Silence

Marianne Moore, 1887 – 1972

My father used to say,
“Superior people never make long visits,
have to be shown Longfellow’s grave
or the glass flowers at Harvard.
Self-reliant like the cat—
that takes its prey to privacy,
the mouse’s limp tail hanging like a shoelace from its mouth—
they sometimes enjoy solitude,
and can be robbed of speech
by speech which has delighted them.
The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence;
not in silence, but restraint.”
Nor was he insincere in saying, “Make my house your inn.”
Inns are not residences.

Succulent poetry in the best possible taste

An encounter with delicious language can leave you ‘lusting for French fries’
Maureen Kenellly
At a recent poetry reading I had the curious experience of being overwhelmed by a ferocious hunger. I was listening to Peter Sirr read his terrific poem Madly Singing in the City, in which the chip-shop institution Leo Burdock plays a starring role. As Sirr read his lines about chips leaping in the tray and the “hot package . . . unswaddled, salted, drenched, wrapped again”, events overtook me, and before long I found myself propelled in the door of Burdock’s, demanding my very own hot package.
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Another fine poet, Margaret Atwood, also finds inspiration in the humble chip; her poem February finds her thinking “dire thoughts” and “lusting for French fries with a splash of vinegar”.
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The rich taste of words in our mouth can often resemble, maybe even rival, the taste of food. Just think of Seamus Heaney’s brilliant lines “Anahorish, soft gradient of consonant, vowel-meadow” and feel the sensuous splendour as the syllables come alive in your mouth.
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The culinary realm itself has provided rich inspiration for the poetic imagination. In a typically entertaining essay in The Outnumbered Poet, Dennis O’Driscoll refers to a great menu of fine food poems, such as Pablo Neruda’s The Great Tablecloth, Galway Kinnell’s ‘high-fibre’ poem Oatmeal and Douglas Dunn’s Ratatouille.

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Shadows

D.H. Lawrence

And if tonight my soul may find her peace

in sleep, and sink in good oblivion,

and in the morning wake like a new-opened flower

then I have been dipped again in God, and new-created.
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And if, as weeks go round, in the dark of the moon

my spirit darkens and goes out, and soft strange gloom

pervades my movements and my thoughts and words

then I shall know that I am walking still

with God, we are close together now the moon’s in shadow.
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And if, as autumn deepens and darkens

I feel the pain of falling leaves, and stems that break in storms

and trouble and dissolution and distress

and then the softness of deep shadows folding,

folding around my soul and spirit, around my lips

so sweet, like a swoon, or more like the drowse of a low, sad song

singing darker than the nightingale, on, on to the solstice

and the silence of short days, the silence of the year, the shadow,

then I shall know that my life is moving still

with the dark earth, and drenched

with the deep oblivion of earth’s lapse and renewal.
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And if, in the changing phases of man’s life

I fall in sickness and in misery

my wrists seem broken and my heart seems dead

and strength is gone, and my life
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is only the leavings of a life:

and still, among it all, snatches of lovely oblivion, and snatches of renewal

odd, wintry flowers upon the withered stem, yet new, strange flowers

such as my life has not brought forth before, new blossoms of me
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then I must know that still

I am in the hands of the unknown God,

he is breaking me down to his own oblivion

to send me forth on a new morning, a new man.

The Faithful Poetry of Christian Wiman

Review: Christian Wiman, ‘Hammer Is the Prayer: Selected Poems’

      By Micah Mattix

All poetry is comparison. One thing resembles another—a squirrel is an itch, for example—and the poet notes the relation by metaphor, repetition, sound. Sometimes the comparison is stated, sometimes it is implied, and sometimes it is made through characters. Bad poems can be bad for a number of reasons, but banal or inscrutable comparisons are common flaws. In the one case, the comparison is so obvious as to bore; in the other, it makes no sense because it is merely private or mangled by shoddy thinking.
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In his first collection of selected poems, Hammer Is the Prayer, Christian Wiman, the former editor of Poetry, compares things by accumulation. Many of his poems begin in media res, with a response to a question or a thought about a previous event, and progress by observation. Sometimes the speaker addresses a “you,” sometimes not. While a handful of poems take on the voice of a character, many are straight lyrics, written in a voice that alternates between description (of an apocalyptic Texas landscape, for example, or downtown Chicago) and intonation (“I am a ghost of all I don’t remember, / a grown man standing where a child once stood”) with an occasional touch of playfulness.

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Now

By Robert Browning

Out of your whole life give but a moment! All of your life that has gone before, All to come after it,—so you ignore, So you make perfect the present,—condense, In a rapture of rage, for perfection’s endowment, Thought and feeling and soul and sense— Merged in a moment which gives me at last You around me for once, you beneath me, above me— Me—sure that despite of time future, time past,— This tick of our life-time’s one moment you love me! How long such suspension may linger? Ah, Sweet— The moment eternal—just that and no more— When ecstasy’s utmost we clutch at the core While cheeks burn, arms open, eyes shut and lips meet!

The House Dog’s Grave (Haig, an English bulldog)

Robinson Jeffers, 1941

I’ve changed my ways a little; I cannot now

Run with you in the evenings along the shore,

Except in a kind of dream; and you, if you dream a moment,

You see me there.
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So leave awhile the paw-marks on the front door

Where I used to scratch to go out or in,

And you’d soon open; leave on the kitchen floor

The marks of my drinking-pan.
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I cannot lie by your fire as I used to do

On the warm stone,

Nor at the foot of your bed; no, all the night through

I lie alone.
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But your kind thought has laid me less than six feet

Outside your window where firelight so often plays,

And where you sit to read–and I fear often grieving for me–

Every night your lamplight lies on my place.
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You, man and woman, live so long, it is hard

To think of you ever dying

A little dog would get tired, living so long.

I hope that when you are lying
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Under the ground like me your lives will appear

As good and joyful as mine.

No, dear, that’s too much hope: you are not so well cared for

As I have been.
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And never have known the passionate undivided

Fidelities that I knew.

Your minds are perhaps too active, too many-sided. . .

But to me you were true.
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You were never masters, but friends. I was your friend.

I loved you well, and was loved. Deep love endures

To the end and far past the end. If this is my end,

I am not lonely. I am not afraid. I am still yours.

Dockery and Son

BY PHILIP LARKIN

‘Dockery was junior to you,

Wasn’t he?’ said the Dean. ‘His son’s here now.’   

Death-suited, visitant, I nod. ‘And do

You keep in touch with—’ Or remember how   

Black-gowned, unbreakfasted, and still half-tight   

We used to stand before that desk, to give   

‘Our version’ of ‘these incidents last night’?   

I try the door of where I used to live:
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Locked. The lawn spreads dazzlingly wide.

A known bell chimes. I catch my train, ignored.   

Canal and clouds and colleges subside

Slowly from view. But Dockery, good Lord,   

Anyone up today must have been born

In ’43, when I was twenty-one.

If he was younger, did he get this son

At nineteen, twenty? Was he that withdrawn
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High-collared public-schoolboy, sharing rooms

With Cartwright who was killed? Well, it just shows   

How much … How little … Yawning, I suppose

I fell asleep, waking at the fumes

And furnace-glares of Sheffield, where I changed,   

And ate an awful pie, and walked along   

The platform to its end to see the ranged   

Joining and parting lines reflect a strong
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Unhindered moon. To have no son, no wife,   

No house or land still seemed quite natural.   

Only a numbness registered the shock   

Of finding out how much had gone of life,   

How widely from the others. Dockery, now:   

Only nineteen, he must have taken stock

Of what he wanted, and been capable

Of … No, that’s not the difference: rather, how
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Convinced he was he should be added to!

Why did he think adding meant increase?

To me it was dilution. Where do these

Innate assumptions come from? Not from what   

We think truest, or most want to do:

Those warp tight-shut, like doors. They’re more a style   

Our lives bring with them: habit for a while,

Suddenly they harden into all we’ve got
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And how we got it; looked back on, they rear   

Like sand-clouds, thick and close, embodying   

For Dockery a son, for me nothing,

Nothing with all a son’s harsh patronage.   

Life is first boredom, then fear.

Whether or not we use it, it goes,

And leaves what something hidden from us chose,   

And age, and then the only end of age.

That it will never come again

Emily Dickinson

That it will never come again

Is what makes life so sweet.

Believing what we don’t believe

Does not exhilarate.
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That if it be, it be at best

An ablative estate —

This instigates an appetite

Precisely opposite.

Ballade of Indignation

Gail White

I’m driving through New Mexico, let’s say,

facing the glories of the setting sun.

But just before I get to Santa Fe,

there you are, stranger, with your ganglion

sized brain and SUV that weighs a ton,

paying no mind to sunset’s golden crown,

but nitter-nattering ninety-nine to one …

so would you kindly put your cell phone down?
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I’m dining out, which is the perfect way

to make the brain cells sing in unison,

relaxing with my Merlot and filet,

when there you are with that damned cell phone on

your ear, discussing how some game’s been won

and whether stocks are up or upside-down.

You’re sharing all your life with everyone,

so would you kindly put your cell phone down?
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Haven’t you noticed it’s a lovely day?

The kind that makes you want to jump and run?

But even jogging, you can’t throw away

that cell phone, can you?  Why, you’ve just begun

to give your boss a sales plan that will stun

competitors and make your rivals drown.

Look out, you fool!  You’re running down a nun,

so would you kindly put your cell phone down?
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L’Envoi
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Friend, I’m no longer saying this for fun.

Road rage has made me rampage through the town.

I’m out of Prozac, and I have a gun.

So would you kindly put your cell phone down?

Sadness, An Improvisation

Donald Justice

1
Dear ghosts, dear presences, O my dear parents,

Why were you so sad on porches, whispering?

What great melancholies were loosed among our swings!

As before a storm one hears the leaves whispering

And marks each small change in the atmosphere,

So was it then to overhear and to fear. 

2

But all things then were oracle and secret.

Remember the night when, lost, returning, we turned back

Confused, and our headlights singled out the fox?

Our thoughts went with it then, turning and turning back

With the same terror, into the deep thicket

Beside the highway, at home in the dark thicket. 

3

I say the wood within is the dark wood,

Or wound no torn shirt can entirely bandage,

But the sad hand returns to it in secret

Repeatedly, encouraging the bandage

To speak of that other world we might have borne,

The lost world buried before it could be born. 

4

Burchfield describes the pinched white souls of violets

Frothing the mouth of a derelict old mine

Just as an evil August night comes down,

All umber, but for one smudge of dusky carmine.

It is the sky of a peculiar sadness— 

The other side perhaps of some rare gladness. 

5

What is it to be happy, after all? Think

Of the first small joys. Think of how our parents

Would whistle as they packed for the long summers,

Or, busy about the usual tasks of parents,

Smile down at us suddenly for some secret reason,

Or simply smile, not needing any reason. 

6

But even in the summers we remember

The forest had its eyes, the sea its voices,

And there were roads no map would ever master,

Lost roads and moonless nights and ancient voices— 

And night crept down with an awful slowness toward the water;

And there were lanterns once, doubled in the water. 

7

Sadness has its own beauty, of course. Toward dusk,

Let us say, the river darkens and look bruised,

And we stand looking out at it through rain.

It is as if life itself were somehow bruised

And tender at this hour; and a few tears commence.

Not that they are but that they feel immense.