Category: poetry

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So much depends upon a red cableknit sweater

I don’t know
about a wheelbarrow

but

things also depend

on a red
cableknit sweater

old and worn
and soft

like the blue-and-white
striped overalls
paired with it

(Apologies to William Carlos Williams)

There used to be a store in the malls, back in the 1990s, called Britches Great Outdoors. I didn’t shop there often, which I kind of regret because the two things I own from that store, I like a great deal. One is a pair of overalls that is among my favorite pairs of overalls ever, and I periodically look on eBay to see if any are hitting the market (no dice so far, ever). The other is this red cableknit sweater.

Sweaters are always amazing and wonderful, and everyone should own a few, as far as I’m concerned. Sweaters are kind of a “workhorse” article of clothing, in that they serve multiple functions, being both warm and usually looking good. But an old cableknit sweater is a special pleasure. In truth it may not be so warm as it used to be, as the sweater ages and the knit starts to loosen ever-so-slightly, so more air gets through it than before. And maybe there are starting to be a few fraying spots, only really noticeable if you’re the one who has worn the sweater a lot and you know how it used to be. Maybe around the bottom it’s given way a bit and maybe the collar and the cuffs aren’t as tight and neat as they used to be. But that’s OK.

And maybe the sweater itself fits a little bit strangely on you now. Mine certainly does: let’s just say that I filled it out quite a bit more tightly back when I bought in the 1990s. I suppose, by definition, the sweater is “vintage”, and it feels it: there is certainly a lot more room in it, and when I wear it under a pair of overalls, it balloons out from beneath the denim more than it did years ago.

Come to think of it: there’s something to be said for your soft and aged cableknit sweater being a bit too large, too. After all, one of the under-remarked qualities of overalls is that they can give new life, through covering and restraint, to tops that might otherwise not work as well on their own anymore.

If you don’t have a slightly oversized and old cableknit sweater, get one. And if you have a cableknit sweater that you’ve been considering getting rid of because it’s not what it used to be, maybe wait out that instinct a bit. It might just age itself into a new life…especially if you’re inclined to wearing overalls.

(I wanted to take a photo for this post of me holding a poetry book open to William Carlos Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow”, with the sweater and the bib of my overalls showing beyond, but it turns out that I only own one poetry book with that particular poem in it, and that book splits the poem between two pages. Alas! Betrayed by kerning!)

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Edgar Guest on Taxation: a poem

Today is April 15, Tax Day! And it’s still April, National Poetry Month, so after a few minutes of Googling “poems about taxes”, here’s one that’s actually not entirely pessimistic about whole affair. I could go on for a bit about Americans and their attitude on taxes, but I won’t, except to note that somehow American conservatives have managed to convince a great many Americans over the last few decades that the thing holding them back is what government takes out of their paychecks, which is a handy way of also getting Americans to now wonder what their employers aren’t putting in those paychecks in the first place.

Anyway, here is “Taxes” by Edgar Guest, a poet once called “the People’s Poet”, and whose work isn’t highly regarded these days, if indeed it ever was; Dorothy Parker once quipped, “Id rather flunk my Wasserman Test than read a poem by Edgar Guest.” Ouch. (Yes, I had to look up what a Wasserman Test is.)

When they become due I don’t like them at all.
Taxes look large be they ever so small
Taxes are debts which I venture to say,
No man or no woman is happy to pay.
I grumble about them, as most of us do.
For it seems that with taxes I never am through.

But when I reflect on the city I love,
With its sewers below and its pavements above,
And its schools and its parks where children may play
I can see what I get for the money I pay.
And I say to myself: “Little joy would we know
If we kept all our money and spent it alone.”

I couldn’t build streets and I couldn’t fight fire
Policemen to guard us I never could hire.
A water department I couldn’t maintain.
Instead of a city we’d still have a plain
Then I look at the bill for the taxes they charge,
And I say to myself: “Well, that isn’t so large.”

I walk through a hospital thronged with the ill 
And I find that it shrivels the size of my bill. 
As in beauty and splendor my home city grows, 
It is easy to see where my tax money goes
And I say to myself: “if we lived hit and miss
And gave up our taxes, we couldn’t do this.”

(Text via)

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National Poetry Month begins….

A Ballad of Baseball Burdens

The burden of hard hitting. Slug away
      Like Honus Wagner or like Tyrus Cobb.
Else fandom shouteth: “Who said you could play?
      Back to the jasper league, you minor slob!”
      Swat, hit, connect, line out, get on the job.
Else you shall feel the brunt of fandom’s ire
      Biff, bang it, clout it, hit it on the knob—
This is the end of every fan’s desire.

The burden of good pitching. Curved or straight.
      Or in or out, or haply up or down,
To puzzle him that standeth by the plate,
      To lessen, so to speak, his bat-renoun:
      Like Christy Mathewson or Miner Brown,
So pitch that every man can but admire
      And offer you the freedom of the town—
This is the end of every fan’s desire.

The burden of loud cheering. O the sounds!
      The tumult and the shouting from the throats
Of forty thousand at the Polo Grounds
      Sitting, ay, standing sans their hats and coats.
      A mighty cheer that possibly denotes
That Cub or Pirate fat is in the fire;
      Or, as H. James would say, We’ve got their goats—
This is the end of every fan’s desire.

The burden of a pennant. O the hope,
      The tenuous hope, the hope that’s half a fear,
The lengthy season and the boundless dope,
      And the bromidic; “Wait until next year.”
      O dread disgrace of trailing in the rear,
O Piece of Bunting, flying high and higher
      That next October it shall flutter here:
This is the end of every fan’s desire.

ENVOY

Ah, Fans, let not the Quarry but the Chase
      Be that to which most fondly we aspire!
For us not Stake, but Game; not Goal, but Race—
THIS is the end of every fan’s desire.

By Franklin Pierce Adams.

(I chose a baseball poem because as I write this, the Pittsburgh Pirates are 4-0 and are clearly on their way to their first World Series Championship since 1979. Go Bucs!)

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Something for Thursday: Robert Burns Edition

Robert Burns, painted by Alexander Nasmyth.

Robert Burns, the great poet troubadour of Scotland, was born this date, 1759. For a basic primer on Burns, this article is a good place to start. For some true appreciation, though, skip the basic intro and go right to Sheila O’Malley.

He was prolific. As it stands, there are over 400 Robert Burns known songs in existence. He was a celebrity in his own time. The fame he achieved in his own lifetime, however, is nothing compared to his posthumous fame.

Some of his verses are so engrained in our culture we can’t even imagine anyone wrote them at all. They seem to have just descended upon us, whole, from the heavens, the ether, Olympus. If you’re drunk on New Year’s Eve, gripping a bottle of champagne, and singing “Auld Lang Syne” at the top of your lungs, annoying people on the subway, you are quoting Robbie Burns.

Burns is one of those poets whose work is best sounded aloud, or at least sounded in the mouth, even if one doesn’t make the sounds; one should at least feel them. There are verses of his that seem to make no sense, due to the Scots dialect, but when you sound them out, the meaning becomes absolutely, utterly clear.

For me, the union of Burns’s words and Dougie Maclean’s voice is one of those things of perfection that we get to enjoy once in a while in this world. Here is one of my favorite songs, thanks to Robert Burns and Dougie Maclean!

 

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“Ho! Ho! Ho! To the bottle I go….”

Your Humble Narrator, decked out in Renfest-cottagecore regalia for an evening’s reading in Middle Earth. Note that I’m quaffing a beer, as rum isn’t a thing in Middle Earth, so far as I can tell!

Ho! Ho! Ho! to the bottle I go
To heal my heart and drown my woe.
Rain may fall and wind may blow,
And many miles be still to go,
But under a tall tree, I will lie,
And let the clouds go sailing by.

Drinking Song from The Fellowship of the Ring, JRR Tolkien.

A while back I embarked on a re-read of The Lord of the Rings. My progress has been slower than usual, because of reasons, but as ever I find myself loving this story deeply, and Tolkien’s luminous, lyrical writing continues to astonish and amaze me. I am as drawn in as ever, and this time I’m paying special attention to the poetry, of which JRRT writes many different kinds…including a drinking song or two.

The Peter Jackson movies did a decent job of incorporating Tolkien’s poetry, as much as they could for mass audiences, and here’s an artist who compiles some of the drinking songs from the films into one medley. The songs aren’t entirely Tolkien, but they contain enough of him that I don’t think he’d object to any of this.

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“My City”

I read the poem below yesterday, and its simple theme resonated strongly with me. The poet, the great James Weldon Johnson (perhaps best known for penning the lyrics to “Lift Every Voice and Sing”, the hymn that has come to be known as “the Black national anthem”), is expressing the awful fact that death means that we will never get to see and hear the things we love again. Death doesn’t just rob others of us, it also robs us.

“My City”

When I come down to sleep death’s endless night,
The threshold of the unknown dark to cross,
What to me then will be the keenest loss,
When this bright world blurs on my fading sight?
Will it be that no more I shall see the trees
Or smell the flowers or hear the singing birds
Or watch the flashing streams or patient herds?
No. I am sure it will be none of these.

But, ah! Manhattan’s sights and sounds, her smells,
Her crowds, her throbbing force, the thrill that comes
From being of her a part, her subtle spells,
Her shining towers, her avenues, her slums–
O God! the stark, unutterable pity,
To be dead, and never again behold my city.

That poem speaks, to me, a real and very sad truth. I sometimes wonder if there will come a time when I know that I’ll not hear Rachmaninoff or Berlioz again….

 

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“I will seek not the shadowy region”

In her review of a new movie about Emily Bronte, titled Emily, Sheila O’Malley cites two lines from one of Bronte’s poems:

I’ll walk where my own nature would be leading:
It vexes me to choose another guide.

Somehow I’d never seen that poem before, so I tracked it down. Didn’t take long: I have it in several anthologies. Here it is, in full:

Often rebuked, yet always back returning
To those first feelings that were born with me,
And leaving busy chase of wealth and learning
For idle dreams of things which cannot be:

To-day, I will seek not the shadowy region;
Its unsustaining vastness waxes drear;
And visions rising, legion after legion,
Bring the unreal world too strangely near.

I’ll walk, but not in old heroic traces,
And not in paths of high morality,
And not among the half-distinguished faces,
The clouded forms of long-past history.

I’ll walk where my own nature would be leading:
It vexes me to choose another guide:
Where the grey flocks in ferny glens are feeding;
Where the wild wind blows on the mountain side.

What have those lonely mountains worth revealing?
More glory and more grief than I can tell:
The earth that wakes one human heart to feeling
Can centre both the worlds of Heaven and Hell.

I find myself returning, time and again, to the English Romantics and their ability to create deeply evocative and specific visions and feelings with a relative economy of words. “Grey flocks in ferny glens” conjures such a perfectly precise image in my mind in just five words, and the last stanza seems a perfect encapsulation of the smallness of the single human in the face of universal nature.

 

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“A Poet is Not a Jukebox”

A poem by Dudley Randall:

A poet is not a jukebox, so don’t tell me what to write.
I read a dear friend a poem about love, and she said,
“You’re in to that bag now, for whatever it’s worth,
But why don’t you write about the riot in Miami?”

I didn’t write about Miami because I didn’t know about
   Miami.
I’ve been so busy working for the Census, and listening to
   music all night, and making new poems
That I’ve broken my habit of watching TV and reading
   newspapers.
So it wasn’t absence of Black Pride that caused me not to
   write about Miami,
But simple ignorance.

Telling a Black poet what he ought to write
Is like some Commissar of Culture in Russia telling a poet
He’d better write about the new steel furnaces in the
   Novobigorsk region,
Or the heroic feats of Soviet labor in digging the trans-
   Caucausus Canal,
Or the unprecedented achievement of workers in the sugar
   beet industry who exceeded their quota by 400 per cent
   (it was later discovered to be a typist’s error).

Maybe the Russian poet is watching his mother die of
   cancer,
Or is bleeding from an unhappy love affair,
Or is bursting with happiness and wants to sing of wine,
   roses, and nightingales.

I’ll bet that in a hundred years the poems the Russian
   people will read, sing and love
Will be the poems about his mother’s death, his unfaithful
   mistress, or his wine, roses and nightingales,
Not the poems about steel furnaces, the trans-Caucasus
   Canal, or the sugar beet industry.
A poet writes about what he feels, what agitates his heart
   and sets his pen in motion.
Not what some apparatchik dictates, to promote his own
   career or theories.

Yeah, maybe I’ll write about Miami, as I wrote about
   Birmingham.
But it’ll be because I want to write about Miami, not
   because somebody says I ought to.

Yeah, I write about love. What’s wrong with love?
If we had more loving, we’d have more Black babies to
   become Black brothers and sisters and build the Black
   family.

When people love, they bathe with sweet-smelling soap,
   splash their bodies with perfume or cologne,
Shave, and comb their hair, and put on gleaming silken
   garments,
Speak softly and kindly and study their beloved to
   anticipate and satisfy her every desire.
After loving they’re relaxed and happy and friends with all
   the world.
What’s wrong with love, beauty, joy and peace?

If Josephine had given Napoleon more loving, he wouldn’t
   have sown the meadows of Europe with skulls.
If Hitler had been happy in love, he wouldn’t have baked
   people in ovens.
So don’t tell me it’s trivial and a cop-out to write about
   love and not about Miami.

A poet is not a jukebox.
A poet is not a jukebox.
I repeat, A poet is not a jukebox for someone to shove a
   quarter in his ear and get the tune they want to hear,
Or to pat on the head and call “a good little
   Revolutionary.”
Or to give a Kuumba Liberation Award.

A poet is not a jukebox.
A poet is not a jukebox.
A poet is not a jukebox.

So don’t tell me what to write.

(Text from African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song, Library of America, Kevin Young, ed.)

Dudley Randall (1914-2000) was a poet and also a major figure in Black American publishing. In addition to his own work, he helped to amplify many of the greatest voices in Black American poetry through the publishing house that he founded himself, Broadside Press, which still exists today as half of Broadside Lotus Press (formed when Randall’s company merged with Lotus Press), and through his work and his publishing Randall was an important figure in the Black Arts Movement.

This particular poem’s meaning can be said to apply to all artists, in that artists cannot produce work on demand (or, if they do, the work won’t be as good). But the deeper meaning here seems to be the insistence that Black voices must be made to speak about everything, that Black people must atone for everything, and that generally every Black person be somehow responsible for every act, every incident, every sleight that whites perceive. And through their refusal to accept that responsibility, and their refusal to address all of it–to insist that they are, after all, not a jukebox–they forfeit all claims to have been systematically wronged along with their ancestors.

That’s bad enough, but toward the end it even gets worse: Randall’s argument is that by insisting what he write about, he is deemed unworthy of writing about certain other subjects. This limitation of the poet’s voice, this neutering of a man who wants to write about love but is told he shouldn’t because there’s some other dark topic he should write about instead, is as negative an imposition on a single man’s voice as it is on all the voices of his community.

So let the man write about love, if he wants. Let anyone write about love if they want. Or about the riot in Miami. Just don’t command it of them.

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“The war’ly race may riches chase….” Happy Robert Burns Day!

Green grow the rashes , O; 
Green grow the rashes , O; 
The sweetest hours that e'er I spend, 
Are spent amang the lasses, O. 

There's nought but care on ev'ry han' , 
In ev'ry hour that passes, O: 
What signifies the life o' man, 
An' 'twere na for the lasses, O. 

The war'ly race may riches chase, -
An' riches still may fly them, O; 
An' tho' at last they catch them fast, 
Their hearts can ne'er enjoy them, O. 

But gie me a cannie hour at e'en , 
My arms about my dearie, O; 
An' war'ly cares, an' war'ly men, 
May a' gae tapsalteerie , O! 

For you sae douce , ye sneer at this; 
Ye're nought but senseless asses, O: 
The wisest man the warl' e'er saw , 
He dearly lov'd the lasses, O. 

Auld Nature swears, the lovely dears 
Her noblest work she classes, O: 
Her prentice han' she try'd on man, 
An' then she made the lasses, O. 

Green grow the rashes , O; 
Green grow the rashes , O; 
The sweetest hours that e'er I spend, 
Are spent amang the lasses, O.

Today is Robert Burns Day! Robert Burns, the great poet of Scotland, born this day in 1759. I love his work dearly, and this particular poem, “Green Grow the Rashes O”, is likely my favorite.

For more on him, read Sheila O’Malley. Failing that, read some Burns!

 

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Indigenous People’s Day

Mine is one of the last generations, I suppose, that was taught all the happy American mythology about Christopher Columbus and how he, knowing that the Earth was round whilst everyone else thought it as flat, thought to sail all the way around, and so doing discovered a land of gold and honey that no one knew about.

“Was anybody here already?” one of my classmates or I must have asked.

“Oh yes, the Indians were here. And there was a bit of fighting here and there but there weren’t many of them and they eventually welcomed us and helped the pilgrims.”

“But,” I wish one of my classmates or I had asked, “if they were so nice and welcoming then, why were they bad guys later that we had to kill and now we play ‘Cowboys and Indians’ at recess?”

Anyway.

Here is a poem by Denise Levertov. It’s an English translation of a Spanish poem, that is itself a translation of a Toltec poem that predates the arrival of Columbus. We aren’t sure how many people lived in the Americas prior to 1492, but estimates tend to range in the tens of millions…and by a hundred years later, colonization from Europe had gutted that number down to a small fraction of what it had been before.

Millions.

Vibrant cultures with trade and complex art and architectures and traditions…wiped out.

The poem:

THE ARTIST

The artist: disciple, abundant, multiple, restless.
The true artist: capable, practicing, skillful;
maintains dialogue with his heart, meets things with his mind.

The true artist: draws out all from his heart,
works with delight, makes things with calm, with sagacity,
works like a true Toltec, composes his objects, works dexterously, invents;
arranges materials, adorns them, makes them adjust.

The carrion artist: works at random, sneers at the people,
makes things opaque, brushes across the surface of the face of things,
works without care, defrauds people, is a thief.

From World Poetry: An Anthology of Verse from Antiquity to Our Time.

 

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