Auden more than once explained that his business was poetry and that he wrote prose to earn his keep while pursuing that ill-paid vocation. Luckily he had another powerful reason for writing prose: ‘unless I write something, anything, good, indifferent, or trashy, every day,’ he told his friend James Stern, ‘I feel ill.’
– Frank Kermode on Auden in the LRB (from 2007)
Snow day IV. No classes. Here’s another snowpoem, by Emerson, that would have been more appropriate for yesterday around 1 pm. By now, late afternoon, the snow has stopped falling and has begun melting, and the roads and sidewalks are becoming more navigable. Nous sommes restless.
The Snow-Storm
Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,
Arrives the snow, and, driving o’er the fields,
Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air
Hides hill and woods, the river, and the heaven,
And veils the farmhouse at the garden’s end.
The sled and traveller stopped, the courier’s feet
Delated, all friends shut out, the housemates sit
Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed
In a tumultuous privacy of storm.
Come see the north wind’s masonry.
Out of an unseen quarry evermore
Furnished with tile, the fierce artificer
Curves his white bastions with projected roof
Round every windward stake, or tree, or door.
Speeding, the myriad-handed, his wild work
So fanciful, so savage, nought cares he
For number or proportion. Mockingly,
On coop or kennel he hangs Parian wreaths;
A swan-like form invests the hiddden thorn;
Fills up the farmer’s lane from wall to wall,
Maugre the farmer’s sighs; and at the gate
A tapering turret overtops the work.
And when his hours are numbered, and the world
Is all his own, retiring, as he were not,
Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art
To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone,
Built in an age, the mad wind’s night-work,
The frolic architecture of the snow.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
I have been writing comments by the window, if by “writing comments” you mean “reading the James Wood archive on the LRB.” Alternating between grading, laundry, and cooking requiring the use of the oven all day. The snow has stopped falling at present.
Here’s Wood arguing that Updike is too poetic.
Wood writes: “One of the dangers for the stylist* such as Updike – and one of the ways in which prose is unlike poetry – is that prose always forces the question: who is thinking in these particular words, and why? Point of view, a boring topic to most readers, is the densest riddle for the novelist, since words are either directly ascribed to characters (first-person narration) or indirectly ascribed to them (third-person narration). By contrast, the poet’s words are generally assumed to flow from the poet, who wishes, as it were, to draw attention to himself.* But the novelist may not, and should not, always want to. There is no doubt that the pleasantly alliterative phrase ‘in painful piecemeal’ is rather fine; but is fineness what is needed here, or does it slide a filter between the reader and the supposedly pained narrator?”
– James Wood on John Updike, “Gossip in Gilt,” LRB v. 23 no. 8 (April 2001)
* this is probably exactly why I like Updike so much, and why even his characters’ misogyny, on which Wood expounds further, does not disturb me as much as it would in someone else’s words. Style.
** Of course! Always.
A snowpoem of a different bent, from Richard Hugo. The poem is not all about snow but turns on it, and the idea of smothering. (ahem):
Letter to Logan from Milltown
Dear John: This is a Dear John letter from booze.
With you, liver. With me, bleeding ulcer. The results
are the horrific same: as drunks we’re done. Christ,
John, what a loss to those underground political
movements that count, the Degradationists,
the Dipsomaniacs, and that force gaining momentum
all over the world, the Deteriorationists. I hope
you know how sad this is. Once I quit drinking it was clear
to others, including our chairman (who incidentally
also had to quit drinking) that less 40 pounds
I look resolute and strong and on the surface appear
efficient. Try this for obscene development: they made me
director of creative writing. Better I’d gone on bleeding
getting whiter and whiter and finally blending
into the snow to be found next spring, a tragedy
that surely would increase my poetic reputation.
POET FOUND IN THAW SNOWS CLAIM MISSOULA BARD
I’m in Milltown. You remember that bar, the beautiful bar
run by Harold Herndon where I pissed five years away
but pleasantly. And now I can’t go in for fear
I’ll fall sobbing to the floor. God, the ghosts in there.
The poems. Those honest people from the woods and mill.
What a relief that was from school, from that smelly
student-teacher crap and those dreary committees
where people actually say “considering the lateness
of the hour.” Bad times too. That depressing summer
of ’66 and that woman going — I’ve talked too often
about that. Now no bourbon to dissolve the tension,
to find self-love in blurred fantasies, to find the charm
to ask a woman home. What happens to us, John?
We are older than our scars. We have outlasted and survived
our wars and it turns out we’re not as bad as we thought.
And that’s really sad. But as a funny painter said
at a bash in Portland, and I thought of you then,
give Mother Cabrini another Martini. But not ever again
you and me. Piss on sobriety, and take care. Dick.
– Richard Hugo, from the book In Your Hot Dream. His collected, one of the books for our seminar this semester, is Making Certain It Goes On.
The street is plowed, and a snow-topped taxi and #3 bus just sped south on Saint Paul at something like usual velocity: but the sidewalks, the steps, are all buried again. Looks like less than six inches: nothing like the 20 inches of Snowpocalypse I, but it’s still coming down.
A lone hooded figure, beating its hands about its face like trying to cast away a demon (not my simile, but I don’t remember where I read it) struggles north on the opposite side of the street, wearing a backpack. And now, someone else, walking a bewildered black Lab puppy that runs in circles.
No classes, again. The campus would be accessible easily by those of us who can walk to it: the problem is vehicle and wheel access.
Working from home and from the neighborhood coffeeshops, which are all closing at 5 in anticipation of the upcoming onslaught. Frequenting the raided supermarket, where certain distributors have come through, and others, not. The block of sidewalk in front of my house is navigable by a path etched through the foot-high bank of snow: it is only wide enough for one person to pass at a time. The cars drive through similar trenches, just wide enough for one car. St. Paul is down to one lane. Good thing it’s a one-way street. I imagine the bigger streets, like York Road, have been plowed, but I haven’t been off of these two blocks in three days to see.
More snow to come this evening.
For NYC’ers, the music premieres Tuesday night. More: “The music is part of a 1939 composition, which didn’t see the light of day again until 2004, when a facsimile of Prokofiev’s manuscript was published. It’s one of several pieces Yale faculty, alumni and students will perform Tuesday night. Berman says Music for Athletic Exercises was written to be performed on a grand scale.
“There was a project of putting on a huge athletic pageant on the Red Square in Moscow in the summer of 1939, which would involve thousands of athletes from all over the Soviet Union,” he says.
Berman explains that V.E. Meyerhold, a famous Russian director, was hired to stage this extravaganza, but one morning he didn’t show up to work on the piece.
“Nobody could find him,” Berman says. “He was arrested, as was the habit in these years of the Soviet history. He was arrested, imprisoned and subsequently shot to death.”
Traumatic as it was, Prokofiev finished the piece.”
1) I must not fall.
The spangled sea below wants me to fall.
It is hard as diamonds; it wants to destroy us all.
2) Everything only connected by ‘and’ and ‘and.’
3) Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?
Where would we be today?
– Elizabeth Bishop, from, respectively, “The Unbeliever,” “Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance,” and “Questions of Travel”
It was a slow snow day:
And the sun was beating
On the soldiers by the side of the road
There was a bright light
A shattering of shop windows
The bomb in the baby carriage
Was wired to the radio
These are the days of miracle and wonder
This is the long distance call
The way the camera follows us in slo-mo
The way we look to us all
The way we look to a distant constellation
That’s dying in a corner of the sky
These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don’t cry baby, don’t cry
Don’t cry
– Paul Simon, “The Boy In The Bubble,” Graceland. Happy snow day, Hopkins.
It was nice to be, by proxy-via-television, in that number. Go Saints.
Dara Weinberg 