Gratitude Monday: Be the things

One of my Facebook friends posted this at the weekend:

What immediately flashed into my mind was my BFF’s motto, “Bloom where you’re planted.”

Although the memory—the of her life and her loss—cut me like a stiletto through the ribs, I’m grateful for the reminder of something I admired in her so much; something I’ve struggled with most of my adult life. Now’s as good a time as any to consider how I might do that.

Upsoaring wings: Mother of Exiles

This is the nightmare a deluded electorate put us into in November of 2018: last week the defective-in-every-way occupant of the White House declared that the United States of America is full, and there’s no room for anyone else here, okay? (Unless you’re white, in the market for grotesquely overpriced condos, or extremely hot and not too particular about whom you shtup.)

(It was also a week in which Mr. Stable Genius declared that asylum seekers aren’t human, but animals, averred that his Bronx-born father was born “in a wonderful part of Germany” and informed us that the sound of windmills gives you cancer. And his goober followers swallowed it all. I absolutely despair.)

So here’s your daily reminder to tell that despicable cockroach husk, “Fuck you, and the slobbering, gap-toothed, meth-addled, knuckle-dragging, tobacco-stained, 'clean coal' believing, sister-shagging, hypocritical cretins you rode in on.

Yes—today’s entry for National Poetry Month is by Emma Lazarus, descendant of Sephardic Jews who arrived in New York when it was Nieuw Amsterdam, and therefore antedate any of the Ozymandias of Queens' claim to citizenship (his going only back to his grandfather Friedrich, who fled Bavaria to avoid mandatory military service—cool how that became a family tradition, eh—and established the family money through prostitution). Lazarus began writing as an early teen; her first published collection of poetry and translations was praised by no less a practitioner than William Cullen Bryant.

In 1883, Lazarus was asked to write something to be auctioned in aid of raising money for a pedestal for Liberty Enlightening the World, created by French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi; the one we know as the Statue of Liberty. She declined at first, but relented and wrote a sonnet called “The New Colossus”.

The lines that have since come to embody everything the United States was meant to be weren’t added to the statue until 1901, a decade and a half after Lazarus died aged 38. But they are now so inextricably associated with Lady Liberty that it’s hard to think of the statue without them.

The poem also refutes and condemns everything the current administration and its Repug enablers are trying to do, so it’s good to be reminded of it.

“The New Colossus”

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she

With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Man, those were the days, eh? “Our country is full,” my Irish-American ass. Which anyone espousing that utter claptrap is free to kiss at any time.

Upsoaring wings: Random interpretations

Back to Czechia today, to a contemporary poet. Kateŕina Rudčenková, born 1976, is also a playwright and photographer, although her focus is on poetry. I don’t know much more about her than what I get from her poems, but I really like her stuff. I’m giving you two by way of examples.

“Come Nightfall” speaks to me because it captures that continuo of unease that most people feel about aging—the one that threatens to take over the melody with each passing year. Lifestyle influencers yap on and on about how we’re too youth-obsessed and should learn to embrace our years, but leaving aside the aesthetic side of the process, very few of us indeed escape the tightening physical limitations that advancing age brings. Loss of flexibility, increased pain, lessened mobility, fading eyesight—dunno about you, but they piss the hell out of me. Rudčenková encapsulates this perfectly. (Very perspicacious in one who hasn’t hit 50 yet.)

The last line is a corker, tho, as she turns her commentary around.

“Come Nightfall”

That evening stream of people with their lingering voices

the diminishing light withdrawing from the streets

I don’t want to grow old like the woman at the next table

whose lines are so deep as the pattern on her partner’s pullover

I don’t want to grow old like the woman at the second table

whose hair resembles a wig more than a wig could ever resemble hair

I don’t want my face to be lost in the shop-window of spectacles

and most of all I don’t want my own body

to clamp me tight like a narrow ship’s cabin

all those radiant people and wrecks, I among them

exposing my body to the sun

and my life to random interpretations.

“Yes, I live inside the piano” is from the collection Poetry Not Written for Children that Children Might Nevertheless Enjoy, by Lemony Snicket. I cannot tell how how much it appeals to me. In fact, I’m considering printing it out and taping it to my (closed) office door.

Yes, I live inside the piano,

but there is no need for you

to come and visit me.

Upsoaring wings: damned, damned, damned

I first ran into Jonathan Swift in high school, when I did a paper on the Anglo-Irish hostility. You know—the “hostility” that started in the 12^th Century, when Henry II used the excuse of the Irish Church’s refusal to follow the Gregorian reforms (the ones that stick in my mind being monks’ tonsures and celebration of Easter) invaded Ireland. And it’s continuing today as Henry’s heir Theresa May prepares to abrogate the Good Friday Agreement and reinstate a hard border between the six counties of Ulster and the 26 counties of the Republic.

Well.

The fusion of Mother England and Celtic Ireland has produced nearly 800 years of literary giants: Oscar Wilde, Seán O’Casey, Oliver Goldsmith, George Bernard Shaw, C.S. Lewis, J.M. Synge, Bram Stoker, William Butler Yeats, Samuel Beckett and Swift among them. Swift, born in 1667, straddled Ireland and England literally, born in Dublin, spending much of his early adulthood in England and then return to Dublin where he was Dean of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral from 1715 until his death in 1745. You may know him as the author of Gulliver’s Travels, where we get a taste of his ability to use humor to skewer the many ills he saw in the world.

The one that imprinted on me was A Modest Proposal (full title being A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and for Making them Beneficial to the Publick), in which Swift solves the problem of poverty in Ireland by permitting parents to sell their children as food to what we’d today call members of the 1% (English 1%, to be precise). In quintessentially Swiftian fashion, he mocks the heartlessness that the 1% still show to the poor. It’s deadly.

Swift was politically active, first for the Whigs and then for the Tories, and (as evidenced by Proposal and other writings) he was vehemently opposed to Britain’s Irish policies. He managed to get up Queen Anne’s nose, and lost ecclesiastical appointment in England. Saint Patrick’s, Dublin, was outside Anne’s gift, so that’s where he ended up. Toward the end of his life he became obsessed with death, and suffered from mental illness, quarreling with friends and growing increasingly isolated.

Today’s entry isn’t titled; it’s a concise disquisition on the nature of hell. It strikes me as being timely, nearly 300 years later. Same players, same outcomes. So much for progress.

All folks who pretend to religion and grace,

Allow there's a HELL, but dispute of the place:

But, if HELL may by logical rules be defined

The place of the damned -I'll tell you my mind.

Wherever the damned do chiefly abound,

Most certainly there is HELL to be found:

Damned poets, damned critics, damned blockheads, damned knaves,

Damned senators bribed, damned prostitute slaves;

Damned lawyers and judges, damned lords and damned squires;

Damned spies and informers, damned friends and damned liars;

Damned villains, corrupted in every station;

Damned time-serving priests all over the nation;

And into the bargain I'll readily give you

Damned ignorant prelates, and counsellors privy.

Then let us no longer by parsons be flammed,

For we know by these marks the place of the damned:

And HELL to be sure is at Paris or Rome.

How happy for us that it is not at home!

Upsoaring wings: Through violence and grace

Jean Cocteau was one of those polymaths who are all over the creative place—poet, writer, designer, playwright, artist and filmmaker. And he was good at all of it. He delighted in cocking a snook at bourgeois sensibilities, and he was very good at that, too.

The crowd he ran with—including Picasso, Dialhigev, Apollinaire, Modigliani and Diaghilev—was equally wild and crazy. He collaborated with all sorts of artists to create cutting edge works that outraged the Establishment: novels, poems, ballets, plays, pictures. Nothing was beyond him.

Cocteau greatly admired Orson Welles, who in many ways resembled him as Enfant Terrible and creative genius. They met at the 1936 staging of Welles’ “Voodoo Macbeth”, which moved the story from Scotland to the Caribbean, featured an all African-American cast and substituted Haitian voodoo for the Scottish witchcraft. Just exactly the sort of thing Cocteau loved.

“

At the 1948 Venice Film Festival, the two were in top form, according to Simon Callow. “[Welles] and the perennially provocative Jean Cocteau formed a sort of anti-festival clique…Together in Venice, the two men behaved like two very naughty boys.”

Here’s a photo of the two of them conspiring:

Today’s poem for National Poetry Month is from 1962, not particularly titled (Cocteau was not the sort to get fussed about titles), on Welles, to which I’m adding a drawing Cocteau did of Welles as the frontispiece of a biography by André Bazin:

Orson Welles is a poet

through his violence

and through his grace.

Never does he tumble

from the tightrope

on which he crosses cities

and their dramas.

He is a poet too in the

Loyal friendship he bears

our dreams and our struggles.

Others will know better than I

how to praise his work.

I content myself with sending him

my fraternal greeting.

His handshake is as firm as he is

and I think of it each time my work

obliges me to leap over an obstacle.

Upsoaring wings: The world is a white laundry

In honor of my friend, Viking Maiden, for today’s National Poetry Month entry, we’ll go to Denmark. I did not know Inger Christensen (1935-2009) before now, but I really like her stuff. She didn’t view poetry as “truth” but as “a game, maybe a tragic game—the game we play with a world that plays its own game with us.”

Word.

One of her major works, Alfabet, combines the alphabet and the Fibonacci sequence, which deserves major props, and it’s very much in the “game” arena.

I’m giving you “From April: IV”, which has very striking—grotesque, even—imagery.

Already on the street

with our money clutched

in our hands,

and the world is a white laundry,

where we are boiled and wrung

and dried and ironed,

and smoothed down

and forsaken

we sweep

back

in children’s dreams

of chains and jail

and the heartfelt sigh

of liberation

and in the spark trails

of feelings

the fire eater

the cigarette swallower

come

to light

and we pay

and distance ourselves

with laughter.

Upsoaring wings: Get very drunk

George Gordon, Lord Byron, was one of the big guns of English Romantic poetry. I personally outgrew Romanticism probably some time in my 20s, when it started to seem turgid and overblown. But still, never hurts to pay a visit now and again. I like Romantic music just fine, but the literature—especially poetry—not so much.

As a human, Byron was someone I would not have suffered gladly—he was the model for every self-indulgent legend-in-his-own-mind male from actors to programmers. Again—this lost its charm for me in my 20s. Interestingly, his one legitimate child was Ada Lovelace, the extraordinary bluestocking, mathematician and first computer programmer. Like a lot of self-indulgent LIHOMs, Byron lived large on other folks’ money; he ran up huge debts swanning around Europe and having multiple affairs with men and women without much consideration for anyone but himself. In 1823 he became involved in the Greek war for independence against the Ottoman Turks. An illness turned to sepsis, and he died in Missolonghi in February of the following year.

Byron wrote a lot of epic, melodramatic poetry, but it turns out he had a puckish side. His “Don Juan” is a very long satire on the whole notion of the womanizing libertine. In most of the versions we know in poetry and opera, Don Juan (AKA Don Giovanni) seduces every woman he can, ruining them unrepentantly (because he’s young, good looking and a long way from death), until fate catches up with him after he kills the father of one of his victims.

In short—like Byron—Don Juan is mad, bad and dangerous to know.

Okay, but Byron’s take on Don Juan turns everything on its head. Across 17 cantos, his hero starts out as a seducer, but he is shipwrecked, captured by pirates, sold as a slave by the pirate daughter, disguised as a woman so one of the Sultan’s concubines can get him into the harem; he escapes, joins the Russian army, is invited by Catherine the Great to join her, ah, court, becomes ill, goes to England (supposedly better weather than Russia), has some adventures with British aristos, and The End.

I mean—it pretty much is every damsel in distress of Romantic literature, only with, you know, tackle.

No, I won’t make you read the whole thing, although if you want to, it’s on Project Gutenberg. No, I’ll just share this bit, from Canto II, because it seems pertinent to our experience in 2019:

Let us have wine and women, mirth and laughter,

Sermons and soda water the day after.

Man, being reasonable, must get drunk;

The best of life is but intoxication:

Glory, the grape, love, gold, in these are sunk

The hopes of all men, and of every nation;

Without their sap, how branchless were the trunk

Of life’s strange tree, so fruitful on occasion:

But to return—Get very drunk; and when

You wake with head-ache, you shall see what then.

Upsoaring wings: A slumbering silence lies

The Austrian-Czech poet Rainer Maria Rilke is quite fascinating, because he was basically in love with all the arts—sculpture, painting, music, writing; they all shaped his sensibilities. He was born in Prague in 1875, which was then the capital of Bohemia within the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Having washed out of military academy and been expelled from a trade school, he eventually studied the liberal arts in Prague and Munich. He traveled and lived all over Europe, soaking up what each community had to offer and adding the flavors to his writing. During his long residence in Paris, he hung with Cézanne and acted as secretary to Auguste Rodin, so he would have known the house that’s now Musée Rodin, which I visited last November.

Perhaps he walked along this allée in the garden:

And enjoyed some of these works that I viewed, like the Three Shades:

Or Aphrodite:

Maybe some of these:

Well, anyhow, Rilke had relationships with a number of women of all ages, and managed to stay on good terms with most of them after the passion faded. He famously, in Letters to a Young Poet, admonished a young man trying to decide between a military or a literary career, “Nobody can advise you and help you, nobody. There is only one way. Go into yourself.”

(Of course, he went on to tell the kid how a poet should feel, love and seek truth, but…)

Rilke absorbed influences from all the arts and all the artists he knew. Today’s poem, “Aus einem April” reflects the kind of Art Nouveau period I love and associate with Prague, Vienna, Rodin and the whole megillah. I’m making it my theme for National Poetry Month this year.

“Aus einem April”

Wieder duftet der Wald.

Es heben die schwebenden Lerchen

mit sich den Himmel empor, der unseren Schultern schwer war;

zwar sah man noch durch die Äste den Tag, wie er leer war,-

aber nach langen, regnenden Nachmittagen

kommen die goldübersonnten

neueren Stunden,

vor denen flüchtend an fernen Häuserfronten

alle die wunden

Fenster furchtsam mit Flügeln schlagen.

Dann wird es still. Sogar der Regen geht leiser

über der Steine ruhig dunkelnden Glanz.

Alle Geräusche ducken sich ganz

in die glänzenden Knospen der Reiser.

  

“From April”

Again the woods are odorous, the lark

Lifts on upsoaring wings the heaven gray

That hung above the tree-tops, veiled and dark,

Where branches bare disclosed the empty day.

After long rainy afternoons an hour

Comes with its shafts of golden light and flings

Them at the windows in a radiant shower,

And rain drops beat the panes like timorous wings.

Then all is still. The stones are crooned to sleep

By the soft sound of rain that slowly dies;

And cradled in the branches, hidden deep

In each bright bud, a slumbering silence lies.

Upsoaring wings: Ants and purple weasels

Woops—here we are in April again. So you know what that means. Thirty days of poems because it’s National Poetry Month.

It’s also April Fools’ Day, when tricks are played and jokes are made, typically at someone else’s expense. That someone else is supposed to forgive all at the shout of “April Fool!” Look for silly hoaxy headlines and something silly from Google.

Then back to work with you.

My theme this month—upsoaring wings—comes from Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Aus einem April”, which I’ll get to tomorrow. I think in 2019 we can really use a bit of lifting; I know I do. In honor of my use-it-or-lose-it trip last year, I’ll through in more than the usual number of French and German poets, plus some Czech efforts.

Although he was an all-around creative dynamo (cartoonist, playwright, screenwriter, song writer), we probably know Shel Silverstein best for his children’s books. He came to that genre via his friend Tomi Ungerer, and one of his big hits was the poetry collection Where the Sidewalk Ends, which includes “Oh Have You Heard”, about April Fools, er, well, jokes and stuff.

I equivocate because on rereading it, what was hilarious because unthinkable in 1974 is not nearly as funny in 2019. We got anti-vaxxers waving the Bible; outbreaks of entirely preventable diseases like measles; an occupant of the white house whose brain is pocked and blistered with hate, fear and cruelty; the “principal” of the federal schools agency is in the midst of torching our entire education system; the Labor Department is cutting back on all kinds of worker protections, so you can kiss goodbye the thought of any sort of vacations; and Florida is in fact sinking into the ocean, thanks to climate change deniers and Chamber of Commerce boosters.

At this point, I wouldn’t even be surprised by scalp infestations of ants and purple weasels. Although I’d be mildly amused.

 “Oh Have You Heard”

Oh have you heard it’s time for vaccinations?

I think someone put salt in your tea.

They’re giving us eleven-month vacations.

And Florida has sunk into the sea.

Oh have you heard the President has measles?

The principal has just burned down the school.

Your hair is full of ants and purple weasels—

APRIL FOOL!

Welcome to April, folks. Buckle up.

Gratitude Monday: make 'em laugh

Someone who can make you laugh is a blessing, in any circumstances. When you live in the dark end of the halftone spectrum, that person is sun breaking through the clouds after six months in Seattle.

One of my colleagues does that—it’s a combination of his wit, his choice of words and his puckish expression. He makes me laugh so much my eyes leak. He was gone for a few weeks and I hadn’t realized how much I hadn’t laughed until he returned. And I’m tremendously grateful that he did.

I hope you’ve got someone like him in your life. And that you’re someone like him for others.