an early poem by Carol Ann Duffy

*

I think Carol Ann Duffy is the best living British poet.  Here's a beautifully-crafted early sonnet of hers, which vividly contrasts/connects the human and natural realms:

TERZA RIMA SW19

Over this Common a kestrel treads air

till the earth says mouse or vole.  Far below

two lovers walking by the pond seem unaware.

She feeds the ducks.  He wants her, tells her so

as she half-smiles and stands slightly apart.

He loves me, loves me not with each deft throw.

It could last a year, she thinks, possibly two

and then crumble like stale bread.  The kestrel flies

across the sun as he swears his love is true

and, darling, forever.  Suddenly the earth cries

Now and death drops from above like a stone.

A couple turn and see a strange bird rise.

Into the sky the kestrel climbs alone

and later she might write or he might phone.

/

(Vole (I had to look it up) is defined by the Oxford American Dictionary as: "any of several small animals resembling rats or mice." A kestrel is a small falcon.  SW19: "Mostly Wimbledon, a classy suburb" of London.)  (Note: Duffy did not include this in her Selected Poems (1994), nor in her New Selected Poems (2004).)

/

. . . Notice how effective the internal rhymes that Duffy uses are. In the first stanza, how "Far" echoes "earth" and "air."  See the connections of: over—vole—below—lovers. 

And the el-sounds in: kestrel—till—vole—bel/ow—wal/king.  Then: pond—un/aware.  Further down in the poem, find these: half—deft; crumble—stale—kestrel; love—for/ev/er —above.

The alliterations of: Common—kestrel —walking.

In lines 1-11, this progression of verbs: treads—walking—stands—crumble—drops.  Line 4, the link of 'feeds' and 'wants.' 

The repetition in lines 1-9: lovers, loves, loves, love.  How this last use of 'love' is followed so closely by 'death.' 

In the third stanza the k-sounds reoccur: crumble— kestrel— a/cross; and then, in line 13, sky—kestrel—climbs. 

Line 14 is full of internal rhymes: late/r—might —write—might; she—he. 

The connection between the wild kestrel and the tamer ducks, both wanting to feed, on 'mouse' or 'stale bread.' 

Thread the verbs of communication down through the poem: says—tells—swears—cries—write—phone (contrast the first four present active verbs with the future conditional verbs of the final line). 

Is the final verb assigned to her, "write," more distant than his verb, "phone"? 

The "two lovers" (l. 3) don't dialogue: her response to his telling her he wants her (l. 4) is to half-smile and stand slightly apart (l. 5) and to silently say to herself (silently, I assume, since the italics here are also used to indicate the unvoiced words of "the earth"),

He loves me, loves me not with each deft throw of stale bread to the ducks (l. 6). 

It could last a year, she thinks to herself, possibly two (l. 7). 

He persists and swears his love is true (l. 8) and, darling, forever (l. 9). 

Still, she won't speak; she won't even voice her doubts about his promised "forever." Instead

the earth cries Now (the needs of now take precedence to the vows of forever) and death drops (lines 10-11). 

They turn as one (a couple) to see a strange bird rise (l. 12) 

Why strange: as opposed to the domesticated ducks? 

Strange because its predatory interruption has somehow estranged them? 

To the temporary coupling of two it has introduced the terrible coup of its thirdness?  Its terza has rima'ed them apart. 

This deus ex machina dropping down 'like a stone' has shattered and split and left them each "alone" (l. 13). 

The K's and L's and I's and E's have it: Into the sKY the KestreL CLImbs aLone / And Later shE mIght wrIte or hE mIght phone.

(The kestrel is alone presumably because it has swallowed its prey.  What we devour is no longer 'apart' (l. 5) from us.)

('Apart' is the only endword in the poem which has no counterpart rhyme, a choice made probably for deliberate emphasis and reinforcement of the theme.)

///

on a poem by Camille Martin

*
appreciation: Camille Martin's "comatose in paradise . . ."

*
Camille Martin—

her "six sonnets" in the webzine Moria—

this is the sixth one:

comatose in paradise, but happy, happy
feet! is this where i want to go? thrust
into an age unfavourable to being
a guest in one's own home? the guest
so evolved its dying smile causes
offspring to birth on the spot? progeny
doomed to fail superbly, like houdini's
fetters? is this what i want? am i lucky to think
i am? these twittering birds have nothing
on the silence of magicians from the grave. someday
paradise will be thought savage. did rain fall
because i wanted to write a poem about love,
causing significant damage to blameless paper?
here comes the bus, fool. is that it?

*
Paradise/happy = perfection—

a perfect septenary ("A metrical line of 7 feet, usually . . . trochaic," the Princeton Handbook defines it)—

COmaTOSE in PARaDISE, but HAPpy, HAPpy

—

tose/dise . . . because "All thought emits a TOSS of the DICE" (Mallarmé)—

All thought dies in paradise—

braindead in paradise. Comatose—

replete hibernative stasis which Eliot's veggod protag protests at being cruelly wakened stirred out of, into the Waste Land—

comatose=out of it. Out of it in paradise. OD'd in paradise.

But

"happy, happy": the flapping harpy wings of the angel perched on edenfencegate to oversee the usual expulsion——

"happy / feet!" : Trochaic feet impelling the expelled soul, "thrust"
out of childhood's glade, into adulthood (that "age unfavourable" to being at home anywhere perhaps, much less a "guest" there)—

or into a post-ecological nowhere, homeless in nature—

age = evolved = dying = offspring = birth = progeny =

Houdini, "magician from the grave" bursting free the bounds of every painted and publicized coffin he's chained into

(the fetters of poetic meter—as always—failing superbly)

to provide a show, a career—

all his flamboyant acts of entombment-and-resurrection, a 3 minute Christ—

then famously requesting his friends/his future mourners to

(after the final stunt of his death)

commence seance for a message from him from the afterlife

into which he has been "thrust", from whence he radios nothing but the normal background noises of nature's "silence"—

(as I remember the story, he asked his friends to wait at a particular spot in the park (cue birdtwitter soundtrack) on a specific date where/when he would "contact" them if it was possible—if some telegraphable aspect of him remained postdeath—)

that meetingpoint in the park—what exact location, for one who had based his vocation on dislocating his shoulder to achieve escape from straitjackets, who had saved-his-life so many times by violent wrenchings of his joints and frame, his artistry to dislocate himself within a lock,

to find himself located and situated finally—

"is this where i want to go?" (as if I had a choice not to)—

The desire for a paradisal perfection in one's form, for a voice that will speak from past its physical life

is what drives the poet who's waiting for the bus to bear her away,

anyway is that it, is that the way? After "significant damage"

to the "blameless paper",

the "fool", the "magician" metaphors for the poet—

The eight questionmarks in the poem function as the default impatience (waiting for the bus) that interpolates all such
expressions of the poet's irritabilitus

which guilt-ridden is continually insisting "i wanted to write a poem about love"

(that's what I meant to write, the poet always testifies at his trial, that was my intent)

—love is paradise, even if when that love is over we curse the hypnotic trance that sustained us in that illusory eden—

the comatose quiescence/ simulacrum of death / "its dying smile" of happiness in that "savage" paradise, savage ergo primal, ergo what is past,

gone, over, paradise is always once-was, not now-is—

now is the bus-bench, where we wait to be houdinied from the chains of an ordinary day's luck-lock,

the bus is on time, like those motile trochees,

unlike the posthumous Houdini it will show up per schedule,

the rain via its own temporal metrical system will arrive

when it should,

but the poem won't—

*

a John Ashbery poem

appreciation: John Ashbery's "Farm Film"—

*
Looking at a single poem by John Ashbery and thinking about it seems almost a transgression of his intent to resist such frangible readings, if that is his intent or one of them.

Schemes frustrate or elongate meanings enter my tongue like a retort rebuttal that stretches the Plasticman of my sense lapse to an aerymaspian beaten goldleaf.

Here:

FARM FILM

Takeitapart, no one understands how you can just do
This to yourself. Balancing a long pole on your chin
And seeing only the ooze of foliage and blue sunlight
Above. At the same time you have not forgotten

The attendant itch, but, being occupied solely with making
Ends meet, or the end, believe that it will live, raised
In secrecy, into an important yet invisible destiny, unfulfilled.
If the dappled cows and noon plums ever thought of

Answering you, your answer would be like the sun, convinced
It knows best, maybe having forgotten someday. But for this
She looked long for one clothespin in the grass, the rime
And fire of midnight etched each other out, into importance

That is like a screen sometimes. So many
Patterns to choose from, they the colliding of all dispirited
Illustration on our lives, that will rise in its time like
Temperature, and mean us, and then faint away.

...
This is page 17 in "Shadow Train" (1981), which I've been reading at recently. How many poems, how many pages of poetry has he published since then, a thousand, two thousand?—

I don't know, but I know I haven't read the majority of them.

It's absurd to focus my attention on one old poem like this, and to appreciate it for reasons which are probably spurious since

they are personal, autobiographical—

that is, I spent part of my childhood on a farm.

—Didn't Ashbery himself grow up on a family farm in western New York state, or am I remembering this wrong, but if I'm right do I have the right to read this poem with that biographical fact

if it is a fact (which it is: the first sentence in the bio note of the hardcover edition of Shadow Train says: "John Ashbery was born in Rochester, New York, in 1927, grew up on a farm in western New York, and was educated at Deerfield Academy, Harvard, and Columbia, where he specialized in English literature.")

in the forefront of my responsive attendance? What am I allowed to do when I read an Ashbery poem,

what are the parameters of a permissible perusal?

And regardless in any case I'm scarcely capable of scratching at the surface of the probes raised by any of his works—

So: Unforgivable and misguided of me to say as I read it, Yes:

yes, I know from firsthand the farmer's occupational obsession, how he is constantly "being occupied solely with making / Ends meet," the endless seasonal scrabble to "balance" the crops and the cash income,

to plant and reap the seed, and to "believe that it will live." The belief in one's childhood

which remains back there always growing, always being "raised / In secrecy, into" its "destiny, unfulfilled."

I can think of ways I passed time/entertained myself in the tedium of the farm child not unlike

"Balancing a long pole on your chin / And seeing only the ooze of foliage and blue sunlight / Above."

Teetering a rake or pitchfork on your head, raising in secrecy the unforgotten itch of hickeyrash summer sweat as it films the skin's ooze toward a blue endless day . . .

raising that question the "dappled cows and noon plums" could have answered, and if they had, your answer to theirs could only have been like the sun's, passing with conviction and hence forgotten in its maybe someday—

But the days of childhood blur like winter and summer midnights etching each other out with their recurrent rime and fire, their cold and warmth, their years

with only a stray unimportant in the scheme of anything memory standing out here and there, for example the time your mother

stubbornly refused to come in the house while she looked in the grass for one lost clothespin

and it's getting late, it's supper, it's getting dark, why, why won't she come in!?

You can "takeitapart" (though the jamming together of the very words of that thought indicates the opposite) and try to make these straws these strains cohere in a pattern,

but the patterns overlap like a montage where the screen of all these images "you have not forgotten" collide collate their "dispirited / Illustration on our lives . . ."

and this collision "no one understands," least of all yourself, how can you do this to yourself, put it together take it apart (either way),

the collision of lost seasons and occupations, the cohesion will rise its beanpole like Jack and his poor cow-stalk mother, his plum-mom,

will rise (elevate) its time like the rising temperature that augurs long summer days of boredom

with attendant itches that cause all kinds of erections and their harvest of ooze—

like that phallic pole astride my chin—

no, but the poem will mean us, and then faint away.

Fade, feint. A way.

///

on a poem by Jericho Brown

 *
I encountered this poem a couple years ago at the Rumpus website, and it immediately made a vivid impression—I left a brief comment saying I thought it was an awfully good poem.

Of lately I've been putting together for possible publication my "appreciations", the pieces I've written in praise of particular poems, and thinking about possible candidates for further such proselets, I was reminded of this one by the author posting a comment here recently.  It had been in the back of my mind anyway, so I was glad to have my memory of it prodded.

/
Another Elegy
by Jericho Brown

This is what your dying looks like.
You believe in the sun. You believe
I don't love you. Always be closing,
Said our favorite professor before
He let the gun go off in his mouth.
I turned 29 the way any man turns
In his sleep, unaware of the earth
Moving beneath him, its plates in
Their places, a dated disagreement.
Let's fight it out, baby. You have
Only so long left. A man turns
In his sleep, so I take a picture.
He won't look at it, of course. It's
His bad side, his Mr. Hyde, the hole
In a husband's head, the O
Of his wife's mouth. Every night,
I take a pill. Miss one, and I'm gone.
Miss two, and we're through. Hotels
Bore me, unless I get a mountain view,
A room in which my cell won't work,
And there's nothing to do but see
The sun go down into the ground
That cradles us as any coffin can.


/
Let me see if I can properly speculate about this.  I see a lot of poems online, meaning I glimpse them, "page-view" them, but few take or hold my attention as this one did.

The title is ambivalent and perhaps not especially effective.  It's a bit innocuous.—

Another elegy in the sense that my life (I, the speaker of the poem) has been full-witness to so many deaths, overdreaded with the deaths of those close to me, dear enough to me each that they each demanded an elegy, more and more, elegy after elegy I have had to compose until at last exhausted I can only think of them as blurring into one after Another—?

Or another in the PoTech sense of saying Okay here's another elegy like all the poets throughout history have always written and here's another one with the ironic acknowledgment of such in its title, the wry winking belatedness all contemporary poets must profess cop to before they can even hope to begin to—

Or both senses blended.   Or a third I can't think of—?

23 lines: 8 octosyllabic; 7 enneasyllabic; 4 decasyllabic; 3 heptasyllabic; 1 hendecasyllabic.

Maybe the meter of the 1st line grabbed me: those 3 trochees followed by that spondee.  Their hardness eased/released by the 3 anapests in line 2.

Internal sound-rhyme in line 1 of dy/li strangely echoed by sight-rhyme in line 2: lie/lie.

But lookylook at the L's in these first 3 lines: Looks/Like/beLieve/beLieve/Love/aLways/cLosing.

(Which is Liquid counterpoint to their harsh content and abrupt curtal lines and sentences, perhaps.)

Line 4, 4 internal rhymes kick it home: OUR / [fav]OR[ite] / [profes]SOR / [be]FORE.

Periodic structure effectively varied throughout poem.  Starting with 3 short sentences in the first 3 and a half lines, followed by a 3 and a half line sentence; followed by a 4-line sentence, followed by 2 short ones; etc.

Internal rhymes fill the poem knit-tight and hold it taut-tensioned.   I won't mention them all, but look at:

lines 4/5: PROF[essor] / OFF ; 

line 6: I / [twent]TY / NI[ne] / [w]AY / [a]NY ;

lines 8/9: PLA[tes] / PLA[ces] ; ITS / PLATES / DATE[d]    . . . .

ENgage the ENtrancement of those N's line 5 through 9: guN/turNed/aNy/maN/turNs/uNaware/beNeath/iN/disagreemeNt.

The craftworkship of the poem ensures its element. 

The distribution of enjambed and end-stopped lines seems like a perfect mix of vis a vis. 

Just one more technical detail, admirable for its sturdy undergridding of the climax:

beginning end of line 18, the poem's longest sentence is its last—and in

line 19 starting with the second foot, the meter turns wholly solely iambic through the end of the poem line 23, with only three variations, trochees,

all of which are stressed on their N-sound: ANd / NOTHing (line 21) / INto (line 22)—

indeed the N-sounds re-emerge strongly throughout this final five-line sentence, 

which concludes the poem with these words: aNy coffiN caN.   ENd ENd ENd.  

ANother elegy.  ENother alogy.

/
The imperative mode: This is what your dying looks like.  You believe this, you believe that, you have only so much time left so let's fight out our old disagreements.  Listen to me, Mister, I'll tell you what's what.

But! at that point in the poem, midway, the word "you" disappears.  The direct confrontational address ends, and the "you" becomes present now only by implication—or suggestion:  ?  —

is he the "man turn[ing] in his sleep", the man who refuses to look (look at your dying, man) at the photo which shows him sprawled simulacrum-recumbent of death, that final turning away, death the "bad side" of life, the "Mr. Hyde" to life's Jekyll. . . 

"[H]is Mr. Hyde / the hole in a husband's head" is like the mouth of the professor in line 4, or like "the O of his wife's mouth."   Those aitches and that o.  Ho ho ho: some joke.  

Jocular, somewhat, the poem turns now, no? Sardonic—"Every night, / I take a pill.  Miss one, and I'm gone. /  Miss two, and we're through."  And then, speaking of ho ho ho: Hotels / bore me, iamb, iamb, iamb, iamb, iamb, iamb, iamb, iamb . . .

But why the "turn" from the 2nd-person intimate-spoken "you" to the 3rd-person (impersonal-descriptive) "his"—?

Not sure I understand this dramatic shift.  But the "you" which ends in lines 10-11 also ended in line 3, and vanished for 6 and a half lines: "You believe in the sun.  You believe / I don't love you." (lines 2/3)—

You believe I don't love you, and to prove it I'll ignore you for the next 6 and a half lines, until I can face that dated disagreement (line 10) of whether I love you or not, and confront you: "Let's fight it out, baby.  You have / Only so long left.  A man turns / " (lines 10-11) . . .  (In fact, the "you" has no time left, it is immediately "left" behind and transposed into the third-person "man" . . . )

The repetitions in the poem, the repeated words and phrases work, I think.  And the reappearance of imagery like "sun" in lines 2 and 22 (also there visually as the O, the hole of lines 14/15).  

(Does the somewhat-taunting "You believe in the sun" imply that I don't believe in the sun?  — what does it mean to not believe in the sun?  how does this relate to the sunset at the end of the poem?)

Indeed the poem is aided greatly by these recurrent insistent themes, for example the link from "look" in line 1 to "look" in line 13 to "view" in line 19 and "see" in line 21,

and they don't become (for me as a reader, anyway) monotonous or facile as they might in a poem less well-constructed.

The turn in the middle must have something to do with the you believing I don't love them (him).  That doubt makes me (I, the narrator) turn away at that point to think of past dyings, other elegiac events (the professor's suicide; my turning 29, ie the death of my youth; the continental drift of ancient planetary extinctions foreshadowing the shift of my own deviations toward indifference and defensive postures (let's fight) and the distancing maneuver of slipping into the 3rd-person)—

If he turns away from me and won't look at my bad-sided vision of him (lines 11-14) it must be linked to his wife, Mrs. Jekyll.  Sleeping with me brings out the hole, the Hyde in him, he thinks, or his wife's mouth thinks, and her mouth makes me think of the professor letting the gun go off in his mouth.  Cradle to coffin it fits right in.  It swallows that pill, that sun.

Turnings, endings, closures ("always be closing", line 3), closings which bleed into openings of the mouth or opening of the space between the lovers, or between husband and wife, the gap that separates, the endless gulf across which "my cell" won't reach—

It's a mountain view: objective perspective of the elegy; which in its dimensional instances is not a lament. 

/
Some provisional thoughts for now; maybe later I'll revisit revise or augment the notes above.  I've probably misread some of it, or perhaps most of it, but it's rewarding sometimes to try to stay with a poem for a while if the poem merits it, if the poem flatters my attention.

//

a delightfully piquant Wordsworth sonnet

*
Wordsworth:

[UNTITLED ("Composed December 1806")]

How sweet it is, when mother Fancy rocks
The wayward brain, to saunter through a wood!
An old place, full of many a lovely brood,
Tall trees, green arbours, and ground-flowers in flocks;
And wild rose tip-toe upon hawthorn stocks,
Like a bold Girl, who plays her agile pranks
At Wakes and Fairs with wandering Mountebanks,—
When she stands cresting the Clown's head, and mocks
The crowd beneath her.  Verily I think,
Such place to me is sometimes like a dream
Or map of the whole world: thoughts, link by link,
Enter through ears and eyesight, with such gleam
Of all things, that at last in fear I shrink,
And leap at once from the delicious stream.



*
 Mother, Girl, and Clown, the wayward wandering Mountebank Poet there in December remembering summer's pranks . . .

Not one of Wordsworth's famous sonnets, I don't recall it appearing in any anthology, nor even in a Selected Poems Of.

But I like its bounding quality, the way it leaps from its stream. 

It even echoes the Intimations Ode: "Whither is fled the visionary gleam?" 

Such gleam of all things.

How sweet it is at last in fear to shrink.

I remember reading somewhere that Jung describes the Anima of the adult male as being not commeasurate with his own age, but stunted at the adolescent stage—

hence this "bold Girl" who leaps out of Wordsworth's delicious stream of consciousness . . .

this simile which jumps the poem so suddenly from the "lovely brood" of deep forest solitude to a raucous circus atmosphere,

where the acrobats "link by link" perform their agile pranks for the crowd's amusement.

A troupe of tumble-makers, a clown clan of wandering Mountebanks who entertain at Wakes and Fairs,

with the Girl, probably one of the family, still young enough to win the crowd by her bold saucy manner, her mock of it all . . .

Mother Fancy rocks the cradled wayward child, her lovely brood cradled in his thoughts.

"Wakes" here has the old meaning of "a merry-making held in connection with the feast of the dedication of a church, kept by watching all night" as well as a post-burial celebration . . .

Bold Wordsworth mocking the crowd of thoughts that delight and frighten.

*
Even the self-mockery of great poets is exhilarating (Ashbery or Larkin for more recent examples).

*

I like this sonnet for all the reasons it likes itself.



/

after Dowson

Where Modern Poetry Began: a Conjecture

*

A LAST WORD (by Ernest Dowson, 1899)

Let us go hence: the night is now at hand;

   The day is overworn, the birds all flown;

   And we have reaped the crops the gods have sown;

Despair and death; deep darkness o'er the land,

Broods like an owl; we cannot understand

   Laughter or tears, for we have only known

   Surpassing vanity: vain things alone

Have driven our perverse and aimless band.

Let us go hence, somewhither strange and cold,

   To Hollow Lands where just men and unjust

   Find end of labour, where's rest for the old,

Freedom to all from love and fear and lust.

Twine our torn hands!  O pray the earth enfold

Our life-sick hearts and turn them into dust.

*

Many have linked Dowson's first line here with the start of Eliot's Prufrock: "Let us go then, you and I . . . "

(not to mention Hollow Lands and Hollow Men) . . .

Louis Simpson in his very commendable book, "Three on the Tower," declares that Modern Poetry begins with this simile:

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherised upon a table . . .

If you enter the Boston Common near the corner of Beacon and Arlington streets, you can easily find the Memorial to Ether: it's a large stele structure, erected in 1909 to honor the medical miracle that led to this alleviation of surgical pains . . .

if you walk around it, you'll see carved on its sides the names and facts attending the merciful invention; also engraved there is a depiction of a patient lying upon the surgical table, masked to his necessary numbness, his unfelt salvation . . .

Now as you stand there looking up at the stone monument, imagine it's 1910 and you're a shy young Philosophy major from Harvard on your way to an arty soiree on nearby Beacon Hill, bashfully headed toward paneled rooms where the women come and go talking of Michelangelo,

only you're early probably (you're a bit of an earlywart), and so, trying to forget how nervous the thought of those lamp-eyed women up there on the Hill makes you, you kill time here in the Park by avidly remembering the dissolute lines of a late Dowson and murmuring the beginning of a poem you yourself are working on, yes you're a poet,

as it happens a very handsome young Tom from St Louis, Missouri—

indeed you're a dude though you doubt it to such a perversely-celibate degree, to an extent of fear and desperate longing, that a Saint might envy the Sebastianated profundity, the repressed prowess of your bit-back passions,

there you are muttering and stuttering the start of your poem, your panicky Love Song, but you're stuck, you can't get past the first couple lines that go (going after Dowson) "Let us go then, you and I, / When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a . . . like a  . . ."

Like a what?  Umm, like an enormous purple peony?  an enormous purpled penis?  an enormous, engorged prepuce?—

and then suddenly, out of nowhere, a cat escaped from a nearby mansion streaks past and drags your glance down or aslant from the sunset you've been studying for inspiration—

and all at once your eye is caught on the tumescent wonder of this newly-erected pillar or Cleopatra's Needle whose obeliskness awaits your transfiguration of its nursed and doctored bas-relief figures into the first trope of Modern Verse . . .

in short, you see this great big thing sticking phallic-ly out of the ground, and hard upon it rears the fresh cuts, hot-off-the-chisel, the castrate-straight edges hacked and honed, so recently-rendered in sharp homage to the genius of Hippocrates etcet,

and in particular a sculpted picture that shows, what else,

a patient etherised upon a table.

. . .  It's close to Arlington St, down from the corner of Beacon St about fifty or sixty yards.  There is no plaque commemorating the historic event I've envisioned here, but maybe you can stray chance to stand upon the very spot where Modern Poetry began in my imaginary re-enactment, tableau where I fancy the young poet found himself:

only of course there wouldn't have been all the insane traffic noise there is now back in 1910; if you can blank out those honking horns and rush-hour engines, you might be able to return to that briefest encounter:

can you re-T.S. that bewildering juncture, the awful daring of that moment's surrender . . . ?

Just a short walk away from there, moreover, you may also try to find the place where PostModern Poetry perhaps began in the late 1950s—

the sidewalk where Robert Lowell raged in crucifixed witness as the Boston Garden was ripped apart to build a parkinglot. . . . Stop there or stroll there while all around you, all around the Common, a savage servility slides by on grease.  Inhale that oil, feel that energy, that power, that source the world is killing itself for.

Stroll there and stand there in our Hollow Land . . .

Where?  Somewhither strange and cold.  Let us go hence—

Oh do not ask what is it: let us go and make our visit.

*

*

[When Louise Bogan met Eliot in the 1940s, she was struck by how blithely he retained or emitted an aura of his handsomeness as a youth . . . I don't have the quote, but as I remember it she went on to say something about how those who were physically beautiful when young will often wear the air or the manner (the grace) of that beauty into their middle or old age . . . a bearing, as it were.]

*

on a poem by Jill Essbaum

*

by Jill Alexander Essbaum:

 

Easter

is my season

of defeat.

Though all

is green

and death

is done,  

I feel alone.

As if the stone

rolled off

from the head

of the tomb

is lodged

in the doorframe

of my room,

and everyone

I’ve ever loved

lives happily

just past

my able reach.

And each time

Jesus rises

I’m reminded

of this marble

fact:

they are not

coming back.

/

Let me see if I can elucidate for myself why I am impressed by this poem, and write another 'appreciation' to add to my book (see second paragraph here: http://knottprosepo.blogspot.com/2012/05/some-thoughts-on-another-elegy-by.html ) . . . maybe I should just transfer the ones I've posted here over the years onto a separate blog—

/
I don't or can't make any large claims for the poems I'm writing these notations on, just that they struck me and stayed with me,

and these mini essays are attempts to understand how they involved me, or how I understand my admiration of each verse—I'm not trying to elevate the status of their authors, none of whom need my approbation—

and certainly Essbaum doesn't need it.  Overall her verse seems outstandingly brilliant to me, but for the purpose of these appreciations such praise is superfluous.  She reminds me of Guillevic, and could well be I think a major adjunct to the great tradition of Ungaretti et al, but my opinions are hoo-ha at best.  Nobody wants my words blurbed on the back of their book.

/
Essbaum, Esster, Easter.

/ is my season / of defeat.  EAster / SEAson / deFEAts me because rhyme is cyclical and I am Jill.

Rhymes come back (recur) but, the poem concludes, "they are not / coming back."  They are not Easter.

But the poem is Easter, or the first line of the poem is Easter and Easter is simultaneously the poem's title,

and this latter "fact" makes it the only unaccompanied un-coupleted line of the poem—

as I, the speaker, feel myself uncoupled from "everyone / I've ever loved /"—

"I feel alone."  Easter is alone too, because, although it is celebrated yearly, it is not holidayed for the "fact" of itself in and of itself,

but for the myth it "lodges" or houses or seals up in an immoveable meaning,

another resurrection fantasy whose nature (apparatus) is to declare itself unrepeatable (only, solitary, unique: alone).

Each year the myth is repeated ("Each time Jesus rises"), recurrent as rhymes in a poem, a poem which also seeks to be unrepeatable,

mythical in its uniqueness.  The "fact" it must contain repeating elements in order to become unrepeatable is simply its Sisyphean foot in the door, the feet that heft its syllables of Shklovskian stoniness into that crack—

troch-cracks open the tomb: EAster / IS my / SEAson / OF de / FEAT. 

(Or is it: EAster / is MY / SEAson / of deFEAT: trochee/iamb/trochee/anapest)

Then the iam-breaks split: Though ALL / is GREEN / and DEATH / is DONE / I FEEL / aLONE.  / As IF / the STONE

—and when the seal-stone is "rolled off", the meter rolls off its track:

"rolled off" (line 9) is a what-foot, trochee, iamb, spondee, what,

but lines 10 and 11 sort of bounce anapestically (like that rolled off stone bounces before it comes to rest)

before an iambic line 12, followed by 13 which is pyrrhic/spondee (?): "in the doorframe",

or is it:

IN the / DOORframe / OF my / ROOM.  

"Of" (line 14) seems definitely stressed (to my ear anyway) which then

happily ("happily") rhymes with all the v's that follow in lines 15/16/17:

OF/EVeryone/I'VE/EVer/LOVEd/LIVes.

Lines 15-19 mostly iambic, with maybe a linger-stress on "lives" in 17 echoing its preceding word "loved" and perhaps line 18 ("just past") has a spondaic emphasis—

N's and M's: the poem begins with N's and then beginning line 10 becomes mostly M's:

Lines 1-10: seasoN/greeN/doNe/aloNe/stoNe

(though don't forget all the L's slipping through the poem: aLL/feeL/aLone/roLLed/Lodged/Loved/Lives/happiLy/abLe/marbLe)—

Well, anyone can see the rhymes and soundpatterns woven into the poem, I don't need to point them out everyone,

(like: EAch/JEsus/REminded ... or JeSUS/riSES/thIS . . . TIme/RIses/I'm/reMInded

but the M's are so important I simply muhhhst count them:

line 10 through 14 you have: 

froM/toMb/doorfraMe/My/rooM—  

(but in lines 15-19, the M's vanish!)

and then "coming back" in lines 20-26, the M's resurrect themselves:

tiMe/I'M/reMinded/Marble/coMing.

Line 24 only monosyllablic line, engraved in gravity, incised even more by its colon: "fact:"—

then line 25 ends with a strong "N-word" which gains greater emphasis perhaps by its "remiNded" echo of those N's in the early lines: "they are not"—

—But (drumroll) suddenly, out of nowhere, in the last 3 lines (=3 days=trinity) of Easter, for the first and only time

some "K" sounds occur:

faKt/Koming/bacK

and it seems apropos they would rear here to KonKlude the poem.

The door of the tomb poem klangs shut once more. 

It seals me in from everyone I've ever loved: they "live" while I stay stanzaically stuck here in my perfected/hermetic rhyme room.

Or doesn't Yeats say somewhere that when a poem is successfully finished the poet will hear a "click"?

Click, clack, the poem keeps coming back.  (Fact.)


/

(This is a poem I admired when I read it a year or so ago in Po(Chi)Mag, and I've 'come back' to it many times since.  In general the poetry Poetry Magazine publishes is not much better than what shows up in your Rat Vomit Review, but occasionally a miracle like "Easter" appears.  And actually I thought the other two poems by Essbaum in that issue (January 2011) were just as good as this one, and would equally merit an 'appreciation', hopefully from somebody better qualified to do it.)

/ 
My provisional thoughts for now; maybe later I'll revisit revise or augment the notes above.  If I've made errors in reading it or rigging it, report me to the MLA or the AWP, or the nearest MFA. 

///