First Poems
Here are two poems by Michael Palmer; they appear consecutively in the section of his book Sun entitled “Baudelaire Series.”
A man undergoes pain sitting at a piano
knowing thousands will die while he is playing
He has two thoughts about this
If he should stop they would be free of pain
If he could get the notes right he would be free of pain
In the second case the first thought would be erased
causing pain
It is this instance of playing
he would say to himself
my eyes have grown hollow like yours
my head is enlarged
though empty of thought
Such thoughts destroy music
and this at least is good
*
The opening is read by the tongue
momently for the dead now
as they multiply
far from here—are
(as words this high)—are
amid sand the few fragments
bowl bread violet
curve swollen outward
of flies gathered
at lips and eyes
Here is a poem by W.S. Merwin:
THE ASIANS DYING
When the forests have been destroyed their darkness remains
The ash the great walker follows the possessors
Forever
Nothing they will come to is real
Not for long
Over the watercourses
Like ducks in the time of ducks
The ghosts of the villages trail in the sky
Making a new twilight
Rain falls into the open eyes of the dead
Again again with its pointless sound
When the moon finds them they are the color of everything
The nights disappear like bruises but nothing is healed
The dead go away like bruises
The blood vanishes into the poisoned farmlands
Pain the horizon
Remains
Overhead the seasons rockT
They are paper bells
Calling to nothing living
The possessors move everywhere under
Death their star
Like columns of smoke they advance into the shadows
Like thin flames with no light
They with no past
And fire their only future
A man undergoes pain sitting at a piano
knowing thousands will die while he is playing
He has two thoughts about this
If he should stop they would be free of pain
If he could get the notes right he would be free of pain
In the second case the first thought would be erased
causing pain
It is this instance of playing
he would say to himself
my eyes have grown hollow like yours
my head is enlarged
though empty of thought
Such thoughts destroy music
and this at least is good
*
The opening is read by the tongue
momently for the dead now
as they multiply
far from here—are
(as words this high)—are
amid sand the few fragments
bowl bread violet
curve swollen outward
of flies gathered
at lips and eyes
Here is a poem by W.S. Merwin:
THE ASIANS DYING
When the forests have been destroyed their darkness remains
The ash the great walker follows the possessors
Forever
Nothing they will come to is real
Not for long
Over the watercourses
Like ducks in the time of ducks
The ghosts of the villages trail in the sky
Making a new twilight
Rain falls into the open eyes of the dead
Again again with its pointless sound
When the moon finds them they are the color of everything
The nights disappear like bruises but nothing is healed
The dead go away like bruises
The blood vanishes into the poisoned farmlands
Pain the horizon
Remains
Overhead the seasons rockT
They are paper bells
Calling to nothing living
The possessors move everywhere under
Death their star
Like columns of smoke they advance into the shadows
Like thin flames with no light
They with no past
And fire their only future
posted by & at 9:15 AM
28 Comments:
Here are two poems by Michael Palmer; they appear consecutively in the section of his book Sun entitled “Baudelaire Series.”
A man undergoes pain sitting at a piano
knowing thousands will die while he is playing
He has two thoughts about this
If he should stop they would be free of pain
If he could get the notes right he would be free of pain
In the second case the first thought would be erased
causing pain
It is this instance of playing
he would say to himself
my eyes have grown hollow like yours
my head is enlarged
though empty of thought
Such thoughts destroy music
and this at least is good
*
The opening is read by the tongue
momently for the dead now
as they multiply
far from here—are
(as words this high)—are
amid sand the few fragments
bowl bread violet
curve swollen outward
of flies gathered
at lips and eyes
Here is a poem by W.S. Merwin:
THE ASIANS DYING
When the forests have been destroyed their darkness remains
The ash the great walker follows the possessors
Forever
Nothing they will come to is real
Not for long
Over the watercourses
Like ducks in the time of ducks
The ghosts of the villages trail in the sky
Making a new twilight
Rain falls into the open eyes of the dead
Again again with its pointless sound
When the moon finds them they are the color of everything
The nights disappear like bruises but nothing is healed
The dead go away like bruises
The blood vanishes into the poisoned farmlands
Pain the horizon
Remains
Overhead the seasons rock
They are paper bells
Calling to nothing living
The possessors move everywhere under Death their star
Like columns of smoke they advance into the shadows
Like thin flames with no light
They with no past
And fire their only future
First, a couple of provisos:
My initial reasons for looking at these two writers together (stated on Silliman’s blog after a heated debate about the Merwin) are perhaps not those which this reading will take up,
but I’ve found the comparison fruitful for other reasons, and it’s given me some things to think about.
Palmer writes in books and sequences, so it’s hard to look at one or two poems of his out of their proper context. Therefore, there’s a small amount of “taking my word for it” necessary for this analysis, and here it is:
If you read all of Sun (published in 1988), it becomes pretty clear that, when Palmer writes about the dead and the dying, he’s doing so in reference to the context of political atrocity. One specifically thinks of the US-funded massacres in Latin America and of the heightened public consciousness of this that became most obvious during the Iran-Contra hearings (where one can place such Palmer lines as “I do not remember personally torturing prisoners). Though there are hints of this in the second of the two poems I’ve selected, it’s not as clear without the whole book (this could also be said of much of Merwin’s writing—though not this poem—in which the poetry’s relation to, say, the Vietnam war only becomes clear through an accumulation of oblique references and symbolic images).
Ok. On to Palmer. I’ll spend more time on the first poem than on the second.
It begins with an artist, a musician, at the piano, conscious of death, of political atrocity. This is knowledge, a stable thought against which the unstable thoughts to come resonate. These latter thoughts never get settled in the poem.
There are two possible readings of the thought in the second stanza: it might be “my playing is a privelege, enacted at the expense of the dying, who I could be doing something to help instead.” But death is also “freedom from pain;” in this sense the thought has a false logic, since the “thousands” will be free of pain whether the player plays or not.
Is the second thought expressed fully in the first line of the third stanza (in which case the next line is a commentary by the poet/narrator), or does the second thought already include its consequences, the negation of the first thought? Again, there are multiple possibilities, and this goes for the consequences of erasing thought 1; it would remove the pianist’s pain at getting the notes wrong, and also his pain of conscience—but it would erase the possibility of removing the pain of the “thousands,” causing them pain, and this would be painful for the man, given his knowledge.
There’s a tension here between morality and technique, highlighted by Palmer’s use of “should” in the first thought and “could” in the second (even though both words, here, mean “if he were to”). The options in both areas are flawed, negating each other and themselves. “Causing pain” is given its own stanza, to show how this viscious circle itself produces a negative effect, whereas its component thoughts are framed as responses to a negativity they didn’t claim to cause.
The poem has a symmetrical structure (3 two-line stanzas on each end, with 2 one-liners in the middle), and this is its center. Up to know we’ve had a little structure of thoughts that fit together in all-too-tight logical relationships (even if the parts of these relationships are logically flawed). The syntactical relation of “It is this instance of playing” to the lines that follow it sets up the second half of the poem as being concerned with loosening, a concern it shows by enacting it.
“It is this instance of playing,” while gramatically complete, lacks something—a specification of “it.” The capitalization implies a link to the next stanza, so that this line could be part of what “he would say to himself” (note the “would,” matching up with “could” and “should”). But even in that reading the “it” is unspecified. This lends the line a further independence, which encourages me to read “this” as referring not just to the second case, in which he plays the notes right, but also to the whole structure described in the first half of the poem. A specific way of thinking about art’s relation to atrocity is the subject of the poem, and the one presented leads to both political and aesthetic resignation. The “instance of playing” is just as much the play of the two thoughts as it is the playing of the piano. These very serious thoughts constitute a game, with pretty unsatisfying rules.
The second half of the poem sets up another interiorized, circular, contradictory situation. The man speaks to himself, emphasizing a self-identity (“my eyes have grown hollow like yours,” where the first and third person are the same—perhaps the same person having made the two choices outlined in the first half). The tension between “grown” and “hollow” amplifies the emptiness of this consistency of self-examination (with its emphasis on the self-similarity of the self), which has led it through a particular kind of argument about the realtion of artistic activity and social reality to an empty place. But here, at least, “he” seems aware of what’s happened. This awareness could be the referent of “such thoughts;” it’s a new circle that “at least” gets out of the initial considerations and looks at them. This “at least” emphasizes that the problems have not been solved.
Why is it good that music is destroyed? What does it mean to destroy music? The interpretation I favor is that, in the first half of the poem, art is specifically contrasted with social reality. Music is self-similar, built on relations of internal coherence. To “destroy music” might mean to remove oneself from the situation in which aesthetic practice and social conscience negate each other—maybe one not-quite-solution would be to make an art that shows the scars of the reasons it can’t be music anymore.
Or perhaps “good” shouldn’t be taken as the poet’s estimation at all. The line is as puzzling as it is surprising.
Palmer’s second poem heightens these problematics. It’s also concerned with what’s happening elsewhere “now,” while the work is going on (note his use of “momently,” an adverb that makes “moment” into an adjective), and with the problem of the distance between the poem and these events. The unburied dead, for whose lips and eyes the living tongue attempts to stand in (“for” means both “dedicated to” and “in the stead of”), are “far from here,” and to the poet they can only appear “as words this high.” The poem doesn’t leave it at that, though—here (again) an off-kilter syntax and a masterful use of line and stanza breaks are used to give each of the two occurrences of “are” an independent status as firm assertions of presence; the words “are,” and the dead “are.” The problem here is the possibility of their connection.
What is the significance of writing a poem that takes into account the atrocities ocurring in the world? The poem won’t stop them. Maybe some polemical works can function as rallying cries for people resisting these horrors—or maybe they can “raise consciousness,” help the reader care about the events outside their sphere. Even then, those with the privilege to speak, think, write about these things have to consider their actual position in relation to them. Are they implicated? Innocent but unhelpful? Victims themselves? And how does the language through which they address these questions play a role in the positions they’re in? These are questions that are crucial for me, and Palmer raises them with a particular attentiveness to how the problems are built up, using formal means to heighten the most problematic moments.
Now on to the Merwin. I’ll say immediately that, though WSM attempts to deal more directly, in this work, with political atrocity than does Palmer, I wish that it took some of Palmer’s problematics into account. The stance of “The Asians Dying” is ulimately one of an ethically substantiated name-calling, in which the oppressor (“the possessors”) is called a worshipper of “Death their star” and a bringer of darkness. I absolutely agree with Merwin’s opinion of the bastards who decimated Vietnam, and I’m right there with him in his horror at the long-term effects of the war—the environmental devastation, the poisoning of farmlands—but I think he takes for granted the value of writing a poem of horror at these events, and it’s a general “taking for granted” throughout the poem that I want to criticize.
“The possessors” seems good at first. It brings out the material gluttony of the US economy. But, actually, the US soldiers fighting in Vietnam were largely underprivileged. This doesn’t excuse their actions, but the abstraction of the whole war effort into this one plural noun seems based more on the attempt to produce a particular kind of rhetorical power than on an understanding of the situation. I could be wrong, though—perhaps to the Vietnamese these distinctions didn’t seem so important.
What’s good here is Merwin’s emphasis on the lasting effects of the war; the villages have “ghosts,” their ashes that block out the sun. The seasons themselves become meaningless and empty when the sky barely changes from night to day, and the people to whom it would matter are dead. I particularly like “Again again with its pointless sound.” This line casts meanings out all around it, referring to the rain, to the meaningless of nature without anyone to live with it, and to the very repetition of the observation of repetition (in which case I read the line as “ ‘Again’ again, with its pointless sound”), a meditation on the conditions of reporting atrocity. I don’t, however, find that kind of self-consciousness elsewhere in the poem.
Merwin employs a very conventional line/stanza structure, where the breaks always occur at obvious syntactic points (either between phrases or for rhetorical emphasis of words like “forever,” which is already so powerful that giving it its own line seems like overdoing it—and, besides, “forever” is utterly resigned; is Merwin merely noting this horror, or does he want something to change?). He depends on traditional poetic devices that have no necessary or made relation to the subject matter. Why is the moon personified? It’s clear why the seasons are “overhead,” given the repeated references to the clogged sky, but why do they “rock?” Why “Death their star?” Neither the US soldiers nor their government and its cronies in business worship death; they think of what they’re doing in relation to a sick concept of “democracy,” an anticommunist political stance, or a drive toward maximizing profits and fixing trade relations. None of these factors are present in the poem.
My least favorite part is the string of similes in the last stanza. I don’t see why Merwin needs images of darkness to convey how terrible this all is. Why not “with? columns of smoke?” Why do “the possessors” have to be like “flames?” These are people, or forces, or whatever, that actually start fires—they’re burning villages, raping and murdering people, destroying an entire culture. The only effect of all these devices is to increase the power of the poem and, by extension, of the poet. The goal of consistency of tone with increasing intensity is one that has never served poetry of any kind very well. I get nothing from this that could help me as a poet, citizen, or activist. It doesn’t encourage me to think of my relation to “the possessors,” or of anyone else’s, for that matter, and it leaves the poet himself in a perfectly secure position, one of detached moral outrage.
I think Palmer has a lot more to offer.
Damn fine. When I posted the poems from the comment section I had to format them all! Has to be a better way. Will reply after thinking twice.
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Dear Lilac,
It's exactly that "genorosity with blame" that I mistrust in Merwin's poem. What justifies his position? Is he really, as a successful poet with a house in Hawaii, as unimplicated as his stance makes it seem? More importantly, what does his poem have to add?
Ok, it makes sense that you get more out of the rhetorical intensity of WSM than of MP's stuff. I don't, though--I feel like I'm being manipulated (here, unsuccessfully) by techniques I'm very familiar with and can identify with ease.
Could you elaborate on "sense of arbitrairiness?"
I think Palmer wrote about the Holocaust pretty often, in
"Sun" and in his previous book, "Notes for Echo Lake."
What "taking my word for it" is necessary in my reading? I thought that it was only the connection between MP's references to death & dying and political atrocity (he doesn't just mean people dying in general). Is there more that the poem doesn't do on its own?
What about the common, conventional devices in Merwin's poem? Do they not seem mind-numbing to you? How do you think his devices relate to the subject matter?
Thanks so much for your comments on my reading.
cheers,
Andy
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Thanks! I try to be.
That's me as a gangster, no less, at the wedding party in a staged reading of The Threepenny Opera.
I'll write more later in response to your most recent MP/WSM comments...
And I will respond in a comprehensive yet blithe manner but maybe wiil have to wait till Monday since today I am on a hunt for pumpkins, off to the Gibbs Farm for Halloween this and that and so on.
Lilac,
It's not "objectivity" that I find lacking in Merwin's poetry--nor do I see it in Palmer's. I don't like WSM's accusatory stance when it's filtered through a technique that involved making really heavy symbols out of something whose actual "heaviness" makes a mockery of such attempts--as well as through ways of structuring the poem that I think are just lazy, or taken for granted (here I'm talking about his line breaks and the movement in his sentences). The tone of wisdom and invocation bugs me, too.
I think the stuff on "Carmen is a Cat," at least going on my brief scan of it, is far superior in its structure and in its approach to its subject matter (I'm curious to know more, by the way, about what's happening in Lebanon and what you're doing there). I think that, as far as political poetry goes, my preferences run toward two extremes: the very succinct and crisp (sometimes almost documentary, but including a lot of very "subjective" stuff, as in some of Brecht's late poems) and, on the other hand, the very complex and problematic (some of Barrett Watten's work, for example). Of course, there are a lot of exceptions: Bob Perelman's hilarious poetry that often shows linkages between (for instance) erotic desire, the market, and war; Fanny Howe's weird lyrics full of her strange Catholic Worker brand of spiritual desperation... I guess my favorite stuff in these veins shows how something is working in the events the writing addresses, or introduces a problem that offers a new way to think about them.
I don't really think of Palmer as a primarily "political poet," actually (and I can't argue with your claim that he doesn't get anywhere politically here... but he does give me something to think about). I think, though, that the political elements have an interesting, and very complicated, relationship with the linguistic and philosophical concerns there, and with the issue of the poem addressing someone, which is itself very strange in his work. In fact, nothing there is really what it seems...
I don't think music and pain are metaphors in the poem--or, if they are, they're metaphors for things that are very close to them: artistic thought and violent death.
He writes very much for readers, and definitely not for "the gods."
Finally, I'm shocked (ok, that's a slight hyperbole) that you say that Palmer's lines could be reordered without affecting the poems. I think these poems are extremely tightly constructed, that they play out logics that couldn't exist at all without exactly those words and exactly those line and stanza breaks, and that any shift in them would be a great loss. And this is precisely because of the fact that the parts of the poems don't just flow into one another. This may seem counterintuitive, but I think it's often the case that the order of parts in a more "fragmented" work is more crucial than in a more "unified" one. We could try it, though: I suspect that shuffling Palmer's sentences around would destroy the poems, whereas you could change the order of Merwin's sentences and it would hardly matter at all, given the repeated uses of the same metaphors and the (to me, oppressively) consistent tone.
'Zat's all for now.
--Andy
I have a few minutes before I go once again to sit all on a pre All Hallows Eve to sit in a restored 19th century farmhouse on Gibbs Farm and listen to an actor playing the Old Schoolmaster read “The Tell Tale Heart” or “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and then end the evening in the restored etc. kitchen of the same eating a soul cake and sipping hot apple cider.
So – to the first poem – and an only partial reading. Andy, I wish I hadn’t read your damn fine analysis but I have and so will respond to that.
I don’t think that the poem really “ begins with an artist, a musician, at the piano, conscious of death, of political atrocity.” I believe the context you provided is the correct one == atrocity etc.. Make sense to me. But can’t agree with that “ specific way of thinking about art’s relation to atrocity is the subject of the poem, and the one presented leads to both political and aesthetic resignation.”
“A man undergoes pain sitting at a piano
knowing thousands will die while he is playing
He has two thoughts about this
If he should stop they would be free of pain
If he could get the notes right he would be free of pain
In the second case the first thought would be erased
causing pain”
My problem is that this line” If he should stop they would be free of pain” makes no sense if we are to believe that the man playing the piano is an artist. Why would the “they” be free of pain if he would stop creating/reproducing music/art? Cause…effect? What possible relationship? So – to follow along – if a poet stops writing the “they” (and let’s say they are victims of atrocity) would be free of pain? How? And then how would the thought that “If he should stop they would be free of pain” be erased if he got the notes right and then (the break significant) cause pain?
I think it makes more sense and works altogether if what Palmer wants to do is to depict the mind of someone who could think he is creating beauty/bringing surcease of sorrow (sorry Poe on my mind) by causing thousands of death. So if he “should” (nice – I get the distinction between should and the could that follows) stop “they would be free of pain” and if he could get the notes right he would be free of pain. That is the deaths are necessary because he is trying to create beauty through death but can’t – not yet. He’s trying – can’t get the notes right. But then when and if he does “get the notes right” the knowledge of the thousands dying while he is playing vanishes and this “causes pain” as he just blithely plays on.
“It is this instance of playing
he would say to himself
my eyes have grown hollow like yours
my head is enlarged
though empty of thought
Such thoughts destroy music
and this at least is good”
And here, of course, is the familiar and strange “Instance of playing” when he gets the notes right in which the killer identifies with the victims – made over in his own image and thought vanishes and there is a pure thoughtlessness and a transcendence of suffering and an achieved consummation familiar enough as just what is desired by various systems of mass death. And it is just this will to death of totalitarian systems the will to destroy others and then finally the self that has been "discovered" in various responses to the death cults of the last century.
The last two lines – who says them? Strange mix. The thought of no thought destroys music? You can’t really make them fit. Actually it seems impossible to say just what is meant. You choose
“To “destroy music” might mean to remove oneself from the situation in which aesthetic practice and social conscience negate each other—maybe one not-quite-solution would be to make an art that shows the scars of the reasons it can’t be music anymore.”
And then:
“Or perhaps “good” shouldn’t be taken as the poet’s estimation at all. The line is as puzzling as it is surprising.”
Bu the lines fit if the speaker it is the speaker who is causing the pain -- since his ultimate goal is to destroy himself.
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The big question is what is gained by making this difficult to discover? The thoughts -- as you outline them and as I outlined them -- are fairly complex and strange and difficult enough if you measure difficulty by the srandard of ordinary speech. But -- say you want to -- as you do-- value these thoughts as adequate to get at the tension between aesthetics and social practice or to get at (as I would have it) the totalitarian mind.
But why willingly write "causing pain" for example rather than killing? Maybe if the speaker is the tyrant this euphemism works -- how that fellow would think.
But if the poem is about the tension between social practice and aesthetics?
After all if we are describing atrocities as the core of all of this the, phrase is rather neutral and inadequate. I think you might feel that going with "killing" or making the poem more explicit would implicate the poem in certain rhetorical excesses or certain complications and simplifications brought on by striving for clarity instead of a rich ambiguity.
If I were you and feeling wicked I would describe these as instance of totalitarian thought (taking a cue from Plato) -- excesses and moves designed to overcome thought with manipulated emotion.
If the thoughts finally expressed, with all the complications you have outlined, were actually instances of what I think poetry should strive for: that is (and I probably stole this from the Russians) the saying of what various systems of tyranny (political and aesthetic etc.)try tp prevent being said, I would agree that the deliberate avoidance of rhetoric of a certain sort and the deliberate ambiguity was justified.
But, finally, the "thoughts" expressed in the poem don't justify complexity in so far as a refusal of emotion and of clarity is a refusal to make the poem available in certain ways and to engage with atrocity on a more than philosophical or aesthetic level.
There should be a turn against the quietude and abstraction at least. Something that questions the assumptions of the poem. Just as a similar poem written in the modes I am assuming you are suspicious of should include a turn the other way.
On to the Merwin briefly. At least a reaction to this:
“The possessors” seems good at first. It brings out the material gluttony of the US economy. But, actually, the US soldiers fighting in Vietnam were largely underprivileged. This doesn’t excuse their actions, but the abstraction of the whole war effort into this one plural noun seems based more on the attempt to produce a particular kind of rhetorical power than on an understanding of the situation. I could be wrong, though—perhaps to the Vietnamese these distinctions"
And also this:
The stance of “The Asians Dying” is ulimately one of an ethically substantiated name-calling, in which the oppressor (“the possessors”) is called a worshipper of “Death their star” and a bringer of darkness. I absolutely agree with Merwin’s opinion of the bastards who decimated Vietnam, and I’m right there with him in his horror at the long-term effects of the war—the environmental devastation, the poisoning of farmlands—but I think he takes for granted the value of writing a poem of horror at these events, and it’s a general “taking for granted” throughout the poem that I want to criticize."
You are, first of all, suspicious of a certain kind of rhetorical power that simplifies and abstracts and ignores complications and certain facts (that for instance those who fought in Vietnam did not think of themselves as bringers of death, were from the lower classes and so on). Essentially Merwin's patrician attitude and his distance in fact pisses you off:
"I think he takes for granted the value of writing a poem of horror at these events, and it’s a general “taking for granted” throughout the poem that I want to criticize."
Before I offer my own take on the Merwin poem I want to discuss this.
First of all it is easy from a distance of many years to believe -- after all of the poems and movies etc about the horrors of Vietnam -- to believe that writing this sort of poem was easy -- just another poem declaiming the horrors of this war. But the fact is that THEN (and I remember then) it was still quite horrible to make the leap from our stated mission in Vietnam to the assertion that we (that is "us" including the "them" named McNamera, Kissinger etc.)were engaging in essentially mindless mass murder. The abstraction of all those soldiers who did, mostly, come from the ranks of those whose luck ran out and were born to be used by the ruling classes as bringers of pointless death was shocking. But that is what you become when used this way. The possibility that we had done this to ourselves wasn't something many wanted to admit.
The question might be whether Merwin had earned the right to say just this. I'd say it is impossible to decide. If you want to believe that he was a comfortable fellow making easy use of certain sorts of tropes and taking for granted the value of writing a poem about these horrors how can anyone prove otherwise?
The point would be to demonstrate that this is just what happens in the poem. You've tried to do this I think. I don't think you succeed because I think the abstraction of the war into just that noun -- in spite of whatever flaws in Marwin's assumptions as to his right to say so -- is just what was needed than and maybe now.
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This might be cheating but if you go here
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/merwin/asians1.htm
you can read much I would say specifically about the images in the poem, their vagueness and then their precision (the eyes of the dead open) and several attempts to appreciate the flow of the poem.
Even the refusal to title the poem the way one would expect, that is "To the Asians Dying" and not "The Asians Dying" is addressed and you can see an attempt to establish that Merwin was precise in many of the ways you admire.
I can't find the detached moral outrage you see anywhere throughout the poem.
In fact I would argue that just the description of the bringers of death as "The Possessors" provides much more for you as a poet, citizen, or activist" than the attempts at parodox and deep thought available from the Palmer poem.
If you begin to examine the mad logic of the Vietnam war the phrase "the village had to be destroyed in order to save it" is a damn good place to begin. That is, to the "possessors" turning something that is real into nothing is simply a consequence of the fact that "nothing they come to is real." And the King Lear play on "nothing" is rather well done. That is, not a thing they come to is real to them and the "nothing they come to" by destroying whatever they encounter is what ultimately is real to them and for them.
I don't see how you can fail to take away something from just these lines as a poet and a citizen. As a citizen: here is a real insight into the machinery of death. A hard conclusion -- especially then when Americans exceptionalism insisted on our innocence of all this. The insight that -- irregardless of the particularities of just who is forced to do the killing -- the nothingness that is able to effect killing in this way transforms everything to part of the machinery of death or its victims is necessary and really was not something we recognized. This, for a citizen, is not a trivial insight and is always hidden from us by everything that would strive to prevent this sort of self knowledge. WE have become death.
I was in the army during this. And for me this absolute seemed and seems a necessary insight. Gets past all the excuses and gets to the core of it all.
Certainly this insight does not prevent or even make less likely the consideration of nuance and complexity. It's the beginning of the same.
Joe,
All sorts of excellent points. Busy Sunday here; I'll respond soon's I can.
Hope Washington Irving treated you well. I still like "Sleepy Hollow."
Andy
This year the guy playing the Old Schoolmaster choose to portray him imbibing of Tanners Royal Tonic and Elixer. I'm not sure I liked that change.
The Blizzard of Sixty-six
Snow came early here, and hard:
roads treacherous; wires down.
School authorities should have cancelled
the annual high school Christmas dance:
two couples died on the way home.
"Tragedy!" the local papers declared,
but the snow kept falling.
Somewhere in a folder in a file
is a photograph of me in a uniform:
one stripe for PFC; girl in a yellow gown.
I took her home through the falling snow,
kissed goodnight, and left for Asia.
All through that long year, snow
fell and fell on the green rice,
on gray buffalo, thatched huts, green
patrols, and the mounting yellow dead.
Randy, class of '65, died
in terminal cold in the Mekong Delta;
Kenny, class of '66, died in a blizzard
of lead in the Central Highlands;
I came home with permanent chills,
the yellow nameless dead of Asia
crammed into my seabag, and all of us
looking for a reason.
We never found one. Presidents
come and go away like snowdrifts
in driveways; generals come and go;
the earth goes on silently turning
and turning through its seasons,
and the snow keeps falling.
Copyright © 1984 by W. D. Ehrhart
So I think this works altogether and is worth more than either of the poems posted. Obvious -- the snow. Pretty fine -- "the terminal cold in the Mekong Delta. And quiet -- no pretense. The objection possibly to the usualness of the controlling metaphor somehow not to the point.
But not entirely satisfactory either. Still - I've always remembered this poem. Lot's of reasons I should, of course. Class of 66 and all that.
.
And here's a poem by Robert Bly just published in the New Yorker
Heard Whispers
The spider sways in October winds; she hears the whisk
Of the bat's foot as it leaves the branch, the groan
The bear makes far out on Labrador ice,
The cry of the wren as the hurricane takes
The house, the cones falling, the sigh of the nun
As she dies, the whisper Jesus makes to
The woman drawing water, the nearly silent weeping
Of bones eager to be laid away in the grave.
Damn. Both whisk and weeping should be on the line above.
I like Bly and really like a few of his poems. I weep with the bones when I think of him finishing this poem and putting it into a little envelope and sending it off to the New Yorker. Another pointless poem. Nothing there at all. Everything just gratuitous. Tired gestures leading to the usual smarmy ending.
But what the hell was he thinking?
How could he look at this and not simply be depressed? trapped! trapped.
Ok, Andy if you are not still recovering from the notorious Madison Halloween parade and Lilac if you have come in from the rain what do you think?
I would seriously like to hear from someone who can show me what there IS in the Bly poem. You guys can't do it. Understandable. Higher standards. But someone must (or why do they keep publishing them?) get something from the typical New Yorker poem of the last however many years. Please have their people contact my people.
Yowza. Stuff is piling up here. Should we post a new poem with its own comment thread? I can come up with one if need be, but it needn't be me.
I'll try to scratch some of the surfaces recently introduced, jumping quasi-randomly from point to point. Indeed I shan't comment on the Bly; no interest here.
One great thing about this discussion for me and my personal projects is the way it's made my reading of Palmer even more difficult. I've loved his work for a decade or so, and have always been unable to figure it out somehow. This is weird for me since, compared to some of my other favorite writers (Barrett Watten, for instance, most of whose work I find nigh-impenetrable and yet could say a great deal about), Palmer's poems seem a lot like poems to me, with their lyrical tone, their generally compact lines and stanzas, etc. So I've been meaning to start writing about Palmer for a couple of years now, to figure out why I like him so much. What I've retained from my initial reading of those bits of Sun is the analysis of the way the poems work--their formal maneuvers in particular. I still think Palmer's writing, in the sense of being conscious of everything that's going on in the poem and not letting things just happen due to habit, is superb, exemplary. And my main remaining beef with the Merwin, the one I don't think I can budge on, is that he lacks this consciousness. So, if I drop the political comparison, it's a matter of who I think is the better poet.
I don't think I can maintain an admiration for the political stance in Palmer's poems here--I'm not really sure there is one, at least not in the sense that there is in Merwin's.
I don't feel like I've been completely clear about my Merwin gripes. No surprise. But let me state a disclaimer or two.
I'm not "against emotion," or against emotional expressivity. Some of my favorite writing is very expressive/emotional in the usual sense, and I find a great deal of my favorite writing to be emotionally effective in one way or another (Ron's, for instance, can sometimes be very moving just by virtue of sudden changes in sentence length, and my nerdy heart goes pitterpat). I do think Palmer's poems here (though not all of them) are pretty detached, and I like that too. I don't find Merwin's to be all that expressive, actually--the rage-at-a-distance I wrote about is actually at a distance from the poem. I wish his disgust came into the poem more powerfully, disrupting what I still take to be an atrophied way of writing (which is a hyperbolic way of saying that his images "sound powerful" but don't affect me.
I also never thought that Merwin himself wrote the poem and then sat back smugly in the comfort of his accomplished critical attitude. I think he was probably freaked out and pissed off. And I would never be such a snot as to question "his right" to say what he says.
Joe, you point at the personal difficulty Merwin, or anyone, must have had in recognizing what was really going on in Vietnam, and I'm sure you're right. I don't think that's the same as the question of the difficulty or ease of the literary technique. Aside from that, do you like this poem because it commemorates that terrible discovery? Do you think it made, or could make, people see more clearly, or is it a record of an instance of that seeing? Subjectively speaking, I have considered the government-military-industrial complex suspect until proven good-willed (which never happens) ever since I was aware of their existence. I never had to go through the shock and horror of realizing that my country wasn't a force for good in the world, because I knew that it wasn't from the moment I started learning American history. And the tension between loving the landscape and the variety of people and the folk musics and so forth with a contempt for power structures was something I engaged with pretty early on. This is all just to explain why this poem might not move me the way(s) it does you, and Lilac.
I've gotta go cook dinner, so just another thing or two:
I like the Ehrhart poem. You're right; it's better politically than either Merwin's or Palmer's, and pretty clear of junk (and the slight amount of junk--the metaphor--isn't just a metaphor, and also isn't bothersome because of the kind of poem this is).
I don't feel like I've responded adequately to interepretative claims about the Palmer, and I haven't checked out the URL on the Merwin yet. But so little time. I'll try.
Thank y'all for a great conversation.
Andy
Andy, why don’t you post a new poem? I’ll put up a new post so put the new poem in the comment section. Maybe Lilac will be prompted by yours to put one beside it.
“I don't find Merwin's to be all that expressive, actually--the rage-at-a-distance I wrote about is actually at a distance from the poem. I wish his disgust came into the poem more powerfully, disrupting what I still take to be an atrophied way of writing (which is a hyperbolic way of saying that his images "sound powerful" but don't affect me.”
Yeah, I agree and distance “from the poem” seems exact tho I wish I were able to describe how what you mean means to me. I’ll try. I am not as kind as you – for example I would be mean enough to imagine a certain smugness when the poem is done or, at least, a sense that the poem is somehow privileged. I imagine Merwin reading the Ehrhart poem with a certain condescension.
Too straightforward, the thought that he (Merwin) has access to something greater. That is, for me, there is a certain poet as prophet pretentiousness I sense in Merwin’s work in general. This poem has some of that – maybe impossible to avoid once a certain stance is assumed no matter how well meaning and sincere and modest the poet.
A while back I was as usual on a Sunday at the University of Minnesota library browsing through the stacks – poetry. Just what’s there. Oppen. Take this home. Dugan. He just died. What’s that Anabasis or something poem from the Norton Anthology? His. Damn fine. Wish I could remember.
Tuli Kupferberg – when was this last taken out? Shit. 1988. Damn I’m old. And then came across an anthology of poems by Vietnam vet poets and translations of poems by Vietnamese poets in the war. Who reads these?
And then I remember while in the Army and driving down to Austin from Fort Hood. The only place for hippies in Texas and finding new books of poems about the war from Viet vets. Ah, this is the stuff. But really almost all gone now while in shippy climes people still chat of Merwin. That is, I resent the inevitable privileging of the Bards at Home at the University.
So what’s missing from the Merwin poem is just the world. However, that’s the point of the poem and it works – maybe in spite of Merwin. But I can find hundreds of poems I think better. Still a good poem for what it is – and what it was then.
“Joe, you point at the personal difficulty Merwin, or anyone, must have had in recognizing what was really going on in Vietnam, and I'm sure you're right. I don't think that's the same as the question of the difficulty or ease of the literary technique. Aside from that, do you like this poem because it commemorates that terrible discovery? Do you think it made, or could make, people see more clearly, or is it a record of an instance of that seeing?”
I think that there’s a chance that the “we have become death” discovery suggested by the poem is finally just an instance of that discovery and that seeing. Just because of the way things are (how to begin even describing the machinery that relegates some poems to oblivion and others to an after life?) this poem is likely to remain a poem that is discussed – it will have a sort of official status – and will enter the canon of poetry written during the Vietnam war.
More in a bit. This is fun.
Ode To Ernie Ford
Once upon a time everything
was homemade. The tortillas
down to the chocolate eclairs
the little girls and little boys
would pick their share of as they
dangled from the arm
of the chain-smoking novena plastered
mothers in pill box hats. The bread
smelted forth out a great silent
machine, round and gray towers
with a day's worth of bread.
Traded from behind the counters
of drug stores and day-old places,
full of handwritten credits.
The salesgirl's face the same
over and over from the liquor shops
to the mercantile where all the women
felt the worth of yards of gingham
with garden tended hands stuck
in apron pockets over poodle pieces
and last year's dresses
and as they fondled bolts of laundry
hung to dry out on sagging lines
nearwhere the stockyard blood
soaked into saw dust from coin-op horses,
they sang benedictions to another day
older and deeper in debt, what you get
from eight hours in the mineral graves
the new fangled loaves to six yards of eyelet.
Before the burns and infestations,
the migrations of paisley, the formation
of smokes over the Dead Sea downwind
from Cananea pleurosis-nervosis in most of us.
The commemorations, handmade and so trusted
the dusting powders and ore cars full of snuff,
Yardley Rose of Avon, poor damn Lucky Strike.
The seas too dried to part.
Ode to Ernie Ford a Lilac poem. I can't help it. Here there is the world and moves damn fine.
It made me happy to post it and is a fine contrast to my maundering on about Merwin never being able to say exactly what I want to say.
Andy -- I am immensely cheered by our discussion. Forgive my giving into temptation. Lilac's poem is about her growing up in Bisbee, Arizona when the copper mine was failing but still active.
Here's one by Kit Robinson, from his book A Day Off. I like it, and want to figure out what to say about it. But for now, just the poem:
WITHOUT A COAT
Now the particles
fall from the glass.
The day goes
without saying.
Simple systems
are torn.
Play
and the energy
builds
a place to visit
in the hills.
The sun
when we last saw it
moved
a little to the
right
and down.
Now pale
are sky
and building. Inter-
spersed, that's
how I feel
things stand:
bird to leaf to
the same sun
over the
course of a
light breeze.
There is a desperation
about the moving
company
truck
as a symbol
for love.
Thought
bent back on
thought leaves
the view clear.
Each leaf
shows light or
shadow, all
together moving
topple logic.
Logs are hewn
from trunks
to build a
cabin cruiser
in the sky.
Motes dart about:
castles lead
checkered careers.
The chimney bricks
are lit
to west
haphazardly
protruding.
A single thought
returns
to name
a few.
Shirt on and
out the door
goes the human:
wandering near and
wide of the
market.
Place to place
footfalls land
in advance of
the gram.
This script
better have its i's
examined. Body
blocks bring
sweaty power to
a halt. Pick
up the pieces
you know?
Wheels turn
the world, days
on end.
Mind
bodies forth
in outside takes
that faze.
Sweet light:
peeled paint
on a door
on a roof
under the great
indifferent blue.
Now the dance begins.
Now two men
have taken that door
off its frame
and are fitting
it with thin pine
veneer cut to the right
size. Father
and son they are
working quietly
above the traffic.
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