Ars Interpres has accepted the Brodsky elegy for publication, for which I'm beholden (& very grateful) to Alan Shaw.

funny how these lines from the (very different) Brodsky poem, posted earlier, forecast what I'm fiddling with now :

Droning brittle wings, poets take their stations 
At the edge of the cliff – their noise intuitive, innate...

Seems fitting, this time of year, to post again my old contribution to the Yeats/Auden/Eliot/Brodsky elegy round-robin. (from Way Stations):

JOSEPH BRODSKY
    
                   But each grave is the limit of the earth. 
 1

  
 You died on a cold night in January.
 It was Superbowl Sunday.  A supine empire,
 Preoccupied with bread and circuses,
 Land Rovers, stratagems of muscle-
 Bound heroes.  Next day, fire
 Swallows the famous opera house in Venice.
 Not with a bang – with a light rustle
 Of red silk, your heart passed the final
 Exam, black-sailed, in the science of farewells.

  
 Snow falls on the fleeting moiré of the sea;
 It falls on horsemen passing by, on the halfbacks
 Of the dolphins' curved smiles (in a mirror
 Of alien tribes).  Snow falls on night grass
 In the trackless pine forest; it falls with the stars
 Drifting down from unnumbered, shiftless heaven;
 So it fell, and will fall, on those bronze eyelids.
 A guarded glance, coiled in frozen hexagons;
 Shy cedar voice, immured in pyramids.

  
 Snow mixed with tears signals a hearth somewhere.
 Not in the street, not in this Byzantine air
 Of columns and cenotaphs – no.  Just a home
 By a river of marrying streams; a certain Rome
 Where tongues descend – ascending voices mingle
 In companionable flame.  This friendly fire
 Eats brotherly dusk, shakes fearful ether
 Into evening wine... one hawk's cry
 Screams – and melds into the Muse's profile.


     
 2

  
 Life's flimsy laundry, easily
 Unraveled.  Transparent butterfly net,
 Wing of a moth, how slyly they
 Trap the hunter, iced on an alpine sheet.

  
 You fight the droning in your head
 With all the cunning you can muster;
 Turning its power against itself, you lead
 A life Laertes would approve (bluster,

  
 Business laboring for acclaim)
 Only to drown the voice above the trees.
 Relentless, impervious to shame,
 It finds you out, brings you to your knees.

  
 And like the heavy signet ring,
 A chieftain's ring, that hidden in hand
 Sealed Hamlet's heart (O molten, circling sting) –
 The droning issues forth its stark command.

  
 You listened, followed.  A shuttling pencil
 In a nighthawk's beak – a spear in your side;
 And a huge sea-moth with crossbone stencil
 Shattered your lamp.  Died.

  
 Summer ends, the droning subsides.
 The ruthless tango of prose and poetry
 Is dead.  Cicada shells, butterfly hides...
 Some leftover spider's ecstasy.


     
 3

  
 In the depths of the Soviet winter, in the ponderous cold
 Of Siberia, a boy cups an abandoned moth in his hands,
 Born – to die a few hours old –

  
 Into a false firewood springtime.  Its delicate wings
 Are only an affront to the divine benevolence; he understands
 Nothing; his hands, like an insect coffin, bear the stings

  
 Of the nails themselves; like a dry cocoon, absently,
 They drift to the shack wall, and the fingers fan,
 In unison, a camouflaged figure in the pinewood pantry.

  
 This tender sign... a tenderness snuffed out.
 This heavy icon, then... true mimic of an action?
 Or only the swollen, distorted wings of a parasite?
 
 Or only the screech of broken chalk on slate?
 Droning brittle wings, poets take their stations
 At the edge of the cliff – their noise intuitive, innate...

  
 The butterfly is gone.  Its form was here, immaculate;
 The hands tracing its flight, aimless, serpentine,
 Mimic its undetermined motion – late, late –

  
 Since that double-woven fountain, afloat with indirection,
 Surging, sparkling, translucent, seeks its mate
 In a signal heaven – a camouflage beyond dissection.                 
 
                                        2.2.96

The final section of this poem alludes to a Brodsky poem about a boy and a moth, which in turn alludes to a Nabokov short story. Oddly enough, the 2nd and 3rd sections of this poem were written before Brodsky died. The original version was not an elegy for Brodsky : the poem had opened with a section about my adolescent infatuation with Nabokov! So, when you consider that this elegy is part of a cycle of elegies - Auden for Yeats, Brodsky, echoing Auden, for TS Eliot - then this Nabokovian reference forms a second loop.

cf. Mandelstam (in a not-so-great, not-terrible translation) :

Sisters - Heaviness and Tenderness - you look the same.
Wasps and bees both suck the heavy rose.
Man dies, and the hot sand cools again.
Carried off on a black stretcher, yesterday’s sun goes.

 
Oh, honeycombs’ heaviness, nets’ tenderness,
it’s easier to lift a stone than to say your name!
I have one purpose left, a golden purpose,
how, from time’s weight, to free myself again.

 
I drink the turbid air like a dark water.
The rose was earth; time, ploughed from underneath.
Woven, the heavy, tender roses, in a slow vortex, 
the roses, heaviness and tenderness, in a double-wreath.

This was the salvageable part of my contribution. Echoes a particular poem of Brodsky's, which incidentally echoed an earlier short story by Nabokov.

         3

  
         In the depths of the Soviet winter, in the ponderous cold
 Of Siberia, a boy cups an abandoned moth in his hands,
 Born – to die a few hours old –

  
         Into a false firewood springtime.  Its delicate wings
 Are only an affront to the divine benevolence; he understands
 Nothing; his hands, like an insect coffin, bear the stings

  
         Of the nails themselves; like a dry cocoon, absently,
 They drift to the shack wall, and the fingers fan,
 In unison, a camouflaged figure in the pinewood pantry.

  
         This tender sign... a tenderness snuffed out.
 This heavy icon, then... true mimic of an action?
 Or only the swollen, distorted wings of a parasite?
  
         Or only the screech of broken chalk on slate?
 Droning brittle wings, poets take their stations
 At the edge of the cliff – their noise intuitive, innate...

  
         The butterfly is gone.  Its form was here, immaculate;
 The hands tracing its flight, aimless, serpentine,
 Mimic its undetermined motion – late, late –

  
         Since that double-woven fountain, afloat with indirection,
 Surging, sparkling, translucent, seeks its mate
 In a signal heaven – a camouflage beyond dissection.


      
                                     2.2.96

(the poem ("Joseph Brodsky") was published on the op-ed page of the Providence Journal not long after it was written. Curiously, WB Yeats wrote & published a short series of articles for the same paper, in the 1890s. I think they were about aspects of Irish culture and their offshoots in America.)

Auden started it:

He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Strange. Both Yeats & Joseph Brodsky died on this day, Jan. 28th. Strange, because Brodsky wrote a famous elegy (He died at the start of the year, in January...) for TS Eliot, which was an echo of Auden's famous elegy for Yeats.

(I learn things from my own archive. I tried to keep up the round-robin with that elegy for Brodsky (see archive for 1.30.04.)

On the other hand, one can admire & love the strange elegiac feeling of "Swamp Formalism", and imagine Lisa Jarnot actually responding with rueful self-disgust to the "poetic" improvisatory talent (like her own, the unacknowledged legislator) of Rumsfeld-in-action (at the news conferences). (I think the feeling is similar in "Land of Lincoln"; maybe I'm fooling myself.)

What bothers me is the dumbing-down of speech into a special idiom. All poetry is a special idiom, but if it's too obvious, you show your hand - ie. it becomes rhetoric. (Ron Silliman's pretentious syllable-counting only underlines - unintentionally - the artificiality, the mannerism, of the technique.) Incantantory, neo-romantic, poetical. . . & overly rhetorical. (Gabe Gudding - who believes that poetry is rhetoric - would disagree.)

Ghostly meetings : Brodsky, Eliot, Yeats

I see from Laurable's calendar that Brodsky & Yeats died on the same day, Jan. 28th.

Curious, considering the round robin involved when Brodsky, in his elegy for TS Eliot, closely echoed Auden's elegy for Yeats, both of them emphasizing the cold January weather. (I tried to do the same thing for Brodsky a few years ago.)

 
 JOSEPH BRODSKY   
                     But each grave is the limit of the earth.
       
                   1
  
 You died on a cold night in January.
 It was Superbowl Sunday.  A supine empire,
 Preoccupied with bread and circuses,
 Land Rovers, stratagems of muscle-
 Bound heroes.  Next day, fire
 Swallows the famous opera house in Venice.
 Not with a bang – with a light rustle
 Of red silk, your heart passed the final
 Exam, black-sailed, in the science of farewells.

 Snow falls on the fleeting moiré of the sea;
 It falls on horsemen passing by, on the halfbacks
 Of the dolphins' curved smiles (in a mirror
 Of alien tribes).  Snow falls on night grass
 In the trackless pine forest; it falls with the stars
 Drifting down from unnumbered, shiftless heaven;
 So it fell, and will fall, on those bronze eyelids.
 A guarded glance, coiled in frozen hexagons;
 Shy cedar voice, immured in pyramids.

 Snow mixed with tears signals a hearth somewhere.
 Not in the street, not in this Byzantine air
 Of columns and cenotaphs – no.  Just a home
 By a river of marrying streams; a certain Rome
 Where tongues descend – ascending voices mingle
 In companionable flame.  This friendly fire
 Eats brotherly dusk, shakes fearful ether
 Into evening wine... one hawk's cry
 Screams – and melds into the Muse's profile.
     
                  2

 Life's flimsy laundry, easily
 Unraveled.  Transparent butterfly net,
 Wing of a moth, how slyly they
 Trap the hunter, iced on an alpine sheet.

 You fight the droning in your head
 With all the cunning you can muster;
 Turning its power against itself, you lead
 A life Laertes would approve (bluster,

 Business laboring for acclaim)
 Only to drown the voice above the trees.
 Relentless, impervious to shame,
 It finds you out, brings you to your knees.

 And like the heavy signet ring,
 A chieftain's ring, that hidden in hand
 Sealed Hamlet's heart (O molten, circling sting) –
 The droning issues forth its stark command.

 You listened, followed.  A shuttling pencil
 In a nighthawk's beak – a spear in your side;
 And a huge sea-moth with crossbone stencil
 Shattered your lamp.  Died.

 Summer ends, the droning subsides.
 The ruthless tango of prose and poetry
 Is dead.  Cicada shells, butterfly hides...
 Some leftover spider's ecstasy.
     
                   3

 In the depths of the Soviet winter, in the ponderous cold
 Of Siberia, a boy cups an abandoned moth in his hands,
 Born – to die a few hours old –

 Into a false firewood springtime.  Its delicate wings
 Are only an affront to the divine benevolence; he understands
 Nothing; his hands, like an insect coffin, bear the stings

 Of the nails themselves; like a dry cocoon, absently,
 They drift to the shack wall, and the fingers fan,
 In unison, a camouflaged figure in the pinewood pantry.

 This tender sign... a tenderness snuffed out.
 This heavy icon, then... true mimic of an action?
 Or only the swollen, distorted wings of a parasite?
  

 Or only the screech of broken chalk on slate?
 Droning brittle wings, poets take their stations
 At the edge of the cliff – their noise intuitive, innate...

 The butterfly is gone.  Its form was here, immaculate;
 The hands tracing its flight, aimless, serpentine,
 Mimic its undetermined motion – late, late –

 Since that double-woven fountain, afloat with indirection,
 Surging, sparkling, translucent, seeks its mate
 In a signal heaven – a camouflage beyond dissection.
      
                                     2.2.96

Berryman, Dream Song :

79

         
             Op. posth. no. 2

 
Whence flew the litter whereon he was laid?
Of what heroic stuff was warlock Henry made?
and questions of that sort
perplexed the bulging cosmos, O in short
was sandalwood in good supply when he
flared out of history

 
& the obituary in the New York Times
into the world of generosity
creating the air where are
& can be, only, heroes?  Statues & rhymes
signal his fiery Passage, a mountainous sea,
the occlusion of a star:

 
anything afterward, of high lament,
let too his giant faults appear, as sent
together with his virtues down
and let this day be his, throughout the town,
region & cosmos, lest he freeze our blood
with terrible returns.

The groundwork was laid for my interest in Mandelstam when I was in high school, in the 60s. Russian literature was Nabokov, Tolstoy, Gogol, Dostoevsky. The swampy, forested, birch-laden landscape of northern Minnesota, where I spent a lot of time then, was mirrored in this literary Russia. Nabokov was a favorite of my mother, & most of his books were on the shelves at home. Reading "Speak, Memory", Nabokov's childhood memoir, was an exercise in vicarious nostalgia (no one understands heartsickness for childhood like an adolescent). My high school prose writing included awkward Nabokovian echoes.

Once, much later, I wrote a 3-part poem exploring my absorption in Nabokov. Several years after that, I heard Joseph Brodsky give a stupendous reading at Brown (he recited his fairly long poems in both Russian and English, all from memory). The sloped auditorium was jammed. Brodsky took questions afterwards, & he raised a laugh when I asked if he had a favorite poem by Mandelstam. He said, "Yes, I do. Next question." After the reading, however, we talked. I apologized for "putting him on the spot" about Mandelstam. He was very charming and affable. He encouraged me to read more Auden. He even accepted a few of my poems, saying it would give him something to read back at his hotel.

When Brodsky died a few years later, I took the poem I had started about my obsession with Nabokov, and simply replaced the first section with a tribute to Brodsky. The last section (about the boy with the moth) worked very well - since Brodsky himself had written a poem based on this episode - which first appears in a short story by Nabokov. The Brodsky poem is also an echo of his tribute to Eliot, which was an echo of Auden's tribute to Yeats. I enjoyed adding another spoke to this elegiac cycle (English-Irish-American-Russian-American. . .). The poem was published on the op-ed page of the Providence Journal, the RI paper of record - where, incidentally, and curiously enough, Yeats himself had published a series of literary essays back in the 1890s.

Here is the poem:

JOSEPH BRODSKY

But each grave is the limit of the earth.

1

You died on a cold night in January.
It was Superbowl Sunday. A supine empire,
preoccupied with bread and circuses,
Land Rovers, stratagems of muscle-
bound heroes. Next day, fire
swallows the famous opera house in Venice.
Not with a bang - with a light rustle
of red silk, your heart passed the final
exam, black-sailed, in the science of farewells.

Snow falls on the fleeting moiré of the sea;
It falls on horsemen passing by, on the halfbacks
of the dolphins' curved smiles (in a mirror
of alien tribes). Snow falls on night grass
in the trackless pine forest; it falls with the stars
drifting down from unnumbered, shiftless heaven;
so it fell, and will fall, on those bronze eyelids.
A guarded glance, coiled in frozen hexagons;
shy cedar voice, immured in pyramids.

Snow mixed with tears signals a hearth somewhere.
Not in the street, not in this Byzantine air
of columns and cenotaphs - no. Just a home
by a river of marrying streams; a certain Rome
where tongues descend - ascending voices mingle
in companionable flame. This friendly fire
eats brotherly dusk, shakes fearful ether
into evening wine. . . one hawk's cry
screams - and melds into the Muse's profile.

2

Life's flimsy laundry, easily
unraveled. Transparent butterfly net,
wing of a moth, how slyly they
trap the hunter, iced on an alpine sheet.

You fight the droning in your head
with all the cunning you can muster;
turning its power against itself, you lead
a life Laertes would approve (bluster,

business laboring for acclaim)
only to drown the voice above the trees.
Relentless, impervious to shame,
it finds you out, brings you to your knees.

And like the heavy signet ring,
a chieftain's ring, that hidden in hand
sealed Hamlet's heart (O molten, circling sting) -
the droning issues forth its stark command.

You listened, followed. A shuttling pencil
in a nighthawk's beak - a spear in your side;
and a huge sea-moth with crossbone stencil
shattered your lamp. Died.

Summer ends, the droning subsides.
The ruthless tango of prose and poetry
is dead. Cicada shells, butterfly hides. . .
some leftover spider's ecstasy.

3

In the depths of the Soviet winter, in the ponderous cold
of Siberia, a boy cups an abandoned moth in his hands,
born - to die a few hours old -

into a false firewood springtime. Its delicate wings
are only an affront to the divine benevolence; he understands
nothing; his hands, like an insect coffin, bear the stings

of the nails themselves; like a dry cocoon, absently,
they drift to the shack wall, and the fingers fan,
in unison, a camouflaged figure in the pinewood pantry.

This tender sign. . . a tenderness snuffed out.
This heavy icon, then. . . true mimic of an action?
Or only the swollen, distorted wings of a parasite?

Or only the screech of broken chalk on slate?
Droning brittle wings, poets take their stations
at the edge of the cliff - their noise intuitive, innate. . .

The butterfly is gone. Its form was here, immaculate;
the hands tracing its flight, aimless, serpentine,
mimic its undetermined motion - late, late -

since that double-woven fountain, afloat with indirection,
surging, sparkling, translucent, seeks its mate
in a signal heaven - a camouflage beyond dissection.


2.2.96


Now when I re-read it, the solemn tone and the heavy allusions to other poems almost wreck it, maybe do wreck it; but the last section lifts it up & together again, or almost.