Remember Rizzo from the movie Grease? The indomitable Stockard Channing played a smoldering hottie who rivals the perky Olivia Newton-John. We recognize the split: Betty Rizzo struts her T & A. Wholesome Sandy flaunts perfect teeth.

Back in the day Rizzo was called a slut, a word that even sounds dirty. Leap forward thirty-five years and we’d be her cheering squad. Sure, Rizzo boasted a fine rack and leaned toward the uncouth, but like today’s female protagonists, she had moxie and smarts. Think: Jennifer Lawrence in Silver Linings Playbook. Think: Katniss Everdeen in Hunger Games. Think: Lisbeth Salander in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. These characters have more in common with the brazen dames immortalized by Crawford, Stanwyck, and Davis than they do with the kittenish Newton-John. Fifty years ago, in The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan inspired women to stash their aprons next to their brooms and see what else the world offered. How would the prophetic Betty have reacted to what Elizabeth Hand calls the new Femininjas?

Philip Larkin’s noted poem This Be the Verse harpoons familial sanctity.

 

“Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf
Get out early as you can
And don’t have any kids yourself.”

 

Not solely an angry poem, This Be the Verse is a recalcitrant force. In reality, Larkin’s fucked up benefaction is as much a sly smirk as it is contemptuous memorial. Along the lines of that anonymous dictum, it takes one to know one.

What Larkin has been to the anti-familial, John Tottenham strives to be for the anti-marriage set. Tottenham’s second poetic issue is Antiepithalamia and other Poems of Regret and Resentment, from Penny-Ante Editions. The epithalamia the title sets itself against is an obscurity and so is defined on the back- epi-tha-la-mium n., pl. –miums or mia: A song or poem in honor of a bride and bridegroom. Right from the start, the book winks at its reader, for it is a screwed up invention about what it perceives as a screwed up invention. As the first line of the book’s first Antiepithalmium stresses “At last their smugness is united.” Quite.

You’ve surely seen all the fanfare on TNB lately about The Beautiful Anthology (TNB Books, June 2012), a collection of essays, stories and some poetry on the topic of beauty. Thanks to the tireless efforts of editor Elizabeth Collins the book has emerged as a very beautiful physical object full of diverse, witty, engaging pieces. There has already been a fair bit written about the essays in this volume, but given my whole-hearted insistence that poetry is the queen of all forms of writing, I decided a look at Erato’s hand on the book is in order.

From an obituary in the New York Times:

For all her verbal prowess, for all her prolific output, Ms. Rich retained a dexterous command of the plain, pithy utterance. In a 1984 speech she summed up her reason for writing — and, by loud unspoken implication, her reason for being — in just seven words.

What she and her sisters-in-arms were fighting to achieve, she said, was simply this: “the creation of a society without domination.”

Irreverence is the champion of liberty and its only sure defense.
~ Mark Twain

 

The debate regarding a MFA in Creative Writing/Poetry is getting really old. Those of us who care about the art of poetry are quite aware of each side’s stance—on the one hand poetry is treated as a calling (Anti-MFA; the romanticism of outsiders who lead reckless lifestyles and who place the judgment of a “successful career” as a poet into the hands of posterity), on the other hand poetry is treated as a career (Pro-MFA; careerism, wherein schooled poets explicitly strategize with other schooled poets, publishing each other’s poems and books in order to stay on track to tenure and/or to maintain a recognizable status of “success”). Without a doubt, the Pro-MFA side is the sovereign of literary publications and the publishing system. It is for this reason that the Anti-MFA side comes off as the aggressor in this debate; the Pro-MFA side deflecting its opponents’ jabs with an aloof air of boredom, or at times with an agitated sense of exasperation. The bottom line is that this debate, this nonsense, must be brought to closure. And so, please bear with me as I rehash a few issues here in a swift attempt to finally, and thankfully, put an end to the MFA debate.

In summer of 2009, in a comment on my own piece, “Only one poem for the implosion of Capital”, I invoked Skelton for his leadership bringing female grace upon my pen.

Refresshyng myndys the Aprell shoure of rayne;
Condute of comforte, and well most souerayne;
Herber enverduryd, contynuall fressh and grene;
Of lusty somer the passyng goodly quene;

(Refreshing minds the April shower of rain;
Conduit of comfort, and well most sovereign;
Herber enverdured, continual fresh and green;    “Herber enverdured”: herb garden covered in greenery
Of lusty summer the passing goodly queen;)

Last year was a pretty good one for writing, but there must have been a superior, secondary, annual echo, because about a month ago, the goodly passing queen halted, pulled up a chair, and flourished a Midsummer birch wand.  Someone must have whispered my need in her ear.

One-time featured TNB poet Heather Fowler runs an annual poetry marathon in July.  Each day she posts a new theme, and a new poetical form on Facebook, writes a suitable poem or two, and then invites other poets to join in.  I dipped in a toe a bit diffidently at first, but by the time the month was out, I found I’d written over forty poems, with a surprising level of concentration.  Along the way I learned and re-learned a few things about my own poetic impulses.

Along the way I also put to use something I claimed in my article “Poetry for the Nervous, Vol 2: What’s useful?”

“I’ve found that the more poetry I have coursing through my veins, the faster I write, the less I suffer writer’s block, and the more readily I marshal all the latent intellectual resources at my disposal.  That doesn’t just go for literary writing.  I also write a lot of technical articles in my professional career, and as a businessman I write a lot of commercial correspondence.  It is a real gift to be able to do so very efficiently, focusing less on the mechanics of writing than on the technical and business problems at hand.“

July was a hell of a month for business problems at hand.

I co-founded my company with three other partners, and as with all small business, it’s a perpetual strategic balance to maintain a sound footing.  We’ve grown over the years, which is good, but there have also been emerging stresses on how best to achieve this strategic balance, and the stresses reached a breaking point in late June.  The month was an imposing wall of meetings with and proposals to departing and prospective partners; corporate administrative matters; calls to employees to ensure they could remain productive despite all the furore, and so on.  There was real urgency provided by the fact that my wife is due to give birth in August.  I did not want the mess to seep into August.  The upshot: a lot of writing, and a lot of reading, including at one point the full statutes deriving from the Virginia Limited Liability Company act.  There was enough water in July to form a wicked drowning pool.  Let the bodies hit the floor, for sure¹.

The first of July came along with circumstances that really made me worry about the future of the company.  The call was unmistakable to roll up the sleeves.  I embraced the weekend like a final, large gulp of air before submerging into that pool for who knew how long.  For this reason the first poetic challenge I could swing into was July 4th.  “Write a quatern on the theme ‘Oubliet/tte’.” “Forgetting” sounds nice.  Oh snap!  Quatern!

I started seriously writing poetry late in secondary school.  As soon as I got to University, as I’ve related in my inaugural TNB piece, I ran into a formidable culture of wordsmiths.  Many of my new poet friends loved exercise in forms, and wrote sonnets, villanelles, heroic couplets and more.  I went along with all that, of course, but my love for French poetry was really burgeoning, so I also went in the direction of the various rondel variations, triolets, quaterns and such.  Since leaving Nigeria I’d largely gotten away from heavy experimenting with forms, because this is an activity so much more pleasurable in poetic companionship with others, which I’d lost once I arrived in the US.  I’ve become used to my comfortable old shoes—iambic tetrameter quatrain, and odd, invented forms of my own.

Here I was tickled back towards the quatern.  Not a bad bomb bursting in air for July 4th.  “Oubliette” of course made me think of an old favorite, Corbière’s “Sonnet de Nuit”

Oubliette verrouillé
Qui me renferme…dehors!
(Bolted up dungeon
Which encloses me…outside!)

I started to translate this into an English quatern, but I kept hearing in the back of my mind an opening echo from Neruda:

Si tú me olvidas, quiero
Que tú sepas una cosa.
(If you forget me
I wish you to know
one thing.)

So my quatern began:

The cell is ten dreams by ten nights
I’ve paced forever to its zero
”Si tú me olvidas, quiero
Que tú sepas una cosa”: my light

Gutters against your fading picture
The cell is ten dreams by ten nights.

Once I found the right fount, in Neruda, the poem flowed effortlessly into the form.  July 4th.  After a frightfully sapping weekend I posted my completed poem and basked in a corona of new-found energy more spectacular than any of the municipal rocketry displays in earnest progress.  Off I went to the other family activities planned for the long weekend.

Tuesday started with the expected wallop, and also settled the pattern for July right away.  I’d wake up to feverish sequences of e-mail in the morning (many of my colleagues are two timezones ahead).  Over brunch I’d read Heather’s main note, and ponder the theme and form a little while.  Back to work I’d go.  When I finally turned my back on office matters in the evening, I’d grab my pen, despite being nearly crushed with exhaustion.  I’d start writing and to my surprise, the poem would flow almost autonomously.  Sometimes I’d find myself writing two or even three poems.  The resulting burst of energy would serve me in leaving the troubles behind as I spent time with the family, and as I participated here on TNB, and with the others sharing poems with Heather.  Each day would drain me, and each poetic evening would revive me with amazing sureness.  It was like driving my Prius through the continental divide mountains.  The uphills would use up all the hybrid battery juice, and the engine would be squirreling the last miles to the crest of the pass, then the downhill would recharge the batteries to the electronic display’s lime green brim.

I tried my hand at forms I’d never ventured in before: fibonacci sequence, ethere, cinquain, ghazal.  I’d always wanted to try my hand at ghazal, but no poem had ever presented itself to me to write that way.  July 18th, my hand was forced: “write a ghazal to the theme ‘lucid dreaming.’”

My doom marked once I get the sign I crave
Sly look my way casting that shine I crave.

From reverie to rest I hire your form
For scenes on sets whose design I crave.

My tongue on, my lips press those sweet nipples
Round which sweep the fleshly line I crave.

“From reverie to rest” of course a half line from Jonathan Swift’s “The Day of Judgment” that popped into my mind upon the phrase “lucid dreaming.”   July 18th Heather set us to terzanelles, a new form for me, a cross between a villanelle and terza rima.  I used to write villanelles, but beyond teenage I’d found them too cloying.  The terzanelle variation mixes just enough spice into proceedings.  I was smitten. I wrote one, then another, then another.  A friend posted a line on Facebook and mused that it looked like something I’d turn into a poem.  I duly turned it into a terzanelle.  I listened to Erykah Badu’s New Amerykah Part Two (Return of the Ankh), and before I knew it I was writing a terzanelle for each song.

Satisfaction and desire cross
Timelines like lazy jet trails against blue
Background of embrace, creation, loss.

Even hesi braves strict ordeal ruled…true;
Concentrating on music, lover and babies
Timelines like lazy jet trails against blue

Willing happiness away from maybes
(Whisper one…two…three…CLAP! One…two…three…CLAP!)
Concentrating on music, lover and babies.

Often the day’s theme, or Heather’s starter poem, would stir into consciousness some memorized poem, or poem fragment. During the work day, the feelers would start to creep into my consciousness, and I’d have to reluctantly shake them shake off and focus.  But did these truncated tendrils continue to weave their mesh into complete poems in my subconscious?  July 20th.  “Write a huitain on the theme ‘dancing.’”  I was airport bound, then hurrying to the gate, flight to Washington DC.  Bounding in my head as I went along, Ezra Pound’s “Dance Figure”.  I got to the gate as it was boarding, and almost held up the plane, writing a poem that spilled out onto a piece of scrap paper balanced on my knee.

Dark eyed, woman of my dreams,
Burnt jewel perfection, regal date,
Your hands on me like frosted streams,
Like winding sheet of goddess fate.

The month went on with the drama playing out at work.  World cup final day I watched the game with a bunch of my francophone friends, several of whom are also entrepreneurs.  Marc (name changed) has been involved in a lot of business and investing drama on his time.  At half time we’re chatting about my corporate problem.  He gives me a telescoping look and says “do you want me to put in a serious, but low-ball bid on the company to skew valuation in your favor?”  I actually hesitate a moment before laughing it off, and we turn back to the game.  July 25th.  “Write a cleave to the theme ‘Oranges Are Not,’” a variation of a theme I’d suggested, in honor of Holland: “Clockwork Orange.”  Half lines from World Cup finals day sifted into that diabolical form in the requisite two columns.

almost time for the game        slow, sultry afternoon
relish the unstripping              sunlight off bare skin
to don the Oranje                     and sudden occlusion
frisson of excitement               fingertip under trim of cloth
cresting wave of build-up       electric junebug of static stroke
crashes into early attack         smart of unexpected discharge
and sudden dry clarity            and sticky examination
tang of the sour core               of hothouse grape gambit
clockwork orange                    so much for tactics

Junebugs.  That came from an off-hand complaint by Becky Palapala.  Scraps, snippets, ingredients shaken into a confetti cannon and blasted into the air, all were coalescing under the influence of a strange field of gestalt.

But what was the source of the field?  Is this what happens at poetic workshops?  I’ve always scorned workshops, from my second-hand knowledge of them.  My impression of them is of reductive, depersonalizing experience.  I suppose it probably depends on the participants.  Perhaps it was just the rhythm of writing something every day, combined with the fact that I’d be surprised by theme and form each day, further combined with other events in my life that heightened the rush from poetic release, fueling a beneficial addiction.  Or maybe it was all a special moment, and I shouldn’t worry too hard about figuring out how to bottle it. 

We resolved the situation at my company right at the end of the month.  The resolution was fair, but also favorable to our continued success.  It was a huge weight off my shoulders that we settled matters before I had to turn my attention to the new household arrival.  I’ve observed to my wife that poetry helped me focus.  That it probably saved my company.  So much for people who scoff that poetry doesn’t have its applications.  That it has no place in the practical world.

My practical world in July was a marbled texture of hard economic realities and the aethereal, courtly spell of Erato, of Summer’s goodly queen.  The hard stuff was always prone to shatter, leaving a wreck of sharp-edged pieces, without the unexpected grace of soft poetic lining.

It’s a lesson that might be worth contemplating more broadly, living as we are in times perhaps too clogged with sharp-edged pieces of hard economic reality, while too bare of the soft, protective lining of poetry and her sister arts.

❧❧❧

¹ Considering this is TNB I considered using an allusion from the MacDonald novel “The Drowning Pool” instead, but nah, the band gets it closer to the mood.

Note: all verses quoted in this post are fragments of complete poems.

Image credit: “Morning Glow on the Western Ridge”

I was born in Burlington, Vermont in 1948. Though I did not appreciate it at the time, I received a greater and more appealing exposure to books and poetry than most kids get. My mother was a nurse, and my father was a teacher; and my mother regularly read aloud to me and my two siblings (my younger brother Bradley and my younger sister Martha), starting well before we reached school age. The poems my mother read included Edward Lear’s “The Owl and the Pussy-Cat,” selections from Mother Goose, Eugene Field’s “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod,” Robert Louis Stevenson’s Child’s Garden of Verses, and Dr. Seuss’s Cat in the Hat.

In addition to being fortunate in drawing the open-minded and literate family I did, I was lucky in the state and city of my birth. When I was growing up, Robert Frost was still living for much of the year in Ripton, which is just off Route 7 about 35 miles south of Burlington. He was our “local” poet and in 1961 was officially made Laureate of Vermont. By the fourth or fifth grade our teachers had introduced us to his work. I was particularly enchanted by the little Morgan colt in “The Runaway” and by the “miniature thunder” his hooves make as he dashes about the meadow, frightened by his first experience of a snowstorm. And beginning at the age twelve or thirteen, I attended the productions of a fine summer Shakespeare festival at the University of Vermont (which sits on a hill overlooking Burlington and Lake Champlain), with the result that I had seen or read most of Shakespeare’s major plays, and some of his interesting lesser ones, by the time I graduated from high school.

Though always a reader, I probably would have not become a poet had I not gone to college at Stanford. When I arrived, I discovered and took classes from a group of terrific young writer-teachers in the English Department. This community had been fostered by, and reflected the enduring influence of, two longstanding members of the faculty, the poet Yvor Winters (who had recently retired and who sadly died of cancer not long after) and the novelist Wallace Stegner. Moreover, nearby San Francisco was center of the Beat Movement. In this environment, it was perhaps inevitable that a student like myself, who loved books, would be drawn more deeply into literature and would try his hand at verse. After receiving my B. A. from Stanford in 1970, I attended Brandeis University for graduate study with the wonderful epigrammatic poet and Renaissance scholar, J. V. Cunningham, eventually writing under his direction a doctoral thesis on the history of detective fiction.

My first book of poems, Uncertainties and Rest, appeared in 1979. Sapphics against Anger and Other Poems followed in 1986. (In 1995, these were reprinted in a joint volume, Sapphics and Uncertainties.) More recent collections include The Color Wheel (1994) and Toward the Winter Solstice (2006). I have also edited The Poems of J.V. Cunningham (1997) and have published two books of criticism: Missing Measures (1990) and All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing (1999). The first of these examines the revolt against meter in modern poetry and deals with poetics and literary history; the second offers a more practical, nuts-and-bolts discussion of meter and versification.

To close on a personal note, my wife Victoria and I have been married for 31 years and divide our time between Los Angeles and New York City. A librarian and art historian, she is the Brooke Russell Astor Director of Collections Strategy for the New York Public Library, and I’m a professor of English at California State University, Los Angeles, where I also direct the school’s Center for Contemporary Poetry and Poetics.

Editor’s note:  Mr. Steele, a poet and critic I’ve long admired, is this week’s poetry feature.  He submitted an autobiography for us which was too long to use in the template, but notable enough for its own piece.

Please see also his poem “Pastoral at Rock Point” and his self-interview.

—Uche Ogbuji.

In the maiden voyage of this column, Poetry for the Nervous, Vol 1, I led with the principle that what you love, what strikes you, what moves you in poetry is what matters.  Critics do not matter.  The judgments of others do not matter.  Poetry is yours to dispose as your heart dictates.  If your teachers or friends impose upon you some poem or poet they champion, and you just don’t get it, there is no need to think yourself stupid or inadequate, nor to give up on poetry as a whole.  You will find what you love eventually, because poetry in its essence is as deep within us as our desire to communicate.

From an appeal towards what you love, I’ll work into something a bit less romantic.  I think the best poetry is also useful.  That’s a dangerous word in the world of art, wrapped up as it is in the most ancient debates about aesthetics and utility, but I’m always ready to argue that gallery art is great, but does it really beat, say, a well crafted chair that is beautiful to behold, and is also very comfortable for sitting?  Do any human efforts match the art of nature, for whom, especially if you are a cosmologist, utility is the most fundamental quantity?

Poetry can be useful, and the greatest poetry is almost always useful.  Poetry originated our need to communicate basic lessons about nature.  When do you plant what seeds, and what are the signs for harvest?  It’s not the most exciting thing to learn by rote the patterns of the stars, so these became stories, with personified heroes and gods, and this became mythology as poet after poet added layers to the basic lessons.  From the ancient Babylonian practice of parallel themes within poetic couplets, which birthed the poetry of The Bible and so many other religions that endure to this day, to the Homeric Hymns derived from centuries of elaboration by Greek poets, to the Nordic edda and skalds (and thus scops and makars), whose tales embroidered the maps and navigation that gave them mastery of the oceans, evolving into the great sagas.  Then there are the storytelling traditions throughout African and the pre-colonial New World.

Now that social utility is better developed than the needs of simple agriculture, the range of poetic usefulness is broader.  Uses range from the sacred—bringing yourself through incantation closer to the deity of your chosen religion—to the profane—throwing out some choice quotes at a dinner party to impress the guests.  But lyric poetry, light verse and the like emerged because you can’t just sit and listen to lessons hour after hour.  You need diversions, and these diversions over time, as technology has reduced the need for mimetic means of communication, have become the essence of poetry.  Music, of course, started as the accompaniment to poetry, and emerged into its own separate art form.

Poetry was life-blood in the days when we peopled ever more inhospitable corners of the earth, and pragmatic lessons passed from settlement to settlement, and generation to generation were an urgent matter.  Poetry will never again be so important now that it’s main function is enjoyment rather than survival, and that is just the nature of things, but that doesn’t mean the concept of useful poetry is dead.

I myself use poetry in place of religious prayer and incantation.  I recite memorized poetry to myself at times of stress—it has an amazing ability to calm me—or even when I’m bored and have no book handy.

Considering most of my audience here are writers, I’ll mention that I use poetry to improve my facility with language.  Poetry, almost by definition, is the repository of extraordinary language, and having extraordinary at the fingertips makes it easier to express yourself even ordinarily.  I’ve found that the more poetry I have coursing through my veins, the faster I write, the less I suffer writer’s block, and the more readily I marshal all the latent intellectual resources at my disposal.  That doesn’t just go for literary writing.  I also write a lot of technical articles in my professional career, and as a businessman I write a lot of commercial correspondence.  It is a real gift to be able to do so very efficiently, focusing less on the mechanics of writing than on the technical and business problems at hand.  I fully credit that to devoted reading and memorization of poetry.

For more general advocacy, I’ll level the biggest weapon.  Greg Olear tipped his cap this way in comments to the last piece where he said:

“In college, I memorized “To His Coy Mistress,” and used it as a pick-up line. Totally worked. A poem 400 years old!”

Poetry will never outlast its romantic uses.  Whether your Cyrano is a talented friend, a long-dead icon such as Andrew Marvell, author of “To His Coy Mistress,”¹ or you got it well covered yourself (you poetic vixen/stud), use poetry to get you some.  And I don’t know how I can offer any better advocacy than that.

I selected this next poem not because it has “useful” in its title, but because sometimes the greatest use for poetry is to stimulate sympathy to an expressed perspective.  This poem is brilliant in how effectively it makes you see a given situation that’s only too common.  I felt it really made me understand something I’m lucky never to have experienced myself.

Catherine Tufariello is an accomplished and well-anthologized poet whose work I greatly enjoy, and recommend for her combination of sublime skill in verse with a very natural voice.  She resides in Indiana with her family, where she teaches at Valparaiso University.

“Useful Advice” by Catherine Tufariello

You’re 37? Don’t you think that maybe
It’s time you settled down and had a baby?

No wine? Does this mean happy news? I knew it!

Hey, are you sure you two know how to do it?

All Dennis has to do is look at me
And I’m knocked up.
                                          Some things aren’t meant to be.
It’s sad, but try to see this as God’s will.

I’ve heard that sometimes when you take the Pill—

A friend of mine got pregnant when she stopped
Working so hard.
                                    Why don’t you two adopt?
You’ll have one of your own then, like my niece.

At work I heard about this herb from Greece—

My sister swears by dong quai. Want to try it?

Forget the high-tech stuff. Just change your diet.

It’s true! Too much caffeine can make you sterile.

Yoga is good for that. My cousin Carol—

They have these ceremonies in Peru—

You mind my asking, is it him or you?

Have you tried acupuncture? Meditation?

It’s in your head. Relax! Take a vacation
And have some fun. You think too much. Stop trying.

Did I say something wrong? Why are you crying?

♬

(posted with permission from the Author)

For the second poem, I’ve chosen an excerpt from the beginning of Fulke Greville’s marvelous 16th century poem, “A Treatise of Humane Learning.”  I chose it because it is one of the best didactic poems in English, and it has a real use.  In it Greville lays out the concepts of humanism, which, from adaptation of platonic ideas by Erasmus at The University of Paris, through flowering in the renaissance, is the engine of Western civilization and modern thinking.

If you want to understand the forces behind the Reformation, behind much Western Philosophy in the spirit of Descartes, behind the exploration and colonization period of European history, behind the enlightened Caliphates of Moorish Spain (yes, Saracens often cottoned on much more quickly than white Europeans), behind the English Civil War, French and American revolutions, and ultimately behind socialism and thus the Russian revolution, as well as the Adam-Smith-derived economic science that evolved in parallel, you may never find a better discussion than Greville’s poem.

This poem is also aesthetically beautiful, and brilliantly crafted, which has not always been the case with didactic poetry.  In fact, the reason you rarely see such poems in the modern age is because hacks put out stuff well worthy of ridicule in English as well as French after the Renaissance, and the influential Romantic poets (Wordsworth in particular) pretty much banished the practice.  Yes, even my excerpt is a bit long (I selected from 152 total stanzas) but again I think the pay-off in food for thought is well worth it.

I look forward to discussion of how Greville’s characterizations of the various functions of consciousness, intelligence and reason match your modern take on these concepts.

Sir Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke was a Baron, accomplished statesman, and one of the greatest Elizabethan poets.  I love Shakespeare and Sidney, but I’ve often felt that Greville is more suited to the modern ear because he is less fanciful in his style.  Greville was also a famous biographer of Sidney.

I have modernized spelling throughout the poem.

“A Treatise of Humane Learning” by Fulke Greville

The mind of man is this world’s true dimension;
And Knowledge is the measure of the mind:
And as the mind, in her vast comprehension,
Contains more worlds than all the world can find:
        So knowledge does itself far more extend,
        Than all the minds of men can comprehend.

A climbing height it is without a head,
Depth without bottom, way without an end;
A circle with no line environed;
Not comprehended, all it comprehends;
        Worth infinite, yet satisfies no mind
        Till it that infinite of the God-head find.

This knowledge is the same forbidden tree,
Which man lusts after to be his Maker;
For knowledge is of Power’s eternity,
And perfect Glory, the true image-taker;
        So as what does the infinite contain,
        Must be as infinite as it again.

[...]

For our defects in nature who sees not?
We enter, first things present not conceiving,
Not knowing future, what is past forgot:
All other creatures instant power receiving,
        To help themselves; Man only brings sense
        To feel and wail his native impotence.

Which Sense, man’s first instructor, while it shows
To free him from deceit, deceives him most;
And from this false root that mistaking grows,
Which truth in humane knowledge knowledge has lost:
        So that by judging Sense herein, perfection,
        Man must deny his nature’s imperfection.

[...]

Knowledge’s next organ is Imagination;
A glass, wherein the object of our Sense
Ought to respect true height or declination,
For understanding clears intelligence:                                     “clears”: illuminates
For this Power also has her variation,
Fixed in some, in some with difference;
In all, so shadowed with self-application,
        As makes her pictures, still too foul or fair;
        Not like the life in lineament or air.

This power besides, always cannot receive
What Sense reports, but what the affections please
To admit; ‘and as those princes that do leave
‘Their State in trust to men corrupt with ease,
        ’False in their faith or but to faction friend;
        ’The truth of things can scarcely comprehend.

So must the Imagination from the Sense
Be misinformed, while our affections cast
False shapes and forms, on their intelligence,
And to keep out true intromission thence,
        Abstracts the imagination, or distastes,
        With images preoccupately placed.                                     “preoccupately”: with obsessive care

Hence our desires, fears, hopes, love, hate, and sorrow,
In fancy make us hear, feel, see impressions,
Such as out of our Sense they do not borrow;
And are the efficient cause, the true progression
        Of sleeping visions, idle phantasms waking;
        Life, dreams; and knowledge, apparitions making.

Again, our Memory, register of Sense,
And mould of arts, as mother of Induction,
Corrupted with disguised intelligence,
Can yield no images for man’s instruction:
        But—from stained wombs—abortive birth
        Of strange opinions, to confound the Earth.

The last chief oracle of what man knows
Is Understanding; which though it contain
Some ruinous notions, which our nature shows,
Of general truths, yet have they such a stain
From our corruption, as all light they lose;
        Save to convince of ignorance and sin,
        Which where they reign let no perfection in.

[...]

Nor in any right line can her eyes ascend,
To view the things that immaterial are;
‘For as the sun does, while his beams descend,
‘Lighten the Earth, but shadow every star:
        So Reason stooping to attend the Sense,
        Darkens the spirit’s clear intelligence.

[...]

Again, we see the best complexions vain,
And in the worst, more nimble subtlety:
From whence Wit, a distemper of the brain,
The Schools conclude; and our capacity
        How much more sharp, the more it apprehends,
        Still to distract, and less Truth comprehends.

But all these natural defects perchance
May be supplied by Sciences and Arts;
Which we thirst after, study, admire, advance,
As if restore our fall, recure our smarts                                     “recure”: recover
        They could, bring in perfection, burn our rods;
        With Demades to make us like our gods.                                     “Demades”: author of a life of Alexander the Great; possibly the first to suggest literal divinity for Alexander

[...]

♬

Please remember, dear reader, that you are the key part of this column.  Do tell what you think of these poems.  What do you like about them?  Do you have other poems you find useful in any way?  What do you think bout the idea of utility of poetry, and in art?  And I’m always looking for discussion of poetry in general?  What have been your experiences?  Do you have any poems you recommend to people who normally wouldn’t bother with poetry?  Any poets you wished more people would check out?  Any thoughts on big-name poems or poets you find overrated?

❧❧❧

¹There have been numerous poetic responses to Andrew Marvell’s classic, from the very earnest to the very ironical, which in itself illustrates the imaginative power of the pastoral love lyric.

In the interests of candor, I should preface this review by stating that Nancy White was a beloved and formative teacher of mine when I was a student in the 1990s at Saint Ann’s School in Brooklyn. It was in her class that it first seemed possible to make a place for oneself in the world through the written word. Nancy and I reestablished contact only a few months ago and I was sorry to hear of the difficulties she had endured in the time that had passed, but it would be no exaggeration to say that from the compost of misfortune grew an amazing thing: a book of poems called “Detour.”

The poem “Woven and Sewn” opens this collection with a surprising and arresting tough-love invocation: “You are no virgin listen. You must stop here.” This voice is both contemporary and timeless, assured and experienced, with its second person address aimed as much at the poet herself as to the reader. This dialogue exhorts us to take heed, to “Sit down,” for there are important things to be read.

White’s voice here sets the tone for the rest of the collection in which virtually every poem is spoken in the second person, an affect that results in an immediate, intense, and sustained identification between reader and poet. The use of the second person in place of the poetic “I” serves to mediate the potential of a solipsistic or journal-entry quality in such an introspective and domestic narrative. Instead, White transcends the confessional and succeeds in gathering and inviting a sense of the universal, of reciprocal alterity; a sense of the recognition of the other that is oneself.

As is suggested by the circuitous implication of the title, the narrative of “Detour” follows a non-linear path that mirrors that of the psychoanalytic process. The structure of the book, divided into three parts – “Smoke,” “Solid,” and “No Sequel” – moves from the cataclysmic events leading to divorce to an unsentimental review of childhood where a revised understanding and reclamation of the self takes place before returning to a present that readdresses what has come to pass on different and farther-seeing terms. Based perhaps on the credence that the only way out is through, “Detour” describes a kind of map of the internal processes necessary in the evolution of the psyche after your world has been shattered and ultimately answers the question: How do we express personal transformation in poetic terms?

“Poetry is a form of courage” which is the “ability to do something that frightens one, for one’s choices can’t be about being afraid,” says Joan Retallack. Similarly, Charles Bernstein speaks of an “aversive poetics” in which “mental fright” is the “place where poetry begins.” We hear this starting point of fear in “Propeller” where:

       you don’t know don’t know
       because all of this so far is mostly made of fear

As with “Propeller,” in many of the poems, the rawness of emotion is undercut by an adherence to and innovation of form. Replete with fresh turns of phrase, syntax, and construction, they showcase a delight in words and a playfulness of language, music, and line. There is also strong evidence of a sharp wit and an ironic, self-deprecating sense of humor.

“Thirst,” “Honest,” The Drinkers,” “Your Life Has Stood,” “Look Up,” “Tide Going Out,” “You Remember How a Voice,” “Your Mother Starts Talking,” “Ceremony for Coming of Age,” and “After Detour,” for example, are full of surprising linebreaks and/or parenthetical clauses that create a sometimes discordant, sometimes syncopated visual and musical experience that mirrors the interjections of the mind when one’s thoughts become at once repetitive and scattered.

In “Reflection in a Hard Surface,” these techniques describe the devastating guilt of an imagined complicity in one’s own betrayal, of not knowing better, of expecting to have known better:

                     not you (no one) he
        lied to you them us her and the you you
       thought you
       were isn’t now so who
       listened who ate
       the bait who let it into the
       ear like a drop of warm oil did it ease
       something there where we had hardened did we
       store his lie down in red coils did the hue of our
listening reach for him to tell it (the story) again (the story)
welcome and annihilating did we assist did we assist weren’t we there

“Grasslands,” bearing echoes of e.e. cummings, but with a sharper edge of melancholy, knowingness, and reflectiveness, demonstrates how White’s voice is more modernist than postmodern. The use here of the phatic function, or verse equivalence, with its disruption of non-verbal utterance, is at once amused, musing, and deathly serious:

       you force the car
       fast on the oiled road
       narrowing like love become

       useful but you
       are fruitful pining
       magic as a frying pan

       see how
       explanations pow
       smear harden on the windshield

In such poems as “Beauty,” however, we glimpse a more unadulterated rawness that is nonetheless controlled by the freshness and rigor of its form. Neither shying away from the hard facts, nor dwelling on the pain of them, “Beauty” demonstrates a trust in the reader that allows for the revelation of vulnerability. The vulnerability here lies in the specificities, just as the devil is in the details, and it is through the microscope of such detail that the simultaneity of the particular and the universal in such a loss is conveyed:

       … his neck smelling of
       narcissus his lack of hangnails his laugh like
       a landmine such intention

       of goodness his appearance golden his
       tantrums his silence frozen after fine sex
              cordial after bad his beauty his

       beauty his darkness is love

In “Summer,” White’s sense of irony and humor, her tendency to not take herself too seriously emerges and yet it is not lost on the reader that what is happening here is deeply serious as well as utterly human. Describing how one grows accustomed to certain habits of emotion, it begins with a meditation on the sadness of premature endings:

       Today the sun is out which is sad.
              Trees sad when rustling and when still.
              Leaves that drop in July. When the lilies
                     open their widest, it is sad to be
                     alone in the house…

The poem builds to reveal that:

       … It is sad that he slept
       with those women, some of whom you
       also fed at that table. Discussing it,
              civilized, was sad, and the climb up
                     again and again to start over…

And later, White writes:

       You think, when you feel it return,
              how loyal sadness is, how accustomed you are,
                     spreading its folds about you.

This ladylike image of sadness as a skirt spread around you, its politeness and primness, not only convey the awareness that such habits of thought are possible to change, but it does so with White’s keen, wry sense of humor lurking beneath.

And in “Your Father, Your Son,” White attempts to debunk gendered socializations as she tries to claim for herself “the fine foul language of his big male freedom,” to redress the dominance of maleness in pursuit of a big female freedom despite fears and expectations.

What is so appealing here goes beyond a mastery of craft and technique to something more essential: present in “Detour” is a sincere argument in favor of exploring the subjectivity of personhood that speaks to the importance of the evolution of a singular unique self. The elucidation of this painfully hard-won process in the poetry of “Detour” becomes an act of courage, compassion, and feminism.

White has a gift for putting disparate things next to one another in a kind of ontological plurality – different modes of language and different modes of abstraction. But the stylistic diversity is held together by an embodied, intensely physical and sensual urgency where each emotion is fully rendered and felt. It is this profound humanness and humanity that allow for the strong sense of satisfaction and poetic concretion with which “Detour” leaves the reader.

To that end, we see in the final chapter, as in “They Ask You About Middle Age,” the growth on an assertive hopefulness in the idea of harvest and the ripeness of personal maturity:

       Soft, barely believable mornings (and other sweet
fruits) do grow.

And the final poem, “Below the Lifeboat” shows us what can happen after going through the process, the promise of becoming “unified” “after detour.”

I am crazy about poetry. Absolutely besotted. Poetry has helped me though the darkest days I’ve endured; it’s calmed me down during minor surgeries; it’s helped me remember experiences I never want to lose to the horizon; and it’s helped me put out of my mind destructive vexations.  Poetry is so utterly a part of my life, my everyday, that I am still astonished when I run into people who dislike poetry, who distrust poetry, who even fear poetry.  As any lover prickles in unrest unless everyone else acknowledges the magnificence of their beloved, I find myself wanting to draw my friends, my family, my colleagues into my inductive field of admiration.

This column is for those who are nervous about poetry, those who have had a nervous breakdown from the effects of poetry stuffed down their gullets by bad teachers. For those who have felt belittled or just bewildered by what they have been cajoled to admire, under pain of being called Philistines.  For those who have found their intelligence insulted by shallow irrelevance.  This column is not about educating you, but rather sharing delights with you, with the full understanding that you will like some of it, and dislike some of it, and that, that’s OK.  I’ll present different ideas and themes regarding poetry each time, and I’ll always have a poem or two to share, and I hope I can put you in the mood to share alike. To tell me why the poems I pick work for you, or why they do not.  To tell me in general why you love or hate poetry.  Each column is just a touchstone for discussion. I want to hear about your experiences with poetry, or lack of same, whether good or bad, satisfying or enervating.

First of all, since this is the 21st century, I want you to know that in your experiences with poetry you have the prerogative of individual liberty.  You have the right to like what you like, and to hate what you hate.  It would seem this doesn’t need saying, but in dealing with people’s problems with poetry I often hear that they feel they would be treated as uncouth or shallow if they admitted not getting what was the big deal about some Shakespeare sonnet, or some Whitman piece.  My personal motto comes from an Ezra Pound piece that I expect would not be everyone’s cup of tea.

What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross.

It’s perfectly OK to roll your eyes at the archaic second person form.  What the line itself is saying is that what you have come to love is what matters, and you don’t even need to bother with the rest.  If poetry is not giving you pleasure, then for you it is a failure, and that is OK.  Poetry is diverse enough that you will find something to love well.  My only agendum is to make a few modest suggestions, and have a give-and-take with you that informs my future suggestions.  Above all, I want the entire process to be fun.  If you ever learned about poetry in a musty room, with the dark drapes whispering to you in Greek, Latin and nasal Queen’s English in perfect Received Pronunciation, it’s time to rip the shades down, and let the sun stream in.  (I happen to love Greek and Latin and all that, but that’s because I was fortunate enough to find it for myself in a sunny, green field).

So without further ado, here is the first poem.

“Benediction” by Stanley Kunitz.

God banish from your house
The fly, the roach, the mouse

That riots in the walls
Until the plaster falls;

Admonish from your door
The hypocrite and liar;

No shy, soft tigrish fear
Permit upon your stair,

Nor agents of your doubt.
God drive them whistling out.

Let nothing touched with evil,
Let nothing that can shrivel

Heart’s tenderest frond, intrude
Upon your still deep blood.

Against the drip of night
God keep all windows tight,

Protect your mirrors from
Surprise, delirium,

Admit no trailing wind
Into your shuttered mind

To plume the lake of sleep
With dreams. If you must weep

God give you tears, but leave
You secrecy to grieve,

And islands for your pride,
And love to nest in your side.

God grant that, to the bone,
Yourself may be your own;

God grant that I may be
(my sweet) sweet company.

This is one of many poems I have off-head, and is a favorite for me to recite to my kids at bed time.  It’s gentle, understated, and yet quite rich.  It’s in a beat called iambic trimeter: da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM, which keeps it light-hearted, but generally when Kunitz uses the word “God” he does so in what’s called a spondee, with two strong syllables in succession.  “God ban(ish),” “God drive,” “God keep,” “God give,”"God grant,” “God grant.”  These spondees punctuate the lighthearted rhythm with emphasis that suggests the seriousness of the blessings, and the repetition at the end rounds out the poem with sweet insistence.  Repetition is one of the most important devices in poetry.  Poetry should be memorable.  You should find it coming to your mind at unexpected times.

Kunitz, an American poet, was twice Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (AKA US Poet Laureate), most recently in 2000.  He lived to see his 100th birthday before he died.  I’ve generally tended to dislike the work of those who become US Poet Laureate, but there is a lot from Kunitz to admire.

“Benediction” is one of the poems in my favorite volume of poetry, from which a good number of my suggestions will come.

“Parachute men” by Lenrie Peters

Parachute men say
The first jump
Takes the breath away
Feet in the air disturb
Till you get used to it.

Solid ground
Is not where you left it
As you plunge down
Perhaps head first

As you listen to
Your arteries talking
You learn to sustain hope.

Suddenly you are only
Holding an umbrella
In a windy place
As the warm earth
Reaches out to you
Reassures you
The vibrating interim is over

You try to land
Where green grass yields
And carry your pack
Across the fields

The violent arrival
Puts out the joint
Earth has nowhere to go
You are at the staring point

Jumping across worlds
In condensed time
After the awkward fall
We are always at the starting point

This is one of my favorite African poems in English.  Lenrie Peters was Gambian, but connected to Sierra Leone, and one of the more eloquent voices of pan-Africanism.  He was educated as a surgeon, but he published several books of poetry and a novel.  “Parachute Men” isn’t in a fixed meter, and only occasionally uses rhyme at the end of lines, and I’ve always said you hear its structure more clearly if you can hear it in a West African accent.  Regardless of accent it has a restless cadence that accompanies the gently shifting images.  Again you can see the power of repetition in the last two stanzas.  There is of course a marvelous double-entendre in “puts out the joint,” in a stanza that captures very strongly the finality of arrival, and its looping permanence.

Tell me what you think of these poems.  What do you like about them?  What about poetry in general?  What have been your experiences?  Do you have any poems you recommend to people who normally wouldn’t bother with poetry?  Any poets you wished more people would check out?  Any thoughts on big-name poems or poets you find overrated?

I’ve often heard it said that “there is no such thing as a communist Igbo”, a reference to our intense mercantile culture. Somewhat like stereotype of Lebanese, we’ve tended to structure our very existence around what we can sell, and in this 419 age, what we can con out of others. Ok, before I get an earful, that’s just a handful of petty thug “areaboy” “yahoozees”, but I digress.

Sometimes in my disgust for the roaring Supercapitalism that exploded out of Reaganomics, and Clinton’s deregulation of capital markets, I’ve taken comfort in the adage about my birthright to capitalism. They got be the ones fucking it up because my market gods (led by the Goddess Ahianjoku) don’t make no mistakes. And yes, my market gods had about enough, and all you have to to is check the news for the overdue actuarial apocalypse. The derivatives deluge. Head for the arks! Or never mind, it’s not really that bad.

The public radio show Marketplace put out a call for poems with an economic theme for April (so-called “National Poetry Month”). But as April winds up, 6 months deep into the implosion of global capital, the one poem seems painfully obvious. It’s well enough known, but I believe it’s  never been well enough understood.

“Canto XLV” (“With Usura”) — Ezra Pound

Possibly the greatest poem in English ever to make economics its central focus. It’s not as simplistic an anti-capitalist poem as Pounds enemies would have you think. True, Pound himself drew upon it while in the heights of his anti-capitalist fervor, while spreading propaganda for Mussolini during the war, but if you stick to the text, it has a clarity yet dexterity of theme that belies such blunt assessments.

With usura hath no man a house of good stone
each block cut smooth and well fitting
that delight might cover their face,

with usura

hath no man a painted paradise on his church wall
harpes et luthes
or where virgin receiveth message
and halo projects from incision,

In general, Pound is decrying usurious motive (i.e. investment for profit) as a primary motivation for the sponsorship, creation and exchange of art. But he starts on shaky ground. He starts with one of the universal capital assets of humanity. I have to accept that Pound’s first stanza is a marvel of careful, persuasive stresses and pauses, but its core message is patently false. Investment drives the house of good stone as much as delight. On the other hand, in this April of 2009, with houses of all manner of stone collapsing around us, it’s hard not to reflect that a little more delight, and a little less usura might have spared us all a whole lot of trouble. Even in swinging wildly, Pound manages to land a resounding blow.

And from there he’s on to the church. By the very nature of most churches, Pound is unimpeachable in this stanza. It’s a bit of a fraidy-cat dodge to take refuge in the church after running through the construction site kicking down scaffolding, but its done, so we pass on.

with usura

seeth no man Gonzaga his heirs and his concubines
no picture is made to endure nor to live with
but it is made to sell and sell quickly

The central theme of all Pound’s work is that the impulse to art should be what we require for fullness of life—what we “lovest well”, and not merely what might “sell, and sell quickly”. If we restrict analysis to fine arts, I think Pound’s is sound reasoning. But even if the Italian nobles and condottieri Pound so admired weren’t commissioning art for the promise of margin on sale, they were looking for the prestige that goes hand-in-hand with capital. Gonzaga, Medici and Malatesta, like Maecenas long before them, are once removed from the grubby world of artistic spectators, but only once.

with usura, sin against nature,
is thy bread ever more of stale rags
is thy bread dry as paper,
with no mountain wheat, no strong flour

with usura the line grows thick

with usura is no clear demarcation
and no man can find site for his dwelling
Stone cutter is kept from his stone
weaver is kept from his loom

WITH USURA

wool comes not to market
sheep bringeth no gain with usura
Usura is a murrain, usura
blunteth the needle in the the maid's hand
and stoppeth the spinner's cunning.

Here Pound extends his argument to ancient crafts. But notice how finely he balances it. It would be silly to say that the mason or the baker aren’t seeking a profit, but Pound argues that ideally their profit lies in direct commerce to the buyer, and not a mass production that drowns craft. When you are selling to ten thousand it is less about the personal palate, the long-negotiated boundaries of community or the carefully-measured cut of cloth. It’s all about the race to the average, to the mediocre, to the safe rather than the cunning. It’s not “commerce is evil”, but rather “petty commerce is the richest and most enduring commerce”.

The age of financial derivatives brought along something called “acceleration”From a broader, more basic perspective, this process starts with packaging up production in such an intricate manner that commerce expands from the modest living profits of small-holder commerce to modest growth supporting a workforce in a factory chain.  As the process continues commerce expands to the towering heights of national and trans-national conglomerates, then to the truly inscrutable monster of global capital. At each phase, you apply as many levers, AKA instruments, or (call them what they are) debts and bets between production and eventual usage. When it works, you aggregate petty industry into billionaire poker chips. When it doesn’t work the sky falls on our heads, except for the billionaires who have large enough umbrellas for shelter.

This was Pound’s warning. You don’t have to be a communist to understand that there can easily be too much of even capitalism. Corruption germinates in our human perceptions and institutions the moment you start to stretch the space from the producer to the consumer beyond the reach of a handshake.

                                     Pietro Lombardo
came not by usura
Duccio came not by usura
nor Pier della Francesca; Zuan Bellin' not by usura
nor was "La Callunia" painted.
Came not by usura Angelico; came not Ambrogio Praedis,
No church of cut stone signed: Adamo me fecit.
Not by usura St. Trophime
Not by usura St. Hilaire,

An aside to mention how eagerly I sought out St. Trophime the first and second times I visited Arles. The second time my wife was amazed at the reverence this battered old church held for her agnostic of a husband. But it was not just the church, but the idea that the church inspired. Then again, there is a lot of magic in the build of the church itself, so I highly recommend a visit if you’re ever nearby.

This is where Pound hits his stride. A vision of art nurtured in the quiet, plain room from which speculators are forbidden. And once again, what better safe zone from which to lob missiles than the nearest church?

Usura rusteth the chisel
It rusteth the craft and the craftsman
It gnaweth the thread in the loom
None learneth to weave gold in her pattern;
Azure hath a canker by usura; cramoisi is unbroidered
Emerald findeth no Memling

Pound is swinging back to all his themes now, increasing the urgency of his music with each round. Now he’s back to traditional crafts.

Usura slayeth the child in the womb
It stayeth the young man's courting
It hath brought palsey to bed, lyeth
between the young bride and her bridegroom

     CONTRA NATURAM

They have brought whores for Eleusis
Corpses are set to banquet

at behest of usura.

He lands his gavel with a thunderous stroke. Here he pulls the threads of his lesson together into a noose for his nemesis, the “old bitch gone in the teeth”. Once again, this poem doesn’t inspire me to disparage capitalism, but rather to reflect that capitalism is the right way to manage truly scarce resources. Human ingenuity, creativity and the commons of our livelihood and production only become scarce resources when we distort them to fit that mold.

If you’re longing for an object lesson in less impressive form than Pound’s, think of the 20th century effort by big media to define intellect as property. Most of us who are not managers and lawyers of big media companies sense how wrong this is. Ideas and expression are not scarce until, seeking endless profit, we distort society to make them artificially scarce.

Another example, if you like, is as Mos Def puts it in “New World Water”

There are places where TB is common as TV
'Cause foreign-based companies go and get greedy
The type of cats who pollute the whole shore line
Have it purified, sell it for a dollar twenty-five

Water isn’t scarce (in most parts of the world) until our industrial distortions create a scarcity of water.

Pound may well have been classifying all investment as usura, and if so, he was a fool, and paid dearly for his foolishness. But why let such an assumption blind you to an important lesson? Usura to me means taking things that do not belong to speculative investment, and creating whatever distortions open up a path to profit, and eventually destroy the good.

Considering the clear, large-scale destruction of good unfolding right before our eyes, there may be no better time to reconsider Pound’s lesson.

—————————————–

Complementary musings:

• End of Reaganomics: even Republicans seeing the MENE MENE TEKEL
• The Hollow Men

✄ ✄ ✄

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The inaugural poem by Elizabeth Alexander had one of the greatest audiences for poetry in the past 16 years or so, ever since Maya Angelou in 1993.  It seeped over its huge audience just yesterday.  Do you remember any of it?  How about the opening?

“Praise song for the day.”

How about the opening two words?  These were repeated several times in the poem as an unstructured refrain.  I wonder if you remembered any of it, even those two leading words, by the time John Roberts misremembered the thirty-five words of the constitution’s presidential oath.  If you didn’t, does it make you question the entire point of the inaugural poem?

Some critics have been complaining that Obama’s address didn’t soar to the remarkable heights for which he’s famous.  Others reasonably respond that there’s too much serious business at hand for oratorical flights, now that campaign has matured into presidency.  Both sides do seem to agree that some inspiration beyond the ordinary would have been useful salt for the audience in these hard times.  How quickly it passes from notice that Elizabeth Alexander recited a poem less than an hour before Obama’s address.  Do we all completely forget that poetry is supposed to inspire, to elevate, to transcend the ordinary?

You might say “poetry isn’t for regular people”.  But how many times have you heard a rap lyric, a chant from a protest march, or something on Def Poetry Jam, that immediately stuck with you, remembered days later?  I argue that the success of poetry can be measured precisely by how well it’s remembered by ordinary people.

I’d say putting on a poem was exactly what Obama needed to do, if only it could be the right poem.  The insipid, academic inaugural poem of 2009 will go into the archives alongside the insipid, academic inaugural poem of 1993 (Angelou’s poem began “A Rock, A River, A Tree…” and meandered on from there).  We’ve all found in between many other magic words more worth remembering.

That’s probably unfair; poetry written for occasion is almost always a disappointment, even in the hands of the greatest poets.  I don’t know much of Alexander, but I was disappointed in 1993 because I believed that if politics warmed to a black female choice, Rita Dove would be far more likely to produce something memorable.  But even Dove might well have crafted a duck.  Maybe the most important role of such poems is indirect—a reminder of where we can find inspiration, rather than the stuff itself.

My own response to Alexander’s forgettable work was to find something more memorable to round out the moment.  With a bit of my own effort, I got the fix I needed.  And after all, isn’t that what Obama has always been about?  We need to be more a culture of rolling up our sleeves and getting our own work done.  I guess that applies to culture itself, as well.

With luck, that’s something we can all remember.

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