My Editions of the Romantics: That Which Connects

"It has been estimated that at the time of Keats' death, the combined sales of the three books published during his lifetime amounted to 200 copies." 

Andrew Motion, The Guardian
January 23, 2010

Yet here we are, two hundred years later, and the Keats-Shelley Memorial Association is running an international prize for essay and poetry celebrating the publication of the first volume.

How does a life that ended at 25 wield such power?

This year's theme is "To a Friend" and the idea of Keats's own relationships. It stirred in me enormous emotions about my own relationship to John Keats-- through the editions of his poems that brought him into my life. Like great choral music, if no one picks up the actual books and reads (or sings), the genius is silent.

First stirrings. 
In junior high school, just starting to be conscious of the names Keats, Shelley, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, I noticed books that had long been on the family  bookshelf: The Literature of England: An Anthology & A History, Vol. 1 & 2, Wood, Wyatt, Anderson, Scott, Foresman and Company, 1947; and Seven Centuries of Verse: English & American, A.J.M Smith, Michigan State College, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1947.

They are my parents' college anthologies from the early 1950s! Each filled with representations of the Romantics.

As I sit up late many nights and page through the big books over and over I feel an enormous connection to the pages of the Romantics. I dive in so easily, read so easily, understand on an as-yet untutored level. And I develop a deep connection to these editions because they belong to my parents and bring me in communion with en entire world I long to know more about.

I only realized years later that I grew up with some casual peppering of some of the great quotes in casual conversation: my Mom, "It winter comes, can spring be far behind" whenever the snows came forceful; my Dad pronouncing "A thing of beauty is a joy forever" in the most sardonic tone when something wasn't going right.

For myself I felt particularly drawn to

Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold, 
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen; 

That wonderful cadence and what I visualized as an Emerald City of books gleaming in gold: I did not know who Chapman was then. My love of this poem would lead me to getting a fairly significant and needed college scholarship because of an essay I wrote based on it. Hmm. So, those late night cogitations had meaning outside of my own heart. . . .

College
College brought the heady days of being an English major and spending hours with the poets I had met in the family's anthologies. I had the privilege of studying with William Keach for Romantics, and so was ushered into some of the finest thinking about the era and work and enjoyed expert tutelage about my own ideas.

On the larger canvas love came and went, was requited and unrequited in a strange venn diagram that included Paul Fussell and a shy student I'll call "Keats" who was courting me and whom I did not appreciate, blinded by my love for a "Byron" who would never be right for me.

For my birthday one year "Keats" bought me a handful of various Romantics tomes from our college town's wonderful used book store. He inscribed the Byron volume with "Happy Birthday--The years ahead, however thin the strands, however frayed , this one will still be strong, our love for theses books, especially Byron."

Sadly, as I had not appreciated the gift bearer, I barely even looked at the Keats volume at the time.

Turns out is it

The Poetical Works of John Keats  

Given From His Own Editions and Other Authentic Sources and Collated With Many Manuscripts

Edited with notes by H. Buxton Forman and Mrs. Keats and a Biographical Sketch by Wm. M. Rossetti

Complete Edition

A. L. Burt Company, New York

And Now
Looking into this realm of gold now unexpectedly renews my relationship with Keats as I discover the deep riches of this edition decades after I first owned it. (Its one glaring flaw is on the spine, which regrettably heralds Keat's Poems.)

The great Victorian biographer/forger H. Buxton Forman became friends with Dante Gabriel Rossetti around 1871, which probably led to brother William's biographical sketch being included in the full poetical works volume.

Rossetti's sketch feels like a portal that daisy chains back to a direct connection to Keats and Shelley as in 'shaking the hand of the hand that shook Abraham Lincoln's hand.' Keats died in 1821, Rossetti was born in 1829, but twenty-five years on the outer circle was still very much alive to pass along knowledge to the literary Rossettis.  The New York edition is from 1906, although the Rossetti sketch is from some years earlier, as he refers to Frances Mary Llanos Gutierrez as "this lady still living in Spain and has a son known as a painter," and she died in 1889.

I love the cadence of Rossetti's prose and how he limns the overall sketch. He touches on many points that have since been much retold, including that Keats did not die from negative criticism:

"It is more to the purpose to say that the once very prevalent story that Keats had been extremely pained and dejected by the adverse reviews, even to the extend of losing in consequences of them  his health and ultimately his life, was a romance of literature. Shelley by a noble poem, and Byron by a jeer, are greatly responsible for the diffusion and acceptance of this fable: Lord Houghton has, to the deep satisfaction of all who value manliness as a portion of the poetic character, dispelled it once and forever." [page xi-xii]

Rossetti also captures the power of desire to be close to our bright star, remarking on the burial instruction to inscribe "Here lies one whose name was write in water":

"That is an age-long and shoreless water, which will continue flowing while generation after generation of men, his brothers and lovers, come to contemplate the sacred tomb in Rome, dominated by the pyramid of Caius Cestius. They have but to move some paces aside, and stand by a still more sacred tomb which opened in the ensuing year, 1822--that of the world-loving, world-hated Shelley, divinest of the demigods." [xvi to xvii] 

Rossetti ends his sketch with thoughts of the poet's character

"As of Keats's character, so of his poetry, enjoyment is the primary element, the perpetual undertone: his very melancholy is the luxury of sadness." [xviii]

"Keats, youthful and prodigal, the magician of unnumbered beauties which neither author nor reader can think of counting or assessing, is the Keats of our affections." [xix] 

Of all the magical ideas that Keats left us, the poem that suggests that poetry itself can replace drinking for mind/body altering experience is in some ways the most ambitious.

Ode to a Nightingale [Forman page 227]

"Away, away I fly to thee
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards
But on the viewless wings of Poesy."

Benjamin Robert Haydon (and others, and the timeline) tell us that Keats was suffering from the untimely death of his brother Tom when he wrote it.

"Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies:"

Forman note: "Haydon, in a letter to Miss Mitford (Correspondence &c, Volume II, page 72) says of Keats--'The death of his brother wounded him deeply, and it appeared to me from that hour he began to droop. He wrote his exquisite 'Ode to the Nightingale' at this time, and as we were one evening walking in the Kilburn meadows he repeated it to me, before he put it to paper, in a low, tremulous undertone which affected me extremely." [page 227]

We know that it was Haydon who gave a copy of the poem to Annals of the Fine Arts editor James Elmes, who purchased it and published it in the July issue, before it was published in the 1820 collection with "Lamia." I wonder if Keats really recited it to Haydon during the act of creation.

But of no import.

The poem has been explicated, close-read, metrically analyzed from every possible angle; I sometimes feel the weight of all of the thought, much of it profound, clever, nuanced.

I struggle to stay close to Keats in my own way, not merely a repository of Forman and Perkins and Hirsch (either of them).

Stanza 7
"Thou  wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path 
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that ofttimes hath
Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn." 

Forman note:
"In the last line of the stanza the word fairy instead of faery stands in the manuscript and in the Annals: but the Lamia volume reads faery, which enhances the poetic value of the line in the subtlest manner--eliminating all possible connection of fairy-land with Christmas trees, tinsel, and Santa Claus, and carrying the imagination safely back to the middle ages---to Amadis of Gaul, to Palmerin of England, and above all to the East, to the Thousand and One Nights. " [page 229]

"Christmas! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is famed to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades 
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:—do I wake or sleep?" 

And in my own happy dream state, that fleeting music can only be:

What can I give Keats,
Poor as I am?
If I were a poet
I would bring iambs;
If I were a scholar
Endymion's where I'd start.
Yet what I can, I give Keats -
Give my heart
Give . . . my heart. 

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 Mapeel     3/25/2017     literature, national poetry month, poetry   

April Is National Poetry Month: Robert Frost in Orange Is the New Black and More

April is National Poetry Month! From the poets.org website: Inaugurated by the Academy of American Poets in 1996, National Poetry Month is now held every April, when schools, publishers, libraries, booksellers, and poets throughout the United States band together to celebrate poetry and its vital place in American culture.

I encourage everyone to look at the 30 Ways to Celebrate, with a month of poetic activities. My offering is "Revisit a Poem."

The poem is Robert Frost's much anthologized "The Road Not Taken." What prompted the choice is I recently stumbled upon my retort poem—doesn't everybody have one?—which I wrote when I was 13. I had a very poetic yearnings in junior high school, before the angst set in.

I'm not entirely at his "ages and ages" hence stage, but far enough along to appreciate the energy and optimism of early the teen years, and to smile at the ability to mirror the original cadence and rhyme scheme pretty well.

In Defense of the Road Less Traveled

They say the man who had the task
To choose of two roads, when he was asked,
Chose the one traveled upon less.
(I would think that this is best.)

Then they contend that he did sigh
A lament of regret before he died.
To this I say I cannot see
How from his words they hold this to be.

Perhaps my eyes are too new yet
To recognize the anxiety and regret
That they can see and identify;
Through personal experience they sympathize.

To prove them wrong I pray to hold
To this less traveled, regrettable road.
Then show my contentment ages hence
And declare: it did make all the difference.

M.A. Peel, 13-year-old poet

Revisiting the Original
Frost's 1916 poem entered pop culture consciousness last year in Orange Is the New Black in the episode "Blood Donut." On that occasion, Slate's David Haglund wrote a great current-day summary of the nearly century-old debate about the poem's meaning, and dare we say, Frost's intention (paging W.K. Wimsatt's Verbal Icon).

"Taystee Jefferson (Danielle Brooks) makes a passing reference to “the road less traveled,” prompting a brief, agitated lecture from her fellow inmate, Piper Chapman (Taylor Schilling). “You know,” Piper says, “that doesn’t mean what everyone thinks it means.” snip 
"But Piper is essentially right about the “The Road Not Taken,” which has long been one of the more misunderstood chestnuts in American poetry. In the first three stanzas, the speaker of the 1916 poem looks at one road, then another, which he calls “just as fair.” This second road, he thinks, has “perhaps the better claim,” because it appears less trodden. But he quickly corrects himself, noting that the “passing” of people to and fro “had worn them really about the same.”

Lots of good links in Haglund's piece to voices explicating in various directions, although many back the 'there-is-no-difference-in-the-paths' meme based on the line "had worn them really about the same."

What strikes me now is, how is everyone missing the grassy knoll:

"Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black."

One side was "grassy and wanted wear" and then he completely contradicts that when he says "Had worn them really about the same."  So what seems like a sweet pastoral poem really has a serious World War One-like disjunction at its core—is anything what we thought it was; dulce est decorum est, pro patria mori?—which gets compounded as we progress to the sigh and beyond.

The other thing that strikes me is the title. He did not title it "The Road Less Traveled" i.e., the chosen path.  His title focuses us first on the unknown, the empty cipher, the path not taken, starting us off immediately with the wistful. He was 42 when he wrote the poem, and he knew a thing or two how these things go.

And Now for the Designers
Chip Kidd did the National Poetry Month poster for this year, focusing on Walt Whitman. Leaves of Grass. Sure. Making the other dominant image just a hand, Whitman's actual hand to size from a cast. Hmm. No comment.

My favorite remains Paul Sahre from 2009 and the brilliant visualization of my pal T.S. Eliot.

  

(top photo from here)

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 Mapeel     4/03/2014     current events, national poetry month, poetry   

The L.I.R.R. Commuter Tales (with thanks to Chaucer)

I was born in Brooklyn, but grew up on Long Island, so I have Commuting in my DNA. My dad and brother worked in Manhattan, and there was no doubt I would too.

I started commuting on the Long Island Railroad into Manhattan at 16 for an internship at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and continued on and off until I moved into the city at 24.

I was horrified by the depressing suburban commuting experience, and ranted about its Dickensian dark side in a small piece that the NY Times ran in a Sunday Long Island opinion column.

Wordsworth tells us that "poetry is emotion recollected in tranquility."

After I had moved into the city, I thought about my fellow suburbanites who were still grappling with a twice daily struggle with the commuting monster. Hmm.

Chaucer gave us The Knight’s Tale, Second Nun, Monk’s Tale, the Wife of Bath, etc., enroute from London to the pilgrimage site of St. Thomas Becket’s tomb at Canterbury Cathedral.

My L.I.R.R. Commuter Tales offers a look at some of the types I met on the rails: the Dashing Dan, the Bridge Players Four, and the Angry Young Man.

The L.I.R.R. Commuter Tales by Ellen O'Neill

Prologue

Drawn by the power of the almighty dollar
Thousands don the starched-white collar.
Through the bowels of the earth they make their way,
Five times a week, twice a day.

The Commuter is a complicated class
With its varying breeds traveling en masse.
View them not as a homogenous whole
Their characters differ as their stories unfold.


The Dashing Dan

The Dashing Dan flies off the bus
To make the 5:36 it’s an absolute must
To sprint a 440 around the block;
He is confidently playing “Beat the Clock.”
The stairs of the station are now in sight,
In one mighty leap he has bounded two flights.
The digital clock that decides his fate
Whether he will arrive home on time or late,
Viciously displays 5:34
As the trainmen threaten to close the train doors.

But Dan does not fear
That the appointed time draws near!
His strong sturdy legs enable him to pass
The slow, sluggish movements of the bovine mass.
It is 5:35 and one staircase more
Then a second-wind sprint to reach the train door.

He smiles as he crosses the threshold,
Another day a master, a pro.
With a move of the hand, his tie knot to fix
The train pulls away, it is 5:36.


The Bridge Players Four

The Bridge Players Four, as the may be named,
Have come into a small bit of fame.
The regulars on the train expect these four
To occupy the facing seats to the left of the door.
Before the train has pulled away
The Players prepare for the long journey’s play.
Coats, ties, and briefcases are stored on the rack,
While bad remembrances of the day are sacked.
For the game is an escape for their overworked minds
And they do not allow intrusions of any kind.
The ad for Cosmopolitan is taken from its space
And sits across their laps as the playing base.

North, the dealer, is boisterous and loud.
He enjoys his games, and of his group he is proud,
For they can talk and laugh and enjoy a good cigar
While depression and fatigue fill the rest of the car.
His feigned hearty laughter bellows out to chime
How in the midst of other’s misery, he is having a good time.

South, his partner, seated across the board
Flinches ever so slightly each time that North roars.
Refined and reserved, he also enjoys the game
But never stops wishing that North were more tame.

Though East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet,
The two join forces twice a day, the North and South to beat.
East and West became fast friends as part of their master plan,
Each wanting to associate with the followers of Pierre Cardin.
As North and South already enjoyed the benefits of that fame,
So East and West sought them out and joined their little game.

Thus East pals with North by laughing just as loud,
While West appeases South, complaining of vulgar crowds.
And so they bid the long way home.
Though it’s not often plain,
The game they play continuously to further person gain.

The Angry Young Man

There appears on the scene the Angry Young Man
In a three-pieced grey suit with diploma in hand.
He has mastered Economics and Management 304,
International Banking, Finance, and more.
They have taught him well the classical business form,
Now he descends upon Wall Street to take it by storm.

For how clearly he sees the evils of the past
Which his elders, his teachers, have permitted to last.
And that Troubled Grey area which perplexes the wise
Separates into White and Black in his eyes.
As it was obvious to that noble man of Spain
So it is to our Man blatantly plain
That he must go forth with his luminous pearl
And enlighten the floundering businessman’s world.

Armed with his youth he boards the train
Defiantly standing, for there is no strain
In commuting four hours a day when one is twenty-two
And sturdy legs and a pure heart easily support you.

On the way home he judges his peers:
The middle-aged man content with his beer;
The suburbanized man with his middle-aged spread
Who sprawls out in his seat like it were his bed,
And unconsciously snores with his mouth open wide
Upsetting the tired young assistant who sits at his side.

The Angry Young Man feels contempt and scorn
For his elders who should have corrected all ere he was born.
Not yet knowing the injustices of life,
The Angry Young Man continues his fight
Against that which silently oppresses his peers,
Whose faces reflect the frustration of years.

Epilogue

The Commuter is a hardy breed,
A descendant of the pioneer, who, with his steed
Trekked three thousand miles is search of hope:
The Commuter travels that far, but in a narrower scope.
All of his efforts focus on getting there and back again,
His traveling takes him nowhere but where he’s already been.

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 Mapeel     10/03/2013     national poetry month, poetry   

They'll Always Be an England: Poet of the Most Famous Cricket Poem Is Also a Jack the Ripper Suspect

 “More than any other sport, cricket is a lesson in civility.” “I cannot be the first to wonder if what we see when we see men in white take to a cricket field, is men imagining an environment of justice.” 

                                                                       Joseph O'Neill, Netherland

My twitter feed is alive with the sound of cricket tweets from both England and Australia supporters.

I enjoy reading all #Ashes tweets, although I remain amongst the baffled by the sport. I enjoyed all the descriptions of Lord Peter's prowess on the field in Murder Must Advertise, and the Inspector Morse episode "Deceived by Flight" (Morse: People are dying out there. Even cricket needs to come to a stop") but I've never gotten the whole picture of what's going on.

Yet, as the test matches have now moved to the hallowed Lord's, (July 18 to 22), I know this is the time to cast a kind thought on Francis Thompson, the late-nineteenth century English ascetic who wrote the most famous poem about cricket; wrote one of the most fevered and thoughtful essays on Shelley; and is on the standard list of Jack the Ripper suspects.  That is one crazy Albion trifecta.


The Hound of Heaven Leads us to Lord's
I first came across Thompson in an anthology of Catholic poets for his most famous poem of all, the “Hound of Heaven,” a compelling mystic vision of a soul running from the grace of God.

I FLED Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.


Francis Thompson was born in Lancashire in 1859 to parents who were Catholic converts, no light matter in England. He studied for the priesthood as a young man, but was rejected by the seminary director. His father was a doctor, and Francis went to medical school for six years in Manchester. He failed the medical examinations three times (more about that later) because he didn’t have enough interest in the science classes.

His mother gave him De Quincey’s Confessions of an Opium Eater when he was 18, and his desire for creative release lead him to laudanum until he was a full-blown addict. He moved to London in the hopes of becoming a writer, but he was a tortured soul who couldn’t navigate daily life and he spent years living on the streets. Through the fog he managed to submit some poems to Merrie England, edited by husband and wife Wilfred and Alice Meynell. Wilfred was deeply impressed and published several. Thompson thus came under the care of this couple, who did what they could to help him.

Shortly before his death in 1907, Wiki tells us that Thompson was invited to watch Lancashire play Middlesex at Lord’s. He became so nostalgic for the days of the great cricketers Hornby and Barlow that he stayed home and wrote the poem “At Lord’s”--considered the sport's most famous verse--rather than attend the match.

It’s fascinating that a man who himself is repeatedly described as “unbalanced” would have such a passion for cricket, whose very essence is order and justice, as O'Neill described. The contrast gets even more odd when we learn that some people think he is an infamous serial killer.

But first, the first stanza of the great  “At Lord’s”, which has given rise to several book titles on the sport of cricket.

It is little I repair to the matches of the Southron folk,
Though my own red roses there may blow;
It is little I repair to the matches of the Southron folk,
Though the red roses crest the caps, I know.
For the field is full of shades as I near a shadowy coast,
And a ghostly batsman plays to the bowling of a ghost,
And I look through my tears on a soundless-clapping host
As the run stealers flicker to and fro,
To and fro:
O my Hornby and my Barlow long ago !

Overwrought, Yes, but Jack the Ripper?
In 1999, Richard Patterson proposed the theory that Francis Thompson is Jack the Ripper:

"Francis Thompson had a violent childhood, doomed medical school training, and a continual fascination with death. Thompson’s life and verse reflect his downward drug induced spiral into vagrancy. In 1888 Thompson was suicidal, and in possession of a dissecting scalpel. He was living near the murder scene in the West India docks, and he had been homeless man for three years. During the murders, he was seeking out a prostitute for whom he had a fancy. Upon meeting Thompson she vanished and he became delirious all during the very time of the Whitechapel murders."

Patterson also has an elaborate theory that the murders were committed on certain Catholic saints feast days, and that there is a religious connection that hasn’t been looked at before. (He doesn’t seem to know that you can find a Catholic saint’s day on nearly all 365 days of the year, so that’s not much of an argument.)

He has other “evidence,” including Thompson joking in a letter that he needs to start shaving with a razor rather than the scalpel he usually uses, and there is some handwriting similarities between he and the Ripper. Overall Patterson is not very persuasive, but it is an odd fate for a poet to end up on the Ripper suspect list  at all.

"The Saddest Records"
Thompson tried to commit suicide as a young man. Supposedly Chatterton came to him in a vision and convinced him not to. Well, of course he did, Chatterton being the strange 18th century talented misfit prodigy who was a poetry forger--writing poems and passing them off as medieval in origin--before taking his own life at 17.

Thompson died at 48 from tuberculosis. Here's a passage from his essay on Shelley, where he empathizes with the difficult life of poets:

Why indeed (one is tempted to ask in concluding) should it be that the poets who have written for us the poetry richest in skiey grain, most free from admixture with the duller things of earth--the Shelleys, the Coleridges, the Keats--are the very poets whose lives are among the saddest records in literature?

You had a tough time too, Francis.

An Addendum In a Lighter Vein:

The Anglican Psalm Chant for the Rules of cricket (via Di Pereira)





(Photo above from The Guardian, Tony Jenkins. The Queen greets players at first day at Lord's)

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 Mapeel     7/19/2013     current events, national poetry month, poetry   

Poetry in Oils

It so happened, in this month of poetry, that I bought a new painting for my living room, and I thought, painting is poetry captured in oils.

Surprise, surprise, this is not a new idea.

Ut pictura poesis “as is painting, so is poetry” Horace

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with the gift of speech
Simonides

Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen
daVinci

Owning a piece of art for your home is one of life’s quieter joys. It’s something that Terry Teachout has written about frequently and with eloquence: the purchase of a piece, receiving it into the home, finding “the spot” for it, taking literal time to sit enjoy it. Teachout has several artists that he had the desire for and then found the means to purchase. For me, it is just one, the New York, now Westport-based artist David Barton.

I am friends with David, by my desire to collect his work is on a completely different plane from that personal bond. I fell in love with his painting years ago. He has several series, but it’s his architectural paintings that I am drawn to and have collected: a house from Booth Bay, Maine; a detail from St. Louis Cathedral, New Orleans; a sun-drenched country front door; and the new piece, a Soho corner. (This jpeg of the piece does not do it justice in the slightest.)

I love the interesting color palette, and the precision of line. I love the stylized sensibility and the mastery of place. I love the sheer talent expressed. The paintings are silent, but it’s no accident that the language of art buying centers around a piece “speaking” to you or not. And that language, for me, is poetry, not prose.

“The Relations between Poetry and Painting”

This is the title of a lecture Wallace Stevens gave at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1951. For such a sexy title it’s a pretty dry lecture. But one good point is that there is a cosmic sense of the poetic that gets equally channeled to painting and to words.

More specifically, Poets have been inspired by great paintings: W.H Auden “Musee des Beaux Arts”; John Berryman “Winter Landscape”; William Carlos Williams “Peasant Wedding.” (This site matches up pictures of the paintings with the poems).

And there is at least one very famous reverse: the William Carlos Williams poem “The Great Figure” inspired Charles Demuth to paint "The Figure 5 in Gold."


Among the rain
And lights
I saw the figure 5
in gold
on a red
fire truck
moving
tense
unheeded
to gong clangs
siren howls
and wheels rumbling
through the dark city


And so I will soon have the poetry of a Soho cast iron building in my living room with a startling blue sky (that sadly echoes how blue the sky was the morning of 9/11). It will be like having a window to downtown from the Upper West Side.

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 Mapeel     4/26/2009     national poetry month   

National Poetry Month: A Shadow of Chris Thomas

Poetry has a poignant power to capture the shadows of lives. Chris Thomas, the pen name of one of my great college loves. We had an intensity that was painful on every level. We tried to get together for real many times, but the stars never aligned for us. One of the last times we met was a year after my father died. He later sent me a printed page from a small journal with this poem he had written. He is a cognitive scientist (working for the likes of IBM, Lucent, etc.) who at one time published fairly frequently. I hear Chris is on his second marriage. I hope he has found happiness.

Today is the anniversary of my father’s death, and I recently came across Chris's poem while cleaning through my mother’s house.

A Daughter’s Question—
One Year After Her Father’s Death

I’ve seen you stealing sleep
From tired old women on the train.
I’ve looked down and
seen you pour out my sleeves,
raining from my fingers.

It’s so like you—gone for 6 weeks,
leaving me in lengthening solitude,
only to feel you, there in my bed,
and the quake of morning.
Why are you here?

I set the table for four not three.
Something I feed you keeps you alive
and I fear of self-inspection.
A birthday passes without you,
Yet somewhere you dress for church on Sunday.

A passage from some obscure Irish novel
with no source attributed
is scrawled on my bathroom wall.
But I live alone, that’s what bothers me.
You’re everywhere I bring you.

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 Mapeel     4/16/2009     national poetry month, poetry   

A Poetic Journey: First Stop, Intro to Francis Thompson

April is the cruelest month, the sweetest month, and, since 1996, a month dedicated to poetry by the Academy of American Poets.

Their goals for National Poetry Month, from the website’s FAQ:
* Highlight the extraordinary legacy and ongoing achievement of American poets
* Introduce more Americans to the pleasures of reading poetry
* Bring poets and poetry to the public in immediate and innovative ways
* Make poetry a more important part of the school curriculum
* Increase the attention paid to poetry by national and local media
* Encourage increased publication, distribution, and sales of poetry books
* Increase public and private philanthropic support for poets and poetry

In that spirit, I’m going to focus my tiny spot of the blogosphere on a poetic journey, (more partial to English than to American poetry). Where do we find it? What does bring to our lives?

Each year there is an official poster. This year it is particularly inspired in thought and execution by Paul Sahre.

“Do I dare disturb the universe”—-one of the all-time great lines--written in the steamed bathroom mirror. Does the poet dare? Does Prufrock dare? Do we readers dare? You will not look at your own fogged mirror the same way as you did yesterday. That’s an accomplishment for both Sahre and Academy.

Uttering the words “dare” and “poetry” in the same breath feels at first blush silly. Skydiving is something you dare to do, but poetry?

And yet controlling the language to expose the beguiling hints and flashes of the complexity of human emotion and thought is a dangerous activity. When it goes wrong, it’s a mess. When it goes right, its illumination can be as painful as it is helpful.

Poetry That Crosses Our Path

For a New Yorker, one way was the Poetry in Motion series on the subway. You could look up and see a snatch of Whitman or Yeats or Dickinson. I was a fan, but I think the program has been cut in the budget nightmares.

Then there are the poems we stumble across in the strangest places.

The fairest things have fleetest end,
Their scent survives their close:
But the rose's scent is bitterness
To him that loved the rose.

I came upon this quotation in an Avengers episode! "Silent Dust," from the black & white Mrs. Peel era. Mrs. Peel is in a pub getting information from a suspect, who is a rose grower.


What I love about this is that it’s not a very famous quotation. It’s from “To Daisy” by Francis Thompson (whom Mrs. Peel does identify in the episode.) Roger Marshall is the sole writer of the episode, and so we know who planted it. That’s what writers get to do to whatever they get their hands on. Newspaper/magazine titles, book titles, movie/tv dialogue-—they plant pieces of poetry for others to stumble upon and discover. After noticing that little bit of poetry in the episode for years, I decided to look into Francis Thompson.

And lo and behold, there is no more fitting figure to discover during National Poetry Month than this Victorian English ascetic poet, a fascinating, sad man who developed an opium addiction after reading De Quincey’s Confession of an Opium Eater at the impressionable age of 18. (It was given to him by his mother who died shortly afterward. It seems he was doomed.) Thompson left behind tantalizing work, including a brilliant, feverish essay on Shelley, one of cricket’s great poems, and an overly anthologized “Catholic” poem. And to top it off, he’s also on the suspect list for the real Jack the Ripper. My NPM exploration of Francis Thompson is here.

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 Mapeel     4/13/2009     national poetry month   

Happy Easter and National Poetry Month

Make no mistake: if he rose at all
It was as His body;
If the cell's dissolution did not reverse, the molecule reknit,
The amino acids rekindle,
The Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
Each soft spring recurrent;
It was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the
Eleven apostles;
It was as His flesh; ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes
The same valved heart
That--pierced--died, withered, paused, and then regathered
Out of enduring Might
New strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence,
Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded
Credulity of earlier ages:
Let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
Not a stone in a story,
But the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of
Time will eclipse for each of us
The wide light of day.

And if we have an angel at the tomb,
Make it a real angel,
Weighty with Max Planck's quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in
The dawn light, robed in real linen
Spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
For our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
Lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed
By the miracle,
And crushed by remonstrance.

- John Updike, "Seven Stanzas at Easter"

(hat tip, those Atlantic Monthly guys, Andrew Sullivan, Ross Douthat)

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 Mapeel     4/12/2009     national poetry month