Saturday, May 30, 2015

Edwin Arlington Robinson / The Sheaves


The Sheaves 

by Edwin Arlington Robinson

The American poet displays uncharacteristic romantic and metaphysical tendencies, while pondering a golden field of wheat and the passing of time

Carol Rumens
Monday 25 May 2015 12.27 BST


The Sheaves


Where long the shadows of the wind had rolled,
Green wheat was yielding to the change assigned;
And as by some vast magic undivined
The world was turning slowly into gold.
Like nothing that was ever bought or sold
It waited there, the body and the mind;
And with a mighty meaning of a kind
That tells the more the more it is not told.
So in a land where all days are not fair,
Fair days went on till on another day
A thousand golden sheaves were lying there,
Shining and still, but not for long to stay –
As if a thousand girls with golden hair
Might rise from where they slept and go away.

This week’s poem is one of Edwin Arlington Robinson’s later sonnets and is, in some ways, an atypical work. Even in his shorter pieces, Robinson favoured offbeat human characters, the “queer odd sticks of men”, as he described them (and women, too, of course). His wry vignettes and unheroic narratives were executed with the detachment and specificity of a certain kind of fiction writer – Chekhov might not be far off the comparative mark. Robinson’s forms were traditional, his subjects and approach were not.
The Sheaves at first glance, then, looks aberrant, a poem in which Robinson lets down his hair and indulges in suppressed romantic and metaphysical tendencies, entwining them in a final glorious union. Yet the concession to “some vast magic undivined” is moderated by a certain scrupulous realism, almost offstage but clearly audible as the sonnet unfolds. “As by some vast magic”, “As if a thousand girls” – a wariness of metaphor is marked at such points. The speaker who registers the wonderful phenomena also registers the connivance of his imagination.
To associate wheat with the colour “gold” is hardly original: one might find references to golden wheat in a million texts. Yet maybe we ought to respect Robinson for his modesty in picking a near-cliche that is, nonetheless, an acceptably accurate description. Never one to self-advertise through poetic figures, Robinson remains true to ordinary expression, when ordinary expression seems true. More importantly, “gold” has connotations useful to the poem’s ultimately realist framing. In the octet, it’s the “world” that is “turning slowly into gold” – a visual exaggeration that summons the King Midas myth if only to reject it. But by claiming this world as transcendental, “Like nothing that was ever bought and sold”, the poem reminds us of the very thing it resists – the stifling ubiquity of buying and selling.
The image of the glowing wheat gains further veracity from its presentation as a stage in a process. The plants are green in the first line. They have stayed unripened for perhaps a longer season than usual, but at last are “yielding” – a perfect verb that connects to the action of the wind – “to the change assigned”. There is no miracle hovering in the word “assigned”. The moment of vision, placed on pause, still unquestionably belongs to a natural life cycle.
The speaker knows all about this mutability, but tells us, “It waited there, the body and the mind”. In this strange personification of the world of gold, attention may have turned to the human players – the offstage labourers, farmers, dealers who might be said to form the mind that directs the land’s body. But perhaps, in view of the “mighty meaning” that follows, the poet discerns something like “mind” in the natural process itself. Line eight persists with the sense of mystery and unknowability. The deft chiasmus there seems to reach out to a kind of religious paradox. But it’s also close to an expression of Robinson’s own subtle narrative art – which often “tells the more the more it is not told”.
In the sestet’s opening lines, we can hear Robinson’s usual, low-key tone of voice as he alludes to “a land where all days are not fair”. That dry understatement precedes the report that, nevertheless, the “fair days went on” – and this documentary honesty somehow earns the epiphany: “A thousand golden sheaves were lying there, / Shining and still”. The further qualification “but not for long” – an echo with the “long”, so beautifully placed and hopefully charged – in line one prepares us for a later stage of the process. This time, Robinson allows himself the grandest of fanciful notions: the newly made sheaves might be sleeping, golden-haired girls who will rise of their own volition “and go away”. This is depicted so vividly, it almost happens in front of our eyes, but Robinson is merely imagining a scene yet to be realised. The poem holds on to its moment of magnificence inviolate.
Might Robinson verge towards sentimentality with his golden-haired girls? Despite the faint Shakespearean echo, I found myself going back to a lighter, sweeter sonnet in which golden hair and geography coincide, Charles Tennyson Turner’s Letty’s Globe. But the comparison isn’t very fair: Robinson isn’t pursuing charm, and his girls are not winsome children. They are not quite goddesses, although akin to spirits of the corn, but have bodies and minds that ground the poem’s metaphysics. The golden hair humanises and even vulgarises them, so, despite their slow-moving grandeur, they are emblems of the common tragedies. Lovers forsake one another. Youth dreams its time away and wakes to find years have imperceptibly passed. Lives end and leave no trace. What Robinson has almost said in the octet, that wheat is a commodity, to be bought and sold like any other, also lingers in the sestet, with its one-sentence symphony of fulfilment and transience.



Thursday, May 28, 2015

The Smutty-Metaphor Queen of Lawrence, Kansas


Credit...
Mark Peckmezian for The New York Times

The Smutty-Metaphor Queen of Lawrence, Kansas



By Jesse Lichtenstein
May 28, 2014


Just before she took the microphone one soggy night in Portland, Ore., the poet Patricia Lockwood downed a shot of cheap bourbon. She had never had a drink right before a reading, but she often enacts some private joke when she speaks in public. It might be slurping her water loudly into the microphone, or rolling (instead of stepping) onto a stage, or, in this case, ingesting something that tasted to her like a puddle in a forest — anything to erase what she calls the “anxiety kegels” leading up to a performance.

That evening, more than a hundred poetry fans — most of them in their 20s, most of them clutching cans of bargain beer — crowded into a corner of a 12,000-square-foot wood-and-metal shop as Lockwood began a 12-minute romp of a poem called “The Father and Mother of American Tit-Pics.”

Lockwood is all large eyes, apple cheeks and pixie haircut — like an early Disney creation, perhaps a woodland creature; one of her fans recently rendered her as a My Little Pony. The contrast between how she presents and what she writes is something Lockwood delights in.

“Emily Dickinson was the father of American poetry and Walt Whitman was the mother,” she read. “Walt Whitman nude, in the forest, staring deep into a still pool — the only means of taking tit-pics available at that time.”

I laughed, like everyone else in the audience, and then settled in for a poem that re-envisioned two 19th-century pillars of American poetry through a kaleidoscope of contemporary obsessions. Occasionally, the sound of arc welding filled the silences between stanzas. It was, she later said, “the butchest I have ever felt.”

Not long before this performance, a friend of mine introduced me to Lockwood’s work, handing me a copy of her first book, “Balloon Pop Outlaw Black,” which his small poetry press had just published. Large portions of it are meditations on the cartoon character Popeye. It would seem an unlikely candidate for a New Yorker critic’s end-of-the-year picks, yet it was, and it also became the best-selling small-press poetry book of 2013 (by a living poet), marking Lockwood as indie-poetry royalty. This week, her second collection of poems, “Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals,” comes out from Penguin, and in April, Lockwood announced the sale of her memoir to Riverhead.

Most poets who publish with the top indie or trade publishers in the country teach at universities, and nearly all have taken advanced degrees — an M.F.A. or even a Ph.D. in creative writing. The effect of grad-school workshops on literature in the United States has been the subject of endless debate — the M.F.A. vs. N.Y.C. meme being the most recent variation on the theme. Lockwood has no M.F.A., she never even went to college. She married at 21, has scarcely ever held a job and, by her telling, seems to have spent her adult life in a Proustian attitude, writing for hours each day from her “desk-bed.” Now, at 32, Lockwood finds herself on the verge of literary fame, a product of ill fortune followed by good fortune and the perhaps naïve expectations of success that only an outsider can maintain.

Lockwood, who goes by “Tricia,” may be best known for her persona on Twitter, where her steady stream of surreal, sexually explicit and often sexually impossible humor has won her 30,000 followers and a string of admirers in the world of comedy. Andy Richter, the longtime sidekick to Conan O’Brien, considers her a friend, though he has never met her offline: “She’s funny, she’s interesting and she’s a weirdo — which is all I ask for in a person.” Megan Amram, a writer for “Parks and Recreation,” came across Lockwood’s poetry first, relishing her ability to “heighten pop culture to saintly levels,” and then found her Twitter feed. “Both of us love the subversion of common sayings or verbal tropes,” Amram told me, “and we also love making fun of the way women are viewed as sex objects.” Rob Delaney, whom Comedy Central called “the funniest person on Twitter” and who has more than a million Twitter followers, heard about Lockwood from Amram. He “went insane,” he said, “and read everything by her.”

Lockwood’s Twitter “sexts” — inspired by political scandals and cable-news stories on the sexual menace of cellphones — reimagine the sweaty-thumbed expression of a generation’s libido as a kind of gnomic poetry. She began composing the sexts in 2011, and soon online journals were compiling their favorites. The Huffington Post ran an article with the headline: “Patricia Lockwood’s Sext Poems Will Make You LOL.” Many are unprintable in these pages, but here’s a taste:

Sext: I am a living male turtleneck. You are an art teacher in winter. You
put your whole head through me




THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE


Wednesday, May 27, 2015

Denise Levertov / The Jacob's Ladder

Denise Levertov

The Jacob's Ladder
by DENISE LEVERTOV
BIOGRAPHY
The stairway is not
a thing of gleaming strands
a radiant evanescence
for angels' feet that only glance in their tread, and
need not touch the stone.
It is of stone.
A rosy stone that takes
a glowing tone of softness
only because behind it the sky is a doubtful,
a doubting night gray.
A stairway of sharp
angles, solidly built.
One sees that the angels must spring
down from one step to the next, giving a little
lift of the wings:
and a man climbing
must scrape his knees, and bring
the grip of his hands into play. The cut stone
consoles his groping feet. Wings brush past him.
The poem ascends.




Monday, May 25, 2015

Denise Levertov / The Freeing of the Dust


The Freeing of the Dust

by Denise Levertov
BIOGRAPHY

Unwrap the dust from its mummycloths.
Let Ariel learn

a blessing for Caliban
and Caliban drink dew freom the lotus
open upon the waters.
Bitter the slow
river water: dew
shall  wet his lips with light.
Let the dust
float, the wrappings too
are dust.
              Drift upon the stir
of air, of dark
river: ashes of wat had lived,
                      or seeds
                of ancient sesame,
                     or namelessly
pure dust that is all
in all.              Bless,
weightless Spirit. Drink,
Caliban, push your tongue
heavy into the calyx.




Denise Levertov
"Poems 1972-1982"
New Directions Publishing Corporation, 2001.





Thursday, May 21, 2015

Billie Holiday / I'm a fool to want you



Billie Holiday
I'M A FOOL TO WANT YOU

This song is from Billie`s final album "Lady in Satin" completed and released in her lifetime.
Ray Ellis said of the album:
"I would say that the most emotional moment was her listening to the playback of "I'm a Fool to Want You". There were tears in her eyes...After we finished the album I went into the control room and listened to all the takes. I must admit I was unhappy with her performance, but I was just listening musically instead of emotionally. It wasn't until I heard the final mix a few weeks later that I realized how great her performance really was."


I` m a fool to want you

I` m a fool to want you
I` m a fool to want you
To want a love that cant be true
A love thats there for others too

I` m a fool to hold you
Such a fool to hold you
To seek a kiss not mine alone
To share a kiss that devil has known

Time and time again I said Id leave you
Time and time again I went away
But then would come the time when I would need you
And once again these words I had to say

Take me back, I love you
...i need you
I know its wrong, it must be wrong
But right or wrong I cant get along...
........Without you.......




Saturday, May 16, 2015

Billie Holiday / All of me




Billie Holiday

All of me


by Seymour Simons and Gerald Marks

All of me
Why not take all of me
Can't you see
I'm no good without you
Take my lips
I want to lose them
Take my arms
I'll never use them
Your goodbye left me with eyes that cry
How can I go on dear, without you
You took the part that once was my heart
So why not take all of me