Poems by Stephen Crane

Along with Isaac Babel, Stephen Crane is my favorite short story writer. (I could throw Trevor, McGahern and Salter in the mix, but then I start to sound wishy-washy.) In the story, "The Open Boat," Crane wrote my favorite opening line; he wrote my favorite ending in "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky." Crane also wrote poems, strange little poems that remind me, no so much in their language or themes as in the way they get where they are going, of Emily Dickinson. Here are three. They have no titles, so I'll just number them. In #1, I like "gardens/ lying at impossible distances." Feels very precisely like life. In #2, I hear the first voice as some lying, hyperbolic evangelist in Ocean Grove, NJ, the revival town near where Crane grew up. The second voice, ironically, sounds like a truth-teller. In poem #3, I like the craving for hope and, of course, "...hence with your red sword of virtue."

1

There was set before me a mighty hill,

And long days I climbed

Through regions of snow.

When I had before me the summit-view,

It seemed that my labor

Had been to see gardens

Lying at impossible distances.

2

"Truth," said a traveller,

"Is a rock, a mighty fortress;

Often have I been to it,

Even to its highest tower,

From whence the world looks back."

"Truth," said a traveller,

"Is a breath, a wind,

A shadow, a phantom;

Long have I pursued it,

But never have I touched

The hem of its garment."

And I believed the second traveller;

For truth was to me

A breath, a wind,

A shadow, a phantom;

And never had I touched

The hem of its garment.

3

Supposing that I should have the courage

To let a red sword of virtue

Plunge into my heart,

Letting to the weeds of the ground

My sinful blood,

What can you offer me?

A gardened castle?

A flowery kingdom?

What? A hope?

Then hence with your red sword of virtue.

Even in the Bitter Core the Seed

If I should apply myself
tongue to skin -- but one should never
press too hard but only lightly
pass over until the object begins
to break down, lightly, so it barely knows
you're trying, until for your gentle persistence
it secrets its essence to you alone,
surrenders for having found finally
your subtle touch agreeable and true,

                                                             lightly,
because you must maintain your application
in duration, almost an apparition, so the taste
that stays sweet comes, leisurely and long,
lightly, so you'll recall that first bright smoothness
even as your (light) effort takes you
all the way to the core, so when you arrive --
and this is inevitable, you must believe it --
you will have come to understand
that even in the bitter core
lies the seed to which your long
and gentle plight has given light.

                                                 

                                                   - J. O'Brien

                                                       

Psychache in the Life of John Kennedy Toole

There's a new, interesting and sensitive biography of John Kennedy Toole out. It's called Butterfly in the Typewriter: The Short, Tragic Life of John Kennedy Toole and the Remarkable Story of A Confederacy of Dunces. Or coming out. Not sure if it's out yet. Toole wrote the great comic novel in the Sixties, while stationed at an Army base in Puerto Rico. It was never published in his lifetime. Cory MacLauchlin's book traces the labyrinthine path the manuscript took to publication and fame. Walker Percy enters the story late, but figures as a hero, along with the Toole's mother, for their roles in the novel's publication. Toole killed himself, and the author of the bio considers very realistically,  with insight and compassion, the possible causes of his suicide. Here he summarizes the conclusions of Edwin Schneidman, who studied suicide and those who commit it. It's an accurate elucidation of the conundrum of living with pain but no visible wound.

Foremost suicidologist Edwin Shneidman described suicide as an incredibly complex event. He coined the term "psychache" to express the intricate and complicated condition leading up to suicide. After years of studying suicides and interviewing people with suicidal tendencies, some of whom ultimately carried out the act despite his efforts to help then, Shneidman determined that suicide is not reactive, but rather "purposive." In his definition, it is a "concatenated, complicated, multi-dimensional, conscious, and unconscious 'choice' of the best possible practical solution to a perceived problem, dilemma, impasse, crisis or desperation." And before arriving at the decision to kill oneself, Shneidman argues, the person is in excruciating pain; the pain may have no physical manifestation but still relentlessly tortures the subject. To the person suffering from this "psychache," the pain is just as potent and troubling as the ghost pain riddling the body of an amputee. They cannot point to the wound they feel, but they feel it intensely. In this context, suicide is not a moment of weakness, but rather a final attempt to take control of the pain, regardless of its origin.

                                                                                                 - Cory MacLauchlin

                                                                                                   Butterfly in the Typewriter

Poem by Gevorg Emin

Seemingly simple, but does it describe the Armenian poet himself? Or what has become of someone he knew? Or a country? A people? All humanity? I feel like I was an exclamation point until about the age of 18. Question mark ever since.

The Question Mark

Poor thing. Poor crippled measure

of punctuation. Who would know,

who could imagine you used to be

an exclamation point?

What force bent you over?

Age, time and the vices

of this century?

Did you not once evoke,

call out and stress?

But you got weary of it all,

got wise, and turned like this.

                                 -Gevorg Emin

                                 Translated byDiana Der Hovanessian

Poem by R.S. Thomas

Thomas was a great poet of the second half of the 20th Century. I mean one of the great poets. Welsh (thus the Anglo-spellings), an Anglican priest, often he wrote as if to reconcile his despair at the silence of God with his faith. He wrote about, and universalized, marriage, Welsh nationalism and what he referred to as "the machine," by which I think he meant a coldly engineered future that is slowly crowding out the influence of the human soul. Some of his greatest work was done in and about old age. This one, ostensibly about traveling, I came upon while traveling myself.

Somewhere

Something to bring back to show

you have been there: a lock of God's

hair, stolen from him while he was

asleep; a photograph of the garden

of the spirit. As has been said,

the point of travelling is not

to arrive, but to return home

laden with pollen you shall work up

into the honey the mind feeds on.

What are our lives but harbours

we are continually setting out

from, airports at which we touch

down and remain in too briefly

to recognise what it is they remind

us of? And always in one

another we seek the proof

of experiences it would be worthy dying for.

Surely there is a shirt of fire

this one wore, that is hung up now

like some rare fleece in the hall of heroes?

Surely these husbands and wives

have dipped their marriages in a fast

spring? Surely there exists somewhere,

as the justification for our looking for it,

the one light that can cast such shadows.

R.S. elsewhere on the blog: "Song at the Year's Turning"

2 Short, Ancient Irish Poems

These two poems from 9th Century Ireland (or around the 9th Century) reflect two sides of the complex Irish soul. And weather. One is from springtime and shows the happy side, the optimistic side, the tone of life I associate with my Grandfather, the side that loves God and nature. The other is the bleaker side and while a little obscure, is clearly full of foreboding. I associate it with me.

My understanding is that the first was found scribbled in the margin of a book an unknown 9th Century monk was transcribing by hand. At some point, he was distracted by the birdsongs and the peacefulness of his situation, wrote about it in verse, and was pretty damn happy with how it came out. On the rare occasions when I think I have written something good, a good phrase or sentence or paragraph, I admit to thinking to myself, "good the stuff I write in my cushy seat."

 

Notes of a Monastic Scribe

A hedge before me, one behind,

a blackbird sings from that,

above my small book many-lined

I apprehend his chat.

Up trees, in costumes buff,

mild accurate cuckoos bleat,

Lord love me, good the stuff

I write in a shady seat.

The other poem, I have run across several versions of it, is about winter and it makes me shiver. "Ice-frost time" and all that. Here are three translations, in order of how I like them. The middle one is the most recent version, and is a translation from the Irish by the great 20th Century Irish writer Flann O'Brien, author of, among many things, the novels At Swim Two Birds and The Pour Mouth; both are very funny. The third version below is probably the most poetically accomplished of these translations, but I like but I like #1 best, probably because it's the first I read.

#1

From the Fenian Cycle

A tale I have for you. Ox murmurs,

Winter roars, summer is gone.

Wind high cold, sun low.

Cry is attacking, sea resounding.

Very red raying has concealed form.

Voice of geese has become usual,

Cold has caught the wings of birds,

Ice-frost time; wretched, very wretched.

                                  A tale I have for you.

#2

Flan O'Brien's Version

Here's a song --

stags give tongue

winter snows

summer goes.

High cold blow

sun is low

brief is day

seas give spray.

Fern clumps redden

shapes are hidden

wild geese raise

wonted cries.

Cold now girds

wings of birds

icy time --

that's my rime.

#3

Winter's Approach

List my lay; oxen roar,

Winter chides, Summer's o'er,

Sinks the sun, cold winds rise

Moans assail, ocean cries.

Ferns flush red, change hides all,

Clanging now, gray geese call,

Wild wings cringe, cold with rime,

Drear, most drear, ice-frost time.

Why I read John Clare, Part 2

I also read John Clare for the empathy and compassion. I love in this poem -- I've seen it titled both "Gipsies" and "The Gypsy Camp" -- the perspective dipping inside and out of minds and bodies, how the boy "thinks upon the fire" and the gypsy "tucks his hands up." How the dog "feels the heat too strong" and how his pathetic condition (and the early image of the forest that "lies alone") adds so much impact to the poem's conclusion about the people it describes. Clare wrote this while a resident of the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, where he died in 1864, in May.

Engraving, Northampton General Lunatic Asylum; thanks, Wik

The Gypsy Camp

The snow falls deep; the forest lies alone;

The boy goes hasty for his load of brakes,

Then thinks upon the fire and hurries back;

The gypsy knocks his hands and tucks them up.

And seeks his squalid camp, half hidden in snow,

Beneath the oak which breaks away the wind,

And bushes close in snow-like hovel warm;

There tainted mutton wastes upon the coals,

And the half-wasted dog squats close and rubs,

Then feels the heat too strong, and goes aloof;

He watches well, but none a bit can spare,

And vainly waits the morsel thrown away.

Tis thus they live -- a picture to the place,

A quiet, pilfering, unprotected race

Why I Read John Clare, Part 1

I read John Clare because I like the sounds, like those of the closing line of this poem from the early-mid-1800s. I also like "the lodging snows..." Fodder is cattle feed; here, brawl means a loud noise or clamor.

Clare, 1820s, image borrowed from the John Clare Society 

The Foddering Boy 

The foddering boy along the crumping snows

With straw-band-belted legs and folded arm

Hastens and on the blast that keenly blows

Oft turns for breath and beats his fingers warm

And shakes the lodging snows from off his clothes,

Buttoning his doublet closer from the storm

And slouching his brown beaver o'er his nose.

Then faces it again -- and seeks the stack

Within its circling fence -- where hungry lows

Expecting cattle making many a track

About the snows -- impatient for the sound

When in huge fork-fulls trailing at his back

He litters the sweet hay about the ground

And brawls to call the staring cattle back.

David Stacton Aphorism

American author David Stacton is, was -- he's done writing now -- known for peppering his narratives with aphorisms. Often, they clearly are coming from the narrator, or are clearly in a character's voice. Other times I find it hard to tell and so figure it's just Stacton making a point he wished to make, some piece of wisdom, some certainty he felt he possessed and that he needed to share. I think it probably felt good to write it and eventually see it in print, even if very few people read it, as very few people read Stacton. He wrote challenging literary novels on wildly varying topics, as well as, under the pseudonym Bud Clifton, pulpy novels with great pulp titles like D is for Delinquent and The Murder Specialist, and one with a rather fine homoerotic cover, Muscle Boy, seen below. As for the following lines from a Stacton novel, they don't quite represent a typical Stacton aphorism, but what struck me was how true the thing about what is not audible seemed, and then how differently I felt about the rest of it. What remains audible for me are not the proper things, but things I said that I wish I hadn't, trivial things for sure, but they refuse to leave me be. What remains audible as well is what I wish I'd said, even if I never meant to say it. 

What is audible is what we said before, trivial things, the proper things for people to say while they wait. What is not audible is what we meant to say, and would so much like to say.

                                                                                             -David Stacton

                                                                                              Old Acquaintance

                                                                                              1964

Poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins Protesting the Cutting Down of Trees

As with Mew, I share with Hopkins a visceral reaction to the cutting down of trees I've known.

Binsley Poplars

felled 1879

My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,

Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,

All felled, felled, are all felled:

    Of a fresh and following folded rank

                    Not spared, not one

                    That dandled a sandalled

              Shadow that swam or sank

On meadow and river and wind-wandering weed-winding bank.

O if we but knew what we do

           When we delve or hew --

Hack and rack the growing green!

            Since country is so tender

To touch, her being so slender,

That, like this sleek and seeing ball

But a prick will make no eye at all,

Where we, even where we mean

  

                      To mend her we end her,

           When we hew or delve:

After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.

    Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve

            Strokes of havok unselve

                    The sweet especial scene

Rural scene, a rural scene,

Sweet especial rural scene.