Touchstones and the Nobel kerfuffle

Muse reading a scroll by an open chest.
Attic red-figure lekythos, ca. 435-425 BC. From Boeotia.
Musée du Louvre. Public domain, Wikipedia.

Bob Dylan . . . can be read and should be read [italics mine], and is a great poet in the grand English poetic tradition. --Sara Danius, Nobel Permanent Secretary 

or 

There’s little that’s inherently controversial about praising words originally meant for vocal delivery. Playwrights have won the Nobel Prize for Literature before. But in an era when songwriting and song performance and song recording are tied together, when many musicians’ literary voices are first received via their literal voices, lyrics alone should inevitably have a hard time competing with “pure” poetry or prose. --Spencer Kornhaber (what a name!) at The Atlantic

A great many of my friends and acquaintances have been busy proving that Dylan either deserves or does not deserve the Nobel, given for the written portion of his work considered as literature. A great many famous people have done likewise.

Being a peaceable sort, I leave them to the joy of it.

But I'm pleased that people are talking about poetry.... What has interested me about this whole episode is the common lack of any sort of clarity about what poetry is, or what high achievement in poetry might look like. Instead, most people are carried away by a tsunami of love for Dylan, or by their anger at the debasement of literature--the latter group assumes that we all know what literature is, though I haven't seen any defining examples or analysis.

The problem with the award is that is given only for the written part of a singer-songwriter's work. But it's hard for us to look at just the words. The songs keep getting in the way, don't they?

I suggest a simple comparison based on some touchstone work by Dylan and a poet, a this versus that to let us consider and meditate on what it means to: a.) hold up lyrics to a song as written literature and b.) to hold up a poem meant to stand alone as written literature to be read silently or aloud.

Here are written lyrics to a Dylan song--do your best to not hear the music in your head. (Well, I can't do it, and I doubt very much that the Nobel committee could either!) Again, remember that the award is for the written words only. If you're my age--well, if you grew up in the Western world--you probably grew up with Dylan songs running through your head, so it's quite a challenge to look just at the words.

I will let Rolling Stone pick the song. Here's the no. 1 on their countdown list, 10 Greatest Bob Dylan Songs.

Once upon a time you dressed so fine
Threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn't you?
People call say 'beware doll, you're bound to fall'
You thought they were all kidding you
You used to laugh about
Everybody that was hanging out
Now you don't talk so loud
Now you don't seem so proud
About having to be scrounging your next meal

How does it feel, how does it feel?
To be without a home
Like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone

Ahh you've gone to the finest schools, alright Miss Lonely
But you know you only used to get juiced in it

The first fourteen lines of "Like a Rolling Stone" give you a taste, but maybe you'd better read the whole thing here. Copyright, copyright! I don't want to get in trouble with something quite so powerful as the Dylan enterprises.

And next to that, we should put a poem not set to music, one that aspires to literature. To lean over backwards and be generous yet parallel, I'll pick one by a living American poet who aspires to literature (but who was, of course, just passed over for the Nobel.) After all, Dylan hadn't won the Nobel until yesterday.

Like Dylan's lyrics, this poem is also under copyright protection, so I'll just give a 14-line excerpt and a link to the remainder. Here goes:

The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul
Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple
As false dawn.
                     Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels.

    Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,
Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.
Now they are rising together in calm swells
Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear
With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;

    Now they are flying in place, conveying
The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving
And staying like white water; and now of a sudden

Read the rest of Richard Wilbur's "Love Calls Us to the Things of This World" at The Poetry Foundation, here.

But perhaps it is more appropriate to look at a poem by someone who has won a Nobel prize for literature. Try these fourteen lines:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

The falcon cannot hear the falconer; 

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; 

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, 

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned; 

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity. 

Surely some revelation is at hand; 

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.   

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out   

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi 

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert   

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   

Read the rest of "The Second Coming" by Yeats here. (Even if you've departed on a bandwagon already, Yeats is always worth a look. And, indeed, a second look.)

And now, after some meditation on words alone, perhaps it would be appropriate to have an opinion....

* * *

Postscript: A. M. Juster says, "Dylan’s Nobel honors his words for their musicality, accessibility, and ideas. His recognition may help to drag scholars, MFA programs, and literary journals away from their postmodernist tedium and toward a welcome revival of poetry that provokes and delights the public. For that reason alone, as others flame about Dylan’s Nobel don’t think twice – it’s alright." Read the rest here.

Марія Затуренська / Marya Zaturenska

Wikimedia Commons, public domain

from January 21, 1983, The New York Times Obituaries: Miss Zaturenska, who was married to Horace Gregory, the Bollingen Prize poet, wrote eight volumes of her poetry and edited six anthologies. Her many awards included the Shelley and John Reed Prizes from Poetry Magazine, where her work was first published. Mrs. Gregory was born in Kiev, Russia, and came to the United States at the age of 8, living with her parents on Henry Street, near the Settlement House. While working in factories, she attended high school at night. In 1922, she received a scholarship to Valparaiso University in Indiana and, a year later, transferred to the University of Wisconsin. She graduated from the Wisconsin Library School in 1925 and was married to Mr. Gregory that year. Final Volume in '74 Her books included ''Threshold and Heart''[sic], ''Cold Morning Sky,'' for which she received the Pulitzer Prize, ''Collected Poems'' and, her final volume, published in 1974, ''The Hidden Waterfall.''

Marya Zaturenska appears to be almost wholly forgotten, at least so far as the internet is concerned. Several of her poems are online at American Studies at the University of Virginia, along with some rather dismissive comments:

Althoug [sic] she is still regarded as a technically skilled poet her adherence to the modes and methods of the English decadent school, a movement of the late 19th and early 20th century which, "proclaimed the superiority of art over nature and often found the greatest beauty in dying things" eventually "earned her a reputation as an 'old-fashioned' writer" and relegated her work to the status of "quaint epiphanies" (Contemporary Authors Online).

"Adherence to the modes." "Old-fashioned." "Quaint epiphanies." Rather scornful, no? Just think of her, a young girl laboring in a factory by day and going to school at night, already writing poetry! How dare someone at the University of Virginia put her in a "quaint" box and shut the lid without more of an inspection? These days, "technically skilled" is probably also a slap in her face, at least when it comes from the academy. More than a century on, the ivory tower still believes that "free verse" is "new" and form out of date.

Well, I happen to think it ridiculous to judge a poet by supposed adherence to a "school"; it doesn't even matter what poets call themselves in that way (school or no-school.) It just matters whether the poems remain alive.

She seems to be a lover of older poetry, though I also see connections to contemporaries. I've just begun noodling around in her Collected Poems but already see that Zaturenska loves the Renaissance--Waller and Herrick and Sidney and more. I have already caught a near-echo of Henry Vaughan (his "Silence and stealth of days") and some likenesses to early Kathleen Raine (and therefore to Yeats.)

Raine and Zaturenska were near contemporaries, but the utter dearth of information online (and the dearth of first-rate libraries in the boondockeries of central New York) doesn't tell me if they knew each other's work. The poems in Zaturenska's Threshold and Hearth (1934) keep reminding me of some Raine poems in Stone and Flower (1943.) Here's Zaturenska's Daphne-in-transformation:

Daphne

Roots spring from my feet, Apollo, like a tree
The silver laurels grow deep into me;
Undone, undone, these thoughts of mine that beat
With a great vigor in the drouth and heat;
So my blood answers, so with sap my veins,
So as leaves in whom no wind complains,
This is the metamorphosis, this the change
Through which my days now range:
That which was I, am now no longer I,
Among my branches let the wild birds cry,
Around me let the alien rivers flow,
Beneath my shade let other maidens go.

Like Raine, she wanders in mythic lands ruled by Apollo. But I've also bumped up against a few Zaturenska poems that take me back to another kind of myth, to Poe and his admirers--the vulture and the abyss, the pursuit of demons, the horror in the blood. Even in gentler, milder poems, Zaturenska's teller is restless and pursued by shadows. Here's a quiet, "unquiet" poem that reminds me again of Raine:

Images in Lake Water

The tree's sun-glittering arms are bowed
With graceful supplication in lake water.
Metallic-green and musically still
Float tree and water in one image, solitary and proud,
Till the bird-image joins them and the cloud.

Idly I watch the glimmering lights depart,
So gay falls summer glittering on the lake
And on the dreaming trees, on my transfigured heart
Grown iridescent for a shadow's sake.

Unchanging and transparent solitude
Where mobile waters haunt the enduring dream
That trembles like a lily on the stream,
A troubled whiteness on a heavy green,
A starry snowdrop on a summer scene.

Imagination colors all our watching mood,
The day contracted to a pool, a tree, a shade
All summer shining in a little space,
And the slow falling of the night delayed
With flowing images in the mind, betrayed
In mirrored silence, my unquiet face.

Raine's fish that is shadow and stillness, "unmoved, equated with the stream / As flowers are fit for air, man for his dream," comes to mind. And I'm thinking of Yeats again, his fairies who give "unquiet dreams," his "unquiet wanderer," or his fusion of heart and bird and cloud and stream and the troubling of waters here:

Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
The horse that comes from the road,
The rider, the birds that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud,
Minute by minute they change;
A shadow of cloud on the stream
Changes minute by minute.

On a side note, Raine was quite frank and generous in regards to her debt to Yeats (and Blake.) Here's a little poem ("Returning Autumn") from Kathleen Raine's Stone and Flower:

All creatures passionate for grace
Quest their desire through groves and seas
That flesh may win a human face,
And pain be crowned with holiness.

And lovers out of present days
Float back upon the body's dream
Of a green branch that dips and sways,
Caught in the current of a stream.

Has anybody channeled Yeats more thoroughly than Raine in that second stanza? The lovers, body and the dream, the green branch, the stream: it is wonderfully Yeatsian. I don't know if any early twentieth-century poet could play with such images without invoking Yeats. After all, he is--to re-cast his own metaphor--a cloud that casts a mighty shadow on the living stream.

I can't help thinking that Raine and Zaturenska might have liked each other's poems. Among her contemporaries, Zaturenska seems not only kindred to Kathleen Raine, but to Louise Bogan and Edwin Muir in mythic focus.

So I shall read some more of Marya Zaturenska and see what I find. I think it would be interesting to take a peek at the Pulitzer winners from the last century and pay attention to why their work has lasted or fallen away. For now, I shall pay some attention to Zaturenska and her life in poetry.

* * *

"What is easier than liking a book?  All sorts of people do it every day."

--Wuthering Expectations

Another thing I liked--

a Pegasus for poetry

If you write poetry or love to read poetry, you might like to read this Paris Review interview with the late Peter Levi (1931-2000), poet and writer and classics scholar, a Jesuit priest for 29 years, and one of those lucky souls elected Oxford Professor of Poetry. I read it last night (hat tip to A. M. Juster) and then again this morning. It is long and crammed with interesting talk about his life and poetry, and it's opinionated enough that a reader finds points of disagreement--that's part of what makes it so interesting. Now I think that I would like to read something of his. (Via twitter, editor John Wilson tells me that the Brigid Allen biography of Peter Levi is quite good.) Here are a few samples that by no means exhaust what is curious or compelling in the interview (The Art of Poetry, no. 24):

ON LIFE WITHOUT WRITING POEMS

George Seferis in a diary speaks of life, without writing poems, as a disorder. I remember thinking when I read that first, it’s the opposite. Poems are a disorder. However necessary and desirable, however protecting the survival of the brute life of childhood, a disorder. But now after a long time of not writing poems, I see he’s right. Without writing one just piles up like heaps of leaves. One doesn’t know what is happening or who one is. And soon one will not dare ask, perhaps, any honest question. Or worse, one may stumble unguarded on some honest answer. Because there is no way of knowing the implications of feeling, except of precise feeling, of something quite exact, as happens in a poem. It is as if poetry were a continual whale spouting or breathing. And yet this is not why one writes poetry. One writes it because of the things themselves, and the words themselves, and the people themselves.

ON YEATS AND THE SERIOUS

He makes a kind of compelling noise, doesn’t he? He’s the ancient mariner all right. Yeats worked from notes too. One of the most impressive things that I know about him comes from his notebooks. He writes out in prose several times, beginnings for a poem. He starts out by saying: “I have often taken off my clothes, both fast and slowly, for this or that woman.” He goes on in that boring, silly old man’s way. Very embarrassing. And then, do you know what the first lines of that poem are?

That is no country for old men. The young 
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees

It makes me cry it’s so beautiful. If you’re a poet, when you start to write, then you are serious. Or you’d better be. None of us can be serious all the time. To be serious in that sense requires a lot of things, such as being relaxed beforehand, things like love and generosity, and discipline, and a sufficient degree of venom. Self-hatred, love of others, hatred of others . . . all these things you need . . . whatever is the right mixture for you.

ON READERS

You can drive out bad writing by good writing only because the public reads your works and not the other works. Therefore it’s the readers who do it, not the writer. Language lives in the mouth.

Elder artists, 3: Yeats

Poetry Ireland

Maurice Harmon, "Old Age and Creativity"
Poetry Ireland May/June 2012

The question is what happens when the poet reaches old age. Does he discover new subject matter and different techniques? There are no simple answers. Very often the subjects that preoccupied him in the past still interest him although he may approach them from a different angle and in a different tone. W B Yeats made growing old itself an issue. He did not like it, hated the loss of physical strength and the waning of sexual energy. In ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ he declared, ‘An aged man is but a paltry thing’ unless ‘Soul clap its hands and sing’, unless he can counter physical decline with imaginative intensity. He proceeds to make conflict central to his later work, dramatising and imagining the contrast between youth and age, past and present, stability and change. In the process his style changed from the ringing declarations of ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ to the compressed power of ‘Leda and the Swan’ to ballad forms in Last Poems. He was that kind of poet, constantly remaking himself and becoming remarkably vigorous in old age. In these years he also extended his intellectual range, placing his sense of personal loss within the contexts of civilisations rising and falling.

***

The wonderful Louise Bogan on Yeats,
The Atlantic 1938

Muse and poet

William Butler Yeats, at the age of seventy-three, stands well within the company of the great poets. He is still writing, and the poems which now appear, usually embedded in short plays or set into the commentary and prefaces which have been another preoccupation of his later years, are, in many instances, as vigorous and as subtle as the poems written by him during the years ordinarily considered to be the period of a poet's maturity. Yeats has advanced into age with his art strengthened by a long battle which had as its object a literature written by Irishmen fit to take its place among the noble literatures of the world. The spectacle of a poet's work invigorated by his lifelong struggle against the artistic inertia of his nation is one that would shed strong light into any era. The phenomenon of a poet who enjoys continued development into the beginning of old age is in itself rare. Goethe, Sophocles, and, in a lesser degree, Milton come to mind as men whose last works burned with the gathered fuel of their lives. More often development, in a poet, comes to a full stop; and it is frequently a negation of the ideals of his youth, as well as a declination of his powers, that throws a shadow across his final pages.

...

Yeats's faith in the development of his own powers has never failed. He wrote, in 1923, after receiving from the King of Sweden the medal symbolizing the Nobel Prize:—

It shows a young man listening to a Muse, who stands young and beautiful with a great lyre in her hand, and I think as I examine it, "I was good-looking once like that young man, but my unpractised verse was full of infirmity, my Muse old as it were, and now I am old and rheumatic and nothing to look at, but my Muse is young." I am even persuaded that she is like those Angels in Swedenborg's vision, and moves perpetually "towards the dayspring of her youth."

 ***

Monkey postscript

Despite the proliferation of testicular tales, no "monkey glands" were involved in Yeats's self-renewal. He did have a vasectomy, an enactment of what Susan Johnston Graf called "sexual magic," evidently a belief that the "vital energy of procreation would be channeled into imaginary, literary, and visionary work" (W. B. Yeats: Twentieth-Century Magus, p. 203)

Graf suggests that, as Kathleen Raine--a follower of Yeats and Blake, and a poet worth reading--pointed out, the operation (and other sometimes-embarrassing-to-scholars facts like an interest in the occult) may have been one element that allowed a new flowering. His belief in its efficacy, that is, may have contributed to his powers in his late writing. If you really (really, now!) want to know more, you can google "Yeats" and "Steinach operation" to find out heaps more. Richard Ellmann and others have attempted to put the wilder stories to bed, so to speak, but it seems the rumors are a bit too lively to suppress.

Down by the bayou

I have a brand new poem up on Autumn Sky Poetry Daily. If you love Yeats, you probably can't miss that it has a formal relationship to "Down by the Salley Gardens." But it's a tricksy poem with something up its sleeve. Here it is: "I Met My True Love Walking."

And if you like that one (or don't and are still bold!), here's another recent one at Autumn Sky: "Landscape with Icefall."

You Asked no. 13: Reading, affinities and animadversions

Berlin, 1932
Collage in progress
Mary Boxley Bullington

In response to a request to interview some of my painter friends, I have been interviewing Mary Boxley Bullington. As she, in turn, insisted on interviewing me, a part of the You asked series will be composed of our questions to each other.

Bullington: Who are two or three of your favorite poets—the ones you return to over and over--and why? What do you look for in reading other poets? What gives you the most pleasure when you read or write poetry and what most annoys you? Why?

Youmans: Yeats. I have a love for Yeats that just won’t quit. This year I’m not dipping into him but reading him book by book, trying to get a better sense of the stages of his life in poetry. I admire the way he kept burgeoning and leafing out, and that he continued writing into age without becoming stale. He didn’t stay one thing; the young lyric poet of the Celtic Twilight is very different from late Yeats, though they have elements in common. And all this is true even though I don’t particularly care for some of his ideas, and even though I don’t always sympathize with his created mythology. Nevertheless, I like it that he has a mythology and framework and edifice of poetry, and that he mythologizes his own life and loves and concerns, placing it and them on a higher plane. I’m fond of his sense that what we see is not all that there is, and of his attempts to pierce various veils. Most of

all, I like it that his poetry always wishes to approach song.

Shakespeare. How can I not pick him? He is so myriad in voice, so infinitely varied in what he undertakes. I don’t expect any more explanation is needed, even if he is a dead white male, jettisoned by hip English departments.

Lots of other poets have left work that I return to: the Beowulf poet, the Gawain poet, Wyatt, Herbert, Vaughan, Donne, Marvel, Blake, Keats, Coleridge, Dickinson, Hopkins, Bishop, etc. And that’s just poetry in English (or Anglo-Saxon.) Whim will take me back to Li Po or Borges or Cavafy or Homer (or Lodge’s versions!) or Sappho or Virgil or Tranströmer or Rilke or Darío or Akhmatova—it’s hard to say where I might whirl off to next, though I have some contemporary poets I want to read or reread, and I’ve been wanting to take a look at more work from the classical world. I started the morning with a poem by Gabriela Mistral, but this month I’ve been reading Robert Walser and Yeats and Chesterton’s The Ballad of the White Horse (clearly a strong source for Tolkien), and also Mary Kinzie’s The Cure of Poetry in an Age of Prose. 

What do I look for? Both a sense of kinship and utter difference please me. I am lured by sound, truth, muscular strength, metaphysical boldness, beauty, fearlessness, range of subject, wideness and depth—by many things. I suppose what pulls me most surely is the sense of captured energy and life.

You ask what most annoys me. I don’t think annoyance ever comes into my writing or reading. I’m simply going to stop reading if a work seems lifeless and without energy. I’ll also stop when a poetry book seems too prosaic, as if a bit of prose had been chopped into lines, helter-skelter. I’m especially likely to put a book down when that very prosiness does not work in terms of prose syntax. I tend to get tired of poems with a narrow scope of subject and lack of depth.  Poetry is a great sea, with room for little jellyfish and sharks and right whales. Just as the sea needs every sort, poetry may need every sort of poet. Even the sorts of poets whose work a writer dislikes may be important to him or her—important in strengthening and establishing what it is the writer does like and desire to see in poems. And even a smaller talent brings joy and growth to its owner, and surely that’s good.

Some other general tendencies and popular academic trends bother me. I don’t like to see poets who are scornful of the past lives devoted to poetry. The proper stance for any poet in relation to the past ought to be one of humility in the presence of mastery. The dead should not be dead to us if their work is alive. The academy-based desire to wage war on what is called cultural appropriation can be destructive to an art that has long been a kind of Silk Road of cultural exchange. Who could possibly untangle those world-spanning threads? Likewise, the idea of rejecting all dead white male writers is destructive to young poets, particularly women. Don’t read Shakespeare, Milton, or Chaucer? Cut them from the English major? Just slash yourself off at the knees and be done with it! The trajectory of many ideas now trendy in the academic world is destructive to poets. The misapprehension that we still have a living avant garde in poetry and so haven’t exhausted the concepts born of Modernism is, to me, simply wrong. The academy should be a fruitful place. Too often of late, it has crafted strictures that hobble the mind.

And what do I find bothersome in my own work? I’m not exactly sorry when time shows me that a poem of my own isn’t as good as I thought it was—how terrible if I could never tell! I simply go on my path, pursuing the muse. But every poet knows that the fire in the head will never be fully matched by a poem. That’s why Yeats’s wandering Aengus spends his whole life chasing after a glimmering girl. The dream poem will always be better than the poem on the page, since no poem can quite catch the entirety of the flood that sweeps through when a poem arrives. And that’s fine. Perhaps an onslaught of perfection would put an end to future poems. 

What stays news

John Singer Sargent,
portrait of Yeats, 1908

Yeats died on this date. Auden says, "What instruments we have agree / The day of his death was a dark cold day." All these years of loving Yeats's poems, and I still lean on him for the news that matters.

   Turning and turning in the widening gyre
   The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
   Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
   Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
   The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
   The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
   The best lack all conviction, while the worst
   Are full of passionate intensity.

"He disappeared in the dead of winter." Requiescat in pace.

Wordsmith, rest in peace--

James Foley, truth-teller, wordsmith
*
* * *
Beautiful, sensitive face photographed by Steven Senne/AP
*
Remembering Daniel Pearl
and all those held by ISIS and others.
*
"We ask for your prayers for Jim and his family." GlobalPost
Addendum: in his own words
* * *
The Committee to Protect Journalists estimates 
that there are about 20 journalists missing in Syria, 
many of them held by ISIS. -CNN

* * *

I died for beauty, but was scarce 

Adjusted in the tomb, 

When one who died for truth was lain 

In an adjoining room. 

He questioned softly why I failed? 

"For beauty," I replied. 

"And I for truth - the two are one; 

We brethren are," he said. 

And so, as kinsmen met a-night, 

We talked between the rooms, 

Until the moss had reached our lips, 

And covered up our names.

--Emily Dickinson

* * *

The third section of "In Memory of W. B. Yeats" 

recurs to me so often now--sometimes daily.

* * *

Journalist James Foley disappeared in northwest Syria on Thanksgiving Day, November 22 2012. Jim is the oldest of five children. He has reported independently and objectively from the Middle East for the past five years. Prior to his work as a journalist, Jim helped empower disadvantaged individuals as a teacher and mentor assisting them in improving their lives.

A beautiful, good, and true life is a light to us all. 

Memory palace, no. 4

Courtesy of sxc.hu and Fran Priestly of the U. S.  That's a photograph
of her sister reading poetry--it could have been Yeats she read,
but, no, she is reading Tennyson. Of course, Yeats read Tennyson...

I've been busy with Glimmerglass edits, The Book of the Red King final polishes (long delayed), the always-tedious author questionnaire, and a bothersome cold, but today I am going to memorize another poem. This one is by Yeats; it's a lyric from The Wind Among the Reeds. I've heard "The Song of Wandering Aengus" sung many times, so it shouldn't be too difficult. And every time I've heard it read aloud with another poem by another writer, Yeats has managed to put the other poem to shame, despite or because of its simplicity of narrative.

Despite that simplicity, one can talk endlessly of elements like Aengus Óg and Caer, or Aengus Óg and hazel wands and faeries, and the meaning of solar and lunar or roundness and wholeness. But I've never thought that any of those explications, however charming and fanciful, did any more for the poem than the clear image of the poet with the fire to make the beautiful and true burning in his head, leading him on (though he may be never satisfied with his efforts to snare the uncatchable) to a mystical goal uniting all things--poet and muse, fire-to-create and transcendental fulfillment, male and female, sun and moon, gold and silver.

The poet gives his life and grows "old with wandering" until he, like Nathaniel Hawthorne's artist of the beautiful, "catches a far other butterfly" and is transformed. As Hawthorne puts it, "When the artist rose high enough to achieve the beautiful, the symbol by which he made it perceptible to mortal senses became of little value in his eyes while his spirit possessed itself in the enjoyment of the reality."

I love the opening of the poem and how Yeats brings together in one easy motion the realms of earth, air, fire, and water:

I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.

I'm finding that I already know that stanza, probably from hearing and reading the poem so often. The only part I had any trouble remembering was "out to," which has a slight awkwardness, so that I kept wanting to alter it. Probably Thoreau was in my head as well, the man who says, "I went to the woods because," and his because is that he wants to live life deliberately, to suck out its marrow, and not find later that he has not lived. It's not so different from Aengus, called by fire and giving over all of life to a ruling pursuit. Thoreau, too, wonderfully mixes up stream and stars and time and fish: "Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars."

I'm fooling with the second stanza now, and finding that my mind does not expect or want to remember a duplicate end word in floor:

When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire aflame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And some one called me by my name:

I just realized that there's a line in one of my Fool poems from The Book of the Red King that conjures this stanza of the poem for me, yoking fire and rustling: "When Fool walked in the rustling fire."

It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.

I keep wanting to change "apple blossom" to "apple blossoms" to be a little more earthy and less poetique. Still, I love this poem, and it is, through and through, drenched in the romance of Celtic twilight. So "apple blossom" it is.

When I tried the last stanza without taking a peek, it turned out that I knew it, aside from one line, which my mind skipped over entirely, as if it were not essential to the narrative: "And walk among long dappled grass." I'm having a tiny bit of trouble with "among." Among grass? Metrically, yes, but...

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

I'm beginning to think that perhaps a poet should memorize each poem before concluding it is done. I don't imagine that I ever had much in the way of a negative thought about this poem before. (However, experience says that just because one publishes doesn't mean that a poem is polished to high gloss. I hate to admit it, but I've published poems online or in magazines that I later decided were simply not finished. And of course I felt mortified to think I had once thought them done. Time tells.) But Yeats is one of my heroes, and I rarely think of him as having less than a perfect finish.

Once I know the poem by heart and no longer pause to remember, I expect that I'll be back to my former happy state, not questioning these little decisions. But noticing tiny, almost-invisible snags is another interesting aspect to memorization.

A fire was in my head--

Clive Hicks-Jenkins
for The Foliate Head, poetry from
UK: Stanza Press, 2012

Listening to Mike Scott and the Waterboys and An Appointment with Mr. Yeats after writing the opening chapter--the warning chapter--to a very odd story...

Looks as if it might be described as a cross between two very different forms, one being a novel and the other being . . . eh, later!

I didn't mean to start anything new in fiction until I had finished going over The Book of the Red King poems and fooled with my out-in-2015 novel a bit more. I had the idea of changing the ending, even though it has been on the publisher's desk for a long time. And I wanted to tinker with the children's novel that has been lying around for entirely too long.

And I certainly didn't want to begin anything in prose until after I visited classes at Wofford College in South Carolina and did a reading at Hub City in November.

But perhaps I have fallen into something new after all. Or perhaps it will wander away . . . And that's all I shall say because you know (if you don't know, see left column) I AM SECRET.

"Come away, come away!"

Poem of magic

Go here to see a complete version of this translation and art
by Kathleen Mooney.

Douglas Hyde and Amargin

from Geoffrey Moorhouse
Sun Dancing:A Vision of Medieval Ireland
(Harcourt, Brace, 1997)

"The old [Irish] stories say that there was a poet, Amargin, who led* the Tuatha Dé Danann when they arrived in Ireland. To him is attributed some Druidic verse which no less an authority than Douglas Hyde--himself a poet, a literary scholar and the first President of Ireland (1938-45)--believed might be the oldest surviving lines in any European vernacular outside Greece. This was Dr Hyde's translation:

I am the wind which breathes upon the sea,
I am the wave of the ocean,
I am the murmur of the billows,
I am the ox of the seven combats,
I am the vulture upon the rock,
I am the fairest of the plants,
I am the wild boar in valour,
I am a salmon in the water,
I am a lake in the plain,
I am a word of knowledge,
I am the point of the lance in battle,
I am the God who creates in the head, the fire.
Who is it who throws light into the meeting on the mountain? 
Who announces the age of the moon (if not I)?
Who reaches the place where the sun couches (if not I)?"

Amargin and Aengus

Versions of these lines exist in translations by Yeats's friend and patron, Lady Gregory, by Robert Graves, and others. I find that especially interesting because of the start of that marvelous Yeats lyric, "The Song of Wandering Aengus": "I went out to the hazel wood, / Because a fire was in my head."

Aengus was one of the Tuatha Dé Danann and a god of eternal youthfulness, but Yeats gives us a mortal Aengus who ages, though the passion for the little silver trout girl reflects the love of the mythic Aengus for Caer, who alternated between swan and young woman. Yeats's wonderful Aengus is no mythic god but a hero who keeps faith with his search for the beautiful and for completion.

The Magic Storm (and Clarke)

*Here is another version and summation of those mythic events, courtesy of Wikipedia, in which Amergin Glúingel is a leader of the Milesians (said to be Gaelic-speaking Celts) against the three kings of the Tuatha Dé Danann (each killed by one of the three surviving sons of Míl Espáine) and later names Ireland after their three queens. Amergin is both bard and judge and sets the rules of engagement, retreating beyond the ninth wave and its magical boundary before the assault begins. They will gain Ireland if they can reach land, and five of Amergin's brothers will die in the attempt.

Amergin sings the poem in order to dispel the magical storm sent by druids to prevent the Milesian forces from reaching Irish soil. (If you are a Susanna Clarke fan, a druidic, magical storm that attempts to halt the Milesians and keep them beyond a barrier of waves might just remind you of the sea blockade of magical rainwater ships in Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.)

The Magic Words

So "The Song of Amergin" (or Amargin, or many other variants--Amairgin, Amorgen, Aimhirghin) is in fact both magic and poem. And who can doubt that a poem should, at its best, be magical and change how we see the world?"

"the centre cannot hold"

 Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
 Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
 The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
 The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
 The best lack all conviction, while the worst
 Are full of passionate intensity.
              --Yeats

Have been watching the news on the computer, listening to the early morning havoc in Boston. Amazing how much wreck and mayhem two young, wild minds can cause. (For that matter, it's amazing how much damage anhydrous ammonia can do in Texas. Or bombs on the other side of the world.) Outside, the birds have not heard and are chirping of better news, and the flowers have not heard of images and go on standing, cold and inviolate. What a beautiful, terribly fallen world.

Addendum: After some chat about the link and implications of what Yeats says on facebook, I should certainly add that in this instance certainly "the best" have been wonderfully forthcoming with help in Boston. I am glad Yeats is a poet, not a certified prophet!

So sad this week for many of the family of man, including that grieving family on the other side of the world whose sons will not come home again... Little brother on the loose, did you admire your elder brother too much?

Faced with assaults on precious pieces of our world and the post-marathon risk of increasing post-terror militarism in this country, we go on, doing what we must do as part of families and businesses and temples and schools and so on. And so do I, along with a thing I feel meant to do: making stories and poems and attempting to support what is fine and worthy in our culture.

"Like a tower"

"Journey's End" with Tretower castle by Clive Hicks-Jenkins.
You can find something I wrote about this piece here.

Poem as tower

Unterecker, A Reader's Guide to William Butler Yeats (p. 107):

By staring at any poem long enough, however, by searching for all possible correlations, we can begin to apprehend details of the internal organization of poetic art. Only if we learn to read Yeats in this way--which is, in fact, a kind of inverse process of composition--can we ever understand what Yeats is trying to make out of poetry. In one sense, each of his poems is no more than a statement architecturally conceived. It is a linguistic design (and so static) which says something (and so seems to be in action.) Like a tower which thrusts up and bears down, which falls in toward a center and which is pushed out by its weight, the poem achieves a repose assembled from precarious antithetical violences.                      

Oddly,

the paradoxes of action and repose above quote reminded me of Augustine's Confessions, where he says, "But you, O Lord, are eternally at work and eternally at rest. It is not in time that you see or in time that you move or in time that you rest: yet you make what we see in time; you make time itself and the repose which comes when time ceases." Later he says, "You are for ever at rest, because you are your own repose."

To be eternally at work and eternally at rest is to have reached perfection, completion, fullness: as is sought in the making of that framework of words called a poem.

Thaliad / surprise / artist and reader

The week past

was a pleasant one for Thaliad, with wonderful things said privately and on the net. As a number of people have asked me if there is anything they can do for Thaliad or another of my 2012 books (A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage, The Foliate Head, and Thaliad), and as I seem to be irredeemably shy about asking people to do anything at all, I am linking to a pretty good list (from somebody who is not a bit shy about telling us!) of what anyone can do for any newish book they want to help. It's accurate enough, though I think that the importance of "likes" and reviews for Amazon's secret algorithm is underestimated. Those things change how (in)visible a book is, and determine whether it comes up as an alternative in searches and "you might like" lists, as well as in such things as Amazon newsletters.

A surprise 

that I hope people will find pleasant is on the way! If you want a hint, go here, although it won't be quite like what has gone before. I'm feeling pleased and glad that other people like Thaliad and want to celebrate it. I'll be recording a portion of the poem this week in advance of this interesting surprise...

Addendum: I wasn't so sure that people would be lured by surprise, but now that I have seen some immediate remarks by people at twitter and facebook, I feel pressed to add here that the work at the link was done by the marvelous Paul Digby, who is a fascinating man--UK-born composer, videographer, photographer, painter, bespoke framemaker, carpenter, etc. He has an artistic sensibility that affects everything he touches. Thank you, Paul!

I left a quote

on poet Dale Favier's blog yesterday, in response to some comments on his second post on Thaliad. I remembered the quote this morning and add it in here, as I think it sums up something I believe and also pays tribute to readers as co-artists:

If an author interprets a poem of his own he limits its suggestibility... Ultimately meaning in art--both meaning of literary symbol and of that greater symbol the work of art itself--is a joint achievement of artist and audience. As the artist pounds into his symbol all the richness he can summon, as he 'takes a word and derives the world from it,' so to the symbol the intelligent reader brings all of the past he has been able to gather into himself. --John Unterecker, from his guide to Yeats

Common things

Clive Hicks-Jenkins interior art for THALIAD

COMMON THINGS

An effective symbol, as a matter of fact, must almost always be based on something as dry, and as familiar as dust. In the long run, the symbolist celebrates the importance of the obvious--by making the obvious important. The great literary symbols have almost all been common things. --John Unterecker, William Butler Yeats, p. 40

So Yeats returns again and again to the moon in all her phases, the sun, the rose, the mask, the tower, the tree, and the bird. I'm thinking again of his great simplicity conjoined with a sense of great artifice, and all in the service of making a seamless edifice of poems.

SYMBOLIC FUNCTION

That function is ultimately one of offering us not "meaning"--no symbol gives us that; it's the worst vehicle in the world for "meaning"--but instead the feeling of meaning, a far different thing, for the feeling of meaning is an undefined sense of order, of rightness, of congruence at the heart of things. --Unterecker, William Butler Yeats

That line sends me to Wallace Stevens and his "metaphysician" twanging on a wire in the dark, letting sounds pass through "sudden rightnesses, wholly / Containing the mind." The poem is a wholeness, the register of completion, a perfect symbol, or what Stevens calls the "finding of a satisfaction."

THALIAD

Here is but a snip of wild weather from Ch. 11, The Rebel Sky:

The roses blossomed on heat’s lattices
In blues no earthly rose could conjure up—
Great cabbage roses, bruising cumulus
With pearly dew that sluiced the prickled stems
And, sliding on cold streams within the air,
Vaulted from a moveable precipice
To slam from heights on wind-lashed surfaces
As lightning’s forests sprouted upside down.

Somewhere impossible to breathe and be,
Where cataracts are ring-tailed roarers seized
And then let go, where hail is grown from dust
Like instant pearls to rattle in the sky.
A power struck war hammers on the rose
And rock of anvil-clouds: the rain obscured,
Erased the land, ascended as a mist.

New visitors: For more on Thaliad, go here, or visit my Scribd site to read excerpts from my three 2012 books, A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage, The Foliate Head, and Thaliad. Review clips and information for those and my 2011 collection, The Throne of Psyche, can be found by clicking on the page tabs above.

St. Valentine's Day / Dulac, Yeats / Thaliad

Edmund Dulac, from Gods and Mortals in Love
Persephone accosted by Hades,
soon to be wrenched from the world of spring.
A Valentine for snowy climes
longing for the return of spring to the earth.
See more of this series at artpassions.net.

Edmund Dulac, Yeats, Valentine's Day

I picked a Dulac image for Valentine's Day, as I have been realizing how close he was to Yeats at various times--right to that strange, macabre business of Yeats's bones, moved from grave to ossuary and confused with others before they were returned to Ireland. I suppose in this age of inspecting the bones of kings, we will be digging him up next, to make sure we have the right pieces of him.

Long ago I felt absolutely transfixed by the presence of bones--if they were his!--in the churchyard under the shadow of Ben Bulben. I was 24, riding my blue-green Peugeot around the perimeter of Ireland. I still love Yeats, and never blame him for being "silly like us," as Auden says, because a major part of his silliness was in order to draw from himself those poems he left behind.

Thaliad in WNC

An article about Thaliad is in this week's The Sylva Herald in western North Carolina. Athough you have to sign up to read the entire piece and see images, alas, a good portion of the article is visible without signing in.

Lines for Valentine's Day--Yeats, again--

The wrong of unshapely things
is a wrong too great to be told;
I hunger to build them anew
and sit on a green knoll apart,  

With the earth and the sky and the water,
remade, like a casket of gold
For my dreams of your image that blossoms
a rose in the deeps of my heart.
           --stanzas from "The Rose in the Deeps of His Heart"

Snowy morning with books

Nemo

Mike and I rolled from bed at five to shovel snow and send your youngest off to Syracuse for a wrestling tournament, as he wanted to see the seniors wrestle in sectionals. My brain is full of light, fluffy stars this morning . . .

Reading Yeats's Ghosts: a few quotes from Yeats I did not recall

I began to wonder whether I have and always have had some nervous weakness inherited from my mother. . . . I escaped from it all as a writer through my sense of style. Is not one's art made out of a struggle in one's soul?

She read no books, but she and the fisherman's wife would tell each other stories that Homer might have told, pleased with any moment of sudden intensity and laughing together over any point of satire.

I have a great sense of abundance--more than I have had for years. George's ghosts have educated me.

Reading Ink and Spirit

There is something about the best poetry that is above time. So when we talk about literature, and put it beside the word 'millennium', there is a danger that we will forget literature's great gift of getting to the heart of things outside the dimension of linear time. In this, religion and literature share a room; poetry, with its sharpened point of word-choice, and polished crystal of rhythm, does it very powerfully. --David Scott, "Religion, Literature, and the Third Millennium"

"All things fall and are built again"

Anyone who chases the muse with energy ends up on a narrow, solitary path. Long ago, I slowly grew to understand that I was opposed to a good deal in contemporary work and the realm of the avant-garde. Then a clearer sense of what I desired to do emerged, in part from rejection of certain books and choices; in that I was no different from any other writer.

My little row of books stands in peaceful opposition to an arts culture that has--in my opinion--embraced quite a few false gods of late. These idols include: a clinging to the ever-diminishing returns of Modernism, once forceful and alive; money as the prime measure of artistic success; decadent, feeble content, often deliberately destructive and scornful of past folk and fairy tales and literary heritage; nihilism; irony; personal navel inspection; popularity as more important than achievement; the stripping-away of vital subject matter and soul; a kind of fascinating tedium; an insistence on so-called "progress" in art, as though art meant merely the advancement of factual knowledge; the radical breakage and abolition of traditional forms; groupthink; the replacement of art and thoughtfulness by relentless entertainment.

Are false culture-gods new?  No, though I think we may have a few extra packed in our bags.

This morning I read Robert Merry's article, "Spengler's Ominous Prophecy." I recall seeing The Decline of the West in my academic father's office when I was child, but have never read Spengler. I found Merry's summation and analysis interesting, in light of our current military forays around the world and domestic events at home, and for what it says about the arts and the flowering and fall of cultures. It is well worth a little rumination, though one may not agree with his conclusions.

My response was mixed; Spengler is inspiring on spatial and mathematical issues and how they relate to a given culture and result in certain kind of architecture, stance, etc. In fact, his ideas about the unity of ideas in a culture fascinate. Was he a pessimistic sort, a melancholic, though? He certainly sees no avenue for escape from his wheels of fate. And as a mother of three children and a writer, I am one small argument against his ideas about the modern "Ibsen woman." His healthy culture seems to be populated entirely by figures like Cather's Antonia, robust peasantry with many children. I rather doubt that his larger argument is built entirely on rock--do we not know a great deal more about the civilizations he studied a century ago? How does new knowledge shake his argument?

As a thinker, he is as mythic as Yeats in his view of history, and as Romantic. His refusal to be sad about what he sees as inevitable decay also reminded me of Yeats and his gyres and his bold world-rebuilders. I found it curious to look through Spengler's Romantic time-telescope. Do I believe him? Sad as I am about some recent world and national events, I have a mustard seed of faith in renewal and rebirth and grace and so identify with the phoenix.

We have yet our beautiful liberty to act.

Artists are likewise, and must preserve their freedom to go a singular way. All quests involve a choice and have a price that must be paid. All things worth doing involve phoenix-like rebirth. And "All things fall and are built again," as Yeats wrote.

Here's a Merry-sample:

The passion for creative expression and new strains of culture knowledge runs on for centuries, generally a thousand years or more unless interrupted by external forces. But eventually it peters out. Then begins that civilizational phase, characterized by the deterioration of the folk traditions and innocent enthusiasms of the culture. Its cultural essence, once of the soil and spread throughout the “mother-region” in town, village and city, now becomes the domain of a few rich and powerful “world-cities,” which twist and distort the concepts of old and replace them with cynicism, cosmopolitanism, irony and a money culture.  

Thus, Spengler draws a sharp distinction between culture and civilization. The former is the phase of creative energy, the “soul” of the countryside; the latter is a time of material preoccupation, the “intellect” of the city. As Hughes elaborates, “So long as the culture phase lasts, the leading figures in a society manifest a sure sense of artistic ‘style’ and personal ‘form.’ Indeed, the breakdown of style and form most clearly marks the transition from culture to civilization.”

Salmagundi for the New Year

LISTEN TO A CASSANDRA?

Thanks to Beth Adams (editor, publisher, writer, artist!) of The Cassandra Pages for listing a novel of mine among her favorites of 2012: "Particular standouts written by friends included Marly Youmans' evocative and poignant novel of an orphan boy-turned-hobo in the depression-era South, A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage. The whole list and discussion is worth a look.

LAST CHANCES: VAL/ORSON

Val/Orson appeared in several hardcover editions, one of which was quite limited and rather expensive. That one, the jacketed hardcover, is still in print. Originally priced at £24.99, the remaining copies are now on sale at £7.99. It was, by the by, editor John Wilson's Book of the Year at Books and Culture Magazine.

YEATS, I LOVE

Stauffer:  "Yeats believed in courage. His commitment to life was as unequivocal as it can ever be in a poet. there was no room in his living for world-weariness, and everyone has noted the miraculously increasing youth and vigor in his writings as he grew older. It is as if life for him were a heady drink, and long quaffing could only increase the frenzy and the Dionysian affirmation." The Golden Nightingale, p. 18.

"Poetry delights us as a manifestation of energy." p. 81

MISSED THE MAYAN MAYDAY MELEE?

For those craving the apocalyptic: Thaliad in all its frabjous beauty, with art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins and design by Beth Adams. Paperback and limited edition paperback links summed up here.

NOTE TO BOOK FOLK IN 2012

This year has got to be the year to banish the horrid view of book as product. Stacks of boxes of Brillo pads. Even painted Warholian stacks of Brillo boxes. Enough!

NOTE TO SELF AND BEES

"Like the bees, [the artists] must put their lives into the sting they give." -Emerson

HOPEFUL THOUGHT FOR A NEW YEAR

George Herbert: "Do not wait; the time will never be 'just right.' Start where you stand, and work with whatever tools you may have at your command, and better tools will be found as you go along."

The symbol in poetry

Because I do not have a picture of a golden nightingale,
I shall instead toss in some birds-of-paradise...
Siem Reap, Cambodia, Fall 2009

I am still enjoying Donald A. Stauffer's The Golden Nightingale: Essays on Some Principles of Poetry in the Lyrics of William Butler Yeats (New York: Macmillan, 1949.) I love the way he used Yeats as a kind of lens to say larger things about poetry.

Professor Stauffer held degrees from the University of Colorado, Princeton, and Oxford; he was a longtime professor at Princeton, a Rhodes scholar, a Guggenheim recipient. Like so many of his generation, he was also schooled in war, a Marine and an Air Combat Intelligence Officer. He wrote a number of books, including a novel and critical books on the nature of poetry and the "intent" of the critic. As a thoughtful critic, he appears to have been useful to both other critics and to poets, and that is an aim almost lost in our time. He died at 50, only three years after this book was published.

Here he is on symbols and Yeats.

* * *

"I am now certain," Yeats writes, "that the imagination has some way of lighting on the truth that the reason has not." What are the characteristics of these imaginative poetic symbols?

1. Each is unified and indivisible.

2. Each has a meaning--since Yeats is no theorist of "pure poetry," content to rest in the ineffable name.

3. Though a symbol is as indivisble as a perfect sphere, one may view its hemispheres, seeing the permanent expressed in the particular, the dreaming in the waking, the boundless in the bounded.

4. This complex meaning is untranslatable; it cannot satisfactorily be expressed in other terms.

5. Each symbols is inexhaustibly suggestive, rooted in the past, whether the past is that of the artist or of mankind.

6. Each symbol has a moral meaning, in the wide sense that a sympathetic awareness of reality makes men better.

7. Each symbol is self-creating, and cannot be deliberately sought.

8. Each symbol grows slowly, its existence often realized before its meaning is understood.

9. Every artist has his central symbol, or a group of related symbols that form a dominating symbolic pattern.

10. And finally, this unified symbol constitutes a revelation.

This, then, is Yeats's decalogue on symbolism, consistently expressed throughout his writings and exemplified in his poems. His own words may give body and beauty to these related propositions, with reinforcements and echoes in the notes. A poetic symbol is unified, meaningful, complex, untranslatable, inexhaustibly suggestive, moral, self-creating, slow-growing, centrally important, and revelatory.

* * *

I must leave my myths and symbols to explain themselves as the years go by and one poem lights up another.
   --Yeats, Poems, 1912