The Sunday Poet: William Harney

William Harney

  English Professor William Harney of Endicott College chimes in on the "Trump" thing...

Republicans, Donald Trump, and the Exquisite Corpse

Bent on creating what has never been before,

Participants each draw a

Body part and pass it forward

To be assembled,

Human and monster both,

With its enormous head;

Its shock of orange hair.

Their goal?

To blow up the museums,

Kill the curators,

Hang the judges,

Jail the experts,

Expel the know-it-alls,

Level the playing field,

And, of course, selflessly,

(Because I don’t need to do this, folks,

I really don’t)

Fill the openings at the top.

---William Harney

Against Sunset: Poems by Stanley Plumly

Against Sunset

Poems by Stanley Plumly

W.W. Norton & Company

www.wwnorton.com

500 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10110

ISBN: 978-0-393-25394-8

84 pages

$25.95 Cloth

Review by Dennis Daly

Stanley Plumly hobnobs with dead people – romantic poets, contemporary poets, and personal relations. Whether citing real or imagined incidents from diaries or first-hand memories evoked from his past life, Plumly uses his verses to delve into the meaning of mortality and the mystery of life itself. He gently sorts out the strange draws and the nagging fears inherent in that “good night,” and explores those inclinations with a lyricism that mesmerizes his undaunted readers.

Two exquisite, airy pieces act as bookends to this collection. The opening poem, Dutch Elm, celebrates a suburbia of the mind, the dreamy paths leading to a mnemonic self-nullification. Plumly uses the majestic elm trees of his past life as his metaphoric, solace-delivering vehicle. The protective canopy of these trees shelter the poet’s most intimate moments and his deepest sorrows, a reality that shadows him like an afterlife. Here’s the lyrical heart of the poem,

I miss in particular the perspective looking down

the distances of all those Elm named streets disappearing

into dusk, the last sun turned the stained blue of church windows.

I miss standing there, letting the welcome dark make me invisible.

I miss the birds starting to sleep, their talking in their songs becoming

silent, then their silence. I even miss not standing there.    

Against Sunset, Plumly’s title poem and the last piece in this impressive collection, extols the half-light of rising and setting suns. Speed matters as life lines up against the backdrop of horizon and sunset. The word “Against” in the title seems to take on an alternative meaning devoid of negativity. Plumly links the fall and rise of death and birth in his concluding lines,

The horizon, halfway disappeared between above and below—

night falls too or does it also rise out of the death-glitter of water?

And if night is the long straight path of the full moon pouring down

on the face of the deep, what makes us wish we could walk there,

like a flat skipped stone? I’ve seen the sun-path poured at dawn

on the flat other side of the country, but it was different, the yellow

morning red with fire, the new day’s burning hours oh so slowly climbing.

Within the depths of this book, many of the poems center on certain dead poets. In Mortal Acts Plumly reminisces about Galway Kinnell in a lovely narrative with a heartfelt point. But the real interesting part happens on the way to the aforesaid point. Here’s a taste of Plumly’s irony,

You hadn’t been there long, the job

at Binghamton meant traveling by bus

or driving to the center of the state

where the noir-in-color painter Edward

Hopper had once made lonely art of

Depression downtown buildings bleaker

than the rail yards and B&O freight cars.

In the end you couldn’t do it, drive or take

the bus, be that tired again, so you won

the Pulitzer and efficiency apartment

that goes with full professorships at nearby

NYU, as close as you could get to home

in faraway Vermont.

Replete with multiple caesuras in the form of dashes, Plumly’s To Autumn, which he bases on letters from John Keats to Richard Woodhouse and John Hamilton Reynolds, chronicles Keats’ poetic walks that served up the heavily-misted landscapes for that poet’s piece Ode to Autumn.  Plumly knows whereof he speaks—he has written a book on John Keats. The poet fastens many of Keats’ insightful quotations together with explanatory phrases and connective words. The process works spectacularly well. The poem opens this way,

A walk along the water meadows by the playing fields

of the college—a mile-and-a-half to the hospice

of St. Cross—a walk he takes almost every day

in the “pleasantest town I was ever in,”

including a Sunday named for the sun cutting angles

with its scythe, when it strikes him just how beautiful

the season has become here at the end of summer,

the gathering of light, the harvest coming in,

“chaste weather—Dian skies… a temperate sharpness.”

He writes Reynolds that he “never liked stubble fields

so much as now…

Keats’ aforementioned letters were written a year and a half before his death.

Set in the heart of this collection, Plumly’s thirteen-section poem, Early Nineteenth Century English Poetry Walks, amazes with its mosaic of famous lives pieced together by a twenty-first century denizen not unfamiliar with pastoral romance. Keats appears again, as does William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, essayist Charles Lamb,  Thomas Chatterton, and others. The constant movement of these artists in their walkabouts mimic their imagined realities and their romanticized fates. Each of the thirteen poetic sections is thirteen lines long. How unlucky! Section 11 explores the very nature of these walks. Consider these lines,

Walks.  Coleridge walks, at his best, through abstraction thick as glass,

toward what Hart Crane calls “an improved infancy,” both his sons’s

and his own. There is no stopping Coleridge. Shelley, “borne darkly,

fearfully, afar,” tries to walk on water, “far from shore.” Keats,

in the thousand days before the end, walks in ever-closing circles

Sounds a bit like an academic exercise, doesn’t it? Well, it’s not. Plumly seems to know exactly what he’s doing. He has reached back into the nineteenth century and grabbed hold of these melancholic constructions of country landscape, which have been disused in our new century, sets them in place, and then employs this context as a framework to his contemplation of mortality. Plumly then weaves his own personal contacts and concerns into this emotional panorama. The poetic consequences of these strategies both enlighten and comfort readers of this subtly-layered, rewarding book.

The Creative Spirit: Caring for the Soul; the Role of Arts in Healing

 

Click on Pic to Enlarge

 

 

 

 

 

 I got this note about an important event from Carol Menkiti--co-owner of the Grolier Book Shop

 

 

Dear Doug,

I  wanted to let you know about an event being presented by a group of people struggling with mental health issues.  They belong to a group that I founded with two other women called Caring For the Soul.  They meet monthly, and Dr. Nancy Kehoe leads the group. The evening of presentations is called: Caring for the Soul: the Role of the Arts in Healing .  There will be an art show, readings, poetry, music, singing, etc. It will be Thursday , Oct. 20 at 7PM in DiGiovanni Hall at St. Pauls Catholic Church on 29 Mt. Auburn St. (Harvard Square). Knowing that you have worked very long and effectively in the field of mental health, I thought you might find the occasion interesting.  It is free and open to the public.  I am attaching a flyer that tells about it. 

 

Hope you can come.  All the best, Carol (Menkiti)

Mother Brook Literary Series: Robin Stratton/Doug Holder

The Sunday Poet: Daniel Senser

Daniel Senser

"Hi. My name is Daniel Senser. I am thirty years old, and have been serious about poetry since I was eighteen. I was a Biology major in college, and was struggling in my classes and getting frustrated, so I picked up The Iliad one day at the library. After reading it, it reignited a love of poetry that had roots in my childhood, when my dad used to read poems to me. Besides Homer, some of my influences were Borges, Levertov, and Billy Collins. I also went through a faze where I was really into old Eastern poetry. I have been published in the Penwood Review, Ship of Fools, and California Quarterly, among others. Hope you enjoy these poems"

Autumn

Near death, the leaves of Autumn
Begin to fall, much like these words
Now fall upon your ear.
And when they turn brittle
And crumble, and turn to dust
 Enriching the earth,
The breath of the wind--
The breath of your soul--
Will answer for their deaths
With the promise that life goes on.

Phalangeal Advancement

The innocent and charming hysteria of my eyes

Served nicely as a diversion for my hand

Which rose up like the tide upon the sand

Of the inner portion of her stubbly thigh.

Before I could reach the cavern

Carved out in the underside of her short black skirt,

She cried out, “Don’t!”

And as the sea follows Poseidon’s commands,

So my hand was halted for the moment.

“Trust me,” I said, sounding more like a boy than a man,

“This hand is pure as the guitarist's upon the strings—

Let me tune your soul to your own best liking,

And to mine, with this hand.”

She lay back, eyes closed, smiling.
The sea rushed in, filling the cavern,

Which, for the briefest of moments,

Teemed with the life that I wanted for her.

Adornment

Naked, she needed no adornment
Except for my flesh.

The garden in her eyes grew lush
Under the sunlight of my own.

Together, we constructed many shapes
Till, exhausted, we collapsed into the humid jungle

Of our united oblivion.

Abandonment and Identity in Robert Pinsky’s new book At the Foundling Hospital

Robert Pinsky

Abandonment and Identity in Robert Pinsky’s new book At the Foundling Hospital

article by Michael Todd Steffen

In Robert Pinsky’s new collection of poems, At the Foundling Hospital, we get timely expressions of doubt, about facts, about information, the language that attempts to manage facts:

                                                                        It’s not

            Exactly our fungicides killing the world’s bees.

            The theory is, rather, the fungicides make the bees

            Die from our pesticides, otherwise harmless. Or,

            Maybe it’s the other way around, who knows?

Pinsky has elected to title the poem “CUNNING AND GREED” after bits of dialogue inserted in the poem from Dickens’ novel David Copperfield, resonating with the theme of the book of poems, with its title designating special hospitals or shelters (comemorated at the Foundling Museum in London, which also includes an impressive collection of 18th century art work) where abandoned infants, or orphans, Dickens’ heroes, could be left to be cared for.

            Near the end Uriah Heep says, David Copperfield,

            I’ve always hated you, you’ve always been against me.

            Copperfield retorts, As I’ve told you before, it’s you,

            Heep, who have been against the whole world…

            Your artful greed and cunning—against the whole world.

            And never yet has there been any greed and cunning

            That did not do too much and overreach themselves…

It is interesting that the poet for his title has inverted the accusing words from the passage, greed and cunning, to “CUNNING AND GREED.” Language is easily manipulated, even the words of Charles Dickens. It is a fact that undermines all “facts,” not threatening to poetry whose domain is the imagination,  yet bothersome to the social as well as natural sciences that use language to assert truths about humanity and the physical world. So the confusion is permitted as to what is killing the bees, the fungicide or the pesticide which makes the fungicide deadly… Or, “who knows?”

Poetry is hard enough to define. Some like it for its strangeness and riddlesome quality, for its ambiguous utterances producing irony or mild double-entendre, conveying two or several meanings simultaneously. “CUNNING AND GREED” serves as a good example of this, one of the many ways Pinsky’s poems can step beyond just pleasing us to dazzling, while they instruct—or rather, bring up things we perhaps need to be concerned with. We are not in the age of Lucretius or Pope where didacticism goes over with appreciation. So Pinsky defers ideology and the sermon to quotes from Dickens, managing to avoid any obvious banner-waving about a troubling environmental phenomenon (the spreading death of honey bees, thought by Einstein and other leading scientists to herald the end of our natural food chain) by leaping from the passage in David Copperfield to the mention of the bees. This way, he has called attention to the plight of these beneficial creatures without too much souring our pleasure at the reading, without getting in our face about it. The Dickens’ quotes are like old museum pieces. The “who knows?” protects us with its mild indifference or nonchalance. Though we have more and more cause of it, we don’t appreciate alarm. We may have just picked up on the bees themselves in the passage, which quietly appears to be about the confusion between fungicides and pesticides. The real problem gets lost in the debate. The passage mimes somewhat the national debate, about bees and everything else, about our being.

The thing about “information” these days with the Internet in everybody’s palm 24/7, there’s no shortage of it. For this reason, bringing up the threat to the bees gets a little more focus by its being showcased in a book by a nationally honored poet, not the vast anywhere of cyberspace that allows everything and anything. Among all the grave subjects he could take on, Pinsky’s discernment and delivery distinguish his poems. We may pause to remember the poem doesn’t place the national debate at its center, or bees, or David Copperfield. It holds up some weighing ideas in the title, “CUNNING AND GREED,” which are not directly addressed in the poem, while it sings and interweaves these various concerns, perhaps softly ruing some facts, disowned children and their agencies, a threatened environment, in a palatable way that is like simply giving voice to these pains and anxieties, singing the blues, as poets and singers do.

This is present in the flower at the beginning of the poem. The peculiar orchid is an example of cunning, or artifice, artfulness, in one of many deception strategies we recognize as intelligent in nature:

            An orchid that mimics an extinct female bee survives

            Persisting for generations with untouched pollen

            Stagnant inside it: an unmated simulation becoming

            A funeral portrait. Floral, archaic as rhymed verse.

It is a self-reflexive trope for the poet to announce that “rhymed verse” is “archaic.”The poem on the previous page, “THE WARMING,” also on an anxiety of the age, chants in rhymed couplets, bemusedly in the opening about the sexual origin of song, the symbiotic partner of the poem, the lyric:

            Young men like my uncles in olden times would “croon”:

            Walking or at work, a musical inward groan:

            The blue of the night meets the gold of the day.

            Ramona. Dance, Ballerina. Too-ra-loo-ra-lay.

            I asked my mother, why did they sing like that?

            Her enigmatic answer: They’re in heat.

            Stopped at a light just now a guy in his van

            Their same age, sound system blasting, windows down.

            We men like sounding hot. Or warm and charming—

            Even folk singers who rhyme about global warming…

Music has long been a key topic in Pinsky’s poetry, whether it’s a “Song of Porcelain,” “Louie Louie,” or a canto translated from Dante. The theme pulses with a strong vein in the new collection in titles like “Mixed Chorus,” the jazz rhythm poem “Horn,” in a recitation game called “Baseball” in “The City,” or in “Glory” evoking an ode by Pindar reminding us of the power of verse to celebrate and to be remembered—for over 2,000 years! If poetry is memorably significant, though, it is also as we find it in the title poem, “THE FOUNDLING TOKENS,” a lot of spare reminders and wishes in the way of personal keepsakes, scribbled notes, identifiers:

            At the Foundling Museum

            A wall displaying hundreds

            Of scraps, each pinned once

            To some one particular infant’s

            Nightie, nappie or blanket

            Each with surviving particulate

            Ink or graphite in studied lines

            Betokening a life…

Like the debate about fungicides or pesticides, rhyming poetry and rhyme’s archaic quality, music and poetry are both poignant and wondrous but also frail and evanescent.

            My friend was in a coma, so I dove

            Deep into his brain to word him back. I tried

            To sing Hallelujah, I Just Love Her So in

            Ray Charles’s voice. Of course the silence grew.

            I couldn’t sing the alphabet song. My voice

            Couldn’t say words I knew: Because I Could

            Not Stop For Death, He Kindly Stopped For Me…

                                                            (“IN THE COMA”)

(With the reference to “the alphabet song” perhaps we get a glimpse at a former poem that was very popular for Pinsky about ten years ago, “A, B, C”—“Any body can die…”)

Curious as the sound of a musical instrument being played, the opening poem, “INSTRUMENT,” makes a myth of the making of the first lyre out of a tortoise shell and strings of rabbit gut. We normally think of cat for the gut of stringed instruments. The rabbit in this poem perhaps brings an allusion to the fable of the tortoise and the hare, reminding the reader of the distractions, frustrations, impatience and ultimate slowness of the victory of finding music. The process involves the work of “a little newborn god” (Love, portrayed as a child god?—or perhaps left—“newborn”—at a foundling hospital), in an effort to sound the mystery of the—

            Sweet vibration of

            Mind, mind, mind

            Enclosed in its orbit…

Louise Glück has praised Pinksy’s “taste for assignments to which he devises ingenious solutions.”

So the solution to “Instrument,” as an artifact of the thinking triadic Mind, mind, mind itself:

            The newborn baby god—

            As clever and violent

            As his own instrument

            Of sweet, all-consuming

            Imagination, held

            By its own vibration:

            Mind, mind, mind pulled

            Taut in its bony shell…

            Thrumming from here to there

            In the cloven brainflesh…

            With its blood-warm channels…

Thought for the poet is like the hum of music. A stringed instrument may be as adequate a model of our psyches, language and of meaning (another of Pinsky’s curiosities) as theories by Freud or Jung, religions or philosophies.

An astonishing leap occurs between the first poem, “Instrument,” and the second, “Procession,” that reminds me of the leap in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, between the stone-age ape bone tossed into the air and its correlative image of a spaceship navigating to the moon in the space age. From the birth of consciousness and the invention of the primitive tortoise-shell lyre, the second poem in Pinsky’s new book shuttles us to the dominance of scientific instruments observing the planet and worlds beyond and within:

            At the summit of Mount Kea, an array of antennae

            Sensitive to the colors of invisible light. Defiling

            The sacred mountain, they tilt and sidle to measure

            Submillimeter waves from across the universe:

            System of cosmic removes and fine extremes

            Devoted to track the wavering nature of things.

That is de rerum natura, the nature of things pervasively from the core through the sphere, “wavering,” between this and that, denoting a divide: it is a long and vast way to come from “the cloven brainflesh” in “Instrument.” If the national debate is split between fungicides and pesticides, the pattern for that division has been deeply established and is widely resonant. We didn’t make this up any more than it makes us up. Yet we are caught in this circle of ourselves.

Only recently John Koethe released his 10th book of poems, The Swimmer. Including his most recent Selected Poems, At a Foundling Hospital makes this Robert Pinsky’s 10th collection of poetry. Who said the 9th is always the most masterly? This is as curious, fun and moving a collection as he has put together. It sings and dances with humor, surprise and assurance and here and there draws across deep cello chords for our fears and sorrows, giving credence to the miracle of forging identity and culture out of human leftness, abandonment, witnessing the strange (self?) destruction in the wake of our inventions.

At the Founding Hospital

Poems by Robert Pinsky

Farrar Straus Giroux/New York

ISBN 9780374715472 (e-book)