Here’s another curious poem.
“Jesus Feeds the 5000 Using Various Cutting Edge Recipes from 1950s Magazines”
“So the disciples gorge themselves on honey dipped spam
crowned with the many crowns of identical pineapple rings
as they jostle for spots on the picnic blanket, and the children…”
Poet Scott Cairns has written some revealing, thoughtful reflections as psalms to the Lord. Clearly, these poems are written for people who are not as awesome as we are. We have claimed our blessing and walk as strong as the Nephilim. We don’t grovel before the Lord, like the man in this poem:
“Idiot Psalm 1”
O God Belovéd if obliquely so,
dimly apprehended in the midst
of this, the fraught obscuring fog
of my insufficiently capacious ken,
Ostensible Lover of our kind—while
apparently aloof—allow
that I might glimpse once more
Your shadow in the land, avail
for me, a second time, the sense
of dire Presence in the pulsing
hollow near the heart.
Once more, O Lord, from Your Enormity incline
your Face to shine upon Your servant, shy
of immolation, if You will.
In his Nobel Prize lecture, poet Seamus Heaney said, “The form of the poem, in other words, is crucial to poetry’s power to do the thing which always is and always will be to poetry’s credit: the power to persuade that vulnerable part of our consciousness of its rightness in spite of the evidence of wrongness all around it, the power to remind us that we are hunters and gatherers of values, that our very solitudes and distresses are creditable, in so far as they, too, are an earnest of our veritable human being.”
Heaney, 74, died this morning just prior to a medical procedure.
Ireland Taoiseach Enda Kenny said, “For us, Seamus Heaney was the keeper of language, our codes, our essence as a people.”
This article quotes a 1995 Irish Times piece on Heaney’s publishing success: “Book sales may not mean much in the areas of fiction or biography, but for a poet to sell in the thousands is remarkable proof to his ability to speak in his poems to what are inadequately called ‘ordinary people.’”
You can hear the poet reading or reciting some of his poems here.
Craigslist Ad: “Poet available to begin work immediately. Capable in rhyme and meter, fluent in traditional and contemporary forms. Quotidian observations available at standard rate of $15/hour; occasional verse at slightly higher rate of $17/hour. Incomprehensible garbage $25/hour. Angst extra.”
It’s funny, but he isn’t joking. He is writing poems on request, even to insult the requester, ala Lane Severson. Observe:
“Now a mere pawn in the house of bishops
He can manage neither a coherent theology
Nor back-to-back-to-back pushups,
Having spent the past eight years
Generating five poorly behaved children
With one wife who, worn out, loathes him
And can’t stop staring at his poorly combed hair.”
That’s only a bit of it, but the point is Lane paid for that abuse.
How? It makes me itch.
Ron Charles reviews the next Harper’s Magazine, which asks why all modern poetry is bad. Several poets are named. “Anne Carson may be Canadian, but that’s no defense; her verse ‘is so obscure, mannered, and private that one (this one, at least) cannot follow its windings.'” I wasn’t aware that being Canadian was a defense for anything, but perhaps in some literary or academic circles, someone from Canada is perceived as standing on a higher plane.
I believe Charles concludes that these complaints are not new, that contemporary poets are often criticized for pioneering obtuseness, and that some modern poets, who were not named in the Harper’s article, are quite good. S’up wit dat, as the poet might say.
The editor of Poetry magazine is moving on. Tom Bartlett writes:
He’s not abandoning poetry—he’s not sure he could ever do that… This June he’s leaving his plum poetry gig to become a senior lecturer of religion and literature at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music and the Yale Divinity School, a job that was offered to him a couple of years after he lectured at the institute. “My life has been aiming at this,” he says. “It seems to me incredibly exciting but also a necessary thing for me to put my faith more on the line on a daily basis.”
I’ve been thinking about that myself lately.
“After dark vapors have oppress’d our plains
For a long dreary season, comes a day
Born of the gentle South, and clears away
From the sick heavens all unseemly stains.
The anxious month, relieved of its pains,
Takes as a long-lost right the feel of May;
The eyelids with the passing coolness play
Like rose leaves with the drip of Summer rains.
The calmest thoughts came round us; as of leaves
Budding—fruit ripening in stillness—Autumn suns
Smiling at eve upon the quiet sheaves—
Sweet Sappho’s cheek—a smiling infant’s breath—
The gradual sand that through an hour-glass runs—
A woodland rivulet—a Poet’s death.” — Keats
W. H. Auden explains:
Every poet, consciously or unconsciously, holds the following absolute presuppositions, as the dogmas of his art:
(1) A historical world exists, a world of unique events and unique persons, related by analogy, not identity. The number of events and analogical relations is potentially infinite. The existence of such a world is a good, and every addition to the number of events, persons and relations is an additional good.
(2) The historical world is a fallen world, i.e. though it is good that it exists, the way in which it exists is evil, being full of unfreedom and disorder.
(3) The historical world is a redeemable world. The unfreedom and disorder of the past can be reconciled in the future.
It follows from the first presupposition that the poet’s activity in creating a poem is analogous to God’s activity in creating man after his own image. It is not an imitation, for were it so, the poet would be able to create like God ex nihilo; instead, he requires pre-existing occasions of feeling and a pre-existing language out of which to create. It is analogous in that the poet creates not necessarily according to a law of nature but voluntarily according to provocation.
(stolen from Alan Jacobs)