Dark Lady on the bus

In the late 60s I attended Blake School, in Hopkins, MN (west of Minneapolis - poet Allen Grossman's alma mater) through high school. Every senior at Blake had to deliver a "Chapel Speech" at some point (I wrote a novella called Chapel Hill which describes what this involved). Anyway, my "chapel speech" in 1969 was a long poem, which came to me suddenly (one day in the fall of 1969) after I had stalled for a long time in the putting-together of that speech. The resulting poem (along with some others) was part of my successful college application to Brown U. I don't think I had ever read Shakespeare's Sonnets before writing this : the "Dark Lady" was just part of the cultural air. (Another element of the atmosphere was that Blake at the time was a "boys' school" : we were required to wear coats & ties every morning, in Chapel.) Anyway, here is the poem :

HIGH SCHOOL CHAPEL SPEECH

Hi there glad you could all come
just straighten your ties and listen to a tale
my name is Prester John
I'm a king from deepest Africa
ancient coptic christian
in heathen jungle,
where tigers and Tarzan
compete for prize money,
while cameras roll and monkeys scream
I'm Prester John
son of the magi
magi that's right magic
teller of lies/teller of truth/teller of lies
so just straighten your ties and listen.

I'm an old man
once I was young rolling in hay
heaving bright air through fields
bones of beasts not yet risen burned
me through laughter, silence.

Then one day
then one day the day turned aquick black
then back again new before I knew
I was pounding in the dark and afraid
but I could not go back to Smileand.

I pounded and frowned and groaned
pounded and groaned and frowned
groaned and frowned and pounded.
I moved slowly into enclosures of steel
then quickly broke them down
fearing dreams and fearing days
writing my name in different ways

(my name remember is Prester John, priest john.
your neckties are asleep. wake up and listen.)

So I climbed fresh-blaked on a bright bus
which wound its way toward washington
where we meant to carry candles, chant
and further exorcise the place.
we shall be a million strong, we sang
and we shall overcome. we rode like children.

and then
and then far back deep under the dark
rear of our bus arose a flower
arose a dark, dark lady on a seashell
from beneath the green seat
a dark, dark lady riding a seashell
a dark, dark lady riding a shell
and she drew me and drew me and drew me
back, back into the bus, back, back, back
back, back into the bus, back, back, back, back

(Wake up! Remember! I am Prester John,
mythical ruler in northern rockies
a holy flower colony of children
where our own few seeds sprout, and
we survive and live and grow.)

So she drowned me
and my lady and I were lost
and I was lost, and white washington
temples were lost and we awoke
exhausted in Ithaca, New York.
I read the news of Washington,
groaning in Ithaca nowhere.
My dark lady laughed her rage
and screamed her laughter
into frozen nights.
So I went away, away, away, away.

Wake up! This is the last time! Remember!
I'm an old man making food
in my children's colony, bearded
like Moses or Ulysses or Prester John
I rule my flower children with a fist
so they may survive in wilderness.
but my days grow yellow.
my children are not sane.
the ground lies fallow, while
my sons steal down the mountain to find
a hamburger stand, and my eldest now,
he wears a coat and tie, and my youngest, now,
he wants to be a business man, and my daughters, now,
they want to go to school...

(1969)

Shakespeare's Sonnet 105 famously applies that janus-faced word, fair :

Let not my love be called idolatry,
Nor my beloved as an idol show,
Since all alike my songs and praises be
To one, of one, still such, and ever so.
Kind is my love to-day, to-morrow kind,
Still constant in a wondrous excellence;
Therefore my verse to constancy confined,
One thing expressing, leaves out difference.
Fair, kind, and true, is all my argument,
Fair, kind, and true, varying to other words;
And in this change is my invention spent,
Three themes in one, which wondrous scope affords.
Fair, kind, and true, have often lived alone,
Which three till now, never kept seat in one.

A brief summa. Reminds me of this passage I just read in PK Dick's Divine Invasion :

"A man came to the great Rabbi Hillel - he lived in the first century, C.E. - and said, 'I will become a proselyte on the condition that you teach me the entire Torah while I stand on one foot.' Hillel said, "Whatever is hateful to you, do not do it to your neighbor. That is the entire Torah. The rest is commentary. Go learn it.'"

THE POETRY of earth is never dead:  
  When all the birds are faint with the hot sun,  
  And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run  
From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead;  
That is the Grasshopper’s — he takes the lead          
  In summer luxury, — he has never done  
  With his delights; for when tired out with fun  
He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed.  
The poetry of earth is ceasing never:  
  On a lone winter evening, when the frost         
    Has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills  
The Cricket’s song, in warmth increasing ever,  
  And seems to one in drowsiness half lost,  
    The Grasshopper’s among some grassy hills.


 
                              December 30, 1816. 

There have been thousands of loony ideas about Shakespeare, down through the ages. There are & have been millions of confused & troubled young people, who take themselves & their own visions too seriously. Granted, my grandiose adventure with the ghost of WS & the sound of the Sonnets, 35 years ago, has its farcical & pathetic aspects.

What has stayed with me, though, and continued to influence my direction in life, is something in the complexity of the total experience which I tried to relate here. Not so much the obsession with the Sonnets, but the way Shakespeare & the Bible turned into an interior agon, like a remake of an old morality play, God & the Devil struggling for a soul. Not so much my megalomania, but the way that "synchronicity" & coincidences (& I am not merely imagining the "knock on the door", at midnight, as I was on my knees overwhelmed by the Faust story; nor am I simply inventing the "voice," which I felt was emerging somehow from my chest) seemed to reinforce the sensation I had that I was living out some paradigmatic drama.

I think what I'm trying to tell here, or want to tell here, or have been telling here, over the past week or so, is a poet's story. Allen, over here, wrote today about the social economy of American poetry, and the sense of being out of the networks, out of the loop. My feeling has been for quite a while that it's very hard to generalize about all that. There are too many groups & group labels, which are nothing but shortcuts (or short-circuits) for apprehension, response & evaluation. I would want to emphasize the uniqueness of each poet's path & approach, as well as the individuality, the originality, of a genuine critic's responses & discoveries.

& I feel like boasting, too. I feel like saying that my work & my example & presence are just too much for the "arbiters" & the systems to handle. Too much of a challenge to the popular aesthetic theories, the networks, the sacred cows, & the ingrained predilections. So there, I'm boasting. But it's futile & counter-productive! A cul-de-sac. I can only keep putting it out there & wait for somebody (like the 2 AB's!) to listen.

Kent Johnson sent a query to the comment-box of the previous post. I deleted it along with some ill-considered responses of my own, but it got me thinking about the "Shakespeare event" of 1973, a pivotal crisis in my life. So I'd like to try to address his question somewhat, and at the same time provide some context, as I see it, to that experience. I think I will have to do this in a sequence of posts. In the meantime, the "hypertext" Island Road post, below, has teleported over to my warehouse/distribution center, AlephoeBooks, for those who would like continued quick access to it (AlephoeBooks doesn't scroll so fast as HG Poetics).

So here goes.

1

In the fall of 1972, I was a junior at Brown Univ. Those were the heady days of "curricular reform", and I took full advantage of the lack of required courses, choosing mostly creative writing classes. In my freshman year, I won 3 literary contests offered by the English Dept., and had my first chapbook published. That was exciting. Of course, the war in Vietnam was on. I had applied for conscientious objector status, which angered & worried my father. But I had the student deferment, & got a high draft number. So I was lucky, and I didn't push my "objector" status to any substantial act of protest.

In those days, I think you could say I was on the edge of manic depression. I was often gloomy and withdrawn, shy of human contact. One romance had already ended, another was in trouble; the "sexual revolution" and my feelings of guilt & dislocation were in jarring contrast. On top of this, my writing was not going so well. My sophomore year was far more difficult than the previous one. I had, seemingly, already played out a sort of happy-go-lucky NY School (award-winning) persona; I was reading a lot of heavy-duty "masters" (Stevens, Rilke, et al.) and feeling unsure of myself.

In early December of that year, my cousin Juliet jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge. I took this very hard. My own sense of psychological balance was fragile.

Later that month, I picked up Shakespeare's Sonnets for the first time. Suddenly I had the strangest sensation, totally new to me, simultaneously frightening & exhilarating. I thought that, by some unknown process, utterly anachronistic, Shakespeare was addressing me personally. The sonnets to the Young Man were written to me.

I'm fully aware that the literary history of responses to the Bard is chock full of eccentric episodes (such as Prof. Looney's theories of authorship, & far beyond). Even as it was happening, the irrationality of my experience was shocking to me. And shortly thereafter, I renounced poetry altogether. In a sense, this first "Bard episode" was the culmination of a downward spiral of depression. Dimly, I recognized the manic nature, the compensatory aspect, of my response to the Sonnets. I changed my major to History, and signed up for a completely "unliterary" spring semester.

This was probably the third sonnet I'd written. I had just been reading James Wright's selected poems, sort of browsing through it. It occurred to me that his voice sounded something like an old bear, and at that moment, I opened the book to a poem about bear cubs in springtime. So I wrote this sonnet. I know it's a little ponderous... oh well, it was an early effort.

A VOICE


 
 
A voice moves in a heart fallen asleep,
murmuring there like a thawing rivulet.
I heard your voice, fluent in the deep
sweetness of the land, compassionate;
flowing beneath our cold, intemperate
harshness, the icebound lake of our death.
Meekness, only; poverty in spirit;
and over the abandoned towns, a breath
of life... When you placed a simple wreath
of memory upon this common ground,
I heard a wholly other spring, beneath
these grasslands, waiting to be found –

 
a vernal undertaking.  We might bear
from hibernation something we can share.

We note the perfect discord of line #8. ("He'll teach them to sing out what we hold dear.") This line, despite its iambic-pentameter basis, is a metrical disaster.

There, I've simplified the syntax now, it's better. The poem pivots on lines 7-9. I think it's OK... The opening octet focuses on the (only half-believed) "logic" of supposedly "winning over" the torture victims (making them sing in unison). The sextet discounts all that, replacing it with the more basic goal of squeezing out useful information. The final couplet underlines the greater folly, the more egregious illogic, of the whole process.

This idea of making prisoners "sing" is sort of a Hieronymous-Boschian parody of the "attunement", the spiritual "octave", alluded to in previous poems (posted here over the last few weeks & months).

"Torture Logic" should maybe be titled "Tortured Language". Too much of a leap to the sextet ("Be that as may be..."). This is hard to do smoothly. The sonnet doesn't really work without awareness of Frost's model. But maybe that's OK. (Closet readers will note the almost-circular logic of the end-rhymes, etc.)

I wonder who reads my blog (I know you do). Feel as if I've gone off on my own track now, no longer have much affinity with the other poetry bloggers, nor do I sense they do with me.

another slight revision to sonnet posted previously.

where except in blogland could you do something like this? (I read Jonathan's reading of Frost's sonnet first.) In German poetry it's called widerruf, or widderruf - a parody or drastic recasting of another poem. (Celan is my context here.)

(To squeal is to sing, and the torturer (like Eve, in a way...) is teaching them to sing.)

TORTURE LOGIC


 
 
He will insist, and can almost believe
that if these surly, scrawny, naked men
absorb the special lessons they receive
their time together in the holding pen
(the soakings, burnings, beatings, and the rest –
the stench, shame, hunger, sleeplessness and fear)
will not have been in vain, as some have guessed.
He’ll teach them to sing out what we hold dear.
Be that as may be, he is in their face:
whoever they are, whatever game they play
he’ll screw loose information, leave no trace.
As for the stubborn... always another day!
We don’t know yet who’s causing us such grief
but causing pain will surely bring relief.

Jonathan offered a fine reading of Frost sonnet yesterday (5/18) ("Never Again Would the Birds' Song Be the Same").

Just got an email from Elena Shvarts : singing bird-clock arrived safely in St. Petersburg.

this was originally written in a comment box over at Kasey's, but I repost it here in honor of AWP :

The learned felines settled in their cribs,
and sniffed the weighty tomes, all catnip-scented,
and flipped the pages with their five-clawed nibs,
and purred in praise, or growlingly dissented,
but mostly yawned and stretched their flexive limbs
or curled into tight balls, and snoozed away:
so went the Conference on Cat Prose & Poems
for several nights (they slept right through the day).

 
And all was well, until cats A and B
(I shan't reveal their names) began to yowl
in heat of anger (not the other kind);
they spilled right out of the C.C.P.P.
and took their catfight, cheek by jowl,
into the alley... oh... never mind.

This one's a little better, maybe. [To illustrate earlier comments today: note how (not really so) archaic setting plays into archaizing style.]

THE CRUSADER'S LAMENT


 
 
Dispatched to save a fruitful farming town
resembling those of our own lovely shires
assaulted by fierce nomads, like to drown
their dry-baked jealousies in others' tears
I sent for reinforcements to its chief
who answered me, “Thy master is delayed
(by falconry) from bringing swift relief:
I can do nought: may God come to thine aid!”

 
Now raging shadows all around my tent
merge with my shadow and the nightly dark
and terror and indifference are blent
in my own blood.  Lordly denials dent
my helmet, and the skull beneath... O mark
thee, saint and infidel – here’s devil’s work!

"Aha!" I said, thinking I could write
a sonnet in no time.  How wrong
can you get!  I knew it wasn't right
to start this way!  Time's passing,
too - I have to finish this before night-
fall, I guess - that's the hard part - thing
is, it's getting worse by the minute!
This is terrible!  Wait - phone's ring-

 
ing - "Hello?  Mike?  Jonathan?  Who is -"
hung up.  Somebody trying to interrupt
my sonnet, here - hup - now the cat's
whining - sorry, got to go and let
her in - let the warm cat (overheated)
in!  And now my lovely song's completed.

(6 utterly wasted min.)

Enjoying the back & forth on sonnets & formalism with Mike, Jonathan, Kasey, Tim, et al. Impressed with the displayed skill at ex tempore versifying. Clearly they've read & absorbed a lot of sonnets. Clever, adept, that's the word(s) for it.

I think however that the puzzle about belatedness &/or contemporary relevance of sonnets, etc. and traditional techniques in general, has not yet been "solved" (& can probably only be resolved by example, or many examples, anyway). Two side issues may need to be dealt with before addressing it:

1) the difference between versifying & poetry. One person's hack versifier may be another person's excellent poet; what are the grounds for distinguishing authentic poetry from mere versifying? Jonathan seemed to be starting to get at this question, but more could be said.

2) the prevalent mediocrity of contemporary poetry. Time after time, when someone quotes this or that poet to defend this or that traditionalist or experimental position, I have the nagging thought : "Is this the best they can do?" I mean, are we finding the best examples out there to argue this or that point? To put it another way : the polemicists for both sides of the question, of whether or not traditional forms are still viable, seem to rest their arguments on faulty evidence (basically, crappy poems).

Jonathan, with some interesting comments on one of Shakespeare's sonnets. (He's always thinking up productive & well-defined poetry self-edification projects.)

I would interpret the poem slightly differently, I think (it's complicated!). Yes, narcissism is not self-love per se; it's merely one symptom of it, one form it takes. But the speaker is not "lying", because he's not accusing himself of narcissism : he's accusing himself of overweening self-love. This excess is none other than original sin, which fills "every part"and is "grounded" in his inward heart. When he sees his aging image in the glass, he's reminded of his mortality & human frailty, and recognizes that he's been projecting his inescapably excessive self-love - in narcissistic fashion - on his admired young friend. The glimpse of his aging image in the mirror is not a narcissistic moment, but a moment of truth.

Why is overweening self-love "original sin", inescapable? Well, it's grounded in our "god-like" subjectivity and self-consciousness. I love this sentence from Nicolaus Cusanus : "Omnia enim universalia, generalia atque specialia in te Iuliano iulianizant." [All universals, generalities, and specifics julianize in you, Giuliano.]

We are each a little creative world, a microcosm : a situation which has both its glories & its dangers, which is why we love to - and must - keep looking into (& through) various kinds of "glasses".

I love this weather, not too cold, cloudy, moist, yellow leaves, or none, or few.

Sun Returns to Womb.

Driving through Jersey wastelands near Newark Airport over the weekend, had old recurrent impulse to dig cave in abandoned area (say near freeway off-ramp), start fire, live there. Kind of escapism. Poetics of hobo-ism (as distinct from homelessness).

Island Road begins in this weather. The "structured" meanings of this sequence have yet to be explored. Reading a poetic text re-enacts death/rebirth. The time-design, the seasonal "year" of Island Road, culminates in the Shakespearean "year"-echo in the section called "To the Green Constellation" (based partly on Fowler's numerological readings of The Sonnets). Sonnet-rebirth; Shakespeare-Now.

But you already knew that, and so does Prof. Hinkel.

Poetry does not take sides. Poets may, but poetry doesn't.

The politics of style is one of the most boring traits exhibited by human herd-instinct.

There IS a third way, and a fourth way, and a fifth way. . .

Sonnet 124

If my dear love were but the child of state,
It might for Fortune's bastard be unfathered,
As subject to time's love or to time's hate,
Weeds among weeds, or flowers with flowers gathered.
No it was builded far from accident,
It suffers not in smiling pomp, nor falls
Under the blow of thralled discontent,
Whereto th'inviting time our fashion calls:
It fears not policy that heretic,
Which works on leases of short-numbered hours,
But all alone stands hugely politic,
That it nor grows with heat, nor drowns with showers.
To this I witness call the fools of time,
Which die for goodness, who have lived for crime.

. . . so I guess if you wanted to play with the analogy between the Cantorian infinite-dimensional (geometric) line, and the Mandelshtamian infinitely dense (poetic) line - and you thought of writing in general as a compression of dimensions - and you thought of Time as one of the dimensions. . .

then you could imagine a technical basis for the notion that poetry is this sort of distinct perennial activity-in-Nowness, as I tried to outline earlier in the archives. . . Mandelstam [paraphrasing]: "we don't want the text of Ovidius Naso, we want the living breathing Ovid!" - and - "only the moment of recognition is sweet to us". . .

- thinking of when I read the Sonnets at age 19 and had the uncanny sense that Shakespeare was talking directly to me from another dimension. . . and then Ecclesiastes dropped by ("vanity, vanity. . ."). . .

Time dimensions encrypted in sentences. Someone speaking to you, face to face.