Upsoaring wings: Waters of the Nile

Since it feels as though we’ve all fallen down the rabbit hole, I think it’s time to have a couple of poems from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. I don’t think they need much of an introduction from me; I’ll just point out that Lewis Carroll’s silliness makes more sense than politics these days.

“Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Bat”

Twinkle, twinkle, little bat

How I wonder what you’re at!

Up above the world you fly,

Like a tea tray in the sky.

Twinkle, twinkle little bat!

How I wonder what you’re at!

“The Crocodile”

How doth the little crocodile

Improve his shining tail,

And pour the waters of the Nile

On every golden scale!

How cheerfully he seems to grin,

How neatly spreads his claws,

And welcomes little fishes in,

With gently smiling jaws!

Upsoaring wings: Breath is money

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the grand old man of the Beat generation—poet, artist, bookseller and publisher—celebrated his 100^th birthday last month by publishing an autobiographical novel. He doesn’t consider himself a Beat poet, but he certainly captured those times.

As owner of City Lights Bookstore and Publishing, he published many of the Beats; he was arrested on obscenity charges for publishing Allan Ginsburg’s Howl. The subsequent trial was a landmark First Amendment case, which Ferlinghetti won when the judge ruled the poem had redeeming social value.

Seems odd that this happened in San Francisco, but it was the 50s.

Ferlinghetti identifies as a philosophical anarchist, and he has opposed totalitarianism all his life. In 2006, in the midst of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the rise of the Tea Party and other bad juju, Ferlinghetti wrote a poem echoing Khalil Gibran’s “Pity the Nation”. It’s appalling that the update was needed 73 years after Gibran, and that it’s even more needed 13 years on.

“Pity the Nation”

(After Khalil Gibran)

Pity the nation whose people are sheep

And whose shepherds mislead them

Pity the nation whose leaders are liars

Whose sages are silenced

And whose bigots haunt the airwaves

Pity the nation that raises not its voice

Except to praise conquerers

And acclaim the bully as hero

And aims to rule the world

By force and by torture

Pity the nation that knows

No other language but its own

And no other culture but its own

Pity the nation whose breath is money

And sleeps the sleep of the too well fed

Pity the nation oh pity the people

who allow their rights to  erode

and their freedoms to be washed away

 My country, tears of thee

 Sweet land of liberty!

Upsoaring wings: Trumpeting and hooting

When I was a teenager, Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet was all the rage. I confess I did not read it, but my lack of support notwithstanding, Gibran is the third-best selling poet of all time. (Shakespeare and Lao Tzu were ahead of him, if you’re asking.)

Gibran was born in Lebanon when it was part of the Ottoman Empire and moved with his mother and siblings to the United States around the turn of the last century. He was a gifted artist as well as a poet; another of those super-creative types.

Today’s entry for National Poetry Month, “Pity the Nation”, was published in 1933, two years after Gibran’s death. I think you’ll agree that it is heartbreaking, and that we are living that heartbreak today.

“Pity the Nation”

Pity the nation that is full of beliefs and empty of religion.

Pity the nation that acclaims the bully as hero,

and that deems the glittering conqueror bountiful.

Pity a nation that despises a passion in its dream,

yet submits in its awakening.

Pity the nation that raises not its voice
save when it walks in a funeral,

boasts not except among its ruins,

and will rebel not save when its neck is laid

between the sword and the block.

Pity the nation whose statesman is a fox,
whose philosopher is a juggler,
and whose art is the art of patching and mimicking.

Pity the nation that welcomes its new ruler with trumpeting,

and farewells him with hooting,

only to welcome another with trumpeting again.

Upsoaring wings: Turn away your eyes

Dorothy Parker is high on my list of favorite American poets. She wielded words equivalent to a Medici with a sword. Never a wasted syllable; unerringly the blade went straight to the heart. Like a Medici’s, Parker’s skill did not come without loss of her own blood. Her preferred analgesic against an unhappy life was alcohol, and she could put it away, sadly.

In addition to being a brilliant writer of poetry, prose and screenplays, Parker was a lifelong activist for civil liberties and social justice. Her membership in the Communist party and her anti-fascist and pro-union activities earned her a place on the Hollywood blacklist, and she was a supporter of Martin Luther King, Jr. She left her estate to him on her death in 1967; upon his murder a year later, his family bequeathed it to the NAACP.

I really wonder what Parker would have had to say about today’s world. Twitter would have been a great medium for her, because of her ability to thrust deep with few words. What words would she have had for the Kleptocrat and his mob, I wonder?

Today’s entry for National Poetry Month wasn’t intended to be political, but rereading it, I feel like she’s captured the death of the dream of the American promise.

“A Dream Lies Dead”

A dream lies dead here. May you softly go

Before this place, and turn away your eyes,

Nor seek to know the look of that which dies

Importuning Life for life. Walk not in woe,

But, for a little, let your step be slow.

And, of your mercy, be not sweetly wise

With words of hope and Spring and tenderer skies.

A dream lies dead; and this all mourners know:

Whenever one drifted petal leaves the tree-

Though white of bloom as it had been before

And proudly waitful of fecundity-

One little loveliness can be no more;

And so must Beauty bow her imperfect head

Because a dream has joined the wistful dead!

Upsoaring wings: Wings grow tired

First of all, you have to understand that some of the most boring moments of my life were spent at baseball games: one major league, one AAA minor league. Baseball decidedly not been berry berry good to me.

However, when I brought up WaPo yesterday afternoon and saw the red BREAKING NEWS banner that the arse in the White House has canceled the deal for Major League Baseball (MLB) to sign Cuban players, I flipped out. I didn’t even have to read the story (although I did) to know that this is just a mean-spirited, bloody-minded, petty, vindictive willie-waving exercise and bogus stunt to show everyone in the country who’s the boss.

This little, little putz is still pissed off that he wasn’t allowed to buy a NFL team and that his only listing in the sports history books is going to be as the fool who tanked the WFL. And he’s taking it out on Cuban ball players. Because. He. Can.

If you want to laugh, consider that an administration mouthpiece apparently said with a straight face that MLB payments to the Cuban baseball federation amount to “human trafficking”. Like 1)that’s remotely the case or 2)this crowd gives a flying fuck for human trafficking (except where the Kleptocrat gets a cut of the fees).

So today we’re having a couple of poems from the 20^th-Century Cuban Dulce María Loynaz. Loynaz actually trained as a lawyer, but I don’t hold that against her. Her husband went into exile for some time after the Revolution, but Loynaz remained, and went into seclusion.

Someone asked her why she didn’t also leave. She replied, “I was here first.” Batista, Castro—no importa. She followed her own path.

I’m sharing two of her poems, in Spanish and in English.

“Viajero”

Yo soy como el viajero

que llega a un Puerto y no lo espera nadie;

Soy el viajero tímido que pasa

entre abrazos ajenos y sonrisa

que no son para él…

Como el viajero solo

que se alza el cuello del abrigo

en el gran muelle frío.

“The Traveler”

I am like the traveler

Who arrives at a port where no one waits for him;

I am the shy traveler who walks

Among other people’s embraces and smiles

Which are not for him…

Like the lone traveler

Who turns up the collar of his overcoat

In the chill of the great wharf.

tr: Judith Kerman

From her Poemas sin Nombre (Untitled Poems):

Poema CII

Pajarillos de jaula me van pareciendo a mí misma mis sueños.

Si los suelto, perecen o regresan. Y es que el grano y el cielo

hay que ganarlos; pero el grano es demasiado pequeño y el

cielo es demasiado grande..., y las alas, como los pies, también

se cansan.

“My Dreams”

My dreams are starting to look like birds in a cage.

If I let them go, they either die or return.

I know that the great sky and the tiniest grain

are things we must earn, but the grain is too small

and the sky is too big, and wings, like feet, grow tired.

tr: Paul Weinfield

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.