Poem for Today

I like the poetry of Wallace Stevens about as much as any I have read. Especially poetry written in the last century, on into this one. I had never encountered the poem below until yesterday, discussed on Mary Karr’s Facebook page (yes, there is literature on FB.) I have enjoyed Ms. Karr’s poetry and memoirs, the latest of which is Lit, the third installment of memoirs of her childhood, adolescence and adulthood (so far.)  Wonderful writing.

Anyway, after posting a video discussion of this poem of Steven’s, Karr commented on critics who narrowly interpret poems according to their school of criticism; “…they pimp out the most obscure poems, so they’re required to stand between a good poem and the average reader.”

Yes, oh yes, and yes again, Ms. Karr.

I have spent years reading, for example, “Peter Quince at the Clavier,” which moves me each time, but still I find in that poem puzzles and mysteries defying definitive explanation. Poems that can do that will never die for me. I can see that the poem below will follow the same course.

Thanks to Ms. Karr for the heads up on the Rabbit King of the Ghosts.

- From Poetry Magazine

A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts

by Wallace Stevens

The difficulty to think at the end of day,
When the shapeless shadow covers the sun
And nothing is left except light on your fur—

There was the cat slopping its milk all day,
Fat cat, red tongue, green mind, white milk
And August the most peaceful month.

To be, in the grass, in the peacefullest time,
Without that monument of cat,
The cat forgotten in the moon;

And to feel that the light is a rabbit-light,
In which everything is meant for you
And nothing need be explained;

Then there is nothing to think of. It comes of itself;
And east rushes west and west rushes down,
No matter. The grass is full

And full of yourself. The trees around are for you,
The whole of the wideness of night is for you,
A self that touches all edges,

You become a self that fills the four corners of night.
The red cat hides away in the fur-light
And there you are humped high, humped up,

You are humped higher and higher, black as stone—
You sit with your head like a carving in space
And the little green cat is a bug in the grass.

Wallace Stevens, “A Rabbit as the King of Ghosts” from Collected Poems.
Copyright 1923, 1951, 1954 by Wallace Stevens.

O, Lost!

The preceding post, on the Word of the Day from Merriam Webster, put Thomas Wolfe back in the forefront of my mind. He lurks way back there in the distant rooms filled with the disused furniture of my youth, occasionally pulled out for examination. I don’t read him much any more, apart from some of his stories, “Chickamauga” being one of my favorites. When I was nineteen I read Look Homeward, Angel and Of Time and the River, and was besotted with Wolfean language and angst. Nineteen is a great time for angst; just enough experience to make you prematurely world-weary and sorry for yourself, and not enough to realize that everybody confronts those feelings and mostly gets past them, broadening their outlook on life.

Nevertheless, I remain an admirer of Thomas Wolfe, who was described by William Faulkner once as the outstanding writer amongst his generation, great because he risked everything to “get the whole of life on the head of a pin,” or words to that effect. In context, Faulkner was defining great literature as the biggest failure, a case of the writer’s reach exceeding his grasp. Wolfe certainly reached. Below is the opening of his first novel, Look Homeward, Angel, originally titled O, Lost!

..a stone, a leaf, an unfound door; of a stone, a leaf, a door. And of all the
forgotten faces.
Naked and alone we came into exile. In her dark womb we did not know
our mother’s face; from the prison of her flesh have we come into the unspeak-
able and incommunicable prison of this earth.
Which of us has known his brother? Which of us has looked into his father’s
heart? Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent? Which of us is not
forever a stranger and alone?
O waste of loss, in the hot mazes, lost, among bright stars on this most weary
unbright cinder, lost! Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten
language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door.
Where? When?
O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.

Word of the Day

… courtesy of Merriam Webster, with slight modifications by me:

The Word of the Day for October 09, 2009 is:
baroque • \buh-ROHK\ • adjective, often capitalized

1 : of or relating to a style of art and music marked by complex forms and bold ornamentation

*2 : characterized by grotesqueness, extravagance, complexity, or flamboyance

3 : irregularly shaped

Felix’s Example Sentence:

The “Gonzo journalism” of Hunter S. Thompson, Jr. rested on a twentieth century baroque prose style, developed with an eye towards shocking and entertaining its audience in equal measure.

Did you know?

“Baroque” came to English from a French word meaning “irregularly shaped.” At first, the word in French was used mostly to refer to pearls. Eventually, it came to describe an extravagant style of art characterized by curving lines, gilt, and gold. This type of art, which was prevalent especially in the 17th century, was sometimes considered to be excessively decorated and overly complicated. It makes sense, therefore, that the meaning of the word “baroque” has broadened to include anything that seems excessively ornate or elaborate.

*Indicates the sense illustrated in the example sentence.

Hyperlinks…

…are killing reference books, a sweeping generalization for the day. Have you ever tried to get through the day without a sweeping generalization? That is so old school, like opening an unabridged Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary – which I still do, occasionally.  I bought my copy some years ago at a clearance sale for yet another dying independent bookstore. A different sort of endangered species. The 21st century marches on.

I have always had an advanced case of the Enclyclopedia Disease, unable to simply look up one topic. Flipping through pages looking for congress, I  would pause at aardvark, or sometimes make it as far as camera obscura. The same thing would happen with dictionaries, or thesauruses, or Bartlett’s Quotations.

Then came the internet, closely followed by the World Wide Web and those ultimate diversions of purpose, hyperlinks. Like the Enterprise hyperjumping entire galaxies at warp 5,  I could now follow an infinite branching network of paths into the densest thickets of information. Sitting down to my computer early in the evening, I might find myself still at the keyboard in the small hours of the morning, eyes grainy, mouse hand cramping badly, my mind growing numb from information overload.

I am getting better. Or age is forcing restraint where once was only appetite.  But…what was that link I saw on Facebook a little while ago…

Stop me before I click again, somebody, please! Lead me back to my bookshelves. Save print media, the next casualty of technology.

Words to Heed

From Cormac McCarthy’s novel, No Country for Old Men, this  exchange towards the end of the book made me pause. One of many pauses in reading McCarthy. Sheriff Ed Tom Bell is talking with his uncle Ellis, former deputy sheriff confined to a wheelchair by a wound inflicted in the line of duty. Ed Tom passes on news about the man that shot Ellis.

The man that shot you died in prison.
In Angola. Yes.
What would you of done if he’d been released?
I don’t know. Nothin. There wouldnt have been no point to it. There aint no point to it. Not to any of it.
I’m kindly surprised to hear you say that.
You wear out, Ed Tom. All the time you spend tryin to get back what’s been took from you there’s more goin out the door. After a while you just try and get a tourniquet on it.

At some point in life, a sense of your own limits makes more sense than trying to clear the table. Just walk away. Some would call that bleak, Ed Tom among them.

The trick is to know when to leave that table to others.

Pentecost

Today was the feast of Pentecost, when the infusion of the Holy Spirit into the Disciples lent them eloquence in every language, the better to spread the Gospel. St. Paul’s was decked in liturgical scarlet, even to the dominant color of the altar flowers, with red balloons tethered to the first few pews in the nave.

For the second lesson, members of the congregation who were if not fluent, at least able to speak with appropriate accents, several languages, recited in turn the lesson from the Acts of the Apostles, recounting the wind of the Holy Spirit, and the confusion of those that heard the babel of languages coming from the fisher folk and common men that Jesus had chosen.

Higher Inhumanities

This past Sunday, the Chattanooga Times Free Press carried an article on higher education and the job market. The title of the article was:  ” Liberal arts? Think again.” The reporter had interviewed a student who had graduated with an English B.A. last fall. She is still looking for a real job while she picks up service industry jobs. Educators scrambling for dollars themselves are reacting to shrinking markets for Humanities graduates and dwindling interest among students by emphasizing a “market-driven” approach to curricula and degree programs.

Where is Sir Francis Bacon when we need him? Among many other things he said about education, he asserted, “Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.” Sir Francis would not have understood the merchandising of education. The liberal arts have been losing ground to technical and business courses for years. Some years ago I read that not a few English departments had dropped Shakespeare courses for general degree requirements. If an English major did not select a concentration in drama, or Elizabethan/Jacobean literature, there was no need  to take courses on W. Shakespeare. No Hamlet, no Romeo and Juliet, no King Lear – no Falstaff! – ah, never banish Jack Falstaff!

…banish not him thy Harry’s company, banish him not Harry’s company : banish plump Jack, and banish all the world.  - Henry IV, I

Indeed. Cold fish that Prince Hal – Harry – was, he would probably give a wintry smile at the demise of literature as important to higher education. Literature, along with history, art courses and the humanities all give “all the world” to students wanting a complete education, to learn readiness, conference, writing and all the context of western thought, education and civilization. Exact and exacting education is basic, not vocational training only.

Reading for Eerie Nights

…or days, for that matter. I have always liked ghost stories, paranormal adventures and to some degree, horror tales. Many people leave this appetite behind, relegated to those childish things they put aside as they grow up. I think not growing up entirely is a good thing, therefore have never repudiated the old stories first encountered when my personal world was young.

The first encounter I had with ghost stories written with literary sensibility came when I was ten. An older cousin of mine made me a birthday present of a anthology of ghost stories compiled by Edward Wagenknecht, The Fireside Book of Ghost Stories. The editor’s name is enough to inspire thoughts of dark forests and running wolves somewhere in central Europe.

The Teacher Who Mattered

It is axiomatic that teachers remember few of their students over a career, they have so many. Corollary to that axiom is the observation that students quite often remember one or two teachers to the end of their days.

I had several teachers who mattered through the years. A couple of them stay fixed in my memory, as though the dusty light of sunlit schoolrooms past trapped them like pedagogues in amber. One such, who only taught me for one semester, when I was a junior at The Baylor School for Boys, is probably the best English teacher I ever had, perhaps the best teacher of any I ever had. Frank P. Steele was one of the young teachers at school, a tall,  smiling man with sandy hair already thinning. The crusty old men who dominated the faculty at Baylor often gave short shrift to young teachers, but the head of the English department had commented to a class I attended the year before that Frank Steele was “a poet, and knows how to teach it. If any of you pissants have him next year, maybe he can get you to appreciate poetry. I can’t.” Mr. Hitt, aptly named, was not much for positive reinforcement.