D.H. Lawrence, now mostly remembered for Lady Chatterley's Lover and the censorship trial that followed, also had a stellar career in poetry (which many regard as superior to any of his novels). They possess an animal vibrance that stands in sharp contrast to his more cerebral contempories (T.S. Eliot's Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock was published in the same year, 1917).

One can easily imagine that the narrator of the two poems below would not only dare to eat a peach, he would eat it off his lover's body and spit it in the face of his enemies. Kick off your new year with a little bit of passion. Enjoy!

"New Year's Eve" by D.H. Lawrence

There are only two things now,
The great black night scooped out
And this fire-glow.

This fire-glow, the core,
And we the two ripe pips
That are held in store.

Listen, the darkness rings
As it circulates round our fire.
Take off your things.

Your shoulders, your bruised throat!
Your breasts, your nakedness!
This fiery coat!

As the darkness flickers and dips,
As the firelight falls and leaps
From your feet to your lips!

"New Year's Night" by D.H. Lawrence

Now you are mine, to-night at last I say it;
You’re a dove I have bought for sacrifice,
And to-night I slay it.

Here in my arms my naked sacrifice!
Death, do you hear, in my arms I am bringing
My offering, bought at great price.

She’s a silvery dove worth more than all I’ve got.
Now I offer her up to the ancient, inexorable God,
Who knows me not.

Look, she’s a wonderful dove, without blemish or spot!
I sacrifice all in her, my last of the world,
Pride, strength, all the lot.

All, all on the altar! And death swooping down
Like a falcon. ’Tis God has taken the victim;
I have won my renown.

In the spirit of the poem, I will keep this short. It's beautiful, it's simple, it's genius. I salute you, Richard Wilbur.

Wilbur made his name by translating our most beloved French satirists, Voltaire and Moliere. But poetry fell out of him wherever he went, including the battlefronts of World War II.

The best poetry manages to take the many contradictions and complications of the world and put it into order. This does it in spades.

"A Short History" by Richard Wilbur

"Corn planted us; tamed cattle made us tame."

"Thence hut and citadel and kingdom came."

Good night, Adrienne Rich. To my sadness, I didn't know you were still alive.

Perhaps it's generational: the assumption that all the poets I studied and loved in school are long passed. Like many of the great female poets of the mid-century, Rich was packaged in my mind with the Great Suicides - Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Sara Teasdale. Her death of natural cause seems a triumph over her generation.

That she was alive meant the possibility of two-way conversation. She spoke to me, and I assumed that was it. Now this really is it; this one-way road of reading and appreciating and loving, with no chance of extending the conversation passed a monologue.

There really is a difference between how we read the dead and how we read the living. But that's a blog post for another day.

For now, one of my favorite works: "Diving into the Wreck" Think about which image stick most strongly in your mind.

"Diving into the Wreck" by Adrienne Rich

First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.
I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his
assiduous team
aboard the sun-flooded schooner
but here alone.

There is a ladder.
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
Otherwise
it is a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment.

I go down.
Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.
I go down.
My flippers cripple me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.

First the air is blue and then
it is bluer and then green and then
black I am blacking out and yet
my mask is powerful
it pumps my blood with power
the sea is another story
the sea is not a question of power
I have to learn alone
to turn my body without force
in the deep element.

And now: it is easy to forget
what I came for
among so many who have always
lived here
swaying their crenellated fans
between the reefs
and besides
you breathe differently down here.

I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed

the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and away into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.

This is the place.
And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body.
We circle silently
about the wreck
we dive into the hold.
I am she: I am he

whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
obscurely inside barrels
half-wedged and left to rot
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass

We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear

 

William Blake was born, on this day, in 1757.

As I was searching for an appropriate work to highlight, I came across a wonderful post at Biblioodyssey, with scanned images of Blake's original relief etchings for Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. I borrowed the images for today's discussion from that wonderful website, but you should go have a poke around yourself, especially if you love pretty things from all over the world.

I already knew I wanted to talk about "The Human Abstract," but it's interesting reading the poem in context. While they were originally published separately, Blake combined both Songs into one, in order to make explicit that they're really two sides of the same coin: original grace versus the fall from innocence.

"The Human Abstract" directly responds to "The Divine Image" from the earlier work.

It's a troubling conclusion: the qualities of mercy, pity, peace and love only become necessary because the opposite is so prevalent. Although these are held as divine virtues, they carry with them the seeds of darkness, at least as practiced by men of religion. Oddly, though, Blake seems to be extolling the virtues of selfishness. To break the chain between these qualities and their opposites, these values must be conducted without regard for others, they have to be held as personal rules of conduct that eist at all times. In case you found them hard to read, I've reprinted the two poems below: The Divine Images To Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love  All pray in their distress; And to these virtues of delight Return their thankfulness. For Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love Is God, our father dear, And Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love Is Man, his child and care. For Mercy has a human heart, Pity a human face, And Love, the human form divine, And Peace, the human dress. Then every man, of every clime, That prays in his distress, Prays to the human form divine, Love, Mercy, Pity, Peace. And all must love the human form, In heathen, Turk, or Jew; Where Mercy, Love, and Pity dwell There God is dwelling too.   The Human Abstract Pity would be no more If we did not make somebody Poor; And Mercy no more could be If all were as happy as we. And mutual fear brings peace, Till the selfish loves increase: Then Cruelty knits a snare, And spreads his baits with care. He sits down with holy fears, And waters the grounds with tears; Then Humility takes its root Underneath his foot. Soon spreads the dismal shade Of Mystery over his head; And the Catterpiller and Fly Feed on the Mystery. And it bears the fruit of Deceit, Ruddy and sweet to eat; And the Raven his nest has made In its thickest shade. The Gods of the earth and sea Sought thro' Nature to find this Tree; But their search was all in vain: There grows one in the Human Brain.

 

Tomas Tranströmer, one of Sweden's most famous poets, took home the Nobel Prize for Literature last week, adding to a substantial collection of awards. I wasn't too familiar with his work before he won the prize, though I had come across a few poems in my digital wanderings.

The specificity of his imagery draws you straight into the strange little world that he creates in this poem, where we move langurously out of time and into a Stockholm neighborhood. It's all a sleight of hand though, as Tranströmer draws explicitly from The Great Gatsby, with "so much rowing with invisible oars against the current!"

His theme becomes explicit; it's the same as Fitzgerald's: people leave their homes and their families in search of the American dream, and few are lucky enough to find it. And sometimes, finding it will ruin your life.

The Indoors is Endless, by Tomas Tranströmer

It’s spring in 1827, Beethoven
hoists his death-mask and sails off.

The grindstones are turning in Europe’s windmills.
The wild geese are flying northwards.

Here is the north, here is Stockholm
swimming palaces and hovels.

The logs in the royal fireplace
collapse from Attention to At Ease.

Peace prevails, vaccine and potatoes,
but the city wells breathe heavily.

Privy barrels in sedan chairs like paschas
are carried by night over the North Bridge.

The cobblestones make them stagger
mamselles loafers gentlemen.

Implacably still, the sign-board
with the smoking blackamoor.

So many islands, so much rowing
with invisible oars against the current!

The channels open up, April May
and sweet honey dribbling June.

The heat reaches islands far out.
The village doors are open, except one.

The snake-clock’s pointer licks the silence.
The rock slopes glow with geology’s patience.

It happened like this, or almost.
It is an obscure family tale

about Erik, done down by a curse
disabled by a bullet through the soul.

He went to town, met an enemy
and sailed home sick and grey.

Keeps to his bed all that summer.
The tools on the wall are in mourning.

He lies awake, hears the woolly flutter
of night moths, his moonlight comrades.

His strength ebbs out, he pushes in vain
against the iron-bound tomorrow.

And the God of the depths cries out of the depths
‘Deliver me! Deliver yourself!’

All the surface action turns inwards.
He’s taken apart, put together.

The wind rises and the wild rose bushes
catch on the fleeing light.

The future opens, he looks into
the self-rotating kaleidoscope

sees indistinct fluttering faces
family faces not yet born.

By mistake his gaze strikes me
as I walk around here in Washington

among grandiose houses where only   
every second column bears weight.

White buildings in crematorium style
where the dream of the poor turns to ash.

The gentle downward slope gets steeper
and imperceptibly becomes an abyss.

It's National Poetry Day in Britain, which has led to an amazing amount of twitter spam of favorite lines from the twitterati.

For whatever reason, "Fire and Ice" was the first to come to mind for me. Coincidentally, two research teams, led by Saul Perlmutter, Brian Schmidt and Adam Riess, have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for observing that the world will, in fact, freeze to death. The idea is that the universe will keep expanding and become more and more cold until the temperature reaches absolute zero, at which point all molecular motion will cease.

Uplifting stuff, huh?

This poem is unusually pessimistic for Frost, who usually adopts a tone of wistful nostalgia, and doesn't care to make general statements about humanity as a whole. Nonetheless, there's a neat progression from the bleakness of this poem to "Mending Wall," with the famous line "good fences make good neighbors."

I don't think I'm in a particularly pessimistic mood, but I'm certainly a little more concerned about the direction America is moving in, given the rampant illegality of the assassination of Anwar Al-Awlaki. When you allow the government to assassinate a citizen without due process, then where does the power of the government end?

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
and would suffice.

Basically, that which makes us human will lead us to destroy the world, one way or another.

In the past decade or so, it seems that questions of poverty in the Western world are dealt with in terms of utility or efficiency rather than morality or ethics. While it tends to be disingenuous when politicians tell their little anecdotes about little boys named Steve who can't afford pencils, it tugs at our heartstrings but doesn't ask us to empathize.

"The Alley Violinist" shows how the simplest of verse can grow and grow and take on meaning far more important than what the words convey literally. It brings to uncomfortable life the choice the poor musician must make: take the money he or she desperately needs and deny someone the tiniest bit of happiness, or give happiness and starve.

What would you do?

"The Alley Violinist," by Robert Lax

if you were an alley violinist

and they threw you money
from three windows

and the first note contained
a nickel and said:
when you play, we dance and
sing, signed
a very poor family

and the second one contained
a dime and said:
I like your playing very much,
signed
a sick old lady

and the last one contained
a dollar and said:
beat it,

would you:
stand there and play?

beat it?

walk away playing your fiddle?

I'm not sure if it's a good thing or a bad thing that comic book superheroes have become so ubiquitous in culture that they've even invaded poetry, and I have little interest in wading into that debate [today].

I do find it intriguing that even as actual sales of comic books are at their lowest ever, their cultural currency continues to increase (not without limit, however. The genre runs risk of over-saturation in the movies, at least).

However, I was immensely startled when I read this poem, available as a free read on the website of the Paris Review, of all places. It's a wonderfully evocative piece, suggesting the alternate push and pull between God and man, a tension that results in superheroes and supervillains, Sinestro in this case.

Or I'm misreading everything and it's about nothing more than a roller-coaster.

Either way, enjoy!

THE NITRO by Clare Rossini

I wanted sky. That was my ambition. And now I'm being tugged
Up a small steel mountain,

A burly chain beneath the car hauling my weight
And a trail of my fellow aspirants. Poised at the top, we waver.

Then the slow turn downward,
The gathering speed, hurtling

Toward the earth from which, with a paste of mud and spit,
In that one foreboding

Story, the god
Made the man.

Upward again, turning and writhing in air, my body become a space
Where, as in love,

The great forces stream through:
Space, wind, light, the seconds blurring by like years.

O my god, I hear the cries of those around me as we are borne up and
Down and up and down,

Our breath three
Tubular steel

Hills back.
Let this not end, my body says and, at the same time, Let it be done,

As with a sudden jerk, a brake
Catches, the train slows, we arrive

At the platform milling with the shades
Called the living. Down the ramp. Back to a frail rain

Glossing popcorn stands, the carousel's splintered mirrors, and
—Hey! It's some dude

Dressed as Sinestro from the Legion of Doom, his power ring strobing,
Scattering the crowd.

-The Paris Review Spring 2011

Last week, Philip Levine followed in the footsteps of such distinguished poets as Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Frost and Gwendolyn Brooks to win the coveted position of U.S. Poet Laureate.

Now you may be wondering why I'm posting a Galway Kinnell poem instead of a Levine work. Well, in this phenomenal interview with the Paris Review, Levine was quizzed in-depth about the role of "influence," about the push and pull of loving other people's work, and learning from it.

In the midst of that, Levine said this:

"I don’t think Galway Kinnell influenced me, but what’s more important, he inspired me. When I read his great poem “The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World,” I said, My God, this is how good the poetry of my generation can be. I can remember exactly where I was when I first read it, on the second floor of the library in an armchair holding The Hudson Review and shivering with excitement."

"Shivering with excitement," I thought to myself. To google we go! Thusly I read "The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ Into the New World," which is as terrific as I'd hoped, painting a closer picture of New York City than seems possible. But I will not lie to you, dear reader. It's long. Not "Iliad" long, but definitely "Goblin Market" long.

But it's worth it. With Levine, I share the sensation of "how the hell does he do that?" I read all of Kinnell's poems available online and each of them is stunning, approachable and beautiful, bringing poetry down from its celestial yet untouchable resting place to its roots as an enlargement of everyday life.

So I choose "Daybreak" for you. Read it, and read it again, and then tell me what you think.

Daybreak

On the tidal mud, just before sunset,
dozens of starfishes
were creeping. It was
as though the mud were a sky
and enormous, imperfect stars
moved across it as slowly
as the actual stars cross heaven.
All at once they stopped,
and, as if they had simply
increased their receptivity
to gravity, they sank down
into the mud, faded down
into it and lay still, and by the time
pink of sunset broke across them
they were as invisible
as the true stars at daybreak.

"Daybreak," by Galway Kinnell from A New Selected Poems (Houghton Mifflin).

I searched long and hard for a poem that touched most directly on the mayhem afflicting the United Kingdom in the past few days. I looked into poetry written after a number of 20th century riots, but none got to the heart of what's happening in the London riots.

And, for that matter, what is happening in the London riots? People are rushing to make snap judgments before the dust settles; many commentators and journalists are going to end up with egg on their face. Socialist thinkers focus on socio-economic factors, the middle-class fixate on the complete inadequacy of policing in London, and government flaks toe the line on "these people are criminals! Criminals I tell you!"

Very few seem to be able to hold all three thoughts simultaneously in their head, which is why I have great doubt that the structural factors leading to the rioting and the looting will be adequately addressed before flare-ups happen again. Overuse of police force kicked off the riots, but inadequate police presence emboldened the looters. The fact is that the government did not have an adequate response was because they were blind-sided; they have long ignored the marginalized, and are then surprised that there's a sizeable population with no investment in "civil" society.

Langston Hughes's poem, probably his most famous, was written about the disenfranchisement of an entire population, an entire population for whom the American Dream was not just a hope, but an insidious fantasy, conspiring to keep the have-nots in their place. When you are faced with no hope and no opportunity beyond what you're experiencing at the current moment, then your entire view of the world becomes warped, your view of those more rich, more successful than you turns dark.

"Or does it explode" indeed.

"Harlem"

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up

like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore -
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over -
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags

like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

--Langston Hughes, 1951

 

By Jacob Polley

I'm of many minds when it comes to selecting poems for this series. (I really should stop calling it "Poem of the day," but hey. One blogger can only cover so much.) The former English Lit major in me wants to go in for deeper analysis of the familiar greats to find new angles (as with the Robert Frost I did previously), but the political scientist in me wants to dig in and find forgotten perspectives to illustrate history as written by the losers, by the unfortunate.

In the area of literature, there's always a suggestion that we cannot even understand other cultures, other mentalities, without living life in their own words. Accepting that there are limits to multilingualism, we must at least read works in translation before we can pretend to empathize with anyone. I do believe that to a powerful extent. I believe that cultural philosophies and realities are laid bare by linguistics; the Eskimos have more than a dozen words for ice, and that tells us something about their society. The Germans have specific words for emotions that cannot be described in fewer than 5 English words, and that tell us something (particularly given how many variations there are on feelings related to melancholy).

On the other hand, I find it greatly problematic that often the value of a work is judged not by its inherent goodness or badness, but by its context. Reading literature in this way shows a profound disbelief in the power of the human imagination. It suggests that artists are not creators, but that they are heavily constrained by the world around them. Which some certainly are, but I think that diminishes the beauty of words themselves.

But now I'll come to Zbigniew Herbert, the author of today's poem. He was a key member of the Polish resistance in WWII, which today overshadows his considerable skills in poetry and literature. But politics are essential to Polish literature: in the Stalinist era, socialist realism was the required style in both art and literature. Herbert refused to participate in this, however, so he was unable to publish until 1957. So it is said that all the varying political trends, failures and malfeasance that Poland faced in the 20th century snakes through all of Herbert's poetry, simmering just under the surface. While I'm not sure I agree with that accepted thesis, one cannot deny the undercurrents of hopes dashed, of crushing disappointment, of ideals replaced by cheap desires, that sits in this poem.

Silk of a Soul by Zbigniew Herbert

Never 
did I speak with her 
either about love 
or about death 

only blind taste 
and mute touch 
used to run between us 
when we absorbed in ourselves. 
we lay close 

I must 
peek inside her 
to see what she wears 
at her centre 

when she slept 
with her lips open 
I peeked 

and what 
and what 
would you think 
I caught sight of 

I was expecting 
branches 
I was expecting 
a bird 
I was expecting 
a house 
by a lake great and silent 

but there 
on a glass counter 
I caught sight of a pair 
of silk stockings 
my God 
I’ll buy her those stockings 
I’ll buy them 

but what will appear then 
on the glass counter 
of the little soul 

will it be something 
which cannot be touched 
even with one finger of a dream

(Translated by Alissa Valles)

 

I chose this because of a fantastic BBC documentary series I've been watching by the same name, which essentially traces the democratizing effects of networks and systems from Ayn Rand's thought through Silicon Valley's network utopians and then back through nature itself.

I've been reading a lot of Brautigan over the past year, but this is a different beast. Rather than his typical humorous anti-poetry, here he expresses sentiments that might have inspired Philip K. Dick dystopia.

It sums up the political theory driving the whole series: that computer systems will replace so-called governance as the guidance for ordered society, but only if man can create computer networks as free, open and structured as ecological systems.

I honestly wonder if some BBC producer read this poem and then created a documentary series to illustrate it.

"All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace"
by Richard Brautigan

I'd like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.

I like to think

• (right now, please!)

of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.

I like to think

• (it has to be!)

of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.

I've had this on my 'poem of the day' list for a long time. I've refrained from posting it for a couple reasons. One, that if you are remotely interested in poetry (or attended any high school English class in America), you probably already know it. Second, it's Robert Frost. Frost isn't that cool or edgy, at least not on first glance.

This poem's crept up on me a few times lately. For one thing, it's a test case for the International Memory Championships (my new obsession!), owing to its abstract imagery.

But that, again, does it a disservice. For those of us who aren't memory olympiads, it's a poem we're required to memorize for a weekly pop quiz, and then we promptly forget it. All beauty is then lost. Learning it that way, would you have thought it a meditation on the very nature of property and ownership itself? On sovereignty and generosity? Of white man's burden, and the glorification of colonialism?

I thought not. Spend some time with it. Try to imagine whose voice speaks. Little hints of tyranny peek through about the speaker and the owner of the woods. If indeed one can own the woods on a public wayfare.

Robert Frost - Stopping By The Woods On A Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

 

 

For today's edition of Poem of the Day, I bring you Robert Hass. Hass is the closest thing we have to a 'household name poet' in the U.S. (excluding rappers and musicians of course). He was poet laureate from 1995-1997, won the Pulitzer Prize, and regularly publishes in mainstream newspapers.

This one's from 1979, and says everything about love, loss and the persistence of memory. Hass plays with language in order to hold it more accountable, in order to say that, no matter how hard we try, the use of words reduces the magical to something more mundane, and "everything dissolves".

Enjoy!

All the new thinking is about loss.

In this it resembles all the old thinking.

The idea, for example, that each particular erases

the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-

faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk

of that black birch is, by his presence,

some tragic falling off from a first world

of undivided light. Or the other notion that,

because there is in this world no one thing

to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,

a word is elegy to what it signifies.

We talked about it late last night and in the voice

of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone

almost querulous. After a while I understood that,

talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,

pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman

I made love to and I remembered how, holding

her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,

I felt a violent wonder at her presence

like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river

with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,

muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish

called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.

Longing, we say, because desire is full

of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.

But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,

the thing her father said that hurt her, what

she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous

as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.

Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,

saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

 

 

"Maxine"
Part 1

No party is
complete
without you.

Everybody
knows that.

The party
starts when
you arrive.

"Robot"
Part 2

Robot likes to sleep
through long lazy summer afternoons.
So do his friends
with the sun reflecting
off them like tin cans.

"Fred Bought a Pair of Ice Skates"
Part 3

Fred bought a pair of ice skates.
That was twenty years ago.
He still has them but he doesn't
skate any more.

"Calvin Listens to Starfish"
Part 4

Calvin listens to starfish.
He listens to them very carefully,
lying in the tide pools,
soaking wet
with his clothes on,
but is he really listening to them?

"Liz Looks at Herself in the Mirror"
Part 5

She's very depressed.
Nothing went right today,
so she doesn't believe that
shes there.
"Doris"
Part 6

This morning there
was a knock at the
door. You answered it.
The mailman was standing
there. He slapped your
face.

"Ginger"
Part 7

She’s glad
that Bill
likes her.

"Vicky Sleeps with Dead People"
Part 8

Vicky sleeps out in the woods
with dead people but she always
combs her hair in the morning.
Her parents don't understand her.
And she doesn't understand them.
They try. She tries. The dead
people try. They will all work
it out someday.

"Betty Makes Wonderful Waffles"
Part 9

Everybody agrees to
that.

"Claudia/1923-1970"
Part 10

Her mother still living
is 65.

Her grandmother still living
is 86.

"People in my family
live for a long time!"
—Claudia always used to say,
laughing.

What a surprise
she had.

"Walter"
Part 11

Every night: just before he falls asleep
Walter coughs. Having never slept
in a room with another person, he thinks
that everybody coughs just before they fall
asleep. That's his world.

"Morgan"
Part 12

Morgan finished second in his high school
presidential election in 1931.
He never recovered from it.
After that he wasn't interested in people
any more. They couldn't be counted on.
He has been working as a night watchman
at the same factory for over thirty years now.
At midnight he walks among the silent equipment.
He pretends they are his friends and they like
him very much. They would have voted
for him.

"Molly"
Part 13

Molly is afraid to go into the attic.
She's afraid if she went up there
and saw the box of clothes that she
used to wear twenty years ago,
she would start crying.


"'Ah, Great Expectations!'"
Part 14

Sam likes to say, "Ah, great expectations!"
at least three or four times in every
conversation. He is twelve years old.
Nobody knows what he is talking about when
he says it. Sometimes it makes people
feel uncomfortable.

Fascism and Germany have been on my mind lately; it's no secret that actually I've been more than a little obsessed with the whole thing since I went on a guided London walk that illustrated how close Britain came to becoming a fascist state itself during the fervor and uncertainty of the 1920s. And given the wonder and joy of cross-referencing and hyperlinks, that obsession led into an obsession with the Mitford sisters, which led to a brief passion for new journalism, which led to Joan Didion, and so it goes.

These days I flit from obsession to obsession like a butterfly to a flower, taking what I need before moving to the next. But when I was younger, perhaps I did flit, but I spent far more time on each subject of interest, far more focus and holistic study before I tired of it. One particular interest was Sylvia Plath. Perhaps I made myself romantically damaged to be like her. Perhaps I already was damaged and saw a kindred spirit when I read Bell Jar. But I am not Sylvia Plath, though if I so desired, I could cross Regent's Park and stick my head in her very own oven. Luckily I have grown past such desires.

What I always find surprising, though, is that she's still with me. That I can find beauty in her work despite the fact that I've grown up and am stronger than her in so many ways, better blessed in so many others. I still carry my small hardback everyman collection of her poetry everywhere I go, so that I may take quick sips when thirsty. (This is the same reason I always have at least one Tori Amos song, one Abba song and one Bangles song on my iPod, in case of emotional emergencies.)

Desultory am I, it is obvious. But here we journey towards the point. Why did I choose "Daddy" instead of a hundred other less obvious choices? Because it's impossible to get the first stanza out of your head. It's impossible not to be drawn into the strange rhythm of her words, like a steady march. It is superficially evocative but still rewards study.

This won't be the last Plath poem I feature, but this is the right one for this moment.

DADDY
 
You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time---
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off the beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My Polack friend

Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene

An engine, an engine,
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been sacred of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You----

Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I'm finally through.
The black telephone's off at the root,
The voices just can't worm through.

If I've killed one man, I've killed two---
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.

There's a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.

Like many people, my entire knowledge of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda comes from the lovely film Il Postino, about a postman in Italy who's only job is to bring Neruda mail from all his swooning female fans. As the friendship grew between the two men, the postman gains the confidence from Neruda's words to woo the woman he loves.

Power of words, eh? For some reason, I never tried to read Neruda afterwards. But this morning, in a Dorothy Parker inspired frenzy of reading, I stumbled across a few, and was particularly enraptured by "I Do Not Love You Except Because I Love You." Talk about love that eats you alive.

Enjoy!

I DO NOT LOVE YOU EXCEPT BECAUSE I LOVE YOU

I do not love you except because I love you;
I go from loving to not loving you,
From waiting to not waiting for you
My heart moves from cold to fire.

I love you only because it's you the one I love;
I hate you deeply, and hating you
Bend to you, and the measure of my changing love for you
Is that I do not see you but love you blindly.

Maybe January light will consume
My heart with its cruel
Ray, stealing my key to true calm.

In this part of the story I am the one who
Dies, the only one, and I will die of love because I love you,
Because I love you, Love, in fire and blood.