro was on hand, occasionally stepping out to gauge the audience’s reactions. The actress Jennifer Ehle sat beneath a wall-mounted monitor showing the performance, marking up her pages. Jon Hamm made coffee.

Maggie Siff, who plays the psychiatrist on “Billions,” studied her chapter, “Bad Days,” which mentions a synagogue bombing in Cincinnati. “The anti-Semites so emboldened,” she read when it was her turn, and “soon my homeland would be nothing more than my birthplace.” On page 122, she’d marked an insertion, made by Shapiro the night before, that mentions “the mayhem in St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Buffalo.” Shapiro told Siff, “I realized we can’t cut Pittsburgh now.”

“Every day, it feels like another level of . . . ” Siff started to say.

“And who knows what’s going to happen tomorrow,” Shapiro said. “For a novel to be this prescient is extraordinary. Or maybe the rest of us just didn’t see it coming, and Roth did.”

A stage manager said, “Five minutes.”

“Be right back,” the actor John Turturro said. He went out and read Chapter 4, in which the Roth patriarch tells a Lindbergh-supporting relative, “Not so long ago you couldn’t bear the man either. But now this anti-Semite is your friend. The stock market is up, profits are up, business is booming—and why?” When Turturro returned, Hamm gave him a thumbs-up.

André Holland, who acted in “Moonlight,” read a chapter in which the older Roth brother gets a chance to visit the White House. “I am not impressed by the White House!” his father screams. “The person who lives there is a Nazi.” Hamm, drinking his second cup of coffee, said, “When I read this book, I was, like, When was this written? The parallels are right there.” He added, “I think Roth died from grief.”

Schwartz came in and reminded the actors “There’s no curtain call.”

“Is anybody going to say anything?” asked the actor Scott Shepherd, who was given the book’s final chapter to read.

“No,” Schwartz said.

“Good,” Shepherd said. “Let Roth have the last word.” ♦

This article appears in the print edition of the November 12, 2018, issue, with the headline “Prescient.”

·         Paige Williams, the Laventhol/Newsday Visiting Professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, became a staff writer at The New Yorker in 2015.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In balance with this life, this death

World War I  ended on this day one hundred years ago.

I cannot even imagine it.  Neither could my parents; my father was 4 years old; my mother, 3 years old. 

But I know much more about that war and its continuing reverberations because I teach a course called Modernity in Literature to university students.  I've taught it first in 2010, and have taught it about five times since then. I will teach it again this Spring semester. The literature tells so much.

Here is one poem by William Butler Yeats:

An Irish Airman Foresees His Death
W. B. Yeats

I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love;
My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.

Let Less Happen

cartoon by André Carrilho


Last night as I finished watching the Rachel Maddow show and pulled myself away from The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell,  I came to the realization that Donald Trump occupies a place in my brain.  A large and unwelcome place.  Ever since the months before the 2016 election, and especially since I began to read and respond to his obnoxious tweets,  he has been there - every day. 

I think back on nine presidents I knew superficially in my lifetime: ( I was alive but too young for Truman and Eisenhower)  Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Bush1, Clinton, Bush2, and Obama. I never thought about them except during crises, or during the 6:30 news. 

Now , Trump is on my mind every day, and sometimes even during the night when I wake up worried.  This is so wrong.

If this is true of me, it must be true of many other Americans.

He loves and craves attention. He creates false crises to keep our attention.  It's working, and I hate it.
I hate his guts, and pray for his removal from office.  I don't like his Vice-President, Pence, but Pence would not behave like this.

Today I am remembering this wonderful ironic poem by Kay Ryan, in which she yearns for an ordinary day without melodrama:

“Blandeur”

If it please God,
let less happen.
Even out Earth’s
rondure, flatten
Eiger, blanden
the Grand Canyon.
Make valleys
slightly higher,
widen fissures
to arable land,
remand your
terrible glaciers
and silence
their calving,
halving or doubling
all geographical features
toward the mean.
Unlean against our hearts.
Withdraw your grandeur
From these parts.

—Kay Ryan
—from Say Uncle

 

 

 

Dan Vera's marvelous painting

I love this and must share it here:

art by Dan Vera  " In Our Dreams the Constellations Sing of Migration"

Who Gets Rapture?

Here's a garden poem I like, by Maxine Kumin:


"After the Harvest"

Pulling the garden, I always think
of starving to death, of how it would be to get by
on what the hard frost left untouched
at the end of the world: a penance of kale,
jerusalem artichokes, brussels sprouts,
some serviceberries, windfall apples
and the dubious bounty of hickory nuts.

Pretty slim pickings for the Tribulation
if that's what this is, preceding
the Rapture I choose to be left out of.
Having never acceded to an initial coming
I hold out no hope for a second
let alone this bland vision of mail-order angels
lifting born-again drivers up from behind the wheel
leaving the rest of us loose on the highways
to play out a rudderless dodgem.

When parents were gods survival was a game
I played in my head, reading by flashlight
under the covers Swiss Family Robinson
and The Adventures of Perrine, who lived in a hut
and was happy weaving moccasins out of marsh grass.

I longed to be orphaned like her, out on my own,
befriending little creatures of the woods,
never cold or wet or hungry. to be snug
in spite of the world's world is the child-hermit's plan.
Meekly I ate the detested liver and lima beans.

Now all of the gods agree, no part of the main
can survive the nuclear night. and yet,
like a student of mine who is writing a book
on an island linked by once-a-week ferry
to Juneau, where one pay phone and a hot spring bath
suffice for all, in innocent ways we still
need to test the fringe of the freezing dark.
He thinks he can be happy there year round
and the child in me envies his Cave of the Winds.

Meanwhile I fling cornstalks and cucumber,
pea and squash vines across the fence
and the horses mosey over to bet carrot tops.
I am mesmerized by the gesture, handfeeding
feathery greens to the brood mares. this could

be last year or five years or ten years ago
and I sense it is ending, this cycle of saving
and sprouting: a houseful of seedlings in March,
the cutworms in May, June's ubiquitous weeds,
the long August drought peppered with grasshoppers
even as I lop the last purple cabbage, big
as a baby's head, big as my grandson's brain
who on the other side of the world is naming
a surfeit of tropical fruits in five-tone Thai.
A child I long to see again,
growing up in a land where thousands, displaced,
unwanted, diseased, are awash in despair.

Who will put the wafer of survival on their tongues,
lift them out of the camps, restore
their villages, replant their fields, those gardens
that want to bear twelve months of the year?
Who gets Rapture?

Sidelong we catch film clips of the Tribulation
but nobody wants to measure the breadth and length
of the firestorms that lurk in Overkill,
certitude of result though overwhelming strength,
they define it in military circles,

their flyboys swirling up in sunset contrails.
The local kids suit up to bob for apples,
go trick-or-treating on both sides of Main.
November rattles its dry husks down the food chain
on this peaceable island at the top of the hill.

--Maxine Kumin

Starry Skies in November

photo by Bored Panda



Here's a lovely poem by Marge Piercy:

"Leonids Over Us"

The sky is streaked with them
burning hole in black space --
like fireworks, someone says
all friendly in the dark chill
of Newcomb Hollow in November,
friends known only by voices.

We lie on the cold sand and it
embraces us, this beach
where locals never go in summer
and boast of their absence. Now
we lie eyes open to the flowers
of white ice that blaze over us

and seem to imprint directly
on our brains. I feel the earth,
rolling beneath as we face out
into the endlessness we usually
ignore. Past the evanescent
meteors, infinity pulls hard.

--Marge Piercy

The Democrats Won the House of Representatives

cartoon by C Jones

This is an answer to my prayers.

The next worry:  what will Trump do next to unsettle our country?   He has already fired his Attorney General... not 24 hours after the election.

I am "cutting and pasting" a brief article from Vox, an online publication that I saw today:

Two Americas: amplified, tearing apart

The midterms produced a divided Congress that's emblematic of a split America, drifting further apart and pointing to poisonous years ahead.

The net result: Two parties with two wildly different bases and philosophies are pulling farther and farther apart — and are certain to double down on divisiveness heading into 2020.

 

• The Democratic strategy of targeting women, minorities and the young was vindicated with the new House majority. We saw record liberal turnout in many suburbs.
• The Republican strategy of targeting men, whites and rural voters was vindicated with the larger Senate majority. We saw record conservative turnout in rural Trump country.

Fox News' Karl Rove, the former George W. Bush architect, said: "Let’s be clear. ... Both parties are broken."

• A GOP lobbyist emailed:  "Poisonous gridlock. Hemlock?"

Shades of 2016: The blue wave was a lot less ferocious and unanimous than much of the polling, forecasts and commentary had led Americans to expect.

• It's a reminder that, even after all the post-2016 angst, all the supposed experts still don't fully understand the country.
• Republican pollster Frank Luntz told me in a phone interview that there’s a "hidden Trump" vote" of 2% or 3% that refuses to respond to pollsters: "They see it as helping the elite control them."
• Former Obama strategist David Axelrod said on CNN: "I think this is going to prompt a new round of soul-searching about whether and how you can poll accurately ... A lot of these races that were blowouts ... polled as tight."

Be smart: Although President Trump lost the House, he made the midterms about the Senate during his final swing. And the White House feels vindicated by wins in Indiana and — likely — Florida.

• Look for Trump to act like he won re-election, even though he faces a treacherous two years, with Congress and with his own 2020 re-election map.

Still carried away by America

Voting Line,  painting by Charly Palmer



It's Election Day in the United States.

This year, I am praying for a restoration of the system of checks and balances in our government.

Among other things.


Here's a poem by Alicia Ostriker:

Ghazal: America the Beautiful

 

Do you remember our earnestness our sincerity
in first grade when we learned to sing America
The Beautiful along with the Star-Spangled Banner
and say the Pledge of Allegiance to America
We put our hands over our first grade hearts
we felt proud to be citizens of America
I said One Nation Invisible until corrected
maybe I was right about America
School days school days dear old Golden Rule Days
when we learned how to behave in America
What to wear, how to smoke, how to despise our parents
who didn’t understand us or America
Only later learning the Banner and the Beautiful
live on opposite sides of the street in America
Only later discovering the Nation is divisible
by money by power by color by gender by sex America
We comprehend it now this land is two lands
one triumphant bully one still hopeful America
Imagining amber waves of grain blowing in the wind
purple mountains and no homeless in America
Sometimes I still put my hand tenderly on my heart
somehow or other still carried away by America.


 

Bright Sign of Loneliness too great for me...

"Yea, I have looked, and seen November there;
The changeless seal of change it seemed to be,
Fair death of things that, living once, were fair;
Bright sign of loneliness too great for me,
Strange image of the dread eternity,
In whose void patience how can these have part,
These outstretched feverish hands, this restless heart?"


-  William Morris, November

 

There are Birds Here

As I worry and pray about the outcome of ourJa midterm elections on November 6,
I am moved by this poem by Jamaal May:

There Are Birds Here

                                                                        

For Detroit

There are birds here,

so many birds here

is what I was trying to say

when they said those birds were metaphors

for what is trapped

between buildings

and buildings. No.

The birds are here

to root around for bread

the girl’s hands tear

and toss like confetti. No,

I don’t mean the bread is torn like cotton,

I said confetti, and no

not the confetti

a tank can make of a building.

I mean the confetti

a boy can’t stop smiling about

and no his smile isn’t much

like a skeleton at all. And no

his neighborhood is not like a war zone.

I am trying to say

his neighborhood

is as tattered and feathered

as anything else,

as shadow pierced by sun

and light parted

by shadow-dance as anything else,

but they won’t stop saying

how lovely the ruins,

how ruined the lovely

children must be in that birdless city.

 

 

On a Windy Day

Here's a wonderful poem by James Arthur:

Wind

 

              it’s true sometimes I cannot

stop myself from spilling

              the recycling

 

unpetalling apple blossoms raiding

a picnic

making off with napkins I’m nothing

              until I happen

flipping an umbrella outside-in

                      throwing its owner

              into a fumble

pelting the avenue with sleet or dust

 

at times downtown

              riding over galleries of air

so full of high excitement howling

I borrow an old woman’s hat

              and fling it into the road

 

arriving with news of the larkspur

              and the bumblebee

at times embracing you so lightly

in ways you don’t even register

              as touch

 

 

 

Who can tell the population of heaven?

photograph:  Temple from the Burning Man exhibit, Renwick Gallery, Washington DC



On this All Saints Day, here's a poem I wrote about 10 years ago:

Named after Saints

 

Holographic Holistic Hagiography

Sounds like Hag Geography.

The mapping of Hags around the world.

Hags I have known,

Hags I’ve only read about,

But this is Hagiography, photography that makes you say Gee!

Not hags, but saints, and those

Named after saints.

Monica, model of worrying mother,

Martin , patron of the torn cloak,

Rose, rubbing pimento into her perfect skin,

Anne- in Leonardo’s sketch, huge earth mother with legs like tree trunks,

Like the bed made out of the tree, the castle built around the bed in the Odyssey,

Saint Hopkins, reporting every sunset,

Saint Merton, still falling in love ,

Lucy, with her eyes on a platter,

Lucy with her eyes on the assembly line chocolates,

John the Baptist and Frank the Methodist

and Marlon the Method.

Who can tell the population of heaven?