Instruction:
## The Tusks of Blood

    My chant must enclose hell
    And yet here leave behind
    Myself of touch and vow;
    My hour has come when gales—
    The brief song of Greek—
    Have found the inner teeth alone.
    Here listen, someone is calling—
    Why the ugly praise and fate?
    Shall I be a joiner to this
    And leave here the good hope?
    Not to prank the lucky star
    I’ll apologize, wait until
    The great way works for woe!
    Woe? never, you Parsifal;
    Never—and by the trait of love’s
    Light shell, sneering outpour.
    Not to blame—wait, a travel
    For an excuse; a good life lay
    In the real actions, the pomped
    Horn, and the pardons of a door.
    What interfering, cloaked love
    Rules my thoughts!
    Shall I write: O anger, hast thou
    Not treated thy refuging forbear?
    Perhaps I can walk a bit
    To my truthful veins and relate
    The sport of the steeds that trot
    The stirring muscles of an earthly
    Gait and my hearted glow.
    O worm, worm-heated soil,
    Peal sad mereing folds
    Where cometh a home afar;
    And again a slow fainting ghost
    Gliding over a path easily seen. . .
    God! some voices disturb me
    From the inner room;
    I catch the subject: Death!
    Death, what a careless value
    To such aged spirits. Again
    A sad remark. Life not valued
    By such retired souls, who
    Should be apart to believe
    Justice . . .  Ah, man, not thy boast!
    He was a marked lad
    Who poorly helped himself.
    What should this mean?
    Fill your pockets—I’ll let
    You know the grass of a grave.
    O the pillars of silk and good tea,
    Confusion of women, the bare bust—
    Embarrassment, carnal filth
    Of its justice lacks environment;
    O creaking earth, necessity; hell,
    No more wise; then the next child—
    What can he give?
    You pallid stork, gazing—
    Who gazed before you, cooled
    The summer spray?
    Very bad for an apartment Jew to claim
    Everlasting renaissance.
    What a delivery was this,
    Sucked by secret gilded creatures
    Who slew gold for a membrane!
    O tear, sped into the basin
    Of sparkling night aghast in silence,
    And the pipes’ swift pain
    Of the boiling steam shocks uplifting
    You, endless wretch of silver!

—Samuel Greenberg

### __Rights & Access

This poem is in the public domain.

Output:
I’m going to read a poem today about a mostly unknown poet named Samuel
Greenberg, who was born in Vienna in 1893 and died, twenty-three years later,
in 1917. The poem—aside from being fascinating and brilliant, perhaps a great
poem—is illustrative, also in its way, of the huge wave of immigration coming
from southern and eastern Europe at the turn of the last century. And I’m
using it as an illustration of that—particularly of Jewish immigration in the
Lower East Side into America, but mostly Jews who settled in New York City in
the Lower East Side, which of course by this time was well-known for movies
and stories and so on. There, of course, were Italian immigrants and Russian
and Polish and Lithuanian and Hungarian, and so on—immigrants as well, and
their experiences are not to be ignored. And I suspect—I know, in some
respects—almost identical to the Jewish experience.

Between 1881 and 1910, over a million and a half Jews came from Poland,
Russia, and other areas in eastern Europe, and they settled in their ghetto in
the Lower East Side—it wasn’t defined by the government as a ghetto, but it
was a self-imposed ghetto—coming mostly out of limited opportunities and
poverty. There in the ghetto they worked in sweatshops—as we all know,
pushcarts were in the street; as we all know, the streets themselves were
swarming with people as we’ve seen in the movies. The flats they lived in have
been somewhat romanticized because of very, very famous singers, actors,
writers, artists of various types—grew up in that ghetto. The rooms
themselves, the apartments, were dark, smelly coldwater flats, known by the
famous name of “tenement.” Ironically, in the last fifteen years, the Lower
East Side has been gentrified—even large buildings, small skyscrapers, are
being built there. It’s ironic beyond belief.

But Samuel Greenberg was a genius of sorts and, strangely odd in his way, he
both painted and he wrote poetry. He would probably have died unknown, except
that Hart Crane—the great Hart Crane, the great American poet, born in
1898—discovered his poetry somehow and was madly obsessed with it—by the
language, the imagination, the irrational images of Greenberg. And he went so
far as even to . . . well, I’ll use the word copy, I’ll use the word
plagiarize, one poem from Greenberg. Greenberg’s poem is called “Conduct,” and
Crane’s poem is called “Emblems of Conduct.” It is not a major poem of Hart
Crane, and I’m not—how shall I say—putting him down or attacking him for this.
He was overwhelmingly inspired by Greenberg. Of course, Crane’s inspiration
extended beyond Samuel Greenberg, I must say.

At any rate, to get back to him: he fell in love with America in his way, and
he lived in poverty in his early youth. His father was an embroidery worker in
gold and silver and made a decent living, but somehow one of the panics—one of
the depressions or other—he lost everything, and so Samuel was on his own from
the age of sixteen or seventeen on. He got a job in a leather factory. He may
have gone to the seventh or eighth grade, I’m not sure exactly how long—fell
in love with baseball. The family lived at the corner of Suffolk and Grand, a
place then that was . . . he described in one of his prose memoirs as “an
insult of poverty, an insult of life.” He developed, as many others did,
tuberculosis at an early age; spent half of his life, really, in wards and
tuberculosis sanatoriums. Indeed, his last two years he was helpless and died
in such a sanatorium.

As far as poetry is concerned, his chief influences were Keats, Shelley,
and—more than anybody else—Emerson. He did have access to Palgrave’s _Golden
Treasury_ and somehow, as it does to original, isolated poets—like Dickinson,
like Blake, Chatterton—as they somehow get the information—mystically,
magically—it’s theirs. And there is, in his poetry, a rush of sound and image.
He filled seventeen notebooks with drawings and poems, mostly in pencil, and
it took weeks and months, even years, to decipher some of these. Maybe twenty
to thirty percent of the work has been published. And it was for the
work—through the praise and discovery of him—by the well-known poet and critic
Allen Tate, that Greenberg’s work became available. Tate said, among other
things, that no history of the 20th century, of 20th century poetry, would be
complete without reference to Greenberg.

There are so many things to say about him, but I’m going to read one poem and
then I’m going to say a few words about his strange and unique and beautiful
autobiography that he wrote of about eighteen pages. I’m going to read a few
words from that. So we go to the poem itself, “Tusks of Blood.” As far as I
can decipher it, the poem, which is written in alternate three- and four-
stressed lines, is an awareness—an experience—of a birth in one of those flats
that I discovered next door.

And the ending, “endless wretch of silver,” probably refers to the steam
radiators, though it may refer to the silver—the child may have been
emblematic—or it may have been the symbol of the child or the silver nitrate
that was poured into his eyes, I don’t know. But I want to say that in the
autobiography—I’m just sort of explaining it in his strange and innocent
language—I’m going to read one or two short passages.

> We often found our father laboring over a frame of gold, a real axel easily
> remembered, some working maidens at his side, and perhaps even our mother
> took part in the exquisite handling of thread and stitch. Some pure, Hebrew
> atmosphere gathered between our doors, rabbi and priest, Negro and Greek,
> such fathoms of character sprang up between the embroidery tasks.

And then his mother’s death—

> Life was now a spongy condition. Our mother gradually became ill. Ear
> trouble, germ trouble, nose trouble, skull trouble, death trouble, resulted
> and the family buried her, somewhere on Long Island, where a cemetery called
> Washington was the grave for many poor victims, as our un-praised love was
> settled. We returned to a café near the dune place, where gathered a party
> of thirty or more, ate cheese and eggs, with a schooner of beer and coffee.
> The rituals of the Jewish religion demand that one remain seated for seven
> days upon the floor. Well, we sat on soft cushions.

And finally, finally at the very end he says—

> And it happened again that the old story of weakness [and he’s referring,
> here, to tuberculosis] returned. I was taken to the hospital of descending
> charity, where things became a careful selection through sanitation and
> rest. Where was school? Oh, what I would give for the knowledge of
> grammatical truth. But I saw that science is perfection, as long as the
> world exists”

And so, I’m going to end with that. Thank you. ****


Instruction:
## Swedenborg (from “Tradition”)

    Well he saw man created according
    to the motion of the elements. He located
    the soul: in the blood. Retired
    at last––to a house where he paid
    window-tax (for increasing the light!).
    Lived simply. Gardened. Saw visions.

    Nothing for supper but tea.
    Now he saw the soul from his “Pray,
    what is matter” leave for the touchy
    ––heavens!––blue rose kind of thing.
    Strange––he did grow a blue rose,
    you know.

    *

    I lost you to water, summer
    when the young girls swim,
    to the hot shore
    to little peet-tweet-
                   pert girls.

    Now it’s cold your bright knock
    ––Orion’s with his dog after him––
    at my door, boy
    on a winter
                          wave ride.

    *

    I married

    in the world’s black night
    for warmth
                          if not repose.
                          At the close––

    someone.

    I hid with him
    from the long range guns.
                        We lay leg
                         in the cupboard, head

    in closet.

    A slit of light
    at no bird dawn––
                       Untaught
                        I thought
    he drank

    too much.
    I say

                        I married
                        and lived unburied.

    I thought––

    *

    You see here
    the influence
    of inference

    Moon on rippled
    stream

    “Except as
    and unless”

    *

    Your erudition
    the elegant flower
    of which

    my blue chicory
    at scrub end

    of ditch

    illuminates

    *

    Alone

    a still state hard
    as sard

    then again whisper-talk
    preserved in chalk

    At last no (TV) gun
    no more coats than one

    no hair lightener
    Sweethearts of the whiter

    walls

    *

    Why can’t I be happy
    in my sorrow

    my drinking man
    today

    my quiet
    tomorrow

    *

    And what you liked
    or did––
    no matter
    once the moon
    dipped down
    and fish rose
    from under

    *

    Cleaned all surfaces
    and behind all solids
    and righted leaning things

    Considered then, becurtained
    the metaphysics
    of flight from housecleanings

    *

    Young in Fall I said: the birds
    are at their highest thoughts
    of leaving

    Middle life said nothing––
    grounded
    to a livelihood

    Old age––a high gabbling gathering
    before goodbye
    of all we know

—Lorine Niedecker

### __Rights & Access

Lorine Niedecker, “Swedenborg (from “Tradition”)” from Collected Works.
Copyright © 2004 by Lorine Niedecker. University of California Press.

Reprinted by permission of Bob Arnold, literary executor.

Output:
Lorine Niedecker was born on May 12, 1903, and died on December 31, 1970. She
lived most of her life in a rural landscape on Black Hawk Island near Fort
Atkinson, Wisconsin. It wouldn’t be out of line to say that she had two homes
in her life: the one by water (“The Brontës had their moors, I have my
marshes,” she once wrote), and the avant-garde poetry scene birthed in 1931 in
the Objectivist issue of _Poetry_ magazine, which she read. Almost immediately
thereafter Niedecker began a correspondence with Louis Zukofsky that was to
last the rest of her life. At this point in her writing she veered away from
earlier influences of the Imagists and Surrealists. She began sending her work
to _Poetry_ , where it was accepted. Eventually she became a central member of
the Objectivists, the only female poet in the group.

Letters were a crucial companion, and no doubt sustaining to her art, and to
the art of those she wrote. Among her epistolary friends were Marianne Moore,
William Carlos Williams, Cid Corman, and Clayton Eshelman.

She wrote ground-breaking work, addressing subject matters of gender, work,
sexual politics, social politics, marriage, and domesticity long before
others. She developed a lyric that was both clear and complicated, ever-alive
to eccentricities and shifts of American vernacular, sounding vowels and
consonants alongside the intricate movements of the natural world. She never
quite left Surrealism in that there was an ever-abiding interest in the
subconscious. While her experimentation was cosmopolitan, and her range of
reference global and century-spanning, her idiom was of the folk.

I’ll read an excerpt from her poem “Tradition,” written in 1965. This section
of the poem is subtitled “Swedenborg,” referring to the 18th century Swedish
scientist, philosopher and mystic.


Instruction:
## Drum-Taps

    **Beat! Beat! Drums!**
    Beat! beat! drums!—blow! bugles! blow!
    Through the windows—through doors—burst like a ruthless force,
    Into the solemn church, and scatter the congregation,
    Into the school where the scholar is studying,
    Leave not the bridegroom quiet—no happiness must he have now with his bride,
    Nor the peaceful farmer any peace, ploughing his field or gathering his grain,
    So fierce you whirr and pound you drums—so shrill you bugles blow.

    Beat! beat! drums!—blow! bugles! blow!
    Over the traffic of cities—over the rumble of wheels in the streets;
    Are beds prepared for sleepers at night in the houses? no sleepers must sleep
                   in those beds,
    No bargainers’ bargains by day—no brokers or speculators—would they continue?
    Would the talkers be talking? would the singer attempt to sing?
    Would the lawyer rise in the court to state his case before the judge?
    Then rattle quicker, heavier drums—you bugles wilder blow.

    Beat! beat! drums!—blow! bugles! blow!
    Make no parley—stop for no expostulation,
    Mind not the timid—mind not the weeper or prayer,
    Mind not the old man beseeching the young man,
    Let not the child’s voice be heard, nor the mother’s entreaties,
    Make even the trestles to shake the dead where they lie awaiting the hearses,
    So strong you thump O terrible drums—so loud you bugles blow.

    **Cavalry Crossing a Ford**
    A line in long array where they wind betwixt green islands,
    They take a serpentine course, their arms flash in the sun—hark to the musical
                 clank,
    Behold the silvery river, in it the splashing horses loitering stop to drink,
    Behold the brown-faced men, each group, each person a picture, the negligent
                  rest on the saddles,
    Some emerge on the opposite bank, others are just entering the ford—while,
    Scarlet and blue and snowy white,
    The guidon flags flutter gayly in the wind.

    **Bivouac on a Mountain Side**
    I see before me now a traveling army halting,
    Below a fertile valley spread, with barns and the orchards of summer,
    Behind, the terraced sides of a mountain, abrupt, in places rising high,
    Broken, with rocks, with clinging cedars, with tall shapes dingily seen,
    The numerous camp-fires scatter'd near and far, some away up on the mountain,
    The shadowy forms of men and horses, looming, large-sized,  flickering,
    And over all the sky—the sky! far, far out of reach, Studded, breaking out, the
                eternal stars.

    **Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field one Night**
    When you my son and my comrade dropt at my side that day,
    One look I but gave which your dear eyes return’d with a look I shall never forget,
    One touch of your hand to mine O boy, reach’d up as you lay on the ground,
    Then onward I sped in the battle, the even-contested battle,
    Till late in the night reliev’d to the place at last again I made my way,
    Found you in death so cold dear comrade, found your body son of responding
                kisses, (never again on earth responding,)
    Bared your face in the starlight, curious the scene, cool blew the moderate night-
                wind,
    Long there and then in vigil I stood, dimly around me the battle-field spreading,
    Vigil wondrous and vigil sweet there in the fragrant silent night,
    But not a tear fell, not even a long-drawn sigh, long, long I gazed,
    Then on the earth partially reclining sat by your side leaning my chin in my hands,
    Passing sweet hours, immortal and mystic hours with you dearest comrade—not a
               tear, not a word,
    Vigil of silence, love and death, vigil for you my son and my soldier,
    As onward silently stars aloft, eastward new ones upward stole,
    Vigil final for you brave boy, (I could not save you, swift was your death,
    Faithfully loved you and cared for you living, I think we shall surely meet again,)
    Till at latest lingering of the night, indeed just as the dawn appear’d,
    My comrade I wrapt in his blanket, envelop’d well his form,
    Folded the blanket well, tucking it carefully over head and carefully under feet,
    And there and then and bathed by the rising sun, my son in his grave, in his rude-
              dug grave I deposited,
    Ending my vigil strange with that, vigil of night and battle-field dim,
    Vigil for boy of responding kisses, (never again on earth responding,)
    Vigil for comrade swiftly slain, vigil I never forget, how as day brighten’d,
    I rose from the chill ground and folded my soldier well in his blanket,
    And buried him where he fell.

    **Look  Down, Fair Moon**
    Look down, fair moon and bathe this scene,
    Pour softly down night's nimbus floods, on faces ghastly, swollen, purple;
    On the dead, on their backs, with their arms toss'd wide,
    Pour down your unstinted nimbus, sacred moon.

—Walt Whitman

### __Rights & Access

These poems are in the public domain.

Output:
This is J. D. McClatchy, and I’m recording this on June the 11th, 2012, in the
midst of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War. These four years the country
is commemorating the terrible events of those days so long ago, and on June
the 11th, 1862, the South was enjoying a series of stinging victories. And I
have in front of me a copy of a letter that General Lee wrote to Stonewall
Jackson saying,

> General, your recent successes have been the cause of the liveliest joy in
> this army as well as in the country. The admiration excited by your skill
> and boldness has been constantly mingled with solicitude for your situation.
> The practicality of reinforcing you has been the subject of earnest
> consideration. It has been determined to do so at the expense of weakening
> this army.

And so on and so forth, as General Lee planned his great campaign.

The Civil War remains the most cataclysmic and tragic event in our history.
Behind the struggle, driving its purpose and passions, loomed the greatest of
issues: the fate of a country and the rights of its people. Hateful decisions
were at the heart of the conflict. A Northern sense of justice and a Southern
sense of honor, moral principle and emotional pride, drove men to their deaths
amid the terrors of war—the deafening noise, the blinding smoke, the ground
slick with blood, the cries of the fallen. Over 620,000 soldiers died during
those four years, nearly as many as in all of America’s other wars combined.
Proud cities were put to the torch, civilian populations were brutalized,
fertile countryside was reduced to wasteland, brother fought against brother,
and there was not a household in the land that did not have a loss to mourn.
The very names of the fearsome battles and valiant commanders ring in people’s
memories with the force of myth. The grandeur and pathos of the two shredded
armies never failed to thrill. In the end, slavery would be abolished,
succession defeated, and a new nation born in fire, blood, and sorrow. And
each side in the conflict would discover its tragic hero: for the South,
Robert E. Lee, whom I just quoted—the model Virginia gentlemen who fought for
the lost cause with audacious skill and relentless determination; for the
North, Abraham Lincoln, the martyred redeemer president who spoke for American
democracy with an eloquence unmatched in our history. It is such stuff as
epics are made on. And yet, it seems strange that no one great sweeping poem,
no American Iliad, ever emerged from this most momentous event in the lives
and imaginations of Americans.

Individual poets did write, of course, and we have as our substitute for an
epic poem marvelous lyric takes and moral meditations by Herman Melville and,
above all, Walt Whitman, whose collection in 1867 called _Drum Taps_ brought
together the poems he had written, both in the field and back in Washington,
about episodes in the Civil War, in which he worked tirelessly as a nurse in
the field hospitals.


Instruction:
## The Other Side of the River

    Easter again, and a small rain falls
    On the mockingbird and the housefly,
    					on the Chevrolet

    In its purple joy
    And the TV antennas huddled across the hillside—

    Easter again, and the palm trees hunch
    Deeper beneath their burden,
    				The dark puddles take in

    Whatever is given them,
    And nothing rises more than halfway out of itself—

    Easter with all its little mouths open in the rain.
    			_____________

    There is no metaphor for the spring’s disgrace,
    No matter how much the rose leaves look like bronze dove
       hearts,
    No matter how much the plum trees preen in the wind.

    For weeks I’ve thought about the Savannah River,
    For no reason,
    	    and the winter fields around Garnett, South Carolina
    My brother and I used to hunt
    At Christmas,
    		Princess and Buddy working the millet stands
    And the vine-lipped face of the pine woods
    In their languorous zig-zags,
    The quail, when they flushed, bursting like shrapnel points
    Between the trees and the leggy shrubs
    					   into the undergrowth,
    Everything else in motion as though under water,
    My brother and I, the guns, their reports tolling from far away
    Through the aqueous, limb-filtered light,
    December sun like a single tropical fish
    Uninterested anyway,
    			Suspended and holding still
    In the coral stems of the pearl-dusked and distant trees . . .

    There is no metaphor for any of this,
    Or the meta-weather of April,
    The vinca blossoms like deep bruises among the green.
    			_____________
    It’s linkage I’m talking about,
    		  and harmonies and structures
    And all the various things that lock our wrists to the past.

    Something infinite behind everything appears,
    					 and then disappears.

    It’s all a matter of how
    you narrow the surfaces.
    It’s all a matter of how you fit in the sky.
                                            _____________

    Often, at night, when the stars seem as close as they do now,
        and as full,
    And the trees balloon and subside in the way they do
    					   when the wind is right,
    As they do now after the rain,
    			        the sea way off with its false sheen,
    And the sky that slick black of wet rubber,
    I’m 15 again, and back on Mt. Anne in North Carolina
    Repairing the fire tower,
    Nobody else around but the horse I packed in with,
    				    and five days to finish the job.
    Those nights were the longest night I ever remember,
    The lake and pavilion 3,000 feet below
    				        as though modeled in tinfoil,
    And even more distant than that,
    The last fire out, the after-reflection of Lake Llewellyn
    Aluminum glare in the sponged dark,
    Lightning bugs everywhere,
    			        the plump stars
    Dangling and falling near on their black strings.

    These nights are like that,
    The silvery alphabet of the sea
    				increasingly difficult to transcribe,
    And larger each year, everything farther away, and less clear,
    Than I want it to be,
    		        not enough time to do the job,
    And faint thunks in the earth,
    As though somewhere nearby a horse was nervously pawing
        the ground.

    I want to sit by the bank of the river,
    		 in the shade of the evergreen tree,
    And look in the face of whatever,
    		          the whatever that’s waiting for me.
                                            _____________

    There comes a point when everything starts to dust away
    More quickly than it appears,
    		          when what we have to comfort the dark
    Is just that dust, and just its going away.

    25 years I used to sit on this jut of rocks
    As the sun went down like an offering through the glaze
    And backfires of Monterey Bay,
    And anything I could think of was mine because it was there
    			in front of me, numinously everywhere,
    Appearing and piling up . . .

    So to have come to this,
    		    remembering what I did do, and what I
                                     didn’t do,
    The gulls whimpering over the boathouse,
    				                the monarch butterflies
    Cruising the flower beds,
    And all the soft hairs of spring thrusting up through the wind,
    And the sun, as it always does,
    	         dropping into its slot without a click,
    Is a short life of trouble.

—Charles Wright

### __Rights & Access

“The Other Side of the River” Charles Wright from _The World of Ten Thousand
Things: Poems, 1980-1990_. Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux, 1991.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Output:
This is James Tate reading “The Other Side of the River” by Charles Wright.

[Did this poem deepen or complicate conventional notions of American
identity?]

Well, I … I mean obviously I’m going to say yes, just because it has many
elements throughout it, throughout the poem, that might sound familiar to most
readers of American poetry—it’s its place and youth and specific memories, and
so on. But then for him to arrive at the incredible last line in the poem, “Is
a short life of trouble,” I mean, that’s pretty shocking and it jolts you to
think back on the whole poem and wonder how you got there and so on. And the
poem holds up to such scrutiny.

[How do you relate to this, the speaker in this poem, or as Charles Wright?]

I guess I’d like to go hunting with him, you know, hunting quail. There are
such beautiful memories, and so on, of childhood in the South, in the fire
tower, and hunting with his brother, and things like that. Yeah, he’s a
familiar guy and somebody I feel I care about.

[How has this poem informed your work, specifically in terms of identity?]

It hasn’t.

Well, I’ll speak about Charles Wright particularly. He spent most of his life
detailing subjects centered, always, around him and his world and … I mean,
there are no imaginary flights, supposedly, though of course there are in
language—language is the great conveyor of both his subject and his poetics,
you know? And so he seems like he’s locked into some very narrow thing, namely
the self, but in truth, it gets very large and wide thanks to his great use of
language, and his love of language, and the rhythm, and things of that sort.


Instruction:
## XIII (Dedications)

    I know you are reading this poem
    late, before leaving your office
    of the one intense yellow lamp-spot and the darkening window
    in the lassitude of a building faded to quiet
    long after rush-hour.      I know you are reading this poem
    standing up in a bookstore far from the ocean
    on a gray day of early spring, faint flakes driven
    across the plains' enormous spaces around you.
    I know you are reading this poem
    in a room where too much has happened for you to bear
    where the bedclothes lie in stagnant coils on the bed
    and the open valise speaks of flight
    but you cannot leave yet.    I know you are reading this poem
    As the underground train loses momentum and before
                  running up the stairs
    toward a new kind of love
    your life has never allowed.
    I know you are reading this poem by the light
    of the television screen where soundless images jerk and slide
    while you wait for the newscast from the intifada.
    I know you are reading this poem in a waiting-room
    of eyes met and unmeeting, of identity with strangers.
    I know you are reading this poem by fluorescent light
    in the boredom and fatigue of the young who are counted out,
    count themselves out, at too early an age.     I know
    you are reading this poem through your failing sight, the thick
    lens enlarging these letters beyond all meaning yet you read on
    because even the alphabet is precious.
    I know you are reading this poem as you pace beside the stove
    warming milk, a crying child on your shoulder, a book in your hand
    because life is short and you too are thirsty.
    I know you are reading this poem which is not in your language
    guessing at some words while others keep you reading
    and I want to know which words they are.
    I know you are reading this poem listening for something,
                     torn between bitterness and hope
    turning back once again to the task you cannot refuse.
    I know you are reading this poem because there is nothing
                     else left to read
    there where you have landed, stripped as you are.

—Adrienne Rich

### __Rights & Access

Part XIII “(Dedications)” from “An Atlas of the Difficult World”. Copyright ©
2016 by the Adrienne Rich Literary Trust.

Copyright © 1991 by Adrienne Rich, from COLLECTED POEMS: 1950-2012 by Adrienne
Rich.

Used by Permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Audio recording use by
permission of The Frances Goldin Literary Agency.

Output:
I'm Jane Hirshfield, reading “(Dedications),” by Adrienne Rich.

“(Dedications)” is the final section of Adrienne Rich's thirteen-part “An
Atlas of the Difficult World.” The full poem is a work of stocktaking, an
inventory both personal and cultural. It was finished almost thirty years ago,
in 1991: the year of the first Gulf War, of Rodney King's beating and Anita
Hill's disregarded testimony, the year of the break-up of the Soviet Union, of
CNN and the 24 hour news cycle, of the unstoppable, rising death toll of HIV-
AIDS. Read decades after its writing, “An Atlas of the Difficult World”
remains a startlingly relevant map of unsolved griefs.

“(Dedications),” the poem's closing section, offers what also abides: its
relevant solace. The poem is a litany of community-summoning and blessing. It
holds an album of lives, and of longings, recognized and unrecognized both.
The poem creates, too, in the way that art's outward looking makes almost
always also a mirror, a self-portrait of its author. Rich's own longing,
fears, and hope are here, and her fierce, lifelong, unrelenting desire to
write words that might serve.

Rich was a poet of political awareness, ecological awareness, social
awareness, eros awareness, and language awareness. She wrote from and of the
inseparability of these ways of seeing and feeling, and she wrote of shared
lives and shared fates. One of this poem's central intentions and gifts is the
way it enacts and expands our sense of what and who we might mean when we say
the word “we.” She described poetry as “a liberative language, connecting us
to others like and unlike ourselves.” The definition of liberation as
connection—with not only the like but the unlike—was for Rich a foundational
value. The same contract is at the core of any genuinely democratic self-
governance, and at the core of a working literature, a working relationship, a
working compassion.

Rich sets into “(Dedications)” both our necessary solitudes and our necessary
ties. Each person described here stands or sits inside one moment alone
(inside the reader's necessary and focusing solitude, inside the inner life),
and at the same time is in a world among and with others. The figures resemble
those in the separate windows of a painting by Edward Hopper. Yet the central,
great sleight of tongue in this poem is the way its shape-shifting,
transformative second-person “you” makes of separate lives the felt experience
of a communal whole. We see the lives in the windows and we step inside them,
inside the continuous world we also live in.

It's worth pausing to look more closely at the way this experience is made.
The “you” addressed in each sentence is singular, local, specific—a person
young or old, in love, in exhaustion, in grief or hope or desperation, each of
them reaching back for these words from within their own distinct place in the
difficult world. And yet each uttered “you” cannot help but also be heard by
the person now reading the poem as himself, as herself. We read that simple,
acknowledging phrase, “and you too are thirsty,” and, each time, “I am” comes
as answer.

To change one into many and many into one is one of the alchemical
possibilities of the second-person pronoun in English. It's also, in a larger
way, one of the alchemies of poetry itself: whatever comes into awareness
while reading a poem becomes subjective. We read poems as we see: from the
inside. And we read poems as we feel and understand anything: with the heart-
mind’s unboundaried capacity for empathy.

This poem is propelled by empathy. The poem is also propelled by its craft of
music and structure. It moves on the twin devices of list and anaphora's
parallel structure, the way each sentence begins with the same set of words.
Any American poet reading “(Dedications)” cannot help but hear in it also some
trace of the earlier voice of Walt Whitman, who set out to define a still-new
country in part by his own many lists. Any poem with a list of a certain
length signals “more”—that the list could go on without end. Whitman summoned
our American awareness of a vast and shared country by naming its almost
infinite parts and labors, its lives and places. He founded an understanding
of American poetry as one that takes up (in some of its poems, by no means
all) that larger task: the creation of a shared, unconfining definition of the
country's nature, not by generalization but by an embrace of the actual
topography of the real, in our lives and in the lives of others. Whitman set
out to create and strengthen the warmly affectionate “we” of “ _E Pluribus
Unum”_ — “from many one.” “(Dedications)” takes up that task in turn.

Both Whitman and Rich wrote, too, in the grief of America's still-
incompletion—grief that this great “we” remains fragile, in progress,
imperiled. Both Rich and Whitman are poets unblinded to our profound
imperfection, yet hopeful: they set out to make with their words the country
they hoped might exist. Rich was a poet and an activist of inclusion. No one
was abandoned by her gaze or by the rigor of her compassion even in judgment.
Dignity and the fullness of being were for her both words' and life's measure.

Rich knew well that her work was part of a longer historical arc. But her
“wild patience”—the phrase comes from another book's title, _A Wild Patience
Has Taken Me This Far_ —meant she could not simply wait and hope that the rest
of the country would someday join her. “Poetry,” she said in one interview,
“can add its grain to an accumulation of consciousness against the idea that
there is no alternative.” She was in this work of possibility-addition for the
long run. However dark her poems' vision could at times be, Rich meant to
counter despair. She meant to increase our hunger for justice, for dignity,
for a sane politics, sane relationships, and a sane ecological ethic. Her
steady, life-saving envisioning of what she found present, what she saw
missing, cut windows into the walls of our separation, doors into the silences
of our ignorance, complacency, inattention. Reading Rich can feel as if each
poem were the conjuring of a password into a life more awake, alert, and
unguarded. That is my experience reading this poem, in which she imagines and
summons her readers, her plural, singular, thirsty, companions: You _._ I. We.


Instruction:
## American Coma

    I believe in the burned field,
    the sailboat on the sill
    of a desert farmhouse.

    That stars on the undersides of our skulls
    can spell the way home
    even when the lights have gone out,
    the maps again erased.

    The fray of a rope. Chafe of my hands.
    Black horses broken loose
    over a trampled dawn—your body
    beneath the tin of a bent truck grating.
    Footprints at the edge of the earth
    where they found you. Magdalena

    I believe you became the clouds,
    the Sangre de Cristos’ pink rim of morning,
    the musk of your blood on my t-shirt as I drive away,
    all smoke and sooty desert in my rearview.

    It’s not the fantasy of a land that survives
    but its rocks, redwoods, ghosts,
    armadillos crushed in roadside gutters through Texas—

    I believe their blood can stay with you
    six hundred miles to the Mexican gulf,
    that you can use their remains
    to bind bear claws, cowrie shells,
    something to dance with.

    That when you awake you will not remember
    any of this: the sirens, sticky
    tubes they cocooned around you

    the way you looked at me from behind the in-patient door,
    eyes empty boats dozing on the edge
    and I on the rocks peering into waves
    piecing together fins out of crushed armadillos
    picked up from the roadsides I traveled to find you
    where Chevy appendages, cigarette-butts,
    the birdfood of petrified Wonderbread crusts
    are the songs of detached, mechanical wings.

    I believe
    when America awakes
    she will not remember any of this:
    you smashed over the precipice—
    a pipe dream hinged upon a dead saguaro root.

    Your pages flapping, tar-stained,
    blown into shadows of buttes.

    I gather you like kindling,
    set you on fire, the fugue of black
    horses drowning in the surf.

—Jennifer Elise Foerster

### __Rights & Access

"American Coma" Jennifer Elise Foerster from _Leaving Tulsa_. University of
Arizona Press, 2013.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Output:
This poem, “American Coma”, is from a book by young, Muskogee Creek poet
Jennifer Elise Foerster called _Leaving Tulsa_. It’s a beautiful book, a new
book of poems, and they really remind me of the urgent vision fueling
Kerouac’s _On the Road_ and, for Muskogee people, we’ve been on the road for
quite a while, from the Southeastern part of the United States and a long walk
from there to Oklahoma. And the book is … and this poem is … I feel like this
poem, it’s … the whole book is embedded in this poem, is a young Muskogee
woman carrying that walk in her and leaving for other places in America, like
the Southwest, like the Bay Area, and the road is demanding, you know, the
road to becoming a human being, the road to acknowledging the story or the
historical trauma that marks everyone in this country, every American, every
American has to deal with the effects of colonization. And the outcome here of
this, you know, is the damage inflicted, inflicted by America—America the
person, America the being, America the hungry beast.

She begins with “I believe in the burned field,” and that last stanza is
startling: “I gather you like kindling,/ set you on fire, the fugue of black/
horses drowning in the surf.” Fire is the transformer. Fire makes ashes. Fire
is spirit and it takes every … it transforms us to the most basic part of
ourselves. And then, of course, the appearance of these black horses—these
horses that represent, in so many of our poems, in indigenous writers and
American writers, too, I believe, they represent, in a sense, that spirit, the
spirit of the free America, the America of multicultural ideas and energy. So
in this poem, she’s putting the story of a broken people back together; she’s
making a road home, maybe even cleaning the road home for the people, for the
person in this story who’s been broken, and for her own brokenness and the
brokenness of a whole country.

A coma suggests that the body is here, and the spirit is out roaming around
and is unsettled and doesn’t really feel ready to come back and take on this
particular life. But the poem is hopeful because, as Foerster says, “I
believe/ when America awakes/ she will not remember any of this:/ you smashed
over the precipice—/ a pipe dream hinged upon a dead saguaro root.” So
Foerster in this poem and this book of poems is really … exemplifies the next
generation of young indigenous poets who are overlapping my generation—a
generation that came up through indigenous movements, indigenous rights
movements. And I know, I’d been looking, many of us had been looking, to see
who was out there and who was coming up, and here they are, and here is
Jennifer with this very powerful voice.


Instruction:
## Making Peace

    A voice from the dark called out,
                 ‘The poets must give us
    imagination of peace, to oust the intense, familiar
    imagination of disaster. Peace, not only
    the absence of war.’
                                       But peace, like a poem,
    is not there ahead of itself,
    can’t be imagined before it is made,
    can’t be known except
    in the words of its making,
    grammar of justice,
    syntax of mutual aid.
                                           A feeling towards it,
    dimly sensing a rhythm, is all we have
    until we begin to utter its metaphors,
    learning them as we speak.
                                                  A line of peace might appear
    if we restructured the sentence our lives are making,
    revoked its reaffirmation of profit and power,
    questioned our needs, allowed
    long pauses . . .
                            A cadence of peace might balance its weight
    on that different fulcrum; peace, a presence,
    an energy field more intense than war,
    might pulse then,
    stanza by stanza into the world,
    each act of living
    one of its words, each word
    a vibration of light—facets
    of the forming crystal.

—Denise Levertov

### __Rights & Access

Denise Levertov, “Making Peace” from _Breathing the Water_.

Copyright © 1987 by Denise Levertov.

Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.

Output:
Hello, this is Juan Felipe Herrera, Poet Laureate of the United States 2015 to
2017. I want to read you a poem by one of favorite poets, Denise Levertov. It
is titled “Making Peace” from her book _Breathing the Water,_ published in
1997 by New Directions Press.

So now we look at the poem a little bit. Think about it a little bit. I’ve
always loved Denise Levertov, her writing, her position as a poet, her
relentless giving of her poems to the people, to this thing we call “social
reality” that many have struggled with, to deal with. _Is it real? Is it
perception? Is it just atomic particles?_ Denise, maybe she includes all that
in here. But really, she’s in _it._ Let me just say that. Even though she was
called, her poetry was called sentimentalist, her poetry was called not
poetry. But it was something like, the term “pamphleteering.” It’s a pamphlet,
it’s a small broadside, it’s a piece of a newspaper. So she received a lot of
criticism. Kind of literary bullying. But you know that’s what Denise is made
of, she responds to a bigger picture. She continued talking about, writing
about the Detroit riots, about Vietnam, about women’s position in society,
writing essays, writing about poetry and writing about everything that’s in
this poem. The indescribable. _What is that voice? What is that darkness? What
is that absence of war? Do we know what that is?_ It sounds easy. Four words:
the absence of war.

I don’t think we need any ornamentalist layering and refiguring and
emulsifying – that in itself is a key question that this poem offers. And she
converts it to a poem. That piece like a poem is “not there ahead of itself,”
she says. Ahead of itself. Peace is not ahead of itself. That’s another
insight, that is another insight. You and I, the reader, has to deal with
that. _What is this thing called that not be ahead of itself? Can we be not
ahead of ourselves? Can our life be not ahead of itself?_ And when we are
that, we are closer to peace. We are closer to the raw, full imagination of
what peace is. If we are conjuring forward, it’s fantasy perhaps. It’s a plan
perhaps. It’s an agenda perhaps. But it is not now where peace happens, can’t
happen and most of all can be made. And I really enjoy how she speaks about
the poem, its materials, its elements and how peace is like that. And most of
all, how it’s all threaded and structured as, she says, in our lives, in our
life, stuff. She talks about rhythm, she talks about restructuring “the
sentence our lives are making,” she says, “Revoked its reaffirmation of profit
and power.” That is something that we can do, that we must do in this poem
called peace, in making this poem called peace making, “Making Peace” as she
talks about loooong pauses, “until we begin to utter its metaphors, / learning
them as we speak,” she says. And then later on, allowing the long pauses.

And that’s another key in this poem – there is the making of things and then
there is the long pause and pauses, inside and perhaps outside the making. And
that is a paradox – making and not-making, being and not-being, being ahead
and being here in the now and the cadence of it and the balance of it. And the
energy of it. She says, “an energy field more intense than war,” the cadence
of peace. You tell me if this is simplistic. You tell me if this is
sentimentalist. And she goes on stanza by stanza into the world. As we make
peace, as we make our lives in the present, outside profit and power, outside
the “imagination of disaster,” as she says. We are in the act of living. And I
think this was Denise Levertov, writing about Vietnam, writing about the
Detroit riots, writing about women’s life in society and the power grid,
writing about the inside and the outside. And herself being kind of an
outsider, born in England and growing up becoming a bigger poet here in the
United States. An outsider and an insider. She spoke in her essays _Light up
the Cave,_ around the same decade or so when _Breathing the Water_ came out
about the outscape and the inscape of the poem, writing about what’s out there
and writing about our interiority and how they’re both related, interrelated.
And in a way this poem does that too, talking about war and profit and power
and talking about each act of living. And the ending of the poem, each word,
she says, “a vibration of light—facets / of the forming crystal.” Here is this
new universe and it begins with these crystals. And these crystals have facets
and these facets are acts of living. I know this sounds like I’m reading these
big pieces of thick wood or pasting them together and creating a statement
about her writing, about this poem. That’s not really it. These are just the
materials of this poem that you and I have to address and reflect on and find
what being is, find what presence is, find what the absence of war is, find
what making our lives is all about, and find what making peace is.

So let us thank Denise Levertov for a wonderful life, for incredible poetry
and for being concerned with the big questions, of war and peace, being,
humanity, and how it can be made with our own life.


Instruction:
## Come to the Stone. . .

    The child saw the bombers skate like stones across the fields
    As he trudged down the ways the summer strewed
    With its reluctant foliage; how many giants
    Rose and peered down and vanished, by the road
    The ants had littered with their crumbs and dead.

    “That man is white and red like my clown doll,”
    He says to his mother, who has gone away.
    “I didn’t cry, I didn’t cry.”
    In the sky the planes are angry like the wind.
    The people are punishing the people—why?

    He answers easily, his foolish eyes
    Brightening at that long simile, the world.
    The angels sway about his story like balloons.
    A child makes everything—except his death—a child’s.
    _Come to the stone and tell me why I died._

—Randall Jarrell

### __Rights & Access

"Come to the Stone..." by Randall Jarrell from _The Complete Poems_.

Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux, 1971.

Used by permission of the publisher.

Output:
I locate the intense experience this poem offers me in the plain speech of the
lines. “The people are punishing the people, why?” It’s such plain speech. The
line isn’t in quotation marks. It’s the poem’s speaker or the poet who asks
why, not the child, isn’t it? Still, the line is phrased like a child’s
observation and question. It is a puzzle, a riddle, and a stark fact, like
man’s inhumanity to man, like violence—especially against the innocent, which
is unthinkable suffering that’s imposed by choice. The statements in question
are either desperate or offhanded or both. To encounter it at the center of
this little song is like hearing a human voice in a room in which you thought
you were alone.

Owen Barfield says in his book _Poetic Diction_ that the appreciation of a
poem involves a felt change of consciousness. This is such a moment for me. In
this line my own mind merges with that of the poet and that of the child in a
terrible triangle containing a oneness. This isn’t the commonplace strategy of
showing adults how silly their behavior is by showing it to us through the
eyes of a child. This is merging of consciousnesses: “The people are punishing
the people—why?” Robert Lowell called Randall Jarrell the most heartbreaking
poet of our time. I would say that this is his most heartbreaking poem, and
the line I cite the most heartbreaking of lines.

“Come to the Stone . . . ” was first published in 1945 when no one would need
to be told what was happening in the poem. That it could as easily be speaking
to events in our decade is somehow more of a shock than it should be, given
human history. Randall Jarrell despised power politics, the ants it makes of
human beings. The death of this child, coming to him from the sky, is a horror
of course. “’I didn’t cry, I didn’t cry.’”

But, does the poem exist because the poet can’t let the mechanical distance of
the bombers dehumanize the child? Does Jarrell attempt to get back the child’s
voice to let him show us himself the thing we’ve done? The child answers our
question with “his foolish eyes,” which are of course infinitely more
knowledgeable than our own. The poet grants the child the last word here on
death. When it comes to death, this child, the “long simile” of the world has
killed, this child is now more knowing than any living adult can be.

Jarrell, who was a pilot instructor during WWII, was implicated in the deaths
of children from the sky. This poem pours out of that dark hole in his sky. In
“Come to the Stone . . . ” the poet labors—vainly of course—to return the
child’s voice to the world in the poem. He tries to show us that he himself is
a human dealing in these deaths. It’s no good. No poem is ever worth a child.
The poem means nothing to the child who has been killed, and in this line “The
angels sway above his story like balloons” the poet acknowledges the useless
and silly grandiose gift of a poem to a dead child.

Still, thinking of Jarrell’s encounter here with the child he perhaps himself,
helped to kill, I think about the poem a drone could never write. The guilted
drone would never suffer. Does that matter? “Come to the stone and tell me why
I died.” The child doesn’t ask this favor of us because it matters any longer
to him.


Instruction:
## Poem out of Childhood

    I

    Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry    :
    Not Angles, angels    :     and the magnificent past
    shot deep illuminations into high-school.
    I opened the door into the concert-hall
    and a rush of triumphant violins answered me
    while the syphilitic woman turned her mouldered face
    intruding upon Brahms.         Suddenly, in an accident
    the girl’s brother was killed, but her father had just died    :
    she stood against the wall, leaning her cheek,
    dumbly her arms fell, “What will become of me?”    and
    I went into the corridor for a drink of water.
    These bandages of image wrap my head
    when I put my hand up I hardly feel the wounds.
    We sat on the steps of the unrented house
    raining blood down on Loeb and Leopold,
    creating again how they removed his glasses
    and philosophically slit his throat.
    They who manipulated and misused our youth,
    smearing those centuries upon our hands,
    trapping us in a welter of dead names,
    snuffing and shaking heads at patent truth . . . .
    We were ready to go the long descent with Virgil
    the bough’s gold shade advancing forever with us,
    entering the populated cold of drawing-rooms;
    Sappho, with her drowned hair trailing along Greek waters,
    weed binding it, a fillet of kelp enclosing
    the temples’ ardent fruit    :
    Not Sappho, Sacco.
    Rebellion pioneered among our lives,
    viewing from far-off many-branching deltas,
    innumerable seas.

    II

    In adolescence I knew travellers
    speakers digressing from the ink-pocked rooms,
    bearing the unequivocal sunny word.
    Prinzip’s year bore us    :    see us turning at breast
    quietly while the air throbs over Sarajevo
    after the mechanic laugh of that bullet.
    How could they know what sinister knowledge finds
    its way among our brains’ wet palpitance,
    what words would nudge and giggle at our spine,
    what murders dance?
    These horrors have approached the growing child;
    now that the factory is sealed-up brick
    the kids throw stones, smashing the windows,
    membranes of uselessness in desolation.
    We grew older quickly, watching the father shave
    and the splatter of lather hardening on the glass,
    playing in sandboxes to escape paralysis,
    being victimized by fataller sly things.
    “Oh, and you,” he said, scraping his jaw, “what will you be?”
    “Maybe    :    something    :    like    :    Joan    :    of    :    Arc . . . .”
    Allies Advance, we see
    Six Miles South to Soissons.      And we beat the drums.
    Watchsprings snap in the mind, uncoil, relax,
    the leafy years all somber with foreign war.
    How could we know what exposed guts resembled?
    A wave, shocked to motion, babbles margins
    from Asia to Far Rockaway spiralling
    among clocks in its four-dimensional circles.
    Disturbed by war we pedalled bicycles
    breakneck down the decline, until the treads
    conquered our speed and pulled our feet behind them,
    and pulled our heads.
    We never knew the war, standing so small
    looking at eye-level toward the puttees, searching
    the picture-books for sceptres, pennants for truth;
    see Galahad unaided by puberty.
    Ratat a drum uppon the armistice,
    Kodak As You Go    :    photo    :    they danced late,
    and we were a generation of grim children
    leaning over the bedroom sills, watching
    the music and the shoulders and how the war was over,
    laughing until the blow on the mouth broke night
    wide out from cover.
    The child’s curls blow in a forgotten wind,
    immortal ivy trembles on the wall:
    the sun has crystallized these scenes, and tall
    shadows remember time cannot rescind.

    III

    Organize the full results of that rich past
    open the windows     :     potent catalyst,
    harsh theory of knowledge, running down the aisles
    crying out in the classrooms, March ravening on the plain,
    inexorable sun and wind and natural thought.
    Dialectically our youth unfolds     :
    the pale child walking to the river, passional
    in ignorance     in loneliness     demanding
    its habitation for the leaping dream, kissing
    quick air, the vibrations of transient light,
    not knowing substance or reserve, walking
    in valvular air, each person in the street
    conceived surrounded by his life and pain,
    fixed against time, subtly by these impaled      :
    death and that shapeless war.        Listening at dead doors,
    our youth assumes a thousand differing flesh
    summoning fact from abandoned machines of trade,
    knocking on the wall of the nailed-up power-plant,
    telephoning hello, the deserted factory, ready
    for the affirmative clap of truth
    ricochetting from thought to thought among
    the childhood, the gestures, the rigid travellers.

—Muriel Rukeyser

### __Rights & Access

“Poem Out of Childhood” by Muriel Rukeyser.

Copyright © 2005 by Muriel Rukeyser.

Reprinted by permission of ICM Partners.

Output:
My name is Linda Gregerson and I’m going to be reading “Poem Out of Childhood”
by Muriel Rukeyser.

In _The Life of Poetry_ , Muriel Rukeyser describes the “first public day” she
remembers: crowds of people filling the streets of New York, confetti and
crying, kissing and noise. Which prompted young Muriel to take out her drum
and beat it. The day was April 28, 1918. False Armistice Day. “The war was not
yet over.”

“Poem Out of Childhood” is the very first poem in Rukeyser’s first book,
_Theory of Flight_ , and it features, front and center, the political
manifesto from which she would never depart. “Not Angles, angels,” “Not
Sappho, Sacco.” Rukeyser had no patience for the artificial sequestrations of
poetry and politics, private imagination and collective history. She was six
months old when Gavrilo Prinzip shot the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo;
she always considered herself to have been born under the sign of war. We are
creatures of history, she believed; we take it in as we take in air and milk.
And, although there is ignorance aplenty, some of it deadly, there is no such
thing as perfect innocence, if to be innocent means to be untouched. Rukeyser
was fierce in her insistence that the world was one: a tsunami born in Asia
moves across the waters to North America; a shooting in Sarajevo means
slaughtered millions from the Caucasus to France; the dividends paid to
pensioners by Union Carbide are just a little larger because miners in West
Virginia have been allowed to die of silicosis.

“Not Angles, angels”: a musical logic, and one that appears on the surface to
be choosing the life of the spirit. But the phrase derives from a famous story
told by the Venerable Bede. When Pope Gregory, writes Bede, observed a
consignment of fair-skinned, fair-haired slaves in the market in Rome one day,
he asked his companion who they were. “Angles,” said his companion. “ _Non
Angli, sed angeli_ ,” replied the Pope. Not Angles, angels. A story the
English construed for centuries as a sign that they were a chosen people. The
lovely, bell-like echoes of a pun are taken to reflect the stamp of heavenly
favor, beneath which lies – just barely beneath – a double-sided story of
enslavement and racial privilege.

“Not Sappho, Sacco.” The notorious trials and execution of Sacco and Vanzetti
played out for seven years of Rukeyser’s early life, calling into question the
very foundations of justice and political tolerance in America, throwing a
harsh light on class and ethnic divisions. So when the poet, fresh out of her
privileged education at Vassar, claims a muse, she refuses to stay within the
proper, decorous lyric boundaries.

And yet. The “not” in Rukeyser’s alliterative formulations has to be taken
with a grain of salt, I think: the wit and the music rely upon the yoking of
terms, after all, not upon the occlusion of one by the other. “Not only” is
how I hear it. Not only Sappho, but also Sacco. There is no such thing as a
separate realm of the aesthetic.

“See us turning at breast,” she writes, and the “throbbing” over Sarajevo
keeps time with the milky rhythms of a nursing child. The brain’s “wet
palpitance” is ripe for the insinuations of “sinister knowledge.” The tenors
and textures of our era make us what we are. No “membrane” of innocence
separates the home front from the battlefront: the factories are boarded up;
the kids throw stones. Polio lurks outside the sandbox.

Rukeyser was only twenty-one when _Theory of Flight_ won the Yale Younger
Poets Prize, but her artistry was as fully formed as was her moral and
political sensibility. Take, for example, the indented four stanzas that
constitute the bulk of section two in “Poem Out of Childhood.” A flexible
pentameter is repeatedly cut off at the knees in the seventh line of an eleven
line stanza. The joyful alliterations of a child’s early lessons in reading
harden into wartime headlines: Six Miles South to Soissons. The seductive
unfoldings of image and phrase give way to intimations of in-the-wings or in-
the-margins violence. A fugitive end rhyme (finds/spine, palpitance/dance,
glass/paralysis) settles into something firmer (be/see, circles/bicycles,
treads/heads, over/cover, wall/tall) and suggests a system of sinister
concordances that history’s children cannot escape and time cannot “rescind.”

The fourth of these stanzas begins with the regressive rhythms of tin drum and
advertising jingle, then modulates into something so tempered with
disillusionment (“a generation of grim children”) that the reader, or this
reader in any case, comes to think she can trust the new, more comprehensive
momentums (“the music and the shoulders and how the war was over”) until these
too come up against the shock of new violence: “the blow on the mouth broke
night / wide out from cover.” I don’t know to what extent that blow on the
mouth is meant to suggest a “merely” domestic cruelty and to what extent it is
meant as a reference to the crushing revelation that news of the armistice had
been mistaken: its ability to resonate on both the larger and the smaller
scale is surely part of its power. In the ordinary way of thinking, night is
something that provides cover. But here it is the ghastly, underlying reality
that hides under cover of the ordinary and is always about to break out.

The child who “breathes-in experience” is born not merely into death, as all
that lives is born into mortality, but also into the surfeit of death that
human beings visit upon one another. Throughout the course of her poetic
career, with passion and unflinching acuity, Rukeyser would document the
infinite varieties this surfeit assumes: death-by-violence, death-by-poverty,
death-by-indifference, death-by-greed. And precisely because she refuses to
“edit out” the ghastliness and the systems that sustain it, she writes the
most life-affirming poetry I know.


Instruction:
## Backwater Blues

    When it rains five days and the skies turn dark as night
    When it rains five days and the skies turn dark as night
    Then trouble's takin' place in the lowlands at night

    I woke up this mornin’, can’t even get out of my door
    I woke up this mornin’, can’t even get out of my door
    There's been enough trouble to make a poor girl wonder where she want to go

    Then they rowed a little boat about five miles ’cross the pond
    Then they rowed a little boat about five miles ’cross the pond
    I packed all my clothes, throwed them in and they rowed me along

    When it thunders and lightnin’ and when the wind begins to blow
    When it thunders and lightnin’ and the wind begins to blow
    There’s thousands of people ain’t got no place to go

    Then I went and stood upon some high old lonesome hill
    Then I went and stood upon some high old lonesome hill
    Then looked down on the house were I used to live

    Backwater blues done call me to pack my things and go
    Backwater blues done call me to pack my things and go
    ’Cause my house fell down and I can’t live there no more

    Mmm, I can’t move no more
    Mmm, I can’t move no more
    There ain’t no place for a poor old girl to go

—Bessie Smith

### __Rights & Access

This poem is in the pubic domain.

Output:
Bessie Smith recorded “Backwater Blues” in 1927, and it became an anthem for
one of the most devastating national disasters in US history. The Mississippi
River flood of 1927 was horrific. About a thousand people lost their lives.
Almost half a million homes were destroyed. Almost a million people became
homeless for a time. Entire black neighborhoods were wiped out. This incident
gave birth to an important blues era, now known as the Delta Blues era. The
blues artists who wrote and sang in this era there are famous names in this
era such as Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson, Howling Wolf, and of course, Bessie
Smith, who is one of my favorites.

Bessie actually wrote “Backwater Blues” for the Cumberland River flood that
hit Nashville on Christmas morning 1926. Nonetheless, when she recorded it in
1927 “Backwater Blues” became an anthem for the great Mississippi River Flood.
The flood was a devastating ordeal. There were reports that officials behaved
in a discriminatory fashion. They relocated the white folks in an expedient
manner but corralled the black folks into abysmal camps. There was evidence of
lynchings and unspeakable killings and terrible acts against the black
community. Let’s look at this poem closely. I mean, first, it sets up a
terrible storm when it rained five days and the skies turned dark as night,
when it rained five days and the skies turned dark as night. But the second
strophe, the second stanza, we turn inward, and it’s about personal disaster:
I woke up this morning can’t even get out of my door, I woke up this morning
can’t _even_ get out of my door. The poem moves to personal depression. I
think in the best identity poems that the self represents something much
larger than the self. The scene is set with the terrific storm by the female
speaker, so depressed that she can’t even get out of the door. This personal
depression by extension is about the depression of an entire people,
marginalized in the back waters, stricken with poverty, homelessness,
suffering social injustice, discrimination, and now hit with this catastrophic
natural disaster. The despair is deep, is deeply personal, but it is also
metaphorical and speaks to the despair of an entire community. Of course, we
Americans have historical amnesia. Most of us don’t remember the great
Mississippi River Flood of 1927, but when I read this poem a few years ago
during a gathering on the behalf of Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, the same
issues resounded—neighborhoods destroyed, slow government response, the
African American neighborhoods were hit the hardest. Terrible images came
across the television screen and recently with global warming and continuous
flooding and natural disasters this poem survives the test of time and can
speak to a variety of incidents and international dislocated peoples.

Let’s look at the blues poem as a form. The first two lines are of almost
equal length. The first line sets the scene, the second line repeats the first
for emphasis. The third line either comments or reverses the first two lines.
There is one integral line throughout the stanza. The “a” rhyme glues the
three-line stanza together. “Backwater blues done caused me to pack up my
things and go, / Backwater blues done caused me to pack up my things and go, /
'Cause my house fell down and I can't live there no more.” This is a song
poem. The best song poems, I believe, can live on the pages as well as in the
ear. The blues poems remind us that the American poetic tradition can be
traced to African American oral tradition; that great art, great poems come
from deep suffering that is personal, historical, and political and could be
read on the page as well as sung out loud. I can’t do justice to this poem, to
“Backwater Blues,” by just reciting it myself. Please download this song,
preferably the original 1927 recording by Bessie Smith, and listen to her
amazing singing. There’s this rich toughness in her voice that tells us this
girl and her people are going to get through this calamity. Her voice is
subversive, defiant despite all odds against her.

I love writing blues poems. As a poet who writes in English I know that every
time I write a sonnet I pay homage to the high European tradition and to
master poets like Shakespeare, Dunn, Keats, Petrarch. I see myself as an
activist Chinese American poet, and I want to show the multiple sides of my
literary inheritance. I make it a point to learn the African American poetic
tradition. The blues poems was more here on American soil, and so I study the
blues poems closely and write blues poems to pay homage to all those African
American blues masters. Of course, I learn so much from the Bessie Smith’s
blues poems. I have her strong voice in my ear at all times. Thank you


Instruction:
## A Cowboy’s Prayer
_(Written for Mother)_

    Oh Lord, I’ve never lived where churches
            grow.
        I love creation better as it stood
    That day You finished it so long ago
        And looked upon Your work and called it
             good.
    I know that others find You in the light
        That’s sifted down through tinted window
            panes,
    And yet I seem to feel You near tonight
        In this dim, quiet starlight on the plains.
    I thank You, Lord, that I am placed so well,
        That You have made my freedom so com-
            plete;
    That I’m no slave of whistle, clock or bell,
        Nor weak-eyed prisoner of wall and street.
    Just let me live my life as I’ve begun
        And give me work that’s open to the sky;
    Make me a pardner of the wind and sun,
        And I won’t ask a life that’s soft or high.
    Let me be easy on the man that’s down;
        Let me be square and generous with all.
    I’m careless sometimes, Lord, when I’m in
            town,
        But never let ‘em say I’m mean or small!
    Make me as big and open as the plains,
        As honest as the hawse between my knees,
    Clean as the wind that blows behind the rains,
        Free as the hawk that circles down the
            breeze!
    Forgive me, Lord, if sometimes I forget.
        You know about the reasons that are hid.
    You understand the things that gall and fret;
        You know me better than my mother did.
    Just keep an eye on all that’s done and said
        And right me, sometimes, when I turn
            aside,
    And guide me on the long, dim, trail ahead
        That stretches upward toward the Great
            Divide.

—Badger Clark

### __Rights & Access

This poem is in the public domain.

Output:
This is Marilyn Nelson, reading “A Cowboy’s Prayer” by Badger Clark.

That was “A Cowboy’s Prayer” by Charles Badger Clark. This poem was first
published in 1906, but it was published many times as anonymous. It had a life
of its own without the name of its author. Badger Clark was so charmed by this
that he had a collection of anonymous publications of his poems. He collected
them—he had sixty copies of poems that had been—or, at times, that this poem
had been published anonymously.

Badger Clark’s dates are 1883 to 1957. He was, and is, one of the classic
cowboy poets and made a major contribution to the literature of the west. He
was the first poet laureate of South Dakota. He was named poet laureate in
1937 and served, I think, 20 years as poet laureate of South Dakota. He lived
alone in a cabin with no electricity, running water, or telephone, on land
that is now a state park. He travelled as a young man, however, and this poem,
“A Cowboy’s Prayer,” was written during the time he was living in Arizona. I
think you can hear the “Westernness” of this poem. Badger Clark wrote poems
that were very popular during his lifetime. One of his poems was recorded by
the singing cowboy star Tex Ritter. Another was set to music and recorded by
the Fred Waring chorus. Bob Dylan recorded one of Badger Clark’s songs or
poems as a song. And Johnny Cash recorded a version of this poem, “A Cowboy’s
Prayer.”

I think that to really appreciate this poem, we may have to set aside
political correctness and ethnic sensitivity. This poem was published in 1906
during the ascendance of the American myth which, of course we know, refused
to confront for many years America’s history of genocide. This was the myth of
an America which is big, open, honest, clean, and free. I think this poem is
related to Woody Guthrie’s song, which we all know and love, “This Land is
Your Land, This Land is My Land.” Like that song, this poem expresses a
reverence which is evoked by the land. It’s an ecological poem, I suppose one
might say . . . one might say it’s a green poem. It’s a poem about loving
America as _a land_. As a landscape. I think it has something also in common
with Emily Dickinson’s poem, 236, which begins “Some keep the Sabbath going to
church / I keep it staying at home.” It is easy to think, because of Emily
Dickinson’s life, that when she said “at home” she meant _indoors_ , but a
close reading of the poems makes it clear that she meant _out of doors_. At
home, she’s at home in an orchard. It’s a poem that takes place in an orchard
with a bobolink as a preacher. So it’s a poem also about land reverence,
nature reverence. Loving the land. Loving the landscape.

I first encountered Badger Clark’s poem in a tourist gift shop, somewhere on a
highway—probably Route 66. My family stopped at, somewhere out West, on one of
several cross-country driving trips we made during the 1950s. I remember
picking up the poem as a postcard in a postcard rack, and I believe it was
identified as being anonymous. I remember reading this poem and being deeply
moved by it. I must have been maybe nine. I begged my parents to buy it for me
and for years I kept it in my box of childhood treasures. I liked then, and
still like, the poet’s sense of reverence without dogma. The fact that this is
not a poem that takes you to any particular religion. I liked its simple
ethical values. Its hope to be clean and honest, sort of, Boy Scout
values/Girl Scout values. And I also liked its humility. Its confession of
failures, of faults. And I also loved—as a child, I loved the speaker of this
poem as I loved all those painfully honest, tough but gentle, big, open,
honest, clean and free movie and television cowboys, who populated America’s
dream of herself when I was a child during that first half of this last
century.


Instruction:
## Howl, Part III

    Carl Solomon! I’m with you in Rockland
       where you’re madder than I am
    I’m with you in Rockland
       where you must feel very strange
    I’m with you in Rockland
       where you imitate the shade of my mother
    I’m with you in Rockland
       where you’ve murdered your twelve secretaries
    I’m with you in Rockland
       where you laugh at this invisible humor
    I’m with you in Rockland
       where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter
    I’m with you in Rockland
       where your condition has become serious and is reported on the radio
    I’m with you in Rockland
       where the faculties of the skull no longer admit the worms of the senses
    I'm with you in Rockland
       where you drink the tea of the breasts of the spinsters of Utica
    I’m with you in Rockland
       where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the harpies of the Bronx
    I’m with you in Rockland
       where you scream in a straightjacket that you’re losing the game of the
       actual pingpong of the abyss
    I’m with you in Rockland
       where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul is innocent and immortal
       it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse
    I’m with you in Rockland
       where fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its body again from
       its pilgrimage to a cross in the void
    I’m with you in Rockland
       where you accuse your doctors of insanity and plot the Hebrew socialist
       revolution against the fascist national Golgotha
    I’m with you in Rockland
       where you will split the heavens of Long Island and resurrect your living
       human Jesus from the superhuman tomb
    I’m with you in Rockland
       where there are twentyfive thousand mad comrades all together singing
       the final stanzas of the Internationale
    I’m with you in Rockland
       where we hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets the
       United States that coughs all night and won’t let us sleep
    I’m with you in Rockland
       where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls’ airplanes
       roaring over the roof they’ve come to drop angelic bombs the hospital
       illuminates itself    imaginary walls collapse    O skinny legions run outside
       O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here    O victory
       forget your underwear we’re free
    I’m with you in Rockland
       in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across
       America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night

—Allen Ginsberg

### __Rights & Access

From "Howl" by Allen Ginsberg, from _Collected Poems: 1947-1997_ by Allen
Ginsberg. Copyright © 1956, 2006 by Allen Ginsberg, LLC, used by permission of
The Wylie Agency LLC.

Output:
It’s sometimes interesting to look at poetry through the lens of history. In
1955, the year 29-year-old Allen Ginsberg wrote the poem he titled “Howl,”
Marian Anderson became the first African American singer to perform with the
71-year-old metropolitan opera company in New York City. That same year, 1955,
rock ‘n’ roll debuted in a film called “Blackboard Jungle,” an adaptation of a
novel by Evan Hunter about inner-city teaching. The movie featured the song
“Rock Around the Clock” by Bill Haley & His Comets. When the film was
screened, teenage audiences began dancing in the aisles. Steve Jobs was born
in 1955, the visionary entrepreneur who would introduce the personal computer
and desktop publishing to the world, and set in motion a global, technical
revolution. In November of 1955, America increased its military involvement in
the conflict between North and South Vietnam. Having just won their struggle
for independence from France, the two had decided to go to war against one
another.

It’s rare that a single event results in permanent social change, and more
rare, yet, when that single event is the publication of a poem. “Howl” is one
of those few poems. Dedicated to Carl Solomon, a man Ginsberg met when he was
visiting his mother in a mental hospital, “Howl” famously begins, “I saw the
best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, naked
. . .” It goes on from there to become a sustained, high-energy complaint
about social hypocrisy. The poem’s essential argument is that America in 1955
had so narrow an idea of what is considered “normal,” that there was no room
for any diversity or creativity. For a man, “normal” in 1955 was someone with
a nine-to-five job who intended to marry, or had already married, a woman who
wore short-waist dresses and high heels. Homosexuals like Ginsberg risked not
just social alienation, but imprisonment. In every state of the union, sex
between consenting adults of the same sex was punishable by a jail or prison
sentence.

In “Howl,” Ginsberg celebrates all of those whose lives fell outside what was
considered mainstream. He celebrates those who are marginalized because of
their sexuality, or their race, or because their political ideas were
considered radical, or because they were artists or musicians, or because they
were drug addicts. He registers his objection to the fact of their social
outcast status, and highlights the contradiction between a country that says
it welcomes difference but then fails to protect the rights of those who are
different.

The poem, written in long lines, has four parts—the last of which is titled
“Footnote for Howl.” The long-line free verse form was first used 100 years
earlier by another American poet, Walt Whitman. In Whitman’s poem “Song of
Myself,” those long lines celebrate Whitman’s individuality, and invite all
readers to likewise celebrate theirs. Whitman’s argument is that we all belong
in the same universe. Because both poems are written in long lines, the music
of the two poems is in some way similar, and yet is also very different. Both
poets use a poetic strategy called “anaphora,” where the poet creates a sound
pattern based on repeating one or more words at the beginning of several
consecutive lines. In Whitman’s poem, the use of anaphora gives the poem an
expansive, oracular quality similar to Protestant sermons in the King James
Bible. In Ginsberg’s poem, the use of anaphora also has echoes of a sermon,
but the sound is more like a sermon delivered by a zealous, ecstatic, almost
manic revival tent preacher.

In spite of the tonal difference, both poets are widely inclusive, folding
into the poem anything and everything American, and of their moment: Whitman’s
vast pastoral landscape becomes Ginsberg’s mean-city streets. While Whitman
slyly gestured toward both homosexual and heterosexual practices, Ginsberg’s
sexual references are explicit, slang-based, and sometimes graphic. While both
poems argue for freedom, and for belonging, Ginsberg’s poem is much more
confrontational. There’s a persistent sense in “Howl” of an explosive charge
about to be detonated, as if the narrow confines of 1955 were so narrow they
were bound to give way.

After the poem was published in 1956 by City Lights Books, the publisher,
poet, and City Lights bookstore owner, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, was arrested and
charged with disseminating obscene literature. The “Howl” obscenity trial came
down to the question of who has the right to speak, and who has a right to
read that speech. Academics were called to the witness stand, with some
speaking for, and others against, the poem’s literary merits. The deciding
judge, Clayton Horne, found that the poem was not obscene. He wrote this in
his decision:

> The authors of the first amendment knew that novel and unconventional ideas
> might disturb the complacent, but they chose to encourage a freedom which
> they believed essential if vigorous enlightenment was ever to triumph over
> slothful ignorance.

He went on to say:

> I do not believe that “Howl” is without redeeming social importance. The
> first part of “Howl” presents a picture of a nightmare world; the second
> part is an indictment of those elements in modern society destructive to the
> best qualities of human nature—such elements are predominately identified as
> materialism, conformity, and mechanization leading toward war; the third
> part presents a picture of an individual who is a specific representation of
> what the author conceives of as a general condition; “Footnote to Howl”
> seems to be a declamation that everything in the world is holy, including
> parts of the body by name—it ends in a plea for holy living.

“Howl,” fueled by the publicity from the trial, became one of the most famous
poems of the 20th century. It’s the artifact of a moment when the young poet
Allen Ginsberg decided to take a stand to support and protect the freedom that
democracy promises. There was no poem like “Howl.” He invented it out of his
youthful desire to be rebellious, both in his life and in his poetry.
Rebellion is part of the American identity, and “Howl” embodies rebellion. It
calls into question limits on sexuality, and on art.

By reprising Whitman’s long poetic line, Ginsberg linked his poem to existing
poetic tradition, but he shifted the focus and revved the speed to make it
better represent his own historical moment. In doing so, he ushered in a new
music in poetry, just as the music of rock ‘n’ roll was being born, and racial
barriers were coming down, and the contentious Vietnam War was beginning. The
continual effort to reinvent the past for one’s own era is very American.
We’re charmed by changes in fashion, cars, and architecture. We tell time by
evolving styles. “Howl” defines a certain moment when the beat generation
refused to behave, but its greatness lies in the fact that it is timeless in
its concerns, and the way it takes its stand for lasting principles. That’s
what makes it a great poem—and a great American poem.


Instruction:
## A Plain Song for Comadre

    Though the unseen may vanish, though insight fails
    And doubter and downcast saint
    Join in the same complaint,
    What holy things were ever frightened off
    By a fly's buzz, or itches, or a cough?
    Harder than nails

    They are, more warmly constant than the sun,
    At whose continual sign
    The dimly prompted vine
    Upbraids itself to a green excellence.
    What evening, when the slow and forced expense
    Of sweat is done,

    Does not the dark come flooding the straight furrow
    Or filling the well-made bowl?
    What night will not the whole
    Sky with its clear studs and steady spheres
    Turn on a sound chimney? It is seventeen years
    Come tomorrow

    That Bruna Sandoval has kept the church
    Of San Ysidro, sweeping
    And scrubbing the aisles, keeping
    The candlesticks and the plaster faces bright,
    And seen no visions but the thing done right
    From the clay porch

    To the white altar. For love and in all weathers
    This is what she has done.
    Sometimes the early sun
    Shines as she flings the scrubwater out, with a crash
    Of grimy rainbows, and the stained suds flash
    Like angel-feathers.

—Richard Wilbur

### __Rights & Access

"A Plain Song for Comadre" from THINGS OF THIS WORLD by Richard Wilbur.

Copyright © 1956, renewed 1984 by Richard Wilbur.

Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights
reserved.

Output:
Not his most famous poem, and neither short nor long, Richard Wilbur’s “A
Plain Song for Comadre” has nonetheless haunted this reader since I first came
upon it in the 1970s. The poem is partly about the years passing, so I’ll date
it within the context of Wilbur’s life (he lived 96 years, dying in 2017) and
my own life. The poem’s first journal appearance was in _Poetry_ in February
1954, half a year before I was born, and it was then collected in Wilbur’s
third book, _Things of This World_ , in 1956. I don’t think a single year has
gone by in the last forty when I haven’t read it at least two or three times,
or discovered a few lines from it echoing in my head—particularly “It is
seventeen years /Come tomorrow //That Bruna Sandoval has kept the church /Of
San Ysidro…”

Why this milestone achieved by Bruna Sandoval, a “comadre” (in Spanish, a
neighbor or a friend or a godmother) who cleans a church in a small California
town on the Mexican border, should so move me, born in Michigan to a wholly
different life, is something of a mystery. Any solution may have to start with
the tone of high importance Richard Wilbur so often brings (I’m going to use
the present tense about him—his poetry lives) to the things of this world.
What we do matters: writing or reading poems, scrubbing floors. And yet
Wilbur’s reader must be careful not to say anything too neat and summary about
his poems; this poet may have perfected simplicity, but he isn’t easy.
Although the title’s “Plain Song” suggests both the unison singing of the
earliest Christian church choristers and Wilbur’s own lyric, he starts on such
a high philosophical plane that we have difficulty knowing what he means.
“Though the unseen may vanish”—the very first phrase is a conundrum. Isn’t it
the _seen_ that may vanish?

The sentence goes on: “though insight fails /And doubter and downcast saint
/Join in the same complaint…” Oh, now we “see.” The “insight” that fails us is
the failure of faith; of thinking that “holy things” may have vanished merely
because we don’t see them. The art of seeing has always been at least as
essential to Wilbur’s enterprise (he was the son of a painter) as his
Christian beliefs. Having established the metaphor of vision here, as in so
many poems, Wilbur now enriches the scene by listing “holy things” (“a fly’s
buzz, or itches, or a cough”) perceived only by senses other than the
visual—of hearing and of touch. Wilbur’s fly, as many readers have noted,
drifts in by way of his beloved Emily Dickinson. (“I heard a Fly buzz - when I
died,” her poem begins; and its later phrase “With Blue - uncertain -
stumbling Buzz” is a little triumph of synesthesia that may also have inspired
Wilbur’s sense-scumbling.)

In any case, holy things are “harder than nails”—a homely cliché that is not a
cliché, given that it may hint too at the Crucifixion; and perhaps it’s here,
at the end of the first stanza, that we first take note of how liquidly
Wilbur’s enjambments contradict the hard-as-nails edges of his lines. Although
the rhyme scheme of the six-line stanza is securely hammered in place (each
rhyme exact, and in the symmetrical sequence _abbcca_ ), the liquidity comes
partly from a metrical scheme that contradicts that chosen symmetry. The
number of stresses per line as the stanza progresses (that is, 5 stresses in
the first line, followed by 3,3,5,5, and 2) makes its own asymmetrical
pattern. That means that in the poem’s first line, for instance, a pentameter
ending in “fails” will eventually rhyme perfectly with the stanza’s final
line, “nails”—but that concluding line is uniquely, dramatically brief, with
only two stresses. Although sense will spill into the second stanza, this
sixth line of the first stanza catches you up short. The closest analogy in
music might be counterpoint. If such a technique could be called plain song,
Wilbur surely relishes being complicated about plainness.

Another way to take conscious note of the poem’s liquidity is to look at the
length of sentences. The first sentence ends with a question on line 5; the
second with a period on line 10. But the poem, we remember, isn’t in five-line
stanzas. Its six-line-per-stanza logic depends more on a sort of propulsive
patience—on both poet and reader continuing to follow the stanza past the
resounding cadence of a sentence. Wilbur’s delays—subjects and predicates
preceded by dependent clauses (such as “Though the unseen may vanish”), or by
adjectival phrases (as in “Harder than nails //They are”)—take their time in a
way that compliments the reader: you can be patient too. The gorgeousness of
the language itself makes you content to wait. Taking such firm but leisurely
control, in long sentences, of what you will learn when, Wilbur resembles
another of his beloved poets—John Milton, whose cosmology seems to be invoked
too. Wilbur’s “whole / Sky with its clear studs and steady spheres” that “Turn
on a sound chimney” is one whose musical spheres ring out from a long-gone
era.

But let’s not pass over another moment that precedes this image—in stanza two,
where in response to the “sign” of the sun, “the dimly prompted vine /
Upbraids itself to a fine excellence.” Richard Wilbur wrote a lot of light
verse, most of it aimed at children, and no account of his seriousness should
fail to note that he could be laugh-aloud funny. More often, though, his humor
involves quiet wit like this. The vine is “dimly” prompted because it doesn’t
get enough at first of the “warmly constant” sun; it’s also “dim” because it’s
short on intelligence. And yet it has character—it “Upbraids itself,” it self-
criticizes as it grows and entwines itself upward. (Note how the word
“Upbraids” is placed at the beginning of the line, which by the rules of this
poem means “U” must be capitalized—it’s a little taller already.)

That self-castigating hard laborer, the vine, which becomes rhymingly “fine”
in its excellence, might be seen as a symbol of Bruna Sandoval. But we haven’t
met her yet! Among the seemingly casual architectural feats of this 30-line
poem is that with the word “Turn” on line seventeen, Wilbur turns at last from
general principles to one single human, Bruna Sandoval, and tells us of her
seventeen years of work. From here on out, it is her poem. She has “kept” the
church of San Ysidro—and with this verb the poet, who seems to enjoy a god-
like omniscience about his unsung heroine, shows special attentiveness. He
never says she “cleans” the church; instead, she keeps it. She keeps “the
plaster faces bright” as well as the “clay porch”—there’s no immortal art in
this church, no monumental marble. With his nod in the direction of humble
materials, the great Richard Wilbur shows something of his own humility and
why he is drawn to Bruna Sandoval’s. She is a person who “has seen no visions”
(which recalls the first line’s reference to the “unseen”) and whose goal is
“the thing done right.” The simple monosyllabic word “done” is repeated
surprisingly soon, too—repeated when the sophisticated Wilbur might have
chosen some loftier verb. “For love and in all weathers / This is what she has
done.” Doing, over and over, is a form of prayer, he seems to say. The words
“sweeping” and “scrubbing” appear _before_ “grimy” and “stained”—that is, the
sweeping and scrubbing will be done again. Bruna Sandoval is familiar with
this soiled world, and she has no idea she is being celebrated for what she
does with it. What she knows is how to “fling the scrubwater out” and, matter-
of-factly, to see rainbows and angel-feathers there.


Instruction:
## The Argonaut

    What made anyone think I was a Communist I don’t know.  I never went
    to any of the Communist meetings.  I didn’t know any other Communists.
    I didn’t believe in any of their tenets.  It’s true, I hunted elk in the
    winter.  I never actually shot any, but I followed them.  And I laced my
    cranberry juice with vodka.  But these things didn’t make me a Communist.
    I stood on the bridge and watched the boats go out to sea.  I dreamed
    of going with them one day.  I danced alone in my apartment.  I hated my
    job with the government.  I went to parties where I didn’t know anyone.
    I went to the zoo and talked to the animals.  I dreamed I had an affair
    with a zebra and its stripes rubbed off on me.  I met a woman I
    liked and called her on the phone.  She said she liked phone sex and I
    didn’t know what she meant.  I lay on the couch and counted my blessings.
    There were none, or so few they slipped through my fingers.  I got up and
    looked out the window.  A cloud of sparrows flew by.  I made myself a can
    of soup.  I thought of my relatives, all gone except for one.  I called
    her on the phone.  She didn’t remember me.  I told her I was Edna’s son.
    She said, “I remember Edna.  I never liked her.  She cursed too much.”
    My mother never cursed, but I wasn’t about to argue.  I went to the movies.
    I saw Hopalong Cassidy.  I wished he didn’t wave so much.  But I liked
    the popcorn.  I walked about the city, feeding the pigeons.  I bought a
    soda on the street.  I sat down in a garden.  A woman came along and sat
    down beside me.  She said, “Nice day, isn’t it?”  I said, “Yes, very,
    I like it.”  “What do you do for a living?” she said.  “I’m an accountant
    in the government,” I said.  “That must be nice,” she said.  “But most
    people I know think I’m a Communist,” I said.  “That’s a joke, right?”
    she said.  “To me it is,” I said.  “To me, you look more like an
    Argonaut,” she said.  “What’s an Argonaut?” I said.  “It’s somebody
    who swims in the deep waters of the ocean in search of treasure,” she
    said.  “I found a penny in my bathtub once when I was a kid,” I said.
    “Then you’re an Argonaut,” she said.

—James Tate

### __Rights & Access

James Tate, “The Argonaut” from _The Government Lake_.
Copyright © 2019.
Reprinted by permission of Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins

Output:
James Tate died on July 8th, 2015, at the age of 71. This poem is from his
final volume of poetry, _The Government Lake_. His life as a poet lasted
nearly fifty years, since his first book, _The Lost Pilot_ , won the Yale
Younger Poets award when Jim was 22. Jim was my teacher at the MFA program at
UMass Amherst, and later became a friend. I loved him and his poems dearly,
and learned so much from him and them, and still do.

From his very earliest poems his voice was always completely present and
appealing. It’s that thing great poets have, that you can’t exactly describe
and can never imitate, not that you would want to. Jim was from the Midwest,
and his poems have a straightforward, no bull, goofy, casually brilliant
bemusement that is unmistakably American: a bit of Chaplin, or the hilarious
victim Joseph Keaton, nicknamed Buster by Houdini when he fell down a flight
of stairs at the age of three, along with some Will Rogers, the knowing
vaudeville cowboy from Oologah, Oklahoma.

There was always a storytelling impulse in Jim’s poems, even in the most wild
and surreal. In his last several books, he fully embraced the possibilities of
narrative, from shaggy dog stories to distracted stemwinders to ordinary
rambles that turn sharply surreal. Most are written in the first person, and
describe more or less ordinary situations that are constantly slipping into a
dreamlike quasi-reality. You could almost add a paradox to a paradox and call
them lineated prose poems.

Often in Jim’s poems, beyond the antic hilarity, there is also a sense of
undefined dread, a gradual unraveling of the conventions we depend on, and our
assumptions. This double consciousness, that whatever is “normal” barely
covers up something deeper, wilder, stranger, more anarchic, and beyond our
ordinary ken, strikes me as characteristic of much of the best of American
literature.

As in “The Argonaut,” Jim’s poems often start with a premise, either mundane
or absurd, as if the reader has wandered into an ongoing internal monologue.
Here the speaker gently quarrels with the anachronistic accusation that he’s a
communist. He examines his behaviors for signs, and makes a kind of
haphazardly organized confession, at turns absurd and heartbreaking, not to
being a communist, but something else. A confused lonely dreamer? It does seem
a bit dangerous to be one of those these days.

It’s a tired truism to say that poems take things that are ordinary, mundane,
small, ignorable, and transform them, making them feel full of magic and
importance. Yet that is exactly what they sometimes do. And when it happens,
as it does here with this small childhood memory and moment of connection
between strangers, it can feel thrilling, sad, full of regret and hope and
possibility, a representation of how our lives can feel suddenly meaningful in
undeniable, unparaphrasable, fathomless ways.