Rough weather, Sublime Poetry

To share with you this rough, divisive weather
And not to grieve because we have to share it,
Desire to wear the dark of night together
And feel no colder that we do not wear it,
Because sometimes my sight of you is clearer,
The memory not clouded by the sense,
To know that nothing now can make you dearer
Than does the close touch of intelligence,
To be the prisoner of your kindnesses
And tell myself I want you to be free,
To wish you here with me despite all this,
To wish you here, knowing you cannot be—
This is a way of love in our rough season,
This side of madness, the other side of reason.

–James Reeves (1909-1978 )

I was confounded by the syntax of this sonnet at first, but then realized a way round it was to divide its train of thought in 2s. (the commas are indicative of this) So this is my rusty attempt at paraphrase:

Lines 1-2: To share with you our woes is not an occasion for grief.

Lines 3-4: You and I are cold despite the absence of grief.

Lines 5-6: (The “because” is perplexing because it does not answer a previous query; I can surmise that raw emotion is breaking through here as it seems like a recollection of love)
I remember you best through memory untouched by the senses.

Lines 7-8: Nothing can bring you back except cold rationality of these lines?

Lines 9-10: This is a very confusing line to a mere mortal like me. I am entrapped by your qualities (ie kindness) but I want you to be free from me, but ironically i am not free from you. A paradox or some impossible wish the speaker is making?

Lines 11-12: I wish you were here (x2), but it is impossible.

Lines 13-14: These are the strange currents of our love. Binaries: Madness/Reason, Absence/Presence, You and I. Don’t you just love complicated relationships and the madness that comes from it? There is simply no resolution and you wonder why poetry indeed makes NOTHING happen.

Up

Give dear Margaret Atwood a chance a explain why you cannot get out of bed, and what needs to be done to haul you up. Up you go..

You wake up filled with dread.
There seems no reason for it.
Morning light sifts through the window,
There is birdsong.
You can’t get out of bed.It’s something about the crumpled sheets
Hanging over the edge like jungle
Foliage, the terry slippers gaping
Their dark pink mouths for your feet,
The unseen breakfast—some of it
In the refridgerator you do not dare
To open—you will not dare to eat.

What prevents you? The future. The future tense
Immense as outer space.
You could get lost there.
No. nothing so simple. The past, its density
And drowned events pressing you down,
Like sea water, like gelatin
Filling your lungs instead of air.

Forget all that and let’s get up.
Try moving your arm.
Try moving your head.
Pretend the house is on fire
And you must run or burn.
No, that one’s useless
It’s never worked before.

Where it is coming from, this echo?
This huge No that surrounds you,
Silent as the folds of the yellow
Curtains, mute as the cheerful

Mexican bowl with its cargo
Of mummified flowers?
(you chose the colours of the sun,
Not the dried neutrals of the shadow,
God knows you tried)

Now here’s a good one:
You’re lying on your deathbed.
You have one hour to live.
Who is it, exactly, you have needed
All these years to forgive?

Re-discovery

I was looking at some of my old pictures of Italy and there was this amazing outpouring of images that prompted me to put them in words. Of course, there is a a deep cathartic value in this for me, because Italy reminds me of Yat. And there’s this picture that I chanced upon, seeing her in the only way I can, of her in a sunlit terrace in San Gimigiano. And somehow the phrase “as clear as the light of day” seemed so appropriate to my sense of direction, and that I had to wrest some lines from memories that were choking me. So to my dear Yat, to whom some places in the middle of Italy mean little, but mean everything in the world to me…

In some half-imagined scene of mine,
Perhaps in a sunit piazza in Trieste,
I am thinking most deeply of you again.

I squint at these soft lines that say
“mai piu ritornerai, mai piu”, which sound like
the begging of all thirty good years of me
to return no more, no more to you.

Why these lines have loitered
Half-heeded in one’s throat, no one can say.
Not in this vast, ruinously classical urban space
Where the Italian afternoon goes on forever,
marked by long shadows.

The old Italians like Galilei and Columbus
were feted for mapping starry-eyed point to point.
Then why did I want to be re-discovered by you
In this cobbled square, when I caught in a lowered gaze,
that piazza really meant insurrection,
not connection.

Anne Stevenson’s fig to St Valentine

I’m going to quote Charlie Brooker from the Guardian on this most auspicious 14th February:
“This week, millions of people across the country will celebrate the crippling delusion known as “love” by sending flowers, booking restaurants and placing stomach-churning small ads in newspapers. Valentine’s Day – the only national occasion dedicated to mental illness – is a stressful ordeal at the best of times”

But here’s my favourite riposte, a luscious and subtle fig to the romantic recidivist:

They will fit, she thinks

but only if her backbone

cuts perfectly into his rib cage,

and only if his knees

dock exactly under her knees

and all four

agree on a common angle.

All would be well

if only

they could face each other.

Even as it is

there are compensations

for having to meet

nose to neck

chest to scapula

groin to rump.

When they sleep

they look, at least

as if they were going

In the same direction.

–Anne Stevenson

How to get a person into bed

Mess around with genre, create your own love poetry using dissimilar references, insert in the odd painterly description she thinks is a compliment, then speak it to the person you want to sleep with in a deadpan voice. Watch how Billy Collins, America’s Poet Laureate, talks the talk…

Love, all love

I feel a little sapped if I have to tell my students, oh look here’s another metaphor, because instructing this and explaining that, divests a poem such as this of its ambulant afterglow. When the subject is love, all love; scholarly explication seems unwanted at times. Here’s Kenneth’s Koch “To You”…

I love you as a sheriff searches for a walnut
That will solve a murder case unsolved for years
Because the murderer left it in the snow beside a window
Through which he saw her head, connecting with
Her shoulders by a neck, and laid a red
Roof in her heart. For this we live a thousand years;
For this we love, and we live because we love, we are not
Inside a bottle, thank goodness! I love you as a
Kid searches for a goat; I am crazier than shirttails
In the wind, when you’re near, a wind that blows from
The big blue sea, so shiny so deep and so ulike us;
I think I am bicycling across an Africa of green and white
Fields
Always, to be near you, even in my heart
When I’m awake, which swims, and also I believe that you
Are trustworthy as the sidewalk which leads me to
The place where I again think of you, a new
Harmony of thoughts! I love you as the sunlight leads the
Prow
Of a ship which sails from Hartford to Miami, and I love you
Best at dawn, when even before I am awake the sun
Receives me in the questions which you always pose.

A mathematical love poem

Who says mathematics needs to be coldly analytical? Not since John Donne’s clever metaphor of a couple separated yet joined, like the legs of a compass, has love poetry been aligned with… tools, really. This is Martha Collins, her mathematical voice quivering with emotion. There are really 3 voices here. The first 7 lines are said by an analyst, the next 3 refutes (look for the all important word “BUT”) the previous lines. The last 4 shoots the invitation of love forward, via a pun via the line. Wait for the punchline.

And yes, having written this, I realize it’s a sonnet as well…

Draw a line. Write a line. There.

Stay in line, hold the line, a glance

Between the lines is fine but don’t

Turn corners, cross, cut in, go over

or out, between two points of no

return’s line of flight, between

two points of view’s a line of vision.

But a line of thought is rarely

Straight, an open line’s no party

Line, however fine your point.

A line of fire communicates, but drop

Your weapons and drop your line,

Consider the shortest distance from x

To y, let x be me, let y be you.

–Martha Collins

Portraiture in Verse

Scheherazade

He is languid as a fed lion.
She in her salt and sackcloth gown is gone
Into a wilderness of wind at noon

Where the wonderful covered well of tales
is a dry waterhole

or a bell
Abandoned. What is the sound at noon
of silence in a grain

of sand? It may be what is borne
by her beyond the hollowed bone of thought,
the loud elaborated heart

the salt

and sack-
cloth shadow begging briefly at her back
Her Bedouin back

–Gillian Allnutt

Something amazingly dense is going on here. I love portraits in verse, from Homer to Homer Simpson and especially those that need long calculated moments or days to unravel.

1. If there were any paintings to accompany this poem, Henri Rosseau’s eerie The Sleeping Gypsy comes to mind.
2. Salt and Sackcloth “frame” the beginning and end, though their arrangements within the stanzas are different. Why is her sackcloth gown replaced by a shadow? Why do her clothes have to beg? Very arresting obstacles throw in the way of comprehension…
3. That perplexing riddle in the middle stanza, worse than a Russian puzzle box: “what is the sound at noon of silence in a grain of sand?” is answered by something completely else, beyond a “hollowed bone of thought”, the “loud elaborated heart”. I like the way thought itself (and by extension the reader’s comprehension) is carried and hustled, like one of Scheherazade’s tales within tales, through the air and environment, through the human physiology, but arriving inexorably back to the start… her salt and sackcloth garments. What does it all mean?

In Patagonia

“Depressing lovely” is as critical as my faculties are going to get tonight. I’ve pondered over Kate Clanchy’s poem very privately for a long time; it remains to me the most heart-breaking poem I’ve read, digested, dedicated to and believed in. I’ve long thought of explaining to you what it meant, but I think this time, i’ll resist meaning where meaning is almost certain to be reside, and resist love where it seems expected. Literature mostly seems blight and too empty of happy moments (“Happiness Writes White” goes the saying) and I know I’ve always been attracted to what is the purgatorial and the grey. ‘In Patagonia” changes no minds, inspires no turnaround, convinces no divorce and moves no heart already blocked, I slowly realized years later, but I think I’ll love it all the more for that…

I said perhaps Patagonia, and pictured
a peninsula, wide enough
for a couple of ladderback chairs
to wobble on at high tide. I thought

of us in breathless cold, facing
a horizon round as a coin, looped
in a cat’s cradle strung by gulls
from sea to sun. I planned to wait

till the waves had bored themselves
to sleep, till the last clinging barnacles,
growing worried in the hush, had
paddled off in tiny coracles, till

those restless birds, your actor’s hands,
had dropped slack into your lap,
until you’d turned, at last, to me.
When I spoke of Patagonia, I meant

skies all empty aching blue. I meant
years. I meant all of them with you.

–Kate Clanchy

A riddle inside a mystery wrapped in a box

There are poems that are arcane as the most eccentric University Professors, and poems that are as clear as the light of day… The difficult thing about writing love poetry especially, as many of us have found out to our cost, is that the most sincere exhortations don’t always work. Superlatives may sound clichéd, while clever conceits may simply fall flat.

What I like about Robert Graves’s poems is his literalism, which you could say spoils many of his love poems. But look carefully again and the literalism suggests much more.

“She tells her love” is almost entirely devoid of imagery. At first glance, one is left with a dry taste in one’s mouth. 36 compacted words and not a single outright proclamation of affection. Hardly inspiring of love!

But I think that just as light is the best foil for the dark, so is intimate love sharply and effectively conveyed through a surface of drowsy, half-whispered words (preferably at 3am). Just one enigma about Robert Grave’s piece: What is she whispering?

She tells her love while half asleep,

In the dark hours,

With half-words whispered low

As Earth stirs in her winter sleep

And puts out grass and flowers

Despite the snow,

Despite the falling snow.