We wonder why the test

I was chatting yesterday with a friend and former colleague. He was part of the first shock wave of 12,000 employees laid off in January of last year from the Megalithic Software Company (I was let go in May). We meet once a week to check in, give encouragement and have some laughs.

But I realized as we were talking about the job market that I feel a greater sense of destabilization than just looking for a job. We’re seeing concerted, credible attacks on the institutions of government and democracy and I’m suddenly conscious of how much is riding on this election cycle, and how tenuous is my conviction that the center will hold. It’s not just the student demonstrations, or even the police riot responses (although they’re certainly top of mind); it’s that millions of people would rather solidify their own immiseration than vote for a candidate with a D after his/her name.

The noseless face-spiting crowd want the whole thing, and they’re willing to do anything to get it. And our institutions were not shaped to deal with this level of fuckery.

So—today I’m turning to one of my most stalwart sources of comfort, Sweet Honey in the Rock. Let’s have “We’ll Understand it Bye and Bye”. Bernice Johnson Reagon's voice anchors this like a rock. We all could use that in these times. 

 

 

©2024 Bas Bleu

 

Seen on the street

On my walks last week I discovered that the Sidewalk Chalk Artist has returned, with expanded coverage.

 

©2024 Bas Bleu

May Day! May Day!

For May Day, I think I’m just going to give you a selection of April flowers from the People’s Republic. It’s either that or a screed on the need for unions to restore balance against the capitalist oligarchs, and—TBH—I’m just a bit too tired for that.

©2024 Bas Bleu

He gave all his heart

We need someone with gravitas to close out National Poetry Month, and I can think of no one better qualified for that than William Butler Yeats. Because you know how I love Yeats.

In the past I’ve given you the apocalyptic and the historical (“Second Coming” and “Easter, 1916”), and one related to the First World War (“An Irish Airman Foresees his Death”). I’m going to dial it back to the eternal subject of poetry, love—the positive and the not-so-positive.

Yeats had a powerful passion for a woman named Maud Gonne—I mean, he was hopelessly in love with her. And she spurned him. As in, he proposed marriage to her four times over a period of ten years, and she turned him down every time. Even worse, she married the Irish nationalist John MacBride, who was an abusive drunk.

(After MacBride was executed by the British following the Easter Uprising in 1916, Yeats tried one more time. With the same result. Oh—and then he proposed to Gonne’s 22-year-old-daughter, who also refused him. Look, artists, poets—whaddya gonna do?)

Yeats had other affairs, and following his rejection by Gonne mere et fille, he married Georgie Hyde Lees (whom he met through one of his lovers). They had a happy marriage, with two children, but I’m thinking it wasn’t that full-bore heart-wrenching feeling he had for Gonne. It’s hard, after all, to sustain that kind of thing over time.

So it’s no real surprise to me that Yeats cautions us against rushing wholeheartedly into love. Even though, of course, he was unable to follow his own advice.

“Never Give All the Heart”

Never give all the heart, for love
Will hardly seem worth thinking of
To passionate women if it seem
Certain, and they never dream
That it fades out from kiss to kiss;
For everything that’s lovely is
But a brief, dreamy, kind delight.
O never give the heart outright,
For they, for all smooth lips can say,
Have given their hearts up to the play.
And who could play it well enough
If deaf and dumb and blind with love?
He that made this knows all the cost,
For he gave all his heart and lost.

And on that bittersweet note, National Poetry Month comes to an end. I hope you’ve enjoyed it as much as I have.

 

 

©2024 Bas Bleu

 

Gratitude Monday: The longed-for tidal wave of justice

My gratitude today is National Poetry Month. For the past 11 Aprils, I’ve stepped away from whatever was going on in my life—although not from what was going on in the world—to explore poetry as a means of understanding, well, everything and anything.

Poetry helped me deal with four years of the kleptocracy that was the last presidential administration. It gave me hope during the first year of the pandemic. It presented a framework for the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This year, it reminded me there’s more to life than a job hunt.

And National Poetry Month introduced me to new poets, just as it strengthened my bonds with old friends.

All of this is cause for deep gratitude.

Today’s entry for National Poetry Month comes from Seámus Heaney. Eight years ago I gave you his heartbreaking “Requiem for the Croppies”, and mentioned his linguistic mastery, which included lyrical translations from Irish, Latin and Greek. For this round, I’ve chosen “The Cure at Troy”, which is Heaney’s take on Sophocles’ Philoctetes.

All you need to know about Philoctetes is that he was one of the approximately 72 squillion suitors for Helen, and thus honor-bound to help Menelaus retrieve her from Troy. He was stranded on the island of Lemnos on the way (different versions give different reasons, but all seem to involve some kind of suppurating wound whose putrescence offended the Greeks). After many years of siege, the Greeks were told they wouldn’t win the war until they possessed the weapons of Heracles, which were…on Lemnos. As you might imagine, Philoctetes (reduced to a solitary animal-like existence in the intervening time) wasn’t exactly overjoyed at the prospect of handing over the sacred weapons to the very men who’d abandoned him (he was particularly pissed off at Odysseus), but Heracles appeared and told him to give up the artifacts and his wound would be healed by Asclepius, and he would become a great hero, a key driver of winning the war. (Some versions have him killing Paris, the little toerag who started the whole thing; others put him in the actual Trojan Horse. Either way he was instrumental in driving a stake through it.)

So there are a lot of symbolic moving parts to this one—the festering wound that won’t heal and leads to the debasement of a warrior; only by a series of redemptive decisions is he given a permanent cure, which leads to the end of a long, exhausting war.

Heaney wrote his version in 1990 as a tribute to Nelson Mandela, and an indictment of apartheid. (Its relevance to the situation in Northern Ireland is also obvious.) Note that—like Mandela—Heaney urges the reader to move beyond revenge, to the “further shore” with “cures and healing wells.” But he also speaks of the "longed-for tidal wave of justice" that is building. I believe these are thoughts we should keep before us in these times.

“The Cure at Troy”

Human beings suffer,
They torture one another,
They get hurt and get hard,
No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured.

The innocent in gaols
Beat on their bars together.
A hunger-striker’s father
Stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
Faints at the funeral home.

History says, don’t hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracle
And cures and healing wells.

Call miracle self-healing:
The utter, self-revealing

Double-take of feeling.
If there’s fire on the mountain
Or lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky

That means someone is hearing
The outcry and the birth-cry
Of new life at its term.

©2024 Bas Bleu

 

Ecstatic mimicry

Rita Dove, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, was the first African-American to be named Poet Laureate by the Library of Congress. In addition to poetry, she has written a play, a novel and numerous collections of essays. Several of her poems have been set to music. She’s taught creative writing at a number of universities, including the University of Virginia since 1989.

I chose “American Smooth” for today’s National Poetry Month entry because I found out that she and her husband of 45 years, Fred Viebahn, are avid ballroom dancers. This poem perfectly captures that magic of the waltz or the foxtrot. 

“American Smooth”

We were dancing—it must have
been a foxtrot or a waltz,
something romantic but
requiring restraint,
rise and fall, precise
execution as we moved
into the next song without
stopping, two chests heaving
above a seven-league
stride—such perfect agony,
one learns to smile through,
ecstatic mimicry
being the sine qua non
of American Smooth.
And because I was distracted
by the effort of
keeping my frame
(the leftward lean, head turned
just enough to gaze out
past your ear and always
smiling, smiling),
I didn’t notice
how still you’d become until
we had done it
(for two measures?
four?)—achieved flight,
that swift and serene
magnificence,
before the earth
remembered who we were
and brought us down.

 

 

 

©2024 Bas Bleu

History has yet to start

Eleven years ago I gave you a poem by Iraqui-American poet Dunya Mikhail. (Wow—I’ve been doing National Poetry Month for 11 years?!) I’d heard her read “The War Works Hard” on NPR years before and bought her first collection that same day. It was one of the four books I carried with me when I moved to Seattle that were meant to tide me over until my shipped household goods arrived.

A Chaldean Catholic and a critic of the regime of Saddam Hussein, Mikhail fled Iraq in 1995 at age 30, eventually settling in Michigan, where she works as a lecturer in Arabic at Oakland University.

“Another Planet” is from The War Works Hard, which was published in 2005. But its themes and wishes are eternal. That’s poetry’s job—to remind us of how much or little we’ve progresses.

“Another Planet"

I have a special ticket
to another planet
beyond this Earth.
A comfortable world, and beautiful:
a world without much smoke,
not too hot
and not too cold.
The creatures
are gentler there,
and the governments
have no secrets.
The police are nonexistent:
there are no problems
and no fights.
And the schools
don’t exhaust their students
with too much work
for history has yet to start
and there’s no geography
and no other languages.
And even better:
the war
has left its “r” behind
and turned into love,
so the weapons sleep
beneath the dust,
and the planes pass by
without shelling the cities,
and the boats
look like smiles
on the water.
All things
are peaceful
and kind
on the other planet
beyond this Earth.
But still I hesitate
to go alone.
                     Tr: Kareem James Abu-Zeid

 

©2024 Bas Bleu

 

Where I stand

Today for National Poetry Month we’re having something from singer-songwriter Don McLean. No—not “American Pie”. Also, not “Starry Night”. Not even “And I Love Her So”. It’s one that cut to my heart from the moment I first heard of it.

No one can listen to this and tell me McLean is not a poet.

 

 

©2024 Bas Bleu

The silly walls

Langston Hughes was one of the many vibrant and eloquent voices of the Harlem Renaissance. And like Yeats and Hopkins and Owen and Marlowe, I just can’t get enough of him.

Today we’re having “I Look at the World” because I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to be the out-of-place ones in our society. Hughes always captures that viewpoint concisely.

“I Look at the World” 

I look at the world
From awakening eyes in a black face—
And this is what I see:
This fenced-off narrow space   
Assigned to me.

I look then at the silly walls
Through dark eyes in a dark face—
And this is what I know:
That all these walls oppression builds
Will have to go!

I look at my own body   
With eyes no longer blind—
And I see that my own hands can make
The world that's in my mind.
Then let us hurry, comrades,
The road to find.

 

 

 

 

©2024 Bas Bleu

 

Satan ne te fête

We last saw poems from Mots d’Heures: Gousses, Rames eight years ago, so we’re due for more. They are so very funny.

Keep in mind that, as with all poetry, these verses are meant to be read aloud to get the full appreciation. This may be difficult if you don’t speak French. It might be a challenge even if you do. So I have included the, erm, phonetic transliteration of the poems at the bottom of this post, in invisible electrons. If you really, really need it, just highlight the space and the text will become visible. As will the reason why this is a Friday set of poetry.

The poems don’t have titles; they are helpfully numbered, like Shakespeare’s sonnets. Or the Psalms. Or items on a Chinese menu.

“10”

Lit-elle messe, moffette,1
Satan ne te fête,
Et digne somme coeurs et nouez.
À longue qu’aime est-ce pailles d’Eure.
Et ne Satan bise ailleurs
Et ne fredonne messe. Moffette, ah, ouais!2

1. Moffette. Noxious exhalations formed in underground galleries or mines.
2. This little fragment is a moral precept addressed to a young girl. She is advised to go to mass even under the most adverse conditions in order to confound Satan and keep her heart pure until the knot (marriage) is tied. She is warned against long engagements and to stay out of hayfields be they as lush and lovely as those of the Eure valley, for Satan will not be off spoiling crops elsewhere. She must not mumble at mass, or the consequences will make the noxious fumes of earth seem trivial.

“1”

Un petit d’un petit¹
S’étonne aux Halles2
Un petit d’un petit
Ah! degrés te fallent3
Indolent qui ne sort cesse4
Indolent qui ne se mène5
Qu’importe un petit d’un petit
Tout Gai de Reguennes.6

1. The inevitable result of a child marriage.

2. The subject of this epigrammatic poem is obviously from the provinces, since a native Parisian would take this famous old market for granted.

3. Since this personage bears no titles, we are led to believe that the poet writes of one of those unfortunate idiot-children that in olden days existed as a living skeleton in their family’s closet.  Am inclined to believe, however, that this is a fine piece of mis direction and that the poet is actually writing of some famous political prisoner, or the illegitimate offspring of some noble house. The Man in the Iron Maask, perhaps?

4, 5. Another misdirection. Obviously it was not laziness that prevented this person’s going out and taking himself places.

5. Another misdirection. Obviously it was not laziness that prevented this person’s going out and taking himself places.

[1] He was obviously prevented from fulfilling his destiny, since he is compared to Gai de Reguennes. This was a young squire (to one of his uncles, A Gaillard of Normandy) who died at the tender age of twelve of a surfeit of Saracen arrows before the walls of Acre in 1191.

 Highlight the area below to reveal the poems.

 

Little Miss Muffet
Sat on a tuffet,
Eating her curds and whey;
There came a big spider,
Who sat down beside her
And frightened Miss Muffet away.

 

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king's horses and all the king's men
Couldn't put Humpty together again.

 

 

©2024 Bas Bleu