Poetry, Reading, Writing

Attunement by a lusty old man

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I’ve been re-reading a favorite book, Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon, a massive elegy for the sublime in literature. Its tone of defiance and celebration of great art, yelling like Lear at the overwhelming storm of dying standards and political correctness. has always brought great pleasure.

And I hated, as Bloom did, what he labeled “The School of Resentment” — literature critics with political agendas that trounce aesthetics. The late 80s and early 90s were overrun by the massive overshoot by multiculturalists who went beyond consideration and reflection on other cultures to a mad competitive rush to see who could be the most sensitive over the self-identified labels of the day (generally fine) and on behalf of categories they did not belong to (okay in theory, hideous in practice).

And among the things I enjoy now, 20 years later, is the world feels as if the School of Resentment has significantly faded. Gone is the Carry Nation prudery and groupthink of anti-sex writers like Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin. The feminist field is now as wide and diverse in approaches as it should be, given its constituents are more than half the population.

I credit this book for helping recover my love of reading after graduating college. Showing that it was important to read for reading’s sake – as I’d spent the last several years reading in anticipation of quizzes and discussions and dissecting the works in graded essays and other projects. Harold Bloom and Camille Paglia helped me recover my ability to enjoy and seek out works for their ambition and their strangeness, and that I could fly by the nets of identity politics and engage with art of lasting merit.

But Bloom himself.

The videos I’ve seen of him have been of a man who probably looked 60 by his late 30s yet has held steady within his sturdy torso, resembling a bag of profound sighs (though he rarely sighs). A melodious, despairing, challenging voice that suits his authorial tone. He proclaims himself “Bloom Brontosaurus Bardolator” as a badge, a sense of resignation, and “a certain fury”. He rarely looks at the interviewer or the camera. He obviously tasks his brain with searches and phrases too much for visual courtesies, though he is perfectly gracious in his words to people.

Naomi Wolf famously accused him of hitting on her while she was an undergraduate student at Yale. If true, doubtless a horrifying, macabre experience, and she’s entitled to her rage at the unethical behavior. Yet his alleged line to her was so sublimely skeezy (“You have the aura of election upon you”), the dirty old woman/man part within us all can’t help but feel a little moved.

But, all allegations, and who has NOT had a shady moment in the “Just trying to get laid” department?

Resolutely fond of him I will remain. Sorry for that Yoda syntax. I remain fond and grateful to the man.

 

Poetry, Writing

Waking from a nap

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I open the window to let in the sound of the rain.
Gust falls.
A police siren.
Subsides. A train whistle to the east.
Another heavy burst. Then quiet, steady.

Passing car in the alley splays the steady runoff down the pavement.
Dry room. Fond room.
Another heave of the wind brings water through the screen,
Onto the windowsill, onto the floor.
Worry later.

Poetry, Writing

The Soul Selects Her/His Own Society

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The Soul Selects Her Own Society
by Emily Dickinson

The Soul selects her own Society —
Then — shuts the Door —
To her divine Majority —
Present no more —

Unmoved — she notes the Chariots — pausing —
At her low Gate —
Unmoved — an Emperor be kneeling
Upon her Mat —

I’ve known her — from an ample nation —
Choose One —
Then — close the Valves of her attention —
Like Stone —

 

Socializing when you don’t want to is a drag. Even when socializing isn’t a dreary duty, the people delightful, the occasion a privilege.

Yes, everyone feels that way at times.

I really enjoy writing. The concentration. But I need to be away from people I know to do it. If only there were some way to easily close the valves Dickinson writes of, then open them again at will without feeling/being an asshole.

Poetry, Writing

Anne Sexton at home

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Don’t know why this footage exists, but it’s compelling. The Spanish subtitles add to it. Does attunement and sublime expression require someone to be cracked?

Poetry

“My Makeup” by Rochelle Kraut

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This sits in the malaise that sighs in the between-beat parts of Pink’s “Get This Party Started” or Ke$ha “choose debauchery” anthems.

My Makeup
by Rochelle Kraut

on my cheeks I wear
the flush of two beers

on my eyes I use
the dark circles of sleepless nights
to great advantage

for lipstick
I wear my lips

Poetry

“Dover Beach” by Matthew Arnold

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A zillion years ago in a Victorian Lit class in college, the professor required that students memorize “Dover Beach” by Matthew Arnold. We were reading several of Arnold’s essays, esp. “Culture and Anarchy” so reading some of the poems in the same book was CONVENIENT, but the face-making at having to ABSORB something and recite it before the class was HUGE. How DARE this professor at a middling state university require his students memorize & recite a poem like we were in elementary school! And the professor, at the time the head of the department, RELISHED the pained looks we were giving out. “It’s important that you have at least one poem in your life you can recite,” he admonished. The more time passes, the more I respect that.

The last five lines are the only ones that spill into conscious thought. So, not a poetry share from the core, but as a show of respect for the professor who insisted a room full of 20-something ponces LEARN something. National Poetry Month has only a few days left, so expect the posts to get cruder come May.

Dover Beach
by Matthew Arnold

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; — on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Agean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Poetry

“We Real Cool” by Gwendolyn Brooks

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Gwendolyn Brooks is from Topeka, Kansas. As a fellow Kansan, I love that.

We Real Cool
by Gwendolyn Brooks

The Pool Players.
Seven at the Golden Shovel.

We real cool. We
Left school. We

Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We
Die soon.

Poetry

“Sailing to Byzantium” by William Butler Yeats

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My favorite poem in my twenties. Though Yeats wrote it at the age of 62, its boasting and yearning resonated with my aspirations to write. Every few years I return to it to check in with the young man and measure what I had in mind for myself back THEN compared to what I’ve accomplished NOW. Similar to what I do with locations in the real world – return to old haunts. If the location has bad memories, revisiting it in presumably a happier time (or less melodramatic) let me take the power of the moment back. An idle fancy may strike where a shimmer of Future Me might be visible to assure Then Me that the trial of that moment would be temporary: only endure it, lad.

Sailing to Byzantium
by William Butler Yeats

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
— Those dying generations — at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unaging intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enameling
To keep a drowsy emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.