Poetry at work

Daniel Aks

Wallace Stevens

It’s hard to imagine anything less poetic than surety bonds, yet that was the odd corner of the insurance business that occupied Wallace Stevens, one of the 20th century’s greatest poets, for the bulk of his professional career.
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Stevens went to law school after trying his hand at journalism and achieved financial security as a senior executive at what is now The Hartford. In 1935, his salary was US$20,000 — the equivalent of $372,000 in today’s money.
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A steady professional income took the pressure off and, despite the demands of the job, made it possible for Stevens to create an astonishing body of imaginative work in his spare time. Check out his breathtaking “Sunday Morning,” to cite a single example.
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CONTINUUM

Igor Klikovac

1.

I often find Father in my laughter or the way the hand holds

a cigarette; he’s still not saying much, same as back then, when we used

to bump into each other on the stairwell at dawn, one with a fishing rod

and a necklace of insects, the other – hungry for sleep. We’d say hello,

and shuffle the darkness between us with our palms down

like dominos. He looked happiest then, and I try to remember him that way;

nowadays, he seems embarrassed by all this sneaking around,

and the gimmicks he must use to remind me who it is, calling.

2.

The day I was leaving, though I hadn’t told a soul, he appeared

from nowhere. Because of the strange name on my papers and all the soldiers,

he had to pretend he knew no one on the bus. He stared past my window

like he was the one being dropped in a foreign country.

3.

Our last letters touched shoulders in passing, his arriving

a few days after he was gone, mine in a pair of new shoes, together

with a pound note for his smoking debts, hidden under the insole.

4.

When he comes to visit now, at least it’s clearer why one of us

had always hobbled behind. Finally, it seems, we can squeeze into

the same spot, and honour this life’s haughty space-time confinement.

We take on things untroubled by possibilities, we shun choice,

our wills are perforated on a paper roll, we pass the black and white of days

always part of the same, insanely well-polished tune …

From Stockholm Syndrome by Igor Klikovac, translated by John McAuliffe, published by Smith|Doorstop.

Thomas Merton: the hermit who never was, his young lover and mysterious death

John Cooney, former Irish Times religious affairs correspondent, concludes his profile of the great Catholic mystic and bestselling author, suggesting his death was suicide

In 1965, aged 50, Thomas Merton became the first ever hermit of the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky, which had been founded by French Cistercians of the Strict Observance in 1848, the year of revolutionary change in Europe. Merton’s appointment marked a new phase in his commitment to contemplative life, which should have grounded him even more within the abbey’s cloistered walls near the rural village of Bardstown. Instead, three years later the world’s most famous literary monk died prematurely in absurd circumstances in faraway Thailand, while on a speaking tour of East Asia as a celebrity itinerant guru during the closing weeks of the twentieth century’s year of “brutal” revolutions. (1)
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This article will examine the last years of Merton’s life and accounts of how he met his end. His official biographer, Michael Mott, concluded that Merton’s death was by electrocution on December 10th, 1968, caused by one of three factors: suicide, murder or an accident. Mott opted for accidental death, without fully ruling out assassination, but dismissed, however, suicide on the grounds that there was neither motive nor circumstance for this. (2)

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Home

John Clare

Muses no more what ere ye be

In fancys pleasures roam

But sing (by truth inspir’d) wi’ me

The pleasures of a home
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Nor vain extreems I sigh for here

No Lordlings costly dome

‘Be thine the choice’ says reason ‘where

‘Contentment crowns a home’
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O! fate to give my bosom peace

Unsettl’d as I roam

To bid my restless wanderings cease

& fix me in a home
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A evening cot days toils to cheer

When tir’d I ceas’d to roam

& lovley Ema smileing near

O happy happy home
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How oft the tramping Vagrant sighs

(By fate ordain’d to roam)

For labours best & happiest joys

The comforts of a home
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& O when labour night descries

When ceas’d to toil & roam

What joys will in his bosom rise

To think he owns a home

The Treasures That Prevail: On the Prose of Adrienne Rich

By Sandra M. Gilbert

Toward the end of “Diving into the Wreck,” one of her most renowned poems, Adrienne Rich explains the goals of her underwater journey:
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I came to explore the wreck.

The words are purposes.

The words are maps.

I came to see the damage that was done

and the treasures that prevail.

I stroke the beam of my lamp

slowly along the flank

of something more permanent

than fish or weed
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the thing I came for:

the wreck and not the story of the wreck

the thing itself and not the myth
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Here, she says, is the imperative of investigation: needful research into “the damage that was done / and the treasures that prevail.” Arguably, as she confided that she discovered sometime in the sixties, such research into reality—“the thing itself and not the myth”—was a major aim of her work as a poet. But perhaps it hasn’t yet been clearly enough understood how crucially her writings in prose complemented, supplemented, enriched, and, yes, inspired her writing in verse. For in these writings she was not just one of many contemporary poets illuminating her verse through confessional glosses but a major memoirist, essayist, theorist, and scholar.

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Dor

Nathalie Handal

We walk through clouds

wrapped in ancient symbols
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We descend the hill

wearing water
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Maybe we are dead

and don’t know it
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Maybe we are violet flowers

and those we long for
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love only

our unmade hearts
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On attends, on attends
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Wait for Duras and Eminescu

to tell us in French then Romanian
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light has wounds

slow down—

memory is misgivings
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Wait until the nails

get rusty

in the houses of our past.

Why W.S. Merwin endures, and other best poetry to read this month

By Elizabeth LundThe Essential W.S. Merwin (Copper Canyon) beautifully demonstrates why Merwin has been one of America’s most decorated and important poets for more than 60 years. Edited by Michael Wiegers, this concise collection contains the best of the two-time Pulitzer winner’s work, including selections from Merwin’s first book, “A Mask for Janus” (1952) as well as “The Lice” (1967) , “The Carrier of Ladders”(1970) and “The Shadow of Sirius” (2008). The book, which will be published in September, also includes translations and prose pieces that help give readers a fuller understanding of Merwin’s range and changing aesthetics. His earlier poems reflect the formal style of the time and are influenced by classical myths, biblical stories and medieval poetry and ballads. Over time, Merwin’s writing became looser and more experimental, eventually dropping all punctuation. His focus, too, shifted from a keen sense of impending loss to an abiding connection with the natural and unseen realms. What remained constant was Merwin’s striking, evocative imagery, as in these lines from “The Unwritten”: “Inside this pencil/ crouch words that have never been written/ never been spoken/ never been taught/ they’re hiding/ they’re awake in there/ dark in the dark/ hearing us/ but they won’t come out/ not for love not for time not for fire.” Merwin’s skill is matched by his wisdom and his ability to connect a particular moment with something larger. A singing bird in “The Wren,” for instance, is “one of those voices without question/ and without answer like the beam of some/ star familiar.”

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Anne Hathaway

Carol Ann Duffy
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Item I gyve unto my wief my second best bed…’

(from Shakespeare’s will)
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The bed we loved in was a spinning world

of forests, castles, torchlight, cliff-tops, seas

where he would dive for pearls. My lover’s words

were shooting stars which fell to earth as kisses

on these lips; my body now a softer rhyme

to his, now echo, assonance; his touch

a verb dancing in the centre of a noun.

Some nights I dreamed he’d written me, the bed

a page beneath his writer’s hands. Romance

and drama played by touch, by scent, by taste.

In the other bed, the best, our guests dozed on,

dribbling their prose. My living laughing love –

I hold him in the casket of my widow’s head

as he held me upon that next best bed.
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From New Selected Poems 1984-2004  (Picador, 2004). Originally published in The World’s Wife (Macmillan, 1999).

April Rain Song

Langston Hughes 
Let the rain kiss you.
Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops.
Let the rain sing you a lullaby.
The rain makes still pools on the sidewalk.
The rain makes running pools in the gutter.
The rain plays a little sleep-song on our roof at night –
And I love the rain. 

TODAY: In 1818

Today in 1818, John Keats and Samuel Taylor Coleridge go for a walk on Hampstead Heath. In a letter to his brother George, Keats writes that they talked about “a thousand things… nightingales, poetry, poetical sensation, metaphysics.”