The Cold Hill Side
As months and years accumulate,
I miss you more and more.
Forgetting where I put the key,
I sometimes find a door
and other times feel stunned and lost,
though living in my own
body and life, presumably,
bewildered and alone
as the knight, kidnapped and released
to a dim world, who said
And I awoke and found me here
on the cold hill side.
Again, Rachel Hadas, from the New Yorker. She is, by the way, a Hopkins alum from when the MFA was an MA.
Cosmic? Perhaps. Unprecedented? Not
to the old women sitting in the sun,
the old men planted in cafes till noon
or midnight taking in the human scene,
connoisseurs of past-passing-and-to-come.
These watchers locate in their repertory
mythic fragments of some kindred story
and draw them dripping out of memory’s well.
– from Rachel Hadas’s poem “The Chorus.” I can’t believe I didn’t know it existed until now. The whole thing is online here. This, incidentally, came for a search for an appropriate Oscar-night poem: Ella Wheeler Wilcox’s preachy “The Actor” was the worst of what I waded through first.
AT MOORDITCH
“Now,” said the voice of lock and window-bar,
“You must confront things as they truly are.
Open your eyes at last, and see
The desolateness of reality.”
“Things have,” I said, “a pallid, empty look,
Like pictures in an unused coloring books.”
“Now that the scales have fallen from your eyes,”
Said the sad hallways, “you must recognize
How childishly your former sight
Salted the world with glory and delight.”
“This cannot be the world,” I said. “Nor will it,
Till the heart’s crayon spangle and fulfill it.”
– Richard “Poet” Wilbur, from Mayflies
I love that question, “What is your work now?” That should be a question I ask myself every day — a question we should ask of each other every day. It’s beautiful and the most relevant question a human being can ask. Not “Are you happy?”, as I used to think; one’s happiness is largely a condition of one’s having real work to do.
– Poet Jason Koo interviewed in the Feb 2010 Bookslut. Here is a link to two of his poems in Shampoo, “Shopping with Mayakovsky” and “I Just Got Out Of A Serious Relationship.” From the latter:
[…]
Instead of giving me some good old-fashioned
Attention he’d stare into my colander all night long
Trying to count the number of holes. “Honey,
I think I see some constellations!” He’d bring this
Lunacy into the bedroom, saying, Little Dipper,
Big Dipper … and as if that weren’t bad enough, he took
My six-volume Modern Library box set of Proust
And drew Garfield cartoons all over the margins.
Imagine Gilberte strolling down the Champs-Elysées
And Garfield stuffing himself with lasagna at her side…
the NYT has placement-checked some anonymous person (or persons) who put line breaks into Missed Connections postings on Craigslist.
The titian haired girl who brushes her teeth after smoking cigarettes
I hope you started your painting.
I hope you began your photo essay.
I hope you’re not spending your nights
trying to find clever means
of getting your hands on Xanax.
I hope you’re not living out
in the Alaskan wilderness.
I hope you’re hurting a little less.
with snow boots. Still navigating knee-deep curving trenches through the snowbanks of Charles Village, some so narrow you have to walk like you’re on a balance beam. The snow sits on the ground. But we’re back on campus, at last. It’s great to have classes again: theory, seminar, reading series, the whole nine. I even got into a practice room tonight.
We never know what we have lost, or what we have found.
We are only ourselves, and that promise.
Continue to walk in the world. Yes, love it!
He continued to walk in the world.
– RPW, from “Audubon: A Vision”
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
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.
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”
that the interwobs have provided: Noteflight, an online music notation program that lets you share scores, and For Better For Verse (via Bookslut) an interactive scansion practice website that lets you scan poems and get feedback on your scansion, out of UVA. The world is more efficient now. I especially like that both of them are free and public.
Dara Weinberg 